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

dried sea sponge at her feet, snatched it. She pulled Kleto’s bucket down and dipped the thing into what water remained, then patted her face. “Look, see? I am cleaning myself. Your task is complete. Go!”

The assembly observed her repeat this, then seemed satisfied and filtered out through the mouth of the cave—which, Isme saw, was more like a hole leading to a hall, and concluded she and Kleto were in a branch of a larger underground system.

When they left the room, Kleto sagged down into a crouch. “I was worried they would realize you were not a boy.”

“Does it still matter?” Isme wondered, settling into a more comfortable position. The bucket remained near, and she was still patting at her face, feeling the grime wetting and scraping away.

Kleto glared. “Of course it matters. Lone women are always to be enslaved—got it? No matter what people, when, or where.”

“Right,” said Isme, adjusting what remained of her boy’s chiton. “How do you know that they think I’m a boy, though?”

“I said I understand one word in twenty,” Kleto repeated. “From their babbling, I got that much. Besides, the women among them went to me, and the men toward you.”

“They did?” said Isme, realizing that Kleto had understood the difference in sex despite the similar clothing, but she had not—even now, after meeting many people, she was still that girl on the island who had nothing to compare but herself and her father. She understood then how much she relied on cues of clothing and obviousness, like beards, to give her knowledge about strangers.

Kleto comprehended also, snorted, “You’re hopeless.”

Isme could only smile and continue to pat herself. There was a wound on the underside of her chin that smarted, and scrapes all along her limbs as though she had been scuffed and scratched by an animal, but she recognized the marks of sand.

“We’re alive,” she concluded. Kleto hunched into a shrug.

After a moment filled with nothing but breathing and Isme wincing at discovering some new hurt, Kleto said, “I don’t suppose these are the cannibals that the sailors were talking about. The one who make people kings and queens and then eat them.”

Wild men, Isme thought, remembering back to Delphi, where she and her father had stood out by wearing their animal skins, but still not too badly, because among the people of the city below Delphi there had been others, men dressed like the wilds.

She did not know their language, and they stayed far enough from the island of her father that she had never seen them—but he had told stories of them, too, and sometimes Isme had thanked them in her heart, because some of the things her father taught her to survive into the new world had come from them.

The people of before, her father had said—the people who had received fire from Prometheus, and decided not to advance beyond that. Men from the bronze world, before the world of now, who had survived Zeus’s great flood outside of Deucalion and Pyrrha’s boat, who lived away from the civilizations built by the men of stone. The ones who had been made directly by Epimetheus’s fingers...

The men of the world of iron were part rock and part bronze men, on account that Deucalion and Pyrrha had tossed stones over their shoulders to give birth to the new generation of men, and then their children had intermarried with them. But the people far enough into the wilds, the bronze men, were the descendants of those warring peoples whom Zeus had sent the waters to destroy in the first place. Few still survived.

Isme had always thought that, if she did indeed live beyond the end of this world, then she would be similar to them in the new one—a relic, something from the days before, a reminder that there had been many worlds before and perhaps many worlds after. And she would always be apart from whatever men lived.

“I doubt they will eat us,” said Isme, but did not say aloud the other half: yet I also doubt they saved us from the goodness of their hearts. There’s something they want.

Kleto snorted again. “Everyone thinks that before they’re eaten.”

Isme breathed deep. “They wouldn’t do that. By now they’ve got to have learned their lesson in not offending the gods—otherwise Zeus would have truly killed them all.”

Kleto frowned. “I’m missing something, aren’t I?”

“We both are,” said Isme, pondering what the sailors had meant by ‘ceremonies forgotten by civilized men.’ Her mind went to what she knew of the worlds before—bronze, the world of war; then silver, destroyed for impiety; and gold, during the time of Titans—and wondered how far back the wild men’s worship went.

~

They were left alone for days. The wild men came with food and water, carrying out any waste. Kleto complained in clipped, snappish tones, but underneath was worry. Isme sometimes hoped that in the night when Kleto fell asleep the voice from the woods would appear, to break its silence—since she was assured that even now it was still here—but it did not speak.

At last Kleto, unable to withstand the cave any longer, stood and strode through the door. Isme was forced to watch because she knew stopping Kleto was impossible. And yet nothing happened; a wild man was posted in the passage, seemingly to watch them, but he let them pass with only his head turning to follow them down the hall. They emerged into another passage, and there was light for them to follow, and found themselves outside.

The cave lay on the foothills of mountains, not big mountains like Parnassus but worthy of the title nonetheless. Below was a cultivated slope, hand-hewn rows of dirt with sprigs of domesticated plants. Yet as they advanced down, they saw how yellow the crop was, pale and sunburnt. Kleto had never farmed, but Isme knew enough from the small crops on her island to recognize death.

There is plenty of sun, she thought, plenty of water. Something else is the cause.