Somewhere in the Peloponnese, A Dark Age
1099 BCE
A pile of fresh-cut flowers, still green with last night’s rainwater, lay across the olivewood table. Anastasis watched her sister Korē as she braided the myrtle, tried to memorize the weaving of stem over stem. Korē looked like a spring maiden, surrounded by blossoms. The moonlight tarried in her smooth black tresses, and gave a shimmering ivory polish to her skin. Korē hummed a melody their mater had once sung to them, as she worked. Before the memory could lead to sadness, Ana snatched the myrtle.
“Ana!” Korē gasped, the way she’d correct one of their hens.
“You shouldn’t do your own bridal wreath,” said Ana. “It’s bad luck.”
Korē reached to retrieve the myrtle. “And who says that?”
“I say it.” Ana settled the myrtle on the far side of the table, beyond Korē’s grasp.
Korē laughed, but at that same moment, tears were prickling her eyes, like precious little stones. Ana did not mention them. She did not need to ask why Korē was crying. Their mater should have been threading this bridal wreath. But childbirth had taken her, three years before. Their sisters, who may have helped, had long passed to the Underworld, by starvation, fever, famine, plague….
Rather than be haunted by phantoms, Ana pulled at the stems of the wreath, one, the other. There was order. Korē touched her hand. “Ana, you’re binding them too tight.”
Ana pinched a bud, spry and green beneath her thumb. “They’re not tight enough.”
She thought about Korē getting married tomorrow. She would move to the tanner’s house in the village, and Ana would only ever see her again on market days. Ana wanted to be mad at her sister for getting married, but then, one day, she would be expected to get married too. So instead, she said, “This will be the prettiest wreath in the world. More beautiful than Aphrodite’s.”
“Ana, you shall draw the gods’ eyes upon us,” Korē warned, low.
Ana only laughed. “We are already cursed. What are a few more words?”
Korē scrunched the curls at the crown of Ana’s head. “The gods bring mischief to the ones who catch their eyes.” Her voice tilted sing-songy, as she recited fragments of rhyme. “A maiden’s shining beauty stirs the thunder in the skies…. Best hide, maidens, hide.”
“What a sad song. Are we to stay home and never do anything with ourselves?”
Korē put on a brave, beautiful smile. Her lips were like rose petals, trembling with dew. “Well, we are to get married. And see each other every market day.” She squeezed Ana’s hand in hers, like that was enough to bind a promise in their world.
Ana wove violets into the myrtle. “I wish we could add roses, too,” she murmured. Bushes of white roses grew on a mountain bluff beyond the woods, but the girls were not allowed to go out there anymore, since wolves had been hunting nearby.
“I wish so too,” Korē said.
They strung the remaining flowers into garlands for their sisters and their mater. They would have laid them at their graves, except their graves were also in the woods, and thus forbidden. When the garlands had all been finished and arranged along the table, Ana fit Korē into her bridal wreath, myrtle and violet, with sprigs of oregano.
“See? More beautiful than Aphrodite,” Ana said.
Korē made a sound that was half-laugh, half-sigh, as she gazed at her reflection in the bronze mirror and ran her fingers through her hair as though it belonged to someone else. “Oh Ana, you enjoy taunting fate far too much.” Then she grabbed a garland from the table and settled it on Ana’s head, adjusting it so that it sat just perfectly, like a crown. “You will make a beautiful bride too, one day.” She added in a conspiratorial whisper, “So long as the gods do not notice your happiness, it is yours.”
So long as the gods did not notice
Lauren Ruesink is a graduate of DePaul University’s creative writing program, and holds degrees in Latin and Psychology.