When anybody visited the Underworld, the souls they met were not those of the recently dead, but those Hades thought it good for them to meet. I was grateful for that soul, as it was grateful to me. I did not visit the Underworld often. The only time I had seen Lethe before was when I had taken up my mortal life.
Jathery was the first to speak. “Are we going to drink?” gla asked. “I don’t believe they’d let us out the other way.”
“We’re in Fate’s domain here,” I said. Everything had that kind of inevitability it always did when Fate was involved, an inevitability like an underlining echo. It was very hard to resist. “You could perhaps go back and argue Necessity’s case, but I think the rest of us must go on, or we overstep.”
“We didn’t die,” Athene said. “But no, it is a kind of death, I see.”
“I don’t want to forget,” Jathery said. “But if I only wet my lips, perhaps I will remember.”
“If I forget, then it was all for nothing,” Athene said.
“I don’t think we’ll truly forget,” I said. It didn’t seem possible that we could. “But it might fade and seem less immediate, be like something learned.”
“Part of Him is always there,” Jathery said.
“Part of all of us is always there,” Athene said.
“But He is conscious of it.” Jathery rocked to and fro a little. “Unity and multiplicity, one and everything, below and above. And conscious of every movement from first to last, all the time.”
“Don’t ask me how Father can be aware of that and carry on a conversation,” I said. The idea was daunting. I’d never have understood it without going there.
“It wasn’t what we thought,” Athene said. “It wasn’t the Chaos before and after time. It was the One.”
“It was both,” Jathery said. “As I have long suspected.”
“Pico will be delighted.” Athene smiled. “He was there. Everyone was there. Is there. Will be there?”
Not even the aorist sufficed. “It’s a Mystery,” I said.
“I’m going through,” Jathery declared. Gla stepped down into the water. The fish swirled all around him, orange, and gold, and white and gold swirled with blue. Mortal souls clung close to him, then drank and drifted away across the stream and vanished. Gla scooped up some water in gla hand and took the tiniest sip.
“Do you remember?” I asked.
“Quite enough,” gla said.
I followed. When I touched the water to my lips and tongue, I did not forget, but as I had suspected, my memory of it softened. It became no less felt or immediate, but more poetic, easier to compass and compare. I was extremely glad to reach the far bank, as glad as the mortal souls around me who were speeding off towards their new beginnings. Ahead I could see a thinning of the darkness.
“What would happen if I went through without drinking?” Athene called from the shadowed bank.
“Fate would catch you,” I said.
“Try it and see?” Jathery suggested.
She did. She stepped down imperiously and strode on boldly. Then she slipped partway across, fell under the water, and came up a second later, drenched and spluttering. “Fate had you by the heel,” Jathery said, laughing.
“Have you forgotten?” I asked, putting out my arm to help her out.
“I haven’t forgotten anything,” she said, taking my hand. “Only it all seems distant, like you said, and also very emotional, felt not thought. Is it like that for you?”
“Well it was certainly very emotional,” I said, diplomatically. I wondered how much she had really lost.
She released my hand and we all began walking up the slope, away from Lethe. “Thank you,” she said, and she didn’t mean for the help out of the river. “I’m sorry I didn’t trust you and made it so complicated. I thought you’d go to Father and I was afraid of what might happen.”
“Florent-Claude sends his love,” I said.
“I’ll go to Father now and tell him everything.”
“Do you want us to come, or would you rather see him alone?” I asked. There was a grey glimmer of true light ahead. We were almost out of the Underworld and close to Olympos.
“I can manage alone, but I’ll accept your offer of company,” she said.
“And you, Jathery? You can go and sort things out about Alkippe now. You probably have other things to do, too? Eggs to hatch, names to change, Saeli to fool? So we won’t see you again for a long time?”
The writing on Jathery’s skin shifted and changed, and I was sorry I couldn’t make it out, even if it probably now read “Apollo sucks.”
“I agreed to abide by Father’s judgement,” gla said. “As for Alkippe, no.”
“No? What do you mean, no?”
Jathery blinked gla multicolored eyelids slowly. “I now feel Necessity forbidding me even more strongly than it compelled me before. Perhaps the existence of that child is the price we have paid.”
“No,” I protested. “You have to deal with that. It wouldn’t be right for Marsilia and Thetis and Alkippe to pay for what we have done. Necessity couldn’t require—” But of course it could, it could be that cruel. A bright philosophical child. Would they even remember she had existed? I felt much more sympathetic to Thetis’s wailing than I had been when I heard it.
“We can ask Father about that too,” Athene said.
We took a few more steps towards the light and then appeared in the meadow on Olympos where I’d last been at the time of the Relocation. The same blue and gold bell-shaped flowers were nodding among the grass, and Father was sitting in the same place, as tall as the mountains but no bigger than a man. We walked towards him through the tall grass. Jathery walked on the other side of Athene. I wondered how Father seemed to gla, whether gla saw Father as Saeli. Father looked at the three of us evenly. He saw us, and so he knew where we had been and why, he knew everything, he had always known, and now it came to his attention. I understood this so much better than I had before.
“I have a song,” I said, before anyone else said anything.
Father spread a hand granting permission, to a distant rumble of thunder. Athene and Jathery took their places on the grass, flanking him. I took up my lyre, my true immortal Olympian lyre which never—unlike the mortal ones I’d been making do with for so long—needed tuning. That might not be my favorite thing about being a god, but it’s close.
I sang about being out there, much as I have set it down here. I could see Father smile as I sang. Athene seemed to be listening very intently. I wondered again how much she remembered.
“Good boy, Phoebus,” he said, when I finished and sat down. “And now you understand why I told you not to go there.”
“We are there already,” Athene said.
Lightning flashed to and fro among the peaks.
“Why do you keep so much from us?” Jathery asked, gla face expressionless but with anguish in gla voice.
“You have to be ready,” Father said. “You have to discover things for yourselves.” He looked at me. “Are you planning to sing that? To mortals?”
“I’m going to sing it on Plato,” I said. “There are people there who need to hear it, and are ready to understand it. I’m going to sing it to Sokrates and Pico.”
“They have a meeting to interrogate the gods, before the human ship lands,” he said. “You should go and sing it there. And you two should show up at the meeting too.” He waved at Athene and Jathery. “They deserve a chance to engage you in dialectic, after all you’ve done. And then bring Pico here. It’s time.”