Chapter 21
Tiryns
In the end, when it happened, it was not the saffron. It was not anything at all really. Night after night the queen lay there, sex raised and all else pointed down, so that his potency might flow downstream, as is the way of things. She found that, with time, it was not so painful.
She even became aware, from the faraway place that she kept herself, that it might be pleasurable.
The queen though – that meditative, passive person at her surface – she had not learned how to experience such things yet, and remained stoic and quiet.
There were times when the king made her laugh.
They were rare and he was often not in on the joke, so serious with his crown always on and his man’s voice at odds with his gambolling movements.
But it was an improvement. A lessening. It was at these times that the queen turned, as if over her shoulder, to the one buried behind her reveries, that lived in the vacant space of her nights, barren of dreams and work.
The other looked back, occasionally raised a hand in wary greeting. But did not venture forth.
The quickening came a year after they had arrived at Tiryns, not three months after the completion of the palace. The queen had suspected for some time; she had not bled and as one who was so late to bleed, she was particularly attuned to her cycles and rhythms.
She had said nothing. Had secreted away this new information like small furry forest creatures store food for the winter that she experienced for the first time. But eventually, even Perseus noticed her swelling.
‘Wife,’ he started, strained. He knew a woman’s beauty was dear to her, he would not wish to suggest that his perfect queen was guilty of overindulgence or indolence, but as he appraised her naked form, he stammered, ‘You do seem … you have eaten well lately?’
She laughed, the sound startling them both.
‘Wife? Are you well?’
‘I am very well, my lord. I believe I carry your son.’
He ran immediately to tell his mother.
Danae was overjoyed and the dowager declared three days of feasting and games to celebrate the long-awaited news.
All were invited except, of course, the queen, who was ushered away to the quiet of her apartments for her seclusion, to lie and wait.
She enjoyed this initially. It had been a while since she had known such peace and privacy.
She was free to take gentle walks about the forest, to be sung to by her ladies, to weave a little.
She had not played her harp since she had left her home, before that even, but her fingers remembered the strings and she found an old, nostalgic enjoyment there.
She did not dance, though. Indeed, she could not have, dancing was a danger to unborn children, but she had not danced since she left the banks of the Nile, except for at her wedding.
That stilted swaying in Perseus’ arms – Perseus who was as graceful as a diving eagle with a sword but was quite duck-footed when moving to music – could hardly be called dancing.
In time, though, the silence began to press at her.
It was consumptive and she let it digest her, the lightness brought about by novelty giving way to the old lethargy that found new depths; she descended further into the gloom.
She would build a tower of conviction, each brick a reason why this was a choice and a want.
Then she would smell or taste something that reminded her of a before time and she would retch violently, the tower crumbling about her.
The nights grew as she did and soon she was too large and it was too cold for her to go outside.
It was her second winter, her second time experiencing true cold, the late months far away from emergence and hydrated growth, made instead of knife-sharp frost in her lungs, puffing quills of sensation followed swiftly by the newness of numb extremities.
It was the coldest the region had seen in decades, the first snow in as many years, and the queen learned that she could appreciate the phlegmatic white at a distance, the way it turned the world to whispers.
As the mud vanished beneath her feet, however, as the trickling forest pools grew quiet and hard, she began to detach again, come apart at the place where her various selves were stitched.
She stared at her swelling stomach as though it belonged to someone else and when the baby kicked inside her she jumped, as though an intruder was at her door.
For the first time since her homeland, she began to dream.
She saw her child burst forth, tearing her stomach and twisting, a black serpent splashing in a sea of blood.
She saw a baby girl snatched from her womb and thrown by her husband over the high walls of their home.
She saw herself labouring, as if from above, only to give birth to a teeming mass that wriggled like worms but, on closer inspection, was actually rope that twisted and reached to bind her.
The best that could be said about that first labour was that it was quick.
It seemed that after so long a delay, her body was rewarding her for her patience.
When the first spasm hit, she admired the way that she could experience so many different pains, as though she had a rich palate for it.
She tried to compare them, counted each seizing agony through grit-toothed groans, mused deliriously on waves, on why pain and pleasure exist in a rise and fall, on when the fall would come.
When Danae arrived, she was not there. She hid herself away behind violet and blue and the sparkle of river and so her eyes were vacant as she toiled.
When the boy was half born, Danae pulled him from the queen’s vagina and declared him a little king.
The queen herself could only stare and pant, noises that were new tearing from her mouth.
When the dowager handed over her son, calling for the king to name him, she shrank away in terror.
Her women looked at her with worried expectation.
He was as purple and slimy as things that live beneath rocks in the sea.
Then he began screaming and she returned to herself, somewhat.
She was still unstitched, but she could hitch and tuck her fraying for now and find the placid smile that accompanied such a hasty dressing.
He was suckling at her greedily by the time his father arrived, panting, having run from the other side of the compound where he had been in meetings with his advisors about a new journey and a new city.
He was not made for the mundanity of daily rule and was growing restless once more.
His queen had been taught about such things and found meditation in the small of exponential improvement.
But this, the novelty of fatherhood, this would keep him still a while longer.
He reached for the boy at the exact moment that the baby, as if sensing he was needed, turned his head and precociously opened his eyes. The king lifted his son.
‘Perses. You are Perses.’
When the queen again felt that tight animation within her, her first thought was relief.
If she was going to do it again, it might as well be quickly.
She had come to govern her body with the same attentive pragmatism as the kingdom and she had not yet given her large, billowing chitons away.
Then the dread rushed in. To be expectant twice in one year seemed excessive, she was only just free of it, she did not know if she could do it again.
Her women consoled her. They were a careful amalgamation of the young and the old, the wise and the silly.
They’d hailed initially from Serifos, Tiryns and Argos.
Then she cast wider, sent missives to Kerma, Carthage and her mother’s home of Jaffa.
They came with gods and goddesses old and new, and while they prayed well to her husband’s family, she never bade them renounce those they held in their heart.
She learned of Tanit’s craftsmanship and Baal Hammon’s love of incense.
Their tales of Isis and Osiris, of Sobek and Hapi and Amun-Ra were sharp nostalgia, sweet as tamarind, and though she did not pray, she did remember – which is a kind of worship itself.
She had selected carefully, wary of the prickling rejection of her girlhood, but unable to stop the yearning for such companionship.
She loved women. She would not keep a court of politickers as her parents had.
Striving and ambition were, she knew, inevitable, but she sought friendship unashamedly and had, finally, felt something approaching it.
‘Worry not, my lady, the second time is far better.’
‘You are strong, madam, you endured it once, you can do so again.’
‘You have naiad blood, you need not fear!’
She sat in her apartments and tried to hearten.
Summer had fully blossomed and her women had planted all manner of bright and fragrant things in her gardens.
Her son was his father’s image, all golden curls and sturdy limbs, but had a depth to his skin, acquired from his mother, that his nurses cooed over.
At half a year, he was already toddling around on stocky little legs, having bypassed crawling entirely as the transportation of lower beings.
He would snatch at things, pull things over on to himself and take what wasn’t his.
His father crowed and laughed when such chaos ensued. ‘He knows his right, our little king!’
But the queen would gently remove the braids of her women from his chubby fingers and say No firmly, looking seriously into eyes that resembled hers. No was the Prince Perses’ first word. He uttered it loudly and deliberately when she pointed to her stomach and said, ‘New brother!’