Goddess of Yesterday (17 page)

I opened the bundle of Hermione's things.

Cloth is more valuable than gold, for it takes so much time and effort to go from shearing fleece, through spinning and dying and weaving and seaming, until at last there is a gown. Hundreds of hours might exist in the fine cloth of a princess's gown. I sorted through the choices Bia had made. I who had lately owned an island now owned one yellow shawl, a Medusa and four gowns. All were too beautiful to rip up, but I chose one and tore it into bandages for Rhodea's feet.

Zanthus watched.

The cook had prepared rations for the crew before sailing. Two benches at a time, the men got cold oatmeal with a bit of honey, cold flat bread and cold clear water. Rhodea, Pleis and I were fed last. The cook squatted beside us, sitting on his heels, and held out a bowl for Pleis. Good white bread was soaking in goat's milk and honey. It was the little prince's favorite meal and he put his face into the bowl and drank and chewed.

“Thank you,” I said.

By nightfall we were far from any shore. We could see other ships in a soft foggy way but we certainly could not see thirty-three of them. Zanthus cut back on the number of rowers, letting as many as possible rest, but kept his ship going through the night.

The cook, to my horror, started a fire on the ship. He insisted that it was perfectly safe to have a fire on top of the ballast stones. He broiled the fish he had been catching, flipping them one by one to rowers.

A warship is not built for sleeping. The crew curled up on benches and on top of one another. Our tiny deck pitched back and forth. The gunwales were not three handspans out of the water. Rhodea was terrified. “When I fall asleep,” she cried, “I'll fall into the sea.”

“You fall on me when I'm asleep, woman,” said a rower, “and I'll see that you fall overboard.”

I lashed Rhodea to the rail, using a coil of papyrus rope and the knots taught me by the shepherds. Then I tied Pleis to my waist. He molded himself to me and slept. Zanthus examined the knots. I met his eyes and he was the first to look away.

The dark descended utterly.

The word for sea along the coast is
kolpos
, a smooth and motherly word. The word for sea far from the coast is
pelagos
, open and uncertain. But the word for deep sea is
laitma
, grim and terrible. A word to drown in.

We floated on
laitma.

And then the men who were awake but not rowing began to sing. Every ship sang: drinking songs and long sweet ballads, rowing chants and tunes of war. Their voices were deep and rich. The threnody of the creaking ships had made me weep but the song of the sailors gave me rest. I slept, waking now and then when the sea tossed enough that the rope choked my breathing.

Dawn brought a white sky, as if the sun had gone mad. The heat was brutal. The men drank far more than their rations. The leather water bags shrank and folded. The hardened paws of the men blistered where they gripped the oars and then their blisters broke and bled.

Rhodea and I could no longer distract Pleis. Trapped in his tiny space, unable to play or run or even get out of the
sun, he cried on and on. The men glared and Zanthus stooped over us. “I'll tell you a story,” he said.

“No, thank you, Captain.”

“When the sun hangs high in the heaven, the sea god slips into his dark and slimy caverns. There he plays with his brine children.”

Seals. Pretty things until you watch them eat.

“Later in the day, his brine children rise up from the waves, shiny with foam, exhaling the stench of their last meal. Do not let the boy whine. Or the stench you will breathe from the guts of seals will be the son of Menelaus.”

“Captain,” I said, “you need not tell more stories.”

“As long as you understand this one.”

Hanging Hermione's cloak over my stretched rope, I made a tent for Pleis to sit beneath so his skin would not burn. To protect my own skin, I put the yellow linen shawl over my hair, draping it over my forehead and my cheeks. We did not know what had become of the bundle of clothing and toys for Pleis. Pleis played with my Medusa and Zanthus stayed away from us.

That second night we stopped on an unknown island with a bare and bony aspect. The men were so stiff they had to lift one another out of the benches. The cook made a fire and broiled fish, which he laced with onions and cheese. The seamen slept the moment they had finished eating.

The watchmen stumbled back and forth, never varying their pattern. Their yawns were as loud as their footsteps. They let the fire go out. The moon also went out, covered by clouds. On such an island, there would be neither wolf nor bear.

“Are you going to slip away?” breathed Rhodea.

“Of course not,” I said, although my heart was already running in the hills.

“Only you can protect the little prince. I worship such as you, Lady Callisto. Do not leave us to face the Trojans alone.”

“I am not worthy of worship, Rhodea.” I told her how Bia had told me to take Hermione's place; how I expected Helen to kill me when at last we landed on the same shore.

Rhodea dismissed that. “Your death would not amuse Helen. She will treat you as she does Aethra. She loves a queen laid low. Do you know what Aethra did for years, until she could no longer lift anything heavier than a fleece? She drew every bucket of water for Helen's bath herself, hand over hand from the well, the rope tearing her palm. And when it had been heated, she alone carried the hot water up the stairs, two buckets at a time. Ten for a bath. Helen enjoyed saying the water wasn't warm enough. Aethra would have to bail it out, carry it down, heat it again and carry it back. That's why her shoulders are knotted and her spine twisted.”

“Maybe I should just roll into the sea and breathe salt water.”

“Helen would want to watch,” said Rhodea.

On the third day, the weather changed so quickly that the men could not get the sail down in time. The bow plunged in great gusts and without warning the sail split. A great strip of it lashed out like a flag. The men fought to get the rest of the sail down. The mast was lowered with difficulty as the ship thrashed in a wild sea.

Ophion
rose high and fell hard. Time and again our bodies were smacked against the deck and twice I bit my tongue. Pleis found it a joyful game to be hurled skyward and fall with a thud.

Rhodea became seasick.

I used the rope to bind Pleis to my chest and that was not enough, so the cook lashed us to the rail.

The sea climbed into the ship with us. Every resting rower bailed, leather bucket after leather bucket. Water gathered in the hold and the ship became unstable. The loot from Apollo's temple and Menelaus' palace shifted.
Ophion
would be swamped.

Again and again, Rhodea threw up. The sailors would give her nothing to drink. They were low on water.

Zanthus offered his best wine to the sea, but the weather did not change.

A wave as high as the walls of Amyklai came upon us like the hand of a god shoveling sand. It singled us out. The impact of that wave was like a great wet stone.

A steering oar snapped.

The helmsman needed two to control the boat. One steering oar merely makes a ship go in circles.

Men sprang toward our tiny deck. The cook yanked on the slipknot of my rope, dropping Pleis and me onto a bench whose rower had climbed out to bail. Rhodea he flung into protruding handles of oars. The rowers cursed her and shoved her away so violently that she was thrown into the oars on the other side.

From the now empty afterdeck, the men ripped up a plank for a splint, attaching the old steering handle to a spare oar to replace their rudder.

We were riding so low in the water that every wave felt like a mountain. Then I saw real mountains: Sheer cliffs loomed in front of us like the legs of Zeus. In a moment we would smash on those rock and be driftwood.

Rhodea screamed in terror.

The wet fingers of the sea held
Ophion
up in the air and then dropped her beneath a wave. We came back up, ship and men sputtering.

Rhodea vomited into the lap of a rower. The man tossed her overboard, as if she had been the pit of an olive, and continued rowing.

As swiftly as the gale had come, it ended.

The wind settled and the sea lay down. The men stitched a quick repair to the sail and stepped the mast, and we were spinning east.

“The woman was our problem,” said Zanthus confidently. He thanked the rower. “The seals will eat her now. It is good.”

N
OT ONE SHIP HAD BEEN
lost in the gale. In a few hours, Zanthus caught up with the fleet. Thirty-three ships sped beneath the blazing sky.

Yet the crew was uneasy. The wind was pushing us southeast when we wanted to go northeast. We were not in danger, but neither were we in control. There was much calling back and forth between ships. “If this keeps up,” said Zanthus glumly, “we shall be visiting Egypt.”

“It wasn't enough to give that slave woman to the sea god,” said a rower. “We are never going to get home.” He jutted his chin toward Pleis and me, which is how they point in the East, with their sharp beards instead of their fingers. “Give the god of the sea a prince and princess, my captain, and we'll have a chance.”

I yelled loud enough for three ships to hear. “You touch my prince, you dog of a Trojan, and the gods will rip your
Ophion
apart board by board and pierce your heart with its splinters.”

Zanthus laughed and saluted me.

I had spoken like a servant or a guest, referring to Pleis as “my prince.” Hermione would have said “my brother.” I did not think any of them had noticed. After all, a boy and a prince is far more important than a girl and a princess. It was
not actually wrong for me to call my brother “my prince.” Still, I must not slip again.

Once or twice we were close to the flagship
Paphus.
I stared at the tiny cabin in which Paris and Helen sheltered. I hoped Helen had been as sick as Rhodea. I hoped she had gotten sick all over Paris. I hoped the Trojan prince despised Helen now and regretted his stupidity in taking her.

But I knew better.

The half-god part of Helen would not be humiliated. That beautiful body would not vomit, not cling in terror. In fact, I found it amazing that such a woman had had four childbirths. Had Helen suffered the usual pain? The fear? The after difficulties?

Pleis played next to me, accustomed now to the fact that he could move only a few inches in any direction. He climbed over and around me, marching his only toy, my Medusa, up and down my spine. “Calli,” he said to me contentedly. “Ssssto.”

The crew had not noticed that Pleis did not call me “Hermione” or “sister.” They thought him backward, because he spoke nonsense.

Isle after isle tilted in the shining sea. Had I been captain of the fleet, I would have put in at some safe harbor and waited for the wind to change in my favor. But Paris did not.

Ophion
was always the straggler. Continually we arrived on a shore as the others were departing. And yet Zanthus to me seemed a fine captain. I did not understand why we failed to keep up.

The wind flung us where it chose until on the sixth day we arrived at the end of the sea. We were hundreds and hundreds of miles south of Troy. The Main Land here in the Far East had no cliffs and no mountains. It hardly rose above the
water at all and its beaches were without end. The city whose harbor we entered was called Sidon.

Ophion
was the last Trojan ship to reach port.

Not content with the shape of the land, Sidon had increased her bay with immense stone bulwarks, reaching hundreds of feet out into the water. What labor it had taken to load so many huge stones on rafts and lower them into place! Yet the walls were as smooth as if the masons had been standing in a field, not in dories tossed by waves.

Children and dogs raced along these great stone piers. Women sat dangling their feet toward the water, making fishnets. Slaves were washing salt and seaweed out of old nets and patching the tears. The Trojan fleet had largely beached, their bright sails already spread on the shore to dry. Excited vendors were trotting around, shouting for customers.

The flagship
Paphus
had been moored at the outermost end of the longest wharf, facing out toward the sea. Zanthus tied up closer to shore,
Ophion
bumping against the hulls of other Trojan ships. Fat reed mats were hung over the edges of each boat to keep them from scraping each other.

We too moored facing out. I felt oddly frightened by those thirty-three bows. The ships were not moored for easy loading but for swift departure.

But we were not here to loot. Sidon was treating Paris as a friend. I could see where flowers had been strewn, that Helen might walk on rose petals. Inside the walls, the flag of Paris was already flying next to the flag of Sidon. The king of Sidon was doubtless even now calling Helen a star in the sky, thanking the immortal gods that he had the privilege of sheltering her.

Paris could rest here only a few days, to restore the supply
of food and water, and then we would have to set off. We were in danger from the changing season. Summer was nearly past. The autumn sea was too wild for ships.
Ophion
, at least, had already experienced some heavy sea.