Mother, Maiden, Crone

Mother, Maiden, Crone

“And the son of Cronos made her a nurse of the young, who after that day saw with their eyes the light of all-seeing Dawn”.

- Hesiod, Theogony

The moment I saw the little girl creeping up to the altar, I was ready to grant her every wish. If only it were up to me.

The shrine outside Lagina is placed at a crossroads, where the city and the wilds coalesce, because my mistress is the patron of such places, a goddess of the in-betweens. She is the sole Titan able to traverse between realms unfettered- these days, she is the sole Titan of them all. My mistress once told me that the only people that you can safely assume deserve our saving are human women, especially young ones. She said they’ve been given a bad lot, on the whole, and aside from circumstances of sacrilege, we should do our part to protect them whenever we are able. I am inclined to agree with her, biased as I am, so I bite off veiny hands and man-parts at her slightest command.

Plus, there was something in the child’s expression. She trembled at the yawning, howling dogs, but she held her head high, and kept her grip on her offering tight. It was a small, three-headed clay figurine. My mistress. I crossed my paws before me as she approached.

“What brings you to the altar of Hecate, child?” I asked her. The girl yelped, jumped, and dropped her figurine. It shattered into pieces across the stone at her feet before the altar, some of which hopped out of sight into the night past the illumination of the torches. The child had wide, dark eyes. Dog’s eyes. They were frozen in shock.

“You can… s-speak?” She shook her head a little as if in rejection.

“As well as you.” Better, in all honesty, but I did not say so. She was still as her offering had been before its demise.

“Are you… are you H-?”

“I am Hecuba. I am the goddess Hecate’s familiar.” It would not be proper for anyone, even a child, to mistake her for her mistress. Not for so much as a moment. “What boon do you seek?”

The child fisted her trembling hands, then looked down at her broken offering, like she had already forgotten it was there. “Oh, I-… none. I just came to pay my respect.” The line had the air of being adopted and rehearsed. I tilted my head.

“Alone?”

“I’m very brave. Everyone says so.” She scrunched up her face, perhaps to demonstrate her courage. Had humans become stranger since I counted myself among them, or had I?

“Indeed,” I said, amused. The other dogs watched with interest, but not the kind that would indicate a perceived threat. Their eyes glittered from the shadows, black jewels under dark water. I rose to my haunches. “The goddess requires a token of respect in the form of an offering, child. Return again with sufficient payment.”

She gave a stilted bow, another indication of her misperception of decorum as a lowborn. She should have kneeled. I forgave her, because she reminded me of one of my own brood, long ago.

“Thank you, great one.”

I did not smile, because I did not want to frighten her with my sharp teeth.

“Take care journeying through the darkness. It can swallow you.” I turned to leave, the pack at my heels, to find my mistress and spin her the tale. The girl’s oval of a face disappeared as I looked over my shoulder, her statue left littering the ground in the ring of firelight. As I watched, it mended, a thousand pieces sewn back together by the force of my mistress’ will. I smiled, then, and howled my coming arrival to her and to the night.

My mistress was the Mother that night, as she preferred to be while working. Wisdom came with this form, she said, but without the aching joints of the Crone. I’m not sure if she meant that in jest, because I’m not sure how much pain she can truly feel. Perhaps she chooses to, to tie herself to the humans. I’ve never asked. Anyway, that night she was repainting stars. She liked to pluck them from the heavens when they got dim, to shine them up a bit and then replant them in their black velvet field. Her celestial cousins never minded her forays into their domains, because no one ever minded, and yet always minded my mistress. The other dogs, however, brayed their annoyance at her toil, because the stars would begin to glow so brightly with her shining that they upset the eye. I didn’t mind, because she let me sit at her feet and would tell me stories. That night, they were of Astraea, one of my mistress’ cousins.

“A complete prude,” my mistress said. “But to each their own, and for a daughter of Zeus, perhaps that should be taken as more a virtue than a failing.”

“What is her charge?”

“Justice, primarily. She holds the scales of truth.” My mistress did not elaborate about what that might mean. She scrubbed at a blue dwarf with a rag of golden fleece. It cast cool, stark shadows against the walls of our halls, and I squinted against its pulsing luminosity.

“There was a child at your shrine outside Lagina today. A small girl.”

“Yes. Did you discover what she sought?”

“She did not say. Only to pay her respects.”

My mistress snorted. “Children,” she said, “can pay in nothing but.”

“Will you grant her your favor?”

“If she returns, perhaps. If her offering and request are aligned with my will.” The next star was a red giant. It threatened to swallow the room, the temple, maybe even the whole world in its fiery maw, until my mistress compressed it into her fist and turned it to the size of a coin. “Go rest now,” she said, and sometimes, even after all these years, it felt odd to receive orders, and odder still how naturally I obeyed them. I was never so docile as a human, but perhaps I am better this way.

When she saved and sentenced me on the shores of a foreign land, my mistress asked if I would like to retain my mind, or if I should be happier truly mute, nothing more than a dog (a goddess’ dog, but a beast nonetheless). She said the strain of the transformation can be a burden, but from what I remember, I much prefer this state to my former. The memories are stilted, now, and shuddering with loss and covered with a red film like blood spray.

I can bear it, I said to her, looking into the endless black of her eyes and the hollow flesh of her aged Crone face, I am not afraid.

Much like the little girl at the altar, and my little girl at the altar before her. There are times I wish I had answered differently, so that I might have had the slate wiped clean.

I watched the little unnamed devotee wander through the city that night, trying to find a suitable offering. It was clear she was grasping at straws, and that her sandals were wearing through, because she limped and swore at the rocks in the uneven streets that snagged her feet. I melted into shadowy corners, and she did not notice me, as I do not have to reveal myself to mortals should I wish to travel unseen. She tried to bargain with a vendor in a market stall, with what, I couldn’t guess, and he rapped her hands with a switch where they lay, palm up, on his table of wares. I saw the sheen of tears in her eyes as she passed my alleyway. She couldn’t steal; there were guards in the marketplace, glinting in the spring sunlight and trapping it in their bronze breastplates and spears.

Eventually, she stopped by a fountain in the square. Other children were playing, but she did not. She sat on its edge with her feet dangling, watching the movement of the purple crocuses that had sprouted in the dirt along the creases of the cobbles.

“Those who have nothing are nothing,” she muttered quietly to herself, and flicked a pebble into the water. Her words again rang of foreign repetition. Then the plunk of the pebble. Then a tall man parted the crowd with his body and voice.

“Isse! Is that you? Where in Zeus’ name have you been?!” He was upon her quickly, gripping her arm. At first, the familial concern touched me, then I noticed the strength of the grip, her dark skin going pale. I could smell her fear across the courtyard. “Come! Now!”

He drug her away. I followed.

Isse lived alone with the man in a house on the outskirts of the city that looked like it had previously been partially demolished. I found her asleep on her straw mat on the floor, and said her name.

“Isse.”

By the time she woke, I was gone, but the mended clay figurine I had brought her remained at her feet.

We waited at the crossroads until dawn, but it simply never came.

“I asked Apollo to wait,” my mistress said, easy as that. She was the Maiden now, her face unlined and pearlescent, her hand resting on her crossed knee where she sat on her own altar. “She will be here.”

Isse’s murky form began as only a blur in the darkness, even with my keen canine eyes. When she saw my mistress, she stopped walking, gripping her hands behind her back.

“Hello, Isse,” the goddess said, “Hecuba told me about you.”

I hadn’t really, or I hadn’t needed to, but I didn’t comment. Isse gulped.

“Hello?” She said, like it was her first attempt at ever speaking the word.

“What is it you seek here, young human?”

“I…,” it was only then that the sun began to rise, the edges of the sky pulled up by Apollo’s chariot. “I want to be free.”

“A deceptively complicated request,” my mistress tutted. “Do you think his death would grant you freedom?”

“I don’t know,” the child whispered. It was telling that neither girl needed to clarify who ‘he’ was.

“Hmm. And what have you brought as an offering?”

I liked this about my mistress, her playfulness. As if she didn’t know. As if she hadn’t spoken to her cousin Astraea through a mirror earlier that very night, and received permission from the one who tipped the scales of justice to take on another ward. Isse produced the figurine from behind her back, and with it a somewhat wilted purple crocus, the same color as the lilac-tinged sky. She placed the figurine at my mistress’ bare feet, and then, to my shock, the crocus at mine. In all my time in the spectral hunt, I had never received an offering of my own. I had never even considered it as a possibility. I whined in the back of my throat and gazed up at my mistress, pleading, begging, Can we keep her? She smiled down at me, a smile that spread as slowly as the sunrise had.

“Isse,” she told the small girl who stood on her two feet at a fork in the road between two lives, “there is a choice to be made, and only you can make it.”