by Anne Fortier
When Lilli finally came to, she peered in all directions with her poor, unseeing eyes, then started crying, her narrow shoulders trembling in despair. “This is not the river,” she sobbed. “You are just saying that to comfort me.”
“But it is! Feel.” Myrina guided her sister’s hands into the shallow stream. “I swear to you, this is it.” She looked around at the dusty rubble. An abundance of trees must have lined this waterway in its prime, but now they were little more than crumbling skeletons toppling this way and that in search of support—the sad remains of a lush world long gone. “It has to be.”
“But I cannot hear the water at all,” said Lilli, bravely wiping her tears before cocking her head to listen. “It must be a very quiet river.”
“It is,” admitted Myrina. “An old and tired river. But it is still alive, and it will lead us to the sea. Come, drink now.”
For a while they were silent, gorging themselves with water. At first, it was as if Myrina’s throat had forgotten how to swallow, but once she had managed to force down the first few mouthfuls, she could feel the cool liquid trickling through her body, restoring life wherever it went.
When her belly was full, Myrina lay back against the rocks and closed her eyes. So many days without rest, and the last, agonizing stretch without water. For how long had she carried Lilli? Two whole days? No, it was not possible.
A startled shriek and a sudden flapping of wings pulled her back upright. Seeing her sister’s terror as she kept flinging her arms at some invisible enemy, Myrina immediately drew the knife from her belt.
“It was a bird!” cried Lilli, furiously rubbing her leg. “It bit me! Where did it go? Don’t let it bite me again!”
Myrina held up a hand against the sun and eyed the two scrawny vultures circling overhead. “Hateful vermin!” she muttered, putting away the knife and reaching for her bow instead. “Expecting to feast on us today—”
“Why do the gods despise us so?” Lilli rocked back and forth, hugging her knees. “Why do they want us dead?”
“I would not waste my time speculating about the gods.” Myrina eased her finest bird arrow out of the quiver. “If they really wanted to kill us, they could have done so forty times.” She laid the arrow on the string, rose slowly on her feet, and pulled back the bow. “Clearly, some power wants to keep us alive.”
Later, when they were lying by the small driftwood fire under a starlit sky, digesting their unsavory meal, Lilli snuggled up to Myrina and said, “Mama came for me, you know. I saw her so clearly….”
Saying nothing, Myrina merely drew her sister closer.
“She looked happy,” Lilli went on. “She wanted to embrace me, but then she saw you, and I think she was afraid you would be upset with her for taking me away … so she didn’t.”
They lay quietly for a while.
It seemed so distant now, their life back home. And yet the memories of their lost friends and loved ones were still strong enough to choke and silence them both, just as Myrina knew that the terrible, evil reek of sickness and death would surely linger in her nose forever.
After leaving the village, they had both been miserably ill with shakes and convulsions. Myrina had been convinced they would die—in fact, she had almost welcomed the thought. But then she slowly began recovering, as did Lilli, although her sister’s fever lingered long enough to harm her eyes. For several horrible mornings in a row, the girl had woken up from fitful sleep seeing less and less, until finally she saw nothing at all. “Is it near daybreak?” she had asked on that last day, peering helplessly into the bright sunshine.
“It is not far,” Myrina had whispered, drawing Lilli into a sobbing embrace and kissing her again and again, while the awful truth had clawed at her throat from the inside.
But they were still alive. They had survived the pestilence, and now they had survived the desert, too. From here on, things could only get better. Myrina refused to think otherwise.
“Are you sure—” Lilli began, as she did every night. But this time she did not finish the sentence but merely bit her lip and looked away. They both knew there would be no answer to Lilli’s big question until they reached their destination. Could the Moon Goddess in the big city undo the damage of the fever and restore her eyesight? No one but the Goddess knew the answer.
“I am sure of one thing,” said Myrina, polishing their mother’s bracelet with the skirt of her tunic. Underneath the stubborn residue of soot was the jackal-headed serpent she remembered so well, staring at her with blackened eyes. “Mother would be proud if she saw you now.”
Lilli looked up quizzically, unable to fix her gaze on Myrina’s face. “You don’t think she would be angry with me for being useless?”
Myrina drew the girl closer. “Useless is for farmers who don’t farm, and herdsmen who don’t herd. Remember that you are a sister. A sister does not need eyes to be useful, merely a smile and a brave heart.”
Lilli sighed heavily, her shoulders slumping as she leaned on their traveling satchel. “I am only your half sister. Perhaps that is why I do not have your courage; had I had your father, I might have shared your hunter’s heart.”
“Hush! Fathers come and fathers go, but Earth stays the same. Just as there is no such thing as half a heart, there can be no such thing as half a sister.”
“I suppose,” muttered Lilli. “But I am still not sure I can ever smile again.”
“Well, I am,” said Myrina, resting her chin on Lilli’s head. “Remember that she who braves the lion becomes the lion. We will brave this lion, and we will smile again.”
“But lions don’t smile,” muttered Lilli, still hugging the satchel.
Myrina made a growl and started biting her sister’s neck until they were both giggling. “Then we shall teach them how.”
MYRINA AND LILLI FOLLOWED the river for ten days.
They now had plenty of water to drink, but the land surrounding them on all sides was barren. Whenever Myrina came across a living plant that tasted halfway edible, she would munch a few leaves or tubers, then wait a while to observe the effects on her stomach before offering it to Lilli. And whenever the languid stream pooled in a basin of slightly cooler water, Myrina would prowl the perimeter, trying to spear a lonely fish.
On particularly hot days, an animal or two might come down to the river to drink with abandon, and thanks to her bow and a few intact arrows Myrina was usually able to serve up a side of unfamiliar meat for dinner. Those were the good moments. Staying up late, eating as much as they possibly could, the sisters inevitably found themselves circling back to life as it used to be.
How trifling the daily sorrows of their village seemed now. And how much greater all the little pleasures. The comforts of family, the worries and the gossip … it all blended together in a bright and happy dream, an impossibly innocent world that survived in words alone.
Since they had both been born in the Tamash Village, Myrina and Lilli had never thought of it as anything other than home. And when the other children occasionally jeered at them for being foreigners with foreign habits, their mother dismissed it as ignorance. “They think it is evil for a woman to have children with different men,” she would say, rolling her eyes at the subject. “Little do they know their own father may not be the one they think it is.”
In addition to the whoring charge there had been the issue of their mother’s mysterious skills with herbs and roots. While the other village women might spend their days gossiping about her sinful ways, as soon as an ailment struck, they would be upon her doorstep, begging for a remedy.
More than once, the village elders had come to the hut with their fine robes and carved staffs, asking that Talla no longer practice her foreign arts. But she had merely shaken her head at them, knowing their wives would never let them drive her out of town. On one particular occasion, Myrina remembered her mother taunting the village chief, saying, “You think I put a curse on your little one-eyed bird, Nholo? Maybe if you didn’t sit on it all da
y long, talking rubbish, it would soar to new heights.”
But even those once-unhappy moments were beatified by the golden light of memory. Grudges were forgotten and debts quite forgiven; Myrina was amazed to see how easily death stripped away all the niggling details of life and left an entire village of petty people cleansed and amiable.
As day after day of monotonous travel went by, the sisters would often return to the same few memories over and over, as if the pleasure grew with repetition. “I can still see it,” Lilli would say, half-giggling. “Mother trying to catch the old rooster…. Oh, she was so mad! And all those young men so desperately in love with you, but too afraid to even smile at you—”
Myrina never corrected Lilli when she spoke like that. She merely laughed along and let her sister roam around in this imaginary past for as long as possible. The present, she knew, would come back soon enough.
ON THE ELEVENTH DAY, the river widened into a delta and now, finally, Myrina began seeing evidence of other human beings. Narrow dug-out canals for irrigation shaped the landscape in spiderweb patterns, and yet not a trickle of water made it into the fields. The soil was as parched here as it had been at home, and there was not a farmer to be seen. “What is it?” Lilli asked at last, unnerved by her sister’s long silence.
“Nothing.” Myrina tried to sound cheerful, but the truth was, she was sick with worry. Wherever she looked, she saw abandoned farming tools and desolate strips of pastureland. The only animals in evidence were scraggy crows circling the sky. Where were the people?
“Shh!” Lilli stopped abruptly and held up her hand. “Do you hear that?”
“What?” All Myrina heard were the cries of the birds.
“Voices”—Lilli turned her head this way and that—”men’s voices.”
Infused with hope, Myrina clambered up on a large boulder for a better look around. Before them was a coastline and large body of water—a sight that filled her with relief. “It is the sea!” she exclaimed, pointing without thinking. “It is enormous … just as Mother said it would be.”
No one back in the village, except their mother, had ever seen the sea. But the elders had often talked of it, all nodding in agreement, sitting in the shade underneath the fig tree. It was big and blue and dangerous, they had said, absentmindedly batting away the flies, and on its distant shores were cities full of danger and suffering, cities full of evil strangers….
Their mother had always laughed at such speech, reminding her daughters that men tend to resent things beyond their understanding. “The city is no more evil than the village,” she had once said, brushing it all aside with a hand covered in bread dough. “In fact, people there are a great deal less jealous than they are here.”
“Then why did you leave?” Myrina wanted to know, sprinkling more flour on her mother’s hands. “And why can we not go back there?”
“Maybe we will. But for now, this is where the Goddess wants us to be.”
Myrina had not been fooled. She knew her mother was concealing something to do with the Moon Goddess. But no matter how she phrased her questions, she could not provoke the answers she was hoping for. All her mother ever said was, “We are her faithful servants, Myrina. The Goddess will always be there for us. Never question that.”
AS THE SISTERS MADE their way through the clingy weeds of the estuary, Myrina found that the sea was surprisingly shallow and marshy. Tall reeds were growing out of the water, and there were no waves to speak of, hardly even ripples. “I don’t like this,” said Lilli at one point, when they were both knee-deep in mud and slimy sea grass. “What if there are snakes?”
“I doubt there are,” said Myrina, lying, as she stabbed the water in front of them with her spear. “Snakes don’t like open water.”
Just then, a burst of voices made them both stop.
“That is what I heard before!” hissed Lilli, pressing nervously against her sister’s back. “Can you see them?”
Myrina pushed aside the reeds with her spear shaft. Through the tangle of green stems she could make out a small boat carrying three fishermen. They were too busy with their nets to notice her and Lilli, and she quickly decided they were hardworking men and thus trustworthy.
“Come!” She pulled Lilli through the water, anxious to reach the boat before it disappeared. The idea of spending another night in the dusty riverbed or in this marsh swarming with bugs was unbearable. Wherever those three fishermen were going, she and Lilli were going, too.
As soon as they were close enough to be seen, Myrina called out to the men, waving her spear in the air. She was in water up to her waist now, with Lilli riding on her back. Not surprisingly, the men stared at her in disbelief.
“They have seen us!” gasped Myrina, wading through the muddy water with unsteady strides. “They are smiling and waving us onboard—” But as she came closer to the boat, she saw that the men were not smiling. They were gesturing frantically, their faces contorted with fear.
Moments later, eager hands pulled first Lilli, then Myrina, onboard the boat, after which the men collapsed in relief and pointed into the water with long strings of explanation in a foreign language. “What is it?” Lilli wanted to know, clinging to her sister’s muddy tunic. “What are they saying?”
“I wish I understood,” muttered Myrina. Judging by their looks, the fishermen were a father and his two grown sons, and they did not seem like men who were easily shaken. “I think—”
Just then, the riverboat rocked, and the younger men instantly reached to steady their father. Myrina saw them all glancing nervously at the water, and she finally understood the source of their alarm.
A long, speckled form circled the boat, its enormous body sliding through the mire. Was it a large fish? But she saw neither head nor tail, merely a never-ending body as thick around as a human being. A colossal snake.
“What is it?” whimpered Lilli, sensing the sudden tension. “Tell me!”
Myrina could barely speak. She had seen large serpents before, certainly, but never anything like this. “Oh, it is nothing,” she finally managed to say. “Just seaweed clinging to the hull.”
After a few anxious moments the snake seemed to lose interest in the boat, and the men relaxed and began talking again. They checked a few more traps, but their catch was meager. Only a dozen or so fish and a couple of eels, but even so, the fishermen seemed in good spirits as they picked up their poles and laboriously propelled the boat forward with small, rhythmic jerks.
“Where are we going?” whispered Lilli, shivering with fatigue.
Myrina drew her sister’s head to her chest and stroked her grimy cheek. “We are going to the big city, little lion. The Moon Goddess is waiting for us there, remember?”
PART II
DAWN
CHAPTER SEVEN
The Amazons will gladly guide you on your way.
—AESCHYLUS, Prometheus Bound
GATWICK AIRPORT
IF MR. LUDWIG WAS SURPRISED TO FIND ME SITTING AT THE DEPARture gate, casually leafing through an abandoned boating magazine, he didn’t show it. He merely nodded, as if my presence was to be expected, and said, “Coffee?”
As soon as he had disappeared, I deflated with relief and exhaustion. For all my assumed calm, the past few hours had undoubtedly been the most hectic of my life, and I had been at a breathless gallop ever since finding Granny’s notebook in the attic. Fortunately, my father had been perfectly available for a small adventure and had insisted on driving me all the way to the airport. “Although I do confess to a slight curiosity,” he had said, quite reasonably, while we were parked briefly in front of my Oxford college and I was struggling to squeeze a hastily packed suitcase into the backseat of the Mini.
“It’s just for a night or two,” I replied, sliding into the passenger seat and tightening my disheveled ponytail. “Maybe three.”
The engine was still going, and my father was still holding the steering wheel, but the car was not moving. “What about your teaching
?”
I moved uncomfortably in my seat. “I’ll be back before you know it. It’s a research trip. Someone is actually paying me to go to Amsterdam—”
“I take it young Moselane is not your benefactor?” My father was staring into the rearview mirror as he said this, and when I twisted around I saw James emerging from college with a tennis racket over his shoulder.
I suddenly felt hot all over, and it was not a pleasant sensation. There he was, reason incarnate, as gorgeous as ever … would it not be wise to inform him that I was leaving, rather than sneaking off like this?
“Oh, bugger,” I said, checking my watch. “We really need to go.”
My father kept glancing at the rearview mirror as we rolled down Merton Street, probably wondering how to present this inauspicious turn of events to my mother, and I felt the prickly yarn of guilt in my throat grow bigger with every twitch of his eye. But how could I possibly tell him the truth? He had never taken any steps to discuss Granny, had never told me about the notebook she had clearly left for me. To open the subject now on our way to the airport at what was, to him, breakneck speed, could hardly be a good idea. “I’m sorry, Daddy,” I muttered, patting his arm. “I’ll explain when I return.”
We drove in silence for a bit. Out of the corner of my eye I could see his habitual dislike of confrontation wrestling with his growing parental concern, and in the end he took a deep breath and said, “Just promise me this is not some sort of”—he had to do a little run-up to pronounce the word—”elopement? You know we are perfectly capable of paying for a wedding reception—”
