CHAPTER NINE
IWATCH THE BOAT UNTIL it disappears, remaining seated long after I last glimpse its sails.
I never understood such descriptors: broken hearts and tragedy that fells others in its wake.
But this betrayal stings so sharply I feel it everywhere, like my ribs are cracking, my chest caving open, leaving everything inside raw … exposed.
‘You are mine,’ he’d declared as he broke away from trailing his lips down my neck. ‘You will always be mine.’
He’d murmured declarations with every kiss, compliments with every touch, covered my body in lies and then pushed them inside me.
And I wish I could make that pain real, wish that vulnerability could become reality because I want nothing more than to rip my skin off, long peeling strips to tear with my teeth.
To replace that affection with savagery, because that would at least make sense.
Why, why, why?
The day burns sudden and hot – and though I never met my sun-god grandfather it feels like he’s trying to push some sense into me. My hurt does not so much fade but becomes secondary to all those far more urgent things: shelter, water, food.
Hopefully finding a semblance of civilization. In the best case, there’s a temple somewhere near here and I can claim I’m a priestess on a pilgrimage, seeking refuge and a new station.
The worst-case scenarios involve dying of exposure or being attacked by a wild beast, or my father’s ships racing in pursuit and finding me here. So I start walking, tracing the shoreline in the hope I can find a river that I can follow back to a town.
And, with nothing else to distract me, the roiling agony of my thoughts resumes. The outrage, I could move past. That Theseus is a bastard isn’t all that surprising. I’m hurt, sure, but it’s increasingly marginal against the growing frustration of allowing myself to be so reprehensibly stupid.
Churning through the memories, I find cracks.
The spaces where he wanted the story of me more than the real thing.
Where he countered my tragic tales with the exact sort of promises that might entice me – a court of love, a gentle father.
The clear lies, even from the start. Brave and stupid stupid stupid.
But I trusted it because I wanted it so badly – every promise, everything I wanted to hear. Gods, he knew that – I was so obvious! Grief-stricken and isolated, and he’d pushed it to his full advantage, crafting a world where everything I wanted was within reach, but only through him.
And so I fucking slept with him – traded my one apparent value because I mistook the fragile net he’d woven for true safety. And Zeus above, it was in a cave! After quite a lot of wine! It was not exactly worth holding out for.
Why leave me? Why here? Why not push me back into my father’s arms in Crete if this was his plan? I can see now the very obvious escape in his vow: I swear on the River Styx, we will be wed the same day we arrive in Athens.
Well, I’m not reaching Athens.
Perhaps he took me aboard solely because he could ruin me further than by simply leaving me in Crete. What bigger offence to your enemy than taking his daughter’s virginity and not even marrying her after?
I kick against an encroaching wave. What a foolish notion – as though even our bodies cannot exist without somehow being about men, our value marked by their touch. Well, I don’t exactly feel different, Theseus, so maybe your cock’s not as powerful as you thought.
Alright, so perhaps I’m not pushing past the outrage.
In fact, I’m so busy seething I realize I’ve missed actual signs here – campfires along the beach. Old and long burned out, not left by the Athenians last night. I stop at one, finding a sharp-edged rock within its midst.
The sort of thing used to scrape and prepare fur pelts.
I turn to the forest looming above me. The incline steepens, trees running up into the valley between two steep cliff sides.
If there were people here, they would not be by the sea where pirates could raid and plunder them. They’d be up in the hills with towns built to blend into the rockfaces.
The heat has sweat pooling in the small of my back and dripping down my thighs. My mouth aches with dryness. And I’d also quite like to wash last night off me. I need water.
So I pick up that sharpened rock and, steeling myself, I step into the forest.
The sound of the ocean vanishes behind me.
‘Now would be a really convenient time for a ray of sunlight to illuminate a path,’ I murmur, just in case my grandfather is watching.
But I can hardly spot the sun through the trees.
After a few minutes, I stumble upon a thicket of berries, and the thorny bushes trail up a hill. Maybe they’ve been cultivated. If not, at least I won’t starve.
I reach for a handful, tart blackberries that are hard and under-ripe. I trip over something – an arrowhead driven into the dirt – and land next to a small basket-like shrub. In its leaves, I spot clusters of grapes. I reach for them hungrily and they are plump and fresh and burst across my tongue.
They’re so delicious I suck the seeds as I walk, savouring every last drop.
But if I thought the sun was bad, it is nothing to the feeling of it beginning to cool. Of time running out and darkness descending as I still find nowhere to shelter.
All my worst-case imaginings of fleeing my home featured begging for food on the streets of a distant city, scrubbing laundry for coin or hauling cargo for merchants.
They all involved people and food and civilization – the sorts of places ships dock, the crowds it might be easy to vanish into.
I did not imagine this sort of survival.
Wait – survival? The arrowheads, the pelts and campfires. If there is no one here, those signs might have been left by Artemis and her hunters. If there is no permanent population on this island, then who else would flit in for a hunt and then vanish again?
Like I have summoned it, I break into a clearing.
The trees give way to rolling vineyards which rise beyond a ring of huts. Thirteen of them. Circular bound-wood walls and flat stone roofs, thick heavy doors facing inwards like a court. And in their centre, a well.
I race towards it, not caring who might be around.
I yank so desperately on the ties I fear the bucket might come loose and then it is in my hands, and I am pouring cold, clear water down my throat. There must be some underground spring for all this vegetation, something not dependent on rain or a river or …
I start sputtering on the water and fear I may have downed it too quickly. So I draw away and take in the huts surrounding me.
A few have windows – small high openings to let light in – though there’s no sign of movement within. There are no footprints in the dirt, no noise carrying through.
But they do not appear entirely abandoned either – the hinges well worn, the roofs patched.
Olympus above, how to play this? I’d been so focused on finding people I hadn’t truly considered what to say when I did. Could the priestess ruse work? I could say my boat got into trouble in last night’s storm and I woke up on the shore?
With nothing to lose, I try the first door. Then the next. And the next.
No one.
I have to break the handles off the doors to get them open, smashing them with a big heavy rock – scraping my fingers against the rough wood with every attempt.
They aren’t homes at all – they’re storerooms. I go through them, one by one.
Amphorae filled with fermenting grapes, some already distilled to perfect wine.
Weapons – or hunting tools at the very least. Serrated knives and fishing nets – though some of those have torn.
There’s even a loom in one, with piles of wool to spin thread from.
There are cups, instruments, linen sheets.
It must be Artemis. No other god travels in a pack like she does – and these are clearly intended for a group to come and need them at any time.
I ransack what I know of her, and any sacred islands she might have.
Delos would certainly be populated. Leros, maybe?
Although we would have had to have sailed considerably off course …
Wait. I race back to that first hut. Wine. Wine!
Isn’t that a new invention? It has only just found the courts of Crete but here it is, so that means … someone was here! And not that long ago either!
I slam the lid of the amphora shut before my tears can taint it.
I have shelter and water and proof that someone has been here, and potentially they might be again soon. I might survive this.
So I make myself a bed from the sheets, preparing for an early start to repair those nets and try to catch something.
I can do this – survive first. Then find a way off the island.
I tell myself it will get easier, but in truth each day is a little harder than the last.
Whenever I think I have it figured out and I could scrounge together some life here, something goes wrong.
For every laid net, foraged berry, repaired tool or stockpiled supply there are rodents that eat what I have managed to store, insects that rot the rest, holes I can’t patch.
I am so immensely grateful that Daedalus taught us skills of some use – how to start a fire, lay traps and use half the tools I find in the huts, but it doesn’t make up for a lifetime of being tended to in a palace.
I don’t even know what it is I don’t know until it comes to hurt me.
There is the day I venture further into the forest, delighting in finding a lake brimming with fish I can catch with my own bare hands.
But hours later I am doubled over, vomiting so violently I choke, and I don’t know if it’s the lake water or the fish themselves and I am practically crawling back to the huts, writhing in agony until three suns have passed.
No one wipes my brow or fetches medicine or empties the damn bowl so the whole place smells ill and acidic, and then just when I’m over the worst of it my monthly bleeding begins, and then I am doubled over again, screeching in agony without willow bark to numb the pain or servants to bring hot towels for me to clutch against my stomach.
I do not know what I’m fighting for because surely it’s not this.
For a week afterwards I am weak and shaky, surviving on easily foraged berries and water from the large amphorae I’d emptied of wine so I did not have to haul the bucket up and down so often.
A week or so more – how can I possibly track it?
– I’m starting to feel once more like this could be sustainable.
I’ve finally figured out how to smoke meat so that it lasts a few more days without rotting, have even pulled salt from the ocean to help.
But then a storm comes in the night, not only turning the entire world around me to a muddy swamp, but washing away the lines and snares I’d laid so there is no meat anyway, not for a while longer.
I suppose one day I don’t drink enough, or my haphazard diet gets to me, or it all just suddenly overwhelms me, how hard and miserable it is, and I crawl back into the hut even though the sun is still high. I can’t do it, not today. I’d rather starve. Rather waste away than live like this.
How long has it been now? A handful of weeks?
What’s Theseus doing right now?
Someone would have passed by now if they were going to – so just how far off course were we knocked by that storm?
I spend most of the next morning unable to move from my bed too – unsure whether it’s exhaustion or something deeper, a mental weariness.
But even so: I can’t stop, I think, even as my body lies limp. He doesn’t get to win.
I manage to drag myself up in the afternoon, determining to gather enough food that I might survive the next few days – because he doesn’t get to win. I haul two baskets of berries and grapes back – because he doesn’t get to win.
I begin hanging broken nets as curtains in the hope they might keep insects out better than they caught fish – because he doesn’t get to –
The door screeches open behind me.
My heart leaps. A person? A mirage? A goddess? I turn so quickly I wrap myself up in the nets I’d just been hanging.
‘You aren’t Artemis,’ I blurt.
The sun is a dim setting glow behind the figure in the doorway. It renders him radiant – though from the shining copper curls, verdant eyes and slow-gliding smile, he might be capable of that himself.
‘No,’ he says, and there’s something wild in his gaze as that grin sets in full, carnage in his unabashed delight. ‘Though I’m told the resemblance is uncanny.’