She nodded, her tears gone and her terrible guilt drained away. Then she kissed my hands and pattered off.

I sat there without moving, both lamps foundered. Thetis had murdered my sons – and for what? Some crazed and impossible dream. Superstition. Fancy. She had deprived them of their right to be men, she had committed crimes so foul I wanted to go to her and run her through on my sword. But she still carried my seventh child within her body. The sword would have to wait. And vengeance belonged to the Gods of the New Religion.

On the fifth day after I had spoken to Aresune the old woman came running to find me, her hair streaming wild in the wind behind her. It was late afternoon and I had gone down to the horse paddocks to watch my stallions, for mating season was close and the horse masters wanted to give me the schedule of who would service whom.

I loped back to the palace with Aresune perched upon my neck, something of a steed myself.

‘What are you going to do?’ she asked as I lowered her outside Thetis’s door.

‘Come in with you,’ I said.

She gasped, squealed. ‘Sire, sire! It is forbidden!’

‘So is murder,’ I said, and opened the door.

Birth is a women’s mystery, not to be profaned by any masculine presence. It is a world of earth owning no sky. When the New Religion overcame the Old, some things did not change; Mother Kubaba, the Great Goddess, still rules the affairs of women. Especially everything having to do with the growing of new human fruit – and the plucking of it, whether immature, at perfect ripeness or withered with age.

Thus when I entered no one saw me for a moment; I had the time to watch, to smell, to hear. The room stank of sweat and blood, other things foreign and appalling to a man. Labour had clearly progressed, for the house women were in the act of conducting Thetis from her bed to the childing stool while the midwives hovered, instructed, fussed. My wife was naked, her grotesquely swollen abdomen almost luminous with distension. Carefully they arranged her thighs on the hard wooden surface to either side of the wide gap in the stool’s seat designed to free the birth canal’s termination, the place where the baby’s head would appear and its body follow.

A wooden bucket slopping water stood on the floor nearby, but none of the women spared it a glance because they had no idea what it was there for.

They saw me and flew at me, faces outraged, thinking that the King had gone mad, determined to drive him out. I swung a blow at the closest which knocked her sprawling; the rest cowered back. Aresune was hunched over the bucket, muttering charms to ward off the Evil Eye, and did not move when I chased the women out and dropped the bar on the door.

Thetis saw everything. Her face glistened with sweat and her eyes were black, but she controlled her fury.

‘Get out, Peleus,’ she said softly.

For answer I shoved Aresune aside, walked to the pail of sea water, picked it up and tipped the water upon the floor. ‘No more murders, Thetis. This son is mine.’

‘Murder? Murder? Oh, you fool! I’ve killed no one! I am a Goddess! My sons are immortal!’

I took her by the shoulders as she sat, bent over, atop the childing stool. ‘Your sons are dead, woman! They are doomed to be mindless shades because you offered them no chance to do deeds great enough to win the love and admiration of the Gods! No Elysian Fields, no heroic status, no place among the stars. You are not a Goddess! You are a mortal woman!’

Her answer was a shrill scream of torment; her back arched and her hands gripped the stool’s wooden arms so strongly that their knuckles gleamed silver.

Aresune came to life. ‘It is the moment!’ she cried. ‘He is about to be born!’

‘You will not have him, Peleus!’ growled Thetis.

She began to force her legs together against all the instinct which drove her to open them wide. ‘I’ll crush his head to pulp!’ she snarled, then screamed, on and on and on. ‘Oh, Father! Father Nereus! He tears me apart!’

The veins stood out on her brow in purple cords, tears rolled down her cheeks, and still she fought to close her legs. Though demented with pain, she strained every last fibre of will and brought her legs inexorably together, crossed them and twined them about each other to lock them in place.

Aresune was down on the sopping floor, head beneath the stool; I heard her shriek, then whinny a chuckle. ‘Ai! Ai!’ she screeched. ‘Peleus, it is his foot! He comes breech, it is his foot!’ She crabbed out, got up and swung me round to face her with the strength of a young man in her ancient arm. ‘Do you want a living son?’ she asked.

‘Yes, yes!’

‘Then unlock her legs, sire. He is coming out feet first, his head is unharmed.’

I knelt and put my left hand upon Thetis’s top knee, slid my right beneath it to grasp her other knee, and pulled my hands apart. Her bones creaked dangerously; she reared her head up and spat curses and spittle like a corrosive rain, her face – I swear it as I looked at her and she looked at me – her face gone to the scales and wedge of a snake. Her knees began to separate; I was too strong for her. And if that did not prove her mortality, what could?

Aresune dived under my hands. I closed my eyes and hung on. Came a sharp, short sound, a convulsive gasp, and suddenly the room was filled with the wail of a living infant. My eyes flew open, I stared incredulously at Aresune, at the object she was holding head downward from one hand – a grisly, wet, slippery thing jerking and threshing and howling to the roof of the heavens – a thing with penis and scrotum bulging beneath the envelope of membrane. A son! I had a living son!

Thetis sat quietly, her face empty and still. But her eyes were not on me. They were focused upon my son, whom Aresune was cleaning, tying off the cord, wrapping in fresh white linen.

‘A son to delight your heart, Peleus!’ laughed Aresune. ‘The biggest, healthiest babe I have ever seen! I drew him out by his little right heel.’

I panicked. ‘His heel! His right heel, old woman! Is it broken? Is it deformed?’

She lifted the swathes of cloth to display one perfect heel – the left – and one swollen, bruised foot and ankle. ‘They are both intact, sire. The right one will heal and the marks fade.’

Thetis laughed, a weak and shadowed sound. ‘His right heel. So that was how he breathed earthly air. His foot came first… No wonder he tore at me so. Yes, the marks will fade, but that right heel will be his undoing. One day when he needs it firm and sinewy, it will remember the day of his birth and betray him.’

I ignored her, my arms outstretched. ‘Give him to me! Let me see him, Aresune! Heart of my hearts, core of my being, my son! My son!’

I informed the Court that I had a living son. The exultation, the joy! All Iolkos, all Thessalia had suffered with me through the years.

But after everyone had gone I sat upon my throne of pure white marble with my head between my hands, so weary I could not think. The voices gradually died away in the distance, and the darkest, loneliest webs of the night began a-spinning. A son. I had a living son, but I should have had seven living sons. My wife was a madwoman.

She entered the faintly illuminated chamber with her feet bare, dressed once more in the transparent, floating robe she had worn on Skyros. Face lined and old, she crossed the chill flagged floor slowly, her walk speaking of her body’s pain.

‘Peleus,’ she said from the bottom of the dais.

I had seen her through my hands, and took them now from my head, lifting it.

‘I am going back to Skyros, husband.’

‘Lykomedes won’t want you, wife.’

‘Then I will go somewhere I am wanted.’

‘Like Medea, in a chariot drawn by snakes?’