by Ann Halam
One figure, in strange scaled armor, was close to us. I could see the gaping mouth, the bulging eyes of terror. Sometimes the dead preserved by the volcanic ash of the Great Disaster had been found like this. The deep ash looked like stone but it was very soft. When it weathered away, the dead—those who’d not been close enough to burn to nothing—were still there, still on their feet. Burned pits for eyes. But the eyes that had faced the Gorgons were intact, globes of stone.
I turned to see what the fleeing dead had seen.
There was a wall. It was massive: easily as high as three men, and built of huge, well-dressed blocks. There were no loopholes, no gates. It curved on either side, seeming to enclose a space no larger than our Sacred Enclosure.
“Well, now for the last trial. Are you ready, my Kore?”
Andromeda was shaking her head. She took a step away from me.
“I’m going back to Haifa now. You have to go on alone.”
“What? No, no, Andromeda. It’s too late. You’ll have to come with me.”
Over the wall with her in my arms, then set her down where …?
This was all wrong. I stood there trying to convince myself there was a way I could take her with me. It was no use. I have her in my arms, the Gorgons attack, I set her down, how’s she going to defend herself?
“I must go. To the rock of sacrifice. It’s time.”
I’ll find somewhere to hide her, I thought desperately. I’ll put her somewhere she’ll be safe, where I can find her again. But though she spoke like a sleepwalker, Andromeda had seen the look in my eye. She took another step backward, and I knew that I dared not touch her. When lads and girls fight where I come from—not with each other, not physically, but lads fighting lads, girls fighting girls—they scream insults, before and during. It’s your mother’s another, your dog looks like a pig, you have stupid hair. Any old rubbish, childish or vicious. I’d only a couple of times in my life had someone look at me the way she did then: unarmed, silent, resolute, ready to kill, ready to die. There’s nowhere she can go, I thought. “Wait here! Just be here when I get back!”
I leapt over the wall.
This is a garden?
The Garden of the Hesperides was a petrified charnel house. The stone figures, which had been scattered on the plain, were a crowd in here, and none of them was whole. Any champion who’d managed to get this far had died petrified while being torn apart. The mutilated statues weren’t alone either. There were animals prowling in the shadows. Shapes moved in the withered undergrowth; eyes glinted through tattered creepers. I heard a coughing growl, a chorus of high, yipping barks that went off into weird cackling. It was hard to make out the size of the place. I thought I saw the opposite curve of the wall, not far off at all, but then I wasn’t sure. Maybe the garden was much bigger than I had thought. Was that cough a lion?
I’d never met a lion. We didn’t have big predators on Serifos; I didn’t like the idea of meeting one now. But wild animals were not my concern. Invisible, Athini’s shield on my left arm, the harpe naked in my hand, I crept forward.
Something was stirring, like a dry fountain: a murmurous hissing sound….
The three Gorgons were asleep on the bare ground under some dead trees, in a dell in the middle of the enclosure. Is there day in this place? I wondered. Will they wake? How long before sunrise? I walked around them at a cautious distance, very careful where I put my feet. The creatures were man-sized, which made them brawny women, but not giants. They were naked; their leathery hides looked gray in the dusk; the boar tusks gleamed. Two of them lay curled together like cats; the third was apart. The bat wings folded on their shoulders didn’t look big enough for flight, but then neither did the wings on my borrowed sandals. The snakes all the monsters had for hair were not sleeping. It was their movement I had heard. They slithered over and under each other, three nests of vipers, in a continual rustling stir. I saw a small mouth gape. The snake’s throat was red inside, a little stab of color, and a shock thrilled through me. The snakes must have eyes, if they had mouths….
But they can’t see me, I reminded myself.
I guessed that the one lying apart would be the Medusa, who was human, or had been human—not some kind of supernatural animal. But I’d better make sure. Look into the shield, I thought. I moved in, to make that test on the two sisters who were sleeping like cats. It was tough on my nerves. I had to find an angle where I could catch a glimpse of one bestial face and then the other, without getting into a position where I risked being caught by either one’s deadly glance. I kept cool, I was patient and I did it. I couldn’t see them clearly in the shield; there was too much shadow, but I could make out the movement of the snakes, so I knew I was getting the picture. They were monsters.
So that leaves you, I thought, standing over the third sister.
I was lucky I’d thought about the horror of killing someone. If it had hit me now, it would have shaken me badly, and now I mustn’t falter.
I hope this releases you from torture, lady Medusa. If I’m doing wrong, forgive me…. Look into the shield, said Athini, in the brilliant light of a high, stony place. In reflection she is not a monster, far from it. Then one sweep, and leap back. I heard her voice. I felt the sweat of that training session running on my body. But the sweat was cold now. I crouched, one knee forward, weight on my back heel. I turned the shield on my arm. I looked into it.
Oh, Great Mother. I saw the Medusa’s face. I saw the most grievous, heart-opening beauty in the world, her eyes open, looking out at me; and around her I glimpsed the Garden, the shining waters, the flowers, the boughs of the apple trees bending low, rich with fruit. There was no monster. I was the hideous intruder in paradise. Oh, worse. The beautiful woman was my Moumi, young as I first remembered her, looking at me with a girl-mother’s tender love.
Oh, Great All, it was Athini herself.
It was Athini herself, looking out from inside me.
I was Athini.
I was the monster.
I had to kill the monster, so I could be Athini.
The snakes rose up, a nest of eyes and whirling patterns, coiling in and out of each other. I saw that they were my thoughts: my mind was a nest of shining serpents; like the spirits of rock and spring, we were many. I saw thought like the flying marks on the tallyboard racing and mingling, bright and swift as lightning. I saw that words are thought reflected. But these are mysteries: mysteries that don’t tell the truth, they are the truth. I did not falter. I knew it was right. I was right to do this. S’bw’r … I drew back the harpe. I could hear Athini’s voice again, coolly saying: Her blood is poisonous. Don’t get the blood on your skin. I was ready to get out of the way, fast.
One sweep.
And … and something leapt from the gouting, severed throat. A warrior in armor, who flickered gold and was gone. A huge, beautiful winged beast, who bent his shining head and looked at me with gentle, eager eyes. His pinions swept in a mighty downbeat, his hooves spurned air. I flung the bloody sickle and pitched myself backward, yelling and frantically clutching the Snakehead by the hair.
Nobody had told me about that!
I was engulfed in the thunder and rush of his passing, and then he was gone. The Gorgon sisters, Euryale and Sthenno, had woken and begun screaming. I was scrabbling around on the ground, one handed, terrified I would put my bare palm, or knee, in the great slick of poisonous blood, whimpering they can’t see me, they can’t see me. They could smell me, though, and they could hear me.
I found the harpe. I got the Snakehead into the kibisis, without turning myself into stone. I fought a rearguard, retracing my steps: a nasty, naked retreat with no one to give me covering fire. Thank the Great Mother those Gorgons were as bewildered and terrified as I had been, by the living thunderclap that had come boiling out of Medusa. Neither of them had the wit to get upwind and cut me off.
I flew through the dead trees, running in the air, fending off random bat-winged claw and tusk attacks; I reached the
wall, and only then grasped that I should have leapt for the sky at once. I shot up, the Gorgons following on my heels, but in the wide air they quickly lost my scent. They flapped away, screaming at each other, in the wrong direction. I was glad I hadn’t had to kill them.
I wheeled, and plunged to earth. I stabbed the harpe into the ground again and again, and scraped it against stone, to get rid of the last trace of poison. I had landed at the foot of the wall. I collapsed with my back against it. The dim plain was unchanged, the rusty overcast the same. I felt tears on my face, and touched them, puzzled. Why am I crying? I wondered. I thought it was because I would never see the Garden again, the way I’d glimpsed it in Athini’s shield. “Andromeda?”
The scale-armored warrior, the stone figure who’d been beside us when I left her, was right in front of me. But I couldn’t see her. I sheathed the harpe. I’d dropped the shield when I fell to earth. I picked it up and slung it on my back again. I threaded the kibisis onto my belt by the drawstring. Where was she? I took off the king of death’s helmet, so that she could see me.
“Andromeda?”
“Andromeda!”
I ran around calling her name, but I knew she had gone. There was nowhere to hide on that killing ground. She had gone. She had vanished, back to Haifa and the sacrifice, the way she’d warned me it would happen. But I had the Medusa Head. The peace and glory of knowing I had done it welled up in me. I had the means to follow her, swift as thought. I could save Andromeda’s life.
Andromeda had been dreaming for a long time. She’d dreamed that she and Perseus were taken on board a strange ship that was going to carry them to the river of the dead. They had to cook for a small army of rowers who would eat nothing but meat and bread. She knew the ship wasn’t entirely real, nor were the crew. Sometimes you could almost see through them; or they seemed mysteriously small and far away…. It was one of those dreams that’s a good dream, but you know something’s wrong. It went on for days, full of detail. She and Perseus talked and talked, alone together. But in the end the captain threw them overboard, and they reached the river by somehow falling through a whirlpool into a cavern (this part was very confusing).
She didn’t remember leaving the cavern. She’d been in the middle of explaining to Perseus that she had to be somewhere else when she’d found herself alone, walking along a road. She was crying, but she knew she was not awake. She’d been walking a long time. I don’t like this, she thought, like a child. I want to go back to the other dream, the complicated one with Perseus in it.
The road had become a courtyard. She was in the great Outer Court of the Women’s Palace, at home in Haifa. It was empty. She knew she was still dreaming, because there were always crowds in here, day and night: men and women both, embassies from far away, palace officials, private petitioners. It seemed to be morning, quite early…. She pushed open the tall blue-and-white doors to her mother’s audience court. It was empty too, but she could hear the sound of weeping. She pressed on, pushing against the empty air that seemed to cling to her and hold her back. The sky overhead was blue and bright. This was a bad omen, because it was the tenth month and the rains should be on their way. The sky should be thick, the air heavy with brooding heat. Her sense that something was wrong grew stronger. The singing birds on the frieze, the flowering trees in their pots seemed to clamor at her: Run away, Andromeda, run away!
The doors to her mother’s inner apartments were always guarded by the palace regiment, the Royal Ethiopians, who held this honor directly from the queen. Often two immense and kindly royal cousins, called Aden and Kelmet, would be found on duty here. There was no sign of them: no guards at all. Andromeda was very uneasy, something was terribly wrong. Now she was in her mother’s cool, high-ceilinged private rooms: sunlight falling like bright spears through the spaces under the eaves, beautiful things around her. The weeping was closer. Everything came back to her but she couldn’t believe it was real. She had never smuggled herself out of the palace; she had never escaped in the crowds of people fleeing the threat of earthquake. She had never traded her gold bracelets; she’d never been to Serifos.
She’d always been here, walking along this corridor with the painted walls of a river scene, her bare feet making no sound on the cool tiled floor.
Her mother was sitting on a carved stool in front of the windows of her bedchamber, very upright, her hands gripping a gold-figured cosmetics case in her lap. There were deep grooves gouged between her fine brows, and on either side of her beautiful dark red lips, as if she’d been holding her mouth like that, calm and quiet, by an act of will, for months.
Cassiopeia was not weeping. It was the young women who were weeping; they were crying because they were mortally terrified. An older woman, another of those royal cousins (all the many personal servants of the palace were minor members of the royal family), was lining them up, chivvying them into place, making them stand straight and uncover their tearstained faces. The girls were all more or less dark-skinned, slim and tall, like the princess. Three of them were Andromeda’s half sisters: children of Kephus by lesser mothers, noblewomen or concubines. The other unlucky teenagers, Andromeda didn’t know.
None of them was a very good match.
She understood what was happening at once, and knew that her mother must be desperate. Cassiopeia was a sincerely religious woman, but she might have tried to get away with “deceiving” the God. Phoenician nobles offered substitutes instead of their own precious children all the time—and the Gods showed no displeasure. But it was the priests who had demanded the life of Princess Andromeda. The queen must have her back against the wall, if she was going to try and deceive them. It must be today, thought Andromeda, and she trembled. She’d been hoping for a respite.
On the queen’s great bed, laid out on the coverlet like a flat dead person, was the covering of gold that the sacrifice would wear: a dress entirely made of thin pieces of gold linked with gold wire and set with jewels; and a sacred diadem with trembling gold leaves, and pearl and coral flowers. All to be thrown away …
The queen had seen her daughter, and was staring at this vision in horror.
“Mama?”
Andromeda knelt and bowed her head, raising her joined hands in salute, as she always did when she entered her mother’s presence. Cassiopeia was loving but proud. She expected ceremony to be respected, even in private life.
“Let them go. You don’t need a substitute. I came back.”
Nothing more merciless than fear.
The chief priests of Haifa had been feuding with Cassiopeia for a long time. They resented the Ethiopian’s wisdom, her power over the people, and even her beauty. They’d been plotting for years to increase their own influence and reduce the queen’s scope. They were ruthless. They’d seen the portent of the first quake as an opportunity, and claimed Andromeda as a sacrifice to bring Cassiopeia to her knees. But they were also truly afraid. Like Cassiopeia the great queen, they knew things. They knew that deep wells were failing; that harvests were smaller, year by year; that the Middle Sea was growing more dangerous and trade was suffering. Fewer ships plied the longer routes; less merchandise was carried. Taki, the shipping magnate of the Blue Star line, had strong rooms full of treasure, but common goods were growing scarcer…. The priests looked into the future, further than anyone. They saw that even a city like Haifa might founder.
They weren’t just greedy for material power. They truly believed that the creeping, deadly changes were wrought by Gods who could be bought like corrupt human beings. They believed, like the Achaeans, that great Fira had been destroyed because Minoan women knew too much; because the Minoans had lived too soft, prizing the peace above war. They believed it could happen again, and this time the Great Disaster would destroy Phoenicia. They didn’t understand her “flying marks,” but they were sure that Andromeda’s unnatural learning was displeasing to the Gods. She had to die.
Andromeda knew all this. She was Cassiopeia’s daughter, she’d been trained
to understand statecraft. But it didn’t help.
The wailing and moaning of the palace women left her no dignity. They wanted to bathe her, anoint her with funeral oils, dress her in finest purple. She wouldn’t let them touch her salt-stained rags, or even comb her hair. But that was her last victory. She was sealed into the gold dress and delivered to the priests. She was made to walk through the city dressed in gold, and shackled, the chief priest of Melqart walking ahead of her in triumph, bearing the sacred diadem. The people crowded to watch her pass by, keening and howling. She was surrounded by the sound of breaking pottery. Vases and furniture were thrown from high windows; fine woven cloth was torn to pieces: all the destruction that was customary at a funeral.
“Don’t mourn me!” she shouted, infuriated. “I am not being murdered! This is my choice! I’m god-touched! This is right!”
The howls, the holy drums and rattles, the smashing of precious objects, the chanting of the priests drowned her out. She wanted her mother. She wanted her mother to be here, proudly telling the people that Andromeda was willing. That the priests were false but the sacrifice was true. But Cassiopeia and Kephus had retreated to the depths of the palace, leaving Andromeda to look like a dumb animal led to the slaughter—which was so unfair.
She was taken to the rock in a sacred barge. The moaning and weeping of the crowd diminished. She watched the long sweep of the oars, and felt the cool sea breeze. The sky was darker now, and the heat heavy: like a normal tenth-month day. They made her lie down, then fastened the chains to four bronze rings hammered into the rock so that she was pinioned by her wrists and ankles. The rock struck cold through the metal; she could feel the slimy touch of seaweed on her bare arms.