SIX

Phaeton’s tone was rough, despite his intentions, and almost unseemly – a son’s address to his mother should always be polite.

But Clymene was a woman slow to anger. She was aware that she had offered her growing son too much silence on this long-unspoken question, and that she had stifled her own memories too long.

Only a careful eye would have noticed the needle trembling, her quickened pulse alive in the green and golden thread. Clymene slipped the needle safely into the garment on her lap.

Strong feeling stirring in her voice she asked, “Who has dared to say otherwise?”

Phaeton had always, until this moment, taken pleasure in this courtyard.

Like many children, he had formed soldiers of potter’s clay, shaved by friendly potters from their turning wheels. Baked in the sun, these warriors had played out their triumphs here beside the dancing waters.

Now the young man reported Epaphus’s insult, regretting even as he spoke that he had troubled his mother this day, disturbing Clymene – but bringing him closer to the inevitable and disappointing truth.

When Phaeton concluded the news of his young adversary and the defeated griffin, Clymene plucked the silver thimble from her finger, and tossed it onto the bricks.

“Epaphus’s mother is that mouse-haired creature, Thalia,” she said angrily, “who noised it about the village that I was the companion of ox-herders and wine-sots, little better than herself.”

The noblewoman hesitated, displeased at her own outburst. She continued in a more gentle cadence, “The gods have other consorts among mortal women, Phaeton my son, but none of them make this countryside their home.”

“I doubt that it is possible,” said Phaeton. He had long ago come to question such matters, and now he could not keep silent. “Forgive me, Mother, but I certainly can’t believe that the god of sunlight seeks the love of mortal women like yourself.”

Phaeton at once wished he had not said this – but it was too late. He had spoken, and now his mother knew how he felt.

Clymene folded her hands and wished the divinities of the hearth could grant her the proper response to this. She gazed up from her shadowy seat toward the sunlight, still falling this late in the afternoon, golden across the fountain.

No god, she believed, should abandon his son to face both a griffin and a common insult in one day. And certainly no deity should allow his offspring to doubt the loving power of the gods.

Even with an effort to speak formally, Phaeton’s voice trembled as he added, “I now understand the true nature of my parentage, and on the subject I will never pain you again.”

“You do not trouble me, Phaeton,” said the gentlewoman. Your divine father troubles me, she nearly allowed herself to add.

The young man spoke with difficulty, but with the added dignity divine Minerva graced him with that hour. “I imagine now that my father was some mortal man you cannot bring yourself to mention.”

Clymene felt years of consolation fall away before her. Knowing the truth, and believing that Phaeton shared it, had kept her heart alive during the long and bitter winter nights.

“Can you so doubt me, Phaeton?” she asked.

Phaeton turned away.

Clymene rose, and she stepped into the bold sunlight she had avoided for too long.

She took her son by the hand and turned to look upward at that source of light so rich it is blinding. She closed her eyes and felt the radiance gather her in, flooding her, her senses alight.

“I swear under the Lightning-Thruster’s blue sky,” she said, beginning the most solemn of oaths, one uttered before Jupiter. She raised her voice, “I swear upon the life of the husband I love that your father was the divine Phoebus.”

This oath shook Phaeton deeply.

And it awakened the beginnings of joy.

Then, stirred by some inner daemon, or by Venus herself, the bringer of desire, Clymene turned to her son and continued, “Go to him, Phaeton.”

The young man blinked his eyes, his gaze tearful from gazing upward, and bewildered, too, at his mother’s meaning.

“It is not right,” said Clymene, “that you face dangers and even churlish insult without your driving father’s help.”

Phaeton held up his hand to shade his eyes from the all-searching sun.

“Take yourself,” his mother was saying, “to the end of the world, all the way to the gates of sunrise and seek your father in his temple.”

“Is such a journey possible?” asked Phaeton, his voice a bare whisper.

But he was thrilled, nonetheless – everything he had ever doubted was suddenly made certain.

“Leave today,” said Clymene, “and let your immortal father tell you all about his love for a fleet-footed maiden.”