The Ruin of Eros

Chapter Six

I gasp, and I’m not the only one. I hear Dimitra’s voice to my side, and my father’s; even the king speaks in an angry murmur.

I shake out the nightcap as if this is some prank—as if yesterday’s shorn hair could somehow have been placed inside the cap while I was sleeping—but there’s no prank. I reach a trembling hand up to my head to verify what I already know. I rake my hair between my fingers, holding it in front of my eyes. If anything, it is brighter than before. It shines between my fingers like gold.

Cursed gold.

“It cannot be! I saw it myself! With my own eyes!”

“I cut it with my own hands!”

“Kirios Demou…” My father turns, appealing for another witness. But I see him, Kirios Demou, backing away slowly, his cold eyes on me.

“I demand to know the meaning of this.” The king’s voice is tight with anger that has not yet erupted. He won’t tolerate being made a fool of, no king would.

“An outrage!” one of the councilmen says. “What do you take us for, girl?”

My thoughts are whirling too fast, like a child’s spinning toy.

“I cut it off myself,” Dimitra says staunchly. “It must have grown back in the night. It is the gods’ will.”

“Don’t lie, girl,” a councilman growls.

“She—she’s not lying,” I murmur. In the moment’s silence that follows, my heart pounds.

“If it’s not a lie,” another of the men says, “then the girl’s a witch.”

Then even he stops speaking, because the birds in the trees have gone quiet, and something unearthly is in the air. The king, surrounded by his retinue, looks from one face to another as though they can give him answers. I lock eyes with Dimitra, who looks furious with me and also with everybody else.

“ Renounce her .”

We all turn. It’s the High Priestess speaking, and yet it is not her voice. The voice that speaks from her mouth is young, not old, and it is beautiful. It’s like a voice from in dreams; the moan of the wind and the rush of a river. Each of the men drops to their knees at the sound of it.

“ Renounce her ,” the voice says again, and I feel my heart leap in fearful agony.

“ Offer her to me, and I will show your people mercy .”

My father stares at me, wild-eyed, then prostrates himself on the ground.

“Great Aphrodite! You would not take my daughter from me? Goddess, no offense was meant!”

But the voice is silent. The water-roar slowly fades. We are alone once more. The king’s men look at each other, eyes wide.

“We must…we must seek forgiveness.” My father’s words fall over themselves. “Perhaps…perhaps some great tribute…”

“The time for tribute has passed.” It’s Kirios Demou who speaks. “The gods’ will is stone. You have heard Aphrodite’s will. Do not imagine that you have the power to change it.”

“Get up, witch.” One of the men jerks me roughly to my feet. My father’s hand goes to his sword, then so do the other soldiers’.

“Peace!” the king roars. “There will be no bloodshed here.” The color has flooded from his face and his voice is shaky. He looks toward the sky, then meets my eyes. I don’t like what I see there.

“The goddess has been merciful,” he says. “Despite great offense, she has offered us a path to atone.”

“At my daughter’s expense!”

“Hold your tongue, Kirios Andreos!”

The other men mumble amongst each other, and there is nothing gentle in the sound. A few steal glances at me.

“The gods do not ask your permission, Andreos, for what they choose to take.” The king glances my way again. “They will have their pound of flesh either way; you will not flaunt their will or mine. You have one daughter left, old man. For her sake, do not anger me or your gods further.”

A great coldness seems to have taken over my body. Offer her to me.

They mean to sacrifice me.

My father’s voice reaches me from far away.

“There must be something we can do.”

“What you can do”—Kirios Demou’s voice cuts in—“what you will do, is what the king demands.”

The king is staring up toward the temple, his eyes on its soaring columns.

“We will take her to Aphrodite’s Pillow. The offering will be made at dawn.”

*

Back home, Father bolts the front door and tells the servants to stand guard. My heart has not beat normally, I think, for hours. If I let myself think about what just happened, my mouth dries up so that I can barely swallow.

Offering.

Aphrodite’s Pillow is a place further down the mountain, almost halfway to the sea. It is a rock formation, a sort of tabletop jutting out over the water below. They say in the olden times sacrifices were offered there, back when these lands worshipped the Titans; back when they did not only slaughter bulls and sheep for the gods, but humans, too.

I close my eyes. I have retreated upstairs, leaving Father and Dimitra to argue below. How can it all have come to this, and so fast? They say the gods are merciless, and yet I never thought to suffer like this—to suffer for something I haven’t done, something that was not my fault.

How quickly Sikyon went from singing my praises to calling me a witch. But I suppose I should not be surprised. Dimitra says they called my mother a witch, too, even though she married and produced a child, did the things a woman was supposed to. Even though she wore her cloak of respectability well. She dallied with herbs and potions, I am told, and did not mix with the neighbors. Her biggest sin, though, was to marry my father when other women of Sikyon wanted him for themselves. No one objected to a soldier bedding a foreign girl when he was off at the front, but to bring her home, marry her? Witchcraft, they said.

And now they say it of me.

“Gather your jewels, Psyche.” Father appears in the doorway to my room, his face seeming to have aged years in a couple of hours. “I have told Dimitra to do the same. I will see to our other valuables. We must take as little as possible. Only what we can easily carry.”

“What are you talking about?” My voice shakes.

“Father says we are to sneak away from here in the night.” Dimitra appears behind him, her voice hard as glass. “To become ostraka of our own making . ”

“To save your sister.” Father turns to her. “Would you have it any other way?”

Dimitra turns away, but I know what’s running through her mind. Ostraka are unlucky. By many, they are considered untouchable. She will lose everything. The money from our small packs of valuables will not last long. We will become vagrants.

I don’t want this future for her. I don’t want it for my father.

I nod.

“I will pack.” But once Dimitra’s withdrawn to her room and my father’s gone back to his study, I go to find him. He’s hovering over a tray of valuables: a small icon made of gold; a signet ring of his father’s; a knife with a jewel-encrusted handle that belonged to my mother. A strange heirloom, but the only one she had, Father says. He used to take it out and show it to me sometimes, if I begged hard enough. But he never let me touch it. Too sharp for little fingers, he would say. I wonder if he thinks we need weapons, now.

“What if Kirios Demou is right?” I say. “Aphrodite has issued her demand. Aren’t we just trying to fool the gods by running away?”

Running away doesn’t work when it’s the gods who are after you. I know that much from the old stories, and Father should too. He’s the one who told us the stories.

He doesn’t meet my eyes, just stares down at the tray in front of him before finally shoveling everything into a satchel.

My father is wealthy because he is powerful; he is powerful because everyone here knows him. How would he manage, how would he ever support us, if we had to start from scratch somewhere new? Dimitra and I have never been taught a trade, we would be useless to him.

“ I will run,” I say. “I’ll leave. Tonight. But you and Dimitra can stay here, and be safe.”

“Do not ask me to give you up,” he says, and his voice has a tremor in it.

“Even for my sister’s sake?” I say. It is a cruel question, but I must make him see. He must protect her too. “Think of the life you will subject her to, if you force this on her.”

He shakes his head fast, like a swimmer ridding his ear of water. He does not want to hear me. He does not want to see.

“We will leave together,” he says. “All will be well.”

I pause.

“Father…”

No one has asked me for the truth about my hair, and what happened today at the temple. Father and Dimitra both saw it for themselves. They know there was no trick to it.

“You saw what happened at the temple,” I say. “It was not right.”

He smiles nervously, his eyes still not meeting mine.

“It’s not the time for that now. We will seek answers later.”

“Father…”

“Psyche, go .” He blinks fast, his voice tight with agitation. “Pack your things. Hide your jewels under your robes. Do as I say.”

Upstairs I do as he bids me—it does not take long—and sit before the window, waiting for the dusk to turn to darkness.

I have no explanation for what happened today, but if I’m honest, it’s not quite as out of the blue as it might seem. Certainly, this hasn’t happened before. But things—other things—have happened. Like when I was fourteen and scalded myself with boiling water, but the burn was gone by morning. Or the time I fell dismounting a carriage and felt the bone go under me. Then the next day, when I could walk easily again, everyone said it must have only been a light sprain. And why not? It was the most reasonable answer. I was healthy, I was lucky, I healed a little quicker than other children. Certainly no one spoke of miracles.

But now I wonder if instead, we should have spoken of curses.

Night falls, midnight comes and goes. Father keeps us away from the windows, and warns us to be quiet, to keep our activity from the servants’ notice. It’s an hour before dawn when we tiptoe to the door. Father has some twine and sheets of linen; he plans to wrap the hooves of our horse, Ada, to muffle them before hitching her to the carriage. He looks at the large cowhide bag Dimitra has dragged out from her cedar chest.

“We take nothing we can’t carry on foot.” He takes the bag from her and leaves it by the door. I feel Dimitra fuming silently. One more indignity; one more thing I have deprived her of.

“Ready?” In the darkness, Father looks from one of us to the other, his eyes hooded by shadows. I nod. Dimitra says nothing.

“Good. Then go silently to the stable. Dimitra, you first. Then you, Psyche. I’ll follow.”

The night is velvet, the deep darkness of the pre-dawn hours. We step out into it, but my feet are barely on the flagstones when I hear a sound.

A clearing of the throat. Polite. Male.

I look over and there they are.

Yiannis and Vasilis.