28
The Forge SHORT STORIES
Spring 2021
the sacrifice By: Kaitlin Swanton
They had warned me for weeks not to venture down to Ceto’s cave. They said that if I came out alive, I would not be the same. Undead. Monster. She-beast. I spat on the earth and said that it was we who would not be the same. Soon, we would be dead. I enunciated dead so it was two syllables, not one. And so, I ventured down there anyway. Now I see them screaming on our village grounds; my cold eyes leer into the distance at the smell of the enemy steaming from downwind pirate ships while I hunch over the hills above them all. The enemy is here. And I should have listened to the warnings. *** They are both my mothers and my sisters. Women who live alone in a small village by the shore, isolated. They raised me on the island Sarpedon. Built me from infanthood, gave me education, survival skills, and religious idolatry. We are a pious people. I am Arete, born on Cisthene in Aeolis. My father was a fisherman and my birth mother died from infection after labor. I was named so by her in the hopes that a name meaning virtue would bring lucky days about for my father, with nets full of fresh haul to sell at the market. I do not remember much from those days. I do remember why I ran away, though.
I had been six when I heard my father make arrangements for my marriage to the woodcutter’s son. My hair was as fire and my eyes were as water, with a face speckled by freckles and rose cheeks. I was bound to fetch a suitor with a good bride price as I aged and so an arrangement was made. The money was sorely needed--the fish came and went and the debts rose higher. It was inevitable, my father said. Inside, I screamed. I feared the day a man would touch my body and do to me what had been done to my mother, and so at six years of age I stole my father’s only boat and sailed to nowhere. I preferred death than marriage, for death would be kindlier. That was when I crashed upon the shores of Sarpedon three days later after a storm and I was found by my sisters, my mothers. They took me, raised me, taught me, loved me. Never once was I promised to a man twice my age. I thought of my old life less and came to belong to the new one I was given. I never once thought of my father. My sisters were a religious group that worshipped the land of Sarpedon and its waters in respect of sea deities Ceto and Phorcys. It had been Ceto’s powers, her blessings that enchanted the island to be a safe place for groups of women to live. Never once did my sisters fear the wars of men because the island kept the ways of men afar. We were hidden as a pearl buried in a stretch of coral reefs.
