‘I am king first and father second.’
I spit in his face. ‘You have never been my father. Achiroe will send the hippos and they will trample you to dust.’
He recoils from my venom and leaves me, prostrate on the rock.
She comes slowly, haltingly, creeping like dread.
Her dark shape is a spreading shadow beneath the surface but out here, covered by the strange darkness of this almost sea, away from the intimacy of the Nile’s banks, she seems smaller. I cannot believe that she has splintered ships, though I once did and know she has. I cannot believe that she will bring about my end, though she already has. I do not beg her. It would not be fair to beg her while she begs herself.
She is fighting but she is not her own. She rears up; the sun is blocked still by the towering wall of sea, but her scales shine, despite the gloom. She is so beautiful, and I drink in the crowned head and the fiercely snapping jaw, filling my heart with her, all of her, glad at least that my end will come while staring at her.I will nourish her with my body.I think it giddily and feel a wild soaring joy that even here, even now, I could not be stopped from giving myself to her, that it is she who will possess me. I watch her eyes, the familiar black, encased in orange,flick flick flick, as she rears again, bucks, thrashing against the waves. She is wresting from herself but is no match, for there are greater forces than we. And there, that thing between us, there it is again, grown so strong with thick shiny leaves, we watered it without realizing. Now it sways sharply,we are drowning it, my love, we are too bright, and the damp, warm earth is yellowing and dying and is no place for small, soft worms.
She is almost upon me. Her mouth is opened and I see hersharp fangs, smell the hot death that awaits me, and I think again that, despite it all, to be swallowed by her is better than many of my alternatives. I do not think, in this moment, that I am afraid. The violence of the way my mother was taken from me, her fierce dignity even at her end, all of this has pushed me over an edge. After all that has happened – and the sight of my Ceto begging in the earth – I am beyond fear.
She foams and froths, shrieking in high, howling, bestial cries, a sound I did not know she could make, and my heart, my tattered, shredded heart, is splintered again into so many pieces that it is unfathomable to me that they ever made up a whole heart at all. But even as she pitches towards me and my muscles lock, my pulse jumping, my body feeling the blind terror that my mind cannot, I know I would give her every piece all over again, just to rest one night beside her, safe in the knowledge that she wanted me too.
She is almost upon me now and I smile through my tears.
My love is resisting with everything she has but Horkos pulls her on, inevitably on.
I will give her honesty because she is the one I do not lie to. I tell her she is magnificent because she is. I tell her I forgive her because I can see that she will never forgive herself. I tell her that I love her because I want it to be the last thing that I say.
The wings continue to beat above me, Eris and Horkos watching closely. They are loud in my ears, I feel the down gusts cooling the sweat that beads my face, closer and closer, but I do not look up because I do not want to look away from Ceto.
But she looks away from me.
It is just as in the stories, though stories are not realities.Even when they are, a whole life and many truths, the ability to wrap it all in a mouth is, necessarily, reductive.
I had once thought the speed of a quick end a mercy. But I was wrong because what could be more cruel, more callous, than something as bright and beautiful and enduring as Promethean flame being snuffed out in an instant?
And it is an instant.
It is lava banking and cooling to obsidian, which cracks immediately under the pressure of the speed at which it has solidified. It is her petrified eyes, wide and flaring and no longer locked on mine.
She looks away.
My gaze does not hold her, I do not hold her, and my muffled mind and slack grip are to blame. My stupid, useless face that surely knows what it is to keep eyes upon it, is to blame. It fails in the only thing it has ever been good for and the last thing Ceto sees is a reminder that our freedom must always, always come at a price.
And she is scared; that is what breaks me finally, sending me careering away from myself. That is what I will think over and over.At the end, she was scared.
She looks away from me. And the future that I had no knowledge of emerges before me.
She is stone at once.
Caught between rearing and launching, now suddenly grey and heavy, she falls and falls and falls. Perhaps it is the fate of women to shred, rather than expand. The top half of her body crashes into the rocky cape and shatters. Her lower half and tail sink below the teeming surf. Her head explodes and I am bathed in her rock and rubble.
And a man lands before me.
His tunic is dirty but his sandals are bright gold with enormous wings. He is staggeringly handsome, broad and golden haired. He stands, looking down at me, with the head of the Gorgon in his hands and the pieces of my lover at his feet.
17
Aethiopia
The man does not care that I cling to debris and will not touch him. He does not care that I am so mad with grief that when he unties me, I steal his sword and try to run myself through several times. I want the sharp point in my flesh, I want to be in pieces like my mother and follow those that have been taken from me. I want it to end. But he simply stops me gently, and, when I turn the sword on him, he knocks it easily out of my hands. He does not care that he has stolen the last thing that was mine. He does not care that I am on my knees, bowed under the weight of my broken heart. He cares only that I am the most beautiful girl he has ever seen. He says it to me over and over again. I ignore him. I can hear a high, animal keening. It is visceral, shredding the air, and I know it is me. I long for my earlier dulling grief, the woollen muffling that had descended like clouds. I scrabble at the fragments of her on the cape and dash them against my skin, press them into me until I am bloody and my throat is chafed and swollen from screaming her name.
Ceto, Ceto, Ceto.
I cannot endure it; it will not be endured. I have lost so much and been so stolen from that I should be hollow, butnothing expands like empty space and I will implode under its force. I wish to die, I wish to shatter into pieces and be rubble with her, I wish to stay with her always, always.
