Ellen Datlow - The Beastly Bride

The stars tell stories. Some of the stars are our own people, taken from the pains of this life up into the heavens. The stars make patterns, too, and surely it all means something. Here on earth, there is pain and blood and strife. But the stars move in an orderly way, pacing out a huge dance across time that no man has seen the end of.

If I watch long enough, I think I might learn.

As it is, I am often forced out of my bed into a cold and drippy day and expected to run about, shouting, following smelly dogs howling to wake the dead. They are perfectly nice dogs, ordinarily, but they become monsters when we hunt. And so I run after poor wild beasts that never did me any harm, to open great wounds in their sides with my spear or my arrows — if the dogs’ teeth don’t get to them first — to rip open their sleek and beautiful hides and ruin them forever, letting out their life’s blood in the process while the poor animals writhe and froth trying to escape.

When I leave this earth, I would not mind becoming a star, or even a full constellation. People will look up at me and tell my story. And I will become part of the great pattern, the great dance.

Chiron says that I should not mock my sister’s dreams. He says that our dreams are our truth, even if we cannot achieve them. He says that I should help my sister, if I can, to bear whatever fate the gods choose for her. I’ll try.

I cannot bear it. I cannot bear to think, because I am a girl, almost a woman now, that my fate will be to become the wife of any man. I wish to follow the goddess. I wish to run with her in the hunt by day, and lie with her and her nymphs by night.

Instead, a man’s hands on me? A man’s mouth on my lips, a man’s body on mine?

The only rough hair and rough skin I want anywhere near me is that of my kill. Rather than yield to a man’s touch, I would become a lion, a boar, a hare, or a deer, myself.

Such transformations are not unheard of. The stories abound of men and women turned to animals, to trees or flowers or even stars, in order to escape a more terrible fate. The gods can be cruel, but they have always helped our house.

Whom shall I pray to, then?

To Phoebus Apollo, who desired and chased the fair nymph Daphne, she who ran from him — as I would run, even from a god — screaming for help? Just as his hands reached her, Daphne turned into a laurel tree. Her toes became roots, her skin bark, her hair leaves, leaving the god unsatisfied. I don’t want to be a tree. I want to run, and run free.

To the great Zeus, lover of the beautiful mortal Io? The god was powerless when his angry wife, Hera, turned pretty Io into a cow, afflicted by flies and unable to speak her torment.

No help from the gods, then, and what goddess would hear my prayers? Hera, goddess of wives and hearths, wants me for her own. Wise Athena would mock me. And Aphrodite. her kind of rapturous love is not for me. Only Artemis the Hunter can save me.

All my life I have prayed to her. But if she has heard me, she does not care.

Is it because of my impiety? Do I love the goddess Artemis too much? There is a marble statue in her temple, with high round breasts and long white thighs. Once, when I was alone there, I reached out and touched them, running my fingers along all that whiteness, cool as stone but smooth as perfect flesh. Nobody saw me, I’m sure. I dream of touching them again. But I’m afraid of how even the thought makes me feel, all hungry with a hunger there is no food for, and aching like pain, only strangely sweet. All I have to do is think about touching her, to feel that way again. I don’t think there’s even a name for how I feel. It fills me utterly, and I am almost powerless before it. So I dare to call it love. Maybe this is why Zeus could not leave pretty Io alone, though it meant her doom. Or why Apollo ran after the screaming Daphne.

Maybe the goddess does not want such love from me. But it is hers, all the same.

My sister grows pale. It is terrible to see. She weeps and spins, and burns herbs at the altar of Artemis. Now Creusa wants to build her own special altar to the goddess. Yesterday she begged me to bring her horns from a mighty stag, the finest in the forest.

I’ll do a lot for poor Creusa. So I suppose I’ll take a good sharp saw, and hack away at the next deer we kill. It’s not really the season for the great-horned stags. The older ones are cunning in the hunt, and the young ones not yet grown. But for my sister, I will make a stag appear, if I can. If it will make her happy.

The suitors are coming. Four from the north, three from the south, and two from the east. They will expect hospitality befitting the House of Cadmus. I must be here to welcome them when they come.

Or I must flee.

What will I do, oh, what will I do? Choose the least horrible of them, and submit?

Or could I leave the safety of our city and of my mother’s house, to live outcast and alone in some wasteland without people? Live all by myself in a cave by a spring, devoting my life and my virginity to her who hunts by day and shines by night? My hair would grow tangled, my clothing the skins of the beasts I caught. I would drink only water, eat the flesh of my prey. The only fire I’d ever see would be my own, the only voice the voices of my dogs, and of my kills. Can I do it?

I found Creusa with a knife in her hand, lifting her blade to her own neck.

“Stop!” My hand is so much bigger than hers, now. It was not hard to circle hand and knife in my grasp. “Sister, I beg you! No matter how hard this life is, it is better than wandering with the starless shades.”

“You big star-gazing ox,” she said, but she wasn’t angry. “I was just cutting my hair.”

She wore a short chiton, and her cloak was on the chest next to her, even though the weather is very hot.

I saw it then. “You’re going?”

“Yes,” she whispered. “It is my fate.”

“A nameless, homeless wanderer? Oh, Creusa, no!”

“What else can I do? Grandfather will not let me dedicate myself to Artemis and live chaste. While I am under his roof, I must obey his will.” She patted my hand, releasing her knife into it. “And so I’m leaving. I will seek the goddess all my life, and maybe she will take pity on me and let me find her.”

“And if she doesn’t? Creusa, what then?”

Her eyes filled with tears. “I don’t know. I don’t know what else to do.”

I took both her hands. They were so cold. I looked hard into her eyes, which shone with unshed stars. “Don’t go. Not yet. Once you have gone, you can never come back. There’s still time.”

“Time for what?”

“I’ll think of something,” I promised her. “I’ll watch the skies. There is a pattern, there is a dance. ”

She shook her head. She doesn’t believe the night skies hold any answers. But she put her knife down, pinned up her hair again, and folded up her cloak.

What a fool I’ve been! The answer to my escape has been before me all along.

As I sat spinning under the great tree in the courtyard, in he walked, grandfather’s old friend, gray and gnarled as the staff he stretches before him to find his way.

The seer Tiresias.

I flung myself at his feet, kneeling in supplication, clutching the hem of his robe. I would not rise, but made the old seer bend down to hear my whispered plea: “Prophet, blinded by the gods for what you saw — I beg you, tell me the secret of your transformation!”