Danae

by Laura Gill

  Klymene, who walked on my right, interjected, “That depends on whether you’re his friend or enemy, but when it comes to women Polydektes has a wandering eye and isn’t shy about taking what he wants. Stay in the village and out of sight.”

  Although I did not view my looks as anything more than middling, I took the women’s advice to heart. Attracting notice was the last thing I wanted.

  No one was home when we came in to check the hearth and prepare supper. I reclaimed Eurymedon from Huamia’s daughter, who had been watching him along with her younger siblings, and changed him. The sight of the fleeces and fine linens on the bed perturbed me now more than before; nighttime meant the stirring of demons.

  Evening fell. Diktys returned home, hung up his implements, and washed. We ate in silence. I nursed Eurymedon, who afterward was content to be dandled and admired by our hosts; he was more comfortable among strangers than I. Maybe he knew better than his mother, and understood that it was impossible to survive and keep one’s sanity when mired in a perpetual state of suspicion. He had not yet learned about betrayal.

  Once I put the baby to bed, Diktys drew me aside. “I haven’t forgotten what I said yesterday. Let’s talk outside.”

  Glancing once through the open door, then at him, I shook my head. “It’s dark out. Why not remain here?”

  He searched my face before giving a knowing nod. “I see. An unmarried woman doesn’t trust herself with me alone at night. No, you’re right. I forgot myself.” He raised a hand to forestall my protestations that I meant no offense. “I simply assumed you might want privacy when I asked my questions.”

  “I thought the elders would do that,” I told him, “but they haven’t come. Didn’t you say they would?”

  “Yes, but I spoke with the damos earlier and they’re content to leave the decision in my hands. Besides...” Here, he grinned. “Some of the elders have already seen and measured you. This afternoon, during the excursion. Luktia and Iolanthe and Philagra, they’re members of the damos.” He laughed. “I’m sorry if you thought you were to be interrogated by a group of severe old men. I forget sometimes that customs are different on the mainland.”

  Diktys sat down again, while Klymene swept and straightened around us. “You’re from Arcadia? That’s nowhere near the sea, and yet here you are.”

  During the day, I had had time to devise a story containing as much truth as I dared tell; Phileia always said that lies were harder to remember. “My family dedicated me as a consecrated virgin to the goddess of the cave sanctuary, Potnia Theron. When I got with child, the priestesses didn’t punish me, because the rape wasn’t my fault, but they sent me home because I bore a boy, and nothing male is allowed inside the sanctuary.” I sat stiffly, my eyes averted. Women were so much easier to read. Diktys was inscrutable. Maybe men could see right through women. “My kinsmen took my son to expose him in the wilderness, but I fought them. So they decided on the chest, to rid themselves of us both, and leave our deaths to the gods.” I felt nothing, saying that, when it should have hurt unbearably. Another life, I reminded myself. I had, through the mercy of the gods, been reborn as Dorea. Rebirth was cause for rejoicing.

  “And that’s everything?”

  I felt rather than observed Diktys staring at me, weighing, assessing my tale. “That’s all I intend to tell you.”

  Several moments passed in which I dared not breathe. My heart beat a staccato rhythm. Might he challenge me?

  “Still, there’s something uncommon about you,” he finally commented. Goddess, he could look inside me! “Are you educated?”

  He took a carbonized twig from the hearth and on the plastered hearth curb scrawled the trio of signs that spelled my name: do-re-a. “What does it say?” he asked.

  A test, to see whether I could read and write. I shrugged. “Say? That looks like nothing but gibberish to me.”

  “Hah!” he laughed. “You’re not even looking.”

  Angry, I glared at him, matching him stare for stare. “What does it matter whether I can read or not?” I regretted my sharp-edged tone almost at once. “I can cook and gather herbs, and Iolanthe says there’s weaving to do. She says the village owes woolen cloth to the king.”

  “You mean the allotment?” Diktys showed his annoyance when Klymene, dissatisfied with his efforts at erasing his charcoal marks, leaned in to do the job for him. “Of course. We need good weavers. Are you good on the loom? If you are, that’s good. It’s best to keep to the village and out of sight, although...”

  Pulling a face, he waited till his aunt finished sweeping to resume speaking, and then, whatever thought gave him pause, he dismissed it with a wave. “Never mind. Megistokritos isn’t that observant. About Eurymedon, though...” Again, he demurred. “Well, if you and he are to stay—and there’s no reason why you shouldn’t—the boy will need somebody to help raise him. A father-figure, I mean. There are certain things a mother can’t teach a boy.” Diktys swallowed. His face darkened. Clearly flustered, he glanced aside.

  I tensed. “Is this...are you proposing marriage?” Ktimene had warned me that I would have to surrender myself to a man in exchange for his protection. Her words were not, as I anticipated, merely the ravings of a priestess who hated men and had not lived among them since childhood, but the truth. So I must wed Diktys. He was not disagreeable, I supposed, but as my husband he would want—no, expect—to have children by me, to touch me in ways I could not bear. Perhaps I could postpone the inevitable. “It’s only been two days. You’re a stranger, and I’m a stranger, and—”

  “Marriage?” Diktys reacted with complete astonishment and utter embarrassment. “No, gods forbid—guest-right forbids me from compelling you to—I meant only...” For a moment, he could not articulate precisely what he had meant, while I thanked Hera for interceding and turning his mind against marriage. “Eurymedon would become my nephew, and you would be my sister.” Diktys stared at the hearth curb rather than at me. “That way, you would come under my protection without having to become my wife, unless you want to...” He cleared his throat, a gesture of his that I had come to recognize as a nervous tic. “With another woman in the house to help, Klymene might stop pestering me to marry and produce children.” To cover his awkwardness, Diktys directed a pointed look toward his aunt, but Klymene pretended not to have heard.

  What to say? It was by far the best arrangement I could have hoped for under the circumstances, even though his uneasiness about it heightened my own uncertainty. Suppose he changed his mind and demanded marriage? Ktimene had said that men acted out of self-interest rather than compassion or common sense, as women did.

  I took it upon myself to lighten the mood while gleaning more information. “Thank you for the kindness.” I managed a shy smile, so he would not continue to blame himself for my mistake. “But surely you have nephews already!”

  After a moment’s contemplation, Diktys nodded. “I do, but my kinsmen live elsewhere on the island. My father’s been dead five years. As for my mother and brother, they live elsewhere on the island. You’re not likely to ever meet them.”

  “I’m sorry I misunderstood,” I said quietly. “I mean, my experiences with men have not been...” The right words eluded me. “They’ve been dreadful. I’ve known so few of them, and none have been as gracious. You seem better, more honorable.” Heat suffused my face. I should really hold my tongue. “Please, let me consider this...your kind offer.” A delay would buy me time to learn more about him. Yielding too quickly would surely give Diktys ideas, and make me appear weak. Did I really need a man to help me be a better mother?

  Again, I slept with difficulty. Night’s blackness remained hard to bear, as well as the silence that tempted the spirit with grim contemplation. I woke with Diktys and Klymene at the fishermen’s hour. Klymene let me help her chop leeks for the stew pot while we waited for the boats to return. “A body gets used these hours,” she offered as reassurance when she observed me yawning. “It took me six weeks, if I remember right.
Diktys adapted right away, of course, but he’s younger and then he’s always kept odd hours.”

  “You weren’t born here in the village?”

  “Oh, no. Diktys’s mother and I are from Amnissos in Crete.”

  “Crete?” Her mention of the island startled me. “My mother was from Crete.”

  Klymene brightened. “Oh? From what part?”

  “Knossos,” I said.

  “Why, that’s but a short walk inland from Amnissos! I might have known her. What work did she do?”

  At that, I realized I had said too much. If I revealed that my mother’s name was Aganippe, Klymene would know at once that she was the princess of Knossos, daughter of the Minos. So I collected my thoughts and told a half-truth. “I’m not sure, really. She died when I was very young. I hardly remember her.”

  Klymene made a sympathetic noise as she added another handful of leeks to her cutting board. “You weren’t born on Crete?”

  I shook my head. “My mother was born in Knossos and came over to the mainland by ship. She had black hair. That’s all I know about her. She died of fever when I was four, before she could tell me anything about her life or people. All I really remember is my stepmother and the priestesses of the sanctuary.”

  “Knossos is in a pretty valley,” Klymene said. “I had a stepmother, too. She was kindly, though, quite unlike the stories. Maybe she was a bit too indulgent. I used to be so spoiled when I was your age, staying up late to dance the sacred dances, and lounging in bed until afternoon. Why, I was older than you the first time I milked a goat!”

  I paused. “Will Diktys keep his word when he says he will be my brother, or will he expect marriage?” While Klymene could have told me much more about Knossos and how she—and my mother—had grown up as a Cretan lady, I was too afraid of giving myself away to inquire. Maybe I had already revealed too much by saying that my mother was from Knossos and had died when I was young. Far more prudent, I thought, to focus on the present.

  Klymene scraped the pile of chopped leeks into a generous wooden bowl. “You heard him last night.” She looked knowingly at me. “You don’t want marriage. I can see that. You were a consecrated virgin. Diktys is an honorable man. He respects your dignity. I should probably tell you, though, you could do far worse if you wanted a husband. Most of the marriageable girls in town swoon at his feet, but I’ve never seen him get so flustered around a girl till you arrived—and that’s not from lack of experience. He could have his pick.”

  I had noticed how some of the village girls my age batted their eyelashes around Diktys; they were foolish like the initiates on the Mountain, giggling and whispering about handsome young men. A few of them even cast suspicious looks in my direction. Was that what lay behind their evil eye, jealousy over a fisherman? I had assumed they hated me because I had not yet been purified, because I was a stranger. Stealing Diktys from them? Nothing of the sort had ever occurred to me. “He likes me?”

  “You haven’t noticed how he looks at you, how he blushes?” Klymene chuckled as she started cutting more leeks.

  I tried to concentrate on my task, to match her productiveness. “What am I supposed to think? Sometimes he’s serious and other times he toys with me. Do all men do that?”

  “You’ve no experience at all with men—apart from Eurymedon’s father? I know you were a consecrated virgin, but surely the sanctuary had guards.”

  Klymene’s skepticism cut me to the quick. “You think I played coy with one of them and encouraged him to rape me? The sanctuary was on a mountain peak, and the sentries and herders and hunters were all female.” Controlling my anger around my hostess required an effort that left me visibly shaking. “A male violated the precinct and took me unwillingly, but not because I winked at him and played with his affections. The first time he approached me, I ran from him. The second time, he simply seized what he wanted.”

  We did not speak further of the matter, but awkwardly resumed our tasks. It was understood that I would accept the offer but required time to adjust to the change, and that I would tell Diktys directly.

  Later, after the morning sleep, she took me to the weaving house to show me the three upright looms, baskets of raw wool, combs, and spindles. “What we weave for ourselves comes from the island’s flocks. What we owe the king comes mostly from his estates, sometimes from the Argives of Tiryns. That’s what we owe our wanax, King Proitus of Tiryns. We call that the allotment.”

  The allotments mirrored the palace workshops on a smaller scale. Pelargos turned out woolen fabric. In Chora and other towns there were workshops to turn the island’s abundant resources of gold and silver into jewelry and costly vessels.

  Neither Tiryns nor Chora, it seemed, demanded much from Pelargos in the way of quantity; there were but three women dedicated to the task. They had six months to comb, wash, spin, and weave. Manageable work.

  Then Klymene showed me where the women stored the finished cloth. “I hope you don’t mind,” she said. “It’s much too big to bring into the house, and too good to leave out with the boats to store sailcloth in. I haven’t seen such splendid Cretan workmanship since I was a girl. Did it belong to your mother?”

  I found myself unable to move, my attention fixated on the chest. Memories returned in a flood. Not of my mother, but of more recent horrors made explicit in the physical damage it had suffered, that mimicked my own ordeal. Joinery along the corner and bottom seals ruined by crude applications of the pitch that had made it airtight, its panels depicting priestesses in saffron and blue offering gifts to a seated goddess faded and cracked by exposure, elicited an involuntary gasp.

  Klymene noticed my distress. “It won’t come to any further harm here, and will serve a good purpose.”

  I nodded dumbly, and let her lead me away to attend to other tasks, but I stumbled through the remainder of that day in a daze. My head ached. I shivered despite the sun’s warmth, and again dreaded night’s coming. Holding Eurymedon could not completely alleviate my distress, nor could the lighting of lamps to banish the darkness.

  “What is this?” Diktys exclaimed when he returned home and noticed my silence and lack of appetite. “Are you ill?” His hand against my brow felt comforting. “You’ve a fever.”

  Klymene brought over a cool compress. “She’s tried to do too much too quickly, and I have no doubt seeing the chest upset her.”

  “Hmm, perhaps we should go ahead and destroy it. I know you like the Cretan decorations, Klymene, but it’s an ill-omened thing.” Diktys took the compress and began gently dabbing my brow, face, and neck; the coolness intensified my shivering. My limbs and the palms of my hands ached.

  “And she should be purified, having come so soon from the dark goddess’s embrace. But she seemed so well, her resurrection such a miracle, no one thought to hasten the rites. And the child, too, before we have the amphidromia.” I groaned despite myself. Goddess knew, Klymene meant well, but the sound of her voice stabbed the place behind my eyes.

  At the fishermen’s hour, she stayed in with me. But soon Philagra came, and others with home remedies and offers to care for Eurymedon. All I wanted was light and quiet, not their conversation of sending for the town priestess to exorcise the pollution from me and the baby, or a briefer debate over whether Huamia, who had nursed Eurymedon and was attending to him now, should also receive purification.

  Upon returning—thank the gods for his good common sense—Diktys banished the neighbor women from the house. “It’s sleep Dorea needs, not all this fussing and gossip. Klymene, send for Leukothea.”

  Quiet brought flashbacks to the terrifying ordeal of the chest, to Acrisius’s ruffians seizing Eurymedon, kicking and punching me. To the ominous dark and stench of the Persephone Cave. Even to Zeus himself, mouth bleeding butterflies, overwhelming me like a thundercloud, taking what he wanted. Curling into a fetal position, I wept into the pillow, and kept weeping even when I felt a weight settle on the mattress beside me and a hand stroke my hair.

  “
Weep,” Diktys urged whisper-soft. “You’re a very strong woman, whoever you are, wherever you’ve come from, but you’re not made of stone.”

  A spark of temptation to confide everything in him was stifled by my hiccupping sobs. Better, I thought, not to bring the dead into the house. Maybe Eurymedon should have a new name. No. The amphidromia, which should have been carried out five days after his birth, would confirm the sanctity of his life.

  When I could speak, I did, but in murmurs. “I shouldn’t keep you awake. Men don’t play nursemaid.”

  He crooked his familiar smile. “I’ve given comfort to many a sick companion. Mostly fellow fishermen, and once my Uncle Makednes, when he broke his leg jumping into the surf. Lady Athena would have blushed to hear the foul tongue on him. We’d just beached on the isle of Tenedos, opposite windy Wilusa, and... Ah, but you need your sleep.” Diktys removed the compress, which had lost its coolness, from my neck. “Another time, maybe.”

  *~*~*~*

  A woman came in the afternoon. She had wild hair and wore necklaces of shell and teeth over threadbare priestess garb. Her bare breasts gleamed with red ocher, and she smelled strongly of garlic and animal fat. What manner of holy women did the people of Seriphos look to? I gagged and turned away, wishing she had not come.

  Unfortunately for me, she marched straight to my bed and, gesticulating wildly, commanded my attention. “Awaken, Dorea, and attend!” Could she not see that my eyes were already open? “I am Leukothea, high priestess of Athena and Diktynna.” What did the Mistress of Battles have to do with a goddess of fishing nets? And unless the islanders set very low standards for the servants of the gods, Leukothea was far from being a high priestess. I might have forgiven her appearance and stench had she possessed a tenth of Phileia’s aura. “I have journeyed this long way to bring you a gift of rebirth!” The woman could not have walked more than a mile. Diktys and Klymene had gone to the expense of summoning a fraud.