Antiquities: Five Stories Set in Ancient Worlds Read online

  My father ate my sandals. He ate dried flowers the slaves had arranged around the palace, and he even ate peacock feathers.

  Mother left after Father ate all her undergarments and chewed the wax flowers off her favorite wig.

  He would have sold the stones of our palace for handfuls of moldy grain. I managed to find someone who would buy the palace intact, but soon that money was gone too, and we wandered the streets looking for discarded fruit in the gutters and begging lepta from strangers. We slept in a shack so miserable it had been deserted by everyone else.

  I did not feel I could leave him; everyone else already had. I remembered the days when his eyes were clear, when he spoke to me of strategy and philosophy and distant lands and art.

  At night I lay listening to my father grind his teeth. His mind had vanished under the onslaught of his hunger. I was afraid to sleep; I had seen him salivate while staring at my toes.

  Soon after that, my father sold me for the first time.

  The man who bought me took me to his villa by the sea. He was old and harsh, but he only wanted me once a night, and during the day I played in the sand near the wine-dark salty water. A host of slaves tended to the master’s needs and the needs of the household, the vineyard, and the olive orchard. His cook made the most delectable things to eat; none of them were rotten; and my father did not try to snatch every morsel from my fingers before I could put it in my mouth.

  Sometimes I thought of my father and wondered if my price bought him enough food to kill his hunger, even if only for a little while. I wished it so.

  The honey cakes Theodora made every afternoon, the roast rabbit and fowl and lamb we had with bread for supper every night with sweet red wine, the dried figs and ripe apples always within reach filled out my flesh. When I pressed my fingers against my forearm, I could barely feel my bones. My stomach no longer talked to me night and day.

  I lived in a beautiful place where even the mosaics on the floor delighted the senses with shades and contrasts of brilliant glass colors. The air was warm here, and someone else did all the work.

  And yet I had changed from starving freewoman to well-fed slave.

  Some days I lay on the beach and scooped sand over my body, as though I could bury myself alive and emerge another person.

  One day a large man rose from the waves and walked up the beach to stand at my feet. His beard and hair were the golden color of kelp, and his eyes gray as fog. His skin was sunburnt brown, and when he smiled down at me, his teeth gleamed like a slice of snow against a summer-baked rock.

  “What are you doing there, daughter?” he asked in a deep voice.

  The last thing I wanted to be to any man was a daughter. In the end I had liked that less than being a man’s concubine. I did not know this man or what he might mean to me, so I said nothing.

  “Did you know that this is a beach where gods wander?” he asked, and I shook my head. I had heard of places where gods and goddesses touched Earth and took mortal shape to wander among us and make trouble for those they encountered, and of other places where vapors issued from cracks down to the depths, and gods’ wills were made known to the sibyls who breathed the fumes, and emerged from the sibyls’ lips in riddles and verses that only the wise could interpret.

  Just such a place had been the grove where my father cut Demeter’s trees for his roof braces. My father struck the first blow into an ancient tree that many had prayed to, and blood flowed from the wound. Then the Goddess appeared as an old woman and begged him to stop, but he did not heed her. He had laughed and struck another blow.

  I wanted no consort with gods.

  I sifted more sand over my legs.

  “Do I frighten you?” he asked, sitting beside me.

  I slanted him a sideways glance. He frightened me, of course; but everything frightened me, more or less. Fear in me was a constant that only occasionally surged up into something sharp and prickling.

  “Can you not speak?” he asked, and his concern seemed real.

  “I can speak,” I murmured without looking at him.

  “What is your name?”

  “Mestra.” Once my name had meant something. No one used it anymore.

  “Mestra. I won’t hurt you,” he said, and laid his big hard hand over mine on the sand. The heat in his hand surprised me. He lifted my hand and pressed his lips against my palm, and then a madness came over me so that I reached for him: he seemed to me like cold water in a desert.

  What happened after was strange. It was as if I was not inside my body, or anywhere on Earth, but rather as though we were two liquids floating in some ocean, separate and then mixed together. It went beyond wine madness to someplace better.

  For a while I was afraid to return to the shore. I stayed in the upper rooms during the day, embroidering borders onto robes and household linens, as I had been taught to do as a girl. After time passed and the ocean man did not come into the villa, I ventured out onto the balcony to do my needlework where the sun would help me pick out the patterns. Every day I thought about the liquid strangeness of melting into the man, and how I rose afterward in my own body without feeling at all hurt or worried.

  It was ten days before I went back to the beach, and then the man came to me immediately, wet and glistening, as though he had been waiting and watching.

  Days followed, all of a pattern: nights I went to my master, and days I went to my stranger on the beach.

  A day came when the stranger sat beside me. “What are these marks on your shoulders?” he asked.

  “My master beat me last night,” I said. He had looked on me as I stood before him, naked; and he had touched me, and made me stroke him with oil and put my mouth on him; but his little stick had not lifted so he could poke it into me, and so he had beat me with a lash.

  My stranger swam into the sea, came back with a small pottery jar, and stroked unguent into my shoulders and back. I felt soothed and comforted. We did not go to the mad place at all that day.

  The next day, I had more marks. Even the ground-up corpses of insects could not make my master’s stick rise. I hesitated to return to the beach. What if these blemishes proved to my stranger that I was not worthy of his attentions?

  It was late in the afternoon when I finally went down to the water. He came and wrapped his arms around me, pressing me back against his warm wet chest. “This will not do,” he said.

  I shrugged in his embrace. What else was there?

  “I am Poseidon.”

  I stiffened. What if I had done something to offend him? Would he curse me as Demeter had cursed my father? I could not think of any way I had been disrespectful to him except on the first day when I would not look at him or speak.

  “I can give you the power of change,” he said.

  And so he taught me to turn myself into animals.

  That night when my master called me in, and no undignified thing I did could make his stick rise, I watched him lift the lash to strike me and I changed into a leopard.

  He did not want me then; so I ran away.

  I went to the beach and ran. Night was not dark! Stars shimmered in the night sky above me and all the scents were strong and inviting. I nosed small animals out from under the sand and ate them, crunching through shells to sweet, tender meat inside. I was free and wild. I danced in the wave edges, snapped at the foam. I raked my claws down tree trunks and leapt long distances.

  Dogs caught my scent and barked as I ghosted past their masters’ estates, but I only laughed, for they were tied up and I was free.

  I slept on the beach and woke in my old body.

  When dawn came I was far from everything I had ever known; my leopard feet had carried me a distance I could not remember. I had passed other villas in the night, and gone through a forest that did not reach across the sand; and now, in the forest fringe, I could smell city smells, woodsmoke, body wastes, smithy fires and molten metal, meat roasting, bread baking, and the acrid scent of the dye works. I had no clothes or shoe
s and could not remember how to change back into a leopard.

  I waited in the shadow of trees for a while, and saw the fishing boats put out from a harbor around a curve of beach. I wondered if Poseidon would be able to find me here. I longed for his embrace.

  I waited out the day and the gnawing of hunger in my stomach. Images of honey cakes and the ripe red flesh of figs danced through my mind.

  Even the little shellfish under the sand enticed me now, but I was not good at catching them, and I could not peel them out of their shells. I found a few dried apples on a tree in the forest where once an orchard had stood.

  All day I waited, and my god did not come. He had told me that the other beach was a beach where gods wandered; perhaps there were many beaches where they never came, and this was one. Neither could I remember how to change into a creature that could be strong and brave and take care of itself in this world. As the sun lowered into the sea, I decided to go to the city.

  I walked down the beach in twilight, following the little boats as they headed in after a day’s harvest. I found the harbor where they went to tie up for the night and offload their fish. I waited until night had fallen entirely before I approached the docks.

  On the beach where fisherfolk mended nets during the day I found a torn piece of net big enough to wrap around me. It did not conceal much, but it made me feel better.

  One of the first people I saw in those dirty dockside streets was my father, gaunt and hungry, with eyes that burned. He stank of living too long with himself, and his clothes were filthy tatters. I would have walked past, but he stared and stared at my face and said, finally, “Mestra? Is that you?”

  I knelt before him, holding my net around me like some captured thing. “Father. You look worse.”

  “I have nothing and less than nothing. How my stomach hurts from starving! Can you help me?”

  “I have nothing and less than nothing,” I said. I touched his hand. Once he had given me a green pearl the size of my thumbnail, so beautiful I had spent half a day staring into it. We had traded it for a goat; but I still remembered the day he gave it to me.

  “You have a father who needs you,” he said, and because that was more than I had before I found him, I let him sell me again.

  I knew my price would soon be gone, and my father’s hunger would go unsatisfied. But maybe for a moment when he saw all the food he could buy, he would imagine it could satisfy him. Maybe that moment would be worth this.

  The man who bought me this time was not so rich, and his villa had only one slave in it. She was glad of my help with household tasks; and he was not cruel to me, at least at first, though he wanted more of me than my first master had. Still, I spent some daylight hours on the beach.

  Presently my god found me again. “Where did you go?” he asked.

  I told him about my adventures as a leopard, my escape and not knowing how to find him again or how to change, and he taught me again how to be an animal. We spent sun-laden hours together. At night I went in to my new master.

  For half a year all was well.

  Then something went wrong with my master’s holdings, and his anger came out; his other slave was more valuable to him, so he struck me.

  At least for a little while.

  Until I turned into giant serpent.

  I had not known the form I would choose; I found myself inside a strange body, and I saw that my master feared me. His mouth opened in a scream I could not hear, and he ran from me. I danced in that room where he had given me pain, danced with my scales sliding across the tiles, my tongue tasting the air for hints of sandalwood, cedar, and fear. How could a normal man master me? I danced my strange delight until the slave came in carrying a torch. She, too, was terrified, but she came toward me, brandishing her fire, and I fled out the window.

  Before the dawn came I had swallowed a kid from my master’s herd and found a place to hide and digest.

  Sunlight brought me back to myself.

  I made my way to the city.

  This time, my father lay near death. For a little I considered walking away and never coming back, but he laid his hand upon my foot as I stood looking down at him, and I let him sell me again.

  The seventh time my father sold me, things changed.

  My new master took me home to the finest villa I had seen since leaving our palace. He gave me a slave of my own who dressed me and bathed me, rubbed me with scented oils, pumiced the calluses from my feet, ironed waves into my hair, and wound golden chains studded with jewels around my neck, wrists, and ankles. She perfumed me with essences of flowers and trees until I did not know myself.

  Always when I went in to this newest master I looked more beautiful than I had ever imagined possible, even when I was still a princess. Always this new master treated me as though I were a favorite wife.

  A time came when I thought perhaps all my other lives had melted behind me, leaving me solid in this one so that I would never again have to remember the others.

  Later a time came when my master Autolycus became displeased with me for some small thing, a pearl misplaced, perhaps, or one that did not perfectly match another.

  The next night my slave, Lilla, did not put any jewels on me at all.

  That night my master complained of the way my clothes draped about me, and the next night I came to him naked. The following night I came to him without any perfumes or oils, and the night that followed that I came to him with my hair unpressed and unbound.

  This night I was just as I had been when he bought me at the market, except cleaner; if he complained of anything about me, I knew that as a woman, I would not be able to change it more to his liking.

  “How rough your skin,” he said, touching me. “How harsh your hair.”

  “I am as you asked me to be,” I said.

  “Yes,” he said. He stroked his knuckle down my cheek.

  “I have changed as I was directed,” I said. “This is as essential a self as I have.”

  “And yet I have heard that you can change still more,” he said.

  “Oh?” My heart struck harder inside me.

  “I have heard stories of men who thought they owned a woman but found that they owned a leopard, a serpent, a phoenix, a horned goat, a basilisk, a lion, a wolf.”

  “Strange stories,” I said.

  “I heard that these men did not know what they had until they raised their fists in anger,” he whispered to me. He stroked his knuckle down my other cheek, and then placed his hand over my breast. “I wonder if there might be some other way to persuade you to change.”

  “Me?” I said.

  “Are you not Mestra, daughter of Erysichthon?”

  I stepped away from him, afraid of one who stared so deep into my history. “I am not,” I said over my pounding heart.

  “Are you not?”

  “I am not.”

  He looked away a moment, then faced me. “Are you not Mestra Proteus?”

  I could not deny it again; any truth thrice denied becomes a lie, with the denial becoming true.

  I whispered, “I am.”

  “And do you not change?” he asked.

  I stared into his eyes and at first said nothing. I did not want to make this lie or truth. I wanted it to be unknown.

  “Will you change for me? I do not want to hit you.”

  What will you give me? I wanted to ask. It was a strange thought. I did not want to give up my secret, my secret that could save me; what if I needed it later? And yet...in my mind I was ready to bargain. A new thing.

  “Change for me,” he said, stroking my shoulders.

  And so I did.

  For Autolycus, I became a centaur.

  He marveled, and thought me wonderful, even when I changed back into myself.

  Later, when he was asleep, I lay and stared at the ceiling rushes. I thought about my lovers and my masters and their hungers. Some hungers fed me: because I satisfied their hungers, Poseidon had given me the power to change, and Autolycu
s had accepted my change as a gift.

  I wondered if Autolycus would change the way the others had, and want to strike me when something went wrong. I still had change in me. I knew he could only master me so long as I let him.

  He too had had thoughts in the night. In the morning he manumitted me, and when I was a freed woman, he asked me to marry him.

  I agreed.

  We went down to the docks together. I did not know what I could do for my father: nothing could defeat the curse of hunger he lived under. Each time I had escaped a master and returned to my father, he had looked more gaunt and wasted, more fever-eyed and less in his own mind. Each time he sold me I worried less about myself and more about him. Each time I wondered if he would be there the next time I returned.

  This time was the last.

  I gripped my husband’s hand and stared. My father, dirty and skeletal, had pulled his foot up to his chest. He tugged his big toe closer to his mouth, and then he saw me.

  “Mestra,” he croaked. “What have you brought me?”

  I gave him six loaves of bread. They disappeared inside him in an instant.

  I thought, I can change. I can change into something so large it would take him a week to....

  Then I knew I could not feed my father anymore.

  We stared into each other’s eyes for a long moment. His gaze dropped before mine did.

  He lifted his left hand, thrust his fingers into his mouth, and bit down.

  I turned away, pressed my face into my husband’s chest. I could not watch, but I listened as my father devoured himself, until even Autolycus could stand it no longer and we left.

  There are some nights when I remember and long for the liquid fire of my unions with Poseidon. Then I think of unleashed hunger, and touch my husband’s solid shoulder. Eventually sleep finds me again.

  Whatever Was Forgotten

  In the course of my life, I was a scribe under one pharaoh, a general under another, and finally I took the Crown of the Two Lands myself. These are some of my titles before I ascended to the double crown:

  Foremost of the King's courtiers;