Stone Blind(4)

Euryale’s bulging eyes widened. ‘Why would he do that?’ she asked. ‘Where would he have got a mortal child from? A shipwreck?’

The Gorgons knew very little about their father. An old god, he lived in the depths of the ocean with their mother, Ceto. They had many offspring besides Euryale and Sthenno: Scylla, a nymph with six dog heads and their six vicious mouths, who lived in a high cave over the sea from which she would appear to eat passing sailors. Proud Echidna, half-nymph, half-snake. The Graiai – three sisters who shared a single eye and a single tooth – who dwelt in a cave somewhere even the Gorgons would hesitate to go.

Sthenno and her sister were gradually closing in on the child. The sea whispered behind them. The baby had been left far above the tide’s reach. Sthenno pointed to the wet trail that led to it: there were paired indentations on either side.

Euryale nodded. ‘It was Father,’ she said. ‘Those are the marks of his claws, surely.’

As they drew nearer, Sthenno noticed that the child was sleeping on a messy pile of dead seaweed: had her father scooped it up to form a sort of bed? Everything she could see and everything she thought she knew were battling one another in her mind. The thought of Phorcys doing anything as – Sthenno hunted for the word – mortal as laying a baby in a handmade crib was impossible. And yet, here were the marks of his claws, each side of the wide path made by his fish tail. And there was the baby lying safely beyond the water, sleeping on a thick pile of translucent dead weeds. Like empty skins snakes left behind in the sand, she thought.

It was only when they were right on top of the child, and Euryale was eyeing it as an unwanted visitor and an undersized meal, that the two sisters understood that Phorcys had delivered it to them for a reason.

‘She has . . .’ Euryale dropped into a low crouch, tilting her head for a better view of the child’s shoulders. They could see only a little of her back through the seaweed, but her sister was right. The baby had wings.

*

It took the Gorgons a whole day to accept that they had acquired another sister, a mortal one. It took them several more days to learn not to kill her by accident.

‘Why is it crying?’ Euryale asked her sister, prodding the baby with her hand, talon curled carefully into her palm so she wouldn’t injure her.

Sthenno looked at her sister in alarm. ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘Who knows why mortals do anything?’ Both tried to think of mortals they might have seen behaving similarly, but neither could bring one to mind. In fact, they couldn’t remember seeing any human children, but Euryale suddenly thought of a cormorant’s nest in the rocks nearby. The cormorant had chicks, she told Sthenno, who nodded as though she remembered.

‘The chicks made a terrible noise,’ Euryale said. ‘And the mother fed them.’ Her wide mouth split into a grin. She flew a little way inland until she came to the nearest settlements. She flew back with a stolen sheep under each arm. ‘Milk,’ she said. ‘They give babies milk.’

And so even though they were goddesses, they learned to feed their sister. After a while, Sthenno found she couldn’t remember what their home had looked like without a small flock of curve-horned sheep scrambling over the rocky ground with ease. Even Euryale – who had once combed the skies searching for prey, seizing it in her mighty jaws and crunching its bones for the sheer pleasure of the sound – seemed to enjoy looking after them. One day, an eagle tried to pick off one of their lambs, and Euryale rose in the air to defend it. The eagle was too fast for her, and she returned empty-handed, a few of the bird’s feathers falling to the sand behind her. But still it did not dare to try again.

In the early days, Sthenno wondered if Phorcys might return to explain his behaviour or to bring a message from their mother, Ceto, but he never came. The two Gorgons felt differently about this: Euryale was proud that their parents had entrusted the strange mortal child to them to look after. Sthenno wondered if her father had left the child with them hoping they would fail. It was impossible for gods to look at mortals and not feel some revulsion. Sthenno loved her new sister as much as she loved Euryale. But she still had to repress a shudder when she caught sight of her sister’s horrifyingly small hands and feet, her revolting little fingernails. And yet, even if something had gone wrong with her birth, Medusa was a Gorgon too. And perhaps she would improve with time.

Because this was the next upsetting development. The baby kept changing: growing, shifting as they watched, like Proteus. No sooner had they adapted to some inexplicable feature of her than she developed a new one. They carried her everywhere because she couldn’t move on her own, and then without warning she could crawl. They grew accustomed to that, and then she stopped crawling and started to walk. Her wings grew along with the rest of her, and it was a relief to them both to discover that even if she couldn’t fly very well, she was not completely earthbound. Euryale confessed that the wings reminded her they were sisters, in spite of everything. They felt a brief surge of hope when her teeth appeared, but they were small and stayed firmly inside her mouth, not like proper tusks. She could use them to chew, but what use was that to anyone?

As Medusa would not stop changing, her sisters had to change too. Sthenno learned to make bread because milk no longer satisfied her. The three of them stared at the dough as it blistered and rose on the wide flat rock they had balanced over their fire. Euryale had been watching women perform the same chore and had brought back instructions and advice. The more time went on, the more they found themselves copying the humans who lived nearby.