Dark of the Moon

EPILOGUE

Tonight is the new moon, and I dance.

My feet remember the complicated patterns that my mother taught me. I guide my little daughter through the steps, and her mouth grows round as she gawks at my cow-horn headdress, which mimics the shape of the crescent above us. She holds my hand, and I laugh encouragement. My bare feet mark the golden sand of the beach, and the signs they form mingle with the smaller patterns made by hers.

I don't need to wait until morning light to read the marks. They will repeat the news I hear from passing sailors, who say that Theseus is well, that his kingdom prospers and his people adore him. The marks will tell those who can read them that Medea and her son fled from Athens and that no one has heard of them since. They will say that Minos-Who-Was died peacefully in his sleep after the last Birth of the Sun Festival and that Damia terrorizes the servants and tends to Orthia as she would a favorite child, spoiling her and giving her everything she wants.

They will say that my husband, a quiet and gentle priest of Dionysos, loves me and Phaedra and our daughter and that he will love the child I am to bear near the Harvest Festival. My husband's sister is a priestess of Selene and was my first friend on Naxos. She can tease a laugh out of me at any moment, and she has done much to teach me the ways of the people here.

Now that I know what love is, I know I felt nothing like that for Theseus. Friendship, yes; gratitude for his kindness to Asterion and for seeing me as a woman and not a goddess in training, yes; but not love. That is something different, and something I hope my friend Theseus will find.

What the marks do not tell me, what they can never tell me, is whether I could have prevented my brother's death and whether I became Goddess that spring evening in Knossos. Sometimes I think I did and that if I had stayed home instead of crossing the sea, then one day I would join my mother and her mother and all our Mothers in the moon. At other times, I think that I never was Goddess, or I would have been able to read the warning signs that She sent me. In either case, at the end of my days, I will lie in the ground next to my husband and our son, who died while being born, a year after I came to Naxos.

Phaedra is being trained to worship Dionysos. She has a sunny disposition, and my husband treats her as his own. Our little daughter is not She-Who-Will-Be-Goddess. Even if I had a Minos to initiate her, I could never bear to watch her survey the silent crowd, seeking her husband, knowing that her actions would mean a man's death. She will be a priestess and will serve Selene, but I wonder how long it will be before even that simple worship disappears.

But for now, it is enough that I am here on a warm summer night, dancing under the new moon with my daughter, and that in our small house up the hill, my husband and Phaedra are waiting for us, with Artemis keeping watch.

I dance.