33. Seeing Red

Mother’s Blood

Zos was tired. It was the sort of fatigue that was just as much embedded in the mind as it was settled in the bones, and every step he took up the wagon-worn road hurt. It had been months since he’d bathed properly, and beneath the salt-crusted garments he wore, he could smell his own sweat and stink.

He should have stopped, he realized now; he should have stayed in the city a little longer, used one of the public bath houses, had his clothing washed and the leather of his sandals conditioned to try to salvage the damage that the sea air had done to them. There was no guarantee, after all, that Ilona still lived in her house on the hill. It had been six years since he had spoken to his sister. Six years and it felt like six hundred. Anything could have happened. She could have married. She could have moved. She could have died.

The thought caused the man to falter.

He could handle Ilona having moved away or having married. He could handle the undoubtedly bitter argument that they would have when he showed up on her front door, he thought, but he didn’t think he could handle her being dead. Not now. Not after…

Taking a ragged breath, he pushed his damp hair from his face and forced himself the last few yards up to the top of the hill he’d been ascending. Relief filled him with his next inhale: the house was still standing at least—it was still a good stadion off, still, but even at this distance, he could see it standing at the top of another hill, and the land around it boasted carful guidance of the house’s residents. Leaning heavily on his walking stick, feeling much older than twenty-five, Zos gathered the weathered remains of his strength and continued on what he hoped would be the last leg of his journey home.

A scrawny, half-naked boy with close cropped hair and dirty face met Zos at the edge of the front garden. He stared solemnly up at the adult with large eyes that were too dark to distinguish their proper colour—or else Zos was too tired, or too taken aback by the sight of the boy who stood, bare-chested, on sturdy legs, as though he dared the approaching stranger to challenge him. The child looked no older than six, and still his stance said, “I am the man of this house.”

            Zos exhaled slowly and watched the boy watch him for several long moments before asking, “Is this still the residence of Ilona Theodisiakis?”

            For one dreadful moment, Zos thought that the boy was going to say no. Then, slowly, he nodded. “She does,” possession ran deep in the boy’s tone and he jutted his pointy chin at the older male. “What do you want with my mother?”

            Relief made his knees weak, but pride kept him standing—even if it meant leaning against the stick that held him upright. And another emotion, something a little too mixed up for Zos to identify, settled in the empty place his heart should have been.

“Your mother is my sister,” he told the boy, managing a smile, and very carefully, he knelt, pushing his hair from his eyes. “There, you see? Her eyes are the reverse of mine, but they’re still the same two colours.”

The boy eyed the man warily, shifted his weight, uncertain; Zos was once again aware of the fact that he smelled badly and was underfed. The voyage from Iberia had eaten away at his body as much as it had his soul, and he was certain that he was not making a particularly good impression with the boy.

But the boy’s open skepticism was, as far as Zos could tell, the only feeling that the boy had toward him, and Zos felt a sort of displaced pride in his nephew. In a year or so, when it came time to send the boy off, Ilona would certainly be proud in the knowledge that her son wouldn’t flinch at the challenges he’d face.

“All right,” the boy nodded and took a step backward. “I can take you to her.” He turned on his heels and walked through the sweeping garden to open archways of the house’s front. Zos stood, knees cracking as he straightened his legs, and followed the youth.

“Where is your father, boy?” he asked when he joined the child under the shade cast by the second floor of the villa.

“My father does not live among mortals, mother says,” the boy cast a look over his shoulder, daring Zos to challenge the statement before he turned again and continued in to the building, through the large courtyard and up a set of narrow steps. “I am Alexis, son of Hades.”

How like his sister, he thought, following the child up the steps and into a room at the end of a small hallway, to give a child a legacy that would be all but impossible to uphold.

The room he had been led to was large. Open windows made up more of the walls than stone, and the fresh air carried with it the heady scents of poppy and lavender from the fields beyond the house. And there, at the far corner of the room sat two women at a large loom.

If they had been busy before Zos entered, they were not now. Both women—the first, a soft faced, plump little thing dressed in a pale pink chiton, looked both embarrassed and outraged—and rightly so, Zos reasoned, as men traditionally did not enter a gynaikon,  unless he was familiar with the mistress of the house. She had no way of knowing that he was related to second woman, who was seated on the stool next to her and dressed in a rather plainer chiton. Not until Alexis announced:

“Mother, this man says he’s your brother and wants to speak with you.”

Zos busied himself by studying a tapestry that hung on the opposite wall between two of the larger windows while the woman in pink and the woman in white exchanged hushed, unhappy words that he couldn’t quite hear. The former crossed the room in a huff, still muttering under her breath. She grabbed at the slender arm of the little boy on her way passed, ignoring his indignant squawks, and slammed the door shut behind her.

Zos did not take his eyes off the tapestry. “Had I known you had made this room into the women’s quarters, I would have remained in the hall and spared the boy a beating,” he murmured.

“Alexis is old enough that he should know not to allow unfamiliar men into this side of the house, even if they do claim to be his uncle.”

Ilona’s voice was hard. Zos expected it to be, but it still hurt.

“How old?” He was following a wide blue band in the tapestry and trying to determine which river it represented.

“Five and some months.”  He heard her stand, heard the way she shifted her weight, and felt a strange heaviness in his twin’s steps as she moved across the floor. He pulled his gaze from the tapestry and realized with a slight start that Ilona’s heavy steps were because she was carrying.

He averted his gaze and licked his lips. “And which god fathered this one?”

“You’ve got some nerve asking me that,” Ilona stopped a few feet from him and put her hands on her stomach. “It’s been six years since you’ve shown up here.”

“I wrote.”

“As if I wanted your letters.”

“I could have done with some from you,” he glanced at her, tilting his head so he could see her with his good eye. “You had a child and didn’t tell me.”

“That stopped being your concern when you chose that girl over me.”

The accusation squeezed his heart so tightly that it was hard to breathe, and he clenched his jaw to keep a scathing remark from being voiced. After a short inhale, he said, “I didn’t abandon you, Ilona, I got married.”

“And I suppose I was to live in your house and help that child look after your children?” She scoffed. “Is it any wonder that I came back home?”

“I see that you’re certainly living your life fancy-free with one and a half children and a single servant.”

“I administrate. One of us had to keep up the business when that girl took your manhood.”

Kaia. He wanted to correct Ilona, to command that she call his wife by her name, but he hadn’t said her name himself since…

They’d fought. Loud enough that everyone on the ship had known exactly what they fought about, had known that he was a coward for running away from conflict, family in tow. They fought until Rhea cried and Kaia banished him to the upper deck and told him not to speak to her until she invited him to.

The last time he’d said her name, he’d been angry at her.

“Why are you hear, Zosimus?”

“She’s dead.” His voice was tight. A hundred and one other things could have been said at that moment in response to his sister’s scathing remark, but that’s the one that surfaced, and he could barely breathe for saying it. “She’s dead, Ilona. She and the girl.”

His teeth creaked under the pressure of his jaw, and when he relaxed again, a pain shot into his ear. When he looked at his sister, his twin, the person who he should always be able to count on, he wanted to ask, are you happy now? But he knew if he did, he’d hear the one thing that he absolutely didn’t want to: yes.

He could see it in the hard flash of triumph in his sister’s eyes as she cradled her stomach in her arms, the way she tilted her chin upward. She didn’t smile, but he could see the beginnings of one ghosting at the corners of her lips.

“Dead.” Some tiny part of him withered away at the tone in Ilona’s voice.

And then the expression was gone, her voice softened, and for a moment, Zos hoped that maybe he’d imagined the whole exchange. That Ilona, as much as she had disliked Kaia, hadn’t been satisfied by the news.

“Oh, brother mine,” she crooned, and his hope grew just a little stronger. Ilona took several steps toward him, closing the distance that separated them, and wrapped her arms around one of his. “My brother, my twin…I can’t imagine the pain of your loss.”

A hand reached up to touch his face, and when he looked down at Ilona, Zos felt ashamed that he’d even momentarily convinced himself that his sister would rejoice at the idea of his pain.

She pulled him across the room to a chair and guided him into it with strong hands. “Tell me everything, brother mine.”

With a ragged breath, he did. He told her about how his constant attempts to contact her had begun to form a rift in his relationship with his wife, how they’d tried to mend that relationship with another child and how the pregnancy didn’t take. He told her how they tried twice more before Kaia began to show signs of carrying to term, and about how their joy was diminished when news came that Rome was expanding in their direction. He told her about the arguments they’d had, the debates of whether they should stay in Kaia’s village and accept the invasion, whether the men should fight, how foolish any attempt to resist would be in the long run. He told Ilona how, in the dead of night, he’d bundled up his little girl and his sleeping wife—“I drugged her,” he admitted. “I didn’t want another argument, so I put some herbs in her wine to make her sleep heavier so she wouldn’t wake”—and brought them aboard a ship that was destined for Achaea. The storm, the pirates.  Seven tightly wrapped bodied, one only a third of the size of the others, another wrapped with the body it wasn’t ready to have been separated from, disappearing beneath the black water that surrounded them, and there wasn’t even any wine left to get drunk with.

He purged, possibly in one, long, desperate breath, only vaguely aware that his sister held his face between her hands, occasionally running her fingers through is lanky, dirty hair. When he finally ran out of things to say, he looked up at her beseechingly. “You were right,” he laughed, only a little hysterically, his voice breaking. “You said I’d go to pieces without you and you were right.”

“I’m always right, brother,” Ilona said, one hand leaving his hair to adjust something that sat on a table just behind his shoulder.

“You are,” he agreed hollowly, reaching up to touch her swollen belly. It was too much like Kaia. She would have been about this size, now. And how many times had he sat in front of her as he sat in front of Ilona now, speaking to their daughter. And the first words from his mouth that this unborn child had heard carried nothing but his shame… “I’m so sorry.” He didn’t know whether he was talking to his sister or her child.

Regardless, it was Ilona who answered. “Don’t be. After all, if you didn’t abandon me the way you did, there would probably be eight bodies at the bottom at the bottom of the ocean instead of seven.” She used her knuckles to tilt her brother’s face upward. “You never were very brave, were you, brother mine? I think our father must have been right when he said you were our mother’s only child.”

Her words shocked Zos, broke something in him that he didn’t know was there to break. He opened his mouth to respond, not knowing what exactly he was going to say, when in one deft movement, the woman brought her hand down across the side of his face.

At first, he thought she’d raked her nails across his face, but the pain was too sharp, and it spread from a single fine line from the inside corner of his eyebrow to his jaw. The physical pain cleared his head enough to intercept her hand before it and the small knife it held had a chance to do anymore damage.

His free hand cupped the side of his face and came away bloody. “Ilona—“

“Don’t say my name,” she spat. “Don’t say my name and don’t you dare call me sister in my house. You’re worthless. You’re a coward! My son is a better man than you are!

His hand tightened around her wrist, their arms shaking, but he couldn’t tell if it was because he shook or Ilona. “What was I supposed to do? Fight off Rome singlehandedly?  Fight with nothing but farmers and potters at my side?”

“A lot of good it did you to run,” she hissed. “And you run back to me when you can’t even keep your own wife and children alive, the very people you abandoned me for.” She pulled her hand out of his grasp and threw the knife to the floor. “And you expect me to take you in now.”

With a hand pressed to his still bleeding face, Zos whispered, “I’m sorry. I know, I know, Ilona, I know and I’m sorry.”

“Sorry is weak, just like you’re weak. Your apologies mean less to me than you.”

“What can I do?” he stopped trying to use his free hand to keep the blood from running down his arm. It was a deep cut, he realized, and would bleed until it was sealed.

Ilona laughed, high pitched and hysteric. “What can you do? As if I should know the answer? From where I stand, you can do nothing, brother mine. You can’t take care of me, you let your family down—not just that girl you married, your blood and kin. You destroy everything you touch with your uselessness.”

He hung his head, having no words left, and for what felt to be a very long time, neither of them spoke. Then, finally, a hand touched the top of his head.

“I was your last resort,” Ilona noted, “and I am all you have left in this world.”

He didn’t answer, afraid that if he did, she would use the words against him later.

Her hand slipped to cover his bloodied one, and very carefully so as not to disturb the child she carried, she crouched on the floor in front of him, putting herself in his line of sight. “All we have is each other,” she said a little more firmly. “You understand that, don’t you? It’s the two of us against the whole world.”

Zos nodded. “Yes,” he agreed, not knowing what else to say but understanding exactly what she implied. “Yes, it’s us against the world.”

Ilona smiled and stroked the hand that covered his eye. “You’ll remember that now; and you’ll remember today for the rest of your life,” she said sweetly, her other hand cupping the other side of his face. “And if for some reason you ever forget, again, well,” she pressed her lips to his forehead and carefully heaved herself to her feet, “I just can’t imagine what people would think if they knew Theodisios’s youngest son had so much of his mother’s blood in him.”