‘Achiroe.’ My mother steps forward, dipping her head in reluctant respect. ‘We have had the best physicians, the best medicine men to attend to him, but he has sickened so suddenly. They cannot find what the matter is. They have leeched him and tried many herbs and poultices but nothing seems to revive him.’
‘They will not revive him.’ She crouches beside him, her son, her youngest boy. She strokes his forehead and he stirs at her touch.
‘Ma?’
‘My Phineus. My dear, honest boy.’
My father slurps at his cup. Even now he cannot keep the twist of jealousy from his face.
‘Andromeda?’ Phineus’ voice is so thin, his gestures are so small. I cannot go to him, I cannot hold this limp, wilting figure alongside the sturdy man of gold and clay that stood as a pillar in my childhood. ‘Andromeda?’ He says it again and I force my feet to move. I kneel by his side. He smiles as I lay my fingers across his burning arm and guilt tears at my insides.
‘Phineus.’
‘You have her still? Your little hippo?’
My jaw is tight, held fast against the roar that is building within me and I pull her from my pocket. He smiles again. His eyes, half open, flutter closed.
‘It would have been nice.’
He is gone before the moon returns to the sky.
For a few days, I play wife to Phineus. I tend to him as I might have done in life. I would not have resented it. I wouldhave liked the world better if it were one where men such as Phineus might live as kings. My guilt lives and breathes, it snarls at my sobs, dares me to grieve when this is my fault, dares me to miss him when I did not rectify our separation. He wished to be friends, and I did not give him the chance and now I cannot. My grandmother and I wash his body, warm violet water and cloths and natron and oils. I have never seen a man so naked before and I am determined to honour his body, the case that kept his good soul and his honest heart, by restoring it to its appearance of vitality. We move him to the hearth room, and it is here that we ready him for what will come next. Outside, the business of his pyre is undertaken by those men of the court who had loved him and longed to bow to him as king. It is uncommon for royals to be cremated and even rarer for those ashes not to be kept in gleaming urns made of gold, but it was Phineus’ request. He had told me, once, that it was unconscionable, the idea that he would be gilded in a tomb and left alone in the dark.
‘Set me alight and scatter me in the Nile, Andromeda, where I can watch our grandchildren play.’
When his body is ready, the mourners come. The men who had respected him bow their heads. The women who had desired him dot the lotus white of his linen with tears and I scowl at my spoiled handiwork. My grandmother and I guard him always, wafting incense and saying prayers, and Ceto guards me, a hand at my back, keeping me upright. She holds me close in the circle of her arms, and I weep into the dark waves of her hair at night. She forces me to eat, though I cannot swallow. She is a step behind me in the funeral procession, where I lead in my best jewellery, next to my grandmother. All around us life has grown and is readyto be plucked and prove our plenty. We burn him on the banks beside the palace. Achiroe is animal in her sorrow and her high, keening wails are echoed on all sides by women and birds and creatures of the river. We gather his ashes and cast them out as he wished, and I feel him leave us. The currents carry him the length of his land and he is home, all over, home.
I do not attend the feasting that follows. I have been so long away from public engagements and there could be no worse time for that reacquaintance. The roar in me is rising to a climax and I sense the descent will bring a further severing. I am dry inside, I have been too long out of the water and I have nothing left to cry. Back in my apartments I drift off to sleep but am awoken, not long after, by voices raised in pique in the now rarely used eastern court.
‘You will not stay and toast to your son?’
‘I will not drink with you. You are a harbinger of grief and danger.’
‘You will not lay this atmydoor, Achiroe!’
‘We did not need an Olympian relation.’
‘Phineus sickened, men sicken all the time!’ I hear a muffled collision, between a slap and a thud; I know my mother has stamped her foot.
‘You are a fool.’
‘You are unambitious and you raised unambitious sons!’
‘You are still young, Cassiopeia. You are too young to understand why I act as I do.’ My grandmother’s voice cracks. ‘He would have been a fine king. A great king. He would have made this kingdom great.’
‘This kingdom is great because ofme!’
‘You with your plans and politics—’
‘Yes. Me! Me with my plans and politics! It is I who negotiate and toil, I with my foreign, barren mortal blood! I, with my orange seeds and hippo gods!’ I stand and creep to the door, peer around its slightest crack. Ceto does not leave the bed.
‘You are foolish and arrogant.’ My grandmother is closest to me and my view is partly obscured by her back. ‘You do not yet see, you are but a child, you do not know the cost that ambition demands. Nothing is free, nothing.’
My mother draws herself up, haughty with determination. ‘I will pay any cost! I will pay with my life, if it means my child is not shackled to one as spineless as your sons.’
She has gone too far.
My grandmother crashes over her. Her reeds whip around her as though in a wind and she pins my mother to a pillar. The face of Hera watches from a frieze across its top.
