Homes like urns, not much larger, mud and stick. She weaves between them, slows as she comes close. No movement, no living being, no sound here. She stands before her cave hole and knows that all the kings in the world cut into pieces and cooked will not be enough to make up for this.

There is no air to breathe. She kneels and crawls into darkness and reaches for bodies. Warm, still warm, and she feels movement, sobs as she feels each part of them, checks each arm and leg and head to find all intact and no blood. My babies, she says.

We’re not supposed to talk, they tell her. We’re not supposed to move.

Yes, she says. Hurry. And she pulls them from shadow as the first sun cuts through the olive grove on the slope above, turning each tiny leaf to pale gold. We have to run. Keep the sun at your back, and don’t stop.

Down through other hovels, along dirt tracks away from the citadel, the world jolting, shaken, she pulls her small sons off their feet, drags until they run again, ignores their cries. She doesn’t look at them, only clamps down hard on thin arms. Thistle and all else that would tear and scratch grown along the path, not wide enough for three, her children screaming at her now, but she doesn’t care. They’ll survive a few scratches. She has gone beyond blood and breath and muscle, runs from some other source, untiring. The gods must feel this, the earth spread beneath and passing without effort, distance collapsed. She has grown taller, her limbs stretching, feet no longer touching ground, as weightless as shadow.

5

5

Nothing grows here without thorn or spike. Ground of stone white and red and black, veins raised up in endless small ridges crumbling, backs of beasts buried long ago, earth-giants looking downward. In the distance, combined, all somehow looks brown, broken mountains baked. All that grows keeps low, vines without green, pale discs burnt and still alive, catching at her sons as she drags them along. Even the tufts of yellow grass have spikes in their seeds.

Every settlement ends this way, in wilderness abrupt and complete, place of wind and beast and the gods. No olive or fig or grape. But Acastus will follow.

Looking over her shoulder as she runs, for spear and shield and dust, listening for feet. Hekate, she calls. Let every beast of rock and earth rise up in their path. Make us unfound. Lose us in a wasteland.

She runs and runs toward nothing, her shadow slipping closer, shifting over that ground, shrinking. No longer any cries from her sons, stumbling weight she pulls along. No longer weightless herself but stiffening, legs rigid and painful, throat torn.