Stone Blind(61)

In front of her stood the makeshift altar: a wooden box with tendrils and circles carved into it. On top of this was a calathus, woven from willow rods, ready to contain the offerings they would pile into it. Andromeda wondered why they had made an altar from a box and a basket, but she already knew the answer. These men didn’t care about Poseidon, for all that they served in his temple and grew fat on his offerings. They didn’t revere him in celebration, they lived only to punish those who blasphemed.

And the daughter of those who blasphemed. Andromeda could hear her mother behind her, still weeping extravagantly, and she looked out over the sea that would consume her. She half-wished the priest had blindfolded her, so she couldn’t watch death arriving. Sometimes they did that, with animals. She had seen it. Rather than risk a heifer shying away from the shining blade, they bound its eyes so it would meet its destiny calmly. Would Poseidon raise the sea to drown her? She tried to imagine how it would feel to see the water coming ever closer. And then wondered if it would be worse only to hear it, never to be quite sure until it touched her. Or would she just be left here until she died from thirst, or hunger? Shunned by the sea rather than claimed by it. She shivered, in spite of the heat.

Her parents were drawing nearer: she could hear her mother gabbling, trying to negotiate with the older priest. Let me offer this, Andromeda heard, and this, and this. There was the clattering of metal landing on metal, and Andromeda took a moment to realize her mother was pulling off necklaces, bracelets, earrings, every piece of gold she could carry or wear. She was piling them up in her hands, offering them to the priest to try and buy back her daughter’s life. Andromeda felt the tears come.

She did not want her parents to see her cry, didn’t want to add to her mother’s guilt and sorrow. But now the tears had arrived they flowed down her face. She tensed her wrists against the ropes without thinking, reflexively trying to raise her hands to wipe her eyes. The tears itched on her cheeks, the ropes bit at her wrists.

And in that moment, Andromeda decided that she might not die quietly after all.





Athene


‘I am sorry,’ said Perseus. ‘I think I must have misunderstood.’

‘I’m not sure you have,’ said Hermes. He had resisted taking a bet from Dionysus on how long this son of Zeus would last, because he had believed the king of the gods would take it amiss. But now he felt a brief surge of an emotion it took him a moment to identify as remorse. If he had only known!

‘I think I must have,’ Perseus repeated. ‘Because I thought you said that the mortal Gorgon, the one I have to behead because the others are immortal so can’t be injured and could crush me like a stack of dry twigs, that one? It sounded to me as though you were saying she now has the power to turn me to stone with a single glance. And that can’t be right, can it? Because if that’s what you meant . . .’

The two gods stared at him.

‘Usually a mortal runs out of breath before saying that many words,’ said Athene.

‘I wonder if they aren’t normally facing certain death?’ said Perseus.

‘Your face has gone all red,’ she replied.

‘Because I’ve failed,’ he shouted. ‘How can I fulfil my promise to my mother now?’ He covered his face with his hands and wept.

‘I don’t even have a mother,’ said Athene. ‘I’m sure she won’t mind.’

‘She will lose everything if I fail in the attempt,’ he said. ‘I either go home now, without the Gorgon head to buy her freedom. Or I die trying.’

‘I think that option is worse for you,’ said Hermes. ‘I mean, relatively.’

‘Yes,’ Perseus agreed. ‘And worse for my mother.’

‘It’s really the same for her,’ Athene replied. ‘She marries the king either way, doesn’t she?’

Perseus dropped his hands and looked at the goddess. ‘I hate to disagree with you,’ he said. ‘But it’s not quite the same, is it?’

‘Isn’t it?’ asked Hermes.

‘No,’ said Perseus. ‘Because one way she loses her freedom and happiness. And the other way she loses her freedom and happiness and her only son.’

‘Oh yes, of course,’ said Hermes. ‘And she would mind that more?’

‘Yes,’ Perseus replied. ‘She would.’

‘I think you’re being a bit melodramatic,’ said Athene. ‘You’re behaving as though you’d have had a better chance if you didn’t know about the Gorgon’s power.’

‘No,’ said Perseus. ‘I’m behaving as though I have been clambering over a terrifying rocky island and negotiating with horrible old hags and pleading with nymphs who are laughing at me and trekking along a desolate coastline for days and it’s all been for nothing.’

‘You’re going red again,’ she said. ‘And you hadn’t really faded from the last time you forgot to breathe.’

Perseus took a deep breath but it didn’t improve matters at all.

‘How will I face her?’ he said. ‘How will I arrive back at Dictys’s house and tell her I’ve failed?’

‘I would suggest that it’ll be a lot easier to do that if you aren’t made of stone.’ Hermes was still smarting about the untaken bet. Why did Athene never tell anyone when she’d cursed someone like this? No wonder half the Olympians preferred Poseidon, even though his perpetual sense of grievance was so tedious.