Her refusal to allow their relationship to take on a physical dimension only made Zeus love her more. Although she never told him so, Metis returned the love. As a result there existed a kind of crackle in the air whenever the two were close.
One day Zeus saw Metis standing over a large boulder and bashing its flat surface with a small round-ended stone.
‘What on earth are you doing?’
‘Crushing mustard seeds and crystals of salt.’
‘Of course you are.’
‘Today,’ said Metis, ‘is your seventeenth birthday. You are ready to go to Othrys and fulfil your destiny. Rhea will be here soon, but first I must finish a little preparation of my own devising.’
‘What’s in that jar?’
‘In here there is a mixture of poppy juice and copper sulphate, sweetened with a syrup of manna provided by the Meliae, our friends of the ash tree. I’ll put all the ingredients together and shake them up. Like so.’
‘I don’t understand.’
‘Look, here is your mother. She will explain.’
As Metis looked on, Rhea outlined the plan to Zeus. Mother and son gazed deep into each other’s eyes, took a deep breath and swore an oath, son to mother, mother to son. They were ready.
Rebirth of the Five
Midnight. The thick cloth that Erebus and Nyx threw across earth, sea and sky to mark the end of Hemera’s and Aether’s diurnal round blanketed the world. In a valley high up on Mount Othrys, the Lord of All paced alone, banging his chest, restless and miserable. Kronos had grown into the most foul-tempered and discontented Titan of all. Power over everything gave him no satisfaction. Since Rhea had – without explanation – banned him from the conjugal bed, sleep had been a stranger to him too. Denied its healing balm his mood and digestion, neither good at the best of times, had worsened. The last of the babies he had swallowed seemed to have provoked a sharp acid reflux that the previous five had not. Where was the joy in omnipotence when his stomach griped and his thoughts stumbled blindly in the thick fog of insomnia?
His heart lifted to a state approaching something like happiness, however, when he heard, unexpectedly, the sound of Rhea’s low sweet voice humming gently to herself as she came up the slope towards the mountaintop. Loveliest sister and dearest wife! It was quite natural that she had been a little upset by his consumption of their six children, but she surely understood that he had had no choice. She was a Titan, she knew about duty and destiny. He called out to her.
‘Rhea?’
‘Kronos! Awake at this hour?’
‘I have been awake for more days and nights than I can count. Hypnos and Morpheus have made themselves strangers to me. Full of scorpions is my mind, dear wife.’ Macbeth, another murderer deprived of sleep and plagued by dark prophesies, was to say the same thing, but not for many years yet.
‘Oh tush, my love. Cannot the wit and craft of a Titaness surpass those silly sleep demons? There is nothing Hypnos and Morpheus can do to soothe your aching body, to calm your racing mind, to ease your wounded spirit, that I cannot match with something sweet and warm of my own.’
‘Your sweet warm lips! Your sweet warm thighs! Your sweet warm –’
‘Those in time, impatient lord! But first, I have brought you a present. A lovely boy to be your cupbearer.’
From the recess stepped Zeus, a radiant smile lighting up his handsome face. He bowed and proffered Kronos a jewelled goblet which the Titan snatched greedily.
‘Pretty, very pretty. I might try him later,’ he said casting an admiring eye over Zeus and drinking down the contents of the goblet in one greedy draft. ‘But Rhea, it is you that I love.’
It was too dark for him to see that Rhea had hoisted one eyebrow into an arch of contemptuous incredulity.
‘You love me?’ she hissed. ‘You? Love? Me? You, who ate all but one of my darling children? You dare talk to me of love?’
Kronos gave an unhappy hiccup. He was undergoing the strangest sensations. He frowned and tried to focus. What was Rhea saying? It could not be that she no longer loved him. His mind was even more foggy and his stomach even more turbulent than usual. What was wrong with him? Oh, and there was something else she had said. Something that made no sense at all.
‘What do you mean,’ he asked in a voice thick with confusion and nausea, ‘by saying that I ate “all but one” of your children? I ate all of them. I distinctly remember.’
A strong young voice cracked through the night air like a whip. ‘Not quite all, father!’
Kronos, the nausea rising in an alarming surge, turned in shock to see the young cupbearer step from the shadows.
‘Who … who … whooooooooo!’ Kronos’s question turned into a sudden uprush of uncontrollable vomiting. From his gut, in one heaving spasm, erupted a large stone. The linen in which it was once wrapped had long since been dissolved by stomach acid. Kronos gazed at it stupidly, his eyes swimming and his face white. But before he could understand what he was seeing he was assailed by that horrible and unmistakable feeling that tells a vomiter there is more to come. Far more.
Zeus leapt fleetly forward, picked up the regurgitated boulder and hurled it far, far away, much as Kronos had once flung Ouranos’s genitals far, far away from the exact same spot. We will find out later where it landed and what happened.
Inside Kronos the compound of salt, mustard and ipecacuanha continued to do its emetic work.fn19 One by one he spewed up the five children he had swallowed. First out was Hera.fn20 Then came Poseidon, Demeter, Hades and finally Hestia, before the tormented Titan collapsed in a paroxysm of exhausted panting.
If you recall, Metis’s potion also included a quantity of poppy juice. This immediately began to take somniferous effect. Letting out one last great rumbling groan, Kronos rolled over and fell into a deep, deep sleep.
With a cry of exultation Zeus bent over his snoring father to grasp the great sickle and administer the coup de grâce. He would sever Kronos’s head in one blow and raise it up in triumph before the world, creating a victorious tableau that would never be forgotten and that artists would depict until the end of time. But the scythe, forged by Gaia for Kronos, could not be used against him. Powerful as Zeus was, he was unable even to pick it up. He tried once, but it felt as if it was fixed to the ground.
‘Gaia gave it to him and only Gaia can take it away from him,’ said Rhea. ‘Let it be.’
‘But I must kill him,’ said Zeus. ‘We must be revenged.’
‘His mother Earth protects him. Do not anger her. You will need her in the time to come. You will have your revenge.’
Zeus gave up his attempts to move the scythe. It was vexing that he could not behead his hated father as he lay there snoring like a pig, but his mother was right. It could wait. There was too much to celebrate.
In the starlight over Mount Othrys he and his five liberated siblings laughed and stamped and hooted and howled with delight. Their mother laughed too, clapping her hands with joy to see her radiant sons and daughters so well and so happy, out in the world at last and ready to claim their inheritance. Each of the five rescued ones took it in turn to embrace Zeus, their youngest but now eldest brother, their saviour and their leader. They swore allegiance to him for ever. Together they would overthrow Kronos and his whole ugly race and establish a new order …