Stone Blind(5)

*

Mortals had always feared the Gorgons, but the feeling was not reciprocated. Although their sisters, the Graiai, lived in a cave as far from humankind as they could, the Gorgons simply lived where they chose and people avoided them. Neither sister could remember why they had decided on this particular spot on the shores of Libya, but they had made it their home. They had a wide, sandy shore, bordered on both sides by large sun-bleached rocks, marked here and there by tufts of sturdy grass. The rocks formed great outposts: a hard climb but an easy flight for a Gorgon to reach the highest points and gaze out over the sea with its sharp-beaked birds diving for fish, or turn to face inland across the vivid red earth and the dark green scrub. And cutting across the furthest edge of the shore was a jagged scar in the rock, left by one of Poseidon’s earthquakes which had almost torn the land in two. The ground was higher on the Gorgons’ side of the breach, but not by much. Nonetheless, it gave the two of them an unspoken sense that they had picked the right part, the higher part, of the coast for themselves.

Libya was home to many creatures – cattle and horses were their closest neighbours, brought by the people who had settled nearby. Euryale remembered a time when there were no humans within a day’s flying of their home. They used to be further away, but something had changed. She asked Sthenno if she could recall what had happened, but there was never any point asking Sthenno about these things. She always thought the world was as unchanging as they were. But even the Gorgons had changed, Euryale said: they had been two and now they were three. Sthenno shrugged and said, perhaps it was the weather. Humans worried about the weather, didn’t they? Because they had animals to feed and crops to grow. And perhaps that was the difference. The land was drier, hotter than before. Euryale reminded her sister of a time when they had flown across great swathes of green, bursting with noise: the conversation of swallows, the call of bee-eaters and the song of crested larks. When they had landed beside a huge lake, and watched the storks bathing in the still water. Sthenno nodded uncertainly. She never disputed her sister’s memory, but she didn’t always share its clarity.

Gradually, Sthenno agreed, their neighbours had moved closer to the coast, closer to the sea. But their secluded shore remained private because it was too inaccessible, and anyway, men told each other stories about the creatures they believed they had glimpsed there. Monsters from the deep with huge mouths, vicious tusks, leathery wings: so fast and strong and always to be feared. They had manes like lions, or hair made from snakes, or bristles like wild boar. The Gorgons were everything and nothing to most mortals, Sthenno said. She might remember less than Euryale but she understood more.

And so men avoided their home, the beach and the sea, the rocks and the cave. The cave which Sthenno thought they must have chosen because of Medusa. Euryale knew they had lived beside it before Medusa was their sister, but she never mentioned it. The cave was Medusa’s home, as soon as she was big enough to explore it. Gorgons loved the heat: Sthenno and Euryale could lie for hours in the scorching sun, unfurling their wings and allowing the warmth to seep through them. But Medusa would squint in the brightest part of the day, and her skin would become too hot. When she was still small, she found shade beneath her sisters’ outstretched wings. But as she grew bigger, she spent long days learning the recesses of their cave – its many hidden tunnels and paths, and the way the jagged scar visible on the sands could somehow also be found underfoot in the blackness inside the cave – so intimately that when the sun grew too hot, she would kiss her sisters on their bearded cheeks and withdraw to the cooler air to sleep.

Sthenno had no daughter, but she felt like the mother of Medusa and she knew Euryale felt the same. And although she hadn’t chosen the emotions she now experienced, she tried not to be appalled by them. The confusion and revulsion that Medusa had first provoked in both sisters had ebbed away. The anxiety, however, had not. Sthenno had never felt a moment of fear in her life before she was responsible for a child. What should she be afraid of, a Gorgon like her? Of men? Of beasts? The idea was absurd. And she had never experienced fear for another creature until Medusa. She had never felt the slightest worry when Euryale was away hunting or exploring: her sister could defend herself against any attack, just as she could. And then there was Medusa, who could be hurt by anything, even a stone.

Did all children have such unsteady limbs when they were small? Did they all collapse with no warning? Did they all spout blood when they came into contact with anything hard? Forgetful as she was, Sthenno remembered one thing and that was the cold dread which shuddered through her when Medusa tripped over the grasses that their flock negotiated without hesitation. She had been playing up on the higher rocks, showing off the wings that had let her fly the little way she could not climb. Medusa’s fall was sudden and brief as she dropped onto a jutting rock that pierced through the sand beneath her. Sthenno could not say how old her sister had been, but she was not even the height of Euryale’s bony hip. The noise she had made: Sthenno and Euryale had exchanged a wordless glance, each knowing the other’s thought. Was this the moment when their sister emerged as a true Gorgon? The moment when she finally made the same deathless howl that Sthenno could create if she merely opened her wide mouth and cried out?

It was not. This was not a display of strength but of fragility. The howl was disappointingly short-lived, as the little girl had to gulp for more breath to sustain it. Breathing was an awful weakness. And then the blood appeared, pouring in a vicious stream down the child’s leg. Sthenno hadn’t even known what it was at first, had no idea that her sister’s veins ran with this sticky redness when she should be filled with ichor, like a normal creature. She and Euryale ran to their sister, lifted her in their arms, cradled their wings around her. Euryale licked the blood gently from Medusa’s skin. The howls subsided and the tears that ran down her cheeks disappeared, faint salt traces all that was left of them until Euryale licked those away too. Medusa stared at the rock that had hurt her. Euryale didn’t need words to understand. She drove a clawed foot into it, watching her sister as the rock fractured and smashed beneath her.