Ariadne(5)

I could feel a change in Eirene as she sat beside me. My words had surprised her. She had no doubt expected that I was distraught over a trifle, a wisp that she could swipe away like mist dissolving in the rosy fingers of the dawn. What I did not know was that I had hit upon a truth of womanhood: however blameless a life we led, the passions and the greed of men could bring us to ruin, and there was nothing we could do.

Eirene could not deny that truth. So she told us a story. A worthy hero, Perseus, born from the golden rain of Zeus who visited the lonely, lovely Danae sealed in her roofless bronze chamber with only the sky to look upon. He grew to be a worthy son of his shining father and, as all heroes must do, he conquered a terrible monster and relieved the world of her ravages. We’d heard the story of how he had cut off the head of the Gorgon, Medusa, and thrilled to hear how the snakes that grew from her dreadful head writhed and spat and hissed as he swung his wondrous sword. News of this deed had only recently reached our court and we’d all marvelled over his courage and shivered to imagine his shield which now bore the Gorgon head and turned all who looked upon it immediately into stone.

But Eirene did not tell us of Perseus today. Instead, she told us how Medusa had gained her crown of serpents and her petrifying gaze. It was a story I might have come of late to expect. No longer was my world one of brave heroes; I was learning all too swiftly the women’s pain that throbbed unspoken through the tales of their feats.

‘Medusa was beautiful,’ Eirene told us. She had put down the comb now and Phaedra climbed up on to her lap to listen. My sister was rarely still, but stories could always hold her enraptured. ‘My mother saw her once, at a great festival to Athena, just from a distance, but she could recognise Medusa by her glorious hair. It shone like a river and none could mistake the maiden for any other. But she grew into a ravishing young woman and swore herself to be chaste, laughing at the suitors who clamoured for her hand . . .’ Eirene paused, as if weighing her words carefully. Well she might, for she knew it was not a fitting story for young princesses. But for reasons only she could say, she told it to us anyway. ‘In the temple of Athena, one suitor came before her that she could not scorn or run from. The mighty Poseidon wanted the beautiful girl for himself and he would not hear her pleas or her cries, nor did he restrain himself from defiling the sacred temple in which they stood.’ Eirene drew in her breath, slow and precise.

My tears had stilled now and I listened intently. I only knew Medusa as a monster. I had not thought she had ever been anything else. The stories of Perseus did not allow for a Medusa with a story of her own.

‘Athena was angry,’ Eirene went on. ‘A virgin goddess, she could not stand for such a brazen crime in her own temple. She must punish the girl who was so shameless as to be overpowered by Poseidon and to offend Athena’s sight so vilely with her undoing.’

So, Medusa had to pay for Poseidon’s act. It made no sense at all, and then I tilted my head and saw it with the logic of the gods. The pieces slid into place: a terrible picture when viewed from our mortal perspective, like the beauty of a spider’s web that must look so horrifying to the fly.

‘Athena struck Medusa’s hair and crowned her instead with living snakes. She took her beauty and made Medusa’s face so terrible that it would turn onlookers to stone. And so Medusa rampaged, leaving statues wherever she went, statues whose faces were frozen forever in revulsion and horror. As fervently as men had desired her, now they feared her and fled in her path. She took her vengeance a hundred times over before Perseus took her head.’

I shook myself from my appalled silence. ‘Why did you tell us that story, Eirene, instead of one of the usual ones?’

She stroked my hair but her eyes were fixed on a distant point. ‘I thought it was time that you knew something different,’ she answered.

I took that story with me in the coming days and turned it over, like the stone in a ripe peach: the sudden, unexpected hard shock in the centre of everything. I could not fail to see the parallels between Medusa and Pasiphae. Both paid the price for another’s crime. But Pasiphae shrank and became smaller every day, even whilst her belly stretched and grew oddly misshapen with her strange baby. She did not raise her eyes from the ground, she did not open her mouth to speak. She was no Medusa, wearing her agony in screaming serpents that uncoiled furiously from her head. Instead, she withdrew to an unreachable corner of her soul. My mother was no more than a thin shell lying almost transparent on the sand, worn to nearly nothing by the crashing waves.

I would be Medusa, if it came to it, I resolved. If the gods held me accountable one day for the sins of someone else, if they came for me to punish a man’s actions, I would not hide away like Pasiphae. I would wear that coronet of snakes and the world would shrink from me instead.





2


Asterion, my terrible brother, was born in my tenth year, not long after Eirene told us that story. I had attended my mother after the births of other children – my brother Deucalion and my sister Phaedra – so I believed that I knew what to expect. It was not so with Asterion. The agony was writ deep throughout Pasiphae. Her divine blood from Helios sustained her life through the ordeal but it did not shield her from the pain – pain I shrank from imagining, though in the depths of night I would be unable to prevent my thoughts from wandering there. The thought of scraping hooves, the budding horns upon his misshapen head, the panic of his drumming limbs – I shuddered to envision exactly how he had torn his way free from my mother, a fragile sunbeam. The furnace of pain in which he was cast shattered the gentle Pasiphae and my already absented mother never truly returned to me from that journey into flame and suffering.