THE PRIESTESS’ DAUGHTER

THE PRIESTESS’ DAUGHTER, by Jennifer Blackford

I barely remember my father’s golden eyes,

or his shouted laugh that made even

my solemn priestess mother smile.

She knew too much and not enough

of wild things.

Before my father died, all the village children envied me.

He was the only man we knew

with his own bronze sword, its inlaid scabbard

jewelled and finely-tooled, finer

than any woman’s treasures here in our village

above Delphi, or down by the sea teeming with tunny

and sardines. We never saw him use the sword,

but all the kids hung on his strange-sounding words

hoping he just might slash a weed

or shoo a goat into the milking shed

with that bright-polished blade.

The village women bitched

about the foreign warrior with golden eyes

when they thought I couldn’t hear.

Too handsome, too foreign, too dangerous,

such strange golden eyes. How, why

had their priestess (not a queen,

not rich, not even beautiful) snagged him?

Why did he not notice their superior loveliness?

My eyes are golden, too. The women

side-eyed me, sometimes made the sign

against the evil eye

even when they knew that I could see.

Most of the men did too, if

they were looking at my eyes

and not my budding breasts.

They all thought I saw too much.

But my old playmate Xanthos

loved me as he always had,

running, telling stories, watching

the sheep and goats together.

I was sure we’d marry —

until the nymphs took him

as their newest plaything

dancing and singing with him

day and night, invisible to all but him and me.

He saw them clear as summer sun at noon

and just as lovely. To me

they were ripples in dark water

on a moonless night, but I still glimpsed

their flowing pondweed hair, their slender necks

regal as any queen’s, their long inhuman thighs.

My Xanthos’s eyes were far too bright,

his cheeks were flushed. Laughing,

he danced and sang himself to death

exhilarated beyond the mortal need

for food, drink, sleep.

My father was a long year dead by then.

Three months of coughing his lungs out,

that bronze sword no use to him

or anyone. Mother prayed to the goddess

she served above all others, Our Lady of Wild Things,

and pleaded with the water nymphs

for help. They’d healed old drunk Gorgias

in fall. They would not, did not heal

the foreign warrior with golden eyes,

the only man my mother ever truly saw. 

She was beyond distraught.

Only my love for Xanthos kept me whole.

But now my Xanthos, too, was dead.

Mother washed my dead love for his burial

in water drawn from the nymphs’ spring.

Their peculiar power was all that stopped

the man-wolves’ clever hands from digging up

his corpse, my father’s, grandmother’s,

all the village dead.

How could I bear it?

After the misery of Xanthos’s funeral feast

I ran weeping up the mountain

prepared to kill immortals with my father’s dagger –

lighter than the sword

but just as sharp and bright.

I stood there by the pool, deadly bronze

hanging weighty from my hands.

I saw the naiads clear as the spring

that flowed from the limestone cliff.

They shimmered silver in the rising moon.

Gracious as royalty, they led me to the throne

carved out of rock when giants walked our hills

and centaurs hunted the forest.

I sat enthroned, my rage as cold within me

as the rock beneath my thighs.

I shouted, screamed and wept,

I stormed and thundered. If mortals

can shoot lightning from their hands, I did.

I’m sure I saw them flinch.

The smell of burning pondweed hair

hung on the evening air.

“Xanthos was mine,” I screamed,

“as Father belonged to my priestess mother.

Why did you refuse to heal my father?”

The tallest of the nymphs bowed her queenly head.

“That was not our fault. Persephone desired him

to walk beside her in her vast quiet realm.

We have no power to stand

against that great goddess.

Your Xanthos, though. That was perhaps our fault.

But we are lonely, our lives so long.

How can you begrudge a playmate

now and then, to sing and dance with us?”

Lightning again.

“Xanthos was mine, the treasure of my heart.

You ruined everything.”

My rage undid them.

They, or the power of the limestone throne

undid me too, changed me from village girl

golden-eyed daughter of the quiet priestess

to something else.

“We will take no more mortals,”

the tallest of them offered,

“if you will stay with us

as our companion.”

I bowed my head.

I’m almost one of them, now

but more solid, less watery,

perhaps even more powerful

if I’m so inclined. Perhaps

when I recover from my two lost loves

I’ll find myself inclined.

The mortal world is hidden from me here,

cracked reflections on the water of our spring.

Mortals move so fast.

A blink, and I miss

an hour, a day,

perhaps a year.

The man-wolves come each midnight

with offerings of soft grey creatures:

doves, weasels, water rats.

Often I hear my mother’s voice

or glimpse her bending near my throne

setting down gifts for me – honeyed figs,

cheese wrapped in leaves, a cup of wine –

and she’s already gone. I beg her goddess

that one evening our broken times

will mesh, and I can hold her hand again,

hug her, kiss her dear face.

________________________________________

Jenny’s poems and stories have appeared in august Australian and international literary journals as well as Asimov’s, Strange Horizons, Cosmos magazine and multiple Rhysling anthologies. Award-winning Sydney press Pitt Street Poetry published an illustrated chapbook of her cat poems, The Duties of a Cat, in 2013, and her first full-length poetry book, The Loyalty of Chickens, in 2017. She won two prizes in the 2016 Sisters in Crime Australia Scarlet Stiletto awards for a murder mystery set in classical Delphi, with water nymphs. Eagle Books published her spooky middle-grade adventure The Girl in the Mirror in October 2019. She is jennyblackford on Facebook and @dutiesofacat on Twitter.