For the Winner
Page 19
‘I—’
‘Go.’
At last, shamed, despairing, with nothing left to ask for, I recognized my defeat. Slowly, Myrtessa by my side, my thoughts pounding with anger and humiliation, I walked out of the circle of lords who had once called me one of their own and made my way across the shore and up towards the dark overhanging forests above, one arm clutched across my bare chest, Myrtessa walking huddled and shaking beside me.
Wondering, with a dull ache within my heart, whether I would ever see Greece again.
A few days later we were walking across the lowlands of Colchis, wild goats cropping on the meadows, dark, marshy earth underfoot, mountain streams gushing over rocks. In the distance we could see the mountains forested with firs and broken by rocky canyons. It was a fine late summer’s day, the warm air stirred by a slight breeze, the sun sparkling upon the tumbling water of the streams. Eagles soared overhead and cried echoing calls to each other, their feathered wings outlined against the sky. We had been moving from village to village, stopping only for the night, then travelling on – though Myrtessa had made sure we found a weaver-woman willing to lend us a needle with which to stitch up our torn clothes. Now we were striking out, without much hope, towards a small gathering of dwellings sending up curls of smoke into the air from their house-fires, nestled on the slope of the mountains and visible for several leagues from the valley beneath.
For I had determined my course almost as soon as I had left the Greek camp.
Jason could exile me from the quest, he could threaten me with death, but he could not stop me trying to rescue Pagasae and Kaladrosos from his rule.
The rich, earthy scent of the marshes and the sounds of the waters of the next mountain stream tumbling over rocks filled my senses as we stopped to eat at the middle of the day. I had caught a red fox – the wound on my shoulder was beginning to mend, thanks to Myrtessa’s ministrations, and though it still twinged with pain I could handle my bow to hunt – and Myrtessa had lit a fire beside the river with piles of dry twigs and leaves gathered from the outskirts of the nearby forest. We busied ourselves skinning and spitting the carcass on a forked twig and roasting it over the flames, and it was not until we had eaten our fill that we settled down to talk.
‘I have been thinking,’ I said, cupping some water from the stream in my hands and sipping at it. ‘We were almost killed by the lords, upon the shore of the river.’ I gave her a frank stare. ‘Why did you come with me? You did not know me. You had a life in Pagasae. You had Neda, Philoetius, Hora. What made you risk everything to journey beside a person you hardly knew?’
She tipped a bilberry into her mouth and smiled. ‘I don’t know.’
‘I am serious, Myrtessa.’
She looked into my face, and the smile faded from her lips. ‘I told you,’ she said, and I saw her rub at the brand inside her right wrist. ‘I disliked being a slave. You already know all there is to know.’
I shook my head. ‘I do not think you wanted to leave Pagasae simply because of that. I think there is more.’
There was a long silence this time. At last she said, ‘Trust me, Atalanta, you are better off not knowing.’
I almost laughed, but then I saw the look in her eyes, and my laughter died in my throat. ‘If you do not want to say …’
But she was not listening. A glazed look of pain had come over her face. ‘I was born in Lesbos,’ she said, her gaze distant. ‘The main-landers raided the island when I was five years of age. Corythus was among them. He – he captured me, and took me among his prizes.’
She was talking in a flat voice, as if the painful memories were now nothing but dim recollections of sufferings past. I said nothing, but watched her. An eagle soared above us, calling into the lonely wilderness. ‘I can hardly remember my parents, or my homeland. I hear the other slaves, sometimes, talking of an island whose valleys are carpeted with violets in spring and where coves shaded by pine trees curve around pale waters and white sands – but I do not remember it. Not much.’
She took a deep breath. ‘In any case, Corythus enslaved me, along with several other young girls and a few of our women. We returned to Pagasae with him, ordered to tend his fires, scrub his floors – and, when we were older, we were summoned to his chambers, to bathe our master and to lie with him in his bed.’
Her eyes were bright with tears, and she swallowed, hard.
When she spoke again, her voice was slightly unsteady. ‘After a few months of his summoning me to his bed almost nightly, I told him I was with child. He did not call for me again, and when it was time for the baby to come, I bore it in the pantry off the kitchens, with only Hora and the girls to tend me with a tub of cold water and some old cloths. He – he was a boy, a beautiful little baby boy, with –’ she let out a sob and her voice shook ‘– with the – the sm-smallest fingers and a t-tiny dimpled chin and—’ She was unable to continue. I moved to sit beside her and clasped her shoulders, holding her tightly as she wept. After a while the shaking in her body subsided. She sniffed a couple of times and wiped her eyes upon the back of her hand, then turned to me, her eyes red-rimmed.
‘He had the baby taken away almost as soon as it was born,’ she said, her voice barely a whisper. ‘Where he was taken, I do not know. Exposed to die on the rocks above Makronita, most likely, though perhaps he was sold into slavery. And every day, there was the fear that Corythus might summon me again … that I might once again have to bear the pain of carrying his child within me, bringing it into this world, then letting him tear it away from me and send it to die.’ Her voice broke as she said, ‘I did not think I would have the strength to do it again.’
She dried her eyes on the corner of her tunic. A silence fell between us, broken only by the bubbling of the river nearby over the stones.
‘A moving tale, is it not?’ she asked at last, glancing back at me with the ghost of a smile.
I could hardly speak. I opened my mouth to say something, though I knew not what, but Myrtessa held up a hand to stop me. ‘Enough,’ she said. ‘It is done. I would rather you did not speak – Lady Hera knows I do not need consolation, not any more.’
‘I would have said the same,’ I said honestly, and I saw a flicker of gratitude in her eyes.
‘Do you understand, now, why I had to leave?’ she asked.
I nodded bleakly. There was nothing I could say to comfort her. But as we sat there, upon the plain of a foreign land, a lone eagle soaring overhead and the river gushing before us, I moved towards her and held her in my arms: two women alone in the world, unloved, unwanted.
Bound together by our abandonment and loss.
‘Come,’ I said at last, moving away from her and feeling the tears wet on my cheeks, the bandages on my injured shoulder damp where hers had fallen. I stood up. ‘Come,’ I said again, and held out a hand to her. ‘We should be able to reach the village before dusk.’
It was nearing sunset when we finally arrived, for we had had to cross several rocky gorges, the branches of willow trees trailing from the banks. Our tunics were damp from wading across one particularly fast-flowing ravine, where the water ran in eddying currents over the rocks. Our feet and ankles were crusted with the mud of the marshes, our hair hanging lank beside our faces. I was hot, thirsty and harrowed by hunger, the palms of my hands cut from scrambling over the rocks, the wound at my left shoulder breaking open and bleeding as we climbed. My anger at Jason for his cruel and unjust sentence pulsed through me, urging me on, on, though my thighs ached and the gash at my shoulder throbbed.
We approached the village, which we later learnt was named Suzona, by a dirt track surrounded by marshy green plains lined with eucalyptus trees that released their heady scent into the air, accompanied by the tolling of goats’ bells. The houses were dark and squat, clustered close together and built from whole tree trunks, with low, sloping roofs and small windows set high in the walls. A goatherd crossed our path with his flock, and stared at us with dark, unfathomable eyes, the ribb
on tied around his forehead fluttering in the breeze. The dwellings were becoming more frequent now, and we could see women scattering grain to geese in the enclosures before the houses, children playing with sticks in the mud, men chopping wood beneath the shade of the forest with heavy-bladed axes. All of them stopped and stared at us as we passed, and I nodded and smiled at them, trying to ignore the cloud of suspicion that seemed to follow us.
I approached a woman who was scrubbing the doorstep at the threshold of her house. She had continued to work in spite of our presence and her expression seemed – though perhaps I was only imagining it so – a little less wary than those of the others. She straightened, wiping her hands on a coarse cloth tied around her waist and giving me an even stare.
I pointed at myself, then at Myrtessa. ‘Greeks,’ I said, slowly and clearly. ‘Friends.’
The woman’s eyebrows contracted very slightly. Footsteps behind her announced the arrival of a thick-set man with high cheekbones. She talked to him, very fast, in a language I did not know. I glanced at Myrtessa, who shrugged her shoulders.
‘Greeks?’ the man asked, pointing at me, his accent so strong that I hardly recognized the word.
I nodded, my heart pounding. ‘Yes, Greeks. Do you know Greek? Can you speak it? Can we—’
But he pushed past the woman, unhooked a burning torch that was hanging on a bracket on the outside wall of the house, and started to walk up the beaten track, in the direction of the mountains. He stopped and turned to beckon us.
‘I think he wants – he wants us to follow him,’ Myrtessa said in a low voice.
I hesitated, my eyes on the broad sword hanging from the belt at the man’s waist. ‘Should we trust him?’
‘Do we have a choice?’
‘I suppose not.’ I reached behind me to check the bow upon my back, taking comfort in the sturdy stave and the fletchings of the arrows. ‘Very well.’ I beckoned to Myrtessa and we started up the track after the man. Men and women wearing thick boots and patterned tunics over trousers, tied at the waist with belts, stood watching us as we passed, and goats tethered to doorposts bleated balefully into the silence. The light was fading fast, and I rubbed my arms, shivering, as the path climbed upwards and the trees grew denser, tall fragrant pines and firs with a thick underbrush of bilberries. Soon the dwellings had fallen away and we were crunching over leaves in the darkened forest upon the mountain slopes, the air thick with the damp, earthen smell of moss, large rocks protruding from the forest floor, like a giant’s knuckles, shadowed in the flickering light of our guide’s torch. Myrtessa was climbing in silence beside me, her shoulders hunched against the cold but her expression set, determined. I looked around warily, wondering where we were being taken, feeling the bow tapping upon the back of my head and waist as some small comfort in this dark, unknown place …
Then, at last, a single dwelling came into view, perched within the undergrowth, low-lying and of dark wood, like those down in the village. A fire must have been blazing inside, for the small, high windows were lit, and smoke was rising in a twisting spiral from a chimney set in the centre of the roof. A single column of stone shaped into the vague likeness of a human body stood before it, a ribbon of dark blue tied around it, a wreath of summer flowers set beneath it and a clay plate filled with offerings of fruits and grain. The man gestured to the door of the house, nodded once, then turned upon his heel and trudged away down the path, his footsteps, crunching upon the leaves, fading into the distance.
I exchanged a look with Myrtessa. She was pale but her eyes were bright in the flickering light from the windows. She nodded. ‘Go on.’
I stepped forwards to the low wooden door and knocked, then clasped my arms around my body, waiting.
The door opened a crack, and an eye appeared behind it, dark like the eyes of the villagers, fringed with long lashes. Then the door was drawn open, and I felt a rush of warmth on my skin. A fire was indeed burning inside, on a circular stone hearth, its light obscured by the woman who stood before me, her skin creased and weather-beaten, her hair greying at the temples, a simple blue fringed robe thrown over her trousers and belted with a leather girdle. Beside the hearth another woman, younger, crouched before the fire, her arms encircling a little boy of no more than three, with nut-brown skin and dimpled cheeks. The flames cast leaping, dancing shadows over the walls, and I noticed woven carpets decorating the floors, simple, low furniture carved from wood and, towards the back of the room, a single bed-frame covered neatly with woven rugs. A pair of fish were frying in a flat-bottomed pan set over the fire, and the scent of strong oil and unfamiliar herbs – some of which were hanging from the roof-beams in neatly tied bunches – wafted past my nostrils, making my stomach growl with hunger.
The older woman’s eyes swept over my short hair, the bandages on my shoulder, then down to my patched tunic and the bow and arrows hanging at my back.
‘Well, well,’ she said, in strongly accented Greek. The corners of her mouth flickered into a smile as my eyes widened to hear her speak my native tongue. ‘I am sure you have quite a story to tell.’ She stepped away from the door and beckoned us inside.
‘I don’t know …’ I turned to Myrtessa, but she had already darted into the hut, her arms clutched around her, and was crouching at the fire.
‘I will not harm you,’ the woman said, with a half-smile. ‘It is you who are entering my house with weapons, not I.’
I ran my thumb back and forth along the strap of my quiver, still uncertain. The fish smelt crisp and sweet, enough to make my mouth water, and the warmth of the fire was beckoning me. I felt a wave of fatigue wash over me and decided, for once, to fling caution to the winds. There would be time for watchfulness later, once I had eaten and warmed my cold limbs.
‘How is it that you speak Greek?’ I asked, stepping forwards as she closed the door behind us and slid a bolt into the bars. To judge from her appearance – the dark eyes, high cheekbones and hair drawn back from the temples – as well as her accent and dress, she was not a native Greek. And yet …
‘How is it that you have come to Colchis?’ she asked, throwing a bright glance in my direction before leaning over the fire and turning the fish in the spattering oil.
I looked up to see that she was smiling at me, her eyes sparkling in the firelight. ‘Shall we eat first, before either of us asks another question?’
The fish was salted past my taste, but I was so famished I hardly cared. The flesh was tender and served with heavy bread, almost like the cake we baked for the gods on feast days in Kaladrosos. I looked over at Myrtessa, licking the tips of my fingers for the last of the oil, my belly warm with the satisfaction of a good meal, wanting to ask her how she liked the food. But her eyes were fixed elsewhere. I followed her gaze and saw that she was watching the child, who was being fed sips of watered wine from a tiny clay pot fitted with a spout by his mother, with an expression of such tenderness and longing that I felt as if I had intruded on some private grief that could not be put into words.
I turned quickly to address the older woman, hardly knowing what I would say, only that I wanted to appear as if I had not seen the pain upon Myrtessa’s face, but she forestalled me, holding up her hand. ‘You must dress before we talk,’ she said. ‘In this country a guest who has not been clothed in proper raiment is an offence to the gods.’
‘It is so in our country also.’
She got to her feet from the stool upon which she was sitting, her movements surprisingly fluent and graceful for her age. ‘Come,’ our host said, and held out a hand to Myrtessa, who stood slowly, her eyes still drawn towards the child. She led us through a doorway into another room, fitted from floor to ceiling with wooden shelves loaded with clay pots, jars, rough-woven cloths and blankets. She plucked a couple of patterned tunics, trousers and boots from one of the shelves and handed them to us. After she closed the door behind us we changed, stripping the wet tunics from our skin and pulling on the scratchy woollen trousers and boots.
‘And you look like a true-born Greek, do you?’ Indeed, Myrtessa, with her dark hair, her belted tunic covered with striped patterns, her loose leggings and high cuffed boots, appeared so similar to the stories they told of trousered Amazons that I half expected her to draw an axe from her back.
I pushed open the door back to the main room, and found the old woman waiting there for us.
‘Just a moment,’ she said, placing a hand on Myrtessa’s arm as she made to follow me. Myrtessa hung back as I went to the hearth, seating myself upon a wooden stool by the flames, and I heard the sound of their whispered voices over the spitting of the fire. A few moments later Myrtessa joined me, flushed, her eyes bright.
‘What did she ask you?’
Myrtessa shrugged, lips pressed together, though a smile was lingering at the corners of her mouth. ‘Nothing of consequence. I will tell you later.’ She settled herself upon the carpets of the floor with the child upon her lap, as our host passed me a cup of heated water flavoured with sprigs of mint, and another to Myrtessa.
‘You have honoured us as your guests,’ I said, taking a sip of the drink, ‘and it is owed to you by custom that you know the names of those to whom you give your hospitality. I am Atalanta, daughter of Iasus, king of Pagasae.’ I was growing more accustomed to it, especially since I had seen Prince Lycon’s medallion with my own eyes, yet still, it felt odd to say it aloud. ‘This is Myrtessa, my companion and my friend.’
Myrtessa gave me a half-smile, her cheeks pink from the warmth of the fire, the child’s little hand gripping one of her fingers.
I took a deep breath and decided – since I had nothing left to lose – to risk the truth.