by Diana Tyler
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
THERISMOS
Once inside the city, we are greeted first by the agora. This tremendous marketplace is as busy and vivacious as it was when I left it three years ago, the night I followed my arrested brother and his captors seventy miles south to Enochos. Merchants and craftsmen stand before their booths selling a cornucopia of goods, ranging from odorous leeks and garlic to perfumes, honey jars, and figurines. Other artists and potters work diligently at their stations beneath the stoa, a marble and limestone porch lined with august Ionic columns, the spiral, scroll-like capitals of which suggest its appeal to creative hands and studious minds alike.
The only thing that is different from the way it was three years ago is the disapproving looks the general and I receive from our fellow Eusebians, repulsed by the sight – and smell, no doubt – of the Centaur. We pretend not to notice, and I laugh to myself as the Centaur nods his head and winks at each of the women that pass by.
“It’s a good thing I cleaned myself up in the river, isn’t it?” he says to the general and me as he strokes his stubbly chin.
“That reminds me,” Titus says, hastily pulling a short rope from his belt. He loops it around the Centaur’s neck, ties a tight knot, and begins to lead him through the street. “It looks suspicious to have you roaming free, accompanying a pair of respectable Eusebians,” he jokes. “Just play along, will you?”
The Centaur snorts and rolls his eyes. “With all due respect, general, you will owe me as many sausages and honey cakes as I like for the rest of my days.”
I soon begin to notice that up and down the wide street, behind and between every booth, young boys and girls run with sunshine bouncing off the apples of their smiling cheeks as they merrily wave myrtle and willow twigs.
“What’s going on?” the Centaur asks.
“You have been away a while, haven’t you,” Titus says. “Everyone is preparing for Therismos.”
“The Feast of the Harvest,” I add.
For every Eusebian, children most of all, it is the happiest time of the year. Though I haven’t celebrated the Feast in years, just seeing the children gamboling about spontaneously sends a child-like thrill and a bittersweet ache through my body…
Jasper and I couldn’t wait for the arrival of autumn when our father would wake us up before dawn and lead us into the sleepy evergreen forest where we’d forage tree branches, sticks, and leaves until lunch time. All afternoon we remained outside, using the materials we’d gathered to build a booth for us all to dwell in throughout Therismos. Meanwhile, our mother enjoyed the solitude of her hearth as she cooked a seasonal soup of squash, cabbage, and garden peas and baked a dessert of sesame and poppy seeds, hazelnuts and honey which formed a texture and taste so divine that my mouth still waters at the thought of it.
The first morning of the seven-day feast, our father would summon my brother and me outside the new shelter and recite the poem he’d written when Jasper was born to illustrate the reason why we celebrated and slept in the primitive shelter; we couldn’t run amok inside of it until we listened…
“It happened thousands of years ago, in a far-away winter land,
Our ancestors fled a tyrant’s rule, guided by light from Duna’s hand.
They marched toward this fair and fertile coast, freed forever from whip and chain,
But they feared the giants that dwelled here – how fast their faith in him did wane.
Duna was angered by their mumblings, and made them wander forty years,
‘Til the doubting generation died, and took away with them their fears.
But all the while, he provided, sent them fire and bread each day,
And they slept sound inside their shelters, until called to set out on their way…
When they saw the walls of the giants, not a one did cower or quake,
For a Man of Duna came to them and said the city was theirs to take.
In obedience they trumpeted, never raising a sword or shield;
At sound of blast and sight of faith did the entire city yield.
The walls shook and crumbled to the sea; our weary feet would no more roam,
As we now celebrate our harvest, we remember our former home…
Within those huts, underneath the stars, we felt forgiveness, tasted grace,
And that is a story of stories that no one shall ever erase.”
It is when my attention is caught by the cheerful witt-witt! of a swallow perched atop the cornice crowning the stoa that my longing for childhood is dismissed. I suddenly ask the question:
“Do you think Tycho is inside the stoa, general? Perhaps we should go search for him. He’d like to know we’re all right.”
“Tycho…I know that name,” says the Centaur.
“I’m sure you do. He is – was – a Pythonian like you,” I reply.
The Centaur’s eyes stare ahead blankly as his ruddy complexion grows pale.
“Oh no. He was a Petrodian of a different sort. I was nothing more than a bad-tempered child compared to the likes of Tycho. He was one of the few men whose evil made me think perhaps Python really does exist.”
“What do you mean? What has he done?” I ask.
“I don’t think the general would find it appropriate for me to divulge the details to an innocent young woman like you,” answers the Centaur.
“I’m not innocent!” I argue. “I am responsible for the deaths of four Eusebians whose only crime was not bowing to Diokles. Their blood is on my hands, Centaur. I am no better than Tycho.”
“Nor am I,” interjects Titus, turning to us with watery eyes. “Had I not been such a coward, I never would have sent the psiloi after Ireneus, and I certainly wouldn’t have assigned you to the Gryphon.”
My heart tightens, and I clench the general’s arm.
“It’s all right, general. What is important now is that we aren’t cowards anymore. I’m sorry I brought up the past. It doesn’t do any of us any good,” I say.
The general nods his head and clears his throat, reassuming a soldierly stance.
“Thank you, Iris. And the Centaur is right. It will not benefit us to hear of Tycho’s past either. No matter what egregious crimes or heinous acts is he guilty of, he has been forgiven by Duna. He serves him now.”
“You make the man sound like a faultless priest!” the Centaur remarks.
“That’s it!” As the words exit out of my mouth, my legs carry me like wings to the ancient heart of my homeland beating within it: the Eusebian Temple.
I feel like Icarus as the wings I’d imagined carrying me across the agora melt like wax when I come to what is known by Eusebians simply as the “bathing place.” How could I forget…
The bathing place is a rectangular rock-cut pool fed by the waters of the Maqor Spring which flows into it from the city’s two main aqueducts. Before anyone can enter the precincts of the Temple, they must be immersed in the pool as a ritual act of purification.
On the final day of Therismos, my family and I would come here along with all of Eirene and patiently wait our turn to step into the pool. As we waited, our father reminded us to ponder the past twelve months and silently list the things that had made us spiritually unclean. “You will go into it a peasant, and rise out of it a queen,” he encouraged me. Meanwhile, the Alpha guards looked down on us all with derisive eyes and supercilious smiles, their full armor and puffed-up chests reminding us, the vanquished “peasants”, to remember our place.
Back then it was difficult for me to name the wrongs I’d done; I was well-behaved most of the time, obeyed our teachers and studied my lessons, and hardly ever told a lie. Even as slave to my brother’s murderer, I did my duty without disdain. But my actions since the night at Okeanos, when I gripped a Soukinoi blade, belie my innocence. I realize now that the darkness I’ve brought to this world was within me all along. I could only repress it for so long after my life fell into ruins.
Today, as I stare into the crystal waters and th
e hunter’s eyes reflecting back at me, my mind is flooded with the turbid profusion of my trespasses. From defying Duna to his face in The Great Sea to delivering a tortuous death to guiltless Ireneus, I fear there is not enough water in all of Petros to make me pure again.
“Stop tarrying, Iris!” The voice like Alexa’s that I heard on the mountain top with the Gryphon shouts inside my head. “Forget about Tycho. Do what you came here to do!”
“Acheron,” I whisper, slowly stepping foot onto the pool’s first step.
“Can you hurry up, please?” I hear a child’s voice ask from behind me. I turn to see a red-headed girl holding her mother’s hand.
“I’m sorry. She’s a bit eager to get to the festival,” says her mother.
“The festival!” the voice returns. “The Guardians are at the Temple during the festival – Acheron is at the Temple!”
My heart rate quickens. My hands sweat. My mouth goes try. I take a deep breath and lower my other foot onto the step.
“She’s very polite. My apologies for making you wait. I haven’t been here in a while,” I say, noticing that an endless line has formed behind them. “Here I go!” I smile at the girl, then dive headlong into the pool with a splash, no longer fretting about the state of my soul.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
INDIGO
I scurry around the periphery of the Eusebian Court, jumping carefully from one shadow to the next, trying my best to ignore the white-robed figures of the priests whose imperturbable demeanors and humbly bowed heads sicken my stomach with thoughts of Ireneus. Each one carries armfuls of large red branches and sickle-shaped willow leaves to be placed around the holy altar where it is said Duna first breathed life into man. It is also the place on which a band of vandalizing Alphas once scattered the carved-off hooves and chopped-off tails of dead Centaurs as blasphemous sacrifices to our “silly, jealous god.”
It was for beseeching Acheron over the unclean offerings that my brother and the others were murdered. Rather than putting an end to the desecration, my master ordered one-hundred thousand drachmae from the Temple treasury instead, an amount it would take a Eusebian nearly four lifetimes of labor to earn. The city retaliated not with force, but with mockery, matching the offenders’ crime; they sent a beggar’s basket around the agora to fill with coins for our presumably impoverished Guardian. Little did they know what the price would be for such impudence: the bodies of five of their sons, burned alive on Enochos, a sea filled more with ashes and tears than water.
“Iris!” a voice calls out from the immaculate columned aisles. But when I turn, I see no one.
I continue walking through at a brisker pace, gripping my dagger as though Acheron could present himself at any moment.
You’re very close now, Iris. Be ready…the voice inside me warns.
“My lady!” It isn’t Acheron at all.
Tycho.
I begin to run towards the sound.
“Tycho? Where are you?” Now I am in the sunshine, standing in the midst of the unroofed court, hoping my mind is not playing tricks on me.
My eyes skim the clusters of families around me. It appears every man has either an arm wrapped around his wife’s waist or a child atop his shoulders.
Where is he?
I feel a hand rest itself on my shoulder. I look at it and see that it is nearly completely covered by a long white, priestly sleeve.
“My lady,” whispers the voice.
I turn to see Tycho, his broad smile gleaming in the noonday sun.
“You answer to it now,” he says.
“It’s what you insist on calling me. I suppose I’ll get used to it one day,” I smile back, surprised by just how happy I feel to see him.
“You’re – you’re a priest?” I ask him, as he takes my hand in each of his and squeezes it so tight that I think my fingers will break.
“It’s my disguise,” he says. “A rather good one, don’t you think?”
I laugh. “Yes. I thought I was being haunted there in the colonnade.”
“I’m sorry. I didn’t want to follow you inside and make anyone suspicious. Congregating with Soukinoi is not a priestly duty, you know,” he winks.
“I’m not a Soukina anymore, Tycho. I can’t bear to think about what might have happened had I stayed there a day longer.”
Tycho’s smile fades from his lips and rises into his eyes where it lightly traces the topaz inside them, like sunlight framing the clouds.
“Thank Duna,” he sighs, his enlivened eyes looking heavenward. “Come with me,” he says, lessening his grip on my hand as he pulls me after him.
“Wait. What about Titus?” I ask, looking frantically around the court for his tanned face towering above the others, or for the Centaur’s tail swatting irritably at the air. “And the Centaur…” I whisper, remembering that Centaurs are prohibited from the Temple’s inner courts.
“Meet me at the woodshed just over there in three minutes. Trust me,” Tycho says. And I don’t ask another question.
The woodshed, situated at the northeastern quadrant of the Eusebian Court, was completely empty. The priests consigned to menial tasks had finished sorting the good willow wood from the detestable, and all that was left were forsaken piles of discarded, worm-eaten branches judged unfit for the altar.
I waited for Tycho only a few moments. As he approached I listened to him quietly singing along with the priests assembled somewhere I could not see, somewhere above me like wood nymphs hidden in the trees. The timbre of the priests’ voices harmonizing with harps, lyres, cymbals, and flutes was unlike anything I’d ever heard before, as if their music had been traveling tirelessly through the dissonant eons of time, destined to arrive here in this Temple at this very moment…
“How great are your works; we remember all that you have done,
You set us free from bondage and gave us hope of a Promised One.
Those who sow tears today shall reap joy and song tomorrow,
We trust you, Duna, our eternal King, to rid us again of sorrow.
Unless you build our walls, we labor here in vain;
Hear our prayers, heal our land, and restore us once again.”
This song was one of many sung every year on the final day of Therismos to express thanksgiving to Duna for freeing our people once before and for faithfully providing an abundant autumn harvest ever since. But I couldn’t help but notice how Tycho changed the words, albeit ever so slightly:
“You set us free from bondage and sent us your Promised One.”
Most Eusebians consider Phos just another charlatan, another failed pseudo-christos, or “anointed one.” But not Tycho.
I didn’t have to ask him why; I knew the reason is that he, like Jasper, believes Phos was the one of whom the Oracles spoke and the priests sing. Phos’ death in the Great Sea was the greatest paradox in of all Petrodian history. His defeat was, to Jasper and the other disciples, an everlasting and irrefutable victory…over iniquity, over sickness, over evil, over death.
And yet here I am, a guilt-stained Eusebian woman infected with an all-consuming lust for vengeance because of the cold-blooded Alpha Guardian who took my brother’s life.
Where is victory?
When I step into the Indigo Chamber behind Tycho, I spot one man who appears to have been waiting for me, ready to answer such questions as that. But unlike Diokles, the skin of this learned man neither dances with the energy of mystic vapors, nor sparkles with the capricious anointing of Apollo. His face is deeply wrinkled and ashen, like thin papyrus starting to decay, and his gait is stiff and slow, yet not without dignity as he holds his shoulders back and deftly adjusts his turban, at the front of which is fastened a flower-shaped plate of pure gold.
“My dear,” he says to me, with the rich, orotund voice of a much younger man. “Welcome to Eirene. Tycho tells me it’s been three years since you’ve been home.”
Home. All this time I thought I didn’t have one; all the people of my home are dead. And
who knows what’s become of our house and the tannery; both have probably been burned to the ground to purge the air of its putrid smells. But then again, this city is my home. It is as much a part of me as my family, and the earth on which it is built cannot be destroyed – not by any man, at least.
“It is good to be home,” I smile softly.
“Iris, this is Anatolius,” says Tycho. “He has graciously given me sanctuary here.”
“And for you,” adds the priest.
Anatolius turns and leads us to the front of the room, above which a giant silk cloth of indigo hangs and traverses the width of the chamber, rolling like a wave as a passive breeze sails across it.
This indigo “veil” as it is called, is said to represent the perennial barrier between Petros and heaven, between man and his creator. Each year on the Day of Katallagé, or, “reconciliation,” the high priests take down the veil, sprinkle the blood of the purest lambs and bulls upon it, then carry it into the Eusebian Court where they hold it by its corners, and, along with all of Eirene, plead with Duna to forgive them for another year of falling short of his holiness.
“We hide not our transgressions; we lay each one at your feet,
To mingle with the blood of lambs and with your justice meet.
Look favorably on our contrite hearts, forgive us, and make us new,
So that when fire falls and flood waters rise, we can run once more to you.”
“I’m sure Diokles has already sent his assassins for both of us,” Tycho says to me. “I haven’t stopped praying for you and the general since I last saw you at Ēlektōr.”
The general…Where is Titus?
“I have asked one of the attendants to bring food for you, Iris. I assume you are hungry?” Anatolius asks.