Chapter Fourteen
OUTSIDE THE WINTER RAINS had begun to fall. My lioness whelped, and her cubs tumbled across the hearth on their clumsy, new-made paws. I could not smile at it. The earth seemed to echo where I walked. Above me the sky stretched out its empty hands.
I waited for Hermes so I might ask him what became of Medea and Jason, but he always seemed to know when I wanted him, and stayed away. I tried to weave, but my mind felt needle-pricked. Now that Medea had named my loneliness, it hung from everything, clinging like spiderwebs, unavoidable. I ran along the beach, gasped up and down the forest paths, trying to shake it from me. I sifted and resifted my memories of Aeëtes, all those hours we had leaned against each other. That old sickening feeling returned: that every moment of my life I had been a fool.
I helped Prometheus, I reminded myself. But it sounded pathetic even to my ears. How long would I cling to that handful of minutes, trying to cover myself as if with some threadbare blanket? It did not matter what I had done then. Prometheus was on his crag, and I was here.
The days moved slowly, dropping like petals from a blown rose. I gripped the cedar loom and made myself breathe its scent. I tried to remember the feel of Daedalus’ scars beneath my fingers, but the memories were built of air, and blew away. Someone will come, I thought. All the ships in the world, all the men. Someone must. I stared into the horizon until my eyes blurred, hoping for some fishermen, some cargo, even a shipwreck. There was nothing.
I pressed my face into my lion’s fur. Surely there was some divine trick to make the hours go faster. To let them slip past unseen, to sleep for years, so that when I woke again the world would be new. I closed my eyes. Through the window I heard the bees singing in the garden. My lion’s tail beat against the stones. An eternity later, when I opened my eyes, the shadows had not even moved.
She was standing over me, frowning. Dark-haired, dark-eyed, with round limbs and a head neat as a nightingale’s breast. A familiar smell wafted from her skin. Rose oil and my grandfather’s river.
“I am come to serve you,” she said.
I had been drowsing in my chair. I stared up blearily, thinking she must be an apparition, some hallucination of my solitude. “What?”
She wrinkled her nose. Apparently all her humility had been used up in those words. “I am Alke,” she said. “Is this not Aiaia? Are you not the daughter of Helios?”
“I am.”
“I am sentenced to be your servant.”
I felt as if I dreamed. Slowly, I got to my feet. “Sentenced? By whom? I have not heard of such a thing. Speak, what power sent you?”
Naiads show their feelings as water shows ripples. However she had told herself this would go, it was not like this. “The great gods sent me.”
“Zeus?”
“No,” she said. “My father.”
“And who is he?”
She named some minor river-lord in the Peloponnese. I had heard of him, perhaps met him once, but he had never sat in my father’s halls.
“Why send you to me?”
She looked at me as if I were the greatest idiot she had ever met. “You are a daughter of Helios.”
How could I have forgotten what it was like among the lesser gods? The desperate clawing for any advantage. Even disgraced, I still had the blood of the sun in my veins, which made me a desirable mistress. Indeed, for such as her father, my disgrace would be encouragement, lowering me enough that he dared to reach up.
“Why were you punished?”
“I fell in love with a mortal,” she said. “A noble shepherd. My father disapproved and now I must do a year’s penance.”
I considered her. Her back was straight, her eyes up. She showed no fear, not of me, not of my wolves and lions. And her father disapproved of her.
“Sit,” I said. “Be welcome.”
She sat, but her mouth was puckered as if she sucked an unripe olive. She looked around with distaste. When I offered her food, she turned her head aside like a sulky baby. When I tried to speak to her, she folded her arms and pursed her lips. They only opened to voice her complaints: about the smell of the dyes bubbling on the stove, the lion hairs on the rugs, even Daedalus’ loom. And for all her protestations about serving, she did not offer to carry a single dish.
There is no need to be surprised, I told myself. She is a nymph, which means a dry well. “Go home, then,” I said, “if you are so miserable. I release you from your sentence.”
“You cannot. The great gods have commanded me. There is nothing you can do to release me. I am staying a year.”
It should have upset her, but she was smirking. Preening as if in victory before a crowd. I watched. When she had spoken of the gods exiling her, she had showed no anger, and no grief either. She took their authority as natural, irresistible, like the movements of the spheres. But I was a nymph like her, and an exile too, a daughter of a greater father, yes, but with no husband and dirty fingers and oddly dressed hair. It put me in her reach, she reasoned. So I was the one she would fight.
You are being foolish. I am not your enemy, and pulling faces is no real power. They have convinced you—But even as the words formed in my mouth, I let them go. It would be like Persian to her. She would not understand it, not in a thousand years. And I was done giving lessons.
I leaned forward and spoke the language she understood. “Here is how it will go, Alke. I will not hear you. I will not smell your rose oil or find your hairs about my house. You will feed yourself, care for yourself, and if you cause me a moment’s more trouble, I will turn you into a blindworm and drop you in the sea for the fish.”
Her smirks were wiped away. She blanched and pressed her fingers to her mouth and fled. After that she kept to herself as I had ordered. But word had spread among the gods that Aiaia was a good place to send difficult daughters. A dryad arrived who had fled her intended husband. Two stone-faced oreads followed, exiled from their mountains. Now whenever I tried to cast a spell, all I could hear was rattling bracelets. As I worked at the loom, they flashed in and out of the corners of my vision. They whispered and rustled from every corner. There was always someone leaning moon-faced over a pool when I wanted to swim. As I passed, their snickering laughter washed against my heels. I would not live that way again. Not on Aiaia.
I went to the clearing and called Hermes. He came, smiling already. “So? How do you like your new handmaids?”
“I do not,” I said. “Go to my father and see how they can be taken away.”
I feared he might object to being sent on an errand, but it was too amusing for him to miss. When he came back he said, “What did you expect? Your father is delighted. He says it’s only right that his high blood is served by lesser divinities. He will encourage more fathers to send their daughters.”
“No,” I said. “I will take no more. Tell my father.”
“Prisoners don’t usually dictate their own conditions.”
My face stung, but I knew better than to show it. “Tell my father I will do something awful to them if they do not leave. I will turn them into rats.”
“I can’t imagine Zeus would like that. Weren’t you already exiled for acts against your kin? You should beware further punishment.”
“You could speak on my behalf. Try to persuade him.”
His black eyes glittered. “I’m afraid I’m only a messenger.”
“Please,” I said. “I do not want them here, truly. I am not being funny.”
“No,” he said, “you are not. You are being very dull. Use your imagination, they must be good for something. Take them to your bed.”
“That is absurd,” I said. “They would run screaming.”