‘Do you spend every morning inside, inlessons?’ Her eyes are closed, relishing the play of warmth on her eyelids, but Ican hear the way she twists the last word, as though she does not think very highly of my intellect.
‘Yes. I suppose you don’t take lessons, do you? I bet you can’t even read.’
‘I learned at the feet of the Lord of the Sea. I had lessons aplenty.’
‘You probably spend your days drowning men and sinking ships.’
Her eyes flash open and she grins at me. Her teeth snap, the incisors the sharpest of any I’ve seen. It is menacing and I jump backwards, despite myself. She laughs softly and the sound snakes over my skin. I shudder and curse myself.
‘Why would I drown men? It would be a terrible waste of fresh meat.’
I cannot tell if she is joking. My face scrunches in disgust. ‘So you’re a scavenger as well as a savage and a serpent. I’ll have to get rid of you when I’m your queen. I can’t have attendants with such awful taste and such poor manners.’
‘You don’t look like you’ve tasted much of men,little queen.’ She turns my epithet into something saccharine and mocking. ‘I’d wager they’ve tried to take a bite out ofyou, though.’
I flinch. ‘I am the princess,’ I say with a conviction I do not feel, ‘I am favoured by the gods. No one touches me.’
She is unimpressed, probes again. ‘And what do you do after lessons? Retreat behind your palace walls once more?’
‘I do whatever I like. Swim or fish with my grandmother or spend time with my mother.’
She nods as though she suspected as much. ‘And that is whatever you like?’
I think of walking about the grounds with Phineus,stretching our legs, long, languid, as though whatever we shared could be endlessly extended. ‘Sometimes I pick fruit and flowers.’
‘Howsmallyou are!’ She says it with a laugh and that laugh makes me want to scream. I want to rage, I want to throw something or hit her. I am not prone to violent temper, but I would do it if I wasn’t so sure that this would only make her laugh harder.
‘I cannot be much younger than you!’
‘That is not what I meant by small.’
I can feel myself coming undone. She is joyfully pulling at my threads, creating a kind of new internal chaos, and I storm away, towards the Nile, towards safety. She follows me, of course, and I realize that this, this is how it will be now. There will be no more minutes of silent, solitary pause in the orange grove with my mother, never again will it just be Achiroe and I, splashing our feet in the waters of our home. I will only be alone when I am sleeping.Shewill be with me always, and when she is not, when I am finally granted a reprieve, I will be pulled below the surface ofherwaters, I shall sink intoherhome and be a wife tohermaster.
I do not care that she is watching, that she may laugh. I run for my grandmother. I find her where I always do, sitting waiting for me on the banks. I fling myself into her lap; I cry and cry and cry.
And Ceto – Ceto is there.
7
Aethiopia
Time passes, I do not bleed, and Ceto remains. The moon waxes and wanes along with my relief and anxiety; the protracted judgement lingering over my head. Each night I say a silent thanks to Artemis, watching me from my wall, for her hesitation in bringing the transition.
My body, though, continues to change. I feel it ripening, detaching, becoming something else. My buzzing, striving self is still in there, somewhere. At sixteen, womanhood grows like a fig around me – soft, fleshy, sweet. The men who serve my father eye me hungrily. They do not touch me, but I see their imaginings on their faces.
The dry heat of summer dampens, absorbing the river’s moisture, alleviated only by the slightly cooler nights of autumn. We do not grow closer, Ceto and I; she is a snarling spectre still. My fear of her wanes as my temper rises. I resent the honesty of her scorn, the piercing clarity as she sneers at my life. I have regressed to growing pains; the palace is my skin, the sandstone columns and granite pillars my obdurate bones. My muscles are made of my mother still, stretching to her will and anything left of me, anything living between body and self, is stifled to silenceby lessons and decorum andeyes, always theeyes, weighing and judging and expecting.
When I visit my grandmother, Ceto slips beneath the water and vanishes, lurking, no doubt watching, but mercifully out of sight. I sink into the cool river besideAchiroe, grateful for the reprieve from the Nereid’s scowling face, and swim as if I might hope to outpace her. I feel her follow at a distance, the kissing currents about me aware of her, but she is easier to ignore here. My grandmother and I share songs with the water birds. They land and drift idly, a chorus of tales, new arrivals fleeing climes that will begin to grow colder. It is only here that I feel something shift in the shadow at my back, a brightness like curiosity, as though the Nereid has seen something new. I ignore her still; no doubt she has just found something more to pick and pull at.
Ceto does not like the amount of time we spend inside, pacing the corners like a caged animal. She continues to scoff and snort at my lessons but does not speak until we are out of earshot of my tutors. Her resentment is outweighed only by her deference for her master; she has been ordered not to disrupt my development. I ignore the constricting of my chest when her taunting materializes my future husband before me, the breathless terror as I remember the threat that gleamed in the silver of his limbs and the stories I have heard. The sea god must have the best. And if he must have me then I will serve Aethiopia still, bringing them prosperity and powerful allies. I will be the best. The best singer, the best dancer, the best weaver.
‘The best wife,’ murmurs Ceto in that low, devastating voice, the one she uses to injure. It is careful with the kind of nonchalance that incenses me.
‘Yes,’ I snap back. ‘Thebest. I am the best.’
‘Of course.’ She says it so smoothly, so controlled. She is playing with me before she eats me, cooking me slowly, turning me on a spit. I am aflame.
‘Yes. And? And so? You are not the best at anything, you taunt because you are jealous.’ I repeat the refrain my mother has whispered to me almost every night since Ceto’s arrival, brushing and soothing my hair while ignoring the Nereid’s sneers and pretending that her ambition has not welcomed an intruder into the privacy of our hearth room.
