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Fireside Reflections |
He’s not my Hercules. Not the brash arrogant braggart who was happy getting drunk, happier getting laid and happiest when he could do both together. There’s none of that in the man that sits across the fire from me now, a bemused – and pleased - expression on his face as he enjoys the taste of my herb stuffed, clay baked trout. I can’t imagine this man in an impassioned rage, shattering the latest furniture with abstracted blows as he stalks about the castle, cursing the world which gave him birth. I’ve seen the Sovereign in that mood too often for comfort. Seen him push aside a hapless guard or servant who couldn’t move fast enough – and been there to hastily smother the resultant moans of pain in case his liege lord took further offence at the complaints of a man shattered beyond repair.
There is nothing but gentleness in the blue eyes that watch me now. The same eyes I have seen lit by unholy fires, filled with eager cruelty, and sometimes – rarely sometimes – hollow with pain and haunted by unreachable grief.
That was my Hercules. The man behind the thirst for power, the lust for control and the need to dominate. The man I entertained, that I sought to draw out with every joke, with every hopeful trick or pratfall, was hidden deep within the black grief which had swallowed him up and made him into a monster.
He never was a kind man – never the man who watches me now with his eyes troubled for completely different reasons – but there was a time when he was loved. Loved by his mother, strict and unforgiving as she was. Loved by his wife and children for his strength, his pride, and the way he used to indulge their every whim. And loved by me, who’d been his friend and his fool ever since that long ago day when he caught me thieving from his Father’s temple – and decided to ‘keep’ me like a favoured pet, like some paltry mortal satellite caught in the orbit of his semi-divine magnificence.
He was my protector and my tormentor all those long years of growing from boys to men. I was his servant, his whipping boy, his procurer and his confident. I amused him – and I made sure I went on doing it, too scared of him to risk escape from that orbit of servitude, too devoted to realise that – where I offered love – he returned only fear and favours that cost him nothing at all.
Was that why I followed his reflection into this world? Was there a piece of me that still needed his affirmation? A piece that said – with knowing cruelty – you are nothing without him? Didn’t I want to be nothing? No more a target or the butt of jokes, no more living on the edge of fear, dancing my desperate wits around his mercurial moods, praying that I had the right words ready to say, whatever they might be?
There were days I prayed for such a life. To be free of his tyranny, free to be myself instead of what he made me.
And yet – who am I, without him?
I sit and watch the man across the fire, answering his friendly smile with a cautious one of my own. He’s not my Hercules. But nor am I his Iolaus – the man whose name lifts a haunted smile to his lips, whose memory lies like shards of broken glass behind his eyes. Who was this blond hero, this quicksilver soul, who was never still, never daunted, never dismayed? I can see no echo of myself in that memory. The echoes must be there, though; they write shivers of pain in those steel blue eyes.
His steel blue eyes.
It hurts to see them. To know I’m responsible for putting them there – except that it isn’t me, anymore than he is the one whose presence wakes me, sweating and panicked from my sleep. We are two strangers sharing a common loss, needing each other in a way that neither of us could possibly explain.
Did I love the Sovereign, the way that he loved his golden hunter? My heart is too battered to tell. I know I will never inspire the kind of aching grief which haunts the son of Zeus in this world. It isn’t a dark grief, although it must have been filled with shadows when it first descended. Nor is it the bitter, twisted grief which turned my boyhood drunken bully into the tyrant who owned my world. It’s a strange, bright grief – one which he takes out to study from time to time, feeling the pain, using it to remind him he’s still alive. Still loved. Even in loss. I know my presence doesn’t help to heal that pain – but it gives it shapes, defines its focus.
I see the love in his eyes – the love I had always wanted and never found, for all Ares’ teasing words as to my place in the scheme of things. ‘You’re his heart’ he used to say. ‘Without you, he’s an empty shell. He hurts you for making him feel – yet those feelings are so precious, he hoards them like diamonds.’
Ares always did talk nonsense. But watching this man, I begin to wonder. Because I know now that, in my own beaten, craven way, I did love the man who used and abused me. I would have died for him. Did once. It was a huge relief to be dead and I never figured out how or why I was dragged back to my living hell on earth. Not until I came here – and learned the other side of the story.
I owe this man – this gentle, loving man – my life. Long before I ever met him. Before I even knew he existed. He saved me. And saved me again when my world became a place of bitter ashes, a place where I no longer had a place.
He’s not my Hercules – and I will never fill the empty space in his heart, any more than he will ever be able to truly heal the wounds in mine. But he is my friend. I can only pray – as I sit and watch him, watching me with that look in his eyes – that, one day, he will be able to say as much of me.
