I shuddered. Though the Amish had many children and did not use birth control, we didn’t violate one another like that. It seemed the very definition of evil.
“Hera was understandably the jealous sort. She was the goddess of marriage and unable to keep her own marriage together. She heckled Hercules for years, starting with sending serpents to kill him in his crib. When Zeus loved Lamia, a queen of Libya, Hera murdered her children and turned her into a monster.”
I squirmed. I was a bit uncomfortable hearing this, these tales of other gods. But I convinced myself that they were simply fiction. Like Wonder Woman. None of the Greek gods were swooping in to save the earth from vampire attacks. But the thrill of hearing this bit of blasphemy quickened my blood.
“My favorite myth about her, though, was the story of Io. Io was a priestess of Hera who’d caught Zeus’s wandering eye. Io wanted nothing to do with him and rejected his advances. Zeus then sent the oracles to pester Io’s father, who eventually kicked her out of the house. Poor Io was walking through the fields alone when Zeus came upon her and tried to seduce her.
“Hera very nearly walked in on this. To avoid being caught, Zeus transformed Io into a very beautiful white cow.
“Hera, however, was familiar with Zeus’s shape-changing tricks and demanded that Io be given to her as a gift. Zeus was stuck between a rock and a hard place; he handed the cow over to Hera.
“Hera, determined to keep Zeus and his would-be mistress separated, gave the cow to a giant named Argus the All-Seeing. Io was chained to a sacred olive tree at one of Hera’s temples. Argus was a pretty good guard, since he had a hundred eyes and never closed all of them. He could sleep with a few of them open at any time.”
“What happened to Io? I mean . . . I imagine that Zeus moved on to the next conquest.” I rested my chin on my knee. No one had really told me stories since I was a child. I knew all the old biblical stories by heart. This was new. While reading was a common pastime among Plain folk, that interest rarely extended into fiction. The dogs ambled in and lay beside me. Perhaps they liked the rhythm of Alex’s voice. I thought that he would make a good professor.
“Well, Zeus ordered the messenger god, Hermes, to kill Argus. Hermes showed up to the tree in the disguise of a shepherd. He managed to lull Argus to sleep by speaking magic incantations, then slugged him with a rock, killing him.”
“And Io? Was she free?”
“Eh. She was free but stuck in the form of a cow. Hera sent a gadfly to harass her for the remainder of her days and prevent her from resting. So, Io wandered until she came to the ends of the earth. For the ancient Greeks, that was pretty much as far as what’s now Turkey. Zeus transformed her back into a woman when Hera wasn’t looking. She conceived a daughter by Zeus’s touch. Io gave birth in secret and hid her daughter with a nymph who raised her while Io continued to flee Hera’s wrath.
“Io continued to run—ran as far as Egypt. Pimp-daddy Zeus came by and laid the golden touch on her again—bam!—and she’s pregnant with child number two. She gave birth to her son, Epaphus, in the Nile. Hera found out about this one. She had the boy abducted. But Io persevered. She searched far and wide to find him in Syria.
“By this time, Io had had truly enough of the Greek gods. She returned to Egypt and swore them off, asking instead for the protection of the Egyptian goddess Isis.”
“Isis was gentler than Hera, I’d guess.”
“Yep. Isis was a mother and nature goddess. She was all about love and kindness. Isis took her in. Io became a priestess of Isis and married an Egyptian king. She never came back to Greece.”
I sat in silence when Alex wrapped up his tale. I absorbed the whole of it, then blurted out: “That’s terrible.”
He smiled. “Those were the old gods for you, though. Wrathful. And this was how Hera treated one of her priestesses, one of her most fervent followers, who never wanted anything to do with Zeus. The part that amazes me is that it took Io so long to renounce them and switch to Team Isis. I guess you stick with what you know.”
“Ja,” I said. “You do.”
“Yeah. But the thing that I like about the story is that Io eventually gets her happy ending. I don’t know of another myth in which one of Zeus’s mortal women gets one. And she does it through sheer determination. Perseverance.”
He lapsed into silence. I stared up at the flickering lantern. Darkness had fallen soft and thick around us. The Singing was over by now, and I would be expected home.
“I should be getting back.” I stretched, stood, reached for the lantern. I felt bad taking his only good source of light. “My parents will be missing me.”
“I can walk you back,” he said.
I looked at the wound still angry on his temple. “I’m not sure that would be a good idea.”
“I’ll go with you part of the way.” He reached for the flashlight in the pile of his meager possessions and put it in his pocket. His sleeve hiked up as he did so, and I saw a black mark on his forearm.
I reached for his wrist. “Are you hurt?”
He shook his head, smiled. “No.” He rolled his sleeve up farther for me to see. “It’s a tattoo. See?”
The black mark stretched across his forearm, up to his elbow. It looked like something architectural, a stepped tower. I squinted at it, holding my lantern high.
“What is it?”
“It is a moment of folly from spring break one year. You might consider it my own Rumspringa.” He rolled his eyes at his own foolishness. “It’s called a Djed pillar. The backbone of the Egyptian god Osiris.”
“So you do believe in a god.” My skin crawled at the idea of someone worshipping those wrathful gods of fiction—for real. I dropped his wrist.
“Maybe abstractly,” he admitted sheepishly, rubbing at the tattoo.
We walked toward the mouth of the barn. I doused the lantern as he pulled the door shut.
“Osiris is a good god? Like Isis?” I wanted to believe that there was some nugget of good in Alex.
“Actually, he’s the husband of Isis. Unlike the tumult of Zeus’s relationship with Hera, there was no infidelity or jealousy between them.”
The sky was overcast, and I could smell rain coming. The night was soft and thick as lampblack, blanketing the field. I think that the crickets could sense the rain too; I couldn’t hear them.
“That’s something, at least,” I said, walking beside him. Some beauty in the fiction.
“Well, they weren’t without their challenges. Osiris was assassinated by his brother, Set. His body was torn into pieces and thrown into the Nile.”
“Again, your myths are terrible.”
I could see his teeth shining white in the darkness. “But this one has a happy ending too. Isis picked up the pieces of his body from the Nile and put him back together. Osiris was resurrected by his wife and became god of the dead and rebirth.”
I shuddered. There was something sinister about the idea of a god of the dead. “And you were moved to put his symbol on your arm?”
He shrugged. “I was going through a tough time. My grandfather had died, and I didn’t want to believe in the permanence of death.”
I thought about that. It was, in its way, similar to how Elijah was coping with the disappearance of his brothers. Trying to fight against the permanence of death. But I didn’t understand why Alex would choose something so . . . dark.
I pointed at a light in the distance. “That’s my house.”
He squinted at it. “Okay. I’ll watch from here . . . at least, as far as I can. To see that you get there.”