4.2 In Achaea

In which the sisters meet again.

The vultures’ calls stopped abruptly and turned into metallic cries of warning. Atropos felt the chill of a cloud on her face, and she opened her eyes in alarm to see the black shape of a descending bird plummeting towards her, its claws raised ready. It blotted out the sun and screamed triumphantly.

The eagle landed and held her down with a punishing grip. Atropos twisted under its claws on the white rock, and the eagle glared down at her.

‘Go to your sisters. Learn from them. Then give me what I ask.’

Zeus’s voice was a harsh call of anger, but his talons did not tear her. With a heavy flap of his vast wings, he rose in the air, kicking backwards into the stream, scattering the white stones and tearing down the moss. Atropos crept under a bush until it was dark. Then in the moonlight she rebuilt the walls of the spring and remade the banks of its stream. She found a broad stone that a snake could sleep on in the sun, and fitted it into the stones above the water seeping out of the earth.

‘Themis. This is your new shrine,’ she said aloud. She sat by the falling water until daybreak.

When she could see rosiness fingering its way across the eastern edge of the sky, she soared into the air as a falcon and flew upwards until the curve of the earth was a circle around her, and the blue of the sky was darkening above her tawny feathered head. She asked herself where her sisters would be, and her hawk’s eye showed her a far-off mountain peak in the north, and the green darkness of a valley beneath it. Satisfied, she descended through the air towards the valley, circling lazily down through the warming currents of air that were now spiralling up from the earth below her. When she landed she changed back into human shape. She would walk, now that she knew the way.