Eternal doesn’t mean forever.  Forever means nothing to The Old Ones.  They just are.  The sun and the moon and the planets ride round and around in their celestial grooves, but The Old Ones see the pattern complete.  Their divine moment is everywhen.

It was Bel who pondered the mystery of time.  He watched the flicker of the seasons, and the tides of species rising, adapting or failing to adapt – ever changing, always the same.  And he wondered endlessly – or to put it another way, he wondered for no time at all.

He walked down from Tara Hill, where the gods made their home, and in a fertile grove of abundant shamrock green he came upon the river goddess Shannon.  She was, of course, very beautiful.  The rich brown of rocks and earth, the soft abundance of moss and fern by the stream, the laughing song of the water – all these were reflections of her.  Bel saw that it was so, that’s all.  In his discontent, he spoke to her thus:  “This cyclical world we have created, this endless rush of becoming and dissipating, with all its little ones that are born to die – why did we do it?”

“So that we could see the glory of our divine love dancing around us!” said Shannon, and without hesitation she dived into the water, looping and bubbling amongst the eddies of her stream.  She emerged laughing, and shaking water from her eternally burnished hair.  She considered her point made, but Bel, sober underworld god that he was, did not join the game.

“Yes, but what do we see in their eyes?” he asked.  He scanned the craggy hilltop above, and pointed out a proud silhouette on the skyline.  “See that stag yonder?” he said, “Does he know anything at all, in the way that we do?”

“You’re a god,” said Shannon, with a shrug of her pretty shoulders.  “Go into the stag, and see.  Me, I go into a leaping salmon.  Oh, the thrill of that chase to the spawning pools!”  She trailed her long fingers in the rushing stream, and shivered at the nowness of it.  “As a salmon,” she said, “I have not mind enough to calculate the disaster to my kind if I fail, but every shimmering scale and fin of my racing body feels it.  The agony of white water thrashing over me urges me on.  Win through or die, it says.  I win through!”

“Yes.  But…”  Bel watched Shannon fling her arms skyward in triumph.  Why did he detect a false note, an edge of vanity, in her speech?  “But you are still Shannon,” he said.  “Really, you know you will not die.  The salmon was no more than a season’s entertainment for you.  Shannon, we don’t know what mortality is like, any more than the creatures, by their gift of life, know us.”

“I know all,” said Shannon easily, gathering an armful of water-mint to inhale.  “But when I go into a mortal, I disregard my eternal nature.  I would not otherwise feel that passionate drive to reach my goal – that race with death.  Only the surety of death bestows true vitality.”

She spoke with confidence, but as she buried her face in the dripping garlands of mint she held, Bel noticed a wrinkle of doubt upon her brow.

“Shannon,” he said gently, “if you disregarded your true nature as you say, you would not return to Tara a goddess.  You would remain a salmon and die.  Shannon would now be a past thing.  A thing of time.”

There was no answer.  He couldn’t see her face.  Trembling, he continued to speak his thought.  “I have found something we immortals do not know.  It puts me in mind of the sacrifice of The Oldest Ones.”

“How I grieve for their loss!” cried Shannon, automatically.

Bel raised an eyebrow.  “We say She has given herself to fertilise the newborn earth…”  Shannon sobbed, Bel went on.  “We say He has given himself, maddened with grief for her…”

“Oh, my grandmother and my grandfather!” cried Shannon, sincerely grieved, as always.

“…But they become strangers to us, once their fate is sealed,” said Bel.  “In that season before the earth eats them, when they know they are going to die, they are passionate, serious, full of love and desperation…”

“As are we all,” said Shannon, but still she would not look at him.

“There is something we do not know,” he said, his voice deep with wondering.  “As gods, we know the beginning and the end, but we stand and watch.  If we go into the creatures, we feel life, but cannot live it…”

At last, Shannon looked into his face.  “What is to be done?” she asked.

“I will think on it,” he said.

“You have thought,” she replied.  “A theory it remains.  True passion is in striving to know.  Come, you go this way, I’ll go that.  I wonder, who will discover life first?”

She dived into the water and was gone.  As she dived, she fetched up many miles away, in a pool she knew to be fed by the Fountain of Knowledge.  Salmon scattered to left and right as she surfaced:  Salmon who knew life and death, as she could not.  She sat on a rock by the pool for a long time, or for no time, and watched the salmon of knowledge.  The wrinkle of doubt on her forehead hurt her eyes.

She stood up, holding her body rigid, as a furious child does.  She pointed at the bank opposite, and spoke the words of creation as though they were a curse.  The rich earth heaved, and up sprouted a hazel tree.  It branched, burst into leaf, and fruited.  The nuts it bore carried the knowledge of life and death, of good and evil.  Shannon watched the first ripe nut fall.  It landed with an innocent plop, in the shallows at the edge of the pool.  A salmon darted forth and swallowed it.  Shannon watched.  Nothing happened.  The salmon didn’t have such a mind as she did.  Even the greatest knowledge could make no impact on his life of water, flies, and spawning times.

She waded through the pool, plucked a nut from the tree, and raised it to her mouth.  She paused for a moment, looking up at the fountain that fed the pool.  Love and passion, hatred and terror, life and death…all this would flow down on her head, if she knew.  She ate the nut.  The fountain leapt skyward.  The hazel tree was ripped from the earth.  The pool boiled.  The stream, the river Shannon, burst its banks, and there was a flood like never before.  She who had been the goddess was smashed, flung far and wide, and she joined The Oldest Ones.  But in those first and last moments of time, she knew.  And she cried out in wonder as she died.

For himself, Bel went down into the underworld, and took a handful of the rich, black potential that was there.  It was the stuff that had been, and would be, alive.  He squeezed it in his hands, moulding it into a figure not unlike his own favourite form.

“I name you Alsiso – the fated one,” he said, as he smoothed out the limbs of the man.  “You are made of the stuff of life.  The cyclical stuff that has been trees, insects, mountains, that could be air, animals, flowers:  But you will have mind like mine, so you can see this, and know that eternity is impossible for you.  You will have awesome power, and yet you will know that you must die.”

He put a spark of himself into Alsiso, then lay him in a magic boat, and gave it a push towards the shore of the Island of the Gods.  That push was the Atlantic storm system.  That push caused Alsiso to reach land as a thriving chieftain, leading his brave, ruthless, seafaring people to glory.

And when Alsiso set foot on the shore, he cried out in fury.  He threw himself down and pounded the sand like a madman.  “This earth is my mother who died!” he cried.  He stood up and shook his fist at the sun.  “This light is my father, who will one day fail!” he howled.

And his people trembled to see him rage so at the gods, and they felt the awfulness of their fate.  Some ran to build up cairns for the dead, and to offer propitiation to the terrible gods.  Some fell into each others’ arms, desperately sucking life from the passions of their flesh.  Some nurtured children, thinking to give what life there was to their loved ones, or hoping to pass thus into a new generation.

Yet others looked at one another in a fever of jealousy and suspicion.  “Will you be the one to kill me?” they cried.  “Would even you be the one to bring down this cruel fate upon my head?”  And there was war and strife.

And as the people foamed and raged across the land, their vitality spilled out in music and poetry.  Their jealousy mined the earth for everything She could offer, and their stubborn determination produced things of wonder and craft –  weapons and adornments that caught the sun, and shattered His light, ever more ingenious solutions to the problems their formidable minds thought up.

But with time, Alsiso’s blood began to cool.  At last, all rage spent, he sat down upon a hilltop and watched his people thriving and striving.  Did he feel proud, happy for them?  He did.  Did he feel resentful, sorry for them?  He did.

For three days and nights he watched them, then he stood up and turned sideways to the sun, so that he could look the other way.  Now he watched the gods, spinning without change in their timeless dance.  He remembered what Bel had done, and through the spark of divinity that was in him, he understood.  He looked upon The Old Ones, and he felt sorry for them.

He turned his face once more to his own people, and cried out,  “Oh, my people, gather to me!”  The people came to him.  He spread his arms, pointing out the wide, green beauty of the Island of the Gods.

“Who does this land belong to?” he asked the crowd.

“It is ours!” they cried.

“Who made it for us?”

“Our mother, The Oldest One!”

“And whom do we fear?”

“The Old Ones!”

“And why do we share our wondrous land with these tyrannical gods?”

A muttering and a grumbling ran through the crowd.  Alsiso waited.  Which way would the wind blow?  The murmur rolled around the hillside, echoing now this way, now that.  Here and there a shout broke out, and then all at once the people were united, waiting only for a lead.

“Kill the gods!” cried someone, and moments later, it was a chorus like thunder.  “Kill the gods!  Kill the gods!” the people cried.

Never questioning their potency, the hordes of Alsiso’s people ran at Tara Hill, toting their ingenious weapons of bronze and iron, and with the passion that death alone can ignite, they wreaked great slaughter amongst the Ones who had thought themselves deathless.

That evening, as the sun set, its dying rays bathed a mound of gore and hacked bodies.  On the top of that mound, Alsiso found himself in single combat with Bel.  They had fought long and hard but at last, each drove his mighty weapon deep into the other’s flesh.  Alsiso cried out in mortal agony, but Bel shook his head, and looked upon him with sadness and love.

“My creation,” he said, “a time will come when your children will regret the loss of their gods.  When the magic of Tara Hill is long forgotten, when the works of man reach an unstoppable momentum, they will grow tired of their cleverness and their strength.  Then, I prophesy, they will cry out for the return of the gods!”  Alsiso and Bel clasped each other, and fell to their knees.  Bel’s voice grew weaker, but still he spoke, as if his words could carry comfort.

“Tell me Alsiso,” he whispered, “when that time comes, and your children no longer wish to be kings of the world, will their cleverness be enough to bring the gods back to them?”

But Alsiso didn’t answer, for he was already dead.  As weeping women laid their beloved king’s body in his boat, and heaved it onto the waves, Bel looked at Alsiso’s beautiful face one last time, and he saw that the man had died happy.  And as the spark that Alsiso had carried in life returned to its father, Bel found that he understood, and his heart swelled with pride and sorrow, as he sank into the waves of the Atlantic, never more to set foot upon the Isle of the Gods – but as The Oldest Ones could have told him, never is only a matter of time.

Copyright © Kay Green, 2003.  First published by Elastic Press (www.elasticpress.com)