Snakehead (16 page)

“I think so. If I’m careful. I’ll have help.”

I longed for his advice. But there was something between us—something the boss had seen at once, when I came back from that meeting with my father, and I hadn’t spotted until last night. Polydectes was finished. He was doomed.

I was such a kid. I’d wondered why Papa Dicty was in a strange mood. Now I understood. The Gods were going to destroy the king, for reasons of their own, and I was to be their instrument. And in spite of everything I think Papa Dicty still loved his brother.

He nodded, sighed and smiled at me sadly.

“I’ve been thinking, Perseus … I could forge a press that would turn out hollow tubes of wheat paste, like sausage skins. It wouldn’t be too hard. Tubes would absorb the sauce better. It would make for richer dishes. What do you say?”

“Sounds great. When can we start?”

We both knew I wouldn’t be helping him in the furnace yard again.

“I should have left Serifos,” I said. “As soon as I was old enough to be a threat to him. Is that what you were
waiting for, before Andromeda came? For me to realize I had to leave? Well, I’m leaving now, Papa, so maybe it’ll be all right.”

“You’re a good boy.” He patted my hand, and sighed. “Sometimes I wish I’d made different choices, long ago. I wish that I was king of Serifos now, and you were my heir. But it won’t do, thinking like that.” He looked at me straight, man to man, and that gave me a shock. “You are
not
my grandson, son of Zeus.”

“I wish I was,” I blurted, like a kid. “I’ve been raised by the most noble, wisest prince in the Kyklades. I wouldn’t have had things any other way. I’m
proud
of your choices. I’m proud of everything you’ve taught me.”

Then I felt as if I was making a funeral oration, so I shut up.

The boss got to his feet. “We are in the hands of the Gods. It’s not the most comfortable place to be, but let’s make the best of it. We’re in for a big night. The Yacht Club kids are gathering, eager to throw their money around and bask in your reflected glory. Hurry up and bathe, and …” He looked at the poor-box tunic. “Change into something decent before you come down.”

Palikari was back at the bar, with the remains of a black eye, his left arm in a sling, and a half-healed scalp cut hidden by his vine wreath. He was knocking out the best Kitron slammers in the Middle Sea, one-handed. I was at the front of the house. My mother was being gracious
with the guests and keeping everything in order; Andromeda was serving tables at speed, and cheerfully fending off personal questions. I had never known how much I loved my life, the bustle and the chatter, the sheer
fun
of running a good restaurant on a busy night. The Yacht Club kids got wilder and more inventive about what had happened at the High Place. Pali and I had a good time being mysterious.

“C’mon, Pali, who beat you up?
Was
it Perseus?”

“Couldn’t possibly comment, ma’am.”

“The Medusa’s head! The man’s insane! So what did you say to him, really?”

“I said, er, I’d give it a try.”

I avoided my mother. I was scared to face her. I was afraid she blamed me for the pain I’d caused Papa Dicty…. The evening wound down. We cleared up. Bundles of used linen for Koukla, plate scrapings for the pigs and goats, better class of leftovers packed up for the poor. Put the chairs on the tables, sweep up, sluice down the floor, swish the water out into the yard … I looked around about midnight and found that Moumi had gone off to bed, and I hadn’t spoken to her.

I went out into the yard. Andromeda was sitting in the dark, on the stone bench by the wellhouse. I sat beside her, feeling nervous. She’d been refusing to look at me again, all evening. The mules stirred and whickered to each other in the stable. Mémé trotted along the wall, on her nightly rounds. I remembered how embarrassed I’d
been when I first brought the girl who wore solid gold to this humble setting. “I’m sorry about this morning.”

“No,” she said wearily. “You were right, I didn’t understand.
You’re
not going to certain death, son of Zeus.”

“Not like you, Princess Andromeda.”

She looked up at the stars, that glinted like white fire though the branches of the tamarisk. “How does it feel to know that you’re immortal? Is it a good feeling?”

I shrugged. “I don’t think about it. How does it feel to know you’re going to die, Andromeda? I don’t know what
immortality
means, I don’t know what will happen, nobody has explained it. I don’t even know if I’ll still be Perseus…. How is that different from dying?”

Somehow, this exchange cleared the air. She smiled at me, and I told her about meeting Athini and Hermes on the road: the weapons training, the loot. I told her the last, strange thing Athini had said:
You are our action
.

“Feet and hands,” said Andromeda. “We use them to walk around and pick things up, and never tell them why. If they had voices, perhaps they’d ask us,
Why do we have to make these moves that don’t mean anything to us? …
Do you feel better about being sent to murder someone now?”

“I don’t feel
better
. But when Wisdom and Thought in human form stop you on the road, and tell you there’s no need to have moral scruples, what can you do?”

“When the Lord of Ocean and Earthquake says he wants your life …”

I winced. “Did you
see
him? I mean, when you rededicated yourself?”

“Yes.”

“I thought so.”

Everything was so hopeless, and so filled with piercing sweetness. I took her hand, I kissed her fingertips, she leaned her head on my shoulder. Her hair smelled of rose oil. “Andromeda, come with me?”

“Come
with
you? What do you mean?”

“I know you have to go to Haifa. I know you have no choice. But I’m leaving the island too. We could travel together, part of the way?” She sat up and looked at me. The last lamp had been put out indoors; I could only see the liquid gleam of her eyes. “You could write down my instructions, in your new writing. I’m never going to remember everything.”

“Perseus, what would be the use of that? You couldn’t read them.”

“No, but you could read them to me. Will you come?”

At the back of my mind was the thought that if she was with me, I still had a chance to save her, but I wasn’t going to tell her that. I didn’t even believe it. I just couldn’t bear to leave her. Another day, another hour, was worth everything.

“All right,” she said. “I will.”

A
ndromeda dreamed of horses. It was a cloudy dream of impressions, then for a moment everything would become clear, more than real. There were horses all around her, brown and chestnut and bay. She walked between them, thrilled by their size and strength, not at all afraid. When they bent their heads to look into her face, their eyes were gentle and eager. She was to bridle one of them. She used the hank of purple yarn that she had tried to sacrifice; it seemed to be knotted together with her loom weights. She slipped the bridle over a horse’s muzzle—it was like catching a thought—and leapt onto the horse’s back. The long spring from the ground, up into the air, felt like magic. But she knew it wasn’t magic. It was simply that she had never used this power to leap before. She had been timid without knowing it…. Then she was in the Outer Court of the
Women’s Palace at home. She was sitting cross-legged in a sunny alcove, by herself, writing on a white cloth stretched in a frame. She could hear the sounds of the city, faintly. Black horses ran down her arms, and through her hands. They raced over the cloth and were fixed there, flying marks. But they were still alive.
Perseus
.

She woke from the dream, full of an idea: something about horses and the flying marks being one and the same? It slipped from her grasp. Was Perseus a horse? Or was he the flying marks? She smiled. According to her idea he must be both.

No, that was wrong. She knew what the horses in her dreams meant. They were the presence of the God: the Lord of Making and Breaking, the horse tamer, who was going to kill her. She wrapped her face in a scarf of soft hair, and pressed it against her eyes. “It is just,” she whispered, and lay still. If any mother’s child must be killed to appease the God of Earthquake, it had to be Andromeda.

The day had been breathlessly hot. The little room had grown cooler while she slept, but it was still bright. She sat up and looked around. In the window niche stood a small red jug holding three ears of corn, one blue cornflower and two white daisies. Her bundle lay against the wall, by the open door. The weights—which she’d never used here, she had no standing loom—were in there, and the purple yarn.

“I’ll miss you,” she said to the room. “You’ve been a true friend to me.”

She got up, twisted her hair into a knot and sat on the floor to look at her weavings. She’d washed the stiffening size out of them, and left them spread out to dry. None of them was bigger than a hand towel. She held up each of the three and looked at them carefully, feeling the joy of creation—the joy that almost makes you forgive the mistakes, the uneven places, that you can always see. She did not give her pieces away lightly. A gift had to mean something, and it had to be
right
for the person. For Palikari a green-and-yellow stepped design, which meant a field of ripening wheat in the language of patterns, and the white convolvulus motif twining around it. For Anthe no pattern, just uneven patches of pure color; this had been more difficult than she’d thought it would be.

That’s the contrast I wanted.

And here, the balance is good.

She lingered over Papa Dicty’s, thinking of her dream. The flying marks were not like horses. They were like weaving. The new kind of writing was made from the marks for actual things: ox, jar, cart, horse, house. They only appeared in fragments, but together they added up to a message in sounds … the way that choosing where a weft color will show, and where it will be hidden, makes a picture in the finished cloth. It was easier in the Minoan language than in her own. She folded the completed pieces, and went to look at the new work on her little
frame loom. It was barely started; it would never be finished. It would have been an intricate pattern, not a picture. You can put so much more meaning into a pattern. Dark blue, for his eyes. A sheeny chestnut, and a lighter golden brown. She needed a hundred more shades, far more than Seatown could provide. She knelt there, fighting tears, remembering “Kore,” and the night Perseus had leaned in her doorway, asking her if she ever slept. Moments that ought to have been the beginning of a life story, but were the end …
It is just, it is just
.

When she was sure she could smile, she combed her hair and went downstairs.

The north wind of summer had started to fail, taking all the freshness from the island’s air. Andromeda had been on Serifos for two months. The shipping season was not over; in Haifa the rains, and the festival of sacrifice, were still far off. But it was time, maybe past time, for her to be on her way.

The kitchen was closed; the staff had a holiday. The restaurant would not be opening this evening, because of the excessive heat. The hearth fire burned low, crusted with gray ash. She quietly joined Papa Dicty and his household at the family table. They would eat later; they had a guest with them now. It was an old man called Yiannis, a smelly old seadog who was a very faithful customer, but not so good at paying his tally. He raised his
cup to Andromeda, calling her Kore, and she gave him a friendly answer.

The table was spread with stiff, dirty scrolls of sheepskin, partly unrolled. They must be the old man’s star charts. He was showing them to Papa Dicty, Pali and Anthe. Perseus and his mother were pursuing a different conversation. Andromeda watched the faces of mother and son, and listened. Lady Danae was concerned about dangers closer to home than the Medusa’s lair.

“Perseus, the king doesn’t want the public blame for your death. But if you are set upon in an alley in Paros port, and dropped in the harbor with a boulder tied to your feet, all people will know is that you didn’t come back.”

Perseus glanced at Papa Dicty, and spoke low: “I’m safe from the king, Moumi. The Gods have decided to set me up against him because they need me for this chore.”

“You’re part of their plans,” said Danae, equally low. “Don’t think that means you know what those plans are. Don’t think it means you can trust them. You can’t.”

They were like brother and sister in this light: two blue-eyed Achaeans conferring before a battle, Queen Danae giving advice to her young general.

The Gorgons’ lair was in Africa, but Perseus must not go south. He’d been told that he must find the Stygian nymphs before he could reach the Garden of the Hesperides. There was a river called the Styx, on the Greek Mainland, which Papa Dicty knew of. It was both a
real place, and—to the Greeks—the river of death: the Dark Water everyone must cross. But the days when islanders had known all the routes around the Mainland were in the past. Yiannis was being consulted about coasts that were now rarely visited. They lay beyond the busy, divided Achaean nations, in unknown northern lands.