Page 70 of The Ruin of Eros

Morning comes, slow and red. I reach a village, and then another one after that. The path becomes a road, and after a while I see others on it—here and there another horse-rider, here and there a person on foot. I keep the hood of my cloak up, and my eyes on the path. I don’t want their attention. I don’t want them to ask where I’m from or why I’m traveling this way. I don’t want them to notice that I’m a woman, and young.

When dusk starts to fall for the second night, I think aboutstopping. I’m exhausted. How long is it since I slept?

I ask around to find a room before the darkness thickens. Thexenodochoi, the villagers who offer up their rooms for travelers, do so as a holy act—but they are more eager to host some guests than others, that much is easy to see. The first door is opened by a woman, who narrows her eyes at me and tells me their house is full. The next door is opened by a man, and although he says there is room for me, I do not like how he says it. I dismount to ask some children playing in a small square. They eye me curiously; one of them has dark eyes that remind me of young Hector Georgiou.

“Try the house with the red door, after the shrine,” the boy says. “Kirios Hieronymus is good to wayfarers.”

Sure enough, when I knock the door opens quickly, and a stocky man with deep brown hair ushers me in. There’s a free room, he says, and a table with bread and wine for me if I wish it.

“Will you have this for it?” I take my father’s ring from the bag and show it to him.

He looks at it, looks back at me, then shakes his head.

“Keep it, girl,” he says gruffly. “You may eat as a guest tonight.”

I take my bread and wine in the one large room where other travelers are dining. I seat myself in a dark corner; they barely notice me come in, so deep are they in conversation.

“You’ve felt the storms, have you not?” one of them is saying. “If you knew how to cast for omens, brother, you would know it. Something is amiss with the gods.”

“Something is always amiss with the gods,” another says, waving his companion’s words away with a mouthful of wine. “They fight more than we do down here.”

“Be that as it may,” a third one says, “whatever her priestesses decree, we’d be fools not to follow.”

“Whose priestesses?” I say at last, and the men go silent,turning my way. They stare, but I don’t lower my hood.

“Why, Aphrodite,” the first of them, a tall, whiskered fellow, says. The others are tight-lipped, seeming unsure whether they ought to share such speculations with a woman.

“Her priests have issued a decree,” the whiskered man continues. “Those seeking her blessing are no longer to worship her son, the god Eros.”

The piece of bread falls from my hand. What can this mean? As the whiskered man’s companion said, we are used to the gods and their fighting—but this seems different.

“Rumor has it the temples of Eros have been falling. We are not to rebuild them, the priests say. Even his shrines are not to be used. Likenesses and statues are to be covered or put away.”

I swallow, feeling a chill go down my spine.

“But surely such a thing will not happen. He is one of our gods. We can’t just…stop.”

The men look at each other.

“There are many gods we have stopped worshiping over the years,” one says finally. “Our ancestors worshiped the Titans.”

True enough. The Titans were an ancient race, and I suppose no one has worshiped them in these lands since Zeus brought his clan to Mount Olympus—but that was many years ago.

The man shrugs. “No doubt with every generation, some are lost.”

I say nothing. It is too hard to fathom. Gods cannot be killed, and yet…what he is describing sounds almost like a death.

“Well,” one of the other men says, “I reckon it’s time we turn in.” He eyes me as he says it, and there’s a hesitant rumble of agreement. Left alone in the room, I finish my bread and wine slowly, then climb to my room and lock the door. I push the weight of the bed against the door, and through the night I lie with my mother’s knife beside the pillow.

At first light I slip out to the stables, untie Ajax, and pull myaching limbs up over his back. Ajax, I think, suffers none of my exhaustion. Even on these dusty paths, his black coat looks sleek and unsullied, his mane as lush as ever, and the walking does not appear to tire him. Nor does he show any reluctance, any instinct to pull against me or run off. And I know that is not because he is tame—he is a wild creature, much wilder than I. I can only judge that he is here by choice; that he remains here, with me, by choice. I whisper to him as we walk on.

“I have heard strange things of your master last night, Ajax. I do not know what to make of them.”

The roads are empty enough, and if anyone thinks me a madwoman for conversing with her horse, they keep it to themselves.

By the time the sun is halfway through its ascent, I have my first glance of the sea, and something about the sight brings tears to my eyes. By noon, we are riding by the coast. It is bracing, euphoric even. I feel something stirring as I watch the waves glinting under the sun, the blue ripples laced with gold. From the high vantage point of Sikyon, though the sea was within sight, it felt remote. Not so now as we ride through these flat lands, along this endless briny expanse—dancing, ever-shifting. My mother was an island girl, the child of fisher-people. Perhaps that’s why my blood seems to rejoice at the sight of all this.

We have to wait a while for a ferryman at Patras, but the crossing itself takes no more than half an hour, with the currents in our favor. I give him an extra coin because I can tell he’s not pleased about Ajax; it’s a large enough ferry, and not unusual for a rider to cross with their horse, but the great stallion looks bigger on the boat than he did on land.

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