June, Wednesday 2, 2004 – Rhea: Here's the last bit of Rhea's story. It's out of order, I guess---since it's after Rhea's last history and before the Lord of Misrule. History has its own sense of pacing, I suppose.
It was about 12 pesserids before the end of the Third Kingdom.
Rhea cracked.
"I do all the work to bring forth our children," she said, staring into the mirror of the world, "and he keeps eating them."
The Kouretes who served her shouted. They rattled their swords and armor. They began to dance.
"It is not right---"
She was pregnant. Her belly was full. She did not want Cronos to eat this child. So she took the sickle of flint. She climbed a web that hung between the places of the world. There, not in the sky, not on the land, and not in the sea, she cut her belly open and spilled Zeus out onto the web.
"Yey-aa!" cried the Kouretes. They shook their swords. They made a thunder upon the world and drowned the cries of infant Zeus.
With fear and courage Rhea looked down onto the face of her newest son.
Infant dismay gathered like clouds on the clearness of his face. He looked woeful. He had not asked to leave the womb. He had not wished Rhea to birth him onto a web. He did not want Rhea to leave him there, with the roar of the Kouretes' dancing and morning dew to be his milk. He was cold and bloody and he did not want to be alone.
But only one creature in all the world was free, and it was not yet Zeus.
Rhea stitched her stomach back together with the substance of the web. As he watched her work the needle understanding came slowly into Zeus' mind.
He spoke words that no one had said in many thousands of years.
"The Lord am I of all within this world," said Zeus.
And then he laughed, and then he laughed, seeing his perfect little fingers for the first time in all the history of the world.
Rhea bundled a stone in swaddling and returned to the world. Her face was impassive. She handed Cronos the stone and said, "Look, o my love, delicious pink and purple Zeus."
Cronos did not look.
He swallowed down the stone and cut up her placenta and he ate it too.
"You have invented a new tonality," he said. "For words of love."
"I am not happy," Rhea said.
And Cronos smiled over the blood of the placenta on his mouth and said, "Then I am doing well."
I'm almost certain to use this later. But for now, it's on the cutting room floor.
The gates of the hospital dangle open from black iron poles. Graves litter the hospital grounds. Abandon hope, preaches the graffiti on the wall, all ye who enter h---.
There it turns into a long and bloody scrawl.
"I am not sure," complains the girl, "that this is the best facility to treat a wounded hand."
The Minister bends over. He reads the text on one of the gravestones. His face wrinkles in a sneer, as if to say is that all you have accomplished? to the immutable stone.
He says, "You can see the sign of the red cross above it, which means Hospital."
"It could be a red plus," argues the girl.
The minister straightens. "Meaning?"
"Arithmetic kills."
"Trigonometry kills," says the minister. "Geometry, perhaps. Not arithmetic."
The girl's name is Ink Catherly, but everybody calls her the imago. It's an algebraic operation you can perform on Hilbert spaces, she'll tell you, and maybe that's the truth.