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

acting troupe was performing lower on the mountain. These stories were of serious and mournful natures. Pelagia and Kleto shared the burden of Isme’s care between them, switching places to see the plays and perform themselves.

“We are women,” Pelagia once explained, “So of course we don’t perform in the theater—but there are many symposia and they need lyre players and singers, and you can’t really have music without the singing being about something, so we do perform, too.”

Isme did not entirely understand why it was necessary for women to remain off the stage, especially since women were part of the stories, and the idea that a young man like Lycander would play a woman seemed absurd. She thought about him prancing around the stage as Medea, demanding that his husband Jason fulfill the duties due to him as wife and mother of Jason’s children, and broke into giggles. But that story was ultimately no laughing matter—she knew the fate of those children in the tale.

But then again men and women ultimately did not seem all that different. Isme had seen enough people to begin picking up on the differences, but many remained subtle. Even now, she constantly compared everyone to herself, animals, or her father...

Her father, always in her thoughts, who she sometimes rambled about without knowing what she was saying, but Pelagia would nod and Kleto would look away.

Some days passed before she began to feel as though her limbs were her own again. Wine was no longer poured over her feet. When she looked down she could see little white pock marks among her toes, but she was without pain. Pelagia looked relieved and said, “For a while, your feet were twice as big as they should have been. Perhaps Apollon still lingers around for his brother’s ceremony and decided to heal you as a thank you for all your trouble.”

“A thank you?” said Isme, not understanding the reference.

Kleto, who was there because this was late at night, lifted her eyes and glared at Pelagia. She said, “For the last time, it couldn’t have been Isme up at the temple.”

Pelagia looked chastised, but began to explain. Somehow, during the six days that Isme had lost, the Oracle at Delphi had delivered prophecies. Yet there had been a new priestess. Men entering the temple had described her as very young, surprisingly dark from the sun, and wearing the skins of animals.

The acting troupe had heard this news.

The resemblance to Isme had been uncanny—and Kleto and Pelagia had seen her dragged off by the old woman and two burly men. Yet they had never been able to confirm this suspicion. After all, how could Isme end up as the priestess of Delphi?

Kleto had concluded that something had happened in the temple of Delphi, but clearly Isme had not become a priestess otherwise she could not now be down here with them. The priestess had to remain in Delphi until her death. And Pelagia disagreed. They turned to bickering over this—but Isme, listening to this quarrel in silence, stroked her own arms and felt goosebumps.

“You should be glad for Lycander, though,” said Pelagia, who was giving Kleto little glances. “Every day he tried to go up to the temple and see who the priestess was, but we didn’t arrange to ask a question ahead of time. It was lucky he was up there for one last attempt, though the ceremonies were over, otherwise you would have had to hobble down the mountain and never found us.”

Kleto was scowling. Isme knew she should be concerned about Kleto’s feelings, that she could once again view Isme as a rival. And yet—as she recalled the way Lycander had once told her father how he would look after her, and realized how seriously Lycander still took that vow—the only thing she could feel was grateful.

~

The last day of the Dionysos ceremonies belonged to the women.

Or so Isme was told. Listening to Pelagia describe the rites over the past five days had taught her that while she knew most of the stories of the gods from her father, she knew very little about ceremonies. Indeed, they seemed almost like two different things—rituals to honor the gods, and then stories about them.

Isme had begun to wonder which of these things had come first: story or ritual?

But to hear Pelagia’s excited ramblings brought Isme into a contemplative state. She thought of tales of goats and sheep brought before Delphi and sliced open, still alive, so their entrails could be read and the beats of their hearts counted to answer questions. Not all of them had been given to Apollon—and not all of them were yet given to Dionysos, either, because she still sometimes heard them baying outside.

She thought, In the well of songs, was I to be offered like one of these goats?

If she had, what would her own insides have read? The prophecy at her birth said she would understand the end of the world. Perhaps that was the knowledge she would have brought up from the underworld, which Apollon had been seeking. But who really knew the mind of a god seeking anything?

But she could not linger on these dark thoughts on this day, since both Kleto and Pelagia remained in the tent, distracting her. When the light outside began to dim, Pelagia grew ever more restless, and at last demanded, “Shall we go now?”

Kleto’s eyes always seemed brighter in nighttime, and lingered on Isme as she said, “Yes, let us go.” She drew to her feet and the two of them paused, waiting. Isme watched them both, kept her silence until she began to feel discomfort as they gazed down at her.

Then Pelagia said, “Isme, aren’t you coming?”

I don’t dare, Isme would have said. From Pelagia’s ramblings she had come to understand that some sort of ritual had been planned for this night, and it was expected that the women involved would encounter Dionysos somehow. She had heard plenty of stories where women drunk with