No Friend to This House

And he wasn’t, of course, because here was the third cruel trick the Fates had played on Alcimede. Despite everything she had told him when he was a boy, her son was determined to be a hero. And because the women of Iolcus were all fools, dazzled by the mere idea of adventures, she could not even share her grief with them. It was easy for them to think a quest would burnish her family honour, but it hardly felt that way to Alcimede. She had been granted only one child, and one who cared so little for her that he would set sail in an untested boat without so much as a thought about who would look after his mother while he was gone.

And of course, Aeson had been no use – again – when Pelias made his cruel announcement. The king had recently declared that Iolcus was in need of a golden fleece, a magical artefact from far across the sea. Pelias knew little more about it: some gift from a goddess to her children, was it? Its beauty and power were fabled; people said it would bring riches to whichever land held it. But Pelias was already rich and had no need of any artefacts. The thing that made the fleece particularly desirable was how very far away it was, and how difficult to reach, across such dangerous seas.

Soon, there was a shipbuilder, and a crew. Men were volunteering from all over Greece to be part of this grand quest. Pelias could scarcely suppress his smirk when the messenger said that Jason – the king’s own nephew – was hoping to make his parents and his uncle proud by leading this voyage. Pelias didn’t necessarily want Jason to die, although it was all the same to him if he did. He merely wished that his nephew – and any other man who thought he might have a claim on anything Pelias regarded as his own – would leave his kingdom, and never return. Which, of course, this ship’s crew could not once they had undertaken such a mighty task. The humiliation of failure would see off the ones death did not seize.

And so, on a bright spring morning, Alcimede counted a whole new set of misfortunes sent by the Fates to plague her. Jason was coming to bid farewell to his mother and to attempt to console his father, who had taken to bed months before when the voyage was first suggested. Alcimede still hoped to dissuade her son from travelling. How could he abandon her this way? Better she should have died before being left with no one to help look after his father.

Jason tried to placate Alcimede, to persuade her that he would be back in Iolcus before long, and to promise that he would be bringing the golden fleece to prove his worth. He would make her proud, he was sure of it. But his mother had grown used to disappointment before her son was born. There was no dissuading her from it now.

Iphias

towards the land of Colchis,

The words Iphias left unsaid would have moved the sky and parted the sea.

Last night she had been standing before the altar of Artemis, protector of her city, murmuring a quiet prayer. No one else was by the shrine at that hour, no one but the statue. Artemis towered above Iphias, left foot planted on the plinth, right foot behind her, heel raised. The golden straps of her sandals and the golden hem of her dress glittered in the flickering torchlight. The goddess had a serene expression and a few strands of hair snaked free from her plait. Something about the pose, the way Artemis had been caught mid-stride, always made Iphias feel restless, as though she too was at the beginning of a journey. But as the priestess picked a stray white hair from her tunic, she was reminded that there were no journeys ahead for her.

Iphias smiled up at the moon as she walked around the sanctuary, checking everything was in order. Artemis was always closer to her when the moon was full. But when she looked back down into the shadows around her, the visions came to her in a rush, bright and terrible: images of the young man who planned to set sail the very next day. She saw lethal trials ahead of him – brief flashes of horror – as though she was gazing up at a pitch-black sky, illuminated by sudden bolts of lightning. Iphias prayed for guidance, but the goddess waited until she was asleep before delivering her message in a dream.

Iphias felt the weariness in her knees as she offered up her thanks the next morning. Tired though she was, the priestess had the strength to perform this task. All she needed to do now was wait for the right time. And she knew it was approaching because the city spoke of nothing else as the men made the final preparations to ready their ship. Everyone who passed the temple brought another fragment of news as Iphias stood on the wide marble steps.

She sensed the tension filling the city as the men prepared to sail and the women to grieve, but she did not share it. The men’s impossible quest would become possible once they had Artemis’ advice. The priestess watched the street filling with people who wanted to see the Argo launch from her safe harbour. Today was a day they would tell sceptical children and grandchildren they had witnessed. And where there was a spectacle, there were traders selling food, offerings, amulets to bring luck to a sailor or those he was leaving behind.

The hubbub was building now, so Iphias knew that Jason had left his parents’ house and was walking towards the harbour. Soon he would be right outside the temple: she had seen it already, in her dream. She descended a single step, wanting to be closer to the path so she could make herself heard, yet not wanting to lose her vantage point.

But as Jason came around the final curve of the street before he reached her, the crowd surged, a sudden swell taking the old woman away from the temple. Jason had grown to be a very handsome man, Iphias thought, as she scurried along with the thronging people to avoid losing her footing. There was no denying it. Even Artemis would look on him with favour: he resembled her twin, the sun to her moon. Iphias felt herself being tugged in his direction and then came the moment of connection, when her eyes met his.

The priestess felt the spark of acknowledgement. She knew Jason had seen her and wanted to discuss his plans. But just as she opened her mouth to speak, the whirl of people moved again and she was behind him as he strode away. She felt dizzy and detached, as though she had been awake through her dreams and was sleeping now. Iphias almost fell, but two younger priestesses from the temple had seen her difficulty and rushed over to help her.

‘Did you have something to tell him?’ asked one. It took Iphias a moment to hear the words and to understand what the girl was asking.

‘We could send a messenger,’ the other one said. ‘Or take the message ourselves.’

Iphias could see the excitement on their faces but she could not quite remember what might have caused it. She did have a message for someone, she knew that. She had been about to speak, but then she had not. And that was all she could find, blinking away tears from the harsh light of late morning. She would never again remember the words Artemis had given her, or the way Jason had seen her and walked past without stopping to take his leave of the goddess or her priestess. And the goddess would play no role in Jason’s quest, because he had shunned her in this way.

Some men are born to be a favourite of the gods. Or at least to seem so, for a while.

Aphrodite

through the dark Symplegades;

Aphrodite perched on her rock at Paphos, and looked out at the Cyprian sea. No wonder she always came here when one or another of the gods had irritated her. As the sun danced on the glimmering waves, she felt something akin to envy that anything could be so beautiful besides her. The Graces were preparing the water for her bath, and she was glad of it. Once her skin was oiled and she could slip into a new dress, she might feel less irritated. She ran her tongue lightly across the back of her teeth because it was the only way she knew to express rage without affecting the shape of her perfect mouth. But she could contain her fury no longer: why would anyone be so foolish – she screamed the word into the gentle breeze – as to neglect her? Why?

She resented it when it was her husband, always leaving her to go and make . . . She paused briefly. Armour? Spear heads? Whatever he did. It scarcely mattered, because if he didn’t craft them, then someone else would. Men always needed the tools to wound. And so, she supposed, did other gods. The ethereal glory of her smile was such that no one would have dared call it a smirk. But the satisfaction that prompted it was entirely directed at herself. She could destroy a man or incapacitate a god using nothing but their own desires, which were hers to control. Weapons seemed to her a very cumbersome way to go about taking a life, when compared to longing or its bedfellow, despair.

In this way Aphrodite nursed her anger, allowing it to grow. Hephaestus did sometimes fill her with rage, but he had done nothing particular to antagonize her today, so she would not punish him. Then she heard a pair of oystercatchers chattering to one another on the shore below, but the birds had never insulted her, so she would leave them to their courtship. No, it was only men who could be so offensive, so provoking. She paused while she remembered some of the many different forms of revenge she had taken on men over the years. She smiled again when she saw the bodies she had broken and the lives she had shattered. No battlefield could be bloodier than hers, and she had never fired so much as a single slender arrow.

And yet. Again she felt the surging anger. And yet, men had learned nothing from these lessons, so kindly offered them by this mightiest goddess. Had they looked on the destruction of the impious and vowed to live better lives? Perhaps they had, but in that case, they were perjurers as well as blasphemers. Because here she was, unable to enjoy her bath because she was thinking of the inexcusable people of some tiny island in the Thracian Sea. She could barely remember its name before today, but she would make the Lemnians one promise, and she would keep it sooner than they could imagine was possible. They would regret insulting her.

They would regret building their temples to Zeus, to Hera, to Artemis and Apollo, of course. Naturally they would build one to Poseidon, because they spent so much of their pitiful lives at sea. They had dedicated their largest temple to Hephaestus, which only sharpened the sting. To ignore her, the goddess whose favour everyone desired? She shook her head and her beautiful hair shimmered in the sun. She had given them plenty of time to correct their catastrophic mistake and beg her forgiveness. And had they?

Perhaps if it had been a sanctuary for Demeter, she might have allowed some of them to live. Mortals needed a good harvest, she supposed. But it was a temple to Athene they had decided to build next. Athene! And even that she might have ignored if the women had prayed to her. She had occasionally let men off if their wives had begged. But the women of Lemnos had done nothing. No temple, no shrine, no offerings. And she could hardly ignore such a slight.

She curled the fingers of her left hand, and examined her shell-like nails. There was no trace of imperfection. A lilting call told her the Graces had readied her bath, and she rose and turned away from the sea. As her gaze fell on the jugs of perfectly heated water, the neat piles of fresh clothes and the bottles of heady perfume, she smiled. Yes, of course. There was no better way to punish the people of Lemnos.

Eïone

if only the pine trees in the glades on Mount Pelion had never been chopped down;

Most of the women agreed the worst of it was that they didn’t know if the men were telling the truth. But for Eïone – although later she would nod in agreement with the others, concealing her private grief behind their collective shame – uncertainty was by no means the worst part. That came right at the beginning, with the revulsion that crossed her husband’s face when she turned to him one morning, as she always did. She expected to find herself caught in his embrace, his chin resting on the top of her head. But instead of holding her in his arms, he turned away grimacing. She opened her mouth to ask what was wrong, and then immediately changed her mind. Perhaps he was in pain, in which case he would surely tell her about it soon. But though she had never seen such an expression on his face before, she recognized it immediately. It was not pain she had witnessed. It was disgust.

She wanted to speak to her sisters about it, but when she met with them later that day, she found she could not. There was something wrong between them, all four scratchy and defensive with one another. Usually Eïone kept the peace between her siblings, but she was too upset to intervene, so they squabbled over things none of them cared about and she returned home as anxious as she had left it. And her worry only increased when she found the house empty. The men were preparing for another raid on a Thracian coastal town, their fourth since the seas had calmed at the end of the winter. But surely, he wouldn’t have left without a word? Eïone wanted to hurry round to her neighbours and ask if their husbands were missing too, but she felt her face reddening just to think of how she might frame the question. What if their husbands were happily sitting indoors, eating bread and sheep’s cheese, and they stared at her as she stammered out her question?

Anyway, he might return at any moment. Perhaps he had gone to feed the chickens and an old friend had arrived unexpectedly. She walked from room to room, unable to settle and unsure if she should prepare food or wait. As the shadows on the floor grew longer, she decided she was hungry, and went to see if the chickens had laid them any eggs. She blinked in the bright sun and almost trod on one of the birds as she stepped outside.

‘Why are you sitting right by the door?’ she asked the chicken, but it only blinked in reply. As she approached the coop, all three birds ran towards her, clucking urgently. She frowned.

‘Did he not feed you?’ she asked. ‘Are you hungry?’

She had a sudden vision of herself as a widow, a woman crazed with loneliness, talking to her chickens and expecting their reply. There was a small grain store next to the house, so she answered her own question and collected a scoop of grain. The clucking grew increasingly loud and she scattered the food on the dry brown earth. Staphylus had left without even feeding their birds. She tried to remember a time her husband – usually such a kind man – had abandoned animals unfed. She shook her head as if that would dislodge the way the word filled her eyes and ears: never, never, never. As the chickens ate their corn in quiet satisfaction, she collected three eggs and turned to go back indoors. She strained to hear voices from the neighbouring houses but there was nothing, not even a baby crying.

*

By sundown, he had not returned. She had made vegetable soup, but she ate alone, one flickering candle enough to see her meagre dinner. When someone knocked on the door, she started, and put her hand to her mouth to cover the inadvertent cry. The door opened and Eunea looked almost as alarmed as Eïone knew she herself must.

‘Is Staphylus here?’ she asked.

Eïone opened her mouth to say no, but her voice cracked and no sound came. She shook her head.

‘Do you know where he is?’ asked Eunea, and Eïone felt her voice return, only temporarily silenced by solitude.

‘No,’ she replied. ‘I came home and the house was empty.’ Her face felt hot, and she was grateful for the dim light.

‘Oenepion is gone too,’ Eunea said. ‘He didn’t say a word.’

Eïone nodded. ‘I don’t know where they are.’

‘There’s a raid coming,’ Eunea said, and Eïone nodded again.

‘But why leave without saying anything?’

The two women stood in the half dark. ‘Can I—?’ Eunea didn’t need to finish her sentence because Eïone was already pushing a low chair in her direction.

*

The next day, it became clear that many men were missing, and the women all asked the same questions of themselves and one another. Their ships were gone from the harbour, so this solved one puzzle while creating several more. The men – even those too old to fight – had gone to Thrace, then, but they had done so in a needlessly secretive way. So the women did as they always did when their menfolk were away: tended to their homes, their children, their crops and their livestock, and tried not to think about the spears and arrows of the Thracians piercing their beloved flesh.

Eïone had never worried about Staphylus because he was such a bear of a man. No one would choose to fight him. His sight was keen, his feet were quick and he didn’t take foolish risks. But she didn’t feel her usual confidence in the man who had left her house without saying goodbye. When she tried to reach him in her mind, she could only see that expression of revulsion, a moment of unspoken estrangement. And she wondered if something had changed within her, because she didn’t quite believe that the man who had left – the man who would return, if the gods willed it – was the husband she loved.

*

She knew Oenepion had returned to Eunea, because she heard the shouting.

Word had come early that the first ships had been seen, riding low over the waves, weighed down with booty. Some women flocked to the harbour with their children, but Eïone had stayed on the hill, looking down at the bright white sails and wondering which one was fluttering above his head. She continued to work on their small plot of land, pretending that she wasn’t waiting and hoping. But Staphylus didn’t come home that day, or the next. And as she opened her door to Eunea again – this time with a bruise purpling her cheek – Eïone wasn’t sure how much she minded being alone.

Besides, she was not alone. The two women divided the chores and the food between them: Eïone had more eggs than she could eat, after all. She missed the strength of her husband, and she missed his easy kindness. But when Eunea asked her for an example of him being kind, she realized that it had been many months since she had seen this side of her husband.

‘I don’t know when it stopped,’ she said. And as she spoke, she knew that after the initial shock of his disappearance had worn away, her anxiety had curdled to indifference.

And Eunea nodded in recognition. The idea that Oenepion – a man who had never raised his voice until this year – would physically push her out of her own house was incredible. If she had received an oracle a year ago telling her this would happen, she would have assumed the priestess was lying. But here she was, sitting on her friend’s bed, her left eye still swollen shut. After a few days, Eunea crept home to try and collect some of her most precious belongings – a necklace, a ring that had been her mother’s – and she discovered the house was empty. She ran back to tell Eïone that he had gone again, smiling with relief. But she did not stay in her home, fearful that he might return at any moment and blacken her other eye. And again, the women found themselves wondering where the men had gone.

*

The rumour began circulating in the market square, where trade and talk were brisk. Two children had gone hunting on the other side of the island, and they came back with news of the men’s camp. The men weren’t calling it that, of course. They were claiming it as the new town of Lemnos, but it was a shanty town at most, a few lean-to huts. Nonetheless, it was where the missing men of Lemnos were: they had abandoned their wives and they had sent their comrades to Thrace to raid a town and steal the women they found there. And now – the Lemnian women could scarcely believe it – they were living with these slaves as though these were their wives. While the women who had borne and raised their children were spurned. The violence, the indifference, the cruelty, these all paled beside this public humiliation.

They could tolerate it no longer; they took their grievances to the king.

The Lemnian Women

if only those mighty heroes had never picked up their oars,

Hypsipyle loved her father, and she tried not to notice his declining faculties. She remembered Thoas when his eyesight was so sharp he could teach her the name of every bird flying overhead; she remembered when his appetite was so great he could enjoy a banquet every night. And as she watched a slave spoon food into her father’s mouth across the huge table, she wondered why people prayed for a long life. He reminded her of a story he had told her as a child: of Eos and her mortal husband Tithonus.

The goddess Eos spread the red streaks of dawn across the sky each day, and one morning her searching gaze picked out a beautiful young man from a city on the mainland, not far from Lemnos. Tithonus was tall and strong with golden skin and thick black hair, and he played the lyre almost as well as Apollo himself. When Eos approached him, he didn’t falter as mortals so often did. He returned her gaze and her desire, and left his home to live in hers. Every morning Eos would leave him sleeping in their bed and then she would return to him as Helios began to share his light with the world. Tithonus would sing for her and his songs almost never told of the way he missed the light – her light – playing on the walls of his father’s house as his family began their day.

One day, Eos noticed a tiny change in her lover’s face, a small crease she had never seen before. She tried to hide her alarm, but she could not deceive the man she loved. He was changing, ageing, and there was nothing she could do to keep him as he was. But Zeus could help them, she explained to Tithonus. Zeus could intervene in a man’s life if he chose: all Tithonus needed to do was ask. So her beloved approached the king of the gods and begged for a small favour. Zeus affected not to hear him for a while but eventually Hera pointed at the young man and suggested Zeus either swat him or listen to him. Tithonus stammered out his plea for eternal life, and Zeus declared the matter closed.

It was years before they realized his mistake. Faint lines continued to form around his eyes and mouth. Gradually the lines grew less faint, and then they became pronounced. Tithonus had asked to live for ever, but he had not asked to remain young for ever. And so he grew older and drier, smaller and wearier with every passing year. And though Eos had sworn she would love him for ever, she loved him less when he finally turned into a cicada – the oldest and driest of creatures – than she had when he was a man.