Snakehead (14 page)

“What about your father?”

“Kephus?” She almost laughed. “Daddy’s very sorry this had to happen. But needs must, if the priests want a princess. He has plenty of other children.”

I’ll kill him, I thought. I’ll smash his teeth through the back of his skull.

But it’s easy enough to say these things, think these things, when you’re big and strong, and you’ve never done anything worse than knock down a lout or two.

“Do you believe in the Gods?” I asked abruptly.

I could see her clear, dark profile; a frown gathering between her level brows; the curve of her lashes, shadowing her cheek. “I believe they are not what we think they are. That there are veils on veils, between us and them …”

“I don’t mean do you believe they exist.” Suddenly I was shaking. I couldn’t stop. “I meant do you believe in the way they tell us to behave, Zeus and the rest, the way my mother taught me. Never mind what they do themselves?”

“What is it? What’s the matter?”

“I
do
believe,” I said. “I never thought about it before, but now I
know
. If I kill an innocent person, the Furies will rise from hell and pursue me, and tear my soul to shreds.”

I had heard Polydectes speak his lines. Visions, strange dreams: shadows I could see and other people couldn’t …
I couldn’t run away from all that now. I knew the other world was real. More real than earth or stone.

“Everything my father told me has come true.
It’s real
, Andromeda. I’m supposed to go and kill the Medusa, a beautiful woman who offended the Supernaturals and got turned into a monster. D’you know how she offended? I didn’t know, but I’ve found out. The Yacht Club kids know all about it. Her
crime
was that a God raped her. The way my father raped my mother.”

“Oh, Perseus …”

“She never did me any harm, but I’m to track her down and kill her, this wretched woman in her misery, because the Supernaturals are playing some game. My father thinks he can make me, but I can’t do it. I won’t do it.”

Andromeda tried to calm me. She stood up and held my head against her breast, imprisoning my clenched fists. She stroked my hair and kissed me. “Perseus, Perseus, my hero, my dearest, my love …” I freed myself so that I could see the light in her eyes. But the way she was looking at me twisted like a knife. How could she look at me like that?

“It’s
all right,”
she said, like someone soothing a hysterical child. “You’re not going to kill the Medusa. It’s not murder, it’s just an impossible task. You’re going off on a quest to get killed, for some reason of your father’s that we don’t understand. And I am going back to Haifa,
because I must. We are both dead, you and I. We are ghosts.”

She smiled at me sadly, gently, full of wise, hopeless love.

“You don’t understand me at all!” I shouted, furious. I pulled my hands away, left her there and went storming off down the hillside.

I
ended up at the gates of the Enclosure scratched to bits, dust and thorns all over my party clothes. A spray of morning glory flowers, fluted horns of lilac, blue and violet, nodded from the fence beside me, newly opened to the sun. The gates weren’t barred; they rarely are. I went inside, just because it looked quiet in there. I couldn’t see any sisters around. They must have been working in the herb and vegetable gardens, or in the hospital. The Town Meeting benches had been stored away again. I walked about on the beaten earth, trying not to think about Andromeda. I couldn’t bear her attitude, all that shining love and noble resignation. I wanted her to run for her life, and take me with her.

I looked at the old wooden door to the bathing place, which always seemed like a door into the center of the earth. You had to stoop to get inside; I’d have to bend
double, now I was grown. Once, there’d been a hot spring in the caves, with healing powers. The water wasn’t hot anymore; the flow of all our underground water had changed since the Great Disaster. It was still sacred. People were brought to bathe if they were very ill, or mad. They came when they had something important to do, like buying property, getting married, confessing a crime, or before a child was born.

We could bathe; we could bring our dreams to be interpreted. Every other Great Mother ritual was totally secret. Maybe there
weren’t
any rituals, I thought. Maybe that was what you found out when you became a nun. The big secret, new sister dear, is that there isn’t one. All we do is tend our gardens, and look after the sick and poor. I thought of what Andromeda had said,
There are veils on veils…
. Great Mother herself was at the back of the nuns’ smoky alcove, on a plinth of dark red stone with veins of black that was supposed to have been brought here from Fira long ago. She knelt on her heels, her arms folded under her small breasts. She was carved from a kind of stone the color of oatmeal, polished very smooth; she was only about two hands high. She was older than the plinth, maybe by a thousand years, but Great Mother’s statues always showed her as a young girl, hardly more than a child.

Once, her features would have been painted, and the painting renewed at ritual times. There was nobody
qualified to do that now. Holy Mother was never going to let Popo get his hands on her. But I could feel her watching me, although all I could see was a jaunty, cheerful nose in a smooth shield of a face with a pointed chin.

What should I do? I thought. It wasn’t a prayer, and the cheerful little girl didn’t answer it. But I thought I’d kneel for a moment with her….

“Perseus! Good heavens, boy,
what
have you been doing to yourself?”

I nearly jumped out of my skin. It was Holy Mother. She’d crept up behind me, the silent way she can, and was standing there leaning on her cane, looking disgusted.

“Uh, nothing. I ran down the hillside, I don’t know why.”

“Huh. You got drunk at that party, obviously. Have you come to bathe? You’d better, before your mother sees the state of you.”

I had not thought of it, but she was right. I had come to bathe. I nodded. “Well, come on, then.”

I followed her, bending double, into the bathing place, then stripped and oiled myself with the holy oil while she lit some tiny lamps, pointing out where I’d missed a bit, and grumbling on Koukla’s behalf about the state of my best clothes. I knelt, humbly naked, in the worn old bathtub, the remains of red paint with a black design barely visible in the gloom. The old lady opened the holy-water tap, took her
personal bronze scraper, thin and fine as a leaf, and went to work. She had no respect. She might as well have been washing a dog, a dirty overgrown puppy, the way she pushed me around. But it was soothing, somehow, although she made me yelp. I felt like a little boy being bathed by my mother. I felt I’d be
seriously
clean after this, and my mind would be miraculously clear.

The cold douche was so cold it made my eyes water.

“There you are. Out you get, rub yourself down. I’ll fetch you a clean tunic, and don’t worry about the customary donation.”

“Thank you.”

“I’ll put it on Dicty’s temple tithe. Item: scrubbing one enormous child who can’t see a plain path when it’s set down in front of him.”

“Sorry.”

Holy Mother wasn’t very old, no older than the boss, and that’s hardly middle-aged in the islands. We say we’re like our olive trees, at our best between seventy and ninety. But she’d been born with a case of curved spine, which our people consider a sign of a vocation to holy orders. With her slow walk and her cane, and the long gray veil swathing her, she seemed ancient.

I had a feeling she worked on it. All proper Holy Mothers ought to be bent and crabby, and senior to everyone.

“Holy Mother, what happened when the Princess Andromeda came here?”

“None of your business. As long as it’s not immoral,
foreigners may use their own forms of worship here. What
happened
is between the young woman and her God.”

She shuffled off, muttering about my disgraceful curiosity, and returned with an armful of old clothes. I wanted to ask her, please, what should I do? Should I obey my Supernatural father, take off on a quest and commit murder? Commit the murder for my own reasons?
For Andromeda?
Should I stay on Serifos, kill a tyrant, unleash the destruction of war and break my
real
father’s heart? Or should I run away from the whole mess? Take a berth on the next ship out and never look back?

These seemed to be my miserable options, and she was the holiest person I knew. But I didn’t manage to get started in the secret dark of the bathing chamber. When we were out in the sun again, I wearing a too-short, poor-box tunic the poor had declined through good taste, I knew it would be useless. I wasn’t going to get any help in here. Great Mother had gone off somewhere, and left her pets in charge.

But I tried.

“Holy Mother, is it ever right to commit murder?”

“Of course not. What are you? Four years old?” She looked at me sharply.
“Have
you killed someone unfairly? Did things turn nasty up there? Oh,
Perseus
. You’re going to cost your poor family a fortune in hooliganism fines. You’ll have to say it was the heat of the moment; you’ll probably get away with that. Claim that you’re truly sorry and agree on a price with the family, that’s all.”

I gave up.

“What do you think of the black metal, Holy Mother? Is it a bad thing?”

The old lady sniffed, and led the way to the gates. “It’s fine for farm machinery,” she said. “And common weapons, I
suppose
. Absolutely useless for ritual purposes. Put it in a bone-dry cave, that stuff rots faster than human flesh.”

So much for old-time holiness.

I walked into the hills, because anywhere in town I’d run into friends and neighbors buzzing with the news of the Medusa Head Challenge. At first I walked because I couldn’t stand to go home. I couldn’t face Dicty or my mother, and I didn’t ever want to see Andromeda again. If we were
dead
, what was the point? We should part now.

After a while I just walked, lost in hopeless plotting.

Andromeda would never break the vow she had made in the Enclosure. I
could not
stop her from sacrificing herself…. I knew how it would be done. She hadn’t told me, but I’d got it out of Dicty. He thought the description could be relied on: Taki’s agent was extremely trustworthy. Princess Andromeda would be chained to a sacred rock just offshore, and left there for the monster, or the tidal wave, which would devour her and subside with no further damage. If the priests were to be believed.

I’d asked him how long it was supposed to take.

The boss had shaken his head. “A matter of hours, I believe. There are big seas on that coast at the end of summer, without anything supernatural involved.”

I saw myself rescuing her from that rock. I’d get to Haifa, be out there with a boat. I’d row up when the priests had left, cut the chains and snatch her away before she drowned.

No use—she’d hate me and she’d be right.
She was god-touched
. Whatever that meant, it meant something real. More real than those conniving priests could imagine. Die in her place? No use—that would be an insult too. The duty was
hers
. If I wanted to save her, I had to deal with the God.

Somehow, in that short span of time when she was on the rock, I had to make it so that her people didn’t need the sacrifice.

When Great Zeus had ordered me to accept the Medusa Head Challenge, and told me that Godhead itself was no protection against the Medusa’s power, an idea had leapt at me, almost the moment I heard those words. I’d been brooding on it ever since.

How would it sound if I told her?

I’m going to kill an innocent woman to save your life, Andromeda.
No! No!

Find the Gorgons’ lair, spot the mortal one, chop off her head …

No. Stop that
.

I can’t do it.

I
won’t do it
. I won’t kill an innocent victim of their games.

How do you tell which is the mortal one? What kind of blade do you use?

I woke out of my walking daze in uncleared forest. I didn’t know what time it was; I couldn’t see the sun. The sky was a blank strip of blue, so intense it shaded to violet. The black shadow of the trees on either side confused my eyes. I didn’t know where I was…. Of course I knew where I was. I must know! Serifos is a small island. I could walk across the “trackless forest” of our highest peaks in an hour or so. But the path under my feet looked strange.

My shoulders prickled. I looked behind and saw nothing move, but I knew I was in danger.

There was light ahead. I made for it with relief, and came out of the trees into a high, stony place. Black slopes of ilex and pine fell into hazy brown distance; the shining sea was all around. The Turning Islands, my Kyklades, were spread in every direction, an island everywhere you looked, haloed in silver mist, floating between sky and ocean. The path wound between big red and rusty boulders. There were two people standing in my way, in a narrow place where there was no room to get by. The light was dazzling. I couldn’t make out the figures clearly, though I was within a few paces of them. I was afraid, and that made me angry.