Danae

by Laura Gill

  Laodike harrumphed. “That’s stupid.” She turned up her snub nose as if the very notion smelled offensive. “Who ever heard of not having a name? So what was it before?” A halfhearted attempt at a friendly nudge irked me; she might easily have been the one who had shoved me from behind yesterday. “Come on, you can tell me!”

  Itamo, within earshot, peered over to see what was going on. “Tell you what? What’re you doing, talking to Nobody?”

  “She won’t tell her real name.”

  Why could they not just leave me alone, or pretend not to see me as others had? “I don’t have a name.”

  “What’s this idle grousing about?” The raven’s eyes on her headdress glittering balefully, Sostrate interjected. “Laodike, it’s your turn with the bow. Make sure you don’t drop your elbow like last time. Itamo, why aren’t you practicing your stance with Kynane? If you’re going to pick up a bow, it’s either to hunt or defend yourself, not to show off.”

  Finally, Sostrate winked at me. “Well, little Nobody. Baubo’s ready to practice stringing the bow with you. Now go, and make sure to put some effort into it.” She shooed me away to the shade of the oak tree where yesterday I had wrestled with my tears, and where now the youngest Hunter awaited me with an unstrung bow and a length of sinew. I dreaded the exercise but welcomed the intimacy of a private lesson. Baubo was nice.

  Later, when I told Phileia how my morning had progressed, she paused, tilted her head, and measured me for a long, anxious moment. “I have been thinking that perhaps this has gone on too long,” she finally said. “Our intention was to fill you up, not crush your spirit or leave you questioning yourself. Different girls have different needs, I suppose. I was a spoiled little wretch who needed to be taken down several pegs. You, on the other hand...”

  She fell silent again, and contemplative. I did not understand everything she told me; my ears comprehended only that I had failed to toughen up.

  “I don’t think you were ever comfortable in the skin of the girl you once were,” Phileia added. “Perhaps it’s time to make you into the girl you should be.” She reached out and took my hands. “Are you ready to descend into the earth to meet the Mistress, to be reborn?” I gawped at her. What was she requesting of me?

  Her hands squeezed mine, and then she rephrased the question, “Are you ready to receive a new name and be dedicated?”

  Any normal girl, I thought, would have jumped up and cried yes. I just sat there like a stunned heifer, trying to untangle a skein of words.

  “Outis, are you listening?”

  “Yes.”

  “Are you ready to meet the Mistress and be dedicated?” Phileia repeated the question with greater urgency. “It’s all right if you aren’t. Much will be asked of you, but you will gain much in return. I remember when I first emerged from under the earth after meeting the Mistress, when I became Phileia. Wonderful memories.” She released one of my hands in order to push a stray lock of hair away from my face. “Will you think about it?”

  She was giving me a choice now, when she had not given me any say in the stripping of my old identity? “What do I have to do?”

  “You will have to fast for three days, but that isn’t beyond your ability to endure. We priestesses have tricks to make the ordeal easier. You will have to pray at certain times of the day and night.”

  I was not thinking about the preparations, but about the terrible parts, the descent into the underworld, the encounter with the Mistress. Was she a monster with wings and claws, like the figurine Sostrate had shown me in Argos? “Do I have to go alone into the cave?”

  “Of course not!” Phileia practically laughed, even though it was a serious question. “No one ventures alone into the Mistress’s domain, ever, not even a high priestess. Both Ktimene and I will accompany you.”

  “Will I be tied up?”

  “Tied up?” It took her a moment to grasp my reference. “No, no scarlet cords, no binding.”

  I agreed to undergo the ordeal because there was nothing else for me to do. Either I met the Mistress and was dedicated, or I remained a nobody forever. I chose, but had no real choice.

  That night, Phileia served me extra portions of bread and porridge. “Eat everything up,” she insisted, “but slowly. Don’t make yourself sick. The idea is to fill yourself up so you can keep your strength while fasting.”

  In addition, I had to memorize special prayers which I had to say three times by day, and another three times by night; that meant I had to wake thrice from a sound slumber and, yawning and bleary-eyed, amble over to the hearth to reverence the Mistress. Sometimes I nodded off during the prayer, and started awake because Ktimene pinched me.

  The first night, my belly ached from eating too much, and by morning I was irritable and chafing over the regulations governing my preparations to meet the Mistress. Ktimene took over my domestic chores, meaning I could sleep in a bit once I made my sunrise devotions, but it also meant that my waking hours were filled with unrelenting boredom. Because I was fasting, Phileia forbade me help her prepare meals. I could not go outside for fresh air because it meant possibly encountering someone who would tempt me away from the Mistress’s service with false words or by offering me food or drink.

  Phileia brought me a drink of cold spring water flavored with honey and mint. “You’re only forbidden meat and milk, and the grains of the field,” she explained. “This kykeon is a drink devised by Demeter herself. It will help sustain you.”

  What would have sustained me was a break in the monotony of carding and spinning wool. Many women claimed to like the task because it required no thought, but for me that was the problem. Wool-working allowed my mind far too much space in which to wander. A thousand mysterious pairs of eyes watched, and then there was the omnipresent raven, the talisman of the dark goddess, heightening my apprehensions about the coming rites

  “You’re doing well.” Phileia’s regular interjections did not allay my anxiety as she doubtlessly intended, but exacerbated it, because I could not ask questions about the ceremony or what name I would receive.

  By the dawn of the third day, I was sleep-deprived, weak and trembling from hunger. Ktimene roused me for the ritual bath. “Brace yourself, girl.”

  The shock of the cold water bit through to my bones, instantly banishing my sleepiness. The priestesses drenched me once, then hustled me out to swaddle me in a woolen blanket warm from the fire. “Later you can have a hot bath,” Phileia said.

  My teeth chattered, and Ktimene attacking my damp hair with a towel did not help. “Speak the prayers,” she said. “Thank the Mistress for today.”

  I did not feel particularly thankful. My stomach gurgled audibly, prompting a comment from Ktimene. “Just a little longer. Today is your name-day, after all.” She misunderstood my body’s cues. Hunger was the last thing I felt. My belly knotted and fluttered. I wanted to vomit despite there being nothing in my stomach. Did I really want to do this? I had no particular devotion to the Mistress. Gods knew, I owned no backbone. If I changed my mind halfway through the rite, resisted as I had during the stripping of my name, tried to run screaming from the cave, the priestesses could not give back my old identity and return me to Argos.

  I swallowed back bile and tried not to think about caves and winged demons, and all the other horrors surely awaiting me in the Mistress’s primeval domain. Yet I could not help the tears that escaped, lacked the courage to correct the priestesses when they assumed that it was the icy bath or lack of nourishment that upset me.

  Dawn had barely broken by the time we left the house. A thin mist carpeted the mountainside, creeping in smoky white tendrils along the paths. Ktimene carried a single lantern. Somewhere among the dark shadows of the firs hugging the cliffs, I heard an owl mourn the arrival of Helios’s burning chariot, then the flutter of birdsong. Athena’s presence waxed strong, but the goddess watching me from the treetops was not the kindly patron goddess of Argos; she was instead the dreadful Mistress of Battles, the owl-fa
ced ravager with sharp talons that devoured small things like cowardly little girls.

  The path turned right, then left, hugging sheer drops into a mountain gorge still blanketed in shadows. Phileia and Ktimene walked quickly, urging me along faster than I wanted to go. Several times, vomit rose in my gorge. I hesitated, sucked down the cold mountain air because Phileia told me it helped, and hastened to keep pace. Why did I not turn around and run back toward the village as I so desperately wanted to? No one forced me to follow, yet I kept walking and asking myself why.

  The path diverged, and to the left became a passageway sloping down toward a fracture in the mountainside framed by dripping foliage. Immediately I thought of the dromos of Mother’s tomb, recognized the darkness beyond the opening as the kind of black, yeasty place where one encountered noxious, dead things. Every fiber of my being protested. I balked. “No. I don’t want to.”

  Phileia reached for my hand, but I no longer knew her as the grandmotherly woman who had encouraged me; her chalk-white face and soot-rimmed eyes belonged to Persephone. Even her voice changed, its forbidding tones lancing through me to raise goose pebbles on my skin. “There is nothing behind you, Outis. The only way is forward. The only way is through me.”

  Dawn was breaking. The whole world seemed to stand still on my decision. What to do? Taking the dark goddess’s hand meant entering the underworld. Did the shades of the dead lurk in that cave? Would I see Mother? I knew the goddess’s touch would be cold, holding none of the reassurance the breathing, living Phileia might offer.

  “Go with her.” Ktimene nudged me from behind. “She offers you her protection.”

  When I took the goddess’s hand, her flesh felt clammy like potter’s clay, her bones prominent, reminding me of my own mortality. If I went into the darkness with her, would she slough her skin and transform into a skeleton?

  Ktimene with the lantern went first, ducking under the curtain of moss and bedewed vines to illuminate the way. At once, the miasma of rotting earth and dampness assaulted my nostrils, and the air moving through the opening carried with it the heavy groaning of the mountain.

  Why did the Mistress have to dwell in such a forbidding place? Why choose a dank and mountainous cave over the realms of the whole wide earth and the boundless sky? Why not instead a beautiful, manmade sanctuary under the sun-bright sky, such as the cult house in Argos? She could have appeared to me as anything she wished, even as my own mother, so why the ghastly countenance of the goddess of death?

  Could she read my thoughts? Would she chastise me for questioning her choice of manifestation? Would she open her mouth to reveal fangs, and then tear me to shreds? I tried to empty my mind. Impossible with a hundred thousand separate terrors whirling around inside my skull.

  Gravel mixed with slippery mud underfoot, making the way ahead precarious. Ktimene’s lantern threw fragments of illumination and shadow, revealing places where the limestone dripped like melting wax, trapping misshapen faces and limbs. I jumped to see them there. Were those shades? Was my mother imprisoned there? Or was that what happened to those who displeased the Mistress? I imagined myself stuck in the rock, screaming for all eternity.

  Through all this, my gasps and starts, the goddess holding my hand made no reaction, neither comment nor sound nor sign of acknowledgment.

  Up higher, I caught the impression of draperies frozen in motion. More disconcerting still, formations of rock thrust up through the floor, amorphous pillars suggesting even more people turned to stone. And then there was the gag-inducing stench. Something or someone had crawled into the cavern, gotten lost, and been devoured; I swore I heard demons gnawing the bones just beyond my sight.

  More than a dozen paces later, Ktimene halted. The lantern swayed in her hand, its single candle arcing back and forth like a miniature sun. “This is the place.”

  A wall of loose-fitting stones formed a crude temenos enclosing a limestone stalagmite whose uppermost reaches vanished among the shadows of the cavern’s ceiling. Phileia had spoken of a primeval Mother of the Mountains, a goddess-pillar under the earth. Potsherds littered the ground, as did animal bones. Blood was shed here. Phileia had lied. There were sacrifices and scarlet bonds. Now the high priestess as Persephone would sacrifice me, too. Warm liquid trickled down my inner thigh. The Mistress who lurked everywhere would know.

  Leaving the lantern on the floor, Ktimene raised both arms toward the goddess-pillar. “Potnia, Mother of the Mountains, we come!” Echo took her cry and carried it in every direction. My instincts shrieked out against her utterance. Demons would now pour out of the darkness and tear us to shreds. Cerberos. I thought of the dreadful, three-headed hound of Hades.

  The cold hand holding mine released me. Phileia-as-Persephone pointed wordlessly to the ground before the goddess-pillar. I knelt. Loose stones dug into the flesh of my knees. I kept wanting to glance behind me, to make sure that the high priestess was not reaching for a labrys to strike off my head; some of the skeletons scattered around the temenos wall were headless.

  Instead, Phileia raised her spindly arms. “Hail, Potnia, Mother of the Mountains, Giver of Life, Receiver of the Dead!” Ktimene repeated the words, indicated with a nudge that it was my turn. I uttered the customary greeting in an uncertain voice. Echo carried my voice away.

  Phileia continued, “Great Potnia, here is the girl Outis. If you find her pleasing, accept her into service as a novice.” She would not find me pleasing, not at all! “Let her be granted a name.”

  Quavering all over, conscious of my own irregular heartbeat and the eerie sounds of the cave, I waited. Waited an eternity. I could practically feel the pillar goddess’s limestone fingers clamping down on my shoulder, practically smell the ozone of an impending lightning strike. I shut my eyes. Would it hurt very much? What was it like, spending eternity frozen into the Mountain?

  I started at the sound of Phileia’s voice speaking again. “Let her be dedicated!” For a moment, I thought I heard something else, Persephone herself commanding: “Let her be sacrificed!”

  A scream rose in my throat. I tensed. Would Ktimene grab me as she had before? My gaze darted about for signs of a scarlet thread, a gleaming labrys. No. Ktimene just stood there, ramrod-straight, shielding her eyes with her right hand, palm turned outward: the ritual pose for an adorant facing an immortal. Phileia swayed on her feet with both arms upraised. I felt frozen, uncertain; my own senses betrayed me. What should this nameless girl with no spine be doing? Bowing my head, or bending double to kiss the ground where sacrificial bones and potsherds lay?

  “Let her be dedicated!” the goddess-in-Phileia cried. “Let her name be Myrtale!”

  The name resounded around me, through me. A name sacred to Aphrodite, the name of the goddess’s own sacred tree, the myrtle with its lovely pink blossoms. Was that my name the nymph Echo called? Three syllables conveying such beauty, and now the Mother, the Mistress of All, applied that loveliness to me?

  I heard breathy groan and a shuffling movement, and Ktimene murmur, “Sit and rest a while. I will fetch Myrtale.”

  Did she mean me? Scraping footfalls, a presence looming above me, and there were Ktimene’s shoes, the threadbare hem of her priestess-garment. “Get up, Myrtale.”

  She spoke to me! Outis who had been Danaë really had become Myrtale. Only with Ktimene’s assistance could I stand, and when I was on my I stood gazing around the calm darkness of the cave in wonder. The faces in the limestone draperies and misshapen walls had stopped screaming and become quiescent. The pillar was just that: a column of stone, the goddess within at rest.

  “Myrtale.” Phileia now, holding out her arms. “Come to me. Let me be the first to rejoice with you.”

  I wobbled over to the high priestess and fell into her arms. Phileia, too, was trembling, or was that just me? I released a long breath with a little laugh of relief.

  The high priestess rocked me back and forth, and I kept hearing “Myrtale” in my head, on her tongue. “It’s over, all over,�
�� she repeated. “Today is your name-day.”

  Name-day. A silly smile grew from within. The priestesses were actually going to celebrate my name-day, when everybody in the time before had forgotten! Oh, but that was another girl who was neglected, not me!

  We ascended into daylight. Helios’s chariot had since risen; the world above glowed with such magnificence that my eyes burned and watered. No more reek of stagnant water and dead flesh. Pine needles scented the air. I forgot my weakness and hunger, even that my dress was stained with urine. Springtime had come. The sunlight tasted like honeycombs, the fluttering in my belly transformed into butterflies with rainbow wings.

  “I am glad that you are happy,” Phileia remarked. She walked slowly, leaning on Ktimene’s arm. Would the two not hurry up? I wanted to break my fast. I wanted to share my new name with the other Women of the Mountain.

  PART THREE

  ZEUS IN THE OAK

  “Godlike Perseus Eurymedon, for by that name his mother also called him.”

  Apollonius of Rhodes, Argonautica IV, 1502-1536

  CHAPTER NINE

  The cave mouth, its fringe of hanging foliage now dry in the heat of summer, exuded an air of foreboding.

  I was fourteen years old, newly flowered into womanhood, and about to undertake a mystery all priestesses serving the Mistress had to know and accept. On such a fine day as this, I would rather have avoided the subject of death altogether.

  I resisted the urge to scratch my temples. The white face paint was not merely a new part of my ritual garb, but also protection in the Mistress’s domain; the shades would not disturb a priestess wearing Persephone’s chalk-white visage. Yet it was hard to wear in such weather. Summer’s dry warmth brought dust and sweat, and pollen filtered through the air, so by the time we priestesses reached the sanctuary cave to undertake our task of disinterring the dead, we were flushed and itching.