Circe(75)

I waited until Telegonus slept again, for I could not summon the focus I needed while he was fighting against me. Two spells I made that night. One carried the drop of blood and moly; the other had fragments of every part of the island, from its cliffs to its salt flats. I worked in a great frenzy, and when the sun rose I held two stoppered flasks before me.

My chest was heaving with exhaustion, but I would not wait, not another moment. With Telegonus still bound against me, I climbed to the highest peak, a bare strip of rock beneath the hanging sky. I set my feet upon the stone. “Athena would kill my child, and so I defend him,” I cried. “Be witness now to the power of Circe, witch of Aiaia.”

I poured the blood-draught on the rock. It hissed like molten bronze in water. White smoke billowed into the air, rising, spreading. It massed, forming a great arc over the island, closing us in. A layer of living death. If Athena came, she would be forced to turn aside, like a shark meeting fresh water.

The second spell I cast beneath it. It was an enchantment woven into the island itself, every bird and beast and grain of sand, every leaf and rock and drop of water. I marked them, and all the generations in their bellies, with Telegonus’ name. If ever she did break through that smoke, the island would rise up in his defense, the beasts and birds, the branches and rocks, the roots in the earth. Then we would make our stand together.

I stood beneath the sun, waiting for an answer: a sizzling thunderbolt. Athena’s gray spear, pinning my heart to the rock. I could hear myself panting a little. The weight of those spells was dragging at my neck like a yoke. They were too great to stand by themselves, and hour after hour I would have to carry them with me, brace them up with my will, and renew them in full each month. Three days it would take me. One to regather all those pieces of the island, beach and grove and meadow, scale and feather and fur. Another day to mix them. A third of utmost concentration to draw out the stink of death from the drops of blood I hoarded. And all the while Telegonus would twist and wail against me, and the spells would grind down upon my shoulders. None of that mattered. I had said I would do anything for him, and now I would prove it and hold up the sky.

I waited all morning, tensed, but no answer came. It was done, I finally realized. We were free. Not just from Athena, but from all of them. The spells hung on me, yet I felt weightless. For the first time, Aiaia was ours alone. Giddily, I knelt and unwrapped my fighting son. I set him down upon the earth, free. “You are safe. We may be happy at last.”

What a fool I was. All those days of my fear and his constraint were like a debt that must be paid. He careered across the island, refusing to sit, or even stop for a moment. Athena had been barred, yet there still remained all the ordinary dangers of the island, rocks and cliffs and stinging creatures that I had to pry from his hands. Whenever I tried to reach for him, he would run, darting and defiant, towards some precipice. He seemed angry at the world. The stone he could not throw far enough, his own legs, which did not run fast enough. He wanted to scale the trees like the lions did, in a great leap, and when he could not he would beat at their trunks with his fists.

I would try to take him in my arms, telling him, Have patience, your strength will come in time. But he arched away from me screaming, and nothing could console him, for he was not one of those children whom you may wave something shiny at and they will forget. I gave him soothing herbs and possets, even sleeping draughts, but they did nothing. The only thing that calmed him was the sea. The wind that was as restless as he was, the waves filled with their motion. He would stand in the surf, his small hand in mine, and point. The horizon, I named. The open sky. The waves and tides and currents. He would whisper the sounds to himself all the rest of the day, and if I tried to pull him away, show him something else, fruits or flowers, some small spell, he would leap from me, twisting up his face. No!

The worst were the days when I had to shape those two spells again. He ran from me whenever I wanted him, but the moment I took up my work, he would drum at the floor with his heels, crying for my attention. Tomorrow I will take you to the sea, I promised. But that was nothing to him, and he would tear apart the house to draw my eye. He was older by then, too big to be slung to my chest, and the disasters he could cause had grown with him. He toppled over a table filled with plates; he climbed up the shelves and smashed my phials. I would set the wolves to watch him, but he was too much for them, and they fled to the garden. I could feel my panic rising. The spell would run out before I could cast it. Athena would arrive in her rage.

I know what I was in those days: unsteady, inconstant, a badly made bow. Every fault in me his raising laid bare. Every selfishness, every weakness. One day, when the spells were due, he picked up a great glass bowl and broke it in shards on his bare feet. I came running to pluck him away, to sweep and scrub, but he battered at me as if I had taken his dearest friend. At last I had to put him in a bedroom and shut the door between us. He screamed and screamed, and there came a pounding like his head against the wall. I finished my cleaning and tried to work, but my own head was beating at itself by then. I kept thinking that if I let him rage long enough, he must at last wear himself out and sleep. But he only went on, wilder and wilder as the shadows lengthened. The day was passing and the spell not done. It would be easy to say that my hands moved on their own, but that is not how it was. I was angry, burning hot.

I had always sworn to myself that I would not use magic on him. It seemed like something Ae?tes would do, setting my will over his. But in that moment I seized the poppy, sleep-drugs, all the rest, brewed them till they sizzled. I went to the room. He was kicking the pieces of shutter that he had torn from the windows. Come, I said. Drink this.