Chapter 3
Aethiopia
My father’s palace is one of open spaces and few doors.
He likes to believe in his own omniscience while insisting that his refusal to build an upper floor is out of respect for the gods.
Ascension is hubris, Andromeda. We are people of the water and earth.
I would not wish to encroach upon the domain of mighty Zeus.
In truth, King Cepheus is simply afraid of heights.
The rooms are divided into a senet board of courts, halls and antechambers, all connected by archways and gilded columns.
My apartments overlook the river. My mother had initially protested this proximity to my grandmother, had placed me on the western side of the palace and taken the eastern side as her own.
This did not last very long. My grandmother flooded my mother’s halls daily, sending fish flying through her windows where they died gasping, rotting at an unnatural speed in my mother’s bed.
My father, caught between his immovable mother and his irresistible wife, sought a compromise.
My apartments would be nearest to my grandmother, but entry to the adjoining court was to be permitted by my mother only.
She kept her own personal quarters but would entertain her closest friends in the eastern court, in view of my rooms. If she was absent, someone who reported to her was present.
This appeased her initially, until it became clear that even her most bosom companions did not love her more than they feared Achiroe.
I take the long way back to my apartments, hoping to avoid the prying eyes of my mother’s ladies, women who helped birth me and have closely observed every inch I have grown, every awkward jutting change in my body.
I pass through the northern court, which serves as a kind of entrance hall, tales of the Titanomachy painted in friezes around the columns: Zeus’ usurpation blazes in vivid shades across the ceilings.
The swallowing of Metis, an Oceanid and my grandmother’s aunt, marks the divide between this court and the central court.
With its hypaethral structure, the sky above is mirrored in the pool at its middle, which is filled with river water, gifted by my grandmother.
The central court is devoted entirely to Metis’ daughter Athena.
I still feel her gaze on me often, heavy as clouds and fixing as kinship, but when I turn to look for her, I see nothing.
‘Their words in our language, their gods in our style,’ my mother had once muttered.
‘They’re my gods too, Mama.’ I had said it gently but could not keep the slight frown from my face. ‘My kin.’
She started beside me, and I looked up at her to see her face blink and ripple.
I did not have a name for her expression, but she said, ‘Yes. Of course,’ as though I was not supposed to have heard her.
She spoke to me less of her own gods after that, though she had once taught me prayers to Amun-Ra and Bastet.
I had learned eagerly, as I learned all things from her eagerly, drawing eyes of Horus in kohl along my legs for protection.
We would giggle together, hide the adornment from my father, and I adored this shared secret-keeping.
But after this, it was as though she remembered that I was not merely a devotee of the Western gods, but a descendant.
The connecting southern court houses my father and mother’s thrones and I pass by unnoticed in the melee.
Servants carry heavy shining ewers and platters so full of figs and dates and grapes and cheese that they stagger under their weight.
There are no slaves in our kingdom. Neighbouring states visit and leave with bemused expressions upon their faces, write bard’s epics of Aethiopia, a land so prosperous that free labour is simply not the done thing, so fertile that it need not trade for it has all it desires, and so verdant and rich that locals say colour was born here.
There are no men and women captured because my grandmother is displeased by war.
She loathes its pollution of clean water and fertile soil.
And my father is not a brave or ambitious man.
He is not suited to a general’s armour, cannot be pictured astride a horse, leading troops into battle.
He is an idle statesman and a poor economist and has always been contented by his slice of the world, small enough to remain wealthy.
Leave the other men to their waging and enslaving, to their empires.
We are Aethiopians. The bards sing of us.
We have many elephants, we are rich in gold and ebony, and our men are the tallest, the most handsome, the longest lived.
My mother would remain silent when he made such declarations, his belly full of salted fish, words heavy and ripe with spiced wine, sloshing his cup to the court at large. The corner of her lip would tug and her hands would seek invisible loose strands of hair, patting them back into place.
I intend to turn left into the hearth room, a large antechamber in the eastern corner of the palace that connects to the throne room and the eastern court.
We seldom have use for a fireplace – our land is arid – but my mother insists on lighting this one every night.
It is where she brushes my hair and is the only place that I can remember ever spending time alone with my parents.
On rare, rare nights, where my father is not so drunk that he leers wetly at my mother, and not so sober that he barks in sharp-voiced contempt at me, he will pat our heads and tell us a story.
He is a wonderful storyteller, my father.
He has a talent for imitation, for performance, and can conjure, from his meagre limbs and paunchy middle, the swooning of damsels rescued by broad, swaggering heroes, snatched from the snapping jaws of monsters.
‘It is unwise not to examine all options.’
‘Must I always repeat myself? The decision is made, Cassiopeia.’
I have dawdled too long with my memories, and my mother has beaten me back here.
Now I must choose between her disapproval and the enquiring of her women in the eastern court.
The stain of blue across the marble flashes through my mind.
I choose the eastern court and turn to retrace my steps, but something in my mother’s tone catches my stride and I listen out of sight behind a pillar.
‘They have travelled all this way. To refuse them now would be a slight.’
‘You should have thought of that before you invited them. Again. Any other man would beat his wife for such insubordination. Let alone a king.’
‘You are too generous with me, sir.’
‘Yes, I am magnanimous,’ my father replies.
He is disgruntled but there is no sting to the words.
He is not capable of sting where my mother is concerned.
I imagine him, a plump, fuzzy bee, threateningly flashing his dangerous rump, and a caracal, my mother, feigning kittenish wariness while batting him into the dust, knowing that he will only draw blood when he wishes to tear out his own insides.
‘You are indeed. And your word is, of course, final, my king. But should we spurn so many young, agile, wealthy men, we may suffer for it later. Let them enjoy our famed Aethiopian hospitality, the xenia of which you are so proud. Let them leave feeling they have gained a lustrous ally.’ I hear it, the purr of velvet wrapping round the steel beneath.
I am not so layered, not so skilled a weaver.
Is this an art I should learn? Or is it one that I should be kept ignorant of? Do as I say, not as I do.
‘So long as they do not call on us to fight their wars.’
‘Why should they? They know your army is not that of a conqueror.’
‘Well then, they might think we are ripe for taking!’
‘Never, my lord. It is well known how favoured you are by the gods.’
‘They will want her. Everyone wants her.’ I know it is me he speaks of.
The her is a huffed exhale, exasperated, a breath shy of a retch.
I hear the rustle of cloth then, and my mother purrs.
My father hums, his tone deepening to something low in his chest, and there is a strange, damp sound, faint like the flopping of freshly caught fish.
‘Your word is final, my king.’
A gasp, an ah becoming an oh, is the only reply.
I hurry away with a pit in my stomach, no desire to hear any more.
It is not the first time I have stumbled across such conversations between my mother and father.
My father wishes me to marry Phineus. My grandmother agrees.
She fears men, does not trust them and so would only trust me in the care of her son.
I once asked her how this could be, if she had been married to one.
She replied that she was a goddess and he was not.
‘But I am not a goddess,’ I had said, and felt a precocious pang, a forebear of future anxiety.
‘No, my little queen, you are not.’
My father does not fear men, but he cannot bear the idea of a foreigner on his throne.
A foreigner may not be so favoured by the gods, may lose the kingdom to some reaching pharaoh, who would collect his hedjet into a pschent, and place a viceroy here ruling our kingdom from miles away.
It is a mark of how much he abhors the idea that he approves of the betrothal, because my father has no love for his brother.
He resents Phineus as he resents me, favoured above him by his mother.
He did not inherit his mother’s affinity, and my grandmother, not one for tact, never bothered to hide her disappointment.
Phineus is no more the kin of the Potamoi in aspect than my father, but he is clever and kind and people are always laughing around him.
Other than on the evenings that my father performs his stories, they bear no resemblance.