Here, darling. I've made you chamomile. Here. Hold it. Hold it with two hands. Careful, love, don't spill. 

     You see how steam roars out the mouth of the cup? You see the shapes it makes in the air? Watch the steam. Tell me what shapes it makes when Boreas touches it with cold fingers. Tell me how satyrs with their long hair wrapped in garlands of anemone link arms and dance with naiads in groves where apples hang down from the trees in clusters of eternal skin and meat. Tell me how mortals spin in and out of the heavens, how wide-winged Cygnus trails stars and wide-winged Icarus trails feathers. Here, darling. Rest your many heads on my shoulder. 

     Yes, love, I know it's dark here. I know your father throws boulders at the walls and shouts at you because he cannot shout at the gods. Shh. Drink your tea.

     I heard a song once, which I still hear sometimes, when you are asleep with the shadows of stalactites tucked over you like a quilt, and it is nighttime up above. 

     I heard it first the day after your father cut Zeus' tendons from his arms, when the skies shone clean and cloudless over Greece. I rested in the woods below Olympus, watching wind move through grass, wondering at the small lives of the trees and the smaller lives of the woodpeckers.

    The song found me there. It crept between the trees and whispered a secret in my ear and led me by my hand through brambles and river mud and along the dried-out beds where gudgeons once darted in streams. I followed it while your father burned cities–yes, with a fire just like yours. Someday, you will breathe more than sparks to warm cold tea. 

     It led me to the edge of a steep incline, past which black sky and black sea joined in one enormous mass of empty darkness. The music went quiet, and from the darkness emerged its source. He was Aegipan, a satyr god with a fish's tail. 

     I asked him the name of the tune.

     A mortal man first sang it, he told me, at the deathbed of his friend. 

     I ordered him to play more. I wanted to hear the end.

     He laughed at me, but he took the lyre up again. 

     This next bit is very secret, darling. You must promise me you will never tell it, not even to your sisters. There, make the promise. Promise on your heart and your soul and the second talon on your right hand. Yes, that one. Careful. If you break your promise, it will fall clean off!

     Your father told you how the goat monster and the sky god stole his victory. He didn't tell you that I helped the goat monster–Aegipan–climb to the cloudless peaks of Olympus, nor that I told him what tune to play when he arrived. That is my secret–our secret, now. 

     You know how the goat monster tricked your father–how he stole Zeus' tendons back, pretending he meant to string them through his lyre. You know how Zeus fought your father for many weeks, how lightning lit the dark skies so brilliantly mortal farmers thought they'd overslept and rushed out to the fields in their nightclothes. 

     You don't know how much they broke. I watched from above as a wave devoured soil, exposing the flimsy white roots of barley plants, as the wind tore the roof off a barn, as houses flooded and streets flooded and Zeus and your father knocked over palaces and kept fighting. 

Through it all, Aegipan played on. Sometimes soft and sometimes deafening, his song rose between the trees and the mountains and reverberated back off the thunderclouds. 

     I was glad when Zeus finally defeated your father, mainly because the rain slowed and the seas settled and the song quieted to a trickle of disparate notes. I should have fled then, hidden in one of those distant woodland places where all kinds of creatures may sleep in the sunlight and dance in the shade. I might have rested my head on a tree root while Cassiopeia and Cepheus and all their starry ilk ran laps around the universe, and drawn animals and people around the shapes of the clouds.

     But I trusted too much in the goodwill of the gods. They are no less cruel than we are, only more deceitful, and they wear prettier faces when they lie. Zeus didn't care that I'd helped him. He flung this mountain over me, and trapped your father and me together in this horrible, horrible dark. 

     So drink your tea and save your fire, love. Someday, we'll reclaim the world I lost us. We'll steal the gods' palaces and their crowns and their seats on lofty Olympus. We'll lock them up tight, away from the clouds and the stars. And we'll be better than they were: you and your sisters and I. We'll be kinder. 

     Is your tea all done? Good thing. It's past your bedtime. There, I'll take the mug. Sleep tight, love, but if you wake up before morning, listen closely. Try and hear Aegipan's lyre, even through so much stone and earth. Listen, and someday, when we rule, Aegipan may play a new song.