In the Moon of Asterion

by Rebecca Lochlann

Finally Themiste took in a deep breath and swallowed. Turning to the servant, she gave the order to go and fetch her scribe, and to be quick.

  “I don’t understand. Where did this come from?” Themiste asked as the woman bowed and left. “A dream?”

  “No, Minos. It was no dream. The words came to me in the middle of the marriage rite. Neither you, nor my mother, nor Chrysaleon, heard it.” Should she relate the part Menoetius had played in the prophecy, the promise he’d been given? No doubt the oracle should know. But something stilled her tongue. For one thing, it wasn’t her secret to reveal, and she was afraid of somehow giving away that she’d been with him when she miscarried. Also, there was something odd about Themiste’s expression when she’d said, I have spoken to the council, and so has the Zagreus— a flush to her skin and a faltering of her gaze that spoke of secrets being kept, something being withheld.

  The priestess and the handmaid returned soon after. Themiste and Aridela went over the passage until Themiste was satisfied that she had it faithfully recorded on several sheaves of papyrus. “This voice,” Themiste said. “It spoke at length and in detail, yet you seem to remember it exactly. It’s been so long. Are you sure your memory is correct?”

  Aridela nodded. “Yes. It’s always there. It never fades.” Weary and drained, she rested the back of her head against the wall and closed her eyes.

  Themiste sent the other women away. When she and Aridela were alone, she said, “It sits ill upon me to do this now, but I am going away. I promise to return before the honey gathering begins.”

  “Why?” Aridela opened her eyes and straightened, frowning. “Where must you go?”

  “You know a few of the prophecies were dug up from under the palace. Only tablets. I fear those inscribed on papyrus are forever lost, but I’ve been working on recreating them as best I can.”

  Aridela nodded.

  “In dream and vision, I see myself putting the tablets in a dark, rocky crevice, a well-hidden place. I think if I do this they’ll be safe, even if the earth shakes again. I’d like to take Selene with me. She can help me find a likely spot. Do I have your leave?”

  “Surely,” Aridela said, though her heart plummeted. Still, the honey gathering would begin in a fortnight, so the separation wouldn’t be long. She stifled her protests and smiled. “We will miss you.”

  “I ask you not to tell anyone where we’ve gone. Whatever I find must be kept secret. I need time as well, Aridela, time to commune with the Lady in silence and solitude.”

  “I understand.” Aridela’s reluctance melted. “You’ve done so much since the Butcher’s invasion. Go away, Themiste, and recover. Make yourself strong again.”

  Again Themiste’s gaze faltered and she flushed, setting off a peal of alarms in Aridela’s mind. “There’s something else. You should know first. Soon enough, everyone will know.”

  “What is it, Minos? What’s happened?”

  Themiste turned her head and stared at the wall. “A… child grows inside me.” Tears shimmered in her eyes, and her hands trembled. She brought her gaze back to Aridela. It was unreadable.

  “Themiste?” Aridela’s mind dropped into an instant of numb blankness before shock catapulted through her, then envy and finally, apprehension.

  The oracle nodded. “Two dark moons have passed with no kaliara. I saw three cracked empty birds’ eggs, and last night a cat gave birth in the corridor outside my chambers. Remember when Rhené could tell you had quickened by the signs your body gave? I have similar symptoms. It’s very early, but I’m certain a child has taken root inside me.”

  “Did you… break your vows?” She was almost too afraid to ask, but she had to know. Always, Aridela had been the child and Themiste the adult. It felt strange to be the one requiring an answer instead of giving one.

  “No.”

  Aridela gave a sigh of relief. “Then Athene sends a miracle. You conceived in the old way, the sacred way, from the north wind.”

  “I love sprouting beans and often eat them.” Themiste gave the faintest of smiles. “Perhaps they planted the soul of a dead hero in my womb.”

  Aridela threw back her covers.

  “What are you doing?”

  “I want to kneel before you. Without doubt you are the holiest of women.”

  Themiste flushed. She knocked over the stool in her haste to rise and back away from the bed. A strangely terrified expression passed over her face. It must be due to the reverence Aridela wanted to show her. Themiste was shy and solitary. Kaphtor’s holy oracle wanted no recognition. Yet she would have it— much recognition and acclaim.

  “Never kneel to me,” Themiste said. “Never.”

  Stammering something unintelligible, she fled before Aridela could protest.

  For a fortnight, while Themiste and Selene were gone, Aridela followed her healer’s orders and rested. She spent most of her time, when the weather allowed, on an undamaged terrace that gave a southern view across the plains toward Mount Juktas, and was out of the way of the laborers and architects.

  A rather surprising, attentive companion was Chrysaleon’s slave, Alexiare.

  “I hope when you regain your strength, my lady, you’ll come out of the palace and see the splendid recovery of your land.” He lifted his face to the sun and swept out one arm. “Do you feel it, the returning warmth?”

  “Yes,” she said. “I wish I could go out now. I feel perfectly well, but Rhené is overly zealous.” She sipped at a drink made from barley, which had been transported by boat from Aptara especially for her.

  He gave her a deferential pat on the arm. “I doubt that, my lady, given the facts. Putting aside the Destruction, there has been invasion, captivity, brutality, isolation, hunger, and then the battle, in which you took such an active part you were wounded near unto death.”

  “True. It has not been our easiest year.”

  His smile was admiring. “Yet none of it defeated you. May I ask how the knife wound fares?”

  “It aches and the scar is ugly, but no infection came of it and the flesh has completely healed over.” Beyond everything else, it was the loss of Chrysaleon’s child that remained almost unbearable, but she said nothing of that, and neither did he.

  He seemed satisfied and puttered about, making sure she drank every drop of her stimulating barley-honey concoction.

  “Have you seen the Zagreus?” she asked.

  “He went to Amnisos on a dispute between your builders and the Mycenaeans. Would you like me to send a messenger after him?”

  “No. You stay and keep me company— if it doesn’t bother your voice too much.”

  He bowed again and lowered himself onto a nearby stool, propping his stick between his legs. “Never, my lady. It’s good to be in the place I think of as home. I lived in Tamara for part of my childhood. Your mother’s mother’s mother was queen.”

  “But you were with Chrysaleon when he was young?”

  “Yes, my lady. I’ve been with your consort since he and Menoetius were born.”

  “You would have known their mothers.”

  “I did, Menoetius’s mother more so. Chrysaleon’s mother, Clematia, was a reserved woman, but Sorcha— Menoetius’s mother— and I spent quite a lot of time together.”

  “He told me a little. The rumors, that she was a priestess, and had the gift of augury.”

  “I was rather afraid of her. I believe she saw it all before it happened— that she would be captured and enslaved. She could have changed the course of her life, but chose not to in order to give birth to Menoetius.” He brushed hair out of his eyes and added with the quirk of an eyebrow, “One time I watched her make lightning in the sky. Wherever she pointed, it burned, and she laughed like a child with a toy.”

  Aridela stifled any expression of disbelief out of courtesy. Surely only an Immortal could do such a thing. Alexiare must be mistaken. “Before all this trouble with Chrysaleon, Menoetius told me he wanted to go to her country and find her.”

  Alexiare
’s head angled and his shoulder rose slightly, saying without words, No chance of that now.

  Aridela thought of the day she and Menoetius sat on the crumbling brink of a cliff and discovered they shared something: a memory from a dream. For longer than you can imagine, I will be with you, in you, of you. Together we bring forth a new world, and nothing can ever part us.

  Even now it sent a shiver through her. Menoetius’s death would break that promise. She lowered her face, not wanting the observant Alexiare to see her despair.

  Her time in the labyrinth with Kaphtor’s Beast remained foggy, impossible to recapture. When she tried to remember all they’d said to each other, a headache would begin to pound like hammer blows, and she could recall no more than glimpses of a huge angry black bull mixed with Menoetius’s anguished face, the Lady’s eyes, and someone saying, The sea claims final possession.

  Rhené came then, wanting Aridela to have her daily massage and herb bath, but two mornings later, Alexiare joined her on the terrace again. This time, Aridela had arranged for a chair to be placed next to her so he wouldn’t have to crouch on an uncomfortable stool. They resumed their pleasant dialogue almost as though there had been no interruption.

  “Many at the citadel of Mycenae call your consort ‘Lion killer,’ Alexiare said. “You know, of course, how he saved his brother’s life.”

  “Yes. Menoetius told me.”

  “Did Menoetius tell you of his nightmare— the one where he fights a lion?”

  “Yes.”

  Alexiare paused; his study of her was suddenly speculative, making his thoughts obvious. What happened between you on the mountain? He knew, as did Chrysaleon, that Menoetius never spoke casually of either of these events— the actual attack or the dream that accompanied it.

  Hoping to divert his conjectures, she said, “I, too, once experienced a mystical dream.”

  “Yes, my lady?” He reached out and tucked the coverlet over her shoulder.

  “It was last year, before— everything. I’d asked the Lady to let me dance with a bull.” She contemplated how the dream had forced its way into her sleep nearly every night, but now was gone, evaporated. It was so obvious to her that its purpose was to spark Chrysaleon’s desire to stay, to win the Games and become her consort. Once that was done, it was no longer needed. How could anyone doubt that Athene took an interest in the affairs of mortals?

  “Which you did,” Alexiare said as her silence continued.

  She brought herself back to the present. “We were on the holy mountain, there. That one.” She pointed toward Mount Juktas. Alexiare looked, and nodded. “Preparing Iphiboë for the coming grove rites.”

  His gaze upon her turned sympathetic. She hurried on, her eyes stinging with tears. “I dreamed the statue of Velchanos came to life.” She tried to speak normally, but couldn’t fully stifle a small quaver. “He walked across the clearing to me, a man with long golden hair and green eyes. Because of that dream, I knew Chrysaleon later, when I first saw him.”

  Alexiare stared, wide-eyed and sharp. “When was this, my lady? When, exactly?”

  “The Moon of Mead-making, last year,” she said. “A month, almost two, before the Games. Before Chrysaleon and his brother came to Kaphtor.”

  “Ah.” His smile was both mysterious and satisfied. “Did this— vision— say or do anything? Or merely appear to you?”

  “He vowed he and I would always be together.”

  But when the god initially transformed from stone, he hadn’t resembled Chrysaleon. He was darker. She recognized him. She even named him.

  It was Carmanor’s image who began the phrase, For longer than you can imagine….

  Then a fracturing noise, like that of a lightning bolt striking a tree, interrupted him. When her sight cleared and the ringing in her ears faded, Chrysaleon stood before her.

  Since then, both men, in their own ways, had convinced her they had each heard this promise.

  She wanted to tell her new friend these details, to have his insight. He was a man she was growing to trust and value. But he spoke again, disrupting her thoughts.

  “This is most intriguing, my lady. Our dreams, I think, are not meaningless, but methods for deities to tell us what we need to know. You wouldn’t have been so quickly drawn to your consort if you hadn’t envisioned him this way first.”

  “That’s true. I’ve thought many times it molded my heart to his before I ever saw him.”

  Chrysaleon’s slave looked so satisfied it nearly caused Aridela to laugh out loud. Maybe it was only that he was pleased for his lord and the queen of Kaphtor, but truly, he seemed to think he was responsible for the enchanted dream that bonded her so swiftly and wholly to his master.

  “My mother once claimed she saw my future,” he said. “She wouldn’t reveal it in detail, but made me promise to always remain with High King Chrysaleon. She said if I did, I would experience the tilting of the world, and I would be part of causing this, and would achieve immortality. So far, nothing of any note has happened, and I begin to wonder if she was mistaken.” His shrug conveyed his doubt. “I cannot pretend many years are left to me.”

  Aridela could think of no way to refute this. He was a very old man.

  But his mind, still apparently sharp, had already flown to another topic. “May I ask you something, my lady, about Harpalycus the Butcher? Only if you’re strong enough. I don’t wish to upset you.”

  “I am not so fragile. What do you want to know?”

  “It was you who killed him. You were there as he died.”

  “Yes.”

  “Did anything unusual happen? Anything that seemed different, hard to explain?”

  “It did seem so… but he’d stabbed me.” Aridela absently rubbed the wool tunic over the spot where Harpalycus had sunk his blade. The scar throbbed unpleasantly, perhaps in memory of that instant when the knife penetrated flesh and muscle. “I was close to death myself. I’d forgotten, but yes, there was something.”

  “Can you describe it? I would be most grateful.”

  “I slit his throat with the knife he’d used to stab me. His blood poured over my face and into my eyes— that’s why what I saw can’t be trusted, but I thought smoke came out of the wound. There was a stench, as of something rotting.”

  Alexiare’s knuckles whitened on the arms of his chair. “Yes, my lady?” he said, his voice filled with tremors.

  “I seemed to lose myself. I still lived, but in some fashion I became joined to him.” She shuddered. Speaking of it brought back his heaviness as he’d straddled her, his breath, the murderous glow in his eyes, all too vividly. She swallowed hard and clenched her jaw, fighting for control. “I felt his thoughts. His hatred. I saw his life. I saw him—”

  “My lady?” Alexiare leaned forward. “Something must have happened to separate him from you, for I vow you are Queen Aridela alone. Did something— someone pull you apart?” He’d forgotten his manners, for he gripped her wrist, even shook it a little.

  “There was a flare of light, and a woman, with a spear. It wasn’t Selene or anyone else I recognized, but it must have been one of our warriors. She shouted at Harpalycus to release me, and he did.”

  “What are you doing?”

  Neither had heard Chrysaleon approach. He stood, frowning at Alexiare’s hand upon the queen’s arm.

  Alexiare released her as though she’d burst into flames. “I beg your forgiveness, my lord,” he said, rising and bowing. “Allow me to leave you in peace.” He bowed again and hobbled away, his cane tapping on the stones.

  “You frightened him,” Aridela said.

  He gave her a demanding stare.

  She laughed. “Are you jealous?”

  After a lengthy pause, during which he regarded her darkly, his mouth slid into a sheepish smile. He dropped into the chair Alexiare had vacated and briefly clasped her hand.

  “Clematia was your mother’s name, wasn’t it?” she asked.

  “Yes. She was Clematia of Seriphos. Quee
n of Mycenae.”

  “Alexiare told me about Menoetius’s mother, but he said hardly anything about yours.”

  Chrysaleon scowled. “The slave who birthed Menoetius claimed to have the power of sight and sorcery. It makes a more exciting tale than one that begins and ends with, ‘She was a loyal wife and queen, who spent her days caring for her children and the kingdom.’”

  “I don’t think he meant such a thing.”

  “I grew weary long ago of hearing about that bitch. She brought unrest wherever she went. Sorcha made the queen appear as nothing. Throughout my mother’s life, until the day she died, she had to endure the humiliation Sorcha brought upon her. For the stories never waned, my lady, though Sorcha herself was gone. To this day there are tales and songs of Sorcha the White Seer, of her reckless power, her cruel heart. She was cruel. Of that I’m certain.”

  His lips whitened as they pressed together.

  “Forgive me,” Aridela said. “I asked about your mother because I wanted to know more about her.”

  He flushed, but his hands unclenched.

  “Is it true she was a priestess? Themiste told me your sister wants to come here and enter the shrines.”

  He rose and paced to the edge of the terrace, frightening away a line of preening sparrows.

  “You’re angry,” she said. “What is it?”

  He turned and faced her. “My father is dead. My mother is dead. Mycenae hangs suspended like a gemstone before the greedy eyes of the Kindred. I am bound to die and my sister will vanish into your holy caves as though she was never born. Menoetius lives only at my pleasure, which has run dry. If Mycenae is attacked, Gelanor will likely be slaughtered, too.”

  “Chrysaleon—”

  He returned and picked her up in his arms, his eyes fierce, his cheeks flushed. “Only you can save me from disappearance. Only you, by giving birth to my child.” As the fire of anger transformed into the burn of desire, he said, “Don’t let me be forgotten. Don’t let my line die.”

  I won’t let them kill you! She wanted to whisper it with all her being. I will save you. But no matter how softly she spoke, Athene would hear.