Circe(97)

“You see it as a sort of vengeance then. Bringing a god down on my head.”

“I see it as payment in kind.”

She would have made an archer, I thought. That cold-eyed precision.

“You have no ground to make bargains, Lady Penelope. This is Aiaia.”

“Then let me not bargain. What would you prefer, begging? Of course, you are a goddess.”

She knelt at the foot of my loom and lifted her hands, lowering her eyes to the floor. “Daughter of Helios, Bright-eyed Circe, Mistress of Beasts and Witch of Aiaia, grant me sanctuary on your dread isle, for I have no husband and no home, and nowhere else in the world is safe for me and my son. I will give you blood every year, if you will hear me.”

“Get up.”

She did not move. The posture looked obscene on her. “My husband spoke warmly of you. More warmly, I confess, than I liked. He said of all the gods and monsters he had met, you were the only one he would wish to meet again.”

“I said, get up.”

She rose.

“You will tell me everything, and then I will decide.”

We faced each other across the shadowed room. The air tasted of lightning. She said, “You have been talking to my son. He will have implied that his father was lost in the war. That he came home changed, too soaked in death and grief to live as an ordinary man. The curse of soldiers. Is it so?”

“Something like that.”

“My son is better than I am, and better than his father too. Yet he does not see all things.”

“And you do?”

“I am from Sparta. We know about old soldiers there. The trembling hands, the startling from sleep. The man who spills his wine every time the trumpets blow. My husband’s hands were steady as a blacksmith’s, and when the trumpets sounded, he was first to the harbor scanning the horizon. The war did not break him; it made him more himself. At Troy he found at last a scope to equal his abilities. Always a new scheme, a new plot, a new disaster to avert.”

“He tried to get out of the war.”

“Ah, that old story. The madness, the plow. That too was a plot. He had sworn an oath to the gods—he knew there was no getting out. He expected to be caught. Then the Greeks would laugh at his failure and think that all his tricks would be so easily seen through.”

I was frowning. “He gave no sign of that when he told me.”

“I’m sure he didn’t. My husband lied with every breath, and that includes to you, and to himself. He never did anything for a single purpose.”

“He said the same of you once.”

I meant it to wound her, but she only nodded. “We thought ourselves great minds of the world. When we were first married, we made a thousand plans together, of how we would turn everything we touched to our advantage. Then the war came. He said Agamemnon was the worst commander he had ever seen, but he thought he could use him to make a name for himself. And so he did. His contrivances defeated Troy and reshaped half the world. I contrived too. Which goats to breed with which, how to increase the harvest, where the fishermen could best cast their nets. Such were our pressing concerns on Ithaca. You should have seen his face when he came home. He killed the suitors, but then what was left? Fish and goats. A graying wife who was no goddess and a son he could not understand.”

Her voice filled the air, sharp as crushed cypress.

“There were no war councils, no armies to conquer or command. What men there had once been were dead, since half were his crew and the other half my suitors. And every day there seemed to come some fresh report of distant glory. Menelaus had built a brand-new golden palace. Diomedes had conquered a kingdom in Italy. Even Aeneas, that Trojan refugee, had founded a city. My husband sent to Orestes, Agamemnon’s son, offering himself as counselor. Orestes sent back that he had all the counselors he needed, and anyway he would never want to disturb the rest of such a hero.

“He sent to more sons after that, Nestor’s and Idomeneus’ and others’, but they all said the same. They did not want him. And do you know what I told myself? That he only needed time. That any moment he would remember the pleasures of modest home and hearth. The pleasures of my presence. We would plot together again.” Her mouth twisted in self-mockery. “But he did not want that life. He would go down to the beach and pace. I watched him from my window and remembered a story he’d told me once about a great serpent that the men of the north believe in, which yearns to devour all the world.”

I remembered that story too. In the end, the serpent ate itself.

“And as he paced, he would talk to the air, which gathered all around him, glowing brightest silver on his skin.”

Silver. “Athena.”

“Who else?” She smiled, bitter and cold. “Every time he would calm she came again. Whispering in his ear, darting down from the clouds to fill him up with dreams of all the adventures he was missing.”

Athena, that restless goddess whose schemes spun on and on. She had fought to bring her hero home, to see him lifted among his people, for her honor and his. To hear him tell the tales of his victories, of the deaths they had dealt to the Trojans together. But I remembered the greed in her eyes when she spoke of him: an owl with a kill in its claws. Her favorite could never be allowed to grow dull and domestic. He must live in action’s eye, bright and polished, always striving and seeking, always delighting her with some new twist of cleverness, some brilliance he summoned out of the air.