The Mysteries, A Novel of Ancient Eleusis

by David Sheppard

  *

  Melaina experienced many changes upon her return home. She saw none of her friends and cousins, who were kept indoors as their families readied their escape to Salamis. It wasn't just the Persian invasion, but also her mother's demand that she take command of the slave women, weavers and tenders of the sacred hearth, while Myrrhine orchestrated their own escape on the sly. Although the Hierophant forbade it, the entire sacred quarter prepared for evacuation, and Myrrhine was behind it all.

  The caretaking of her father's grave now fell to Melaina. She'd purposely avoided her father's tomb since returning, but that evening she went carrying a wicker funerary basket filled with nourishment for the dead. There, she found herself overcome with guilt at being apart from him for so long. "Dear father," she said, "forgive my months of neglect while at Brauron. The only consolation I can give is that you never left my thoughts. My one great crime is that I can no longer visualize your appearance. How could I have forgotten your kind face? Still, it's done, and I hope you'll punish me for it." She sobbed softly.

  Just as she was about to leave, a thought occurred to her, as if someone had spoken. In days of old, King Agamemnon's son, Orestes, and his daughter, Electra, had avenged their father's murder. She continued praying. "Having seen the Persian menace firsthand, I realize the depth of wrong done you. I'll do whatever I can to avenge your death, although I have no brother to help me as did Electra. I love you, father."

  Then she slipped out unnoticed to the blacksmith's shop.

  She'd desperately wished to see her friends and had set a plan in motion. Even as a child Melaina had been fearless and difficult for her mother to control. Within the stone fence in back of their home, a deep woods grew: black alder, poplar, and a small grove of cypress. It was Melaina's favorite place, where she came to watch birds from all over the Aegean rest their wings: horned owls that hooted evenings, falcons, cormorants, bustling flocks of finches.

  Her favorite place for reading her grandfather's scrolls, those he'd let her borrow from his library, was within the shadow of a large pomegranate tree. The pomegranate was a symbol of Persephone, and therefore of the Mysteries of Demeter that fueled the ancient sanctuary. Melaina felt close to the divine Daughter of the Dead, particularly since her own father was among those who had passed to the Elysian Fields. She felt closer to him there beneath the pomegranate tree.

  Around the smooth-stone wall ran crooking grapevines, the ply of green leaves hiding purple clusters. Here and there along the base of the fence, beds of violets and tender grasses grew. Melaina was forever climbing the fence, peering over its edge and into the smithy beyond. When she was older, she scaled the fence to get a closer look, and there the hysterical slave women, who were supposed to be watching her, would find her keeping company with the blacksmith. Her mother would then set Melaina down, provide a lengthy dissertation on the expectation that women would leave their homes seldom, if ever, and that the most cherished girls were those whose faces had never been seen in public.

  But Melaina had a scandalous appetite for adventure. She developed a reputation. Her mother secretly thought it amusing and rather appreciated the blacksmith's parental attitude toward Melaina. The little girl sorely missed the male influence of her father, and the blacksmith helped fill the gap. But her mother hated the smith's two workmen, "fashioners of evil," she called them, and sternly warned Melaina to stay away from them.

  Earlier in the day, Melaina, heedless of impropriety, had sent a slave girl to ask Agido and Anaktoria, her two best friends, to meet her in the smoked-filled precinct of the blacksmith. As she left her father's grave and crept out into the bedlam of the dark street, she fell in behind a herdsman and several bleating sheep, their tiny hooves echoing sharp cries against stone. She had to step aside as a man pulling a two-wheeled cart plunged by out of control. The flashing blacksmith's fire was her guiding light.

  She loved watching the smith work, and he made jewelry for her, anything she asked. He was a disciple of two gods, crippled Hephaestus, god of fire, and Prometheus, Forethought himself, who stole fire from Hephaestus and gave it to mankind, so we might not dwindle into nonexistence. Thus, the blacksmith owed his livelihood to Hephaestus and Prometheus, and he repaid them by telling and retelling their myths. Melaina would sit and watch him, winds of the two bellows delivering great gusts or faint puffs at his bidding, the smiting and counter-smiting of his great hammer and anvil working the woe on woe of beaten metal as it shaped to his will.

  Melaina entered his open shop from the back, coughing at furnace smoke. She stood watching him, busy as he was at the bellows, from the open door to the room where he kept his precious metals and where her friends would soon join her. The blacksmith, Palaemon by name, suffered from a birth deformity, as had Hephaestus, and limped on both feet. This resulted in a rocking motion as he moved about, a hesitating forward roll of his entire frame. His upper body had strengthened to compensate for weak legs, so that he appeared a composite of two people, a giant from the waist up, somewhat of a dwarf from the waist down. He was from the island of Rhodes and likened the lower portion of himself to that of the Telchines, the mythical dwarfed metalworkers of the Underworld who practiced magic beneath Rhodes. "With these withered legs," he'd told her, "all my hopes are for the next life. That's why I chose Eleusis when I left Rhodes."

  Melaina had hoped to talk to him while she waited for her friends, but a constant stream of warriors passed through demanding immediate repairs to weapons and armor. As the blacksmith pounded new spear points and reshaped damaged swords, Melaina heard them ask if he'd evacuate, but Palaemon shook his head. He'd left Rhodes years before to escape the Persians. He'd not run again.

  Two of the smith's workmen, Akmon and Damnameneus, labored at the anvils. These two sullen giants were her mother's "fashioners of evil," whom Melaina had never heard speak and thought them perhaps mutes. A third, dwarf-like man with bow-shaped legs sat at a table working cold gold into jewelry and mumbling something about tears of the gods and the birth of metals.

  Melaina spotted her friends peeking into the shop and motioned them to her. How good to feast on their smiling faces. Anaktoria was tall, thin and stately, as the ancients described Artemis. Agido was short, round. My little dumpling, Melaina called her. How she loved Agido!

  Melaina made each of them tell what had happened during her long absence. Agido's father had given her older sister in marriage to a man from Ithaca. Her mother was shattered. "Oh, Melaina!" Agido cried, pearl-drop tears spilling from her eyes, "I may never see her again."

  "Take heart, little Agido," said Melaina, thinking Agido reminded her of Theodora at Brauron. "Ithaca is a fine island. Odysseus, the man of many wiles, once ruled there. At least she'll be safe a while longer from the tight fist of Persia."

  Melaina had never seen Anaktoria so excited. Although her friend tried to keep it hidden, her eyes fairly sparkled, and her hands couldn't keep still. Anaktoria stood behind Agido with her hands on Agido's shoulders. "This summer I went with mother to the great healing center at Epidaurus. She dreamt of Asklepios."

  "God of healing?"

  "Exactly."

  "Why did your mother go?"

  "She'd not had a child in two years. She feared her womb had dried up. She got pregnant the very next month."

  "Wonderful! I know you'll enjoy a little brother or sister."

  Melaina grew serious and reached for the leather bag she'd snatched while escaping Brauron and over Kallias' objection. She raised a few notes on the aulos, told them of her new proficiency on the lyre and of her newfound love of Sappho's poetry. But finally she told of her plans.

  "I've decided to follow Artemis," she said. "I'll not marry but remain virgin and teach here at Eleusis."

  She didn't get the response she expected. Agido was confused. "Why?" she asked. "Marriage is every girl's one wish, her fulfillment as wife and mother."

  Anaktoria's eyebrows pulled together.

  Melaina told of her desire
to start a school for girls at Eleusis. "Like Sappho's school for girls on Lesbos," she said. Then she realized they knew nothing of Sappho and would never understand. She grew irritable and dropped the subject entirely. Instead, she told them of the burning of the temple at Brauron, the death of Kynthia. She was about to relay the story of the camel when they heard a noise from outside, a growl. Melaina turned just as Agido's mother pounced on them.

  "I might have known she'd be with you," she said, jerking little Agido to her feet and scowling at Melaina. She turned on Anaktoria. "Your mother is beside herself with worry." As she dragged Agido from the room, Anaktoria's face grew grave. "I'd better go too," she said, and charged after them.

  Left breathless and guilt ridden, Melaina realized she should have known better than to drag others into her little outing. She'd been gone longer than planned herself and tried to sneak past the blacksmith to hurry home, but he caught her eye. Palaemon sponged his face, hands, massive neck and hairy chest, then taking up a stick to lean on, came limping to Melaina.

  "Little mistress," he said, his kind face still with beads of sweat. "I'd heard you returned to us."

  "It's good to be back in the warmth of your shop once again, to hear the music of metal on metal. I was afraid you'd forgotten me."

  He smiled through a grizzly beard but said nothing. Instead he shuffled to a box he kept against the wall, raised the lid and retrieved something shiny. "So you're a woman now," he said, but his voice showed no irony. He seemed to be groping for words. He sat on the chair before her, where Agido had sat only a moment before, and held in the light of an oil lamp a magnificent gold broach.

  "On Rhodes," Palaemon said, "I learned the art of fine metal work. This is the first I've attempted in years. The magicians who live beneath Rhodes developed the subtle working of granulated gold many centuries ago."

  He stopped for a moment to catch his breath, and Melaina realized his excitement. He brought both her hands forward and placed the object in them. "It's an eagle, a special one made by the marriage of metals, male and female ores."

  Melaina found its beauty spellbinding. The eagle had been created from tiny gold granules merged but not melted onto a gold surface. It seemed to retain the spark and flame of the metalworking process, throwing both light and shadow. "Its beauty defies saying," she said.

  "Thousands of years ago when Prometheus stole fire and gave it to man, Zeus ordered Hephaestus to chain Prometheus to a Scythian mountainside at the edge of the world. For thirty thousand years an eagle came every day to eat out Prometheus' liver, which renewed itself every night. This golden eagle is a reminder of that one, but also contains a warning. When Prometheus gave us fire, something came with it. His act was one of arrogance, and it's tainted our existence ever since. It's as if the fuel with which all fires burn, even those of the soul, is arrogance. Our arrogance tells us we control our fate, and we're unable to accept that the gods give us our lot in life. In fact, we're but the beaten metal molded in the smithy of the gods. Remember that, little mistress, and the world is yours. The gods punish arrogance swiftly."

  Melaina had hardly heard his words, so captivated was she by the ancient symbols etched on its underside. The sharp scratches seemed to release the broach's own internal light. "And the script?"

  The smith's eyes rose to meet hers, but he hesitated. "It's not so much the words but the power locked within. The language is very old. Comes from ancient Crete before even king Minos or his mother Europa, stolen from Tyre by Zeus himself, walked the craggy shores of the giant island. So old we've lost the sound of the words. But when I was a child, the Telchines of Rhodes still knew the ancient writing and taught me to render the letters. They also taught me a bit of their magic, pale though it's now become even in their hands. It's not a good-luck charm, more a divine commandment."

  Palaemon sat for a moment lost in thought, eyes mesmerized by the gold light coming from the object she held. He woke from the trance. "Off with you!" he said, looking alarmed, "before your mother finds you here and renders my head as lame as my legs."

  "I'll study it well, keeping in mind your words. Perhaps its insight will be revealed when I need it most." She clutched the broach to her heart, bent and kissed him on the sooty cheek.

  Then she was off.