Everyone Should Eat His Own Turtle (A Greek Myth Novel) by H.C. Southwark (nonfiction book recommendations TXT) 📕

said her father. And it once everyone’s laughter came to have a strain of nerves, and quieted. Eutropios gained a wary look, as Isme’s father stretched out his own arm to her hiding in the bushes, same as Eutropios had done with his caravan. Isme realized that she was being beckoned.

Slowly, aware that all the staves were now being gripped tight again and the sheathed knives were drawn out once more, Isme stepped into view. The animal the stranger rode upon turned its ears towards her, the tips meeting together like two arrowheads kissing. It was even larger now that she was up close.

Eutropios’s eyebrows raised again, but this time almost to his hairline. He leaned forward on the beast and said, “Your slave?”

Isme thought this was a very strange thing to say. Her mind went back to the moment when her father had explained that she had a different birth father, and how she had wondered if other people would not know that she and her father were a family. Perhaps they looked too different after all. Something surged upward from her stomach—a feeling that made her want to run, no, to charge blindly ahead not caring whether there was a cliff or a field in front of her. The sensation was vaguely like anger.

Before her father could respond, she said, “I am his daughter.”

Eutropios’s eyebrows descended to a frown. He said, “A daughter not taught very well how to speak to her betters, I see.”

“What child is not impetuous?” Epimetheus replied quickly. “She does not speak, usually, and now she merely speaks because there is someone to listen to her.” And he lifted his arm, wrapping Isme in a half-hug. With a smile across his face, he asked, “Now, do we look like robbers? If I said yes, would you now believe me?”

Whatever mistake Isme had just made was forgotten. Eutropios was back on the joke. He said, “I have never heard of a robber bringing his daughter along on hunts.”

Isme would have corrected him again, telling him that she and her father hunted all the time, but supposed she should not speak without knowing how her words would be received. There was some rule that she did not understand and had already broken—all within her first sentence to another human being aside from her father.

Being silent must have been the correct choice. Eutropios seemed almost to wait for her to say something, but when she did not his smile deepened. He gestured again to the caravan, saying, “Well then, we cannot turn down free labor. Welcome, friends!”

FIVE.

~

“The women are in the middle of the caravan,” said her father. “That’s the place that is the safest, so you will walk there with them. I will be up front in case of an attack.”

Isme felt ready to argue, gripping her staff tight, but then she remembered how merely talking to Eutropios had nearly gotten her into trouble. The people of the mainland had strange customs that she did not easily understand. She would try to behave like one of them, to avoid suspicion, and hopefully nothing bad would happen to her father while they were separated in a big group like this.

And so she said, “Yes, Father.”

Her father nodded as they walked. Before he left her, he said in a low voice, “If anyone asks, you are just a goatherd girl. Think carefully and learn quickly, Isme. Listening is better than speaking.”

She watched him walk away to the front of the caravan. With each step it seemed as though an invisible string between them was being plucked, stretched to some limit. Isme did not know whether it could break. And she resolved: she and her father could not break no matter what happened—she would not allow them to fall apart.

Turning, Isme saw six other people in the middle of the caravan, and another astride an animal, observing her. In her mind she replaced them with the memory of seals lying flat on the beach, and as she approached all of their round furry heads lifted at once as though they were one giant creature divided into small pieces.

I am a seal hunter, Isme told herself. She squared her shoulders, raised her chin. She felt much bigger like this, more intimidating, even if the people were taller—and the one on the animal’s back was twice as high.

“I am Isme,” she said, and copying Eutropios’s greeting: “Well met, everyone.”

They did not respond, but instead continued to observe her. As though waiting for her to say something else. In a way she could not define, Isme thought that they were both amused and afraid at the same time—but she could not tell why.

And so she observed them as they observed her.

She supposed everyone in the caravan’s middle was a woman, simply by the fact that they did not have any beards. However, she quickly revised this when she saw that the person mounted on the creature was wearing a one-shouldered chiton, exposing that he did not have a breast. Nonetheless, his cheeks were still smooth—although everyone else who was a man, including Isme’s own father, had hair on their faces.

Or so Isme thought. Not all of them were wearing one-shouldered garments.

Isme had been told that the growing of a beard was the way that boys became men, same as how bleeding during the absent moon was how girls became women. Frightening as the blood had been for her, and as annoying as it was to have it repeated each moon, she found that she much preferred bleeding to beards. She imagined that the lower half of one’s face would become very hot, especially in this summer weather. Not to mention that eating became a more arduous task. At least the bleeding came only a few times and was gone for most of the seasons.

No beard—this must be a boy, Isme thought. She had never met a boy before. She had met herself as a girl and woman, and her father