Circe Read online

  “What was his best part?”

  “His lover, Patroclus. He didn’t like me much, but then the good ones never do. Achilles went mad when he died; nearly mad, anyway.”

  I had turned from the loom by then. I wanted to watch his face as he talked. Through the windows the dark sky was ebbing to gray. A wolf sighed on her paws. I saw him hesitate at last. “Lady Circe,” he said. “Golden witch of Aiaia. You gave us mercy, and we needed it. Our ship is splintered. The men are close to breaking. I am ashamed to ask for more, but I think I must. In my dearest hopes we stay a month. Is it too long?”

  A burst of joy, like honey in my throat. I kept my face steady though.

  “I do not think a month should be too long.”

  He spent his days working on the ship. In the evenings, we would sit before the hearth while the men ate their suppers, and at night he came to my bed. His shoulders were thick, carved from his warrior hours. I ran my hands across his ragged scars. There were pleasures there, but in truth the greater pleasure was after, when we lay together in the darkness and he told me stories of Troy, conjuring the war for me spear by spear. Proud Agamemnon, leader of the host, brittle as badly tempered iron. Menelaus, his brother, whose wife Helen’s abduction had begun the war. Brave, dull-brained Ajax, built like a mountainside. Diomedes, Odysseus’ ruthless right hand. And then the Trojans: handsome Paris, laughing thief of Helen’s heart. His father, white-bearded Priam, king of Troy, beloved by the gods for his gentleness. Hecuba, his queen with a warrior’s spirit, whose womb had borne so many noble fruits. Hector, her eldest, noble heir and bulwark to his great walled city.

  And Odysseus, I thought. The spiral shell. Always another curve out of sight.

  I began to see what he’d meant when he had talked of his army’s weakness. It was not their sinews that had wavered, but their discipline. There had never been a parade of prouder men, more fractious and unyielding, each certain the war would fail without them.

  “Do you know who truly wins wars?” he asked me one night.

  We lay on the rugs at the foot of my bed. Moment by moment, his vitality had returned. His eyes were bright now, storm-lit. When he talked, he was lawyer and bard and crossroads charlatan at once, arguing his case, entertaining, pulling back the veil to show you the secrets of the world. It was not just his words, though they were clever enough. It was everything together: his face, his gestures, the sliding tones of his voice. I would say it was like a spell he cast, but there was no spell I knew that could equal it. The gift was his alone.

  “The generals take the credit, of course, and indeed they provide the gold. But they are always calling you into their tent and asking for reports of what you’re doing instead of letting you go do it. The songs say it is heroes. They are another piece. When Achilles puts on his helmet and cleaves his red path through the field, the hearts of common men swell in their chests. They think of the stories that will be told, and they long to be in them. I fought beside Achilles. I stood shield to shield with Ajax. I felt the wind and fan of their great spears. Those soldiers, of course, are yet another piece, for though they are weak and unsteady, when they are harnessed together they will carry you to victory. But there is a hand that must gather all those pieces and make them whole. A mind to guide the purpose, and not flinch from war’s necessities.”

  “And that is your part,” I said. “Which means you are like Daedalus after all. Only instead of wood, you work in men.”

  The look he gave me. Like purest, unmixed wine. “After Achilles died, Agamemnon named me Best of the Greeks. Other men fought bravely, but they flinched from war’s true nature. Only I had the stomach to see what must be done.”

  His chest was bare and hatched with scars. I tapped it lightly, as if sounding what lay within. “Such as?”

  “You promise mercy to spies so they will spill their story, then you kill them after. You beat men who mutiny. You coax heroes from their sulks. You keep spirits high at any cost. When the great hero Philoctetes was crippled with a festering wound, the men lost their courage over it. So I left him behind on an island and claimed he had asked to be left. Ajax and Agamemnon would have battered at Troy’s locked gates until they died, but it was I who thought of the trick of the giant horse, and I spun the story that convinced the Trojans to pull it inside. I crouched in the wooden belly with my picked men, and if any shook with terror and strain, I put my knife to his throat. When the Trojans finally slept, we tore through them like foxes among soft-feathered chicks.”

  These were no songs to sing before a court, no tales from the great golden age. Yet somehow in his mouth they did not seem dishonorable, but just and inspired and wisely pragmatic.

  “Why did you go to war in the first place, if you knew what the other kings were like?”

  He rubbed at his cheek. “Oh, because of a foolish oath I swore. I tried to get out of it. My son was a year old, and I still felt new-married. There would be other glories, I thought, and when Agamemnon’s man came to collect me I pretended to be mad. I went out naked and began plowing a winter field. He put my infant son in the blade’s path. I stopped, of course, and so I was collected with the rest.”

  A bitter paradox, I thought: to keep his son he had to lose him.

  “You must have been angry.”

  He lifted his hands, let them drop. “The world is an unjust place. Look what happened to that counselor of Agamemnon’s. Palamedes, his name was. He served the army well, but fell in a pit while on a night watch. Someone had set sharpened stakes in the bottom. Terrible loss.”

  His eyes glittered. If good Patroclus had been there he might have said, Sir, you are no true hero, no Heracles, no Jason. You speak no honest speeches from pure heart. You do no noble deeds in the gleaming sunlight.

  But I had met Jason. And I knew what sort of deeds could be done in the sun’s sight. I said nothing.

  The days passed, and the nights with them. My house was crowded with some four dozen men, and for the first time in my life, I found myself steeped in mortal flesh. Those frail bodies of theirs took relentless attention, food and drink, sleep and rest, the cleaning of limbs and fluxes. Such patience mortals must have, I thought, to drag themselves through it hour after hour. The fifth day, Odysseus’ awl slipped and punctured the pad of his thumb. I gave him salves and worked my charms to drive off infection, but it still took half a moon to heal. I watched the pain passing over his face. Now it hurt, and now still it hurt, and now, and now. And that was only one among his discomforts, stiff neck and acid stomach and the ache of old wounds. I ran my hands over his ribbed scars, easing him as I could. The scars themselves I offered to wipe away. He shook his head. “How would I know myself?”

  I was secretly glad. They suited him. Enduring Odysseus, he was, and the name was stitched into his skin. Whoever saw him must salute and say: There is a man who has seen the world. There is a captain with stories to tell.

  I might have told him, in those hours, stories of my own. Scylla and Glaucos, Aeëtes, the Minotaur. The stone wall cutting into my back. The floor of my hall wet with blood, reflecting the moon. The bodies I had dragged one by one down the hill, and burned with their ship. The sound flesh makes when it tears and re-forms and how, when you change a man, you may stop the transformation partway through, and then that monstrous, half-beast thing will die.

  His face would be intent as he listened, his relentless mind examining, weighing and cataloguing. However I pretended I could conceal my thoughts as well as he, I knew it was not true. He would see down to my bones. He would gather my weaknesses up and set them with the rest of his collection, alongside Achilles’ and Ajax’s. He kept them on his person as other men keep their knives.

  I looked down at my body, bare in the fire’s light, and tried to imagine it written over with its history: my palm with its lightning streak, my hand missing its fingers, the thousand cuts from my witch-work, the gristled furrows of my father’s fire, the skin of my face like some half-melted taper. And those were
only the things that had left marks.

  There would be no salutes. What had Aeëtes called an ugly nymph? A stain upon the face of the world.

  My smooth belly glowed beneath my hand, the color of honey shining in the sun. I drew him down to me. I was a golden witch, who had no past at all.

  I began to know his men a little, those unsteady hearts that he had spoken of, those leaky vessels. Polites was better-mannered than the rest, Eurylochos stubborn and sulky. Thin-faced Elpenor had a laugh like a screechy owl. They reminded me of wolf pups, their griefs gone when their bellies were full. They looked down when I passed, as if to be sure their hands were still their own.

  Every day they spent at games. They held races through the hills and on the beach. They were always running up to Odysseus, panting. Will you judge our archery contest? Our discus throw? Our spears?

  Sometimes he would go off smiling with them, but sometimes he would shout, or strike them. He was not so easy and even as he pretended. Living with him was like standing beside the sea. Each day a different color, a different foam-capped height, but always the same restless intensity pulling towards the horizon. When the rail broke on his ship he kicked it out in fury and threw the pieces into the sea. The next day he went grimly to the forest with his axe, and when Eurylochos offered to help him, he bared his teeth. He could still marshal himself, show the face he must have worn each day to harness Achilles, but it cost him, and after he was prone to moods and tempers. The men would slink away, and I saw the confusion on their faces. Daedalus had said to me once: Even the best iron grows brittle with too much beating.

  I was smooth as oil, calm as windless water. I drew him out, asked him for stories of his travels among foreign lands and men. He told me of the armies of Memnon, son of the Dawn, king of Aethiopia, and the Amazon horsewomen with their crescent shields. He had heard that in Egypt some of their pharaohs were women dressed in men’s clothes. In India, he’d heard, there were ants the size of foxes who dig up gold among the dunes. And to the far north were a people who did not believe that Oceanos’ river circled the earth, but instead it was a great girdling serpent, thick around as a boat and always hungry. It could never be still, for its appetite drove it ever onwards, devouring everything bite by bite, and one day when it had eaten all the world, it would devour itself.

  But however far afield he traveled, always he came back to Ithaca. His olive groves and his goats, his loyal servants and the excellent hunting dogs he’d raised by hand. His noble parents and his old nurse and his first boar hunt, which had given him the long scar I had seen on his leg. His son, Telemachus, would be bringing the herds down from the mountains by now. He will be good with them, I always was. Every prince needs to know his lands, and there’s no better way to learn than by grazing the goats. He never said, What if I go home, and all of it is ash? But I saw the thought in him, living like a second body, and feeding in the dark.

  It was autumn by then, the light thinning, the grass crackling underfoot. The month was nearly gone. We were lying in my bed. “I think we must leave very soon, or else stay the winter.”

  The window was open; the breeze passed over us. It was a trick of his, to set a sentence out like a plate on a table and see what you would put on it. But he surprised me by continuing. “I would stay,” he said. “If you would have me. It will only be until spring. I will go as soon as the seas are passable. It will be scarcely any delay.”

  That last was not said to me, but to some person he argued with silently. His men perhaps, his wife, I did not care. I kept my face turned away so he would not see my pleasure.

  “I will have you,” I said.

  Something shifted in him after that, the releasing of a tension I had not realized he held. The next day he went humming down to the shore with his crew. They dragged the ship into a sheltered cave. They staked it, rolled the sail, stowed all the gear to keep it safely through the winter storms till spring.

  Sometimes, I would see him watching me. An intentness would come over his face, and he would begin to ask me his casual, sideways questions. About the island, about my father, the loom, my history, witchcraft. I had come to know that look well: it was the same he wore when he spotted a crab with a triple claw, or wondered over the trick tides of Aiaia’s east bay. The world was made of mysteries, and I was only another riddle among the millions. I did not answer him, and though he pretended frustration, I began to see that it pleased him in some strange way. A door that did not open at his knock was a novelty in its own right, and a kind of relief as well. All the world confessed to him. He confessed to me.

  Some stories he told me by daylight. Others came only when the fire was burnt out, and there was no one to know his face but the shadows.

  “It was after the cyclops,” he said. “We had a bit of luck at last. We landed on the Island of the Winds. You know it?”

  “King Aeolus,” I said. One of Zeus’ pets, whose job it was to keep track of the gusts that spin ships across the world.

  “I pleased him, and he sped us on our way. He gave me besides a great bag holding all of the contrary winds, so they could not trouble us. For nine days and nine nights we skimmed across the waves. I did not sleep, not even an hour, for I was guarding the bag. I had told my men what it was, of course, but—” He shook his head. “They decided it was treasure I did not wish to share. The portions they had received from Troy had been long lost in the waves. They did not want to come home empty-handed. Well.” He drew a deep breath. “You may imagine what happened.”

  I did imagine it. His men were unrulier than ever now, giddy with the prospect of a whole winter’s idleness. At night they liked to play a game of throwing wine dregs. They picked some trencher as the target, but their aim was terrible, for by then they had drunk down bowl after bowl. The table grew stained as if with slaughter, and they looked to my nymphs to clear it up. When I told them they would do it themselves, they eyed each other, and if I had been anyone else, they would have defied me. But they still remembered their snouts.

  “At last when I could fight it no longer,” Odysseus said, “I fell asleep. I did not feel them take the bag from my hand. It was the howling of the winds that woke me. They whirled out of the bag and blew us back as if we had never left. Every league undone. They think I grieve for their dead comrades, and I do. But sometimes it is all I can do not to kill them myself. They have wrinkles, but no wisdom. I took them to war before they could do any of those things that steady a man. They were unmarried when they left. They had no children. They had no years of lean harvest, when they must scrape the bottom of their stores, and no good years either, that they might learn to save. They have not seen their parents grow old and begin to fail. They have not seen them die. I fear I have robbed them not only of their youth but their age as well.”

  He rubbed at his knuckles. He had been a bowman when he was young, and the strength it takes to string and nock and shoot taxes hands like nothing else. He had left his bow behind when he went to war, but the pain had followed him. He’d told me once that if he had brought the bow, he would have been the best archer in both armies.

  “Then why leave it?”

  Politics, he had explained. The bow was Paris’ weapon. Paris, the pretty wife-stealer. “Among heroes, he was seen as cowardly. No bowman would ever have been made Best of the Greeks, no matter how skilled he was.”

  “Heroes are fools,” I had said.

  He had laughed. “We are agreed.”

  His eyes were closed. He was silent so long I thought he slept. Then he said: “If you could have seen how close we were to Ithaca. I could smell the fishing fires from the beach.”

  I began to ask him for small favors. Would he kill a buck for dinner? Would he catch a few fish? My sty was falling to pieces, might he mend some of the posts? It gave me a sharp pleasure to see him come in the door with full nets, with baskets of fruit from my orchards. He joined me in the garden, staking vines. We spoke of what winds were blowing, how Elpenor had taken to slee
ping on the roof, and whether we should forbid it.

  “That idiot,” he said. “He will break his neck.”

  “I will tell him he only has permission when he’s sober.”

  He snorted. “That will be never.”

  I knew I was a fool. Even if he stayed past that spring to the next, such a man could never be happy closed up on my narrow shores. And even if somehow I found a way to keep him contented, yet still there were limits, for he was mortal, and not young. Give thanks, I told myself. A winter is more than you had with Daedalus.

  I did not give thanks. I learned his favorite foods and smiled to see his pleasure in them. At night we sat together at the hearth and talked over the day. “What do you think,” I asked him, “about the great oak, struck by lightning? Do you think there is rot within?”

  “I will look,” he said. “If there is, it will not be hard to take down. I will do it before dinner tomorrow.”

  He cut it down, then hacked the rest of the day at my brambles. “They were overrun. What you really need is some goats. A flock of four would have them flat in a month. And they’d keep it flat.”

  “And where will I find goats?”

  That word between us, Ithaca, like the breaking of a spell.

  “Never mind,” I said. “I will transform a few of the sheep, that will fix it.”

  At dinner, my nymphs had begun to linger near the men, to lead the ones they liked to their beds. This pleased me too. My household mingling with his. I had once told Daedalus that I would never marry, because my hands were dirty, and I liked my work too much. But this was a man with his own dirty hands.

  And where, Circe, do you think he learned all these domestic niceties?

  My wife, he always said, when he talked of her. My wife, my wife. Those words, carried before him like a shield. Like country folk who will not say the god of death’s name, for fear he will come and take their dearest heart.