Isme sat outside her father’s cave and waited to see if the world would end.
The sun was halfway down and losing strength fast, with little flecks of stars swimming in the east. Eyes fixed on the sky, Isme pulled her dark hair away from her face and tied it with a thong, brushing ash onto her cheeks to shield from the heat. At sunset she needed to build the night fire. That way, if the world did not end, she would be warm all night long.
I hope the world does not end tonight, thought Isme. If the world had ended yesterday, that would not have been so bad. But today I am alone.
Her father left on a journey this morning. Had done so every other moon since Isme had become a woman last winter. Being alone for the end of the world seemed unbearable. But this was not all. Today was also the first full moon of spring.
Tonight, when the sands had cooled, the turtles would come.
If the world did not end first, of course.
Assembling everything for the night fire, Isme kept glancing at the sky. Her father’s brother had prophesied that this world would end in darkness and an earthquake. The world before now had ended in water, and the one before that in fire, and the one before that nobody knew. Compared to these options, Isme thought darkness and an earthquake did not sound so bad.
Her hands trembled as she considered what method she should use to start the night fire. She had been like this all day, strung tight like an animal skin cured to leather. Focus, she repeated, surveying the hearth. Her father had taught her many different ways for fire. Flint, bore-sticks, friction. Isme knew she should practice these methods because she might need one of them someday. Be prepared for anything in the end of the world.
Yet there was one way that Isme preferred. Her father called it the “cheating method,” and she used it so often that she might forget the other ways. But tonight, glancing at the other side of the hearth, where her father normally sat during the building of the night fire, Isme felt a prickly thorn bush rise against the inside of her ribs.
She said: “But you’re not here, Father, so I’ll do what I want.”
I’ll break all the rules, she thought, after all, I am a woman now.
Tonight, she was going to go to the beach, unaccompanied, and see the turtles all by herself. Her father never needed to know. She would break his rules and come home afterward and nobody would be the wiser—except Grandmother Kalliope, goddess-muse of song, but she was the sort to keep secrets despite being a storyteller.
Isme would start her disobedience now. A night fire using her cheating method.
Settling back onto her heels, Isme closed her eyes and reached her mind out to the fire. This was how to cheat: to find her secret well of songs. She had asked her father about her well once and he had said: that is the Muse, the great song-goddess Kalliope, lingering under your mind in that space between body and soul. And Isme had rejoiced.
Fire was there, same as everything she could ever want to sing about. Isme pushed toward the flame, asking: What do you want me to sing? What will call you forth?
Words came to her, words from the fire, simply, easily, as though fire was eager to be born. Opening her mouth, feeling like a leaf on a stream, Isme felt the words emerge as she sang what fire had taught her:
Flickering, flickering
Hasten forth bright spark
Soon the sun will be gone
And you alone will be here
To remind us we are alive—
The insides of Isme’s eyelids lit red, and when she opened them fire was before her, cackling like a baby bird in the center of the hearth stones. Isme laughed.
Tonight fire was just as jittery as she was, just as eager to begin. She reached forth and took more kindling from the briar pile and fed it to the fire, which opened its greedy maw and ate. She continued until it was fully grown, capable of surviving the rest of the night.
Above, the sun was no longer visible. His descent at first was slow, but all at once he lost vigor and in freefall plunged below the line of the hills. He was not quite down yet, Isme knew, for on the beach he was still holding his head above the water, but he would soon drown.
The indigo in the east darkened to black and the curved edge of the Milky Way could be seen. Further down the horizon, Isme knew there was a faint glow of more light coming. The moon, full-faced and round like the eye of a god, was waking, calling to the tide, the turtles. If Isme wanted to see them, she needed to start out now.
But first, the end of the world. She sat, waited for the sky to darken more. Breathed the night air and gazed about the campsite lit by her night fire: the kiln where she and her father made pottery, the opening to the cave with its cloth door, the ditches dug for water runoff...
There was plenty of darkness. But no earthquake.
The world had not ended.
Isme felt breath leave her, nostrils flaring with the outflow. She closed her eyes and thanked Grandmother Kalliope for the delay in the end of the world, that her father had time to return and they could be together for the event.
She had set aside a suitable torch for the walk to the beach. Grabbing, her hands smooth and soft against the wood but also tight with tension, Isme stuck the end into the fire. Greedy as ever, fire clutched at the wood and Isme pulled it upright, held them both aloft. Fire simply continued chewing.
Reassuring herself again, she said, “Father will never know.”
The way through the woods was not so easy in the dark. The sun was gone before Isme reached the crest of the hills. She lifted each foot high, trying to avoid stubbing her toes, but she could not stop each footstep from landing on something: briars or twigs or uneven soil that made her ankles jut at odd angles. Fortunately, Isme’s feet were well-calloused and her wiry limbs were strong.
Any fear Isme contained, walking along in the darkness, she dispelled by telling herself one of her favorite stories:
A long time ago, there was a man named Orpheus, who was the son of the god Apollon, king of light, and Kalliope, muse of song. He was so skilled in music that when he sang and played, even wild animals would come to sit at his feet. There are many stories about him—but none so great as how he died for his love, Eurydice.
At their wedding, as she danced to Orpheus’s music, Eurydice trod on a snake and was bitten. Dying, her spirit fled down to Hades below.
But Orpheus did not give up on his love. Playing his lyre and singing of his loss, he found the entrance to the underworld.
His music worked miracles. Charon, the greedy ferryman, shipped Orpheus across the river without payment. Cerberus, the watchdog, let him pass. And finally even Hades himself, god of the dead, was moved by Orpheus’s song, which caused Persephone to weep with sorrow.
Merciless Hades agreed to let Orpheus have Eurydice’s soul, with one condition: that, as he led her soul back up to the world of the living, Orpheus should not turn and look at her.
And so Orpheus set out to do the impossible: bring his love back to life! He sang as he walked back up the cave trail to the living world. But as he walked, he began to doubt; was Eurydice really behind him? Or was this all a trick? A bad dream? At last he could withstand temptation and doubt no longer, and took a look behind. There stood the soul of Eurydice, following him, but the moment he saw her, she vanished.
He lost his chance—his love was gone.
Orpheus knew nothing could make him happy ever again. In grief he traveled the land, singing his sorrows, and at hearing his song even the stones would weep. Animals and brutes in the wilderness would come and lay at his feet and die from heartbreak.
But then one day some Maenads, women under the spell of Dionysos, god of wine, met him in the woods. They yelled at Orpheus to join them in partying, but he could not overcome his sadness. The Maenads screamed so loudly that they could not hear his song and so were unaffected. Eventually they became enraged and tore him into pieces, tossing his head into the river Hebrus.
But even then, Orpheus’s music did not die: the head continued to sing, even as it flowed down the river. The Hebrus carried his head all the way down to the sea—where, if you stand quiet on a beach and listen, you can still hear Orpheus singing to this day.
A macabre story, Isme thought, but in truth she liked it all the more for that.
By the time she crested the hill and started down, she could see much better, moonlight filtering through the trees. The moon was rising now—Isme must hurry.
She sent a thought to the turtles, words that she imagined weaving through the trees and sweeping down to the beach like wind—I’m coming, my friends.
When she began descent to the beach, Isme was no longer following the path. There was the sound of the ocean ahead of her, waves beating the shore. The turtles would surf the tide of the moon rising behind the island. When half the night was finished, they would follow its retreat as the ebbing pulled them back to sea.
The trees gave way, parting to reveal scrub-grass and bushes. In the dark they looked like half-trees, as if the vegetation was shrinking into the earth. Hurry picked up Isme’s steps; just over the ridge was the beach.
Sand gleamed in the moonlight, as if it too was made of water.
She froze there, at the height of the ridge, gazing out over the dunes. Isme imagined that the beach looked like what good dreams must be like. Soft and soothing. As she gazed out over the water, she tried to imagine what lay on the other side: woods, and cities, men and beasts. Her father had told her many stories of the outside world: stories of gods and monsters and heroes and war. He was fond of Hercules, who he said at least had some sense in him.
Her ears strained, trying to listen for Orpheus’s song, but the ocean only sighed.
Isme admired the untouched sand. There were no tracks here; no beasts, certainly no men. She was the lone living thing as far as could be seen. If the moon looked down on her, surely Selene thought that Isme was the last creature alive.
But I’m not alone, not really, thought Isme, and she stepped to the sea—toward the other lives that were waiting for her in the water. As she walked, she left behind her the evidence of her existence, tracks that marked her lifeblood. Motion equaled life.
She stood quietly, before weariness began to pull at her limbs and she sat, waiting for the moon to rise just a little higher, for the sea to reveal what she had come for. Isme would wait all night, if need be, feeling the vibration of tension ready to snap her into pieces should she have calculated wrong, and her friends not appear.
And in the distance, came the first sign: a little wet orb bobbled up in the waves.
Isme stared, eagerness stretching her taut. The orb stared back. Set into its roundness were two circles that shimmered in the light of moon and sea. A pair of eyes.
They regarded each other, Isme gazing at the sea and the sea gazing back. Isme held still as she could, for if she moved too much then the sea would remain only water. After a time the sea seemed to decide she was safe and there were more, little round pebbles bobbing up in the foam, blowing bubbles out nostrils, reaching the sand with the sounds of flesh slapping, the scrape of shells against sand, waterlogged and squelching under the weight, grains disturbed into eddies smoothed out by the next wave.
Such noises were incidental. For the creatures themselves were silent; in silence they reached the land, in silence they threw their swollen bodies onto the grit and grime. They birthed themselves and crawled, heaved, struggled with such effort that Isme would have felt pity, if her mind had room, if she was not consumed by wonder.
Gone were the jitters that had kept her awake for the last few nights, the misery that had clouded her chores when her father had announced his trip that morning and she realized he would be gone for the first full moon. She knew then that she would be back the next day, and the next, until her father came home and caught her.
If the world did not end on any of those sunsets, of course.
In her stillness Isme let them come, approaching slowly, heaving big bulbous forms up the beach to the sand that was not burdened with waves, the place where sand only came because of the great storms. All around her now, huffing with effort, the turtles made their way, pausing in confusion when they encountered her shins, snuffing and tonguing her knees and lifting their heads and blinking their moonbeam eyes to try to see her clearly. They seemed most puzzled by her torch, which still glowed with embers where she had stabbed the handle end into the sand.
Only when the turtles had surrounded her did Isme feel the song rising inside, the turtles summoning the words from that place deep within where fire had lurked, earlier:
Little turtle, little turtle
Where do you come from?
You bob up from the depths
And I wonder if you belong there, not here
Where your bodies struggle in the sand.
What do you see down there
In the deep, in the dark
Where no men are
Save the dead?
Are there turtle gods you worship
Who call to you in waters below?
Do they whisper the secrets of the world
In your ears?
Little turtle, little turtle
If you tell me
I promise not to tell the living men.
She let the notes fade from the crisp air. The music would carry over the sea and be heard by more turtles, who would know to come to land, that it was safe now. Isme was less a creator than a conduit through which the music, the universe, expressed itself. Isme never felt as though she was inventing a song; the song was inventing her.
Only in her relaxed state did she see what she had missed—
Out on the water there was a light on what would have been the horizon. That should have been impossible. Isme’s dreamy mind first thought it was a fallen star. Yet as she stared, Isme saw the light bob up and down, like carried by a turtle. But turtles did not have fire. Only men and gods did.
All of her father’s admonitions came to her again, all his commands: no fire during the day, when smoke could be seen on the sea; no fire on the beach at night, where passing ships could spot the glow; no singing outside careful times, when the ears of men could not even chance to hear by accident.
Isme had broken the rules before. But this time was different.
This time, she could have been found.
Turning, she fled through the dunes and back toward the hill, hoping to reach the crest before whatever was on the water arrived, if they did. In her haste she left the smoking torch behind. Dumbfounded, the turtles stared after her, heaved their swollen bodies forward, stretching out necks with wet mouths as if to say:
Wait, come back.
For a long time Isme sat in her father’s cave, with the sealskin hide pulled over the entrance, having doused the night fire outside. She was cold. But she had a suspicion that her trembling was due to fear more than anything else.
They can’t come here, she told herself. My father ringed the cave with watcher stones, and people who don’t know the cave is here can’t see it. Unless I invite them.
Isme was not stupid enough to invite men in.
She thought about her father’s stories. Tantalus, who served up his own son as stew. Tereus, who raped his sister-in-law and ate his child. And then Thyestes... Come to think of it, Isme thought, a lot of the stories involved people eating each other.
A clear lesson: men were savages.
Her father said that one winter after she was born, a thousand ships had sailed over the sea to a far different land with great terrible walls, and begun war there, over a woman. The first time her father had left the island since Isme’s womanhood, he had come back with news about this war. The men were still killing each other. It had been ten years.
I’m going to spend all night awake worrying, realized Isme.
This was not entirely accurate. Sometime in the middle of the night, when the moon was beginning her descent, Isme felt the odd sensation between wakefulness and sleep. She sat in the complete dark, shivering, aware that she was asleep and dreaming her reality. But if this was a dream then it was the same as the waking world.
Next morning the coming sun cast the earth in gray. Isme stayed behind the cloth entrance to her father’s cave, until she could bear no more. I will just poke my head out, she thought. She half-crawled to the entrance and set her fingers against the seal-skin cloth where flecks of light from the late morning sun shone through.
When I pull this back, Isme thought, there had better not be a man sitting outside watching to see if anyone is here.
That was impossible with the watcher stones.
Isme pulled back the cloth and looked. Everything was in order. The sun still shone gray, but that was due to the cloudy skies, distorting all light to the paler ends of the spectrum. Isme’s eyes traced over the circle where her father had buried the watcher stones. She knew what they looked like: faces, carved in stone, set upside-down with their chins pointing upward.
Each stone had two faces on it—a face looking inside the circle toward her father’s cave, and another face looking outward to the rest of the world. The ones facing outside had their eyes open; but the ones facing inward had their eyes shut. Every few years, Isme and her father had to dig them up and move them about, to ensure that they stayed aware at their posts, her father said, like changing the guard of a city.
“But I don’t even know if they work,” said Isme. After all, no man had ever arrived at the island to test the watcher stones. She had only her father’s claims about the stones as proof they would work. But if she trusted her father about the coming end of the world, then surely she could trust him about the watcher stones.
Stepping cautiously, Isme surveyed everything. Nobody in sight. The birds of the island were singing. She imagined that they would fall quiet if something was in the woods.
Approaching the fire, Isme made sure it was completely out. The sky may be gray today, but a column of smoke could still be seen from the ocean. Smoke was different from clouds, darker, less fanciful, reeking of death rather than rain. Fortunately, the embers of the fire were long dead. Yet as Isme considered this, she realized:
Last night she had left her torch on the beach.
Anyone on the beach could find it. She had not hidden the torch; she had just stabbed the handle into the sand while awaiting the turtles. Again, her thoughts in the previous night came to her: turtles do not make fire. Only gods and men do.
If anyone saw her torch then they would reach the same conclusion. The torch was burnt out, but might as well be alight. It would guide men to shore.
“I don’t have a choice,” she said, ducking into her father’s cave to take one of the walking sticks he had carved and hardened in the fire. She had often tumbled staves with her father but never won. Yet this was better than nothing to defend herself with.
She paused at the watcher stones, sent up a silent song—Kalliope, let the song of this journey be of a foolish new-woman who encountered nothing but only scared herself.
The walk through the woods was much more treacherous this time. Isme moved slowly, aware that if someone was in the woods, whoever spotted the other first would have an advantage. The overcast sky dulled everything. She rubbed gray ash over herself before leaving, hoping this would camouflage her.
Cresting the hill toward the beach, Isme noticed something unusual through the trees. She crouched, crawling to get a better line of sight, and found herself confused.
There was a dark shape lying in the scrub-grass, about the size of a human being. Isme pieced together the figure’s shape and position: a man, lying face down, one arm splayed out over his head and the other tucked under his body.
How unpleasant, Isme thought. The scrub-grass had burrs in it.
Something was wrong.
The question came: continue on toward this man, with the risk that could involve, or return to her father’s cave and safety? Isme gripped her staff and drew a line in the dirt with her toe. She gazed out over the rest of the scrub-grass, not quite able to see the beach beyond the ridge. Anyone and anything could be out there.
He might be hurt, thought Isme. Father would know what to do. But he isn’t here. This is my decision—just like going to the beach last night. I am not supposed to reveal myself to people. But Father doesn’t have a rule about what to do when a man is hurt.
And she thought: in stories, when people are hurt, someone always helps.
That thought spurred her, and she left the safety of the trees, keeping herself crouched low, but approaching the man. About two arm’s length, she thought better of coming within grabbing distance, and instead called, “Sir, are you awake?”
The man did not stir. This close, she could see that his hand stretched out above his head had fingers bent in ways that they should not bend. Deciding that a wounded man was less of a threat, she took a step forward and poked him with her stick. No reaction. Reaching out, she touched his head. His skin was cold and wet. Worried now, she rolled him over and found his eyes were open, unblinking, limbs stiff like driftwood.
He was dead.
Isme had never seen a dead man before, let alone a live one besides herself and her father. He did not look as ugly as she had supposed men would. In stories, women wailed for the dead. But making noise seemed dangerous if Isme did not know whether anyone else was on the beach over the ridge.
The only thing Isme could think to say was a quick prayer: “Lord Hermes, guide of the dead, take this man’s soul to the underworld and let him pass the river in peace.”
Carefully, Isme turned and stepped further into the scrub-grass, keeping low, approaching the crest of the ridge and beach. She would check if any of the man’s companions were around. If so, they could gather the body while she went back to the watcher stones and safety. If not, Isme would have to take care of him herself.
But there were more shapes on the beach. Shadows. Strange lumps in the sand that she had never seen before—except that she had, and he was lying still behind her in the scrub-grass.
Isme felt her spine straighten, her feet continuing to walk, without permission, tumbling on, the ready stiff position of her hands clutching the staff loosening, until she was dragging the end behind her on the grass. She halted at the line of the sand and stared out, counting. One, two—four, five—not even halfway there. More.
Strewn about them were driftwood and waterlogged cloth. More than one was face-down in the water, dashed back and again by the waves, much like the turtles had flung themselves ashore in the night. And overtop crawled the crabs, while overhead gulls whirled and screamed for joy. But there was no motion in the shapes underneath.
Beyond the beach the low tide of the sea whispered, without a ship in sight, gray skies continuing out along the horizon forever. The sun was hiding his face.
This is the first chapter of Daughter of Orpheus, a story at the edge of Greek Mythology. You can read all 400 pages for free by joining the author’s email newsletter, which is also chock full of stories, artwork, and other fantasy goodies.