Alle Kapitel von Mother Took Revenge on the King of the Gods for Me: Kapitel 1 – Kapitel 10

For half a year after I died, my mother never broke down again.She no longer shattered the sacred relics Zeus had given her, no longer wept over my shrine until the temple shook. Now she only sat by the window of the small temple on the western flank of Olympus, and she would sit there from morning till night.Only in the deep of night, when everything was still, did she press her face into the little blanket that had once covered me and weep without a sound.I drifted beside her and tried to wipe her tears away, but my hand passed through her half-transparent shoulder, again and again. My fingers slid over her cheek and met nothing. I was a wandering shade now, a ghost so bound to her mother that even the underworld would not take me in.My mother’s hollow grief began to wear on Zeus. He came in frowning, golden lightning crackling at his heels, not with rage but with impatience. He looked at her the way a man looks at some old ornament he has tired of but cannot quite bring himself

The day Zeus brought my mother up to Olympus was the happiest of her life.That was seven years ago. She was twenty-two then, living in a small seaside town in the mortal world. Her father was a fisherman, her own mother long dead, and her days were spent mending nets along the shore.Zeus turned himself into a golden eagle and dove down out of the sky. My mother said that in that first moment she thought the eagle meant to take her eyes, and she squeezed them shut in terror. But the eagle only settled lightly on her shoulder, its golden feathers brushing her cheek, warm and soft.Then it spoke. “I am Zeus, the King of the Gods. You are the most beautiful mortal I have ever seen.”She thought she was dreaming. She pinched her own arm and gasped at the sting. Zeus laughed, a sound like distant thunder. “No dream. Come away with me.”He took the shape of the golden eagle once more and had her climb onto his back. She hesitated a long while before she finally wrapped her arms around his n

Hera came smiling, a golden basket on her arm, a few golden apples nestled inside.They were the golden apples brought as tribute by the Hesperides, fruit from the divine tree that Gaia, the Earth Mother, had planted with her own hands. Each one was beyond price. Each one stood for honor and for power.Hera set the basket on my mother’s table, found a chair, sat, and crossed her legs.“Semele,” she said, her voice sweet as honey laced with poison, “I hear a child who dies young is lonely down below. It is so pitiable. The gods have always had the custom of marrying the dead to one another. My nephew Alcyoneus, the boy who pushed Hebe, died himself last month. They are near enough in age. Why not wed the two children in the grave, so each has company in the dark?”My mother stared at her.“What did you say?” Her voice was very low, as if forced up from the bottom of her throat.Hera rose and came around behind her, bent down, her lips almost at my mother’s ear. Her voice was light as a

The dungeon was cold and wet.My mother huddled in the corner with her arms around her knees, like an animal in a cage. The darkness was thick enough to grip in the hand, and the air reeked of rust and rot. Her clothes were soaked through, clinging to her skin, cold as ice.By the third day her legs had gone numb. Not in pain, simply without feeling. She tried to stand, and they would not obey her, two wooden posts that buckled and dropped her into the foul water. Her face went under, she choked, and she coughed for a long time.No one came. Zeus never came, not once.He was busy. He was busy celebrating with Hera the new divine rank her nephew had been granted. The boy who killed me had been raised, in death, to God of Courage, his statue set at the very gate of Olympus.The Plaza of Heroes was packed with gods. Hera stood at Zeus’s side, radiant. The parents of Alcyoneus wept and knelt and gave thanks. With his own hands Zeus set a golden laurel on the head of a statue of a thing tha

My mother lived in the mortal world for three years.In all that time she never once spoke of Olympus. But now and then Julian would hear something from a merchant passing through town: that the King of the Gods was searching for a woman, that he had shut Hera away, that he had let Hera out again, that he had stripped his statue from Alcyoneus. And one thing more, which the merchant let fall lightly and my mother caught and kept, every word of it: that the King of the Gods was said to have sat alone before Hebe’s shrine for a whole month, letting no one near, and that not even Hera had dared go to call him away.When she heard these things, nothing showed on her face. She only kept chopping her vegetables, or went on drying her herbs.But I knew. She remembered. She remembered everything.One evening she and Julian walked by the river. The setting sun stained the water orange-red, and the far hills folded over one another like an ink painting. Julian told some joke; I had drifted too f