by Laura Gill
“I take it he hasn’t had an amphidromia?”
“A what?” The term registered as something familiar but long ago and far away, part of my Argive childhood perhaps, but not a thing practiced among the Women of the Mountain. I thought harder. Amphidromia. On the tip of my tongue, then... “A naming feast, you mean?” Like my full brother and shorter-lived half-brother had celebrated, when the family presented the newborn child to friends and relations, when there were olive branches for a boy and garlands of unspun wool for a girl. I did not remember mine. “No, he hasn’t,” I croaked. Why should the thought upset me so? The Women of the Mountain did not deal in newborns, and I had not expected the king of Argos or Danaë’s aunt to welcome my son.
Eurymedon’s suckling only heightened my misery; the sensation of his gumming on my nipple shot straight to my heart, reminding me that my son had no family, no true place of belonging. I blinked to suppress the tears starting to stream down my cheeks. Perhaps I could manage something in the way of an amphidromia, once I figured out how to conduct the rituals.
“Are you crying over there?” I heard Diktys rise from the hearth. Goddess forbid, was he actually going to come over? I hoped to avoid a scene. “Please, I meant no offense. I asked only because it’s something we can remedy.”
“You’ve said quite enough for one night, Nephew,” Klymene chastened. “The young woman is exhausted and trying to nurse her baby. Go do something. Leave your pestering until tomorrow, when the other elders question her.”
Diktys muttered something and stepped outside. The moment he withdrew, Klymene appeared at my elbow with a rag. “Blow your nose and cry. Diktys means well, but he’s a typical man. No sense for women’s moods.” I took the rag, but used it to sop up the milk from my other nipple, and then dab Eurymedon’s mouth as he finished nursing. Only then, as I laid him over my shoulder to burp him, did I attend to myself.
Klymene stroked her wrinkled fingers through his dark ringlets. “What a handsome boy! Shall I change him for you? It would be no trouble.” She sounded eager, but I hesitated to break the maternal bond. At the moment, my only constant was my son.
“Later, perhaps.” A noncommittal answer that seemed to confirm the dark future Hera had foretold for me.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
Sleep came hard that night. As the hour deepened, the darkness descended, and the scent and sensation of the bedding evoked recent terrors. Turning toward the wall, I sobbed into the cushion until spent, and even then my troubled mind spun through uncertainties. What would tomorrow bring? Would the elders ask too many questions that I could not answer? What if they decided to evict me and Eurymedon?
Working myself into a tangle of worries did no one any good, and I tried hard to expunge all thoughts of suffering, real or imagined. I concentrated on breathing in and out. I even counted goats, something I had not done in a long while, mostly because Phileia, when I had confided this childhood practice to her, had insisted that priestesses and Women of the Mountain did not need to resort to such infantile things.
Diktys’s snoring and Klymene’s snuffling nearby helped to reassure me somewhat that I was safe among people, and that I would not suddenly awaken inside the chest to the terrifying realization that my rescue was all a cruel jest. And yet, their night noises served as a constant reminder that I was a refugee among strangers, that I occupied the same room as a man who kept trying to engage me in banter even though he knew I was not interested.
Just as I began to doze off, my hosts stirred. “What is it?” Had Argive ships, tracking the movements of the chest from a distance, found us and beached nearby? I instinctively reached for Eurymedon, whose slumber, too, was agitated by the sudden disturbance, and did my best to soothe him. His diaper was full. Did I have time to change him, or was it already too late, and Acrisius’s ruffians were storming through the village?
Diktys replied through a yawn. “Nothing. Go back to sleep.” In the lamplight, he looked bleary-eyed and disheveled. “We’re going out for the midnight run.”
“But it’s still night.” Klymene had provided a supply of diapers, if I could remember where they were.
“How do you think fresh fish gets into the market at dawn?” Fishermen plied their trade in the middle of the night? Diktys scratched himself, yawning yet again. He began collecting tools: a knife and bone fish hooks. “Sardines and mackerel are caught in the dark of night. The light of the lanterns lures them. Don’t you know that?”
“No, I lived on a mountain,” I said.
“Don’t mind his mumbling.” Klymene added fuel to the embers in the hearth. “He’s never himself when he first wakes. Just like his father. Lost in the dream haze of Morpheus.” Sniffing the air, she nodded toward the baby. “He needs a change, I think. Stay and rest. There’s no need for you to help with the cooking. I should be back shortly.”
I washed Eurymedon, nursed him, and brought him into bed with me for reassurance. Outside the house, I heard people moving around, speaking, calling to each other from a distance. I dozed for a while, into the predawn hours, then rose and wrapped myself in Klymene’s shawl. I left Eurymedon in his warm, fleecy nest while I cracked open the door and peeked out to observe the villagers.
Already the sky was lightening, the black night yielding to shades of blue, and though the sea remained dark, the pinpricks of a dozen lanterns cast reflections onto the deep. Twice the number of lanterns illuminated the beach. Silhouetted shapes swarmed around what seemed to be a pair of beached boats. Were they casting off to sea, or returning? I saw men and women hauling on heavy nets, dragging them ashore.
The smell of baking bread competed with the cold salt air; the combination stirred rumblings in my belly. Just as I started to venture into the dooryard for a closer look at the beached boats and fishermen harvesting the nets, Klymene appeared with a covered basket tucked under one arm. “What are you doing up?”
“I couldn’t sleep,” I said.
“If you’re hungry, there’s bread.” She fished under the cloth covering the basket and produced a round of flatbread. “The men will want to eat and sleep. The women will be heading into town to barter their wares.”
The bread was warm and soft, and I chewed slowly to savor it. After, I followed Klymene to the beach. The daylight steadily strengthened. Women worked alongside the fishermen, spreading the nets to dry on the sand above the high tide mark, and securing the beached fishing boats on chocks.
Most of the fish went with the market women, ten or twelve sturdy matrons who balanced their wares in vessels atop their heads. The men straggled in from the beach with the lanterns and their implements. From afar, I spied a Diktys heading with his extinguished lantern back to the house. What remained of the catch swiftly vanished under the expert knives of the women, elders, and older children staying behind. Within an hour, the sardines and mackerel were scaled, gutted, and either skewered for cooking on portable grills or cubed for the stew pot. Klymene and I did not participate in this work; she found places for us at the edge of the beach where we helped Philagra watch the neighbors’ children and her grandchildren.
Meanwhile, neighbors drew water and milked goats, morning tasks familiar to me. But when I indicated a willingness to assist my hosts, Klymene refused. “A guest is no mule to shoulder a host’s burdens,” she said.
Inactivity made me crazy. If Klymene and Diktys thought me jumpy now, they would find me outright annoying in another day or two. “How much longer am I supposed to rest and be useless? I’m perfectly capable.” I motioned to the harried-looking middle-aged woman tending to a fisherman with scraped arms. “I know the plants and herbs of the field, and how to make medicines. I could make her labors easier.”
Philagra hummed a disapproving tone. “Luktia won’t like you, a pretty young thing, laying your hands all over her husband.”
I flushed. Would the long-faced, tired woman truly take my efforts for an attempt to seduce the scraggly old man who was her husband? Why would I want him in
the first place? “That’s not what I meant.”
“Of course not,” Philagra said matter-of-factly. “Why do you have such short hair? A servant fleeing a cruel master?”
It had not occurred to me that my hair, which was slowly growing back, might cause others to mistake me for a menial. “No,” I answered quickly. “I dedicated it to the Mistress when I became a woman.”
“Hmm, the Mistress.” Philagra interrupted herself to admonish a toddler to stop harassing a sea crab, and to scold another for eating sand. Had I realized I would be outside babysitting, I would have brought Eurymedon. I ought to go back and fetch him so he would not wake to an empty house. “You mean Dia?”
Phileia had mentioned that Dia was one of the Mistress’s many manifestations, what people called her in the islands. “Yes,” I said. Trying to explain about Potnia Theron and the Mother of the Mountains might betray more than I wanted.
When the stew was ready, Klymene and I carried a portion back to the house. She owned a nonchalant air about attending to chores while Diktys slept; she thought nothing of airing out bedding, sweeping, and shifting things around, whereas I, after nursing Eurymedon and changing him, tiptoed around trying not to get underfoot. I made my bed, and was grateful Klymene let me do that much.
Guest-right was such a frustrating burden when I was not allowed to exercise my talents. I was not altogether ignorant about guest-host relations, though the Women of the Mountain sheltered few travelers, and I had been kept away from the megaron where King Acrisius had entertained visitors. Hosts lavished gifts and honors upon guests with the implicit understanding that the favor might someday be returned. How could I ever repay the hospitality of my rescuers unless they permitted me to do something?
Diktys slept soundly. His nose proved stronger than his ears, because he awakened straightaway when Klymene uncovered the pot containing the stew. He greeted us politely, washed, and ate before leaving the house to attend to his daily tasks.
“Now the women rest,” Klymene said.
Daylight helped the process along. I slept deeply, but not long; Klymene roused me in the early afternoon. She combed my hair, ordered me to wash behind the ears, and otherwise took pains to make certain I looked presentable. “Posidaeia expects only the best.”
“Are we going to the sanctuary?” I was about to be interviewed by the village elders, maybe their priestess, too.
She brushed imaginary dust from my dress. “We’re going to the shrine, not the sanctuary. Posidaeia’s owed a thanksgiving offering. Luktia will bring the milk, and Iolanthe the honey. Bring the baby. The goddess likes children. She’ll appreciate seeing the little one she helped rescue from the deep.”
But it was Hera who had rescued Eurymedon and me from the chest, not the female Poseidon. “And the other gods?” I ventured. What was Posidaeia to me when Hera and Zeus had both manifested themselves in my visions? It was they who required libations, not this other goddess. “Can I also honor them at the shrine?”
“In the sanctuary, once the elders approve and you’ve been purified,” Klymene answered. She brought my cloak; last night she had mended a tear Acrisius’s men must have made when they wrestled me into the chest.
“Where is your priestess?” I asked. Had Philagra or Huamia, or any of the women I had encountered in the last twenty-four hours been the priestess of Pelargos, Klymene surely would have introduced us.
“Our priestess died some years ago, without training a successor. But we have a woman from Livadi who comes to the village once a month, or on special occasions.” Klymene fetched her shawl. “There’s no need for Leukothea to come just for this. Anybody can approach Posidaeia at this shrine.”
The visit to Posidaeia’s shrine was strictly a woman’s outing, which put me somewhat at ease, although I wondered when the village elders were going to question me. Tonight? Klymene would not answer my queries, because, as she claimed, she did not know. Nor would she say when or how I was to receive purification, only, “That depends on when we can get Leukothea to come.” All I knew for certain was that the rites of purification must take place soon.
More than a dozen women I had encountered earlier that morning joined us on the footpath to the shrine. We bypassed foam-washed boulders and climbed windswept sea dunes fringed with beach grass while heading west, away from the harbor and most populated areas.
The shrine of the sea goddess consisted of a flat rock altar on which stood a weathered stack of stones vaguely resembling a woman. Men might have erected her long ago, or she had been formed of the bones of the earth, as had the Mistress-pillar of the Mountain’s cave sanctuary. She possessed a certain potency, despite her precarious stance and the pale-to-dark spatters of gull droppings that were her sole adornment.
The Mistress-pillar had seemed a potent force, too, but where had that goddess been when Zeus forced his way into the sanctuary? Maybe Posidaeia represented nothing more than wish-fulfillment for women who wanted blue-haired Poseidon to be more kindly and approachable. Or maybe she was a powerful goddess I should learn to respect.
We did not offer the thanksgiving libations right away, which I found odd and even a bit disconcerting. Instead, we spread out brightly patterned blankets and sat on the ground in the presence of the goddess.
The middle-aged, harried-looking woman I recognized as Luktia announced to all the women, “Normally, we would start right away with the libations, but I’ve just realized that we can’t do anything for this young woman or her child unless she has a name. How else will the goddess know her?” More than a dozen heads turned in my direction. “Klymene says she’s been calling herself Outis, but, really, that’s no name at all.”
Did she have to announce my lack of name to the entire island? “Names are given,” I answered, “not taken. You decide.”
Easier said than done. Every woman voiced an opinion or three, and from there descended into bickering. All over a single name? To be honest, I did not like Phoebe or Tyche, Klytie or Melissa, because choosing one would have meant rejecting the others and thus offending the women who had suggested them. Within a short time, I wished I had not invited them to debate the matter, but rather proposed that the priestess Leukothea should consult the gods as Phileia had done to obtain the name Myrtale.
“Why not Dorea?” Klymene, who had remained as observant and silent as I throughout this process, had to raise her voice to be heard. “Diktys suggested it last night. And if anything, the young woman is a gift from the sea.”
Dorea. Maybe not the prettiest name, or the most telling, for I was no gift to anyone, but I seconded the choice. “We should honor the goddess.” I indicated the rough-hewn Posidaeia. What immortal allowed her worshippers to make themselves at ease and carry on for so long without demanding recognition or an offering?
Luktia laughed. Spidery lines around her mouth and eyes highlighted the broken blood vessels splotching her cheeks, a sign that she had spent long hours outdoors in rough weather, just like the redoubtable herdswomen on the Mountain. “She’s a patient goddess. Waits through squalls for Lord Poseidon to calm himself. Watches the harbor for our ships and men to come home. She knows what pleasure it is when a long wait is over. So we make her wait, and make it sweet.” Convivial agreement answered her statement.
In the mountains, we would have gathered flowers to make garlands, but the dunes were a stark wasteland relieved only by the tufts of sharp-edged beach grass. Instead, the women went down to the ocean’s edge to collect shells and pebbles worn round and smooth by the surf; my landlubber’s natural wariness of the sea and my inability to swim held me back, but when the women returned, laughing and breathless, they deposited their treasures on the goddess’s altar.
“Dorea!” Calling my name, they linked hands and danced a circle around me. At once, I was transported back to another time, years ago, when the Women of the Mountain had celebrated and welcomed Myrtale into their midst. Only now, the women of Pelargos did not hustle me to my feet to partake in the dance.
“When you’re rested and purified.” Klymene had remained with me, to explain the rites. “Don’t tax yourself.”
After this innocent revelry, Luktia and another older woman, Iolanthe, poured out the libations of honey and milk, and chanted the thanksgiving prayers on my behalf; again, due to my perceived ritual pollution. I dared not correct them by saying that Hera herself had healed my wounds and restored me, therefore removing the miasma of death. I was simply grateful that the women regarded me not as an itinerant, but with the implication of permanence, belonging.
Late afternoon signaled the end of the outing. We returned to the village in twos and threes. Iolanthe, crook-backed and garrulous, walked beside me. Because it was a clear day, and I had earlier betrayed my ignorance of the local landscape, she pointed out various features. This goddess-blessed pomegranate tree or that shepherd’s rock, this house or that wall on the rocky heights; she described each feature with tidbits of gossip about who lived there or visited, till finally she directed my attention to the highest of ridges overlooking the harbor. That morning on the beach, I had noticed for the first time the walled citadel girded about by cliff-hugging houses and buildings washed in shades of ochre from palest pink to deep earthen brown.
“That’s Chora, where the king lives.” Iolanthe set a cautionary hand on my forearm. “Don’t go there, or anywhere else the king’s officials can see you.” Did she mean that word of my mysterious resurrection and presence had spread, that my enemies might search for me in town? I kept my queries innocuous.
“Is it dangerous there?”
Iolanthe uttered a thin, ironic laugh. “Not for an old stick like me, but a pretty girl like you? The king’s men hear of you, they’ll come and take you straightaway to the citadel, and you’ll probably never return.”
Chora seemed innocuous enough at this distance, but so had the Larissa of Argos. Why would Seriphos’s king seize attractive girls unless it was for one of those reasons Ktimene had always warned against? “Is he cruel, the king?”
