Lassair had burst out of a doorway to greet and fuss at all her new guests, but now stopped, staring at Minori. Minori could sense a little hurt in her gaze. What has happened, Truthsayer? You are . . . .
“Carrying a piece of the sun,” Minori said, very quietly, her eyes downcast. “Just as Sophia once told me I would.”
That night, having assured herself that all of the refugees had been turned over to Fritti’s capable hands to find them places to stay, and having greeted her mother, daughter, and granddaughter, Minori spent the next hour or so comforting her mother. Ensuring that Aika knew that her father had chosen the moment of his death, and died with a sword in his hand. Aika wept, as much for her home, as for Tadaoki himself. They set up a little shrine in the guest room, where Tadaoki’s picture would stand where Aika could see it, and where she could put flowers and food offerings.
Finally, Minori made her way to her bedroom. Amaterasu’s voice was quiescent at the back of her head; the goddess was deeply occupied, trying to stave off the mad gods and settle the unquiet earth and sea near Nippon. Minori opened a closet door, and dug through several boxes. She’d hidden these things away, because they hurt too much too look at; pictures of her and Kanmi. Wedding portraits. Kanmi holding Masako for the first time in the hospital. Minori’s throat burned, and she carried them across the room to a little table she’d cleared for just this purpose. “I’m sorry it took me so long,” she told the empty air. “I can already hear you laughing at me, anyway.”
She put the pictures on the table, and put a little incense burner between them. Lit the sweet substance, and let herself focus on the twirling, swirling veils of smoke. I believe in you, Kanmi, she said, silently. I believe in you. You’ll come home to me, someday. But know, that for the moment, I’m . . . all right. I’m not alone.
It might have been her imagination, but she thought a breath of wind caressed her face.
Chapter 16: Collapse
Cassandra is a terrible and terrifying figure. She’s been mythologized, yes, but I truly do believe that this prophetess lived. Some say Apollo gave her the gift of prophecy, and some say serpents licked her ears clean, and thus gave her this insidious gift. Some say she promised to be Apollo’s consort, and upon obtaining this gift, spurned him, refused to grant him her favors. Let us consider these legendary accounts:
Apollo of Delphi, said to be as radiant and beautiful as the sun, pursued the nymph Daphne, who preferred to be turned forever into a laurel tree than accept his advances. He pursued Castalia, who preferred to be turned into a spring at Delphi, rather than slake his thirst for her body. He pursued Marpessa, who, though kidnapped by a mortal, chose the mortal over the god, knowing that the god would tire of her when she grew old. He fathered Troilus on Hecuba, King Priam of Troy’s wife, in and around the other nineteen children she bore, including poor doomed Cassandra, the very mortal with whom he later became obsessed.
For an immortal poet and singer of songs who shines as beautifully as the sun, quite a number of women seem to have preferred death to his embrace. So I think it highly likely that Cassandra bore the gift of prophecy as a result of her lineage tracing back to some spirit . . . perhaps even to Apollo himself, as a grandfather or great-grandfather . . . and she refused him out of repugnance. While most spirits do not understand the concept of incest—it is a very human thing, after all—the ancient Hellenes certainly considered such things taboo, as the legend of Oedipus the King tells us. Even if she was given the gift of prophecy, no legend records her having asked for this gift, and, strictly from a contemporary standpoint, no means no.
For whatever reason, she declined his favor. Apollo—the same Apollo who once flayed a satyr alive, for playing music as well as he did, and for having had the hubris to challenge a god—took umbrage, and cursed her so that no one would ever believe her prophecies again. For ten years, this daughter of Priam watched as the Hellenes besieged her city. She knew precisely how everything would transpire. No one believed her, so she was powerless to prevent the fall of Troy, and her own horrific fate. She took refuge in the Temple of Athena as the city fell, and Ajax—brave, noble hero that he was, to have had his name preserved in song and story—raped her on the altar.
Agamemnon then took her as his personal concubine. Such was all that captured women could expect, in those days. To be taken as a captive, raped by those who had conquered the city, and to pray that at least it would only be by one of them. That the man who’d taken her as his spoils of war would be ‘civilized’ and not give her to his men, or to any other man who happened to desire her.
Cassandra was, by all reports, red-haired, blue-eyed, and the second-most beautiful woman in the world, after Helen of Troy herself. And by no fault of her own, she was taken back to Hellas by Agamemnon. Though enduring him—even forcing herself to respond to him—was probably the only way she could survive, she could not have loved the man who had destroyed her home. But even her own death, she knew in advance, Aeschylus tells us in Agamemnon. The king’s wife, Clytemnestra, had taken a lover of her own during his ten-year absence. And little wonder, that. After all, Clytemnestra’s own first husband had been killed by Agamemnon, and he’d married her by force, to ensure his hold on her kingdom. He presumably raped Clytemnestra repeatedly, or she, too, brought herself to endure him, for she bore him children . . . among them Iphigenia. Whom he promptly sacrificed to the gods, so as to gain favorable winds with which to speed his way to Troy.
And yet, according to many ancient authors—all male—the queen was jealous of the fabled beauty of Cassandra. And so Clytemnestra murdered both Cassandra, as the ‘lover’ of her husband, and then she and her lover murdered her husband. (It couldn’t possibly have been that Clytemnestra knew Cassandra was a prophetess, and feared that Cassandra might warn Agamemnon. It couldn’t have been for any so rational a motivation as that. No, for the ancient Hellenes, women were the repository of irrationality and emotionality.)
And Cassandra knew it would happen, and could not stop the course of events, for the simple fact that no one believed her. Or perhaps she would not, because it was her only way out of the trap of her own existence, and silence was the only way in which she could ensure that justice would be done on Agamemnon’s head.
I cannot but think, that in light of the recently-recovered works of Aeschylus on the topic of Prometheus and the Trojan War, and those plays’ meditations on the gods’ motivations in destroying their own descendants in that war, that the godslayer who chased the Hellene gods hence from Troy’s burning towers should have been more thorough in his work. For surely, there has never been a more spiteful and cruel retaliation for being told no than to inflict on a woman a lifetime of helplessly awaiting her own torturous and slow death in mind, body, and spirit. For surely, Cassandra’s body was the last part of her to die.
My own sister was a Pythia at Delphi. Some say, the most powerful ever to have lived. I have fought against her prophecies since she was ten years old, and in all those years, she has never been wrong. Sometimes cryptic. Sometimes abstruse. But never wrong, and she has always felt that she could not escape her fate any more than Cassandra could. And what was her crime?
She, like the satyr flayed alive by the great god, happened to be as good as, if not better at something, than he was.
If I could cry out for justice against a Hellene god, I would. If I could challenge, fight, and slay him, I would. The Hellenes themselves have had the right of it: they’ve largely chosen to ignore their own gods. And that is the best and most just punishment currently possible, I believe. But if a true godslayer ever happens to arise on this world again? I might well point the way to Apollo of Delphi. And then laugh in glee.
—Sigrun Caetia, private journal. Iunius 23, 1992 AC.
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Maius 2, 1990 AC
Maccis Matrugena slumped in on himself in the seat of the Hatasahl jumbo jet, trying to minimize his height a little. He’d just started another growth spurt, an
d he was hungry at the moment. Even the airline meals, being warmed in the kitchen compartment between first class and where he and his father and siblings sat, in second-class, smelled divine. His nose twitched. Chicken salad with grapes, rosemary, and a little . . . what is that? Tarragon? Yes. Tarragon. He usually didn't realize how much better his sense of smell was, compared to a regular human's. Beef tips in red wine and mushroom sauce. Nice, soft challah bread. I wonder if they’d be offended if I asked for one of everything. His nose twitched again. Pity the one steward wears that odd Egyptian hair wax. Covers almost all the other scents.
He shifted a little as Vorvena, his eldest full-sister, elbowed him in the ribs. He had the aisle seat, across from his father; both of them needed the leg room. Maccis had just hit five foot ten; he was still far shorter than his father, who stood six inches past six feet in height, but Maccis had only just turned fifteen. It was odd suddenly being Aunt Sigrun or Aunt Lassair’s height, and just as bizarre to find himself looking down at Zaya. Of course, his mother frequently took him into Little Gothia, so Maccis had plenty of fenris, hveðungr, and jotun acquaintances of his own age. And that usually took care of any thoughts he had of being tall. A male jotun his age was usually pushing past the seven foot mark. And a fenris his age . . . well, they were usually pushing the six hundred pound mark. Maccis was underweight for his height at the moment, and barely tipped the scales at a hundred and forty-five pounds, soaking wet. His wolf form therefore looked just as scrawny as his human one. “What?” he asked Vorvena, edging away from her sharp elbows.
“You’re a boy. Tell me what this means.” She shoved a note in his hand.
Maccis did his best not to sigh or roll his eyes, and glanced across the aisle at his father, who had Fyriacus and Enica, one of the sets of twins, beside him, with Enica pinned in by the window. His father had a grimoire open in his lap, and his glasses perched on his nose as he read, as Enica shoved her twin, hard, beside him. “Children, stop, or you are getting off the airplane right now,” Trennus warned them. “And then you can reimburse me for your wasted tickets.”
They all settled, instantly.
If his father could stay calm, when Da hated planes, Maccis figured that he could stifle his annoyance with his older sister. He looked down at the note, which was written in block letters.
Hey, Vorvena. I think you’re pretty, and I think it’s neat that you can change form. Can you give yourself a tail? Can you turn yourself into, say, half-girl, half-fox? I think that would look really good on you. Check Yes or No and then leave this note sticking out of your locker.
Maccis frowned after a moment. “Who in the Morrigan’s name gave you this? And when? Last week of school?”
“It’s not signed. It was shoved in my locker. And yes, the very last week of school.” Vorvena sounded nervous and excited at once. “I mean, is this good, or is this . . . creepy?”
“If you didn’t think it was creepy, you wouldn’t be asking me,” Maccis pointed out, he thought, fairly reasonably.
Vorvena chuffed between her teeth and snatched the paper back from him. “Is it so much to think that someone could think that I’m pretty?”
Oh. It’s going to be one of those conversations that I can’t win and the rules change as I’m talking. Maccis looked past Vorvena at Eisa, and his red-haired sister shrugged back at him. “I didn’t say that,” he said, slumping down further in the seat. “But since you asked me, the guy couldn’t even put his name to it . . . if it even is a guy. Can’t tell from the hand-writing. And whoever it is, spends most of the note asking you about what you can do. Not asking if they can get to know you, or asking to meet you, or anything else.”
“Sounds like someone wants information to make fun of you with,” Eisa supplied, shrugging. “You should know better by now, Vorvena. I get this all the time.”
Vorvena slumped in her chair, now, too. “I know . . .” she mumbled. “It would just be nice . . . .”
“Find a nieten or a harpy,” Eisa told her, cheerfully. “The harpy males are supposed to be the ones who stay home and take care of the children, and they can fly. So you can fly together!”
Maccis had already tuned out, opening his book—The Mars Colony: A Decade on the Red Planet. Uncle Adam had given it to him, and it had a paw-print in ink from Dr. Larus Sillen, the fenris who’d written the foreword. It was a treasured possession, though scarcely two months old. He’d devoured the pictures of the underground vaults, the greenhouses below the surface, lit with grow-bulbs that obtained electricity from solar panels on the plains outside the Cydonian mesa into which the colony had been built. The pumps that helped re-circulate water for heating and cooling were ley-powered, and there were diagrams of them, too. He relished looking at the simple tanks that were used to catch and process urine and feces into ammonia and fertilizer for the plants.
The biggest issues the colonists talked about, in their interviews, were the lack of light and the lack of animal-based protein in their diets. They lived underground most of the time, protected from the radiation, so they were often tired and cranky from the lack of sunlight. They also depended on re-supply from the Moon for animal proteins, so most of them wound up eating a lot of soy and nuts from the greenhouses to try to make up the lack. But they all spoke with such joy about the light gravity of Mars. The beauty of the stark, inhospitable environment. How privileged they were, to be first.
Maccis wanted, more than almost anything else in the world, to run there. Preferably, in wolf form. It wasn’t going to happen unless the planet could be terraformed, of course. But even in human form, in a suit? It would be wonderful. He flipped a page. It was so odd to have time to himself. Every waking minute the past three years, he’d either been at school, at sparring, or maybe at Zaya’s house to work on school projects. And when he wasn’t working on schoolwork, he’d been in the refugee camps, at his mother’s request. Working with people whose bodies had been forcibly altered. Most of them were intensely bitter, and he’d done his best not to look anything but human around them. The fact that he could change into whatever he wanted, whenever he wanted, so long as the weight stayed the same . . . it was a sore spot for someone who’d just been forced into the shape of a minotaur and needed speech therapy just to learn how to grunt out words again.
He was excited to be able to spend a summer in Britannia again. It felt like normalcy. Except, of course, he’d watched the news every night with the rest of his family. He’d seen waves of refugees from places like Korea and Nippon fleeing to Australia, taking refuge in a place at least nominally protected by the Roman gods. Quite a few had come to Judea, as well, following Aunt Minori. No, this isn’t normalcy. This might be our last chance for a long time to see Da’s home, and Mother’s woods. He’s not bringing any of the little ones with us, and anyone older than Fyri and Enica is already . . . at work or at university or off fighting, like Solinus . . . .
Another jab from his sister’s elbow, irritatingly placed. “What?” he snapped.
“Have you been listening at all?”
“No. Why?”
Another jab, and this time he retaliated, just hard enough to let her know that he was getting tired of the elbowing. Vorvena hissed at him, and Maccis lifted his lips clear of his teeth. “I said,” Vorvena told him, and leaned in so he couldn’t possibly miss her words, “That you put on this great big show of not caring about courting, and then you follow Zaya around like a puppy.”
Maccis rattled the leather collar at his throat. “That’s precisely what I am,” he told his sister, with bright cheer. “I am a big, safe, fluffy puppy.” A sing-song note at the end. Probably better that way. Her father could drop-kick me so far into the Veil, that our da might not be able to find me with a radar telescope. He shrugged, and turned a page.
“I’m just saying, you’re really obvious, little brother.”
Not to her. Maccis shrugged again, still not answering.
“Do I have to tear the book out of your hands?”
“Settle down over there,” their father told them, not looking up from his grimoire.
First time in three years, running through his mother’s forest. Maccis lost himself for days there, as Saraid’s form shimmered into place, running with him on the ground, their paws eating the miles. Overhead, Vorvena forced her mass down and took to the air as a hawk. Maccis thought of his older sister as more of a doe or a dove, so it was always odd seeing her in hawk-form, but she matched their speeds in it, unerringly. Their father ran with them, in human form, doing a fine job of keeping pace as he leaped over boulders and climbed hills at their sides. Greenness and beauty, everywhere. Hundreds of miles of ancient oak trees, blotting out the sun. Maccis had been here before, years ago, but he’d ached for it in his bones, and hadn’t even realized that this was what he’d missed. I love it here, he told his mother, silently. I never want to leave.
But we must. Our business is elsewhere, alas. And there are many who need us.
What about what we need, Mother?
For the moment, that does not matter. There may come a time when we are all free to choose again. I hope it will be soon.
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