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Pirithous
Her fear slid into his chest like a knife through his ribs. He had expected disbelief, doubt, but not fear. Not from her. Not ever from her. And not the betrayal that came with it.
“Thalia.” He touched her arm, his fingers closing over the gold cuff. That she still wore the gift he’d given her had reassured him, until now. She stiffened at his touch, and it wasn’t lust that made her heart race. “I gave you my word that I would not harm you.”
“That was before you told me you were three thousand years old and came out of hell.”
“I am the same man you allowed to help you, the same man you fed and sheltered last night and this morning.”
“No,” she said. “Now you’re the son of a god. Not a man at all.”
He smiled without humor. The way she said it made it sound like an insult. “You don’t believe that.”
“I don’t. But you’re about to prove it.” She opened the door and slid out of the car.
He followed her. The fear in her mind could send her running from him, but he had the advantage there as well, if he wished to take it. Not that chasing her down would help him to win her trust, much as he might prefer throwing her over his shoulder and hauling her off. It would have been simpler that way. But things in this world did not seem to follow the simplest path. Not anymore.
She kept the car between them, not closing the door after she stood outside it, and he swallowed his irritation. Surely he could not be the only man who had claimed divine lineage. Whatever god they worshipped must take his share of pleasure, here or there, as was his right.
He took his eyes off her only long enough to identify the metal pole, with what appeared to be more of the magic torches at its height. He could bend iron with his bare hands, though it was brittle at times, and like bronze, if he forced it too quickly it would snap. This did not look like iron, but surely it could not be much harder.
“What are you going to do?” she asked.
Pirithous climbed atop the base, made of some kind of formed stone, and hoped it would give him enough leverage. He wrapped his arm around the pole, fitting it under his armpit and bracing his foot against the base. If he weren’t careful he’d rip the post out of its moorings rather than just bending it. Though it would accomplish the same goal, either way.
“Stay back,” he warned her. He waited until she’d moved to the other side of the car, a small rectangle of metal in her hand.
And then he heaved against the pole. The thrum of lightning roared through his blood, his eyes burning white with his father’s power added to his own. The metal screeched in protest, one of the nails holding it to the stone snapping free before he adjusted his grip.
“What—”
He felt the metal give beneath his arm, heard a rattle from above, and kept pushing. Hollow, he thought, as he forced the pole to bend and it crumpled. It was hollow, not solid, as he’d feared. It would have to be enough.
A clatter which had nothing to do with the pole, now forming more of an elbow than a straight line, drew his attention back to Thalia. She’d dropped the metal rectangle, along with the jangling slivers of metal she called keys, her face pale.
“Proof enough, Thalia? Or shall I rip it from the stone and tie it into knots?” He could, with his father’s power warming his hands. The metal was weakening under his arm, twisting and collapsing into its center.
She shook her head, mute, her throat working, as if she could not manage to speak through her shock. And she stared at him, though not at the pole he’d bent or his arms wrapped around it; her eyes were locked on his.
He released the pole and leapt off the stone base. But Thalia backed away.
“Your eyes,” she rasped.
“Yes.” He didn’t need her to tell him what he looked like. Zeus’s power always turned his eyes a burning white. The flash of lightning was enough to intimidate even the most fearless opponent. “But you need not fear me, Thalia. You wear my gift, remember? We are guest-friends.”
“You just...” She tore her gaze from his face at last, staring over his shoulder at the bent and crumpled torch. “You did that with your bare hands.”
“Immense strength, as I said. I cannot tell you how many cups and bowls I ruined as a youth, before I learned my own power. My mother made me eat and drink from wood and I turned it all into splinters for moons.” He risked another step forward, and though she tensed, she did not move away. “Do you believe me now, Thalia?”
She shook her head, swallowing, but he didn’t think it was in answer to his question so much as a denial of what she saw with her own two eyes. Her fear had a desperate edge now, climbing toward terror. He bit his tongue on a curse. If she would let him near enough to touch her, he could calm her in a moment. All he needed was a spark of curiosity, or interest, or even lust, and he could stoke it into a blaze to burn her fear away, leaving reassurance in its wake. It would have been easier that way. But no. He needed her to accept him on her own terms, without his interference.
“Does your god not take lovers among his followers, fathering demigods of his own?”
Her eyes slid back to him and he felt her confusion. Better than fear. “Jesus isn’t... wasn’t... He just turned water into wine and talked a lot about loving one another.”
He smiled and moved toward her again, circling rather than approaching directly. “But you know the life of Heracles. You know that men of my kind have lived in the past.”
She shook her head again. “It was just myths. Stories. Nobody believes in it.”
“He lived, just as I do now. Lived and breathed and served the gods as hero.” And no wonder the gods had released him if they had no worshippers among the living. Persephone’s words made greater sense to him now. The gods wanted their people back, their power and influence over men. But how they expected him to accomplish it, he did not know.
She gripped the door of the car, her knuckles white, her face gray. Confusion began to edge out the terror, looped with denial.
“I need your help, Thalia,” he said softly. If he kept talking to her, perhaps she would calm. Even better if she spoke to him. “This world of yours, I do not know what to make of it. I do not know how to live in it. I owe the gods a debt I cannot pay without your guidance.”
Her grip loosened on the door, but he couldn’t be sure if it was to make it easier for her to flee, or because she saw his sincerity.
“You promised to clothe me when I was but a man, lost without his country. You promised to shelter me, to feed me. Will you teach me, too? Will you help me?”
“You could be out of your mind,” she said. “Sick, somehow. You could be some drug addict. Hopped up on steroids.”
“I have offered you proof.” Steroids meant nothing to him, but her tone made it offensive. “You’ve seen my father’s power and my own. What harm will it do you to trust me now as you did this morning?”
“You’re a rapist.”
His jaw tightened, but he swallowed his irritation. Always, it came back to this. As if she believed him to be some beast, like Agamemnon, forcing himself on every woman he met with violence and threats.
“If I meant to take you against your will, Thalia, you would be beneath me, now. You and Nikki, both.”
She snorted, but her shoulders eased and she no longer watched him as if he were hunting her. “That’s not really reassuring.”
“What would you have me do to prove myself further?”
“I don’t know.”
But she closed the door of the car and looked away from him long enough to pick up the things she’d dropped. She stared at the small rectangle for a long moment, then hid it away somewhere in her clothing, along with the keys. He waited, unwilling to press her. The choice must be hers, and he would not risk frightening her further.
With a sigh, she met his eyes again. “Is there anything else I should know about you?”
He smiled his relief, though he had not realized until that moment how important it was to him. “Nothing more, I give you my word.”
“Then if you’re going to go off to live in the woods, you should at least have some beef jerky or something to get you started. And some water bottles, maybe.” She pressed her lips together, her forehead furrowing before her gaze slid away again. “And you never did tell me what you liked to eat.”
***
GRAPES, BREAD, LAMB, beef, cheeses. That was what he asked of Thalia, and she provided it, along with a number of other foods he’d never heard of or seen before. Small blue berries, named for their color, a vegetable she called broccoli, some kind of root that she told him was a potato. He couldn’t keep track of most of what she put in the cart she pushed in front of her—made of metal, of course—or what made it into the “paper bags” she had him carry up the stairs into her home. He set it all down on the table in her strange kitchen, and she sent him back again to collect the clothing she’d bought him and bring it inside.
Not that he couldn’t have carried all of it, if he’d had hands enough, but he had the feeling that a second show of strength, even so slight, would have done him more harm than good. She hadn’t spoken about the torch post, but she’d stared at it, and him, uneasily as they’d returned to the car after their trip through the food market. That she’d brought him back to her home at all he thought fortunate.
After she put the food away she disappeared into Nikki’s room, returning with two large books.
“You said something about Theseus and Helen, before the Trojan War?” she asked, sitting down at the table she’d just cleared.
He nodded. “Theseus and I...” Admitting to the kidnapping of another woman seemed less than wise, but he saw no other way. “Helen came to Theseus, asking him to take her from Sparta. I helped him to remove her from the city.”
She arched an eyebrow at him, but made no comment, instead fanning through the leaves before pausing on a page with lists written in such small script he wondered how anyone had marked it so neatly. Then she turned back to the middle, and he watched her eyes sweep across the pages, wishing he could read it. Her face paled again, and she glanced up at him with a strange expression, something caught between disbelief and confusion.
“Does it speak of Theseus?” he asked.
“Um.” She traced her lower lip with a fingertip, and his blood warmed as he watched her. “Theseus’s wife was named Phaedra?”
He couldn’t stop himself from grimacing. “His second wife, yes. And the author of much of his pain.”
“Well, according to this, she tried to seduce his son, Hippo-something?”
“Hippolytus. His son by his first wife, the Amazon queen Antiope.”
“But. She also says that you and Theseus were um.” She flushed red from her chest to her cheeks. “You know. More than just friends.”
“We were cousins, and brothers in all but blood.”
She turned even redder. “But not lovers?”
Of all the things she might have asked. He stared at her for a moment, baffled. “Lovers?”
“Um. Phaedra says that you were having an affair with him.”
He chuckled, then laughed outright. Hard and long, until his eyes brimmed with tears and his stomach ached.
“With Theseus?” he gasped, struggling to quiet himself long enough to speak. Oh, Phaedra. Foolish, troublesome, jealous girl. “As many women as the man took, and she thought he preferred my company for his pleasure?”
Thalia’s blush faded and she was almost smiling. “I don’t know what she thought, really, but those are the words Ovid put in her mouth. Um. Let me keep reading. Helen came after Phaedra?”
He was still laughing to himself, brushing the tears from his eyes. “After, yes.”
“This says you and Theseus made some kind of pact to marry daughters of Zeus.” Her forehead creased. “Didn’t you say that Zeus is your father? Wouldn’t that mean she’d be one of your sisters?”
He flicked his fingers in dismissal. “Zeus and Hera were brother and sister as well. It mattered little.”
“So you helped him abduct Helen. She was only a child!”
“She was a woman.”
Thalia’s eyes narrowed. “No wonder you were flirting with that sales girl, if you like your women barely out of puberty. You know they put people in jail for that, now?”
“Helen was bleeding. She knew what she wanted, and Theseus was far kinder to her than a man nearer her age would have been. But women married young, in my day.”
“You mean they were child brides.”
“And it is as strange to me that you are unmarried with no children as it is to you that Helen married so young.” Pirithous shrugged. The world had changed. He’d already admitted as much. “Read on.”
“Hmph.” She went back to the book, but he could feel her irritation, until it shifted to relief. “Oh. This says that Helen’s brothers came and stole her back while you and Theseus were in Hades trying to steal Persephone.”
“Ah.” He sat down across from her. “Her brothers. But how did they know?”
“It sounds like they just kind of waltzed into Athens. Some guy named Menestheus told them where Helen was, so they made him king, and took her back with them.”
He closed his eyes, rubbing his forehead. That was what Theseus had returned to, when Heracles had pulled him free? That snake, Menestheus, ruling as king in his place. In the place of Demophon. “What of Theseus’s sons?”
“They were sent away. And Helen’s brothers took his mother as a slave or attendant or something for Helen, maybe. It isn’t exactly clear if it’s the same Aethra who went with her to Troy. She would have been kind of old, don’t you think?”
“She was favored by Poseidon. He blessed her with a long life, after Theseus was born.” But all he could think of was Theseus, returning home to find his family gone, the woman he loved taken from him. Because Pirithous had been too foolish to realize that Aphrodite toyed with them. “Is there word of Theseus?”
“Hang on.” She turned another page and read silently for a moment. “It says when he was pulled off the chair, the backs of his thighs were ripped off, and when he got back to Athens, they didn’t want him as king anymore. So he retired to some island and the king there pushed him off a cliff.”
Theseus, forgive me. He shut his eyes, wishing he could block out the knowledge of his friend’s fate as easily as the light. Helen had warned them, but they hadn’t had the wit to listen. No—he hadn’t. Theseus had voiced his reservations, but Pirithous had made him come, to fulfill his pledge. And in repayment for Theseus’s loyalty, it seemed Pirithous had destroyed his friend’s life.
“He deserved better.”
Thalia’s fingers closed over his on the table, and he opened his eyes. She studied him with concern. “I’m sorry. I should have... I forgot that you knew him. That this isn’t just a story to you.” She squeezed his hand. “It says his death was a parallel to how his father died, so maybe it isn’t what really happened. Maybe he just retired and led a quiet life until he died of natural causes, but someone thought it would be more dramatic to tell it this way. Like the Phaedra business, about you two being lovers.”
“Perhaps.” Persephone, I wish you had told me. Warned me. Why did you send me here, instead of loosing me in Hades with the men I fought beside? He brushed his thumb across Thalia’s fingers and pulled his hand free. “But he is still dead. He lost his city and Helen married Menelaus. That would have been torture enough for him, even if he had not died so poorly.”
“If it makes you feel any better, Hercules—Heracles—died when his wife gave him a poisoned shirt to wear. Except that then Zeus made him a god, so I guess that isn’t really better.” She closed the book and sighed. “I’m sorry.”
Zeus had seen fit to grant Heracles immortality, but not Theseus? He shook his head, rising from the table. “Excuse me.”
“Where are you going?”
To curse the gods and pray for forgiveness. To weep for the man who had been a brother to him, and the woman he had betrayed to the fate she feared, when he had sworn his protection to both of them. He wouldn’t admit to any of it.
“Outside.” He pushed the door open, and made for the trees.
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