“Good evening, my Tessa,” said the man. His voice was smooth and comforting, although quite resonant, bespeaking power and authority.
“Who are you?” she asked, not trying to hide her indignity or a small amount of fear.
“You need not be afraid of me,” said the man. “I am called Zeus. You have heard of me?”
She paused for a moment, considering the question, then shook her head. It was a marvelous piece of work, she thought in spite of herself, still stealing glances at the piece which the man carried.
“You have not? Ah, that is good.”
“Good?”
“You will understand everything . . . someday, but for now, I wish to tell you something.”
“Tell me something. What are you doing here? I thought everyone had disappeared long ago. You must be from Guardian then?”
“Not exactly,” was all he said and took a step closer to her.
She immediately tensed and her mind raced, trying to recall some of the basic techniques in self-defense which Varian had been teaching her. They had all seemed so simple when she was learning them, but now, when she needed the knowledge, it would not come to her.
“Is there something wrong?” asked Zeus.
“Please, don’t come any closer. I don’t know you. . . . I can’t . . . I can’t trust you.”
The man paused and smiled. It was a very disarming, quite charming smile, and she relaxed visibly. There was something odd about him that went beyond his strange attire and his speech, which she could not place as having any dialect patterns in the known World.
“Please, I assure you I mean no harm. I have come, in fact, to give you a gift. . . .”
“Me? A gift?” Tessa laughed at the incongruity of the thought. It was the last thing she would have expected from the man, yet her gaze flew instantly back to the box he carried.
“But first, a story,” he said, moving to the edge of a desktop, where he half sat, composing himself in a most casual fashion.
“A story? Oh yes, you said something before about that.”
“Yes, I did. Now listen, please, it is a story of creation. Do you know any?”
“I have heard folktales. But they are just foolishness. . . .”
Zeus smiled. “Yes, they are, aren’t they?” He paused to rub his beard contemplatively and place the box on the desktop. “Now then, listen. A long time ago, when the World was being pulled together out of Chaos, there were two brothers—their names do not matter—who were very different in personality and in worth, even though both were what we would call, for want of a better word, ‘gods. ‘“
“Gods?” Tessa looked at him oddly.
“Yes, you know—all powerful, quite influential around the universe, that sort of fellow. . . .”
“Oh . . . oh yes, of course,” she said, a bit patronizingly.
“Well, come now, I mean this is a creation tale, isn’t it?” asked Zeus.
“Yes, I suppose you’re right,” she said. “Go on, now.”
“All right. And so, these brothers were quite different types of gods. Brother Number One was very, very wise. The wisest perhaps of all the gods; and of course, Number Two—”
“Was not very bright, scatterbrained, perhaps . . . a real problem,” said Tessa.
“Are you sure you haven’t heard this one?”
Tessa smiled. “No, but it is rather obvious so far, isn’t it?”
Zeus shrugged. “I guess so,” he said. “Anyway, to continue: Both brothers had a large hand in creating the World, giving it all its animals and even mankind itself—only at first the situation was quite literal. I mean it was mankind. No women yet. And believe it or not, things went along rather nicely for a while, until the brothers did something (I don’t remember what it was but it had something to do with offerings which the Elder—the chief deity—was to receive from men) which angered the Elder. And so, the elder god devised a unique punishment for the two brothers . . . he created a woman and gave her to Brother Number Two for his wife.”
“That’s a punishment?”
Again Zeus shrugged. “I didn’t make it up; I can only tell it like it is. . . .”
“Very well,” she said. “What happened next?”
“Well, Brother Number One was very upset about this turn of events . . . not because he didn’t receive the woman for a wife, but because he did not trust the elder god’s apparent kindness, nor did he have much faith in his brother’s competence to handle the situation. It did not, by the way, help matters that the woman was truly beautiful—the most beautiful woman who has ever lived, from now till the present. She was so magnificently created, in fact, that Brother Number Two lost all of what little judgment he might have possessed when dealing with her. The result was that the ‘first’ woman became a pampered, spoiled princess, who grew quickly accustomed to getting her own way in all matters. This, too, upset Brother Number One, but he busied himself with the new World, which he had created, and tried to make things as good as he could for the world of men; he even went up to the forges of the gods and brought man the gift of fire. . . . But this act, too, brought down the anger of the elder god who didn’t particularly want these new creatures, these men, to have fire.” Zeus paused and gestured about the room. “I mean, maybe he was right . . . you see where it’s taken us?”
Tessa nodded and urged him to continue.
“There’s not much more, I promise. And so the elder god devised another punishment for everybody involved. He created this box”—and he paused to hold up the magnificent work of art, the carved chest—”which he then gave to the woman as a belated bridal gift. Now although the box possessed hinges of hand-forged silver and had no lock upon its face, there was an inscription attached to it which said that the woman was
