Frozen and staring, I simply look at him. I do not move when she draws for a second time, one of her own now, bright silver in the night, aimed at my stomach. I do not move as it flies towards me, I do not duck or try to avoid its flight. She is not inevitable but this does not foreclose the existence of inevitable things; I have learned this the hard way. The arrow does not hurt when it buries itself in my lower abdomen, but it winds me and I slump beside Phineus in the dry, dry earth.
They stand above me.
Aphrodite says, ‘It is as it must be.’
Artemis whispers, ‘I am sorry.’
14
Aethiopia
I do not remember how I got back to bed but I wake beside Ceto in the morning. The night is as a dream and I almost do not tell her of it. But she is literate in the lines of my brow. I say the words quietly, beneath our sheets, like the way I used to cry my heartache and secrets into my bed for no one to keep. She runs her hand over where the arrow buried itself in my flesh. There is no mark there. We do not know what to make of it and so we begin our day as usual. But we are only playing at being ourselves. We eat the food the attendants bring in small, delicate bites; we lack our usual appetites because our stomachs are leaden with waiting.
Occasionally there is a twist and flip inside me, a fish caught on a line, suspended above its home in the moments before being devoured.
Down by the river, everything is muted. The reeds rustle with wind but I do not hear their whistling, the birds are watchful in their trees but silent. The vivid day, far from brightening everything, seems to leech it of all colour. Achiroe still has not returned.
‘Wood decays at the shore like this,’ Ceto murmurs to me,‘rotted and blanched by the sea.’ I grip her hand tighter and we sit in silence.
It happens a little after midday. A frenetic activity draws my eye, people are running, calling. Ceto and I stand to watch. A young man comes hurrying towards us, an attendant I think, one of Phineus’.
Phineus.
We run. I know it must be bad because he is not in his own apartments, separate from the palace on the western side of the grounds, but in my father’s. I recognize the two physicians who crouch at his bedside before my parents, and shrink away, but they are not looking at me.
Phineus lies on a pallet in the middle of my father’s antechamber. The door to the gardens is thrown wide.
‘We found him lying in the dirt.’
‘He must have walked, sleeping.’
‘His skin is ablaze, my lord.’
Phineus is breathing but it is a barely-there flutter. His handsome face is shining, wan and grey. They have stripped him of his robes to reduce his fever and he is wrapped in only a cloth. I scan his stomach, his chest – but there is no sign of the arrow. I remember that it was gold, borrowed from Apollo, he who delivers sickness and disease to men. My knees weaken and a little cry escapes with my breath. Heads snap to me, realizing I’m present, and my mother orders me out of the room. I believe her concern but I see the advisors in attendance making signs against bad luck as I am ushered out, their fingers and thumbs twitching surreptitiously behind their backs.
‘You must send for my grandmother!’ I call. ‘You must send for his mother!’
I am hardly outside again before I fall to weeping. I clutch at Ceto and allow despair to wrack me. I see Phineus crumple over and over, I see him lying in a room that is not his, wrapped in cloth that is not his, in a body that is not his, for a crime that was not his.
‘It is my fault, it is my fault!’ The words heave out of me and I scrabble to the banks of the river. The world is etiolated and blurry through my tears. I wipe my face, streaking it with dirt, and splash into the water. Here, at least, is familiarity.
‘Achiroe! Achiroe! Grandmama! Achiroe!’
At last I see her, the shining dome of her head rising from our river home, and I collapse into her arms.
‘Forgive me, forgive me!’ I can say nothing else and so Ceto must explain. Achiroe stills as she listens and then is on the land and moving for the palace with strides that fast outpace mine. We run to keep up.
‘Where were you?’ I gasp through my tears. ‘Where did you go for so long?’
‘I went to speak with my father,’ she does not slow, ‘but he would not help and he would not allow me to return. He suspected danger and he would not let me near it.’ Her teeth are gritted. ‘He believes me too attached to our mortal kin.’
I am unsurprised. I have learned enough of gods. Achiroe scatters scurrying attendants and curious nobles, clearing a path that no one dares block. One of my father’s advisors tries, ‘My Lady Achiroe, the king has ordered—’ and a wind that smells of violet springs blasts him from her path.
‘I will see my son.’
She towers in the doorway of my father’s apartments. Ceto and I peer around her. My parents are calm as they face her – they had expected this.
‘Mother.’ My father sips from his cup still.
