Danae

by Laura Gill

  “We tried, but the king’s charioteer cut us off,” Luktia explained.

  Iolanthe added, grumbling, “Nearly ran us over.”

  Diktys finally turned to me. “Are you all right?”

  Shaken, but fine. “I’m more concerned about you,” I said. “Would you have really exchanged blows?”

  “We’ve clashed before.” He gave me his hand to escort me home, though his presence did not reassure me as much as I wished. Klymene followed. If only Sostrate and her Hunters had been there. “Sometimes he drinks too much mead and wants to box or wrestle. Other times he comes with his companions to mock me, but he hasn’t done that in a while.”

  So there was the strong likelihood of Polydektes returning. I breathed deeply to try to control my trembling. “Would he really have forced me into his chariot?”

  Klymene took it upon herself to answer. “He’s done it before, with pretty girls and even married women from all parts of the island. He doesn’t harm them, only... His mother, that foolish woman, encourages him.”

  Several neighbors paused to watch us walk past. Diktys made placating gestures to indicate the excitement was over. “Yes, he could have,” he told me. “But he likes to play the artful seducer and extortionist. When a woman resists his blandishments, he’s been known to threaten her family with more taxes, or he’ll persuade the vendors and neighbors not to provide the family any food or other things.” Diktys pulled an ugly face as he grunted his disgust. “One way or another, the king always gets what he wants.”

  Upon reaching the house, he retrieved from the dooryard the net he had been mending. Eurymedon, spending the afternoon in Philagra’s care, was absent. Maybe it was safe to return to the weaving house. I really did want to finish making that green dye. “I had no idea you were the king’s brother.”

  Averting his gaze, Diktys made a show of searching inside the net for his displaced shuttle and needle. “Only by birth.”

  Because he volunteered no further information, I asked, “Why do you live here and not in the palace?”

  He harrumphed. “You’ve just seen why I don’t live under my brother’s roof. Oh, I might have taken an estate somewhere, but my keeping state as a royal kinsman would have attracted a faction of disaffected nobles. Seriphos is too small for that kind of rivalry.” Finding his tools, he sat on the ground, pulled the net into his lap, and started working again. “We can’t divide the island the way Acrisius and Proitus have divided old Argos. Besides, I much prefer the sea.” He forced a grin. “Fishermen aren’t regarded so highly outside the village. The smell of fish keeps the noblemen from coming and trying to involve me in their conspiracies.”

  Though I wanted to return to the weaving house and pretend nothing had happened, I nevertheless felt compelled to crouch down beside him. Diktys represented a safety the women of Pelargos could not provide. “Will he return?”

  “I don’t doubt it.” Diktys shrugged, but when he glanced over at me his eyes conveyed deeper worries. “If you want to go with him for a month or two—that is, if you think you can bear him and my mother, and his concubines—you might do very well out of it. Some pretty clothes and trinkets, the possibility of bearing a king’s child. Who knows? It’s a much softer life than this one.” The bitterness behind the suggestion was unmistakable, just as the meaning of it was shocking enough to bring on an uncontrollable blush.

  “I-I wouldn’t...” That was no good. Where had my courage gone? “Your boorish brother is no prize,” I said firmly.

  Diktys’s grasp on the net and tools betrayed his white-knuckled tension. “I told you before, he has ways of persuading reluctant lovers.”

  Tearing my gaze from his, I studied the stuccoed walls, the threshold with its protective talisman, mirroring the apotropaic eye guarding Diktys’s boat. Yet there was no escaping his scrutiny. “He can threaten, posture, and bribe all he wants, but it won’t get him anywhere. If I wanted a man I would have chosen one right here, and sooner.” I chafed my arms. Suddenly I realized that I was shivering. Better to be angry and hot than cold with fear. “What I want to know is who told him about me? It was the palace official, Megistokritos, wasn’t it? I just knew there was something about the way he looked at me and questioned me.”

  “Probably.”

  Absurd man, brooding even after I had assured him in no uncertain terms that I did not want Polydektes and would never go to him of my own free will. Not wanting to press the issue, I stood and brushed the dirt from my dress. “Is it safe to return to the weaving house?”

  His grunt served as affirmation, yet as I turned to go, I felt a tug on my skirt. “Dorea?” Diktys’s expression had changed, his gaze softening, almost pleading. “Did you really mean what you said, about choosing...here?”

  What had I said in my excitable state? That I would marry him? “I-I don’t know,” I stammered. That would not do! “If I wanted to be with a man, I meant.” And that still was not sufficient, because Diktys’s expression fell, and I felt terrible for having said it. Better to have held my tongue altogether than given him false hope.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  Nothing prepared me for my son’s emerging personality. After being such a well-behaved infant, Eurymedon became a restless toddler, abnormally intelligent, energetic, and I feared trouble. An exceptionally handsome child, with curling black hair and blue eyes, at three years old he was willful and precocious.

  From the moment he could talk, he articulated experiencing dreams of black wolves, flying in the talons of an eagle, a curved terrace a thousand feet above a vast caldera, and his own birth. Diktys and Klymene dismissed these visions as mere night terrors, and offered to sit beside Eurymedon until he fell asleep. I knew better, and while they attended to the midnight run, I stayed behind with my son. I tucked him back under the fleeces with cautionary words.

  “You mustn’t speak of those dreams.” I smoothed his disheveled curls with gentle fingers. “Morpheus sent them for you alone.”

  “But they frighten me, Mama.”

  Of course they did, because they were memories of real events, but he was much too young for explanations or expectations of his keeping silent. Far safer for him to believe they were sent by a mischievous Morpheus. “The god sends me troubling dreams sometimes, too,” I confided. “They mean nothing.”

  Perhaps another child would have accepted the answer, but Eurymedon was always questioning, always seeking. He pushed back the fleeces as if he were suddenly too hot. “It’s like I’m remembering.” A frown creased his smooth brow. “Like I was really there.”

  At such times, I hid my dismay. Did he remember being thrust with me into the chest and then falling and impacting? Did he recall that split second of being broken before Hera whisked us away? “Sometimes dreams are like that,” I lied. “Just tell yourself that Morpheus can only hurt you inside your dreams. When you’re awake, you’re protected by your mother, and Uncle Diktys, and Aunt Klymene, and that we all love you very much.”

  Eurymedon’s frown deepened. “But you’re in those dreams, and you can’t protect me.” His eyes glittered with moisture in the lamplight. “I see a nasty lady with black bird feathers in her hair taking me away, and there’s mean men who hit you and try to leave me on a mountain. I don’t know why.” Then he burst into tears, and I gathered him into my arms to rock him. By then, I was also crying, both for the remembered event and the cruel fact that Eurymedon shared my suffering.

  The next afternoon, after his nap, we went to the sanctuary to leave an offering of Selenos’s sour wine for Morpheus. I did not think Morpheus held any malice toward my son, or that Eurymedon’s night terrors were necessarily of the god’s making. Yet I beseeched him to send sweet dreams to banish the memories no child should have.

  For all that he recalled, and for his precociousness, Eurymedon did not know who his father was, only that it was not Diktys. Surely he must remember the conversation between me and Hera, or growing inside my womb in the dream-garden while Zeus watched. He
must have been distracted by the bee goddess’s tiny servants feeding him nectar during our time with the Queen of Heaven, and he might have been too unformed in my womb to even be capable of recalling the garden or the presence of his terrible, awesome father.

  “Diktys is your uncle, silly,” I told him.

  “Then that means the king is my father?”

  Polydektes sent occasional gifts, and on rare occasions came out to the village, once under the pretense of making amends with his brother, but more often he stayed at a distance, on the heights where he observed from his chariot.

  “No,” I said. “Why do you even want to know?” During his visits, the king of Seriphos pointedly ignored my son, a slight I was not willing to ignore in exchange for his oily compliments and some cheap trinkets.

  Eurymedon frowned. “Because it’s important. I think my father’s a king.”

  King of Heaven and Lord of Olympus, yes, but what my son did not already know for himself he need not be told. “Silly child!” I exclaimed. “Your father isn’t the king of this island.”

  “Another island, maybe?”

  “No, and stop asking.” I sharpened my tone, though little good a scolding would do him. “Your Uncle Diktys is all the father you need.”

  Eurymedon liked to spend his afternoons on the beach with Diktys and the other fishermen, busily constructing sand sanctuaries, and digging for crabs and shells, while the men mended their tackle. He pretended to be a sea captain, a king, the god of the deep, making for himself coronets of kelp and the fibrous sea grass called egagropili that washed ashore. I scolded him for that last and never relaxed my disapproval, regardless of how often Diktys laughed and claimed that it was quite normal to emulate Poseidon.

  “It flatters the god!”

  “He should have chores,” I said. “If he won’t play with the other children, he should have something useful to do.”

  Diktys scratched his beard. “His hands are still too small and clumsy for him to learn to repair fishing nets, and he...” He leaned against the wall of the dooryard where I worked at my spinning as he sought the right words. “I don’t know that he can master himself long enough to learn. Making and repairing nets takes patience. He’s going to make mistakes.”

  “As I did when learning to spin.” Raw wool passed between my fingers without my conscious attention. Yet even then, while twisting the yarn and keeping the spindle going, an idea came to me. “Do you think he’s old enough to learn how to spin goat hair to make the fibers for the netting? He needs something.”

  As I feared, however, my son threw down the spindle and stomped his feet. “Spinning is girls’ work!”

  “Eurymedon,” Diktys said in a tone of quiet menace, “pick up the spindle and apologize to your mother.”

  My son did neither. Yet where another man would have thrashed the boy, Diktys leaned down, retrieved the spindle, and, still stooping, faced his three-year-old opponent. “You know what? I don’t believe you can do it. You’re still too slow and small. Perhaps I should put this away until you’re much older.”

  With increasing frequency, Diktys and I were compelled to resort to this tactic to get him to do something. But to what end? When would Eurymedon learn to do things because they needed doing, because he had a responsibility? Three years old might be far too young to be thinking of obligations, I admitted, but I despised having to challenge my son where other children’s parents had only to issue a command or threaten punishment.

  “No!” Eurymedon defiantly grabbed for the spindle, but Diktys withheld it by holding it over his head. “Ah, not so quickly, young man! Are you going to do what I say and learn properly? This isn’t a plaything.”

  “Yes!”

  “Yes, what?” Diktys, Klymene, and I had all discussed this: Eurymedon had to learn to think through his decisions, and not give in to his native impulsiveness. Sterner parents could not have brought him under control; we had tried the switch, and still utilized it sometimes for his worst offenses, but, I reflected, his half-immortal parentage engendered a certain fearlessness that made him more resilient to corporal discipline than his peers.

  Sighing dramatically, he amended, “Yes, Uncle Diktys.” His eye-rolling, however, prompted me to pinch his arm. “Ouch, Mother!”

  “You’re being insolent, and you’re not listening,” Diktys said. “Are you going to get tired of practicing and give up?”

  “I’ll be good, I swear!” Eurymedon stamped his feet impatiently, though I did not hold my breath that he would adhere to that promise. Rarely did he finish tasks that his elders gave him, only projects he himself began.

  Diktys started to yield, lowering the spindle, yet continuing to keep it out of grasp. “Good. You finish what you start, always, or men will brand you a quitter and a good-for-nothing.”

  Despite his precociousness, either Eurymedon did not quite grasp the shame of being labeled a quitter, or at his tender age he simply did not care, for it was a tactic both Diktys and I had tried on many occasions. He required some other motivation. “If you listen and do well,” I stated, “perhaps Diktys will show you how to write the sign for goat.” There was nothing strange in that promise. All fishermen’s children, even girls, learned tallies so they could barter in town. Diktys was fluent in the language of the tallies. He also spoke Cretan and some Egyptian, and knew a few phrases in whatever tongue the people spoke across the sea on the Canaanite coast.

  Eurymedon gazed expectantly up at Diktys. “Uncle, will you teach me how to write the gods’ names?”

  I stared at Diktys, whose glower reflected my apprehensions. “Absolutely not,” he said. “The immortals are a mystery, not for children. When you’re old enough, I’ll teach you how to prepare the sacrifice and summon the gods for the offering. But if you want to know about the gods, do as you’re told and I’ll tell you all about the Egyptian Hermes. He has the head of a jackal, a kind of dog that dwells in wastelands.”

  “Is he a messenger like Hermes?” Eurymedon took the spindle, without much interest. Spinning goat hair for nets would, I predicted, turn out to be a very brief apprenticeship. “Does he have winged sandals?”

  “Ah, not so fast!” Diktys took him by the shoulders and steered him toward the beach. “First comes the work, then the reward.”

  *~*~*~*

  When the sound of harness bells and creaking leather and wicker reached my ears, I started. Polydektes coming to harass me was the last problem I wished to deal with that afternoon. Keremaia, brooding over some unspecified slight, criticized everything from Panope’s spinning, which was always gossamer-fine, to my weaving. Having to deal with the headwoman’s nervous energy, in addition to my child’s, left me half-minded to snap at Keremaia so we could finish our quotas in peace.

  Then the chariot stopped just outside. Expecting Polydektes, I gritted my teeth and continued working, combing the shed. Goddess help me if I did not snap at the king. When would he ever get it through his thick head that I wanted nothing to do with—?

  “Stop your squealing, you lazy sluts.” Keremaia’s unrelenting gaze fixed on me. “It’s the queen mother.”

  Without having gone outside to actually see who it was, how could she be so confident? Had she known in advance? I had long suspected she was a spy for the palace, but this was the first time she had betrayed herself.

  Nevertheless, the queen mother? If Polydektes rarely associated with his brother and aunt, then Queen-Mother Amphiera never bothered at all. Diktys rarely spoke of his mother, but Klymene was more open on the subject of her older sister; she painted the unsympathetic portrait of a self-absorbed, petty woman who in her youth had schemed to become King Magnes’s queen, and now actively discouraged Polydektes from taking a wife to avoid losing her influence.

  Keremaia forced us from our tasks and hustled us outside to greet the queen mother properly. Neighbors, too, had come from their houses and dooryards, and climbed up from the beach to see what business the king’s mother had in the village. Kerema
ia simpered with excitement, brushing wrinkles from her dress and tucking a stray lock of hair behind her ear.

  Queen-Mother Amphiera cut a tall figure, and wore the haughtiness of a woman used to being coddled. She had been beautiful once, but time and pettiness had etched cruel lines around her mouth. Vanity compelled her to color her Cretan-style pin-curls with Egyptian henna, and paint her face like a priestess. Enough gold and jewels to furnish all the palace ladies of Argos adorned her skirts and dangled from her ears, wrists, and throat; the Mistress of the Winds set her ornaments chiming even when she stood still.

  Her scent, a cloying mixture of sandalwood and iris, preceded her; Panope valiantly stifled her sneeze. Ignoring the crowd of villagers, Amphiera lifted the hem of her skirt and with fastidious care made her way toward us. Keremaia bowed, as did all of us weavers. Withering a little inside, I tried to prepare myself, for I had no doubt that her business was with me.

  Amphiera made a show of inspecting us right there in front of the entire village. Appraising, measuring, even sniffing the air around us. Auge cringed and covered her eyes. Ornis flushed bright red. Panope maintained a brave face despite her nervousness. I drew steadying breaths, willing myself to be patient.

  When Amphiera finally stepped before me, I met her gaze directly, holding it for several heartbeats before lowering it as expected. Just like Polydektes, she owned a serpent’s eyes, cold-blooded and flat. Meanwhile, her scent enveloped me in a cloud of foreboding. Perhaps she meant to order me into the chariot, to pander to her eldest son by apprehending me where Diktys, unable to publicly defy his own mother, could not interfere.

  “You must be Dorea.” The queen mother enunciated her speech with an affected Cretan lisp, and like Polydektes, her breath reeked of cloves. Her mouth was full of yellowing teeth, showing a front gap where one had fallen out. “They say you are a difficult woman.”