“It’s been hard to be close to him for a long time,” Sophia admitted. “Every time I looked at him, all I could see was this moment.”
“Then why,” Medea demanded, her voice harsh, “didn’t you call and say he was going to be sick? Why didn’t you intervene and save your father’s life?’
Sigrun had never seen that black rage directed at Sophia before. She’d seen it, often enough, directed at her, but never at Medea’s own daughter. Sophia just looked at her mother, blankly. “Because I didn’t see myself calling. It was his time. He was always going to die this way. Just like you were always going to die of a stroke. It’ll be in about twenty years. You’ll be in a wheelchair for a while, paralyzed on the left side, and then the second stroke will finish the job in the nursing home.” Sophia tipped her head to the side. “And I know that telling you that won’t make you feel any better, or change the future at all. Why should I have told Fæder the details? It would only have preyed on his mind.” Sophia shrugged. “As this will prey on yours.”
Medea slapped Sophia across the face, ten feet from the cooling body of her husband. Sigrun moved so fast, even she was surprised, and had Medea up against the wall of the private room, while a couple of white-robed doctors looked in from the hall in dismay. “She is precisely what you made of her,” Sigrun said, softly, each word cold. “Never in her life have you struck her, save that you threatened to beat her when the visions began. I told you then, as I tell you now. You will not raise your hand to her when she speaks of what she sees, for she does not lie.”
Belatedly realizing that she had her stepmother pinned against the wall, Sigrun released her hold, and controlled her temper. “Medea . . . I know that your grief makes you irrational. And I am sorry for your loss. Sincerely.” The words almost choked her to say, but she had to acknowledge it. She had to acknowledge that this woman had had feelings for her father. That Medea had shared his life for decades. She had to respect that.
Medea raised her eyes and stared at Sigrun. “I have no need for your false sympathies. Eternally young. Immortal. And always wearing the face of his dead wife, a constant reminder of what he lost. Take your hypocrisy and get out of my sight, you little whore.”
Adam moved forward, suddenly, his body language suddenly angry, as if mass were elective, and he suddenly bulked twice what he normally did. Sigrun put a hand to his arm, even as she turned her face aside sharply, as if slapped. She’d tried. She’d reached out, and whether it was motivated by grief or decades of resentment, she couldn’t tell, but Medea had squelched a peace offering given across the body of the man they’d both loved. “As you wish,” Sigrun replied, blankly, and gave her father’s body one last look. The anger was, at least, keeping the grief at bay, for the moment, though she knew she was going to find her way to their apartment in Rome or their house and Judea and simply scream. Let her own four walls be the silent witness to her loss of control. “Sophia . . . I will wait for you outside.”
“Oh, no need. I’ll come with you.” Sophia wiggled her fingers at her furious, grief-stricken mother, and said, calmly, “I’ll see you at the funeral, Mother.”
Hers or our father’s? Sigrun wondered, staring at Sophia blankly. Sophia caught the expression, and said, a little wistfully, “Our father’s, silly. I won’t be able to go to Mother’s. I won’t be . . . well.”
Sigrun caught Adam’s head-shake as they stepped out into the hall, and whole-heartedly agreed with it. Compared to her family, his was paradise. Rivkah had a solid job as an oncology nurse, and had married a young Carthaginian engineer, much to her brother Mikayel’s displeasure. She spent her weekends with her husband’s family in Tyre. Chani, the rebel of the family, had shown a strong aptitude for art, and had actually opted to get her teaching certificate, so that she could do what she loved—painting—while actually earning a paycheck doing it. She’d also just gotten married. There were little irksome moments, mostly revolving around Mikayel’s staunch conservatism, but nothing yet like the scene Adam had just been a witness to in the hospital room. “You all right, Sig?” he asked, in the hall, brushing her hair back from her eyes.
Sigrun considered that for a moment, and felt her lower lip quiver. Compressed it. “No,” she admitted, as Sophia slipped out behind them, closing the door. Sophia surprised her by wrapping her arms around her again, and leaning into her for a moment. “Sophia? I am so very sorry for everything in there. And I regret, deeply, that you’ll have to continue to deal with her. For me . . . other than you . . . I am done with the family.” Sigrun swallowed, and put her cheek against her sister’s hair. “You are . . . all right?”
“Oh, I’m fine.” Sophia said, calmly. “I knew what she was going to say and do before I walked in the room. You know, I actually enjoyed finally getting to say the words to her? I knew she was going to slap any words of sympathy right out of your mouth, sister. I know she’s going to ignore our father’s request to be cremated, and will put him in some hole in the ground, instead. I know she’s going to sell the house, instead of giving it over to you, the way it says in his will, and I know you’re not going to contest her on that, because you feel guilty. Guilty because she believed that Fæder loved you more than he loved her, ” Sophia shrugged. “She’s going to move back to Hellas, and all my aunts and uncles—the ones you’ve never met—are going to tell her she should have convinced him to move out of that dreadful northern climate years ago. She’s going to wonder where all her brothers and sisters were, when their father sold her into slavery to pay for his business debts. She’s going to think that they’re all after her money—oh, and some of them will be, relatives are like that, you know—but she’ll shut all of them out of her life. And she’s going to die alone. The hospital will be overrun with monsters.” Sophia shrugged. “Note that I didn’t tell her that. I didn’t tell her that it’s going to be hard for her to push the chair and flee, with half of her body paralyzed, or that the stroke will be a mercy compared to what they would have done to her.” She smiled at Sigrun. “Oh, it’s so much better when you’re around, Sigrun. It’s so much easier to see the now when you’re here.”
Sigrun had let Sophia pull back, so that only her fingers were still on her sister’s shoulders. She had absolutely no idea what to say to any of that. Just stared, wordless, at her younger sister. Sophia reached up and patted one of her hands, lightly. “Thank you for believing me,” she added. “Of course, I knew you would.” She tipped her head back, and Sigrun could see the tears suddenly collecting in her green eyes. “Of course, if you believed me about this, doesn’t that mean you believe me about everything?” Her voice was like a child’s.
Sigrun flinched. Adam moved up behind her, resting a hand on her shoulder. Communicating without words, that he was here. “Sophia,” Sigrun said, her voice breaking, “. . . Yes. I believe you when you say that you see what you see. But I don’t believe that it’s immutable. I don’t believe that there’s nothing we can do about it.”
Sophia sighed. “I knew you’d say that.”
Sigrun closed her eyes. “Can we,” she asked, carefully, “have one day . . . one day . . . in which to mourn for our father? One day in which there is no prophecy? No futures?”
She felt a hand touch her face. “Of course,” Sophia said, consolingly. “I did all my mourning years ago, the first time I watched him die. It’s different for you. Oh, but I did want to tell you something, before anything else.”
Sigrun opened her eyes, and her stomach clenched. “Yes?”
“It’s all right,” Sophia told her, gently. “I forgive you in advance.” At Sigrun’s bewildered glance, she said, “The centaurs. You’re not going to be in time. And I won’t leave, because it’s the only thing I see for myself.” A single tear coursed down Sophia’s cheek. Not for their father, but for . . . both of them? “You won’t get there in time, Sigrun. But it’s all right. Because you were never going to win.”
Once everything fell out precisely how Sophia had said that it would�
��damn her—and Medea moved to Hellas, after selling a house that Sigrun didn’t actually feel was her home anymore, and therefore didn’t want to contest for ownership of . . . Sigrun was the one who called Sophia, late in 1964. “Sophia? I’m going back to Cimbri. I . . . would like it very much . . . if you came with me.”
“I don’t see myself going there, Sigrun.”
From anyone else, that would be a casual brush-off. From her? Anything but. “I’m going to have our father exhumed. Burned on a proper funeral pyre and sent to the gods the way he wanted to be sent.” Sigrun sat at her kitchen table in Judea, staring out the window. Lassair had been going from neighbor to neighbor in the past few years. Helping with little gardening tasks. Trennus and Lassair’s house actually had grapevines running up the sides, heavy with fruit in the fall, and beautiful cypress trees. Sigrun’s yard, thanks to Lassair, had the only lilacs she’d ever seen blooming in this miserably hot climate, and in the kitchen garden, helped by the little house-spirits, there was a white cherry tree that Sigrun privately went out, late at night and without a ladder, to pluck fruit from the highest branches so that the birds didn’t get it all. “Come with me.”
There was a pause on the other end of the line. Sophia was actually breathing hard, in short little pants. “I . . . .”
“Come with me. Please.” Sigrun swallowed. She hadn’t even been able to cry at her father’s funeral, not with Medea right there.
“. . . he didn’t want this . . .” The words were a sad echo of the words Sophia had whispered at the funeral, a year ago, in Cimbri, watching as the casket was settled into a mausoleum wall. This isn’t right. But it’s how I saw it. “I . . . I don’t see me not doing it . . . . And in the end, it . . . probably doesn’t matter if he’s in a wall or in ashes, will it?” Tremulous uncertainty. Asking permission of creation.
Sigrun stirred at the table. She hadn’t actually thought Sophia would come with her. She’d been resigned to going alone. Adam was stuck in Raccia with Livorus, and Sigrun was taking a week to do this, between assignments. “That sounds . . . good,” she said, hesitantly.
And so the two sisters flew to Cimbri. And as they stood by the ritual pyre, watching the flames dance and the smoke rise to the pale gray sky, Sigrun finally was able to weep for her father, and it started to rain, the water from the sky concealing the tears on her face.
Sophia’s hands were clenching and unclenching. “I’m glad I came, Sigrun,” she said, finally. “But I . . . I can’t do this again. I could do this, because it didn’t matter. But . . . this . . . was of my own free will.”
Sigrun’s throat tightened anew, and she put her arms around her sister. One more try, she thought. One more chance to try to save you, little sister. “Does it matter what you eat for breakfast?” Sigrun asked, as gently as she could. “Does it matter who you sleep with?”
“. . . no.”
“But you still do what you see yourself doing, anyway.”
A pause, and a sigh. “Yes. Always.” A little smile as Sophia looked up at her. “You’re a servant, and I’m a slave, Sigrun. That’s the difference between us. But it’s all right. In another life? I’ll be free.”
Appendix I: Geography
Asia
Korea
Seorabeol — Seoul
Nippon
*Edo — Tokyo
*Hokkaido Island
Qin
Beijing —Capital of Qin
Llasa — Capital of the Tibetan Protectorate of Qin
Europa
Geographical features
*Áhkká — Mountain in far northern Sweden; site of an entrance to Valhalla
Haemodae — Shetland
*Mount Parnassus — Mountain in Hellas. Location of the Corycian Cave.
Orcades — Orkney islands
*Pielinen — Lake in Fennmark
Sequana river — Seine
*Taunus mountains, Greater Feldberg and Smaller Feldberg — Located in Hessen, Germany
Tamesis river — Thames
Britannia
Subprovinces
Cantium, petty kingdom — Kent
Caledonia, petty kingdom — Scotland
Cymru, petty kingdom — Wales
Eboracum, petty kingdom — York
Kernow, petty kingdom — Cornwall
Umbria, petty kingdom — Northumbria
Cities
Dhu Rinn —Durness
Dubrās — Dover
Inbhir Nis — Inverness
Londonium — London
Tarvodubron* (“Bullwater”) — Current capital of Caledonia. (Thurso)
Continental Gaul
Named Subprovinces:
Aquitania (Southern France)
Belgae (Belgium)
Tarraconnensis, Lusitania, and Baetica (Iberian Gaul)
Isle of the Blessed — Madeira
Cities:
Carthaginensis — Cartagena, Spain
Lucentum — Alicante, Spain— Seville, Spain
*Lutetia Parisiorum — Paris
*Toxandria — Campine, Belgium
Valentia — Valencia
Germania
Agrippinensium — Cologne/Köln
*Frankonovurd am Main —Frankfurt
Raccia
Kiev — Kiev
Novgorod — Novgorod
Moskva — Moscow
Varangkov — St. Petersburg
Rome/Italia
Lilybaeum — Marsala, Sicily
*Rome
Other locations in Europa
Athens — City in Hellas
Argos — City in Hellas, noted for claiming to have the tomb of Prometheus
Cimbri — Denmark
Delphi — City in Hellas, home of the Oracle
*Gotaland — Southern Sweden
Jönköping, capital city (Jönköping, Sweden)
Mjölby, city on northern border. (Mjölby, Sweden)
Ostrogotia (eastern province of Gotaland)
Fennmark — Finland
Lieksa— City in Fennmark (Lieksa, Finland)
Turku — Capital of Fennmark (Turku, Finland)
Polania — Poland
Caesaria Aquilonis (North America)
Geographical features
Aeturnus Flumenis — Mississippi river
Apalachen mountains — Appalachian mountains
Bláthach Peninsula — Florida
Lake Caestus — Lake Michigan
Lake Erielhonan — Lake Erie
Lake Monache — Mammoth Lakes
Mannahata — Manhattan Island
*Mitsi'adazi (or Goldeseasteð) — Yellowstone, river and region
Muhheakantuck — Hudson River
Nivalis mountains — Sierra Nevada mountains
Ohio Flumenis — Ohio river
Saxetae mountains — Rockies
Tó Baʼáadi river — Rio Grande
Yohhe'met — Yosemite
Novo Germania
Cities and landmarks
*Burgundoi — San Francisco
Odinhall
Ceasterhild Brycgian (Citygate Bridge – Golden Gate Bridge)
Pellicane Island — Alcatraz island
Cimbri-on-the-Caestus — Chicago (Sigrun’s birthplace)
Duwamish — Seattle
Frisii – Montreal
Marcomanni – Cincinnati
*Nova Trier — New York
Statue of Odin and his ravens in Muhheakantuck Harbor
Saxony — Detroit
Novo Gaul
Cities and landmarks
Alba Aesculus — Albuquerque
*Arlesus — New Orleans
Caddo Bluff — Dallas
Clovis — St. Louis
*Crann Péitseog — Atlanta
Croatoan — Roanoke, Virginia
*Divodurum – Houston
*Féir Crompán — Carrizo Springs
*Nimes — Los Angeles
*Ponca — Omaha
Romaine — Richmond, Virginia
/> *Tongeran – Phoenix
Tidewater — Norfolk, Virginia
Non-affiliated countries of Caesaria Aquilonis
*Chahiksichahik territory
Chinooks
Comanche Alliance
Diné Lands
Iroquois Confederation
Lakota Nation
Hopi Nation
Oraibi — Major Hopi city
Ute Federation
Nahautl
Cities and regions
*Fuscus Lapillus — Piedras Negras
*Tenochtitlan — Mexico City
*Teotihuacan — Ruins of the same name
*Tikal, Tikali region — Guatemala
Caribbean region
Borikén — Puerto Rico
Coabana — Cuba
Karankawa — Galveston island (part of Novo Gaul)
Kùutsmil — Cozumel (part of Nahautl)
Taino islands — Caribbean islands
Caesaria Australis (South America)
Geographical features
*Ibirapitanga rainforest— Amazon rainforest
Tawantinsuyu
Cities and landmarks
*Coropuna — Volcano
*Cuzco — Cusco
*Machu Picchu
*Nazca Lines
Middle East
Cities
*Borsippa — Location of major Magi academy. (Southwest Iraq)
Byzantium — Capital of Lydian province (Istanbul, Turkey)
*Chalus — City in Media, on the Caspian. (Chalus, Iran)
Damascus — Capital of West Assyria, province of Rome
Ecbatana — City in Media, southwest of Chalus. (Near Lalejin, Iran)
Gazaca — City in West Assyria (No current real-world location. Approximately Zanjan, Iran.)
*Jerusalem — Capital of Judea
Meggido — Judean city (a place called Armageddon)
Persepolis — Capital of Persia (Real world: ruins south of Estakhr, Iran)
Shiqmona — Port city of Judea (Haifa, Israel)
*Tyre —Carthaginian city, province of Rome (Tyre, Lebanon)
The Valkyrie (The Saga of Edda-Earth Book 1) Page 132