“You’ve devoted yourself to Kamrusepa all your life,” Briseis said. “Why won’t she save you and take away the pain?” Briseis’s fingers knotted tightly into the curly fleece covering the bed frame.
Antiope closed her eyes a moment. Then she opened them and looked at her daughter. Her throat rattled with the effort to draw in more air. “Even goddesses... must accept the death of mortals dear to them… but she is here with me.”
Antiope raised her hand a little from the bed. “Your father? Brothers?”
“Father hasn’t returned, nor Adamas and Bienor. I sent a messenger after them as you asked.”
“Ah, well…” Her mother’s eyes closed, and she seemed to sink further into the bed.
Briseis slipped out of the room and stood at the top of the stairs, wanting to hear the noise of her father and brothers coming through the gate. She’d sent one of the menservants to tell them to come right away. In good weather it only took part of an afternoon to get from the walled city of Lyrnessos back to the estate, but with this storm …. When they left that morning, the sky was clear enough and her mother hadn’t shown any alarming signs. They had no reason not to go, especially when the king needed her father’s advice because of the rumors of Greek raids. Reports had come in of attacks on the towns north of their powerful ally Troy. Her father was the king’s chief military advisor and he’d raised her two oldest brothers as warriors, so they had gone with him to the Council the king had called. But if they didn’t get home soon, it would be too late.
Hearing nothing, Briseis turned back to her mother’s room. When she held her fingers to her mother’s mouth, she could barely feel the movement of breath. The burn of rage Briseis had felt for months flared hotter. Her mother had concealed her illness until she couldn’t hide her pain any longer. They should have fought it together from the beginning. Her mother always said illness treated early was illness cured. When Antiope insisted they could do nothing, Briseis hunted for months for a cure among the clay tablets in her mother’s library. While her mother had written, “Thus says Antiope” at the bottom of some of them, the tablets from past healers also filled the library. Briseis decided her mother hadn’t had the strength to search through the records as she would have for any other ill person. But of the various teas and poultices Briseis tried, along with the many rites, none had improved Antiope’s health.
Briseis believed her mother had given in to this illness, accepted defeat from the beginning. Illness generally came from the gods as punishment for violations against the gods’ laws. In case her mother had neglected a sacrifice or some similar affront—any more serious sin seemed unlikely—Briseis performed a snake divination at the temple to ask Kamrusepa directly how they had offended the gods. But the swimming snakes had given only a muddled answer as they touched the words inscribed in the great basin. The snakes failed to identify anything Briseis could correct. Even before she’d tried the divination it had seemed impossible to Briseis that her mother could have sinned so greatly that Kamrusepa sent the illness, but giving in to the disease felt like a sin to Briseis. Her mother had resigned herself to death too easily, and the gods abandoned her because she did not love life enough—their gift to all. She needed to be dragged back to life.
Briseis had an idea. “You two stay with Mama. I need some supplies.”
She ran downstairs to the back storerooms, the sound of the storm growing muted as she went deeper into the house with its thick walls. Once inside the library, the comforting odor of clay soothed her. Her mother, Briseis thought, was a mixture of lavender and earthy clay. She pulled tablets from the wooden pigeonholes, scanning the words formed with a reed stylus that her brothers said looked like bird tracks. She found it, “The Breath of Life Incantation.” It hadn’t made sense to her when she’d been required to copy it for practice three years ago, but it did now. Her heart felt light. She committed the rite to memory and tucked the palm-sized tablet back in its place.
She hurried through the megaron hall, the main room of the house with its two-storied ceiling and circular hearth, out to the main courtyard and into the kitchen opposite the stables. The wind-driven rain splattered under the portico’s shelter.
The cook, a middle-aged woman with a kinder heart than her boney, hard face indicated, looked up in surprise from sorting lentils when Briseis appeared at the door.
“For Mama, hurry. I need honey, mint and sweet wine.”
The cook quickly gathered everything on a tray, and Briseis carried it back upstairs. From the carved wooden chest next to the floor-to-ceiling loom in her mother’s sitting room, she grabbed a sachet of lavender and a clay incantation jar shaped like a fig.
Iatros and Eurome looked up when she entered the sleeping chamber. She set down the tray on the table and leaned in close over her mother. Antiope’s lips were parted, her eyes closed, their lids withered like fallen leaves in winter. The space between breaths felt impossibly long.
Iatros crouched by the bed, biting his upper lip, eyes fixed on his sister.
Briseis shifted her mother’s legs aside and sat down. She closed her eyes and waited while the fear she felt emptied out with each breath she exhaled. The power of the ritual’s words filled her mind. She called to Kamrusepa, praying for her to give power to this rite.
She opened her eyes and placed both hands on her mother’s chest, then her head.
“Antiope, wife of Glaukos, mother of Bienor, Adamas, Iatros, and Briseis, you have heard death whisper in your ear. You have mistaken that whisper for the nurturing breath that flows in and out of every human being. You have gone after death. Return now. Hear the breath of life.”
Briseis poured wine and honey into the fig jar, breathed into it, and then added the lavender and mint, crushing the leaves to release their scent as she held the jar close to her mother.
“Antiope, do you smell the spring? The time of new growth and blossoms? Remember the spring. Remember your children. Remember the sweetness of life. Remember that you love life. Take a strong breath.”
Silently Briseis added, Come back, Mama, I need you. Remember how much I love you. Antiope sighed and her eyelids fluttered for a moment. Iatros cried out.
Briseis’s heart leapt like a deer. “Mama!”
Daughter and son clung to their mother’s hands. They waited for Antiope to open her eyes and reassure them that she would live. They listened for the slow rattle to quicken. Instead it faded, caught once, tangled in a last wisp of life, then fell silent.
Tears ran down Briseis’s face, hot against her skin. Gradually her wet cheeks grew cold.
Later—how much later Briseis wasn’t sure—Eurome gently pulled Iatros and Briseis from their mother’s side. The old woman gathered them into her arms and held them tight against her generous bosom. Iatros sobbed, but Briseis’s tears had burned away in anger. She raged at her mother, Kamrusepa, and death itself. In spite of the storm, she needed to run outdoors into the fields and woods. Something vital would boil over inside her if she did not escape from this room with its stink of sulfur and the sight of her lifeless mother.
She broke free from her nurse, raced down the stairs and out into the courtyard. As soon as she left the protection of the portico, the rain and wind hit her full force. She ran across the courtyard toward the tall wooden gates that protected the house from raiders. The gatekeeper had thrown them open in the hope that Glaukos and his sons would soon return.
Briseis pushed against the rain, running fast along the path through the fields of her father’s estate toward the creek. The storm surrounded her. The clouds lay so low they seemed to swallow the foothills of Mount Ida that fingered down into her father’s land. Mist cloaked even the lowest terraces of orchards on the slopes, and the forests higher up had disappeared entirely. Soon her clothes clung to her in soggy, cold folds that she tugged out of her way. The wind pulled most of her coppery hair from its clasp, blowing it about her face and up like a wild crown. The icy spears of rain drove hard against her face
, and she felt relief at focusing on her discomfort.
She wanted her mother. Antiope taught that the hardest lesson for a healer is accepting death, but Briseis had already lost patients. She had learned that lesson. Her mother’s death wasn’t a lesson. It was personal, a searing pain. She turned her palms and face into the hard-pounding rain.
The leather soles of her shoes slipped on the muddy path. She stumbled over a broken branch near the creek. Fallen limbs lay all about. She ignored the menace and headed for the place where a huge oak reached its branches over the creek. She had come here often as a small child with her nurse to look for watercress for the kitchen. Later she came alone on hot summer days to cool her feet, enjoying the sound of the creek and the tree’s leafy shelter. Now she wanted to throw her arms around the trunk, an anchor against her loss.
As she peered through the rain, there, unmistakably, was the sharp bend in the creek, but instead of the tree she saw a strange emptiness. The gray sky glowered at her where once the oak’s branches had offered shelter. The creek’s bank looked like an angry god had ripped out a huge piece of it and flung down stone and mud in disgust. Upturned roots reached helplessly toward their old home. The tree sprawled across the creek, and the water boiled up behind it, creeping toward her as it overflowed its banks.
She retreated from the muddy surge. Her wet skirt tangled her legs, but she yanked it out of the way and climbed onto a boulder high on the creek’s bank. Her tunic stuck to her back. Rain ran down her face. She shivered with cold, but she didn’t want to leave the storm. Staring at the chaos around her, she felt a kindred soul in this violence. She wanted to break and tear until she rooted out the grief that filled her at the thought of her mother’s lifeless body in the upstairs chamber.
She sat on the boulder above the churning creek and curled her arms around her knees into a tight ball, her head tucked. How would the days ahead feel without her mother’s steady presence? She wanted her mother with her for one thing especially—her marriage to the king’s son, Mynes. That day loomed close and filled her with dread. She feared Mynes. Please let my fear be mistaken.
Why hadn’t Kamrusepa protected her mother? She wanted to demand an answer, but that might prove dangerous. She must not anger the goddess. As the city’s only healing priestess—no longer in training, whatever she might wish—Briseis now held the well-being of Lyrnessos in her hands: the fertility of crops and women, their health. She would pray and sacrifice to Kamrusepa at the Spring Festival, and the goddess would either listen or not. She must do all she could to be beloved of the goddess the way her mother had been.
Her mother’s whisper returned. “Even goddesses must accept the death of mortals dear to them.” Briseis unfolded herself and stood. She gathered her sodden skirt and leapt from the boulder, throwing herself into the wind, feeling the strength of it course through her body. That strength could dash her against the stones and yet she felt it inside like blood flowing through her, sustaining her. Did her goddess understand her grief with equal pain and offer this strength? She ran with the wind’s force along the edge of the swollen creek and saw the image of tears pouring down Kamrusepa’s cheeks. Then from the stores of tales she had loved throughout her childhood came other grieving goddesses, bent in sorrow, flooding her imagination, providing her with strange comfort that they suffered as she did and yet endured.
Amongst these images, one goddess stood out. Thetis crouched over the body of her warrior son, clawing at her cheeks while she howled. From the bard’s tale, Briseis recognized Achilles in the bloodied figure, the greatest of the Greeks, with his red-gold hair, piercing green eyes, and fluidity born of the sea—except this hero still lived. Why this image of his death? Then she remembered that his divine mother had tried to burn away her infant son’s mortality, to spare herself this eternal grief, each night laying him in the magic embers and searing away a little more frailty, creating the most invincible warrior of all. Her husband Peleus, a mere man, saw her rite and misunderstood the flames. He snatched the baby from the fire and through his mistake doomed him to die. His love-inspired ignorance would also doom Thetis to suffer eternal sorrow once that dread moment Briseis had imagined finally came. Even a goddess could not escape grief, no matter how hard she tried. Forever this searing pain, like Briseis’s. Perhaps, Briseis allowed, Thetis’s pain would be worse—a child lost, unbearable, unnatural. Perhaps the gods should not love any mortal too dearly.
Briseis turned toward home, letting the rain, cold and hard, obliterate her tears. She stumbled back to the house, her limbs spent, slow going amidst the maelstrom’s power.
Chapter Two
Blossoms and A Groom
Briseis trudged in from the storm. Ahead she saw her father and brothers hurrying in through the gates and ran to catch up. They stood in the megaron hall, wet and bewildered. None of the servants had greeted them. No one wanted to tell the sad news, she guessed. Her father turned when she entered. He always understood her. Seeing her drenched and drained, he pulled Briseis into a hug and then broke away to run upstairs to his wife’s chamber without a word.
“Is it Mama?” Bienor asked.
She nodded. “She’s gone. I’m sorry.”
Her oldest brother had broad shoulders and muscular arms. He carried himself like the leader of warriors he had been raised to be, but at that moment he sank onto one of the mud-brick benches built into the back wall of the megaron hall. He had the same dark curls and soft brown eyes as Iatros, but even with his head bowed in grief, he retained a look of strength.
Bienor raised his head. “Did she go peacefully at the end?”
Briseis nodded, tears welling up. “She wanted to escape the pain. She was glad to go, but she asked for both of you. She wanted to see you, but… her strength didn’t hold.”
Adamas, the middle brother, shook his head. “How could she have gone so quickly? We came as fast as we could.” His face flushed in anger. Briseis felt too exhausted to respond to his outburst and she could not soften his grief.
Adamas flung his wet cloak into a heap on the floor. His straight hair, lighter than his brothers’, lay plastered against his head. His eyes, gray like Briseis’s, darted around the big hall as if to find someone to contradict his sister’s words.
“We ran through the rain to get here, but I didn’t believe the messenger—that it was so desperate. She’s been sick for so long. Why today?”
Briseis shrugged. She’d done everything she could to postpone her mother’s death. “After you’d gone, her breathing grew labored. It was more sudden than I’ve ever witnessed.” She touched her brother’s arm. “I’m so sorry.”
Adamas gave her a hug. “You’re as wet as I am. I’m sorry. Did she say anything—a message for us?” Briseis shook her head and squeezed his arm.
A serving woman came in with linen towels. Briseis took one and passed through the megaron hall up the cedar stairs to her parents’ sleeping quarters. The storm raged on and Briseis was grateful that her house, like the palace, had enough room for an inside staircase instead of the outside ladders most homes used.
Her father knelt by the bed where her mother lay, holding one of his wife’s hands to his lips. His lean, tall body seemed too angular to embrace the fragile remnant of his beloved wife.
Briseis stood in the doorway, unwilling either to intrude on his grief or to desert him. His bent head had more gray than she remembered. It must be more visible now that his dark hair was wet—too soon for the shock of Antiope’s death to turn it gray. His damp tunic dripped and she saw him shiver. She stepped forward and wrapped the towel around his shoulders, leaving her hand resting on his back, although the sobs she felt under her palm racked her as much as him.
By the next morning, Eurome and the serving women had prepared Antiope’s body, dressed her in the blue gown she wore as priestess on festival days, and laid her on a wooden bier before the family shrine in the megaron hall.
The storm cleared. The curtains over the doors of the
upstairs sleeping chambers were pulled back; sunlight came down to the great hall through the windows of these rooms, which opened onto a balcony around the upper floor. This indirect light brightened the great hall’s frescoed scenes of a bard singing to the accompaniment of his lyre and flowers growing among craggy rocks. To Briseis these familiar, cheerful surroundings seemed an incongruous place to lay out her mother’s lifeless body.
As the servants and family gathered, the megaron hall, usually the heart of family life and the place for feasts and the bards’ tales, was filled with grief. The serving women wailed in lamentation and raked their faces and necks with their nails. Briseis felt the scratches on her own face and smelled the sourness of her dried blood. Her father and brothers smeared ashes on their heads and arms.
Here, where the family’s shrine held the spirits of their protective gods and ancestors, she must transfer her mother’s spirit from the shell of her body into the object Briseis and her father had chosen—Antiope’s satchel, which held her sacred healing materials. Briseis pressed the large satchel against her chest with both arms as if she could embrace her mother through it. If Briseis performed the rite correctly—and doubt about this haunted Briseis—then Antiope would watch over her family from the satchel that would reside forever in the shrine to receive their offerings. Later they would burn Antiope’s body on the pyre and gather her bones and ashes, but this moment mattered most. Once again, her mother’s fate rested on her. She had failed yesterday to save her mother. Now her mother’s soul would find a peaceful place near her family or it wouldn’t—dependent on Briseis’s abilities as a priestess.
Briseis hadn’t slept well. Each time she dozed, the hopeless finality of her mother’s loss would penetrate and throw her wide awake as if someone had tossed her out of bed. Her body ached and her mind’s grogginess frightened her. She wasn’t ready. Her father and brothers, clustered near her, should have given her comfort, but they seemed lost in their grief.
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