EARTH’S CREATION AND
THE BIRTH OF THE GODS
Earth was alone. She had no companion. So she took a piece from the center of herself and made the sun and that was the first god. But in time he left Earth. He promised to always send her light during the day, but at night she was still alone. So she took a piece from the edge of herself and made the moon, and she was the first goddess. After a while the moon too went away from Earth. She promised to send her light to keep Earth company at night, but the moon’s promises are worth nothing, and she sent only part of her light and sometimes forgot entirely. When she forgot, there was no moonlight at all, and the Earth was lonely again.
So she breathed out into the firmament, and she made the Sky. The Sky wrapped himself all around her and was her companion. He promised to stay with her always, and Earth was happy. Earth and the Sky’s first children were the mountain ranges, and Hephestia was the oldest. They had more children who were the great oceans and the middle sea, and their youngest children were the great rivers Seperchia and Skander.
One day the Sky wanted to know what he looked like, so the Earth made a thousand goddesses and spread them all across the world to hold mirrors for the sky, and those are the lakes. The Sky looked at himself in the mirrors. He was blue and white with clouds and sometimes black and spangled with stars, and when the sun set, he was beautiful indeed. He grew vain. He looked at the Earth, who was round and colorless, and he felt superior.
“I am quite beautiful,” he said to Earth, “but you are very dull. The only pretty things about you are your lakes.” And he spent all his time looking into the water and would not speak to Earth. So Earth swept up the dust from the mountains and made snow and the dust from the valleys and made dark black soil, and in the soil she scattered the seeds for forests and flowers and covered herself with green trees and bright colors and told the Sky that she was as beautiful as he. But he had eyes only for the lakes, who reflected his own glory. They bore him children, who were the smaller rivers and streams. Earth was jealous and made trees grow up around each of the lakes, hiding them from the Sky’s view.
The Sky was angry. He took up some of the black soil from Earth’s valleys and some of the snow from her mountains, and he mixed them together and blew hard and scattered them across the world. Every speck of dust grew into a human, some dark like the valley soil and some white as the snow. So, though we come from the Earth, we must thank the Sky for our creation, because it was the Sky that made man. But he was impatient and did not do such a job as the Earth would have done. Man came out small and weak and without the gifts of the gods. When the Sky sent men to clear the forest around the lakes, that he might see them, they were too weak to pull down the trees.
Earth looked at them climbing through her forests and said, “Why have you made these?”
And the Sky was ashamed, and he told her that he wanted to see the lakes, and the Earth was ashamed and said that she wanted the Sky to speak only to her. The Sky promised that he would look at the lakes only sometimes, and the Earth promised to hide only some of the lakes in the trees. And they were happy.
But Earth watched the humans that the Sky had made and felt sorry for them. They were cold and hungry. So she gave them fire to make them warm, and she gave them seeds to scatter on the ground. She made animals for them to eat, but no matter what gifts she gave them the humans were ungrateful. They thanked only the Sky for having made them. The Earth grew angry and she shook with her anger, and the houses that the humans had built fell down and the animals that they had gathered were frightened and ran away, and the humans realized that they had made a terrible mistake. From then on there were always some humans who thanked the Earth for her gifts and some humans who thanked the Sky for their creation.
When the magus was finished, the group of us sitting around the fire was quiet. Then Sophos asked, “The people in Eddis, do they really believe that?”
I barked with laughter, and everyone looked at me. “In the city of Sounis do they really believe that the Nine Gods won the Earth in a battle with Giants? That the First God spawns godlets left and right and his wife is a shrew who is always outwitted?” I lifted the back of my head off the ground and crossed my arms underneath it. “No, they don’t believe that, Sophos. It’s just religion. They like to go up to the temple on feast days and pretend that there is some god who wants the worthless sacrificial bits of a cow, and people get to eat the rest. It’s just an excuse to kill a cow.”
“You sound very learned, Gen. What do you know about it?” asked the magus.
I sat up and moved to the fire before I answered him. “My mother was from the mountain country. It’s no different there. Everybody goes to the temple, and everybody likes to hear the old stories after dinner, but that doesn’t mean they expect a god to show up at their door.”
“Oh?”
“Yes,” I said, letting my tongue run away from me. “And you made a lot of mistakes. You aren’t even pronouncing the name of the country right. The people on the mountains call it Eeddis, not Eddis. And you left out the part where the Earth cries when the Sky God ignores her and turns the oceans to salt.”
“I did?”
“Yes, I told you, my mother told me the stories when I was little. I know them all, and I know that they call the country Eeddis.”
“As for that, Gen, I can tell you that Eeddis is the old pronunciation used before the invaders came. We’ve changed the pronunciation of many of our words since the time of the invaders, while Eddisian pronunciations haven’t altered for centuries. Eddis is pronounced differently now, whatever the people of that country say.”
“It’s their country,” I grumbled. “They ought to know the right name for it.”
“It isn’t that Eeddis is the wrong name, Gen. It’s just an old way of saying the same word. The rest of the civilized world has moved on. Tell me what other mistakes I made.”
I told him as many as I’d noticed. Most of the mistakes were bits of the story that he had left out.
When I was done, he said, “It’s always interesting to hear different versions of people’s folktales, Gen, but you shouldn’t think that your mother’s stories are true to the original ones. I’ve studied them for many years and am sure that I have the most accurate versions. It often happens that emigrants like your mother can’t remember parts of the original, so they make things up and then forget that the story was ever different. Many of these myths were created by great storytellers centuries ago, and it is inevitable that in the hands of common people they get debased.”
“My mother never debased anything in her entire life,” I said hotly.
“Oh, don’t be offended,” the magus said. “I’m sure she never meant to, but your mother wasn’t educated. Uneducated people rarely know much about the things they talk about every day. She probably never even knew that your name, Gen, comes from the longer name Eugenides.”
“She did, too,” I insisted. “You’re the one that doesn’t know anything. You never knew my mother, and you don’t know anything about her.”
“Don’t be silly. Of course I know about her. She fell from a fourth-story window of Baron Eructhes’s villa and died when you were ten years old.”
The wind sighed in the pine needles over my head. I’d forgotten that that was written in the pamphlet that was my criminal record. The king’s courts were apt to have a pickpocket’s entire life story written in tiny handwriting on a collection of paper sheets folded together in the prison’s record room.
The magus saw that he had cut deep and went on. His voice dripped condescension. “Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe Gen is a family name. The title of King’s Thief is a hereditary one now in Eddis, and I think the current Thief is named Eugenides. Maybe you’re related. A cousin, perhaps, to someone exalted.” He snickered. I could feel my face burning and knew that I was red right to the hairline.
“Eugenides,” I nearly stuttered, “was the god of thieves. We are all named after him.” I jumped up from the fire and stamped back to the blanket that was mine. The night was cool, so I wrapped up in the wool cloak and admitted to myself that the magus had gotten the better of me in that exchange. Everyone else seemed to agree.
The magus was as smug as a cat the next day. Pol made breakfast, and then we packed up, careful to leave no sign of our presence beside the trail. Sophos and Ambiades collected pine needles to cover the burnt space of our cooking fire. By noon we had reached the other side of the mountain ridge and were looking at our descent.
“I am not going down that until I’ve had lunch,” I announced. “I have no intention of dying on an empty stomach.” I was flip but perfectly serious, and when the magus tried to force me, I balked. He cuffed me on the head with his seal ring, but I wouldn’t budge. I was going to rest before I started down a shale slope where I would need not only my balance but all the strength that the king’s prison had left in my legs. I dug in my heels and wouldn’t move. We had lunch.
After lunch we started down the mountainside. I wanted to go last, but Pol wouldn’t let me. I went second to last and only had to worry about the rocks that Pol kicked down. The magus, who went first, had Pol’s rocks as well as mine, Sophos’s, and Ambiades’s. I sent down a few especially for him but felt bad when Sophos caught one of the rocks that Pol kicked loose squarely in the back of the head. None of us could stop to see if he was badly hurt until we’d reached the end of the flysch. It was about seventy-five feet to the bottom of it, and as soon as we were safely on solid rock, Pol checked Sophos.
“Turn around,” he said.
“It’s all right,” said Sophos, but his eyes were still watering. “It’s not bleeding.” He kept looking at his hand to be sure. Pol rubbed the bump rising on the back of his head and agreed that he would probably live.
“I regret that,” he said, and seemed very serious about his apology for something he could not have prevented. “Do you need to rest for a while?”
“We could have a second lunch,” I suggested, and received a glare from the magus.
Sophos said he was fine, so we started again. There was no streambed here to follow, at least not at first. We walked across the side of the mountain on a goat path between rocks. I felt very exposed and worried about who might be watching from above. The last thing I wanted was to be caught hiking across Eddis with the king’s magus of Sounis, and we could not have been more visible, five people traipsing through vegetation no higher than our knees. I asked the magus why the secrecy in the morning when anyone passing could see us in the open.
“Only someone else on this trail,” he said. “And the trail is rarely used. As long as we don’t leave any permanent signs, no one will know that we passed here. There are better ways to get down to Attolia.”
I looked up at the rubble above and said, “I bet there are. Can’t we be seen from the forest?”
“No, it’s unlikely that anyone would be there.”
I snorted. “A successful thief doesn’t depend on things being unlikely to happen,” I said.
“A successful thief?” said the magus. “How would you know?”
I retired chagrined from the field of contest.
After a quarter of a mile we picked our way down a particularly steep slope and came to a tiny plateau, paved with flagstones and edged with ancient olive trees. At the back of the plateau, really no more than a deep ledge, a cave led into the mountainside. Growing out of a cleft in the stone above the cave, a fig tree shaded its opening. A spring welled up somewhere in the dark and ran out through a tiled channel in the pavement. Beside the channel was a tiny temple, no more than ten feet high, built from blocks of marble, with miniature marble pillars in front.
“Behold,” said the magus with a sweep of his hand, “the place where we were supposed to have lunch. Take a quick look, Sophos. It’s your first heathen temple.” He explained that it was an altar to the goddess of the spring that rose in the cave. It had probably been built as much as a thousand years earlier. He showed him the craftsmanship that went into dressing the marble, so that each stone fit perfectly against the others.
“Looking at a small temple like this, you can see how the larger temples were fitted together. Everything is in scale. If there are four pieces to each column in the main temple of the river gods, then there are four pieces to each column here, and all the joining will be the same.” Sophos was as fascinated as the magus. The two of them went into the temple to see the figure of the goddess and came out looking impressed. Ambiades was bored.
The magus saw his expression and said, “So, Ambiades, knowing someone’s religion can help you manipulate that person, which is why Sophos’s father thinks no country should have more than one set of gods. Let me give you some examples.”
We started down the path that the water from the spring had carved during the last millennium. It was an easy hike. There were even steps carved into the stone at the steep places, no doubt by a thousand years of worshipers at the shrine above us. As we walked, Ambiades listened with interest to the magus. It was obvious that he paid close attention to anything that he thought might be useful to him. He just didn’t see the point in natural history.
The magus began to ask questions. For a long time Ambiades answered each one; then Sophos began answering, and Ambiades’s comments became more and more sullen. I tried to listen, but only bits and pieces floated back up the trail. After Ambiades had snarled at Sophos a few times, the magus sent Sophos to walk in the back and lectured to Ambiades alone. I was surprised to hear Sophos and Pol behind me chatting like old friends. Pol wanted to know what had set off Ambiades.
“Identifying mountain ranges. He doesn’t like that sort of thing, so he doesn’t pay attention. But even so, he knows more than I do.”
“You’ll catch up.”
“I suppose, if my father lets me stay.”
“Oh?”
“You know what I mean, Pol. If he finds out I want to stay, he’ll take me away.”
“And do you want to stay?”
“Yes,” said Sophos quite firmly. “I like learning, and the magus isn’t as frightening as I thought at first.”
“No? Shall I tell him you said so?”
“Don’t you dare. And don’t tell my father either. You know my father is hoping he’ll toughen me up. Don’t you think the magus is nicer than he seems at first?”
“I couldn’t say,” said Pol.
“Well, he isn’t nearly as hard on me as he is on Ambiades.”
“Leaves that to Ambiades, I notice,” said Pol.
“Oh, I don’t mind, Pol. I like Ambiades. He’s smart, and he’s not usually so…so—”
“High-handed?” Pol supplied the word.
“Temperamental,” said Sophos. “I think something is bothering him.” He changed the subject. “Do you know where we’re going?”
I pricked up my ears.
“Attolia,” said Pol, which was nothing more than the obvious at that point.
“Is that all you know? Then why are you here?”
“Your father sent me to keep an eye on you. Toughen you up.”
Sophos laughed. “No, really, why?”
“Just what I said.”
“I’ll bet the magus needed someone reliable, and Father said he couldn’t have you without me.”
I bet he was right.
We came to a steep place and had to scramble. Once we’d worked our way down, Pol dropped behind Sophos, effectively ending their conversation. Sophos moved up beside me.
“Are you really named after the god of thieves?” “I am.”
“Well, how could they tell what you were going to be when you were just a baby?”
“How did they know what you were going to be when you were a baby?”
“My father was a duke.”
“So my mother was a thief.”
“So you would have to grow up to be one, too?”
“Most of the people in my family thought so. My father wanted me to be a soldier, but he’s been disappointed.”
Behind us I heard Pol grunt. He no doubt thought my father’s disappointment was justified.
“Your father? He did?”
Sophos sounded so surprised that I looked over at him and asked, “Why shouldn’t he?”
“Oh, well, I mean…” Sophos turned red, and I wondered about the circulation of his blood; maybe his body kept an extra supply of it in his head, ready for blushing.
“What surprises you?” I asked. “That my father was a soldier? Or that I knew him? Did you think that I was illegitimate?”
Sophos opened and closed his mouth without saying anything.
I told him that no, I wasn’t illegitimate. “I even have brothers and sisters,” I told him, “with the same father.” Poor Sophos looked as if he wanted the ground to swallow him.
“What do they do?” he finally asked.
“Well, one of my brothers is a soldier, and the other brother is a watchmaker.”
“Really? Can he make those new watches that are flat instead of round in the back?” He seemed interested, and I was going to tell him that Stenides had made his first flat watch about two years ago, but the magus noticed Sophos talking to me and called him away.
As Sophos pulled ahead, I said loudly, “My sisters are even married, and honest housewives to boot.” At least they were mostly honest.
The valley eroded by the spring never deepened enough to be called a gorge. Its sides curved gently away from us, and only in a few places was the going stony. As we descended, we could see Attolia stretched out ahead of us, and to the right the sea. Dotted across the horizon, islands continued the mountain range behind us. On the far side of the Attolian valley was another mountain range, and out of that came the Seperchia River. It wandered along the plain, sometimes nearer to the Hephestial Mountains, sometimes many miles away. Just before it reached the coast, it bumped against a rocky spur of the foothills and was diverted into the Hephestial range itself. There the mountains were soft limestone, and the river had cut a pass down to Sounis to flow past the king’s city and finally into the middle sea.
“It’s much greener than home, isn’t it?” Sophos commented to no one in particular.
He was quite right. Where the view of Sounis had been brown and baked gold, this country was shades of green. Even the olive trees, planted below us, were a richer color than the silver gray trees on the other side of the range.
“They get the easterly winds that dump their rain when they hit the mountains,” the magus explained. “Attolia gets nearly twice as much rain every year as we do.”
“They export wine, figs, olives, and grapes as well as cereals. They have pastureland to support their own cattle, and they don’t import sheep from Eddis,” Ambiades said knowledgeably, and the magus laughed.
“Gods, you were paying attention!”
I thought at first that Ambiades was going to smile, but he scowled instead and didn’t speak until we stopped for the night, and then it was only to berate Sophos. It was strange behavior for someone who had been so contented by the fire the night before. I couldn’t see why Sophos liked him, but it was obvious that he did. Worshiped might be a better word. All he needed to do was build a miniature temple and get Ambiades to stand on the altar.
I guessed that Ambiades was usually more pleasant company. The magus didn’t seem likely to tolerate prolonged sullenness in an apprentice, and it seemed to me that he thought highly of Ambiades even if he did call him a fool from time to time.
After dinner Sophos asked if there were other stories about the gods, and the magus began the story of Eugenides and the Sky God’s Thunderbolts but stopped almost immediately.
“He’s your patron god,” he said to me. “Why don’t you tell Sophos who he is?”
I don’t know what he expected me to say, but I told the entire story as I had learned it from my mother, and he didn’t interrupt.
THE BIRTH OF EUGENIDES,
GOD OF THIEVES
It had been many years since the creation of man, and he had multiplied across the land. One day as Earth walked through her forests, she met a woodcutter. His axe lay beside him on the ground, and he wept.
“Why weep, woodcutter?” Earth asked him. “I see no hurt.”
“Oh, Lady,” said the woodcutter, “my hurt is overwhelming because it is someone else’s pain that makes me cry.”
“What pain?” asked Earth, and the woodcutter explained that he and his wife wished to have children, but they had none, and this made his wife so sad that she sat in her house and wept. And the woodcutter, when he thought of his wife’s tears, wept, too.
Earth brushed the tears from his cheeks and told him to meet her again in the forest in nine days, and in that time she would bring him a son.
The woodcutter went home and told his wife what had happened, and in nine days he went again into the forest to meet the goddess there. She asked, “Where is your wife?”
The woodcutter explained that she hadn’t come. It is one thing to meet the Goddess in the forest and another thing to convince your wife that you have done so. His wife thought her husband had lost his mind, and she wept all the more.
“Go,” said Earth, “and tell your wife to come tomorrow, or she will have no child and no husband and no home either when the day is done.”
So the woodcutter went home to his wife and pleaded with her to come to the forest, and to please him, she agreed. So the next day she was with her husband, and Earth asked her, “Have you a cradle?”
And the woman said no. It is one thing to humor your husband, who has suddenly gone crazy, but it is something else to let all the neighbors know that he is crazy by asking to borrow a cradle for a baby he says that you are going to get from the Goddess.
“Go,” said Earth, “and get a cradle and small clothes and blankets, or you will have no child and no husband and no home by this time tomorrow.”
So the woodcutter and his wife went to their neighbors, and the neighbors were good people. They gave to the woodcutter and his wife the things they said they needed, and they asked no questions because it was perfectly clear to them that their neighbors had lost their wits.
The next day in the forest when Earth asked, “Have you a cradle?” the woodcutter and his wife said, “Yes.”
“Have you small clothing?”
They said, “Yes.”
“And blankets? And all the things you will need for a baby?” and they said yes, and Earth showed them the baby in her arms. And the woodcutter’s wife came close to her, and she said, “Have you a name for him?”
And the Earth had no name. The gods know themselves and have no need of names. It is man who names all things, even gods.
“Then we will call him Eugenides,” said the woodcutter’s wife, “the wellborn.”
They took Eugenides to their home, and he was their own son. The Earth sometimes came in the guise of an old woman and brought him presents. When he was very little, the presents were little, a top that spun in different colors, soap bubbles that hung over his cradle, a blanket of fine moleskin to keep him warm in the winter. When he was five, she brought him the gift of languages that he might understand the animals all around him. When he was ten, she brought him the gift of summoning that he might converse with the lesser gods of streams and lakes.
When Eugenides was fifteen and Earth would have given him immortality, the Sky stopped her on her way.
“Where are you going?” he asked.
“To see my son,” said Earth.
“What son have you but mine?” said the Sky.
“I have my own son and the woodcutter’s,” said Earth, and the Sky was angry. He went to the home of Eugenides and he threw down thunderbolts and the house was destroyed and Eugenides and his parents ran frightened into the forest. The Sky looked for them there, but the forest was Earth’s and in Earth’s name hid them.
The Sky grew still more angry and shouted at the Earth, “You shall have no sons but my sons! You shall have no people but my people!” And he threw down his thunderbolts on the villages where the people thanked the Earth for her gifts, but he spared the villages where the people thanked him for their creation.
And the Earth grew angry also and she said she would have none of his people and she shook with her anger and she destroyed the villages that the Sky God had spared. All over the world the villages of the Earth’s people and the Sky’s people were destroyed and the crops burnt in the fields and the animals lost and the people were afraid and prayed for rescue, but Earth and the Sky were too angry to hear them.
All the people in the world might have died then, but Hephestia heard their cries. She was the oldest child of the Earth and the Sky and closest to them in power. She went to each and spoke to them and said, “Why should the Earth not have what children she pleases? Look at the children you have had.” And the Sky remembered his children who were streams and rivers and saw that they were choked with refuse of the burning caused by his thunderbolts.
Hephestia went to Earth and said, “Why should you not have the people of the Sky? Look what people you have for your own.” And Earth looked and she saw her people afraid, without homes or food, their houses destroyed and all their livelihoods gone. The Sky’s people were frightened, too, and they begged her to put away her anger and forgive them if they had offended her. And Earth did put away her anger, and the Sky did put away his anger as well.
Hephestia asked them, “Why should they suffer because you are angry with each other? Give me your thunderbolts, Father, and give up to me your power to shake the ground, Mother, so that they will not suffer again from your anger with each other.”
Earth gave Hephestia her power to shake the ground, and the Sky promised to give her his thunderbolts. He promised also not to harm Eugenides, but he said the Earth must not give him any more presents and never give immortality to any children but his children. Earth promised, and she and the Sky were at peace.
The people of the Sky and the Earth rebuilt their homes and recovered their animals and replanted their fields, but from then on they were careful to build two altars in every village to thank the Sky for their creation and the Earth for her gifts, that they would always be the people of them both. And in times of great need they pray not only to the Earth and the Sky but to Hephestia as well that she will intercede on their behalf with her parents.
“You sound very different when you are telling a story,” said Sophos.
“That,” I said acidly, “is the way my mother told it to me.”
“I liked it.”
“Well, it is the only one you will hear tonight,” said the magus. “Eugenides and the Sky God will have to wait for tomorrow.” To me he said, “Your mother seems to have taken the story and made it her own.”
“Of course,” jeered Ambiades. “She was a thief.”
That night I slept lightly for the first time since being in prison. I woke as the moon, half full, shone on the hillside. I rolled over to look at what stars I could see and noticed Ambiades, sitting up in his blankets.
“What are you doing awake?” I asked him.
“Keeping an eye on you.”
I looked at the other three sleeping bodies. “You take turns?” Ambiades nodded.
“Since when?”
“Since the last inn.”
“Really? And I’ve been too tired to appreciate it until now.” I shook my head with regret and went back to sleep.