My mother’s gods are, of course, absent. They will find little here in the way of devotion and my father’s worship is tied too closely to his own ego; he would not erect a statue without ensuring that it reifies the might of his blood. As I approach my mother now, I can feel her disapproval reaching towards me, hands itching to tidy and mould. I hold out my basket.
‘I caught dinner!’ She does not take it. Merely turns wordlessly, walking straight-backed towards the avenue ahead of me, lined with date palms, avoiding their shadows like the plague she believes pallor to be. I run to catch up with her and we walk in silence for a time. The date palms become fig trees,their fruit bruised and full before the small hanging suns of the orange trees take their place. My mother picks a few. She inhales deeply, the sound of the scent in her nostrils somehow visceral, somehow earthy, at odds with her usually delicate gestures, the precision of her fingers as she strips dead leaves from favoured flowers. I see the way the orange takes up residence beneath her skin, eases the tension of her muscles.
‘I planted this tree.’
‘I know, Mama.’
‘All of these orange trees, I planted. I was the age that you are now.’
I don’t say anything; she knows I know this. When she left her home at sixteen, seeds were all she had taken, along with her dowry. She would have new dresses, new jewels, she was to wed a king. Her mother’s family had once been minor nobles in my father’s kingdom but she had grown up in her father’s house in Jaffa, the land of oranges. He was a merchant, an ally of the Pharaoh’s general and a proud follower of their religion. My mother had been intended as a priestess, in service to Tawaret. Perhaps this was prophetic – a devotee of the Lady of the Birth House and the Mistress of Pure Water, half-woman half-hippopotamus, betrothed to the grandson of a river god. My mother would certainly say so.
She lives in the legacy of our futures far more presently than the reality of her existence. Word was sent that Cepheus, King of Aethiopia, grandson of Nilus, wanted a wife. She was not permitted to bring anything of her old life, of the gods and goddesses she had held in her heart. The Western gods have always favoured my father’s family, despite the proximity of our kingdom to the empire where Amun-Ra is most revered. Cepheus once dined with Zeus himself, at thetable of his grandfather. Nilus was old enough to tell wonderful stories without the scheming ambition that would have made him a threat.
When my mother had arrived in Aethiopia, she said not a word to anyone and was not seen by my father until their wedding night. She has told me this story often, dragging me into my future with her, the minutes of my father’s straining, his pinching fingers at her breasts, the collapse of his body against hers, his subsequent order, ‘You have what you need. Make me a son.’
She had run out to the front of the palace, seeds sweaty in the palm of her hands, and scattered them in the bare earth that had once been a path between the fig trees and the looming figure of Oceanus. She has told me of his glare as she fell to her knees and prayed for abundance to a goddess she should no longer believe in. The oranges were ripe and sweet the day that I was born. My mother sucked on them as she suckled me herself and would hear nothing of my father’s consternation at her failure to produce a son. It became clear, not long after, that she was barren. She had been old to wed but was late to bleed and frankly so beautiful that her age had been overlooked. Any other woman might have found herself flung from her throne, but not Cassiopeia.
When she whispers to me of her old gods, I cannot picture Isis without picturing her face. Though her secret communion with Tawaret burns bright inside her, to me Cassiopeia is as inevitable as the divine mother. King makers, both.I do not need more children, I have been fruitful enough. You will bear kings and sons of kings.She has often murmured to me of the sister and wife to Osiris, who grieved him so fiercely, and whose rage was so acute at his loss that her pain itself becamea kind of magic and resurrected him. Osiris may be ruler of theDuat, the underworld, but all he possesses, he has because of Isis. My mother is similarly steely and unyielding, and she is a good queen, everyone says so. She is shrewd and charismatic, and my father is neither.
She places the oranges in my basket now and walks on, nearing Oceanus’ likeness. He glares down at her and, as usual, she glares back. Everything in our palace is vast, dwarfing, intended to humble, but humility is unnatural on my mother. She turns at the threshold, notices my attention, the familiar standoff weighing heavy on me today. I make as if to imitate her, to raise my chin at the river of the world, but she tuts.
‘Do as I say, not as I do,’ she says. ‘The appearance of modesty is a privilege, Andromeda. It is a cosmetic infinitely more appealing than kohl or blush and will keep you far safer. They say Aphrodite can be jealous of those who are beautiful and know it too well. I carry hubris so you don’t have to.’ My mother often says things that confuse me but make me feel as though I have somehow disappointed her. I look down at my hands where they clutch the basket, pick at the caking mud.
‘I have laid out your clothes for later. You are to wear your silver set with it. Come to me when you are bathed and dressed, and I will do your hair.’
My head snaps up. In our land gold is commonplace, beautiful but ordinary like the blue lilies in my hair. Silver is harder to find, prized by our family for the way that it resembles the light that plays over the river.
‘Why the silver set?’
She pats her artfully coiled and braided hair. I know thegesture. It is the one she makes when she is evading a direct answer and is displeased at being dishonest on another’s terms.
‘Because I wish it.’
She is unhappy with me, but she is not scolding. Suspicion blooms at the corner of my mind. I nod and move past her, embraced by the cool dim of the antechamber. I turn towards my apartments but she catches me first, takes the basket from my hands, plucks the lilies from my hair. She moves off in the direction of the kitchens, grinding the flowers under her jewelled sandals, smearing blue across the white marble. A servant emerges from the shadows and immediately cleans it away, leaving not a trace behind.
3
Aethiopia
My father’s palace is one of open spaces and few doors. He likes to believe in his own omniscience while insisting that his refusal to build an upper floor is out of respect for the gods.Ascension is hubris, Andromeda. We are people of the water and earth. I would not wish to encroach upon the domain of mighty Zeus.In truth, King Cepheus is simply afraid of heights.
The rooms are divided into asenetboard of courts, halls and antechambers, all connected by archways and gilded columns. My apartments overlook the river. My mother had initially protested this proximity to my grandmother, had placed me on the western side of the palace and taken the eastern side as her own. This did not last very long. My grandmother flooded my mother’s halls daily, sending fish flying through her windows where they died gasping, rotting at an unnatural speed in my mother’s bed.
My father, caught between his immovable mother and his irresistible wife, sought a compromise. My apartments would be nearest to my grandmother, but entry to the adjoining court was to be permitted by my mother only. She kept her own personal quarters but would entertain her closest friends in the eastern court, in view of my rooms. If she was absent,someone who reported to her was present. This appeased her initially, until it became clear that even her most bosom companions did not love her more than they feared Achiroe.
I take the long way back to my apartments, hoping to avoid the prying eyes of my mother’s ladies, women who helped birth me and have closely observed every inch I have grown, every awkward jutting change in my body. I pass through the northern court, which serves as a kind of entrance hall, tales of the Titanomachy painted in friezes around the columns: Zeus’ usurpation blazes in vivid shades across the ceilings. The swallowing of Metis, an Oceanid and my grandmother’s aunt, marks the divide between this court and the central court. With its hypaethral structure, the sky above is mirrored in the pool at its middle, which is filled with river water, gifted by my grandmother. The central court is devoted entirely to Metis’ daughter Athena. I still feel her gaze on me often, heavy as clouds and fixing as kinship, but when I turn to look for her, I see nothing.
‘Their words in our language, their gods in our style,’ my mother had once muttered.
‘They’re my gods too, Mama.’ I had said it gently but could not keep the slight frown from my face. ‘My kin.’
She started beside me, and I looked up at her to see her face blink and ripple. I did not have a name for her expression, but she said, ‘Yes. Of course,’ as though I was not supposed to have heard her. She spoke to me less of her own gods after that, though she had once taught me prayers to Amun-Ra and Bastet. I had learned eagerly, as I learned all things from her eagerly, drawing eyes of Horus in kohl along my legs for protection. We would giggle together, hide the adornment from my father, and I adored this shared secret-keeping. But afterthis, it was as though she remembered that I was not merely a devotee of the Western gods, but a descendant.
The connecting southern court houses my father and mother’s thrones and I pass by unnoticed in the melee. Servants carry heavy shining ewers and platters so full of figs and dates and grapes and cheese that they stagger under their weight. There are no slaves in our kingdom. Neighbouring states visit and leave with bemused expressions upon their faces, write bard’s epics of Aethiopia, a land so prosperous that free labour is simply not the done thing, so fertile that it need not trade for it has all it desires, and so verdant and rich that locals say colour was born here.
There are no men and women captured because my grandmother is displeased by war. She loathes its pollution of clean water and fertile soil. And my father is not a brave or ambitious man. He is not suited to a general’s armour, cannot be pictured astride a horse, leading troops into battle. He is an idle statesman and a poor economist and has always been contented by his slice of the world, small enough to remain wealthy.Leave the other men to their waging and enslaving, to their empires. We are Aethiopians. The bards sing of us. We have many elephants, we are rich in gold and ebony, and our men are the tallest, the most handsome, the longest lived.
My mother would remain silent when he made such declarations, his belly full of salted fish, words heavy and ripe with spiced wine, sloshing his cup to the court at large. The corner of her lip would tug and her hands would seek invisible loose strands of hair, patting them back into place.
