“Did he believe in the gods of the Greeks?” she asked. The switch from coy flirtation to intellectual curiosity was mildly jarring, but I didn’t mind all that much. The truth was, there were few beings on Earth with greater native intelligence, on average, than succubi. It was the sort of thing one was better off knowing in advance.
“He didn’t,” I said, “but many still did in his day, as did most of their ancestors.”
“And Aristotle? Or Socrates? Or, I don’t know, Parmenides, Eratosthenes, Pythagoras, Heraclitus…”
“You’ve been bedding a scholar, haven’t you?” I asked. It had been a very long time since anyone had rattled off such a long list of Greeks to me.
“I’ve been reading,” she said a touch sternly. She slipped off her knees and lay back on the blankets, looking up at the ceiling.
“I can tell. No, most of the great thinkers did not believe in the old gods. They preferred to set up their own private cults instead, since the body politic at large did still believe. Pythagoras’s cult was particularly notorious, but he was also a lunatic.”
“I thought he was interesting,” she said. She reached over her head with one arm and found my leg, which she rubbed gently the way one might tickle a pet. It was as if she was daring me to form complete sentences.
“Interesting yes, sane no,” I said. “The Pythagoreans worshipped numbers instead of gods.”
“That doesn’t sound so crazy to me. Not in comparison.”
“Except they had a tendency to draw their swords on non-initiates. They were particularly protective of the dodecahedron.”
Rowena laughed. She had a rich, velvety laugh that caused men to run toward the sound, even if they couldn’t walk unaided prior to hearing it.
“All right,” she said, “I accept your opinion on Pythagoras. But… what I don’t understand is how anyone could in seriousness think the Pantheon was a reasonable thing.”
Her other hand had managed to discover her cleavage, her fingers teasing along the breastbone, the thumb tracing the outside of her left breast. It was possible she wasn’t even aware she was doing it, but it was all I was aware of. Consequently, my response was nothing more than, “The Pantheon.” Because when you cannot think of what to say, repeating back what you had just heard was nearly always a safe option.
“Zeus,” she offered. “Hermes, Poseidon, Hera, Athena…”
“Yes, I know who you mean, I just don’t know what you mean.”
“Oh, milord. Petulant, irrational, cruel beings living on top of a mountain lusting after mortals and giving them silly quests or hurling thunderbolts at them or turning them into pigs or cows or trees. It’s the sort of thing you tell a child you want to frighten into obedience.”
I leaned forward until I was next to her, looking down at her lovely body. “Maybe that’s how they saw the world,” I suggested. My right hand, on its own initiative, traced its way along her flat stomach and to her hipbone as my lips contemplated giving some serious attention to her nipples. Her skin felt like satin and smelled like cinnamon.
She lifted my hand up to her face. Smiling, she pulled a finger into her mouth and sucked on it for a moment, and then pulled it out and kissed the palm. “You were there,” she pointed out. “Don’t tell me maybe.”
Rolling out from below me, she reached the end of the bed and got to her feet. My heart broke again, along with a few other organs.
I sighed grandly as I watched her walk away. She stopped at the pitcher and slowly poured herself the glass of water she’d turned down so recently. “All right,” I said. “The behavior of the gods was their way of explaining the apparent random cruelty of day-to-day life. Will that do?”
“No.” She leaned back against the wall, sipping from her glass, smiling. I sat up and swung my feet around, meaning to walk to her. “And you have to stay on the bed,” she added.
“Why is that?”
“Because you’re not taking my questions seriously, so you will stay there until I’m satisfied.”
“It seems to me you’ve been fairly well satisfied so far,” I suggested.
“Oh, indeed, milord. But in that regard I can also satisfy myself right here, without additional assistance.”
To punctuate this point, she dipped two fingers into the water and began drawing a line down her belly, stopping just shy of very interesting. I think I may have moaned audibly.
“Ask me again,” I said.
“I want you to explain to me how a civilization that gave birth to the greatest thinkers in history, could possibly subscribe to such a juvenile religious faith.”
“That will take a while,” I confessed, without exaggeration.
“I have nowhere to be.”
Nor did I, but this was not how I expected to be spending all the free time I had set aside. “All right. But this will come at a price.”
“Whatever you feel is appropriate,” she said with a satisfying grin.
I decided on an approach.
“The short explanation,” I began, “is that they believed in the gods because the Greeks had met their gods.”
She looked disappointed. “Now you’re just patronizing me,” she said.
“I’m not.”
“Zeus, Athena and all of that? We are talking about the same gods?”
“Yes.”
“I think I would prefer the longer explanation.”
“All right, another approach: how do you think the gods were created?”
She laughed. “I imagine some overly creative little boy dreamed them up.”
“It’s a serious question, Rowena. How do you create a god?”
She pondered this, while tasting her water by dipping a finger in the glass and then sucking on it. I’ve never seen anyone enjoy fresh water as much as her.
“I guess I don’t know,” she admitted. “The stories of the gods were told for a long time, weren’t they? There wasn’t a… a bible of any kind.”
“No, there wasn’t. The myths were passed on orally. But how did they start?”
She glided away from the wall and settled in the bench in front of the bay window. With legs crossed—said legs being of the long, muscular sort generally seen on dancers, the kind that made men drop whatever they were carrying when she walked by—she leaned back and looked out the window for some time, while sunlight tricked across her naked body with great eagerness. If I had the time, I would have commissioned a painter.
“I know mankind to be notorious when it comes to properly interpreting the natural world,” she said. “Am I a demon?”
“You are definitely not,” I answered. “Although I’m less certain regarding incubi.”
She smiled. Insulting an incubus when talking to a succubus is always a good way to get ahead, because while they are of the same species, they don’t get along in any real sense.
I don’t like them either; most I’ve met have turned out to be dim, charmless rakes. But I understand them. Essentially the responsibility of carrying on the species falls on the incubi, because succubi can’t become pregnant. Thus, the average incubus spends all of his time charming and bedding women in order to impregnate them, and roughly one out of ten offspring ends up being a succubus or an incubus. They tend to prefer married women whose husbands are men of means so that their children will have a decent upbringing, given the incubus isn’t going to be helping raise anybody. I frankly don’t see why any woman would be interested in one, but I am not a woman.
“So,” she continued, “I could easily imagine these gods began as misapprehended stories that developed into something supernatural in the retelling.”
“That’s a large part of it,” I agreed. “But what did the stories begin as?”
“Ah! As men!”
“Exactly. The deeds of great men and women, passed down through history.”
“Great women?”
“History has had many matriarchies, and quite a few women have actively participated in warrior cultures. It wasn’t always as it is now.”
She stood and walked over to the bed, stopping just shy of arm’s reach. I was uncovered and so it was fairly clear I was ready for her to return. “This answer nearly pleases me,” she said.