This Immortal Heart: A Novel of Aphrodite
Jennifer Saint
For Juliet, a goddess among literary agents.
This one is your favorite, so it always had to be for you.
Prologue
The Sky shatters, and an unearthly howl rings through the air.
Ouranos, the god who spans the horizon, splits apart. The adamantine sickle, given to his treacherous son by his treacherous wife, falls to the ground. Its blade gleams with golden blood.
The essence of Ouranos, the primal root of him, has been sheared away. It sinks beneath the waves that pound the rocky shores of Cyprus.
He is unmanned. A ruined king, a devastated god.
The droplets scatter across the earth, and, where they land and mingle with the soil, the last of his children arise. Monsters born of his agony: wild giants and terrible girls.
First come the spear-wielding Gigantes, who will one day wage war against the gods who succeed Ouranos and his son. Next, the three Furies, a trio of blood-born sisters whose immortal lives will be dedicated to the unrelenting pursuit of the most brutal justice.
But the final daughter—the youngest and strongest of his offspring—will step forth not from land but from the churning froth of the sea.
Her head breaks the seething surface, then her shoulders, smooth and bare in the awful light. Her hair, the color of a burnished sunset, clings in dripping ropes to the curves of her body, the seawater glistening on her flesh.
Behind her, the sky is a white void, hollowed out and inert. Emptied of the divine power that had crackled through it since almost the dawn of time.
There is a humming in the earth, a thrill of anticipation, as the goddess strides forwards, the waves foaming around her thighs. The spray against the jutting rock behind her is still tinged with the gold of her father’s blood.
The water gasps at the shore, hissing over the stones of the bay. The sigh of the wind rises into a soft moan, tortured with longing, as the woman looks around her, taking in the island that is to be her first home.
Where her feet touch the ground, tiny star-shaped flowers bloom, their purple petals quivering in the air. The breeze carries the languorous sweetness of their scent, her trailing perfume, as she walks on.
The world has never seen anything so dazzling, and, even though her existence is brand-new, she knows it. She can feel her power awakening in every glorious inch of her body.
Aphrodite smiles.
1
Inside the temple, the air is dim with fragrant smoke. The young woman moves steadily through the billowing clouds, her thin robe swishing at her ankles with every step. Her hair spills down her back, a dark river woven through with saffron ribbons that gleam in the firelight.
She drips honey into a shallow dish, a slow stream of amber, rich and sweet. The aroma mingles with the burning incense. It’s intoxicating.
Her head is bowed as she approaches the statue with her offering. It’s a clumsy likeness, ivory carved by human hands trying to capture the essence of a goddess they can hardly imagine, but her reverence is palpable—and so is her longing.
Lotus blossoms are festooned around the base, their sky-blue petals and sun-golden centers inviting. She sets the honey down at its cold, white feet. Another dish holds a pomegranate cut in two. Dark-red seeds spill from its tender flesh, soft and juicy and tantalizing.
She’s gazing at uncomprehending stone, never dreaming that the goddess she seeks is not in that vacant figure but behind her. The scent of her hair carries the freshness of the wind outside the temple, the one that shakes the leaves on the oak trees, the wind she sometimes whispers into, hoping I will hear her.
And, today, I will.
Inside this temple, we are all alone. Only she holds the keys to this sacred space; no other mortal can enter without her permission. She relishes that power, like I relish mine. I am the Goddess of Love, and she is my priestess. While she belongs to me, she will be safe from the dreary tedium of a husband and the long years of serving his needs.
Instead, she devotes herself to love. When I look inside her heart, I can trace the shape of her unspoken dreams, know who it is that consumes her every thought. The image of one of the other girls who worships here, sweet and pretty, rises in her mind. I feel my priestess’s heart surge with joy as though it beats behind my own breast.
She makes her devotions to my statue, but it isn’t her offerings that draw me here. It’s the rush of flames burning beneath her skin when she thinks of her beloved, melting her from within in an exquisite torture. That is the real gift to me.
Other gods demand blood and sacrifice. What I want from mortals are their secrets. The cravings that they cherish in private; the yearning that pulses through their veins and stirs their souls, that robs them of speech and thrums in their breasts like a hummingbird’s wings. I hear it all, every tentative hope, every forbidden want, every fragmented gasp of passion, and to me they are poetry.
With a final glance at the smooth skin of her cheeks, the sweep of her eyelashes and the pouting curve of her lips, I leave the temple, veiled in a mist that renders me invisible to mortal eyes. When she discovers that she has been rewarded and finds her longing is requited, she’ll give me grateful thanks, but I already have what I came for.
I soar out of the bronze-gated sanctuary of Paphos in the form of a dove, fluttering through the pink skies of dawn as the sun rises over the island.