Psyche and Eros by Luna McNamara EPUB & PDF – eBook Details Online
- Status: Available For Free Download
- Authors: Luna McNamara
- Language: English
- Genre: Greco-Roman Myth & Legend Fantasy eBooks
- Format: PDF / EPUB
- Size: 2 MB
- Price: Free
Despite my unusual destiny, I began life as an ordinary infant, born like
any other to a rush of blood and cries of joy. Though in my case, these were
followed by more than a bit of confusion.
My mother and father were the king and queen of a kingdom in rocky
Greece called Mycenae. When my mother, Astydamia, learned that she was
with child, my father, Alkaios, left the Mycenaean capital of Tiryns and set
off across the mountains. He passed through desolate valleys and rode
beneath craggy cliffsides populated by nesting griffins, until at last he came
to gates that bore the words KNOW THYSELF. It wasn’t his own fate he sought
to learn at the Oracle of Delphi, but his unborn child’s. Mine. Would I be
born healthy and strong? What would I grow up to become?
When my father entered the Oracle’s shadowy earthen chamber, two
things struck him. The first was the smell of the place, redolent of sulphur
and other scents less recognizable. The second was the sight of the woman
who sat on a bronze tripod suspended over an abyss. She wore a peplos robe
that swathed her body in folds of yellow fabric, and her hair was bound up in
a neat braid around her head. This was the Oracle, and she stared at Alkaios
with eyes out of time.
My father shivered. He was a king and used to people trying to wheedle
favours from him, but this woman wanted nothing from anyone.
A priest from the order that had sprung up around the Oracle whispered
the king’s question in her ear. She sat back and drank in the vapours rising up
from the cracks in the earth; these were said to be sent from Apollo himself,
god of prophecy, and brought true visions of the future.
A tremor ran through the Oracle. She began to speak in an unearthly
voice, one that did not belong to the body of such a delicate woman. My
father could not recognize the language she spoke, but the priests were
already scribbling on their clay tablets, performing the complex calculations
needed to interpret the messages of the Oracle. Gods do not always speak in
ways that are easy for mortals to understand, but fortunately the whitebearded priests knew how to translate.
At last, they bestowed the Oracle’s prophecy upon my father. ‘Your child
will conquer a monster feared by the gods themselves.’
My father was ecstatic. His son would be a hero! Alkaios had long
mourned that he did not share the heroic gifts of his father, Perseus, but
sometimes these things skip a generation. His son would be a monster-killer,
a hero, and people would come from all across Greece to pay homage to him.
What a pity that I was no son.
When the midwife handed me to my father on the day of my birth, he
wouldn’t have been more shocked if he had been given a bear cub. A girl! A
girl could not grow up to slay monsters or win renown as a hero.
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