“Dying?”
Both of my husband’s friends glanced at my face, then at each other. An uneasy silence fell heavily across the room, broken only by Lycus’s strange, whispering laughter. Then the men turned together, as if directed by a single, shared mind, and left the house.
When my father and brothers came for me the next morning, they found Lycus already laid out for this prothesis, the first of the triple funerary rites. Dutiful wife that I was, I had roused the kitchen maid Ligeia from her sleep. Together, we washed and anointed Lycus’s body and bound up his wounds with clean white wool, so they would not mar the look of his corpse when we carried it to the cemetery the following day. Then, when dawn came, I crawled into my bed, exhausted from my three-day vigil but entirely content. I did not grieve; I felt no sorrow. My dreams were sweet, full of golden light and the sensation of flying, as if my spirit was a dove loosed from its cote, taking gladly to wing after a long, dark period of confinement.
Later, Ae?tes told me I smiled as I slept. It was my smile that damned me.
Heliodoros shut me in my old chamber in his grand house—the one I had inhabited as a girl. The one I had shared with Pasipha?. The door slammed hard behind him when he left me there, a testament to his anger. My father had not said a single word to me on the long walk from my husband’s home to his own. But my bruised, aching wrist (by which Heliodoros had grabbed me, hauling me from my bed and from the sanctuary of dreams) spoke plainly enough. If I had expected the sympathy due a new widow, I would not receive it from my father.
The chamber had been stripped of most of its old things. Woven rugs and tapestries Pasipha? and I had chosen to brighten the chamber of our girlhood were long gone. Floor and walls alike were bare as clean-picked bones. One of the beds had been removed; a single sleeping couch, hard and narrow, stood in the middle of the room. It was morning, but well could I imagine the shadows of night drawing in around me, circling on all sides, as I huddled beneath that unfriendly bed’s thin sheets. There was one cedar chest tucked into a corner, a tiny clay lamp perched on its lid, my only source of light in the darkness. Beside the chest stood a pot for my night soil. I could hardly have found myself in a bleaker place if I’d been shut up in the black vault of a tomb.
At least I had some company in my prison cell, while I waited to learn what my father would do with me—and what had kindled his anger in the first place. Anthousa had recently been hired into Heliodoros’s household. She was scarcely older than I—little more than a girl—but her tall stature and strong shoulders had made her almost as useful as a strapping young man. As she was near my own age, Heliodoros had pulled Anthousa from the kitchens, where she had been cutting up onions for that night’s stew, and sent her off to my chamber to see to my needs. I believe Heliodoros had some notion that Anthousa’s height and strength would intimidate me, and keep me from plotting an escape. Instead, I found the sympathy my family had denied me in the young woman’s arms.
“My lady,” she’d said, reaching out to comfort me, “we have all heard what happened. The wolves are terrible this year. Some say it’s because of the drought in the east; it has driven the wolves out of their usual places, and they are hungry and desperate. But I suppose that’s no comfort to you.”
I sniffled, wiping away my tears. No matter how kind she seemed, I didn’t dare confess to this stranger that I did not weep for Lycus. My tears were all for my confusion—the strange mist and mire of Heliodoros’s rage, and the stoic silence my two brothers had kept as they’d helped march me back to our father’s home.
“When will Heliodoros set me free?” I asked Anthousa. “Do you know?”
“I have not heard, my lady. But I will be here with you all the while, to cheer you and bring you anything you need. And whenever other duties call me away, there will be other girls to take my place. Demetria, Eumelia, Chrysomallo—they are all very pleasant and kind. We’ll keep the nightmares away.”
“But why should my father hold me here? I’ve done no wrong.”
Anthousa looked down at the toes of her sandals. She shifted uncomfortably from one foot to the other.
“You know something,” I said. “Tell me what you know.”
“I have heard…a rumor, my lady.” She looked up at me, speaking with a sudden rush of passion. “But I don’t believe it. None of us do—we younger women. We know it’s all foolishness—men’s silly fears, and nothing more. But when has a woman ever succeeded in talking sense into a frightened man?”
“Tell me,” I said again. My body had gone cold; my mind was very still, calm with acceptance.
Anthousa sighed. “This morning I heard that two of Lycus’s men ran here in the night, and had Heliodoros wakened long before the sun was up. They told the master that you had worked some dark magic on your husband, and poisoned him while he was too weak to fight you off. They called you a witch.”
A silence. At length, I said, “I see.”
“But none of us believe it,” she insisted again. “Men are fools, the whole lot of them. We know you’ve done no wrong, my lady…for whatever servants’ confidence may be worth to you.”
I forced a smile. “It is worth a good deal to me, just now. My father does not trust me, as you can clearly see. Even my brothers seem to have turned their backs on me.”
The chamber had two small windows; one looked out across the hills, past the temple shrine where Pasipha? and I had made our offerings as children, to the ancient cemetery on a green slope dotted with pines. Anthousa joined me at the window; as the sun sank ever lower in the deep blue of an afternoon sky, we watched my husband’s funeral procession. Tiny as ants, Heliodoros, my brothers, and Lycus’s friends bore the body I had washed and anointed up the windy hill. They gathered around his grave while someone—Heliodoros, I assume—recited the funerary rites. When Lycus was properly consigned to the earth, the distant men began to trickle back down the slope toward the long pale snake of the road, and Anthousa and I turned away.