A Very, Very Long Time Ago
Someplace in Greece
I grimaced at the pulpy mess that covered the altar. The stone slab was splattered with the gore of pigs, chickens, and goats. Their pink tongues flopped out of their gaping mouths, except the chickens, that is, they did not have tongues that I could see.
"Do the sacrifices please you, Great One?" asked the head priestess. She bowed and fluttered about. "Will you bless us with a good harvest this season?"
I carefully lifted the hem of my robes away from a pool of blood on the floor. What did the mortals expect me to do with a bunch of dead animals? It would be one thing if the meat was actually cooked.
"This is fine," I pronounced. "But next time, I would prefer something more-," Less messy, I wanted to say. "A pair of sandals perhaps. And maybe a nice girdle. Purple. And a bronze stylus."
"A bronze what?"
"Never mind," I said quickly.
I had forgotten that Greek humans were still illiterate. In my humble opinion, this was an embarrassment to our pantheon. A mortal civilization could only be as advanced as the deities that guided it. The Egyptian gods were constantly boasting about how their charges had already discovered geometry.
"The sandals and girdle will do."
"That only goes for Ko-ko," chimed a new voice. I cringed at the pet name. Only one entity ever dared to call me that (especially in front of humans) and that was my mother.
All the priestesses made a groveling fuss as Mother floated (figuratively, not literally, levitation is not a godly power in the Greek world, hence the use of chariots) into the temple. However, I raised an eyebrow at the poppy seeds in her diadem. Centuries of inbreeding may have produced gods that all looked alike, but I was certain that our own worshippers would be able to recognize her as Demeter, the original harvest goddess, as opposed to me, Kore the backup.
I stifled a sigh as the head priestess rattled off my mother's many epithets. No one ever showed such jubilance at my presence.
The earthly woman was a pathetic sight, especially for someone of her status. Like most humans, she wore a crude, itchy looking garment that was tied, not sewn, at the shoulders. Her feet were gnarled and calloused from a lifetime of wandering barefoot. And the filth caked on her body! Someone would have to teach these people how to bathe at least once a month.
Mother inspected the bloody goop on the altar. "What is this?" she said in her Stern Voice To Stop You Cold. It was the tone she would use on me when I was little and had done something naughty, like making her grain spout wings and fly away.
"Why is there so little," she demanded.
"A portion of every sacrifice must now be dedicated to Hestia," the head priestess quivered. "It was just mandated by Olympus itself…"
From the look on Mother's face, she had not read the memo.
In order to prevent any unjustified metamorphoses of innocent humans, I confirmed the matter. "Hestia is simply collecting what we owe her each moon for the heating and fire maintenance bill."
The goddess of the hearth had lobbied fiercely to enact an automatic payment system. Apparently she had long tired of banging on doors to collect late dues.
Mother failed miserably in an attempt to hide her annoyance. Like any supreme being, she hated being wrong. Therefore, she changed the subject.
"Now that you're here, darling, you can't ignore me like you ignore all my letters-."
"Hermes loses a lot of them," I lied.
"You only write when you need to borrow money-."
"That only happened once."
She inspected me critically. "Do you have to wear that all the time?" She sighed. "Of all our relatives, you just had to take after your father."
I thought that statement did not mean much, as our gene pool was fairly limited.
I looked down at myself. "What's wrong with what I'm wearing?" It was what I usually wore.
"Well, darling, your robe resembles a gigantic sack-."
"At least I'm clothed." Unlike some other gods.
"Your girdle looks like it has been chewed up by mice-."
"Clawed up by a cat, actually."
"Your sandals are grubby, the soles are peeling, and the straps are cracked-."
"I like my shoes broken in."
"Your diadem is tarnished-."
"Technically, it's patinated."
"And your hair hasn't been brushed in days."
That, I conceded.
"You could pass for a human," she finished.
I did not think that was a very nice thing to say before the groveling humans that were pretending not to hear anything, but I let it pass.
"How are you ever going to get a god? You might as well be invisible…"
I let my mind wander as she gave her usual speech- why can't I get a god, even a mortal man, why can't I ever invent something useful, Hermes is such a lovely singer, and Artemis is so good with a bow… etc.
"Do you think you will discover something soon? Not that I'm embarrassed by you or anything, it's just that everyone else's children are so accomplished." She reached into her robes and pulled out a lead tablet. "Technically, I'm not supposed to give this to anyone but I'm sure they won't notice."
"Your Indus Valley pass?" Gaining access to the restricted areas of the Indus Valley was more difficult than getting a Celtic rainbow fae to part with his gold.
"No one will notice you're not me. The guards aren't human, they can barely tell us apart. Don't lose it! With all the extra security and the red adhesive, it takes about three centuries to get cleared for an access permit."
It had only taken her 3 centuries? My own application for a permit had been denied twelve times.
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The heat of the Valley bore down on my brow as I climbed the rocky stairs. I had to take special care to avoid treading on the trailing robes of the gods walking before me. After the third time I almost tripped on someone else's hem, I wished nudity would come back in style again. Fortunately, our tour group finally paused at one of the designated vantage points.
Our guide turned to face us. "The Indus Valley was populated by mortals from the third to the fifth cycles of the divine cosmos1," she explained, waving her axe at the vast ruins.
Like most dryads, she carried a blade with which to behead anyone who tried to cut down her tree. I did not know why she bothered to carry one here, for I presumed her tree was all the way back in Greece.
"This civilization saw its height during the lifespan of the three footed constellation2, a time that probably corresponded to the golden age of its pantheon."
I craned my neck to see over the vast shoulder of a mountain god. The entire valley was littered with crumbling square structures lined along straight, crisscrossing streets and deep, wide, and long grooves in the ground. It was as if a giant had dragged his heel through the earth, providing the mortals with a grid on which to plan their enormous village.
I studied the enormous crater that had been made in the deeper slope of the valley. The sea glittered calmly in the distance as the workers dug, the archaeologists walked to and fro, and lowly interns fetched refreshments for everyone else. Occasionally, someone would pull a dusty artifact from the earth and start a ruckus. I had never seen anyone get so piqued over a cracked plate. I turned my attention back to the guide, who was flailing her arms with so much enthusiasm that I feared she might hurt someone with her ax.
"We know very little about the gods who had guided this once advanced and powerful society, they disappeared without a trace. The few who remember them recall that they were a reclusive bunch that jealously guarded their secrets. This was, of course, in the time before globalization, when gods of each pantheon kept to themselves and pretended that no one else existed."
I had read about this. The most popular theory offered that the Indus Valley deities wasted away when all their worshippers drowned in a mighty flood. When I looked through my Divoculars, I could even make out mildew stains in the stone lined grooves in the ground, which could indicate a heightened water level.
"This site is important because the ancient gods of this area had apparently given their worshippers the ability to accomplish feats that are difficult to replicate even today. The most remarkable thing is, all the matter in this valley is made of atomos, an earlier form of the four elements. Theoretically, it is not even possible to create a civilization this sophisticated with such archaic magic."
I silently wondered how something as complex and varied as atomos could be the primitive form of four simple elements. Perhaps it was actually the other way around.
The nymph led us into one of the tiny huts that were right off the path. About three of us managed to squeeze inside and huddle around the hollow stone box that stood against the back wall. The rock square was high and thick enough to sit on, but the inside let off a faint, rotten stench. I leaned over and saw a deep tunnel that led straight into the ground.
"There are many of these around the compound," our guide said in a hushed voice. "The people of the Indus Valley obviously did not fear their own mortality, for they built these direct portals into their underworld."
I rolled my eyes. If the Indus Valley's god of the underworld had been anything like ours, I doubted that anyone would have made haste to meet him. Gods were so quick to assume everything was meant for worship. If anything, I thought the portal would have made an excellent toilet, it already smelled like one.
We soon left the stinky little room and progressed along the path. I half listened to the dryad as I watched the diggers bent over their work.
"…particular interest to many gods around the world… learn the secrets of their mysterious Indus Valley counterparts…mortal ruins… only surviving clue about the Lost Pantheon of the Indus Valley."
As a centaur distracted our guide with a question, I quietly left the group and climbed over the rail that kept tourists out of the excavation area. I happened to be one of the gods who wished to unearth the secrets of the Lost Pantheon. Archaeological evidence suggested that their long lost agricultural methods were far superior to the ones known now.
A security guard came rushing over to me on his stork-like legs. His hairy face contorted into a scowl. "Credentials?" he snapped in Prakrit.
I presented my mother's tablets, hoping he would not notice that I had replaced her portrait with my own. He held them up and squinted his beady eyes. "Harvest, Greece, Class Beta research permit, agriculture," he muttered. He tapped the lead documents with a sharp talon. "These are awfully old, aren't they," he asked suspiciously. "We started reissuing papyrus credentials about forty years ago."
I stifled a snort. I was quite certain that the powerful Egyptian lobby had been responsible for this switch from durable lead tablets to flimsy papyrus scrolls. "They're still valid aren't they?" I asked coolly. "I hear there are some gods who still use stone tablets. Have you denied them access as well?"
The guard apologized insincerely and returned my mother's credentials. "The flagged parts are off limits." He clicked his beak in a rather menacing way.
I nodded and securely tucked the documents away, remembering Mother's lecture about red adhesive.
"Dee-meh-teh!" someone cried. I froze and scanned the area for the fowl security guard. I slowly turned around, hoping the speaker would not raise a fuss when he realized I was not, in fact, whom my credentials claimed.
"Demeter?" Another god poked his head up from his digging. A small crowd began to form around me. "Demeter who discovered the Common Creation Concept?"
"No, she's my mother," I said loudly. I immediately realized what a silly admittance this had been when everyone began to request autographed portraits, the dirt from beneath her sandals, or locks of her hair.
"Ven she be back?" someone demanded.
The first speaker must have noticed my annoyance, for he shooed everyone away. "Apologies, you look just like her. I am Chac of the Maya," he bowed. "Fertility, agriculture, rain, and thunder." He spoke slowly, as if Prakrit was difficult for him.
I bowed back. "Kore of Greece. Harvest. Do you prefer Egyptian? Or perhaps Arabic?" Aramaic was also one of the lingua franca of the millennia, but I could only read it, and very slowly at that.
Chac looked delighted, even with tears constantly pouring down his scaly green face. I knew that in Mayan culture, the flow of tears symbolized rain and fertility. Personally, I thought that gushing liquid from a different kind of eye was a better indicator of the latter.
"It is an honor to meet you, Koe-oh-ray." Chac's Arabic was much better than mine. "You are here to study agriculture as well! Excellent. Those war gods," he threw a dark glance at a group of rather belligerent looking deities, "are hoping to excavate a better alloy with which to forge weapons."
I nodded politely.
"I have not seen Dee-meh-teh in centuries. Why does she not come to the Indus Valley anymore? If the development plan gets ratified, this place will no longer be the same!"
"Development plan?"
He made a sound of contempt. "Some gods want to make this place more tourist-friendly by building a replica of the Lost Civilization over the ruins that have already been excavated. Apparently the fees for the research permits are not enough to support the local economy." He shook his head and giggled sadly. "The pro-development lobby also claims that a revitalized public interest in the Indus Valley would be the best way to fund archaeological studies.
"The archaeologists and historians are all against it, of course. But the Board of Historical Preservation seems to thinks this is a modest proposal."
"A modest proposal!" I scoffed. "We may as well eat babies to end starvation! How could anyone replicate a lost civilization when we do not even completely understand it? Would they even bother to build everything from atomos?"
"Atomos was the obsession of Dee-meh-teh as well. Speaking of which…" My mind wandered as Chac strolled next to me, chattering about the newest discoveries, pointing out various gods and what they hoped to find. "That's As Shalla from Assyria, she's studying the unique strain of grain that once grew here… There's Zoroaster, he's trying to reproduce the Indus plumbing system…"
"Is anyone here interested in atomos?" I interrupted.
He looked surprised, or at least I thought he did. It was hard to tell with a being like him. "Your mother devoted much of her life to studying atomos, and yet she ended up abandoning her research in despair and frustration. If she cannot find anything conclusive, it is unlikely anyone else will."
"But I am her daughter," I finished for him.
"Indeed," he smiled.
We walked in silence as he left me to my thoughts. Chac had unknowingly solved a minor puzzle for me, why my mother had become so adverse to any mention of atomos.
My earliest recollection was that of my mother waving these marvelous spinning spheres and discs above my head. They were no bigger than my infant fist and tingled when I grabbed them. Some of them would sink into my cradle while the others would float of their own accord.
Since atomos at normal size were very difficult to see, she would enlarge them to better scrutinize their contents. While I used atomos for the sole purpose of childish entertainment, Mother would study them fervently. The walls of our home were always coated with wax so she could easily carve and rub out complicated equations in order to discover the mystery of atomos.
Then suddenly one day, when I was but a toddler of twenty years, my atomos playthings were replaced with more normal toys like self playing harps, purple fire, and unicorns. I paid little heed to this loss, I was too preoccupied with trying to invent a more efficient form of agriculture. It mainly consisted of a bag of seeds placed over a large explosive buried in the middle of an unplowed field.
I reckoned that she had eventually lost the patience to see through with her research, and was disgruntled by any reminder of her own failure. If I were to learn the means of controlling atomos, it would be much more significant than her discovery of the now-famous PanGaia theory, or, to use the politically correct term, the "Common Creation Concept." I would no longer be the underachieving child of a brilliant scientist. Instead of "Demeter's daughter," I'd be Kore.
I liked the idea of succeeding where my mother had not. Fueled with determination, I decided to keep returning to the Indus Valley to find something substantial to present.
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