I return from hunting to discover that, after seven years of marriage, my wife has turned back into a man.

He’s sitting on a chair just under the cover of the balcony. His hands are in his lap, but they’re locked together, white, and his unguarded face is frowning. He is beautiful. He was beautiful before the change, and he is beautiful after the change, and he will be beautiful no matter what changes are to come.

There’s a quiet roll of thunder in the distance. Rain begins to patter on the roof, running into the courtyard, where it pools against the soil. Before we married, a storm like this would have flooded into the lower level of the house. The furniture would sink into the packed dirt of the floor; the upper level would become sticky with mud as we inevitably tracked the filth upstairs. The first thing my wife did was dig a small trench around the courtyard, guiding the excess outdoors, letting it free into the world.

I set aside my kill. We’ll get that on the spit before we sleep, but for now we need to talk.

There’s a chair beside him. On nights like these, we often sit together to watch the rain, or at least to oversee the children as they play in puddles. The girls must be sleeping. I sit there now. Then, unable to keep myself to the propriety I should technically abide by, I reach out to take his hand in mine.

“So,” I say. “This complicates things.”

#

I had seen nine winters. Tiresias had seen eight. This made me the older, wiser one, and I was determined to read the entrails like my father did. I poked the dead snake with a stick, and the smell did not shake my priestly expression at all.

“I don’t think they read snakes in the temples,” said Tiresias.

“Shut up. You don’t know what they do in the temples.”

“I do,” he protested. “I watch them too.”

“Well, you don’t, actually, because you don’t know how to read.” The guts had long wriggly bits and short blobby bits. Most of them were pink. Some of them were blue. One of the organs was bulging. I poked that with the stick again, wondering if I could make it pop. “See, now, that’s a bad portent. That means you’re going to die.”

“It does not!”

“It really does! ‘Cause it’s all hard but it’s supposed to be soft. That means your flesh’ll get all rotten and the worms will eat you up and you’ll just be bones.”

Tiresias scoffed. “That’s not augury. That’s just truth. That’s how people work. Everyone’s bones.”

“Well, this bit says you’re gonna die and everyone hates you.”

“Xenogenes!”

“And this, that’s the liver—” (I had no idea if it was the liver.) “—and it’s all wrinkled and it means the gods hate you.”

“You’re lying, Xenos!”

“If you say that again I’m gonna predict you- you can’t ever go to war, and when the Argives come you’re just gonna be stuck at home and useless—”

“I hate you!”

“I hate you more!” But my friend was already gone, a trail of dust in the country air. There was a disquiet in my own stomach now. I’d just wanted him to think I was clever. I already wanted to tell him that I didn’t mean any of it, to ask him how the gods could ever hate someone I liked so much. Pride held me back from chasing him down.

Instead, I poked the stomach of the snake again. The side split. There was a gush of fetid air and fluid, and a half-digested creature was reborn into the world. It was unrecognizable, undefinable, a thing between life and death. An ill omen. Even I could see that.

I wasn’t an augur, I reminded myself. I wasn’t a priest. I couldn’t read the entrails.

Even so, I had been correct on every count.

#

My wife runs his fingers over mine—the light, desperate touch that means he wants to learn something on a deadline, that he’s afraid it’ll soon be gone. I want to tell him he has nothing to worry about, but he’d know I was lying.

I will always love him. I will never leave him. I am not the thing we are afraid of.

Instead I ask: “What happened?”

“I came across the snakes again.” He shuts his eyes. He’s blind. I know this improves his vision—transports him elsewhere—rather than impeding it. “Walking on the same path, the one down the cliffs that leads to the lakeside. I didn’t hear them. Of course I didn’t see them. I don’t know how I knew that they were there, but… this time I did nothing, simply continued on my way. It was a beautiful walk. I heard women swimming in the lake, laughing together—the chatter of men catching eels in boats offshore. The wind was warm and kind.”

“I travelled the same path tonight. The rain’s come in.” I don’t know what I’m saying--I don’t want to talk about the weather. I want to know how we’re going to face the village. I want to know that we can face this, together, as the team we’ve always been. I need to know that I’m not going to lose him.

He shivers. “Yes. Well. I returned home and when Manto hugged me she asked me why my cheek was rough. I don’t know when it happened, to be honest. I didn’t realize it.”

“This was earlier today?”

“Yes.”

I close my eyes to join him in darkness. Without thinking I lean my forehead against his, breathe deeply. The world consists of us alone: two men in the dark, in the rain, with nothing but each other.

“This will change things,” I whisper.

“I don’t want it to.”

“We could move to Thebes. They’re more understanding when it comes to people like us.”

“Thebes is dangerous for other reasons.”

I want to press the matter, but I know better. He sees the future. I don’t. I know enough to know I’m missing something, that he isn’t letting me in on his secrets, but he’ll get evasive if I ask. I say instead: “Live as a woman, then. No one would be able to tell, or at least they wouldn’t ask questions. We have children already, that’s all they care about.”

When I open my eyes again, his face is wet. I wipe the tears from his cheek.

“I know,” I say. “You are only yourself. I could love no other.”

#

Tiresias was fourteen when his father blinded him. I didn’t learn about the fight until after it happened: I went to his family’s farm to seek my sparring partner and was met with his absence. It’s easy now to say I’ve loved him all my life, but in hindsight, at that age, I wasn’t there yet. I liked him—I liked our wrestling matches and our swimming expeditions, liked sparring and racing and talking in circles around serious topics. I liked him better than anyone else.

But I didn’t love him yet.

When I asked where he was, Tiresias’ father grunted, and when his mother tried to answer me in words, he hushed her. I left the olive farm concerned, and a little confused.

The road to the village was a pair of wagon ruts. It was older than the gods, lined with brush and scraggy grass. The olive trees, ancient and tangled, had already begun to lose their fruit. It was fertile land, wide and free, but it was hot and dry and brown today. I wondered where Tiresias had gone. I didn’t want to spend the day perching in the olive trees, throwing pits at passers-by, but I’d do it if I had no other option.

I followed the road to the agora—hardly a market, really, just a few neighbors selling crops they’d end up trading between themselves anyway. The village consisted of a temple, some artisans, and the landowner’s manor up on the hill. Goats and sheep often wandered in from the farmland. We had a wall, but it wasn’t much in the name of defense. The raids were infrequent, but present, and when they happened we went to the manor or the temple—I had stolen my first kiss in such an incident, with a temple priestess who laughed at me and whose name I never learned—and simply rebuilt when the fighting was done.

Tiresias was sitting on the steps of the temple. We loitered there often, badgering the temple girls, when the farms lay fallow and time took on the consistency of honey. At first I thought he was crying and prepared to tease him. Then I saw the bandages.

“Are you okay?”

Tiresias nearly leapt into the air. He hadn’t seen me approach. “Xenos?”

“What happened?”

“It’s nothing.”

Bullshit. I waited.

“We got in a fight.” He’d shrunken into himself, hugging his legs. His father had a temper; his mother often encouraged it. I sometimes wondered if she felt safer when the men were fighting, since her husband’s attentions were distracted. “I was dumb. I turned my back on him.”

“Shit.”

“He hit me, I hit the table.” Tiresias mimed the table’s edge against his brow. “My eyes went dark.”

“Shit.”

“They say I’ll probably get them back.” His voice went to a whisper. “Probably.”

I didn’t have words for that. “You need a place to stay?”

“I think that might make it worse.” I wasn’t sure if he laughed. It could have been something else. “The bastard doesn’t trust me. Says I’m useless anyway. Especially if I can’t see. Can’t fight. Can’t take over the farm. Might as well be a woman.”

We paused. For no reason at all, my childhood predictions had stuck like flour to our bones. We’d had a thousand boyhood fights. We’d have a thousand more. I don’t know why we remembered that one so clearly.

“I don’t know shit about augury,” I said. “You’ll get your vision back. You won’t have to hide or anything. I was making it up.”

“They’re all making it up.” Tiresias sounded small and weak. “I don’t think the future cares.”

#

“Did you know this was coming?” I ask.

He hesitates. “Yes.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“What would you have done if I did?”

Now I hesitate. He’s right. He’s always right. He doesn’t even have the grace to be patronizing about it: he’s waiting for me to come to a conclusion he reached months ago. He's just trying to make me admit it.

So I admit it. “I’d have worried. I’d have counted down the time we had left, and I’d have experienced none of it.”

“Would you have told me, then, if our roles were reversed?”

“No. Of course not.”

“Are you mad at me anyways?” He cracks a smile.

“Yes. Absolutely. You’re a bastard.”

It’s still raining. The courtyard pool has overrun into the ditch, flowing out into the vineyard. We’re still sitting here, knee-to-knee, foreheads pressed together. He smells like woodsmoke and iron. After a few days hunting, I’m sure I smell no better.

I want to hit him. I want to kiss him. I hate that I can’t rejoice in his transformation for fear of what we’ll lose.

I know my wife well, for Tiresias seems to be thinking along the same lines. After a silence, he whispers: “Can you still love me? Even like this?”

“I loved you like this before the change. I’d love you if you turned into a calf or a sheep, or a creature of the sea. I’d love you if you turned into a stone. I love your soul, whatever body it resides in.”

His sigh is long-suffering. “I know you do love me, Xenos. But can you? There are practicalities to consider.”

“Fuck practicalities.”

“Xenos.”

“I know.” I can feel the future churning in my stomach like the snake’s half-digested final meal, hard and sharp and acrid, poised to tear through and leave me bleeding. “We’re both tired. The meat needs skinning and smoking, and we need sleep. Surely we can consider those practicalities in the morning.”

“We can’t put this off forever, love.”

“I know.” I’ve grown. “But we can put it off for the night.”

#

It was the end of my twentieth winter. My father and I made the journey into Thebes to celebrate the coming of spring, when Kore returned to the land of the living and my father found himself wealthy with wine. He would sell it in the city, as he preferred to be wealthy with coin.

I had never made the trip with him before. This was unusual: most of my friends had started joining their fathers in the city years ago, and I was well into adulthood. Only Tiresias and I had yet to leave the village. My friend was blind, so Tiresias never complained, but my own father had no excuse. For some reason, he preferred that I stay home, watch over my mother, keep the household safe in his absence. He’d always protested when I asked to accompany him.

But his back wasn’t what it used to be, and the wine was heavy, and my mother was worried he would hurt himself moving the amphorae alone. She berated. He relented. I promised Tiresias that I would tell him everything when I returned.

We passed through the gates and it was like nothing I had ever seen. There were as many people in the market as I had known in my entire life—more, even, as the sun rose and the agora filled with people. It stank of piss and sweat. It brimmed with life and conversation. I imagined worlds between them—the same family ties, the same gossip, the same complications that I knew from home, all magnified a hundred times over. The place was inconceivable.

My father’s city friends came to see him, passing by with festival foods or flower crowns. One man lingered for a while, making idle conversation. Eventually my father made some excuse.

They left together.

I was alone for a long time. I sold the wine. I packed our things into the cart. I played some drinking game with local boys—they purchased the last amphora—and we tried to knock things over with the dregs until they had to leave. After, sitting sideways on the donkey, I had nothing left to do but wait and watch the stars, reading history in the constellations. My father returned eventually.

“If you tell your mother,” he said, “I’ll beat you as blind as Tiresias.”

I did not tell my mother.

I did tell Tiresias, a few days later. We laid together among the new spring blooms. I had tucked a flower behind his ear. He had not removed it. I was watching the clouds pass above us; Tiresias had shut his eyes and was enjoying the warmth of the sun. I’d brought us a lunch: cheese, wrapped in cloth. Oil. Bread. Wine.

“Maybe he gambles,” I said.

“Did he leave with the money?”

“No. I had the purse.”

“Then maybe not.” Tiresias hesitated. “My father tells me cautionary tales. There are… Well, I haven’t seen anything but—”

“Obviously.” He hit me. I deserved it.

“My father told me about… some men. Men to avoid. There are those who… They seek pleasure in the arms of others when they’re in the city. Married men. Their wives aren’t there, and they… seek freedom from their responsibilities.”

“Doesn’t everyone? But I didn’t see any women. Why would he hide that from me?”

“Maybe it was something else. They… don’t always seek freedom with women.”

“Oh.” I exhaled as I considered the other options.

“I heard they’re less particular about such things in the city. There are so many people. No one has land to pass on, and no one needs more children…”

I wasn’t listening. I’d heard of that before. Boys experimented with each other in their youth, and young men often partnered with mentors for a time. Love between men had simply never applied to me, somehow. It was something you grew out of, and something I’d never experienced. It was irrelevant to my life.

Yet—

I knew a man who—

A change sliced through my chest like a child’s stick, tearing a raw cut into the hidden depths of my soul. Something unknown spilled into the open air: possibility was overwhelmed by want, and then desire, all as fast as a flash of lightning.

“Have you ever—”

“I didn’t—"

We both paused. There was a new tension in the air. I reached out to say something—I’ve forgotten what—and somehow my fingers brushed against his arm. His hand took mine. It pulled me down to meet him.

This was no stolen festival kiss. Tiresias did not laugh and shove me away, though I half expected him to. The women I’d been with always feigned at modesty, always played at getting away. He did not. When I tried to pull back, his hand tangled in my hair and pulled me closer.

I had never felt wanted before. Sex was a conquest, for younger men a goal and for husbands a possession. Sex was strength, power, ruling a kingdom of your own making. It wasn’t supposed to be vulnerable.

As I took him inside me, that changed. Somehow, I realized I had been alone all my life, hidden behind walls of my own making. I allowed myself weakness. I allowed myself to trust. Together we were lost at sea: I clung to the wreckage of his body, and he led me through the storm.

When I returned home, long after sunset, my father was waiting up for me. I challenged his look of disapproval with my own. We both had secrets.

#

I’ve slept past sunrise—it takes the sound of the children in the courtyard to wake me. A child’s joy is supposed to be music to a parent’s ears, but my daughters could raise the dead. Daphne’s shrieking out a laugh, Manto’s yelling at her to quiet down, and through it all Historis sings a nonsense song half-tuned to the chaos.

I love them beyond all measure.

This morning, Tiresias is still dressed as his female self—I don’t know why I’d expected him to have cut his hair before I woke up, but the plaits still surprise me. He’s chasing the girls and scooping them into his arms, flinging them up in the air, flying them around the courtyard like overgrown, spasmic birds. It’s all terribly familiar. I’ve witnessed the scene a thousand times, and now I drink it in like a fine wine, desperate to memorize every cacophonous instant.

I sit: the chairs are still in their place from last night. Tiresias has Historis in his hands and swings her through the air in dips and heights. She flails in delight, screams, and kicks him in the head. Tiresias nearly drops her.

Manto notices my laugh and runs to hug me. “You’re awake! Mama said you were sleeping!”

“I was. I was very tired after my trip.” I lift her into my lap and she immediately squirms into an impossible angle. I narrowly avoid getting punched in the ear.

“We’re going to visit the cavern today.”

“Oh, are you?” I’ve learned my lesson. Manto is nearly as good as her mother when it comes to her abilities, and she sometimes states the things she wants as if they were prophecy. She knows I can’t tell the difference. “Did your mother say that, or have we just decided?”

“She hasn’t said it yet, but I’m not making it up!” Manto takes my arms and wraps them around her, snuggling into my chest. “Mama’s going to want you to come with us.”

“Ah, so you are making things up.” I’ve never joined them in the cavern. It’s a place for my wife and his daughters, not for the rest of us. I have no desire to disrespect their lessons.

“I’m not lying, Papa! Mama, tell him I’m not lying!”

Daphne speaks up first. “She’s not lying, Papa. I dreamed it all last night.”

“Me too!” That was Historis, right in Tiresias’ ear. We both wince, in pain and sympathy respectively. “I dreamed it too! There was blood!”

“I don’t remember blood,” says Daphne.

Tiresias manages to get our youngest to the ground without the both of them falling over, rubbing his ear where she shrieked in it.

“They’re right,” he says. “I think we all need to be there today. There are things you should hear.”

#

There is a narrative surrounding boyhood romance, one which suggests a man must be struck by love at first sight like an arrow to the heart. When friends have confided in me, they always speak of longing glances and sustained affection.

That wasn’t my experience. Not at first. Tiresias and I began as an experiment—a moment of curious passion. Maybe we were a little old for such things, and perhaps it was a little ill-advised, but there was no sense of longing: just an understanding and mutual silence. A week of exploration became a month. A season. A year. Then, suddenly, we had not been boys for a long time. Women came and went, but our place together remained constant.

It wasn’t love, I assumed. Neither of us felt the drive to pledge our affections to each other, to swear off all others or intertwine our lives. Separately we traveled and advanced our careers. When parents died—mine both from plague, his mother from his father’s violence—we sought each other in the night, but faced the public world alone.

We hid it well. I don’t believe anyone suspected. I never heard a whisper, never heard a hint of gossip. And yet a few weeks after his mother passed, Tiresias suggested we stop our affair.

“We should focus on finding wives,” he said, leaning his head on my naked chest. “We’ll need families one day. I’ll need a woman to take care of me, eventually. Won’t you?”

Marriage still seemed such a long way off. I had one friend who’d married before thirty, when a girl turned up pregnant, but generally it was the domain of older men. I ran my fingers through Tiresias’ hair, wondering if it was possible to like a woman as much as I liked him. “I guess. If that’s what you want.”

“It is.”

“All right, then.”

He left with the dawn, as he usually did. I went for a walk to wake myself properly: a bit of sun did me good in the mornings, especially in the winter when the air chilled. My wandering led me into the village to greet Demeter at the temple. From there I took the long road back, as I had for every return trip since childhood. The long road turned north toward the cliffs and the lake, then south past Tiresias’ farm, where I bothered the man whenever possible: a conversation, a tryst, a tossed olive pit from a hiding place behind the gate. Once I’d even managed to hit him in the ear.

But things had changed. Would he still want to see me? Surely he would still welcome the diversion, even if we had only seen each other a few hours ago. After all, we were still friends. He still liked my company.

Didn’t he?

When I came to the farm I hesitated. Tiresias was outside, leaning on an olive tree, speaking with an unremarkable woman. I couldn’t make out her face from where I stood, my back to the bluffs and the lake and the wind and the open air—

I turned around. I backtracked to the village and took the short path home instead.

It was well past noon when I finally returned to the vineyard. Suddenly, the emptiness was overwhelming. After the death of my parents and the marriage of my sisters, I lived alone but for the vineyard slaves—who had their own quarters further from the road.

I had never minded that before. It had been a blessing when the last of my sisters departed. I enjoyed my solitude: I became a different man when no one was there to observe me. There was a difference, though, between a house which was empty by choice, and a house which I could not fill with company. Tiresias’ absence rang through the courtyard with a salpinx clarity. It was deafening.

This was when I realized that I loved him.

I wandered the boundaries of my land, hopeless. It was cold; the fields were bare with winter. This was generally a social season, but there was no one whose company would mute the empty ringing in my chest. Wine and food seemed pointless. Even the best of our stock tasted like vinegar and ash.

I found myself in the fields, terribly and painfully sober. Something smelled like alcohol. No—I smelled like alcohol. When had it become night? There were stars above me now. The moon was full. My head ached. Even vinegar and ash had been better company than my own infuriating heart.

There was a rattling wind through the empty vines. A jackal barked in the distance. I heard a mouse—I heard the clacking of a cane against the stakes.

“Xenos?”

My breath caught in my throat. “Tiresias?”

“What are you doing out here?”

“How did you find me?”

“I haven’t yet—” He edged his way around a row of trunks and sighed. “But I can follow my nose.”

“I’m fine.”

“I didn’t ask.” His voice was soft and aching. “You’re not.”

“I’m fine. I don’t anyone—” Maybe I wasn’t fully sober. “I don’t need anyone. I don’t need you.”

“Yes, you do.”

“Shut up.”

“I need you too.”

The trunk of a convenient vine kept me from tipping over. The words hung in the air like a dream. They were impossible. Was it still the wine? Was I asleep, freezing to death in the midnight air?

“I need you,” Tiresias repeated, and this time it was his hand that braced me. “I made a mistake, you know I made a mistake— I know you have to marry someday, but we don’t have to end this—"

I clung to his hand. It was soft and scarred. It was real. He was here.

“Your father had his trips to the city, didn’t he? We’ll say we’re taking a trip to hunt or fish, we’ll steal time for ourselves—”

I didn’t let him finish. I kissed him and I held him close, my eyes shut tight as Orpheus, afraid he would vanish if I dared to look.

Everything changed after that.

#

It’s an hour’s walk or so. It’s not a hard journey, but it’s a harder journey with a child on your shoulders. Of the five of us, I’m the only one who’s never traveled it before, but the girls insist I carry at least one of them at a time.

Daphne pouts. I’m helpless to resist.

The cave has a slanting, rocky entrance, hidden behind the scrub of the plains: I’d have missed it if Tiresias hadn’t led us off the path. Historis takes my hand so I won’t be afraid; Daphne tells me where to watch my step. I have to duck to enter, but the path declines steeply, and it soon opens up.

The cavern itself is larger than I’d expected. There are torches—Manto has them lit before I even perceive the darkness—and there are paintings on the walls. I’m not sure if these are ancient, marked with fingers long turned to bone, or if they were made by my daughters in play. There is a circle of four grass-woven mats on the floor; one placed before three. Manto moves hers aside so that I have a place between her and Historis.

We sit. The girls close their eyes. They breathe deeply, all as one.

“Apollo,” says Tiresias, “we ask you for your sight.”

There’s movement. At first I think it’s an earthquake—the slightest shifting of the stone beneath us—but no disaster follows. There’s a sound like falling sand. As if Gaia herself exhaled, the air changes. The world becomes water; untethered, unconnected. My mind swims; my body sways.

The girls’ eyes snap open. They’re not blind, but now their eyes are as white as their mother’s. He speaks, and he speaks calmly.

“Daughters of Tiresias, what do you see?”

“I see my parent, alone for all his days. I see him weeping.” Unlike any other child I’ve ever met, Historis never tells a lie. I exhale. I already knew that he would leave me, I think. I’m just not ready to deal with it yet.

“I see a great city,” says Daphne. “It moves across the plains, into the mountains. Is it Thebes? But it will be followed. The walls will be breached, no matter where we build them.”

Manto opens her mouth as if to speak, but her breath turns quick with fear. There’s silence for a long moment.

“I see a great conflict,” Manto whispers. “It will erase us. They’ll sing only of the war. Even the songs will change, caught and captured like a butterfly pressed between stones. Everything we are will be forgotten. Everything we love will dry to bone. We are ancient to the future.”

I reach out and take her hand. She grips it tightly. She’s done so well.

“Mother,” said Daphne, “what do you see?”

There’s a sigh. Perhaps from the wind outside, perhaps from my wife.

“Darkness,” he says. “I see only darkness.”

#

He was twenty-seven. I was still a year older than him. We were walking together by the lake.

Tiresias often refused to use his cane on such walks—though he took it with him—preferring the excuse to hang on my arm. Today, however, we had chosen a path with some odd cliff edges. He held me anyway, but kept his surrogate eyes on the ground, careful of the stones and drop-offs.

“They’re talking, you know. As far away as Corinth they say there’s a blind man who reads the entrails.”

He laughed. “They’ll talk more yet, I think. Augury is hardly impressive.”

“You haven’t seen yourself dig into the guts of a ram. Blood everywhere, red up to your elbows, feeling and breathing and tasting the offal—” Tiresias’ face had become unguarded in his blindness, and when he was at the altar it took on a strange serenity. I never watched the readings, really—just that peaceful, content expression. It was the same face he wore when sleeping.

“It’s roasted and shared not minutes later, my friend.”

“Yes, but the rest of us wait until it’s cooked.”

We walked down the hill, heading for the lakeside. The day was overcast, cool and clear but not bright. I helped Tiresias down the rockier portions of the path and took advantage of the brief opportunity to hold his hand, right there in the open. Helping a blind man find his way was one thing, but when our fingers laced it felt like we were getting away with something, somehow. His hand in mine felt like fire stolen from the gods.

No one was around as we took the last long stretch down the bluffs. There was a pleasant breeze over the drop-off. The sun was coming out. We wouldn’t have noticed the snakes if not for Tiresias’ cane.

I saw them briefly before it touched them: two serpents, entwined on the side of the path. I leapt back; Tiresias heard the hiss and reacted, flinging his cane out and away. The snakes were tossed into the air, over the edge.

There was a moment where we nearly laughed in surprise. It was ridiculous—two grown men, jumping like scared girls. A shared moment of absurdity.  Then there was a flash of light. A rush of air. A moment of pure silence. Dust whipped into a cloud; when it died, there was a woman standing before us.

To this day I do not know who she was. It’s been said that she was Hera, or Artemis, or Athena, or a nameless sorceress—no matter who she was, I did not know her. She stood before us just a little larger than life, just a little too tall, reflecting just a little too much of the morning sun. Tiresias could not see her, but he felt her presence. He took a step back. She stepped forward and shoved him to the ground.

“Pathetic,” she said. “You don’t know what you’ve done, do you?”

His voice was small against her resonance. “It was an accident. I’m sorry.”

I imagined stepping forward, defending him, saying something, but I found my body frozen where I stood. To this day I don’t know if that was from her magic, or simply my own weakness.

“Inconsiderate man,” said the woman. She began to circle him. “You call this wisdom, you who interprets the gods? You call this justice? The senseless slaying of innocent creatures?”

“I didn’t mean to cause harm. It was just a snake—”

“A snake!” Whoever she was, the woman wept with her fury. “Together they were a future. You slaughtered their children, and their children’s children. An entire family line. A thousand unborn lives extinguished in your carelessness. Is that lesser simply because they’re animals? Are they worth less because they’re not like you?”

“It was reflexive—"

“Do you know how many men claim that defense? Who claim their base instinct is to hurt, as if that’s somehow forgivable? As if that’s something that can’t be changed? You think it’s in your nature to kill. You’re wrong.”

Tiresias fell silent. In a strange, impossible moment, his eyes met hers.

“This is a valuable lesson,” the woman said. “Make sure you take the chance to learn it.”

There was a great rush of wind, and a brightness so dense I could see nothing but white. When my vision returned, I had fallen to my knees. The woman was gone, and Tiresias had changed.

His frame was thinner. His muscles had diminished. He swayed in place. I rose in time to catch her as she fell.

#

The girls are much quieter on the walk back, and this time I lift Historis to my shoulders without complaint. She nearly falls asleep there; we tuck them into bed when we return. I dodge Tiresias’ glance in the doorway of their bedroom, just barely escaping to check on the meat.

He follows me. I’m taking down the spit, cutting into the beast; we’ll have good eating on this for a while.

“Xenos.”

I shut my eyes.

“We need to talk about this.”

Excuses rise to my teeth and die unspoken. He knows me. He knows how I feel. “I’m not ready.”

“Do you think I am? We don’t have time, love. They’ll come for me tomorrow.”

“They’ve come for you before.” It’s a familiar routine by now. Serious men from the cities—from Thebes, from Plataea, from Thespiae, once as far as Athens—come to knock on our door and ask to see my wife. They take her in to speak with kings and read the entrails. Sometimes I join her for protection—her readings aren’t always kind to the people who hired her.

“Life has changed and you know it.”

I’m silent. I put aside the spit. It needs to cool anyway; the meat’s blistering my hands.

“I won’t come back this time.”

Panic momentarily displaces my sullen depression.

“No—don’t worry, I’ve got a while yet to live. I mean that I won’t return to the village. I’ll stay in Thebes. They’re suffering a plague with a divine source. When I tell the king the truth he needs to hear, time will… set certain things in motion. The situation with the Argives is going to deteriorate. I need to be there.”

“Good,” I said. “Then we move. The city’s better for men like us anyway, and the girls could—”

Tiresias was shaking his head.

“Why not? So you’re a man again—in what world is this fair, love? Why should we have to end things? We married. We had children. We did our duty to the future. In what world are we only allowed seven years of happiness?”

“In another world, maybe we wouldn’t be.” He took my hands in his. It was comforting. It was infuriating. I wanted to shake him until he let us join him. I wanted to cry. “We only have the world we live in, and the world we live in is changing.”

“I’ll dress as a woman if that’s what we need—”

“No, love.” He took a breath. “I don’t mean to say that our sexes don’t impact our futures. They do. Our lives are more dangerous, if we live openly as married men. But in this case I’m concerned for our daughters.”

“What do you mean?”

“You heard Daphne today. Thebes will eventually recover, but first it will fall to the flames. Our little village will fare better. You would endure raids, perhaps, but here the girls are far more likely to be safe. If they come with me to Thebes…”

“They’ll die.”

“No. But in the war to come, they’ll be important.”

I shake my head, draw his hands to my lips. “You’re not telling me everything.”

“No, but I’m trying. I see infinite futures before them—they’ll bring gods into the world, marry kings, practice their craft at Delphi. But if they’re too close… There is a greater threat to come than that of the Argives. I see a war that lasts a decade—a journey that lasts for two. They need to grow up here, Xenos. If we go together, they’ll be drawn into greater danger than either of us can ever imagine.”

I kiss the back of his hand. My voice is softer, more intense, than I intend for it to be. “And you, Tiresias? What danger are you facing?”

“Nothing you can save me from.”

For a moment he’s the older of our pair: a man aged by the years ahead rather than the years behind. I lay a kiss on the furrow of his brow.

“No,” I say. “I can’t tell the future, but I’m something of an interpreter of oracles. Self-defense, you understand.”

Tiresias groans at me, rightfully so.

“I’m not the parent who will spend his future weeping. I know you. Do you really want to spend the rest of your days missing us? Do you really want a life without us in it?”

Moonlight drips from the roof like rain. It pools in the courtyard, flooding the small garden, spilling into the house. Outside, wind brushes through the grass, through the leaves of the vines. Tiresias shivers—from the cold, from the future, from the branching path that lays before us.

“You don’t have to be alone,” I say. My voice is aching. Our faces are a breath apart. Our noses touch. He gives in, closing the distance.

#

Her father was furious when she came home—called her useless, struck her starless, told her she’d have none of her sisters’ dowries—all before we even crossed the threshold of the house. I stood beside her still, surprised into silence, and without thinking I voiced the thing we’d kept secret for years.

“I’ll marry her.”

Her father spat on the dirt of the floor. “Good riddance.”

He held the ceremony as quickly as he could. For the month it took to plan, I avoided Tiresias—we saw each other on the road, or in the market, but that was all. She was alone at first, but then the women seemed to accept her as one of their own. I saw her with a friend I did not know, then two, then a crowd. Once she cornered me and asked: “Are you sure you want to do this?”

Yes. Of course I was sure.

But at night I dreamed of the first time we were together. I remembered the look in his eyes—the desperate want, the way we moved together. For a moment, when I woke, I remained vulnerable and raw. The fear pierced my bones like a blade.

What if things changed?

And of course they already had. What had once been a desperate secret was now a public drama. The expressions of our happiness were nervous exclamations of its normalcy. This is fine, said a smile at a moment of crossed paths. We are normal, insisted a kiss upon her cheek. Do not judge us. Do not ask too many questions.

The wedding came. We feasted and we danced. The men who had once been Tiresias’ friends were now mine alone, apparently, but we spent the evening trying to catch a glimpse of the dancing girls together. I saw her once—a single spin of skirts among the crowd, a flash of jewelry, the music of her laugh.

They swept us through the street, this crowd of ours. The wedding procession howled like wolves: drunken songs all proclaiming the beauty of the bride, punctuated with the occasional yelp as I retaliated against anyone who dared to snigger. When we reached the house I made a performance of handing off an apple to my lovely wife, and kissing her in front of the crowd, and whisking her to our marital chamber—

And then we were alone.

Tiresias laughed and fell back on the bed, a smile on her face. Her teeth were a little crooked. Her hair was growing out, so it stuck in all directions no matter what she did. She was still self-conscious in female clothing. I had never seen a more beautiful woman in my life.

Outside, I knew, they would be waiting for the sounds of sex. I’d been to weddings; I’d cheered when my friends emerged from the bridal chamber, brandishing a bloodied sheet as proudly as a bloodied shield. I had never thought of the girl inside—lying there sated, or scared, or simply alone. Tiresias wasn’t—

“You’re panicking,” she said, and I realized I had frozen. “You’ve been panicking for a month. Sit.”

I sat.

“Talk to me.”

“You’re not a woman,” I said, before I realized the absurdity of that comment. “I mean, you are a woman, but you’re not a woman. You were one of us. We- Whatever we did- Did I do this to you? Did I curse you somehow?”

She didn’t dignify that with an answer. She shouldn’t have. I was being stupid and we both knew it.

“All the other girls I’ve been with, the brides we’ve cheered on, I mean, they weren’t like you. They were… I mean, you’re not…” My voice grew soft. Helpless. “Have you changed?”

“Yes,” she said, “and no.”

“But you’re…”

“I’m a woman, Xenos. Mind and body.”

I imagined them all. Not just the women I’d kissed—the temple girl—but the women I knew. My mother and the exhaustion on her face. My sisters’ nervous laughs before their marriages. The woman who’d married our friend when she got pregnant—she’d been so young. Tiresias’ mother, who’d died at her husband’s hand.

“We’re people, Xenos. We’ve always been people. This isn’t new. Women haven’t changed just because I’m one of them.”

“I know,” I said, but I hadn’t known, not really. I’d spent all my life assuming a woman’s lot was to endure, and a man’s lot was to dream. Somewhere along the way a seed of difference had calcified inside me, had grown into an ugly, fetid creature I could no longer recognize. It strained against the skin of my soul. I thought of my father. I thought of his father. I thought of all the men who had been consumed by the creature inside them, consumed by assumption and violence and conquest, and I could not bear it.

For here, in front of me, was Tiresias. We’d been friends since we were children. I loved her—it was an impossible, complicated love, but I loved her. How could I treat her like I’d treated the others?

And what did that say about how I’d treated the others in the first place?

“Are you scared?” she asked me.

“No,” I lied.

Bullshit. She waited.

“Fine. Yes, I am. I’m scared.” I paused, searching for the words. I didn’t know how to say this, how to beg for her forgiveness. “I think I’ve been wrong. I’m worried you won’t be able to forgive me for the things I didn’t even realize were wrong. I didn’t know, but that’s not an excuse. I should have known. I’m worried what we have is going to change.”

“I hope so. It needs to change.” Tiresias leaned closer. Her hand left mine; her fingers left an after-image of fire where they traced along my arm. “I suspect it will change for the better, not the worse. You’re right to be afraid, and yet you’re not a bad man. I know you. I know you can learn. But oh, my love, we’ve learned all the wrong things.”

Her words had the sharp edge of a knife, trailing against my skin, undoing the tie of my belt. I felt as though she’d carve me away, piece by piece, and remake me from my splinters. Her hand pressed against my chest, and, as if she’d pierced my soul, I fell into the bed reborn.

Whatever I had been, I was that man no longer.

“Can you still love me?” I asked her.

She straddled me, tracing lines across my body. I lay before her, naked; my heart itself was beating at her mercy. How could I be worthy of love, if I could not understand her? What worth did I have, if I had been in the wrong all my life?

And yet she took me inside her, and pressed her body close to mine. For a moment we conflicted—our rhythms out of sync—before we began to move together.

“You are only yourself,” Tiresias whispered. “How could I love another?”

#

Our candles are unlit. The bedroom is dark and silent; I can hear nothing but our breath and the clatter of the window-shutters as the wind picks up outside. The light of the moon is blown in through the cracks.

“Tell me what it’ll be like when we move to Thebes,” he says, playing with my hair. My cheek is pressed against his chest. His heart beats steady on the edge of my hearing.

“The girls will think it’s all an adventure, I’m sure. Historis will learn every crevice of the city in a week. Daphne will cause trouble, in just a few years she’ll have the men showing up at our door—”

“So will Manto.”

“Yes, but Manto won’t be interested. Daphne’s going to love the attention, once she realizes what she can do with it.” He laughs. I kiss his collarbone, watching him, memorizing the dimple of his cheek. “You’ll be important. More important. They’ll call you up to the temple and you’ll divine the path of the future.”

“I already know that,” he says. “What about you?”

“Oh, I don’t know. There aren’t a lot of vineyards in the city. Perhaps I’ll run this place from a distance. Perhaps the landowner will find someone else. Perhaps I’ll do something entirely new. Do they pay you for your time? Maybe I’ll just stay at home with the girls.”

“They’d like that.”

“So would I. You’ll teach them all the secrets of the divine and I’ll teach them all the secrets of the world. We can protect them. Whatever fate has in store, we’ll protect them.”

His embrace has grown a little tight, and now I feel the shudder in his breath. He’s afraid. I can’t blame him. We’ll be afraid together.

“We’re strong,” I say. “Whatever happens, we can take it.”

Tiresias nods, but he’s trembling. I turn in place and wipe the salt from his cheek, observe the lines on his face. I can’t hide from him; he can’t hide from me. I already know what’s coming next.

“Manto will find someone eventually.” My voice is a whisper. “But Daphne will marry first. She’ll be fending off the gods themselves, that one. Though Historis will be the priestess of the three, I think. I can’t see her marrying. Or maybe I just don’t want to think about that yet.”

A laugh breaks through his tears.

“And then you’ll just be stuck with me. I’m sure people will ask questions, but that will be nothing compared to living alone with my farts and my loud chewing—”

Tiresias hits me on the shoulder.

“It’ll be a miracle you don’t leave me the moment the girls are out the door. But you won’t. You’re a fool; you love me. You’ll be stuck with me as we both grow old, hunching over and losing our hair. My eyes will go too, eventually, and then we’ll both be blind, sitting in the dark with no one but each other.”

His breath’s coming slower now, more evenly. I’m secure in his embrace, protected from the world beyond. No sword nor spear could hurt me in the fortress of his arms. Outside, a cloud passes over the moon.

“Do we need anything else but that?” he asks me, and I laugh, and I shake my head. My body finds his again. There’s no more need for words.

Morning arrives eventually. The window is open now, and it’s the light which wakes me. I roll over, expecting the usual company, but the bed is empty.

I sit up.

I hear voices in the street: serious men from Thebes, speaking softly to my wife. There’s a part of me which wants to run to catch them. They aren’t far. They’re just outside the gate. Part of me thinks I can still convince him to change his mind.

Part of me is lying.

I’m frozen again, by will or by magic. The morning light inches across my chest. The girls will be up soon. They’ll have questions, and I’m preparing, running every iteration through my mind before I drag myself from the bed, before I have to break our fasts, before I have to tell them that he’s gone.

I can still hear the fading conversation. I close my eyes, listening to the last echoes of his words, listening until I can no longer make out what he’s saying, listening until he fades into the dawn.

ΤΈΛΟΣ