Goddess of Yesterday (10 page)

“Petra was distantly related to me,” said Helen. “We share the same grandmother five generations back.”

Desperation pierced my heart and spread outward into my limbs, as one poisoned by hemlock would die. I clung to my magic jar. I wet my lips.

But it was not magic that saved me. It was a real princess.

“Isn't that good news, Callisto?” cried Hermione. “You and I are cousins then. But I am so sad for you. Your dear father dead and your mother now a slave.” Hermione pointed to the maid on Helen's left, a very old woman, hair of silver, hands gnarled and trembling, cheeks wrinkled like last year's apple. One eye was white with the blindness that seals up the sight of the very old. She held her sewing up close to her good eye. She had an enormous workbasket to complete. “Aethra was once a queen,” Hermione said. “She belongs to Mother now.”

A queen. Hemming sheets instead of resting on them.

“Yes,” said Helen. She was pleased at the sight of a queen brought low. “My dear brothers Castor and Pollux brought Aethra to me.” Helen put her wool into the silver basket. “Fetch my other embroidery, Aethra. It's upstairs.”

The slave woman's stool was low and her body old and stiff. Aethra struggled to her feet. Helen watched brighteyed, as if enjoying jugglers or gymnasts. When the old queen had made it out of the room, her swollen fingers touching the wall for balance, Helen turned toward me again in her slow considering way. Hers was a remarkably still face, as if halfway between living and dead. “When Queen Petra visited, she told me of the crippled state of her daughter. She showed me the lock of her daughter's hair that she planned to set on the altar of Apollo. It was black.”

“You've just gotten Petra and Nicander mixed up with somebody else, Mother,” said Hermione.

I should have accepted Axon, I thought. I said, “And
Apollo answered her prayers, O queen, for I am no longer crippled.”

The baby boy had been set down. He toddled with the headlong dash of the very small child who cannot stop except by falling. I swung him up to kiss him, praying I could distract Helen. “Hello, Pleisthenes,” I said. A long name for a little boy, but it means “strength,” and such a virtue requires many syllables.

He beamed at me.

“My name is Callisto,” I said to the little boy. The name did not come easily to my tongue. I knew Helen knew I was lying. Because she's half god, I thought. The seeing half.

“We call him Pleis,” Hermione told me, poking a sharp finger into her brother's ribs to make him squeal with laughter. “He's just starting to talk. He can say about ten words. Pleis,” she crooned, “this is Callisto. Say ‘Calli,’ Pleis.”

The baby grabbed one of my curls and chewed on it. “Calli,” he said softly. His chubby arms tightened around my neck and he gave me a wet squashy kiss. My heart flew into his. I loved him.

“Isn't this nice?” said Menelaus in a deep domestic voice. He did not seem a warrior or king. He was just a father, glad to be home, slouched on puffy pillows, watching his children play.

Pleis' clumsy little fingers found the magic jar. “You can't have this,” I said to him. “You might put it in your mouth.”

“What is it?” said Hermione, interested.

“A magic jar. Your father the king bought it for me.”

Menelaus laughed. “It's just glass. A trinket from the bazaar. Helen, we will have Callisto as another daughter until she weds.”

“We will not,” said the queen. Her voice was bored and
final, as a mistress refusing permission to a slave. She did not bother to glance at me.

“Now, Helen,” said her husband, paying just as little attention to her as to a slave. He was half-asleep against soft pillows. Hermione curled up next to him.

The slightest expression touched Helen's smooth face. I could not read it. “I am curious, Menelaus, my husband. Why do you wish to treat this unknown girl as a daughter? This girl with red hair like your own.
Is
she your daughter, Menelaus? You who sail the wide seas for months at a time? You who could have any woman from any isle and I would not be the wiser?”

I dropped my magic jar. The vendor had been right. When it fell on the tiled floor, it split into shards. Pleis was entranced by the sharp shiny pieces and wiggled to get down.

“Now, Helen,” said Menelaus, as if she had disagreed with a dinner menu. “Of course not.” He gestured to a slave to clean up the broken glass. He yawned and closed his eyes again.

“The isle of Siphnos is out of your way, Menelaus. From Troy, you would sail to Antissa, you would cross the Aegean Sea to Euboea, and then proceed down the coast to Gythion.”

“Now, Helen. A ship doesn't control its route as easily as that. Strong wind swept us south the moment we left Troy. We weren't able to cross the Aegean Sea in the north. The winds didn't favor us until we reached Samos.” He sat up a little, speaking to his daughter instead of his wife. “On the isle of Samos, they worship the goddess Hera,” he told Hermione. “All Hera's statues are copper. Her sanctuary is
guarded by peacocks. I brought you tail feathers from the peacock. They're as tall as you are. Green and indigo and sparkling silver.”

“Oooooh, lovely,” said Hermione. “Let's get them right now.”

“I'm too tired. The slaves will bring them in the morning.”

As a summer storm rolls over the sky and fills the air with dark anger, so Helen changed from statue to woman. “And Siphnos?” she said sharply.

I had been in her palace but a few hours, and already I knew that with her husband, the daughter of a god had to raise her voice to get attention.

The room shifted uneasily.

“Now, Helen,” said Menelaus patiently. “From Samos we wove our way east. That part of the Aegean is so full of islands it's hardly even sailing, it's just paddling from one shore to another. By chance we saw a burned citadel and stopped to see. On the shore, guarding the grave she dug for Nicander, was this brave and true little princess. Naturally I brought her home with me.”

Helen twitched her gown as a stalking cat flicks its tail. The great piece of wool she was embroidering fell open on the floor. I was awestruck. From her needle had spilled wild birds and cascading roses, glittering suns and trailing vines, arching lilies and proud stags. I yearned for her to be pleased with me. I wanted to sit by her, to study how she created such beauty, to hand her the wool of her choice and cut the threads with my own knife.

But Helen whirled on me. “How did it happen, girl, that you alone survived such a brutal attack? A king died, yet you
lived? An entire town died, yet you escaped? Did you walk away from your destiny? Were you meant to die?”

But Menelaus had not been listening. “Helen, my dear, sing for me, won't you? I have missed your voice.”

“Yes, Mother, sing!” cried Hermione. “I want Callisto to hear you. Callisto,” she told me, “you have never heard a voice like my mother's.”

Hermione was correct. Helen's voice rang low and ominous like distant thunder. She flicked a torrent of notes off a golden lyre while long angry syllables poured from her throat.

I had expected a typical ladies' lament. Let me love the cry of the lyre; let me soothe with my lullaby; that sort of thing.

When Helen had finished the song, she folded her eyes down, as the eyes of a lion will lower when it has eaten its kill and is sated. She seemed to be within that long ago circle of suitors, reveling in their desire for her. I knew she
remembered every aching glance, every heaving chest and reaching hand.

“That was lovely, dear,” said the king sleepily. “It's nice to be home. Although actually they swore for my sake, as you will recall. Since I am the husband you chose.”

Helen's eyes opened very wide. She regarded Menelaus as a lion regards prey.

T
HE CELEBRATION WELCOMING
Menelaus lasted for days. But grateful as the people were to Menelaus, it was Helen they loved.

How the multitudes hoped for the privilege of her smile, the sound of her voice, the light touch of her hand in praise. She glided among her people like a swan on the Evrotas River. Her shining hair was pulled up into a cup of beaten gold, and below the gold hung one very thick braid, woven with gold threads. Her earrings were puffy gold biscuits and her necklace a gold filigree.

Her face stayed still. You could read no prophecy, understand no mystery, looking at that smooth facade. But neither could you take your eyes away.

People said there had been a contest once among goddesses to see who was the most beautiful. People said goddesses came in second. Helen was first.

I believed it.

I stayed clear of Helen, having remembered only three generations of Callisto's genealogy. Since I did end up sleeping in Hermione's room, I was afraid Helen would be all too aware of me. But Helen turned out to be aware only of herself. Every day, it took the entire morning for her maids to prepare her hair and complexion, adjust her gown and
jewelry, paint her toenails and shadow her eyes. Helen kept her apartments sweet smelling, anointing the pillars with scented oils, rubbing mint against the plaster walls and lavender over her robes. The air around Helen was rich and dusty.

Hermione's room was large and four maids slept on her floor.

But the two women who had helped me on the beach at Siphnos were sold at Helen's instruction. Whatever slave woman was not busy had to fit me in. Once it was Aethra, the old crumpled queen.

I made up names for the rest of the generations. If Helen insisted I had them wrong, I would look confused and bow to her superior knowledge.

It was very hot even after the sun went down, so we slept on Hermione's high porch, hoping for a breeze from the mountains. I had lived on the tops of cliffs, but never at the bottom. I found the sight of those mountains so stirring, so profound. I could more readily imagine Helen sired by a jagged black peak than by a swan.

There were fifty-six rooms on each floor of the palace. I doubt the island of my birth had fifty-six huts. I knew now that Chrysaor's house had been three rooms on a rock; the palace of Nicander merely a pleasant house on a hill.

Wherever I turned at Amyklai were long stairs, long shadows, and bright frescoes on walls.

The royal ladies used a peculiar room, which was on a lower floor. Hermione and Aethra demonstrated several times before I was willing to use the seat.

On my birth island, we used the cliff. We had our favorite spots to sit, my brothers and I, and down our manure would drop, splashing into the sea with a satisfying plop. The peasants went in the straw as did their donkeys, sheep and goats.
Now and then they would throw the old straw into a field and bring in new. At Siphnos, I learned to use pots, which the slave women emptied in the morning and washed in the sea. But in the palace of Amyklai, a clay tunnel ran from a fountain into a tiled room and you sat on a chair while the water in the tunnel carried everything away to a distant pit.

Aethiolus and Maraphius did not simply have manservants; they had tutors whose purpose was instruction, and with these tutors, they had to repeat not only their genealogies back ten generations, but the lineage of all kings and all heroes. Then they had to learn strategies, battles, treaties, and wars.

Every day Hermione wore an amber necklace, a treasure only a princess of great wealth can enjoy. Each bead was a slightly different shade of yellow and inside each bead was frozen a wasp or bee, so Hermione was hung with yellow stinging insects.

I loathed the necklace, but Hermione's nurse, Bia, said it was magic. Hermione said only that her father had brought it when she was very little and put it around her neck himself, so every time she touched it, she thought of him.

A wasp in amber did not describe Menelaus.

It described Helen.

A few days after my arrival, just before sunset, Helen and her women and Hermione walked to the great temple of Apollo. “Here we are, Callisto!” called Hermione, although I was hoping to escape notice. “We'll wait for you.”

I dreaded being with Helen and kept my eyes down. When I caught up Helen said, “Girl. Whose gown are you wearing?”

Everyone else said “my princess” or “Callisto.” Helen
addressed me as a slave. I wondered how long before everybody followed Helen's example.

“The gown is an old one of yours, my queen,” said Aethra. “I thought it fitting for a princess.”

“It
is
fitting for a princess,” said Helen, “so when we return to the palace, take it off that girl.”

“Now, Mother,” said Hermione. “Father says to be kind to Callisto.”

“How like him,” said Helen. “Always being kind. Is this a king? A king should stain the world with blood. Bring honor to his name and treasure to his house! A king should live for his spear.”

Helen strode on ahead. She was no swan today.