by Zizou Corder
In the evening, deep in the woods, she decided to stop for the night. She finished the cheese with some wild celery and a couple of figs she had found along the way. She was too tired to make any kind of shelter, so she just chose a decent-sized tree and folded herself up between its roots in the cloak to sleep. The cloak smelt disgustingly of sweat and old goat, and felt rough against her face, but she didn’t want scorpions or spiders or biting ants to crawl on her in the night. She couldn’t get comfortable, so she finally took off her small chiton and folded that into a pillow. At least it smelt of her, not of horrible man. ‘Artemis, keep me from foul humans,’ she murmured, and as she did she heard a wolf howl, far away. ‘And from wolves,’ she added quickly. ‘And bears.’
Before she slept, she thought of home, and asked Demeter to bless the Centaurs’ grape harvest. And, she said to the Goddess in her mind, please comfort them. They will be sad to have lost me, just as you were sad when your daughter, Persephone, was taken away from you to the underworld – please comfort them. Then, when I can, I will make a sacrifice to you – when I have food I will give you some. Even though it’s yours anyway, as you’re the Goddess of growing things… She was still trying to work that one out when she fell asleep.
The next morning she was very very hungry. Figs and wild fennel were not going to keep her strong, she thought, as she munched on some. There was no point setting traps – she wouldn’t be around to check on them.
She took out her knife and stared at it. What could she catch to eat with a knife?
Nothing. But –
She smiled.
The woods were generous to her. She found a long, strong, thin, flexible sapling of yew. She found a wild vine, strong and whippy late in the season, and cut a couple of lengths for twisting. She clattered through the dead sticks and twigs lying about underfoot, and chose a handful of the best – straight and strong. She sharpened her knife on a stone, and she set to work, whittling, twisting, cutting notches, threading. 5
She sang as she worked.
By mid-morning, she had made a more than passable bow, and a set of sharpened arrows that, if not the best, were not half bad. She smiled at her work, and had another idea. She swiftly cut another length of twisty vine, and used it to strap her knife to the end of a long, strong shaft. A spear! Now she could hunt, and have meat.
But hunting meant slowing down – fast was too noisy, startling deer and birds as she went. Little animals heard her coming, and ran off. Deer were too big, anyway.
That evening she managed to shoot a small wild goat with her bow and arrow. She was proud. Not of the shot – it was an easy shot – but of the fact that her self-made arrow had flown more or less straight, and killed the goat cleanly.
But then: she had no way to cook it. She stared at it helplessly as its eyes filmed over. She had killed it, and now she couldn’t eat it. What a fool she was. She so wished that she had some way of making fire to cook the meat, and burn some as an offering to the Gods, thanking them for keeping her safe so far. She could offer them raw meat, but it was the roasting smell they most liked. And fire would warm her; she could sit by it for comfort in the dark night. She imagined the delicious smell of grilling goat, the sputtering of oil on the embers of a family fire, a hot dinner… For a moment the pain of her loneliness was almost physical – a twist in her belly. She closed her eyes, screwed them up tight so that light and dark shot in sparks inside her eyelids – then she shook the feeling away, almost angrily.
She was so hungry. And she had killed the goat. She owed it the respect of not wasting it.
So she unstrapped her knife from its shaft. ‘Artemis, Goddess of the hunt,’ she said, ‘I am sorry my offering is so pathetic, and not even cooked, but I thank you for keeping me safe from the wild beasts of the woods, and I thank you for this… er… meal…’ and she cut strips of the tough meat from the animal, and she chewed them.
It was disgusting.
But it was food. And she got some nourishment, and nourishment was what she needed. She chewed the bloody meat, and she felt stronger. So she cut some strips and tied them in leaves to take with her.
On the second day she found a small stream at which to fill her water bottle, but on the third day she found no stream, and her water ran out. She spoke to Demeter again as she fell asleep. ‘Please let me find food and water,’ she said softly. ‘Then I can give you some. Please let me be strong. I don’t know who’s in charge of the water here – let the nymphs lead me to it. Please, Artemis, protector of girls, make me brave. Athena, queen of wisdom, let me use my brain. Hera, queen of the family, and Apollo, friend to Centaurs, comfort my family…’
The fourth day was bad. She found no water, and ants had got into the last of the goat meat, which had in any case gone off and started to smell. Mosquitoes had bitten her – normally they didn’t bother her, but these ones were different. The bites itched horribly. A couple had turned red and angry, but she hadn’t been able to find the leaf to rub on them to stop them going septic. She was used to finding everything she needed growing nearby, but these woods were not generous the way Zakynthos was. But worse than all this, a great loneliness was building up inside her; a deep need for her own bed, her own home, her own friends and family. She wanted Chariklo. She wanted Arko.
She walked on, thinking about him, and how he would encourage her if he were here, and how she wouldn’t let him down. I’ll be the kind of boy he is, she thought. That night she found some dank mushrooms and some bitter cornelian cherries. She ate them, along with a handful of last year’s almonds that she found under a tree. She bashed open the shells with a stone on a rock. The white kernels were sweet and delicious, but the brown outer skins were dry and shrivelled her tongue. Even so, she could have eaten many more of them – but she saved some, because she didn’t know what she would find to eat tomorrow in this dry country. If the worst came to the worst, she could eat asphodel tubers, or acorns… but she had no way to grind or prepare them, and uncooked they would make her ill. She slept badly, rolled in her lonely cloak, trying not to cry, listening to her stomach rumbling, and the wolves howling.
She woke hungry, and started out walking already tired. All was scrubby bits of bush, and rock: hot, dry, unforgiving. I shall walk here forever, she thought, until I drop of weakness and just die, alone in the wilderness.
Towards midday she longed for somewhere to rest. There was a gully ahead – perhaps there would be shade. She approached it – and through the dusty leaves, she heard a beautiful sound: the cool splashing noise of gushing, gurgling water. Even the noise of it seemed to clean her soul. New energy rose in her, and she rushed towards it. A bramble tripped her and she landed with a shock on her belly. Right below her face, a few metres down, dappled with sunlight and shadow, surrounded by thick undergrowth and long knobbly trees, was a slow-moving, shallow, narrow river, sliding towards a high, cool waterfall, and falling into a wide, dark pool.
She grabbed herself to her feet and scrabbled round, scratching herself and not caring, searching for a way down to the water. It took an unbearably long time to get to – maybe two minutes! – but then she stood on a rock at the edge, pulling off her sweat-stained, dusty clothes, desperate to dive in but stopping herself, making herself check the depth, making herself go slowly.
She slipped in, naked, from the rock, and let herself slide under the water, feeling the dust and heat lift off her, feeling her hair lift and spread, feeling the coolness spread across her scalp, behind her ears, all over her skin… Nothing had ever felt so good. She opened her hot eyes to the cool dim green of the underwater world, she laughed and gurgled out big silver bubbles of breath… and she shot out again on the surface, splashing, rubbing her fingernails on her grubby scalp, shaking out her head, happy happy happy. She floated on her back – and nearly sank again, for there was no salt to support her body here. But how sweet the water was! Even in the springs on Zakynthos the water had never been this sweet. She swam over to the waterfall and turned
her face up to it, letting the silvery sweetness pour over her. She opened her mouth and drank, cautiously so as not to make herself sick. She kicked off, floating on her back again. Above her the sky was far away at the top of a tunnel of greenery, hot and blue and distant. All was silent.
She splashed.
Happy. And so hungry.
And – oh – there among the greenery, hanging over the bank, was a long branch dripping with feathery leaves and fat, heavy, dark berries, red and luscious-looking – mulberries.
Her favourite.
She kicked herself up out of the water and grabbed the branch. Hanging by one arm, she reached out with the other and plucked the berries, cramming them into her mouth, the sweetness bursting on her tongue and lips and filling her with joy. She kicked her feet in the water with delight. But the mulberries made her even hungrier for real food. She pulled herself out of the water and went upstream, where the fish had not all been frightened off by her splashing and laughing. It took a little while, but she caught four fish, tickling them with her fingers as Chiron had taught her. Using her knife, she cleaned out their trickly red guts. 6
But before she ate, starving as she was, she laid one of the fish out carefully on a bed of fig leaves, with some of the almonds and a fig, on one particular high flat rock which she had spotted for the purpose. ‘Demeter, Artemis, Poseidon and Dionysus,’ she said, ‘thank you. I will give you better as soon as I can.’
She sliced up the other three fish and ate them raw with some fronds of fennel she found growing by the river. They weren’t as good as they would have been if Chariklo had put them on a spit and grilled them, but they were delicious because they were food, and she was hungry.
After she had eaten, she decided to wash her stolen cloak. The smell of the man’s sweat still made her feel sick at night. She dropped it in the water and swirled it slowly about, and pulled it back up on the flat rocks to stamp on it. How heavy it was, full of water. It was hard work for her to lift it, all dripping and itchy. Several stamping sessions and rinsing sessions later, she hung it over a strong tree branch, and did her best to twist bits of it to get rid of the water. It didn’t work very well – but the water was dripping down anyway, making little streams along the rock, and the sun was strong. She hoped the cloak would be dry by nightfall. Smelly or not, it made all the difference to sleeping out, and though the days were hot, the nights were getting colder all the time. It couldn’t be too long now till the autumn equinox. She had to get home before winter, that was for sure.
She washed the little chiton as well, keeping the bigger one to wear. She would stay here a day or two, eating fish and getting her strength back. And she would wash the big one when the little one was dry.
It was a nice place to rest, with the water and the fish and the soft-growing grass on the river bank to sleep on, and the sun and the shade and the rock doves cooing. She swam and sang and slept and planned. Where exactly was Sparta? She couldn’t just head north forever, hoping for the best. After all, she’d been walking for a while now.
Well. Rivers, she knew, flowed into bigger rivers. And cities are built on big rivers. She would follow this little river downstream, and she would see what big river it led to.
The cloak wasn’t dry. The big chiton was, though, so she put that on and shivered herself to sleep with her toes tucked up behind her knees for warmth, and the waterfall gurgling a lullaby.
Halo was about to jump into the pool again early the next morning, before setting off, when she caught sight of her reflection in the calm, smooth water.
Her hair!
She couldn’t be a boy with all that long wild black hair. Centaur boys and men wore their auburn hair long and curly, but the human boys in Zakynthos had their hair cropped short. She wondered how boys in Sparta wore their hair. All she knew about Spartan boys was that they had to leave their homes when they were only seven years old, to join the agoge – the Upbringing – to train as soldiers, and they grew up to be the toughest in the world. The adult warriors wore their hair long, she knew that… Well, she wouldn’t be pretending to be a Spartan boy. She would be pretending to be a Zakynthos boy, because that was the only kind of boy she had ever seen. So she would have to cut off her curls. Just as well – they were horribly matted, and full of sand and twigs.
I can always grow it again, she thought, when I go back to being a girl. So she sat on the rock with her stolen knife, and prepared to hack.
‘Apollo, lover of boys,’ she murmured. ‘Please make me a convincing boy. Please accept me as a boy for the time being, like when Achilles’s mother dressed him as a girl to keep him safe – and Athena, queen of wisdom, you appeared to Odysseus dressed as a boy – and Dionysus, you were a girl for a while…’
Lifting the knife, she carved through her thick black curls ringlet by matted ringlet, and laid them in a pile on the rock beside her.
They looked like a dead animal.
Only then did she dare to look into the water again.
A worried-looking face stared back at her, with clutches of hair sticking up in all directions.
‘I look like a girl with a horrible haircut!’ she cried, and she sharpened her knife on a stone, and hacked again, making it shorter and shorter, checking each time, and each time being unsatisfied.
Finally she gave up. If she cut off any more she’d be as bald as a sheep after a bad shearing. She jumped into the water to rinse off. How cool and delicious the water was as it washed off the itchy shreds of cut hair. She dived down deep, moving fast this way and that through the murky green depths so that the bits of hair wouldn’t stick to her again when she came up.
She moved too fast. She didn’t see properly through the light and shade. She misjudged. One moment she was flicking and twisting like a fish. The next she had slammed her head, hard, full on, against an invisible rock under the water.
A dagger of pain, and then her mind was stunned, blank.
Her body curled back and went limp, hanging like a pale and mysterious flower in the dark water.
All was silence, but for the rock doves still cooing way above as if nothing had happened.
Xαπτερ 8
The boy passing by should not have paid any attention to the girl at the pool. He could see that she was there. So what? He was busy. He had been busy all night. This morning, he was going to sleep. He would have been asleep by now if it hadn’t been for her talking to herself and reciting poetry and cutting her hair and splashing like a crazy thing. But he didn’t have to sleep. He was trained to go without sleep as easily as he could go without food or water or warmth. And she was showing no signs of going. Her presence here changed his mood and distracted him from his purpose. He would leave.
He had just made that decision when he became aware that something was wrong. The splash as she had dived in – there was no answering splash of surfacing, of swimming or getting out again. The silence was too sudden.
He rolled across and looked over the crest down to the pool. In the movement of light and shadow he saw the pale shape in the water.
The boy didn’t hesitate. He scanned the surface for rocks or dangers, threw off his rough cloak and dived cleanly in. He came up beside her and pulled her head backwards on to his shoulder. Kicking his legs like a frog, on his back, he dragged her to the edge and pulled her out on to the flat rocks.
He laid her out in the sun, on her front, and pushed at her back the way he’d been taught to rescue a drowning brother.
She was choking and gasping. There was blood in her spiky wet hair. He sat back on his heels. She was throwing up. She was conscious.
Halo raised her head. She saw a boy. Or a young man. Older than her, anyway. His hair was black like hers, short like hers, and his eyes were greenish-grey in a suntanned face.
A human.
She wiped her face on her arm. A little blood stained it.
Her blood was warm on her scalp, and she touched the wound tenderly with her fingers. Her head roared with pain
. She laid it back down, feeling weak and woozy.
‘Stay there,’ said the boy. His accent was strange. ‘I’ll wash it.’
He scooped handfuls of water over her head, washing the blood from her hair. He too smelt of sweat and sheep, but on him it was a clean scent.
‘The wound’s small,’ he said.
‘Thank you,’ she whispered. ‘I might have…’
‘But you didn’t,’ he said.
‘Thanks to you,’ she said. She pushed herself up, trying to turn towards him.
He stood up. He should just walk away now. If he walked away now, and left the area, he could carry on as if nothing had happened.
And then she passed out again: just toppled over like a piece of cut rope.
He jumped forward to catch her before her head bashed down on the rock. So then he was sitting there with her head practically in his lap. What was he meant to do now?
He looked down at her. He saw a girl of about twelve, with her cropped hair a mess and scratches all over her, wearing – strangely – a gold owl at her neck. She looked as if she had been living in the wild longer than he had. Her face was pale beneath the suntan, and she had a – what was it? A strange mark tattooed on her forehead, faded and indistinct.
Why wasn’t she at home with her mother? Was she a runaway slave? She certainly wasn’t a Helot, or any kind of Spartan…
The boy did not know what to do.
He knew what he should do. He should let down her head, leave her to her fate and return to his duty. There was no question about that. He was in the middle of one of the most important tests of his life. Soon he would be a full soldier of Sparta. Such a man does not get distracted by some runaway girl.
Her wound was bleeding again. He could see the thick dark scarlet blood seeping into her wet black hair. She was shivering.