And Isme looked out at the mainland. This beach stretched from one horizon to the other, like the path of the sun and moon in the sky, as if the earth could equal the sky by extending over everything. Perhaps there was more land in the world than water? Maybe this was something people on the mainland knew the answer to.
She said, “I promise, Father.”
Those three words seemed enough for him. He settled back on his haunches with a look of relief. And Isme wondered: how could he forget her earlier disobedience so easily? But then she realized that he also understood her new resolve.
She had disobeyed once and knew the cost, but the cost had not been paid by herself. That made paying it even worse in her eyes—why should someone else suffer for her mistake?
~
Her father dragged the boat up out of the water, up off the sand, up through the scrub-grass that looked as familiar as home, into the woods, where he placed it in a ditch and covered it with underbrush. Isme helped him work, understanding that this boat might be the only way to return home—and soon, she hoped.
Shouldering his pack, Isme following suit with her own, her father announced, “Now we shall go to the road and see if there are travelers who will take us on.”
Isme asked, “Why? Should we not avoid people?”
“Depends which kind of people,” said her father. “There will be people no matter what. Not only other travelers, but also men on the road waiting to beat and steal from them, perhaps even kill them. If people move in large groups then they have less of a chance of being attacked; that is why we should join a group.”
With a sudden lurching feeling, Isme realized: what she thought was only stories was suddenly very real. Or—no—that was not it. The stories had always been real. It was just that they had been real in some other faraway place, and now they were real right in front of her, real to her, real with her.
“If I was a lone man then I could make the trek on my own,” said Epimetheus. “I could avoid other travelers as much as possible and when bad men fell on me I could simply fight them off.” Seeing how uneasy Isme looked at this prospect, Epimetheus reassured,
“This does not happen often. I am big enough to show that I am not an easy target. Walking alone by myself just confirms this for any robbers. The goal of being a thief is to do less work and gain more than if one was not a thief. When you look like too much work then they will leave you alone and seek less threatening prey.”
As he said this, Isme gripped her walking staff tighter and mentally reviewed all of the times she had practiced tumbling staves with her father. Mostly, she remembered losing. She supposed that was a positive sign that her father could win any fight.
Yet her father looked at her, speculatively, and said, “But you are a woman, Isme. I do not think that traveling alone will work with us. You will present too good of a prize and maybe they will consider the gain worth the risk.”
“I also have a staff, Father,” said Isme. “They don’t have any way of knowing that I’m not as good with staves as you, so would we not both be dangerous?”
Her father laughed. “You are better at staves than most,” he said, and Isme felt her face warm at the praise. “But you best keep that secret, like your voice. Women are not taught to use staves. The robbers will simply assume that you do not know anything and you are just carrying another one of my sticks. If you pretend you are harmless, then you will have the chance to strike first.”
Then his face turned serious. “But also you should never forget—no matter how strong you are, you are still a woman. If a man does not know what he is doing then you are strong enough to beat him. But if he does, you will never match him. Not for strength. You must learn to have guile, Isme. Outthink to outfight.”
~
They found a spot by a road that was a strip of mud and trampled grass, where Isme could hide in the bushes and her father sit on a knee-high stone and wait for travelers to approach. Isme was concerned that travelers might think Epimetheus was a robber and attack him, but he reassured her that lone men often joined caravans. Even if they did not want him around, the caravan would want to avoid conflict and simply leave him be.
“Besides, they will think of me as free protection. I’m a big man and caravans hire big men to move from one place to another. If I ask to join them, I work for free.”
This seems like a fair trade on their end, or so Isme would have hoped they would think. She had never been the leader of a caravan so she did not know for sure.
The sun was a little more than halfway across the sky when a strange sound emerged to Isme’s left. It was a noise like feet, but whoever was walking had hard sandals that rang with every footstep as they clipped against stones and pebbles. From her time hunting, Isme could also tell that this person was heavy. Or perhaps more accurately, the people were all heavy, because the number of footsteps were so many that Isme’s hearing found counting them confusing. She had only ever hunted small deer that populated the island, which typically came in pairs or perhaps up to four.
What emerged from the rolling hills was a group of men and animals—no, thought Isme wildly, men on animals, animals pulling what must have been carts, and people on those carts.
So many people. At first, Isme mistook all of them—people included—as mere animals. Had she not wondered what other men looked like merely a day ago? And now here they were and here she was looking at them. She did not know then that this was not altogether a large group, at most about thirty souls, for they seemed to number all the people in the world.
They were all so very strange.
Some of them had heads that were too big. Others too small. The same with their features: many had eyes that looked enormous, or noses that looked sharp and jutting like a knife, or two stretchy fat finger-things that she barely recognized as lips. She thought that most of them were men, because their hair was not long like hers and they had fur on the bottom of their faces. But she could not tell for sure.
Isme had sometimes wondered what the words “ugly” and “handsome” meant. “Beautiful” she knew from the way the sea looked before a storm—although she did not know how to apply that word to people. In stories, characters reacted to ugliness and beauty in positive and negative ways, but Isme had little understanding of what the qualifications for each descriptor were.
But now she knew: she and her father were handsome, by comparison to these unfamiliar and ugly people in all these bizarre shapes. If the rest of mankind looked as odd as these people did, then the gods themselves must have been cursed—for they would have to spend their endless days looking down at hideous people.
As they approached her father, Isme saw that some of them were far taller than she thought people could be: if her father had set her on his shoulders like he had when she was very small, then her eyes would reach these men’s eyes in height.
“Well met, stranger,” said a man aside one of the animals, when they were about an arm’s reach of distance. He pulled a leather strap tucked in the animal’s mouth, and it halted. To Isme’s eyes, the creature looked like an enormous deer, many times the size of the deer on the island, which came up to about her knees.
She wondered what the name of this creature was. Her mind reviewed different words in the stories: donkey, horse, sheep, cow. Words that meant animals which were very different from deer, or so her father insisted.
“Greetings,” her father responded, seeming calm. Isme decided this must mean that nothing was wrong, even with the man being atop this strange creature. She supposed that in a fight her father would win, for he was a primeval Titan.
Not that the stranger would recognize this. With her father explaining how ordinary people did not understand the truth behind the stories, Isme supposed that the people of this caravan had no idea that they could meet a Titan, much less that they were talking to one. All at once, Isme felt sorry for them. What terrible boring lives these people must have, without even the truth of the stories to comfort th
em.
“I suppose it is futile to ask if you are with a gang of robbers ahead,” said the stranger. He seemed as though he was making some kind of joke, although Isme thought that talking about being attacked was a strange way to provoke laughter.
But her father smiled. He said, “I suppose you think that I would say ‘No, of course not,’ even if I was actually a robber.” The stranger on the animal shrugged, as if to admit that her father was right. And then, another joking question in his voice, her father said, “But what if I said that I was? What then?”
The stranger raised both of his eyebrows about halfway up his forehead. But his voice was still joking when he responded, “I suppose I should have to try and kill you. But no one has ever answered that way before, so I don’t know. I should like to think that a man that honest would not become a robber in the first place.” And then, his voice lingering on the edge between a joke and something else, the stranger said, “Are you going to claim you are a robber?”
“No,” said her father. “But, as we just discussed, my word does not actually mean that much in this situation.” He spread his hands. “Therefore, you must decide whether or not I am worth the risk. Although, for what it is worth, I am not a robber.”
The stranger tilted his head, as though contemplating the patch of skin on the crown of her father’s skull. He said, “I also should like to say that you are not a robber. I have met men who are willing to joke with their victims before attacking them, but I like to think that most men are not that way, and that when they speak to someone they are less likely to hurt him afterwards.”
Her father nodded his head, but with some sort of satisfaction stamped on his features. He said, “And what worry I had about this caravan feels much lessened when a man of quality shows himself to be the leader.” He held his big paw like hand up to his chest. “I am called Epimetheus by those who know me.”
The stranger gave a small laugh. He said, “It is a known name, and also a good shame that such an unflattering name fits someone so well.” He seemed for a moment to consider for himself, and then he said, “I am called Eutropios.”
And he cast his hand back over the company of travelers. Isme’s eyes followed the trajectory of his fingers, and saw that all of their faces were fixed on her father’s shape, and many of them were grasping staves or had pulled knives from cords at their waists. However, they all seem to be relaxing, slowly.
Eutropios said, “We are traveling troupe of actors, and intend to reach Delphi by the end of this moon and Athens by end of summer.” And he seemed to turn speculative, eyeing her father. He said, “I don’t suppose you would be willing to play a clown.”
“As they say,” her father responded, “Everyone has his price. Mine is higher than others.” They and the caravan laughed together and Isme felt tension easing from her own limbs. It seemed as though these people would be friendly to travel with.
“But it is not just me,” said her father. And it once everyone’s laughter came to have a strain of nerves, and quieted. Eutropios gained a wary look, as Isme’s father stretched out his own arm to her hiding in the bushes, same as Eutropios had done with his caravan. Isme realized that she was being beckoned.
Slowly, aware that all the staves were now being gripped tight again and the sheathed knives were drawn out once more, Isme stepped into view. The animal the stranger rode upon turned its ears towards her, the tips meeting together like two arrowheads kissing. It was even larger now that she was up close.
Eutropios’s eyebrows raised again, but this time almost to his hairline. He leaned forward on the beast and said, “Your slave?”
Isme thought this was a very strange thing to say. Her mind went back to the moment when her father had explained that she had a different birth father, and how she had wondered if other people would not know that she and her father were a family. Perhaps they looked too different after all. Something surged upward from her stomach—a feeling that made her want to run, no, to charge blindly ahead not caring whether there was a cliff or a field in front of her. The sensation was vaguely like anger.
Before her father could respond, she said, “I am his daughter.”
Eutropios’s eyebrows descended to a frown. He said, “A daughter not taught very well how to speak to her betters, I see.”
“What child is not impetuous?” Epimetheus replied quickly. “She does not speak, usually, and now she merely speaks because there is someone to listen to her.” And he lifted his arm, wrapping Isme in a half-hug. With a smile across his face, he asked, “Now, do we look like robbers? If I said yes, would you now believe me?”
Whatever mistake Isme had just made was forgotten. Eutropios was back on the joke. He said, “I have never heard of a robber bringing his daughter along on hunts.”
Isme would have corrected him again, telling him that she and her father hunted all the time, but supposed she should not speak without knowing how her words would be received. There was some rule that she did not understand and had already broken—all within her first sentence to another human being aside from her father.
Being silent must have been the correct choice. Eutropios seemed almost to wait for her to say something, but when she did not his smile deepened. He gestured again to the caravan, saying, “Well then, we cannot turn down free labor. Welcome, friends!”
FIVE.
~
“The women are in the middle of the caravan,” said her father. “That’s the place that is the safest, so you will walk there with them. I will be up front in case of an attack.”
Isme felt ready to argue, gripping her staff tight, but then she remembered how merely talking to Eutropios had nearly gotten her into trouble. The people of the mainland had strange customs that she did not easily understand. She would try to behave like one of them, to avoid suspicion, and hopefully nothing bad would happen to her father while they were separated in a big group like this.
And so she said, “Yes, Father.”
Her father nodded as they walked. Before he left her, he said in a low voice, “If anyone asks, you are just a goatherd girl. Think carefully and learn quickly, Isme. Listening is better than speaking.”
She watched him walk away to the front of the caravan. With each step it seemed as though an invisible string between them was being plucked, stretched to some limit. Isme did not know whether it could break. And she resolved: she and her father could not break no matter what happened—she would not allow them to fall apart.
Turning, Isme saw six other people in the middle of the caravan, and another astride an animal, observing her. In her mind she replaced them with the memory of seals lying flat on the beach, and as she approached all of their round furry heads lifted at once as though they were one giant creature divided into small pieces.
I am a seal hunter, Isme told herself. She squared her shoulders, raised her chin. She felt much bigger like this, more intimidating, even if the people were taller—and the one on the animal’s back was twice as high.
“I am Isme,” she said, and copying Eutropios’s greeting: “Well met, everyone.”
They did not respond, but instead continued to observe her. As though waiting for her to say something else. In a way she could not define, Isme thought that they were both amused and afraid at the same time—but she could not tell why.
And so she observed them as they observed her.
She supposed everyone in the caravan’s middle was a woman, simply by the fact that they did not have any beards. However, she quickly revised this when she saw that the person mounted on the creature was wearing a one-shouldered chiton, exposing that he did not have a breast. Nonetheless, his cheeks were still smooth—although everyone else who was a man, including Isme’s own father, had hair on their faces.
Or so Isme thought. Not all of them were wearing one-shouldered garments.
Isme had been told that the growing of a beard was the way that boys became men, same as how bleeding during the absent moon was how girls be
came women. Frightening as the blood had been for her, and as annoying as it was to have it repeated each moon, she found that she much preferred bleeding to beards. She imagined that the lower half of one’s face would become very hot, especially in this summer weather. Not to mention that eating became a more arduous task. At least the bleeding came only a few times and was gone for most of the seasons.
No beard—this must be a boy, Isme thought. She had never met a boy before. She had met herself as a girl and woman, and her father as a man. But a boy was new.
The boy snorted, and Isme realized that she was gazing at him while ignoring everyone else. She glanced away hurriedly, and only then noticed that his exposed legs were covered with hair. Her own legs had only grown hair recently, within the last two summers. Perhaps he was close to being a man?
The five women had formed a half-ring around Isme. Now that she reflected their interest by looking back at them, they glanced among themselves and then one of them raised her hands to indicate her own torso.
“I am Pelagia,” she said, speaking very slowly, so slowly that Isme almost thought she was not speaking Greek. “I am friend. What is your name and where are you from?”
It had taken her several breaths to complete these sentences. Now she stared at Isme like she expected to be attacked. Isme frowned, and replied, not forgetting her father’s advice about pretending to be an ordinary person:
“I just told you. My name is Isme. I am a goatherd.”
The women glanced at each other once again, and the one called Pelagia said, voice still slow, as though she thought slowly: “And where do you keep these goats?”
Isme was saved from having to answer with some further lie by an interruption: “Oh, lay off it, Pelagia,” said the almost-man astride the animal. “She talks a little funny and looks like a barbarian savage, but she understands us well enough.”
Everyone Should Eat His Own Turtle (A Greek Myth Novel) Page 5
