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

the moon was directly above, and the turtles had all fallen still, as though sleeping, though their round orb eyes blinked at her as she moved. Tilting the head, Isme found that it too looked to have fallen asleep.

What do I do with you? She would have asked, but the answer seemed obvious. She would never give the head back to the men of the temple, who had not wanted its messages anyway. There was only one place for the head that she knew.

Stumbling, wobbly, to her feet, she waded into the receded surf, and when water was at her waist, lifted the head to press her lips against the crown. It was lightweight—when she released it, watching the eyes track hers, it bobbed but floated in the waters of the sea. She thought she saw that faint smile again—and she sang:

Father, I give you back

To the place you belong

May you float endless

Below the stars—forever

Goodbye, Father, goodbye—

Whatever else she would have said, she broke off, for that high note began again, the low echoing sound that carried unbroken to the dome of the sky, and so the head drifted off to the sea, endlessly pealing that one note to the world. The song of love.

Isme stood until her body began to shiver, and, fearing the coming heat of freezing to death, turned and trudged out of the water. After all, the world had not yet ended—and for now, she had one more task to accomplish. An answer to find, and then she would rest... for her father’s song, the call of many wars, and a poet, and a conqueror, and Troy rising again—that must be a long time.

But how long? She could only wonder. Not as long as she supposed, after all, she was supposed to see the end of the world, and could only live for so long.

But there are men who were cursed to live longer, she thought—Tithonus, whom Eos the dawn fell in love with, and she asked Zeus for his immortality, but he continued to age and then became a cricket. And Memnon their son, king of Ethiopia, who was granted immortality by Zeus through the tears of Eos his mother. And also Endymion. Glancing up at the moon, Isme wondered—Lady Selene, where is your husband Endymion, whom you cursed with sleep, and thus lies deathless under your loving gaze forever?

Perhaps that was the key—Isme would fall asleep somehow, and then wake at the end of the world.

Shaking her head, she told herself: I’ll find out soon. She paced back up the beach, the turtles watching her, plodding along the sand until she came upon the plant.

Orchid flowers. They grew in sporadic clumps and were tasty to eat, but not too much, because they could turn bitter in the stomach. Each as small as a fingernail. Isme wove her hands through the strands, tracking down until she nearly found the roots, and then broke the stem, pulling a handful along with her.

He sang that I should carry you to the underworld—very well, she thought, holding it close to her chest. Returning to the turtles, Isme stood among them and pondered: The underworld would be the place to go, after all, it is the place of all knowledge—

Yet the thought of going there, walking among the dead, brought puckers to her skin that had nothing to do with cold night air. Isme remembered, at the last moment, not to grip the flowers too tightly, lest they be crushed. They were necessary somehow.

If only Kleto was still here, she thought. If only I was not alone.

And yet... she was not alone, not ever. Realization and memory flowed through her, and she whispered, “Are you still here? Will you come with me to the world of the dead?”

Behind, a voice answered, matter-of-fact as always: “Of course.”

Isme’s next breath was a sigh of relief. She bent down to the turtles nudging her toes, and the voice from the woods asked, “Just curious: how exactly are you getting there?”

“Like this,” Isme said, walking into the surf, the turtles following.

TWENTY-THREE.

~

In the world below, the living girl feels like she is dying, holding her breath so long. Yet the shells she clutches continue to plunge—down, down, down-down-down—

World in suspension—flash of a moment, only as long as that single realization erupts within her—and then everything backwards, down is up and up is down, and she is rising, higher with each beat of the paddles in the shells, and she remembers how the world had inverted inside of herself, when Apollon gave her ambrosia to drink—

Isme’s head surged from the water, shocked by the return of air, but she breathed deep and found her mouth full of a sweet taste—she was reminded of the only similar thing she knew, honey—sugary, thick, sweet—merged with smoke from a cedar-tree. Coughing, she tried to clean her lungs, but taste and smell were overpowering, and breathing more only made everything stronger.

Asphodel, she thought. The flower smelled like rotting. Like death—

Turning in the water, still clutching her friends’ shells, Isme gazed at the underworld—and was surprised to find it so similar and yet so different from the world of the living—

There was no ceiling. Land and water were underfoot, and above was a dark stretched dome, but pocked with stars like the living world, except these were no constellations that Isme had seen, their configurations wrong. Isme had the chilling idea that they were fixed in place somehow, would not turn around a central point nor change with the seasons like the stars above. As if they, too, were dead.

No sunrise or moonrise here. The sky would forever be empty.

The sea in which she floundered with the turtles was quiet, too, no waves or spats or gurgles, just utterly placid and calm, and heavier than Isme recalled water being. As if even the water was dead. In the distance she could see a little light, flickering like a torch, moving smooth and sure without dipping across the water,