“Stop, that hurts,” said Apollo, too calmly.
“I won’t stop unless you help me.”
“Yes, fine.” Lotis let go. Apollo’s wrists bore the imprint of Lotis’ fingers. He uncorked three bottles and poured the contents into a golden bowl. “Drink this.”
She gulped the syrup down like wine. Her legs fused into a trunk. Her fingers split and split and split until they were fans of green leaves. Her eyes popped out of her tree-skull and bloomed into the beautiful white flowers of the lotus.
The townspeople were overjoyed at the appearance of another lotus under which to marry. They erected a statue of Priapus beside the tree.
I knew him first from his music, the haunting voice that came to me through the air. I followed it until I saw him leaning against one of the trees as though he hadn’t given chase all night and still possessed all the energy of a well-rested child. His fingers trespassed in a blur across the strings of his lyre. He’d draped his blue button-down over one shoulder, but his chest was bare. I approached, spear at the ready though I didn’t want to pierce him, for doing so would stop his singing, or at least change it irretrievably into a ghastly moan of death.
“Oh, guardian, guardian, where has she gone?” he sang. “I’ve journeyed long but my girl won’t come out to accept her song.”
“Who have you come for?” I said, pushing the spear’s point into his navel. He didn’t have to tell me his name; one of the books I’d brought with me to the Orangery told the tales of old gods and men and names I’d seen etched in our plaques at the bases of our named trees.
“You know who I’m here for.”
“I do not. As I understand it, you’ve had your fill of many women, perhaps half of our named. How am I supposed to tell from the stories which maiden you really had your heart set on?” I pushed until a drop of red blood dripped from the button hole; it traveled down the shaved trail and disappeared beneath the waist of his overalls. “Tell me her name and I’ll show you her resting place.”
“Daphne,” he whispered, boring his eyes into mine. He let the lyre fall to the ground. He grasped the point of the spear with both hands and pulled it further into his belly. “I’ll die before I leave without her.”
I’d dreamt of him as I had dreamt of all men who graced the reed pages in my books, deprived of the company of men for the whole of a life and feverous with curiosity. If only the spear were my hands digging into his flesh, I would pull his stomach out and make of his body a new book. Instead I pulled back my weapon.
“I’ll take you to her in the morning,” I said. “Until then you’ll go to my cabin and wait for me while I mend the mess you made in my wall.”
“I don’t want to be alone. I’ll go with you.”
“You’ll do no such thing. I know where your Daphne sleeps. Either you go to my cabin and wait until I come back for you, or you taste the point of my spear.”
“I don’t know the way,” he said, but already he bent to gather his lyre into his arms.
“Follow the path,” I said.
He hesitated then nodded and turned to follow the path. I watched him walk until I could no longer see him.
“Daphne,” I whispered. “Show me where you’re hidden.”
In the distance I heard her rustling. I walked the path until I came to a grove of stumps with a single laurel queening over the dead. Unlike Lotis, Daphne did not tempt with poison blossoms, but still those trees that dared to drink from her soil perished before her terrible beauty; her virgin innocence sucked too much sustenance. I touched my palm against the rough of her bark.
“It’s not a sin not to want the way other women want,” I said. Across my chest I could still feel the weight of a book against my skin. I thought of how she’d rejected the man whose skin surely felt as good, or better, than those long-dead books’ skins. “It’s okay to want, too.”
I removed the plaque submerged at her roots, prying it from the place where she had begun to wrap her wood around it. I traveled deeper into the trees until I found one of the nameless, a dwarf of a laurel. I placed the new plaque at her feet, kicking dirt over the name so that Apollo might think it had been there long before he had burst through my wall. I buried her original plaque ten strides from her base. I patched the wall as best I could with spit and stone and dirt until the evening returned and I could no longer see the hole for the darkness behind it. Then I followed the shelter path and found, in my bed, a naked man with both hands drawn beneath his head.
This space here, see, this empty hole where once roots reached deep into the soil, once held a tree with the wounds of a mother upon her bark: a scar near her roots where she tore between the legs. Dryope wasn’t like the first we saw. She loved only two men. The first, her husband, had already fathered her child when she stumbled upon Apollo with his lyre. Her husband was good to her; he cooked the meat he hunted, fed the child so that Dryope might claim a moment to sleep or weave or lay with Apollo in their secret glade.
An artist, Apollo had little to offer Dryope when his clothes cloaked his body, but when he removed them he offered her what she could not weave: a pair of eyes that didn’t know her in her worst moments. Astride him she was invincible and untouchable, though she did allow him to run his hands across the stretch marks that streaked her hips like constellations. Her husband named the marks; Apollo didn’t notice them. When he asked her to leave her husband, she refused.
“What good will that do me?” she said, gathering her clothes. It was time for her to return to her family in the hut they’d built upon land that was once the center of a bustling town, empty now of all but a lotus tree and a crumbling statue of a man with a cock that cast a shadow larger than the statue’s height. She and her husband mocked the statue when they were light with drink.
Each time she left Apollo, she told herself it was the last. Then his song called her across the river, and her husband would know the wild look in her eye. He would take the child from her breast and tell her, go, go. Disappear. We’ll be here when you return.
The night of her transformation she asked Apollo for a dance. He obliged. He wore the leather she’d brought for him, made by her mother. He allowed her to tie his hands with reeds. When the drizzle had ended, leaving only dew across the grass, she stood to leave but was pulled back into the dirt by an insistent hand.
“You’ll stay with me,” Apollo said, digging his nails into her wrist.
She wrenched her wrist away. Apollo grabbed her hands. She tried to leave, to roll away, to run, but he wrapped a reed around her wrist, around her feet.
“I’ll make you stay.”
She squeezed her eyes shut and waited for her life to end, for the devastation of losing control of her body, but she heard only the sound of feet sloshing through mud then nothing. When she opened her eyes, Apollo was gone.
When finally she broke the reeds and ran back to her family, she found her husband’s bags gathered, the baby strapped to his chest.
“You should have told me it was him,” he said. “I only ever wanted you to be happy.”
“I don’t want him,” she said. “He doesn’t know my constellations.”
But her husband no longer trusted the words from her mouth, too tainted were they with the spit of a god-man.
Dryope wove until her fingers bled. She sunk her fingers into the place her daughter had first glimpsed the world until she slept. She dreamt until Apollo came for her.
“I don’t want you here,” she said.
“I don’t want to be here. I brought you a gift.”
“What is it?”
“To ease your pain.”