weald and wold

Ino’s niece is troubled.  The other girls laugh and chatter as they spin, clouds of creamy fleece twisting down into fine thread.  Ino’s niece frowns as she watches the spindle whorl twirl and twirl like a spinning top.  It makes her anxious, though she can’t say why, wobbling its widening path downwards.

Ino clears her throat, and her niece lets her face smooth out at once, puts on a small pleasant smile.  She has had trouble with that: she feels tense so much of the time, a fierce taut fury that she can’t explain and has trouble hiding.  It’s not ladylike, the older women tell her.  A girl should cast her eyes down and smile – no, not so much, you look as if you will tear out someone’s throat – yes, like so, a demure little smile that hints at mysteries that men may long for but never touch.  You are nearly a woman now.  You must think of these things.  She puts that smile on now, like a mask.

Ino’s sister’s child never, in later years, entirely loses that habit, even when the furious eyes are no longer cast down.

The fleece-tipped distaff is light in her left hand.  When she spins for a long time, watching the dizzying spindle until her mind clouds and goes strange, she thinks sometimes that the distaff-shaft grows longer, a light wand within her hand – that ivy twines along it – that it bears not fleecy wool but something dark and prickly as a pinecone.  Sometimes the yarn that forms seems to twist like a snake, thick and coiling.

The spindle-whorl twirls.  Did she have a toy like that as a child, a spinning-top?  In her dreamy daze she smells smoke, dirt, opened guts; a stab of pain all through her, and she casts the spindle away with a sudden cry, scattering the girls.

Ino and her attendants exchange troubled looks.  Ino’s niece is sent to bed without dinner, and she lies on her bed with fierce tearless eyes.  They are so much harsher with her than with the other girls; they watch her every move as snakes will watch a mouse, waiting for the wrong step to strike.  Why are they so anxious, her foster-mother and her women?  They never look so at the other girls, as if – as if they are afraid.

She doesn’t remember falling into sleep, but when she does she dreams of blood, and the sound flesh makes when it tears.  It doesn’t make her afraid: she laughs in her sleep, and the other girls turn in their beds, their dreams suddenly shifting into wildness.  One dreams she suckles a leopard; another that she and her sisters rend limb from limb the man who sometimes touches them, in the dark corridors of the house, tasting his blood on their own teeth.  The suggestion of vines stirs in the heavy shadows of the room, writhes beneath the bed.

Ino’s niece doesn’t recall rising from her bed, but she comes to herself for a moment at the edge of the gardens, in the twilight; her bare feet have left tracks across the rising dew.  By day, here, she can smell the sea beyond the cliffs, but now the night wind is rising, bringing the sharp darkness of the pine woods beyond.  Her hair has come loose and tumbles about her shoulders, and the breeze turns it into snake-ringlets, whispering against her ears.

She needs to move, to run, to dance outside the formal set patterns of weddings and births.  Dry leaves rattle on the branches above, an echo of cymbals and tambourines.  Her body, which has lately started to grow and change in strange unsettling ways, itches all through with it, an ache in her long bones.  She glances back at the darkened house, as if Ino will come rushing out, her long skirts clutched up and her face contorted with that blend of anger and terror that her niece cannot understand.

She goes out of the garden anyway, into the dark woods.

The servants find her in the morning, and cry for Ino.  Looking down at her niece’s body, the woman feels a clutch of fear in her throat, has to put her hand there.  The girl is sprawled out in the dewy grass, bare as a baby; her soft child’s body is still innocent enough, only the soft curves of baby-plumpness at chest and hip – and ivy vines, inexplicable in the well-tended garden, have twined themselves to cover anything that might be seen at her groin.

Ino’s husband comes up beside her, summoned by the servants.  His face is dark and still and grave.  “It can’t go on,” he says, as slaves cover the girl and try to wake her.  She stirs lazily, eyes still closed, her lips a faint demure curve like an archaic statue’s.  Her face, soft with sleep, looks so very young; he thinks of the infant they took in, innocent chubby hands that clutched his finger.  “It’s starting to show more and more.”  His wife nods tightly, hands twisting together anxiously.

A peacock cries in the garden, harsh and strident, and they both flinch.  The shifting morning breeze brings the salt of the sea, the faint crash of waves at the cliffs’ base.  Ino shudders and draws up her shawl, and takes her sister’s child back into the house one final time.

“Zeus … gave birth to Dionysos, whom he entrusted to Hermes. Hermes took him to Ino and Athamas, and persuaded them to bring him up as a girl.  Incensed, Hera inflicted madness on them, so that Athamas stalked and slew his elder son Learkhos on the conviction that he was a deer, while Ino threw Melikertes into a basin of boiling water, and then, carrying both the basin and the corpse of the boy, she jumped to the bottom of the sea.”