As they began to stumble through the trees again, Isme’s mind trailed behind, trying to match words and ideas, to link places and people and things. She thought about the men they left behind, the way Pelagia had curled up then uncoiled and sang as though nothing was wrong and then the voice of Kleto in the darkness.
This last image stuck in her mind, tripping over and over again: the tone of Kleto’s voice, not only in the robbers’ den, but just now, insulting Isme about Artemis…
At last I understand, she realized. You are not so confusing after all, mainlander woman. I know the emotion on your face, I can finally see your heart.
Jealousy.
Readjusting herself, pushing her feet firmer against the ground, Isme ran at her conclusion, glancing at Kleto as she did, unseen and unseeing in the dark. Kleto was jealous. And why should she not be? Isme was some kind of carefree and happy creature that played in the woods while Kleto worked hard and served men.
But you do not know everything, Kleto. You do not know those lonely moments on the shore of my father’s island, staring out to see the mainland—and you do not know what it is like to kill a seal and haul it with nothing but the strength of your arms across the woods... Or what it is like to go singing and see the results lying on the beach the next morning, the smell of sea salt on former human beings...
Or about the end of the world.
Closing her eyes, for the result was much the same anyway, Isme steadied herself, kept putting one foot in front of another, carried the weight. At last she understood something on the mainland, a little thing, but something. There was a small curl of triumph in her.
She thought, as they walked, that she could hear noises behind…
Footsteps in the woods.
TEN.
~
They must have kept running all through what remained of the night, for Isme’s sight was becoming easier to make out shapes, and then all at once there was color. Dull, powdered yellow, but still that meant the sun had risen.
Turning, Isme marked which way was east. Still—they were completely lost. Not only had they traversed in an unknown direction through the woods, they had also fled without knowing any bearing, doubling the confusion. Isme had no idea how she was supposed to find someone when she was lost herself, not without tracking as though hunting. Glancing over at Kleto, however, she saw that the other woman was still grimly determined.
Perhaps Kleto knows a way to find the caravan, thought Isme. Or, she amended, perhaps Kleto is simply accepting that being lost is better than our previous fates.
At full daylight, Isme asked, “How do we find the caravan?”
Kleto said, “We were on the road to Delphi. If we head towards Delphi, we should either arrive ahead or behind of the caravan.”
Nodding, Isme said, “Then how do we find that road?”
“Carefully,” said Kleto. “If people see us, they are likely robbers. I don’t suppose a wild woman like you knows how to track our previous steps?”
“That would only lead us back to those men.”
If they are still men, Isme amended, uncertain whether the birds were herald to a transformation. The robbers had seemed strangely shaped as they had fled...
Kleto stirred under Pelagia’s arm, and Isme could see the strain in her shoulders. Pelagia had become dead weight sometime between dawn light and the risen sun.
Isme halted. Both women sank to their knees on the ground. Pelagia looked deflated, and except for Kleto’s internal fires, she seemed half dead.
Behind them, Isme could still hear the footsteps of the voice in the woods, following as always. No doubt the creature was watching them even now. She wondered what it was thinking—whether it would blame her for what had happened to the robbers, even though some part of her declared that they absolutely deserved it.
Kleto cocked her head, said, “What is that sound?”
“What sound?” Isme asked, not believing Kleto could hear the footsteps of the voice in the woods—though, she amended, just because the voice had not been heard by others did not mean that it could not be heard at all. Indeed, it fell quiet whenever others were around. Was that not proof that others should be able to hear it?
“That sound,” repeated Kleto, “Behind us—it sounds like—"
Pelagia lurched half-upright, wincing on her ankle, crying, “They followed us!”
Isme wanted to say that there was nothing to fear, as far as she knew; because the voice had not hurt her yet, probably was not interested in them anyway, and besides was nothing compared to the men they had left behind. All the voice had done so far was tell her bad news. And yet Pelagia’s conclusion stirred her thoughts, as she realized: not every sound of footsteps in the woods had to belong to her invisible stalker.
Kleto met her eyes over Pelagia’s shoulder. And Isme knew then that Kleto was going to do as she had when first captured: fight.
Turning abruptly, Kleto let her half of Pelagia’s weight sag, leaving Isme alone to bear her. Isme watched as Kleto began to scramble in the bushes, doubtless looking for a stick or rock.
She said, “Why not use the knife?”
Kleto did not pause. “I lost it when those birds came.”
Pelagia screamed. Isme turned to see a man burst from the bushes, running toward them. He was covered in scratches and blood—surely a robber—
They should run. Run! The cry was on Isme’s lips. And yet she had only to glance at Pelagia, ankle swollen, and at Kleto scrabbling in the dirt to realize running was not an option. Kleto was never going to leave Pelagia behind.
So Isme did the only thing that she could think of: she charged.
Perhaps Isme attacking first would give Kleto time to find a weapon and join the fight. Yet when Isme collided with the man she found that Kleto had better act quickly—because he had the same solid build as if she was striking an upright stone.
The man budged only a little, grunting as she impacted, and then the next moment his hand tangled in her hair, wrenching her neck so sharply that Isme barely retained consciousness. She had done the same to birds: break the neck and then the fight was over. Her hands raised, and only by instinct her left forearm prevented his swinging fist from connecting with her cheekbone.
After that everything was a jumble. Isme recalled kicking and hitting the ground as much as his shins—his hand in her hair had her scalp on fire—but she could not spare a hand for that, not when she needed both to fend off his other arm, him punching—striking—clouting—she felt bruises blooming under her skin—
She managed to protect her face just enough to keep her wits, managing after a few tries to clasp his swinging arm under her own armpit—and he would not let go of her hair—so she turned and sunk her teeth into his flesh. Soft. Like biting down on an apple. He tasted like the sea—melted wet and salty on her tongue too—
Cursing, the man flung Isme away.
But falling was something that Isme was used to—all those bouts practicing staves with her father, his chiding: When you fall, don’t try to stop yourself from tumbling, don’t you dare raise your arms and land on your wrists or elbows, that is how you break bones, that is how you jar your muscles so they won’t work later—roll, roll—
Using the momentum, Isme let herself curl until she had her feet under her, and at the end of the movement launched herself upright again. There was nothing to defend herself but her bare hands—
An abrupt thought: If only I had my staff—
—then what? Did she think winning was more possible?
The man inspected his arm, then his eyes tracked from Isme, weaponless but a proven biter, and Kleto, who stood in front of Pelagia with a stone as large as her head held high. Good choice, thought Isme. That would certainly crush through his skull.
If one had the will to kill.
Kleto certainly looked the part. Her eyes were hooded, yet her pupils were like sparks sent out from the hearth they had left behind. She looked as though she would gladly smash
her own skull in before giving into the loss of a fight.
Isme recalled: the purpose of being a robber is to do less work for more gain, but if you look like too much work for too little gain, then they will leave you...
The man laughed.
“Woman,” he told Kleto, “If you were willing to kill, you would have used the knife.”
He charged her. Isme saw the moment that Kleto came to self-realization: that she had been bluffing. And Isme remembered Kleto’s hand trembling back at the robber’s den... Isme had almost dismissed the flickering as firelight on the blade, but now she knew that her other suspicions were correct:
Kleto, the actress, could look savage. She could struggle. But she was no killer.
Isme was a killer. By accident, yes, but still—
Tearing after him, hoping to catch him first before he struck the other women—Isme missed the sound of hoofbeats against the ground. Pelagia noticed, but Isme was focused on one central point: the throat of the man who was attacking Kleto.
When the arrow came, in Isme’s sight it appeared backwards, reversed. As though the arrow’s long neck bloomed outward from the robber’s head.
Isme faltered, momentum pulling at her as she slowed. The man was dead before he hit the ground. Standing above him, she knew that she did not need to check if the deed was complete.
The stone rolled out of Kleto’s hand and fell into the underbrush.
Eyes starting up from what she had finally understood was an arrow, a projectile with an origin point, Isme saw the familiar animal, standing and snuffing the air as though it was grateful for a rest, and astride was Lycander.
Now that he had her attention, Lycander said, “I hear you ran off into the woods, wild woman. It’s astonishing that the three of you are still alive.”
Isme tried to process the words and tone they had been spoken in at the same time, for despite their harsh meaning, he sounded light and airy, like he was joking, as he had before the caravan had been attacked. Despite the dead man lying in front of them.
Opening her mouth, Isme found that words did not come. Instead, Kleto stepped forward, brushing a hand quickly through her hair, which now seems less golden and more dusty, tangled. She said, “Why are you always riding in at the last moment? Would it not be better to kill them before we get to this point?”
“Well,” said Lycander, observing her. “We are dramatists.”
Pelagia said, “For the sake of Apollon himself, please let me ride back to camp.”
Glancing down at her, Isme saw that mixed with the relief on her face was an undercurrent of pain, and she held her limb with the swollen ankle far away from her center mass, as though the distance could also make the pain she was feeling fainter.
As Lycander assented to this, Isme caught a brief sight of Kleto’s face: there was something strange there, some kind a terrible burden. Perhaps disappointment. Or maybe, thrilled by her understanding of Kleto’s hostility towards her, Isme was now overestimating her abilities to read the mainlanders again.
Yet this time, as Kleto glanced up and met Isme’s eyes, her own were not full of resentment and anger. Instead, they had become harder to read once more.
But if Isme had to give the expression a label, she would have said that Kleto looked curious. Or perhaps—suspicious. Of what, Isme did not exactly know. Perhaps Lycander, if Pelagia was right about Kleto’s love obsession; or perhaps whether Isme would interfere with her claim, if it was a claim, on Lycander; or perhaps—
Perhaps Isme’s own singing. She recalled her father’s demand: Show no mainlander what your voice can do unless he risks his life for you, and her voice echoing, I promise, I promise...
She had learned another thing: Kleto was clever, at least.
Even if we are not enemies, thought Isme, that does not mean that we will be friends.
~
Isme finally escaped Kleto’s eyes that sunset, when they reached the rest of the caravan. They had been gone for only two days, and even then the caravan waiting apparently only because Eutropios had declared that Kleto was too valuable to leave. His smile when Lycander arrived with the three women was wider than Isme thought possible on the narrow confines of Eutropios’s face.
But while Kleto was immediately swept into Eutropios’s arms and there held for inspection, Isme felt something inside of her quake, only stilling when she sighted her father. Epimetheus’s face looked like the sand at the beach after she had carved her fingers through it, and when he spotted her it was as though the waves had come up and swept back and taken the lines in the sand with them.
Beckoning, Epimetheus led her into the woods. With all the commotion about Kleto and Pelagia’s whining as she was forced to dismount the animal, nobody followed them.
Isme spoke first, “What happened, Father? Were you hurt?”
“Was I—" blurted Epimetheus, and cut himself off as though he could not bear to repeat her sentence. He held out his hands, asking, “Why did you run into the woods?”
“That woman,” said Isme. “She had gone out there before the attack and nobody else noticed. I thought—I thought someone had to bring her back to the caravan.”
Epimetheus lifted a hand to the shiny skin at the back of his head and closed his eyes. Isme readied herself, knowing this look from the island: she had done something particularly wrong and now he was ready to lecture not just on the right way to do things but also on Isme’s failings. Which, she supposed, were rather large now.
Yet then something in him seemed to shift, and the fire of his lecture died before it even began. At last, keeping his eyes closed, he said, “Did they hurt you?”
Isme tried not to let herself feel so surprised that he knew that she had been caught. If her father had survived the attack by the robbers, then doubtless he had learned she had gone into the woods, and then he probably had tracked her, and from there it was easy to surmise that he had seen she had been caught. The story would have been apparent in her footsteps.
Isme wondered whether her father was able to see the feet of the voice in the woods, following behind, as it surely had. It might even be nearby eavesdropping on them now.
But with that Isme had a wave of thought to follow, and events tumbled down on each other, for she knew if her father had tracked her after her capture, he would have been led to the stone outcropping where she and Pelagia had been forced to wait, and then when Kleto and her captors had joined, the trail would have led through the woods to—
“Did you find them?” she asked, remembering the strange, decrepit building full of men, everything in it seeming to be made of fire, and then the birds fluttering through every nook and cranny like they too were made of flames, shots of lightning that struck through air as though her voice had been the call of thunder.
“Yes,” said Epimetheus. “You were gone when we arrived.”
Coldness swept over Isme. She said, “What did you do?”
“We tracked them,” said Epimetheus. “We hoped that one of the trails was you.”
They must have spent all night, following trail after trail, thought Isme. Surely the men in the building had run out, fanning in all directions, leaving dozens of trails for her father to track, the men of the caravan putting hunting skills to good use.
But only Lycander found them. That meant the men tracking the other trails had—
“What did you do to them?” Isme asked.
Her father’s face turned grim. He said, “What they have done to others all of their lives. This part of the trail to Delphi will be safe for a while. But in the end, it won’t change. There will just come more robbers in time, and when this part of the trail is open for their trade, they will take this spot and prey on travelers again.”
Isme bit the inside of her lip, said, “I know they were terrible men, but killing them...” And she could not finish the sentence, in part because she did not know quite what to say. She had on one side of her scale been ready to kill them herself, but on the other s
ide was a small voice crying: You also have killed, regardless of your intentions. There are men waiting to see you in the underworld!
The difference between justice and mercy, thought Isme. You cannot have both.
And yet somehow, both still exist in this world.
Her father seemed to understand what she was thinking without her speaking aloud. Sighing, he reached forward and pulled her to him. Isme let her head fall and rest on his shoulder, smelling the familiar scent of overworked leather and day-old campfire ash that she had always associated with her father.
He said, “Truly, I did not know I had raised such a gentle daughter. One does not know how a person will react until he is actually attacked. Guessing does not work. But you must know, Isme. In all likelihood those men would have been killed sooner or later anyway. On the trail, by men they attacked, or by their fellow robbers, or by the end of the world. All we can do is hope that in the new world there will not be any robbers like them.”
“But each world is always worse than the last,” muttered Isme. She felt the rise and fall of her father’s chest as he sighed again.
“Perhaps,” he said. “I do not know—all I can see is the pattern of the past. Foresight is my brother Prometheus’s realm. I cannot even find where he is now—after all, he was chained to the mountain, but Lord Herakles freed him. We must go to beyond Delphi to request where he is, for they can see the future for me.”
“When we reach Delphi,” said Isme, “Are you sure they will find your brother? That he would be able to say how to erase my blood guilt?”
“I do not know,” said her father. “The prophetess probably will just give us some kind of puzzle to solve. That is the way with prophecy.”
“Because if we are not sure,” said Isme, “Perhaps we should use our one question to ask about the end of the world. Maybe the gods know something about it.”
Her father said, “Perhaps. But there are things even the gods don’t know.”
And Isme recalled the song from her among the robbers, which called the birds. What words had come from her? ‘And so it is with those have broken faith with the great ancient law, whose words even the gods do not know’—strange, to think that the beings running the world would be ignorant of something so important.
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