Chapter 32:: Answered, Unanswered, Unasked.

“I’ve read this before. You gave it to me last year.”

Daniel looks at him, eyes narrowed behind glasses. He had wondered, once, whether Daniel was his father. Indrashish, with his easy geniality, brown skin and black curls, could never be thought of as a parent. It would also be way too embarrassing to be 5ft5 with 6ft3, built-like-a-house Indrashish for a father. Daniel, quick smiles and nervous energy, intelligence both sword and shield, lean, tending forever towards thin, had felt a better, more plausible choice. Ironic then, or perhaps fitting, that Daniel is going to tell him who his father is. “Fine. What is a hero?”

“A hero is someone who is watched by the gods, who performs deeds of great valour and cunning, lives and dies gloriously, and is often rewarded after death.”

“Wrong. I asked what. You answered who. And that inaccurately.” Daniel smirks when he reaches cautiously for an answer. “That is why your answer is inaccurate.”

“Cause I want to cheat?”

“Matter of fact. The man you define as a hero would do nothing of the sort, would he?”

“Actually, he might. I said nothing about honesty or ethics. That’s medieval Europe, not ancient Greece.”

“But this is hardly a deed of great valour or cunning. You want to use your superior strength to win unfairly. No greater good. No glorious cause.”

“Yes, but that’s sub… how does what I want to do make the answer inaccurate?” Daniel hitches an eyebrow, toys with his cup. “No. No.” Daniel leans back, making himself comfortable, and sips at his coffee. “No. I am not a hero. C’mon, Daniel, what sort of sick joke is this? I’m seventeen. I’m scrawny. I’m sarcastic. I’m petty. How the fu… hell am I a hero?”

“It’s quite alright to curse, Alex. Your life just… the keystone came crashing down. Nobody will mind if you say ‘fuck’.” Daniel sets the cup down, the coffee tipping up almost to the rim. “But you’re still thinking in terms of ‘who’, not ‘what’. Though,” he says, voice meditative, “I suppose your name’s rather apt for the former. What, by birth, is a hero supposed to be?”

“There isn’t any rigid…”

“You’re thinking Iliad again. Don’t. Older.”

“The sacred king?”

“Yes. What did he claim that made him technically superior to his rivals, even his brother?”

“Divine parentage. A god for a father, usually.” He pushes away the meaning of that sentence violently. “Well, technically it can be a goddess mother, like Aeneas’. In the original stories, I suppose more of the heroes would owe their divinity to them than to the gods. I mean, there are some very convoluted theories explaining the birth of heroes that can be easily simplified if one just accepts them as the sons of Athena or Artemis, though that holds for some of the minor gods as well. Part o the reason for the father being immortal, most of it, I suppose, one could say is…”

“Alex, it’s okay.” He hadn’t noticed, but Daniel has shifted, is sitting on the arm of his sofa, projecting calm so strongly that he cannot help sensing it, cannot help relaxing, realising only after he does so that the patterned wood of the sofa had been cutting into his palms. “Better.”

“It’s not real, Daniel. Those are just stories, rationalisations, metaphors.”

“They’re real, Alex. And you’re proof.”

“So my father is Zeus? Apollo? Hermes? Ares? Hades? Poseidon? Well, who is it?”

“I don’t know.”

“How can you not know? You were supposed to tell me everything, you and Indrasish. I waited a week because he got delayed. Now even you tell me you don’t know. What. Is. The. Goddamn. Point.”

“I know who slept with your mother. Doesn’t mean I know who your father is.”

He breathes, forces himself back from the precipice of anger-nausea-frustration he’s leaning over. “I’m not even going to pretend,” he says slowly, “that I understood any of that.”

Daniel frowns, slides off the sofa to sit on the table in front. “Hmm. You know the story of Metis, right? Or Dionysus. Actually, that would work better. Tell me how Dionysus was born.”

“Zeus came to Selene as a man. She conceived a son. Before the son was born, however, she wanted to see Zeus’ divinity. He obliged, but she died, unable to bear it. Prometheus, I think it’s Prometheus, not entirely sure, sewed the yet-unborn Dionysus into Zeus’ thigh and later cut him out.”

“Yes. It’s somewhat like that. You were born, at some pint of time, as a hero, of god and mortal woman. After you died, your mortality was burnt away in the funeral pyre. You, the divine you, the immortal you, was sent either to Elysium, or accepted as a minor god. I think,” Daniel says, picking up his neglected coffee, “that the first is more likely. Anyway, because, unlike Dionysus, you had, despite whatever divinity you possessed, lived and died a mortal on earth, you had to be reborn, of a god and a woman. You were ‘there’ already, wherever there might be, but the mortal part had to be re-forged.”

He can’t think, can barely feel, but the familiar cadence of Daniel lecturing on myths makes this too somehow academic, though it is, and he knows so, anything but. So he tries to fall further into that routine and asks what he would have if all this was just a story. “Which of the gods was it?”

“Hermes. Which, when you think about it, is extra-ordinarily apt.”

“Why her?” Not his mother, not really, but she’s not anything else and he can’t deal with a loss this heart-breaking twice in as many weeks. She’s all he has and he isn’t going to, won’t, can’t, replace her with some long-dust woman whose name he can never know.

“That, I suppose, had as much, or more, to do with chance than anything else. When we were in college, more than two decades ago, we had a professor who was, is still, one of the foremost experts in Greco-Roman mythology. He was brilliant, inspirational. He’s a large part of the reason I do what I do. Most of the girls and a number of the boys were infatuated with him. But there was one specially fascinating thing about him.” He’s intrigued, and knows that shows on his face. He’s also hoping that this won’t turn into a story of his mother, or any of his self-appointed guardians, sleeping with their teacher, and dreading that it will. “He had been teaching at Magdalen for about five years when we joined. We were there for a total of six years, maybe a bit less. In all that time, he never aged a day. And he was maybe 25 / 26 when he joined. You can’t go that decade without your face changing. You’ve seen it in all of us.”

“Immortal?” He’s interested now, rather more than in the divine paternity debacle.

“We weren’t sure. It’s hardly the first thing you think. But we started digging around, very discreetly. Turned out, his father had taught at Magdalen before him, and his grandfather and his great-grandfather, and so on, probably back to when the place was built. Didn’t find records, that far back. And, this was the oddest bit, they were all named Henry White.”

“What did you do after that?” This is part of what Daniel is supposed to be telling him, but it burdens him a lot less, somehow, than all the talk of gods and heroes. Perhaps because this sounds a lot more like the escapades he’s always told about. Perhaps because Daniel is forcing him to treat it like a lark by telling it like one. Perhaps because he is refusing, on some level, think about it.

“Sucked up to Henry White. A lot. Asked questions, hung around after class, ran errands, became TAs during our post-grads. Basically, anything that would allow us to keep digging. Ask Indrasish, if he manages to turn up this week at least, stupid sod has the best stories. Our last year at Magdalen, we finally stumbled upon something. Short version is that White was some not-too-major god, Zephyrus. A wind god, primarily, I believe. He somehow survived when the other Old Gods were exiled or left in anger, or something. The language was garbled and Deborah and I combined could barely make out the script. So, White, or I should say, Zephyrus was, for a very long time the only Old God on earth and…”

“Wait.” Daniel hitches an inquisitive eyebrow at him. “If the Old Gods aren’t here, how did Hermes… you know, arrive?”

“There are always loopholes, Alex. And, well, Hermes is the god of thieves. He isn’t divine on this plane. We cast shadows, right? Humanity is the shadow of the gods. And even that shadow could be cast only long enough that the infants could be brought to the mortal plane.”

“So someone else is wandering around as confused as me? Getting this lecture?” No reason it should be comforting, really, none at all. Doesn’t stop it from being just that.

“Perhaps,” Daniel says, voice deepening and strengthening as the doors to the shop open in a rattling of keys and chattering of female voices. The women are back from their shopping. He wonders how long they’ve been gone. It took a while for the silence in the shop to encourage him to ask Daniel all the questions that have been oppressing him for more than two weeks, and all of them for seven long days. “But I doubt it. She would recollect on her own, though she might well need a nudge. She’s not a hero; she’s fully divine — the daughter of Ares and Aphrodite.

“Harmonia,” he breathes.

“Yes.” There are questions he should be asking, he knows, but the spell has been doubly broken, by the arrival of the others, and by the naming of her name.

“Daniel.” This from downstairs. “Danny, Indrasish called. He’s got a ticket for tomorrow’s flight. Said he tried to call you.”

“I don’t know where my phone is,” Daniel yells back, then starts down the stairs.

“I’ll give you a missed call.” Years of living in Kolkata have taught his mum at least this habit.

“Are you sure it’s not silenced? Or switched off?”

“Almost, Deborah.”

“Are you sure you haven’t left it at the house? ‘Cause you changed shirts…”

He lets the world sink away, myriad voices muted, riotous colours darkened. Thinks, instead, of Harmonia, who has stalked his dreams for night, red lips and red hair and rose-petal robes soaked in blood.