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

Kleto’s eyes that sunset, when they reached the rest of the caravan. They had been gone for only two days, and even then the caravan waiting apparently only because Eutropios had declared that Kleto was too valuable to leave. His smile when Lycander arrived with the three women was wider than Isme thought possible on the narrow confines of Eutropios’s face.

But while Kleto was immediately swept into Eutropios’s arms and there held for inspection, Isme felt something inside of her quake, only stilling when she sighted her father. Epimetheus’s face looked like the sand at the beach after she had carved her fingers through it, and when he spotted her it was as though the waves had come up and swept back and taken the lines in the sand with them.

Beckoning, Epimetheus led her into the woods. With all the commotion about Kleto and Pelagia’s whining as she was forced to dismount the animal, nobody followed them.

Isme spoke first, “What happened, Father? Were you hurt?”

“Was I—" blurted Epimetheus, and cut himself off as though he could not bear to repeat her sentence. He held out his hands, asking, “Why did you run into the woods?”

“That woman,” said Isme. “She had gone out there before the attack and nobody else noticed. I thought—I thought someone had to bring her back to the caravan.”

Epimetheus lifted a hand to the shiny skin at the back of his head and closed his eyes. Isme readied herself, knowing this look from the island: she had done something particularly wrong and now he was ready to lecture not just on the right way to do things but also on Isme’s failings. Which, she supposed, were rather large now.

Yet then something in him seemed to shift, and the fire of his lecture died before it even began. At last, keeping his eyes closed, he said, “Did they hurt you?”

Isme tried not to let herself feel so surprised that he knew that she had been caught. If her father had survived the attack by the robbers, then doubtless he had learned she had gone into the woods, and then he probably had tracked her, and from there it was easy to surmise that he had seen she had been caught. The story would have been apparent in her footsteps.

Isme wondered whether her father was able to see the feet of the voice in the woods, following behind, as it surely had. It might even be nearby eavesdropping on them now.

But with that Isme had a wave of thought to follow, and events tumbled down on each other, for she knew if her father had tracked her after her capture, he would have been led to the stone outcropping where she and Pelagia had been forced to wait, and then when Kleto and her captors had joined, the trail would have led through the woods to—

“Did you find them?” she asked, remembering the strange, decrepit building full of men, everything in it seeming to be made of fire, and then the birds fluttering through every nook and cranny like they too were made of flames, shots of lightning that struck through air as though her voice had been the call of thunder.

“Yes,” said Epimetheus. “You were gone when we arrived.”

Coldness swept over Isme. She said, “What did you do?”

“We tracked them,” said Epimetheus. “We hoped that one of the trails was you.”

They must have spent all night, following trail after trail, thought Isme. Surely the men in the building had run out, fanning in all directions, leaving dozens of trails for her father to track, the men of the caravan putting hunting skills to good use.

But only Lycander found them. That meant the men tracking the other trails had—

“What did you do to them?” Isme asked.

Her father’s face turned grim. He said, “What they have done to others all of their lives. This part of the trail to Delphi will be safe for a while. But in the end, it won’t change. There will just come more robbers in time, and when this part of the trail is open for their trade, they will take this spot and prey on travelers again.”

Isme bit the inside of her lip, said, “I know they were terrible men, but killing them...” And she could not finish the sentence, in part because she did not know quite what to say. She had on one side of her scale been ready to kill them herself, but on the other side was a small voice crying: You also have killed, regardless of your intentions. There are men waiting to see you in the underworld!

The difference between justice and mercy, thought Isme. You cannot have both.

And yet somehow, both still exist in this world.

Her father seemed to understand what she was thinking without her speaking aloud. Sighing, he reached forward and pulled her to him. Isme let her head fall and rest on his shoulder, smelling the familiar scent of overworked leather and day-old campfire ash that she had always associated with her father.

He said, “Truly, I did not know I had raised such a gentle daughter. One does not know how a person will react until he is actually attacked. Guessing does not work. But you must know, Isme. In all likelihood those men would have been killed sooner or later anyway. On the trail, by men they attacked, or by their fellow robbers, or by the end of the world. All we can do is hope that in the new world there will not be any robbers like them.”

“But each world is always worse than the last,” muttered Isme. She felt the rise and fall of her father’s chest as he sighed again.

“Perhaps,” he said. “I do not know—all I can see is the pattern of the past. Foresight is my brother Prometheus’s realm. I cannot even find where he is now—after all, he was chained to the mountain, but Lord Herakles freed him. We must go to beyond Delphi to request where he