Free Goddess of Yesterday by Caroline B. Cooney

slaves.
    “When I was ten, which—”
    Pyros thrashed Tenedos on the back of the neck, where the spine ends, and hit him a second time on the side of his head, just above the ear. Tenedos staggered slightly.
    “Do not bother a princess with your past!” snapped Pyros. “You are nothing. Your past does not matter.”
    Tenedos apologized to me.
    I spoke as a princess would. “I will decide whether a slave requires punishment,” I said sharply to Pyros. But perhaps a princess would not say that, because she would not notice how a slave was treated. I had much to consider.
    Without warning, and although it was midday, we entered a shocking darkness. It was black yet green, filling the world from earth to sky. It was the dark of trees and yet not of trees. It was evil. “What is this?” I whispered. I wound my fingers around each other to keep from grabbing the hand of Tenedos yet again.
    “It is called a forest, my princess. Many trees in oneplace, so dense they blot out the sky, like the evil message of an eclipse. I too hate the forest. On my island, like yours, few trees stand together. We will walk for an hour among these pines before the forest ends.”
    Nicander's bard used to sing a poem:
    Seven ways of terror
in a forest all of pine.
    The empty.
    Now I understood the words.
    “Do not leave the path,” said Tenedos, as if I had considered this for one moment. “The leaves that brush your face are the souls of those who died unburied.”
    But Pyros heard this and hit him again. “Don't talk nonsense, slave. Princess, the trees are just firewood. One day men will cut it all down. Anyway, we are armed. Neither man nor beast will hurt you.”
    Tenedos and I were not worried about man or beast. When the overseer moved on, Tenedos hissed to scare away spirits. “May the daimon of this grove take Pyros and—” With an effort, Tenedos stopped himself from cursing in my presence. I was sorry, because a good collection of curses is a useful thing, and Tenedos probably knew some I had not yet heard. I almost told Tenedos that I agreed with him, Pyros was just a dog tick, but remembered in time that I was the princess Callisto.
    At last we broke out from the evil shade.
    Before us lay tilted fields sliced apart by dark hollows and rocky gorges. The Sparta before us was an unquiet land, skeletal, spines of rock and ribs of stone. White and blackand brown sheep wandered, too many to count even with the word “thousand.” Flocks of wild doves burst out of bushes. Before us were mountains so high they invaded the gods' sky.
    So this was the Main Land. How could the people of Menelaus bear to live under these great mountains, close to the dark of that awful forest?
    But they did not live close, I discovered, for we walked on and on.
    We passed fields of flax being harvested with scythes. I had never seen this, and I found the rhythm and the gleam of the curved blades quite beautiful. Having set in motion my new life, could I keep it swinging back and forth, like a scythe? Or like a scythe, would it cut my throat?
    We came upon slaves knee-deep in pools of water, treading on the flax to soften the stalks so that the linen thread could be removed. It was strange water, having motion but not waves.
    “The Eurotas River,” Tenedos told me. “It runs even in the heat of summer.”
    I had never seen a river, only seasonal brooks from spring rains. And in all my life I had heard of only one river, the river at Troy, the great Hellespont. Since his birth island was close to Troy, Tenedos must have seen that. “Is this what the Hellespont is like?” I said eagerly.
    He nearly laughed out loud. “No. Up this little stream, one man could pole a boat. In the Hellespont, forty rowers could row till their hearts burst and hardly make progress against the current.”
    We passed through fields of clover and red wheat, olive orchards frothing silver leaves like the foamy sea and clustersof tiny stone houses. At the doorstep of a