Page 22 of This Divine Revelry

They aren’t homes at all – they’re storerooms. I go through them, one by one. Amphorae filled with fermenting grapes, some already distilled to perfect wine. Weapons – or hunting tools at the very least. Serrated knives and fishing nets – though some of those have torn. There’s even a loom in one, with piles of wool to spin thread from. There are cups, instruments, linen sheets.

It must be Artemis. No other god travels in a pack like she does – and these are clearly intended for a group to come and need them at any time. I ransack what I know of her, and any sacred islands she might have. Delos would certainly be populated. Leros, maybe? Although we would have had to have sailed considerably off course …

Wait. I race back to that first hut. Wine. Wine!

Isn’t that a new invention? It has only just found the courts of Crete but here it is, so that means … someone was here! And not that long ago either!

I slam the lid of the amphora shut before my tears can taint it.

I have shelter and water and proof that someone has been here, and potentially they might be again soon. I might survive this.

So I make myself a bed from the sheets, preparing for an early start to repair those nets and try to catch something.

I can do this – survive first. Then find a way off the island.

I tell myself it will get easier, but in truth each day is a little harder than the last.

Whenever I think I have it figured out and I could scrounge together some life here, something goes wrong. For every laid net, foraged berry, repaired tool or stockpiled supply there are rodents that eat what I have managed to store, insects that rot the rest, holes I can’t patch. I am so immensely grateful that Daedalus taught us skills of some use – how to start a fire, lay traps and use half the tools I find in the huts, but it doesn’t make up for a lifetime of being tended to in a palace. I don’t even know what it is I don’t know until it comes to hurt me.

There is the day I venture further into the forest, delighting in finding a lake brimming with fish I can catch with my own bare hands. But hours later I am doubled over, vomiting so violently I choke, and I don’t know if it’s the lake water or the fish themselves and I am practically crawling back to the huts, writhing in agony until three suns have passed.

No one wipes my brow or fetches medicine or empties the damn bowl so the whole place smells ill and acidic, and then just when I’m over the worst of it my monthly bleeding begins, and then I am doubled over again, screeching in agony without willow bark to numb the pain or servants to bring hot towels for me to clutch against my stomach.

I do not know what I’m fighting for because surely it’s not this.

For a week afterwards I am weak and shaky, surviving on easily foraged berries and water from the large amphorae I’d emptied of wine so I did not have to haul the bucket up and down so often.

A week or so more – how can I possibly track it? – I’m starting to feel once more like this could be sustainable. I’ve finally figured out how to smoke meat so that it lasts a few more days without rotting, have even pulled salt from the ocean to help. But then a storm comes in the night, not only turning the entire world around me to a muddy swamp, but washing away the lines and snares I’d laid so there is no meat anyway, not for a while longer.

I suppose one day I don’t drink enough, or my haphazard diet gets to me, or it all just suddenly overwhelms me, how hard and miserable it is, and I crawl back into the hut even though the sun is still high. I can’t do it, not today. I’d rather starve. Rather waste away than live like this.

How long has it been now? A handful of weeks?

What’s Theseus doing right now?

Someone would have passed by now if they were going to – so just how far off course were we knocked by that storm?

I spend most of the next morning unable to move from my bed too – unsure whether it’s exhaustion or something deeper, a mental weariness.

But even so: I can’t stop, I think, even as my body lies limp. He doesn’t get to win.

I manage to drag myself up in the afternoon, determining to gather enough food that I might survive the next few days – because he doesn’t get to win. I haul two baskets of berries and grapes back – because he doesn’t get to win.

I begin hanging broken nets as curtains in the hope they might keep insects out better than they caught fish – because he doesn’t get to –

The door screeches open behind me.

My heart leaps. A person? A mirage? A goddess? I turn so quickly I wrap myself up in the nets I’d just been hanging.

‘You aren’t Artemis,’ I blurt.

The sun is a dim setting glow behind the figure in the doorway. It renders him radiant – though from the shining copper curls, verdant eyes and slow-gliding smile, he might be capable of that himself.

‘No,’ he says, and there’s something wild in his gaze as that grin sets in full, carnage in his unabashed delight. ‘Though I’m told the resemblance is uncanny.’

CHAPTER TEN

HE TAKES ME IN SLOWLY, those green eyes bright as jewels and utterly unashamed – though it’s curiosity glinting there rather than desire. I try to imagine what greets him: my hair is a tangle of finger-combed locks, my once-mauve chiton sun-faded to a slightly hued grey; my grandfather’s blood might have kept my skin from burning in the sun but it’s chapped from sea salt on the wind, and something about this place – the lack of soap, the constant sweat, the humidity, maybe just the change to its accustomed olive oil cleanses – has painful red bumps prickling across my chin and forehead.