Stone Blind(30)

So in spite of what people thought and said, it was anxiety rather than arrogance that made her say the words that ruined her life.





Athene


Athene decided to leave Olympus for a while. She had grown weary of its quiet perfection. No wonder the other gods came and went – Poseidon to the sea, Artemis to Mount Cithaeron – to avoid the monotony of home. She walked around its precincts sometimes, half hoping she could find someone to talk to, half trying to avoid them because she could think of nothing they would say that would interest her. Sometimes she stopped by the forge and Hephaestus would pause his hammering to make her a gift of something. They were figurines, sculpted from marble or clay, wood or bronze. He would paint them in bright colours, pouring life into the tiny faces. Athene took them, usually, and admired them for a while as she walked. But then she would lose interest in them and drop them wherever she was standing.

Hephaestus never asked what became of his gifts, and it did not occur to her to ask why he kept making her these figurines when she never kept them. It would have surprised Athene if she had known that the blacksmith god watched her when she left the forge and kept careful note of how long it took her to lose interest in each gift, that he decided what to make next depending on which ones she dropped immediately and which ones she kept for a little longer.

It took him several attempts to make the one she eventually carried all the way back to the halls of Olympus. He’d never had trouble with the eyes or the quizzical angle of the head, but he’d struggled to make the tail feathers so delicate they looked real. Eventually, he found a way to carve the finest lines in the marble, so the solid stone looked capable of fluttering in the breezes. He painted the bird in a dappled pattern of cream on brown, its eyes flat yellow discs around huge black pupils. Its short beak was gilded and its small, strong legs ended with splayed feet and sharp black claws. He had caught the characteristic pose of Athene’s own owl, head turned sideways.

When Hephaestus showed her the model bird, she looked briefly furious, as though someone were playing a cruel trick on her. Then she snatched it from him and he worried he had made the wrong trinket again and that she would hurl it to the ground or smash it against the walls of the forge as she had done once or twice before with other figurines she had not liked.

But once she had it in her hands, her expression softened. He watched in silence as she turned the model over and examined its folded wings. She lifted it to look more closely at its flexed feet, and then lowered it again to examine the beautiful soft brow line he had created. She scratched at the top of its head, cooed as though it could hear her. He said nothing. The model was so realistic that its living counterpart grow irritated and pecked at her fingers until she stroked him instead. She laughed to see the bird’s jealousy.

This statue she did keep.





Euryale


Sthenno and Euryale never really slept, only tried to so that Medusa did not feel left out when she grew tired. So on the night she was cursed and her screams pierced the blackness, they were awake and they ran inside the cave to try to save their girl from whatever was hurting her. But there was no one there, no man, no animal. Euryale caught sight of a scorpion scuttling away in her torchlight and stamped on it just to be certain.

Their flickering light fell on Medusa, who had buried her face into the crooks of her arms. Her hands, though, were lost in a seething mass of snakes. Sthenno had given up hoping that Medusa would have snake hair like she and Euryale did, and yet here it was at last. But whatever had caused the change was clearly causing her terrible pain. Sthenno ran to her and put her arm around Medusa’s shoulders.

‘Darling, what happened?’

But Medusa could not reply, and Sthenno hugged her close. Euryale stood back, because Sthenno had dropped her torch and she didn’t want them to be swathed in darkness. It took her a moment to see that something had changed, that now there were two snake-covered heads together. She had always loved Medusa’s tight black curls, of course. Medusa was beautiful, her hair perhaps more than anything. But now, with snakes writhing around her instead of hair lying inert, she looked . . . Euryale tried to put the thought into words. She looked right. She looked like her sisters, like a Gorgon, like an immortal creature.

Sthenno held Medusa and rubbed her shoulders. ‘Don’t cry, darling. I know, your beautiful hair. You loved it so. Don’t cry.’

Euryale didn’t want to scare these new snakes with fire (her own were well used to such things by now) so she still held back. But Sthenno looked up and beckoned her, so she drove the base of her torch into the hard sand, and approached Medusa slowly. She need not have worried: the snakes didn’t rear or hiss. Her snakes – and Sthenno’s, and Medusa’s – tangled and untangled themselves contentedly, as though they all sprang from a single head. But Medusa still shuddered and wept. Even Euryale could see that although she preferred the snakes, Medusa did not.

And where had they come from? Their sister was mortal, they both knew it. And the only way you could tell she was a Gorgon by looking at her – unless you knew already – was if you noticed her wings. In all other regards she had always looked like an ordinary human girl. Had the snakes just sprouted fully formed from her head? Euryale couldn’t imagine what it would be like not to have them. But then, she also couldn’t imagine what it was like to feel pain. Unable to offer anything else, she took her sister’s arm and held it to her chest.