Free Snakehead by Ann Halam Page A

reached a door in the rocks at the back of the Enclosure. There was a cave, and a small, pale figure on a plinth. The old lady shut out the sunlight, and dragged a brazier from a cupboard in the rock wall. She put together a heap of charcoal and spices, and lit it with a firebox.
    “Now, you lie down and go to sleep. See if you dream.”
    Andromeda knelt. The cave was dry and quiet. This was a very holy place. Light-headed from so many nights with little or no sleep, she slipped at once into a meditation, and didn’t see the Holy Mother leave.
    She saw the Gods of the city where she was born, andthe Gods of her mother’s people, and the Achaean Supernaturals, falling away like veils.
    She didn’t know if she was falling back in time, or deeper and deeper into herself.
    When she came swimming up from the depths again, there was a tall man, with clustering curls and a strong, rich, dark face, sitting behind the brazier. He wore a purple robe, white bordered, and he held a three-pronged spear; he looked at her as if he knew her. “Are you Melqart?” asked Andromeda. She unwrapped her loom weights, the rope of precious purple yarn and her shuttle, and set them on the pyre. She’d meant to burn the tally-boards where she’d written “Dark Water” as well. But when she’d looked for them, the morning after Mando’s singing, they’d gone from behind the bar.
    It didn’t matter. The new kind of writing wasn’t held in those marked boards, it was in her head and hands.
    She lifted up her hands to pray, and remembered the name Holy Mother had told her to use. “Accept the sacrifice, Lord Poseidon, which I make of my free will.”
    The rocks cried out, there was a rushing of feet, a sigh like waves beating on a long, long shore. Somebody was crying…
.
    She sat up with a start, stiff and sore. The man was gone. In his place a pale, small statue gleamed, dim in the darkness. She had fallen asleep. How long had she been in here? It felt like hours. The brazier was cold. The bundle she’d brought with her lay on the sandy floor, stillknotted up. She opened it: the loom weights, the yarn and the shuttle were unharmed, not burned at all. She had only dreamed the offering.
    No, not just a dream, a vision. Because she knew something she hadn’t known before. She could accept what she had to accept, now that it was action, not surrender.
Not something done to me, something I choose to do
.
    I will do it. I can do it. This act is mine
.
    I more or less carried Pali as far as the goat hollow, hoping I wasn’t making the damage worse. Kefi had bravely stayed in his hiding place, through the earth tremor. We sent him racing down the hill with the news, both good and bad. The spirits were not visible, but the spring was a welcome friend. We bathed Palikari’s face, and got him to drink a little water. We thought that was safe, as he didn’t have any chest or belly wounds.
    “I wonder if they felt the earthquake at home,” said Anthe. “Lucky for us it wasn’t worse.” Anthe had not seen what I had seen, or felt what I had felt. To her it had been nothing but a minor tremor, frightening but harmless.
    I shrugged. “It seems to be over, anyway.”
    The walk home took a long time. When we reached the streets, we got him on his feet. It was still midsummer; maybe we could have passed, in the dark, for three lopsided, drunken revelers. But it was very late by then, andwe met no one. The waterfront was quiet, the taverna shuttered. Moumi, Koukla and Dicty were waiting for us in the yard.
    “Kore?” I said at once. I couldn’t help it: I had to know if she was safe.
    “She came home an hour or two ago,” Moumi told me. “I sent her to bed.”
    We took Pali into the kitchen, and laid him on clean towels on the marble-topped table. Lamplight showed my friend’s tanned face gray from loss of blood, dark blood all over him; and he’d passed out again. It was just as well, because the next part was going to be painful. Koukla