Circe(46)

It was Daedalus who answered. A golden cage is still a cage.



Spring passed into summer, and summer into fragrant autumn. There were mists now in the morning and sometimes storms at night. Winter would come soon with its own beauty, the green hellebore leaves shining amid the brown, and the cypresses tall and black against the metal sky. It was not ever truly cold, not as Mount Dicte’s peak, but I was glad for my new cloaks as I climbed the rocks and stood among the winds. Yet, no matter what beauties I sought, what pleasures I found, my sister’s words followed me, taunting, worming deep in my bones and blood.

“You are wrong about witchcraft,” I told her. “It does not come from hate. I made my first spell for love of Glaucos.”

I could hear her mink-voice as if she stood before me. Yet it was in defiance of our father, in defiance of all those who slighted you and would keep you from your desires.

I had seen the look in my father’s eyes when he knew at last what I was. He was thinking he should have snuffed me in my crib.

Just so. Look how they stopped our mother’s womb. Have you not noticed how easily she twists Father and our aunts?

I had noticed it. It seemed to go beyond beauty, beyond whatever bed-tricks she might know. “She is clever.”

Clever! Pasipha? laughed. You always underestimated her. I would not be surprised if she has witch-blood too. We do not get our charms from Helios.

I had wondered that myself.

You are sorry now you scorned her. You spent every day licking Father’s feet, hoping he would set her aside.

I paced the rocks. I had walked the earth for a hundred generations, yet I was still a child to myself. Rage and grief, thwarted desire, lust, self-pity: these are emotions gods know well. But guilt and shame, remorse, ambivalence, those are foreign countries to our kind, which must be learned stone by stone. I could not stop thinking of my sister’s face, that blank shock when I told her I would never be like her. What had she hoped for? That we would send messages back and forth in seabirds’ mouths? That we would share spells, fight the gods? That we might be, in our way, sisters at last?

I tried to imagine it: our heads bent together over herbs, her laugh as she devised some cleverness. I wished then—oh, a dozen impossible things. That I had known sooner what she was. That we had grown up somewhere other than those glittering halls. I could have blunted her poisons, drawn her from her abuses, taught her how to gather the best herbs.

Hah! she said. I will take no lessons from fools like you. You are weak and blind, and it is worse because you choose it. You will be sorry in the end.

It was always easier when she was hateful. “I am not weak. And I will never be sorry not to be like you. Do you hear?”

There was no answer, of course. Only the air, eating my words.



Hermes returned. I no longer thought that he had conspired with Pasipha?. It was only his nature to vaunt his knowledge and laugh at what others did not know. He lounged in my silver chair. “So how did you like Crete? I heard you had some excitement.”

I gave him food and wine, and took him to my bed that night. He was handsome as ever, keen and playful in our couplings. But a distaste rose in me now when I looked at him. One moment I would be laughing, and the next his jests turned sour in my throat. When his hands reached for me, I felt a strange dislocation. They were perfect and unscarred.

My ambivalence, of course, only encouraged him. Any challenge was a game, and any game a pleasure. If I had loved him, he would have been gone, yet my revulsion brought him back and back. He pressed hard to wrap me up, bringing gifts and news, unfolding the whole tale of the Minotaur to me without my asking.

After I had sailed away, he said, Minos and Pasipha?’s eldest, Androgeos, had visited the mainland and been killed near Athens. By then, the people of Crete were restive at having to lose their sons and daughters every harvest, and were threatening revolt. Minos seized his opportunity. He demanded, as payment for his son, that the Athenian king send seven youths and seven maids to feed the monster, or else Crete’s mighty navy would bring war. The frightened king agreed, and one of the youths chosen was his own child, Theseus.

This prince was the mortal I had seen in the mountain pool. But my vision had not told me all: he might have died, if not for the princess Ariadne. She fell in love with him, and to save his life smuggled him a sword and taught him the way through the Labyrinth, which she had learned from Daedalus himself. Yet when he came out from that maze with his hands covered in the monster’s blood, she had wept, and not for joy.

“I heard,” Hermes said, “that she had an unnatural love for the creature. She would go often to its cage and speak softly to it through the bars, and offer delicacies from her own table. Once, she got too close, and its teeth caught her shoulder. She escaped and Daedalus sewed up the wound, but it left a scar at the base of her neck, in the shape of a crown.”

I remembered her face as she said, my brother. “Was she punished? For helping Theseus?”

“No. She fled with him after the creature was dead. Theseus would have married her, but my brother decided he wanted her for himself. You know how he loves the ones with light feet. He told Theseus to leave her on an island, and he would come to claim her.”

I knew which brother he meant. Dionysus, lord of ivy and the grape. Riotous son of Zeus, whom mortals call Releaser, for he frees them from their cares. At least, I thought, with Dionysus she would dance every night.