The Suppliant

Finally free of servitude to an ungrateful brother, torn from the man and the woman he loves most, the Greek outlaw Akhaïdes escapes Nafpaktos with his life but no hope. It is only in the most degrading service to the priests of Delphi and the Great Serpent herself that he finds meaning. And then, from the most unexpected source imaginable, redemption at last.

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When the boy who would later be called Akhaides was exiled and expected to die for killing his own brothers, he simply walked east until he chanced upon people who were glad to take him in. Over time he learned their language and their ways, won a wife, and made a name for himself as an outstandingly clever thief in a world where thievery was widely admired. When he stole back a herd of horses from his wife's brothers, however, he set into motion the machine that would change everything.

Unable to excite the king’s indignation with the injustices done to them, H’oolee’s sons rode, the three of them with twenty followers, to G’atag’atu-olos’ camp on a day when they knew that all the other men were away with their own herds. They rode into the circle of tents and called their sister.

      Solong came out with a baby on her hip, then set the infant carefully aside in a young daughter’s arms. She wiped her hands on her shirt and went forward to meet her brothers.

She stood among them. They did not dismount as they should, to greet her, but sat high above her.

The eldest said, “That thing you sleep with, it stole from us.”

Her temper tripped. “My husband steals from everyone who hasn’t the wit to keep his hands on his own goods. Why should you be different?”

There was a stunned silence. Finally another brother said, “Where is he? I want my horses back.”

Solong turned toward him calmly. “He’s clearing the spring of weeds. His work is too important to be troubled by the likes of you.”

“He stole from us!”

She shrugged. “So steal back and see what it gets you.”

Juchii and his oldest sister came out of the tent laughing, then stopped, stared and fell silent. They glanced at each other, then Juchii spun and raced away. The daughter came quietly to stand behind Solong.

The eldest brother glanced at her, then looked again. He said, “I have an unmarried nephew I might take this girl for. If she can cook.”

“She’s already promised.”

“Your mate doesn’t mind breaking promises.”

“He never does that.”

“He stole our inheritance. A patrimony is a promise.”

She shrugged again. “And you promised when I was born to care for my interests. So why did I live alone with my father, ragged, hungry, with almost no horses, and too old to marry? That – ” she made a rude gesture “ – for you and promises.”

Women and children had come from the other tents, and they stood scattered and still, watching, uncertain.

The eldest brother leaned over his horse’s shoulder. “You’ve lost your manners, sister. Sleeping with animals can do that to you. So I’ll rescue this girl from that kind of future. Only God knows what will happen to her otherwise.” He kicked his horse forward between Solong and her daughter, leaned, and snatched the girl up before she could even back away.

All the women murmured. Stealing the bride was a normal marriage practice but it was ceremonial only, and a great deal of fun. This, on the other hand, was as rare as it was ugly. Solong stared up at her daughter, hanging from her brother’s arm, unable even to formulate the expression of her outrage. The other brothers rode in her way. In a moment they would turn and gallop off, and when would she see her daughter again?

Then one brother raised his head and said, “Well now, what’s here?”

Solong turned, relief flooding her. G’atag’atu-olos came around the tent, a long, sharp-ended digging stick still in his hands, the front of his shirt muddy. Behind him came Juchii, solemn and scared. G’atag’atu-olos stopped there, his colorless eyes as unreadable as always.

There was nothing they could really do, one man and one boy against twenty mounted men. At least G’atag’atu-olos was here to see this, to voice his objections. Then he could go to the king at once to complain. Since the king knew him, since they had dealings together, he should go rather than Solong. She was already deciding what clothes he should wear, what gifts he should take. He would ride the red mare, the one the king so envied. He would…

Then Solong realized that G’atag’atu-olos was standing still, saying nothing. He did not protest. He did not complain. He did not seem surprised, or disapproving, or even alarmed. He just stood there flat-footed, not even looking directly at her brothers, as if simply waiting for this to finish happening.

For all of his oddness, she had never thought that he lacked courage. But what was this, then, that let him stand there and watch these men steal his daughter? Did he care so little that he wouldn’t even object? Was he afraid?

She drew a hard breath, ready to turn her anger on him. But even as she opened her mouth to begin, Juchii took a rapid step away from his father. An instant later, G’atag’atu-olos raised his head and looked at the men on horseback. Solong saw then that although he stood perfectly still, holding the stick, his jaw was taut, his knuckles white, and the veins protruded from the backs of his hands as if they were bound with cords of stone. His face was perfectly still, but eyes glittered.

He said to Solong’s brother, very quietly, “Put her down,” and Solong felt the hair lift on her arms.

The man stared a moment, then recovered and laughed. He had laid the girl across his horse’s withers, like some lifeless booty. She, afraid of falling, was not struggling.

The man said, “So, Dirt-Digger, come to my camp when you’ve cleaned yourself, and we’ll talk. Returning our horses might get this girl back. Or not.”

G’atag’atu-olos’ eyes were fixed on him. He looked nowhere else, did not move, did not even seem to breathe. He said, still quietly, “Put my daughter down and leave right now, or I will kill you.”

The man laughed again, and raised his bridle hand to turn his horse and ride away.

He never finished the motion. The digging stick hissed like an arrow, so hard did G’atag’atu-olos throw it. It struck the center of the man’s chest and propelled him backward, completely off the horse. Solong snatched the reins before the horse could bolt. The other brothers started to yell, started to turn, started to flee but it was all too late.

G’atag’atu-olos ran for the nearest and yanked him bodily down. The man hit the ground hard. The third lashed out with his riding whip. The copper-tipped tails slapped G’atag’atu-olos’ face, but he was not distracted. He dropped on both knees on the downed man’s chest, locked his hands around the throat and crushed it, just like that.

When he sprang from that crouch directly onto the back of the third brother’s horse was when Juchii reached Solong and grabbed the reins from her frozen hand. He backed quickly away, leading the horse out of the melee. Then he helped his sister slide breathlessly down.

Three times the riding whip had lashed G’atag’atu-olos’ face, but it did not do that again. With the horse staggering under the doubled weight, he wrapped one hand in the man’s hair, dragged his head back, and – Solong would never believe this, even years later – bent over him and bit his throat, bit it, like a lion or a wolf. Her brother howled and struggled, the horse spinning in place, until G’atag’atu-olos grabbed the man’s forehead with his other hand and twisted it under his teeth. Solong heard the neck snap even over the frantic drumming of hooves.

As quickly as the body slid off, G’atag’atu-olos did, too. He went to retrieve his digging stick, setting his foot against the dead man’s chest and pulling it free. Then, without a moment’s pause, he raised the stick vertically to the whole reach of his arms, and stabbed the corpse again. Then again. At each thrust the body jumped. Each time he had to hold it with his foot to free the stick, and the stick sucked a spray of blood out after it. The third or fourth time, the end of the stick was brown again: he had plunged it all the way through into the ground.

Solong looked at Juchii. His face, usually so like hers, was now as cryptic as his father’s. The girl had covered her eyes with her hands.

Before Solong could think what to do, how to stop him, Juchii did it for her. He tossed the reins to her, then ran to G’atag’atu-olos. Solong would not have dared go so close, but Juchii laid his hand on his father’s shoulder.

The reaction was instantaneous. G’atag’atu-olos spun around, the stick already whipping one end toward Juchii’s head. Juchii ducked, suddenly as graceful as his father, and in the same motion threw his arms around him. G’atag’atu-olos froze. His face – Solong couldn’t believe – it was unrecognizable as his, as any human’s. The lion, the wolf, the wolverine – she did not know the peryton or the griffin, but they would have been closer. Had she been of his people, she would have pressed both fists to her forehead for self-protection.

Instead she looked frantically around, to send away any of her smaller children who might have seen this. None was there, only the neighbor women, who had already pressed their own children’s faces into their coats and trousers, to screen them. Solong’s daughter stood with her eyes still hidden by her own shaking hands.

And there was her husband, that mild, courteous stranger, looming over her brothers’ corpses with a blood-clogged stick and the face of a monster. Juchii held him tightly, his arms wrapped around him, his face next to his father’s – when had he grown so tall? – murmuring something she couldn’t hear.

The sun stood fixed in the sky and the air did not move. Then finally the stick began to sag. The stick began to sag and his fists eased open. His fists eased open and his shoulders sank and he closed his eyes.

Juchii finally, very slowly and cautiously, let him go. He took the stick from him, stepped around the corpse and went part of the way to the brothers’ friends, who had taken no part and were massed all together on their horses, just staring.

Juchii bent and laid the stick on the ground: a barrier none should cross. He straightened and stood there, until G’atag’atu-olos turned – slow and halting, as if he had forgotten how to walk – and went to join him. G’atag’atu-olos looked at the riders one by one. He asked them, perfectly calmly, “How far does this quarrel go with you?”

“Nowhere, Foreigner,” one of them volunteered. “It’s over.”

“I’ll keep all the horses. Those that I took before, and these three as well.”

“They’re yours.”

G’atag’atu-olos turned back to his family. His face was finally familiar again although his eyes were still harshly bright. His cheekbones and the bridge of his nose were torn in stripes from the whip. He stood there, blood threading down his face and neck; blood splattered up his leggings; his hands, still muddy, open at his sides. For the rest of her life, Solong would remember this: the way this demon changed back to the man she had thought she knew; the way he waited, not knowing, perhaps not caring, if he still had a place here; and the particular way the sun had lit his long pale plait and the silvery hairs of his bare forearms as he had murdered, again and again, a corpse.

It was the daughter who finally crossed that space, passed among her dead kinsmen, took her father’s hands in hers and held them to her breast.

He asked her quietly, “When is your marriage? Remind me.”

“In summer. The first of the Grazing Moon.”

He looked up past her, at Solong. He said, “I’ve been stupid.”

There was absolutely no answer to that. Of all the words Solong might use to describe what she had just witnessed, ‘stupid’ was not one of them.

Juchii brought a basin of water. The daughter dipped her father’s hands and cleaned them, then dried them on the hem of her shirt. She used her hem, as well, to blot the slashes on his face until they stopped bleeding.

There were scuffs of mud on her cheeks. He wiped them away with his clean fingertips. She closed her eyes, still so comfortable with his touch; confident, trusting.

He drew her face to him and kissed her forehead. Solong could not know, none of them could know, that he remembered another young girl, comely and trusting, and what a different set of brothers had done to her. What he had done. But from the way he kissed his daughter, Solong understood that he would never kiss any of his children, ever again.

The dead men lay as he had left them. Their followers still sat their horses uncertainly, a safe distance away. G’atag’atu-olos turned back to them.

He asked, “How will you all ride now?”

They looked at one another. A few murmured, “With you, Foreigner.”

“Wherever I go? Whenever I say?”

“Yes.”

“Then go home. And come when I call you.”

They understood themselves dismissed. A few of them dismounted, stole carefully into the space Juchii had marked, and gathered up the corpses. Then they all rode quietly away.

Juchii had collected the other two horses. G’atag’atu-olos took the three sets of reins and led them to his daughter.

“These are yours,” he said. “They’re good horses. I know their mothers and fathers. Marry that boy as soon as you can, and bring him to ride with me.”