Later she saw him strike her mother. She saw him bring his fist down on an earthenware plate and shatter it, so angry that he did not notice that his hand was bleeding. She saw him send men to be hanged and watched them weep as they were led from the room.
She can see now that her father, too, had a magic circle around him, and that she loved him less on account of who he was than for allowing her inside that circle when so many others were kept out.
The following morning she combs the beach again looking for stones that will strike a spark. This time she selects two of every type then ferries them up to the tent where the air is drier and there is no sea spray. She bangs them together in turn and her spirit leaps when she sees that a tiny star is born with a loud crack between two of the stones. She tears a corner from her dress and picks at it with her dirty nails until it is a wren’s nest of cream fibres.
Only then does she remember that she has no wood. She feels stupid, and scared by the realisation that she is losing the ability to plan ahead. She thinks of the effort involved in finding that wood and begins to cry. But crying is pointless so after a few minutes she stops. She wraps the deerskin round her once more and walks a circuit of the island.
There are no logs because there are no trees, but she succeeds in gathering an armful of dry branches. She is walking beside the cliffs on the way back to the tent when she sees movement in the waves. She turns and watches two dolphins break the surface, curve through the air and enter the water again, then break the water a second time, as if they are riding the rim of some great, hidden wheel. They are heart-stoppingly beautiful, like long, silver bottles or wingless, grey birds.
But they are mocking her. She cannot swim. She would die out there, whereas they can travel to ten kingdoms and back. For a moment she dreams of having their freedom, then realises how little it would profit her. She would not be wanted in Athens. She would not be wanted at home. Here is as good as anywhere.
The dolphins have gone. She returns to the tent, piles the twigs on the ashes of the last fire and rebuilds the little circle of stones the men built around it. She fetches the two stones and the little nest of cotton lint.
It does not work. The stones spark one time in twenty, and when they do she has no way of directing that spark into the lint. She tries a hundred, two hundred times. Her hands are bloody and bruised. Her arms are exhausted. The lint refuses to catch.
She is too tired to remain awake but too uncomfortable to sleep. She drifts halfway between the two states, clipping the edge of nightmares and coming away trailing nameless fears that snap her briefly awake. She thinks she has fallen overboard or is running up an endless slope of shingle, chased by a nameless, seal-faced creature that is and is not her brother.
When dawn comes she lies listening to the shearwaters taking flight. When there is only the muffled sound of the waves left she stands and walks down to the beach, climbing round the rocks at the side of the cove until she is looking down into deeper water. She sits on a rock with her legs dangling. A jellyfish swims below her, a ball of light in a white bag with a charred rim, trailing ragged tentacles. It pulses in the slow wind of the current. She watches, transfixed. She is no longer able to measure time.
The jellyfish is gone. The translucent green water flexes and wobbles like flames dancing in a grate.
There is a rash on the back of her left hand where the skin has reddened and begun to peel away. She runs her fingers over it. There is pain but it does not belong to her.
Clambering back up the scree she hears women’s voices and a high metal chime like tiny bells ringing. She climbs faster but by the time she reaches the curved, grass saddle the voices have stopped and there is no one there.
Her bowels clench. She does not bother to find shelter. She squats and relaxes and what comes out is a foul, orange liquid so that she has to clean herself repeatedly with clumps of torn grass.
She walks aimlessly towards the highest point on the island simply to postpone her return to the tent. She does not want to look at the vastness of the sea so she keeps her eyes fixed on the ground. It is peppered with the burrows out of which the shearwaters emerge. She stops and stamps her feet and realises for the first time how hollow the earth sounds and how it must be honeycombed with little tunnels. She gets down on her hands and knees and begins to tear at the mouth of the nearest hole. The earth is woven thick with pale roots and she has to search for a sharp stone to cut through the toughest of them. She digs farther, making a deep furrow. She feels something scratching and flapping at the ends of her fingers and excavates the last two handfuls of earth to find two fat, grey chicks huddled in their subterranean chamber. She had hoped to find eggs but it is too late in the season. She picks up one of the birds, a puffball of dove-coloured fur. It pecks her with its hooked black beak. She stands up and crushes the head of the chick with the heel of her sandal. She hacks at the chest of the tiny bird with the edge of the stone until it peels back. There is blood all over her hands and tiny feathers stuck to the blood. She bites into the warm innards, chewing at the gristle and swallowing what she can tear off. She is eating feathers along with the meat. She gags but carries on eating. Three mouthfuls. The bird is finished. She gazes down at its brother. It is looking back up at her with its mouth open, waiting to be fed, the black jewels of its eyes glittery in the sunlight.
She walks away, wiping her mouth on the deerskin.
She cannot remember her mother’s face. She can remember the faces of her brother, her cousins, her father. She can remember the faces of the men who sat around the council table. She can remember the faces of the four male servants who were trusted enough to work in the royal apartments. But she cannot bring her mother’s face to mind.
This is the woman who brought her into the world, the woman her father loved. Yet every time she turns her mind’s eye in her mother’s direction she sees only the men she is talking to, the children she is playing with, the maids to whom she is giving orders. She begins to realise how little her mother did, how rarely she offered an opinion, how the family revolved around her without ever making contact, how small an effect she had on the world.
How alike they are, she and her mother, these blank sheets on which men have written their stories, the white paper under the words, making all their achievements possible and contributing nothing to the meaning.
She realises that she can no longer remember what her own face looks like so she leaves the tent and makes her way to the shallow pool on the rock. She puts her back to the sun and makes a canopy of the deerskin cloak to shield the surface from the glare. She stares down into the water and sees her brother’s sister staring up at her, hair matted like his hair, skin filthy like his skin, cheeks sunken, eyes dark, the skull starting to come through.
There is a storm at night. The thunder is like buildings coming down, and after every explosion the tent is flooded with a harsh blue light that sings on the back of her eyes for minutes afterwards. She wills the lightning to strike her directly, for everything to be over in an instant, but this does not happen. The canvas bucks and cracks and after several hours she is woken from her half-sleep by the rough cloth smacking her face as the tent collapses around her. The wind fills the canvas like a sail and drags her along the ground. She has lost all sense of direction and is terrified that she will be hauled over a cliff. She does not want to die, not now, not like this. She does not want to lie on rocks with shattered bones or drown like a dog in a sack but she does not possess the strength to wrestle herself free, so she lies flat and prays for the wind to slacken. Eventually a gust hoists her free of the ground, she is swung hard against a boulder, the tent comes to a halt and she can do nothing but block her ears to the roar and the whipping of the canvas so that she can nurse the pain in her side.