Circe(57)

A few of these, so few I can count them on my fingers, I let go. They did not see me as their dinner. They were pious men, honestly lost, and I would feed them, and if there was a handsome one among them I might take him to my bed. It was not desire, not even its barest scrapings. It was a sort of rage, a knife I used upon myself. I did it to prove my skin was still my own. And did I like the answer I found?

“Leave,” I told them.

They knelt to me on my yellow sands. “Goddess,” they said, “at least give us your name so we may send you our thankful prayers.”

I did not want their prayers, nor my name in their mouths. I wanted them gone. I wanted to scrub myself in the sea until the blood showed through.

I wanted the next crew to come, so I might see again their tearing flesh.

There was always a leader. He was not the largest, and he need not be the captain, but he was the one they looked to for instruction in their cruelty. He had a cold eye and a coiling tension. Like a snake, the poets might say, but I knew snakes better by then. Give me the honest asp, who strikes me if I trouble him and not before.

I did not send my animals away anymore when men came. I let them loll where they liked, around the garden, under my tables. It pleased me to see the men walk among them, trembling at their teeth and unnatural tameness. I did not pretend to be a mortal. I showed my lambent, yellow eyes at every turn. None of it made a difference. I was alone and a woman, that was all that mattered.

I set my feasts before them, the meats and cheese, the fruits and fish. I set as well my largest bronze mixing bowl, filled to the brim with wine. They gulped and chewed, seized dripping cuts of mutton and dangled them down their throats. They poured and poured again, soaking their lips, slopping the table with red. Bits of barley and herbs stuck to their lips. The bowl is empty, they would say to me. Fill it. Add more honey this time, the vintage has a bitter tang.

Of course, I said.

The edge came off their hunger. They began to look around. I saw them notice the marble floors, the platters, the fine weave of my clothes. They smirked. If this was what I dared to show them, imagine what might be hiding in the back.

“Mistress?” the leader would say. “Do not tell me that such a beauty as yourself dwells all alone?”

“Oh, yes,” I would answer. “Quite alone.”

He would smile. He could not help it. There was never any fear in him. Why should there be? He had already noted for himself that there was no man’s cloak hanging by the door, no hunter’s bow, no shepherd’s staff. No sign of brothers or fathers or sons, no vengeance that would follow after. If I were valuable to anyone, I would not be allowed to live alone.

“I’m sorry to hear it,” he said.

The bench would scrape, and he would stand. The men watched with bright eyes. They wanted the freeze, the flinch, the begging that would come.

It was my favorite moment, seeing them frown and try to understand why I wasn’t afraid. In their bodies I could feel my herbs like strings waiting to be plucked. I savored their confusion, their dawning fear. Then I plucked them.

Their backs bent, forcing them onto hands and knees, faces bloating like drowned corpses. They thrashed and the benches turned over, wine splattered the floor. Their screams broke into squeals. I am certain it hurt.

I kept the leader for last, so he could watch. He shrank, pressed against the wall. Please. Spare me, spare me, spare me.

No, I would say. Oh, no.

When it was over it remained only to drive them out to the pen. I raised my staff of ash wood and they ran. The gate closed after them and they pressed back against the posts, their piggy eyes still wet with the last of their human tears.

My nymphs said not a word, though I suspected they watched sometimes through the crack of the door.

“Mistress Circe, another ship. Shall we go back to our room?”

“Please. And pull out the wine for me before you go.”

From one task to another I went, weaving, working, slopping my pigs, crossing and recrossing the isle. I moved straight-backed, as if a great brimming bowl rested in my hands. The dark liquid rippled as I walked, always at the point of overflow, yet never flowing. Only if I stopped, if I lay down, did I feel it begin to bleed.

Brides, nymphs were called, but that is not really how the world saw us. We were an endless feast laid out upon a table, beautiful and renewing. And so very bad at getting away.

The rails of my sty cracked with age and use. From time to time the wood buckled and a pig escaped. Most often, he would throw himself from the cliffs. The seabirds were grateful; they seemed to come from half the world away to feast on the plump bones. I would stand watching as they stripped the fat and sinew. The small pink scrap of tail-skin dangled from one of their beaks like a worm. If it were a man, I wondered if I would pity him. But it was not a man.

When I passed back by the pen, his friends would stare at me with pleading faces. They moaned and squealed, and pressed their snouts to the earth. We are sorry, we are sorry.

Sorry you were caught, I said. Sorry that you thought I was weak, but you were wrong.

On my bed, the lions rested their chins on my stomach. I pushed them off. I rose and walked again.



He asked me once, why pigs. We were seated before my hearth, in our usual chairs. He liked the one draped in cowhide, with silver inlaid in its carvings. Sometimes he would rub the scrolling absently beneath his thumb.

“Why not?” I said.