In the game of life, we are all just pips on the dice. Destined to find ourselves either face up and valued or face down and ignored. It's a craps shoot, life. The question, though--one asked since the dawn of man--is just what hand is throwing those dice.
Ours or God's?
Well, in either case, the hands tossing them are not clean. You could even say they are filthy ... if you wanted to be crude. Crass. Disrespectful.
I can be all of those things when I need to. For the most part, I've tried to be a normal man. Walk the narrow path laid out before me by the lady Fates, those thrice delightful bitches. I've had what is generally called a love-hate relationship with those three women, the Moirai. And not in a meaningless, spiritual kind of way. I literally mean, I both love and hate them.
But then I guess every person feels that way about their mother at some point in their lives. Or "mothers" I guess would be more accurate since I was birthed by all three. Suckled by all three. Raised by all three.
Cast out by all three.
Discarded like a deformed baby in Sparta, only my crime was not being born hideous, or deformed but for being too much like my father, the Moiragetes. The god most people call simply, Zeus.
Now some say the Fates were his daughters. Some say that they were his servants. Some even hint that the Weavers Three were Zeus' eternal lovers, embodiments of the various lusts in his life. Young. Middle. Old.
Yeah. They were all of those and more.
Walking through a deserted back alley, I absently reached up and touched the string of the necklace around my neck. Not the metal coin hanging from it, but the cord itself. Part of the very Mother Thread of Life itself, knotted and braided by the hands of my mothers, it held me tighter to my hated destiny than all the metal chains upon the Earth could. My fingers then drifted down and over the smooth as silk metal coin. Worn by my own fingers till it was slick as ice, the coin was the only gift I ever received from my father.
And it was one that I had given him. Tried to anyway.
As I walked towards the museum, my destination for tonight this Valentines eve, I thought back to that day twenty centuries ago. Give or take a decade. Approaching my father's temple at Corinth on the day of the Lykaia festaval, my little hand held by my mother Lachesis--she was using her staff to make the crowds of worshiper's part before us--I had looked in awe at the majestic white marble structure. I had breathlessly listened to the hundreds of voiced raised in adoration of him. The Thunderer. The Master of the Fates. The Lord of mighty Olympus. KING OF THE GODS!
My father.
My unmet, unseen, unspoken to father. After all, when you are the bastard son of him, birthed on his daughters three, you cannot expect him to look upon your face with kindness, right? You are a byproduct of a god's lust, nothing more. Still I held in my hand a single gold coin, found in the mud of the street, clutched tight in my little fingers. I was going to place if upon the temple altar, an offering of love from a son to his father.
My mothers didn't know I was planning to do this. Or did they? They are the Fates after all; they had certainly measured my thread. They had to have studied the patterns of the weave and woof that was my--their only sons--future. Right? So if they knew and still let me do what I did, if they knew beforehand what I was going to do and what the results would be ... but then why did they not stop me?
Their son. Their beloved offspring.
Or maybe they were simply throwing the dice, too?
Either way, they landed on single pips that cool Lykaia festival day in Corinth. My little arm had barely could reach the top of the offering ladened stone alter; my fingers brushed it as I placed my gold offering. My eyes were upon the sculpted stone face high above that overlooked all of us. What was I looking for that day? Acknowledgement? Or maybe some recognition of my being his by-blow was what I needed that warm summer day, wanted for some reason only a child would understand.
Love?
Could it have been love?
Standing before the door of this modern museum, I looked at the line of round marble columns. Each topped by carefully sculpted capitals to resemble Corinthian leaved columns. I smiled thinking back to that day. Well, if love had been what I was after ... it was the last thing I received.
A roll of thunder, from a clear sky, had shaken the temple. The worshipers huddled in fear, screams of terror filling the air instead of songs and prayers. My mother had looked at me in horror, Lachesis' normally placid face shocked beyond mortal belief. Then I had been dragged from her grip by two large male priests, adorned in black wolf pelts. They screamed blasphemer at me even as they dragged me from the temple. I was tossed down the stone steps, tumbling amid a scuffing mob of feet to land battered and bruised.
What had I done? What was my crime?
Then the rocks began to fall upon me.
A rain of fruit-size stones, dozens upon dozens, hitting and then falling to surround me in a pile. They hit everywhere and no matter how much the small child begged his innocence, his ignorance, or his lack of guilt they did not stop. My blood splattered the temple's stone steps. My screams echoed off its stone columns. And, as I begged my killers to please have mercy, I looked up to see all of my mother's standing there calmly watching me being killed. Clotho, who I had always though so kind. Lachesis, who read to me stories to help me sleep. Atropos, quick with a switch or a harsh word ...
... she alone was crying.
The Inflexible, Inevitable, Unturnable ... was crying?
Then, through my blood filled eyes, I saw a glint of gold rolling down the steps. My coin, my found coin, my festival offering to my father, landed in the pool of blood before my face. My offering had been contemptuously spit back into my face.
When the last light of Apollo's chariot had vanished, I awoke again. I was being held in the arms of a woman, at first, I thought her to be one of my mothers, but then her star-filled black hair brushed my face and her midnight black eyes met mine and I knew that this was not them. She was beautiful. I saw her smile even as I thought that, clearly she could read my face or maybe even my thoughts. She placed a kiss upon my lips and I felt a coldness I had never known filling me.
The cold of the night.
The eternal cold of the goddess Nyx.
So like the icy cold of a bloody covered coin in the hand of a discarded, abandoned, forsaken child. It embraced me. As the Lady of Night did. She took my battered body from that place, breathing life if not warmth back into me. Nyx was to become my new mother, my protector, my teacher, my lover.
The night was all things to me after that.
Walking past the front desk and the tons of little pamphlets, I headed deep into the museum. Strolling undistracted, past all the shiny trinkets and broken detritus of so many lost civilizations. If I had not been so intent on my goal I would have wandered through here looking everything. Seeing again some of the forgotten bits and bobbles from my long life. I was surrounded by so many things that would had been familiar to a younger me.
The Roman, Egyptians, and Ottomans.
The Prussian, Slavic, and Russians.
The French, Germans, and British.
Broken empires, toppled kingdoms, lost places I had called home for many a century.
My eyes stopped on the massive skeleton of a beast, so old I felt suddenly young again. Bones so ancient they had become stone. I stood there, spending the time I did not have, contemplated the fact that all of my long life was not an eye blink compared to the antiquity of this creature's remains. That the mothers I both love and hated, the gods I have worship and despise, the humanity I have walked among and loath ... not even the titans of old can compare to this simple dumb beast.
Humbling, to say the least.
Past those ancient bones I walked into the exhibit where rested, perhaps free of dust for the first time in centuries, some of the oldest things on display here. Most were no longer even recognizable. Broken bits ... lost parts. A lot like me really. Ancient, forgotten, broken and anachronistic ... but still of value, to certain people. To be viewed, perhaps, with half-curious eyes. To never be touched, least they crumble to dust.
Well, this living bit of the past had lost his lustered-glitter in ages long past. No need to hang onto unwanted trash. Time to break the last pieces into dust and show the strong inner core for what it was, or blessedly let time lose that which should have been lost before the building of Rome.
My miserable, eternal life needed to end.
Before me on a stone pedestal stood a bowl. Within the bowl were four stone tiles, worn blank by centuries of mishandling. As I looked down at the ever so faint lines upon them I wondered at the names they must have once held. What the quiet lives of these people, whose lost names had once so defined, must have been like. I also briefly pondered where their bones must now lay, as unnamed as these tiles. Shaking off that melancholy, I glanced at my watch. It was time, or close enough that it didn't matter.
What were minutes in the lifespan of gods? Or even in the life of a half-man like me?
From my pocket, I took an eyeglass case that contained a piece of wood and steel. A broken arrow, four inches long, I handled it with the care one would give holding a viper, for this little triangle and stick were far deadlier that the most toxic of serpent's kiss. The acquisition of it would be a tale in and of itself worthy of Homer's hand. But now it was simply a means to an end. A vengeful possibly bloody end.
The bowl was surrounded by a purple velvet rope to keep viewers at a distance. The pedestal was wired to detect the removal of the bowl. There were guards, sitting eating their vending machine purchased breaks in front of banks of camera fed monitors. All of them were on the lookout for thefts.
Now one was looking for someone to give, to add to the collection.
