Chapter 26 Stones for the Dead
The following days blurred together like a wet mural smudged by careless fingers.
Danae and Metis fell into a steady rhythm.
They rose at dawn and lugged the hydria down to the lake to collect fresh water.
As they walked, Danae kept an eye on the sea, waiting for a ship carrying Atalanta and Telamon to appear on the horizon, her disappointment mounting with each day they did not come.
After the water vase was replenished, she and Metis would walk the island, inspecting the lizard traps dotted between the rocks, and trawl the long grass for cicadas with a fine net fashioned from what Danae suspected was Metis’ hair.
She made sure that Pegasus’ water bowl was refilled when it ran empty, and once the tasks were done, she continued her efforts to try and levitate the stick.
While Danae trained, Metis tended to Heracles, who still had not fully regained consciousness.
As time crept on, Danae harboured a secret worry that Pegasus might abandon her.
When he flew away each morning, the fear swelled in her gut, only to be dispelled when the horse returned just before nightfall.
She was troubled by the idea that he would grow tired of traversing the same splash of sky and eating nothing but dry, brittle grass.
Surely, he would wake one day and realize that the life she offered him was pitiful compared to the one provided by his old masters on Olympus.
On the fifth day she returned to the hut after another frustrating afternoon with the stick to find Metis crouched over Heracles, her hands laid upon his chest. She approached slowly, then sank down beside them, captivated by the shimmering threads seeping from Metis’ hands into Heracles’ body.
The woman opened her eyes as though withdrawing from a trance and leant back with a soft sigh.
‘Will you teach me?’
Metis flexed her fingers. ‘It requires a great deal of control to heal a living thing, especially one as complex as a human. You are not simply extending your ichor into an empty object but guiding someone else’s piece of the tapestry of life.
To influence another’s body into healing itself takes patience and diplomacy. ’ Her eyebrows arched on the last word.
Danae thought of the time she had tried to cure Heracles on Lemnos. She had hurled a clutch of her life-threads into him without any thought or direction, only to have them forcibly ejected.
‘When I’ve mastered levitation, will you show me?’
‘Once you can do as I asked on your first morning and convince a living plant to sprout a new leaf, you will have taken the first step towards learning how to heal others.’
Danae smiled. Her mind flew through possibilities.
She thought of her family back on Naxos.
She could cure the ache in her mother’s back that lingered after birthing her children, her father’s salt-cracked hands, her nephews’ scrapes from playing in the yard.
Then she imagined walking through the village and all those who had shunned her family falling to their knees, begging her to heal their ailing loved ones.
And she would grant their wishes, despite how they had treated her kin.
You would be a benevolent god.
Her focus snapped back into the room. She glanced at Metis, concerned that the voice might have somehow escaped her mind. But the woman’s eyes were closed, her attention once more focused on Heracles.
By the sixth day, Danae had almost lost hope that Atalanta and Telamon were coming and realized that, once again, she must face going on alone.
She stood beneath the feathered shade of the lone palm tree beside the lake, the stick gripped between her fists.
A moment before, she thought she’d finally cracked it.
For five heartbeats the wood had hovered in the air on a cord of her life-threads, her plea chanted down the strands.
Then as she asked it to return to her hand it fell, like it always did.
A bead of sweat trickled between her shoulder blades.
She knew why it hadn’t worked, could feel the precise moment her question tipped into fear and the ebb and flow between her and the stick became a one-sided command.
You must have faith, Metis had said.
She looked around at the dusty earth, the wind-shivered water and the rustling trees.
She held in her mind another time she had taken a leap of faith.
When she’d stood before Manto’s father, Phineus, on a faraway shore and, after months of lying about her identity, had revealed to the old seer who she truly was.
But the courage that had flooded her veins then would not be summoned.
Since the Underworld, she had taken too many steps into the unknown and been dashed on the truth that waited like jagged rocks beneath.
Gaia may have chosen her to be a Titan, but that did not mean the Mother or anyone else would come to her aid.
Creators were not always benevolent. Hades had taught her that.
You alone are enough, said the voice. You are the coming of a new dawn.
Danae bit the soft flesh of her lip so hard she broke the skin.
Blood staining her teeth, she dropped the stick and grasped a handful of the tall reeds swaying by the lake’s edge.
She gasped as their stalks snapped beneath her fingers and their life-threads surged into her, draining down from the tips of their leaves and up from their water-swollen roots.
She staggered back from the dead plants, revelling in the life coursing through her limbs. The ecstasy lasted longer than after the lizard, but still it was a pitiful drop compared to the ocean she knew she could bathe in.
A familiar surge of shame stung her throat as she looked at the dead reeds lying dull and broken next to their vibrant brethren. She glanced about the island, suddenly self-conscious. A flicker of movement caught her eye. Metis stood atop the island’s rocky hill, silhouetted against the bright sky.
Anger chased away the guilt nesting in Danae’s chest. Metis had promised to teach her, yet the woman had done nothing but instruct her to levitate a stick then left her alone to fend for herself.
The burning sun heating the bellows of her frustration, she stormed up the hillside.
Each rock that slipped beneath her feet and spike of spruce that scratched her limbs only fed her rage, and by the time she arrived at the crest of the hill, she had amassed a barrage of accusations ready to fling at Metis.
Her tongue was stilled at the sight of the woman carefully piling stones upon one another, the largest at the base, the smallest at the top. There were several more of these mounds dotted about the hillcrest.
‘What are you doing?’
Metis straightened up, the wind dragging strands of hair across her face. ‘In my village we used to lay our dead upon the earth and bury them beneath stones. These,’ she gestured to the mounds, ‘help me remember.’
Danae pointed to the new mound. ‘Is that for Prometheus?’
Metis blinked. In that moment she looked so small. A relic of an age gone by, standing still while time ravaged the earth around her.
‘Did Gaia choose him too?’
Metis nodded.
‘How long ago did you become a Titan?’
The woman gazed out across the island. You could see everything from their vantage point, the entire rusted patchwork of Delos and scattered spits of land floating in the cerulean sea beyond.
‘I no longer mark the years, but it will have been at least a thousand.’
Danae sank down onto a boulder, the wind of her anger draining from her sails. Looking at Metis felt like gazing into a warped mirror of what was to come.
‘What happened to you? Why aren’t you still guarding the Hesperides tree?’ When her question was met with yet more silence she whispered, ‘What if the Twelve find me before I’ve mastered my powers?’
Metis lowered herself down onto a nearby rock.
‘You must tell me what you know. Teach me how to fight.’
The woman ran a hand over her face. ‘I am.’
‘Levitating a stick is not going to help me defeat Zeus. I need to be able to match the Twelve’s strength –’
‘You can’t.’
Metis shifted her weight to face Danae, one leg tucked beneath her.
‘The Olympians have spent centuries hoarding life-threads and building weapons to amplify their power. That armour they wear isn’t decorative, it allows them to harbour more of the tapestry of life than a single body could possibly hold.
You will never beat them at their own game.
The only way you will win is by twinning your will with that of the Mother. ’
Danae’s stomach hollowed. She swallowed the fear thickening her throat, not daring to voice the question burning in her mind.
What if I can’t do it?
As though reading her thoughts Metis said, ‘Communing with the Mother is not like listening to the voice of your power. She doesn’t speak in words.
It is more like …’ the woman held a fist against her gut, ‘a feeling from deep in your core. A knowing of what is right, even if it is not the path you wish to take.’
Danae didn’t have the heart to say that she had often prayed in the small hours to whatever divine presence had given her powers, but there was never a primordial goddess waiting to guide her, only the ghosts she carried.
She looked across the ocean, past the turquoise shallows to the wine-dark sea beyond.
In the distance, the haze had burned off the water, and for the first time, she could see clearly the faraway island to the south of Delos.
It was crowned with a wreath of clouds, and its hills looked strangely familiar.
‘What is that land on the horizon?’
‘Naxos.’
Home.
The word thudded through her, a longing greater than her thirst for life-threads tugging at her chest. During her life on Naxos, she’d never paid much heed to the islands surrounding her own.
She had imagined them to be replicas of her home and therefore of little interest. Her thoughts had always flown further, to the mainland.
She had no idea, when Prometheus instructed her to find Delos, that he would be sending her within reach of Naxos – like Lemnos, Metis’ island was not marked on any map.
They were so close; her ma and pa, Santos, his little boys, the familiar dusty path to her hut, the sharp tang of cheese cooking on the hearth muddled with the scent of her father’s fishing nets, her mother’s honey cakes, her secret cove.
She could go to them now, envelop herself in everything she longed to return to.
She stood, her eyes stinging with salt as she scoured the land below for Pegasus. But even before the wind had stolen her tears, she knew she could not leave. Like the Titans before her, her life was no longer her own.