And so again, our game of promises. He paints a picture with such certainty, it is as though it has already happened, one of known comfort conjured from our shared routines, simple and small and peaceful. We will have many, many children, and will hear their laughter filling the open, spilling space of my father’s halls. He means every word he says; every wish is an honest one.
‘Just think of it, Andromeda!’ he says. ‘Just think of them playing in our river!’
I try. I try to think of it. I strain for their smiling faces, but my imagination, so vivid with my present, is a wispy thing with my future and they vanish to vapour beneath my mind’s grasp. This queen’s life is far off and foreign. I tell Phineus as much and he reassures me that I will come to feel differently when I am older and can grant myself the freedom to see it all, this land of ours.
‘You will visit the markets, the stalls, speak to the vendors. They will revere you – you will be their queen! Just think of how you will help them, of how they will refuse your coins because they so adore you!’
And I laugh at that image, we two together strolling through the market as we do our gardens, like any other man and wife. ‘Yes, and I shall hide the money under their wares, for their need is greater than mine.’
His chin does something when I say that. Quivers to softness. ‘Of course you shall.’
The cold weight that had abated while Phineus spoke returns, however, as I watch his retreating back. I fear my father’s punishment. Too often have his eyes gleamedspitefully in his brother’s direction and I spend much of the night dwelling on Cepheus’ malice. I need not have worried, however. I had forgotten the root of it all; favourites are currency in our family. And my grandmother’s wrath at hearing of my father’s inaction is so great that for six weeks, Nilus, at a word from his favoured daughter,dries the Nile.
My fifteenth summer is something akin to total anarchy. It does not take long for word to get out that guests of Cepheus attempted to molest his daughter. They angered the gods. It does not matter that these are not Hapi and Sobek, the gods that most in our region of Nubia, with Egypt to our north, believe to be guardians of our land’s commanding river; the Nile is dry and a great region is on the precipice of collapse.
The men are grievously punished. Their lands are seized by the crown. And my father’s name echoes with infamy, from the Erythraean Sea to the rolling desert dunes.
Cepheus, so beloved by the Western gods, that even the threat of harm befalling his daughter brings nations to their knees.And I, with a divine seal placed upon my virginity, find my star burning ever brighter.
But for the first time, the weight of so many eyes does not matter to me. I am cosseted away in the palace, and cosseted further still by my grandmother and Phineus. I simply note that my father is not a man who will protect me. And that Phineus is a man who will.
2
Aethiopia
The afternoon heat rushes towards the earth, but this close to the water, everything is muddy. It cakes my arms, my legs, and I relish its mess with a heady kind of desperation. I am nearly a woman, just past sixteen, and can feel such idle folly being pulled from my grasp, or perhapsIam being pulled from it, out into unknown depths. I sit on the banks in my regular seat and taste change in the water; the world has become membranous, full of so many vast moles and freckles and inconsistencies.
Today is a strange day. The currents whisper louder than usual. Many unknowable things are journeying along them and out to sea. I feel the more bodily of them pass me, eels and rays and other creatures that call both rivers and seas their home, and I find this duality more incomprehensible than the alien creatures of the deep whose images I struggle to conjure.
I flinch and remove my legs from where they paddle as something brushes my skin, some touch of the divine, and I see shimmering flickers beneath the surface. There are nymphs on the move. They do not stop to speak with my grandmother or me, likely knowing they will not be met with friendly conversation.Xeniaand kinship, however distant,grant them passage through these waters, but my grandmother will extend nothing more. They are those who eschew the binary rules of territory and belonging, and today travel as divine guests of Poseidon himself. My grandmother’s contempt is so great it is almost tangible. Eventually, having watched them a while longer, I can no longer hold back the question I am chewing.
‘Did you discover who it is?’
My grandmother’s answering hum is non-committal but I press on anyway, a touch impatient. ‘That the sea god marries?’
‘Some Nereid or other.’ Even with her eyes closed, my grandmother’s lip curls in distaste. ‘Sea nymphs. So haughty.’
Nereids, daughters of Doris and Nereus. I frown. There is a story my grandmother once told me, some old family scandal, that I try not to think of because it horrifies me. But as I have come to fixate on Athena, so too am I preoccupied by the sea, by its awful, inevitable might and I cannot turn my mind away from thoughts of what happened to Doris. She is a nymph, an Oceanid, a daughter of Oceanus, the Titan that rules over all river gods, and, a long time ago, she married Nereus, the Old Man of the Sea.
It did not strike me as terrible initially, certainly not the worst of the tales my grandmother has shared with me, for what horror is there in a nymph marrying a god? But later I would think of my grandmother describing her aunt Doris, her father’s sister, giggly and small, favouring the thin streams of mountain sources, where the water is its most clear and light. Of how most Oceanids and other Naiads – all freshwater nymphs – now scorn Doris, believing her to have betrayed her very nature. A prodigious fear had seized me.Is this what it is to love, to desire? To be cast aside by family? To be so turned from yourself?
Her sparkling beauty had been so at odds with her new husband’s straggling grey-green beard and his slow walk as he leaned on his old, weathered trident, thickly pocked by barnacles. No one could understand her choice. On their wedding day, so said my grandmother, the laughter of the gods rang from Olympus to Elysium. But whenever I think about Doris in her depthless home, giving love and receiving an eternity away from the sun, I do not find it amusing.
‘You always say they are as good as slaves.’
‘And so they are.’ My grandmother glares downstream. ‘But they think they’re so superior with the ocean as their playground. They never visit their mother’s domain.’
I resist the urge to roll my eyes. Nereids could be as much a part of our world, of bouncing pebbles and muddy banks, as their father’s depths. Their mother’s freshwater Oceanid blood would grant them welcome to all rivers and lakes, but they never come inland. The Naiads, the second generation of freshwater nymphs and granddaughters of Oceanus, make their hostility known. It is not hard to imagine my grandmother’s ire should they dare encroach:they’re so entitled, the whole ocean is not enough for them, they must salt our pools and rockeries until all is yellow and wilting.
‘This marriage will further unite Poseidon and Nereus.’
‘The sea is powerful indeed,’ is all my grandmother concedes.
‘Are you not worried, Grandmama?’
‘No.’
‘And Great-grandfather Nilus? He is not worried either?’
