Goddess of Yesterday (2 page)

On the second day, the wind failed us and the crew rowed. We passed many islands. From a distance, each looked like my own, but as we drew close, the island always turned out to be larger and greener.

When nobody was looking, I opened my box. There lay my best doll on a bed of Mother's gold necklaces, and next
to her lay my stone Medusa idol. Medusa is always shown with her scream pouring out of her mouth and the snakes of her hair writhing. Medusa has the power to look upon an enemy and turn him to stone, so she is very powerful to have at your bedside. Of course I had never met an enemy. My father and mother protected me.

And now I had failed them.

On the third day, the king took me on his lap. “I have a great debt to the Lord God Apollo,” said the king, “and with your treasure, I will go to Apollo's temple at Delphi and pay what I owe.”

Apollo was an immense god, too big for our little island. “I hope the Lord Apollo refuses the treasures,” I said to the king. “They aren't yours.”

“They are now,” said Nicander, grinning. “We have caves on Siphnos, too, Anaxandra, but yours are natural and ours are dug in order to mine gold. Every year, we make an egg of solid gold, as large as a man's fist, and offer it to the gods at Delphi.”

My father had been to Delphi. The priestess there was the Mouth of God and could answer all questions. I imagined my father's gift sitting next to the great gold eggs of Siphnos. The egg is very blessed, being a perfect container of future life.

“One year,” said the king, “I thought Apollo had enough gold, so I sent him an egg of lead wrapped in gold leaf.”

I was shocked. He looked the same as any other man, but he had purposely cheated a god. I said silently to my own goddess, When we land, even though they may not know you on their island, I will honor you. You shall have real gold, not lead. I will keep the doll and the Medusa and you will have Mother's necklaces. I don't want to give Callisto a guest-gift after all.

“Apollo took his revenge,” said the king. “First, he sent plague.”

I had never seen plague. Mother said it lived best in cities. She had been born in a city and never once went back after she married Father. I thought about never going home.

“Then Apollo sent rust to infect the crops. We were hungry that winter. And then my baby son died—the fourth of my sons to die.”

Four dead sons?
I held my mind very flat so no thoughts could fly off and be heard by such a god. Plague and dead babies! I prayed to my goddess to keep me safe on an island where such a god ruled.

“Then,” said Nicander, “Apollo flooded my gold mine with seawater.”

I thought this was rather clever of Apollo. He would just keep the gold to start with and Nicander could never cheat him again.

“The oracle at Delphi said if I brought all the gold on Siphnos, it would end the god's anger. But though I brought all the gold, my fifth son died. Then the oracle told me to bring more gold.” He stared out over the waves. The sea was empty. Not a dolphin, not a gull, not a ripple. The name of his island is Siphnos—“empty.”

“To raise that, I have been visiting every chieftain who owes me allegiance. Your father, Anaxandra, is a famous sacker of cities. In song, he is compared to the crafty Odysseus and the great Achilles. Yet your lovely mother had only jewels and clothing for herself, and your father's cache of arms was hardly enough for two ships.” He grinned at the frothy waves and the rising tips of many oars. “You solved the mystery, little Anaxandra.”

On the fourth day we reached Siphnos. It was an island
as bare and bony as my own. We climbed a path so steep it bled stones. A cliff reached over us like rock fingers, hoping for an earthquake and the chance to drop on our heads.

But at the top, the land relaxed. Fields of barley were green and gold, and grapevines grew in rows as even as weaving. There were flocks of sheep so large that Nicander taught me a new number: thousand. We walked for a whole hour to reach the walls of Siphnos town. The people had painted the stones white, so the walls glared in the sun. We went in through a gate twice as tall as the king, and the walls around the gate curved, and I was amazed, for I had thought walls must be straight.

What had looked like an unbroken wall from the outside was houses on the inside, every family's house fastened to the next family's house. These formed an open square bigger than my father's entire town. In the center of the square sat a massive chunk of green marble with a hollow bowl chiseled into its center and a spout at the edge. Around the altar were the treasures wrenched from Nicander's chieftains. I had to admire a king of such force. Strength comes from the gods, and in the end, Apollo desired Nicander to be strong.

Great crowds of people filled the square to embrace their returning men and honor their king. Women pounded the bottoms of copper kettles while old men stood in stiff salute. Girls brought flowers and boys brought lambs. And then the king disappeared through another gate, Lykos went to greet his own family, and I stood alone, too short to be seen, too small to be remembered.

I clung to my box. Finally I followed in the king's footsteps and found myself in another courtyard. All the way around were ground-floor porches and all the way above
were porches in the air. Boxes of flowers hung off railings and pots of flowers stood in corners.

In the center of this second courtyard was the most beautiful and horrifying thing I had ever seen. A child had been turned to stone. He stood in water that splashed out of his hands, and around his feet tiny fish swam and lilies bloomed.

I could not breathe.

What had he done, that Medusa turned him to stone? Was this one of Nicander's dead sons?

The boy was about my age. Even his eyes had been turned to stone—blue agate that glittered in the sun.

O my goddess
, I prayed,
have pity on this little boy
.

“God's knees,” said the king's voice. “I forgot Chrysaor's daughter.” Nicander strode over. The frozen child watched us both. The king was surrounded by rich townsmen whose clothing was embroidered and pleated and whose beards and hair were oiled and braided. “This is the child who gave me the treasure,” said Nicander, and they all laughed.

I did not know how they could laugh when the dead son of their king was frozen beside them. “What happened to your little boy?” I asked.

The king looked around, puzzled.

“The boy now stone,” I said.

There was a moment of silence and again came men's laughter. The king picked me up and held me straddling his hip. “The boy in the fountain was never a real boy, Anaxandra. He was carved by a mason. He is called a statue.”

I did not believe that. The boy had been caught midstep and his bare toes curled. His limbs were smooth and round, as if his mother had just bathed him, and his hair was thick and dense.

And perhaps it was his mother who now joined us, a woman as beautiful as her stone son, with intricately braided black hair and earrings that hung to her shoulders.

“Lady Petra,” said the men, turning their faces to the ground to honor her.

She was laughing. “The little girl has never encountered a statue before?”

“Anaxandra comes from a primitive island, my dear,” said the king. He set me down and put my hand in the queen's. “She will take considerable instruction. Her value as a hostage is gone, but she will be fit company for Callisto.”

The queen and I went up a ladder, which the queen called stairs, to an air porch, which she called a balcony. Their house was indeed a palace. There were six rooms on each floor. We passed through a sleeping room for the queen alone. If five of my babies had died, I would not want to share a room with my husband either.

We entered a bathing room, its smooth cold floor painted with dolphins and blue waves. Slaves stood me in a low tub and scrubbed me, and when I was clean, the queen massaged perfumed oil all over me. “The skin of a peasant is dry and flaky,” she told me. “The skin of a young lady should gleam like sunlight on water.”

I had not known this rule.

It turned out there were many rules I had not known. When the queen oiled my feet, she was appalled to find my soles as tough as oxhide. I never wore sandals. I could run over hot sand and sharp rocks without flinching. “You will wear slippers or shoes at all times, Anaxandra. A young lady has soft feet.”

She toweled my hair so hard I bounced, and as she combed out the snarls I looked up to see a pale thin girl sitting
on a high stool, staring down at me. “Hello, Anaxandra,” she said softly. “I am Callisto. I think you are fortunate to have such tough feet. You can use your feet and I cannot use mine.”

“What happened to your feet?”

She drew up her gown. Her legs were sticks and her feet were not flat on the bottom. I did not see how she could put weight on them. Then I realized that she couldn't.

“I almost never go out. Father says you will have a score of stories to tell me about your island,” she said eagerly.

“Maybe a thousand,” I said, using my new word.

But the queen shook her head. “The feast is beginning. Come. There is much to rejoice in. The king is safely home, he has brought riches, the gods will be pleased, and no man was lost.”

I was not safely home. I was not rich. I was afraid of their gods and my family was lost.

Down the stairs, out of the palace and into the town we went, Callisto carried in a chair. I saw that I did have something to rejoice in. I was not frozen like Callisto and the boy of stone.

Through the Curved Gate was brought a creature so massive I could not believe it submitted to men. Its four great legs moved slowly and its wide dark eyes looked ahead without anger. Very large horns curved from the sides of its great white head. I was awestruck. “What is that?” I whispered to Callisto.

“It's an ox. Have you never seen one pulling the plow?”

I had hardly even seen a plow. Our fields are narrow strips of dirt terraced on sharp hills.

Behind the wondrous ox came six horses. I had never seen a real horse, only pictures on vases. Father captured
horses now and then, when he took a foreign city, but carrying horses on a ship was difficult and feeding them on a ship was worse. He never brought one home, for we had no place for a horse to run and no grain to spare. Besides, horses had weak backs, Father said, even though they looked strong. Donkeys were better.

Two of the horses pulled a real chariot, and beside the driver stood the king, splendid in purple.

Callisto sang the invocation, her voice high and warm like a wooden flute.
“Listen, daughters of thundering Zeus. Listen, sons of great gods. Dance in honor of golden-haired Apollo.”

The ox was brought to stand over the marble altar and how clearly now I saw the difference between a mere chieftain and a real king. My father made things holy with a little lamb, but a king made things holy with a beast so great and calm.

The priest lifted his double-sided ax while the people lifted their voices. Grasping the ox's horns, the men pulled its head back and with one great plunge the priest slit its throat from side to side. There was so much blood it overran the hollow and spilled out into the basin below, and when that had filled, a second basin was brought.

No wonder their fields were so green. No wonder their sheep were counted with that number thousand. When they diluted this holy blood with water and walked the fields, scattering it drop by drop, how blessed would be the soil.

One by one, we dipped our fingers in the holy blood. I raised my hands high to the goddess of my island, that she might not be omitted from this event.
“O goddess of yesterday,”
I sang.

The crowd fell silent to hear me. I was frightened, but having addressed the goddess, I had to go on. I pitched my
voice to carry across the sea.
“Hear my cry. Stay with me. Be also my goddess of tomorrow.”

A pair of swallows swooped above me. Nothing is more holy than the flight of birds, for they cross the divide, equally at home in heaven and earth. It was a good omen.

“You are strong in the magic, Anaxandra,” whispered the queen. She marked my forehead with her bloody thumb. “There,” she said, kissing each side of the print. “Your goddess who was with you yesterday will be with you tomorrow and every tomorrow to come.”

And so I feasted with the people of Siphnos, and danced among them, while the blood print crusted and dried. I wondered just how blessed I was, marked by a woman from whom the gods had taken five babies.

T
HE KING AND QUEEN
had buried the babies in the wall between his bedroom and hers. We did not do that on our island, preferring graves far removed from houses. I never quite got used to having their little sets of bones inside the wall, just beneath the plaster. For a whole year, I slept in a ball to keep my feet safe.

Every morning when I rose, I smoothed away the impression of my body from my mattress. Otherwise evil might lie down in my shape and wait for me. I opened the bedroom door carefully to allow Night and Day to trade places without tripping over me. It made Callisto laugh. “Nobody does that anymore,” she would tell me. “Not even the peasants in the hills.”