Celestial Matters by Richard Garfinkle Read Free Book Online Page A

of sweet sap. Was it hubris on the part of scholars to imagine her wandering through our grove, letting that melange of odors tingle her divine nose and excite her matchless mind?
    Hoping Athena would stop and touch me with her presence, I sat down under a chestnut tree and idly cracked some of the fallen nuts against the bark. I noticed Captain Yellow Hare dip her finger into the running sap of a maple and taste the sweet libation of her native land.
    I was about to speak to her, but my voice froze in my throat; something bright and large danced into my mind accompanied by a chorus of praising singers. A goddess had descended to grip my thoughts with holy inspiration. But it was not Athena, mistress of that orchard. The radiance and the music clarified into a familiar image and voice. Kleio, the Muse of history, stood on the plane of my thoughts, calling me back to her.
    At first I was afraid, afraid that she had come to chastise me for abandoning her service. For years I had been one of the few devotees of her disregarded field of study, but when her sister Ourania had called me to work on Sunthief I had given Kleio up for the sake of my reputation. Now she had returned.
    I humbled myself before her and begged forgiveness for my apostasy. Her countenance was stormy but her eyes were loving. She was angry with me for neglecting her worship these last three years, but I could see she wanted me back. In her hands she cradled a scroll that I knew contained the lecture I would give to the Akademe that night. I held out my hands to receive her gift, but Kleio withheld it. Before she would grant me this favor, she would remind me why I had first entered her service.
    Kleio cast me into the arms of Memory, pulling me back over the years to the time of my despair, when Fame had blessed me with a year’s glory for inventing the ’Eliophile engine and then abandoned me for not following it with any further triumphs.
    My thoughts had run dry, my lectures were barely attended, and I had been relegated by the provost of the Akademe to teaching introductory Ouranology. In a fit of confusion, I had decided to visit my father in Sparta; my hope was that his completely different view of the world might pull me from the clutches of despair. Instead, he greeted me with silence and aloofness and gave me over to the care of his servants.
    After two days of watching him stalk by me without a word of greeting, I retreated into his meager library, hoping for something to take my thoughts away from both Athens and Sparta. Among the numerous tracts on strategy I found a chronicle of battles written by a Persian general six and a half centuries before my birth. It was a rambling discourse by a bitter old man who, like me, had been abandoned by the fickle goddess Fame.
    The man’s morose words reached across the centuries and filled me with black bile. But when I put the scroll down and his anger left me, I realized I had learned a great deal about the time in which he had lived. I found myself wanting to know more, to drown my sorrows in the lives of dead men. It was then that Kleio first appeared to me and unrolled the scroll of time for my mind’s eye to read.
    In the years that followed I snooped through the dusty archives of every city in the Delian League. I read chronicles and ship manifests, scholarly arguments and legal disputes. I stuck my nose into every faded piece of paper from India to Atlantea. I even managed to acquire some documents from the Middle Kingdom, though they taught me little. I tried to organize this knowledge, to formulate theories of the past that I might offer to Kleio as the fruits of my scientific training. But since the Akademe did not consider history a true field of study, my papers were not published, and my lectures were orated before an audience of empty benches.
    When the Archons gave me command of Chandra’s Tear, I gave up Kleio’s worship in order to conform to the proper image of a research scientist;