Chapter Eighteen
Yiannis Demou. The boy I was to marry.
He’s alive, here, in the flesh. Staring at me like he can’t believe his eyes. I can’t believe mine, either.
Memories assail me in a flood. The day our marriage was arranged, watching his father ride up to our door; my father coming to greet him. Yiannis whispering in my ear the day of Sikyon’s great pageant, helping me into the chariot, his touch lingering on my skin. And later, how he did the king’s bidding, and marched me like a prisoner to the rock where I was supposed to die.
I wonder if all this passes through his head, too. He saw me before I saw him; he has had time to gain a little more composure. Still, he does not look so composed.
“Psyche…is it really you?” His eyes are darker than they used to be, shadowed with the things he has seen. His face is as handsome as ever, but careworn for such a young man.
“It is,” I stammer. “And yet, I can hardly believe…I had not thought to see you again.”
“Nor I you.” He looks dazed. “I have heard many rumors of you, each one stranger than the next.” He studies my face, glances toward the doors of the great temple. “Some said that you were stolen away by a terrible demon. Others, that you keep company with the gods. That you have become something more than mortal, even.”
I shake my head. “I bleed just as you do. But as to the rest…it is true enough, after a fashion.”
He stares back. “So you are lover to a god, now?” He laughs a little, not an unkind laugh, but a sharp one. “The girls in Sikyon thought I was a catch, didn’t they? But I suppose you always knew you could do better.”
He doesn’t say it bitterly, but there is something hard in it all the same.
I could remind him of the last day we saw each other, of how he and his friend Vasilis stood guard outside our house, how they marched me down to the rock called Aphrodite’s Pillow. It was not I who betrayed him. Perhaps he sees the direction of my thoughts.
“I’m sorry,” he looks down. “I was wrong, back then. To act as I did.”
Yes , I think. But you were a boy, still. He did not seem young to me then, nor did I think myself so young at the time. But we must have been, for those days were a lifetime ago.
“What happened to your friend?” I say. “Vasilis?” I always liked Yiannis, but it is true, he kept poor company. I remember Vasilis’s mean little eyes, his easy sneer. Some of the girls said he was handsome, but I saw only cruelty in his face.
“He became a mercenary too, like Timon and me.” Yiannis glances away. “He didn’t make it.”
His words are stark. But even so, it’s hard for me to mourn Vasilis, to feel true sorrow at the news that he is dead. But the other thing Yiannis said—Timon, his little brother, is a soldier too. A different kind of pang goes through me, hearing that. Timon was still a boy playing at marbles when I last saw him—thirteen at most.
“Timon is here with you?”
“Over there.” Yiannis nods. “He’s young, but they took him all the same. He will be a better warrior than me, someday.”
“And your parents?” I say.
Something in his face tells me the answer before the words are out.
“Dead. In the earthquake.”
The collapse was severest in the upper part of town, where the wealthiest families lived, including his. I remember riding Ajax through those streets, the dusty rubble, the abandoned homes.
Yiannis blinks, and I can see he’s contending with memories of his own.
“Timon and I came to Sparta on a tide of refugees. I had no great skills.” He laughs that harsh laugh again. “My parents saw no reason to prepare me for a life of toil.”
He has lost everything, or almost everything, and yet he speaks calmly, like one who has got used to loss. One who no longer expects better justice from the gods. I swallow.
“You were always a great athlete,” I say. It’s true: he was one of the fastest runners, and the best discus-thrower in Sikyon.
He shrugs. “At least there was something I could put to use. I sold myself to one of the generals in Sparta as a mercenary. They don’t tend to look so favorably on outsiders—they prefer those who have had the Spartan training since boyhood—but they liked what I could do.” A wry smile flashes briefly over his face. “They call me goat-herd, because I am from some remote, country place, and not from their great city. But they seem to like me well enough.”
It doesn’t surprise me that even without the famous Spartan training they have found a place for him. Yiannis has always had a way of making friends, and of making elders like him. And he has the build of a soldier.
“And your family?” he asks, as if remembering his manners. For a moment it is as though we were back in Sikyon, still courting, politely asking about each other’s parents and their good health.
“My father is dead,” I say. I do not specify. Let him think it was in that same, terrible landslide that buried so many in our village, or whatever else he may imagine. I still don’t have the words for everything that happened in Atlantis, and even if I did, I wouldn’t know how to share it.
“My sister, too, is lost,” I say. Lost . What else can I call her? For a moment I am in the dream again. Could it really be true? Is she out there somewhere, sailing some unknown sea?
Yiannis nods. We’re silent for a moment, absorbing it all. How much the world has changed since we last stood face to face.
“So,” he says at last. “You ride with the gods, and the gods ride with us.” He frowns. I feel the rattle of skepticism, even disbelief, in his voice. “The priests always tell us that, and yet…” He shrugs. Is he thinking of the ambush, of the lives lost yesterday? Of all the lives lost before that?
“I do not think I know what I would say to a god, if I were to ever see one face to face.” He hesitates. “Do they like us, Psyche? The gods?” He looks at me, eyes searching. “Often it seems to me that they do not.”
I feel another pang. The question makes him seem younger, more earnest, despite the weariness he wears. And I don’t know how to answer. It’s a question I’m still asking.
“They like us,” I say. “As a soldier may like his horse.”
Yiannis smiles a little, but it’s brief.
“It truly is extraordinary,” he says, “to see you again. That you should be here.”
“The world is not what I thought it was,” I agree. On the streets behind us, it seems the morning is advancing; there are more men now, walking here and there with a sense of purpose. I can still smell the aftermath of the pyres on the air.
“I am glad you were not injured yesterday,” I say.
Yiannis gives me a half-smile, spreading his arms to show off his unharmed state. “Indeed. Though not all were so lucky.” He looks down the road to where a handful of horses have been tied up. “They are riderless now.”
Riderless horses: a reminder of the dead. But only the wealthier or more senior men, the generals or the cavalry, ride on horseback. It’s the foot-soldiers who always bear the greatest toll, but there are no abandoned horses to remind us of those deaths; no signs at all. Their ashes will be left behind, and their weapons will already have been distributed among the other men, with any surplus left as offerings at the temple.
Around us, voices are getting louder; soldiers are stirring and saluting.
“Men!” A general on horseback, older and authoritative, moves briskly down the path. “Gather yourselves! We march north today.”
Murmuring breaks out.
“Sir…we’re going north? To what purpose?”
“We’re supposed to be returning to Sparta,” another mutters. “We don’t have enough rations to keep going north.”
I doubt it was meant for the general to overhear, but he does nonetheless.
“Then you’ll just have to make yours go further, won’t you?” he barks. “And count yourself lucky I don’t have time to flog you for insubordination.”
I glance at Yiannis’s handsome face and feel a pang of compunction. He’s too young to look so old around the eyes.
“ Yiannis !” One of the men in a nearby group waves impatiently. “Come on, man. I’m not packing for you. Get to it!”
Yiannis turns back to me, shrugs.
“We serve at the pleasure of the gods.” I don’t miss the irony in his voice. He frowns, holding my gaze. “So…will we see each other again?”
I hesitate, but only a moment.
“Yes. We will.” Saying it aloud only makes me feel more determined. I thought my past a wreckage without survivors. But now I have found one, and that is too precious to let slip from me.
He nods, and holds my eyes an instant longer before turning away and walking back toward his men. I watch him go, and tamp down the urge to call him back—as if doing so would call back time itself, pull us both backward through its net, to a time before death and disaster.
But those are fairy tales, and I am not a little girl anymore.