So Pol unpacked the backpacks and made dinner over a fire. It took Sophos some time to find enough fuel to burn, but he managed. I didn’t help. I scuffed a hollow in the sand and lay down in it to rest while I flexed my fingers in limbering exercises and kneaded the wrists as much as I could stand to prevent them from going stiff. I wondered what the magus thought we were up to, out in the middle of nowhere, but I didn’t ask. We weren’t on speaking terms. While Pol cooked, I napped.
The dream I’d had the night before returned. I was walking up steps into a small room with marble walls. There were no windows, but moonlight came from somewhere to fall on the white hair and dress of a woman waiting there for me. She was wearing the ancient peplos that fell in pleated folds to her feet, like one of the women carved in stone beside old altars. As I entered the room, she nodded as if she’d been expecting me for some time, as if I were late. I had a feeling I should recognize her, but I didn’t.
“Who brings you here?” she asked.
“I bring myself.”
“Do you come to offer or to take?”
“To take,” I whispered, my mouth dry.
“Take what you seek if you find it then, but be cautious. Do not offend the gods.” She turned to the tall three-legged table beside her. It held an open scroll and she lifted a stylus and wrote, adding my name at the bottom of a long list and placing a small mark beside it. When I woke a moment later, Pol had dinner ready.
We ate by moonlight, without conversation, and then we sat. Nobody said much, and no one but the magus knew what we were waiting for. To break the silence, he at last condescended to ask me to tell him the story of Eugenides and the thunderbolts. He wanted to compare it with the version he knew.
I rubbed my arm across my forehead and yawned. I wasn’t really in a storytelling mood, but neither did I want to sit in gloomy silence until midnight. I abbreviated the story a bit and told it to him.
EUGENIDES AND THE GREAT FIRE
After Eugenides was born, the woodcutter and his wife had other children. The oldest of these children was Lyopidus. He was jealous of Eugenides because Eugenides had the gifts of the gods and because he was older. If the Earth had not given the woodcutter her own baby, Lyopidus would have been the first of his father’s children, and he never forgot it. At dinner Eugenides sat on the right hand of their father, and when guests came to the house, it was Eugenides that offered them the wine cup.
When the family’s house was destroyed by the Sky God, Lyopidus was sure that Eugenides would be blamed. It was Eugenides who was the cause of the Sky’s anger. Lyopidus wanted his father and mother to abandon Eugenides in the forest, but they would not. And when Eugenides stole the Sky God’s thunderbolts and became immortal, Lyopidus’s jealousy turned to hatred.
Eugenides knew his brother’s feelings, and to avoid them, he traveled across the world. So Lyopidus sat at his father’s right hand and offered his father’s guests the wine cup, but he was still not happy. When the Sky God came to him in the guise of a charioteer with a plan to humiliate Eugenides, Lyopidus was ready to listen.
The Sky God took Lyopidus into his chariot and ferried him across the middle sea to the house where Eugenides lived, and Lyopidus went and knocked at Eugenides’s door and said, “Here is a stranger who asks to share your wine cup.”
And Eugenides came to his doorway, and he saw Lyopidus and said, “Brother, you are no stranger to me. Why do you ask to share my wine cup as a stranger when you are welcome to all I possess as my kin?”
“Eugenides,” said Lyopidus, “in the past I had bad feelings for you, and now all those bad feelings are gone. That is why I say I am a stranger to you, and as an unfamiliar person I ask to share your wine cup and be your guest, so that you can discover if you like me and if you will call me friend as well as brother.”
Eugenides believed him, so he fetched his wine cup and shared it with Lyopidus and called him his guest. But Lyopidus was no friend and no good guest. He asked his brother many questions, like how he hunted and how well he lived and what luxuries he had. Did he have a Samian mirror? An amber necklace? Gold armlets? An iron cooking pot? And each time Eugenides said no, he did not have that thing, Lyopidus said, “Why, I am surprised. You being a son of Earth.”
And Eugenides said, “The Earth gives me no gifts that she does not give all men. I can hardly ask her to give every man an iron cooking pot in order to have one of my own.”
“Ah,” said Lyopidus, “then could you not steal one? As you stole the Sky’s thunderbolts? But no,” he said, setting out his hooks, “I suppose you could not do something so marvelous again.”
“Oh, I could,” said Eugenides, stepping like a mouse into a trap, “if I chose.”
“Ah,” said Lyopidus.
And every day Lyopidus tugged on the hooks he had set in Eugenides’s flesh, begging him to perform some marvelous feat. “I could carry the word of it home to our parents,” he explained. “They have not had news of you for so long.”
For a time Eugenides evaded his request, but Lyopidus built up his arrogance, telling him over and over how clever he had been to defeat the Sky God, how much more clever he could be if he put his mind to it. For instance, he could steal the thunderbolts again, just for a lark, and then return them to Hephestia. He knew that Hephestia was fond of her half brother, part human and part god, and would not be angry at the trick.
After a time Eugenides agreed. He knew Hephestia would not mind, and he was eager to impress Lyopidus because he believed that Lyopidus wanted to be his friend as well as his brother. So he climbed one evening into a fir tree that grew in the great valley of the Hephestial Mountains and he waited for Hephestia to pass beneath him as she went to her temple at the summit. As she passed, Eugenides reached down and lifted the thunderbolts from her back, so lightly that she was unaware that they were gone.
He carried them to his house and showed them to Lyopidus, who pretended to be greatly impressed.
“You could throw one,” he said. “If I tried to throw one, it would kill me, but you are part god.”
“I suppose,” said Eugenides.
“Try,” said Lyopidus. “Just a small one.”
And he nagged and cajoled, and to please him, Eugenides agreed to try. He chose one of the smaller thunderbolts, and he threw it against a tree, where it exploded and set the world on fire.
When the world began to burn, the Sky went to his daughter and said, “Where are the thunderbolts that I have loaned to you?”
“Here at my shoulder, Father,” said Hephestia, but the thunderbolts were gone. Hephestia thought perhaps she had dropped them in the valley, so the Sky told her to go there and look and said that he would look with her.
“If you are so careless with them,” he said, “I am not sure that I will return them to you if I find them.”
From the valley Hephestia could not see the fire, and so the world went on burning. The olive trees burned and Eugenides’s house burned. The fire grew, and Lyopidus was afraid. “You are immortal,” he said to his brother, “but I will die.” Eugenides took his hand, and they ran from the flames. The fire surrounded them. Lyopidus cried out in his fear that it had been the Sky that drove him to entrap his brother, and he called on the Sky to protect him, but there was no answer. Eugenides loved his brother, as little as he deserved it, and he tried to carry him safely through the flames, but Lyopidus burned in his arms, while Hephestia and her father walked silently among the fir trees.