Circe Read online

  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 Aeëtes 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.

  He drank and went back to his tearing. I did not mind now. It was almost a pleasure to watch. He would learn his lesson. He would understand who his mother was. I spoke the word.

  He fell like a toppled stone. His head hit the floor so loudly I gasped. I ran to him. I had thought it would be like sleep, his eyes gently closed. But his whole body was rigid, frozen mid-movement, his fingers curled into claws, his mouth open. His skin was cold beneath my fingers. Medea had said she did not know if those slaves in her father’s halls could perceive what happened to them. I knew. Behind his blank eyes, I could feel his confusion and terror.

  I cried out in horror, and the spell broke. His body sagged, then he scrambled away, staring wildly back at me like a cornered beast. I wept. My shame was hot as blood. I’m sorry, I told him, again and again. He let me come to him, take him in my arms. Gently, I touched the lump that had risen where he had struck his head. I spoke a word to ease it.

  The room was dark by then. Outside, the sun was gone. I held him in my lap as long as I dared, murmuring to him, singing. Then I carried him to the kitchen and gave him dinner. He ate it, clinging to me, and revived. He slid down and began to run again, slamming doors, pulling everything from the shelves that he could reach. I felt a weariness in me so great I thought I would sink into the earth. And every moment that passed, the spell against Athena went undone.

  He kept looking at me over his shoulder. As if he were daring me to come at him, to witch him, to hit him, I did not know. Instead I reached up to the highest shelf for the great clay honey jar he was always yearning for. Here, I said. Take it.

  He ran to it, rolling it in circles until it broke to pieces. Then he wallowed in the sticky puddles, and raced off, trailing threads for the wolves to lick. And so I finished the spells. It took a long time to bathe him and carry him to bed, but at last he lay beneath the quilts. He held my hand, his small warm fingers curled around mine. Guilt and shame sawed at me. He should hate me, I thought. He should flee. But I was all he had. His breath began to drag, and his limbs slackened. “Why can you not be more peaceful?” I whispered. “Why must it be so hard?”

  As if in answer, a vision of my father’s halls drifted up: the sterile earth floor, the black gleam of obsidian. The sound of the game pieces moving on their board, and my father’s golden legs beside me. I had lain quiet and still, but I remembered the ravening hunger that was in me always: to climb into my father’s lap, to rise and run and shout, snatch the draughts from the board and batter them against the walls. To stare at the logs until they burst into flame, to shake him for every secret, as fruits are shaken from a tree. But if I had done
even one of those things there would have been no mercy. He would have burnt me down to ash.

  The moon lay on my son’s forehead. I saw the smudges that water and cloth had not quite scrubbed away. Why should he be peaceful? I never was, nor his father either, when I knew him. The difference was that he was not afraid to be burnt.

  In the long days that followed I clutched that thought like a spar that would save me from the waves. And it did help a little. For when he stared at me, furious and defiant, his whole spirit drawn up against me, I could think of it and take one more breath.

  A thousand years I had lived, but they did not feel so long as Telegonus’ childhood. I had prayed that he would speak early, but then I was sorry for it, since it only gave voice to his storms. No, no, no, he cried, wrenching away from me. And then, a moment later, he would climb over my lap, shouting Mother until my ears ached. I am here, I told him, right here. Yet it was not close enough. I might walk with him all day, play every game he asked for, but if my attention strayed for even a moment, he would rage and wail, clinging to me. I yearned for my nymphs then, for anyone that I might seize by the arm and say, What is wrong with him? But then in the next moment, I was glad no one could see what I had done to him, letting all those early months of my terror batter at his head. No wonder he stormed.

  Come, I coaxed. Let’s do something fun. I will show you magic. Shall I change this berry for you? But he flung it away and ran off to the sea again. Every night when he slept, I stood over his bed and told myself: tomorrow I will do better. Sometimes it was even true. Sometimes, we would run laughing down to the beach and he would sit snug in my lap as we watched the waves. His feet still kicked, his hands pulled restlessly at the skin of my arms. Yet his cheek lay on my chest, and I felt the swell and fall of his breath. My patience overflowed. Scream and scream, I thought. I can bear it.

  Will it was, every hour, will. Like a spell after all, but one that I had to cast upon myself. He was a great river in flood, and I must have channels ready every moment to safely draw his torrent. I began to tell him stories, easy things of a rabbit who looks for food and finds it, of a baby waiting, whose mother comes. He clamored for more, so I went on. I hoped such gentle tales would soothe his fighting soul, and maybe they did. One day I realized that the moon had come and gone since he had thrown himself to the earth. Another moon passed, and somewhere in those months was the last time he ever screamed. I wish I could remember when it was. No, I wish rather I could have told myself when it would come, so all those hopeless days I could have looked to its horizon.

  His mind put forth leaves, thoughts and words that seemed to spring out of the air. Six years old, he was. His brow had cleared, and he would watch me working in the garden, hacking at some root. “Mother,” he said, putting his hand to my shoulder, “try cutting here.” He took out a little knife he had begun to carry, and the root gave way to him. “See?” he said, gravely. “It is easy.”

  He still loved the sea. He knew every shell and fish. He made rafts out of logs and floated in the bay. He blew bubbles into the tidal pools and watched the crabs skitter. “Look at this one,” he would say, towing me by the hand. “I have never seen a larger, I have never seen a smaller. This is the brightest, this is the blackest. This crab has lost one claw, and here its other is growing larger to take its place. Is that not clever?”

  Once again, I wished that someone else were there on the island. Not to commiserate now, but to cherish him with me. I would say, Look, can you believe it? We have come through the rocks and winds. I failed him, yet he is a sweet wonder of this world.

  He made a face, for he saw that my eyes were wet. “Mother,” he said, “the crab will be fine. I told you, the claw is already growing back. Now come here and look at this one. It has spots like eyes. Can it see from them, do you think?”

  At night, he no longer wanted my stories, he made up his own. I think it is where his wildness went, for every tale was filled with outlandish creatures: griffins and leviathans and chimeras who came to feed from his hands, whom he led on adventures or else bested with clever stratagems. Perhaps any child with only his mother for company would have been so imaginative. I cannot say, but his face was rapt as he conjured those visions. He seemed to age with every day, eight and ten and twelve. His gaze grew serious, his limbs tall and strong. He had a habit of tapping one finger on the table as he gave out morals like an old man. He liked best the stories of courage and virtue rewarded. And that is why you must never, you must always, that is why one should be sure to…

  I loved his certainty, his world that was an easy place of right action divided sharply from wrong, of mistake and consequence, of monsters defeated. It was no world I knew, but I would live in it as long as he would let me.

  It was one of those nights, summer, the pigs truffling softly below our window. He was thirteen. I laughed and said, “You have more tales in you than your father.”

  I saw him hesitate, as if I were a rare bird he feared to put to flight. He had asked about his father before, but I had always said, Not yet.

  “Go on,” I said, and smiled at him. “I will answer you. It is time.”

  “Who was he?”

  “A prince who came to this island. He had a thousand and one tricks in him.”

  “What did he look like?”

  I had thought my memories of Odysseus would taste of salt. But there was a pleasure in conjuring him up. “Dark-haired, dark-eyed, with red in his beard. His hands were large, and his legs short and strong. He was always faster than you expected him to be.”

  “Why did he leave?”

  The question was like an oak seedling, I thought. A simple, green shoot above, but underneath the taproot burrowed, spreading deep. I took a breath.

  “When he left, he did not know I carried you. He had a wife at home, and a son as well. But it was more than that. Gods and mortals do not last together happily. He was right to leave when he did.”

  His face, drawn together in thought. “How old was he?”

  “Not far over forty.”

  I saw him counting. “So not even sixty yet. He still lives?”

  It was strange to think of: Odysseus walking on Ithaca’s shore, breathing the air. I had had so little time for dreaming since Telegonus was born. But the image felt solid, wholesome, before me. “I believe he does. He was very strong. In spirit, I mean.”

  Now that the gates were open he sought all I could remember of Odysseus, his lineage, his kingdom, his wife, his son, his childhood occupations, his honors in the war. The stories were still in me, vivid as when Odysseus had first told them, those thousand wily conspiracies and trials. Yet a strange thing happened when I began to recite them back to Telegonus. I found myself hesitating, omitting, altering. With my son’s face before me, their brutalities shone through as they never had before. What I had thought of as adventure now seemed blood-soaked and ugly. Even Odysseus himself seemed changed, callous instead of unflinching. The few times I did leave a story as it was, my son would frown. You did not tell it correctly, he said. My father would never have done such a thing.

  You are right, I would say. Your father let that Trojan spy with his weasel-skin cap go, and he returned safely home to his family. Your father always kept his word.

  Telegonus would beam. “I knew he was an honorable man. Tell me more of his noble deeds.” And so I would spin another lie. Would Odysseus have reproached me for it? I did not know, and I did not care. I would have done worse, much worse, to make my son happy.

  From time to time, in those days, I wondered what I would tell Telegonus if he ever asked me for my own stories. How I might polish Aeëtes, Pasiphaë, Scylla, the pigs. In the end, I did not have to try. He never asked.

  He began spending long hours away upon the island. When he came back, he would be flushed and spilling over with talk. His limbs were stretching, and I heard the crack in his voice. Tell me more about my father, he said. Where is Ithaca? What is it like? How far from here? And what danger
s on the way?

  It was autumn, and I was boiling the fruits in syrup for winter. I could have made the trees bloom fresh at any time, but this was something I had come to enjoy, the bubbling sugars, the translucent jewel colors, the storing up of a good season in my jars.

  “Mother!” He came shouting into the house. “There is a ship which needs us. They are off our shore, half foundered—they will sink if they do not land!”

  It was not the first time he had spotted sailors. They passed often by our isle. But it was the first time he had wanted to help them. I let him pull me out to the cliff. It was true, the ship was tilted over and the hull taking in water.

  “See? Just this once, will you drop the spell? I am sure they will be very grateful.”

  How would you know? I wanted to say. Often those men in most need hate most to be grateful, and will strike at you just to feel whole again.

  “Please,” he said. “What if it is someone like my father?”

  “There is no one like your father.”

  “They will sink, Mother. They will drown! We cannot just stand here and watch, we must do something!”

  His face was stricken. His eyes were sheened with tears.

  “Please, Mother! I cannot bear to watch them die.”

  “This once,” I said. “Once only.”

  We could hear their shouts carried on the wind. Shore, a shore! They turned their boat, lurching towards us. I made him promise to stay hidden while they climbed the trail up to the house. He was to remain in his room until the wine was drunk, and to leave again at my slightest signal. He agreed to all of it, he would have agreed to anything. I went to the kitchen and brewed my old potion. I felt as if I stood in two rooms at once. Here I was mixing the herbs I had mixed a hundred times, my fingers finding their old shapes. And here was my son, leaping and wild. Where are they from, can you tell? What rocks do you think they staved on? Can we help them fix the hull?