Chapter Eight: Ishtar

 Ishtar frowned at Katina, from where she sat at the presumed spot of honor in the circle, and fidgeted for more space between Euphenia and Cleon. The boy next to her scowled and shifted closer to Amalric

 “You,” the man next to Katina said with a frown, “must explain yourselves.”

He was the same one from yesterday, who had rode in one his horse with a slave girl behind him. This worried Ishtar all the more.

“She says we are not her friends?” Ishtar asked, feigning bemusement. “How can this be, Kat? I remember that we were once so—”

“Silence,” she hissed, and Ishtar frowned, less than impressed. She was fine with acting the queen with her horde of followers behind her, but put her out on her own and she would cower and head just like any other rat. “You are no friends of my goddess.”

“And what goddess is that?”

“Meiam,” Katina said with the intensity of someone who had no idea what they were talking about. Ishtar knew it well. She used it as they spoke.

“Meiam?” she echoed, and then all the forced bravado was gone. She was getting an idea of things. “But I know your goddess,” she said, “and she comes to me in dreams.”

“Does she?” Katina asked, and Ishtar ignored the look of rage on Euphenia’s face. She didn’t have time to worry about Euphenia calling her a blasphemer. There were bigger things, like the spear head that was now pressed against the back of her neck. “As what?”

“A great griffin,” she responded without missing a beat, “and her wings were wide as jungle trees are high and she breathed onto me the screams of the guilty.”

“Anyone could say these things,” the woman in armor next to Katina barked. “These are liars that we have housed among us!”

“I am no liar!” Ishtar yelled, and then paused, body still as she felt the tremors and heard the deepness. It was not the lowest voice she had ever heard, nowhere close, but it was not the voice of a woman and Euphenia looked more startled than she. “She smelled like rotted flesh and the breath tasted like blood.”

And those, unlike the screams of the guilty, were not in the scrolls. All eyes were on her and she shifted back into herself, the sharp point of the spear digging deeper in.

“She could’ve made it up,” the woman said softly, and they all watched the slave that ended a large, ancient scroll to Katina, who reluctantly accepted.

“Yes, check the scrolls!” the man from the other day, with his pepper and salt beard, said. “Let us rid ourselves of these infidels quickly.”

Katina rolled the scroll out and Ishtar worried as her blue eyes scanned the aged papyrus and all of the priests and priestesses from Mulak gave Ishtar looks of worry and bewilderment. How had she known these things, and what if she kills us all? The same things were running through her own mind.

What if the dreams were just that, she wondered, nothing more than dreams? What if the goddess had never spoken to me? There are so many others, and I am nothing grand. My fancies have killed us all.

Katina froze, hunching over the scroll to get a better look and her pale skin turned whiter. The men and woman near her all crowded in to get a look, exclamations ringing the air while they demanded to know what the scroll said. Ishtar wondered than if any of them even knew how to read, and then on how Katina knew.

“It is true…” she whispered. “All she has said is true, and she could not have known it.”

Ishtar swallowed a sigh of relief and relaxed once the spear was withdrawn from her head at the wave of Katina’s hand.

“How?” she asked, and Ishtar smiled.

“She sung a story,” she said, settling into her smooth, dry voice.

Katina tilted her head to the side, and Ishtar settled into the comforting knowledge that she knew more about the eastern gods of the Hirans than she ever did. She settled into the idea that, yes, Katina would need Ishtar because Ishtar was safe and this would be a nice tool in Ishtar’s preservation of her life.

And theirs, she thought, looking to Euphenia and the rest.

She smiled, almost ruefully.

Ishtar screamed when she woke up, having opened her eyes one by one because her right was caked with crust. When she opened the left, she had seen nothing, and then just to be safe, she closed her right eye and sniveled when she saw nothing. She jumped out of her bed, disgruntled, and pawed through the tent desperately until she found a mirror in Bryony’s pack.

“No,” she whispered, staring at her eye.

It was better than she had first expected when she realized it was blind, not going off to the sides all wrong like her grandmother’s had but the color had changed to a milky white. The pupil was gone and she shivered, disturbed by the look of it and then Ishtar put the mirror down, backing away once she remembered other changes.

“I was a girl. She,” Ishtar whispered, and then smiled, lifting up her loin cloth, “no, he.”

 She’d never especially longed for anything hanging between her legs, but it felt right to see it, almost a relief to realize his body had changed. The shell he’d been locked in for years was now changed to something he could call his body.

“I am a man,” he murmured, looking down at his lean body with pleasure and then picked the mirror up again.

The blind eye was still there, disturbing and almost a foretelling of worse things to come, but his face had changed slightly. He saw traces of his mother in his face by the high cheekbones and generous mouth, but there were other things, though, foreign traits of someone he’d never met. There was the square jaw, more pronounced features, and longer eyelashes. He glanced down at the broader shoulders and tried to push back worries of what Euphenia might think of it.

Euphenia, he thought, and was no longer able to enjoy it. I have to tell her, better now than have her see me and attack.

“Euphenia?” he whispered, in the voice that she had heard and been perturbed by the other day.

The woman stirred, and Ishtar shook away from his head the long curls, wondering for a moment how he was the one who wanted to be a man and Euphenia was not.

“Hmm?” she hummed lightly, springing from her mat and Ishtar took in a deep breath, heart pounding in his chest.

His nice, flat chest. He didn’t regret any decisions he made, or the deal he’d made with the goddess. His blind eye would always be there, but he couldn’t help but be just a little overjoyed at the new change.

“Euphenia,” he said, “I’m sorry.”

It was Euphenia’s turn to scream then. Dread filled Ishtar, gazing down at Euphenia’s red face as the other leaped up into the air and then had him pinned down on the floor. If Ishtar had thought his outward masculinity would lead to him being stronger than Euphenia, he’d been wrong. His muscles, perhaps, were more distinct then they had been before, but Euphenia held him down with ease.

“Who are you?” she hissed, and Bryony began to stir in her mouth from the noise.

“Ishtar,” he gasped, feeling Euphenia press his face into the ground.

“Don’t lie to me,” she said. “I’m not stupid. Ishtar is my sister.” Ishtar’s body tensed, feeling Euphenia’s elbow press down harder into his back. “You are a man, an intruder. Who are you really?”

“Euphenia?” Bryony asked, rubbing her eyes as she stumbled over to where they were on the ground. “What’s going on? What are you doing with Ishtar?”

Euphenia didn’t answer, and Bryony let out a strange noise between a hiccup and a groan once she saw Ishtar there on the floor. She stooped down to Ishtar, who’s face was now in the ground and frowned.

“Why would he claim to be Ishtar?” she asked, hand going to his head. “Well, he has her hair.”

“So?” Euphenia barked, “He could be any slave. They all look alike.”

Ishtar jerked his head back, for air and the opportunity to say, “I could say the same about you, bald bitch.”

“Let him speak,” Bryony exclaimed, glaring at Euphenia once Ishtar’s face was firmly set back down against the earth. “He looks like her, like Ishtar. He looks like she used to when she dressed up as a boy and met me, except…” She paused, looking down thoughtfully at his head and then up at Euphenia’s red face. “Except, it’s realer.”

“Why should I?” Euphenia snapped, but reluctantly allowed Ishtar’s face up.

Her eyes were squeezed shut tight against the dirt and she slowly opened them, allowing Bryony to cringe at the sight of the blind eye.

“Perhaps it is just a slave,” she mumbled, thinking maybe he was disfigured by a bad master. “But he looks like her. And called you a bald bitch, just like Ishtar.”

“It’s me.”

“Anyone could’ve come up with that,” Euphenia said, but it sounded slightly weaker and her head was now covered by hair.

She wasn’t bald anymore.

“Bry,” Ishtar said quickly, squirming Euphenia’s grasp. “It is me. Remember? All those times on the wall, you’d go on about the men mounting men and Hira, and the women who mounted women. You’d talk about their culture, their slaves, and everything that didn’t matter.”

“Ish?” Euphenia said softly and then her hand went between his legs, poking it as he went stiff with anxiety, wondering if Euphenia would chop them off. “But how?”

“I’d prefer it if you didn’t do that,” Ishtar said wryly, rolling his eyes. “I spoke to the goddess, remember? My voice changed. You were there. And she promised me in exchange for my eye.” And my soul.

But he didn’t feel the need to add any of that.

“Wait,” Euphenia said, and her hold on Ishtar began to slacken, “you speak as if you wanted this.” She frowned. “Is this not some awful curse?”

“No, it is not.” Ishtar frowned and looked at Bryony, with her nearly white hair and grey eyes that actually believed Ishtar. “I wanted this. I’ve…”

“Always wanted this,” she sighed, finishing it for him.

“That was creepy,” he murmured, and she smiled.

“So what?” Euphenia said, and stood to her feet in one irritated motion. “You two are now the sisters?”

“Brother and sister,” Ishtar corrected and straightened up to look at them from his knees, looking down, and he felt odd. “You’ll always be my sister, my bald bitch.”

He toppled back over, holding himself up by his forearms and looked up at them with wide eyes.

“Euphe…” he began and then choked on his words, voice turning to garbles as he fell limp onto the ground, suffocating on his own vomit until Euphenia pulled him out of it.

“By the God, what sorcery is this,” she demanded, pulling him up into her arms while Bryony helped her pull his hair back as he vomited on the ground.

“Get me a bucket.”