by Laura Gill
I hugged Eurymedon against my heart and kissed his downy head, so soft and warm and sweet-smelling; Rhona had anointed him with sage-infused oil last night after cleaning him. How could I ever relinquish him? Letting Phileia take him from me was like letting her reach into my chest to tear out my heart.
My crying agitated him, and when he, in response, started bawling, it tormented me yet further. What nerve I had dissolved right there. “No, no! You can’t take him! He’s mine!” I lunged forward to snatch him from Phileia’s grasp, but I had barely moved when Rhona and Ktimene, having apparently anticipated my reluctance, swooped down upon me like a pair of hawks to entangle me in a restraining embrace.
“Let him go.”
“Sostrate will take good care of him.”
What did the Hunter know about babies? She would lose her footing in the snow and drop Eurymedon. And how would she feed him? Through my tears, I saw Phileia swaddling him in an extra blanket before handing him to Sostrate. “NO!” I screamed. “You can’t take him away from me. He’s MINE!”
“Hush,” Rhona hissed. “You can’t keep him here with you.”
“He’s MINE!” However hard I struggled, my ordeal had left me too weak to break free. “MY SON!”
I heard the door shut. Eurymedon’s cries were lost in the echoes of my own shrieks and the thunderous pounding in my ears. I twisted and pulled, tried to push the women away, and kicked at them, but to no avail. My womb throbbed. I felt blood pulsing from my thighs. Milk leaked from my breasts.
“That’s enough!” Phileia gave me no chance to register the words before slapping me across the face. “You’re making this harder on yourself. Be grateful that your son is healthy and whole, and has a family.”
“I’m his family,” I snarled. What did she know about children, the dried-up old hag? “Bring him back!”
She grasped my chin hard enough to leave marks. “And what would you do with him? We’ve discussed this before. There’s no place here for a boy.” When I wrenched my head to free myself, she released me. “Did you think you could leave the sanctuary and go looking for a husband in one of the villages? Do you really think anyone will take you, a stranger, a failed priestess? You’d end up as a bondswoman, serving some rough master in his house and in his bed. And what would happen to your precious son, then?”
“It’s a fate worse than death,” Ktimene added harshly. “Be grateful. Once you’re purified, the Mistress will take you back.”
As they spoke, I stopped struggling and went limp but for my hiccupping sobs. Never mind becoming a slave. If Eurymedon and I could not be together, then I would rather perish. Thanatos might take me easily, in the depths of winter. A midnight walk into the forest without cloak or shoes would be sufficient. I had even heard that freezing to death was a drowsy, pleasant experience toward the end. Thanatos would find me no trouble at all.
The web of women held me fast in their embrace, as though they could collectively read my thoughts. “Of course you’re suffering,” Rhona said. “We might not be mothers, but we’ll stay with you. Rest and time are what you need now.” Someone pressed the rim of a ceramic cup to my lips. “Drink deeply.”
Hot, bitter liquid burned a trail down my throat to my belly; the brew tasted like the poison I desperately hoped it was. Smothering, the women stroked my hair and kissed my forehead, and, as I gradually became drowsier and sank deeper into the embrace of Hypnos, drew the coverlets over me. Oblivious, I floated down into the darkness where a dreamless void as silent and welcome as the waters of Lethe enveloped me. If I had somehow slipped into the realm of Hades, if I were now lying in the underground of the Persephone Cave, my body quietly rotting in the black earth, then Death was not the terrible thing I had always dreaded.
Sounds filtered into the dark. Not the rush of air through the cave or the distant drip-plop of growing stalactites, but the crackle of a fire, the wind rattling the thatched eaves, the mewling of a child. Something warm nuzzled against me, a lure cast into dark waters to coax me back to the surface. Eyelids fluttering, I registered the blur of firelight and shadow, of bare walls and rafters overhead, and sensed something moving in the fleeces beside me.
Impossible. I must be dreaming with my eyes wide open, because there could be no logical explanation for the baby lying next to me. Eurymedon. My son had returned. Alert and fumbling to sit upright, I tried to process the miracle.
“How are you here?” I gathered him into my arms, eager to feel his warmth and inhale his baby scent. Had someone brought him back? I did not see how, though at the moment it did not matter. I sobbed for joy.
A faint cough from outside alerted me to the presence of others, the sentries posted outside. Someone would hear me, or him, if he cried. I had to be quiet and cautious, and hide Eurymedon from Phileia and Sostrate, and all the women who would take him away again. But how could I conceal him? There were no cupboards or hanging baskets or storage pithoi in the house, only the few furnishings necessary to accommodate a pregnant woman during a short stay. A quick glance at the birthing stool repulsed me. I had bled and soiled myself on that contraption, and besides, it owned no place for concealment.
As if to mirror my thoughts, the foul odor of excrement suddenly wafted past my nostrils. Eurymedon started crying. “Hush, hush! Someone will hear.” Not knowing how else to silence him, I shoved a nipple into his mouth.
His diaper felt wet and lumpy; it took me a moment to realize he had soiled himself as babies did. How stupid of me not to have thought of that! However, Rhona, who had taught me how to nurse Eurymedon, had not offered any instruction on how to change a diaper because she assumed I would not need that information.
Where were the extra diapers? I would need water to wash Eurymedon’s bottom, and that would take time to heat; he would bawl at the touch of cold water. After nursing him, I set him down on the fleeces, then searched the house. I found only my clothes, the woolen plugs the women used for menstruation, and a supply of old linens Rhona kept for the birthing stool. A jug of water sat beside the hearth, along with cheese and some dried figs. With the old linens, I had enough material with which to fashion a diaper, and sufficient resolve to tackle the mess. Poor baby. Whatever god had returned him to me—for it must have been a fleet-footed immortal to bring him back soon, and without attracting notice—had not considered his bodily functions.
Just as I returned to the bed to fetch Eurymedon to the hearth for a changing and bath, the door creaked, then cracked open a hair. “Myrtale?” Pyrrha’s habit of querying before she poked her head in provided adequate warning. I quickly arranged a blanket over my baby to conceal his presence, and then hastened to the door to forestall the sentry.
“Right here,” I said.
“I heard you talking to someone.” Pyrrha’s face was red and windburned despite her muffling woolens. Pale sunlight and brittle cold streamed in from behind her. “Is everything all right here? Are you feeling better?”
Did she think I had a man with me? “Yes, fine.” My reply sounded unsteady and overhasty to myself, but would she notice? “I was, uh, just humming, making breakfast. I would ask you in but I, uh, ought to bathe first.”
Pyrrha’s heavy brows furrowed, and she cocked her head to one side. What did she hear? Eurymedon made no discernible noise that I heard. My heart caught in my throat. Could she somehow smell his soiled diaper? Sentries as well as Hunters owned highly developed senses. I strove to pretend ignorance. “Is something amiss?”
Yet Pyrrha, fixing her gaze on me, made no answer, merely braced her mittened hand on the door and gently but insistently pushed it open. Goddess, how could I keep her from entering without further rousing her suspicions? Bad enough that I was blushing, that I could not keep as cool and detached as I needed to be, but another step and she would have an unobstructed view of the bed complete with the concealed lump that was Eurymedon. If he should move or make the slightest sound...
The moment she sniffed the air, I seized my chance. “I’m af
raid that’s me you smell.” An unconvincing laugh issued from my throat. “I told you, I need to bathe and change my padding. Motherhood is terribly uncomfortable and, uh, disgusting. Waiting forty days to be purified is going to be agony.”
Pyrrha’s attention stayed focused on perusing the dimly-lit interior. “As you say,” she mumbled, without looking at me. “Not that a man would be stupid enough to try breaking in with us around, and during the winter.” A quick glance in my direction and a smile as she started to withdraw offered a ray of hope. “If you’re well enough to take some fresh air later, the high priestess said you should. Maybe this afternoon?”
“Yes!” I exclaimed, too eagerly and loudly. “I haven’t been out in days, and indoors... Maybe tomorrow I can clean a little.”
Thank the benevolent and watchful gods for standing with me, I thought as Pyrrha returned to her post. I dashed to the bed, pulled away the concealing blanket, and carried Eurymedon over to the hearth. “You’re a good boy,” I whispered in his ear. “I need you to be good a while longer.” He whimpered a response. His diaper smelled even worse than before, if that was possible. “Mama will make you clean again.”
I laid him on his back and unknotted the diaper to see what he had done, and sure enough, Eurymedon had soiled himself both ways. So the merciful gods did not change diapers. Grimacing, I cleaned the mess, washed him, and folded and tucked a piece of recycled linen into a brand-new diaper. Eurymedon, waving his tiny arms, smiled up at me. He had such piercing blue eyes, but then, someone, maybe my nurse or one of the palace ladies, had explained that all babies were born with blue eyes, which almost always darkened and changed by the end of the first year. I hoped not in Eurymedon’s case. Everything about him was beautiful.
“Better?” I whispered. His happiness was infectious, banishing my earlier sorrows and current worries, and, as Rhona had promised, even the recollections of my recent travail. A gift of Lady Eleuthia, indeed.
Tramping footfalls just outside alerted me to sudden danger. I barely had time to scoop up Eurymedon and hide him behind the bed before the door swung open and Phileia herself stormed in. “Where is he?” she demanded.
“Who?” How did she know? Just beyond her shoulder, I glimpsed the culprit. Pyrrha’s face betrayed nothing.
“Don’t play stupid with me, Myrtale.” Phileia actively explored the house, turning over blankets, peering under fleeces and footstools as I, frantic for the second time that day, followed her in a clumsy attempt to steer her away from the bed. Yet there was no deterring her, and it was not long before she exposed my son in his hiding place.
I raced past Phileia to rescue him. “He’s mine,” I declared, wrapping both arms around my son. “You can’t take him.” So I had announced yesterday, but in sleep’s embrace I had had a chance to recover my strength. Small matter to me that Phileia was elderly and a high priestess. If she touched so much as a hair on Eurymedon’s head, she would find herself facing a lioness with claws unsheathed. “He’s mine.”
“How did you get him back?” Phileia snapped. Her accusing tone suggested that I myself had somehow slipped past the sentries and ventured alone and weak into an unfamiliar wilderness to seize Eurymedon from a family whose dwelling place I could not have located if my life depended on it. So I related what had happened, insofar as I could explain it, but Phileia, who witnessed with her own eyes the miracle of my son’s conception and accelerated growth in the womb, refused to believe the tale. “Impossible!”
Impossible for her, she meant to say, because she could not have me keep my son outside the sanctuary, but this time she did not waste an explanation. With a quick glance over her shoulder, she shouted, “Sostrate!”
She had brought the Hunter? Clutching Eurymedon even harder, I searched for an avenue of escape, but there was only the one door whose threshold quickly filled with sentries. Sostrate herself, her headdress’s raven eyes glowering, advanced toward me. “I don’t know how you did it,” she began, “but you’ve got to—”
“You stay away!” I shouted, turning my back on her.
“Myrtale, do as you’re told!” Phileia hollered.
The noise we generated set Eurymedon to bawling. I found myself torn between needing to soothe him and desperate to spirit him away, and meanwhile other women entered the house. Sostrate seized my arm, Pyrrha the other, and there was Thalamika to pry Eurymedon from my grasp. I kicked out, my naked toes connecting painfully with someone’s shin. I strained against the women pinning my arms hard enough to get my right free, and instinctively lashed out with a balled fist that delivered a glancing uppercut to Thalamika’s jaw. To my immediate horror, she stumbled for balance with my son in her arms, but then Thebeia, the young sentry, steadied them both.
Something or someone struck the side of my head. I reeled, without losing consciousness. “Thalamika!” I shouted. “Bring him back here. BRING HIM BACK!” When a hand tried to muffle my shouts, I bit down as hard as I could. Blood filled my mouth as a satisfying cry of pain reached my ears. Phileia, storming toward me, raised her hand to box my ear, but I jerked my head to the side at the last moment, so her blow struck one of the other women instead. Teeth bared, my mouth bloody, I snarled at her.
Then I became aware of a loop tightening around my free wrist, and my arm being jerked back and my wrists being fastened together. Tied up like a animal, a prisoner, a bondswoman. I thrashed, but succeeded only in dislocating my shoulder. Despite the sudden pain, I kept going, ready to race into the snow after Thalamika and my baby with my arms tied behind my back, when the world suddenly went vertical.
Next thing I knew, Pyrrha and Thebeia were holding me down while Sostrate bound my ankles. “You’re not going anywhere,” the Hunter muttered.
“The gods brought him back, and they’ll do it again!” My throat, already bruised from having screamed and cried yesterday and during my labor, was becoming hoarse. Whether the gods would save Eurymedon again, or whether they even had before, I could not say for certain; it was only a mother’s unreasoning faith.
Thebeia straddled me, while the other sentries and Phileia assumed positions around the house. “You can’t bind me forever.” My taunt elicited no response. Meanwhile, I became aware of a need to urinate. Should I aggravate the sentries and high priestess further still by relieving myself right there, or should I say something and take the chance that Phileia would let me use the chamber pot? They would probably ignore the request out of spite. Very well. Then I would soil myself. I needed to change my padding, anyway.
Letting go, however, proved harder than I anticipated. My body, knotted all over with tension, refused to relax. Maybe if the cords binding my wrists together had been looser, if my hands were not so blood-starved and aching, I could have made myself go limp and released my bladder, but in the end, growling, I conceded defeat.
“What are you grumbling about?” Phileia barked from the hearth where she sat beside the soiled diaper and old linen; that she made no effort to clean up the mess spoke further as to the depths of her irritation.
“I have to relieve myself!” I shot back. “Would you rather I did it here?” Let her believe that I could.
“Hold it,” she ordered. “That’s the least you deserve for causing this outburst.”
“This is my fault?” I thrashed left then right in a futile attempt to dislodge Thebeia, who made herself quite at home sitting on my legs. “You’re the one who took him away, even when you saw what happened, when you saw how the gods returned him, so don’t you dare—”
“Thebeia, get her up and let her squat over the chamber pot.” Phileia dismissed me with a curt gesture; she did not even acknowledge the accusation. And neither Sostrate nor the sentries added a comment. The atmosphere in that small house had become taut and sullen. A rising wind rattled through the thatch. I thought of Thalamika out there with my son. What did the captain know about caring for babies? Eurymedon would surely catch a chill before he reached whatever herdsman’s hovel his surrogate famil
y occupied.
Determined to push the high priestess further, as well as draw attention to my additional predicament, I added, “I need to change my padding, unless you expect Thebeia to do that for me.” Thoughts of my son exposed to the cold heightened my outrage and bled into my tone. “I didn’t have a chance to clean before you so rudely barged in.”
Phileia’s gaze bored into me. “Don’t expect to be unbound.” As she answered my challenge, she seemed to grow threefold in stature. A trite priestess-trick that I myself could execute. “You’ll run straightaway out into the snow.”
My limbs protested as Thebeia hauled me upright. “If Thalamika can’t hide her tracks, that’s her fault.” No need to deny my purpose, for the high priestess and the other women would have seen right through any attempt to assure them otherwise. “You should have thought twice about taking Eurymedon from me.”
“You’re being a disobedient burden.” Phileia’s acerbic tone ebbed somewhat in its ferocity, suggesting an internal weariness. “You’re old enough to understand why this has to be, but you’re only making it more difficult for yourself. If I had your assurance that you won’t interfere, that you’ll let Eurymedon go to his new home, then—”
“Do you honestly think I went into the dark night after him? I was drugged senseless!” I kept my feet with difficulty. Not having eaten, and having used what little energy I had fighting against Sostrate and the sentries had left me drained. I could not have run out in pursuit of Thalamika and Eurymedon even if Phileia ordered me released.
Just as Phileia started to answer, the door banged open and, to my utter astonishment, Thalamika stood on the threshold wearing a look of stark terror on her face. More importantly, she still carried Eurymedon. I cried out for joy and, momentarily forgetting about the need to urinate, took a lurching step forward.