Circe Read online

  I do not know how I answered. My blood had gone solid in my veins. I was trying to remember that trick of command I used to have. Come in, of course I will help you. Will you not have more wine?

  Though I expected it, I started when the knock came. I opened the door and there they were: ragged, hungry, desperate as always. The captain, did he look like a coiled snake? I could not tell. I felt a sudden, gagging nausea. I wanted to slam the door shut on them, but it was too late for that. They had seen me now, and my son was pressed to the wall, listening to everything. I had warned him that I might need to use magic on them. He had nodded. Of course, Mother, I understand. But he had no idea. He had never heard the crack of ribs remaking themselves, the wet tearing of flesh from its shape.

  They sat at my benches. They ate, and the wine went down their throats. Still, I watched the captain. His eyes were keen. They lingered on the room, on me. He rose. “Lady,” he said. “Your name? Whom should we honor for our meal?”

  I would have done it then, ripped them from themselves. But Telegonus was already stepping out into the hall. He wore a cape and a sword at his waist. He stood tall and straight as a man. He was fifteen.

  “You are in the house of the goddess Circe, daughter of Helios, and her son, called Telegonus. We saw your ship founder and allowed you to come to our island, though usually it is closed to mortals. We will be glad to help you all we can while you are here.”

  His voice was crackless, firm as seasoned planks. His eyes were dark as his father’s, but there were flecks of yellow that shone in them. The men stared. I stared. I thought of Odysseus, separated from Telemachus for years, the shock it must have been to see him suddenly grown.

  The captain knelt. “Goddess, great lord. The blessed Fates themselves must have brought us here.”

  Telegonus gestured for the man to rise. He took the head of the table and served out food from the platters. The men scarcely ate. They were growing towards him like vines to sun, their faces awestruck, competing to tell him their stories. I watched, wondering at where such a gift had hidden in him all this while. But then I had done no magic till I had plants to work upon.

  I let him go down to the shore with them, help them with their repairs. I did not worry, or at least, not much. My spell over the island’s beasts would protect him, but more than that his own spell would, for those men were like creatures enchanted. He was younger than all of them, but they nodded at every word from his lips. He showed them where the best groves were, what trees they could chop down. He showed them the streams and shade. Three days they stayed while they patched the hole in their ship and fed themselves upon our stores. In all that time, he left them only when they slept. Lord, they called him, when they spoke of him, and solicited his opinion earnestly, as if he were some master carpenter of ninety instead of a boy seeing his first hull. Lord Telegonus, sir, what do you think, will this do?

  He examined the patch. “Nicely, I think. Well constructed.”

  They beamed, and when they sailed, they hung off the side, shouting their thanks and prayers. His face stayed bright as long as he could see the ship. Then his joy bled away.

  For many years, I confess, I had hoped he might be a witch. I had tried to teach him about my herbs, their names and properties. I used to do small spells in his presence, hoping one might catch his eye. But he never showed even the faintest interest. Now I saw why. Witchcraft transforms the world. He wanted only to join it.

  I tried to say something, I do not know what. But he was already turning from me, heading for the woods.

  He kept outside all that winter, and all that spring and summer too. From the sun’s first light in the sky until its setting, I did not see him. A few times I asked him where he went, and he waved his hand vaguely at the beach. I did not press. He was preoccupied, always running somewhere breathlessly, coming home flushed with burrs all over his tunic. I saw the strength rising in his shoulders, his jaw widening. “That cave down by the beach,” he said. “The one where my father kept his ship. Can I have it?”

  “Everything here is yours,” I said.

  “But can it be mine alone? You promise not to go in?”

  I remembered how much my young privacies had meant to me. “I promise,” I said.

  I have wondered since if he used those same charms on me that he had worked on the sailors. For I was like a well-fed cow in those days, placid, unquestioning. Let him go, I told myself. He is happy, he is growing. What harm can find him here?

  “Mother,” he said. It was just after dawn, the pale light warming the leaves. I was kneeling in the garden, weeding. He was not usually up so early, but it was his birthday. Sixteen, he was.

  “I made you honeyed pears,” I said.

  He held up his hand, showing a half-eaten fruit, shining with juice. “I found them, thank you.” He paused. “I have something to show you.”

  I wiped off the dirt and followed him down the forest path to the cave. Inside was a small boat, near the size Glaucos’ had been.

  “Whose is this?” I demanded. “Where are they?”

  He shook his head. His cheeks were flushed, his eyes bright. “No, Mother, it is mine. I had the idea before the men came but seeing them made it go much faster. They gave me some of their tools and showed me how to make the others. What do you think?”

  Now that I looked I could see that its sail was stitched from my sheets, its boards roughly planed, still full of splinters. I was angry, but a wondering pride glowed in me as well. My son had built it alone, with nothing but crude tools and his will.

  “It is very trim,” I said.

  He grinned. “It is, isn’t it? He said I should not say anything. But I did not want to keep it from you. I thought—”

  He stopped at the look on my face.

  “Who said?”

  “It is all right, Mother, he means me no harm. He has been helping me. He said he used to visit often. That you are old friends.”

  Old friends. How had I not seen this danger? I remembered now Telegonus’ giddiness when he would come home at night. My nymphs used to come back with that same face. Athena could not cross my spell, no, she had no powers in the underworld. But he walked everywhere. When he was not rolling his dice, he led the spirits to the doors of Hades himself. God of meddling, god of change.

  “Hermes is no friend of mine. Tell me everything he said to you. At once.”

  His face was mottled with embarrassment. “He said he could help me, and he did. He said that it must be sudden. If a scab is to come off, he said, the best way is quickly. It will not even take me half a month, and I will be back by spring. We have tried it in the bay, and it is sound.”

  His words tumbled out so fast I struggled to parse them. “What do you mean? What will not take you half a month?”

  “The journey,” he said. “To Ithaca. Hermes says he can lead me around the monsters, so you do not have to fear about that. If I sail at the noon tide, I will make the next island before dark.”

  I felt speechless, as if he had torn my tongue from my mouth.

  He put a hand to my arm. “You do not have to worry. I will be safe. Hermes is my ancestor through my father, he tells me. He would not betray me. Mother, do you hear?” He was peering at me anxiously from beneath his hair.

  My blood ran cold to see his greenness. Had I ever been so young?

  “He is a god of lies,” I said. “Only fools put their faith in him.”

  He flushed, but a defiance had come into his face. “I know what he is. I do not just rely on him. I have packed my bow. And he has been teaching me a little spear-work besides.” He gestured to a stick leaning in the corner, one of my old kitchen knives laced to its end. He must have seen my horror, for he added, “Not that I will have to use it. It is just a few days to Ithaca, and then I will be safe with my father.”

  He was leaning forward, earnestly. He thought he had answered all my objections. He was proud of himself, bright in his new-forged plans. How easily those words tumb
led from him, safe, my father. I felt myself running with swift, clear rage.

  “What makes you think you will be welcome on Ithaca? All you know of your father is stories. And he already has a son. How do you think Telemachus will like his bastard brother appearing?”

  He flinched a little at bastard, but answered bravely. “I don’t think he would mind. I don’t come for his kingdom, or his inheritance, and so I will explain to him. I will stay the whole winter, and there will be time for us to know each other.”

  “So that is it. It is settled. You and Hermes have the plan, and now you think all that is needed is for me to wish you fair wind.”

  He looked at me, uncertain.

  “Tell me,” I said. “What does all-knowing Hermes say about his sister who wants you dead? About the fact that you will be killed the moment you step away from the island?”

  He nearly sighed. “Mother, it was so long ago. Surely she has forgotten.”

  “Forgotten?” My voice clawed the cave walls. “Are you an idiot? Athena does not forget. She will eat you in one gulp, like an owl takes a stupid mouse.”

  His face paled, but he pressed on like the valiant heart he was. “I will take my chances.”

  “You will not. I forbid it.”

  He stared at me. I had never forbidden him anything before. “But I must go to Ithaca. I have built the ship. I’m ready.”

  I stepped towards him. “Let me explain more clearly. If you leave, you will die. So you will not sail. And if you try, I will burn that boat of yours to cinders.”

  His face was blank with shock. I turned and walked away.

  He did not sail that day. I stalked back and forth in my kitchen, and he kept to his woods. It was dusk when he returned to the house. He banged through the trunks, loudly gathered up bedding. He had come only to show me that he would not stay beneath my roof.

  When he passed me I said, “You want me to treat you like a man, but you act like a child. You have been protected here your whole life. You do not understand the dangers that wait for you in the world. You cannot simply pretend that Athena does not exist.”

  He was ready for me, like tinder for the spark. “You are right. I don’t know the world. How could I? You don’t let me out of your sight.”

  “Athena stood upon that very hearth and demanded I give you to her so she could kill you.”

  “I know,” he said. “You’ve told me a hundred times. Yet she has not tried since, has she? I’m alive, aren’t I?”

  “Because of the spells I cast and carry!” I rose to face him. “Do you know what I have had to do to keep them strong, the hours I have spent fretting over them, testing them to be sure she cannot break through?”

  “You like doing that.”

  “Like it?” The laugh scraped from me. “I like doing my own work, which I have scarcely had time for since you were born!”

  “Then go do your spells! Go do them and let me leave! Be honest, you do not even know if Athena is still angry. Have you tried to speak with her? It has been sixteen years!”

  He said it as if it were sixteen centuries. He could not imagine the scope of gods, the mercilessness that comes of seeing generations rise and fall around you. He was mortal and young. A slow afternoon felt like a year to him.

  I could feel my face kindling, gathering heat. “You think all gods are like me. That you may ignore them as you please, treat them as your servants, that their wishes are only flies to be brushed aside. But they will crush you for pleasure, for spite.”

  “Fear and the gods, fear and the gods! That is all you talk about. It is all you have ever talked about. Yet a thousand thousand men and women walk this world and live to be old. Some of them are even happy, Mother. They do not just cling to safe harbors with desperate faces. I want to be one of them. I mean to be. Why can’t you understand that?”

  The air around me had begun to crackle. “You are the one who does not understand. I have said you will not leave, and that is the end of it.”

  “So that’s it then? I just stay here my whole life? Until I die? I never even try to leave?”

  “If need be.”

  “No!” He slammed the table between us. “I will not do it! There is nothing for me here. Even if another ship comes and I beg you to let it land, what then? A few days’ respite, then they will leave, and I will still be trapped. If this is life, then I would rather die. I would rather Athena kills me, do you hear? At least then I will have seen one thing in my life that was not this island!”

  My vision went white.

  “I do not care what you would rather. If you are too stupid to save your own life, then I will do it for you. My spells will do it.”

  For the first time, he faltered. “What do you mean?”

  “I mean you would not even know what you missed. You would never think of leaving again.”

  He took a step backwards. “No. I will not drink your wine. I will not touch anything you give me.”

  I could taste the venom in my mouth. It was a pleasure to see him frightened at last. “You think that will stop me? You have never understood how strong I am.”

  His look I will remember all my life. A man who has seen the veil lifted and beholds the true face of the world.

  He wrenched open the door and fled into the dark.

  I stood there a long time, a bolt-struck tree scorched to its roots. Then I walked down to the shore. The air was cool but the sand still held the day’s heat. I thought of all the hours I had carried him there, his skin against mine. I had wanted him to walk freely in the world, unburnt and unafraid, and now I had gotten my wish. He could not conceive of a relentless goddess with her spear aimed at his heart.

  I had not told him of his infancy, how angry and difficult it was. I had not told him the stories of the gods’ cruelty, of his own father’s cruelty. I should have, I thought. For sixteen years, I had been holding up the sky, and he had not noticed. I should have forced him to go with me to pick those plants that saved his life. I should have made him stand over the stove while I spoke the words of power. He should understand all I had carried in silence, all that I had done for his safekeeping.

  But then what? He was somewhere in the trees, hiding from me. So easily those spells had risen in my mind, the ones that would let me cut his desires from him, like paring rot from fruit.

  I ground my jaw. I wanted to rage and tear myself and weep. I wanted to curse Hermes for his half-truths and temptations—but Hermes was nothing. I had seen Telegonus’ face when he used to look into the sea and whisper, horizon.

  I closed my eyes. I knew the shore so well, I did not have to see to walk. When he was a child I used to make lists of all the things I would do to keep him safe. It was not much of a game, because the answer was always the same. Anything.

  Odysseus had told me a story once about a king who had a wound that could not be healed, not by any doctor, not by any amount of time. He went to an oracle and heard its answer: only the man who had given the wound could fix it, with the same spear he had used to make it. So the king had limped across the world until he found his enemy, who mended him.

  I wished Odysseus were there so I could ask him: but how did the king get that man to help him, the one who had struck him so deep?

  The answer that came to me was from a different tale. Long ago, in my wide bed, I had asked Odysseus: “What did you do? When you could not make Achilles and Agamemnon listen?”

  He’d smiled in the firelight. “That is easy. You make a plan in which they do not.”

  Chapter Twenty

  I FOUND HIM IN the olive grove. The blankets were tangled around him, as if he had fought on against me in his dreams.

  “My son,” I said. The words were loud in the still air. It was not dawn yet, but I felt it coming, the great rolling wheels of my father’s chariot. “Telegonus.”

  His eyes opened, and his hands flew up, to ward me off. The pain was like a dagger’s point.

  “I come to say that you may go, and
I will help you. But there must be conditions.”

  Did he know how much those words cost me? I do not think he could. It is youth’s gift not to feel its debts. The joy was already washing over him. He threw himself upon me, pressed his face to my neck. I closed my eyes. He smelled like green leaves and running sap. We had breathed only each other for sixteen years.

  “Two days’ delay,” I said. “And three things within them.”

  He nodded eagerly. “Anything.” Now that I had lost, he was pliant. At least he was gracious in victory. I led him to the house and filled his arms with herbs and bottles. Together we carried them clinking down to his ship. There upon his deck I began chopping, grinding, mixing my pastes. He surprised me by watching. Usually he drifted away when I did spells.

  “What will it do?”

  “It is a protection.”

  “Against what?”

  “Whatever I can think of. Whatever Athena can summon—storms, leviathans, a split hull.”

  “Leviathans?”

  I was glad to see him pale a little.

  “This will keep it at bay. If Athena wants to strike at you by sea, she will have to do it herself, directly, and I think she cannot, for she is bound by the Fates. You must keep to the boat, and as soon as you land on Ithaca, go to your father, and ask him to intercede with Athena for you. She is his patron and may listen. Swear to me.”

  “I will.” His face was solemn in the shadows.

  I poured those draughts over each rough board, every inch of sail, speaking my charms.

  “May I try?” he said.

  I gave him what was left of a draught. He drenched a bit of the deck, spoke the words he had heard me say.

  He poked at the wood. “Did it work?”

  “No,” I said.

  “How do you know what words to use?”

  “I speak what has meaning for me.”

  His face worked with effort, as if he pushed a boulder up a hill. He stared at the boards and spoke different words, then different words still. The deck was unchanged. He looked at me, accusing. “It is hard.”