What I've been told of my origins is that The God of the Sea, having laid waste to Atlantis at the command of The God of the Sky, gazed in regret upon her now desolate people and came out of the sea. He took the form of a stallion and sought the most beautiful and divine of the Atlantean centaurs (a species they created in encomium to he) and lay with her. From that union came twins – a boy and a girl. That was me, and my brother. From the earliest I can recall, it was generally perceived that our purpose on earth was to restore Atlantis to her former magnificence.
As far as I know (from the accounts of others of course) that was the only known time when our adored, divine, sexually prolific father pursued a female (of any species) solely for the purpose of impregnating her. It seems more plausible that he'd rather observed that intriguing, bespoke creature lolling about enticingly by the sea and thought 'I'd like some of that', and my brother and I were an accident. Perhaps, as many peopled tattled, he wasn't even our father, and we were changelings spirited away by our centaur mother. Or maybe we were just a pair of no-account bastards – one man's trash, another centaur's political propaganda. Looking back now from such a distance, the truth doesn't really matter anymore.
Actually, looking back, the narrative becomes pretty hazy. It all happened a very long time ago, and a lot of the details escape me. I don't know exactly when I was born, and I'm sorry to say that I can't make much of a guess at it either. In the time since, there were many periods of my life where I stopped trying to measure time. When you're immortal, time rather loses its significance.
One of the few measurements of time that people seemed to be aware of was that our birth came round-about 300 years after Atlantis was destroyed (for the first, but not only time this had happened). During that period, the depleted population had managed to achieve such a level of inbreeding that the current generation almost universally displayed the same odd assortment of dominant genetic features that became characteristic of my race – dark skin. Silvery-white hair. Blue-green eyes. It's amazing that they weren't all cross-eyed with extra fingers, but perhaps that's one of the perks of divine DNA. Coincidentally (or not), my brother and I also shared those telling attributes.
It's strange what my memory chooses to hold on to and what it omits. For example, the face of my brother Ka, whose company I barely left for more than a decade, is lost to me. On the other hand, I spent little more than a couple of years with our mother, yet I remember her perfectly. After that period, she was spotted by a local king, who enticed her into his bed and knocked her up. Our mother was so desperately ashamed to tell our grandfather that when the Goddess Artemis passed our mother lamenting in the forests of Mount Pelion she sent her straight to heaven (you'll see her up there as the constellation Equus, or so they say). Incidentally, I've heard that her illegitimate daughter (our half-sister) later caught our supposed-father's eye and he raped her (this time in the form of a bull, the kinky fellow) and got her pregnant too. Do you see where I'm coming from with him?
One only had to look at our mother, Hippe, to understand why she was an object of all this royal desire and inspiration. She was a sublime young filly with slender legs and curly ankles. Her shining coat was auburn and her skin was pale as marble, her dark eyes sparkled with the reds and yellows of topaz, and her untamed carmine locks spiralled and glowed like fiery passion. I remember that her human breasts were almost pre-pubescently undeveloped, and I don't recall ever being fed like that, though perhaps I'd have been too young to remember. After she ran off with the king and vanished from our lives, my brother cried for weeks. I remember that, but I don't remember feeling sorrow myself. I wasn't a very sentimental child.
After she'd gone, our grandfather Chiron took us under his care and tutorage. I think we were four or five years old. Shortly after that Grandfather started his campaign to spread news of Atlantis' imminent 'salvation' by touring us around what remained of her once far reaching and imposing empire. After the continent was flooded, the remaining population had crawled up to where the tops of hills and mountain peaks still remained as scattered islands poking out of the turbulent waves. The pre-flood Atlanteans (or rather, their government) had made a lot of enemies because of their constant campaigns of war and invasion, and now that the tables had turned her people remained exiled and friendless. There was little land left suitable for agriculture, so food was scarce. Some people had managed to build meagre vessels seaworthy enough to carry them from island to island, not in the hope of finding new land to pitch up on, but to prevent them from having to copulate with their siblings in order to produce offspring. The world, as we knew it, was in a sorry state.
Once again I feel I must apologise for the lack of detail that I'll be able to recount about events in my life which would probably have been enthralling, unbelievable, and otherwise mind-boggling to have witnessed. I also have difficulty separating what I remember from things I heard, thought, or dreamed happened. I remember bits of the early campaign as Grandfather took us from island to island, getting people's attention by showing off the gifts we'd been endowed with – or, as I recall it, the tricks he'd taught us. That isn't to say that we were all show – Grandfather was training us hard in our respective fields, which, for my brother Ka was logic and puzzles, and for me was sorcery. But we also knew how to please a crowd.
One event that coincided with our birth, and doubtlessly counted as favourable evidence in our case as demi-gods, was the appearance in the sky over the forlornly crumbling central palace-come-temple of Atlantis a bright azure-white star. 'Star', though the most appropriate word anybody could come up with to explain the thing, did not really cover it. This star had truly fallen and now hovered perpetually, a man's height above the highest spindly steeple of the palace (which itself was three quarters submerged). The Star's light penetrated a great amount of distance around it, but its brightness was equal, regardless of how near or far from it you happened to be. Weirdly, wherever you stood your shadow was always directly below you (except during the day when the sun cast its own shadows), and The Star shone brightly, day and night. It played havoc with people's sleeping patterns, I can tell you.
Grandfather told people we met to go forth to the place where the central palace had been, and there they would see the temple resurrected by my hand. Sorry to say I can't remember doing it (I'm sure it would have been a sight to be seen) but sure enough, there it was, a waterlogged island and algae-covered tower, and that star twinkling away overhead. You can imagine their wonder. Unlikely as it sounds, nobody even tried to oppose him. I suppose as downtrodden as the people were, any sign that the gods had remembered them was seized and run with.
As news travelled, our 'disciples' grew in number. The temple was restored and the marshy island drained. You might wonder how people, poverty stricken down to their muddy bare feet could afford to dedicate their time to such activities, and the answer is that Grandfather loaned them the means to do it. The money (lent at interest, I might add) was traded with the centaurs for food and the labour and materials for building, on the agreement that it would be paid back when the Atlanteans could once again live off the land they tended. Slowly the palace island got bigger and bigger, and more and more people came, and Grandfather lent them more and more money. He never seemed to run out of it.
While everyone toiled away in poverty, Grandfather moved Ka and I into the newly restored palace, where he continued our training. Apart from his relentless approach to our education, we were extremely spoilt, and from an early age instilled with a heady sense of pre-eminence. At twelve, Ka was a master of mathematics, strategy, engineering and combat, and I was accomplished in sorcery, medicine, hunting, and what I would call 'shamanism'. We were both literate, and had been tutored in the humanities, as well as 'politics', but in retrospect I feel that the latter was rather obscured by our over-arching contempt for anyone that wasn't us. Whether this was Grandfather's intention or not, I do not know. It did though prove to be his downfall.
Grandfather was a master astrologer. He knew everything that was going to happen, from what he read in the sky. I have to say that this was knowledge that wasn't passed down to either Ka or I, and I can't remember whether it was because we weren't able to grasp it, or because Grandfather never tried to teach us. Years after his death, people suggested that he had only feigned an ability to read stars as a means of manipulation, a basis for propaganda. But those words were speculation and rumours, and as there were no astronomers so great among Grandfather's contemporaries as to challenge him, we shall never know - just as there is so much else in the world we shall never know.
If I try to remember how I felt then, I can say that I was happy. I lived in opulence, clothed in emerald encrusted silk and presented daily with food of such excellence which was never again matched in my life so far, which I can assure you is saying something. I was praised for my scholastic accomplishments and took great pride in them. Ka was my best (and only) friend and playmate, and our play was never short of diversion. On the other hand, we were competitive. Or perhaps it was just me who was competitive. Ka was very logical, and less hot-headed than me. Perhaps he understood 'the big picture', even if I didn't.
Around this time, I imagine when he'd figured we were ready, Grandfather summoned us into his presence to inform us of our intended roles in government. His early campaign had ensured that nobody doubted that my brother and I were born to rule, but as we were so young, and he was doing such an excellent job of raising us, he was widely accepted as the steward of the palace, and of course head of government. The combined labour force had salvaged much of the ruined land about the palace-temple. Walls had been built. Fields had been tilled. Any inquisitive invasion forces had been swatted away by the hardy centaur army.
He began our meeting with a critique of the progress we were making in our respective training programmes. I remember clearly that I was wearing an archer's arm guard on my left arm, which was made of white suede and had been embroidered with an intricate geometric pattern, and was also sporting a silver hunting knife with a curved blade that tapered into a point, with half of one edge serrated and the handle inlaid with mother-of-pearl. Both items were gifts, each from a different visiting head-of-state, though I don't recall who precisely.
Grandfather told Ka how pleased he was with the ingenious simplified writing and language system he was working on, but he picked me up on what he called my 'weak form with a fighting blade', by which I think he meant swordsmanship. I know I wasn't as keen on 'man-to-man' combat as I was of sniping and trapping, and looking back I'm sure it was a fair criticism. At the time I remember arguing with him how I didn't understand why adhering to rules and etiquette in fighting could yield more success than attacking opportunistically. He told me it showed a lack of self-discipline. Then he told Ka that he was to become Emperor of Atlantis, and me that I would be High Priestess and General of the Army. He obviously anticipated that the news would make us happy. I wasn't.
I wanted to be Emperor. I wanted to be Queen. I'd been told all my life that it was my birth-right. My father was a god. Who on Earth had the authority to deny me that?
I don't remember exactly what happened next, it's rather as if a mist came down and obscured my memory from recording it. But I know what happened because of the evidence of the immediate aftermath. I can see my arms and hands slippery with blood. I can see my arm guard painted dark red. I can see my eye reflected in a red-and-silver mirror, with small bits of flesh caught in the serrated edge. I can see that Grandfather is on the floor, unmoving apart from the blood oozing through his fingers, which are clamped around his neck. I hear nothing, just a roaring like wind in my head.
