Amelia: Reading from The Gates of Horn and Ivory - Strife

On the westernmost edge of the Oceanus, which spans the vast distance between the world of the living and the underworld, there is a splendid garden, constantly bathed in the glow of the sunset.

The garden belongs to Hera, a wedding gift from her grandmother, and wonderful apple trees with golden fruit grow there, under the jealous guard of the dragon Ladon, an offspring of the Typhon, and the rather distracted oversight of the Hesperides, the daughters of night and of the evening star.

The legendary orchard was far from the real world, in both location and appearance, and because of its priceless bounty, a perpetual temptation for those driven by greed.

When someone broke in to steal the apples, the circle of displeasure, complaint and requests for retribution invariably closed in the Underworld, a constant source of annoyance for Hades, who was expected to do something about it.

“Who was it this time?” Persephone asked.

“It was one of ours, actually. Eris decided to take it upon herself and plot against Hera. You remember Hera, don’t you?”

“Vividly,” Persephone replied.

Hera took exception to the smallest slight, never forgave an offense, and always made sure to drag the entire Olympus into her drama, satisfied only when she was the center of attention.

Her never ending unreasonable demands were legendary among the gods.

“Can you try to see if you can appease the spirits? Three goddesses fighting over a young man’s attention, what could go wrong!” Hades entreated. “Please? For me?”

For all her familiarity with the Underworld, there were beings there Persephone had never warmed up to.

She viscerally disliked Eris, who was the female embodiment of Ares’ bluster and brutality, and improved on the latter’s disturbing attributes with a deceitful personality, which found joy only when she created chaos and strife.

Everywhere Eris went, suffering and war were soon to follow, as she took pleasure in destruction and trickery and couldn’t stop herself from inflicting them, even on her allies.

If Persephone had to choose, she’d definitely have picked Ladon over her.

At least Ladon was an honest monster who didn’t take pleasure in perpetrating his evils.

Eris’ mother, Nyx, was intentionally oblivious to the endeavors of her children, who were so different from each other as night was from day, so much so one would never have guessed they shared a parent.

One had to comment that Eris didn’t balk at stealing from her own sisters, the Hesperides, just to create chaos and war on earth and wrath in Olympus, and Hera was her perfect partner in this game, easily triggered by lèse-majesté and being made to look like a fool, and eager to take offense.

So Persephone set the meeting with the latter for later, and was trying to figure out which of the other two goddesses was more amenable to mending bridges.

Aphrodite, as the winner of this unholy contest, may have been her best chance for a friendly ear, but she was also hare brained and constantly involved in some pathetic love affair, and like most of the gods, also eminently vain, vindictive, and fickle.

Aphrodite could be surprisingly cruel for a goddess of love, especially when she wasn’t given the worship and admiration she thought herself entitled to.

That left Athena, who, one had to assume, was not at all pleased about losing to what she secretly deemed to be a redolent sack of hair, and for the dumbest reason too.

Persephone sighed, and braced herself for an unpleasant meeting where she would have to act her part as queen of the Underworld, and take responsibility for Eris’s misdeeds again.

Hermes arranged the meeting in secret, as not to unsettle Hera’s wrath, since the latter would have surely considered herself entitled to be consulted first.

The meeting was to take place in Crete, at Minos’s palace, itself a sign of contrition and opening to good will to the patron goddess of Athens.

It was out of the way and as far from Troy as possible, and the three sons of Zeus and Europa, all of whom had now found a home and an eternal purpose in Persephone’s kingdom, would make sure the two would not be disturbed.

It was impressive, Minos’s palace, even for a queen.

Its vast stepped plaza and massive stone masonry walls had been laid out by cyclops before the god wars, and the artistry of its dark pottery and colorful frescoes had remained unequaled for centuries.

Persephone walked slowly up the shallow steps towards the main building.

Their limestone glowed blinding white in the midday sun, and she shuddered at the thought of how many human sacrifices those patient steps had seen over the centuries.

At the top of the stairs, she was greeted by Athena, who was always on time and appreciated punctuality in others as well.

Minos’ throne room provided the two with welcome shelter from the unforgiving sun and the eyes of the gods.

Its sumptuously decorated room, surrounded by red columns and walls covered in beautiful frescoes, had only one throne, carved in the stone of the back wall, so both goddesses stood instead, in unspoken and mutually deferent agreement.

At the end of four hours, the two parted ways, and Persephone headed back to the underworld, exhausted.

Hades was waiting for her at the western gate, eager to hear the outcome.

“How did it go?”

“Not well. Apparently Artemis was offended as well and now she got involved in the war too.”

It is amazing how much damage can be done with the minimal amount of effort.

One glossy fruit and some poisonous comments were enough to ensure the wrath and discord of four goddesses, the sacking and ruin of a city, gruesome battle deaths, and the shocking blood sacrifice, revenge conspiracy, murder and destruction of an entire Spartan king’s family.

And as it usually happens under these circumstances, every party involved in this disaster got so entrenched in their umbrage and retaliations they completely forgot what had started the nightmare in the first place, and didn’t even bother to ask Persephone to account for Eris’ conniving.

The meetings with the other two goddesses didn’t go any better.

Aphrodite arrived at the Fortunate Isles in Helios’ chariot, drenching her surroundings in a cloud of perfume, and getting cheered and fussed over by the pampered population.

She refused to step foot on Hades’ mainland, praised the pleasant surroundings of the isles and their temperate weather, but made it very clear she’d already held up her part of the bargain and didn’t intend to pay attention to any of the consequences it ensued.

She despised any activity that didn’t promise her pleasure and couldn’t be bothered to waste her attention on it.

As for Hera, the queen of the gods considered beneath her dignity to have another Olympian negotiate terms about her private affairs, even if the latter had the best of intentions, and curtly declined to meet with Persephone at all.

“I guess that settles it, then,” Hades sighed, resigned.

He was relieved by the surprisingly minor role the Underworld had to play in this brouhaha and decided to keep his kingdom out of the picture altogether, if he could.

And this is how the fates of men are sealed.

Every tragedy is a predictable chain of events, all seemingly unavoidable, which they never are, and triggered on purpose by cunning actors whose carefully planned actions get lost in the fog of war they generate, while said perpetrators distract and confuse all the parties involved with extraneous blather, and waste everyone’s attention and resources in trivial pursuits during which the sequence, the timing and the details of the events become impossible to follow.

The dangers are rarely evident; the threats are always veiled; the words have double meaning and the participation of the conspirators can never be proven.

A convoluted circus act of diverting attention during which the actors seem to disappear, only to transpire, in retrospect, to the audience, that they had never been there to begin with and what the audience thought they saw was only in their heads.

Every epic tragedy starts with a simple game of exploiting one of the classic spiritual weaknesses: greed, vanity, lust, pride, desire for power, and that insignificant initiating event cascades downhill, picking up speeds and magnitudes in the process which dwarf the plans of their conniving masterminds.

And while the conspiracy gets naturally limited by the capacity of the small minds that generated it, reality itself seems to intervene, adding natural disasters, unlikely phenomena and poor timing to make everything worse.

At the end of the debacle nothing is gained, much is destroyed, dignity is never restored, lives are lost, situations are permanently made worse and nobody, for all their efforts, can trace the fateful unfolding of events backwards to its source.

The Olympians go back to nurturing their secular grudges, while the humans forget the harsh lesson in a few years.

The generation which bore witness to the calamity dies off and the whole process can start again, donning a fresh look to surprise the next one.

Persephone wasn’t proud to admit it, but she was relieved her role in this fateful negotiation had been brief and marginal.

Getting involved in the fights between gods was a fool’s errand, because the latter never stopped one-upping each other and kept escalating their conflicts until something priceless was irretrievably broken or lost.

Trying to interfere with this process only made things more frustrating, while delivering no benefit at all.

“I suppose it’s too much to ask that Eris should answer for creating this nightmare,” Persephone offered a rhetorical comment.

“You know whatever answer she will give me is going to be a convoluted bundle of lies. I’ll let her spend some well-deserved time with her other siblings, Nemesis, the Erinyes, and Apate; family is important.”

Persephone shrugged and headed to her gardens to find some peace and quiet.

Thank you for reading.

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