I woke, alone, to the heat of sunlight on my face. The curtains weren't drawn — actually, there were no curtains or even windows at all, come to think of it — and I saw blue sky, and when I propped myself up on my elbow, ships in the far distance: ships with white sails, but also container ships, the only indication I was still in the twenty-first century and still in the real world. The mortal world. The words tasted strange on my tongue.
And then, a sigh.
My eyes flew to the source of the sound and I knew instantly who it was. His stunning white-feathered wings, twitching as he slept, gave him away, but even if he hadn't had them I would have known. He had Ares's messy waves but Aphrodite's blond luminosity. Her delicate nose, his full lips. His long, broad body, her etherealness. Their shared supernatural beauty and grace. This was Eros, god of love. And he was right there, sleeping in the armchair in the corner of this bedroom, breathing loudly now though never snoring, with his legs slung over the armrest and his head slouched to his shoulder. He didn't look a day older than sixteen.
He wore some sort of tunic much like the one Caios had worn, only this one was crisp white and looked a thousand times softer and more luxurious. Next to him on the ground was a quiver full of arrows — some gold, some a dark metal and some wooden — and a golden bow.
What was I supposed to do, wake him up? There had to be some reason Eros was here with me and Ares wasn't.
But while I was debating whether to get out of bed at all, he awoke with a jolt. "I didn't!" he shouted — his voice was angelic if deep and powerful — and looked around in bewilderment. "Oh, hi, Emma!" he said when he saw me, and relaxed.
"Um. Hi." I slowly let myself fall back against the headrest.
He stretched his arms high above his head and yawned, his wings flaring to match, and scrunched his blue eyes shut a second. "I'm sorry," he said then with a face full of guilt, "I wasn't supposed to be sleeping. Can we keep it our little secret?"
I smiled a little. Eros seemed sweet, and innocent. I wouldn't just go and trust anyone here on Olympus, but my boyfriend's son wouldn't hurt me, right? "Who would I tell?" I answered.
He made a sardonic face, looking incredibly like Ares in that moment. "My dad, obviously."
"Ares had you come here? Why?"
"You think my mom would've had me babysit you?" he asked rhetorically, but quickly added, "Actually, yeah, she would. Anyway! Do you want coffee? I want coffee." He said all these words in such quick succession that I didn't think he actually needed coffee, but with a flash one cup appeared in his hands and another on my nightstand. A latte, exactly the way I liked it, and he'd even included a little heart in its foam. Next to it was my phone, entirely intact. Maybe Ares had gone back to that street and — wait. It was Tuesday. I was supposed to be at work.
"Dad already called your boss," Eros said with a smile when I grabbed the phone. "She wishes you a speedy recovery."
"Okay," I exhaled with relief. "Thanks." I took the cup and sipped. It was the best coffee I had ever had. Of course it was. "So you're babysitting me?"
Eros was already holding the coffee cup over his head, desperately waiting for the last few drops to fall into his mouth. He set the cup down and got up to sit cross-legged on the foot of my bed, with his wings tucked neatly behind his back. "Yes, of course. Dad said to tell you he had to attend a meeting and that he'll be back later, but he wanted me to watch over you." He tilted his head. "Although you would've stayed in this room anyway, wouldn't you?"
"No," I objected unconvincingly, crossing my arms. I wouldn't have just sat here waiting for Ares to get back! I would've gone out of the room… to the rest of the palace. There was no way I was setting a single foot outside the building on my own. Even if I was curious about the rest of Olympus.
Eros laughed. The sound was so pure, and his face so genuinely joyful, that I felt instantly at ease. "Come on, get dressed. PHILOMELE!" he hollered, then looking back at me with a smile, "We can have breakfast here, anything you want, or we can go to Demeter's garden and eat her fruits. She'll enjoy the company. Persephone has been away to Hades for too long."
Woah. Demeter? She was Ares's aunt, and one of the older Olympian goddesses. I was definitely not ready to hang out with her. "Do you think she'd let me?" I asked hesitantly.
"Oh, of course," Eros said, waving away my concerns. "Demeter will love you. And even if she doesn't, you're with me and she loves me, so it's fine."
A young woman came into the room and curtsied briefly at Eros, but her smile told me this was only a formality. She was tall and slender, with honey-colored skin and a dark brown fishtail braid falling over her shoulder. She wore yet another simple cream-colored dress.
"Phile! Hi!" Eros jumped off the bed and gave her a tight hug. "Meet Emma, Dad's girlfriend." He accompanied the introduction with a wiggle of his eyebrows — and of his wings.
"Emma," Phile said and gave me a slight but friendly nod, decorously ignoring Eros's winking. "It is a pleasure to meet you. I hope you've had an enjoyable stay thus far."
I shrugged. "I've just been sleeping. And I have no idea if we're staying." My hip had been healed and I'd slept off the pain, after all, so what reason was there not to go home?
"Aw!" Eros exclaimed. "Stay, I want to hang out with you!"
She smiled. "I expect Ares will let us know shortly. In the meantime, if you'll permit me, I am here to help you bathe and dress."
I inhaled deeply. Just go with it, Em, I thought, and nodded. Phile helped me out of bed and took me to the ensuite bathroom, where my favorite toothpaste and skincare products just happened to sit on the shelf. She held my hand to steady me as I stepped into the already-full tub. Eros stayed in the bedroom, examining Ares's things — every once in a while, I heard something fall on the ground, followed by soft cursing.
"Are you a goddess too?" I asked while Phile gently dried me a little later.
"No," she said with another polite yet affectionate smile, "but I am immortal."
"How old are you?" I got out of the tub, again with her hand steadying me.
"We didn't keep as much track of time back then and there." She turned and took a dress from where it was folded on a stool, one that was a lot like hers except light blue and made of a silky chiffon rather than cotton. "But in your way of counting, I think I am about four thousand years old."
Numbers like that had long stopped holding meaning to me. Ares mentioned them so often that even if I still couldn't quite fathom what I heard, it wasn't shocking anymore. I held up my arms so Phile could slide the dress over my shoulders and fasten it with a careful knot and a few pins.
"If you're not a goddess, what are you?" I asked.
"Sit, please, Emma." I did as she said. She started brushing my hair, the bristles of the brush softly massaging my scalp. "I am just as human as you are."
I wanted to turn and look at her, but the pressure of her hand on my hair was enough to keep me in place. "So you were born mortal? Did you want to become immortal?" In all the evenings I had spent reading Greek myths or hearing them first-hand from Ares, I'd found plenty of stories about servants being abducted to Olympus by the gods against their will. Who was to say Ares hadn't done that?
She'd started braiding my hair now; I felt a soft pulling of separated locks of hair. "I didn't think I would have the honor to be taken to Olympus and serve Ares in perpetuity," she answered. "I was born in what was then called Thrace. It was a time when gods still mingled freely with humans, and when temples were their homes in the mortal realm. Ares often visited his' in Thrace, where I served — he was born in the region, so worshipping him came naturally to us. I was a dutiful if lowly servant, and eventually, I was given the privilege of serving here."
It wasn't really an answer to my question; I still didn't know if she had chosen to live forever in the house of the gods. Her definitive tone, though, stopped me from asking her to elaborate, and I sat in silence as she carefully finished my braid and secured the end.
"Does that answer satisfy you?" she asked, as if she had heard my thoughts. But she was human, she'd said, so she couldn't read minds the way that Ares could… right?
Another question had taken its place already. "Was he in love with you?" I knew that Olympus's most famous servant, Ganymede, was here because Zeus had been so captivated by his beauty.
Phile laughed, to my surprise. "No. Ares is not like his father in that respect."
I turned now that she was no longer holding my hair. She sat on the edge of the tub. "Is that a good thing?"
"I'd rather not answer that question while Zeus is in the vicinity," she said with a wink, and seeing my wide eyes, added, "I mean on Olympus. Zeus doesn't deign to come to this palace."
"Why is that?"
Phile shrugged. "I try not to concern myself with these things. They are none of my business," she said, but something told me that she knew exactly why it was, that she knew all the intricacies of the fractured relationship between Ares and his father. She looked at me now as if she could see right into my soul. "You are nervous."
I looked away from her intense gaze. "I don't feel safe here," I admitted.
She nodded empathetically and took my left hand in both of hers. "You are safe here by virtue of Ares's protection," she said with resolve. "Everyone on this mountain knows that if they do anything to hurt you, he will serve their heads on a platter."
"Well, that's reassuring." I didn't want any heads served on platters, metaphorical or otherwise, even if to protect me. I didn't want there to be cause for any of that. I just wanted to be left alone and not worry about gods and goddesses and their thousands of children and whoever else lived here.
She chuckled at the sarcasm in my words. "Truly, Emma, other than the Olympians, everyone is much too afraid of Ares to even try."
I caught my bottom lip between my teeth. "It's the Olympians I'm worried about." I'd met four out of twelve now, and if it were up to Eros (which it probably was), I was going to meet a fifth today. I adored Hermes, so I wasn't concerned about him, and I trusted Apollo for the most part, but I was definitely afraid of Aphrodite. And those were only the ones that were actually Ares's friends.
"You'll be fine. They have no reason to hurt you." She stood up, pulling me along with her. "Come. We should not keep Eros waiting."
When we came back into the bedroom, Eros was sitting stiffly at the foot of the bed, his wings folded tight. Half of Ares's belongings were strewn across the floor and the other half haphazardly put back in their place — it was as if the room had been burgled, and the prime suspect was right in front of us with a remorseful expression on his face.
"Sorry!" he said. "I just… I kept knocking things over." His wings flared as if to illustrate his point.
Phile chortled. "Eros!" she exclaimed. "Have you forgotten that you are a god?"
Eros's face froze in embarrassment before he held out a hand, and with a tense gesture everything was neatly arranged once again.
I didn't know where or how to look — I didn't know how deferential I was supposed to be to Eros — but when his hand dropped down in his lap and he started to grin, so did I.
"I don't have a lot of stuff at my palace," he said rapidly but lightly. "Psyche's and mine, I mean. She got so frustrated with me breaking everything that she decided that we just wouldn't have anything for me to break anymore. But Dad has so much stuff here… See that little wooden horse there? That's from Troy. It's not the horse, of course, that one was a lot bigger. But it was called the city of beautiful horses long before the war and he got that one as part of a sacrifice from someone there..."
His words just kept coming and coming, as if he was overjoyed to have a new audience that had never heard any of it. Strange as it felt to apply the word to an ancient god, he was honestly adorable.
But then the entire atmosphere shifted — all levity left the room as Eros stopped talking suddenly and perked up, his back ram-rod straight, and Phile sank into a deep curtsy. My bewilderment at this abrupt change lasted only for a few seconds, though, because then Ares strode in. He was dressed in the same kind of outfit I usually saw him in — dark jeans, a T-shirt and leather boots — but something was different, something even more commanding in his attitude than usual that made it seem completely reasonable at least for Phile to react the way she did.
After a brief, loaded silence, Ares said, "Philomele. At ease."
"Your grace." She finally rose from her curtsy. I let out the tense breath I'd been holding as I watched.
They maintained what turned out to be a formal charade for a moment before an air of familiarity broke through and both grinned widely.
"I've missed you, Phile." Ares crossed the room to pull her into an embrace.
"You could have come back," she said, muffled into his chest. They broke apart.
I could've felt threatened, maybe, by this display of affection between Ares and a human who had known each other for millennia — but I sensed absolutely zero romantic or sexual chemistry between them. Their relationship was clearly strictly one of friendship.
"It's not that simple," he said, and she just nodded with understanding. He turned to his son. "Thank you, Eros, for taking care of Emma."
Eros crossed his legs again, relaxing now. "I was just about to take her to breakfast at Demeter's."
"Do you want tha..." Ares said, but his eyes widened once his gaze landed on me and he never finished his sentence. "Emma. You look…"
I smiled sheepishly. "Um, good morning."
He briefly shook his head to himself, eyes closed and lips curved into a slight smile, before looking at me from head to toe. "Good morning. It's… it's strange to see you look so… Olympic. But you're... beautiful. Exquisite." He cleared his throat as if to pull himself out of a reverie. "You've outdone yourself, Phile."
"Oh, I did my best," she chuckled, "but it has been a while."
Her tone was light, but something between them shifted, and they exchanged a sympathetic look.
Eros looked back and forth between them and clapped his hands. "Breakfast! Demeter's, or whatever Phile can whip up?"
"Which, may I remind you, Eros," she grinned, "is more than you can cook."
He blew a raspberry in her direction, and raised an eyebrow at me.
Ares rescued me before I had to make a choice. Would it be disrespectful towards Demeter if I chose not to meet her? ...But wouldn't it also be disrespectful towards Phile if I declined her cooking? "Let's do this one step at a time," Ares suggested. "There's plenty of time for you to meet Demeter later."
"Okay," I said, somewhat reassured. Only somewhat, because apparently I was going to meet other Olympians at one point or another.
"Phile, can you make breakfast, please? For…" He looked expectantly at Eros.
"Um," Eros started hesitantly, "I don't know if you want me to stay, Dad… I can go home, Psyche is probably wondering why I'm taking so long..."
Ares was quiet for just a brief moment, before he decisively said, "For all of us. Thank you, Phile."
Phile didn't ask me what I wanted for breakfast, but as it turned out, she didn't need to. When she put a plate in front of me I realized it contained exactly what I was in the mood for, before I had even thought of it myself. The eggs were cooked to perfection, the fruit was the sweetest I had ever tasted, and the bread… I didn't think I could go back to normal, human bread. And then there was that coffee.
'All of us' didn't apparently include Phile, who hurried off after she had served us, saying there was a lot of work to be done now that Ares was back in residence. Ares had told her at least three times that there was no need for her to call back the rest of the staff from their various temporary other postings, but she wouldn't hear it and insisted that he let her run the household and restore the palace to its proper glory.
Not that it needed restoring, as far as I was concerned. The three of us took our breakfast in a sunny, open-walled room that looked out over the azure blue sea. The view was framed by palm trees and flowery shrubs. I felt like I was sitting in a postcard.
Ares told me that we were near the summit, called Mytikas, where the Olympians' palaces were, although his was on the outer edges of the complex. Below us on the lush hillside I saw hundreds more smaller marble palaces; it was almost like a very paradisiac city, and when I expressed my confusion (how could all of this exist on what I knew was a treeless, rocky mountain top?), Ares and Eros started laughing and explained that mortals couldn't see any of it, couldn't enter this divine world, unless brought by a god. The steep, jagged slopes were only an illusion.
And the longer I sat there, watching the sea and the villages by the coast, eating the mouthwatering food and listening to Ares and his son talk, the more I could imagine how Phile and other servants might have chosen to live here. It would be so easy to forget about any earthly struggles here, to get wrapped up in this transcendent perfection all around me.
But I wouldn't. I decided, then and there at that breakfast table, that I would not let myself get sucked in. I refused to get so comfortable that I might risk forgetting about my life back home. This was only a visit. A brief one.
Then again… that didn't mean I couldn't enjoy it while it lasted. I refilled my glass of juice, leaned back and smiled as my eyes slowly closed against the warm January sun.