Dark of the Moon

chapter 7

THIS IS it?" I ask. "This is what my father left me?"

My mother has stopped in front of a boulder lying near the sea path. She flutters her hand to draw my attention to it. I have passed this same boulder hundreds of times and have never attached any importance to it. It's just an ordinary stone, squarish, gray and brown, almost as tall as I am.

"Not the rock, silly!" She laughs as if I've said something ridiculous. After her earlier reluctance to talk about my father, she now seems eager. She gives the boulder an almost affectionate slap. "He rolled it here himself, a few days before he went back to the sea. He said he left something under it for you, and if the baby was—if you turned out to be a boy, you were to move the rock as soon as you were old enough and strong enough and find it."

For the first time since my mother and Konnidas started talking about my parentage, I feel a glimmer of interest. If her story is true and my father left me a gift, it must be something hard, not to be crushed by the weight of the boulder, and durable, since it had to last for years. It might be gold. It might even be jewels.

I join my mother and lay my hand on the rough surface of the rock. It's mottled with small orange and green speckles of lichen, and warm where the sun has touched it. I push. It doesn't budge, which is no surprise.

"What was it that he left?" I press my shoulder into it and shove. The rock stands as motionless as—well, as a rock.

"Oh, I don't know. Nothing important, just some things he didn't have use for anymore, I suppose."

"And you didn't tell me about it earlier because...?"

"Why are you ruining such a lovely day?" my mother asks. She is already pouting, and unless I do something to appease her, she will become cold and silent. For once, I don't care. I turn my back as Konnidas puts his arm around her waist. I know I should join him, that as the offender I'm the one who has the power to soothe her, but I'm too angry. Even though I know it's useless, I push against the huge stone again. As I expected, nothing happens. As I also expected, I hear my mother and stepfather returning to the house.

I can't budge the boulder by myself. I doubt that I can move it even with aid, and I know well that nobody but Konnidas will help me. I can do nothing until I come up with a plan. I follow my mother and stepfather up the path and then along the dusty trail that leads back to our house, turning over the possibilities in my mind. An ox—no, the way is too narrow and strewn with rocks. Anyway, I don't know anyone who would lend me such a valuable animal. A group of three or four men might be able to do something. The same problem arises, though: nobody is likely to want to help me.

I eat my supper without speaking. My mother is silent as well, and she merely picks at her food, which is once again lentil stew. It appears that Konnidas has gone to some trouble to make it especially tasty tonight, though whether to soothe my mother or to cheer me up I don't know. He seasoned it with the last of his store of herbs and has grated dried goat cheese over it. I eat mine, and as soon as my mother rises from her stool, leaving most of hers untouched, I take her bowl and eat what remains in it, too.

With such a full stomach I should sleep well, but instead I lie awake, pondering the problem of the boulder. I need a plan. I always need a plan. Sometimes I think life would be easier if I lived day to day, the way my mother and stepfather do.

Before he married my mother, Konnidas was a merchant who wandered all around Attika selling trinkets. He showed up on our doorstep one morning when I was very small, and he never left. He gave my mother the remaining store of his ribbons and earrings and good-luck charms, and for all I know he never gives a thought to the home he left—if he had one—or the people he grew up with.

But I can never stand to leave anything up in the air. I lie on my pallet on the floor, listening to the two of them talking quietly until they drop into sleep and my mother's breathing falls into rhythm with Konnidas's light snore.

I try not to think of the possibility that my mother has forgotten exactly which stone my father showed her and just pointed at the first one she came to after she grew tired of walking. This part of the seaward path is littered with rocks, thanks to the frequent shakings by Poseidon. I could never push over each one of them. No, I have to figure out a way to move only this one boulder, and if there's nothing under it, I'll know that her story was just that: a story. It sounds like one of the tales she used to tell me when I was little.

If my mother didn't just point out some random rock, and if the man who was my father intended me to be able to move it (two big ifs), then there has to be a way that someone who is not a giant and not a god can find what is lying under it. My father was not a god (this much is clear now), and if he had been a giant, my mother would have mentioned the fact. Yet he managed to move the rock, if she is to be believed. It's not impossible; after all, the temple in town is made of stones much larger than the one on the path, and they had to have gotten there somehow.

I squeeze my eyes shut and remember the scene. The path is steep, and the rock lies at the bottom of an incline. Maybe he placed whatever he meant me to find on the ground, then climbed up on a ledge above it and pushed the rock on top of it. That would be difficult, but not impossible.

Even if true, though, that theory won't help me. The boulder now sits firmly on the flat ground. Unless...

I have a plan.