The Birth of Venus
The Galleria degli Uffizi was a buisy place no matter what time of the day one visited, Aries mused as he watched a group of school children on tour pass by, flanked by their stalwart headmistress. Perhaps he would have to take to breaking and entering as that seemed the only likely way he was ever going to be left alone with his beloved.
He shifted his cool gaze back to the painting and tried to ignore the people who passed by and the old bespectacled man who came to stand beside him.
"It's lovely, isn't it?" the man said, drawing Aries' reluctant attention.
Aries regarded the man the way one might a particularly revolting insect on the tip of their shoe. "You should have seen the real thing," he said.
The man blinked at him in confusion. He looked at the painting again, then at Aries, who merely lifted a brow at him and returned his attention to the painting. The man soon left him alone, disturbed both by the exchange and Aries' ancient and pitiless eyes.
Aries studied the painting grimly. A masterpiece, they called it. He snorted.
Aries had described it as it had happened in minute detail to that absolute ass, Sandro Botticelli, and the painter could not have screwed it up more if he had deliberately tried. Of course, Lorenzo di Pierfrancesco de' Medici had been pleased as puch with the results. Aries knew he would have been enraged if he had been standing on that beach to witness it as it had happened. If Lorenzo had seen her step out of the foam in all her glory with his own eyes, he would have ordered Botticelli's immediate execution and felt well justified in doing so.
Aries closed his eyes and cast his mind back, and though it was a distant memory, five thousand years or more old, it came to him easily. There are just some things even gods can't forget.
He waited patiently on the beach, his bare toes digging into the warm soft sand as he watched two nymphs playing along the tideline. They had a wine colored shroud ready for her when she arrived and were frolicing in the waves with it held over their heads between them so that the wind caught at the fabric and made it billow.
He had been told to wait here, wherever here was. She would come, his father said. Just be patient.
So he waited and he was patient. If there is one thing that one learns from immortality, it is patience.
Around midday there was a change in the wind and Aries lifted his head from watching the nymphs at play to scan the horizon. There, in the distance, something broke the surface of the water and began to move slowly but steadily toward the shore, bobbing on the ocean waves like a bit of cork.
The nymphs noticed it soon after he did and stopped what they were doing to watch its progress. When it slid up on the beach and came to rest half out of the water, it was easy to see that it was a remarkably large oyster. His father certainly had odd ways of making children, Aries decided. As if having Athena spring from his forehead hadn't been enough, now there was this.
The two nymphs skipped a joyful circle around the oyster, then began climbing over it in search of a way to pry it open. As Aries aproched, they finally gave up and clambered down so that he could inspect it.
"Is she in there, do you think?" one of the nymphs asked.
That was the only expination he could think of. Birthed from an oyster; only Zeus could come up with something so utterly ridiculous.
"How do we open it?" the other nymph asked.
Aries shrugged and touched one of the scalloped edges. They all sprang back in surprise when it began to open under his hand.
Aries stood back and watched as the top half of the oyster slowly lifted to reveal a lovely sleeping woman, clothed in nothing but the salt of the ocean and her own flaxen hair. One of the nymphs moved forward to wake her, but he gestured her back with a firm gesture of his hand.
"Aphrodite," Aries said.
The woman stirred, her long fan-like lashes fluttering open to reveal eyes so pale blue that they were almost colorless. In that one moment as she lay there curled on her side, half asleep and half awake, for an instant only, she was not the goddess of beauty and lust, she was only a sleeping woman. For that brief second before she saw him and recognised him for who and what he was, there was nothing at all sexual about her. She was created specifically to be the harbinger of everything carnal and sensual, but for this tiny instant in time she was innocence personified.
Then her eyes focused and that moment passed, and Aries knew with a sad resignation that he would never see it again. It would become one of the moments in his long life that he would charish unto eternity because there are so very few things that he would not have the chance to experience more than once, but this was one of them.
Then she stood, and every movement as she decended from her aquatic womb was deliberate and calculated, the expression on her face inviting him to look and admire. Which he did, but not without a pang of regret for that lost second of innocence.
Aries would sit one day and relate the tale, right down to the warm grit of the sand beneath his feet, the smell of the ocean, the rushing sound of waves, and the tiny crystals of salt caught in Aphrodite's pale lashes. He would tell it all to a man named Sandro Botticelli so that he could paint it for Aries' friend Lorenzo, who had loved the story from the first moment he heard it when he was a boy. And one day Aries would stand in a museum in Florence and wonder how the artist could have painted it exactly the way he described it and still get it so completely wrong.