A sudden loud thrashing in the woods at the edge of the glade sent her to her feet, her heart beating painfully. A large animal, she was sure, but she could see nothing in the shadows. There were wolves, bears, mountain lions in this forest. She grabbed the bow and stood frozen, peering into the trees. She felt stillness and menace. Something was watching her. She thought she saw a pair of eyes in the dark foliage, catching the last light. Large eyes, set far apart, predator eyes. Terrified, she couldn’t move. But she must. She waved her arms and sprang a short way forward, bellowing with all the force of her lungs. A sudden, intense silence answered her. Then came the rustlings, growing fainter, of a reluctant retreat.
Marpessa’s knees gave way and she sat down suddenly. Her eyes fell on the small pile of entrails from the rabbit. The smell of the kill had attracted the predator. Leaping to her feet, she grabbed the entrails and sprinted down the slope, stopping when the foliage grew too thick and flinging them as far as she could into the trees. She washed the gore from her hands in the small nearby stream. Then she ran back, remembering she’d left the rabbit carcass on the frame. By the grace of the gods it was still there. She picked it up, frame and all, and put it in the nearest cave. Dark shadows were closing in from all sides. Rustling noises came from the woods. She went to the fire pit to build up a fire, but the last of the embers had gone out while she was in the woods. I’ll make a new fire, she decided. Arion showed me how. But though she’d tried, never before had she succeeded. She found his precious rocks, gathered tinder, shaved some bark off a dead branch.
Hephaestos, she prayed, help me drive back the darkness.
She struck the rocks repeatedly. Nothing. Arion had made it look so easy. She would not give up. Her hands were bloody when at last there was a shower of tiny sparks—then a small flare. The shavings ignited. Desperately, prayerfully, she fed it with twigs, dead leaves. When the fire came to life, she felt a fierce elation. She added wood and set the cooking frame over it. Luckily she had a pot full of water from the spring. Soon the pot was over the fire and the rabbit cooking. The predator couldn’t steal it from the boiling water. She threw in some wild onion and herbs she had gathered and dried. They would disguise the smell of the meat. I need a weapon, she thought. The bow would do no good if the animal attacked.
Then she remembered—she had a weapon! Arion had fashioned a club from a large fallen branch, and she’d forgotten about it. What a fool not to have kept it at her side! She fetched it from the storage cave and sat by the fire, the club on the ground beside her. Where was Arion? It was fully dark now, and he’d never been this late before. What if something had happened? She suddenly couldn’t catch her breath.
Stop it! It does no good to panic, she thought. But fear had stolen into the glade, its evil presence a black shape teasing the edge of her vision, disappearing when she confronted it directly, sneaking back when she became unwary. Soon it gripped her whole mind. She saw Arion set upon by robbers, lying bloodied in a ditch, Arion falling in the dark and breaking his leg, Arion mauled by a wolf or a bear.
Stop it! she told herself again. Arion can take care of himself. If he lost his way in the dark, he would simply shelter for the night and come back in the morning. But the voice of common sense did not stop the gnawing and twisting of her innards. She got to her feet, shivering. She strode purposefully around the glade, fed more wood into the fire, then sat again, wrapped in her blanket, trying to keep the darkness as well as her dark thoughts at bay.
Suddenly there was a crashing in the underbrush. A looming shadow appeared at the very edge of the circle of firelight. She grabbed the club in shaking hands and sprang to her feet.
XXV
THE DARK WOODS
U
Night had fallen. Arion had left the farmstead too late and become hopelessly lost. He couldn’t find his trail markers on the wooded slopes and wandered around the mountainside for what seemed like hours. At last, by pure luck, when a branch lashed him in the face, he found a leather strip tied to it. His trail! He followed it mostly by feel. Then when he was nearing their camp, he saw a flickering light coming through the trees and smelled smoke. A fire.
He froze. Strangers. Have they found Marpessa? Heart pounding, he raced toward the glade. When he reached it, a slight figure came hurtling at him, shouting and wielding a club. He leapt out of the way. “Marpessa!” he yelped, just in time to stop her from bashing him on the head.
The club fell to the ground. She threw herself into his arms and burst into tears. He was engulfed in her warmth, the feel of her, the sunshine smell of her hair. Heat swept through his blood. For a moment he closed his eyes and gave in to it, tightening his arms about her. Then he forced himself to pull back. He was breathing hard. As her sobs quieted, he felt her staring at him. “Arion, what took you so long?”
For a moment he couldn’t speak. Then he mumbled, “I lost my way. In the dark. Couldn’t see my markers.”
“I was so frightened! Wait ’till I tell you what happened. But first, I’ve made us supper.” Her voice held pride. In the age-old gesture of a host leading a guest toward the hearth, she grasped his hand, her strong, slender fingers entwining around his, and drew him to the fire. When she let go, he ached with emptiness. He was silent while she busied herself over the pot. Then she placed a trencher of rabbit stew in his hands and smiled up at him. “Eat!” she said, and he realized he was ravenous. He ate.
Afterwards, as they were licking the last delicious juices from their fingers, he said, “Tell me how you did this. The rabbit, the fire.” He listened in amazement. None of it could have been easy. There were bloody scabs on her knuckles. He longed to take those hands in his, to soothe away their hurts, but he held still. At the mention of the wild beast, he tensed, pulled the club to his side and surveyed the black woods all around them, his ears tuned to any sound beyond her soft voice, the crackling of the flames. He wanted to tell her that the courage of the ancient heroes ran in her blood, but all he could say through the sudden thickness in his throat was, “You did well, very well.” Woefully inadequate words, but a glowing smile transformed her face.
Then the smile faded, and she said, “I almost forgot to tell you the most important thing. The owl, Athena’s warning.” Arion listened uneasily as she talked of her encounter in the woods. She finished by asking, “What are we going to do?”
He gathered in a deep breath and said, “We stay here. There’s nothing we can do. There’s nowhere else we can go.”
“But what if it means something terrible is going to happen? Something almost did. That wild animal—“
“Hush, Marpessa!” Her name sprang to his lips without his will. “You did all the right things, and now you know how to build a fire. Wild beasts usually stay away from people. With luck we won’t see any more.” To calm her fears, he tried to quell his own misgivings. But the question insinuated itself into his mine. Can we survive the winter here? “Keep the club handy,” he added. “I’ll build a storage chest for our meat and weight down the lid with rocks.”
When she still looked anxious, he said, “We don’t know that it was a message from the goddess. Once when I was a boy I saw an owl in the daytime. My master at the time told me that sometimes they come out in daylight. It may mean nothing. How can you be sure this owl was sent as a warning?”
“I felt it! It was as if I heard the goddess’s voice.” Her eyes came to his face. “Arion, maybe she wants me to go back to Troy and finish my servitude there.”
“No!” The word burst from him. “It’s not safe! I told you what they did to Haleia’s corpse. Besides, I’m sure they think you were killed. Likely they even sent a message to Lokris, before the seas grew too stormy, and—”
She gave an anguished cry. “You think they sent a message?” Too late he realized that the thought had not occurred to her.
Oh, gods! he thought. I only wanted to comfort her, and now I’ve ma
de it worse. “Perhaps I’m wrong. With all the looting and robbing, the dead to be buried, they probably didn’t think of sending word until the seas grew too rough for travel.”
But Marpessa shook her head. “There are many Lokrians in Troy. They would have sent a message right away. Stupid of me to think they wouldn’t.” She added in a broken whisper, “My mother will die if she thinks I’m dead!”
Silence fell.
Then Arion said quickly, “I almost forgot. I brought you something—a woolen tunic.” He had bartered it off the farmer’s wife, along with a sack of barley.
She forced a small smile and cast aside her blanket to pull the tunic over her head, covering the old one. “Thank you, Arion! I was cold today, and this one will be so much warmer.”
“I’m glad.” He stood. “It’s been a long day, Teukros, and you’re tired.” So am I, he thought, down to my bones. “Go to bed. Don’t worry. It does no good.” His voice sounded rougher than he intended. To atone, he reached down to help her to her feet. It was a mistake. At the touch of their hands, his breath quickened, and his blood heated again. He led her to her sleeping cave, managed to mutter, “Good night,” and went abruptly to his own cave.
But tired though he was, he could not sleep. He tried to distract himself from his thoughts, which all had one name, one face. Marpessa.
In my slave’s life, I saw so few women, he thought, tossing about in his sleeping rugs. But I could control desire. It had not always been so. As a lad toiling in Thrasios’s vineyards at the harvest, when he’d looked at the servant girls’ bare legs beneath their kilted skirts, the muscles of their haunches bunching as they worked to press the grapes, his lust must have been obvious. The grown men had laughed at him, humiliating him. By the time he was twenty, he’d had a few groping encounters with an older slave woman from a neighboring farm. He remembered her heavy breasts, her wide hips, the farmyard smell of her. He’d never learned her name. When she stopped coming to meet him, he found it best never to think about women.
Now, with Marpessa, his control had deserted him.
She can be nothing in my life, nor I in hers, he reminded himself. He flung off the sleeping rug and went outside where the night wind struck his skin and cooled his blood. He breathed deeply. Between the branches of the trees a myriad stars gleamed, making him feel small and insignificant.
Here on the mountain their lives could end in a moment. They could starve or be found by hostile Trojans glad to turn in an escaped slave for the reward. Or be killed by wolves or bears. So what was to stop him from going into the cave where she slept?
He made no move.
A young girl who lost her maidenhood was despoiled, ruined. There was also Athena, who demanded virginity in her servant Marpessa. I may be a fool, he thought, but I won’t do anything to harm her.
I love her. The thought jolted his heart. It changed everything, and yet nothing. His next thought was, She must never know.
That meant he had to keep his distance. Never touch her again.
He returned to his bed, wishing for oblivion. From afar came the long, lonely howl of a wolf, filling him with a strange mixture of sadness and fear.
XXVI
THE VINEYARD
U
Thrasios walked slowly around his ruined vineyards, moving from one plant to the next, touching leaves that were brown around the edges. The grapes were stunted on the vine. Though he felt like closing his eyes in despair, he forced himself to stand straight and look around.
Row after row, as far as he could see, was the same. Withered leaves. Bunches of grapes the size of tiny pebbles, wrinkled, green, dying unripened.
Klonios, he thought. He promised me ruin.
Even before this, merchants had stopped buying his wines. That was Klonios’s doing. But could Klonios have wrought a disaster of this proportion? It was not just his vineyards that were dying. Other vintners had reported failures—some form of rot that attacked the vines. Other crops were dying in the fields, and most of the barley and wheat had not even sprouted.
To make matters worse, the rains had not come. All of Naryx, all of Lokris itself, was falling into ruin. Dying. And he had no power, no knowledge, nor even the will to fix it.
These worries were too big for him to think of when all was not well in his own domain. Amaltheia walked through her days like a living ghost, her eyes hollowed in dark circles, the flesh dropping from her bones. She performed all her household duties but never looked at him nor spoke to him. That made little difference in his life since he rarely occupied her bed. But there was the matter of his own failure. He no longer visited his favorite hetaira in Naryx, for he could not trust himself to perform as a man should. These things could only be happening because of the wrath of a god. Or a goddess.
It did not take him long to see which goddess.
His mind turned to the daughter who had previously occupied so little of his thoughts. All at once he was angry. Marpessa was chosen, and it was her chance to uphold the family’s honor. It should have been a simple enough thing to go to Troy and do the goddess’s will. Unworthy. Athena found her unworthy. Or there would have been no raid. She would not have been killed. And none of this would have happened.
As he walked back through his vineyards to his empty warehouse, he felt his shoulders slump and his steps drag like those of an old man.
XXVII
THE SPRING
U
Marpessa knelt in front of her flat stone grinding the barleycorns Arion had brought last night. It was hard work, clean, pure, uncomplicated, and it left her mind free to think. As she fell into the rhythmic, back-and-forth motion, her thoughts flew to her home. Her parents believed her dead. She imagined her mother broken with grief. Oh, my mother! If only I could go home to you now, she cried silently. That made her think of Athena’s message. What should I do? But there was no answer save Arion’s: There’s nothing we can do. The words repeated themselves senselessly in her head until she thrust aside the grinding stone and leapt to her feet.
She went restlessly into the woods, hoping for comfort or even another visitation from Athena that would make the goddess’s will plain. But she saw no owls or any other beasts, only birds clamoring in the trees. Athena, as the gods often were, was elusive, absent.
She came to a rocky promontory from which fell a beautiful waterfall. She sat for a time listening to the music of the water and watching the crystal falls, the rainbow spray where sunlight seeped through the trees. The beauty of the forest soaked into her soul. Her thoughts came clear like the water. Mother, I will accept whatever fate the gods send. I will be strong as you are strong. For it was you who taught me strength. My mother, you be strong too. For me.
Much later when she returned to the camp, she was at peace. She knelt in front of the flat stone again to finish grinding the grain.
Arion finished his repairs for the farmer in the valley while it was still light and trudged up the slope, his anxious thoughts dwelling on Marpessa. Thanks to his blunder, she now knew that her parents most likely thought her dead. He had to find a way to comfort her. Yet he worried about keeping his feelings concealed. He wanted to devour her with his eyes, to caress the gentle slope of her cheek and kiss her lips.
Last night at times he had been almost speechless in her presence. Now he was weary, thirsty, begrimed with sweat and dust. He needed to renew his depleted strength. I need to prepare myself before talking to her. I’ll go wash first, he decided. When he reached the glade, he greeted her briefly and laid down his earnings—a jar of olive oil, some onions and beans, some more barley grain. Then with a muttered excuse, he headed for the spring.
The spring, one of many on the mountainside, was small and almost perfectly round in its nest of rocks. Craggy rock walls sprang up around the point where the icy water gushed from the ground. A huge ancient oak had thrown down gnarled roots to
grip the rock and suck the water from its source. Arion gave a sigh that was almost a groan. This was a place of tranquility. For a moment he forgot his worries as he flung off his tunic and sank into the life-giving waters.
Marpessa remembered that she needed water for cooking. Arion had gone to the spring without taking the caldron to refill. “Arion!” she called, but he was too far to hear. She picked up the empty pot and followed him.
Their frequent trips had worn a path through the underbrush to the spring. As she walked, she listened to the piercing sweetness of a bird’s call—probably a hawk. She stood still, recalling the owl. But there was nothing out of the ordinary here. She wiped dampness from her brow. The air was sultry. A storm was probably on the way.
She stepped out of the underbrush at the edge of the spring—and froze. Arion, his back to her, stood naked in the water. A hot flush rose to her face and neck. The caldron fell from her hands. At once he turned to face her. For too long, though it was probably only a few heartbeats, they were both unable to move or speak. Her eyes came up to his face, which had paled. In the greenish twilight, with his wet hair dripping over his brow, he looked beautiful, his eyes bright in the dimness and achingly vulnerable. All at once Marpessa’s legs came alive with a will of their own, and she turned and bolted like a frightened deer, never stopping until she reached their camp.
There she paced around vehemently, her face hot. How could she have so stupidly blundered upon his privacy? He must hate her for it. What would she say when he came back?
There was a tight feeling in her chest. She could not wipe from her mind what she had seen. After a few more turns about the camp, she remembered that Arion had brought more grain to grind. The task was exactly what she needed so as not to think about what had just happened. She fetched the new sack of barley, then squatted before the flat stone. Pouring out several handfuls, she picked up the grinding stone and began the vigorous back-and-forth movements of stone against stone, pressing down hard, putting all her strength into it to relieve her pent-up feelings. But the more she strove to avoid thinking, the more the image of Arion crept into her head.
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