Black Ships

by Jo Graham

Genres: Historical Fiction; Epic Fantasy; Historical Fantasy

Synopsis

"Haunting and bittersweet, lush and vivid, this extraordinary story has lived with me since I first read it." -- Naomi Novik, author of His Majesty's Dragon The world is ending. One by one the mighty cities are falling, to earthquakes, to flood, to raiders on both land and sea. In a time of war and doubt, Gull is an oracle. Daughter of a slave taken from fallen Troy, chosen at the age of seven to be the voice of the Lady of the Dead, it is her destiny to counsel kings. When nine black ships appear, captained by an exiled Trojan prince, Gull must decide between the life she has been destined for and the most perilous adventure -- to join the remnant of her mother's people in their desperate flight. From the doomed bastions of the City of Pirates to the temples of Byblos, from the intrigues of the Egyptian court to the haunted caves beneath Mount Vesuvius, only Gull can guide Prince Aeneas on his quest, and only she can dare the gates of the Underworld itself to lead him to his destiny. In the last shadowed days of the Age of Bronze, one woman dreams of the world beginning anew. This is her story.

Release date: March 10, 2008

Publisher: Redhook

Print pages: 449

Sample

PYTHIA

You must know that, despite all else I am, I am of the People. My grandfather was a boatbuilder in the Lower City. He built fishing boats, my mother said, and once worked on one of the great ships that plied the coast and out to the islands. My mother was his only daughter. She was fourteen and newly betrothed when the City fell.

The soldiers took her in the front room of the house while her father’s body cooled in the street outside. When they were done with her she was brought out to where the ships were beached outside the ring of our harbor, and the Achaians drew lots for her with the other women of the City.

She fell to the lot of the Old King of Pylos and was brought across the seas before the winter storms made the trip impossible. She was ill on the vessel, but thought it was just the motion of the ship. By the time she got to Pylos it was clear that it was more than that.

King Nestor was old even then, and he had daughters of the great houses of Wilusa to spin and grind meal for him, slaves to his table and loom. He had no use for the daughter of a boatbuilder whose belly already swelled with the seed of an unknown man, so my mother was put to the work of the linen slaves, the women who tend the flax that grows along the river.

I was born there at the height of summer, when the land itself is sleeping and the Great Lady rules over the lands beneath the earth while our world bakes in the sun. I was born on the night of the first rising of Sothis, though I did not know for many years what that meant.

My mother was a boatbuilder’s daughter who had lived all her life within the sound of the sea. Now it was a morning’s walk away, and she might not go there because of her bondage. Perhaps it was homesickness, or perhaps something in the sound of my newborn mewing cries, that caused her to name me Gull, after the black-winged seabirds that had swooped and cried around the Lower City.

By the time the autumn rains came, I was large enough to be carried in a sling on my mother’s back while she worked.

I know it was not that year, but it is my first memory, the green light slanting through the trees that arched over the river, the sound of the water falling over shallow stones, the songs of the women from Wilusa and Lydia as they worked at the flax. I learned their songs as my first tongue, the tongue of the People as women speak it in exile.

There were other children among the linen slaves, though I was the oldest of the ones from Wilusa. There were Lydians older than I, whose mothers had come from far southward down the coast, and a blond Illyrian from north and west of Pylos. Her name was Kyla; she was my childhood friend, the one who paddled with me in the river while our mothers worked. At least until she was also put to work. I knew then what my life would be—the steady rhythm of beating the flax, of harvest and the life of the river. I could imagine no more. The tiny world of the river was still large enough for me.

The summer that I was four was the summer that Triotes came. He was the sister-son of the Old King, tall and blond and handsome as the summer sun. He stopped to water his horses, and talked with my mother. I thought it was odd.

A few days later he came again. I remember watching them talking, Triotes standing at his horses’ heads, ankle deep in the river. I remember thinking something was wrong. My mother was not supposed to smile.

He came often after that. And sometimes I was sent to sleep with Kyla and her mother.

My fifth summer was when my brother was born. He had soft, fair baby hair, and his eyes were the clear gray-blue of the sea. I looked at my reflection in the river, at my hair as dark as my mother’s, eyes like pools of night. And I understood something new. My brother was different.

Triotes threw him high in the air to make him laugh, showed him to his friends when they led their chariots along the road. He was barely a man himself, and he had no sons before, even by a slave. He brought my mother presents.

One night I heard them talking. He was promising that when my brother was older he would bring him to the palace at Pylos, where he would learn to carry the wine cups for princes, where he would learn to use a sword. He was the son of Triotes, and would be known as such.

Later, when he had gone, I crept in beside my mother. My brother, Aren, was at her breast. I watched him nurse for a few minutes. Then I laid down and put my head on my mother’s flat, fair stomach.

“What’s the matter, my Gull?” she said.

“I am the daughter of no man,” I said.

I do not think she had expected that. I heard her breath catch. “You are the daughter of the People,” she said firmly. “You are a daughter of Wilusa. I was born in the shadow of the Great Tower, where the Lower Harbor meets the road. I lived my whole life in the sound of the sea. Your grandfather was a boatbuilder in the Lower City. You are a daughter of Wilusa.” My mother stroked my hair with her free hand, the one that did not support Aren. “You were meant to be born there. But the gods intervened.”

“Then won’t the gods intervene again and take us back?” I asked.

My mother smiled sadly. “I don’t think the gods do things like that.”

And so I returned to the river. I was old enough to help the women with the flax in the green cool twilight along the water. And this, I knew, was where I would spend my life.

I don’t remember the accident that changed all that.

We often played along the road that paralleled the river. It was nothing more than a packed track, rutted from chariots and carts. I remember the chariot, much finer than Triotes’, the blood bay horses, the gleaming bronze. I remember staring transfixed. I remember my mother’s scream, high and shrill like a gull herself.

It was fortunate that the rains had begun and the road was muddy. The wheel passed over my right leg just above the ankle, snapping the bones cleanly, but not cutting my foot off, as I have seen happen since. The road was muddy, and the surface gave.

I remember little of that winter. I don’t remember how long I spent on the pallet in the corner where my mother had given birth to Aren. Perhaps it’s childhood distance. Perhaps it’s the essence of poppy that the oldest of the slave women gave me for the pain. I vaguely remember picking at the wrappings around my leg and being told to stop. And that is all.

I do remember the Feast of the Descent, when the Lady returns to the world beneath and greets Her beloved. The dry season was beginning, and the poppies were dying in the fields, the river running shallow and slow.

My right leg was half the thickness of my left above the ankle, and my right foot twisted, the toes turned inward and the heel out. I could stand, just. All that long spring I tried to walk again. By the height of summer I could stumble slowly, holding on to things for balance, but it was clear that I would never run or dance again.

More important, it was clear that I would never work all day in the shallows of the river.

I did not know why my mother left Aren sleeping with Kyla’s mother and took me walking away from the river, up the long dusty track in a way we had never gone. I asked her over and over where we went, but she did not answer, though she carried me part of the way when the road went steeply uphill. I was light enough for six years old.

There was a turn in the road, and we stopped to rest. My mother brought out a water bottle and we shared it. I looked down and away at the size of the world. The river was a track of green, swirled like a snake across the yellows and browns of the landscape. Behind us, the mountains rose in serrated tiers to peaks as dark and as strange as clouds.

“There,” my mother said. “Gull, do you see that?” She pointed to a silver smudge at the end of the river. “There’s so much dust in the air, it’s hard to see. That’s the sea!”

I looked. The world ended, and the silver began.

“Are there gulls there?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said. “That’s where gulls live.”

“Can we go there?” I asked.

“No,” she said.

We put the water skin away and kept climbing. It was not much farther to go.

The track ended at a clearing, the great towering cypress trees green and mysterious, tangled among rocks on the mountainside. I thought at first it was a desolate place and deserted. But there was the buzzing of flies and the smell of goat dung. I looked again and saw that there was a shed off to the side of the track and downhill, a steep path leading down to it. There was another that led upward, between the great trees. That is the one we took.

My mother walked slowly now. The loam sank beneath our feet. The air was hushed and humid.

There was a cleft before us, a cave opening twice as tall as wide, a little taller than my mother. Before it stood a polished black stone, rounded and featureless.

My mother called out a greeting, and her voice seemed very loud in the wood.

A woman appeared in the entrance. I had been expecting something frightening, but she had the red, sweaty face of a woman who has been working when it’s hot, the mended plain tunic of a servant. “What do you want?” she asked.

“To speak with Pythia,” my mother said, squaring her shoulders.

The woman seemed to size her up. “Pythia is very busy. Have you brought an offering? I see no birds or young goat.”

“I have brought my daughter,” my mother said. “Her name is Gull.”

I thought she would tell us to leave, but at that moment I heard a scraping sound just within the entrance. I suppose my eyes went wide. What stood in the doorway was not a woman.

Her hair was as black as night, piled and curled in elaborate pins made of copper. Her long robes were true black. Her face was as white as the moon, her lips black, and her eyes outlined in black as well, like a skull bleached in a field for a long time. She was beautiful and terrifying. Slowly she came toward us. One long white hand reached out and nearly touched my hair. I was frightened, but I did not move. Things would be as they must be.

“Once they brought us princesses, the daughters of kings to serve the Lady of the Dead. Now they bring us the daughters of slaves, girls who are too maimed to work. This is not an honor offering!”

My mother did not look away from her eyes. “She is my daughter, and she is all I have.”

Pythia looked at me. I saw her eyes fall on my twisted leg. Her brow furrowed, and I saw the paint on it crack in the heat. And I knew it was paint, not her own face. “They will not let you keep her and feed her if she cannot work.”

“Gull is a hard worker,” my mother said. “She is courteous and quick to please. She could serve you well.”

“This is not a large Shrine,” Pythia said. “We are not like some others, with handmaidens who have little to do all day. I need a goatherd, not a girl who cannot walk.”

“She could weave,” my mother suggested.

One taloned hand fixed beneath my chin, tilting my face up. Her eyes were as black as mine. She was an old woman. But there was something else beneath the paint.

I don’t know what she saw in my eyes. I can guess, now, these many years later. But Pythia grunted. She turned with something that was almost a shrug. “Leave her here tonight. We will test her. You can return for her tomorrow.”

I saw the tension leave my mother’s face. “I will. Gull, be good and please great Pythia.”

I embraced her, but did not cling. I understood. There was no food for slaves who could not work. My mother was trying to find another mistress for me.

There was at least food tonight. The servant, whose name was Dolcis, brought me a bowl of the same thin porridge they were eating, Pythia and Dolcis both. It was, I thought, the same porridge we ate in the slave quarters by the river, and I said as much.

The old woman looked at me sharply. “The kings used to have some respect for us. They used to bring us fat goats and fresh fish. They used to bring us the first fruits of the vine. Now we are lucky if the country people bring us apples or meal in thank offerings.”

“Why?” I asked.

“They are impious,” Pythia said. “They make their sacrifices to the gods of bulls and storms, to Athene the keen-eyed. They do not bring their gifts to the Lady of the Dead.” She took a bite of porridge. “Who have you made offering to?”

I had never properly made an offering to anyone, but I thought of the libations I had poured in water, or the thin new well-watered wine we sometimes had. “To the Lady of the Sea,” I said.

Pythia grunted. “They are sisters, the Lady of the Dead and the Lady of the Sea. Like sisters will, They quarrel, but always reconcile. It is well.”

After we had eaten, Dolcis cleared the things away. Pythia sat before me in the light of the brazier. Shadows danced on the walls of the cave.

“Are you afraid of the dark?” she asked.

“No,” I said.

“Good,” she said, and smothered the fire with ashes until only a few coals glowed. It was very dark within the cave. I had never been somewhere there was not even starlight. I heard her moving in the dark, the rustling of cloth.

“Sit here,” she said, and I felt her putting a cushion at my back. I sat up upon it. It raised me so that I sat, my legs crossed, leaning almost over the brazier. She put another cushion behind me so that I might lean back against the wall.

There was more rustling, and I smelled the acrid scent of herbs crumbled over the coals. Rosemary. Laurel. And something richer, like resin, like pine carpets beneath my feet. Something heady, like smoke.

“There,” Pythia said. “Look into the fire and tell me what you see.”

My eyes itched. It was hard to keep them open. They watered. The smoke wavered. The tiny glowing lines of coals blurred. I didn’t know what to say.

She was still talking, but I wasn’t really hearing her. I was looking at the darkness between the glowing lines. At the blackness in the heart of the fire.

“Black ships,” I said, and I hardly knew my own voice.

“Where?” Pythia said.

“Black ships,” I said. I could see them in the darkness of the coals. “Black ships and a burning city. A great city on a headland. Some of the ships are small, not much more than one sail or a few rowers. But some of them are big. Painted black. They’re coming out from land, from the burning city. But there are other ships in the way, between the black ships and the sea.”

My voice caught with the emotion of what I saw. “There are so few of them! I can see them coming, rowing hard. The one in front has seven stars on her prow, Seven Sisters, like the constellation. That’s her name. The soldiers on the other ships have archers. They’re shooting at them.”

One of the sailors was struck in the eye by an arrow. He screamed and plunged into the sea. One of the ships’ boys was hit in the leg and went down with a high, keening sound, his blood spurting across the deck.

One of the small boats was rammed and capsized.

“There are people in the water. They’re not sailors, not on the little boats. Children. Women.” I could see them struggling. The archers were shooting them in the water.

“One of the big ships is turning back. She’s turning around.” I could see the dolphin on her prow, white and red on black.

There was a girl in the water, her slim, naked body cutting through the waves like a dolphin herself. She was almost to the big ship. Now she was there. One of the rowers shipped his oar as she reached for it, stretching her arms up the shaft. She got one foot on the top of the paddle, pulled herself half out of the water. Hands reached down to haul her aboard.

“Seven Sisters has come about,” I said. “She’s bearing down on one of the ships of archers, and they’re hauling at the oars to get out of the way.”

Seven Sisters swung past, close enough that I could see the young man at her tiller, his sandy hair pulled back from his face with a leather thong, lips set in concentration, the wind kissing him.

“They have fire arrows,” I gasped. “The blockaders. They’re lighting them.”

One fell hissing into the sea. Another dropped on the foredeck of Dolphin and was quickly extinguished with a bucket of water. A young man with long black hair was hauling one of the children from the fishing boat aboard.

The rest of the fishing boats were either sunk or out to sea, sails spread to catch the land breeze carrying them away.

I heard shouted words, saw the captain of Seven Sisters waving.

A fire arrow struck the captain of Dolphin full in the chest, his beard igniting. He fell away from the tiller, his face on fire and his chest exploding. The young man with black hair swung the child into the shelter of the rowers’ rail and leaped for the tiller. Seven Sisters swung away, her course between Dolphin and the nearest blockader.

Dolphin’s sail unfurled, red dolphin painted on white. It filled with the land breeze. A moment later Seven Sisters’ spread, black stars against white. Behind them the city burned. Ahead was only open sea.

I was aware of a new sound. It was my own sobs.

Pythia lifted me up as lightly as my mother. “Enough, little one. Enough. You have seen enough and more for the first time.”

She laid me on a pallet of soft sheepskins and covered me with her own cloak. “Rest, little one. Rest.”

And I did, and dreamed no more that night. I did not doubt that I should stay here.

THE ORACLE

We were not isolated at the Shrine. Someone came every few days, usually country people with offerings and questions. They brought last year’s apples, sacks of grain, fresh-baked bread, and olives packed in their own oil. I had never thought much before about where offerings go. You bring them to the gods and then what? They are subsumed into air?

The offerings were for our maintenance, and we ate what they brought with our goats’ milk and the strong cheese Dolcis made from it. There were five white goats on the slopes below. There was a boy from a farm down the mountain who came and tended them. He was twice my age, and did not talk to me, thinking it rather beneath his dignity.

Sometimes nobles would come, in procession with their chariots and fine horses, bronze lances polished to reflect the sun. They would bring salted fish in great jars, amphorae of red wine, and once that summer ten lengths of fine linen, dyed as black as night. I fingered the cloth, wondering if it was flax that I had harvested with my mother and the women of Wilusa.

“Here, let that alone,” one of the servants snapped, seeing my small fingers handling his master’s gift.

Pythia snorted, “Oh, that is just our Linnea, fascinated with the fine cloth.”

Linnea was what she called me, and it stuck, Linen-Girl, the girl from the river of flax. They did not call me Gull in my own tongue, as my mother did.

Often that first summer my mother came up the mountain, but less frequently as the rains began and her work was greater. Also, Aren was bigger, and he had to be watched constantly as he began to walk so that he would not stumble away and drown in the shallows of the river.

When the rains came so did a chariot from the king’s own house, to carry Pythia to the rites that marked the Great Lady’s return, the weeklong celebrations of the Thesmophoria, the Feast of the Return. She went alone, and did not bring me with her. She said I had not yet learned enough to serve her without shaming her. This should have stung, but it did not. I knew I was not fit to serve before people. I was still clumsy and awkward.

She took me the next year. I had just turned eight, and had grown until I needed all new robes, black, without borders, just turned under in a simple seam. Pythia fussed over it while Dolcis sewed, and I knew that I would be taken with her to the Mysteries.

The robe was long and almost hid my foot.

“Bind it up with a cord,” Pythia said, “or the child will not be able to walk.”

Dolcis took a fine black cord and bound it around my waist, pulling the fabric loose above it so that it hung in graceful pleats. “There. It must be long for her to grow yet. She’s got a lot of growing to do.”

“I think not,” Pythia said. “She will always be small. She will never have my height.”

I had not thought of Pythia as tall. But I supposed her taller than my mother, and said so.

“Ah,” said Pythia, “it’s the blood of the old shore people, those who were here before my fathers came with horses and bronze. Little and dark, like the islanders. People of the sea, not people of the chariot.” She lifted up my long hair, thick and heavy. “You will not need the wig when it is your turn. I’ve always had it. My hair was as red as Dolcis’ face when I was a girl. The wig is heavy and it itches. But you’ve fine thick hair, as black as a raven’s wing. You’ll not need it,” she said with satisfaction.

“My turn for what?” I stammered.

She turned her blue eyes on me. I don’t know why I had thought they were black at our first meeting. “When you are Pythia after I am gone.”

“Me? Pythia?”

Pythia touched the side of my face lightly, curled one strand of black hair around her finger. “Do you think we live forever, child? Since before time began there have been the Shrines, some greater, some lesser. And at each there has been Pythia, She Through Whom the Lady of the Dead Speaks. She is always Pythia, though Pythia may age and die. She is the vessel for the Lady, to speak with her mouth and use her hands. For how else may the Lady of the Dead speak clearly to the living, or act above the earth? When I am gone, you will be Pythia.”

“But Dolcis...”

She shrugged. “Dolcis does not have the sight. The Lady marked you as Her own so that you might be brought here where you belong, to serve Her rather than to be a slave all your days.”

“Am I not a slave now?” I asked.

“No more so than we are all Her slaves,” Pythia said.

“But...” I began.

“Even kings must bow to Death,” Pythia said. “Even they, in their fine chariots with their arms so bright must go down into the shadowed lands and stand before Her throne, where She sits with Her Lord, sovereign of the shades. The young warriors with their dogs and bows will go before Her, and She will show them mercy or not, depending on Her will. And Her husband will answer Her pleas for clemency, should She make them, as He did in the case of the kitharist. You remember that?”

I nodded, for I had not forgotten the story of Orpheus, who went to plead with the Lady of the Dead for his bride.

“She has chosen you,” Pythia said. “She has chosen you as Her voice and Her hands. You will be dedicated at the Feast of the Return, the Thesmophoria, as is proper. And from that time forward you cannot do as the living do. You cannot shed blood, or watch it shed. You cannot cut flesh with a knife, or wear the colors of the sun. You belong to the Lady, and to the shades beneath.”

“But Dolcis kills pigeons,” I said. “And she butchered the goat that died.”

“Dolcis is not Pythia, nor will be,” she said. “These restrictions are for you, not for Dolcis. You will follow them from your eighth year, as I have.”

I said what I wondered without thinking. “Does that mean I shall never have a husband or children?”

Pythia’s face tightened. “You belong to the Lady, and belonging to Her you cannot belong to any man. For Her vessel to be a man’s possession would be the gravest blasphemy. Kings have broken that law before, and even now we see the workings of the curse they called down upon their houses.”

Dolcis looked up, startled. I thought she was surprised that Pythia had spoken so plainly, but I did not know of what she spoke. King Nestor had committed no blasphemy that I knew of, and all was well in the palace of Pylos.

Pythia continued. “You will never be a wife, and you will never know a home besides Her Shrine. That is not to say that you cannot know a man, for the Lady is not virgin the year round, but you can never be his wife.”

“And children?” I wondered, for this was not so strange to me. Not one of the linen slaves had a husband, though there were a handful of children.

“Any daughters of yours are daughters to the Shrine, or may marry if it is clear that Her hand is not on them. Sons may not sleep beneath Her roof after the third year of their birth.”

“What then?” I asked.

“They go to their fathers,” she snapped and turned away. “Go on, Linnea. I have much to do.”

I dreamed that night that a fair-haired boy like my brother lay at Pythia’s breast, that he rode away behind a tall man with bronze-colored hair, leaning over the back of the chariot, crying and reaching for her. I did not tell her of this, though usually I told Pythia all of my dreams.

Instead it was I who stood beside her in the back of the chariot, steadying her on the curves of the road, leaning against the driver’s corded leg. I had not ridden in one before, and it was strange to see the world from so high up.

In later years I have seen many great cities, and I can say that it was not one of them, but Pylos seemed a great city to me at the time. In a chariot, it was only an hour’s ride from the Shrine, built about a natural harbor where the flax river met the sea. The buildings were of several stories, in the old style of the islands, with tapered columns painted red and black. The palace was beside the sea, and there was no wall, save a ceremonial one that kept livestock from wandering into the courtyard. There were temples and a handsome open one with a broad reflecting pool for the Lady of the Sea. It was there that we stopped.

The priestesses who served Her temple greeted us with wine and delicate honey cakes, brought a stool for my mistress, and sat with her under linen stretched against the afternoon sun. One of them was my mother’s age, but had the look of Pythia about her, blue eyes and sharp nose, red hair fading to terra-cotta. Her daughter? I wondered. I ate my honey cake and considered until she called her aunt.

They talked until the evening came, and I learned much from their words that I had not known before. Pythia was the half sister of King Nestor himself, by a younger wife. She had been dedicated with all ceremony when she was eight, in days when men were more pious and kings gave their daughters to the gods. Cythera, for that was her name, was the daughter of Pythia’s sister, who was likewise given to the Lady of the Sea.

I licked the last of the honey off my fingers and watched the mosaics on the floor seem to move, the octopus tentacles shivering like a living thing against painted waves. Like waves moving over the floor. Or shivering in a fire.

“Fire,” I whispered. “They will come.”

I heard Cythera’s startled voice, the clatter as she dropped her cup.

“Peace,” Pythia said. “Sometimes it comes on her this way, the hand of the Lady.” She knelt beside me, not disturbing my field of vision. “Linnea, what do you see?”

“Black ships,” I said. “Fire.” Her hand was on my arm, but I hardly felt it. My voice sounded older—stronger and deeper. “I have traveled before, from the islands and the lands that lie beneath the waves. I will not stay here, for darkness is upon the land and the blood of the young doe cries out against the hands of her father, slain to raise the wind!”

I fell forward off the stool, slamming against the cool mosaic.

Pythia raised me, Cythera at her side.

“I’m sorry, mistress,” I said. “I sat too long and fell asleep.”

“She’s bleeding,” Cythera said.

I looked stupidly at my hand, where blood welled from a long cut.

“She has cut her hand on a shard of your cup,” Pythia said. “Come, Linnea. I will bind that for you and you may go to your pallet in the room there. You are tired from the journey, and the young need more sleep than the old.”

I laid down in an alcove off the courtyard, watching the first stars appearing in the autumn sky. Sothis rode proudly in the heavens.

“How did she know?” Cythera asked. “There is little enough said about the sacrifice of poor Iphigenia. Or of the curse her death has called down upon her family, one slain after another. Will that wrath pursue us all?”

“Death waits for us all,” Pythia said. “Sometimes as a hunter, sometimes as a mother. We are in Her hands.”

I HAD NO PART in the Thesmophoria that year, except to stand and watch, and to help Pythia prepare for her part. I was tremendously proud that I wore Pythia’s black linen bag about my waist, with its brushes of fine horsehair and small silver mirror, twin alabaster pots filled with paint of black and white. Sometimes, in the space between parts of the rite, she must reapply the paint where it had smudged.

I suppose I thought less of the solemn nature of the rites than of the crowd, of being in a city with people I did not know. I shared honey cakes made with almond flour with two of the acolytes of the Lady of the Sea, watched the great procession, and even went into the palace itself when the Old King opened his doors to welcome the Lady. I followed after with the other children, singing the “Anados Kores.”

“She rises in beauty. She delights us. Golden maiden! Golden one!” We followed the procession through the wide doors and into the courtyard, where the great round hearth was surrounded by people, the bright warriors multiplied by the ones painted on the walls. Above, the oculus opened to the sky, mirroring the hearth below.

I could not see the king, as I was short and there were many taller people in front of me, but I heard his voice, and it seemed aged but firm. There was another voice after, a clear tenor, which I assumed to belong to his son, Idenes. “Now is the time of joy,” he said. “Let us all eat, and share in Panegia’s joy!”

Slaves brought forth great platters of meats, of olives and fish roasted above sweet woods, of the verdant herbs of spring, the sharp young bulbs of onions roasted with rosemary. Like the rest of the children, I stuffed myself.

Later, last year’s wine flowed freely and not so well watered as I was used to. I wandered out to find the privy.

Behind the palace were the great storehouses, with their storage bins of clay half as tall as a man, sunk into the ground to keep fresh the peas and grain. I asked a woman for the way to the privy, and she answered me in the tongue of Wilusa.

I stopped. “Mother?” I asked, but it was not her.

“No, little one,” she said. I did not know her face, but her hair was light brown and her eyes were blue. Her tunic was the rough one of a slave, and her hands were reddened from the work of the kitchen. I felt the sweetened cakes like a weight in my stomach. “It is that way,” she said, and directed me.

Afterward I did not return to the celebration, but walked the other way, the way I had not gone before.

Here the laughter was louder, but a child clad in black mingles with the shadows. The houses along the harbor were lit with lamps, and shadows moved against them, dancing and coupling in the night. It was not the beauty of the Lady they praised, but of Her daughters.

I slid into the shadow of a shed and then looked around.

The moon was rising over the sea, which spread in little ripples, kissing the shore with waves that came only to my knees, smooth as the surface of a mirror.

I walked into the sea. The sand felt good beneath my feet, and the waters splashed nearly to my waist, sweeping against my knees. The moon made a path across the water.

Something filled in my heart, something for which I did not have words. “Great Lady,” I whispered, but did not know what to ask. I knew only that something was answered, service given and accepted.

“I will go out from the dance,” I said. “I will stand apart. None shall praise my beauty and call me beloved.”

Nor would they, in any event, an ugly dark girl with a twisted foot.

“I will walk in the dark places. I will tend the dead.” I felt the wind stir my hair like a caress, like a mother’s hand.

I went back to the temple and slept soundly on my pallet that night.

The next day I was dedicated, as is proper. I remember very little about it—the ceremony is short, and something of an anticlimax after the great festivals. But Pythia nodded, and seemed satisfied that it was properly done.

AFTER THAT I began my training in earnest. I had to learn all the rites by heart, all the parts, for there is no part of them that is written down. When I asked why not, Pythia looked appalled.

“The language of the islands is for tallies of grain and measures of oil! It is not for the sacred words! If these things were written, then any person might learn them, fitted or not fitted!”

“May I learn then, the writing of the tallies?” I asked.

“You have no need for such things,” Pythia said. “They may be useful for clerks and for those who record what measures are due, but if you train your mind you will remember all you need to know. You do not need such laziness!”

And so I learned instead how to remember. Reciting became a pleasure to me, to make the words as beautiful as they might be. The stories themselves were a pleasure to me and beginning a new one was a treat.

I learned how the paints are made, the rendering of fat and its mixing with olive oil, with charcoal and chalk. I learned how the incense that smokes on the brazier is made, and how its most precious ingredients are the resins that come from over the. . .