Again, the ferryman shook his head.
The air sagged from her lungs, and she turned away from him, curling up on the chill ground.
She drifted in and out of fitful sleep. At one point she dreamed the ferryman lay his cloak over her, tucking its soft corners under her limbs.
Danae woke suddenly. She stared across the misted earth, her breath heavy in her chest. In the distance, the pale plants swayed despite the lack of wind, as though disturbed by an unseen current.
Weary as she was, sleep could not be recaptured, so she sat up and wiped the damp soil from her cheek. As she gazed across the misty plain, she thought she could see figures moving in the haze. She rose silently, Charon’s cloak sliding to the ground with a hiss. She glanced at the ferryman, but he was as still as the rock he slept against, his staff laid beside him like a fallen warrior put to rest with his sword.
She took a step away from the rock, then another. The mist drifted around her ankles, like she was walking on the surface of a cloud. Her eyes remained fixed on the horizon and the dark shapes moving in the dim light. As she walked, she thought she could hear music. Strange lilting sounds that were a medley of hissing and clicking, tangled with a harmony of soft notes sung from human throats.
Her heart began to beat a rhythm of hope in her chest. Were they ghosts?
As she drew closer, the forms solidified until she could make out two hooded figures drifting across the plain, stooping occasionally to pick the plants. Their cloaks were as pale grey as the mist, tattered lengths rasping across the soil.
‘Are you dead?’ Danae asked tentatively.
One of the figures turned.
She gasped, throwing her hands over her eyes as she looked into the face of a beautiful woman, her mouth stretched by a pair of ivory tusks, her hair a mass of writhing snakes.
Gorgons.
Danae’s heart thundered as she waited for the cold creep of her limbs turning to stone. Everyone knew the tale of Medusa, the woman Poseidon had raped in the temple of Athena. Enraged at the violation of her holy sanctuary, the Goddess of Wisdom and Warfare had transformed Medusa into the third gorgon and, like her sisters, cursed her to turn anyone who met her gaze to stone. She was said to have been slain by the hero Perseus, while her sisters lived on in the Underworld.
Danae kept her hands clamped over her face as the hissing circled her.
‘We will not hurt you, creature of flesh,’ said one of the gorgons, her voice a silken caress.
‘There are tales within tales, and very little is what came to pass,’ said her sister, her words creaking like timber.
Danae wriggled her toes. She had not been petrified yet. Perhaps, like so many of the stories she had been told, the power of the gorgons’ stone-sight was only myth.
She lowered her hands.
The gorgons had removed their hoods. Danae stared at their hair, marvelling at the tangle of scaled bodies slidingover their scalps. The first woman’s snakes were green as the hills of Thessaly, her skin a deep hazel, her lips full and questioning. Her sister’s serpents were ebony, her tusks stained with age, her skin creased and pale as the moon.
‘Were you made?’ asked the elder of the two.
Danae frowned. ‘What?’
‘Were you made or were you born?’ pressed the younger.
‘Born,’ she said hesitantly.
A breath fluttered from the elder’s lips, and she moved forward, clutching at Danae’s arms. Her hands were cold and rough.
‘We have been made before and we will be made again,’ she muttered, her snakes hissing like the tragic chorus in a play.
Danae cringed away from her. ‘What do you mean?’
‘More flesh,’ whispered the younger, stepping close on Danae’s other side. ‘He is never sated, always changing, always cutting.’
They grabbed hold of her arms. Their snakes became more frenzied, writhing and hissing, their tiny forked tongues licking the gloom.
‘Get off me.’ Danae struggled, but their grip tightened.
‘We miss our sister,’ cried the elder. ‘We miss her ever-so.’
