Weight by Jeanette Winterson Read Free Book Online

usually started by shouting for it.
    ‘ZEUS! FATHER ZEUS!’ His voice rolled round the mountains, slipping boulders and sending small rocks tumbling into crevasses.
    Zeus was with Hera, in an intimate moment, on agolden couch, and Hera, raising one eyebrow and smiling to herself, pulled Zeus back towards pleasure.
    Heracles was getting angry. If shouting didn’t get him what he wanted he used his club, and so he ran to the top of the highest mountain, careless of the blazing sun, and began to hammer on the sky.
    The gods felt the commotion and some wondered if the giants were attacking them again. Hermes was sent to discover the source of the riot, and when he saw Heracles threatening to split the sky in two, he agreed to take him to Zeus’s palace.
    Zeus knew nothing of this until Heracles opened the bedroom door and found his father on top of his stepmother. Hera turned her beautiful head towards Heracles and gave him that ironic look that he hated, while his prick went kangaroo.
       
    As Zeus withdrew himself from Hera and covered her up, he said to Heracles,
    ‘What do you want with the gods?’

    ‘Pardon Prometheus,’ said Heracles. ‘He has suffered enough.’
    ‘Mercy from a murderer,’ said Hera, without looking at him, ‘Well well.’
       
    Now Zeus had long repented of his punishment to Prometheus, and he was glad of an excuse to pardon him. But not even a god can go back on his word, and so Zeus had to change the punishment from a reality to a symbol. Prometheus must wear a ring made out of his chains, and set with a stone from the Caucasian Mountains. Heracles was to kill the griffon-vulture with an arrow.
    ‘You’ll enjoy that won’t you?’ said Hera, sweeping by him in a silk shift and stroking his unshaven cheek with a hand that smelled of myrrh. When she had left the room, Zeus shrugged his shoulders and patted his rough son on the back, as if to say,
    Women, what can you do with them?
    All night Heracles sat by Prometheus until hiswound closed over, just before dawn. Prometheus was heavily sunburnt, but his stomach was pale like a child’s because the skin was new every day.
    As Heracles dozed, his dreams were filled with the beating of wings and a scorching in his body. He dreamed he was carrying the world again, but the world had a sharp beak and talons and savaged him wherever he stood. Again he tried to tear off his flesh as though it were a shirt.
    He woke up with no time to lose. The vulture was upon Prometheus, it’s beak already scoring a thin red weal across his stomach. Heracles aimed his arrow and shot the bird in the throat. It fell in vast circles, down and down the unscaleable rocks and into a dry gully too far away to see. Heracles snapped Prometheus’s chains with his bare hands, and laughing and crying, Prometheus followed him down the mountain to a great feast held in his honour by the men for whom he had stolen fire so long ago.
    Zeus himself appeared at this feast in his usualguise of the stranger. Hera sent her apologies. She had a headache.
    Zeus had brought Heracles’s arrow with him and he set it in the heavens as the constellation Sagittarius. Heracles was flattered by this especially because it was Hera who always raised up his enemies into the stars. He felt that Zeus had at last acknowledged him. He felt he was at last being rewarded, instead of punished, for the hero, the conqueror, the good man that he was.
       
    Prometheus came to Heracles out of the shadows of the fire.
    ‘Heracles, you have saved me and I thank you.’
    ‘I would save you again, a thousand times,’ said Heracles.
    ‘Then save my brother Atlas. Ask Zeus for his pardon too.’
    Heracles smiled and nodded and turned back to the fire and the feasting. He would not save Atlas,no matter how much he pitied him, because there was the only man who could take his burden, and Heracles would never do that again.
    He looked up and saw Zeus the Stranger gazing at him keenly as if he knew his