The gods even blessed us with two well-made boats. They washed up on our shore, days apart—first a small one, which we used to visit nearby islands ourselves, and then a larger boat, capable of carrying us across the open waves to the peninsula. Returned to the mainland for the first time in more than a year, we found men willing to carry letters to the families we had left behind. I wrote to Pasipha? in Minos every month, but never did I send a single word to my father or my brothers. I was dead to them, and was content to be.
We could have left Aeaea—joined society again, taken on new names and identities, made lives for ourselves in the world we had known before, among ordinary people with their expected conventions. But by that time we wanted no part of the life we had known in Colchis. Should I become a daughter and a wife again, owned and controlled by my father and husband? Should I content myself once more with the label of whore’s orphan, when I had known glory as a free woman, ruler of my own island with its own rich trade? And my friends, Anthousa and Demetria, Ligeia and Agathe—would they be glad to sink once more to the low station of kitchen servant? No. We liked Aeaea; it was ours, as no place in the world had ever been, or could ever be. The society we had made together, generous and loving, cooperative and kind, offered far more freedom than we would find anywhere in the world.
The years passed happily. Little by little, we replaced our house of fallen logs with a true estate, fine and tall, fashioned from the stone blocks we had learned to cut and the timbers we had learned to hew. We spent our days hunting in the forest, tending our gardens, and increasing the size and quality of our herds of sheep and swine. We wanted nothing from the outside world, except for the occasional exchange of goods, and a kind word now and then from the loved ones we still remembered.
We certainly did not want men. But men came to Aeaea, none the less.
In the summer of our seventh year on the island, we faced especially trying times. The season had been hotter and drier than usual; our crops of barley and wheat suffered, parched and stricken by stem-blight. The disease of our small fields seemed an ill omen to me, a harbinger of dark times to come. I had not felt such foreboding since my friends and I had first set foot on Aeaea. Later, the figs in our orchard aborted more than half their fruits long before they could ripen, and my apprehension deepened.
My presentiment proved heart-rendingly accurate. As summer neared its end, the happy little cosmos we had made for ourselves was struck by its first tragedy. Knowing our barley and wheat stores would fall well short of our needs, most of our number took to the sea. Only Anthousa and I stayed behind to mind the animals. The women planned to bring in a fine, fat haul of fish, which we would smoke or salt or pickle, and thus keep our bellies full through the cold months of winter. They took both boats, rowing south and east toward the next-nearest cluster of islands. It was an area we had fished before, many times—but something had changed in current and tide.
My friends told me what had happened when they struggled back to Aeaea’s shore. A force like a god’s hand, unseen but all-powerful, had seized both boats, sucking them toward the sharp rocks and high, jagged cliffs of the island we called Anthemoessa. There were four in the large boat, the one we used to visit the peninsula and communicate with our distant families. The smaller boat, manned by Demetria and Ligeia, was more agile, despite having fewer women at its oars. Demetria and Ligeia rowed clear of that unexpectedly violent current and escaped danger. But the larger boat…alas, it could be neither turned nor slowed. When the women saw that our best boat would surely smash upon the rocks of Anthemoessa, three of them jumped overboard, swimming to the smaller, clinging to its sides and oars. But Chrysomallo remained, struggling with the tiller, trying in vain to save one of our most important assets. Demetria and Ligeia shouted at Chrysomallo to abandon the vessel, to leap in the water and swim to them while she still had some hope of survival. But if Chrysomallo heard their desperate pleas over the crash of surf against sharp black stone, she paid no heed.
The loss of the larger boat was one we could bear. We had long since grown used to life on our island—to making do with what we had, and caring for ourselves. In time, we could trade for another boat, anyhow—though a vessel as large as the one we lost would have cost us dearly.
But Chrysomallo’s death was a catastrophe from which we will never wholly recover. She was friend and lover to each of us; Chrysomallo took a piece of every woman’s heart down into the Underworld. Our world had consisted of eight women. We were eight members of the same body, living as one, functioning in perfect coordination, little thought or compromise required. Now we are seven, and a full year after her death, none of us quite understand how to live without our beloved.
Anthousa felt the death most keenly of all. She had loved Chrysomallo more than the rest of us put together—they had been lovers more often than any other pair. The fact that we’d been unable to recover the body weighed heavily on Anthousa’s heart. When the women had recuperated from their ordeal--physically, at least—we held a ceremony at the water’s edge, entreating Poseidon to look kindly on our lost friend’s spirit, to guide Chrysomallo gently to the shore of that dark and final river.
Anthousa sulked throughout our ceremony, and cast her portion of salt and oil into the sea with a scowl upon her face. “I could have found her body, if you’d only allowed me to take the small boat to Anthemoessa,” she fumed at me later that night. “Those creatures who live on that cursed rock have no doubt eaten her flesh by now!”
“The poor women who dwell on Anthemoessa are not creatures,” I rejoined, as gently as I could manage. The very thought of humans eating the flesh of their own raised stinging bile to the back of my throat. “They are wretches, stranded there by a shipwreck. They are only trying to scratch out a living on their small island, as we do. I am sure they would never think to eat the flesh of a dead woman.”
“If you think them so benign, why haven’t you rescued them from Anthemoessa?” Anthousa shot back at me.
In truth, the wretches of Anthemoessa filled me with a superstitious dread. I was not proud of the feeling, but I could not deny it, either. I had caught sight of them often enough as we’d fished near their island’s shore—so thin and ragged they seemed more bird than human, waving to us in rhythmic but hopeless entreaty. Sometimes, when the wind was right, we could hear them singing hymns to indifferent gods. They seemed to me an omen of terrible luck, of evil and danger. But after defending them, I could never admit as much to my friend.