Maecenas shook his head. “Not when I left. It might take half the night. He started screaming ‘why are you tearing me apart?’ over and over, as if he hadn’t meant to do it to Pytheas, and as if he hadn’t done it to other people before. It’s one of their standard methods of execution, they tell me. They had one of those colosseums in Marissa too, didn’t they? I don’t know that we want to trade with these people after all.”
22
APOLLO
On one of the last days of the Weimar Republic, I ran into my brother Dionysios unexpectedly in a nightclub in Berlin. He was leaning against the wall, half shadowed, a cup in his hand, talking to the piano player. He looked up as I came down the steps and greeted me with a half-smile. He was dressed in black leather, topped off with a leopardskin scarf. He was there for the same reason I was, to save as many as we could, in the teeth of Fate and Necessity. He said something quietly to the pianist, who looked to the saxophonist and played a low D. My brother and I danced together there, cheek to cheek, in that crowded little underground room on the desperate edge of destruction, amid the smoke that was like, and not like, the smoke of sacrifice, and the music that was like, and not like, the music Kebes played on his syrinx that day in the colosseum of Lucia.
Kebes was an enemy, a breaker of guest friendship, a rapist, and a torturer who set up institutional torture in his republic. But none of that is why I turned my lyre upside-down in order to defeat him, or why I killed him in that horrible messy way. The contest was for original composition, any instrument. What Kebes played was not an original composition, it was Gershwin’s “Summertime.” It’s not that he broke the rules of the competition, although he did. He was a plagiarist. He cheated on art, passing off someone else’s work as his own, believing no one would know. Naturally, I would have had to punish that even if he had done nothing else. I sickened of the skinning early on, but I believed that if I kept on inflicting the agony with a promise of the release of death, he would tell me why Athene had given him the syrinx, and how he had learned the music. There were no Masters among the Goodness Group who came from late enough that they would have known or recognized jazz. I couldn’t reveal my knowledge of his plagiarism without giving myself away. Torture is irritatingly ineffective: he taunted me for as long as he could, but he refused to answer my questions and died without telling me. (How I eventually learned the answers is part of another story, which I may tell you one day.)
After he was dead and vanished, and his tattered separated skin, removed with so much slow effort, had vanished with him, I plunged into the clean Aegean to wash off the blood. I emerged again to mortal problems and complications and the relentless mortal timescale where everything has to be dealt with in the instant, with no time to think through the consequences. I had a tiny cut on my thumb where the knife had slipped, and it stung with the salt of the sea water. All my human interactions felt just like that at that moment, raw and stinging and petty. It was all tension—between Lucia and the Excellence, between Kallikles and Klymene, and in the souls of my Young Ones as they tried to deal with their dual nature.
I had been skinning Kebes all through the hours of darkness, and it was weary work; my mortal body needed sleep. But the sun was growing higher in the sky and sleep was far from me. I wanted to be away from the ship and mortal trivialities. I needed to recover from the contest, and the aftermath. I swam again, with Kallikles and Arete.
Swimming always made me feel close to Simmea, because she taught me, because it was the first thing we had shared and the way we came to know each other. I hadn’t done it since she had died. Now, swimming, in a state of physical and mental exhaustion, felt almost like being with her, and yet painful because she wasn’t there and never would be.
We swam out of sight of the ship and the city. I pulled myself up onto a rock, and the Young Ones climbed up and sat beside me, all of us naked in the warm light of my beloved sun. The rock was gray, but turned black where the seawater ran off our bodies to make it wet. The sea broke about it in a little frill of white foam on sapphire. Simmea would have wanted to paint it.
“Clean at last,” I said, inspecting my hands.
“Do you feel any better now that Kebes is dead?” Kallikles asked.
I thought about it for a long moment. “Yes. No. I’m glad I defeated Kebes and I’m glad I killed him, even if it was so slow and messy. He deserved it even before he cheated and broke guest friendship.” I had wanted him dead, and he was dead, and off to a new beginning. Meanwhile, everything else was still here, and more complicated than ever.
“Did he even break it?” Arete asked. “Auge immediately started shouting that he had, but we were formally welcomed to Marissa, not here, and they are independent cities in the same league.”
“They offered us all guest friendship when we arrived,” Kallikles said. “I was one of guards with the envoys. That was clearly and plainly stated.”
“I never accepted it, but they offered it to all of us, and when they attacked everyone they definitely broke it. You had eaten their food, and they attacked you anyway. Kebes organized that attack, so he broke it,” I said. “Besides, that music wasn’t original. It came from the twentieth century. He was cheating and he thought nobody would know.”
Arete drew in her breath sharply, and Kallikles gasped. “How did he know it?”
“He wouldn’t tell me. It must be some god interfering.”
“I’m glad you punished him for it,” Kallikles said.
“Yes. And now that’s over. Done with. Settled.” I tried to feel it was true as I said it. But no matter how much I wanted it to be, nothing felt settled by Kebes’s death, and it gave me no relief.
“What about the Goodness?” Kallikles asked.
“Let them build triremes,” I said, lying back, deliberately trying to relax. They weren’t my people, or my responsibility, or anything to do with me. “Let Yayzu look after them. How surprised he will be when he takes notice of them praying to him from here!”
The sun was warm, and after a little while I did begin to relax a little. The Young Ones sat quietly in the sun. I kept feeling that I had left something unfinished. Not skinning Kebes. I had done that thoroughly, made a proper job of the whole messy business. And now he wasn’t walking around gloating about raping Simmea, or sneering at Arete, or passing off other people’s art as his own. His soul was free for a new beginning, and the world was a better place without him. All the same, I felt as if something was missing. Absent or present, Kebes had been a rival for a long time. I felt emptier without him.
Just then, surprising me utterly, Arete rose up off the rock, neat as Hermes, and flew through the air. It had been such a long time since I’d seen anyone really fly. When in my proper form I could hover in the air, and walk on it, naturally, but I’ve never been able to swoop about like a bird the way she was doing.
“Stand up and let me try carrying you,” she called to Kallikles.
He stood up at once and held his arms out. “Don’t drop me!”
“I won’t. But you’d land in the sea! Or if you don’t want to, you could just walk down the air. Don’t be a baby!”
She swooped down from behind and carried him up with her. I’d never seen anything like it. She made several loops in the air, with him dangling from her arms.
“Is he heavy?” I called.
“No! It’s not difficult at all. I can barely feel his weight—not like holding up a person, more like carrying a baby.”
Kallikles blew a raspberry, and she swooped low and set him gently down beside me on the rock. Then she made one last circuit and perched again by my other side.