Golden Griffins

by Jenny Blackford

About the Author: Jenny Blackford is an award-winning Australian writer and poet. Her poems and stories have appeared in Asimov's Science Fiction, Cosmos, Westerly and many more Australian and international journals and anthologies. She won two prizes in the Sisters in Crime Australia Scarlet Stiletto awards 2016 for a murder mystery set in classical Delphi, with water nymphs. Her spidery, ghostly middle-grade mystery The Girl in the Mirror (Eagle Books) won the 2020 Davitt Award for Best Childrens Crime Novel.

Excerpt

Mother and I had strolled almost the whole way from our farmhouse down to the agora near the harbor, when everything started to go wrong.

It was always a relief to get out of the house, and away from our endless women’s work of spinning and weaving—even if Mother walked so maddeningly slowly, while I tried to hurry us along. Our small expedition was officially to buy fresh tuna and asparagus for the family’s dinner, some dates and almonds for later, and maybe some honey cakes for a snack. But I had an ulterior motive for asking to go shopping with my mother that day: the golden griffin earrings that I’d seen the day before at the jeweler’s stall. They were little half-arches of silver, with tiny flying griffins in shining gold dangling from each of them. There was only one pair, and my life would never be the same if I missed out on them.

Could I really have met griffins near our farm when I was younger, or was that just my over-active imagination? The famous historian Herodotus wrote that griffins guarded their gold from the one-eyed Arimaspians far away in the north-west of Scythia—not here in Athens. What would a golden-winged griffin have been doing near our farmhouse? But the griffin earrings were the most beautiful things that I'd ever seen, except for the griffins—if they were real, not just my imagination.

Then Mother said, “I’ve been thinking, Apollonia. It’s only two or three streets out of our way to call in at Philoumene’s house for a few minutes.”

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