Snakehead (23 page)

Oh, Great Mother. I saw the Medusa’s face. I saw the most grievous, heart-opening beauty in the world, her eyes open, looking out at me; and around her I glimpsed the Garden, the shining waters, the flowers, the boughs of the apple trees bending low, rich with fruit. There was no monster.
I
was the hideous intruder in paradise. Oh, worse. The beautiful woman was my Moumi, young as I first remembered her, looking at me with a girl-mother’s tender love.

Oh, Great All,
it was Athini herself
.

It was Athini herself, looking out from inside me
.

I was Athini
.

I was the monster
.

I had to kill the monster, so I could be Athini
.

The snakes rose up, a nest of eyes and whirling patterns, coiling in and out of each other. I saw that they were my thoughts: my mind was a nest of shining serpents; like the spirits of rock and spring, we were many. I saw thought like the flying marks on the tallyboard
racing and mingling
, bright and swift as lightning. I saw that
words are thought reflected
. But these are mysteries: mysteries that don’t tell the truth, they are the truth. I did not falter. I knew it was right. I was right to do this.
S’bw’r …
I drew back the
harpe
. I could hear Athini’s voice again, coolly saying:
Her blood is poisonous
. Don’t
get the blood on your skin
. I was ready to get out of the way, fast.

One sweep.

And … and something leapt from the gouting, severed throat. A warrior in armor, who flickered gold and was gone. A huge, beautiful winged beast, who bent his shining head and looked at me with gentle, eager eyes. His pinions swept in a mighty downbeat, his hooves spurned air. I flung the bloody sickle and pitched myself backward, yelling and frantically clutching the Snakehead by the hair.

Nobody had told me about that!

I was engulfed in the thunder and rush of his passing, and then he was gone. The Gorgon sisters, Euryale and Sthenno, had woken and begun screaming. I was scrabbling around on the ground, one handed, terrified I would put my bare palm, or knee, in the great slick of poisonous blood, whimpering
they can’t see me, they can’t see me
. They could smell me, though, and they could hear me.

I found the
harpe
. I got the Snakehead into the
kibisis
, without turning myself into stone. I fought a rearguard, retracing my steps: a nasty, naked retreat with no one to give me covering fire. Thank the Great Mother those Gorgons were as bewildered and terrified as I had been, by the living thunderclap that had come boiling out of Medusa. Neither of them had the wit to get upwind and cut me off.

I flew through the dead trees, running in the air, fending off random bat-winged claw and tusk attacks; I reached the wall, and only then grasped that I should have leapt for the sky at once. I shot up, the Gorgons following on my heels, but in the wide air they quickly lost my scent. They flapped away, screaming at each other, in the wrong direction. I was glad I hadn’t had to kill them.

I wheeled, and plunged to earth. I stabbed the
harpe
into the ground again and again, and scraped it against stone, to get rid of the last trace of poison. I had landed at the foot of the wall. I collapsed with my back against it. The dim plain was unchanged, the rusty overcast the same. I felt tears on my face, and touched them, puzzled.
Why am I crying? I wondered. I thought it was because I would never see the Garden again, the way I’d glimpsed it in Athini’s shield. “Andromeda?”

The scale-armored warrior, the stone figure who’d been beside us when I left her, was right in front of me. But I couldn’t see her. I sheathed the
harpe
. I’d dropped the shield when I fell to earth. I picked it up and slung it on my back again. I threaded the
kibisis
onto my belt by the drawstring. Where was she? I took off the king of death’s helmet, so that she could see
me
.

“Andromeda?”

“Andromeda!”

I ran around calling her name, but I knew she had gone. There was nowhere to hide on that killing ground. She had gone. She had vanished, back to Haifa and the sacrifice, the way she’d warned me it would happen. But I had the Medusa Head. The peace and glory of knowing
I had done it
welled up in me. I had the means to follow her, swift as thought. I could save Andromeda’s life.

A
ndromeda had been dreaming for a long time. She’d dreamed that she and Perseus were taken on board a strange ship that was going to carry them to the river of the dead. They had to cook for a small army of rowers who would eat nothing but meat and bread. She knew the ship wasn’t entirely real, nor were the crew. Sometimes you could almost see through them; or they seemed mysteriously small and far away…. It was one of those dreams that’s a good dream, but you know something’s wrong. It went on for days, full of detail. She and Perseus talked and talked, alone together. But in the end the captain threw them overboard, and they reached the river by somehow falling through a whirlpool into a cavern (this part was very confusing).

She didn’t remember leaving the cavern. She’d been in the middle of explaining to Perseus that she had to be
somewhere else when she’d found herself alone, walking along a road. She was crying, but she knew she was not awake. She’d been walking a long time. I don’t like this, she thought, like a child. I want to go back to the other dream, the complicated one with Perseus in it.

The road had become a courtyard. She was in the great Outer Court of the Women’s Palace, at home in Haifa. It was empty. She knew she was still dreaming, because there were
always
crowds in here, day and night: men and women both, embassies from far away, palace officials, private petitioners. It seemed to be morning, quite early…. She pushed open the tall blue-and-white doors to her mother’s audience court. It was empty too, but she could hear the sound of weeping. She pressed on, pushing against the empty air that seemed to cling to her and hold her back. The sky overhead was blue and bright. This was a bad omen, because it was the tenth month and the rains should be on their way. The sky should be thick, the air heavy with brooding heat. Her sense that something was wrong grew stronger. The singing birds on the frieze, the flowering trees in their pots seemed to clamor at her:
Run away, Andromeda, run away!

The doors to her mother’s inner apartments were always guarded by the palace regiment, the Royal Ethiopians, who held this honor directly from the queen. Often two immense and kindly royal cousins, called Aden and Kelmet, would be found on duty here. There was no sign of them:
no guards at all. Andromeda was very uneasy, something was terribly wrong. Now she was in her mother’s cool, high-ceilinged private rooms: sunlight falling like bright spears through the spaces under the eaves, beautiful things around her. The weeping was closer. Everything came back to her but she couldn’t believe it was real. She had never smuggled herself out of the palace; she had never escaped in the crowds of people fleeing the threat of earthquake. She had never traded her gold bracelets; she’d never been to Serifos.

She’d always been here, walking along this corridor with the painted walls of a river scene, her bare feet making no sound on the cool tiled floor.

Her mother was sitting on a carved stool in front of the windows of her bedchamber, very upright, her hands gripping a gold-figured cosmetics case in her lap. There were deep grooves gouged between her fine brows, and on either side of her beautiful dark red lips, as if she’d been holding her mouth like that, calm and quiet, by an act of will, for months.

Cassiopeia was not weeping. It was the young women who were weeping; they were crying because they were mortally terrified. An older woman, another of those royal cousins (all the many personal servants of the palace were minor members of the royal family), was lining them up, chivvying them into place, making them stand straight and uncover their tearstained faces. The girls were all more or
less dark-skinned, slim and tall, like the princess. Three of them were Andromeda’s half sisters: children of Kephus by lesser mothers, noblewomen or concubines. The other unlucky teenagers, Andromeda didn’t know.

None of them was a very good match.

She understood what was happening at once, and knew that her mother must be
desperate
. Cassiopeia was a sincerely religious woman, but she might have tried to get away with “deceiving” the God. Phoenician nobles offered substitutes instead of their own precious children all the time—and the Gods showed no displeasure. But it was the priests who had demanded the life of Princess Andromeda. The queen must have her back against the wall, if she was going to try and deceive
them
. It must be today, thought Andromeda, and she trembled. She’d been hoping for a respite.

On the queen’s great bed, laid out on the coverlet like a flat dead person, was the covering of gold that the sacrifice would wear: a dress entirely made of thin pieces of gold linked with gold wire and set with jewels; and a sacred diadem with trembling gold leaves, and pearl and coral flowers. All to be thrown away …

The queen had seen her daughter, and was staring at this vision in horror.

“Mama?”

Andromeda knelt and bowed her head, raising her joined hands in salute, as she always did when she entered her mother’s presence. Cassiopeia was loving but
proud. She expected ceremony to be respected, even in private life.

“Let them go. You don’t need a substitute. I came back.”

Nothing more merciless than fear.

The chief priests of Haifa had been feuding with Cassiopeia for a long time. They resented the Ethiopian’s wisdom, her power over the people, and even her beauty. They’d been plotting for years to increase their own influence and reduce the queen’s scope. They were ruthless. They’d seen the portent of the first quake as an opportunity, and claimed Andromeda as a sacrifice to bring Cassiopeia to her knees. But they were also truly afraid. Like Cassiopeia the great queen, they
knew
things. They knew that deep wells were failing; that harvests were smaller, year by year; that the Middle Sea was growing more dangerous and trade was suffering. Fewer ships plied the longer routes; less merchandise was carried. Taki, the shipping magnate of the Blue Star line, had strong rooms full of treasure, but common goods were growing scarcer…. The priests looked into the future, further than anyone. They saw that even a city like Haifa might founder.

They weren’t just greedy for material power. They truly believed that the creeping, deadly changes were wrought by Gods who could be bought like corrupt human beings.
They believed, like the Achaeans, that great Fira had been destroyed because Minoan women knew too much; because the Minoans had lived too soft, prizing the peace above war. They believed it could happen again, and this time the Great Disaster would destroy Phoenicia. They didn’t understand her “flying marks,” but they were sure that Andromeda’s unnatural learning was displeasing to the Gods. She had to die.

Andromeda knew all this. She was Cassiopeia’s daughter, she’d been trained to understand statecraft. But it didn’t help.

The wailing and moaning of the palace women left her no dignity. They wanted to bathe her, anoint her with funeral oils, dress her in finest purple. She wouldn’t let them touch her salt-stained rags, or even comb her hair. But that was her last victory. She was sealed into the gold dress and delivered to the priests. She was made to walk through the city dressed in gold, and
shackled
, the chief priest of Melqart walking ahead of her in triumph, bearing the sacred diadem. The people crowded to watch her pass by, keening and howling. She was surrounded by the sound of breaking pottery. Vases and furniture were thrown from high windows; fine woven cloth was torn to pieces: all the destruction that was customary at a funeral.

“Don’t mourn me!” she shouted, infuriated. “I am not being murdered! This is my choice! I’m god-touched! This is right!”

The howls, the holy drums and rattles, the smashing of precious objects, the chanting of the priests drowned her out. She wanted her mother. She wanted her mother to be here, proudly telling the people that Andromeda was willing. That the priests were false but the sacrifice was
true
. But Cassiopeia and Kephus had retreated to the depths of the palace, leaving Andromeda to look like a dumb animal led to the slaughter—which was so unfair.

She was taken to the rock in a sacred barge. The moaning and weeping of the crowd diminished. She watched the long sweep of the oars, and felt the cool sea breeze. The sky was darker now, and the heat heavy: like a normal tenth-month day. They made her lie down, then fastened the chains to four bronze rings hammered into the rock so that she was pinioned by her wrists and ankles. The rock struck cold through the metal; she could feel the slimy touch of seaweed on her bare arms.

“This isn’t your doing!” she shouted.
“I’m
doing this, for the people!”