The Beloved of the God of War

10 - Ambrosia

From the hollow of the curved horn spilled a bounty of grain. What had been unmistakably empty just seconds before was now full of soft brown, pearl-shaped beads. Despite my apprehension, I couldn’t help my lean forward and marvel at it.

“What is it?” I asked. I hesitantly dipped one finger into the hollow and brushed against some of the round grains. It felt soft, and strangely warm. If it weren’t for the ever-present fear inside me making me nervous at the thought of eating anything Ares offered, I would have been tempted to taste it straightaway. There was something oddly alluring about it, even though strictly in appearance, there was nothing special about them at all.

“Ambrosia,” Ares answered, and I lifted my head up to stare at him in continued confusion. My fingers were still hovering over the pile, uncertain and wary. “I said eat.”

At the barely bridled forcefulness in his gruff voice, I hurriedly dropped both of my hands to take a small scoop. I brought it closer to myself before tilting my hands, letting the grains pile sideways onto one cupped palm. “I thought ambrosia was a drink,” I murmured. In truth, I was stalling for an extra moment to try to inspect what I now held; I felt the urge to take it into my mouth, but I could trust neither Ares’s coercions nor my own desires. The horn was obviously magical in nature if it could create food out of nothing in this way, and who knew if the contents it spawned were harmful or not?

But if it was truly harmful, then Ares didn’t know it - or maybe he was just immune: he took a handful of the grains before tipping his head back and bringing his hand to his open mouth. He didn’t chew, I noticed, and simply consumed them with a single swallow. When his chin ducked forward again and I saw his eyes once more, I hastily tipped some of the grains into my mouth as well, before he could take issue with my disobedience.

The instant the beads fell upon my tongue, I could no longer breathe.

Visions passed behind my eyes like ghosts of memories I could no longer remember. I felt an addicting warmth bloom inside me, rushing from my toes to the crowd of my head and back again. My hands shook, and my eyes rolled back into my head as I became undone by the pure, complete bliss that overtook me like blessed fire. I felt my body swaying, and then I tipped backward, unable to keep my balance even though I was still sitting down. Falling, falling - I couldn’t even feel my face anymore, much less fight to maintain consciousness.

I only caught the last possible glimpse of Ares lunging forward over the grain-filled horn at me, scattering the pearly grains with an accidental kick of his bare foot. I heard the object skid away until it smacked into the side of the boat and rattled there. Despite the violent, sudden movement, I was too far gone to feel fear, even when I felt him catch me just before the back of my head hit the wood underneath me.

I drifted away.

--------

When I came to, the sun had risen, and I raised one arm to block the rays of the light that came down to pierce my eyelids. I grimaced and tried to throw off the heavy blanket that covered me, and when I failed, I finally cracked open my eyes.

A lancing shock stabbed through me when I looked around to see nothing but dark water all around me, until I remembered why I was out here on a small boat in the middle of the ocean. My hands curled into clenched fists under the heavy covering. I must have been hoping it was all a dream, that it would all disappear when I awoke in the township just as I had done every morning for the past few years.

“Stay down.”

I shivered at the rough, and now familiar, voice. “What happened to me?” I asked. I shifted around under the heavy blanket again until I looked up to see Ares glaring at me from the bow of the boat, where he had planted one raised foot and had twisted around to look at me.

“You’re weak,” he answered. Or at least, he must have thought that it would answer my question, but I couldn’t begin to understand what he meant. Weak? I knew I was nothing like an old god - nothing like him, but I had never been prone to fainting spells in my life.

“I don’t understand.” I now looked down to see what this scratchy, rustling, oppressively heavy material that covered me was. Some kind of thick leather, I realized, and it was neither flexible nor soft. A tarp of some kind? Well, at least it was warm. The crisp sea breezes that buffeted my hair made me hesitate to throw off the tarp. “What was in the...the ambrosia you gave me?” I asked now. That was the last thing I remembered. The taste of it on my tongue, incredible and heavenly, and then nothing.

“There was nothing in it,” he said brusquely, and he turned away again to face forward out to sea. “As I said, you’re weak. Your body is more like a mortal’s than a god’s.”

I pressed my lips together. I could have told him that myself, or if nothing else, he should have been able to deduce that already on his own.

“Whatever mortal food that you subsisted on in the other plane, it won’t do anything for you here. You’ll eat it again and again for as long as we’re here, in the domain of the sea. Understand?”

I swallowed past the nervous lump in my throat. I didn’t relish the idea of tasting the ambrosia again and courting what had felt like blissful death...or did I? I tensed at the niggling hunger inside me that suddenly appeared with the memory of the taste on my tongue.

“Is that all I can eat?” I asked quietly. He heard me anyway, even though he didn’t deign to turn around.

“Yes. Ambrosia to eat, nectar to drink. You’ll live on the food of the gods out here to drive the scent of the humans' mortality out of your flesh. It’s already doing its work inside you.” Ares now turned his head to throw a look over his shoulder, pinning his baleful, deep red gaze on me. “The smell of the humans is almost gone. Seven days and seven nights is how long it takes to purge it, so tonight, you will be free of it.”

I gave him a dumb, obedient nod in case he was expecting a response, knowing that he was still watching me. I supposed there was no use arguing; he had already determined what to do with me and what to make me do. I had as much chance of resisting as -

I froze.

“Seven days?” I repeated. “Seven nights? What do you mean?” My heart quickened in my chest. But he said nothing, and only continued to stare at me as if I were an insect trapped under a glass. Under even the heavy leather trap, I suddenly felt a chill drive through me, harsh enough to make me quiver. It couldn’t be true, I thought. That couldn’t be right.

“You’ve been asleep six days,” he said, confirming what I had only suspected and desperately hoped was untrue. “Today is the seventh day. That’s how it goes when a god first takes in the ambrosia. Nothing unusual.”

I still couldn’t speak. I stared wide-eyed at Ares, who now slowly lifted his foot off the prow of the boat and began walking toward me.

“The seven days of eating the food of the gods, under the stars, are necessary for the ambrosia to reshape your body and replace the blood in your veins with ichor. And you can’t pass through these waters as a mortal.”

“Seven days,” I repeated slowly, my mind still struggling to catch up to reality. It had been a week? My mother was still back at the township. She would have wondered where I was all this time while I lay here sleeping. “But I didn’t eat while I…”

Ares was now in front of me, looming like a menacing crag as he came to a stop right before my feet. I discreetly pulled them closer to myself under the tarp. “I fed you,” he said coolly. “Once at sunrise, once at sunset. You’ve already eaten once today.”

I didn’t ask how he had managed to get me to eat anything at all while I lay comatose. But truth be told, I thought I could remember fleeting touches, quiet whispers as I had slept. The hard heat of a too-warm body as it pulled me in, arms encircling me and lifting my head up. Fingers on my lips, easing them open.

Had that not been figments of a fever dream? It had to be. Even if he had really kept me alive thus far, he couldn’t have been so tender: there wasn’t an ounce of softness in the man that stood before me now.

“We’ll reach land in the middle of the night, a few hours after sunset. You’ll be fully purified by then, so we’ll be able to set foot on land and do what we need to do. Understand?”

I nodded slowly, not really understanding anything at all but knowing better than to admit it. “Why...why do I need to be purified?” I asked. “What does that have to do with anything?”

Ares tilted his head slightly and narrowed his eyes. “You’re blind because you lived among mortals all your life. You should have figured it out already on your own long before I ever found you, or barring that, you should have felt it the moment you touched the water. Even immortals have to tread the seas with caution now; if you were truly a mortal like the humans, you would have been torn to shreds already by creatures who come to claim your blood.”

I couldn’t escape his wine red gaze that burned into me, through me. “What do you mean?” I whispered. “I don’t understand.”

“The domain of the sea is no longer ours,” Ares said. “Poseidon is dead.”