1.1 In Achaea

In which Lakhesis breaks her loom.

This is the first part of the novella In Achaea, which tells the story of why Atropos came to Shetland, and how.

Let’s begin.

‘The rites of the Olympians have been superimposed on another order of worship.’

Prolegomena to the Study of Greek Religion, Jane Ellen Harrison (1908)

What were they like, the Fates?

There are not many stories about them, so let us collect together what we have, and imagine. They sprang fully formed into being, their tools in their hands. They were created to attend all deathbeds. They waited on lonely roads at dusk after the thieves had gone, and on exposed hillsides on the coldest of nights. They helped the bodies tumble slowly down into the depths. They were in the fields in the heat of the day when the scorpions and snakes were waiting. They followed sickness and injury. They opened the door to Death. They brought life to an end, for everyone, everywhere in the world.

The bringing of this Fate was their concern, nothing else.

There were three of them. Klotho was as massive as a statue. She spun the threads of life. Lakhesis stood like a tree. She drew the threads out and measured them. Atropos was the eldest, thin like bone. She opened her shears at the mark, and made the cut.

Their shadows stood in the angle between the painted wall and the dark door; stretched out in front of the roaring fire, and across the worn stone floor. The crying around the carved bed in the great house or beside the stinking pallet in the hut would become louder. And then the Fates would be gone, to the next place, to the next deathbed, to the next place of slaughter, or murder, or sickness.

In the beginning they had had time to listen and to watch beside the lonely deaths or among the crowded ones.  As they waited for the ends of the humans’ lives in fields, on mountains and at sea, they saw how humans lived.

Atropos learned how to keep her obsidian blades sharp by watching the farmers and the smiths. Klotho listened to the women’s conversations in the kitchens while she spun the threads of their lives, and the lives of their children. Lakhesis liked to sit in the shadows under the windows in the bright weaving rooms, listening to the women talking among the clashing loom-weights, as she measured out the lengths of their lives.

They were never lonely. They always had each other.

Time passed. The work increased. More humans were crossing over to Death’s realm. The sisters called out their Keres, innumerable shadow figures of their selves, to spin, measure and cut where and when they could not go themselves. Thus the balance was kept, and life and death moved in an orderly pattern.

The Fates were seen only from the corner of an eye, or in vague dreams. The painters decided that their hair was bound in wire-framed fillets, dark crinkled tresses hanging stiffly past their shoulders. They were painted in white gowns clipped at the shoulder and tied at the waist. They stood firmly on muscular bare feet, with majestic stature. They were painted on vases and on walls like goddesses or human queens. Their terrible purpose was shown by the fixed glare of their eyes, the tense posture of their bodies at their work. They were sometimes huge, sometimes tiny, sometimes human. Sometimes they were birds, with savage beaks and talons. Sometimes they had wings, when the painters couldn’t decide whether the Erinyes or the Moirai hovered over deathbeds. The three sisters stood, implacably waiting.

It was late spring, and the heat of the morning sun was already filling the air around the three figures in the grove of ilexes. Lakhesis was finishing a new strip of blood-red linen on a hand-loom. It was propped up in the place she had used for so long that the wooden frame had worn its shape into the grey limestone. It was an old loom, made from olivewood.

‘You will break that loom if you are not more gentle.’

Lakhesis ignored Klotho and worked the shuttle through the red threads with jerky movements. She had a set expression on her face. Her bare feet were covered in dust. She did not look at her sisters but threw out a tense remark.

‘Last night, when I was attending the queen’s death, I heard someone call us witches.’

Atropos cut a thread. She glanced across at Lakhesis.

‘God or human?’

Lakhesis pursed her lips. ‘These new gods are already saying it. They laugh at us, but not when I am nearby. And now a human says it. No-one in the room protested. No-one made the sign with their hand. No-one said it was wrong. I was so angry.’

The loom broke into three pieces, wrenched apart.

‘I was finished anyway.’ Lakhesis sliced her weaving from the broken wood with a blackened knife, shiny at the edges. She began to knot the dangling threads with hasty fingers. Two ravens were flying and cawing overhead, playing in the wind blowing over the mountainside.

‘We are neither witches nor sorceresses. Which human said that we were?’ Klotho’s disapproving voice rapped out tartly.

‘Oh, one of the humans watching at the death. He was angry, I think. Your Ker was with me, Atropos, to cut the queen’s thread. It will remember.’

‘That’s the third time I’ve heard us being called witches,’ Atropos said. ‘It’s new. Humans used to understand what we do. I wonder what has changed?’

The sisters had worked in their grove for as long as they could remember, attended by bees and snakes, wafted by the thymy scents of mountain undergrowth. The stones they sat on had worn into smooth shapes, washed by rain and snow, blown clean by the wind, dried in the sun.

Threads hung from all the trees, shining bone-white in the sun, moving in the breeze. The scent of dill floated in the air above the stones where the sisters trod, and a bell chimed sweetly in the wind. The trees surrounding the circular terrace of polished stone were gnarled and twisted with age. Around their roots the ground was thick with dust. Beyond the ilexes, yew trees grew in pools of their own deep shade, massed and silent. Olives grew further down the slope with open ground around them. Their twisted black trunks looked like humans when they had been burnt on the pyres. There seemed to be black trees in every direction.

Each time that Atropos cut a thread, a tree dropped another thread silently to the ground. The dropping threads made a slow unending flow. Their fibres shrivelled and crumbled in the sun. The bone-white dust covered the gnarled roots. It was the same colour as the wiry grass beyond the margins of the stone circle, a waving fringe of dusty whiteness around the black tree roots. All the threads of the world’s dead lay there, until their dust blew away.

Episode 1.2 will follow.

In Achaea © Kate Macdonald 2024.

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