Pytheas looked angry. “She won’t do it,” he said, without any preliminaries. “She hasn’t calmed down at all. You can’t imagine how angry with us she still is.”
“Even after all this time?” I asked. My heart sank. “She’s still angry? Really?”
“Yes, well, you pushed her on her own ground. And I think she’s upset about something else as well. She was already very impatient even before that. She will get over it, but it’ll take time. Usually if I’d made her this angry I’d leave her alone for a decade or so.”
“Time is so different for you,” I said.
“Not any more,” he said, ruefully. “Or not for now, anyway. Now time is as urgent for me as it is for you, and she flat-out refuses to help. She was blisteringly sarcastic. She might even do something to make things worse.”
“What could make it worse?” I asked, and then immediately realized. “Oh, pairing us with awful people?”
“Klymene again,” he said, despondently.
“She wouldn’t be so unjust,” I said.
“You’re making Sokrates’s mistake of assuming the gods are good,” Pytheas said. He led the way over to the little stone bench in the corner where we usually sat when we met here. There was a big lilac bush there and it always smelled sweet. Now at the heart of spring it was just coming into flower, and smelled overwhelming. “The gods are as petty and childish as any of the awful stories about us Plato wanted to keep out of the city. Athene’s one of the best of us, but even she can be … spiteful when she’s angry. Vengeful.”
“It would be horribly unfair to Klymene,” I said, sitting down beside him. “Klymene has done nothing. And all I did was explain that she could trust me to keep my word.”
“She wouldn’t think about Klymene at all, if that’s what she wanted to do. Klymene barely exists to her. Athene has friends and favorites here, like Tullius and Ikaros, but she’s only theoretically granting equal significance to people like Klymene. It’s challenging. I have to really work at it.” He sighed.
“Do you think she’ll do that?”
“She’d be more likely to choose somebody really ugly for me. Or maybe—no, I don’t know. Anyway, it’s not so much me I’m worried about as you. You said—when we were talking on the beach about Daphne, you said you were afraid. And she could match you with somebody brutal.” He put his arm around my shoulders. I could feel the warmth of it through my kiton. I leaned back against him.
“I don’t think there are any brutal golds,” I said, trying to be brave and face the worst. “Anyway, I’ve done it three times now, and Phoenix was pretty crass. It’s not so bad. I can do it again.”
He kicked his legs against the stone. “I hate this. I hate feeling helpless. And I suppose it’s an essential human condition, and yes, even though I was so proud of myself doing this properly I was in fact cheating by knowing Athene was here and could fix things. I suppose in a way my coming here to the city was cheating, compared to going somewhere with poverty and dirt and all the terrible things of mortality seen close up. If I’d been a slave.”
“Too late now,” I said. “Though I suppose you could do it again if you wanted to?”
“I have never heard of anyone doing it again. And I don’t know whether I could make myself.”
“I’m glad you came here.”
“Oh yes.” He squeezed my shoulders. “I don’t want you to have another baby with somebody else.”
“No,” I said. “I don’t want to either. I’m not ready to have another baby. My body is. But what happens if I get like that again? Athene wouldn’t help us reach Asklepius again, and without that I might be in that horrible state for a year or even more.”
“That’s a very good point. There are things that people think help, iron and so on. But you don’t want to risk it yet and I think that makes sense. When I’m back on good terms with Athene and we can fix it would be much better.”
“You said a decade?”
“In a decade you’ll only be twenty-eight, twenty-nine. There are eras when that would be considered quite young to be having a baby.”
“I suppose.” It seemed to me quite a long time to wait.
“But that isn’t the problem, the problem is that you’ll get pregnant at the festival, now, tomorrow, with somebody else. After Athene refused me, I came here with two potential solutions to that.”
I twisted round so that I could see his face, tucking my knees up on the bench and putting my arms around them. “What are they?”
He put his hand on my bare knee, where it felt warm and heavy and almost unbearably erotic. “One is that you and I could mate now, tonight. You’d still have to go through with it tomorrow, but you’d already be pregnant with my son.”
“How is it you’re so sure I’d get pregnant, and that it would be a son?” I asked. It was hard to talk evenly because I was breathless at the thought.
“I’m a god,” he said. “There are so many heroic souls, and so few chances for them to be born heroes.”
“And that counts even though you’re incarnate?”
“This is a soul thing, not a body thing,” he said.
“And how do you know it wouldn’t be a daughter?”
“It wouldn’t—” He stopped and raised his eyebrows. “Usually, it feels unkind to beget a daughter, because in most eras it’s so horrible to be a woman. But I suppose here and now is one of the few places it wouldn’t be. So yes, it could be a daughter. That would be interesting. Different. Fun.”
I was still acutely aware of his hand on my knee. If I chose that option we could be sharing eros in a few moments. I was absolutely ready. We could stand up together there in the Garden of Archimedes, or off in the woods if we were afraid somebody else might come to look at the stars. That would be wonderful, I knew it would. I wanted it so much. It was what I had wanted for so long. But I couldn’t bear the thought of sinking down into that empty state of uncaring again. “What’s the other alternative?”
“If you’re not ready to have another baby now, you could eat silphium, and you won’t get pregnant. Well, you probably would with me because the weight of heroic souls waiting would probably outweigh the power of the plant. But you would be very unlikely to with anyone else.”
“What is it? I never heard of it.”
“It’s a root. I have some. I went and dug some up earlier in case you wanted it.” He handed it to me from the fold in his kiton. It felt like a spring onion. “You would eat it now, and then tomorrow you go through with it, which you’ll have to anyway, but you won’t have a baby. Nobody will think anything is strange, because you did it twice without before.”
“I might be safe anyway.” I thought about it. “One in three is not good odds.”
“You’re slightly more likely to get pregnant again after being pregnant once,” he said. “It’s as if your body has to figure out how to do it.”
Just then a worker came up and began to dismantle part of the wall around the garden. Pytheas took his hand off my knee. I decided to take that as a sign. I put the silphium in my mouth and crunched it up. It tasted like a green onion.