Chapter Twenty One The First Dream

She was wet―so cold. There was water up her nose and in her mouth. There was something round and hard on her tongue. Spitting it out and blowing her nose into her palm, she tried to clear her nasal passages. Finally, she took her first breath. It stung. Opening her eyes, she saw that she was washed up on a beach and there was a gold coin nestled in the sand in front of her. That must have been what was in her mouth. There was a brown cloth sack beside her, too, but she took no notice of it. She felt something on her face. Was someone there? No. The sun was rising. Whatever her circumstances, there was the sun. Its light and warmth reached her face and caressed her cheek like the warm breath of a mother.

“Oh, Heaven!” she cried to the skies raising her arms in the air. “Oh, Heaven! Thank you! Thank you! Thank you!” She put her hands in the sand and pushed herself onto her feet. She tried to take a step, but her dress weighed too much. It was made of wool, and sopping wet, it was too heavy to carry. It was so cold and uncomfortable that she immediately stripped except for the lightest petticoat. Once free, her shoulders and arms were bare and the sun bore down on her so warmly she felt like dancing.

She chased down the beach without a care for whom or what might see her. She jumped and skipped like a prisoner free from jail. She hollered and cried and drank in the landscape like she had never seen one before. The mountains rose and the forest hummed. There were no houses except for a plain gray stone tower set slightly away from the beach, but when she studied it, she recognized it as her home. Her body seemed to remember it was where she belonged.

Home! She was home!

Troublesome details like her name, what she had been doing in the water, what was in the bag, and the rest of her past didn’t concern her. All that mattered was the feeling of freedom that coursed through her body.

She ran to the tower and looked in every room. She found hers and took off her undergarments. As she looked through her wardrobe, she saw that all her clothes were alike. White dresses with dark woolen over-frocks. She grabbed one and put it on. As she dressed herself, her wet hair dripping through her clothes. She grabbed a sheet and twisted it around her black hair to wring as much water from it as possible. Then she combed through the tangles with a seashell comb she found on the chest at the end of the bed. Swiftly, like she had done it every day of her life, she braided it into two long plaits and twisted them into a bun on the base of her neck.

With that done, she went downstairs to find something to eat. She felt like she hadn’t eaten in ages. She was ravenously hungry. In the kitchen, there was bread and fruit, which she ate happily. She drank the entire contents of the clay water pitcher on the cutting board. The kitchen had ground wheat, dried fruit, and bundles of dried herbs hanging from the ceiling. Prowling around, she looked for meat. She wanted meat for supper. Then she realized that it must be in the smokehouse.

“How silly!” she exclaimed, still buoyant from her feeling of freedom.

A path ran from the tower to where a tiny wooden building sat in the middle of two tall bunches of grass. Halfway down the path the girl stopped and stood still in shock. Trails of blood-soaked the yellow grass of the path and ran under the smokehouse door. The young woman tried to steady herself. It was a fresh kill and one of the men had taken it in the smokehouse to butcher. That was what she told herself as she approached. There was nothing to be afraid of.

Putting her hand to the knot in the wooden door, she swung it open. She gasped in horror and let the door fall shut. Turning on her heel, she ran as fast as she could back toward the tower.

Inside the smokehouse, there were two women hunched over the remains of a human body, a man. The girl couldn’t identify him, but he was in pieces with his bare-bones protruding and his internal organs exposed and bloody. The women themselves were terrifying as they pulled his flesh off his bones with their fangs. They had sharp vicious eyes and growled like panthers.

She had to get away. They were cannibals. They would eat her, too.

“Sethos! Stop her!” a woman shrieked.

The girl made it to the door of her tower and slammed it shut behind her. She pulled down the bar that secured it, but she wasn’t sure that it would be enough to save her, so she pushed a chair from the next room over it. She believed for a moment that she was safe, but then she saw a dark head slip past outside the window.

Her eyes flew around the room in a panic. She could see three windows, but there was no way of securing all of them.

She sprinted up to her bedroom and shut the door. There was no lock on the door, so the girl pushed over her wardrobe. Then she began piling everything in the room on top of the wardrobe until it looked like a junk pile.

The girl braced herself against the wardrobe and sat very still. She was so afraid she had sweat running down her temples in rivers. At least the window was well above ground and she wouldn’t have to worry about one of the cannibals getting through it.

But then that dark head popped up over the window sill.

The girl closed her eyes and screamed till she was hoarse, but nothing happened. No one grabbed her and bit her arm or forced her through the open window. She screamed again, but still, no one touched her.

“Open your eyes,” a surprisingly calm voice said.

“I don’t want to,” she cried, shaking her head and screaming again.

“I’m not going to eat you,” the voice said, trying again.

“I don’t believe you.”

“Open your eyes, woman!”

Her eyes snapped open.

That dark head was still at the window. He hadn’t even entered the room. His arms were crossed on the window sill. He seemed weightless and he looked amused. He was ugly, or at least he seemed ugly. As she stared at him, she wondered if he truly was ugly. What was ugly about him? His eyes? Yes, his eyes were definitely hideous. They didn’t look like a human’s eyes at all—more like an animal’s—and the rest of his face was definitely flawed. His nose was too pointed, his hair was too wild, and his cheeks were too thin.

But then he smiled a quirky, thoughtful smile and said, “You’re not the girl from before, are you?”

“What?”

“The girl that was here before,” he continued, “she didn’t act like this. She didn’t run screaming into an enclosed space where she knew she would be easily caught. See?” he said and flapped large, white wings, so the girl could see he had flown up to her window. A single feather slipped in through the window and landed at her feet. The girl stared at it, transfixed, as the monster went on in a casual tone. “She would have stayed on the ground floor, because that would have provided the fastest escape. Actually, I thought you were just coming in here to get a weapon, but what you’ve done makes no sense. She was smart enough to get away. You look the same as her, but you’re not her, are you?”

“I don’t know,” the girl whispered. “I don’t remember.”

“Your eyes are different. Hers weren’t green. They were brown. I tasted her blood once,” the monster said as he folded his wings against his back and slipped into the room. “It was amazing. She tasted like sunshine and bonfire dances.” He put a single finger to his lips and said, “Don’t tell anyone, but I helped her escape from here. I made sure she had enough money to take her anywhere, so she could hide from my flesh-eating relatives. She was supposed to be long gone from here and yet... here you are.”

“Leave me alone,” she begged, almost crying in terror.

“No. I want to see something.” He lowered himself until he was almost on top of her and put one hand on her head and the other on her shoulder. He turned her head so he could see her throat. “You have my mark. I bit you. So, if you are the same girl, why don’t you remember anything? And why have your eyes changed color?”

At that moment, a woman appeared at the window. She also flew through the air and entered the room like a giant bird. This woman was closer to the girl’s idea of beauty. Her hair curled in black and blonde waves. Her colorless eyes stared down at the girl crouched on the floor like she was an insect. Then she squinted. “Sethos, is this the same girl?”

Apparently, that was his name, Sethos. He smiled and said, “Something is wrong here. She’s got my bite marks, but she’s different.”

“Her eyes,” the woman said reflectively. “My mind travels back to a different time when I saw them. It’s the color. I never thought of green as the color of wrath until a green-eyed goddess tore off strips of my skin with a whip intended for animals. Who are you?”

The girl thought hard. “Stella,” she stuttered. “My name is Stella.”

“What a lie!” the woman laughed pitilessly. “I am Raidne. Does my name mean anything to you?”

Unbidden, the words spewed from Stella’s lips, “It makes me want to tear another strip off you, you filthy witch!”

The woman’s face went from cool confidence to absolute fear instantly. “It’s you!” she fell to the floor, bowing and pressing her forehead into the wood. Then she beckoned for Sethos to do the same, which he immediately did. Their wings folded and disappeared into their backs as they knelt.

The girl didn’t know what to do. “What’s happening?” she asked. After her outburst, she had completely reverted back to trembling in front of winged cannibals.

“You are the Lady Persephone, daughter of Mighty Zeus and Gentle Demeter, Goddess of Fertility, Goddess of the Underworld, and wife of the Dark Lord Hades, God of the Underworld, son of Chronos, brother to Zeus the God of Heaven...”

“Stop!” she interrupted. “My name is Stella.”

Raidne ignored her and went on groveling. “We’ll clean up this tower and make it habitable for my lady, or we’ll take you off the island and to the mainland. We’ll do anything you wish.”

“I thought this was the mainland. I saw mountains in the distance.”

“No. This is the southern part of the island. You can see the mountains from here, but this land isn’t connected to them. The mainland is a long way off. It’s not possible to swim. A person must be taken by boat and even then it is a long journey. Do you wish to go there?”

“What is here on the island?”

“This tower and our cave are the only livable places. The rest is a wilderness inhabited by wild animals. The people who tried to settle here brought sheep. They may be dead, we don’t know,” Raidne paused, and caught her breath. When she spoke again it was a dead entreaty, “My lady, Teles and I regret what we did to you every moment of our lives. Please give us some way to make amends. We will do anything to correct our grave misconduct. I beg of you, is there any way to break the curse your beloved goddess mother put on us?”

Stella had no idea what Raidne was talking about. She didn’t believe she was this goddess, Persephone. She wasn’t a goddess, but if she played along with them, they wouldn’t hurt her. They would even take her off the island if she wanted.

“I want to live here for a time,” Stella said after a moment. “I would go directly to the mainland as you say, but my memory is muddled, so I shall live here until I remember enough to live competently. Are all the people here dead?”

“All of them, except me, my sister, and my son,” Raidne muttered hopelessly.

Stella’s eyes traveled over to Sethos, Raidne’s son. His body was awfully rigid. His shoulder blades protruded so far that his back looked like a bull’s. His arms and legs were well-muscled, and he said that he had helped a girl, possibly her, escape. There was definitely something good about him even if he was ugly. She wanted to know why she suddenly felt peculiar when she looked at him.

“Is this man your son?” Stella asked Raidne.

“Yes. He’s my son,” she said, raising her head. “Do you want him?”

“For a servant,” Stella said, wondering if her request sounded plausible.

“He’s yours.”

Expecting some reaction, Stella turned to Sethos, but his face bore no evidence that he was unhappy with this change of events. In fact, she thought she heard him say under his breath, “Bonfire dances.”