Chapter 16 #2
Poseidon turns to Ceto now with an almost paternalistic expression.
He says, ‘Now, Ceto,’ as though she is his child, his pet, and her scolding and discipline is his responsibility.
‘You have your wish. Your sister will be queen. But I speak with the tongue of Horkos, he who glories in repercussions, and you broke your oath.’ He sighs, considering.
‘You will serve me still. Not as before, but unwaveringly.’ He smiles again.
Ceto gasps and stumbles, pulled from my side once more.
I am hollow, heaving great breaths, choking on my kindling mother in my throat.
‘The princess’s face is a challenge,’ the sea god continues, reaching out to stroke Amphitrite’s hair without looking at her, ‘and we cannot allow challenges. But she is abundant. And I would have the Cetus feast before her bondage.’
Slowly, so slowly, I raise my head to meet Ceto’s eyes.
I cannot feel the horror, numb as I am, but she feels it for me.
I see the awful realization in her face.
Through the haze of my grief, understanding comes with mocking clarity.
Who were we to think we might outmanoeuvre a god?
My heart slows. It is trying to distort time, it is trying to stay with her longer.
It does not wish to return to me. I will not keep it as safe, defend it as loyally as she has.
What comes next comes in fragmented shards, disparate and twisting.
Ceto is pleading, begging at her master’s feet. She has loved him and hated him, as she has loved and hated being the Cetus, and it is this that brings me back to my body; knowing that she will live forever, perpetually hating, if this is to be how the end is delivered.
‘I have spent almost six years at her side, do not bid me do this.’ The words are choked and her eyes glisten impossibly.
I have seen her kneel for no one but me, beg for no one else.
The sight of her there, in the ground beneath him, wrecks me so entirely that I wonder how death could possibly be worse.
Amphitrite dives with her dolphin beneath the surf.
She has watched it all impassively, but I have seen her wind her bright hair round and round her pale slender wrists and know that she does not wish to see any more.
Poseidon is laughing at my worm at his feet.
‘I have seen you shatter ships! You have grown soft on land. This will make you strong again.’ The sea god barks my father’s name and my father scrambles to respond, rushing to me, never meeting my eyes.
Ceto flies at us then, screaming my name, reaching for me, drawing her coral knives to cut my father’s hands from where he drags me by my arms, only to be pulled back, shying and bucking like a horse on some invisible rein.
And now I find my fight, in reaching for her I find it.
I cannot bear to see her restrained, I cannot let myself be taken from her like this.
She will never recover, never be free of it, and I cannot be the reason for her shackles.
Our fingers graze but my father is stronger than me, so much stronger than I realized, and he hauls me away, in spite of my kicking, thrashing limbs.
‘Now, now, Ceto,’ Poseidon chides. ‘You will live so long that soon six years will mean a moment. And she will be delicious.’ I do not know if Ceto hears him. She screams my name still. Meda, Meda, Meda.
Cepheus drags me down the coast to the cape. His men fetch rope to bind me with.
His priest, whom he travels with, murmurs prayers.
I do not know what for or who to. The heavens are empty, the gods are here.
I fancy I see them, three shapes silhouetted against the clifftop, eyes upon us, bearing witness but not the weight of experience, and so still full of light.
I writhe and the men hold me down. My father ties knots at my feet and wrists, arms behind my back.
He still does not meet my gaze. I will not allow this.
He will not do this blindly. He will see. I will make him.
‘And so it is to be your hand, is it, Father?’
He says nothing.
‘You used to tell me stories. You used to make us laugh while Mama did my hair.’
His face flickers but he remains silent, hands working over the knots.
‘I am worth your kingdom, but your throne is still worth more.’
Still nothing and I snarl. I will have from him what I want.
‘Phineus was twice the man you are and Cassiopeia was twice the king!’
I have him. He faces me at last.
‘I did not want any of it,’ he hisses. He smells of piss and shit and sweat and drink. ‘But you and your mother. You could not be contained.’
‘I did not want any of it either! The world wanted me and you have never protected me!’
‘I am king first and father second.’
I spit in his face. ‘You have never been my father. Achiroe will send the hippos and they will trample you to dust.’
He recoils from my venom and leaves me, prostrate on the rock.
She comes slowly, haltingly, creeping like dread.
Her dark shape is a spreading shadow beneath the surface but out here, covered by the strange darkness of this almost sea, away from the intimacy of the Nile’s banks, she seems smaller.
I cannot believe that she has splintered ships, though I once did and know she has.
I cannot believe that she will bring about my end, though she already has.
I do not beg her. It would not be fair to beg her while she begs herself.
She is fighting but she is not her own. She rears up; the sun is blocked still by the towering wall of sea, but her scales shine, despite the gloom.
She is so beautiful, and I drink in the crowned head and the fiercely snapping jaw, filling my heart with her, all of her, glad at least that my end will come while staring at her.
I will nourish her with my body. I think it giddily and feel a wild soaring joy that even here, even now, I could not be stopped from giving myself to her, that it is she who will possess me.
I watch her eyes, the familiar black, encased in orange, flick flick flick, as she rears again, bucks, thrashing against the waves.
She is wresting from herself but is no match, for there are greater forces than we.
And there, that thing between us, there it is again, grown so strong with thick shiny leaves, we watered it without realizing.
Now it sways sharply, we are drowning it, my love, we are too bright, and the damp, warm earth is yellowing and dying and is no place for small, soft worms.
She is almost upon me. Her mouth is opened and I see her sharp fangs, smell the hot death that awaits me, and I think again that, despite it all, to be swallowed by her is better than many of my alternatives.
I do not think, in this moment, that I am afraid.
The violence of the way my mother was taken from me, her fierce dignity even at her end, all of this has pushed me over an edge.
After all that has happened – and the sight of my Ceto begging in the earth – I am beyond fear.
She foams and froths, shrieking in high, howling, bestial cries, a sound I did not know she could make, and my heart, my tattered, shredded heart, is splintered again into so many pieces that it is unfathomable to me that they ever made up a whole heart at all.
But even as she pitches towards me and my muscles lock, my pulse jumping, my body feeling the blind terror that my mind cannot, I know I would give her every piece all over again, just to rest one night beside her, safe in the knowledge that she wanted me too.
She is almost upon me now and I smile through my tears.
My love is resisting with everything she has but Horkos pulls her on, inevitably on.
I will give her honesty because she is the one I do not lie to. I tell her she is magnificent because she is. I tell her I forgive her because I can see that she will never forgive herself. I tell her that I love her because I want it to be the last thing that I say.
The wings continue to beat above me, Eris and Horkos watching closely. They are loud in my ears, I feel the down gusts cooling the sweat that beads my face, closer and closer, but I do not look up because I do not want to look away from Ceto.
But she looks away from me.
It is just as in the stories, though stories are not realities. Even when they are, a whole life and many truths, the ability to wrap it all in a mouth is, necessarily, reductive.
I had once thought the speed of a quick end a mercy. But I was wrong because what could be more cruel, more callous, than something as bright and beautiful and enduring as Promethean flame being snuffed out in an instant?
And it is an instant.
It is lava banking and cooling to obsidian, which cracks immediately under the pressure of the speed at which it has solidified. It is her petrified eyes, wide and flaring and no longer locked on mine.
She looks away.
My gaze does not hold her, I do not hold her, and my muffled mind and slack grip are to blame.
My stupid, useless face that surely knows what it is to keep eyes upon it, is to blame.
It fails in the only thing it has ever been good for and the last thing Ceto sees is a reminder that our freedom must always, always come at a price.
And she is scared; that is what breaks me finally, sending me careering away from myself. That is what I will think over and over. At the end, she was scared.
She looks away from me. And the future that I had no knowledge of emerges before me.
She is stone at once.
Caught between rearing and launching, now suddenly grey and heavy, she falls and falls and falls.
Perhaps it is the fate of women to shred, rather than expand.
The top half of her body crashes into the rocky cape and shatters.
Her lower half and tail sink below the teeming surf.
Her head explodes and I am bathed in her rock and rubble.
And a man lands before me.
His tunic is dirty but his sandals are bright gold with enormous wings. He is staggeringly handsome, broad and golden haired. He stands, looking down at me, with the head of the Gorgon in his hands and the pieces of my lover at his feet.