Circe(52)

My woods had gone quiet behind me. All the animals were still, crouching to the ground. As a child, he had liked to lean his head upon my shoulder and watch the seagulls dip to catch their fish. His laugh had been bright as morning sun.

“I met Daedalus,” I said.

He frowned. “Daedalus? He has been dead for years. Where is Medea? Give her to me.”

“She is not here,” I said.

If I had turned the sea to stone I do not think he could have been more shocked. His face bloomed with incredulity and rage.

“You let her go?”

“She did not want to stay.”

“Did not want to? She is a criminal and a traitor! It was your duty to keep her for me!”

I had never seen him so angry before. I had never seen him angry at all. Even so, his face was beautiful, like the waves when they lift their storm-heads. I could still ask for his forgiveness, it was not too late. I could say she tricked me. I was his foolish sister, who trusted too easily and could not see into the cracks of the world. Then he would come ashore and we might—but my imagination would not finish the thought. Behind him at their oar benches sat his men. They stared straight ahead. They had not stirred, not even to brush off a fly or scratch an itch. Their faces were slack and empty, their arms covered in scars and crusted scabs. Old burns.

I had lost him long ago.

The air whipped around us. “Do you hear?” he shouted. “I should punish you.”

“No,” I said. “In Colchis you may work your will. But this is Aiaia.”

A second moment’s true surprise on his face. Then his mouth twisted. “You have done nothing. I will have her in the end.”

“That may be true. But I do not think she will make it easy. She is like you, Ae?tes, as oak to oak. She must live with that, and so, it seems, must you.”

He sneered, then turned and lifted his arm. His sailors moved their joints as one. The oars beat the water and carried him from me.





Chapter Fourteen



OUTSIDE THE WINTER RAINS had begun to fall. My lioness whelped, and her cubs tumbled across the hearth on their clumsy, new-made paws. I could not smile at it. The earth seemed to echo where I walked. Above me the sky stretched out its empty hands.

I waited for Hermes so I might ask him what became of Medea and Jason, but he always seemed to know when I wanted him, and stayed away. I tried to weave, but my mind felt needle-pricked. Now that Medea had named my loneliness, it hung from everything, clinging like spiderwebs, unavoidable. I ran along the beach, gasped up and down the forest paths, trying to shake it from me. I sifted and resifted my memories of Ae?tes, all those hours we had leaned against each other. That old sickening feeling returned: that every moment of my life I had been a fool.

I helped Prometheus, I reminded myself. But it sounded pathetic even to my ears. How long would I cling to that handful of minutes, trying to cover myself as if with some threadbare blanket? It did not matter what I had done then. Prometheus was on his crag, and I was here.

The days moved slowly, dropping like petals from a blown rose. I gripped the cedar loom and made myself breathe its scent. I tried to remember the feel of Daedalus’ scars beneath my fingers, but the memories were built of air, and blew away. Someone will come, I thought. All the ships in the world, all the men. Someone must. I stared into the horizon until my eyes blurred, hoping for some fishermen, some cargo, even a shipwreck. There was nothing.

I pressed my face into my lion’s fur. Surely there was some divine trick to make the hours go faster. To let them slip past unseen, to sleep for years, so that when I woke again the world would be new. I closed my eyes. Through the window I heard the bees singing in the garden. My lion’s tail beat against the stones. An eternity later, when I opened my eyes, the shadows had not even moved.



She was standing over me, frowning. Dark-haired, dark-eyed, with round limbs and a head neat as a nightingale’s breast. A familiar smell wafted from her skin. Rose oil and my grandfather’s river.

“I am come to serve you,” she said.

I had been drowsing in my chair. I stared up blearily, thinking she must be an apparition, some hallucination of my solitude. “What?”

She wrinkled her nose. Apparently all her humility had been used up in those words. “I am Alke,” she said. “Is this not Aiaia? Are you not the daughter of Helios?”

“I am.”

“I am sentenced to be your servant.”

I felt as if I dreamed. Slowly, I got to my feet. “Sentenced? By whom? I have not heard of such a thing. Speak, what power sent you?”

Naiads show their feelings as water shows ripples. However she had told herself this would go, it was not like this. “The great gods sent me.”

“Zeus?”

“No,” she said. “My father.”

“And who is he?”

She named some minor river-lord in the Peloponnese. I had heard of him, perhaps met him once, but he had never sat in my father’s halls.

“Why send you to me?”

She looked at me as if I were the greatest idiot she had ever met. “You are a daughter of Helios.”

How could I have forgotten what it was like among the lesser gods? The desperate clawing for any advantage. Even disgraced, I still had the blood of the sun in my veins, which made me a desirable mistress. Indeed, for such as her father, my disgrace would be encouragement, lowering me enough that he dared to reach up.