Snakehead

by Ann Halam

  “He was set on,” murmured my mother. “Cut down from above and behind, see, Dicty? With a heavy sword. And the slash through his shoulder, looks like the same weapon. They could easily have killed him, but they didn’t.”

  “The rest was done when he was on the ground,” said the boss. “With boots, fists, and here’re the marks of an armored boxing glove. I’d say at least three men.”

  “The cowards!” wailed Anthe. “How dare they! I hate them! I’ll kill them!”

  Moumi prepared a length of catgut by passing it through flame, and threaded a needle that she’d treated the same way. Koukla poured wine into the smaller wounds to clean them. I’d seen this team deal with broken bodies before: I trusted them. I’d been afraid he was dying, so relief flooded me with fury. “I’ll do it for you, Anthe. I have kept the peace, because I know the price we’ll all pay. But this means war!”

  Moumi stared at me, across Palikari’s body. “Perseus!”

  She was right, it wasn’t for me to say.

  The boss looked up from his careful work of searching the head wound, to make sure no dirt or debris remained. “Means war?” he said, head on one side. “I don’t think so. Strangely enough, I don’t believe the king means war. No, the truce still holds.”

  I couldn’t believe it. I was dumbstruck.

  “If we want it to, at least.”

  That’s how things were when Kore found us. We had not heard her coming down the yard stairs, barefoot, and she was not carrying a light. She stood there, a dark blue mantle wrapped over her white sleeping shift, taking in the blood-daubed scene. “What happened?” she gasped. “Great All! It’s Pali!

  Who did this?”

  Koukla brought another basin of hot water for the boss, and carried away the one that was fouled with blood and dirt, shaking her head. “What a mess,” she muttered.

  “He got into a fight,” I said. “It’s not as bad as it looks.”

  “He was attacked, you mean,” cried Anthe. “A cowardly, brutal attack. And we know who’s responsible. But we can’t touch him!”

  “You m-m-mean, the king did this?”

  My mother gave Anthe a warning look, and went on sewing Pali’s shoulder. The boss was swabbing fresh blood from the scalp wound, ready for Moumi to sew it next. “The king Polydectes is my full brother,” he said quietly. “As I’m sure you are aware, my dear. I don’t know if people have heard of him, in your great city so far away, but he has made our island both feared and respected. Our agreement, which works most of the time, is that Seatown is my house, so to speak, where my ways are followed. The High Place belongs to the king and his men, and members of my household respect the boundary. If Palikari broke the agreement tonight, which we won’t know until we can ask him, I’m afraid I’m to blame, because I encouraged him to go in search of information.”

  “But you didn’t send him!” Anthe broke in. “That’s why we didn’t tell you!”

  “Thank you, child, but I will decide how to answer my brother’s men.”

  Then, for once, Dicty’s calm gave way. He wiped his hands on a towel and went with stumbling steps to sit on a bench by the dining room, his head bowed, twisting the towel between his hands. “He would always take the best,” he muttered, “when we were young, when it was Dicty and little Dectes. The proper thing to do, when gifts are offered to the royal house, is to take a modest share and say, ‘The rest is to be distributed, among the vassals, for the poor.’ Dectes always took the most and the best of everything, the best colts, the best weaving, the best fine-worked metal. His hands were always grasping, never open. Our mother died when he was born, you know. After that, every real lady packed up and left. Our father and his women treated the boy with such scorn. So now he is Polydectes, the ruler of many, and he rules by force…. He is the one who understands these times. I was born too late. The old days are gone, and I’ve tried too long to keep them alive.”

  He raised his head; there were tears on his face. “A city on a hill is not a good thing! All these ‘High Places’ that kings are so proud of these days are built on fear. In civilized times cities are built on the shore, or in fine valleys, without walls, welcoming to strangers. Oh, I know Polydectes isn’t alone. The people of Serifos accept him because he is no worse than many rulers in the Middle Sea, that’s the sorry truth. But I did not raise him, teach him well. I am to blame for that.”

  “What could you have done?” asked my mother. “When he challenged the throne? Gone to war with him? Killed your own brother? That would have been a hateful act.”

  “Ha!” said the boss, shaking his head. “Spoken like an Achaean, Danae of Argos. I did not make the truce for family reasons. I did it for my island. For Serifos!”

  Kore was not listening to them. She wasn’t hearing the old story of two brothers. She was staring at Palikari’s battered body with a look of sick horror.

  “Why did Palikari go to the High Place? Was it because of me?”

  We couldn’t answer her. We were trying to think of a lie, and this was written on our faces, when Palikari himself stirred. He half sat up, and gave a moan. “I was ambushed,” he croaked. “Anthe?” She darted over to him and he clutched her, talking feverishly, his eyes wild. “We have to get away from here. It was a trap, I was ambushed, but the news is good. The king will not touch her. He’s heard some story that she’s god-touched, marked for sacrifice. The crazy innards-readers in the High Place confirmed it.”

  Anthe tried to get him to lie down. “Hush. Shhh, sweetheart, lie quiet.”

  Pali stared around at the bright kitchen, and touched the bandage on his shoulder. “Oh, I’m home,” he mumbled in a puzzled voice, and slumped back unconscious again.

  No one spoke. The terrible look of fate was in Kore’s eyes. She stood very straight. I had the feeling that she could not see me, that she was sleepwalking or in darkness.

  “The king is right,” she said. “The king is right. I am a sacrifice.”

  “What do you mean?” cried Anthe. “What’s this about? You’re safe with us!”

  She is not safe with herself, I thought.

  “Kore,” said Papa Dicty, “I think I should tell you what I have heard myself: news that I haven’t yet shared with my family. It’s a story from the far east of the Middle Sea that is making its way around the ports. I heard it from an agent of Taki the shipowner. The big earthquake was not in Libya, it was at Haifa, on the Phoenician coast. They say that the great queen, Cassiopeia the Ethiopian, boasted that her daughter Andromeda was wiser and more beautiful than some Supernatural or other. The earthquake was the result, and the queen is required to sacrifice her daughter to appease the God. Cassiopeia now maintains that she’s holding the princess in prison, preparing her for the day of sacrifice. Rumor has it that in fact the girl has escaped, and no one knows where she is.”

  “Oooh,” breathed Anthe, “that’s why you weren’t worried about the king wanting her!”

  “Be quiet, Anthe.” The boss looked at “Kore” and added gently, “I know the name Cassiopeia, of course. She’s a very famous ruler. I don’t know how much of the rest of the story to believe. Haifa is a long way from here. I was waiting for you to tell us.”

  “It’s all true. I am Andromeda.”

  And my heart leapt, even then, because now I knew her name.

  She went to Dicty, and knelt in front of him.

  “My father, the usurper may rule in the High Place but you are the true king, the guide and protector of your people. Let me tell you how it happened. The priests said that the first quake was a warning. The next would be devastation, another Great Disaster, unless I was given to them. But no one locked me up, so I ran away. The queen did not believe I would run away; princesses of my race do not run away…. You have shown me nothing but kindness, and I have brought trouble to add to your troubles. I’m very, very sorry. But it’s over, I’m going back.

  She stood up gracefully, her head held high. “I knew when I wrote the ‘Dark Water’ song
, when I felt the dead crying to me, that I had to go back. But it was you who taught me to do right, Papa Dicty. I found my courage here.”

  Anthe and my mother stared at each other, openmouthed.

  “Hmm,” said the boss at last. “Princess Andromeda, I hope I haven’t taught you to put your neck on the block for no good reason. Priests claim a human sacrifice will stop an earthquake, or end a drought. Have we ever seen that proved? I’ve heard that the priests of Haifa are jealous of your mother’s power. Are you sure you trust them?”

  Andromeda shook her head slowly, but she hardly seemed to hear him.

  “There are veils and veils, and behind them is the truth. I went to the Enclosure today to rededicate myself. I am sacrificed in my heart. I am ready to die.”

  She looked us in the eye, one by one, standing so straight and proud. It was heartbreaking. Maybe it was easier for the others: they could tell themselves she was deluded.

  Papa Dicty sighed. “Well, well. We should all be prepared to die. Let me give this thought.” He patted the princess on the shoulder, and stood up. “Anthe! Get out of those rags and go and bathe; you’ll feel much better. Let’s finish the sewing and get this young man to bed. Perseus, we’ll need your muscle.”

  Anthe looked down at the tatters of her skirt, and her blood-spattered bare legs. “All right, boss,” she said meekly, and took herself off.

  Palikari had come around again by the time we got him into bed. He was able to sip a cup of warm watered wine, and tell us about the ambush. “My so-called friend was waiting for me,” he said. “We were supposed to talk in the cemetery, but he didn’t feel safe there. He insisted I had to come farther up the steps. I didn’t suspect a thing. He told me about Kore, that she was god-touched, and then they jumped me. I thought I was done for. But they didn’t mean to kill, they just sliced me up and kicked me around.” He grinned at me. “I’ve got a message for you, big kid.”

  “About Kore?”

  He began to shake his head, and winced at the pain. “Our business … I’m to tell you Polydectes the king says, ‘Next time don’t send a servant, Perseus, and don’t hide behind an old man. Come yourself.’” For a moment the boss was out of the picture, and I was no longer a “big kid.” We were two young men, my friend had been beaten up, we were both furious. Pali set the cup down and lay back. “When you do go up there,” he remarked reflectively, “do me a favor. Take me with you, great prince. And let’s be armed, eh?”

  “You bet we will.”

  Palikari closed his eyes.

  “I’ll sit with him for a while,” said the boss. “You go back to that shining girl of yours. See if you can convince her she’s not dead yet.”

  Koukla had gone to bed; the lamps were out. My mother, Anthe and Andromeda were in the dining room, in firelight by the great hearth. It was the dark before dawn, a chill hour even at midsummer. Anthe had changed into clean clothes and was combing out her wet hair. Moumi had made some sage tea. Andromeda was looking tired and shaken, but strangely calm. They were telling her about the harsh underbelly of the truce: the mines worked by kidnapped children, the brutal soldiers preying on villagers. Moumi poured me some tea. I sat holding the bowl, breathing fragrant steam.

  “What kind of metal is it, in the mines?” asked Andromeda. “Is it gold?”

  “No, mostly the new black metal,” said my mother. “Serifos is rotten with it.”

  “Oh yes, I’ve heard of that. It’s very important. So Serifos is rich?”

  “The king is rich.” Anthe dragged her comb viciously, and glowered into the red smolder of the fire. “Not the rest of us. He plays his Mainland friends off against each other, keeps the wealth and we’re supposed to be grateful. The people see him as a necessary evil. They call our boss ‘Papa Dicty.’ They look up to him, they revere him, but they accept the usurper. The boss himself, you heard him, half believes that Polydectes has the right to rule. Because gentleness is out of fashion. Because kindness and reason are signs of weakness!”

  “There’s something else you should know, Andromeda,” added Moumi. “Polydectes wants me for his wife. He hasn’t been able to touch me: I’m his brother’s adopted daughter. But now that Perseus is a man, he feels he has to challenge my son, and claim me. I think that’s why Palikari was set upon. The king wants us to break the truce, because that would be a triumph over his brother. But he’s getting impatient.”

  I’m not a man, I thought. Not really. I’m not anything like ready.

  Andromeda nodded. “I see. Impatient.”

  Then no one spoke. The princess, who had not yet looked at me, seemed to gaze inward, as if looking at her own death, the fate she freely accepted. “Why didn’t your mother try to save you?” whispered Anthe.

  “Anthe!” murmured my mother.

  “No,” said Andromeda. “It’s all right, I don’t mind. She couldn’t say no, Anthe. She came to Haifa, she married my father, Kephus, knowing what she’d have to accept.”

  “The child sacrifices,” said Moumi.

  “Yes.”

  In the terrible times, right after the Great Disaster, hideous things had been committed in our Turning Islands, and in the palaces of Kriti. The legacy of those nightmare years was still with us, making cruelty and rule by force acceptable. What the Phoenicians did was something else, something worse. They practiced child sacrifice, not just on rare occasions but regularly, without shame.

  They’d always done it. It was a scandal we’d heard about even on Serifos. But the Phoenician cities were extremely rich and extremely powerful. And Cassiopeia was a great queen.

  “She knew it was horrible, and she let it continue,” said Andromeda. “To keep her power. How could she refuse, when they told her it was her turn?”

  The wall paintings were rising out of the night, their faded colors woken by the gray dawn. The caïque had been for Andromeda, I realized, not for us. The boss had known who she was, and he’d been afraid the king would take her and send her back to Haifa, for some kind of reward.

  “Do you think there are people searching for you?”

  Andromeda shrugged. “I suppose so. I made it look as if I’d gone south, into Africa. My nurse, who helped me get away, comes from the desert. She’s back with her family; she should be safe from retribution. I took a ship to the west. When I was doing it, I thought I had everything planned, but I didn’t. I didn’t think about what my mother would do when she found I was gone. I just ran. Then I met the refugees in Naxos. They couldn’t have known me; they were from a country on the edge of the quake zone, far from the city. I paid their fares with gold, not because I was generous, but because I was scared and ashamed…. I suppose the shipowner may have given me away. I paid him with so much gold. He didn’t know who I was then, but he must have realized by now. It was his agent who told Papa Dicty the rumor that Andromeda had escaped.”

  “Taki will have melted the bracelets down,” said Anthe. “If he thinks he harbored a runaway princess, he won’t have told anyone. It would be bad for business.”

  “It doesn’t matter, Anthe. I’m not running anymore.”

  We were silent, brought back to earth, but she continued, almost cheerfully. “There’s a festival when our rains begin. It’s in the tenth month. That’s when I’m to be given to the monster…. They call it a sea monster, because the quakes come from the sea. I don’t know what it is really, but I know it will kill me. I’ll have to find a ship going east, as soon as the wind changes.”

  There would be no eastbound ships as long as the summer wind was blowing.

  I have a month, I thought with desperate hope. A month to convince her not to go back. But I knew why she was refusing to look at me. She had tried to run, we had fallen in love, but it was no use. Her fate had tracked her down, and it would not let her go. I thought of war on Serifos, and I felt as if I was being torn apart. A ray of sunlight struck across the floor. Mémé the cat walked in, yawning, and stopped in surprise to see us up.

  “We shoul
d go to bed,” said Moumi. “We’re going to be dog-tired later, and we have a restaurant to run.”

  She was right. Dicty’s must open as usual. Good food, good conversation, a welcome for strangers: life the way it ought to be. We must not be beaten.

  Before I went to bed, I went to Dicty’s office. I opened the safe, and took out the tallyboards where she had written down the “Dark Water” song. The dancing marks seemed to be alive: the living, immortal souls of human words…. Andromeda had told Dicty, so casually, that she had invented a new kind of writing. Could that be true? Yes, I thought. It’s true. I felt the presence of a mysterious power, greater, more real than all Taki’s treasure, or all the black metal in the islands. A power that might change the world. How could the girl who had created this new thing be marked for death?

  I thought of the crying and weeping I had heard when I was on the hill with Anthe. Andromeda must have been in the Sacred Enclosure then. I imagined (no, I knew!) that the spirits of rock and tree and water had wept at the moment when my beloved dedicated herself to death, of her own free will. Why would the spirits weep, if she was right to sacrifice herself?

  I had been running away from the Gods all my life. My mother had insisted on teaching me all she knew about the Achaean Supernaturals. She said I needed to understand what I was. Me, I’d never cared. I wanted to be like the boss, who was far too rational to believe you could appease an earthquake by human sacrifice. He honored the Great Mother, without fuss, and ignored all the rest of them. He loved life, he tried to do right. That was the religion for me.

  Now I wanted to understand, and I couldn’t.

  I remembered her on the dockside at Naxos: her black eyes snapping when she offered to hold my tunic while I dusted off the louts who had insulted Moumi. Now I didn’t feel any of the flustered panic of being in love. I could see no way out of our troubles. I just knew that I would stand by her, and she would stand by me. It was enough.