The Ruin of Eros

Chapter Thirteen

I’m on my bed, eyes shut tight, but the hot tears I was waiting for don’t come. Now that I’m alone, in the privacy of this strange bedroom, I can’t cry. My body has forgotten how.

What do Father and Dimitra think; do they think me dead? Does anyone know the truth of what happened to me that night?

Even I don’t know the truth .

I stare up at the window, now showing a blue sky and a calm sea again.

Lies, lies, lies. I sit up in bed, take off one of my silk slippers and hurl it at the picture.

“Leave me alone !”

To my surprise, the window goes black. Did it obey me, or did I somehow break it?

I turn away and collapse once more on the bed. My whole being smarts with betrayal—but who is it who has betrayed me? My town, my family, or myself? Was I the fool, agreeing to this devil-bargain? Or just a woman with no choice left to make?

I don’t know which answer is worse.

Hours pass, and when a knock sounds at the door, I ignore it.

“Go away,” I say when it comes again.

But it persists, crisp and insistent.

Finally I go to the door and fling it open. It’s Aletheia. She stands a few feet back, gazing her impassive gaze at me. I had thought to feel more sympathy for her, knowing what I now know of her past, but all I can see is the stony dislike in her eyes. I’ve done nothing, and yet she hates me. Is it to be my fault, that I’m a prisoner of this place?

She takes another step back, and I see the dining table is laid again—it must be lunch hour. My stomach does something at the sight of the food, but all I feel is a bitter knot where hunger ought to be.

I shake my head.

“No.” I make to close the door again, but she reaches out and stops its path. She’s stronger than her old body looks. She nods her head toward the table and the message is clear: Sit. Eat.

I scowl at her. “I said, I don’t want any.”

She says nothing, only walks to the table and waits, her eyes fixed on me.

“You needn’t pretend you don’t understand me,” I snap. Now that I know her silence is intended merely to snub me, it’s driving me to the edge. She may hate mortals, but she is part-mortal. She ought not to treat me as though I am less than a beetle.

But now my eyes can’t help straying to the table, stacked with persimmons and pomegranates, dates and figs; cheeses and yogurts and sweet curd and all manner of confections baked in honey. There are foods there I haven’t yet learned to name, foods no one in the Hellenic lands has seen. A surge of hunger roars through me.

“I don’t want it, damn you!”

A pang of guilt shoots through me for swearing at her, but the look on her face when I say it—the way her scorn only deepens—makes me push the guilt away, and want to do worse.

Something is bubbling through me, a kind of rage I haven’t felt in a very long time. It pushes me forward to where Aletheia stands smirking, her arms folded in a sardonic stance. The words burst out of me before I know they’re there.

“I’m a person , damn you! And I don’t want to be here—do you understand? I don’t want to be here. ”

And I push the table as hard as I can.

It doesn’t tip, but it rocks—and piled as high as it is, rocking is enough. One tureen crashes into another; platters slide toward the floor, the weight of them tugging the table-covering with them, and the goblets follow. Dishes careen to the floor and shatter. Glass smashes. Fruit splatters ripe against the marble tile, or rolls across the floor; yoghurt and honey pool and drip.

I stare at it all, feeling dazed. Did I really do this? I feel the tingling under my skin turn electric, then fizzle. Once I’m no longer angry, I’m ashamed.

Aletheia is down on her hands and knees, slowly picking things up from the ground. She still doesn’t speak, doesn’t reproach me, doesn’t show any emotion at all. Just a methodical crouching and lifting as she bends her old knees down to the ground, straightens, and replaces a piece of broken earthenware on the table, and then another.

I can’t bear the sight of it—her old body, her age-spotted hands, bending and stooping.

“Leave it!” The words choke themselves out of me. “Aletheia, please.”

But she doesn’t leave it. She doesn’t look at me.

“Please, Aletheia. I’ll do it.”

She stoops again. She has taken a rag from her pocket, and is swabbing at the floor. Shame drives into me like a knife.

“I said leave it !” It comes out as a scream, and we both stop dead. I have shocked her as much as I’ve shocked myself. The shriek of my voice still rings in my ears.

She drops the cloth and disappears through the door without turning back.

My limbs are shaking. I stand for a while, panting. The silence of the room seems to have a life of its own—as though it is watching me. Eventually I turn and go back to my bedroom, and lie on my bed in the tangle of sheets.

What’s happening to me? I should never have spoken that way to an old woman, friend or enemy. Shame washes over me. Is this who I will become, if I remain here—someone cruel, violent? I turn in the unmade bed; it seems every part of me aches.

I don’t know how long I’ve been lying there when a voice— his voice—sounds on the other side of the door.

“Psyche—are you listening?” He doesn’t wait for me to answer. “I have made accommodations for your sullen ways. But it will not continue. You’ll treat Aletheia with respect, and my home the same way.”

He stops. He’s waiting for me to retort, but I say nothing.

“It’s dinner-time now,” he says. “I won’t ask you to join me, though I think you must be hungry.” He pauses again, and after a while I hear him take a step back from the door.

“Starve yourself to death if you like,” he says finally. “But I don’t think you have the will for it, mortal.”

His footsteps retreat and I roll onto my back, blinking up at the ceiling.

Courage, Psyche .

I can cling to one thing: I will not let this place change me. I will not lose sight of who I am.

For the rest of the night I push down the hunger pangs when they scrabble for purchase in my belly. I think of baby birds, their mouths stretched open, pushing each other aside, demanding to be fed. I can hear him out there, the scrape of his chair as he sits down, the sound of a flagon of wine pouring into a glass. I can smell everything out there, the honey-roast smell of browned meat; the sharp scent of lemons and of mint; the waft of bread warm from the oven.

After a little longer of this, I’m light headed. I can’t think of anything else but my body.

He’s right, I am weak.

But not that weak.

I curl into a ball on my bed, and wait for sleep.

*

When I wake, the window in my room shows a view of a field of emmer wheat under the morning sun.

The light is thin, still early. But I push myself from the bed and begin to dress.

I see now how it has to be. I will have to be strategic. Patient. I cannot live inside a cage—however gilded it may be—but if he will not release me from here by choice, then I will find another way. Every prison has its window. Every cage has its crack.

I will get to work on finding mine.

When I nudge open the bedroom door, I find a note.

Aletheia requires your help in the gardens today.

So he wishes me to go back to the gardens? Well, I have other plans. My intention is to find my way back toward the yard with the stable and the high gate. I know it is the way in and out of this place. All I need is to figure out how it unlocks.

But though I try to find my way through the corridors as before, somehow the correct turns elude me. I reverse back from dead end after dead end until I’m hot and frustrated. I was sure I was on the right path this time. Before, I found it quite by accident, but now it seems almost to avoid me.

I turn on my heel, and go in the opposite direction, and after a while come to a door that is familiar. My heart leaps, but then I recognize it. It’s not the door to the stable-yard at all, but the door out to the gardens.

I grit my teeth. Of course this would be the one door I can find. Again I find myself wondering if these corridors have a will of their own.

Well, I suppose it won’t hurt to have another look at the garden, since I’m here.

As I push open the doors into the golden light, I have to stop to catch my breath. If anything, it’s more beautiful now than it was at twilight. Despite everything, the sight of it sends a ripple of peace through me. I step out into the light, so bright I almost have to shield my eyes.

The land I grew up in is beautiful, to be sure: I love its black soil and sun-bleached skies, its hillsides of white chalk, where donkeys pull their loads up steep paths. But this? This is beauty of a kind I’d never dreamt of. The grass is long and wet, with winding pathways between flower-beds that stretch in every direction, and fruit-trees that overhang the meandering paths, all of it seeming to go on forever. The pond in the middle is a glassy mirror of the sky. And all around it, herbs and flowering plants in row after row, leaves and petals of all colors and shapes, glowing faintly as though underwater.

I have the sense of being watched, and look up in time to see a flicker of movement in the pond, and a splash.

Nymphs, he said. Did I imagine the faint, silvery sound, like a distant laugh? I start to move toward it, where telltale ripples are spreading. But then a sound from right behind me stops me in my tracks.

“Where are you going?” a voice rasps, and I spin around.