Danae

by Laura Gill

  How could she possibly expect me to relax? Through no fault of my own I was pregnant with the child of a forbidden union. I could not leave the house; that meant I had nothing to do but spin wool, yards and yards of wool thread, far more thread than anyone could ever need. My impurity meant I could not prepare food or handle the household deities lest I pass my ritual contamination on to others. Previously, Rhona had said that regular physical exercise benefited expectant mothers, but when it came down to handling my unique situation neither she nor the priestesses were willing to risk injuring me or the baby. “We’ve no idea what to do about a half-divine pregnancy,” she tried to explain. “And you’re already so drained by our earlier...measures, you need to save your strength for the ordeal ahead. Maybe you can get some fresh air later, when Ktimene comes back and can escort you, but to exert yourself?” She shook her head.

  She gave me what herbs she could to soothe my nerves and help me sleep, and urged me to eat whatever meat came from the solstice sacrifices. Just her mentioning the winter rites, where I could not participate, set my teeth gnashing again. “Stop mothering me! I’m tired of being penned inside like an outcast!”

  Rhona visibly tried to be optimistic, despite my oscillating moods and the ritual impurities and unnatural pregnancy she had to deal with; I could tell it was a strain on her nerves. “So every pregnant woman says. Try to smile! At this rate, you’ll give birth in a few weeks. Other women have to suffer for months with backaches and morning sickness and swollen ankles.”

  “Except that other women see this as a blessing,” I grumbled. “Women who want to be mothers pray to Eleuthia and she grants them children.”

  A shadow passed across her face, though she tried to hide it. “No. That isn’t always the way it happens, and the children aren’t always wanted.”

  Having forgotten how to relax, I could not accommodate her, something which I sorely regretted; she and the priestesses treated me better than I deserved. I felt sharp pangs of guilt when, without my prompting, she fetched water to heat over the hearth so I could enjoy a hot bath. “This isn’t necessary, truly.” Even though I craved the luxury of a soak, as well as so many other things, I considered myself unworthy, and did not want it or anything else. So I burst into tears. If I had not displeased the Mistress before, I certainly did now with my constant displays of weakness.

  Rhona said nothing, just continued to sponge my back and shoulders. She added oil of chamomile and rosemary to loosen my nerves, and after the bath rubbed the lavender-scented cream we had made together months ago into the flesh of my belly. Seeing the veined skin tautly stretched over my womb alarmed me; it looked grotesque, unnatural.

  “Your womb will heal in time,” Rhona assured me. “A woman’s body is more resilient than a man’s. Can you imagine a man trying to bear this ordeal? Just bleeding every month would reduce him to a blubbering mess. Why, as the folk below the Mountain tell the tale, Zeus wept and ran to Hephaestus to release the Mistress of Owls from his brow, and that was merely from a headache! Imagine if the almighty Lord of Heaven had to carry an infant to term like an ordinary woman!” I smiled, despite myself. “You’re better than that, Myrtale. Were this happening normally, more gradually, you’d have time to adjust to the changes.”

  After the bath, I wanted to sleep again. Rhona gamely shook out the fleeces to air them then replaced them over the bed. I could have done that much had she let me. Working more might have alleviated much of the tension.

  Phileia returned from her daily chores with a kourotrophos from the birthing hut. “It does no good sitting there unused,” she told me, “and the Mistress of the Hearth hasn’t much experience guarding a pregnant mother.”

  At first, the kourotrophos struck me as crude and disconcerting, not least because this time its protective qualities were meant for me; the last time I had seen one was as my dead self. The pale clay painted with swirls of scarlet represented the blood bond between the mother-figure and the child in her encircling arms.

  For the first time, I wondered what sex the thing inside me would be. “Phileia, what will happen after the birth?”

  She spoke over the sound of the loom. “Don’t concern yourself with that. We will purify you so you may return to—”

  “I mean, what will you do with the child?”

  Her silence alarmed me far more than any answer she could have given. “Do you mean to kill it?” Throwing back the fleeces, I marched straight over to the loom and seized the shuttle from her hand to prevent her from ignoring me. “Killing babies is wrong!” I had heard of families that exposed sickly or deformed babies, or unwanted daughters, and thought it a dreadful thing, to destroy what life the Mistress had decreed.

  Rhona tried to intervene by taking hold of my shoulders to steer me back to bed. “Don’t strain yourself, Myrtale. This isn’t the time to think about such things.”

  “When, then?” I shook myself free just as the high priestess met my gaze. Her troubled countenance and heavy-lidded eyes bespoke a crisis of conscience. She could make all the reassurances she wanted; I knew then what was in her heart. “Absolutely not!” I cried. “It’s quickened. It means to be born.” Even though the Mistress had not sanctioned the life inside me, I could not imagine suffering the ordeal of pregnancy and impurity just to have the child—or whatever it was growing in my womb—killed upon taking its first breath. Zeus would be angry. He might strike me dead with his lightning bolt for allowing his offspring to be harmed.

  “Listen to yourself,” Phileia answered sharply. “Only an hour past you were complaining that you didn’t want the thing inside you. Now you love it?” She shook her head and, just as I started to argue further, cut me short. “Of course we’re not going to kill the child. We’ve already tried that. Besides, this isn’t any ordinary child, but the seed of an immortal.” Still holding my gaze, Phileia reclaimed the shuttle. “But you have to understand, and accept right now, that if you bear a boy you can’t raise it here in the temenos. You can remain, if the goddess agrees, because you’re blameless in this, but you’ll have to relinquish your son. We can find him a home in one of the villages, with a childless couple who would welcome him, but right now, the best thing for you to do is pray for a daughter.”

  “Yes,” Rhona added from behind me. “Pray for a daughter. A daughter would belong to the Mistress, and we would all raise her.” Again, I felt the woman’s hand touch my shoulder, yet this time, preoccupied with processing Phileia’s words, I did not resist when she guided me back to my cot and arranged the fleeces over me. “Don’t fret about what hasn’t come to pass, but rest and keep up your strength.”

  It took a long while for sleep to come, and then I dreamed.

  Resting in a green garden, under a young oak tree that spilled dappled sunlight onto my body, I suddenly found myself able to peer through fabric and flesh, and see the unborn life curled up inside and attached to my womb. A fish with an umbilical cord, losing its tail, developing legs. Its eyes were shut. Fingers like tiny worms floated in a life-giving sea. Monstrous, I would have called it had I been in the waking world, only here in this dreamscape I somehow comprehended that this was how a mortal child unfurled from a seedling, and that once it had finished gestating in my body it would emerge as wholly perfect.

  And male. Half-developed as he was, he nevertheless sported the tiny vestiges of his developing genitalia. Floating in his membranous cocoon, his thread of Fate joining him to my body, the baby, this unborn son of mine, nestled closer against my womb, and I felt the shared warmth slowly, languorously, spread through my limbs. No longer did I have to fear. He was strong and perfect, and we would stay together.

  A disembodied voice spoke, “You would not have been so afraid, had you not defied your woven Fate and run from me.”

  He was there, in the garden, in the sunlight, and in the young oak, distant yet omnipresent. I shuddered despite my best effort to suppress the instinct. But the warmth in my belly spread, suffusing my limbs, relaxing me. Th
ough I could no longer peer into myself to watch my child growing I noticed something else, that I was robed in pink raiment as pale and shimmering as the first blush of sunrise, of weaving so fine and soft it could have come only from Athena’s own loom. My hair—my hair!—spread around my head in a nimbus as rich, thick, and brown as the fertile earth, and in among the strands gold ornaments winked.

  What did it mean, to find myself reposing like a goddess in a divine garden? When I trawled my fingers through my hair, even when I told myself that this was a dream and my hair but an illusion, those tresses felt so heavy, so real that I could just begin to believe that I had never shaved my head, that the Mountain and the cottage were themselves the actual illusions. And when I inhaled deeply of the garden’s fragrance, the taste of sweet wild strawberries blossomed in my throat. How long had it been since I had tasted such a delight? Strawberries did not grow high up on the Mountain, and what few quantities occasional pilgrims brought went straight to the Mistress’s altar in the sanctuary cave.

  Upon waking, I closed my eyes and tried in vain to return to that dreamscape, but as the waking world strengthened its claim on me, I collected my thoughts and sat up. Ktimene had returned. Phileia was laying out supper, a lentil stew that was more herbs and grain than lentils. I left the cot and headed toward the hearth.

  I fed the Mistress of the House and the kourotrophos before breaking my fast. “You have an appetite,” Phileia observed approvingly.

  “I have had a vision. I’m carrying a son.”

  Ktimene, chewing a morsel of bread, paused to exchange a concerned glance with Phileia, who simply nodded.

  Over supper, I related the details of the dream as best as I could recall, and, with the taste of strawberries lingering in my mouth and nostrils, that came rather easily. Phileia narrowed her eyes at my assertion that my son and I would remain inseparable; no doubt she thought me lying to circumvent her decision. I did not belabor my innocence, only shared the facts of the experience as I recalled them, but I could not disguise the confidence I suddenly felt. What I carried was no monstrosity but a healthy and perfect son. Whether or not I liked it, whether or not I was ready to assume the burden, I was going to be a mother.

  At the end of my story, Phileia heaved a sigh and remarked, “We will have to find a family soon, then.”

  How soon was difficult to say. “Women always have to count on their fingers to know when to expect the birth,” the high priestess admitted. She consulted a tally of days that she had made by scoring notches in a wafer of clay, and shook her head. “Quickening happens at sixteen weeks, so twenty-four days...” She and Rhona had begun teaching me how to recognize and calculate the stages of pregnancy. Ktimene, on the other hand, wore her indifference as armor against what she considered an outrage against the Mistress.

  Phileia squinted at the tablet again. “It seems that six days counts as a full month, so at fifty-six days... When the baby starts to drop in your womb, say, around the fifty-second day, then we’ll know the birth is imminent.”

  An eight-week pregnancy, and half that term had already passed. I could scarcely believe those calculations myself. While I ate, Phileia explained about contractions and labor pains, dilating wombs and other things which I had not known before. All I cared about was if I would have to labor long. Would birthing the child be painless? I remembered the long hours my dead self had spent listening to her stepmother’s screams. Yet when pressed, neither Phileia nor Rhona could offer any surety, so I worked out my own answer. Thus far, Eleuthia had not spared me the ills of morning sickness or the inexplicable mood swings; as my pregnancy advanced, she did not alleviate my backaches and swollen ankles.

  As my girth expanded, the weight of the infant pressed down upon my bladder, resulting in the constant urge to relieve myself. Amid my tears of frustration, I struggled to remain optimistic. Ordinary mothers had to endure far longer ordeals, where mine would end in but three more weeks. Surely I could survive that. Eleuthia held me in her hand. I would enjoy the blessing of a child without the months of suffering. Children were a woman’s lot, and a blessing, after all. I thanked the kourotrophos and made offerings, except...

  I could not keep the child. And now, after the comfort of the vision, I desperately wanted to. As much as I wracked my head seeking a remedy, the only solution that presented itself was to leave the Mistress’s service altogether, and with my infant seek a new refuge in one of the villages below. Could I not weave, clean, and cook? I knew the mysteries of the goddess. I knew the secrets of herbs and flowers to make into medicines and dyestuffs. Why should I, a Woman of the Mountain, not be able to earn a decent living for myself and my newborn son?

  Ktimene boxed my ear the moment she heard of it. “Ignorant child! What makes you think a fourteen-year-old girl like you will be left in peace?” My ear throbbed; she had not struck me so in many years. “Some man will claim you, make you his, and you’ll have to spread your legs for him, and bear children. That’s how it is outside the sanctuary, in the world of men. A woman never belongs to herself. You won’t have a choice.”

  I pressed a hand to my ear. “Is that why you despise men, because you don’t want to belong to one?”

  “Why should I?” She defensively folded her arms across her breasts. “And why should you contemplate it? Marriage and childbearing are for women who have nothing else. Their aspirations are quenched, and their spirits broken.” Her words dripped with such disdain that I bristled. “If you have to love this child, then you should pray for a daughter instead.”

  I did not argue further; she knew as well as I that the dream showed the truth. All I could do now was to accept and delight in the fact that I would have a healthy son. Mother-love was a gift like no other, I reflected, to be powerful enough to turn an unsuspecting girl’s apprehension into longing. I no longer dwelled on the circumstances by which I had become pregnant, even though the natural fear and respect for my son’s father persisted.

  Phileia proved less critical of my maternal leanings, while cautioning me not to lose my head. “Remember, Myrtale, you cannot keep him,” she said. “You may name him, and send him to his new kinsmen with some handiwork of your own as a remembrance of his mother, but you cannot keep him as yours. Take comfort instead in the knowledge that he will go to a good family. Take heart. You’re still young, and you’ll likely live long enough to receive his daughters and granddaughters as initiates into the sanctuary.”

  Poor substitutes for a mother’s love, I thought, rejecting each suggestion as she offered it. Nonetheless, she remained sympathetic, granting me little kindnesses. Taking the wool I had spun, she washed and dyed it in shades of amber and chestnut, and encouraged me to weave something for the infant. “Normal mothers have more time than Lady Eleuthia has given you,” Phileia admitted. “It’s been so long, but I recall days in my father’s house when his women sat around weaving and making clothes for the babies to come.”

  “That sounds familiar.” I ran the new-dyed wool between my hands. Weaving a blanket needed weeks, and was hard on the back and feet. Had I known I would want to, I would have started making something much earlier.

  Phileia brought out her sewing basket to rummage among the thread she kept there, and I immediately thought of browsing through my aunt’s many-colored threads. “Let me weave a length of fabric,” she said, “and you may cut and stitch a cap with black thread. It should be easier on your back, I think.”

  My embroidery talents were not as advanced as my spinning or weaving skills, for I had few opportunities on the Mountain to do fancy work. I had no idea which pattern I should use, until Phileia suggested a border of running, interlocking spirals. “My mother liked to do those,” she confided. “And they’re sacred to the goddess. Then there are lightning bolts.” She referred to the zigzag patterns I remembered from the columns in my father’s megaron, where Zeus guarded the throne and the laws of hospitality.

  Soon enough, I acclimated to the rhythm of sewing black spirals upo
n the dark orange fabric, although I worried that the cap would not fit the baby’s head. A blanket would have been better, lasted longer.

  On the afternoon of the fifty-first day, just as I put the finishing stitches into the cap, I noticed I carried the baby lower in my womb; he had dropped into what the wise women had said was a sign of imminent delivery. I informed Phileia, who instructed me to relax while she fetched Ktimene and Rhona. Why she insisted, I could not fathom, as I was experiencing no contractions and my water had not yet broken. By her and Rhona’s calculations, maybe three or four days remained.

  Yet she insisted. So I watched her head out into the snowfall, before I closed the door to sit hearthside to examine my handiwork and ask for the Mistress of the House’s approval; as usual, the little goddess remained indifferent.

  An interminably long time passed before the high priestess returned, yet when the door opened a crowd of women entered. Ktimene and Rhona, I expected. Thalamika in her leather jerkin and shaggy sheepskin cloak, however, startled me. What did the captain of the guard have to do with delivering my child? I stood, opened my mouth to ask what was wrong, when Phileia bade me follow her to my cot. “Gather your things and bundle yourself warmly,” she said. “It’s time for you to move into the birthing house.”

  Despite knowing that I could not deliver in the sanctuary enclosure, I was not prepared to move living quarters. Both Phileia and Rhona had described the place as a well-built house near the stockade, furnished with every necessity a pregnant woman could want, and guarded against male intruders by Thalamika’s women. Now, however, forced to dress warmly and cram my few possessions into a blanket, going there felt more like banishment than a measure of preparation or protection. “You didn’t warn me,” I complained.

  “The Mistress only knows how much time remains.” Phileia urged me to hurry in pulling on my leggings. “Goddess forbid you should bear a boy inside the temenos. He would have to be given up for sacrifice.”