by Ann Halam
“Ah, now we come to Perseus. Did you hope we were leaving you out? Don’t be embarrassed! As the least of my vassals, I know you can’t afford a horse. Your foster father’s a taverna keeper, which I’m glad our parents didn’t live to see, but I suppose old Dicty’s found his own level. Where would he find that kind of money, eh?”
The high table yelled with laughter.
“You’re absolutely right,” I said, loud and clear. But I didn’t stand up. “I’m stone-broke. What do you suggest?”
“Give him your mother!” shouted one of the so-called nobles. “Let him have that secondhand princess as Hippodameia’s bathroom maid.”
“I’d like a pretty yeller-haired bathroom maid myself!” bellowed another of them. “I’ll have her after you, sire. Before we pass her around the barracks, eh?”
“Bit long in the tooth, but she’d do with the lamp blown out!”
Anthe had grabbed my knee under the table. She seemed to be trying to gouge out the bone with her fingernails, but I didn’t need extreme pain to help keep my head. I knew the insults were meant to shake me. But I took note: Tall, older bruiser with a boxer’s nose and ponytail. Fat slob with pasty double chins. Scrawny young blood with the armlets and the goatee beard. I won’t forget you three, I thought as I sat grinning uncertainly—like a pitiful oversized clown, too dumb to tell the difference between raucous fun and damned insults.
Polydectes was wrapped in a showy mantle in the Serifos sunburst style: a gold-and-yellow sun the size of a bonfire splattered over his chest. If I looked like an idiot, he looked like a strutting cockscomb. But I knew he wasn’t, and his friends weren’t fools either. I knew them by what they’d done to Serifos. The king was a tough, cunning, ruthless man in the prime of life, and the men around him were the same. He was no pushover. Yet he was speaking words my father had told me I would hear, and he didn’t know it. He thought he was in control of this, but he was not….
“Your mother’s safe,” he said gravely, after waiting for the laughter to die. He was pretending that the insults weren’t his design: as if his men would have dared to speak like that about Danae without orders. “The gift I want is very different. I’m going to set you a challenge, my fine young fellow. Bring me the head of the Medusa, with the eyes that turn men to stone. Do you think you can manage that?”
(Afterward, some tale-tellers said I made the offer. I boasted I could get him the Medusa Head, trying to make an impression, and Polydectes called my bluff. This is not true, and no one who knows me at all believes it….)
There was a hubbub of excitement. Polydectes’ men were going oooh! because they’d been primed for this moment. The Yacht Club kids hadn’t known what was coming, but they’d heard of the Medusa. She’d been a famous challenge—until so many champions had failed to come back that the quest went out of style. Anthe and Andromeda were in shock for a different reason. I’d told them practically word for word what the king would say.
“The Medusa,” whispered the girl on the other side of me, a traveler from Keros. “Great Mother, Perseus, your tyrant mustn’t get hold of that monstrous thing! A weapon that can turn armies to stone! He could rule the Middle Sea!”
“Don’t be dumb, Kia,” muttered Anthe. “He doesn’t want the Snakehead, he wants rid of Perseus. No one comes back alive from that so-called quest.”
I ignored them. I was fascinated, detached, watching it all unfold. I said what I was supposed to say, shrugging and grinning like a yokel.
“All right. I’ll give it a try, if you like.”
Polydectes smiled. I saw that he was hungry to be revenged on Dicty, and on my mother for refusing him. But just getting me out of the way wasn’t enough; there had to be a twist…. He’s being used, I thought coldly. He’s doomed.
“Accepted!” cried the king with a flourish. The sunburst mantle flashed.
The hall burst into wild applause. The Yacht Club kids were banging and yelling too, not to be outdone. They didn’t care that we were unarmed, outnumbered, and things could still turn nasty. They’re pretty crazy, boys and girls alike, the young braves who wander the Middle Sea looking for fun. “Perseus!” they shouted. “Perseus! Perseus! Perseus! The Snakehead! Perseus!”
As if I was the star of a ball-game team, and the Medusa Head our winning goal.
There was another dessert course, salty this time, with more wines. As it was laid, I saw Polydectes speak to the chief steward. The man came over to me, smirking. “Young sir,” he murmured with fake deference and a pitying grin, “the king has asked me to tell you, feel free to take your leave now. An entertainment is about to start, and we don’t want to shock the young ladies. It’s dancing girls, you see.” There’s nothing wrong with dancing girls. But I knew that the “entertainers” here would be kidnapped villagers, untrained, unwilling, humiliated…. And there was nothing I could do.
“The king hopes you’ll call on the High Place for weapons and supplies. We know your foster father won’t be able to equip you, and we wouldn’t want to put him out.”
“That’s all right,” I said. “We’ve got plenty of meat cleavers.”
Herding drunken Yacht Club kids was like filling a sieve with water. Somehow, I don’t know how, we got them out of there. Outside the hateful walls it was still black night, though dawn couldn’t be far off. Anthe had left a bundle of torches by the road, with the offering baskets. She and Andromeda lit them and handed them around. Gliko gave one to me, and punched me in the shoulder. He was very happy.
“Go, Perseus!” he crowed. “The Medusa Head! That’ll make your name!” He peered into my face. “Hey, you look a bit glum. You can do it, can’t you?”
I shrugged. “I suppose.”
“Tha’s the spirit. Your tyrant’s an idiot. Glad I was there to see you take him on.”
He winked at Andromeda and launched himself after the pack. The away team went dancing, stumbling and singing down the hill. Anthe had gone with them.
I looked at Andromeda, she looked at me.
“They’ll be sober in the morning,” she said.
“I’m sober now.”
“I know you are.”
We let the bobbing lights vanish and then followed slowly, heads down and silent as a pair of tired mules. Neither of us said a word until we reached the cemetery. We sat on the low wall, and she took my hand. The eastern sky was gray; the fading night was cold.
“What’s it like where you live?” I asked.
I could hardly see her face, but I felt her smile.
“Our city’s on the coast. To the east and north and south, you look out and the land goes on and on, forever. It’s an ocean of land; the caravans sail across it. But I had never left Haifa before I ran away. Except once, by sea, to visit Eygpt.”
“I meant where you live. The palace?”
“Oh … It’s not at all like here. Nothing’s square, except the gates. Nothing’s stone, except the doorways to the public rooms, the throne room, and my father’s house, and the halls of judgment. There are gardens on terraces high above the ground, and there’s the bathing place, which is underground and spring fed. There are far too many towers, some of them very tall and spindly, with windows like little black eyes. From the outside it looks exactly like a gathering of giant termites’ nests, painted white….”
She could talk now, because she didn’t have to lie. She’d been our silent mystery girl when she was still fighting for her life. “I don’t know what a termite is.”
“It’s a kind of ant. They make huge nests like blobby towers of earth in our fields: as tall as you. They look half-melted. But they don’t have windows.” She looked at the toes of her sandals. “Termites eat anything.”
I noticed that being by the graves didn’t bother her. She was no more afraid of the dead than I was. “I didn’t like the way that brute kept staring at you.”
“You mean the king? He won’t kidnap me. Men like that don’t meddle in priests’ business. All those horses … Why are hors
es so important, Perseus?”
“Status symbols. Signs of power. They’re important to the Greeks, not to us. But Polydectes wants to be a Greek, an Achaean. That’s why he’s obsessed with my mother.”
“I dream of horses. I don’t know why. I’ve never ridden one.”
The east was growing brighter by the minute. I let go of her hand and rolled my torch on the ground to put it out. Andromeda’s had already guttered. She used the charred end to draw lines and curls on the rocks at our feet.
S’bw’r … I whispered it. “I wish I had a secret name. I would tell it only to you.”
“But you do. I think you’ve spent your life hiding your secret name from everyone, except maybe your mother. Pretending it doesn’t exist, and you’re not him.”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“Son of Zeus.”
“Oh, that …” I shrugged it off. There was something I must say, and the half-light gave me courage. “Andromeda, you can’t go back. What about the new kind of writing? What’ll happen to that incredible, wonderful idea? Don’t you care that it will be lost? What if no one can ever write down ‘Dark Water’ again, and bring it back to life from little flying marks? What if people never learn how to do that again?”
She shook her head listlessly, without looking up. “I thought like that. Now I know it doesn’t matter how talented I am, how clever, how ‘special.’ … Anybody’s child is special. I didn’t tell you, did I? Before I ran away, my mother tried to get the priests to take her, in my place. Of course they said no. A sacrifice has to be young, and virgin. But she’d have died for me. She truly loves me, in her way.”
“Then she’ll protect you.”
“No she won’t. She thinks she brought this punishment down on us, but she’s still a queen, who has to plan for the future. If she refuses to give me up, then even if there’s no earthquake, I’m useless. I’m god-touched now. I can’t rule our country. I can’t make a match that will give us a great alliance. There’s nothing she can do with me.” Andromeda shivered. “It was very unpleasant at home. It was p-p-partly to get away from her guilt and remorse…. No. That’s a lie. I ran because I didn’t want to die. I still don’t want to die. But I’ve accepted it.”
“What about your father?”
“Kephus?” She almost laughed. “Daddy’s very sorry this had to happen. But needs must, if the priests want a princess. He has plenty of other children.”
I’ll kill him, I thought. I’ll smash his teeth through the back of his skull.
But it’s easy enough to say these things, think these things, when you’re big and strong, and you’ve never done anything worse than knock down a lout or two.
“Do you believe in the Gods?” I asked abruptly.
I could see her clear, dark profile; a frown gathering between her level brows; the curve of her lashes, shadowing her cheek. “I believe they are not what we think they are. That there are veils on veils, between us and them …”
“I don’t mean do you believe they exist.” Suddenly I was shaking. I couldn’t stop. “I meant do you believe in the way they tell us to behave, Zeus and the rest, the way my mother taught me. Never mind what they do themselves?”
“What is it? What’s the matter?”
“I do believe,” I said. “I never thought about it before, but now I know. If I kill an innocent person, the Furies will rise from hell and pursue me, and tear my soul to shreds.”
I had heard Polydectes speak his lines. Visions, strange dreams: shadows I could see and other people couldn’t … I couldn’t run away from all that now. I knew the other world was real. More real than earth or stone.
“Everything my father told me has come true. It’s real, Andromeda. I’m supposed to go and kill the Medusa, a beautiful woman who offended the Supernaturals and got turned into a monster. D’you know how she offended? I didn’t know, but I’ve found out. The Yacht Club kids know all about it. Her crime was that a God raped her. The way my father raped my mother.”
“Oh, Perseus …”
“She never did me any harm, but I’m to track her down and kill her, this wretched woman in her misery, because the Supernaturals are playing some game. My father thinks he can make me, but I can’t do it. I won’t do it.”
Andromeda tried to calm me. She stood up and held my head against her breast, imprisoning my clenched fists. She stroked my hair and kissed me. “Perseus, Perseus, my hero, my dearest, my love …” I freed myself so that I could see the light in her eyes. But the way she was looking at me twisted like a knife. How could she look at me like that?
“It’s all right,” she said, like someone soothing a hysterical child. “You’re not going to kill the Medusa. It’s not murder, it’s just an impossible task. You’re going off on a quest to get killed, for some reason of your father’s that we don’t understand. And I am going back to Haifa, because I must. We are both dead, you and I. We are ghosts.”
She smiled at me sadly, gently, full of wise, hopeless love.
“You don’t understand me at all!” I shouted, furious. I pulled my hands away, left her there and went storming off down the hillside.
I ended up at the gates of the Enclosure scratched to bits, dust and thorns all over my party clothes. A spray of morning glory flowers, fluted horns of lilac, blue and violet, nodded from the fence beside me, newly opened to the sun. The gates weren’t barred; they rarely are. I went inside, just because it looked quiet in there. I couldn’t see any sisters around. They must have been working in the herb and vegetable gardens, or in the hospital. The Town Meeting benches had been stored away again. I walked about on the beaten earth, trying not to think about Andromeda. I couldn’t bear her attitude, all that shining love and noble resignation. I wanted her to run for her life, and take me with her.
I looked at the old wooden door to the bathing place, which always seemed like a door into the center of the earth. You had to stoop to get inside; I’d have to bend double, now I was grown. Once, there’d been a hot spring in the caves, with healing powers. The water wasn’t hot anymore; the flow of all our underground water had changed since the Great Disaster. It was still sacred. People were brought to bathe if they were very ill, or mad. They came when they had something important to do, like buying property, getting married, confessing a crime, or before a child was born.
We could bathe; we could bring our dreams to be interpreted. Every other Great Mother ritual was totally secret. Maybe there weren’t any rituals, I thought. Maybe that was what you found out when you became a nun. The big secret, new sister dear, is that there isn’t one. All we do is tend our gardens, and look after the sick and poor. I thought of what Andromeda had said, There are veils on veils…. Great Mother herself was at the back of the nuns’ smoky alcove, on a plinth of dark red stone with veins of black that was supposed to have been brought here from Fira long ago. She knelt on her heels, her arms folded under her small breasts. She was carved from a kind of stone the color of oatmeal, polished very smooth; she was only about two hands high. She was older than the plinth, maybe by a thousand years, but Great Mother’s statues always showed her as a young girl, hardly more than a child.
Once, her features would have been painted, and the painting renewed at ritual times. There was nobody qualified to do that now. Holy Mother was never going to let Popo get his hands on her. But I could feel her watching me, although all I could see was a jaunty, cheerful nose in a smooth shield of a face with a pointed chin.
What should I do? I thought. It wasn’t a prayer, and the cheerful little girl didn’t answer it. But I thought I’d kneel for a moment with her….
“Perseus! Good heavens, boy, what have you been doing to yourself?”
I nearly jumped out of my skin. It was Holy Mother. She’d crept up behind me, the silent way she can, and was standing there leaning on her cane, looking disgusted.
“Uh, nothing. I ran down the hillside, I don’t know why.”
“Huh. You got drunk at that
party, obviously. Have you come to bathe? You’d better, before your mother sees the state of you.”
I had not thought of it, but she was right. I had come to bathe. I nodded. “Well, come on, then.”
I followed her, bending double, into the bathing place, then stripped and oiled myself with the holy oil while she lit some tiny lamps, pointing out where I’d missed a bit, and grumbling on Koukla’s behalf about the state of my best clothes. I knelt, humbly naked, in the worn old bathtub, the remains of red paint with a black design barely visible in the gloom. The old lady opened the holy-water tap, took her personal bronze scraper, thin and fine as a leaf, and went to work. She had no respect. She might as well have been washing a dog, a dirty overgrown puppy, the way she pushed me around. But it was soothing, somehow, although she made me yelp. I felt like a little boy being bathed by my mother. I felt I’d be seriously clean after this, and my mind would be miraculously clear.
The cold douche was so cold it made my eyes water.
“There you are. Out you get, rub yourself down. I’ll fetch you a clean tunic, and don’t worry about the customary donation.”
“Thank you.”
“I’ll put it on Dicty’s temple tithe. Item: scrubbing one enormous child who can’t see a plain path when it’s set down in front of him.”
“Sorry.”
Holy Mother wasn’t very old, no older than the boss, and that’s hardly middle-aged in the islands. We say we’re like our olive trees, at our best between seventy and ninety. But she’d been born with a case of curved spine, which our people consider a sign of a vocation to holy orders. With her slow walk and her cane, and the long gray veil swathing her, she seemed ancient.
I had a feeling she worked on it. All proper Holy Mothers ought to be bent and crabby, and senior to everyone.
“Holy Mother, what happened when the Princess Andromeda came here?”
“None of your business. As long as it’s not immoral, foreigners may use their own forms of worship here. What happened is between the young woman and her God.”
