Chapter 9 #3
‘How have I not been brought here before?’
Ceto laughs. ‘Meda, they are too scared to even take you into the market. And this is a long and difficult journey to make.’
‘But I made it.’
‘Yes. You did.’
‘Well, you carried me.’
‘And you stayed on. The crocodiles did not attack you, the hippos left you alone. It was not all me, that journey.’
I believe her. I would not have before, but here, feeling the tremor in my bones and blood, in the full resonance of this place, I do.
I wish to submerge in it, to be wholly part of it.
I make to swim forward, to sink below and revel in this homecoming, but Ceto catches me. Her fingers are cool on my shoulders.
‘Wait.’ She points ahead. The river becomes the lake a few strokes away.
The water shifts from silted green and is suddenly so clear that everything from the sky above to the lush banks is twinned and reversed before me.
I look at Ceto, I ready myself, I try to see myself in her eyes in preparation but I cannot.
Their depths calm me, though, like the lull before sleep, and I swim forward.
I have seen the shape of myself before, but it is precision that holds the prize.
I churn internally. First, there is a great gulf, a sense of a seismic, unknowable distance between what I see and who I am.
It is not, initially, my face itself that shocks me.
It is that I cannot make sense of what I see as self.
I can only know it as I have known all beings; it is separate, it is another.
But I also, simultaneously, know that this other is me.
When I was small, my teeth started to fall out and I was horrified.
I knew this happened to other children, had seen their gap-toothed grins and felt sickened by their tongues, poking at pink, shiny gums. It had not occurred that this would happen to me, and when it did, I immediately heaved, neck sticky, lips glossy with blood and spit.
More awful still was the sensation of new teeth pushing through, the sudden understanding that my body was opaque to me, existing beyond the precocious diligence of my ruling.
I wonder now if all people feel this way, if everyone that ever sees their own face clearly for the first time tries to align the self with the stranger and feels this estrangement.
And then there are the details. The nose, the eyes, the shape of my mouth – the indescribable yet undeniable more of me that only water this clear – or perhaps it had to be this lake, from which so much of me comes – can show.
I feel a horrifying ambivalence; a hatred for this divine being that is so at odds with the messy, confused, cowardly person that I know myself to be, and a yearning to live up to the expectations held by that face.
The face of the girl in the lake. But I understand the sideways looks now, the whispers, the wariness.
I am beautiful. I am more than beautiful.
My skin is dark, so dark, darker than either of my parents’, that it shines with something heavenly.
My eyes are like cooked honey, my hair is thick, weighted with water in springs past my shoulders.
I am softness personified. Full and inviting, who wouldn’t want a bite? I am dazzling. I despise it.
‘I am lovely,’ I say in horror.
‘Yes,’ says Ceto.
‘It is too much.’
She says nothing.
‘Why did you take me here?’ I am panicking now and the panic is eating at the magic I had been full of. ‘Why did you show me?’
She is surprised by my response but not disappointed.
She almost looks relieved. ‘I wanted you to see that there is a whole world out here. There is so much. So much. You have not seen it. You will not see it when you are married. I also wanted you to see your face and know, with absolute certainty, that I will say yes, when the time comes.’
‘Good! My mother will live!’ I cling to the refrain of the last three years. I am the most beautiful. I will be Queen of the Sea. My mother will live.
‘Meda.’
I see some of my own panic in her face. She masticates her terror, tries to swallow and digest it, but I spare her.
‘You do not want me to marry your lord.’
She does not answer. This is affirmation enough. ‘You fear for me.’
Still no answer.
‘Why? I will be queen. I will be his wife?’ Even as I hear the plea in my voice, I feel a pressure descend on me. The heavy gaze of two grey eyes, swung like lamps towards us.
Ceto taps her tongue against her teeth, murmurs to herself, testing the oath, and then, ‘The river creatures that answer to you – the fish, the birds, the otters. They follow you in awe and fondness. They do not fear you, they respect you. They flock to you like sheep to a shepherd.’
‘Yes. And so?’
‘It is not so in the sea. Poseidon, my master, is great and terrible. He is brother of Zeus and Hades. And he alone stands bachelor. Within him dwells all the untamed force of all the oceans. He is lord of storms and earthquakes and the great waves that swallow islands. My master is great and terrible,’ she says again, ‘and so every great and terrible thing you have heard is true.’
‘I am descended of Nilus, favoured by Athena.’
‘Athena cannot always protect you. Her priestess learned this lesson.’
I know this story, of course. It is as I have feared. He will drown me, he will pound and erode until I am dust.
‘So you have brought me all this way to scare me!’ I am trembling. ‘The oath is made. It is as it will be. I cannot get out of it.’
‘Do you know how I know about the limitations of my oath? About what is permitted and what is not?’
I shake my head.
‘I tried,’ she answers simply. ‘It is like testing the strength of shackles. It is like dipping a toe into fire and seeing how long until it burns.’
‘You have … you have tried to break free.’ I feel foolish for it not having occurred to me earlier.
Her eyes answer. Obviously. She swims to the banks and pulls herself from the water. I follow her, glad to be away from the view of that face. She runs a hand through her hair, twisting the thick dark coil around and around her wrist.
‘The oath was made on my behalf millennia before I was even born, after the fall of the Titans, our shared grandsires. Nereus is like Nilus; he did not fight in the Great War but is still a member of the old guard. He had to submit to the new Lord of the Sea or risk being banished to Tartarus.’ She leans back and her eyes are remote, removed.
‘And then I was born – the last of fifty and unexpected. I was asked to swear anew, but of course the choice was not mine. My father had bent his knee and I am of his line. I was born on bent knees. And so I cannot lie to my master. I cannot disobey a direct order.’
Her gaze returns to my face, scrutinizing. ‘But I am loyal and so he is careless with his orders. He would not think that I would undermine him. I am … a good servant.’
This is what she has brought me here to tell me.
She had so little in the way of options and yet she has sought her freedom.
She has clung to what little of it she can reach.
I have not even tried. I did not think it worth the attempt, I did not believe my life, that small life – because Ceto is right, it is small – worth the fight.
‘Why do you care what happens to me?’ I do not think she will answer; it takes long moments for her to speak. But then she does, and I am surprised again.
‘Is it so hard to believe that after three years at your side, I would find it difficult to bear if you came to harm?’
I do not know what to say to this. I think again of the jagged coral dripping blood; I did not know red and red could be so clashing. ‘It is why you have always been so angry with me. It is because I was so accepting.’
‘I believe you to be more than your face. You have been so determined to contradict me and I do not like to be contradicted.’
I chuckle. ‘Do you not? I hadn’t noticed.’
I dare myself to meet her unflinching gaze.
Despite the shared fear, it is the most at ease I have seen her.
Her shoulders are loose and now her mouth quirks in that way that challenges me, makes me want to play and fight and play some more.
The sprouting bud between us turns this way and that, facing each of us, hoping we will give it what it needs.
‘I was angry with you too. You would not allow my blissful pretence. And it seemed so much easier to be you. I felt you had all the power I wanted and none of the responsibility.’
She snorts and trails her hand through the air.
‘You are not so powerless, Meda.’
I imitate her and feel the air ripple in response. ‘No. I am not.’
She smiles at me. I smile back. The sprouting bud blooms, basking in our conjoined light.
‘I don’t suppose anyone would think that I would not want to marry him,’ I say slowly, ‘that I would not want to be Queen of the Sea. What I want doesn’t matter, after all. My father would gain an Olympian as a son and my mother would be spared.’
‘Yes,’ she says solemnly.
‘Everyone assumes that I want what they want; to last, to be known. You have called me small and perhaps I am – I would have been happy here, with my small life.’
‘That is not what I meant when I called you small.’
We regard each other. Asserting myself over a future that covets peace and anonymity is still self-assertion. I have never thought about it this way before. She is the first to suggest that I might decide to want.
So what do I want?
She sits, watching me, her head tilted. We are close, closer than we have ever been.
The column of her neck is lit by the dying light, water runs off it like nectar.
She is not so quick to dry as she once was, her naiad blood recognizing her frequent freshwater visits and rising to her surface.
All at once I wish to run my tongue along her skin, to taste its sweet ambrosia.
The memory of her body beneath mine, tangling as we had once grappled in the dust, is tangible.
But I feel those grey eyes upon me still, then think of Nilus, absent now but who could return at any time.
There is nothing I want less than my strange, stern great-grandfather, with whom I have spoken but a handful of times, witnessing that desire made manifest. I should fear this wanting, I have never felt its like before, never felt anything that even resembled it, but I do not, just as I should fear her but I do not.
‘I suppose there might be something in being underestimated and unexpected. Freedom, I think. That way, people will always ask the wrong questions.’
Her smile widens. I have got it at last. ‘Yes. Yes, Meda. That is true, I think.’
She pronounces the hypocorism as an epithet, just like the first time she used it, but it is not cruel.
It is a compliment. Her eyes glint and spark with that familiar dare and challenge.
Her hair spills into the grass. I cannot resist and I do not want to.
I tangle a hand in it. I try to do it idly, I worry about spooking her, but she does not react.
Each brush against her is burned on my skin, branded in memory, but this is newly intentional.
I trace my fingers through the dark waves.
She becomes pliant beneath my touch. I am alive with the power of it and of this place.
My hand climbs higher with my heartbeat but I remain torturously restrained.
I sweep each black billowing sheet away from her face.
My fingertips draw the shape of her brow, her collarbones, the lines of her shoulders.
My palm gently cups her neck and when my thumb comes to brush her jaw, I feel something hot grip my lower belly. She shudders. She closes her eyes.