This Immortal Heart: A Novel of Aphrodite(19)
Pandora ties the herbs in bundles, hanging them from hooks in the ceiling so that their peppery scent infuses the air. I sit on her table, listening to the rustle of leaves and the melody she hums, and let my gaze fall upon the rest of the room. A trio of jars is lined neatly against one mud-baked wall, and her eyes keep wandering to the tallest of the three over and over again. I can see why. It stands apart from everything else in here—the three-legged stool, the wooden table, the other jars are all likely the work of Epimetheus, solid and simple. This jar, though, bears the unmistakable stamp of Hephaestus. I recognize the elegance and the subtle intricacy—the narrow foot rounding out to a sweeping curve, a raised pattern looping in relief at the base of the neck, the graceful pair of scrolled handles. Painted friezes wind around it, alternating ornamental motifs with scenes of animals and people: galloping horses, women gathering water, men bearing shields and spears, children picking fruit, hunters with their dogs running before them, prowling wolves and herds of cattle. I imagine the Blacksmith God observing all of human life so that he can re-create it in such faithful detail.
It gives me a sense of foreboding, this jar. Another gift of the gods in this simple home. Pandora unhooks a shutter, letting the sunlight stream in, and I hop up to the sill, stretching my wings to soar away from the house.
Beneath me, the hamlet where Pandora and Epimetheus live shrinks away, and I tilt my head to hear the whispers of yearning hearts, the stifled longings and fervent prayers for glorious Aphrodite to reward them with the object of their desires. As I fly above a house where a newlywed farmer’s wife is brining cheese, she feels suddenly restless, impatient for her husband to hurry home. Out on the field where he’s harnessing an ox to his plow, he pauses beneath the beat of my wings and glances over to the house, seized in an instant with the same urgency for her. Under my path, the winding river is shaded by trees, and the surrounds are noisy with boys running and wrestling and hurling blunt wooden spears. Where my shadow falls over the dappled sunlight, a young man tackles his opponent to the ground and for a second their faces are close, one above the other, a smile shared between just those two, a promise burning in the air of what will happen later when everyone is gone and there’s a chance to steal into the woods alone together.
I fly on, luxuriating in the rising chorus of love in my wake, before I turn my face up toward my home in the heavens, leaving the mortal world behind.
* * *
—
“You visited her?”
Zeus calls out from his lazy position by the fountain in the grand courtyard. He looks extremely satisfied with himself, and I notice a leaf stuck in his hair. No doubt he’s been tumbling in the forests again, hidden under the green canopy from his wife’s view. “Sit,” he tells me.
I take a seat on the bench at his side. The fine mist from the water has settled in tiny droplets on his shoulders and his beard. I feel it on my skin like a gentle caress. “Pandora?” I ask. “Yes, I went to see her.”
“And?” he grins. “What did you think?”
I look at him more closely. The twinkle in his eye, the gleeful smirk. It tells me I was right to be suspicious. “What is it?” I ask. “What trap have you set?”
He shrugs, all innocence. “Whatever do you mean?”
I roll my eyes. “Well,” I say, “Pandora. She’s not just a gift for loyal Epimetheus, is she?”
“No,” Zeus agrees. “She isn’t.”
A cool breeze whispers across my arms, raising goosebumps in its wake. “Tell me, then,” I say. “What have you done?”
I’m thankful, not for the first time, that Zeus loves to boast about his misdeeds. The day he learns discretion, he’ll be far more dangerous.
“You were the one to give her desire,” he says. “We made her beautiful and you gave her appetite. Of all the women in the world, she’s the most like you. Can you guess what she’ll do?”
I think back to Pandora humming in her kitchen. “You set a trap,” I say slowly.
Pleasure warms his cheeks. He looks affable, amused.
“The jar,” I say. “I recognized Hephaestus’ work. What’s it doing in their kitchen?”
“It’s full of everything Epimetheus wants to protect humanity from,” he says. “War, disease, starvation.”
“What do you mean?” I ask. “How could that even be possible?”
“Oh, it isn’t, really.” He laughs, pleased with himself. “But that doesn’t matter. What matters is that the story will get out. Epimetheus had a foolish wife and she cursed humanity the day she did what she was forbidden to do—opened the jar that Epimetheus was safeguarding.”
I remember the pull she felt toward it, the yearning in her chest that urged her on. “Disease and war and starvation already exist,” I point out, “and kill mortals every day.”
He waves my objection away. “Ah, but once the story is out there, they’ll have a reason for them. And, more importantly, someone to blame.”
“But it’s not her fault,” I protest. “Everyone will think an innocent woman is the cause of all their suffering. That doesn’t seem fair.”
“Not just an innocent woman. A wife,” Hera interjects in tones of pure venom as she sweeps past us. I start, not having noticed she was in the courtyard at all. She pauses, throwing a disdainful look at the leaf caught above Zeus’ ear. “Another reason for mortal men to mistreat their wives, as if I don’t hear enough miserable prayers as it is.”