Antiquities: Five Stories Set in Ancient Worlds Read online

  Antiquities:

  Five Short Stories Set in Ancient Worlds

  by Nina Kiriki Hoffman

  Kiriki Press, P.O. Box 10858, Eugene, Oregon 97440 U.S.A.

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in whole or in part, or stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without written permission of publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a review.

  This is a work of fiction. The characters have been created for the sake of this story and are products of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright 1998-2015 by Nina Kiriki Hoffman

  "The Problem with Dating Shapeshifters" © 2009 by Nina Kiriki Hoffman. First appeared in The Trouble with Heroes, edited by Denise Little & Martin H. Greenberg, DAW, November 2009.

  "The Curse Tablet" © 2009 by Nina Kiriki Hoffman. First appeared in Ages of Wonder, edited by Rob St. Martin, Julie Czerneda, and Martin H. Greenberg, DAW, March 2009.

  "Hunger" © 1998 by Nina Kiriki Hoffman. First appeared in Warrior Princesses, edited by Elizabeth Ann Scarborough & Martin H. Greenberg, DAW, May, 1998.

  "Whatever Was Forgotten" © 2002 by Nina Kiriki Hoffman. First appeared in Pharaoh Fantastic, edited by Martin H. Greenberg & Brittiany A. Koren, DAW, December 2002.

  "The Listeners" © 2007 by Nina Kiriki Hoffman. First appeared in The Coyote Road, edited by Ellen Datlow and Terri Windling, Viking, 2007.

  Cover photo © 2015 N.K. Hoffman, from a Roman frieze in the British Museum

  eBook Design, Kiriki Press

  This eBook edition was produced by Kiriki Press

  Originally Printed in the United States of America

  Table of Contents

  Copyright

  Table of Contents

  The Problem with Dating Shapeshifters

  The Curse Tablet

  Hunger

  Whatever Was Forgotten

  The Listeners

  About the Author

  Connect with the Author

  Other Nina Kiriki Hoffman Titles

  The Problem with Dating Shapeshifters

  You know how it is. Your father's a river god, your mother's the naiad of a nearby spring, you figure you'll marry some feature of the landscape and give birth to baby boulders, or, who knows, something from the plant kingdom, when along comes a honey-mouthed stranger with fingers soft as feathers, and before you know it, you've let him into yourself, and then he turns you into a cow because his wife has been spying on you and this is the stupid way he covers up his mistakes.

  You've heard the stories. He turns himself into a swan, a shower of gold, the girl you love, a white bull that smells of flowers, a perfect imitation of someone's husband so she thinks she's doing the right thing by bedding him; he turns his girlfriend into a mosquito and swallows her and she ends up in his head, he does this, he does that, all in a vain attempt to keep his wife in the dark. He's got all this power of change. Why doesn't he just turn his sister-wife into something helpless, and get on with his amours like a normal person?

  But no, not Zeus. Maybe it's because the only mother he knew was the goat Amalthea, a very giving sort of mother, but not a human shape; perhaps that's why he turns his mistresses or himself into animals. Maybe Hera won't play those kinds of games.

  He came to my father's country disguised as a beardless youth, and at first all he wanted to do was debate philosophy with me. I loved a man I could match wits with, and the gods knew I didn't meet many such wandering through the countryside. That was why I so often snuck into the city at the mouth of my father's river, to listen to the philosophers arguing all afternoon in the square — that, and to buy figs and honey and olives.

  I don't know how Zeus knew this argumentative boy was the guise that would work on me, but then, he's is all about courtship, and getting under as many women's chitons as he can. We all have our strengths.

  Mine was, I suppose, that I was a pretty, girl-shaped nymph, and I spent lots of time wandering near my father's river, and rarely visited my mother's spring. Mother might have warned me not to talk to Zeus. She was always warning me about things like that, which was why I stayed far from her. She hadn't wanted me to learn whittling or knife-fighting or card playing, or any of the other things city boys had taught me.

  Father, on the other hand, only paid attention if I called for him to help me, which was why I considered Father my favorite parent. He never noticed the beardless boy who came to court me.

  In my rambles beside my father's river, I sometimes teased the shepherd boys until they kissed me, and enjoyed inspiring them with hopeless longing, without ever letting them press more on me than a kiss. I knew this boy was different, though I didn't know how.

  Zeus knew how to look as inoffensive and ineffectual as those boys, though he was handsomer and cleaner. His golden hair gleamed in the sharp spring sunlight, and his chiton was green as new leaves, but he carried nothing I feared, no knife at his belt, no shepherd's staff in his hand. If my father were watching, he might have thought nothing of seeing me with yet another callow youth.

  In the course of my spirited discussion with the boy, an amphora of sweet red wine and two handle cups painted with scenes of satyrs and maenads appeared. The boy poured, and we both drank from the cups. The wine was not watered the way men drank it when they held their discussions long into the night (a city boy I'd met had snuck me into his master's household while the family was away and let me taste the wine, hoping for favors. I let him listen to my laugh, though I found the drink weaker than water from my mother's spring).

  This boy-disguised Zeus and I went from a clash about how often the gods should meddle in the lives of mortals (he: often; I: leave the mortals alone; aren't they cursed enough already?) to a kiss.

  Perhaps Zeus noticed a stray drop of wine at the corner of my mouth. Perhaps he leaned forward to lick it. Perhaps I turned my head to catch his lips with mine, and his breath was sweet, redolent of apples and honey, with none of the scents of garlic and onions so often on the breaths of shepherds that wandered the Argolis hills.

  His kiss was pleasant, and the spirits in the cup he offered worked through me. The boy and the sun were warm against me, and I was sleepy with wine and content with his caresses. In drowsiness I did not at first notice when he moved past caresses to push into me, but then the red pain came, and I woke. I tried to shove him away, but he held me tight and finished pleasuring himself despite my struggles. How sweet my afternoon had started, and how bitter the taste on my tongue now.

  When he had finished, the boy drew back. He stroked away my tears with his thumbs, and kissed me again, and said, "That wasn't so bad, was it? Next time will be better. I will teach you joy."

  I didn't believe him; my tears flowed.

  He gathered me against him, gentle this time, and he smelled of new grasses and the first flowers of spring, and even though I feared him, I felt comforted.

  Then we heard a thing, though I was not sure what it was. A bird call I had never heard before, or a footstep on the air. The boy sat up and waved his arms, and clouds covered the bright summer sky, and that's when I felt an even deeper apprehension. I had thought him a clumsy and half-kind boy. Now I knew he was more, a meddling immortal, the kind who gave gods a bad name.

  "She's coming," he said, "and I need you to be something else." He hugged me again, and I changed. My fingers fused to become hooves; my arms bunched into spindly legs, and I fell forward on my new front hooves; my
legs shifted and my feet bent double as though to make fists; my toenails spread into hooves; my eyes grew, and my nose and mouth stretched; my dark hair fell out. White hair covered all of my skin. My ears lengthened, horns thrust from my forehead, and at the base of my spine, out stretched a tail tasseled at the end with snowy hair. I grew large and strange to myself. I could no longer see in front, only to both sides. I could not stand upright. I opened my throat to protest, and the voice that came out of me spoke only a long, nasal groan unlike anything I had ever uttered before.

  The boy, standing beside me, grew in stature and musculature, and sprouted a full, curly beard. The golden hair he had worn darkened to bronze. His face matured into a man's face, handsome and hard-edged and cruel. He stood with one hand on my back as the clouds he had conjured cleared, and a glowing, matronly woman stepped down from the sky. "Zeus!" she said. "What are you doing down here?"

  "Just admiring this heifer," he said.

  "Is that all?" She came to him and thrust a hand into his chiton below the waist, grasped the part of him he had thrust into me. "Hmm," she said. "Perhaps you've already finished, or perhaps not begun. Well, what a beautiful animal you have here." She touched me between the eyes. Now that I knew who my seducer was, I feared the worst, for Hera's jealousy was legendary, but her touch was gentle, not poisonous. "She is so sweet, so pretty and clean. Cows are sacred to me. You got her for me, didn't you? So thoughtful!"

  Zeus smiled and shrugged and kicked at the dirt. "Your pleasure is my pleasure," he said.

  That's the problem with dating shapeshifters. They can look like your dream come true. You only find out later that when their wife asks them to give you to her, they go ahead and do it, instead of saying, "Oh, she's not mine to give, I was just watching her for a friend," or, "Wait, I have to go to the bathroom," and while the wife looks the other way, turn you into something small she can't find so easily, or something so horrid she wouldn't want it.

  "Come with me, sweet thing," Hera murmured. She grasped one of my ears and tugged. It hurt. I stepped toward her and the pain eased. She led me up into the sky and we walked with air beneath us until we came to a slope of Mount Olympas where thick grass and fruit trees grew. We had left Zeus behind on Earth.

  Hera sat down on a tuft of grass and said, "I wonder what you looked like before. I always wonder, when I rescue those he's mistreated, but he is the king of the gods, and I gave up some of my power when I married him, so I can't change you back. But I can keep you safe from him, poor child. Would you like that?"

  The great mother goddess would keep me safe from the god who had taken my virginity without asking me and then changed me into a beast? The idiot who had betrayed me into her hands?

  I lowed, and she stroked my nose and summoned her servant, Argus, who had eyes in the front of his head, the back of his head, the sides of his head, and speckled elsewhere on his body. I tried to imagine what it must be like to see in so many directions at once — he had eyes in the palms of his hands, on his knees, on his shoulders — but I couldn't, even though I now knew what it was like to see two directions at once without being able to see in front of me.

  "Argus, keep that bully Zeus from bothering this child," said Hera. She ran her hand along my spine, dropped a kiss on my brow, and left me alone with this odd, all-seeing giant.

  Argus was not much of a conversationalist. His vocabulary consisted of grunts. I wasn't much better. I could low. We had a few exchanges of grunts and moos and gave it up.

  He did as Hera had asked, and followed me everywhere. I ate grass on Olympus and hated it. I wandered in search of something that tasted better, but everything I bit was bitter, and I couldn't even complain to my many-eyed companion.

  I was sick with longing for a proper conversation, or even an improper one, but the other cattle Argus and I encountered couldn't speak to me in anything other than moos and bellows. Sheep and goats made more sounds but even less sense. I would have cursed Zeus if I could have formed words.

  We came down off the mountain and wandered through fields and forests for an age, until I finally drank from a river whose water tasted sweeter to me than anything else had since I had changed. I was confused by this, until I realized I had finally found my father's river again.

  Then I cried. Argus, who with his club had driven off suspicious golden-haired shepherd boys, a white bull, and even a persistent eagle, shook his hands in distress and grunted loudly. Eventually my father came to see what was making such a horrible sound on his shore.

  When my father stood before me, my frustration with my form and my diet erupted into fresh tears. Father stroked me, offered a handful of grass, and asked Argus what was going on. Of course, Argus had no words. Finally I realized I could write what I couldn't say, and I scratched my story into the mud at the river's edge.

  My father was reduced to grunts and mutters, too, as he read my account. The occasional phrase snuck out of him, tortures he'd like to try on unnamed beings of celestial might, a vow to sacrifice a white heifer to Hera in thanks for her help, an exclamation of dismay as he realized what he had just said and apologized to me and to Argus and to the sky and the earth and any other nearby deity he might have offended. Argus had heard enough. He twined a rope around my neck and led me away from my dangerous father.

  I was so tired of my existence I wished Zeus would come so I could kick him in the ass and maybe receive a sizzling thunderbolt in response. When another fair-haired boy arrived, bearing a strange flute he claimed he had made from reeds taken from the final form of another girl pursued by a god she wasn't interested in — she turned into a plant to get away from him, like that ever worked! It only meant she could no longer run, and he could do whatever he liked with her — I wondered if this was another disguise for Zeus.

  Whatever he was, he was wily. I had no idea anyone so full of vocabulary could produce such a string of boring sentences. I thought I had been longing to hear anyone say anything. I was wrong! Trying to follow this man's perambulating sentences put me to sleep.

  Unfortunately, they put my guardian to sleep as well. When I woke up because something thudded past and spattered me with blood, I discovered the stranger had struck off Argus's head.

  So he hadn't been a witty conversationalist, or even good-looking (though he looked well), Argus had still been a faithful and helpful companion who had kept me safe. Hermes, another god in disguise, was the one who had killed him, and seemed to expect gratitude for his deed, but I was too heartsick at the loss of my friend. It was a gift that I couldn't speak then, for surely I would have gotten myself into worse trouble if I had spoken my mind to him.

  Instead, I ran away.

  I was helped in my escape by a gadfly. I didn't know which god or goddess sent it; its bite stung me, and it would not let me be, so I suspected it was Zeus again, taken with me in my new form. The gadfly chased me wherever I went; it would not give me peace. I took to plunging into rivers, rolling in mud so I had armor against its sting, and then, sometimes, I could sleep.

  Between the stings of the gadfly, I discovered that I liked running. I wore myself out with it, so I didn't notice how horrible grass tasted everywhere I went, and how even nectar-rich flowers didn't satisfy my hunger.

  I traveled through lands like none I had ever seen before, and tasted water from different rivers, sensing the gods and naiads in them, sometimes being greeted by these cousins, uncles, aunts, though they did not know me.

  Pursued by the gadfly, I encountered people who spoke languages I didn't recognize, and wearing garments strange to me. I traveled through mountains where rain fell as hard crystals whiter than my coat. I met a tribe of warrior women who led me to the edge of a sea and showed me a ship-killing rock in it. I crossed a river that tasted of copper, and swam in a sea no one had named until I immersed myself in it.

  I came to a land where people had dark skin and the sun shone so hot very little grew, and finally I came to a wide flat river I could wade in, with lush black m
ud that gave me a lovely coat. I followed the river's flow down to where it turned into many little rivers embracing tiny islands, the streams braiding around and through each other, and there I stopped, for I felt something strange. My world had changed, and at first I did not know how.

  I had lost the gadfly somewhere along the river. The air tasted hot, sandy, and spicy, but there was a flavor missing, though I wasn't sure when it had faded. Gone were the scents of olives and grapes. The river's water, when I dipped my nose into it, carried an earthen flavor with none of the mud of home; I could not taste anything of my father's river, my mother's spring, or even sense any relatives of theirs in this wide, wide water. The very plants looked different and strange: feather-topped trees and reeds.

  I stood with my hooves in the water and felt the prickle of change shiver along my skin. All the cow-hair fell off of me, and my limbs shortened; my hooves split into toes and fingers, the hardness retreating to nails; my snout shortened, and my ears pulled back against my head, as hair spilled from the top of it.

  Under the hot summer sun, I stood up, human once more, and realized that the gods I knew had limits, and I had passed beyond them. All-father Zeus could not touch me here. All-mother Hera could no longer protect or attack me.

  I put my hand on my belly and realized I still carried something of the old country within me, a final gift of Zeus. Like so many of his other women, I had his child inside me. It had not quickened while I wore the shape of the cow, but I felt a flutter of movement now.

  Damn him. Well, my child would be born here, where Zeus could no longer find me, and I would raise the child here, where gods didn't drop out of the sky or wander over a hillside, converse with you, seduce you, and mangle your future.

  Then again, I didn't know anything about the gods of this country. Maybe they were as capricious as those of mine.