CHAPTERTWO
SKIA’S NEXT ACCOMPLISHED PROJECT
If skia, “that maid of brauron,” must seem the beginning and the end of all commercial novelties—as by some grand reciprocity—Cephalos was her maritime means to both vital imports through Lykos as well as for conveyance of Brauron’s vast surpluses for export. His boon friends the Princes Erechthëid had also continued his pioneered routes of caravan redistribution through the maintenance to and fro of traffics upon the trails of his overland mule trains.
Putting that aside for a nonce, Mentör addresses the fact that Cephalos greatly wanted to envision Skia again, on a glimpse of her in the past, even as he still did not know her name or her provenance. …
Unbeknownst to him, he’d remained in Skia’s dreams. She was allowed barely a daily thought of him, though, especially as pertinent to the divine promise declared of him to herself. Since that exquisite epiphany, her Goddess had taken over all her [conscious] sense of ardent partnerships. All of them of a workaday sort, Eos the Dawn induced intensive vocation instead, or the dreams so intricately rendered that she taught Skia at how best she should next apply herself.
This would seem to mean that the Goddess was absenting herself because she was so fully preoccupied otherwise or elsewhere. The truth to be learned, though, was that elsewhere and otherwise lay a whole new learning by the Goddess herself of so many novel and fascinating human endeavors. The Goddess was eager to apply herself—to feel herself so applied—most especially since all the springtimes [since 1372 BC]. What she inspirited, I hazard to intuit, renewed her zeal to have Skia daily in execution as her surrogate everywhere abroad the Basin. For how else to explain the tirelessly graced personage that Skia had become in her Sanctuary’s behalf?
Accordingly, even as Cephalos is described by Mentör in full haste homeward to Eleusis, to stay there for a briefest sojourn until his new residency upon the Kekropia of Attica, we also must believe him ardently intent to gaze anew upon Skia. She had been the lovely and silent sentinel whom once upon a time of a splendid dawn’s sunrise had proven an epiphany, an ideal visualization of all that alluring womanhood could be.
He’d been especially tenacious. He had found excuse of visiting Rhapthë below Brauron Cove and Inlet, and then made next excuse of fulfilling his return voyage by circumnavigating Point Sounion. He had hugged the coast of Bay Attica on the prowl of whomever most feminine might be standing statuesquely upon bluffs and sheer cliffsides. There had been no sighting while he ranged southward, none either by his suddenly compulsive return back to Brauron. There, after searching through the inland sororities, he’d hastened by mount of a mule overland to achieve Eleusis at the far end of the MesoGaia. Nothing had become of any probes inla
