Antheia Botanis's Arc

Chapter 9 of 15

The season turned before Antheia expected it. She had gone to the hilltop temple to rest one afternoon and did not leave for three days. The twins came at dawn on the third day, a boy and a girl, both small, both quiet. Roswell caught them in cloth. Verdis stood at the door and did not enter. When Antheia lifted the babies to the window light, she saw the marks on their backs: two vine shapes, each a mirror of the other, drawn in fine dark lines across the shoulder blades. Roswell touched one mark with his thumb and drew his hand back. "Roots," he said. "They already have them." Verdis crossed the threshold then. She looked at each child in turn and set a hand on the boy's foot. The foot did not blacken. She lifted her hand. "The seat holds," she said. "For now the table stays as it is." She left before noon. Antheia sent for a teacher. Not a Greek one. She wrote to her homeland and asked for the old medicine man who had taught her grandmother to read the ground. He came within the week, small and gray, a knife of shell at his throat. "Uncle," she said, and he nodded once. He looked at the twins and at the marks and said, "These will grow fast. You will not keep up. I will stay until they can walk on hard ground." He did not ask for a room. He slept on the temple step. The fields answered the twins before the twins could speak. Wheat that had come up thin thickened in a night. The olive rows below the ridge set fruit out of season. A pair of red foxes wandered up from the low country wearing jasmine at their necks, sat at the temple stair, and would not be chased off. Uncle Jaguar watched them and said, "Leave them. They came for the children." Antheia left them. On the seventh day she walked the mountaintop garden with a basket. The pomegranate she had planted at the center in her first week as goddess stood twice its height. Fruit hung heavy on every branch, split and red. Blossoms opened on the same wood as the fruit. She cut one pomegranate and it bled clean juice. Beside it, on the ground, she found a piece of honeycomb turned to amber, hard as glass, dropped by one of Zeus's bees. She put it in the basket. Roswell met her at the gate. "The messages have started," he said. Three temples had written already. A grove near the coast was greening again. A dry spring had filled. A village wanted to know what god to thank. Antheia set the basket down. The twins had brought a harvest she had not planned for, and every field for a day's walk would know it by morning. Verdis would know it too. The clock Verdis had set was running now, and the season Antheia had asked for was spending itself in a week.