Hestia's Hymn (8)
The temple was a complete wreck. Unable to contain the heat of my own rage, I smashed everything around me and left the place looking like a rag. I had managed to stay calm up to a point, but the moment Medusa escaped I lost every last shred of reason. My roar echoed across all of Argos. Even when King Acrisius, startled by the uproar, came running with his soldiers, the chaos refused to die down until the next morning.
When my senses finally returned, Danae—who had fled first—pulled me into her arms and soothed me. The servants and every citizen of Argos threw themselves into the cleanup, yet I alone walked into the deepest part of the temple and stood before the shattered remains of my wife and the statue of Hestia, utterly lost.
“………………”
My wife, broken into pieces, did not move so much as a finger.
What was she thinking, trapped in stone?
Or was there no consciousness left at all?
Was she simply dead?
A thousand thoughts crossed my mind, but there was no way to know. I used the power over the dead that Hades had granted me and peered into the world of the departed, yet Achilles’s soul was nowhere to be seen. For a moment I wondered if she had already left the living world and descended to the Underworld, but she would never have been ignorant of my ability, so that explanation felt wrong.
Don’t tell me she’s still alive like this?
Worst-case scenario.
Was she in pain?
Even for her, remaining in this state was far too cruel.
Worry clawed at me so hard that I stroked the half-shattered cheek of her face, but all it did was roughen my own feelings; no answer came. Had I really grown that attached to Achilles? The thought left me restless. I had always praised her with empty, honeyed words, yet now that she was like this it felt as if half my own body had been torn away.
“Medusa…”
I recalled the face of the monster who had called herself Andromeda at the end. That damned creature who turned herself into Pegasus and flew away to escape. Just thinking of her made fury boil up again, and knowing that time would eventually smother the rage under reason only made me feel more cheated.
“…………”
I forced the anger down, called reason back, carefully gathered the shattered pieces of Achilles into a basket, and hid them in a corner. No one was helping me through this pain, so for a second I wanted to rage at the gods exactly the way Medusa had said I would—yet the moment I realized even that emotion was part of her scheme, the urge to take it out on the gods vanished completely. I myself had once warned that one should never expect anything from the gods. Begging them for help the instant things turned against me would be pure idiocy. I had to keep the words I had spoken.
Crack, crack, crack…
Once the rage had fully settled, I looked at the stone statue of Hestia that had stood right beside where Achilles had been. Fortunately she was a goddess, so the petrification had never been complete. Reacting to the blessing Hephaestus had given me, she was slowly being released. At first it had only been her toes; a full day later the stone had peeled past her fingers and now covered her entire body. The last fragments clinging to her face were about to fall away.
“H-ah… Perseu…s…”
“!”
She finally managed to speak, forcing the words out between ragged breaths. Relief washed over me as I carefully peeled the stone shards from her face.
“Ah… aah… ugh…”
“Are you all right? I’m using the blessing to reverse the stone, so please don’t push yourself.”
Even in this situation I was still flattering Hestia in that calm tone of voice, and I hated myself for it. Normally I never minded how shamelessly I flattered anyone, but this was the first time it felt repulsive. My lips trembled, yet I forced a smile. If I wasn’t careful I might end up taking my anger out on her.
“Me…dusa… how…?”
“I drove Medusa away.”
“I… see…”
I finished removing the outer stones from her cheeks and forehead, then helped her over to the bed I had been sitting on and laid her down. For someone who had been petrified so long she was surprisingly lively and tried to refuse, but with things as they were I could not afford to make an enemy of Hestia as well. I did everything I could to soothe her while burning to go kill Medusa.
“Ha… haah… Really… how did it come to this…”
“I never dreamed something like this could happen. It is entirely my own inadequacy that brought this about, so I will gladly accept any punishment later.”
“No… no… I had a bad feeling and kept watch around you, yet the disaster still struck. This was an unavoidable accident…?”
I had been trying to force her to stay in bed, but Hestia’s gaze drifted to the stone fragments in the corner. I had no intention of making a show of Achilles’s death, yet Hestia’s face darkened.
“Achilles…?”
“Yes. By the time I arrived, she had already breathed her last.”
“W-why her? When I turned to stone she wasn’t even there! I only stepped forward to protect the children—why did Achilles take my place?!”
“She was standing right in front of you, Lady Hestia. Perhaps she died trying to protect you…”
“Ahh…”
“Please do not worry. She was a hero of Greece; she must have known an unavoidable death would one day come for her. And she died protecting a goddess more noble than any other—surely she is satisfied.”
No.
That can’t be true.
She is definitely furious.
But I did not want to fight a god, so I arbitrarily elevated Achilles’s death and kept my face blank. That at least let me hold the seething emotion in check. It was hardly a healthy way to process things, yet it kept me from exploding in rage.
“Do you truly think so?”
“I will not say it twice.”
When I spoke with a closed-off, expressionless face, Hestia could not hide her pity. I had always smiled in front of her; suddenly going blank was the same as baring every feeling. I had shortened my words because I did not want her to see the rotten, festering emotion inside me—yet that only made my true feelings clearer.
“Only right now. Right now no one else can hear, so you may rage at me. Even if Lord Zeus hears, I promise I will protect you.”
“Please stop. I do not wish to belittle Achilles’s death with my own mouth. She may have been a hero who turned to stone without even a chance to resist, yet the great deed of protecting a god remains. She who wanted more than anyone to fight the strongest and to achieve glory completed a noble death at the end. I have no reason to be angry over that.”
“No reason to be angry… No. You are angry. Otherwise you would never speak in that tone. Our meeting was short, yet I know what kind of man you are. You would never make that face in front of me.”
“You are right. I am angry. But the one I am angry at is not Lady Hestia—it is Medusa. I have not the slightest intention of surrendering to rage and taking it out on someone else.”
“If she had not protected me, could she have lived? Does that not give you more than enough reason to be angry at me?”
“Do you mean to force her own husband to desecrate her final achievement with his own mouth? ‘If she had simply run instead of fighting Medusa she would still be alive, yet the fool turned to stone protecting a petrified goddess’—is that what you want me to say? If you are worried about me, please do not. Achilles was never a woman who knew how to flee from an enemy. Even if the goddess had not been there, she would have thrown herself forward for the children.”
“That is cruel. I would feel better if you simply cursed me. Even in this situation you still cannot speak your true feelings or truly get angry…”
“I feel like I am going to die from the heat rising in me, yet this thing called reason refuses to let me go.”
While I corrected my words and arranged my expression the way I always did for flattery, tears I had not shed in a long time slipped out. They were only a little overflow from the injustice that had piled up, and Hestia wiped them away with her thumb.
“It would be easier if you just spat it out, yet that would mean dancing to Medusa’s tune. Holding it in only makes you feel more wronged.”
“The goddess understands humans very well. That mindset is nobler than anyone’s, so I will never be able to raise my head before you for the rest of my life.”
“No one else… neither I nor Zeus ever wanted you to taste a tragedy like this…”
“I am fine, so please lie down. This is the time to spare your body.”
“No… I am fine. There is something I wish to check…”
Hestia carefully rose from the bed and left my side. Even when I told her to stay lying down just in case, she refused that single request and instead went to the dead Achilles, stroking her fragments in a suspicious manner.
“Achilles… Achilles… can you hear me…?”
“She is dead. Calling her will bring no answer.”
“No… that cannot be…”
Hestia denied my words and asked again.
“Perseus, you can see souls leaving the body, can you not…? Then you should be able to answer… Where is Achilles’s soul right now…?”
“I cannot see it anywhere. Given the state she is in, I can only assume she has already descended to the Underworld.”
“No, that is impossible. Her body is still intact.”
“………What?”
“Long ago, after Sisyphus died, he ordered his wife not to perform the funeral rites for his body so that he could return to life, then tricked the god of the Underworld and came back. Achilles’s body is still intact inside this stone, so she is not completely dead.”
“But she has been shattered into pieces like this… how…”
“She feels no pain; she is simply sleeping. I felt the same when I was petrified. If we can somehow restore this, we can save her.”
“Truly? You mean… we can really save Achilles?”
“Yes.”
Joy surged up at Hestia’s confident declaration—but only for an instant. My reason swallowed even that joy and poured cold water over it, then stomped my face into the dirt with the question: Then how exactly are you going to restore this?
“But there is no way to put a shattered stone statue back together, is there?”
In the modern world, maybe. This was ancient Greece.
Or did Hestia intend to work some miracle and restore it herself?
No. If she could have done that, she would never have turned to stone in the first place.
Even I, who possessed a blessing with excellent compatibility, had needed time to undo the stone curse. That was exactly why I had let Medusa escape. Things would never flow so simply.
“We will not be able to restore her completely, so the only way is to use these fragments to remake her anew. Fortunately her soul is sleeping inside, so if we can fashion a new body using the flesh contained in these pieces, she will be able to return at once.”
Remake the body?
Using the shattered flesh-fragments of the petrified Achilles?
Even knowing this was a mythological world, the conversation was hard to grasp. Hestia was a goddess casually explaining a method she knew, yet as a human I struggled to follow even that.
“I… do not understand. Please consider the man standing before a goddess to be the stupidest person in this world and explain it in detail.”
“It is not difficult. Take these fragments to him and ask him to sculpt them.”
“To whom?”
“To the descendant of Pygmalion, the one who inherits the name of the greatest sculptor.”
“Ah—!”
“Yes. Just as in the myth of Pygmalion, re-sculpt Achilles and then ask the goddess of love for a body. She does not dislike you either, so she will not refuse if you ask. I will go with you and stay by your side.”
“Lady Hestia may remain here. Now that I know that much, it is no difficult task. I will go resolve it quickly and return.”
“No. This is for my sake as well. I am only sparing a little time for the hero who protected me, so do not mind it.”
Even though it was something I could handle alone, Hestia insisted on coming. The offer came from her kind nature rather than any ill intent, so I could not refuse.
“Where is the descendant of Pygmalion? If you do not know, I will make inquiries myself.”
“Do not worry. His descendant is in a place you know very well.”
“Where is that?”
“The island of prostitutes—Cyprus. He never left the homeland of his ancestor.”
“……………”
The island where women who had incurred Aphrodite’s wrath sold their bodies to travelers.
And I was supposed to take a virgin goddess there?
She’s putting me in a difficult spot again.
The news that Achilles could be revived was extremely attractive, yet the joy did not last long before stress crashed over me. More incidents and accidents were certain to erupt, and I still had to stick my head into a place like that. My life and Achilles’s life truly were ill-fated.
*1) There are several myths that intertwine Medusa and Pegasus, most of them related to blood.
One version says that after her death Poseidon turned Medusa into a winged horse so she could be reborn free of Athena’s curse. Another claims that when Perseus slew Medusa, the winged horse descended as a blessing. Still another says the blood that flowed from Medusa’s head into the sea gave birth to him. In every case the myths treat Pegasus as either Medusa’s child or as Medusa herself reborn.