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Unplanned Wars: the Origins of the First and Second Punic Wars De Gruyter Hoyos, B. Dexter Rok: 2012 Język: english Plik: PDF, 5,39 MB Twoje tagi: 0 / 0

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Basile de Césarée : Sur l’origine de l’homme Editions du Cerf e. A. Smets, M. Van Esbroeck Język: french Plik: PDF, 78,01 MB Twoje tagi: 0 / 0

   
      
         
            Chapter Twenty-five

         

         HELIOS WAS NOT A god to be summoned, but I was the wayward daughter who had won Trygon’s tail. Gods love novelty, as I have said. They are curious as cats.

         He stepped from the air. He was wearing his crown, and its rays turned my beach to gold. The purple of his clothes was rich as deep-pooled blood. Hundreds of years and not a thread had changed. He was still that same image that had been seared upon me from my birth.

         “I am come,” he said. His voice rolled like heat from a bonfire.

         “I seek an end to my exile,” I said.

         “There is none. You are punished for eternity.”

         “I ask you to go to Zeus and speak on my behalf. Tell him you would take it as a favor to release me.”

         His face was more incredulous than angry. “Why would I do such a thing?”

         There were many answers I might have given. Because I have been your bargaining piece all along. Because you would have seen those men and known what they were and still you let them land on my island. Because after, when I was a broken thing, you did not come.

         “Because I am your daughter and would be free.”

         He did not even pause. “Disobedient as ever, and over-bold. Calling me here for foolishness and nothing.”

         I looked at his face, blazing with its righteous power. The Great Watchman of the Sky. The Savior, he is called. All-Seeing, Bringer of Light, Delight of Men. I had given him his chance. It was more than he had ever given me.

         “Do you remember,” I said, “when Prometheus was whipped in your hall?”

         His eyes narrowed. “Of course.”

         “I stayed behind, when all the rest of you left. I brought him comfort, and we spoke together.”

         His gaze burned into mine. “You would not have dared.”

         “If you doubt me, you may ask Prometheus himself. Or Aeëtes. Though if you get any truth from him it is a miracle.”

         My skin had begun to ache at his heat; my eyes;  watered.

         “If you did such a thing, it is deepest treason. You are more owed to exile than ever. You deserve greater punishment still, all I can give you. You have exposed us to Zeus’ wrath for some foolish whim.”

         “Yes,” I said. “And if you do not see my exile ended, I will expose you again. I will tell Zeus what I did.”

         His face contracted. For the first time in my life, I had truly shocked him. “You would not. Zeus will destroy you.”

         “Perhaps he will,” I said. “But I think he will listen first. And you are the one he will truly blame, for you should have kept better check on your daughter. Of course, I will tell him other things as well. All those tiptoeing treasons I heard you whisper with my uncles. I think Zeus would be glad to know how deep the Titan mutiny goes, don’t you?”

         “You dare to threaten me?”

         These gods, I thought. They always say the same thing.

         “I do.”

         My father’s skin flared blinding bright. His voice seared at my bones. “You would start a war.”

         “I hope so. For I will see you torn down, Father, before I will be jailed for your convenience any longer.”

         His rage was so hot the air bent and wavered around him. “I can end you with a thought.”

         It was my oldest fear, that white annihilation. I felt it shiver through me. But enough. At last, enough.

         “You can,” I said. “But you have always been cautious, Father. You know I have stood against Athena. I have walked in the blackest deeps. You cannot guess what spells I have cast, what poisons I have gathered to protect myself against you, how your power may rebound upon your head. Who knows what is in me? Will you find out?”

         The words hung in the air. His eyes were discs of ignited gold, but I did not look away.

         “If I do this thing,” he said, “it is the last I will ever do for you. Do not come begging again.”

         “Father,” I said, “I never will. I leave this place tomorrow.”

         He would not ask where, he would not even wonder. So many years I had spent as a child sifting his bright features for his thoughts, trying to glimpse among them one that bore my name. But he was a harp with only one string, and the note it played was himself.

         “You have always been the worst of my children,” he said. “Be sure you do not dishonor me.”

         “I have a better idea. I will do as I please, and when you count your children, leave me out.”

         His body was rigid with wrath. He looked as though he had swallowed a stone, and it choked him.

         “Give Mother my greetings,” I said.

         His jaw bit down and he was gone.

         
              

         

         The yellow sands faded to their usual color. The shadows returned. For a moment I stood breathing, unmoving, my chest filled with a wild battering. But then it was gone. My thoughts were loosed forward, skimming the earth, flying up the hill to my room where the spear waited with its pale poison. It should have been returned to Trygon long ago, yet I had kept it for protection and something else I could not name. At last, I knew what it was.

         I went up to the house and found Penelope, sitting at my loom.

         “It is time for a decision. There are things I must do. I leave tomorrow, I cannot say for how long. I will take you first to Sparta if you would go there.”

         She looked up from the tapestry she was making. A wild sea, with a swimmer striking out into darkness. “And if I would not?”

         “Then you may stay here.”

         She held the shuttle lightly, as if it were a bird with its hollow bones. She said, “Would that not…intrude? I know what I have cost you.”

         Telegonus, she meant. There was grief, and so there would always be. But the gray fog was gone. I felt distant and very clear, like a hawk borne upon the highest aether. I said, “He would never have been happy here.”

         “But because of us, he went with Athena.”

         It had hurt once, but that was only pride. “She is far from the worst of them.”

         Them, I heard myself say.

         “I give you the choice, Penelope. What would you do?”

         A wolf stretched, her mouth squeaking a little with her yawn. “I find I am in no rush for Sparta,” Penelope said.

         “Then come, there are things you must know.” I led her to the kitchen with its rows of jars and bottles. “There is an illusion upon the island to make it appear inhospitable to ships. That will remain while I am gone. But sailors are reckless sometimes, and the ones that are most reckless are often the most desperate. These are my drugs that do not need witchcraft. There are poisons among them, and salves for healing. This one causes sleep.” I handed her a bottle. “It does not work immediately, so you cannot leave it till the last moment. You will need to get it in their wine. Ten drops will be enough. Do you think you can do it?”

         She tipped the contents, felt their weight. A faint smile touched her lips. “You may remember I have some experience in handling unwelcome guests.”

         
              

         

         Wherever Telemachus was, he did not return for dinner. No matter, I told myself. The time when I had softened like wax was past. My path was laid before me. I packed my things. There were a few changes of clothing and a cloak, but the rest was herbs and bottles. I picked up the spear and carried it out into the warm night air. There was spell-work to do, but I wanted to go to the boat first. I had not seen it since Telemachus began his repairs, and I had to be sure it was ready to sail. Streaks of lightning flashed over the sea, and the breeze brought a distant smell of fire. It was that last storm I had told Telegonus to wait for, but I did not fear it. By morning it would blow itself out.

         I stepped into the cave, and stared. It was hard to believe I viewed the same boat. It was longer now, and its bow had been rebuilt and narrowed. The mast was better rigged, and the rudder more trim. I walked around it. At the front a small prow-piece had been added, a seated lioness with her jaws open. The fur was in the Eastern style, each lock separate, curled like the shell of a snail. I reached to touch one.

         “The wax is not set.” He stepped out from the darkness. “I have always thought every ship needs a prow spirit.”

         “It is beautiful,” I said.

         “I was fishing in the cove when Helios came. All the shadows disappeared. I heard you speak to him.”

         I felt a flare of embarrassment. How baleful and outlandish and cruel we must have seemed. I rested my eyes on the boat so I would not have to look at him. “Then you know my exile is ended and I sail tomorrow. I asked your mother if she would go to Sparta or stay. She said she wished to stay. I offer the same choice to you.”

         Outside, the sea made a sound like a shuttle weaving. The stars were yellow as pears, low and ripe on the branch.

         “I have been angry with you,” he said.

         It surprised me. The blood rose stinging to my cheeks. “Angry.”

         “Yes,” he said. “You thought I would go with Athena. Even after all I have said to you. I am not your son and I am not my father. You should have known I do not want anything Athena has.”

         His voice was even, but I felt the sharp edge of his reproach. “I am sorry,” I said. “I could not believe that any in this world would refuse her divinity.”

         “That is amusing coming from you.”

         “I am not a promising young prince of whom great things are expected.”

         “It is overrated.”

         I ran my hand across the lion’s clawed foot, felt the sticky sheen of the wax.

         “Do you always make beautiful things for those you are angry with?”

         “No,” he said. “Only you.”

         Outside, the lightning flickered. “I was angry as well,” I said. “I thought you could not wait to leave.”

         “I do not know how you could think that. You know I cannot hide my face.”

         I could smell the beeswax, sweet and thick.

         “The way you spoke of Athena coming to you. I thought it was longing. Something you kept close, like a secret heart.”

         “I kept it close because I was ashamed. I did not want you to hear how she had preferred my father all along.”

         She is a fool. But I did not say it.

         “I do not want to go to Sparta,” he said. “Nor do I want to stay here. I think you know where I would like to be.”

         “You cannot come,” I said. “It is not safe for mortals.”

         “I suspect it is not safe at all. You should see your face. You cannot hide either.”

         What is my face like? I wanted to ask. Instead I said, “You would leave your mother?”

         “She will be well here. And content, I think.”

         Wood dust floated past, fragrant in the air. It was the same smell that rose from his skin when he carved. I felt reckless suddenly. Sick of all my fretting and convincing, my careful plotting. It came to some by nature, but not to me.

         “If you want to join me, I will not stop you,” I said. “We leave at dawn.”

         
              

         

         I made my preparations and he made his. We worked until the sky began to pale. The ship was filled with all the stores it could hold: cheese and toasted barley, fruits dried and fresh. Telemachus added fishing nets and oars, extra rope and knives, all of it carefully stowed and strapped in its place. With rollers we pushed the boat down to the sea, its hull effortlessly slipping through the breakers. Penelope stood on the shore to wave us off. Telemachus had gone alone to tell her he was leaving. Whatever she thought of it she kept from her face.

         Telemachus lifted the sail. The storm was past. The winds were fresh and blowing well. They caught us, and we glided through the bay. I looked back at Aiaia. Twice in all my days I had seen her dwindling behind me. The water grew between us, and her cliffs shrank. I could taste the salt spray on my lips. All around were those silver-scrolling waves. No thunderbolt came. I was free.

         No, I thought. Not yet.

         “Where do we go?” Telemachus’ hand waited on the rudder.

         The last time I had spoken her name aloud had been to his father. “To the straits,” I said. “To Scylla.”

         I watched the words register. He maneuvered the prow with competent hands.

         “You are not frightened?”

         “You warned me it was not safe,” he said. “I do not think being frightened will help.”

         The sea flowed by. We passed the island where I had stopped with Daedalus on the way to Crete. The beach was still there, and I glimpsed a grove of almond trees. The storm-blasted poplar would be long gone by now, crumbled to earth.

         A pale smudge appeared on the horizon. With each hour it grew, belling like smoke. I knew what it was. “Pull down the sail,” I said. “We have business here first.”

         Over the rail we caught twelve fish, large as we could find. They thrashed, spraying cold drops of salt across the deck. I pinched my herbs into their gasping mouths and spoke the word. The old cracking sound, the tearing of flesh, and then they were fish no more, but twelve rams, fat and addled. They jostled, eyes rolling, packed against each other in the small space. It was a blessing—they would not have been able to stand otherwise. They were not used to having feet.

         Telemachus had to climb over them to get to the oars. “It may be a little hard to row.”

         “They will not be here long.”

         He frowned at one. “Do they taste like mutton?”

         “I don’t know.” I lifted from my herb bag the small clay pot that I had filled the night before. It was stoppered with wax and had a looped handle. With a length of leather cord, I tied it around the largest ram’s neck.

         We unfurled the sail. I had warned Telemachus about the mist and spray, and he had a pair of oars ready in makeshift locks. They were awkward, for the boat was meant for sails, but they would help us through if the wind died completely. “We must keep moving,” I told him. “No matter what.”

         He nodded, as if it would be that easy. I knew better. The spear was in my hand, tipped with its poisonous spine, but I had seen how fast she was. I had told Odysseus once that there was no withstanding her. Yet here I was again.

         Lightly, I touched Telemachus’ shoulder and whispered a charm. I felt the illusion gather over him: he was gone, bare deck, empty air. It would not hold up to scrutiny, but it would hide him from her passing glance. He watched, asking no questions. He trusted me. I turned away, abrupt, to face the prow.

         The mist drifted over us. My hair grew damp, and the sucking sound of the whirlpool reached us across the waves. Charybdis, men had named that vortex. It had claimed its share of sailors, all those who tried to avoid Scylla’s appetite. The rams pressed against me, swaying. They made no sound, as real sheep would have. They did not know how to use their throats. I pitied them, in their trembling, monstrous forms.

         The straits loomed, and we slipped into their mouth. I glanced at Telemachus. He held the oars ready, his eyes alert. Hairs lifted on my neck. What had I done? I should never have brought him.

         The smell struck me, familiar even after so long: rot and hate. And then she came, slithering out of the gray fog. Those old lumpen heads of hers crept along the cliff, rasping as they went. Her bloodshot gaze was fixed on the rams, reeking of fat and fear.

         “Come!” I cried.

         She struck. Six rams were snatched up in six wide-split jaws. She darted back with them into the mist. I heard bones crunching, the wet gulping of her throats. Blood drizzled down the cliff face.

         I had time for a single glance at Telemachus. The wind was nearly dead, and he was rowing now, intent. The sweat stood out on his arms.

         Scylla returned, heads weaving with malevolence. Tufts of fleece showed between her teeth.

         “Now the rest,” I said.

         She took the other six so fast there was no time to count the beat between my words and their vanishing. The ram with the pot had been among them. I tried to listen for its clay shattering in her teeth, but I could make out nothing above the sounds of bones and flesh.

         Last night, beneath the cold moon, I had milked the spear’s poison. It had trickled, clear and thin, into my polished bronze bowl. I had added dittany, gathered so long ago from Crete, cypress root, shards of my cliffs and soil from my garden, and last of all my own red blood. The liquid had foamed and turned yellow. All this I had put into that pot, then sealed it with wax. The draught would be slipping down her throat by now, pooling in her guts.

         I thought twelve sheep would have dulled the edge of her hunger, but when she returned her eyes looked the same as ever, greedy and ravening. As if it were not her belly she fed, but an undying rage.

         “Scylla!” I lifted the spear. “It is I, Circe, daughter of Helios, witch of Aiaia.”

         She shrieked, that old baying cacophony, clawing at my ears, but there was no recognition in it.

         “Long ago I changed you to this form from the nymph you were. I come now with Trygon’s power to make an end to what I began.”

         And into the mist-soaked air, I spoke the word of my will.

         She hissed. Her gaze held not the slightest hint of curiosity. Her heads wove on, searching over the deck as if there might be sheep she had overlooked. Behind me, I could hear Telemachus straining at the oars. Our sail hung limp; he was all that kept us moving forward.

         I saw the instant her eyes pierced my illusion and spotted him. She moaned, low and eager.

         “No!” I brandished the spear. “This mortal is under my protection. You will suffer eternal agony if you try to take him. You see I have Trygon’s tail.”

         She screamed again. Her breath washed over me, stink and searing heat. The heads were weaving faster in her excitement. They snapped the air, long strands of drool swinging from their jaws. She was afraid of the spear, but that would not hold her for long. She had come to like the taste of mortal flesh. She craved it. Stark, black terror rolled through me. I would have sworn I had felt the spell take hold. Had I been wrong? Panic drenched my shoulders. I would have to fight her six ravening heads at once. I was no trained warrior. One of them would get by me and then Telemachus—I would not let myself finish the thought. My mind spat through ideas, all useless: spells that could not touch her, poisons I did not have, gods who would not come to my aid. I could tell Telemachus to jump and swim, but there was nowhere to go. The only path safe from her reach would take him into the devouring whirlpool of Charybdis.

         I set myself between her and Telemachus, spear out-thrust, nerves drawn up. I must wound her before she gets by me, I told myself. I must at least get Trygon’s poison in her blood. I braced for the blow.

         It did not come. One of her mouths was working strangely, jaws hinging and unhinging. A choking noise came from deep within her chest. She gagged, and a yellow foam ran over her teeth.

         “What is it?” I heard Telemachus say. “What’s happening?”

         There was no time for an answer. Her body sagged out of the mist. I had never seen it before, gelatinous and huge. As we watched, it scraped down the cliffside above us. Her heads squealed and bucked, as if trying to haul it back up again. But it only sank further, as inexorably as if it were weighted with stones. I could see now the beginnings of her legs, those twelve monstrous tentacles stretching away from her body into the mist. She kept them hidden always, Hermes had told me, coiled in the cave among the bones and bits of old flesh, gripping the cave’s stone so that the rest of her might dart down for her meals and return.

         Scylla’s heads were snapping and whining, rearing back to bite their own necks. Her gray skin was streaked with yellow foam and her own red blood. A noise began like a boulder drawn across the earth, and suddenly a gray blur tumbled past us, smashing the waves beside our boat. The deck dipped wildly, and I nearly lost my balance. When I was steady again I found myself staring at one of her huge legs. It hung limp off her body, thick as the oldest oak on Aiaia, its end disappearing into the waves.

         It had let go its hold.

         “We must leave,” I said. “Now. There will be more.” Before the words were out, the dragging sound had begun again.

         Telemachus cried out a warning. The leg smashed so close to our stern it sucked the rail half beneath the waves. I was knocked to my knees, and Telemachus thrown from his seat. He managed to cling to the oars, and with effort wrested them back to their places. The waters around us seethed with wash, the boat pitched up and down. In the air over our heads, Scylla cried and thrashed. The weight of the fallen legs had pulled her further down the cliff. The heads were within range now, but she paid no attention to us. She was biting at the limp flesh of her legs, savaging it. I hesitated a moment, then wedged the spear-haft against our supplies so it would not roll in the chaos. I seized one of Telemachus’ oars. “Go.”

         We bent ourselves to rowing. The dragging sound came again and another leg fell, its great surge soaking the deck, slewing the prow towards Charybdis. I caught a glimpse of its whirling chaos that ate ships whole. Telemachus grappled at the rudder, trying to turn us. “A rope,” he shouted.

         I scrabbled one out from our stores. He looped it around the rudder, yanking at it, fighting to point us back out of the straits. Scylla’s body swayed two mast-lengths above us. The legs were still falling, and each impact pulled the dangling trunk further down.

         Ten, I counted. Eleven. “We have to go!”

         Telemachus had righted the prow. He tied off the rudder, and we scrambled back to the oars. Beneath the cliff the boat tossed back and forth in the chopped waters like a fallen leaf. The waves around us were stained yellow. Her remaining leg stretched back up the cliff face. It was all that held her, pulled grotesquely taut.

         She let go. Her massive body struck the water. The wave ripped the oars from our hands, and my head was buffeted by cold salt. I caught a glimpse of our stores washing into the sea, and vanishing with them into the white, Trygon’s spear. I felt the loss like a blow to my chest but there was no time to think of it. I seized Telemachus’ arm, expecting any moment the deck to crack beneath us. But the stout planks held, and the rope on the rudder too. The wash of that last great wave shoved us forward, out of the straits.

         The sound of Charybdis had faded, and the sea lay open around us. I got to my feet and looked back. At the base of the cliff, where Scylla had been, was a hulking shoal. The outline of six snaky necks was still visible upon it, but they did not move. They would never move again. She had turned to stone.

         
              

         

         It was a long way to land. My arms and back ached as if they had been whipped, and Telemachus must have been worse, yet our sail was miraculously intact and it bore us on. The sun seemed to drop into the sea like a falling plate, and night rose over the water. I sighted land through the star-pricked black, and we dragged the boat onto its beach. We had lost all our fresh water stores, and Telemachus was dull-eyed, nearly speechless. I went to find a river and carried back a brimming bowl I’d transformed from a rock. He drained it, and afterwards he lay still so long I began to be afraid, but at last he cleared his throat and asked what food there was. I had gathered a few berries by then, and caught a fish which was spitted over the fire. “I am sorry I put you in such danger,” I said. “If you had not been there, we would have been smashed to pieces.”

         He nodded wearily as he chewed. His face was still drawn and pale. “I confess I am glad we will not have to do it again.” He leaned back upon the sand, and his eyes drooped closed.

         He was safe, for our camp was backed into the corner of a cliff, so I left him to walk the shore. I thought we were on an island, but I could not tell for certain. There was no smoke rising above the trees, and when I listened, I heard nothing but night birds and brush and the hiss of the waves. There were flowers and forests growing thickly inland, but I did not go look. I was seeing before me again that rocky mass that had been Scylla. She was gone, truly gone. For the first time in centuries, I was not lashed to that flood of misery and grief. No more souls would walk to the underworld written with my name.

         I faced the sea. It felt strange to have nothing in my hands, no spear-haft to carry. I could feel the air moving across my palms, salt mingling with the green scent of spring. I imagined the gray length of the tail, sinking through the darkness to find its master. Trygon, I said, your tail comes home to you. I kept it too long, but I made good use of it at last.

         The soft waves washed across the sand.

         The darkness felt clean against my skin. I walked through the cool air as if it were a pool I bathed in. We had lost everything but the pouch of tools he had worn at his waist, and my spell bag, which had been tied to me. We would have to make oars, I thought, and lay in new stores of food. But those thoughts were for tomorrow.

         I passed a pear tree drifted with white blossoms. A fish splashed in the moonlit river. With every step I felt lighter. An emotion was swelling in my throat. It took me a moment to recognize what it was. I had been old and stern for so long, carved with regrets and years like a monolith. But that was only a shape I had been poured into. I did not have to keep it.

         Telemachus slept on. His hands were clasped like a child’s under his chin. They had been bloodied at the oars, and I had salved them, their warm weight resting in my lap. His fingers had been more calloused than I imagined, but his palms were smooth. So often on Aiaia, I had wondered how it would feel to touch him.

         His eyes opened as if I had spoken the words aloud. They were clear as they always were.

         I said, “Scylla was not born a monster. I made her.”

         His face was in the fire’s shadows. “How did it happen?”

         There was a piece of me that shouted its alarm: if you speak he will turn gray and hate you. But I pushed past it. If he turned gray, then he did. I would not go on anymore weaving my cloths by day and unraveling them again at night, making nothing. I told him the whole tale of it, each jealousy and folly and all the lives that had been lost because of me.

         “Her name,” he said. “Scylla. It means the Render. Perhaps it was always her destiny to be a monster, and you were only the instrument.”

         “Do you use the same excuse for the maids you hanged?”

         It was as if I had struck him. “I make no excuse for that. I will wear that shame all my life. I cannot undo it, but I will spend my days wishing I could.”

         “It is how you know you are different from your father,” I said.

         “Yes.” His voice was sharp.

         “It is the same for me,” I said. “Do not try to take my regret from me.”

         He was quiet a long time. “You are wise,” he said.

         “If it is so,” I said, “it is only because I have been fool enough for a hundred lifetimes.”

         “Yet at least what you loved, you fought for.”

         “That is not always a blessing. I must tell you, all my past is like today, monsters and horrors no one wants to hear.”

         He held my gaze. Something about him then reminded me strangely of Trygon. An unearthly, quiet patience.

         “I want to hear,” he said.

         I had kept away from him for so many reasons: his mother and my son, his father and Athena. Because I was a god, and he a man. But it struck me then that at the root of all those reasons was a sort of fear. And I have never been a coward.

         I reached across that breathing air between us and found him.

      
   


   
      
         
            Chapter Thirteen

         

         IT WAS SPRING AND I was down on the eastern slope, picking early strawberries. The sea-winds blew strongly there, and the sweetness of the fruits was always tinged with salt. The pigs began squealing, and I looked up. A ship was making its way towards us through the slanting afternoon light. There was a headwind against it, yet it did not slow or tack. The oarsmen drove it straight as a well-sent arrow.

         My stomach turned over. Hermes had given me no warning, and I could not think what that might mean. The vessel was Mycenaean in style, and bore a figurehead so massive it must have altered the draught of the ship. A pair of black-rimmed eyes smoked on its hull. I caught a strange, faint odor on the wind. I hesitated a moment, then wiped my hands and walked down to the beach.

         The ship was close to shore by then, its prow casting a shadow like a needle over the waves. I counted some three dozen men aboard. Later, of course, there would be a thousand who claimed they were there, or who invented genealogies to trace their blood back. The greatest heroes of their generation, that crew was called. Bold and unshakable, masters of a hundred wild adventures. Certainly, they looked the part: princely and tall, big-shouldered, with rich cloaks and thick hair, raised up on the best their kingdoms had to offer. They wore weapons the way most men wear their clothes. No doubt they’d been wrestling boars and slaying giants from their cradles.

         Yet their faces at the rail were pinched and tense. That smell was stronger now, and there was a heaviness in the air, a dragging weight that seemed to hang from the mast itself. They saw me, yet they made no sound and gave no signs of greeting.

         The anchor dropped with a splash and the plank followed. Above, gulls circled, crying. Two descended, arms touching, heads bowed. A man, broad and muscular, his dark hair lifting in the late breeze. And—it surprised me—a woman, tall and wrapped in black, a long veil flowing down behind her. The pair moved towards me gracefully and without hesitation, as if they were expected guests. They knelt at my feet and the woman held her hands up, long-fingered and bare of any adornment. Her veil was arranged so that not one strand of hair showed beneath it. Her chin stayed resolutely down, concealing her face.

         “Goddess,” she said, “Witch of Aiaia. We come to you for aid.” Her voice was low but clear, with a musicality to it, as if it were used to singing. “We have fled great evil, and to escape it we have done great evil. We are tainted.”

         I could feel it. That unwholesome air had thickened, coating everything with an oily heaviness. Miasma, it was called. Pollution. It rose from unpurified crimes, from deeds done against the gods, and from the unsanctified spilling of blood. It had touched me after the Minotaur’s birth, until Dicte’s waters washed me clean. But this was stronger: a foul, seeping contagion.

         “Will you help us?” she said.

         “Help us, great goddess, we are at your mercy,” the man echoed.

         It was not magic they asked for, but the oldest rite of our kind. Katharsis. The cleansing by smoke and prayer, water and blood. It was forbidden for me to question them, to demand their transgressions, if transgressions they were. My part was only yes or no.

         The man did not have his partner’s discipline. When he had spoken, his chin had lifted a little, and I had glimpsed his face. He was young, even younger than I had thought, his beard still in patches. His skin was raw from wind and sun, but it glowed with health. He was beautiful—like a god, the poets would say. But it was his mortal determination that struck me most, the brave set of his neck, despite the burdens upon him.

         “Rise,” I said. “And come. I will help you as I can.”

         
              

         

         I led them up the pig trails. His hand clasped her arm solicitously, as if he would steady her, but she never stumbled. If anything, her feet were surer than his. And still she was careful to keep her face down.

         I brought them inside. They stepped past the chairs and knelt silently upon the floor stones. Daedalus might have carved a lovely statue of them: Humility.

         I went to the back door, and the pigs ran to me. I put my hand on one, a piglet not half a year old, pure and unspotted. If I were a priest I would have drugged him so he would not take fright and struggle, marring the ritual. In my hands, he went limp as a sleeping child. I washed him, tied the sacred fillets, wove a garland for his neck, and all the while he was quiet, as if he knew and agreed.

         I set the golden basin on the floor and took up the great bronze knife. I had no altar, but I did not need one: anywhere I was became my temple. The animal’s throat opened easily beneath the blade. He did kick then, but only for a moment. I held him firm until his legs stilled, while the red stream poured into the bowl. I sang the hymns, and bathed their hands and faces in sacred water while fragrant herbs burned. I felt the heaviness lifting. The air grew clean, and the oily scent faded. They prayed while I carried away the blood to pour over a tree’s wrinkled roots. I would butcher the body later and cook it for their meal.

         “It is done,” I told them, when I returned.

         He lifted the hem of my cloak to his lips. “Great goddess.”

         She was the one I was watching. I wanted to see her face, freed at last from its careful custody.

         She looked up. Her eyes shone bright as torches. She drew off her veil, revealing hair like the sun on Crete’s hills. A demigod, she was, that potent mix of human and divinity. And more than that: she was my kin. None had such a golden look except the direct line of Helios.

         “I am sorry for my deception,” she said. “But I could not risk you sending me away. Not when I have wished all my life to know you.”

         There was a quality to her that is hard to describe, a fervency, a heat that went to your head. I had expected her to be beautiful, for she walked like a queen of the gods, but it was an odd beauty, not like my mother’s or sister’s. Each of her features alone was nothing, her nose too sharp, her chin over-strong. Yet together they made a whole like the heart of a flame. You could not look away.

         Her eyes were clinging to me as if they would peel me. “You and my father were close as children. I could not know what messages he might have sent you about his wayward daughter.”

         The force in her, the certainty. I should have recognized who she was at first glance, only from the set of her shoulders.

         “You are Aeëtes’ child,” I said. I searched for the name Hermes had told me. “Medea, is it not?”

         “And you are my aunt Circe.”

         She looked like her father, I thought. That high brow and sharp, unyielding gaze. I said no more, but rose and went into the kitchen. I put plates and bread on a tray, added cheese and olives, goblets and wine. It is law that guests must be fed before the host’s curiosity.

         “Refresh yourselves,” I said. “There will be time to make all clear.”

         She served the man first, offering him the most tender morsels, urging bite upon bite. He ate what she gave him hungrily, and when I refilled the tray, he chewed that as well, his hero’s jaw working steadily. She ate little. Her eyes were lowered, a secret again.

         At last the man pushed back his plate. “My name is Jason, heir by rights to the kingdom of Iolcos. My father was a virtuous king but soft-hearted, and when I was a child, my uncle seized his throne from him. He said he would return it to me when I was grown, if I gave him proof of my worth: a golden fleece, kept by a sorcerer in his land of Colchis.”

         I believed that he was a proper prince. He had the trick of speaking like one, rolling words like great boulders, lost in the details of his own legend. I tried to imagine him kneeling before Aeëtes among the milk fountains and coiling dragons. My brother would have thought him dull, and arrogant besides.

         “Lady Hera and Lord Zeus blessed my purpose. They guided me to my ship and helped me gather my comrades. When we arrived in Colchis, I offered King Aeëtes fair treasure in payment for the fleece, but he refused. He said I might have it only if I performed a task for him. The yoking of two bulls, and the plowing and sowing of a great field in a single day. I was willing, of course, and accepted at once. Yet—”

         “Yet the task was impossible.” Medea’s voice slipped between his words easy as water. “A ploy designed to keep him from the fleece. My father had no intention of giving it up, for it is a thing of great story and power. No mortal, however valiant and brave”—at this she turned to Jason, touched her hand to his—“could accomplish those things unaided. The bulls were my father’s own magic, crafted of knife-sharp bronze and breathing fire. Even if Jason yoked them, the seeds he had to sow were another trap. They would become warriors springing up to kill him.”

         Her gaze was fixed passionately on Jason’s face. I spoke, more to bring her back than anything else.

         “So you contrived a trick,” I said.

         Jason did not like that. He was a hero of the great golden age. Trickery was for cowards, men not bull-necked enough to show true courage. Medea spoke quickly over his frown.

         “My love would have refused all help,” she said. “But I insisted, for I could not bear to see him in danger.”

         It softened him. This was a more pleasing tale: the princess swooning at his feet, forswearing her cruel father to be with him. Coming to him at night, in secret, that face of hers the only light. Who could say no?

         But her face was hidden now. Her voice was low, aimed at her own clasped hands.

         “I have some small skill in those crafts you and my father know. I made a simple draught that would protect Jason’s skin from the bulls’ fire.”

         Now that I knew who she was, such meekness looked absurd on her, like a great eagle trying to hunch down to fit inside a sparrow’s nest. Simple, she called that draught? I had never imagined a mortal might perform any magic, let alone such a powerful charm. But Jason was speaking again, rolling out more boulders, yoking the bulls, plowing and seeding the field.

         When the warriors sprang up, he said, he knew the secret for subduing them, which Medea had told him. He must throw a rock among them, and in their rage, they would attack each other. So he did, yet Aeëtes still did not yield the fleece. He said Jason must first defeat the deathless dragon that guarded it. Medea mixed another draught and put the worm to sleep. He ran for his ship with the treasure and Medea as well—his honor could never permit him to abandon an innocent girl to such a wicked tyrant.

         In his mind, he was already telling the tale to his court, to wide-eyed nobles and fainting maidens. He did not thank Medea for her aid; he scarcely looked at her. As if a demigoddess saving him at every turn was only his due.

         She must have sensed my displeasure, for she spoke. “He is honorable indeed, for he married me upon the ship that very night, even with my father’s forces in pursuit. When he has his throne again in Iolcos, I will be his queen.”

         Was it my imagination, or did Jason’s light fade a little at that? There was a silence.

         “What of the blood I washed from your hands?” I said.

         “Yes,” she said softly. “I come to it. My father was enraged. He set out after us, his witchcraft drawing the winds to his sail, and by morning he was very close. I knew my spells were no match for his. Our ship, however blessed, could not outrun him. One hope only I had: my younger brother, whom I had taken with us. He was my father’s heir, and I had thought to exchange him as a hostage for our safety. But when I saw my father at his prow, shouting curses across the water, I knew it would not work. The killing rage was plain on his face. He would be satisfied with nothing but our ruin. He spoke spells in the air, he lifted his staff to bring them down upon our heads. I felt a great fear run through me. Not for myself, but for blameless Jason and his crew.”

         She looked at Jason, but his face was turned to the fire.

         “At that moment—I cannot describe it. A madness came over me. I seized Jason and commanded him to kill my brother. Then I cut the body into pieces and threw them into the waves. Wild as my father was, I knew he must stop to give him proper burial. When I woke from my fit the seas were empty. I thought it had been a dream until I saw my hands covered in my brother’s blood.”

         She held them out to me, as if in proof. They were clean. I had cleaned them.

         Jason’s skin had gone gray as raw lead.

         “Husband,” she said. He started, though she had not spoken loudly. “Your wine cup is dry. May I fill it for you?” She rose, moving with the goblet to the brimming bowl. Jason did not watch, and I would not have noticed if I were not witch myself: the pinch of powder that she dropped into the wine, the whispered word.

         “Here, my love,” she said.

         Her tone was coaxing as a mother’s. He took the wine and drank. When his head rolled back, and the cup would have fallen from his hands, she caught it. Carefully, she set it upon the table, and took her seat again.

         “You understand,” she said. “It is too difficult for him. He blames himself.”

         “There was no madness,” I said.

         “No.” Her golden eyes pierced mine. “Yet some call lovers mad.”

         “If I had known I would not have done the rite.”

         She nodded. “You and most others. Perhaps that is why suppliants may not be questioned. How many of us would be granted pardon if our true hearts were known?”

         She took off her black cloak and laid it over the chair beside her. Her dress beneath was lapis blue, bound with a thin silver belt.

         “Do you feel no remorse?”

         “I suppose I could weep and rub my eyes to please you, but I choose not to live so falsely. My father would have destroyed the whole ship if I had not acted. My brother was a soldier. He sacrificed himself to win the war.”

         “Except he did not sacrifice himself. You murdered him.”

         “I gave him a draught so he would not suffer. It is better than most men get.”

         “He was your blood.”

         Her eyes burned, bright as a comet in the night’s sky. “Is one life worth more than another? I have never thought so.”

         “He did not have to die. You could have turned yourself in with the fleece. Gone back to your father.”

         The look that passed over her face. Like a comet indeed, when it veers to earth and turns the fields to ash.

         “I would have been made to watch while my father tore Jason and his crew limb from limb, then been tormented myself. You will pardon me if I do not call that a choice.”

         She saw the look on my face.

         “You do not believe me?”

         “You have said many things of my brother that I do not recognize.”

         “Let me introduce you then. Do you know what my father’s favorite sport is? Men come often to our isle, looking to prove themselves against a wicked sorcerer. My father likes to set the captains of those ships loose among his dragons and watch them run. The crew he enslaves, stealing away their minds so they have no more will than stones. To entertain his guests, I have seen my father light a brand and hold it to one of those men’s arms. The slave will stand there burning until my father releases him. I have wondered if they are merely empty shells, or if they understand what is being done to them and scream inside. If my father catches me, I will find out, for that is what he will do to me.”

         It was not the voice she had used with Jason, that cloying sweetness. It was not her gleaming self-assurance either. Each word was dark as an axe-head, heavy and unrelenting, and my blood drained at every blow.

         “Surely he would not hurt his own child.”

         She scoffed. “I am no child to him. I was his to dispose of, like his seed-warriors or his fire-breathing bulls. Like my mother, whom he dispatched as soon as she bore him an heir. Perhaps it might have been different if I’d had no witchcraft. But by the time I was ten I could tame the adders from their nests, I could kill lambs with a word and bring them back with another. He punished me for it. He said it made me unmarketable, but in truth, he did not want me taking his secrets to my husband.”

         I heard Pasiphaë as if she whispered in my ear: Aeëtes has never liked a woman in his life.

         “His greatest wish was to trade me off to some sorcerer-god like himself who would pay with exotic poisons. None could be found except his brother, Perses, so he offered me to him. I say my prayers every night that that beast did not want me. He has some goddess of Sumeria he keeps in chains for a wife.”

         I remembered the stories Hermes had told me: Perses and his palace of corpses. Pasiphaë saying, Do you know how I had to keep him happy?

         “It is strange,” I said, the words weak even to my own ears. “Aeëtes always hated Perses.”

         “Not now. They are closest friends, and when Perses visits they talk of nothing but raising the dead and bringing down Olympus.”

         I felt numb, barren as a winter field. “Does Jason know all this?”

         “Of course he does not, are you mad? Every time he looked at me, he would think of poisons and burning skin. A man wants a wife like new grass, fresh and green.”

         Had she not seen Jason flinch? Or did she not want to see? He shrinks from you already.

         She stood, her dress bright as a cresting wave. “My father pursues us still. We must leave at once and drive on to Iolcos. They have an army not even he can stand against, for the goddess Hera fights with them. He will be forced to turn back. Then Jason will be king, and I queen at his side.”

         Her face was incandescent. She spoke each word as if it were a stone she built her future with. Yet for the first time she seemed to me a creature clinging to a precipice, desperate, its claws already slipping. She was young, younger than Glaucos when I had first met him.

         I looked at Jason, drugged, his mouth hanging open. “You are sure of his regard?”

         “You suggest he does not love me?” Her voice sharpened in an instant.

         “He is still half a child, and full mortal besides. He cannot understand your history, nor your witchcraft.”

         “He need not understand them. We are married now, and I will give him heirs and he will forget all this like a fever dream. I will be his good wife, and we will prosper.”

         I touched my fingers to her arm. Her skin was cool, as if she had been walking a long time in the wind.

         “Niece, I fear you do not see all clearly. Your welcome in Iolcos may not be what you imagine.”

         She drew her arm away, frowning. “What do you mean? Why would it not be? I am a princess, worthy of Jason.”

         “You are a foreigner.” I could see it, suddenly, as plain as if it were painted before me. The fractious nobles waiting at home for Jason’s return, each jockeying to match their daughter with the new-made hero and claim a piece of his glory. Medea would be the one thing they would agree upon. “They will resent you. Worse, they will suspect you, for you are the daughter of a sorcerer and a witch in your own right. You have lived only in Colchis, you cannot know how pharmakeia is feared among mortals. They will seek to undermine you at every turn. It will not matter that you helped Jason. They will push that aside, or else use it against you as proof of your unnaturalness.”

         She was staring at me, but I did not stop. My words were tumbling out, catching fire as they went. “You will find no safety there, no peace. Yet still you may be free from your father. I cannot undo his cruelties, but I can ensure that they follow you no further. He said once that witchcraft cannot be taught. He was wrong. He kept his knowledge from you, but I will give you all I know. When he comes, we will turn him away together.”

         She was silent a long moment. “What of Jason?”

         “Let him be a hero. You are something else.”

         “And what is that?”

         In my mind I saw us already, our heads bent together over the purple flowers of aconite, the black roots of moly. I would rescue her from her tainted past.

         “A witch,” I said. “With unbound power. Who need answer to none but herself.”

         “I see,” she said. “Like you? A pathetic exile, who stinks of her loneliness?” She saw the shock on my face. “What, do you think because you surround yourself with cats and pigs, you are deceiving anyone? You do not know me for an afternoon, yet you are scrabbling to keep me. You claim you want to help me, but whom do you really help? ‘Oh, niece, dearest niece! We will be the best of friends and do our magics side by side. I will keep you close, and so fill up my childless days.’” She curled her lip. “I will not sentence myself to such a living death.”

         Restless, I had thought. I was only restless in those days, and a little sad. But she had stripped me to my skin, and now I saw myself in her eyes: a bitter, abandoned crone, a spider, scheming to suck out her life.

         Face stinging, I rose to meet her. “It is better than being married to Jason. You are blind not to see what a weak reed he is. He flinches from you already. And you are what, three days married? What will he do in a year? He is led by his love for himself—you were only expedient. In Iolcos your position will rest on his goodwill. How long do you think that will last, when his countrymen come crying that the murder of your brother brings a curse to their land?”

         Her fists were clenched. “None will learn of my brother’s death. I have sworn the crew to silence.”

         “Such a secret cannot be kept. If you were not a child you would know it. The moment those men are out of earshot they will start their gossip. In a day, the whole kingdom will know, and they will shake your trembling Jason till he falls. ‘Great king, it was not your fault the boy died. It was that villainess, that foreign witch. She carved her own kin, what worse evils does she work even now? Cast her out, cleanse the land, and take a better in her place.’”

         “Jason would never listen to such slander! I delivered him the fleece! He loves me!” She stood fixed in her outrage, bright and defiant. All my hammering had only made her harder. Just so must I have seemed to my grandmother when she said to me: Those are two different things.

         “Medea,” I said. “Listen to me. You are young, and Iolcos will make you old. There is no safety for you there.”

         “Every day makes me old,” she said. “I do not have your years to waste. As for that safety, I do not want it. It is only more chains. Let them come at me if they dare. They will never take Jason from me. I have my powers, and I will use them.”

         Every time she said his name, a fierce eagle love flashed in her eyes. She had him in her grip and would clench him till he died.

         “And if you try to keep me,” she said, “I will fight you too.”

         She would, I thought. Though I was a god, and she a mortal. She would fight the whole world.

         Jason stirred. The spell was fading.

         “Niece,” I said, “I will not keep you against your will. But if you ever—”

         “No,” she said. “I want nothing more from you.”

         She led Jason to the shore. They did not pause to rest or eat, they did not wait for dawn. They drew up the anchor and sailed into the darkness, their path lit only by the veiled moon and the unwavering gold of Medea’s eyes. I kept among the trees, so she would not see me watching and scorn me for that too. But I need not have bothered. She did not look back.

         Out on the beach, the sand was cool, and the starlight dappled my skin. The waves were busy washing away their footprints. I closed my eyes and let the breeze move over me, carrying its scents of brine and ocean-weed. Overhead I felt the constellations turning on their distant tracks. I waited there a long time, listening, sending my mind out into the waves. I heard nothing, no sound of oars, no snap of sail, no voices on the wind. But I knew when he came. I opened my eyes.

         The curve-beaked hull was splitting the waves of my harbor. He stood on its prow, his golden face outlined against the dawning sky. A pleasure rose in me so old and sharp it felt like pain. My brother.

         He lifted his hand and the ship stopped, hanging perfectly still in the waves.

         “Circe,” he cried over the water between us. His voice rang the air like struck bronze. “My daughter came here.”

         “Yes,” I said. “She did.”

         The satisfaction shone on his face. When he was an infant, his head had seemed to me delicate as glass. I used to trace its bones with my finger while he slept.

         “I knew she would. She is desperate. She sought to bind me, but she has bound herself. Her fratricide will hang upon her all her days.”

         “I grieve for your son’s death,” I said.

         “She will pay for it,” he said. “Send her out.”

         My woods had gone quiet behind me. All the animals were still, crouching to the ground. As a child, he had liked to lean his head upon my shoulder and watch the seagulls dip to catch their fish. His laugh had been bright as morning sun.

         “I met Daedalus,” I said.

         He frowned. “Daedalus? He has been dead for years. Where is Medea? Give her to me.”

         “She is not here,” I said.

         If I had turned the sea to stone I do not think he could have been more shocked. His face bloomed with incredulity and rage.

         “You let her go?”

         “She did not want to stay.”

         “Did not want to? She is a criminal and a traitor! It was your duty to keep her for me!”

         I had never seen him so angry before. I had never seen him angry at all. Even so, his face was beautiful, like the waves when they lift their storm-heads. I could still ask for his forgiveness, it was not too late. I could say she tricked me. I was his foolish sister, who trusted too easily and could not see into the cracks of the world. Then he would come ashore and we might—but my imagination would not finish the thought. Behind him at their oar benches sat his men. They stared straight ahead. They had not stirred, not even to brush off a fly or scratch an itch. Their faces were slack and empty, their arms covered in scars and crusted scabs. Old burns.

         I had lost him long ago.

         The air whipped around us. “Do you hear?” he shouted. “I should punish you.”

         “No,” I said. “In Colchis you may work your will. But this is Aiaia.”

         A second moment’s true surprise on his face. Then his mouth twisted. “You have done nothing. I will have her in the end.”

         “That may be true. But I do not think she will make it easy. She is like you, Aeëtes, as oak to oak. She must live with that, and so, it seems, must you.”

         He sneered, then turned and lifted his arm. His sailors moved their joints as one. The oars beat the water and carried him from me.

      
   


   
      
         
            Chapter Twenty-seven

         

         THE FROGS HAD GONE to their wallows; the salamanders slept in brown holes. The pool showed the moon’s half-face, the pinpoints of stars, and all around, bending near, the wavering trees.

         I knelt on the bank, thick with grass. Before me was the old bronze bowl I had used for my magics since the very first. The flowers rested beside me in their pale root swaddles. Stem by stem, I cut them and squeezed out the drops of running sap. The bottom of the bowl grew dark. It too began to show the moon. The last flower I did not squeeze but planted there on the shore, where the sun fell every morning. Perhaps it would grow.

         I could feel the fear in myself, gleaming like water. These flowers had made Scylla a monster, though all she had done was sneer. Glaucos had become a monster of sorts too, everything that was kind in him driven out by godhead. I remembered my old terror, from Telegonus’ birth: what creature waits within me? My imagination conjured up horrors. I would sprout slimy heads and yellow teeth. I would stalk down to the hollow and savage Telemachus to pieces.

         But perhaps, I told myself, it would not be like that. Perhaps all I hoped would come to pass, and Telemachus and I would go to Egypt indeed, and all those other places. We would cross and recross the seas, living on my witchcraft and his carpentry, and when we came to a town a second time, the people would step out of their houses to greet us. He would patch their ships, and I would cast charms against biting flies and fevers, and we would take pleasure in the simple mending of the world.

         The vision blossomed, vivid as the cool grass beneath me, as the black sky over my head. We would visit the Lion Gate of Mycenae, where Agamemnon’s heirs ruled, and the walls of Troy, their stones chilled by winds from ice-peaked Ida. We would ride elephants and walk in the desert night beneath the eyes of gods who had never heard of Titans or Olympians, who took no more notice of us than they did of the sand beetles toiling at our feet. He would say to me that he wanted children, and I would say, “You do not know what you are asking of me,” and he would say, “This time you are not alone.”

         We have a daughter, and then another. Penelope attends my birthing bed. There is pain, but it passes. We live on the island when the children are young and visit often after. She weaves and casts spells while nymphs glide around her. However gray she gets she never seems to tire, but sometimes I see her eyes turn to the horizon where the house of the dead and its souls wait.

         The daughters I dream to life are different from Telegonus, and different from each other. One chases the lions in circles, while the other sits in a corner, watching and remembering everything. We are wild with our love for them, standing over their sleeping faces, whispering about what she said today, what she did. We bring them to meet Telegonus, throned among his golden orchards. He leaps from his couch to embrace us all and introduces us to his captain of the guard, a tall, dark-haired youth who never leaves his side. He is not married yet, he may not ever be, he says. I smile, imagining Athena’s frustration. So polite he is, yet firm and immovable as one of his own city walls. I do not worry for him.

         I have aged. When I look in my polished bronze mirror there are lines upon my face. I am thickened too, and my skin has begun growing loose. I cut myself at my herbs and the scars stay. Sometimes I like it. Sometimes I am vain and dissatisfied. But I do not wish myself back. Of course my flesh reaches for the earth. That is where it belongs. One day, Hermes will lead me down to the halls of the dead. We will scarcely recognize each other, for I will be white-haired, and he will be wrapped in his mystery as Leader of Souls, the only time he is solemn. I think I will enjoy seeing that.

         I know how lucky I am, stupid with luck, crammed with it, stumbling drunk. I wake sometimes in the dark terrified by my life’s precariousness, its thready breath. Beside me, my husband’s pulse beats at his throat; in their beds, my children’s skin shows every faintest scratch. A breeze would blow them over, and the world is filled with more than breezes: diseases and disasters, monsters and pain in a thousand variations. I do not forget either my father and his kind hanging over us, bright and sharp as swords, aimed at our tearing flesh. If they do not fall on us in spite and malice, then they will fall by accident or whim. My breath fights in my throat. How can I live on beneath such a burden of doom?

         I rise then and go to my herbs. I create something, I transform something. My witchcraft is as strong as ever, stronger. This too is good fortune. How many have such power and leisure and defense as I do? Telemachus comes from our bed to find me. He sits with me in the green-smelling darkness, holding my hand. Our faces are both lined now, marked with our years.

         Circe, he says, it will be all right.

         It is not the saying of an oracle or a prophet. They are words you might speak to a child. I have heard him say them to our daughters, when he rocked them back to sleep from a nightmare, when he dressed their small cuts, soothed whatever stung. His skin is familiar as my own beneath my fingers. I listen to his breath, warm upon the night air, and somehow I am comforted. He does not mean that it does not hurt. He does not mean that we are not frightened. Only that: we are here. This is what it means to swim in the tide, to walk the earth and feel it touch your feet. This is what it means to be alive.

         
              

         

         Overhead the constellations dip and wheel. My divinity shines in me like the last rays of the sun before they drown in the sea. I thought once that gods are the opposite of death, but I see now they are more dead than anything, for they are unchanging, and can hold nothing in their hands.

         All my life I have been moving forward, and now I am here. I have a mortal’s voice, let me have the rest. I lift the brimming bowl to my lips and drink.

      
   


   
      
         
            Chapter Twelve

         

         WE WENT THE LONG way back to Aiaia, avoiding Scylla. Eleven days it took. The sky bent its arc over us, clear and bright. I stared into the blinding waves, the white-flaring sun. No one disturbed me. The men averted their gazes when I passed, and I saw them cast a rope I had touched into the waves. I could not blame them. They lived on Knossos and knew too much of witchery already.

         When we landed on Aiaia, they dutifully carried the loom up through the woods and set it before my hearth. They led up the eight sheep. I offered them wine and a meal, but of course they did not accept. They hurried back to their ship, strained at their oars, eager to vanish over the horizon. I watched until the moment they winked out, like a snuffed flame.

         The lion glared from my threshold. She lashed her tail as if to say, That had better be the last of that.

         “I think it will be,” I said.

         After Knossos’ sunny, out-flung pavilions, my house was snug as a burrow. I walked its neat rooms, feeling the silence, the stillness, the scuff of no feet but my own. I put my hand to every surface, every cupboard and cup. They were all as they had been. As they would ever be.

         I went out to my garden. I weeded the same weeds that always grew, and planted the herbs I had gathered on Dicte. They looked strange away from their moonlit hollows, crowded in among my glossy, bright beds. Their hum seemed fainter, their colors faded. I had not considered that perhaps their powers could not survive transplanting.

         In the years I had lived on Aiaia, I had never chafed at my constraint. After my father’s halls, the island seemed to me the wildest, most giddy freedom. Its shores, its peaks, all of them yawned out to the horizon, filled up with magic. But looking at those fragile blooms, for the first time I felt the true weight of my exile. If they died, I could harvest no more. I would never walk again the humming slopes of Dicte. I could not draw water from its silver pool. All those places Hermes had told me of, Araby, Assur, Egypt, they were lost forever.

         You will never leave, my sister had said.

         
              

         

         In defiance, I threw myself into my old life. I did what I liked, the moment that I thought of it. I sang upon the beaches, rearranged my garden. I called the pigs and scratched their bristled backs, brushed the sheep, and summoned wolves to lie panting on my floor. The lion rolled her yellow eyes at them, but she behaved herself, for it was my law that all my animals bear each other.

         Every night, I went out to dig my herbs and roots. I did whatever spells came to mind, just to feel the pleasure of them knitting in my hands. In the morning I cut flowers for my kitchen. In the evenings after dinner, I set myself before Daedalus’ loom. It took me some time to understand it, for it was like no loom I had ever known in the halls of the gods. There was a seat, and the weft was drawn down rather than up. If my grandmother had seen, she would have offered her sea snake for it; the cloth it produced was finer than her best. Daedalus had guessed well: that I would like the whole business of it, the simplicity and skill at once, the smell of the wood, the shush of the shuttle, the satisfying way weft stacked upon weft. It was a little like spell-work, I thought, for your hands must be busy, and your mind sharp and free. Yet my favorite part was not the loom at all, but the making of the dyes. I went hunting for the best colors, madder root and saffron, the scarlet kermes bug and the wine-dark murex from the sea, and alum powder to hold them fast in the wool. I squeezed them, pounded, soaked them in great bubbling pots until the stinking liquids foamed up bright as flowers: crimson and crocus yellow and the deep purple that princes wear. If I had had Athena’s skill, I could have woven a great tapestry of Iris, goddess of the rainbow, flinging down her colors from the sky.

         But I was not Athena. I was happy with simple scarves, with cloaks and blankets that lay like jewels upon my chairs. I draped my lion in one and called her the Queen of Phoenicia. She sat, turning her head this way and that, as if to show off how the purple made her fur shine gold.

         You will never see Phoenicia.

         I rose from my stool and made myself walk the island, admiring the changes every hour brought: the water-striders skimming over the ponds, the stones rolled green and smooth by river currents, the bees flying low, freighted with pollen. The bays were full of lashing fish, the seeds broke from their pods. My dittany, my lilies from Crete, they thrived after all. See? I said to my sister.

         It was Daedalus who answered. A golden cage is still a cage.

         
              

         

         Spring passed into summer, and summer into fragrant autumn. There were mists now in the morning and sometimes storms at night. Winter would come soon with its own beauty, the green hellebore leaves shining amid the brown, and the cypresses tall and black against the metal sky. It was not ever truly cold, not as Mount Dicte’s peak, but I was glad for my new cloaks as I climbed the rocks and stood among the winds. Yet, no matter what beauties I sought, what pleasures I found, my sister’s words followed me, taunting, worming deep in my bones and blood.

         “You are wrong about witchcraft,” I told her. “It does not come from hate. I made my first spell for love of Glaucos.”

         I could hear her mink-voice as if she stood before me. Yet it was in defiance of our father, in defiance of all those who slighted you and would keep you from your desires.

         I had seen the look in my father’s eyes when he knew at last what I was. He was thinking he should have snuffed me in my crib.

         Just so. Look how they stopped our mother’s womb. Have you not noticed how easily she twists Father and our aunts?

         I had noticed it. It seemed to go beyond beauty, beyond whatever bed-tricks she might know. “She is clever.”

         Clever! Pasiphaë laughed. You always underestimated her. I would not be surprised if she has witch-blood too. We do not get our charms from Helios.

         I had wondered that myself.

         You are sorry now you scorned her. You spent every day licking Father’s feet, hoping he would set her aside.

         I paced the rocks. I had walked the earth for a hundred generations, yet I was still a child to myself. Rage and grief, thwarted desire, lust, self-pity: these are emotions gods know well. But guilt and shame, remorse, ambivalence, those are foreign countries to our kind, which must be learned stone by stone. I could not stop thinking of my sister’s face, that blank shock when I told her I would never be like her. What had she hoped for? That we would send messages back and forth in seabirds’ mouths? That we would share spells, fight the gods? That we might be, in our way, sisters at last?

         I tried to imagine it: our heads bent together over herbs, her laugh as she devised some cleverness. I wished then—oh, a dozen impossible things. That I had known sooner what she was. That we had grown up somewhere other than those glittering halls. I could have blunted her poisons, drawn her from her abuses, taught her how to gather the best herbs.

         Hah! she said. I will take no lessons from fools like you. You are weak and blind, and it is worse because you choose it. You will be sorry in the end.

         It was always easier when she was hateful. “I am not weak. And I will never be sorry not to be like you. Do you hear?”

         There was no answer, of course. Only the air, eating my words.

         
              

         

         Hermes returned. I no longer thought that he had conspired with Pasiphaë. It was only his nature to vaunt his knowledge and laugh at what others did not know. He lounged in my silver chair. “So how did you like Crete? I heard you had some excitement.”

         I gave him food and wine, and took him to my bed that night. He was handsome as ever, keen and playful in our couplings. But a distaste rose in me now when I looked at him. One moment I would be laughing, and the next his jests turned sour in my throat. When his hands reached for me, I felt a strange dislocation. They were perfect and unscarred.

         My ambivalence, of course, only encouraged him. Any challenge was a game, and any game a pleasure. If I had loved him, he would have been gone, yet my revulsion brought him back and back. He pressed hard to wrap me up, bringing gifts and news, unfolding the whole tale of the Minotaur to me without my asking.

         After I had sailed away, he said, Minos and Pasiphaë’s eldest, Androgeos, had visited the mainland and been killed near Athens. By then, the people of Crete were restive at having to lose their sons and daughters every harvest, and were threatening revolt. Minos seized his opportunity. He demanded, as payment for his son, that the Athenian king send seven youths and seven maids to feed the monster, or else Crete’s mighty navy would bring war. The frightened king agreed, and one of the youths chosen was his own child, Theseus.

         This prince was the mortal I had seen in the mountain pool. But my vision had not told me all: he might have died, if not for the princess Ariadne. She fell in love with him, and to save his life smuggled him a sword and taught him the way through the Labyrinth, which she had learned from Daedalus himself. Yet when he came out from that maze with his hands covered in the monster’s blood, she had wept, and not for joy.

         “I heard,” Hermes said, “that she had an unnatural love for the creature. She would go often to its cage and speak softly to it through the bars, and offer delicacies from her own table. Once, she got too close, and its teeth caught her shoulder. She escaped and Daedalus sewed up the wound, but it left a scar at the base of her neck, in the shape of a crown.”

         I remembered her face as she said, my brother. “Was she punished? For helping Theseus?”

         “No. She fled with him after the creature was dead. Theseus would have married her, but my brother decided he wanted her for himself. You know how he loves the ones with light feet. He told Theseus to leave her on an island, and he would come to claim her.”

         I knew which brother he meant. Dionysus, lord of ivy and the grape. Riotous son of Zeus, whom mortals call Releaser, for he frees them from their cares. At least, I thought, with Dionysus she would dance every night.

         Hermes shook his head. “He came too late. She had fallen asleep, and Artemis killed her.”

         He spoke so casually that for a moment I thought I’d misheard. “What? She is dead?”

         “I led her to the underworld myself.”

         That lithe and hopeful girl. “For what reason?”

         “I couldn’t get a straight answer out of Artemis. You know how ill-tempered she is. Some incomprehensible slight.” He shrugged.

         My witchcraft was no match against an Olympian, I knew it. But in that moment, I wanted to try. To summon up all my charms, to throw my will upon the spirits of the earth, the beasts, the birds, and set them after Artemis, until she knew what it was to be truly hunted.

         “Come,” Hermes said. “If you cry every time some mortal dies, you’ll drown in a month.”

         “Get out,” I said.

         
              

         

         Icarus, Daedalus, Ariadne. All gone to those dark fields, where hands worked nothing but air, where feet no more touched the earth. If I had been there, I thought. But what would it have changed? It was true what Hermes said. Every moment mortals died, by shipwreck and sword, by wild beasts and wild men, by illness, neglect, and age. It was their fate, as Prometheus had told me, the story that they all shared. No matter how vivid they were in life, no matter how brilliant, no matter the wonders they made, they came to dust and smoke. Meanwhile every petty and useless god would go on sucking down the bright air until the stars went dark.

         
              

         

         Hermes came back, as always. I let him. When he glittered in my hall, my shores did not feel so narrow, the knowledge of my exile did not weigh so heavy. “Tell me the news,” I said. “Tell me of Crete. How did Pasiphaë take the Minotaur’s death?”

         “She went mad, is the rumor. She wears nothing but black now in mourning.”

         “Don’t be a fool. She is only mad if it suits her,” I said.

         “She is said to have cursed Theseus, and he is plagued and plagued since then. Did you hear how his father died?”

         I did not care about Theseus, I wanted to hear of my sister. Hermes must have been laughing as he fed me tale after tale. How she had forbidden Minos from her bed, and her only joy was her youngest daughter, Phaedra. How she was haunting the slopes of Mount Dicte, digging up the whole mountain searching out new poisons. I hoarded every tidbit like a dragon guards its treasure. I was looking for something, I realized, though I could not say what.

         Like all good storytellers, Hermes knew to save the best for last. One evening, he told me of a trick Pasiphaë had played upon Minos in the early days of their marriage. Minos used to order any girl he liked to his bedchamber in front of her face. So she cursed him with a spell that turned his seed to snakes and scorpions. Whenever he lay with a woman, they stung her to death from the inside.

         I remembered the fight I had heard between them. A hundred girls, Pasiphaë had said. They would have been serving maidens, slaves, merchants’ daughters, anyone whose fathers would not dare raise a fuss against the king. All extinguished for nothing but petty pleasure and revenge.

         I sent Hermes from me, and closed my shutters as I never did. Anyone would have thought I was casting a great spell, but I reached for no herbs. I felt a weightless joy. The story was so ugly, so outlandish and disgusting, that it felt like a fever breaking. If I was trapped on this island, at least I did not have to share the world with her and all her kind. Pacing by my lion, I said, “It is done. I will think of them no more. I cast them out and I am finished.”

         The cat pressed her cheek upon her folded paws and kept her eyes upon the floor. So perhaps she knew what I did not.

      
   


   
      
         
            Chapter One

         

         WHEN I WAS BORN, the name for what I was did not exist. They called me nymph, assuming I would be like my mother and aunts and thousand cousins. Least of the lesser goddesses, our powers were so modest they could scarcely ensure our eternities. We spoke to fish and nurtured flowers, coaxed drops from the clouds or salt from the waves. That word, nymph, paced out the length and breadth of our futures. In our language, it means not just goddess, but bride.

         My mother was one of them, a naiad, guardian of fountains and streams. She caught my father’s eye when he came to visit the halls of her own father, Oceanos. Helios and Oceanos were often at each other’s tables in those days. They were cousins, and equal in age, though they did not look it. My father glowed bright as just-forged bronze, while Oceanos had been born with rheumy eyes and a white beard to his lap. Yet they were both Titans, and preferred each other’s company to those new-squeaking gods upon Olympus who had not seen the making of the world.

         Oceanos’ palace was a great wonder, set deep in the earth’s rock. Its high-arched halls were gilded, the stone floors smoothed by centuries of divine feet. Through every room ran the faint sound of Oceanos’ river, source of the world’s fresh waters, so dark you could not tell where it ended and the rock-bed began. On its banks grew grass and soft gray flowers, and also the unnumbered children of Oceanos, naiads and nymphs and river-gods. Otter-sleek, laughing, their faces bright against the dusky air, they passed golden goblets among themselves and wrestled, playing games of love. In their midst, outshining all that lily beauty, sat my mother.

         Her hair was a warm brown, each strand so lustrous it seemed lit from within. She would have felt my father’s gaze, hot as gusts from a bonfire. I see her arrange her dress so it drapes just so over her shoulders. I see her dab her fingers, glinting, in the water. I have seen her do a thousand such tricks a thousand times. My father always fell for them. He believed the world’s natural order was to please him.

         “Who is that?” my father said to Oceanos.

         Oceanos had many golden-eyed grandchildren from my father already, and was glad to think of more. “My daughter Perse. She is yours if you want her.”

         The next day, my father found her by her fountain-pool in the upper world. It was a beautiful place, crowded with fat-headed narcissus, woven over with oak branches. There was no muck, no slimy frogs, only clean, round stones giving way to grass. Even my father, who cared nothing for the subtleties of nymph arts, admired it.

         My mother knew he was coming. Frail she was, but crafty, with a mind like a spike-toothed eel. She saw where the path to power lay for such as her, and it was not in bastards and riverbank tumbles. When he stood before her, arrayed in his glory, she laughed at him. Lie with you? Why should I?

         My father, of course, might have taken what he wanted. But Helios flattered himself that all women went eager to his bed, slave girls and divinities alike. His altars smoked with the proof, offerings from big-bellied mothers and happy by-blows.

         “It is marriage,” she said to him, “or nothing. And if it is marriage, be sure: you may have what girls you like in the field, but you will bring none home, for only I will hold sway in your halls.”

         Conditions, constrainment. These were novelties to my father, and gods love nothing more than novelty. “A bargain,” he said, and gave her a necklace to seal it, one of his own making, strung with beads of rarest amber. Later, when I was born, he gave her a second strand, and another for each of my three siblings. I do not know which she treasured more: the luminous beads themselves or the envy of her sisters when she wore them. I think she would have gone right on collecting them into eternity until they hung from her neck like a yoke on an ox if the high gods had not stopped her. By then they had learned what the four of us were. You may have other children, they told her, only not with him. But other husbands did not give amber beads. It was the only time I ever saw her weep.

         
              

         

         At my birth, an aunt—I will spare you her name because my tale is full of aunts—washed and wrapped me. Another tended to my mother, painting the red back on her lips, brushing her hair with ivory combs. A third went to the door to admit my father.

         “A girl,” my mother said to him, wrinkling her nose.

         But my father did not mind his daughters, who were sweet-tempered and golden as the first press of olives. Men and gods paid dearly for the chance to breed from their blood, and my father’s treasury was said to rival that of the king of the gods himself. He placed his hand on my head in blessing.

         “She will make a fair match,” he said.

         “How fair?” my mother wanted to know. This might be consolation, if I could be traded for something better.

         My father considered, fingering the wisps of my hair, examining my eyes and the cut of my cheeks.

         “A prince, I think.”

         “A prince?” my mother said. “You do not mean a mortal?”

         The revulsion was plain on her face. Once when I was young I asked what mortals looked like. My father said, “You may say they are shaped like us, but only as the worm is shaped like the whale.”

         My mother had been simpler: like savage bags of rotten flesh.

         “Surely she will marry a son of Zeus,” my mother insisted. She had already begun imagining herself at feasts upon Olympus, sitting at Queen Hera’s right hand.

         “No. Her hair is streaked like a lynx. And her chin. There is a sharpness to it that is less than pleasing.”

         My mother did not argue further. Like everyone, she knew the stories of Helios’ temper when he was crossed. However gold he shines, do not forget his fire.

         She stood. Her belly was gone, her waist reknitted, her cheeks fresh and virgin-rosy. All our kind recover quickly, but she was faster still, one of the daughters of Oceanos, who shoot their babes like roe.

         “Come,” she said. “Let us make a better one.”

         
              

         

         I grew quickly. My infancy was the work of hours, my toddlerhood a few moments beyond that. An aunt stayed on hoping to curry favor with my mother and named me Hawk, Circe, for my yellow eyes, and the strange, thin sound of my crying. But when she realized that my mother no more noticed her service than the ground at her feet, she vanished.

         “Mother,” I said, “Aunt is gone.”

         My mother didn’t answer. My father had already departed for his chariot in the sky, and she was winding her hair with flowers, preparing to leave through the secret ways of water, to join her sisters on their grassy riverbanks. I might have followed, but then I would have had to sit all day at my aunts’ feet while they gossiped of things I did not care for and could not understand. So I stayed.

         My father’s halls were dark and silent. His palace was a neighbor to Oceanos’, buried in the earth’s rock, and its walls were made of polished obsidian. Why not? They could have been anything in the world, blood-red marble from Egypt or balsam from Araby, my father had only to wish it so. But he liked the way the obsidian reflected his light, the way its slick surfaces caught fire as he passed. Of course, he did not consider how black it would be when he was gone. My father has never been able to imagine the world without himself in it.

         I could do what I liked at those times: light a torch and run to see the dark flames follow me. Lie on the smooth earth floor and wear small holes in its surface with my fingers. There were no grubs or worms, though I didn’t know to miss them. Nothing lived in those halls, except for us.

         When my father returned at night, the ground rippled like the flank of a horse, and the holes I had made smoothed themselves over. A moment later my mother returned, smelling of flowers. She ran to greet him, and he let her hang from his neck, accepted wine, went to his great silver chair. I followed at his heels. Welcome home, Father, welcome home.

         While he drank his wine, he played draughts. No one was allowed to play with him. He placed the stone counters, spun the board, and placed them again. My mother drenched her voice in honey. “Will you not come to bed, my love?” She turned before him slowly, showing the lushness of her figure as if she were roasting on a spit. Most often he would leave his game then, but sometimes he did not, and those were my favorite times, for my mother would go, slamming the myrrh-wood door behind her.

         At my father’s feet, the whole world was made of gold. The light came from everywhere at once, his yellow skin, his lambent eyes, the bronze flashing of his hair. His flesh was hot as a brazier, and I pressed as close as he would let me, like a lizard to noonday rocks. My aunt had said that some of the lesser gods could scarcely bear to look at him, but I was his daughter and blood, and I stared at his face so long that when I looked away it was pressed upon my vision still, glowing from the floors, the shining walls and inlaid tables, even my own skin.

         “What would happen,” I said, “if a mortal saw you in your fullest glory?”

         “He would be burned to ash in a second.”

         “What if a mortal saw me?”

         My father smiled. I listened to the draught pieces moving, the familiar rasp of marble against wood. “The mortal would count himself fortunate.”

         “I would not burn him?”

         “Of course not,” he said.

         “But my eyes are like yours.”

         “No,” he said. “Look.” His gaze fell upon a log at the fireplace’s side. It glowed, then flamed, then fell as ash to the ground. “And that is the least of my powers. Can you do as much?”

         All night I stared at those logs. I could not.

         
              

         

         My sister was born, and my brother soon after that. I cannot say how long it was exactly. Divine days fall like water from a cataract, and I had not learned yet the mortal trick of counting them. You’d think my father would have taught us better, for he, after all, knows every sunrise. But even he used to call my brother and sister twins. Certainly, from the moment of my brother’s birth, they were entwined like minks. My father blessed them both with one hand. “You,” he said to my luminous sister Pasiphaë. “You will marry an eternal son of Zeus.” He used his prophecy voice, the one that spoke of future certainties. My mother glowed to hear it, thinking of the robes she would wear to Zeus’ feasts.

         “And you,” he said to my brother, in his regular voice, resonant, clear as a summer’s morning. “Every son reflects upon his mother.” My mother was pleased with this, and took it as permission to name him. She called him Perses, for herself.

         The two of them were clever and quickly saw how things stood. They loved to sneer at me behind their ermine paws. Her eyes are yellow as piss. Her voice is screechy as an owl. She is called Hawk, but she should be called Goat for her ugliness.

         Those were their earliest attempts at barbs, still dull, but day by day they sharpened. I learned to avoid them, and they soon found better sport among the infant naiads and river-lords in Oceanos’ halls. When my mother went to her sisters, they followed and established dominion over all our pliant cousins, hypnotized like minnows before the pike’s mouth. They had a hundred tormenting games that they devised. Come, Melia, they coaxed. It is the Olympian fashion to cut off your hair to the nape of your neck. How will you ever catch a husband if you don’t let us do it? When Melia saw herself shorn like a hedgehog and cried, they would laugh till the caverns echoed.

         I left them to it. I preferred my father’s quiet halls and spent every second I could at my father’s feet. One day, perhaps as a reward, he offered to take me with him to visit his sacred herd of cows. This was a great honor, for it meant I might ride in his golden chariot and see the animals that were the envy of all the gods, fifty pure-white heifers that delighted his eye on his daily path over the earth. I leaned over the chariot’s jeweled side, watching in wonder at the earth passing beneath: the rich green of forests, the jagged mountains, and the wide out-flung blue of the ocean. I looked for mortals, but we were too high up to see them.

         The herd lived on the grassy island of Thrinakia with two of my half-sisters as caretakers. When we arrived these sisters ran at once to my father and hung from his neck, exclaiming. Of all my father’s beautiful children, they were among the most beautiful, with skin and hair like molten gold. Lampetia and Phaethousa, their names were. Radiant and Shining.

         “And who is this you have brought with you?”

         “She must be one of Perse’s children, look at her eyes.”

         “Of course!” Lampetia—I thought it was Lampetia—stroked my hair. “Darling, your eyes are nothing to worry about. Nothing at all. Your mother is very beautiful, but she has never been strong.”

         “My eyes are like yours,” I said.

         “How sweet! No, darling, ours are bright as fire, and our hair like sun on the water.”

         “You’re clever to keep yours in a braid,” Phaethousa said. “The brown streaking does not look so bad then. It is a shame you cannot hide your voice the same way.”

         “She could never speak again. That would work, would it not, sister?”

         “So it would.” They smiled. “Shall we go to see the cows?”

         I had never seen a cow before, of any kind, but it did not matter: the animals were so obviously beautiful that I needed no comparison. Their coats were pure as lily petals and their eyes gentle and long-lashed. Their horns had been gilded—that was my sisters’ doing—and when they bent to crop the grass, their necks dipped like dancers. In the sunset light, their backs gleamed glossy-soft.

         “Oh!” I said. “May I touch one?”

         “No,” my father said.

         “Shall we tell you their names? That is White-face, and that is Bright-eyes, and that Darling. There is Lovely Girl and Pretty and Golden-horn and Gleaming. There is Darling and there is—”

         “You named Darling already,” I said. “You said that one was Darling.” I pointed to the first cow, peacefully chewing.

         My sisters looked at each other, then at my father, a single golden glance. But he was gazing at his cows in abstracted glory.

         “You must be mistaken,” they said. “This one we just said is Darling. And this one is Star-bright and this one Flashing and—”

         My father said, “What is this? A scab upon Pretty?”

         Immediately my sisters were falling over themselves. “What scab? Oh, it cannot be! Oh, wicked Pretty, to have hurt yourself. Oh, wicked thing, that hurt you!”

         I leaned close to see. It was a very small scab, smaller than my smallest fingernail, but my father was frowning. “You will fix it by tomorrow.”

         My sisters bobbed their heads, of course, of course. We are so sorry.

         We stepped again into the chariot and my father took up the silver-tipped reins. My sisters pressed a last few kisses to his hands, then the horses leapt, swinging us through the sky. The first constellations were already peeping through the dimming light.

         I remembered how my father had once told me that on earth there were men called astronomers whose task it was to keep track of his rising and setting. They were held in highest esteem among mortals, kept in palaces as counselors of kings, but sometimes my father lingered over one thing or another and threw their calculations into despair. Then those astronomers were hauled before the kings they served and killed as frauds. My father had smiled when he told me. It was what they deserved, he said. Helios the Sun was bound to no will but his own, and none might say what he would do.

         “Father,” I said that day, “are we late enough to kill astronomers?”

         “We are,” he answered, shaking the jingling reins. The horses surged forward, and the world blurred beneath us, the shadows of night smoking from the sea’s edge. I did not look. There was a twisting feeling in my chest, like cloth being wrung dry. I was thinking of those astronomers. I imagined them, low as worms, sagging and bent. Please, they cried, on bony knees, it wasn’t our fault, the sun itself was late.

         The sun is never late, the kings answered from their thrones. It is blasphemy to say so, you must die! And so the axes fell and chopped those pleading men in two.

         “Father,” I said, “I feel strange.”

         “You are hungry,” he said. “It is past time for the feast. Your sisters should be ashamed of themselves for delaying us.”

         I ate well at dinner, yet the feeling lingered. I must have had an odd look on my face, for Perses and Pasiphaë began to snicker from their couch. “Did you swallow a frog?”

         “No,” I said.

         This only made them laugh harder, rubbing their draped limbs on each other like snakes polishing their scales. My sister said, “And how were our father’s golden heifers?”

         “Beautiful.”

         Perses laughed. “She doesn’t know! Have you ever heard of anyone so stupid?”

         “Never,” my sister said.

         I shouldn’t have asked, but I was still drifting in my thoughts, seeing those severed bodies sprawled on marble floors. “What don’t I know?”

         My sister’s perfect mink face. “That he fucks them, of course. That’s how he makes new ones. He turns into a bull and sires their calves, then cooks the ones that get old. That’s why everyone thinks they are immortal.”

         “He does not.”

         They howled, pointing at my reddened cheeks. The sound drew my mother. She loved my siblings’ japes.

         “We’re telling Circe about the cows,” my brother told her. “She didn’t know.”

         My mother’s laughter, silver as a fountain down its rocks. “Stupid Circe.”

         
              

         

         Such were my years then. I would like to say that all the while I waited to break out, but the truth is, I’m afraid I might have floated on, believing those dull miseries were all there was, until the end of days.

      
   


   
      
         
            Chapter Four

         

         I KNEW OF SHIPS from paintings, I had heard of them in stories. They were golden and huge as leviathans, their rails carved from ivory and horn. They were towed by grinning dolphins or else crewed by fifty black-haired nereids, faces silver as moonlight.

         This one had a mast thin as a sapling. Its sail hung skewed and fraying, its sides were patched. I remember the jump in my throat when the sailor lifted his face. Burnt it was, and shiny with sun. A mortal.

         Mankind was spreading across the world. Years had passed since my brother had first found that deserted land for our games. I stood behind a jut of cliff and watched as the man steered, skirting rocks and hauling at the nets. He looked nothing like the well-groomed nobles of Minos’ court. His hair was long and black, draggled from wave-spray. His clothes were worn, and his neck scabbed. Scars showed on his arms where fish scales had cut him. He did not move with unearthly grace, but strongly, cleanly, like a well-built hull in the waves.

         I could hear my pulse, loud in my ears. I thought again of those stories of nymphs ravished and abused by mortals. But this man’s face was soft with youth, and the hands that drew up his catch looked only swift, not cruel. Anyway, in the sky above me was my father, called the Watchman. If I was in danger, he would come.

         He was close to the shore by then, peering down into the water, tracking some fish I could not see. I took a breath and stepped forward onto the beach.

         “Hail, mortal.”

         He fumbled his nets but did not drop them. “Hail,” he said. “What goddess do I address?”

         His voice was gentle in my ears, sweet as summer winds.

         “Circe,” I said.

         “Ah.” His face was carefully blank. He told me much later it was because he had not heard of me and feared to give offense. He knelt on the rough boards. “Most reverend lady. Do I trespass on your waters?”

         “No,” I said. “I have no waters. Is that a boat?”

         Expressions passed across his face, but I could not read them. “It is,” he said.

         “I would like to sail upon it,” I said.

         He hesitated, then began to steer closer to the shore, but I did not know to wait. I waded out through the waves to him and pulled myself aboard. The deck was hot through my sandals, and its motion pleasing, a faint undulation, like I rode upon a snake.

         “Proceed,” I said.

         How stiff I was, dressed in my divine dignity that I did not even know I wore. And he was stiffer still. He trembled when my sleeve brushed his. His eyes darted whenever I addressed him. I realized with a shock that I knew such gestures. I had performed them a thousand times—for my father, and my grandfather, and all those mighty gods who strode through my days. The great chain of fear.

         “Oh, no,” I said to him. “I am not like that. I have scarcely any powers at all and cannot hurt you. Be comfortable, as you were.”

         “Thank you, kind goddess.” But he said it so flinchingly that I had to laugh. It was that laughter, more than my protestation, that seemed to ease him a little. Moment passed into moment, and we began to talk of the things around us: the fish jumping, a bird dipping overhead. I asked him how his nets were made, and he told me, warming to the subject, for he took great care with them. When I told him my father’s name, it sent him glancing at the sun and trembling worse than ever, but at day’s end no wrath had descended and he knelt to me and said that I must have blessed his nets, for they were the fullest they had ever been.

         I looked down at his thick, black hair, shining in the sunset light, his strong shoulders bowing low. This is what all those gods in our halls longed for, such worship. I thought perhaps he had not done it right, or more likely, I had not. All I wanted was to see his face again.

         “Rise,” I told him. “Please. I have not blessed your nets, I have no powers to do so. I am born from naiads, who govern fresh water only, and even their small gifts I lack.”

         “Yet,” he said, “may I return? Will you be here? For I have never known such a wondrous thing in all my life as you.”

         I had stood beside my father’s light. I had held Aeëtes in my arms, and my bed was heaped with thick-wooled blankets woven by immortal hands. But it was not until that moment that I think I had ever been warm.

         “Yes,” I told him. “I will be here.”

         His name was Glaucos, and he came every day. He brought along bread, which I had never tasted, and cheese, which I had, and olives that I liked to see his teeth bite through. I asked him about his family, and he told me that his father was old and bitter, always storming and worrying about food, and his mother used to make herb simples but was broken now from too much labor, and his sister had five children already and was always sick and angry. All of them would be turned out of their cottage if they could not give their lord the tribute he levied.

         No one had ever confided so in me. I drank down every story like a whirlpool sucks down waves, though I could hardly understand half of what they meant, poverty and toil and human terror. The only thing that was clear was Glaucos’ face, his handsome brow and earnest eyes, wet a little from his griefs but smiling always when he looked at me.

         I loved to watch him at his daily tasks, which he did with his hands instead of a blink of power: mending the torn nets, cleaning off the boat’s deck, sparking the flint. When he made his fire, he would start painstakingly with small bits of dried moss placed just so, then the smaller twigs, then larger, building upwards and upwards. This art too, I did not know. Wood needed no coaxing for my father to kindle it.

         He saw me watching and rubbed self-consciously at his calloused hands. “I know I am ugly to you.”

         No, I thought. My grandfather’s halls are filled with shining nymphs and muscled river-gods, but I would rather gaze on you than any of them.

         I shook my head.

         He sighed. “It must be wonderful to be a god and never bear a mark.”

         “My brother once said it feels like water.”

         He considered. “Yes, I can imagi