Circe Read online

  Pain burst in my fingers, so shocking I could not cry out. I thought some scrambled thing: that Daedalus must have dropped the scalpel inside of her, that a bone had broken in her labor and stabbed me. But the pain clamped harder, driving deep into my hand, grinding.

  Teeth. It was teeth.

  I did scream then. I tried to jerk my hand away, but it had me fast in its jaws. In a panic, I yanked. The lips of my sister’s wound parted and the thing slid forth. It thrashed like a fish on a hook, and muck flew across our faces.

  My sister was shrieking. The thing was like an anchor dragging on my arm, and I felt my finger joints tearing. I screamed again, the agony white-hot, and fell on top of the creature, scrabbling for its throat with my hand. When I found it, I bore down, pinning its body beneath me. Its heels beat on the stone, its head twisted, side to side. At last I saw it clear: the nose broad and flat, shining wetly with birth fluid. The shaggy, thick face crowned with two sharp horns. Below, the froggy baby body bucked with unnatural strength. Its eyes were black and fixed on mine.

  Dear gods, I thought, what is it?

  The creature made a choking sound and opened its mouth. I snatched my hand away, bloody and mangled. I had lost my last two fingers and part of a third. The thing’s jaw worked, swallowing what it had taken. Its chin wrenched in my grip, trying to bite me again.

  A shadow beside me. Daedalus, pale and blood-spattered. “I am here.”

  “The knife,” I said.

  “What are you doing? Do not hurt him, he must live!” My sister was struggling on her couch, but she could not rise with her muscles cut.

  “The cord,” I said. It still ran gristle-thick between the creature and my sister’s womb. He sawed at it. My knees were wet where I knelt. My hands were a mass of broken pain and blood.

  “Now a blanket,” I said. “A sack.”

  He brought a thick wool coverlet, laid it on the floor beside me. With my torn fingers, I dragged the thing into its center. It fought still, moaning angrily, and twice I nearly lost it, for it seemed to have grown stronger even in those moments. But Daedalus gathered up the corners, and when he had them, I jerked my hands away. The creature thrashed in the blanket folds, unable to find purchase. I took the ends from him, lifting it off the floor.

  I could hear the rasp of Daedalus’ breath. “A cage,” he said. “We need a cage.”

  “Get one,” I said. “I will hold it.”

  He ran. Inside its sack, the creature twisted like a snake. I saw its limbs lined against the fabric, that thick head, the points of horns.

  Daedalus returned with a birdcage, the finches still fluttering inside. But it was stout, and large enough. I stuffed the blanket in, and he clanged shut the door. He threw another blanket over it, and the creature was hidden.

  I looked at my sister. She was covered in blood, her belly a slaughter-yard. The drips fell wetly to the sodden rug beneath. Her eyes were wild.

  “You did not hurt it?”

  I stared at her. “Are you mad? It tried to eat my hand! Tell me how such an abomination came to be.”

  “Stitch me up.”

  “No,” I said. “You will tell me, or I will let you bleed yourself dry.”

  “Bitch,” she said. But she was wheezing. The pain was wearing her away. Even my sister had an end in her, a place she could not go. We stared at each other, yellow eyes to yellow. “Well, Daedalus?” she said at last. “It is your moment. Tell my sister whose fault this creature is.”

  He looked at me, face weary and streaked with blood. “Mine,” he said. “It is mine. I am the reason this beast lives.”

  From the cage, a wet chewing sound. The finches had gone silent.

  “The gods sent a bull, pure white, to bless the kingdom of Minos. The queen admired the creature and desired to see it more closely, yet it ran from any who came near. So I built the hollow likeness of a cow, with a place inside for her to sit. I gave it wheels, so we might roll it to the beach while the creature slept. I thought it would only be…I did not—”

  “Oh, please,” my sister spat. “The world will be ended before you stammer to your finish. I fucked the sacred bull, all right? Now get the thread.”

  I stitched my sister up. Soldiers came, their faces carefully blank, and bore the cage to an inner closet. My sister called after them, “No one goes near it without my word. And give it something to eat!” Silent handmaids rolled up the soaked rug and carried off the ruined couch as if they did such work every day. They burned frankincense and sweet violets to mask the stench, then bore my sister to the bath.

  “The gods will punish you,” I had told her, while I sewed. But she had only laughed with a giddy lushness.

  “Don’t you know?” she had said. “The gods love their monsters.”

  The words made me start. “You talked to Hermes?”

  “Hermes? What does he have to do with it? I don’t need some Olympian to tell me what is plain before my face. Everyone knows it.” She smirked. “Except for you, as usual.”

  A presence at my side brought me back. Daedalus. We were alone, for the first time since he had come to my island. There were drops of brown spattered across his forehead. His arms were smeared to the elbow. “May I bandage your fingers?”

  “No,” I said. “Thank you. They will fix themselves.”

  “Lady.” He hesitated. “I am in your debt for all my days. If you had not come, it would have been me.”

  His shoulders were taut, tensed as if against a blow. The last time he had thanked me, I had stormed at him. But now I understood more: he, too, knew what it was to make monsters.

  “I am glad it was not,” I said. I nodded at his hands, crusted and stained like everything else. “Yours cannot grow back.”

  He lowered his voice. “Can the creature be killed?”

  I thought of my sister shrieking to be careful. “I don’t know. Pasiphaë seems to believe it can. But even so it is the child of the white bull. It may be guarded by a god, or it may bring down a curse upon any who harm it. I need to think.”

  He rubbed at his scalp, and I saw the hope of an easy solution drain from him. “I must go make another cage then. That one won’t hold it long.”

  He left. The gore was drying stiff upon my cheeks, and my arms were greasy with the creature’s stink. I felt clouded and heavy, sick from the pollution of so much blood. If I called the handmaids, they would bring me to a bath, but I knew that would not be enough. Why had my sister made such an abomination? And why summon me? Most naiads would have fled, but one of the nereids might have done it, they were used to monsters. Or Perses. Why had she not called for him?

  My mind had no answers. It was limp and dulled, useless as my missing fingers. One thought came clear: I must do something. I could not stand by while a horror was loosed upon the world. I had the thought that I should find my sister’s workroom. Perhaps there would be something there to help me, some antidote, some great drug of reversal.

  It was not far, a hall off her bedchamber separated by a curtain. I had never seen another witch’s craft room before, and I walked its shelves expecting I do not know what, a hundred grisly things, kraken livers, dragons’ teeth, the flayed skin of giants. But all I saw were herbs, and rudimentary ones at that: poisons, poppies, a few healing roots. I had no doubt my sister could work plenty with them, for her will had always been strong. But she was lazy, and here was the proof. Those few simples were old and weak as dead leaves. They had been collected haphazardly, some in bud, some already withered, cut with any knife at any time of day.

  I understood something then. My sister might be twice the goddess I was, but I was twice the witch. Her crumbling trash could not help me. And my own herbs from Aiaia would not be enough, strong as they were. The monster was bound to Crete, and whatever would be done, Crete must guide me.

  I traced back through the halls and corridors to the palace center. There I had seen stairs that ran not to the harbor but inland, to the wide, bright gardens and pavilions, whic
h in turn opened out to distant fields.

  All around, busy men and women swept flagstones, picked fruits, hefted their baskets of barley. They kept their eyes diligently lowered as I went. I suppose living with Minos and Pasiphaë they had grown used to ignoring bloodier things than me. I passed the outlying houses of peasants and shepherds, the groves and grazing herds. The hills were lush and so golden with sun that the light seemed to rise from them, but I did not stop to savor the view. My eyes were fixed upon the black outline that stood against the sky.

  Mount Dicte, it is called. No bears or wolves or lions dare to tread there, only the sacred goats, their great horns curling like conch shells. Even in the hottest season, the forests remain dark and cool. At night, the huntress Artemis is said to roam its hills with her shining bow, and in one of its shadowed caves Zeus himself was born and hidden from his devouring father.

  There are herbs there that grow nowhere else. They are so rare, few have been given names. I could feel them swelling in their hollows, breathing tendrils of magic into the air. A small yellow flower with a green center. A drooping lily that bloomed orange-brown. And best of all, furred dittany, queen of healing.

  I did not walk as a mortal walks, but as a god, and the miles fell away beneath my feet. It was dusk when I reached the foothills and began to climb. The branches laced over me. The shade rose deep as water, tingling across my skin. The whole mountain seemed to hum beneath me. Even bloodied and aching as I was, I felt a spurt of giddiness. I traced the mosses, the hummocks of ground upwards, and, at the base of a white poplar, I found a blooming patch of dittany. Its leaves were threaded with power, and I pressed them to my broken fingers. The spell took hold with a word; my hand would be whole by morning. I gathered some of the roots and seeds for my bag, and kept on. The stink and weight of blood hung still upon me, and at last I found a pool, cold and clear, fed by icy melt. I welcomed the shock of its waters, their clean, scouring pain. I worked those small rites of purification which all gods know. With pebbles from the bank, I scrubbed the filth away.

  After, I sat on the bank beneath the silvered leaves and thought of Daedalus’ question. Can the creature be killed?

  Among the gods there are a few who have the gift of prophecy, the ability to peer into the murk and glimpse what fates will come. Not everything may be foreseen. Most gods and mortals have lives that are tied to nothing; they tangle and wend now here, now there, according to no set plan. But then there are those who wear their destinies like nooses, whose lives run straight as planks, however they try to twist. It is these that our prophets may see.

  My father has such foreknowledge, and I had heard it said all my life that the trait was passed to his children also. I had never thought to test it. I had been raised to think I had none of his strengths. But now I touched the water and said, Show me.

  An image formed, delicate and pale, as if made from curls of mist. A smoking torch bobbed in long corridors. A thread unwound through a stone passage. The creature roared, showing its unnatural teeth. It stood tall as a man, dressed in rotting scraps. A mortal, sword in hand, leapt from the shadows to strike it dead.

  The mist ebbed, and the pool cleared again. I had my answer, but it was not the one I had hoped for. The creature was mortal, but it could not die as an infant, by my hand or Daedalus’. It had a fate many years in the future, and must live it out. Until then, it could only be contained. That would be Daedalus’ work, yet there might be a way for me to help him. I paced among the shadowed trees, thinking of that creature and what weaknesses it might have. I remembered its black eyes fixed ravening on mine. Its sucking hunger as it fought me for my hand. How much would it take to sate that appetite? If I had not been a god, it would have crawled up my arm, consuming me inch by inch.

  I felt an idea rise in me. I would need all the secret herbs of Dicte, and with them the strongest binding weeds, ilex root and withy, fennel and hemlock, aconite, hellebore. I would need as well the rest of my moly stores. I slipped through those trees unerring, hunting down each ingredient in its turn. If Artemis walked that night, she kept out of my way.

  I carried the leaves and roots back to the pool and ground them on its rocks. The paste I gathered in one of my bottles, and added some of the pool’s water. Its waves still bore the blood it had washed from my hands, mine and my sister’s too. As if it knew, the draught swirled red and dark.

  I did not sleep that night. I stayed on Dicte until the sky went gray and then began walking back to Knossos. By the time I reached the palace, the sun was bright on the fields. I passed a courtyard that had caught my eye the day before, and stopped now to examine it more closely. In it was a great dancing circle, ringed by laurels and oaks for shade from the beating sun. I had thought its floor was made of stone, but now I saw it was wood, a thousand tiles of it, so smoothed and varnished that they seemed like a single piece. They were painted with a spiral, traveling outwards from its center like the furling crest of a wave. Daedalus’ work, it could be no other.

  A girl was dancing on it. No music played, yet her feet kept perfect time, each step the beat of a silent drum. She moved like a wave herself, graceful, but with relentless, driving motion. On her head shone the circlet of a princess. I would have known her anywhere. The girl from Daedalus’ prow.

  Her eyes widened when she saw me, just like her statue’s. She bowed her head. “Aunt Circe,” she said. “I am glad to meet you. I am Ariadne.”

  I could see pieces of Pasiphaë in her, but only if I searched: her chin, the delicacy of her collarbone.

  “You are skilled,” I said.

  She smiled. “Thank you. My parents are looking for you.”

  “No doubt. But I must find Daedalus.”

  She nodded, as if I were only one of a thousand who wanted him instead of her parents. “I will take you. But we must be careful. The guards are out looking.”

  She slipped her fingers into mine, warm and a little damp from her exercise. Through dozens of narrow side-passages she led me, her feet silent on the stones. We came at last to a bronze door. She beat six times in a rhythm.

  “I cannot play now, Ariadne,” a voice called. “I am busy.”

  “I am with the lady Circe,” she said.

  The door swung open, revealing Daedalus, sooty and stained. Behind him was a workroom, half open to the sky. I saw statues with their cloths still on them, gears and instruments I did not recognize. At the back, a foundry smoked, and metal glowed hot in a mold. A fish spine lay on a table, a strange jagged blade beside it.

  “I have been to Mount Dicte,” I said. “I have glimpsed the creature’s fate. It can die, but not now. A mortal will come who is destined to dispatch it. I do not know how long it may be. The creature was full-grown in my vision.”

  I watched the knowledge settle on him. All the days ahead that he must be on his guard. He drew a breath. “So we contain it then.”

  “Yes. I have brewed a charm that will help. It craves…” I paused, feeling Ariadne behind me. “It craves that flesh you saw it eat. It is part of its nature. I cannot take away that hunger, but I may set bounds upon it.”

  “Anything,” he said. “I am grateful.”

  “Do not be grateful yet,” I said. “For three seasons of the year, the spell will keep its appetite at bay. But every harvest it will return, and must be fed.”

  His eyes flicked to Ariadne behind me. “I understand,” he said.

  “The rest of the time it will still be dangerous, but only as a savage beast might be.”

  He nodded, but I saw he was thinking of harvest time, and the feeding that must come. He glanced at the molds behind him, tinged red with heat. “I will be finished with the cage tomorrow morning.”

  “Good,” I said. “It cannot come too soon. I will work the spell then.”

  When the door closed, Ariadne stood waiting. “You were speaking of the baby that was born, were you not? He is the one that must be kept until he’s killed?”

  “He is.”


  “The servants say he is a monster, and my father shouted at me when I asked about him. But he is still my brother, is he not?”

  I hesitated.

  “I know about my mother and the white bull,” she said.

  No child of Pasiphaë’s could remain innocent for long. “I suppose you may say he is your half-brother,” I said. “Now come. Take me to the king and queen.”

  Griffins preened, delicate and regal, on the walls. The windows spilled sun. My sister lay on her silver couch glowing with health. Beside her, on an alabaster chair, Minos looked old and puffed, like something left dead in the waves. His eyes seized on me as snatcher-birds take fish.

  “Where have you been? The monster needs tending. That is why you were brought here!”

  “I have made a draught,” I said. “So we may transfer it to its new cage more safely.”

  “A draught? I want it killed!”

  “Darling, you sound hysterical,” Pasiphaë said. “You haven’t even heard my sister’s idea. Go on, Circe, please.” She rested her chin on her hand, theatrically expectant.

  “It will bind the creature’s hunger for three seasons of each year.”

  “That’s it?”

  “Now, Minos, you’ll hurt Circe’s feelings. I think it’s a very fine spell, sister. My son’s appetite is a bit unwieldy, isn’t it? He’s gone through most of our prisoners already.”

  “I want the creature dead, and that is final!”

  “It cannot be killed,” I told Minos. “Not now. It has a destiny far in the future.”

  “A destiny!” My sister clapped delightedly. “Oh, tell us what it is! Does it escape and eat someone we know?”

  Minos paled, though he tried to hide it. “Be sure,” he said to me. “You and the craftsman, be sure it is secure.”

  “Yes,” my sister crooned. “Be sure. I hate to think what would happen if it got out. My husband may be a son of Zeus, but his flesh is thoroughly mortal. The truth is”—she lowered her voice to a whisper—“I think he may be afraid of the creature.”