The Lost Sisterhood (40 page)

“This will be your view from now on,” said Paris, coming up behind her. “And this will be mine.” He kissed her neck, then pushed the dress from her shoulders and ran his hands over her skin. “The finest view in Troy … nay, in the world altogether—”

“Please.” Myrina held on to her dress as best she could.

“Just as the sun rises on one side of the earth,” mumbled Paris, tracing every rise, every valley of her spine, “and spends the entire day traveling to the other … so could I spend my days traveling over you, from front to back, from top to toe. And never once”—he pressed against her teasingly from behind—”would you wait in vain for me to rise.”

But Myrina could not bring herself to frolic so soon after the drama she had witnessed. “Do tell me,” she whispered, looking at him over her shoulder, “what your mother meant by what she said. I cannot forget her sadness.”

Paris sighed and released her. “I should have warned you that my mother is superstitious. Do you believe me if I tell you it is nothing to worry about?”

“No.”

“Damn it!” Paris walked out onto the balcony. “That is a fine start to our marriage. But then, I suppose I did not marry you because I wanted to be followed around by a cowering slave.” He glanced at her to make sure she was listening. “What you must understand is that my mother has carried twelve children, but lost nine of them. Some at birth, others later, due to”—he shrugged—”jealous fortune? I do not pretend to understand these matters.”

Myrina shook her head. “Poor woman. To have endured so much grief—”

“Meanwhile”—Paris turned his back on the city, arms crossed—”my wonderful father keeps siring children with his other wives and concubines and is rarely without a babe—or a woman—in his lap.” Seeing Myrina’s shock, he smiled wryly. “I am sorry. But you were the one who wanted to know.”

“And I appreciate your candor.” She moved closer to him, not ready to quit the subject. “But why would your mother accuse me of killing you?”

Paris rolled his eyes. “Religious nonsense.”

Myrina looked at him intently, willing him to continue. When he did not, she framed his face with her hands and said, “Please let me share more than your bed. Something bears down on you, and it pains
me that I cannot help you shoulder the burden. Remember what you taught me … and let me fight with you, back to back, until we have driven it safely away—”

Taking her hands, Paris kissed them one by one. “When I was born,” he finally said, turning toward the ocean again, “there was no shortage of evil omens. The priests used all their tricks to convince my parents I was an unwanted child—hateful to the gods and therefore a threat to Troy.” He threw her a sad smile. “You see, it has always been a fear with us that one day the Earth Shaker will rise and march away from our city in anger, causing destruction as he goes. Occasionally, you will feel him stirring”—Paris ran his hand over a tiny crack in the stone balustrade—”but have no fear, my sweet; he has never been calmer than he is right now.”

Myrina studied his profile, anxious to understand. “What could the priests possibly have against a newborn?”

“They never approved of my father’s choice of wife. They feared that under a queen raised in Ephesus—a queen used to weapons and independence—the Trojan people might revolt against the new gods and revert to their old ways.” Paris hesitated, then continued reluctantly, “I might as well tell you that before my great-grandfather took the throne, Troy was, for many generations, ruled by women. Otrera and my mother are descended from the ancient queens of Troy, and this was why my father chose to ally himself with them through marriage. But the priests have always worried that my mother would challenge my father’s authority as king and so, from the moment she set foot in Troy, they began filling her head with superstitious nonsense.”

Sensing Paris’s pain, Myrina wrapped her arms around him, and they stood like that for a while, looking over the town that seemed joyfully ignorant of its own secret past. “I am sure you can sympathize with my mother,” said Paris at length, leaning his head against Myrina’s. “Relieved as she was to keep her baby, she was distressed by all the talk of evil omens. And so, as soon as another chorus of scheming priests was installed, riffling through entrails and pronouncing self-serving inanities, she consulted them again, to better understand my destiny.”

Paris fell silent once again, his eyes running to and fro across the
teeming city, following an oxcart here, a group of roving sailors there. Then he turned and walked back into the room, to pick up his satchel and take out the cloth containing the golden chalice. He did not unwrap it but merely put it gently on a table before walking over to the bed—an enormous divan mounted on a marble podium between four red stone pillars—to throw himself across it, facedown.

When he finally spoke, his voice was stifled by the soft bedding, but Myrina—climbing up beside him—heard every word, although she might have wished she didn’t. “Now, to please my parents,” Paris began, “the new priests decided my fate was not as evil as formerly thought … as long as I never married. My marriage, they claimed, would enrage the Earth Shaker and he would strike me dead. But here I am”—Paris rolled over, throwing out his arms—”married and still alive.”

When Myrina did not respond, he sat up on one elbow and tugged teasingly at her hair. “Come now, lovely wife, laugh with me. The ways of the gods may be mysterious but the workings of man are only too obvious.”

Myrina, shaken by what she had heard, threw her arms around him. “You didn’t have to marry me, you know. I would have happily lived with you—”

“Liar!” Paris rolled over and pinned her to the bed. “From the moment I first called you Queen Myrina and placed a crown upon your head, we both knew there could be no other way. I had to possess you”—he looked down at her body and the dress that was still undone—” fully and completely.”

“You speak as if you own me,” protested Myrina, partly relieved to quit the sinister topic, yet also piqued by the patronizing tone in which Paris had addressed her ever since their arrival at the palace.

“Do I not?” He smiled at her frown, then began caressing her as if to demonstrate his ownership. “I think I do.”

“Allow me to disagree.” Myrina sneaked a hand underneath his tunic and soon found what she was looking for. “For all your cocky posturing, it is man’s lot to be possessed by woman, not the other way around.” Her touch made Paris lie back on the bed with a gasp of pleasant expectation, and she straddled him triumphantly. “Now that I understand
the mechanics of things,” she said, hovering over him, “I wager that for every rapacious bandit who takes his pleasure at the point of a dagger you will find a hundred husbands bound by the whims of their wives.” Myrina moved teasingly against him, enjoying Paris’s groans of impatience. “No, my love. Yes, my love. Not now, my love.” She leaned forward to catch his eyes, making sure he acknowledged her power over him. “We possess
you,
my prince. Nature wanted it that way. Never forget it.”

M
YRINA’S FIRST WEEK AT
the palace was a confusing web of intense, almost euphoric, happiness intertwined with embarrassments and frustrations that left her—the killer of lake monsters, the savior of enslaved sisters—secretly in tears at the end of every day.

Her primary concern was Lilli. Sadly, Myrina’s ideas of how to ensure her sister’s comfort went far beyond what Paris was prepared to do.
“What?”
he exclaimed, when she first set a tender foot on the subject. “You would have your innocent sister sleep in our room, where she will hear everything we say and do?” He shook his head with disbelief. “Why do you want to strangle our pleasure like this? You know we would never be at ease with her so near.”

Myrina saw his point, of course, and did not repeat her request. But she could not ignore the heartbreak looming ahead. Soon, Hippolyta would want to return to Ephesus, and Kara, Animone, and Kyme would undoubtedly go with her. When they left, Lilli would be sleeping all by herself among strangers in a dormitory in this foreign land. As much as Myrina loved her sister and hated to imagine life without her, there were moments when she felt Lilli might be happier in Ephesus, surrounded by friends.

It did not help that Paris, eager to demonstrate his brotherly love in a more agreeable way, offered to teach Lilli how to ride her own horse. Seeing the excitement spreading like rings around his proposal—involving not only Lilli but everyone who cared for the girl—Myrina could not bring herself to naysay the plan. And so, every evening, after completing his affairs for the day, Paris would come looking for them
in the queen’s courtyard, to give Myrina a quick kiss on the cheek and steal away Lilli for an hour of raucous fun behind the horse stables.

Another blow to Myrina’s contentment was the rampant expectation that she would act the princess in all things and be a hunter no more. Before they had arrived in Troy, it had not even occurred to her Paris might want her to change her ways, but no sooner had they settled into his room before he implored her—in between adoring kisses—to let him put away her weapons for the time being and wear only the clothes he gave her.

“Please understand,” he had said, after teaching her how to use the golden brooches that held her new, flimsy garments together, “I love your hunter’s heart and would never want you otherwise. But people here are old-fashioned and I don’t want them to laugh at me—”

“You mean, they are new-fashioned,” Myrina corrected him. “Did you not tell me that in the olden days, before the Earth Shaker came—”

“Shh!” Paris looked around nervously, although they were completely alone. “We just need to give them time to adjust to the change—”

“What change?” Myrina held out the frilly dress with dismay. “Look at this useless fabric; it is already torn! I might as well walk around naked.”

Their discussion had, perhaps predictably, ended right there, but it was by no means over, at least not for Myrina. She had not exaggerated when she told Paris on their wedding night that she did not know how to be a woman. And although he had been exceedingly accomplished at introducing her to certain aspects of womanhood, he had not prepared her for those many hours of the day where she would have to walk and sit and talk like one, enduring the relentless boredom of female propriety.

While Paris spent his days with the king, either in the throne room or out and about, Myrina had no choice but to remain with her sisters in the queen’s courtyard. In the beginning, she thought the place beautiful; a wide portico went all around a small rectangular garden with a sparkling water basin in the middle—a basin thrice as large as the one she had known in the Temple of the Moon Goddess. But after walking the labyrinthine seashell garden paths a few times and realizing they all
ended up exactly where they started, she began to suspect the heavily guarded seclusion was intended as much to keep the women in as to keep strangers out.

Reclining comfortably in the shade of the portico, the queen spent most of the day with her eyes closed, nodding along to gentle music played by elderly courtiers and sipping tea handed to her by silent servant girls. She rarely engaged anyone in conversation, yet expected all her ladies-in-waiting to sit faithfully by, sharing in her graceful indolence.

Myrina could scarcely believe it was the same woman she had met on that first day, spewing bile in front of the house altar. Not once had the queen mentioned the episode; in fact, when Myrina and her sisters were first brought into the courtyard and officially introduced, it was as though the woman had completely forgotten that initial exchange—as if she had imbibed some elixir that dulled her memory and made her world more agreeable.

“Ah, yes,” she said, when Hippolyta had recited the elaborate greetings sent by Lady Otrera. “My dear sister. How kind. Do thank her and make up something lovely to tell her in return.”

And that was it. Hippolyta was waved aside to make space for a tray with fruit, and no one said another word of welcome. Understandably disappointed, Myrina’s companions soon began to talk longingly of the chores awaiting them at home, and it took all her eloquence to talk them into a full week of such pompous boredom.

“I cannot believe you have chosen this life,” whispered Animone one day, glancing across the courtyard at the king’s concubines and their children, roaming rather noisily under the opposing portico. It had not escaped Myrina’s notice that several of the women were pregnant; what truly bothered her was the look of pity in Animone’s eyes suggesting that one day, she, Myrina, would be the old queen dozing off in the chair, exhausted by nights and nights of sleepless solitude.

That evening, she returned to her quarter with a stash of toy weapons and waited for Paris with new excitement, ready to pounce on him the way she had done so often on the beach in Ephesus. But when he entered the room and looked down at the wooden sword sliding to a
halt at his feet, Paris merely laughed and shook his head. “Where did you get these?” he asked, oblivious to Myrina’s dueling stance.

“I stole them from the boys,” she replied, deflating with disappointment.

“My half brothers?” Paris frowned. “Poor lads. I had better go explain—”

When he finally returned, Myrina was lying on the bed, staring at the painted patterns on the ceiling. Vines, eggs, and fruits … all symbols of fertility. “We are nothing but mares, are we?” she said. “Walking around daintily in our little enclosure, waiting to be bred.”

Paris was too astounded to reply right away, and before he could even bend down to kiss her, Myrina rose from the bed. “Hippolyta may have her weapons,” she continued, “but Myrina may not. And Lilli may ride, but Myrina may not—”

“Of course she may!” Paris came around the bed with a smile, but she turned her back to him.

“A horse!” she said, arms crossed. “I want to ride my
horse.
”

He laughed and seized her by the waist. “My little hunter princess. Weary of luxury already. Wishing she was back in Crete, begging for food scraps.”

Myrina fairly erupted from his embrace.