Circe(27)

“Will you not be punished for coming here and breaking my exile?”

He smiled. “Father knows I do what I like. And anyway, I break nothing. It is only you who are confined. The rest of the world may come and go as we please.”

I was surprised. “But I thought—is it not the greater punishment to force me to be alone?”

“That depends on who visits you, doesn’t it? But exile is exile. Zeus wanted you contained, and so you are. They didn’t really think about it further.”

“How do you know all this?”

“I was there. Watching Zeus and Helios negotiate is always good entertainment. Like two volcanoes trying to decide if they should blow.”

He had fought in the great war, I remembered. He had seen the sky burn, and slain a giant whose head brushed the clouds. For all his lightness, I found I could imagine it.

“Tell me,” I said, “can you play that instrument? Or only steal it?”

He touched his fingers to the strings. The notes leapt out into the air, bright and silver-sweet. He gathered them into a melody as effortlessly as if he were a god of music himself, so that the whole room seemed to live inside the sound.

He looked up, the fire caught in his face. “Do you sing?”

That was another thing about him. He made you want to spill your secrets.

“Only for myself,” I said. “My voice is not pleasing to others. I am told it sounds like a gull crying.”

“Is that what they said? You are no gull. You sound like a mortal.”

The confusion must have been plain on my face, for he laughed.

“Most gods have voices of thunder and rocks. We must speak soft to human ears, or they are broken to pieces. To us, mortals sound faint and thin.”

I remembered how gentle Glaucos’ words had sounded when he had first spoken to me. I had taken it for a sign.

“It is not common,” he said, “but sometimes lesser nymphs are born with human voices. Such a one are you.”

“Why did no one tell me? And how could it be? There is no mortal in me, I am Titan only.”

He shrugged. “Who can ever explain how divine bloodlines work? As for why no one said, I suspect they didn’t know. I spend more time with mortals than most gods and have grown accustomed to their sounds. To me it is only another flavor, like season in food. But if you are ever among men, you’ll notice it: they won’t fear you as they fear the rest of us.”

In a minute he had unraveled one of the great mysteries of my life. I raised my fingers to my throat as if I could touch the strangeness that lay there. A god with a mortal’s voice. It was a shock, and yet there was part of me that felt something almost like recognition.

“Play,” I said. I began to sing, and the lyre followed my voice effortlessly, its timbre rising to sweeten my every phrase. When I finished, the flames were down to their coals and the moon veiled. His eyes shone like dark gems held to light. They were black, one of the marks of deep-running power, from the line of the oldest gods. For the first time it struck me how strange it was that we divide Titans from Olympians, when of course Zeus was born from Titan parents, and Hermes’ own grandfather was the Titan Atlas. The same blood runs in all our veins.

“Do you know the name of this island?” I said.

“I would be a poor god of travelers if I did not know all the places in the world.”

“And will you tell me?”

“It is called Aiaia,” he said.

“Aiaia.” I tasted the sounds. They were soft, folding quietly as wings in the darkened air.

“You know it,” he said. He was watching me closely.

“Of course. It is the place where my father threw his strength to Zeus and proved his loyalty. In the sky above this place, he vanquished a Titan giant, drenching the land with blood.”

“It is quite a coincidence,” he said, “that your father would send you to this island among all the others.”

I could feel his power reaching for my secrets. In the old days I would have rushed forth with a brimming cup of answers, to give him all he wanted. But I was not the same as I had been. I owed him nothing. He would have of me only what I wanted to give.

I rose and stood before him. I could feel my own eyes, yellow as river-stones. “Tell me,” I said, “how do you know that your father is not right about my poisons? How do you know I will not drug you where you sit?”

“I do not.”

“Yet you would dare to stay?”

“I dare anything,” he said.

And that is how we came to be lovers.



Hermes returned often in the years that followed, winging through the dusk. He brought delicacies of the gods—wine stolen from Zeus’ own stores, the sweetest honey of Mount Hybla, where the bees drink only thyme and linden blossoms. Our conversations were pleasures, and our couplings were the same.

“Will you bear my child?” he asked me.

I laughed at him. “No, never and never.”

He was not hurt. He liked such sharpness, for there was nothing in him that had any blood you might spill. He asked only for curiosity’s sake, because it was his nature to seek out answers, to press others for their weaknesses. He wanted to see how moonish I was over him. But all the sop in me was gone. I did not lie dreaming of him during the days, I did not speak his name into my pillow. He was no husband, scarcely even a friend. He was a poison snake, and I was another, and on such terms we pleased ourselves.