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

The boy snorted, and Isme realized that she was gazing at him while ignoring everyone else. She glanced away hurriedly, and only then noticed that his exposed legs were covered with hair. Her own legs had only grown hair recently, within the last two summers. Perhaps he was close to being a man?

The five women had formed a half-ring around Isme. Now that she reflected their interest by looking back at them, they glanced among themselves and then one of them raised her hands to indicate her own torso.

“I am Pelagia,” she said, speaking very slowly, so slowly that Isme almost thought she was not speaking Greek. “I am friend. What is your name and where are you from?”

It had taken her several breaths to complete these sentences. Now she stared at Isme like she expected to be attacked. Isme frowned, and replied, not forgetting her father’s advice about pretending to be an ordinary person:

“I just told you. My name is Isme. I am a goatherd.”

The women glanced at each other once again, and the one called Pelagia said, voice still slow, as though she thought slowly: “And where do you keep these goats?”

Isme was saved from having to answer with some further lie by an interruption: “Oh, lay off it, Pelagia,” said the almost-man astride the animal. “She talks a little funny and looks like a barbarian savage, but she understands us well enough.”

And then Isme realized: how odd she must look to these people. She had been too busy mapping out their differences from herself to recognize that they were doing the same with her but in reverse.

The main differences that Isme could detect was their clothing and the strange coloration of their skin. They seemed pale and shimmery, like fish pulled from the water, or perhaps like Isme’s own belly button, which was curled, and the insides of the whorls were whitened compared to the rest of her. Doubtless in the night these women shone like the glow of the moon in the darkness.

And as for their clothing, they seemed bizarrely luxurious: for they wore woven cloth, the kind that took months to make with the shearing of animals and the stringing of thread and the interlacing of the weave to make one single swath.

Isme wondered why people on the mainland did not simply use animal skin, like she and her father did. Glancing down at her own garment, the sewn patchwork of deer hide tied with a belt, she felt relief for herself by comparison, for in the day’s heat her thighs and arms were exposed and not bundled in sticky sweaty cloth.

Besides, it seemed wasteful. Their bodies would dirty the cloth which took so many people so long to make. Cloth was better used for storing things and carrying them about, like the cheese her father had brought back from the mainland.

At last, seeing that Pelagia’s cheeks had reddened at the boy’s remark as though she had been slapped, and that she remained quiet, the boy atop the animal spoke:

“Well-met, Isme. I am Lycander, nephew to Eutropios.”

He gestured at the women. “These are Pelagia, Cymone, Dareia, Eudokia, and Hypatia. They sing and dance before and after troupe performances, and at symposiums as personal bards. And sometimes even at the baths.”

Isme watched, fascinated, as all five of the other women joined Pelagia in having red cheeks. She wondered if they were ill. Cautiously, she said, “Singing and dancing—that sounds like a pleasant pastime. We could all wish for such good work.”

“Oh,” said one of the women, whose name Isme had already forgotten. She looked comically surprised, and the others mirrored her. “Lycander, she is so generous!”

Isme felt as if she had been walking in the water by the seashore and all at once the land underfoot had given way to nothing but sea, leaving her floundering to stay afloat. She wanted to ask what this comment meant, how she had been generous, or even what generous meant to these people—but her father’s words held her back…

Listening is better than speaking, he had said.

Still, how was she to learn how to behave like these people when she could not understand a simple conversation? Perhaps asking a question counted as listening as long as the answer was longer than the question itself.

However, she was interrupted—perhaps saved—when another woman arrived. She was a head taller than Isme, but was wider, too, in a way that Isme had not seen before. Her father Epimetheus also was wide—but that seemed to be simply the shape of his body, strung with muscle. This woman looked like a seal at the end of summer, smooth and sleek and bubbling with fat under the skin.

Her hair was not dark like Isme’s or the other women. Instead, it was like the pale strands of sand from the beach, strung into strings. In a startled moment, Isme realized that this was what the stories spoke of: hair of gold. She was also much paler than the other women, as pale to them as they were to Isme, and had a dark cloth that she held stretched taut above her face like a branch of a tree to shade from the sun.

This woman observed Isme and said, “Well, looks as though Artemis has lost another one of her hunting nymphs.”

Immediately the other women tittered, sounding like birds early in the morning. Isme frowned, unsure why they were laughing. Still astride the animal, the boy Lycander rolled his eyes and said, “I want no part in bickering women.”

He nudged the animal in the side with his heel and it jerked under him in surprise, then with reluctance ambled off toward the front of the procession.

Still mystified, Isme hoped to correct this new woman’s error, saying, “I am not a nymph of Artemis, although that would be a great honor, of course.”

“Of course,” said the new woman. But the way she said the words indicated to Isme that she did not agree