Wrath Goddess Sing Read online

  Achilles would never forget Deidamia’s radiance, even in later days when she wished she could close the eyes of her memory against the taunt of Damia’s beauty, the openness and the caution of her eyes, the kindness and the worry of her face. And of course there was no way to unsee the first glimmer of unsettledness and despair, the first signs that Achilles herself was a sort of poison that she had brought to Skyros for Deidamia to drink.

  It began on the first night of their friendship, when Achilles stared with guileless envy at the Skyrian princess, marveling over her soft arms and full breasts and swelling hips.

  Damia was fair, tall, and slim, with delicate curves and long pale hair, for here on Skyros, the kallai had herbs and medicines to prevent beard and stink and muscle and rough skin, and Damia had never known the fear of growing up into a man. The gods Achilles did not believe in had been kind to Deidamia of Skyros, and grateful Damia made offerings to the Triad every day. Whenever Achilles told her that the gods had gone away, or died, or else had never existed, Damia only laughed in her face. Anywhere else in Achaia, she would have been forced to live as a prince, a warrior, a man; but here Damia was a princess.

  That this was even possible struck Achilles as the most wonderful miracle, and she begged for the secret: How had Deidamia grown into such a woman? What medicines permitted such a thing? Achilles begged for Damia’s aid, and Damia offered it freely.

  As Achilles blossomed, they became fast friends, running along the mountain paths of Skyros together, watching the sheep in the high pastures and plucking burrs from their soft gray wool, splashing through streams in the forest, offering prayers to Aphrodite, the Queen of Heaven, hunting birds with slings. Damia liked her well in those days and called her “my little Red,” or “skinny Red,” or “subtle Red,” or “Red as red as fire,” which was a pun in the island dialect.

  But later—When was it? When did the first signs show?—something began to change. Perhaps it was the reminders of their difference as Achilles grew fuller under the influence of the Skyrian medicines of womanhood, moonweed and licorice. She regained her grace, no longer clumsy and coltish, darting through the forests twice as fast as Damia could sprint. She could swim like a salmon up the forest streams; she could creep up on birds and pluck them from their nests; she found a fierce and restless pride in the movements of her body. More and more often, she glimpsed Damia looking at her with a brooding intensity.

  Still, it had been Achilles who seduced Deidamia. She had realized that what smoldered in Damia’s eyes was part desire and was so relieved by the idea that she never stopped to ask herself what else flickered there. One night in a grove dedicated to the Queen of Heaven, patron goddess of the kallai, Achilles arranged her limbs in just such a way that she could feel Damia’s eyes on her, and then—ever so slowly—she came closer and closer to the Skyrian princess until they were touching, and their lips met, and they breathed each other in.

  Because Achilles was young, she assumed that the passion between them was love, and that it was enough. She did everything with Damia—walked with Damia, ran with Damia, sang with Damia, wove and sewed with Damia, swam with Damia, lay with Damia, whispered in Damia’s ear, kissed Damia’s throat and breasts and belly, and eventually, as their passion grew more creative, found ways to please Damia, and overcame her discomfort to allow Damia to return the favor. The story she told herself was that they were like Kastor and Polydeukes of Sparta, twin warriors hatched from a single egg, inseparable, yearning to be one.

  She never fully understood what stories Damia told herself, and so she missed the first signs of their separation. She was content to tell herself there were no gods, that peace could last forever, that industry was enough and suffering a choice, and that love—or what she thought was love—was all that she needed.

  “You look different tonight.” Deidamia’s voice had a strange, distant quality. They were dressing in front of Damia’s cloudy copper mirror, belting long dresses below their breasts, and Achilles was pulling hers painfully, defensively tight, to make her curves unmistakable. “Yes,” Damia murmured again. “You look different.”

  Achilles could not see it. “I look like a wild animal. Perhaps a lion—only I’ve gotten fatter.”

  “Rounder and softer,” Damia mused, “like a well-fed bride. I wish my hips were as wide.”

  “I am as sterile as you,” Achilles objected. “A couple of kings come to kidnap me and you start sizing up my hips for childbearing?” The words were supposed to come out light and teasing, but they were ugly words and muddied her meaning. Damia frowned; Achilles frowned back.

  “They said you were the son of the Silent One,” Damia said softly. “I thought your mother was Thetis, queen of Phthia.”

  Achilles’s throat tasted sickly sweet, and her hands felt numb. She had told Damia of the horrific childbirth that still haunted Phthia, the pit-grave in Alope, the way her mother’s toothless jawbone had felt under her fingers—but she had not told her of the rumor Father started. “A myth to justify my faggotry,” she sneered. “Father told everyone the goddess had inhabited my mother, that I am a demigod marked for greatness. It didn’t protect me.”

  Damia let this blasphemy silently pass. Then she shrugged. “What if they find you out?”

  “How?” Achilles narrowed her eyes. She lifted her hair to expose her long neck, examining herself in the mirror for signs that could betray her.

  “Not from your body. The goddess sent them, they said so.” Damia narrowed her eyes. “Don’t say it. Someone could have told them who you were.”

  “I’m not going anywhere with them.” Achilles tossed her head, fluffing out her wild curls. “I like it here.” But a dark mood was stealing over her, and she studied Damia’s face in the mirror. If Damia thought the gods commanded it, perhaps Damia would betray her.

  “I liked your hair up,” Damia said after a while. She took a magnificent copper comb set with tiny chips of malachite arranged in a floral pattern, then bent toward Achilles, pulling her hair up and pinning it with the comb. “No blasphemy tonight, Red. Not in front of guests.”

  Achilles turned away. The frescoed walls had a magnificent scene on them of dolphins and ships bearing purple cloth from Kna’an. She had always liked this fresco: no gods, no monsters, nothing but reality. “I will be as silent as a mouse,” she said, “unless I am challenged.”

  Damia laughed a short, sharp laugh. The supper gongs began to ring from the towers, calling the people of Skyros palace into the great hall, and the guilds below into their meeting halls to eat together, the tanners with the tanners, the smiths with the smiths, the bricklayers with the bricklayers. “That will have to do, I suppose.”

  Chapter Two

  They went down to the great hall and took their places halfway down King Lykomedes’s table, with Diomedes seated opposite Deidamia and Odysseus opposite Achilles. Following the etiquette of the royal court, brass wine flagons shaped like two-headed rams were passed down the table, and Deidamia and Achilles poured and mixed the wine for their neighbors before pouring smaller cups for themselves, dedicating the first drops of each to the Triad.

  “Pyrrha,” Odysseus said warmly, “you look like a meteor. I saw one last week from my ship: a fiery comet with a tail like your red hair that trailed halfway across the sky. It was beautiful and deadly, like so many women.”

  “Is this flirtation?” Achilles murmured. “It won’t work.”

  “I am old enough to be your very youthful father,” Odysseus said blandly, sipping from his cup.

  “Possibly my son,” Achilles countered softly.

  Odyseus gasped, then roared with laughter, wiping wine from his beard. “Wit is the eternal enemy of table manners. I would give half of Ithaka for such a witty mother.”

  “Is your mother not witty?”

  The Ithakan’s eyes narrowed. “Not witty in the same ways,” he countered, “but wise as the Sphinx, which is better.”

  “You can only praise your mother by con
trasting her wisdom with my wit?”

  “By the Silent One,” Odysseus exclaimed, “what did I ever do to you?”

  “If you are invoking the Silent One,” Achilles said, “should you use so many words?”

  Fatted calf was brought out from the kitchen. For a time, conversation and drinking ceased, and everyone concerned themselves with a double fold of fat-wrapped meat, the food of gods as well as kings, spiced with nettle smoke and rosemary and charred pomegranates and salted with dried seafoam. Achilles quietly marveled at the terrible secret that was meat: the flesh of some other creature not unlike herself, charred until the muscles relaxed and gave up their juices, seared to a fiery crust, wrapped around a bone heavy with fatty, salty marrow, a sacrament of carnage that drove away her terror and filled her with angry, combative strength.

  Once the meat had been eaten, a stew of millet and beans was brought out. As they began to eat it, Odysseus said, “So you’re from the mainland.”

  “The mainland has nothing for me but tears.”

  “The mainland has nothing for anyone but tears. Diomedes would disagree, but he is the reason for half the tears.” Odysseus was watching her for her reaction, and no wonder: most people knew of the hero’s exploits.

  But it pleased Achilles to feign ignorance. “Should I have heard of him?”

  “He led the second Theban siege five years ago.” When Achilles only opened her eyes wider, Odysseus blinked. “He’s one of the Seven Against Thebai! Haven’t you heard the poem? ‘When purple-robed Tydeus breathed his bloody last / and the rattle of death filled his neck / his shadow broke free of his feet with a cry / seeking his son in the Islands.’”

  “I know there was a siege or two near Thebai,” Achilles said. “I assume he is a famous warrior. But I am more interested in peace than war. War seems like a wonderful way to make everyone poor and miserable, to increase the share of orphans, to promote superstitions, to waste a lot of good bronze that could be used for tools, to ruin the soil, to kill perfectly good cart-horses pulling chariots, and so on.” Father had given the same speech once word for word, when she told him she wanted to grow up to be a great warrior and kill a million people. Despite everything, the wisdom of the speech had stayed with her.

  “Undoubtedly war is waste and carnage,” Odysseus agreed. “It is only wise if it serves some noble end or provides unusual profit—a city without walls is begging to be plundered, for instance—”

  “I am familiar with piracy.”

  Odysseus smirked. Then his expression became deadly serious. “The war of our times is different. You cannot imagine a cause further from piracy.”

  “International gift-giving?” Achilles said drily.

  “The salvation of our world,” Odysseus said.

  Achilles frowned, resenting her own sudden interest. “Explain.”

  In that moment she realized that the table had been silent for some minutes; all eyes were on them, from King Lykomedes at the head all the way down to the porters and grooms at the foot. Damia was looking at Achilles; everyone else watched Odysseus.

  The Ithakan chuckled for a moment, then rose to his feet. “I understand that ‘the salvation of our world’ is quite a claim to make,” he said, “but I do not make it lightly. I will fill everyone in. King Lykomedes, thank you for your gracious hospitality. I will direct my statement to you and also state my business on your lovely island.”

  Damia’s father nodded quietly. He was a quiet man, one who managed the affairs of Skyros with placid care, issuing most of his orders in writing. “Speak,” he said softly.

  Odysseus tugged at his beard, pulling it into two slender forks—fashionable in the islands, but also an interesting nervous tic. Perhaps he used it to stall for time, or perhaps he liked the roughness of it sprouting from his chin. Then he spread his hands officiously and began to speak in excellent diplomatic Achaian, using the Mykenaian prestige accent that everyone who was anyone learned to imitate.

  “By now, all who have ears have heard the story of how the line of Minos lost the favor of the gods and how Klytaimestra Mino’o wed Great King Agamemnon of Mykenai and brought peace to the seas. The gods began to return, offering signs and portents of their favor. Meteors raced across the sky. The doors of the horizon were opened. In Hattusa, the wife of Great King Tudhaliyas fell pregnant and, after six long months, delivered a giant golden egg and died.”

  Odysseus made an expansive gesture, indicating that the egg was over six feet tall. As he spoke, it seemed to Achilles that she could see the egg in her mind’s eye, perfectly smooth and burnished to a mirror sheen, and inside it, some ancient, horrible mystery. She frowned.

  “It is said that the beauty of Klytaimestra is like the beauty of the stars at night, but from the golden egg erupted a baby of legendary majesty who grew into a woman even lovelier than Klytaimestra: Helen, jewel of the Hittites, prize of Assuwa. The beauty of Helen is like the fire of the sun at noon, and countless princes went to Hattusa to buy her from Tudhaliyas, for on this mother could a race of such kings be sired as has not been seen in generations.”

  Odysseus wandered along the length of the table, gesturing as he spoke, and his fingers flickered as if conjuring an ancient world. “The greatness of Egypt first arose when Great King Sneferu bought for himself the radiant Hetepheres, daughter of Apollo and primordial Ouraneia. Sneferu spread out Hetepheres beneath him like all the kingdoms of the world, and on her he made the glorious Kheops, half god and half man, who spread his rule from Thraki to Akkad to Aithiopia, a kingdom that comprises three-quarters of the universe. The greatest kings are always made by great queens.”

  Everyone stared at him; everyone waited on his words; even Achilles felt herself being lulled, drawn in by the image of the glory of Egypt, of the ancient race of kings from long-ago stories whose descendants still ruled the world from faraway Pi-Ramesses. Odysseus grinned, seeing that he had the room’s rapt attention, and then glided to the foot of the table and turned to face King Lykomedes.

  “Knowing this, Great King Agamemnon increased the glory of the Achaians by wedding Helen of Hattusa to Menelaos Atreidai, his glorious brother, in exchange for peace with Hattusa and a tribute of two hundred pounds of gold, one thousand pounds of silver from Athenai, ten thousand pounds of copper from Alashiya, a thousand pounds of tin from distant Tuli, a thousand head of fine cattle, five hundred unblemished horses, and one thousand robes of rich cloth woven in the islands.

  “Now Klytaimestra and Helen ruled as queens in Mykenai and Sparta, Great Queens for our great empire. Even the ambassadors from Pi-Ramesses and Babylon and Assur and Hattusa exclaimed that no more beautiful brides could be found in Egypt or Mesopotamia or Assuwa. A golden age began in Mykenai and Sparta, centered on the person of Helen, whose half-divine breasts poets call the Apples of the Sun.

  “For seventy years the gods had not blessed us with their full presence, but I was at the marriage feast, and in the skies above us, gazing down on all of us with unimaginable radiance from the Couch of Heaven, breasts bared to nourish us with the milk of divine favor, was Hera, Queen of Kings, smiling down on us for the first time in a generation.

  “This was five years ago. In summer and at harvest, the crops were richer in Achaian lands than for sixty years, and the winters grew warm. On Ithaka, we have not had snow since.”

  The warm summer air blew in through the curtains, filling the great hall with the salt of the sea and the sweetness of the garden terraces, and Odysseus basked for a moment in the image he had conjured. Then someone coughed, and the spell was broken.

  The room felt colder. Odysseus frowned and turned, looking Achilles in the eye. She fought the impulse to look away from him, schooling herself to an implacable calm. She was suddenly conscious of Damia’s comb tugging at her scalp.

  “I will not dress this next part up in poetry,” Odysseus said grimly. “Late last year, Alaksandu, a Hittite prince of absolute corruption and potent sorcery, went into the palace of Menelaos and cast a s
pell on Helen, striking her mute and carrying her away. In that way, also, he sought to frame her as an adulteress, since no one heard her cry out. She was carried off across the sea to Wilusa in Taruisa—a city of great walls and armies, where Alaksandu and his father, Piyama the Sorcerer, hold Helen as their prize. Apollo smiled on the theft, and Tudhaliyas of Hattusa himself gave the theft his blessing, forgetting Agamemnon’s gifts and vows. We should never have trusted the treacherous Hittites.”

  Odysseus began to move again, stalking up the far side of the table, still staring at Achilles, his eyes bright and dangerous. “With Apollo of the Plagues protecting him, Alaksandu grows richer and more powerful every day. His armies swell. He mounts Helen to fill her with his ugly Hittite spawn. She cries each night, unable to speak because of the spell cast on her tongue, mutely begging for Menelaos. Now Menelaos and Agamemnon, King of Kings, are gathering a great army to descend on Wilusa and rescue the stolen queen.

  “But our war is hopeless unless we can find the son of the Silent One, Achilles, son of Peleus and Athena, whose spear alone can pierce Alaksandu and shatter his spell on Helen.” Odysseus let the words hang in the air, looking away from Achilles and letting his bright gaze sweep the hall, taking in every face in turn. “And Achilles is hiding on Skyros.”

  Something stabbed Achilles’s palms, and she nearly winced with the pain. It was her own fingernails, clenched so tightly the skin was beginning to break. Suddenly it felt as if everyone was staring at her—but no, they were still looking at Odysseus.

  Everyone but Deidamia, who met her eyes and glanced away.

  “Therefore, King Lykomedes,” Odysseus concluded, “I ask leave to search for Achilles. The goddess herself told me that he is here, disguised as a woman. I know that the custom of your island protects women born into malformed shapes, women in the bodies of half men, women in the bodies of boys, and all other such, but Achilles is the son of a goddess and has duties.”