Julia Scarborough is an American writer living in London. She earned a BA (First Class) in Classics from Oxford, an MA in art history from the Courtauld Institute (with a thesis on Florentine dragons), and a PhD in Classics from Harvard, where she won prizes for her creative writing in Latin and Ancient Greek. After a postdoctoral fellowship at Wake Forest University, she taught at Harvard and at Amherst College. She has held residencies in fiction writing at the Hambidge Center and the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. She is currently an MA student in creative writing at Goldsmiths (2023-2024).  

This extract comes from a novel that follows the twin sister of Eros, the god of desire, from her childhood among the gods into the historical world of classical Greece, where she falls disastrously in love with Sappho, escapes from slavery, argues with Socrates, and bargains with the gods to stave off a plague from her adopted city. 

Email: julia.scarborough@gmail.com 

The Lesser God of Love 

Characters: 

Cytherea, also known as Aphrodite, goddess of beauty 

Hephaestus, her husband, god of fire, son of Zeus and Hera, who threw him out of the sky when he was a child 

Their twin children: 

Pigeon, also known as Eros (Desire) 

Salamander, so nicknamed after the fire-loving salamanders in her father’s forge 

Chapter 3 

When Ganymede first arrived—the beautiful Trojan boy, with his arms still scratched by the talons of the eagle that had caught him—Pigeon was happy to let him join in their games. Against his sister Pigeon had rarely had a chance to win. 

“What was it like being mortal?” Salamander asked, while Pigeon tossed the thirteen dice with which their aunt had encumbered her latest six-dimensional board game. “Was it horrible, raising animals so you could eat them?” 

“I’m a prince. I don’t raise my own food. That’s what slaves and peasants do.” 

She became aware that, while she tried to coax Ganymede into conversation, her brother was quietly palming his chariot tokens.  

“Princes and kings are mortal too, aren’t they?” 

Ganymede looked at her as if she had asked how many eyes a Cyclops had; if Zeus was the one who thundered. 

“I just wondered,” she said, “why the slaves and peasants go along with it.” 

“Why does your father make thunderbolts for Zeus?” 

The question took her unawares. 

“Because he’s the smith. He makes things.” 

“Why doesn’t he keep them for himself?” 

“He doesn’t want to throw thunderbolts at people. He has actual work to do. He’d rather work.” 

“Look at Zeus,” said Ganymede. “Look at your father. Do you think the gods would let him rule them instead? A cripple with no hair? That’s what it’s like with slaves and peasants. They know they need their betters to rule them. People who are wiser than they are and more beautiful.” 

If she pushed him out of the oculus her father would be disappointed. He was the one who had suggested the twins invite Ganymede to play with them. He must be missing his family, her father had said. 

She noted with pleasure that all of Ganymede’s ships had crossed to her brother’s side of the board. 

 

Any day now, Ganymede said, his people would ransom him. He listed the gifts they would give, the horses and tripods and slave women skilled at weaving, even after Pigeon inquired what Zeus would do with slave women skilled at weaving when the goddess of weaving lived in his house. It only stopped when Ganymede’s people built him a temple. He boasted to the twins about how much gold his statue had taken, how many wagons had hauled it, how many slaves had died of exhaustion, until Pigeon said, “Well, they’re not going to want you back now, are they? You’d be an anticlimax.” 

 

Their father said, when the twins complained, “Imagine being torn away from your home to be a cupbearer forever.” 

“Young and beautiful for all time,” said their mother. “How tragic.” 

If he would at least play more interesting games—with the Hours, or— 

“Not the Hours,” their father said. “He was born mortal. That could go wrong.” 

And Ganymede refused to ride the winds: he claimed that Zeus had forbidden him. 

“It would remind him of the eagle, flying,” their father said. “I wouldn’t like it either.” 

Salamander wondered if Zeus was afraid that Ganymede might escape. Or try to escape, and fall. 

 

When the catastrophe came she was explaining to Ganymede, for the seventh or seventeenth time, the rule about collecting tributes when you rolled a thirteen. Pigeon had disappeared hours before, with Ganymede’s chariots, and though she had wondered what he was up to—whatever it was, however sordid, part of her would rather be doing it—the screeching dazzle of gold that swooped down on the gameboard made her flinch. It was a mechanical eagle, with a wingspan broad enough to send the pieces scattering in its updraft, armies and peaces and fleets. It soared again with a metallic shriek, a city clutched in its talons.  

Ganymede threw his handful of hoplites at her (they fell just short) and scrambled to his feet. She looked around for her brother, and Ganymede must have had the same thought, because as he stalked off he called over his shoulder, “I hate you both.”  

Pigeon sauntered around a column, the eagle perched on his wrist. 

“That really wasn’t fair,” Salamander said. “You know he’s afraid of eagles. And that was an actual city.” 

“Don’t pretend you’re sorry he might not speak to you for a while.” 

As if she could pretend to Pigeon. She said, “Where did you get the eagle?” 

“I did someone a favour.” 

“Who? What did you do?” 

“Guess.” But Pigeon could never wait. He slung himself on the floor to crane over the edge of the oculus, towards Mount Ida. Down in the slant of the afternoon sun the mountainside was crawling with animals, lions and leopards, gazelles and wolves and bears and a shy but hopeful-looking dragon. They came teeming into the open, from every covert and burrow and den. Where they met they coupled without hesitation or prejudice or, in some cases, much chance of success. Salamander watched a hare and a tortoise try their hardest, and was reminded of her parents. 

Banks of violets had sprung up over the slopes, Cytherea’s favourite flowers, because they smelled sweet, and were soft for lying on, and kept you from smelling other smells that might arise. 

…Where was Cytherea? 

Then Salamander spotted the cloud. It hovered, a glittering smudge against the dark blue-green of the forest, over a sheepfold and a flock of sheep in furious ecstasy, one ram with three or four ewes, other ewes with each other in formations that opened a new dimension in the game of seeing pictures in clouds. A sheepdog, solitary of her kind, was making frantic love to a goat. Salamander focused so narrowly that she could hear the bleating of the neglected lambs in their pens. Inside the hut someone was playing the lyre, in a lazy way, with false notes and stops and starts and long gaps in the rhythm, then suddenly a twang and a crash, and silence. Pigeon fluttered up and turned a somersault as he crowed. 

“You didn’t.” She stayed on the ground. 

“I was careful,” he said. “I just grazed her. It wasn’t anywhere near the heart. Zeus ordered me.” 

“Do you even know who this one is?” 

“Some prince. One of Ganymede’s relatives. They have so many princes that this one is watching the sheep.” His voice went smug. “I don’t think he’s watching them very carefully.”  

“Luckily the wolves are distracted.” 

The shimmering cloud had draped itself over the hut. 

“Anyway, he’ll be all right. There’s going to be a war, and he’s going to survive to found a dynasty.” 

“A dynasty?” 

Pigeon flicked his wrist to launch the eagle into the air and snapped his fingers to summon it back. Salamander said, “He wants Mother to start a dynasty?” 

“The mortal, silly.” 

“But he can’t have a child. That’s how dynasties start.” 

“Mother can’t have a child with a mortal.” Technicalities never interested Pigeon. “He’ll have a wife later, obviously.” 

Cytherea climbed through the oculus at the hour of the evening star, radiant, dishevelled, and seeming not to mind that the twins were there to see her. 

“I was playing a little game,” she said, combing petals out of her hair with her fingers. “Pretending to be a mortal girl in a chorus of maidens.” A strange smell hovered about her, through the violets, a greasy smell that might have been sheep.  

 

Some weeks later—long enough that Pigeon would have grown bored of the eagle, had it not been useful for stealing more interesting things—Salamander was trying to ward it off from the gameboard long enough for her to negotiate a truce in a siege, and smuggle the people out of a city by night in a snowstorm, when she heard a noise that only slowly registered as her mother vomiting; and her father rumbling. 

The door opened. Her father’s face was curious. The crust of it was stern, but there was a light underneath. 

“Is she all right?” said Salamander.  

When her father hesitated she risked the question that had lingered in her mind, preposterous, ever since Pigeon had mentioned dynasties. 

“Is she going to have a baby?” 

The magma glowed through her father’s eyes. 

“So it appears.” 

Every feather of Pigeon’s wings ruffled: the puff of his indignation lifted him off the ground. What had he expected? Intercourse with the gods, proverbially, was not without offspring. 

“Isn’t that delightful?” she said. “Won’t you be so happy? You won’t be Mother’s baby anymore.” 

What if it was her father’s child? What if it was a boy, and a boy who was like her, not like Pigeon? What if it wanted to work in the forge?  

“That can’t be,” said Pigeon. “She would never want another child. She has me.” 

But as he was saying this their mother emerged from her bedroom, pale, her eyes red-rimmed. 

“Give me your arrows.” 

When he held them back, startled, she snatched the quiver from his shoulder, breaking the strap. She pulled out the arrows in a bundle, snapped them across her knee, and tossed the pieces away. He scrambled over the floor to gather the bits, the golden eagle circling over his head, letting out its mechanical cries. Cytherea tugged off one of her sandals with its intricate knotting of thongs, caught Pigeon up, and wrenched his wings under her other arm to keep him from wriggling away while she hit him. Salamander closed her eyes, the pain burning in her wings. Stop, she wanted to cry out, you’ll hurt him, meaning the way Hera had hurt their father, irreparably—she imagined Pigeon limping, wings skewed—but if she cried out— 

“It wasn’t my idea.” He was sobbing and choking. “It was Zeus. He made me—” 

“You mean he paid you?” Cytherea raised the sandal to knock the eagle out of the air. “Who gave you those arrows? Answer me.” She stamped on it with her shod heel. “Did Zeus give you those arrows? Is Zeus stronger than Aphrodite? Has watching Zeus ever taught you to look down on me? Answer me,” though she was hitting him again and it was all he could do to gasp. Salamander looked at her father for help and saw that his face had fallen in like a burnt-out log, brightness to ash. So he had thought the child was his. 

“These wings of yours,” said Cytherea, “seem to be taking you places where you have absolutely no need to go. What do you say we clip them?” 

Pigeon was making noises more like an animal than a god. Salamander made herself say, “Mother—” 

Cytherea rounded on her, eyes red in the beautiful mask of her face.  

“Mother?” 

But their father cut in.  

“It seems to me,” he said, “that the time for you to object was when you went to this—mortal? Yes?” His voice was an iron rasp. “What Pigeon did hasn’t changed. You knew this could happen. You weren’t talking then about clipping his wings.” 

Cytherea let the sandal and Pigeon drop. He fell hard to the floor, his wings twisted useless. She turned on her heel and stalked off, unevenly, one foot bare, one sole slapping the bronze floor. After the slam of her bedroom door had died away her voice still echoed in Salamander’s mind, saying Mother? 

Pigeon jerked up, skidding in the air, not getting aloft; then flapped away with a lopsided awkwardness that she felt down her spine.  

“Was it so bad for her,” she said to her father, “when she had us?” 

“That was different. That was—well. You aren’t mortal. That’s obvious. And goddesses don’t have children with mortals often, so we don’t know what to expect.” 

“It won’t—turn her mortal?” 

As soon as she said this it sounded reassuringly stupid. Gods slept with mortal women all the time, without their lightning being in any way dimmed. 

He had picked up the scrap of gold that had been the eagle and was turning it in his hands. He had made it, of course. She took his silence as letting her stupidity pass unremarked. 

Beside him at the workbench she said, tentative, “You don’t have any mortal children.” 

“I can’t run as fast as the rest of them.” He was smoothing out the curve of the eagle’s wing. “Nymphs could get away from me. Besides which, mortal bodies don’t mix well with fire. And I like to flatter myself”—a tap of the hammer—“that your mother would not be happy.” 

He held up the eagle to study its profile, then tweaked the bent hook of its lower beak with his tongs. As he held it out on his open palm, smooth and red with old burns, she thought how easily he could crush Zeus and all the gods together. She felt a hot golden flow of pride to be his child. And relief, to be safely his one true child again. 

When she gave the eagle to Pigeon he flicked it away without meeting her eyes. 

 

Cytherea began to smell. Her feet grew larger, and she went barefoot more often, and she called for her husband to cut off her wedding ring, and under her girdle her belly bulged and then ballooned. (“She must have been huge with two of us,” Salamander said to Pigeon. He shrugged and went on listlessly tossing his knucklebones. One, the impossible score fell out. One again. One.)  

Cytherea wanted strange things to eat. She pushed away ambrosia and called for the servants to bring her dried fish, pickled onions, cheeses, sausages made from sheep guts, all of which made the house smell like a farmyard, said Hera, poking and sniffing. (“But then you would know what a farmyard smells like better than any of us,” she added to her daughter-in-law.) Hera said that dried fish and aged cheese were unwholesome for a mother expecting a baby; Cytherea raised a sardonic eyebrow and swallowed a glob of stinking curds. She called for figs and grapes and raged at the servants because the fruits weren’t firm enough, or ripe enough, but she ravened them.  

One evening at dinner a silver platter appeared, on which was a lump of roasted flesh, its form vaguely familiar. It was a pigeon. When Salamander realized she gagged. Pigeon was folding his wings flat, invisible, all the way into his body. Their father looked uneasy. To roast a bird, it occurred to Salamander, you needed an iron spit, and fire. 

“Mortal children need mortal food,” said Cytherea, her mouth full of pigeon meat. But their father must have intervened after that, because instead of eating her sparrows and hares one by one she withdrew to her temples for meals. They learned this when Hera came to complain. 

“Your wife,” she said to their father, “is eating the sacrifices. Consider. They go through the ritual with the proper dignity, they garland an unblemished calf, they slit its throat and catch every drop of blood, they examine the entrails, they wrap the thighbones in fat, the carvers come to distribute the meat, and the goddess, who they supposed was reclining enthroned on Mount Olympus taking dainty sips of smoke, is crouching behind the altar tearing into the carcass like a wild dog, with her pretty hands, gnawing the bones and sucking the marrow and spitting the gristle out, in front of them.” 

“She doesn’t let them see her, surely, Mother.” 

“Are you so sure? The priestesses are seeing. They put a good face on it—the goddess has manifested her presence—but what are they seeing? What are they going to think? So I am asking you to keep your wife at home, for once, because someone needs to tell her that if she thinks she has a cloud of invisibility around her she is sorely mistaken.” 

“You think she is trying?” 

“It’s hardly a surprise, is it? Given that for all practical purposes she’s half mortal.” 

“Less than that,” said their father. “It’s half hers.” 

“You know that means nothing. It’ll die like any other. Now do you have the spine to tell her or shall I?” 

In fact their mother had changed: she had stopped shining. It was possible to look her in the face, even at the golden hour of the evening, and to think about something else, such as a pigeon with its guts spilling out. She smelled strange, too; her body did things that a mortal body did. Their father made her a chamber pot glittering with figures in precious metals—a queen crouched on all fours while a head with the nubs of horns emerged on the shoulders of a human baby; a midwife pulling the last of three snake-haired triplets from the womb of a mother whom the sight of the first two had already turned to stone. On the inside of the pot their father inlaid the face of a beautiful youth, not the brightest perhaps, a face that bore a certain resemblance to Ganymede’s, with the look of a man who had just seen the goddess of beauty take off her clothes. His mouth hung wide open in awe. Cytherea would clutch her belly and make explosive noises, squatting over the pot, and then have to be cleaned, and the servants would dump the foul-smelling contents through the oculus into the blue. 

“But she’ll change back after the baby’s born, won’t she?” said Salamander to her father. 

“Let’s hope.” 

She wondered, lying awake at night, if her mother was also afraid. What would happen if she stayed half mortal? She might not be welcome to stay among the gods, then. She might not want to stay. Salamander felt as though a door had swung open and let in a wind that smelled sometimes green and sometimes salty with the spray of a sea beyond the oculus rim, and sometimes of things she couldn’t name, rotting. And she was aware of mortality, somewhere below her, shadowy, vast. It must have been there all along—how far down?—waiting for her mother to fall in.  

She had expected Cytherea’s body to force the baby out as fast as it could. Instead the goddess of beauty burbled and dimmed and picked gristle out of her teeth. Salamander examined herself, for the first time finding a use for mirrors, and discovered what could be a strange potential for her own body to go wildly mortal too. 

On the other hand, she had wings: the thought was steadying. If her mother had had wings, could this have happened to her?  

The person for whom the pregnancy was hardest was neither Cytherea, though she sagged, draped in clothes without the girdle that no longer passed around her, nor their father, though he spent every night making thunderbolts now, enough to burn the earth to desert, but Pigeon. For eight months he never crossed the threshold of their mother’s room. It was hard to know if she had told him to keep away from her, or if he was afraid, or ashamed, or disgusted, or holding back in the hope that she would call for him. She never did. Salamander tried to find games that would tempt him—things to steal; ways to tease Ganymede, even—but Pigeon never wanted to fly anywhere anymore, and she gave up trying to coax him, because she began to find feathers that had fallen out of his wings. Flight feathers, not just the down that drifted off every which way on the wind: she recognized them, the same as her own.  

 

Before dawn at the start of the tenth month Cytherea began to shriek. Between the shrieks, drenched in sweat, she called for her chariot and its sparrows to take her to Paphos, to her temple, to Paphos, the cries coming faster and harder to understand. Hera appeared at the door with Eileithuia, the midwife, who shimmered at the edges, all in white, her face carved in lines of pain, her hands as strong as the smith’s. In her belt she wore iron tools like his, a pair of scissors, another of tongs that ended in curved loops. 

“You would think,” said Hera, “my daughter-in-law was the first person ever to have a baby.” 

Eileithuia said, “You remember that your first time was difficult.” 

“I was giving birth to the god of fire. And I need hardly remind you there were no forceps yet, there being no smith to make them. It’s just as well that our delicate flower has never had to deliver a child of her husband’s.” 

Eileithuia said something too soft for Salamander to hear. 

Fast, fast—before she could let herself entertain the second possible meaning— Salamander seized on the first: to deliver a child. So Cytherea had never been pregnant before.  

It made irresistible sense. After all, there were plenty of other ways for gods to have a child. It could have been their father who had carried them, like a seahorse. Strong as he was, he wouldn’t have minded the weight; and Cytherea came from the sea. Or—they were winged; they could have hatched from an egg like birds. That might explain, that must explain (a sinking and shifting and settling took place in her stomach) why the other gods had a way of looking at the twins as if they weren’t quite— 

Cytherea, though, was screaming and Hera was screaming back, “You are not going to Paphos. You want to let mortals put their hands in you?” The twins found each other, unspeaking, and perched on a roofbeam, holding hands. As clearly as if he had said it aloud Salamander knew that Pigeon was afraid that their mother would die. She wanted all the more to comfort him because she saw his fear from a distance; she could only feel what it must be like when she imagined their father in danger, long ago, a child hurled out of the sky. When she thought of Cytherea dying she found herself wondering what would happen. It was hard to imagine a shell of her left. More likely she would go out like a star—Salamander had seen them die, the wild wobbling reel that went suddenly black—and the emptiness would suck in everything around it, the twins and their father and all the gods.  

To distract her brother she told him what she had heard Hera say, and then she regretted it, because if it was bad for him to be afraid that he was going to lose his mother it was worse to be afraid that she wasn’t his mother at all. (Would she have threatened to clip his wings if she had been his mother? But Hera, but Hera, throwing their father to earth…) So she set about talking, talking like one of their father’s automatons, about birds. How very devoted the bird parents had to be, the mother bird to sit on the eggs and keep them warm till they hatched, and the father bird to fly off and bring back food for the mother, and sometimes the other way round, as with the penguins the South Wind had whirled them past— 

Something cried out, some small animal. The thought pierced her of a small soft creature being run through with a spit.  

Eileithuia came out of Cytherea’s room, her robe fading fast from brilliant red to dull crimson, dripping pools as she waddled. Her edges no longer wavered. Under one elbow she held a bundle of linen; in a basin she carried a slippery blood-coloured thing, veined through like a fan of coral, with a pale fleshy cord coiling out of it. It could not—surely—be the mortal baby…? 

Hera appeared, empty-handed. 

“And you’ve found it a nurse?” she said, brisk, officious, as if she had never screamed. “Shall I send Iris to take the child?” 

“She’s going to nurse it herself,” said Eileithuia. 

Hera recoiled. Her face held no lines when it was still, but when she frowned in disgust she looked, if it were possible, her age. 

“Like a goat?” 

“She has the milk, either way. If she doesn’t feed the baby she’ll need to squeeze it out. It’ll hurt her otherwise. Just the same as a cow whose calf has been slaughtered.” 

“I don’t know what she thinks this suckling is going to do for her breasts. Her teats, I should say.” 

“You approve of mortal women who feed their own children. You complain about the ones who give them to slaves to nurse.” 

“Exactly. Nursing bonds the mother and child, which is the last thing we need in this case. What if she ends up wanting to keep him?” 

“Don’t worry,” said Eileithuia, “ambrosia won’t keep a mortal young. He won’t have the stomach for it. And I can’t see her wanting him with her long. A mortal boy. A mortal adolescent male.” 

Hera muttered, “No one thought she would want to keep them long either,” and then Salamander lost what Eileithuia said, which might have been a comment on people who threw their children out of the sky, as the two of them receded down the hall, the old goddess with her soaked dress dripping blood and her face relaxed now, as smooth as a baby’s, beside Hera’s fractured scowl. Behind them they had left the door of Cytherea’s bedroom open. The bed stood out of sight, but Cytherea had so many mirrors that she must have glimpsed the twins in their corner, refracted, with infinite pairs of wings that joined at the tips and slowly stretched as they shifted, not quite breaking apart.  

“Come here, darlings, and meet your little brother.” 

It was their mother’s voice, but dreamy, as they had never heard it. Pigeon shot Salamander a frantic look, as if he thought a monster might be lurking behind the mirrored door, a monster that had eaten their mother and was trying to lure them in for its next meal—or a monster that their mother had become. Salamander could identify this fear because she shared it. But she slid off the roofbeam and waited, treading the air, for her brother to follow, in case she had to catch him with his moulting wings. They fluttered through the door of Cytherea’s room, holding hands, staying clear of the ground, out of a common instinct to remind their mother that they were different. Or to be ready to dodge the fangs. They crossed the threshold into the dazzle of mirrors, and there was their mother in bed, the Graces sponging sweat from her forehead. In her arms she held a small red animal with the naked look of a hatchling still slick with egg, unfeathered.  

“Is it going to have wings?”  

It was the first question Pigeon had asked Cytherea since she had threatened to clip his. 

“He,” she said, smiling. “No, he’s going to be just like his father. He’s perfect. Don’t you think?” 

In fact the creature stank and whimpered and howled day and night. Aeneas they nicknamed it, awful. Cytherea’s nipples turned red and raw. Her stretched balloon of a belly sagged for weeks, and the Graces had to extend her girdle when she dressed to go to her festival, as she insisted on doing, tired as she was, for the sole reason that it shocked her mother-in-law. The baby screamed nonstop while she was away and there was nothing that anyone could do for it, not the automatons or the Graces or Salamander, though she tried cradling it in her arms and singing her mother’s underwater lullabies. Her father had spent his time shut in his workshop since the day the baby was born, hammering out mysterious objects that emerged as toys. There was a hollow golden pomegranate with seeds inside that rattled and chimed when shaken. There was a spinning top in the shape of a beehive that buzzed and hummed as it whirled. There was a little mechanical shepherd that played a pipe while a silver flock gambolled in time to the tune, and a little mechanical wolf that leapt out on a hidden spring and fell on the sheep, and a little mechanical warrior, all in bronze armour, shield and spear and greaves and helmet with dark holes for eyes, who leapt out and fell on the shepherd. Salamander wound up the toys one after another so that their clashing musics echoed off the mirrored walls. Aeneas screamed. 

At last her father came out of the forge—the howls must have penetrated the doors impervious both to lightning and to the blows of the Cyclopes’ hammers—and offered to try. The baby, startled, went quiet in the smooth-burnt hands. 

“You’ll start fires, won’t you?” her father said. 

Cytherea came back from the festival in a deadly mood, her dress soaked through with milk that had leaked from her breasts, and the baby began to whimper when she took him out of her husband’s arms. It was the start of a change. She became more recognizable. And one day the baby was gone.  

“It was time for him to go and live with his father,” she said. 

He had been smiling and laughing. He had begun to sit up on his own, and when you put him on his hands and knees he rocked back and forth. 

“Will we ever see him again?” Salamander asked. 

Cytherea was plucking hairs from her chin that must have strayed there during her pregnancy. 

“I doubt you’ll have much in common, darling. I’m afraid he is going to grow up to be a very boring person.” And to Pigeon she said, “And you are never going to go near him, are you?” but she said it in her old teasing voice, and when Pigeon answered, “Never,” Salamander heard the glee in his promise. Oh, no, he never would.