“I hope I have answers,” she said, trying to ignore the flicker of fire that ran up her arm.
He released her. She put the bowl on the floor and folded her hands on her lap.
He hoisted himself into a sitting position with a sigh. Shadows lingered beneath his eyes. The flesh over his cheekbones was tight and pale and his hands weren’t completely steady, but she resisted the urge to coddle him and simply waited.
The frown remained as he began. “I walked with a god called Damasen,” he said, “in an amazing country; Hesperia, you called it. Athene’s paradise.”
Shock, tinged with disbelief, ran through Themiste. She straightened. “Damasen? Do you mean Aridela’s father?”
“Yes,” he said. He fell into thoughtful silence. Themiste, needing to absorb this amazing information, picked up her spinning and busied her hands, saying only, “That is very peculiar.”
He watched her then asked, “How do you tell the months?”
Thinking a simple answer would suffice, Themiste said, “Long ago, our stargazers mapped the heavens and calculated the passage of time into the calendar we use today.”
He shook his head. “Tell me more,” he said. “Describe the process you use, how it’s different from Mycenae’s.”
“We follow the moon, my lord, as it disappears then grows to round and fertile fullness. When this cycle repeats thirteen times, one of our years has passed. Each of our months lasts twenty-eight days, a consecrated number matching the cycles of women. As you know, our year begins at the rise of the star Iakchos. Kaphtor’s new consort must triumph against the old bull-king on the day before, the one day that lies out of time, between the old year and the new. This day is our holiest. It forms the passage into paradise for the dead consort and crowns the living man.”
Chrysaleon’s intent scrutiny caused a spark of uneasiness to creep up Themiste’s spine. It felt as though he was trying to see inside her. Sensing some secret purpose, she sought to distract him. “In our most ancient times,” she said, putting on a disarming smile, “sacred kings gave their lives twice a year, in winter, at the solstice, and at the height of summer. That one was most important, for the land was thirstiest in the dry heat, and we suffered much destructive pestilence. Long ago, we started our new year in winter; the summer solstice was known as the seventh moon. Some old people still calculate time this way, so you might sometimes hear our first month also called the seventh.”
“Why did you change?”
“Our history tells of a queen who wanted more time with a consort she loved. She changed the custom.” Only after she spoke the words did Themiste realize that perhaps she shouldn’t have. She quickly added, “It was only accepted because we had left the homeland by then and settled on Kaphtor, which doesn’t have the same destructive heat. The twice-yearly sacrifice was no longer needed.”
For a while he was quiet, but then asked the question she had hoped to avoid. “And a great year?”
She wrapped several strands of wool around her spindle as she tried to form the right words. She didn’t want to rouse his suspicions, but the calculation of the eight-year cycle was a secret, spoken of only within the mysteries. “It is a time of one hundred of the moon’s rotations,” she said. “Where have you heard of this?”
For a long while he didn’t answer. At last he said, “Damasen named me the great-year-king.”
The spindle fell from Themiste’s numbed fingers. She rose, stumbling, from the stool, dropping her distaff as well. Her heart hammered as though he’d laid the point of a knife against her throat. “Are you lying to me?”
“No. I don’t know what it means.” He watched her, hoping, maybe, that she would explain. But with difficulty, Themiste backed away without betraying herself further. She bent to retrieve her tools, hiding her face and keeping her hands busy so he wouldn’t see their trembling.
His frown returned but instead of pressing for an answer, he asked, “Can you bring one of my men to me here?”
Themiste called for one of his surviving Mycenaean guard and left them alone to talk.
Her thoughts spun. Had Aridela’s dead father gifted Chrysaleon of Mycenae with such a holy title? How could he have heard of it otherwise? She could think of no way. He must be telling the truth.
She sat down with her pens, ink and papyrus, but didn’t know what to write, and thoughtlessly sharpened her pen until she ruined it. The Oracle Logs spoke of the great-year-king—the ancient tongue called him the thinara king. Several of the prophecies claimed he would bring unimaginable change, not only to Kaphtor, but to the entire world, change that would affect future generations for more years than could be calculated.
Yet another prophecy coming to life in her time.
She readied another pen and forced herself to record everything he had said, knowing there might come a day when she would need to remember their conversation exactly.
A messenger came for her later, saying the Zagreus would like to see her again. She composed her features into a pleasant smile, hoping it would disguise her unease.
He was still sitting up, but he looked exhausted.
“You should rest, my lord,” she said. She remained standing some distance from his pallet.
“I wanted to tell you I’m sending two of my men to Mycenae, to ask my father for help. They’ll join Harpalycus’s soldiers and find a way onto a ship bound for the mainland.” His eyes darkened. “Harpalycus claims to have poisoned my father, but we must try. I wish I could send Menoetius, but… has no one heard from him?”
She shook her head sadly. “No, my lord.”
“He must be dead,” he said after a brief silence. “There’s no help for it then.”
She noticed him fingering a band of some kind on his wrist.
“What is that?” she asked.
He looked down then lifted his arm. “It was on my arm when I woke,” he said. “I don’t remember it. I don’t know how it got there.”
He plucked at it. It was no armband but a twine of silver, and as it unwound, a charm was revealed.
“Why, that’s Aridela’s necklace,” she said. “Her father gave it to Queen Helice when Aridela was a baby. How have you come to have it?”
He held it up, staring at the crescent moons surrounding a lapis bead. “When I walked in the orchards of Hesperia,” he said slowly, “a partridge brought this necklace to Damasen and he gave it to me. He told me I must return it to Aridela. You say what I lived was no more than vision or dream, and didn’t happen except in my mind. If that is so, how did this necklace come to be here, with me?”
There must be a reason. Perhaps Aridela gave it to him, and in his suffering he’d forgotten. But Themiste shrugged, unwilling to squelch his ardent conviction. “There is always magic, my lord,” she said, hoping to soothe him. “It weaves through our lives, guiding us onto paths we might never take otherwise.”
He regarded her, his expression half-startled, but soon smiled, and nodded as though satisfied.
Aridela tracked the sliver of daylight, sometimes golden, sometimes gray, that crept down her cell wall each morning. She watched it twenty times after Lycus’s failed rescue attempt. During those twenty days, Harpalycus had her brought to his bedchamber every evening, and returned to her cell when he grew bored with torturing her.
The band of light on the wall grew dimmer, grayer, as the days marched on toward winter. Harpalycus finally ordered that she be given a blanket as the cell grew frigid.
Day by day, her fear of him waned, until one afternoon, when he gave her his tiresome leering grin, she felt nothing past old, stale hatred. She was always sore and bruised, often bleeding from cuffs she received, mostly from the eunuch. But as time passed, the blows seemed less intense, as though her skin had constructed a toughened shell that allowed her to dismiss them. Pain no longer frightened her. Harpalycus no longer frightened her. Hunger, too, ceased to torment her. She often saw, in her mind’s eye, a set of steps in a dark and shadowed forest leading up
to a closed door with beautiful carved hinges. She understood that the steps offered release, if she could ascend them. She knew that when she finally went through the door, all of this would be over.
But one fear continued, resonating through her mind, through every pulse-beat. It worsened, perhaps because she had nothing to do while Harpalycus was occupied elsewhere but dwell on it.
Lying on the matted straw in her cold, dusky cell, Aridela imagined all she didn’t know. What horrors were being inflicted upon the people and cities of Kaphtor? Within her soul lay unquestioning surety that Harpalycus enjoyed continued success solely because she was his prisoner. Her people were waiting for her to escape and join them. Until she did, there would be no recovery, no triumph, no return to grace and plenty. Like children, they wanted their mother to lead them. Through every weary muscle and shallow breath, through waking obsession and sleeping nightmares, Aridela knew she was the leavening of Kaphtor. She was the alchemist. She would cause the people to rise up in an unstoppable wave of rage. She alone could conjure victory.
Her continuing fear sprang from the possibility that she would never escape. No matter how hard she tried to strangle such futile thoughts, fear survived beneath deliberate images of triumph. She might die the prisoner of Harpalycus; she might grow so dulled and bitter in this dank cell that she would find a way to climb the steps and open the door, especially if a child took root inside her.
She called herself a weakling, a coward, a fool. Every death, known and unknown, weighted her soul. She had allowed this to happen, by not watching Lycus more carefully. By thinking only of Chrysaleon. By occupying her days with decorations and parades when she should have been strengthening the outposts and coastal lookouts.
Her wrists grew bloody because she couldn’t make herself stop testing the strength of the leather.
One morning, as she stared at the crescent of daylight work its way along the wall, she felt something on her forearm.
The snail’s black shell spiraled into a perfect point. A glistening track of mucus dried on her flesh as it traversed the expanse of her arm toward her wrist.
Pausing at the leather strap, the tiny creature’s translucent tentacles rocked back and forth. Though Aridela discerned no eyes or mouth, it seemed to rear up as though examining this barrier to its progress.
“Chew through it,” Aridela encouraged, softly, for the eunuch was snoring on the other side of the cell and it angered him to be awakened. “I must get free. The people need me. Can you help?”
The snail inched onto the strap. It stopped. Its shorter set of tentacles extended, gingerly exploring the leather.
“I must kill the eunuch while he sleeps. Otherwise he’ll be too strong for me,” she whispered. “Then I can escape. I’ll slip through the villa like a shadow. Like you do, unnoticed.”
A thought crept through her mind that a snail could never chew through anything like this tough leather. Or if it could, it would take years.
“Forgive me,” she said. “It’s unkind of me to belittle your abilities. I have faith, I vow it.”
Another thought, passing beneath her fascination with this moist creature, suggested the elixir, the pith of Princess Aridela, was disintegrating into madness.
“I am of divine Athene,” she said. “My course is set like the stars in the heavens. For as long as I am separated from my people, everything will wither—the land, the crops, our souls. Athene has turned her back on us. She will only return when I am free and fighting in her name. I am not mad. I’m not.”
Yet her voice sounded unfamiliar, as though someone she’d never met used her mouth. Poisonous fear consumed another chunk of dwindling hope.
The snail’s eye tentacles swiveled toward her face and waved as though in greeting.
She gave it a careful smile. “You want to know my plan? After I sneak past the guards, I’ll go to someone in the village, a peasant or farmer. Someone who has suffered at the hands of the invaders. My people will hide me in some cranny. I must find Chrysaleon and Themiste, and rescue them. Once I have Chrysaleon and Themiste, we will make our way across the mountains to Knossos.”
Knossos was the center, the heart of her success. Aridela’s imaginings always led to Knossos. There, she would gather her surviving warriors. She would find those of the royal court who had gone into hiding. There must be some. They could not all have been killed.
“First I will find Chrysaleon and Themiste,” she said.
But that annoying murmur spoke again. Your plan is flawed. You don’t know where Chrysaleon and Themiste are. It could take days upon days to discover. They could even be dead. If you escape, you won’t have time to search for them. If you take the time, Harpalycus will find you and whoever helps you will be tortured and killed.
“Are you questioning your queen?” she asked the snail. “Trust me. Someone will know where they are. Someone will know—”
“Be quiet, ugly shrew!” She’d forgotten the eunuch. Her musings and plots had awakened him. He struck her hard above the ear, but she felt only a dull throb and a ticklish trickle of blood through her hair.
When she looked back at her wrist, the snail was gone. It must have been knocked off when she tried to block the eunuch’s blow. Though she searched frantically through the straw, she never found it.
She wept for three days over the loss of her friend.
Faint scuffling woke Aridela from fitful sleep. Groggy, unable to see anything in the blackness of night, she gradually picked out another sound from the first. It was rather sickening, as though someone fought to breathe through lungs filled with fluid. Perhaps the eunuch had fallen ill.
She felt hands upon her, and stiffened. The eunuch had no interest in her. Harpalycus must have come to the cell in one of his drunken midnight fantasies. It had happened before.
But these hands tucked the blanket close and picked her up, cradling her like a child.
“What—” she began.
“Quiet.” The command didn’t come from Harpalycus. At least, she didn’t think it did. But the voice was a man’s.
“The guard?” someone else, a woman, asked.
“I cut his throat.”
Dreaminess showered through the purple black, filling her mind with sparkles. She remembered this feeling from when she was small, when her mother enchanted her with stories, like the romance between Athene and the seal-man. She thought she saw a hint of milky paleness. It might be moonlight. Everyone knew the moon brought divinatory dreams. Lady Athene must be sending her one.
There came an interlude of movement and vertigo as whoever carried her left the cell. Her feet, protruding from the other end of the blanket, brushed now and then against cold stone walls. She made no protests, asked no questions. No one should question a dream from the Goddess.
Athene will show me what I need to see.
The sense of closed-in spaces evaporated. Icy breezes blew over her face. She heard wind hissing and soughing. Athene had taken her outside.
The person who cradled her made no sound as he walked. She felt supported by a cloud. She couldn’t hear him breathing. He seemed to not find her much of a burden. Maybe it was one of Athene’s holy serving-men.
He walked for so long she dozed, and lost track of how much time passed before she heard the woman say, “We’ve gone far enough. Put her down here and rest.”
Wind sighed through tall cypresses. She saw the black outline of their tightly packed branches against a starlit sky. It had been so long since she’d heard such a sound, or breathed anything other than the air emanating from stale, moldy straw. She inhaled, shivering, caring about nothing for one glorious instant but that fresh, free scent.
Water trickled over her lips, shocking her into wakefulness. She opened her mouth and sucked at it, trying to swallow as much as she could before it vanished.
A wet sponge gently soothed her parched lips, but it stung the cuts and bruises, eliciting a gasp.
Someone put an arm around her shoulders,
supporting her while she drank. The blanket loosened and fell around her waist.
She stared at her wrists, at the raw raised welts. The leather straps were gone. Harpalycus’s face leaped into her mind. After Lycus’s attempt at rescue, he’d been angry… so angry. She couldn’t think about what he’d done—
“Aridela,” the woman said.
She turned toward the voice. The night was deep, but she saw and recognized the creamy whiteness of hair, and clutched at it. “Selene?”
“Yes.”
Aridela burst into uncontrolled weeping as realization washed over her. This was no dream.
Selene pressed Aridela’s face against her throat and held her tightly until the storm subsided.
“Where are we?” Aridela wiped at her eyes. “Where is Harpalycus?” She didn’t know if it was the night wind or the hated name that lifted a fresh wash of goose bumps on her arms.
“He’ll never touch you again.” Selene dried Aridela’s face with a corner of the blanket. “I swear it.”
“He’s dead? You killed him?” Hope rose then crashed as Selene shook her head.
Wind caught at Selene’s hair, tossing it about her head. She lifted her gaze from Aridela and beckoned to someone.
Another figure loomed above her then dropped to one knee. Even in the dark, she recognized him by the way the shadows lightened and deepened around his form and face. “Menoetius.” Aridela seized his arm. “You’re alive. What of Chrysaleon?”
He didn’t take her hand, or smile. Agonizing conviction and guilt cascaded over her. It was her fault he and his blood brother had remained on Kaphtor—her interference that made Chrysaleon compete in the Games. Now Menoetius would tell her Chrysaleon was dead, and she couldn’t bear to hear those words.
It wasn’t he, but Selene who answered. “We know nothing of Chrysaleon,” she said, “other than Harpalycus had him taken to Labyrinthos. Themiste, too, was moved there. I have heard she escaped. I don’t know if it’s true, but I hope it is. You must go too, Aridela, to a hiding place, a cave in these mountains Menoetius and I found. We’ve stocked it with food and supplies. I will remain and do what I can. I’ll gather weapons, and try to find out if Themiste still lives. Menoetius will go with you. When it’s safe, I will come for you.”
The Thinara King Page 18
