Chapter 14
Aethiopia
I do not remember how I got back to bed but I wake beside Ceto in the morning.
The night is as a dream and I almost do not tell her of it.
But she is literate in the lines of my brow.
I say the words quietly, beneath our sheets, like the way I used to cry my heartache and secrets into my bed for no one to keep.
She runs her hand over where the arrow buried itself in my flesh.
There is no mark there. We do not know what to make of it and so we begin our day as usual.
But we are only playing at being ourselves.
We eat the food the attendants bring in small, delicate bites; we lack our usual appetites because our stomachs are leaden with waiting.
Occasionally there is a twist and flip inside me, a fish caught on a line, suspended above its home in the moments before being devoured.
Down by the river, everything is muted. The reeds rustle with wind but I do not hear their whistling, the birds are watchful in their trees but silent. The vivid day, far from brightening everything, seems to leech it of all colour. Achiroe still has not returned.
‘Wood decays at the shore like this,’ Ceto murmurs to me, ‘rotted and blanched by the sea.’ I grip her hand tighter and we sit in silence.
It happens a little after midday. A frenetic activity draws my eye, people are running, calling. Ceto and I stand to watch. A young man comes hurrying towards us, an attendant I think, one of Phineus’.
Phineus.
We run. I know it must be bad because he is not in his own apartments, separate from the palace on the western side of the grounds, but in my father’s. I recognize the two physicians who crouch at his bedside before my parents, and shrink away, but they are not looking at me.
Phineus lies on a pallet in the middle of my father’s antechamber. The door to the gardens is thrown wide.
‘We found him lying in the dirt.’
‘He must have walked, sleeping.’
‘His skin is ablaze, my lord.’
Phineus is breathing but it is a barely-there flutter.
His handsome face is shining, wan and grey.
They have stripped him of his robes to reduce his fever and he is wrapped in only a cloth.
I scan his stomach, his chest – but there is no sign of the arrow.
I remember that it was gold, borrowed from Apollo, he who delivers sickness and disease to men.
My knees weaken and a little cry escapes with my breath.
Heads snap to me, realizing I’m present, and my mother orders me out of the room.
I believe her concern but I see the advisors in attendance making signs against bad luck as I am ushered out, their fingers and thumbs twitching surreptitiously behind their backs.
‘You must send for my grandmother!’ I call. ‘You must send for his mother!’
I am hardly outside again before I fall to weeping. I clutch at Ceto and allow despair to wrack me. I see Phineus crumple over and over, I see him lying in a room that is not his, wrapped in cloth that is not his, in a body that is not his, for a crime that was not his.
‘It is my fault, it is my fault!’ The words heave out of me and I scrabble to the banks of the river. The world is etiolated and blurry through my tears. I wipe my face, streaking it with dirt, and splash into the water. Here, at least, is familiarity.
‘Achiroe! Achiroe! Grandmama! Achiroe!’
At last I see her, the shining dome of her head rising from our river home, and I collapse into her arms.
‘Forgive me, forgive me!’ I can say nothing else and so Ceto must explain. Achiroe stills as she listens and then is on the land and moving for the palace with strides that fast outpace mine. We run to keep up.
‘Where were you?’ I gasp through my tears. ‘Where did you go for so long?’
‘I went to speak with my father,’ she does not slow, ‘but he would not help and he would not allow me to return. He suspected danger and he would not let me near it.’ Her teeth are gritted. ‘He believes me too attached to our mortal kin.’
I am unsurprised. I have learned enough of gods. Achiroe scatters scurrying attendants and curious nobles, clearing a path that no one dares block. One of my father’s advisors tries, ‘My Lady Achiroe, the king has ordered—’ and a wind that smells of violet springs blasts him from her path.
‘I will see my son.’
She towers in the doorway of my father’s apartments. Ceto and I peer around her. My parents are calm as they face her – they had expected this.
‘Mother.’ My father sips from his cup still.
‘Achiroe.’ My mother steps forward, dipping her head in reluctant respect.
‘We have had the best physicians, the best medicine men to attend to him, but he has sickened so suddenly. They cannot find what the matter is. They have leeched him and tried many herbs and poultices but nothing seems to revive him.’
‘They will not revive him.’ She crouches beside him, her son, her youngest boy. She strokes his forehead and he stirs at her touch.
‘Ma?’
‘My Phineus. My dear, honest boy.’
My father slurps at his cup. Even now he cannot keep the twist of jealousy from his face.
‘Andromeda?’ Phineus’ voice is so thin, his gestures are so small.
I cannot go to him, I cannot hold this limp, wilting figure alongside the sturdy man of gold and clay that stood as a pillar in my childhood.
‘Andromeda?’ He says it again and I force my feet to move.
I kneel by his side. He smiles as I lay my fingers across his burning arm and guilt tears at my insides.
‘Phineus.’
‘You have her still? Your little hippo?’
My jaw is tight, held fast against the roar that is building within me and I pull her from my pocket. He smiles again. His eyes, half open, flutter closed.
‘It would have been nice.’
He is gone before the moon returns to the sky.
For a few days, I play wife to Phineus. I tend to him as I might have done in life.
I would not have resented it. I would have liked the world better if it were one where men such as Phineus might live as kings.
My guilt lives and breathes, it snarls at my sobs, dares me to grieve when this is my fault, dares me to miss him when I did not rectify our separation.
He wished to be friends, and I did not give him the chance and now I cannot.
My grandmother and I wash his body, warm violet water and cloths and natron and oils.
I have never seen a man so naked before and I am determined to honour his body, the case that kept his good soul and his honest heart, by restoring it to its appearance of vitality.
We move him to the hearth room, and it is here that we ready him for what will come next.
Outside, the business of his pyre is undertaken by those men of the court who had loved him and longed to bow to him as king.
It is uncommon for royals to be cremated and even rarer for those ashes not to be kept in gleaming urns made of gold, but it was Phineus’ request. He had told me, once, that it was unconscionable, the idea that he would be gilded in a tomb and left alone in the dark.
‘Set me alight and scatter me in the Nile, Andromeda, where I can watch our grandchildren play.’
When his body is ready, the mourners come.
The men who had respected him bow their heads.
The women who had desired him dot the lotus white of his linen with tears and I scowl at my spoiled handiwork.
My grandmother and I guard him always, wafting incense and saying prayers, and Ceto guards me, a hand at my back, keeping me upright.
She holds me close in the circle of her arms, and I weep into the dark waves of her hair at night.
She forces me to eat, though I cannot swallow.
She is a step behind me in the funeral procession, where I lead in my best jewellery, next to my grandmother.
All around us life has grown and is ready to be plucked and prove our plenty.
We burn him on the banks beside the palace.
Achiroe is animal in her sorrow and her high, keening wails are echoed on all sides by women and birds and creatures of the river.
We gather his ashes and cast them out as he wished, and I feel him leave us.
The currents carry him the length of his land and he is home, all over, home.
I do not attend the feasting that follows.
I have been so long away from public engagements and there could be no worse time for that reacquaintance.
The roar in me is rising to a climax and I sense the descent will bring a further severing.
I am dry inside, I have been too long out of the water and I have nothing left to cry.
Back in my apartments I drift off to sleep but am awoken, not long after, by voices raised in pique in the now rarely used eastern court.
‘You will not stay and toast to your son?’
‘I will not drink with you. You are a harbinger of grief and danger.’
‘You will not lay this at my door, Achiroe!’
‘We did not need an Olympian relation.’
‘Phineus sickened, men sicken all the time!’ I hear a muffled collision, between a slap and a thud; I know my mother has stamped her foot.
‘You are a fool.’
‘You are unambitious and you raised unambitious sons!’
‘You are still young, Cassiopeia. You are too young to understand why I act as I do.’ My grandmother’s voice cracks. ‘He would have been a fine king. A great king. He would have made this kingdom great.’
‘This kingdom is great because of me!’
‘You with your plans and politics—’
‘Yes. Me! Me with my plans and politics! It is I who negotiate and toil, I with my foreign, barren mortal blood! I, with my orange seeds and hippo gods!’ I stand and creep to the door, peer around its slightest crack. Ceto does not leave the bed.
‘You are foolish and arrogant.’ My grandmother is closest to me and my view is partly obscured by her back. ‘You do not yet see, you are but a child, you do not know the cost that ambition demands. Nothing is free, nothing.’
My mother draws herself up, haughty with determination. ‘I will pay any cost! I will pay with my life, if it means my child is not shackled to one as spineless as your sons.’
She has gone too far.
My grandmother crashes over her. Her reeds whip around her as though in a wind and she pins my mother to a pillar. The face of Hera watches from a frieze across its top.
‘It is not you that will pay. Though I hope you will! Oh, I hope that the Nereid says no and that you will die! I will take care of Andromeda – she will be safe! You have no idea, none at all, what kind of a creature the sea god is! I would not wish him upon my worst enemy, let alone one born of my flesh!’
My mother struggles against the power that holds her in place.
‘But it is my flesh she is born of! Mine! She is mine! You mothered your children – you let the first two kill each other, and Cepheus and Phineus paid for it in their passivity! Well, my daughter will be immortally glorious. You may squander your godhood with fear! You may let your children sicken and die. You may waste your divinity!’
My grandmother drops her. My mother crashes to the ground.
My grandmother advances, leans over her.
‘You know nothing of godhood.’ Achiroe pronounces each word clearly, each syllable ringing with that of which she speaks.
‘You know only stories and little girls’ dreams of fame.
I was once like you. I craved and wanted.
But only fools and men speak of immortal glory.
And you are no man. The gods will drink your blood and laugh at you. ’
My grandmother does not come into my room. Her reeds whip about her still, in a gale force of rage and loss and hatred. She retreats from the palace to the quiet of her river and I am glad for it. My mother rights herself. It is the first time I have seen her hands shake.
She returns to the feast. I lean against the door, the sudden quiet ringing in my ears.
‘You once asked me who I would be if I could choose.’ I do not look at Ceto as I speak. The tapestries tell me their stories and I listen, really listen, for the first time. ‘I would be someone who is trusted by her inferiors, loved by her equals and disregarded by her betters.’
‘That is wise.’
I look at her. Her face is twisted and crumpled. The blankets are a ball in her fist. ‘Ceto?’
She pulls back our sheets. Red stains the bed. I think of Persephone. I think of the silver arrow, pointing the way, the direction of feminine change. I think of pomegranate juice.
She does not tell her master right away.
She dances on the limit of the oath to stay by my side as the building within me breaks and I am furled in agony.
It is nothing like the last time, the time before I took Amphitrite’s potion.
The pain begins in the same place, but radiates outward, down my legs, across my back.
It feels like a punishment. It is years of avoidance catching up with me.
I do not know how to lie, I do not know how to be.
Night draws in but the dark offers no comfort, and I am seized by a terror that I will never know comfort again, that all old things will cease to be and I will lose all peaceful parts of myself.
Ceto suggests going for help, going for Achiroe, but I gasp a refusal, order her to stay and cling to her until my knuckles pale.
There is so much blood, far more blood than my mother prepared me for.
I am amazed there is any left in my body.
I can feel Ceto’s panic. She is not mortal and her own body does not behave this way, she is made of golden ichor and her flesh is not so mutable.
She does not know what to do. She does not pray to the gods because the gods won’t listen, so she murmurs our stories as if they are orisons, my name is a devotional on her tongue and each I love you promises relief even if it does not come.
I begin to drift away and it is blissful, though I know I am entirely too wrong for this to be sleep.
The night is in my apartments, it is in my room, it creeps through the window, blinding our watching hippos and claiming me from my bed.
Maybe I’ll die. I am hopeful, I want her to follow me into this dark.
I am miserly and the world does not deserve her if I am not there to enjoy her too.
Don’t leave me, I think, you are better at the dark than I.
I hear her say, ‘Meda.’ And then, ‘Come back to me.’