A Sea of Sorrow

by Libbie Hawker

  “Hestia’s mercy,” Anthousa muttered. “I’ve never seen a boat like that before.”

  “A war ship,” I replied. A superstitious shudder raced up my spine.

  “There are no wars here—not that I’ve heard. And we would have heard, Circe; we trade often enough that word of any battles would have found its way to Aeaea.”

  I nodded, but did not speak. Words seemed inadequate, faced as I was by that monstrous, lumbering invader. Silent with awe—with dread—I stepped away from the promontory’s edge.

  “They haven’t come to trade,” Anthousa said.

  I shook my head.

  “If it is a war ship, perhaps someone on board is injured or sick. They’ve come for your remedies,” she guessed.

  “Perhaps,” I said faintly. Then I shook myself. Whatever the reason for the visit, we must make ourselves ready to meet them—we, seven women, exiled on our small island. We must face a war ship full of men, alone. I hadn’t the luxury of retreating into fear. I must think clearly, if I had any hope of seeing my friends safely through this encounter. “The sooner we find out what these men want, the sooner we can send them on their way. Come; we must gather the others and stay together in our house. We’re safest there.” With our high walls and sturdy doors, we might hope to hold them off for a time.

  “Right.” Anthousa led the way down the trail, back toward our familiar clearing—the center of our world.

  Praises to the gods, all five of my other companions were hard at work in the clearing outside our farmstead. It took only minutes for Anthousa and I to assemble the women.

  “What has happened?” Emelia asked, wide-eyed. “You both look as if you’ve seen a demon!”

  An uncomfortable thought, sluggish with the weight of premonition, dragged across my mind. Perhaps we have seen a demon. I pushed my fears away. There was nothing any of us could do now, with that great, dark ship landed on our shore. We had to forge ahead together, facing whatever fate the gods had wrought for us.

  I said only, “Visitors. Coming to trade, I suppose.” I hope.

  Ligeia asked, “Oughtn’t we to go meet them on the shore?”

  “They will not meet us on the shore.”

  None of my friends asked what I meant, or how I knew. I was grateful for their silence. I would have been hard-pressed to answer if they had demanded an explanation. My somber stillness—and Anthousa’s—made a definite impression. Agathe slipped inside the house to make ready our bows and hunting spears, in case they should be wanted, while Demetria and Galene called to our wolf friends, summoning them from the woodland shadows. The wolves had never attacked any person, so far as we knew. But all the same, I breathed a sigh of relief when the pack leader padded into the clearing, followed by six or seven of his keen-eyed relations. The leader was a tall, brown-coated male whom we had named Caicias. His muscular shoulder came level with my belt; his presence comforted me, for I hoped his imposing stature—and his cousins, lurking at the fringes of the wood—might deter the warship’s men if they intended us any harm.

  The wait was unbearable. My hands itched for something to do, my mind shrieked hysterically for a distraction. “Eumelia,” I said quietly, “go inside and fetch my distaff.”

  “Now seems an odd time for spinning, Circe.”

  I smiled in wry agreement. “All the same, I want to spin.”

  Eumelia was back in a flash with my spindle and the long, slender staff, but in her haste and distraction, she had forgotten to bring fleece. For a moment, all of us stared at the useless, naked staff and the empty spindle. Then we burst out laughing.

  “Never mind,” I said. Our moment of humor was fleeting, but the relief it brought strengthened all our spirits. I tucked the end of my distaff into my belt, just as I would have done if it had borne a heavy swath of wool, ready for the spinning. The unused spindle hid neatly in the leather pouch I wore upon my hip. “Let the men wonder why I spin invisible wool. I will not explain myself to them.”

  And that was how our visitors found us: arrayed before our home, the vulnerable heart of our island realm, an army of seven women—few, but determined to protect what we had built. And I, with my staff propped on my hip, its point rising high above my head like the scepter of a queen.

  All of us flinched as the men appeared from the trail to the seaside. Men had set foot on Aeaea before, of course—many times, since we had made the island our home. But we had never permitted them to range far beyond the shore. These forward men flooded into the very yard of my beloved house.

  It was an invasion I felt powerless to stop. The many trading parties that had come before numbered no more than ten at the most. Now I counted almost two dozen emerging from the forest. Their clothing was ragged and stained, their beards tangled. Salt had crusted their hair, forming it into ropy locks; it had dried their skin, too, leaving an ashy pallor on their faces and hands, especially visible on those whose natural complexions were dark. Every one of the men had a body like a spring bull—broad, hard-muscled, sharply defined. These were no ordinary traders. They looked as if they’d been traveling across the sea, pulling at their many oars, for years.

  Anthousa stiffened beside me; her eyes sharpened and burned with a sudden fire, like one of her falcons sighting its prey.

  “Steady,” I said quietly. “Any one of them is ten times stronger than all of us put together.”

  She muttered, “Are they fast enough to dodge our spears?”

  “Let’s find out,” Agathe whispered.

  “No,” I answered quickly. “They are too many. Look at their swords—and those at the rear of the group have bows, too. We have eight spears and one bow, perhaps a dozen arrows.”

  “We cannot take them all,” Demetria said uneasily. “Whatever they want, we must deal with them quickly and send them on their way.”

  “Leave the negotiations to me,” I said. None of my friends argued. We had no formal leader on Aeaea, yet even as an exile, I had been the woman of highest rank from our earliest occupation. Whenever a pressing decision had to be made, it fell on me to make it. “I’ll keep them happy and send them on their way. If the gods are good, we’ll see the back of them by sunset.”

  Caicias uttered a low growl as the men formed up ranks at the edge of the clearing. His cousins, bristling gray shadows, slipped from the trees, milling around their leader. The wolves formed a living barrier between us and the men—slinking, hackling, showing the hard white spear-points of their teeth. For a moment I had a mind to leave the wolves to their business—to watch them drive the men back to their ship, and drive the ship out into the waves. But although the pack might take a few men down to the Underworld with them, the sailors’ weapons would make as short a work of our wolves as they’d make of us.

  I went to Caicias and laid a hand upon his head. Instantly, he stilled, as did his followers.

  The men murmured in surprise. One of them said, in a thick, strange accent “What witchery is this?”

  That word fell upon my ears like the crash of a temple cymbal, ringing and sharp. The traders who came to my island often stared at me with awe, or open fear—and so I surmised that rumor still painted me as a witch. But no one had dared speak that word in my presence since Heliodoros banished me from Colchis.

  Choosing to ignore the slight, I stood with my hand upon the wolf’s head, waiting for one of those many men to find his bravery and speak.

  After a protracted silence, punctuated by a good deal of shuffling and throat-clearing, one man stepped forward. His clothing had once been finer than the others’—his tunic had been dyed a deeper red, some years in the past, long before the sun had weathered it. His garb showed fewer stains and tears than his many companions’. He edged as close to Caicias as he dared.

  “I am Eurylochus,” he said. His voice cracked; his throat sounded dry. “I lead these men.”

  “You are their chieftain?” I asked. “Or their king?”

  “No,” he said quickly, shrugging with embarrassme
nt. “We all serve Odysseus, the king of Ithaca. I have the honor to be the king’s second-in-command.”

  I nodded once. I did not know how I ought to respond.

  “Our king sent me ashore with these men.”

  “I can see as much,” I said. “What do you seek on my island, Eurylochus of Ithaca?”

  I had expected Eurylochus to blurt out a need for some healing potion or salve—for his king, perhaps, who waited aboard the ship. If my reputation as a so-called witch had reached their ears, then surely these Ithacans had heard of my skill as a herb-worker, too. I blinked in surprise at Eurylochus’s response.

  “Food. We need good, nourishing food. Hard bread and salt fish cannot sustain us any longer—not with our great numbers.”

  “How many are you?” I said, momentarily startled out of composure.

  He did not answer, but pressed on with his plea. “We saw a column of smoke, and sailed here directly. We must restock our supplies before we can continue on our journey.”

  I pressed my lips together. We had allowed the promontory fire to burn out days ago; it was nothing but a pile of cold ashes now. I would have lit it again, to draw in traders who might possess the wood I needed for the swine-yard fence, but these Ithacans had interfered with this social call.

  Eurylochus glanced up at the sky, pure and blue above the great clearing, unmarred by smoke. He seemed to understand my hesitation. “We have borne steadily toward this island for several days now, even after the smoke died away. Odysseus reasoned that such a fire could only have been created and tended by men…er, that is to say, people, for it did not seem to spread, as a wildfire would.”

  The Ithacan’s persistence annoyed me. It seemed a foreglimpse of unpleasantries to come. “We are hardly convenient, here on Aeaea. Surely there were other islands along the way. You might have visited any of them, and sought the food you need there.”

  “No islands that showed such obvious signs of life,” Eurylochus said. “We couldn’t take the chance. Anyhow, there are too many great, jagged rocks in the vicinity. We could have wrecked our ship, sunk it in a trice.”

  A pity you didn’t, I thought. If only the rocks of Anthemoessa had taken your ship instead of our little boat—and your king instead of our dear Chrysomallo. “But don’t you know how to get your own food from the land? With or without people to tend it, nearly every patch of soil provides sustenance.”

  The Ithacans looked at one another, murmuring behind their hands. I could feel their suspicious glances, though I did not break eye contact with their second-in-command. They found my proclamation absurd.

  “We can fish,” Eurylochus said. “Of course. But we have lived aboard our ship for long, and longer still, my lady. We have no patch of soil.”

  “You sailed past hundreds of patches,” I said acerbically.

  “My lady, it is not as simple as you think, to conjure food from the earth.” His patronizing tone infuriated me; I tightened my grip on the distaff to keep myself from trembling with anger. “It is not even a simple thing to pull fish from the sea. Who can say where the best schools swim—how to find them, what time of day to cast the nets?”

  I retorted before I could counsel myself to a wiser silence. “You might say. The seasons provide—not only food, but knowledge. All one must do is observe the land—or the sea, if one sails. The gods are not so retiring that they hide all hint of their designs from human understanding. Watch the weather, the plants, the animals.”

  At my mention of animals, Eurylochus’s gaze shifted nervously to Caicias. His men looked, too, peering around the clearing at the wolf pack, which had left Caicias to slink about, patrolling the perimeter of our clearing. I noted the Ithacans’ hands, groping anxiously at hilts of sword and dagger. I could have calmed the men’s fears, reassured them that the wolves had tamed themselves—indeed, that they had been friends and allies to us, and never harmed one of my women. Quickly, I decided to hold my tongue. If they truly believed me a witch, capable of taming wolves with my sorcery, then so be it. Fear of my “powers” could give me some advantage in the negotiations to come. Certainly, I could not expect to rid myself of the Ithacans easily. There were far too many of them, and their need was too great. Men desperate for food could be moved to all sorts of depravities.

  “I should like to help you,” I said neutrally, “but I’m afraid I cannot. We have had a difficult summer; the harvest has been poor. We have no food to spare.”

  Eurylochus tore his eyes from the wolf and nodded to the swine-yard beyond where we stood. “You have pigs. We’ll take them all.”

  I could feel my face darken as the blood rushed to my cheeks. “You will take none. Our wheat and barley were blighted, and we lost our fishing boat in a terrible accident. Those pigs are our only hope for the winter.”

  Eurylochus smiled, patiently mocking. “I am sorry to hear of your misfortunes, my lady, but nevertheless: we have come here seeking food, and we will not leave without it.”

  Despite the wolf at my side, Eurylochus moved toward me. A few of his men advanced, too; my gaze flicked to their belts, and I could see that every Ithacan grasped the hilt of his weapon. Behind me, Agathe growled like a wolf herself. I could feel her tension, feel her readiness to run for the spears she had hidden nearby. If she broke rank, the other women might do the same. I had to act quickly, before we opened ourselves to slaughter.

  “Wait.” I lifted my hand from Caicias’s head, stalling the Ithacans with a gesture. “We cannot sacrifice our winter stores to you, for we are exiles, with no way to leave our island. This small farm is all we have, to provide for all our needs. Without our stores—and our swine—we would be left with nothing. But we can feed you for one night. Let us fill your bellies, and gods willing, you’ll be fortified enough to sail on to the peninsula. I can tell you how to find it; the mainland isn’t terribly far away. There, you’ll find more abundant food, and people who are not so desperate that they can’t afford to share.”

  Eurylochus paused, considering my offer. His men muttered and nudged one another with their shoulders. Some were clearly eager for food—and, I thought wryly, for the company of the women. Others still hesitated. Was it my alleged witchery that frightened them so? Or had their king, this Odysseus, charged them with special instructions? Perhaps a night of feasting went too far against their orders.

  I could have said, “Go and fetch your king; we will feed him, too.” But for some reason I could not name, the mere thought of the Ithacan ruler chilled me and turned my stomach. I would not put thought of Odysseus into their heads; let the men do with their king—and his commands—whatever they would. The matter no business of mine.

  Finally, Eurylochus said, “Very well. If you will swear to direct us to a better source of food, we will feast with you tonight.” A sudden sheen of moisture gleamed on his lips. The mere thought of our poor, paltry food-stores had set him to salivating.

  “Then my women and I will set to work.” I turned away, leaving Eurylochus to deal with his men.

  Anthousa hurried to my side as I strode toward our mudbrick oven. “Circe! We cannot feed all these men.”

  “We shall have to. You heard that tangle-haired beast; if we don’t give them something, they’ll take our swine herd. Thank the gods they haven’t seen our sheep yet, but if they take a mind to explore the island, they’ll soon find that herd, too.”

  “But even one supper for so many men…it will beggar us! Winter will be here soon; we can’t afford it.”

  I put my hand on her shoulder and squeezed. I tried to make my friend feel confident, braced. But I couldn’t even convince myself to muster up a spot of optimism. I was weary to the core, and frightened. “We have little choice, Anthousa. We either offer these men a stew pot and a few dozen loaves of bread, or they will offer us the tips of their spears.”

  Sunset came early that night. Summer had fled; the final weeks of our dismal harvest lay before us. Together with my women, I stoked the fires below our largest c
lay cook pots and fanned the coals in the brick ovens to a livid red glow. We chopped and mixed, kneaded and stirred in tense silence while the Ithacan men lounged around a great bonfire, heedlessly burning up our precious stores of wood without a care for the winter to come.

  Galene remembered several large barrels of old wine she had stored in a cave along the promontory trail. She had traded for the barrels more than a year before; as it was not of good quality for drinking, Galene had intended to let it sour into vinegar, which was always useful for pickling plums and cherries, olives and onions and the eggs of the little partridge-like birds that ran about the undergrowth of our forest. We had looked forward to those tasty preserves, but all agreed that we were willing to sacrifice those delicacies if it meant keeping our crowd of dangerous guests in good spirits. Eumelia helped Galene roll the barrels down to the clearing, and soon the men were helping themselves to the wine. If it was poor and nearly spoiled, the Ithacans did not seem to care.

  Thanks to the wine haze, which took hold of the men more firmly with each passing hour, we managed to deceive them with our cooking, thereby saving more of our food cache for our own use. We mixed ashes liberally with the flour, disguising the taste with wild onion and mustard seed, then soaked the loaves in stew drippings to soften the gritty texture. Even with those additions, the bread looked muddy and barely held together. But the Ithacans ate the bread so readily that we were hard pressed to keep up with their appetites. Either they were too drunk to notice how poorly we baked, or it had been so long since they’d seen a proper loaf that they had forgotten how bread ought to look and taste. We dished up a thin stew, made from the stringy meat of gulls, which Anthousa’s falcons had caught. The gull meat had been dried long ago; we soaked it in wine and marinated it with tenderizing herbs, but even after vigorous boiling it was still tough as a boot’s sole. The men never cared. They ate that wretched brew of gull, wild onion, and acorn with as much relish as if we had set before them fine fowls roasted in their plumage.