Circe Read online

  The sailors dropped the anchor, and a single man leapt over the low side and splashed to shore. He followed the seam of beach and woods until he found a path, a small pig trail that wound upwards through the acanthus spears and laurel groves, past the thorn-bush thicket. I lost sight of him then, but I knew where the trail led. I waited.

  He checked when he saw my lion, but only for a moment. With his shoulders straight and unbowed, he knelt to me in the clearing’s grass. I realized I knew him. He was older, the skin of his face more lined, but it was the same man, his head still shaved, his eyes clear. Of all the mortals on the earth, there are only a few the gods will ever hear of. Consider the practicalities. By the time we learn their names, they are dead. They must be meteors indeed to catch our attention. The merely good: you are dust to us.

  “Lady,” he said, “I am sorry to trouble you.”

  “You have not been trouble yet,” I said. “Please stand if you like.”

  If he noticed my mortal voice, he gave no sign. He stood up—I will not say gracefully, for he was too solidly built for that—but easily, like a door swinging on a well-fitted hinge. His eyes met mine without flinching. He was used to gods, I thought. And witches too.

  “What brings the famous Daedalus to my shores?”

  “I am honored you would know me.” His voice was steady as a west wind, warm and constant. “I come as a messenger from your sister. She is with child, and her time approaches. She asks that you attend her delivery.”

  I eyed him. “Are you certain you have come to the right place, messenger? There has never been love between my sister and me.”

  “She does not send to you for love,” he said.

  The breeze blew, carrying the scent of linden flowers. At its back, the muddy stink of the pigs.

  “I’m told my sister has bred half a dozen children each more easily than the last. She cannot die in childbirth and her infants thrive with the strength of her blood. So why does she need me?”

  He spread his hands, deft-looking and thickened with muscle. “Pardon, lady, I can say no more, but she bids me tell you that if you do not help her there is no one else who can. It is your art she wants, lady. Yours alone.”

  So Pasiphaë had heard of my powers and decided they could be of use to her. It was the first compliment I had had from her in my life.

  “Your sister instructed me to say besides that she has permission from your father for you to go. Your exile is lifted for this.”

  I frowned. This was all strange, very strange. What was important enough to make her go to my father? And if she needed more magic, why not summon Perses? It seemed like some sort of trick, but I could not understand why my sister would bother. I was no threat to her.

  I could feel myself being tempted. I was curious, of course, but it was more than that. This was a chance to show her what I had become. Whatever trap she might set, she could not catch me in it, not anymore.

  “What a relief to hear of my reprieve,” I said. “I cannot wait to be freed from my terrible prison.” The terraced hills around us glowed with spring.

  He did not smile. “There is—one more thing. I am instructed to tell you that our path lies through the straits.”

  “What straits?”

  But I saw the answer in his face: the dark stains under his eyes, the weary grief.

  Sickness rose in my throat. “Where Scylla dwells.”

  He nodded.

  “She ordered you to come that way as well?”

  “She did.”

  “How many did you lose?”

  “Twelve,” he said. “We were not fast enough.”

  How could I have forgotten who my sister was? She would never just ask a favor, always she must have a whip to drive you to her will. I could see her bragging and laughing to Minos. Circe’s a fool for mortals, I hear.

  I hated her more than I ever had. It was all so cruelly done. I imagined stalking into my house, slamming the door on its great hinge. Too bad, Pasiphaë. You will have to find some other fool.

  But then six more men, or twelve, would die.

  I scoffed at myself. Who said they would live if I went? I knew no spells to ward off monsters. And Scylla would be enraged when she saw me. I would only bring more of her fury upon them.

  Daedalus was watching me, his face shadowed. Far beyond his shoulder, my father’s chariot was slipping into the sea. In their dusty palace rooms, astronomers were even now tracking its sunset glory, hoping their calculations would hold. Their bony knees trembled, thinking of the headsman’s axe.

  I gathered up my clothes, my bag of simples. I closed the door behind me. There was nothing else to do. The lion could take care of herself.

  “I am ready,” I said.

  The ship’s style was new to me, trim and low in the water. Its hull was beautifully painted with rolling waves and curving dolphins, and by the stern an octopus stretched its snaky arms. As the captain hauled at the anchor, I walked up to the prow to examine the figurehead I had seen.

  It was a young girl in a dancing dress. Her face bore a look of happy surprise, eyes wide, lips just parting, her hair loose over her shoulders. Her small hands were clasped to her chest and she was poised on her toes as if music were about to start. Each detail of it, the curls of her hair, the folds of cloth, was so vivid that I thought at any moment she truly would step into the air. Yet that was not even the real miracle. The work showed, I cannot say how, a glimpse of the girl’s self. The searching cleverness in her gaze, the determined grace of her brow. Her excitement and innocence, easy and green as grass.

  I did not have to ask whose hands had shaped it. A wonder of the mortal world, my brother had called Daedalus, but this was a wonder in any world. I pored over its pleasures, finding a new one every moment: the small dimple in her chin, the knob of her ankle, coltish with youth.

  A marvel it was, but also a message. I had been raised at my father’s feet and knew a boast of power when I saw it. Another king, if he had such a treasure, would keep it under guard in his most fortified hall. Minos and Pasiphaë had set it on a ship, exposed to brine and sun, to pirates and sea-wrack and monsters. As if to say: This is a trifle. We have a thousand more, and better yet the man who makes them.

  The drumbeat drew my attention away. The sailors had taken their benches, and I felt the first judders of motion. The harbor waters began to slide past us. My island dwindled behind.

  I turned my eye to the men filling the deck around me. There were thirty-eight in all. At the stern five guards paced in capes and golden armor. Their noses were lumpen, twisted from too many breakings. I remembered Aeëtes sneering at them: Minos’ thugs, dressed up like princes. The rowers were the pick of Knossos’ mighty navy, so large the oars looked dainty in their hands. Around them, the other sailors moved swiftly, raising a canopy to keep off the sun.

  At Minos and Pasiphaë’s wedding, the huddle of mortals I had glimpsed seemed distant and blurred, as alike as leaves on a tree. But here, beneath the sky, each face was relentlessly distinct. This one was thick, this one smooth, this one bearded with a hooked nose and narrow chin. There were scars and calluses and scrapes, age-lines and cowlicks of hair. One had draped a wet cloth around his neck against the heat. Another wore a bracelet made by childish hands, and a third had a head shaped like a bullfinch’s. It made me dizzy to realize that this was but a fraction of a fraction of all the men the world had bred. How could such variation endure, such endless iteration of minds and faces? Did the earth not go mad?

  “May I bring you a seat?” Daedalus said.

  I turned, glad for the respite of his single face. Daedalus could not have been called handsome, but his features had a pleasing sturdiness.

  “I prefer to stand,” I said. I gestured to the prow-piece. “She is beautiful.”

  He inclined his head, a man used to such compliments. “Thank you.”

  “Tell me something. Why does my sister have you under watch?” When we had stepped on board, the largest guard,
the leader, had roughly searched him.

  “Ah.” He smiled slightly. “Minos and Pasiphaë fear that I do not fully…appreciate their hospitality.”

  I remembered Aeëtes saying: Pasiphaë has him trapped.

  “Surely you might have escaped them on the way.”

  “I might escape them often. But Pasiphaë has something of mine I will not leave.”

  I waited for more, but it did not come. His hands rested on the rail. The knuckles were battered, the fingers hatched with white nicks of scars. As though he had plunged them into broken wood or shards of glass.

  “In the straits,” I said. “You saw Scylla?”

  “Not clearly. The cliff was hidden in spray and fog, and she moved too quickly. Six heads, striking twice, with teeth as long as a leg.”

  I had seen the stains on the deck. They had been scrubbed, yet the blood had soaked deep. All that was left of twelve lives. My stomach twisted with guilt, as Pasiphaë had meant it to.

  “You should know I was the one who did it,” I said. “The one who made Scylla what she is. That is why I am exiled, and why my sister had you take this route.”

  I watched his face for surprise or disgust, even terror. But he only nodded. “She told me.”

  Of course she had. She was a poisoner at heart; she wanted to be sure I came as villain, not savior. Except this time it was nothing but the truth.

  “There is something I do not understand,” I said. “For all my sister’s cruelty she is not often foolish. Why would she risk you on this errand?”

  “I earned my place here myself. I am forbidden to say more, but when we arrive in Crete, I think you will understand.” He hesitated. “Do you know if there is anything we can do against her? Scylla?”

  Above us, the sun burned away the last shreds of cloud. The men panted, even under the canopy.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “I will try.”

  We stood in silence beside that leaping girl as the sea fell away.

  That night we camped on the shore of a flourishing green land. Around their fires, the men were tense and quiet, muffled by dread. I could hear their whispers, the wine sloshing as they passed it. No man wanted to lie awake imagining tomorrow.

  Daedalus had marked out a small space for me with a bedroll, but I left it. I could not bear to be hemmed in by all those breathing, anxious bodies.

  It was strange to tread upon earth other than my own. Where I expected a grove, there came a deer thicket. Where I thought there would be pigs, a badger showed its teeth. The terrain was flatter than my island, the forests low, the flowers in different combinations. I saw a bitter almond tree, a flowered cherry. My fingers itched to harvest their fat power. I bent and plucked a poppy, just to hold its color in my hand. I could feel the throb of its black seeds. Come, make us into magic.

  I did not obey. I was thinking of Scylla, trying to piece together an image from everything I had heard of her: six mouths, six heads, twelve dangling feet. But the more I tried, the more it slipped away. Instead I saw her face as it had been in our halls, round and laughing. The curve of her wrist had been like a swan’s neck. Her chin would tilt delicately to whisper some morsel of gossip in my sister’s ear. Beside them, my brother Perses had sat smirking. He used to toy with Scylla’s hair, winding it around his finger. She would turn and slap his shoulder, and the sound would echo across the hall. They both laughed, for they loved to be at the center always, and I remembered wondering why my sister did not mind such displays, for she allowed none near Perses but herself. Yet she only watched and smiled.

  I thought I had passed those years in my father’s halls sightless as a mole, but now more details came back to me. The green robe Scylla used to wear at special feasts, her silver sandals with lapis lazuli on the strap. There was a gold pin with a cat at its end that kept her hair up from her neck. She had it from…Thebes, I thought. Thebes of Egypt, some admirer there, some beast-headed god. What had happened to that bauble? Was it still lying on the grass beside the water, with her discarded clothes?

  I had come to a small rise, crowded with black poplars. I walked among their furrowed trunks. One of them had been struck recently by lightning, and the bole bore a charred, oozing wound. I put my finger to the burnt sap. I could feel its force, and was sorry I had not brought an extra bottle to gather it. It made me think of Daedalus, that upright man with fire in his bones.

  What was the thing he would not leave behind? His face when he had spoken of it had been careful, his words placed as if they were tiles in a fountain. It must be a lover, I thought. Some pretty handmaid of the palace, or else some handsome groom. My sister could smell such intrigues a year away. Perhaps she had even ordered them to his bed, as the hook to catch the fish. But as I tried to picture their faces, I realized I did not believe in them. Daedalus did not seem like a man newly heart-struck, nor an old lover, with a wife of many years molded to his side. I could not imagine him in a pair, only singular and alone. Gold, then? An invention he had made?

  I thought: if I can keep him alive tomorrow, perhaps I will find out.

  The moon was passing overhead, and the night with it. Daedalus’ voice spoke again in my ears. Her teeth are long as a leg. Cold fear ran through me. What had I been thinking, that I could stand against such a creature? Daedalus’ throat would be ripped open, my own flesh snatched up in her mouths. What would I become after she was finished with me? Ash, smoke? Immortal bones dragging across the bottom of the sea.

  My feet had found the shore. I walked it, cool and gray. I listened to the murmur of the waves, the cries of night birds, but if I am honest I was listening for more than that: the quick rush through the air that I had come to know. Each second, I hoped Hermes would land poised before me, laughing, goading. So, witch of Aiaia, what will you do tomorrow?

  I thought of begging him for help, the sand beneath my knees, my palms upstretched. Or perhaps I would knock him down to the earth and please him that way, for he loved most of all to be surprised. I could hear the tale he would tell later. She was so desperate, she was on me like a cat. He should lie with my sister, I thought. They would like each other. It struck me for the first time that perhaps he had. Perhaps they lay together often and laughed at my dullness. Perhaps all this had been his idea, and that was why he had come this morning, to taunt me and gloat. My mind played over our conversation, sifting it for meaning. See how quickly he made one a fool? That was what he desired most of all: to drive others into doubt, keep them wondering and fretting, stumbling behind his dancing feet. I spoke out to the darkness, to any silent wings that hovered there. “I do not care if you lie with her. Have Perses too, he is the handsomer. You will never be such as I am jealous for.”

  Perhaps he was listening, perhaps he was not. It did not matter, he would not come. It was the better jest to see what extremes I would try, to see how I would curse and flounder. My father would not help me either. Aeëtes might, if only to feel the flex of his power, but he was a world away. I could no more reach him than I could fly into the air.

  I was even more desolate than my sister, I thought. I came for her, but there was no one who would come for me. The thought was steadying. After all, I had been alone my whole life. Aeëtes, Glaucos, these were only pauses in the long stretch of my solitude. Kneeling, I dug my fingers into the sand. I felt the rub of grains beneath my nails. A memory drifted through me. My father speaking our old hopeless law to Glaucos: no god may undo what another has done.

  But I was the one who had done it.

  The moon passed over us. The waves pressed their cold mouths to my feet. Elecampane, I thought. Ash and olive and silver fir. Henbane with burnt cornel bark and, at the base of all, moly. Moly, to break a curse, to ward off that evil thought of mine that had changed her in the first place.

  I brushed away the sand and stood, my bag of simples hanging from my shoulder. As I walked, the bottles rang softly, like goats shaking their bells. The smells wafted around me, familiar as my own skin: earth and clingin
g roots, salt and iron blood.

  The next morning the men were gray and silent. One oiled the oarlocks to keep them from squeaking, another scrubbed at the stained deck, his face red, though whether from sun or grief I could not tell. In the stern a third with a black beard was praying and pouring wine onto the waves. None looked at me—I was Pasiphaë’s sister, after all, and they had long since given up any thought of help from her. But I could feel their tension pressing thickly into the air, the choking terror rising in them moment by moment. Death was coming.

  Do not think of it, I told myself. If you hold firm, none will die today.

  The guard captain had yellowed eyes set in a swollen face. His name was Polydamas and he was large, but I was a goddess, and we were of a height. “I need your cloak,” I said to him, “and your tunic, at once.”

  His eyes narrowed, and I could see the reflexive no in them. I would come to know this type of man, jealous of his little power, to whom I was only a woman.

  “Why?” he said.

  “Because I do not desire the death of your comrades. Do you feel otherwise?”

  The words carried up the deck, and thirty-seven pairs of eyes looked up. He stripped off his clothes and handed them to me. They were the finest on board, extravagant white-combed wool edged with deep purple, sweeping the deck.

  Daedalus had come to stand by me. “May I help?”

  I gave him the cloak to hold up. Behind it, I disrobed and drew on the tunic. The armholes gaped and the waist billowed. The smell of sour human flesh enveloped me.

  “Will you help me with the cloak?”

  Daedalus draped it around me, fastening it by its golden octopus pin. The cloth hung heavy as blankets, loose and slipping from my shoulders. “I’m sorry to say, you don’t look like much of a man.”

  “I’m not meant to look like a man,” I said. “I’m meant to look like my brother. Scylla loved him once, perhaps she still does.”