Mestra #2
All the way from the apple tree, I had thought of what I might say: Look at the miracle that has come to us.
I am your Mestra, but changed. But when his eyes were on me, those words fled.
He looked even worse than he had that morning, so thin that at any moment his skin would tear and his bones stick through.
Cold dizziness washed over me, and I felt the man’s body melt away.
In stories, those whom the gods changed never changed back.
But the whip fell limp to my feet, and my stomach cramped with its old hollowness.
“Father,” I said. And there was my shriveled voice, as it had always been.
He was staring at me. “Since when can you do that?”
“Since today.” My throat felt like dry straw. My legs ached.
He laughed, a single sharp sound. “That must have been a shock. I wish I could have seen his face. That’s what he gets for cheating me out of three chickens. Tell me what happened.”
I told him, in my wisp of a voice.
My father slapped the table. “I knew it! I knew the other gods could not let this go on forever. She cannot just run riot. Hah!” He stood up to pace. It was the most he had moved in days, and I could see every long bone in his legs. The apple I had eaten on the road prickled in my stomach.
“Tell me what you said to the god. You asked to be changed?”
“No, I only asked for help, for your sake.”
“Can you turn back? Try.”
I did not have to try. The moment he said it, a shiver was going down my arms, like gooseflesh, and I felt myself fill with warmth. My chin itched with black hairs. I was taller too, and the tremor in my legs stopped. My father frowned.
“The god certainly picked a brute. I suppose that was the point. All right. Back to yourself.”
Wait, I wanted to say. That man isn’t a brute. But already it was done, my old thin wrists and dirty dress.
He tapped a finger on the table. “Try someone else.”
“What do you mean?”
“The strangeness of the power is significant. It’s a message from the god. Turn into someone else. A female. Any female.”
How was I going to do that? I had no idea.
But my father was waiting so I thought of our old cook, whom I had known since I was a child.
She had a narrow, freckled face and a strong back.
She’d fled after my father ate ten dinners in a row and demanded more.
It’s the vengeance of the goddess, she’d whispered to the groom. It has to be.
I felt her warm skin roll over me. I felt the apron skirt, tight around my waist, the way she liked it tied. My hands were hers, well-muscled from kneading, spattered with oil.
“Not bad,” my father said. “Do you sound like her?”
“I’m not sure,” I said. But I did.
“Good, good.” His eyes were bright, the way they used to be, before he was sick, when the storerooms were full of gold and silver.
He had been the most powerful man in Thessaly, a king descended from gods.
He held mighty feasts, and I would sit beside him and watch as lords came from all over to beg alliance and bring tribute, pouring their gifts into our treasury.
My father laughed with his advisors, as they counted it all up.
We’ll have to expand our dining hall. Next year I will invite the kings of Persia too.
He snapped his fingers. “Mestra. Stop dreaming. Another woman. Young this time.”
I thought of my cousin on my mother’s side, Arete. She was my age, with big grey eyes, and a sweet voice. We’d played together since we were babies. When my father first got sick, she’d tried to persuade me to come stay with them, but I couldn’t leave him alone.
The change was faster, barely a shiver.
“That’s too easy, you already look like her. Someone finer. The most beautiful woman you can think of.”
I thought of the Queen of Mycenae. She and her husband had attended one of those great feasts when I was a child.
She’d brought me a gift, a silver cup with vines on it.
She wore her hair bound in a gold hoop, and her dress was saffron-colored.
To my childish eyes, she had looked like the goddess of dawn.
“Turn around. The likeness is good. And the clothes change too. Take the hoop out of your hair.”
I did, and it vanished in my hands.
He clicked his tongue. “Too bad. But she’s old. Make her your age.”
I tried to imagine it, but no shiver came, and my father frowned. “You’re not trying. Change her hair. Change the dress. Add more jewels.”
But I couldn’t, no matter how I squinted and shivered.
He made a sound of exasperation. “Then try someone else. Someone pretty. One of your friends.”
I didn’t know what friends he was thinking of.
It had been two years since I’d seen any girl my age.
Even my cousin couldn’t visit me anymore, her parents wouldn’t allow it.
The only girl I could think of was my old nurse’s daughter.
She’d come a few times to help her mother, when I was small.
She’d had a loud laugh, and bright eyes.
“Not bad.” My father came close. “Does it go all the way through?”
“Through what?”
But he’d already taken my arm. He pressed his thumb into the plump flesh, and we watched it spring back.
He ran his hand up to my shoulder, then down to my waist. He hadn’t touched me since his affliction began.
His fingers seemed longer than they used to, and the knuckles stood out like the joints on spider legs.
He smiled. “It’s good, it will work. Get some sleep, we’ll start at dawn.”
“Start what?”
“Selling you,” he said. “For more, this time.”
The city was not far. When I was little we used to ride there in a golden chariot, but now of course we walked.
I went as my cousin. I’d wanted to ask if I could go as the man, so I wouldn’t feel so tired, but my father was already angry with me.
We’d been late leaving, because I had not been able to make my cousin plusher, nor her nose less snub, so as to raise her price.
“It is absurd how you persist in this dullness,” he said. “You can change into anyone you can imagine. Stop thinking of only people you know.”
But I couldn’t do it. And the understanding that I was turning into people I knew felt like a sickness in me.
It meant I knew the man, and once I knew that, I realized who he was.
After Poseidon had gone back to the sea, two fishermen had brought in a boat filled with their catch.
They stared at my swollen face and scraped skin, and after a moment one of them came over.
He gave me three fish and I had thanked him again and again.
No, no, he said. No. It’s nothing. It’s just fish. Can I take you home?
No, no, I said. No. It’s nothing.
I hurried away and gave the fish to my father. Then I went and washed the blood from my face, and changed my torn dress.
The memory made my stomach burn, and my cheeks too. It felt as though my clothes had been stripped. I did not want to know that man was someone. I wanted him only to be me.
In the city, my father left me on the steps of the temple to Poseidon. Stay here, he said. And watch for girls you can turn into.
The morning air was cool, and my cousin’s blood had always been thin.
I used to have to rub her arms after swimming, even in the sun.
I rubbed them now, and wished I had my cloak.
No women passed. He should have left me at one of the goddesses’ temples, but of course, he had swung around the square to avoid them.
Once, in the early days of his misery, I had asked him if he would ever think to ask Demeter for forgiveness.
He’d gripped my arm and dragged me close.
“I have done nothing that needs forgiveness. Do not speak of it again.”
So I hadn’t. But I still remembered it, how at first it had been a joke, about needing a larger dining hall to host the kings of Persia, but as the days passed he’d begun to press his advisors.
I want it, he said. I mean to have it. The advisors whispered amongst themselves, then shook their heads.
They had investigated the matter, but there were no trees left to build with.
They had all been cut for the last improvements.
Of course there are trees, my father told them, there are plenty down in the grove.
It was not right to call it a grove. A grove was small and sweet.
This was a great stand of dark pines, and black poplars, and ancient oaks, sacred to the goddess Demeter.
The trees were so thick you could stand below them in a storm and not get wet.
My cousin and I had gone in spring a few times, to leave garlands on the branches.
But my father had been angry and made us stop. Peasant superstition.
“Girl! Arete!” My father was snapping his fingers in front of my face. “Wake up!”
He’d been calling me. It was my cousin’s name, that’s why I hadn’t noticed. A large man stood beside him, watching me. There were bloodstains on his clothing, and I could smell raw meat. Maybe that was why my father had picked him.
“She’ll breed?” he said.
“Her mother did. Six boys.”
My mother had died bearing only me. But I was my cousin now, or whatever girl would get my father the most money.
The man grunted. “Open your mouth,” he said.
I thought he meant I should greet him. “Good morning,” I said. But he wanted to look at my teeth. He gripped my jaw, and tilted my head, to catch the light. His eyes were very small, and his nose fleshy.
It is strange to say, but I was not afraid. He seemed so dull to me. The man I was was a hundred times better than him, I thought. Except then I remembered that I did not want to be that man anymore.
He gave my father a bag of coins, and led me to his dark house. It was filled with crumbs and flies and the stench of a fouled chamber pot.
“I have to go back and work,” he said. “Clean up while I’m gone.”
He snapped his fingers, and a dog lurched up from the shadows to guard the door. The man smirked at me and left.