Chapter 8 #3
She springs. Her tight coils bunch and loosen and I think she is going to strike or to leap at me.
Her orders must forbid her harming me because I would deserve it.
Her arm arcs back, her wrist flicks and something flies towards me.
I duck but it lands deliberately at my feet, splattering my white hems with red-brown.
Panic of what my mother will say erases my other thoughts and I leap back, cursing.
I reach into the mud. It is hard to immediately find it.
It is almost the same colour as the clay, orange-red and submerged.
I hold it between two fingers and away from my dress so that it does not drip.
It is a hippo. Twin to the one I have, that I carry around with me always, smoothing it with my fingers in anxious habit. This one is carved just as cleverly, perhaps even more so. It is made from coral.
I feel my bottom lip fall loose. My chest is tight, and I cannot breathe.
‘To my Meda,’ Ceto hisses the words. ‘May your years be many and fruitful.’
I look up. But she has gone.
The sacrifices open the day. Two dozen bulls, black for Nilus and white for my future husband.
The black bulls’ blood is poured on to the banks, saturating the mud to a madder slurry.
The whites’ is poured into the river, where it whirls as if stirred by a giant finger.
This is seen as another sign of good fortune, though I see my grandmother, on the eastern banks, watching with a wrinkled nose.
The pageants follow. My mother, father and I watch from a raised dais, just beyond the orange trees.
Rows and rows of girls flash wrists, ankles, soft strips of waist. They are not the girls I grew up with, that first cohort who taught me loneliness.
Those are all married with children now, seated with their mothers behind my own, part of some group to which I have not yet been permitted entry and, given what is to come, likely never will.
Not according to the language of my father and his gods.
Kore, young maidens, those who spin and shine and try not to bump into each other, whirligig beetles in shallow pools.
I remember some of them being born, have seen their transition from naked potbellies to gentle curves.
Their older sisters, my sideways-staring peers, are nymphae, young brides.
In time they will all become gynae, women.
But only when they have had children. Womanhood must be earned.
I will simply become a goddess and a queen and that will be that.
Set apart and alone but this, at least, is familiar.
Just as I have always been princess, always little queen, no one will bother to distinguish me beyond this.
After the pageants come the juggling, the races swum across the river, the wrestling and the rowing.
Men heave and sweat, their muscles rippling shadow and light.
They are glorious, like murals or statues or the finely carved hippo pair that clink gently together in my pocket.
I wonder, not for the first time, what it must be like, living as the subject of action rather than the object.
Then we move inside for dancing, singing, food, things I am allowed to partake in.
I eat a cornucopia that I do not taste. I sing and am praised, I dance and am praised.
I am removed, a migrating river bird seeking cooler breezes; I will return in the winter when my white feathers are rich rose, pink with the sweet things I have nibbled.
I feel Ceto’s watchful gaze; I know she is here, somewhere, but I do not see her.
The day blurs, smudges into evening; I long for the night.
I watch Phineus offer smiles to girls who in turn watch me as though I might drown them for sport.
Their mistrust of me has grown, morphed from childhood alienation and the whispers of their older sisters into the kind of wariness that can only exist without respect.
They will be glad when I become the Bride of the Sea.
Their coffers will fill with trade on tides I bear, and they won’t have to see my strangeness.
I make my grateful escape as early as I can; my mother recognizes that I have reached my limit. Young men protest my absence, beg that I stay another dance. I decline.
‘Come on, princess, you’ve not danced with me yet!’
‘Or me!’
Hands reach for me as I depart; they are wine addled and their fingers are sticky with fruit and barley beer.
I recoil. They reach more. These are boys I have grown up with, boys who never defended me from the whispers of their sisters but whom I have been familiar enough with not to fear.
They look up to Phineus, purport to follow his example.
But Phineus is far away, dancing with the girl with the dimples.
My mother is speaking to her women, my father is drunk, and so these boys I have known have forgotten that they know me.
Have forgotten what happens to men who dare to touch me.
Or maybe they haven’t and they believe that they are exceptional, that the panicked mew of my gasps is coquettishness, some pretty manner I have learned out of a desire to seem even more appealing.
They snatch and their hands catch on my beaded overlay; stones split and scatter across the floor.
Not again, not here.
My father’s palace is one of open spaces and few doors.
But tonight it is packed with bodies. This means very little for his omniscience and I cannot separate myself from harm.
I push my way through the crowd. To my horror, three of them follow, laughing.
I cast around for someone, anyone, but no one meets my gaze.
Those that see smile blithely, the princess and her peers at play.
For one wild moment, I think about screaming for help.
Then I think of the hard, damning line of my mother’s mouth, the inevitable, embarrassed laughter, led by my father, that has often met my ‘outbursts’.
And Phineus … If I had ever been his responsibility, I am not any more.
I push on. My hands are balled into fists, the cord of my overlay continues to slip from me, I leave blue and red debris where I stumble.
Pomegranate seeds, the red fruit rolling, I am shivering, eyes paw at where the linen is cold and sticking to my skin—
‘Dance with us, princess!’
‘When else will we get to kiss the hand of a goddess!’
I am through the central court. I avoid the pool and keep moving towards the entrance hall.
I do not want to lead them through the eastern court to my apartments with my lone precious door.
The thought of their fingers pressed against it, leaving marks from grease and sweat on the smooth worn wood, makes whatever I ate roll in my stomach.
‘Come and have a drink, princess!’
‘Come and have some fun!’
‘Doesn’t the sea belong to everyone? I’m sure Poseidon will share!’
I gasp, trip, the string of my overlay tangling in my sandals. The crowd thins and without the pinion of bodies holding me upright, I pitch forward across the threshold of the entrance hall.
I expect to hit the marble floor, but I do not. Ceto is there.
She reads my terror, rights me immediately, her hands are cool on my temples, my collarbones, my waist. She knows without me having to speak.
This is good because I can’t; I search for words but find only the high-pitched starts of syllables that become quick inhalations as I steady my heart and legs. I gasp and gasp.
She simply asks, ‘Who?’
I turn. They are breaking free of the crowd, coming towards me. I point.
Her eyes are volcanic, molten. In them I see the bottomless pit of Tartarus, fires that burn black and eternal; I see a thousand ferocious promises.
In the sharp dipping from fear to lightness I indulge my imagination.
She is raging for me, she wishes to protect me.
But then she speaks. ‘You dare to try to touch the Bride of the Sea?’
They are drawn up short, they look uneasy.
‘You dare to lay hands on Lord Poseidon’s betrothed?’
‘She’s a friend of ours, we were just trying to get her to dance.’
‘The Princess Andromeda has no friends.’ The declaration does not shame me, for once.
Ceto says it as though I am above such things, and I raise my chin as if this were true.
‘I spend every day with her,’ Ceto goes on, ‘I have never seen you before. You dare to try to touch my future queen and you dare to lie to me?’
She stalks towards them, the black scale of her dress slithering behind her.
I see it now, the shape I have not seen before, the one I have heard stories of.
She does not shift exactly, stands there still in skin and on two legs, but I see it.
We all do. A ghost of the Cetus, the great rearing sea serpent.
The black and orange gleam of its eyes. The vicious snap of its teeth.
The hot wind of breath that smells of death and trenches.
The boys who chased me are frozen now. One of them stains his tunic, piss trickling down his legs and pooling on the marble floor.
‘It is only out of respect for my lady and her family that you are all still alive,’ her low voice rings out.
The halls grow quiet, the music has stopped.
‘I would not so sully a feast day in honour of her kin with the spilling of blood as dirty as yours. But mark this – I have been swallowing men whole since birth. And you are not men.’
She makes to turn away. They sag in relief. I am aware of it a moment before it happens; something in my face stirs something in hers.
She is faster than any human so I cannot follow the action.
She coils in that way I have come to know, her movements like pulling a bow string taut.
She tightens and bursts, an arrow releasing, and a jagged strip of coral is clenched in her fist, syrupy and wet with red.
The open wrists of the biggest boy burst flesh and blood like lava through cracked earth.
His hands, separated from his body, fall to the floor. He begins to scream. Ceto does not flinch. She walks to me. Her coral knife is dripping but her skin, her hands, are unblemished.
‘It would have been more disrespectful to leave them all unpunished.’ Her fingers skim my cheekbones, wiping my face. I had not known I was crying. ‘You do not touch what is not yours.’