Circe

by Madeline Miller

My uncles rubbed their hands and smiled back. They went away, bent over their hopes, thinking what they could not wait to do when Titans ruled again. It was my first lesson. Beneath the smooth, familiar face of things is another that waits to tear the world in two.

Every moment he was with me, I felt a rushing in my throat, which was my love for him, so great sometimes I could not speak.

That is one thing gods and mortals share. When we are young, we think ourselves the first to have each feeling in the world.

The worst of my cowardice had been sweated out. In its place was a giddy spark. I will not be like a bird bred in a cage, I thought, too dull to fly even when the door stands open. I stepped into those woods and my life began.

I was drunk, as the wine and nectar in my father’s halls had never made me. No wonder I have been so slow, I thought. All this while, I have been a weaver without wool, a ship without the sea. Yet now look where I sail.

I watched her dance, arms curving like wings, her strong young legs in love with their own motion. This was how mortals found fame, I thought. Through practice and diligence, tending their skills like gardens until they glowed beneath the sun. But gods are born of ichor and nectar, their excellences already bursting from their fingertips. So they find their fame by proving what they can mar: destroying cities, starting wars, breeding plagues and monsters. All that smoke and savor rising so delicately from our altars. It leaves only ash behind. Ariadne’s light feet crossed and recrossed the circle. Every step was perfect, like a gift she gave herself, and she smiled, receiving it. I wanted to seize her by the shoulders. Whatever you do, I wanted to say, do not be too happy. It will bring down fire on your head. I said nothing, and let her dance.

“Let me tell you a truth about Helios and all the rest. They do not care if you are good. They barely care if you are wicked. The only thing that makes them listen is power. It is not enough to be an uncle’s favorite, to please some god in his bed. It is not enough even to be beautiful, for when you go to them, and kneel and say, ‘I have been good, will you help me?’ they wrinkle their brows. Oh, sweetheart, it cannot be done. Oh, darling, you must learn to live with it. And have you asked Helios? You know I do nothing without his word.” She spat upon the floor. “They take what they want, and in return they give you only your own shackles. A thousand times I saw you squashed. I squashed you myself. And every time, I thought, that is it, she is done, she will cry herself into a stone, into some croaking bird, she will leave us and good riddance. Yet always you came back the next day. They were all surprised when you showed yourself a witch, but I knew it long ago. Despite your wet-mouse weeping, I saw how you would not be ground into the earth. You loathed them as I did. I think it is where our power comes from.”

Yet it was true what she said: nymphs were allowed to work only through the power of others. They could expect none for themselves.

Daedalus did not long outlive his son. His limbs turned gray and nerveless, and all his strength was transmuted into smoke. I had no right to claim him, I knew it. But in a solitary life, there are rare moments when another soul dips near yours, as stars once a year brush the earth. Such a constellation was he to me.

Every moment mortals died, by shipwreck and sword, by wild beasts and wild men, by illness, neglect, and age. It was their fate, as Prometheus had told me, the story that they all shared. No matter how vivid they were in life, no matter how brilliant, no matter the wonders they made, they came to dust and smoke. Meanwhile every petty and useless god would go on sucking down the bright air until the stars went dark.

I sat before the hearth ash. I was not shaking anymore. I did not move at all. My flesh seemed to have congealed around me. My skin stretched over it like a dead thing, rubbery and vile.

LATER, YEARS LATER, I would hear a song made of our meeting. The boy who sang it was unskilled, missing notes more often than he hit, yet the sweet music of the verses shone through his mangling. I was not surprised by the portrait of myself: the proud witch undone before the hero’s sword, kneeling and begging for mercy. Humbling women seems to me a chief pastime of poets. As if there can be no story unless we crawl and weep.

sybarites

Self indulgent person

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

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.”

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.

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.

“My wife, though,” he said. “She is constant. Constant in all things. Even wise men go astray sometimes, but never her. She is a fixed star, a true-made bow.” A silence, in which I felt him moving deep among his memories. “Nothing she says has a single meaning, nor a single intention, yet she is steady. She knows herself.”

many closed their eyes and spun fantasies of their wished-for strength. But he was mapped and surveyed, each stone and hummock noted with clear-eyed precision. He measured his gifts to the scruple.

I would look at him and feel a love so sharp it seemed my flesh lay open. I made a list of all the things I would do for him. Scald off my skin. Tear out my eyes. Walk my feet to bones, if only he would be happy and well.

Everything that I had heard of mortal babies flooded back: how they died for no reason, for any reason, because they grew too cold, too hungry, because they lay one way, or another. I felt each breath in his thin chest, how improbable it was, how unlikely that this frail creature, who could not even lift his head, could survive in the harsh world. But he would survive. He would, if I must wrestle the veiled god myself.

My whole life, I had waited for tragedy to find me. I never doubted that it would, for I had desires and defiance and powers more than others thought I deserved, all the things that draw the thunderstroke. A dozen times grief had scorched, but its fire had never burned through my skin. My madness in those days rose from a new certainty: that at last, I had met the thing the gods could use against me.

I know how lucky I am, stupid with luck, crammed with it, stumbling drunk. I wake sometimes in the dark terrified by my life’s precariousness, its thready breath. Beside me, my husband’s pulse beats at his throat; in their beds, my children’s skin shows every faintest scratch. A breeze would blow them over, and the world is filled with more than breezes: diseases and disasters, monsters and pain in a thousand variations.

Overhead the constellations dip and wheel. My divinity shines in me like the last rays of the sun before they drown in the sea. I thought once that gods are the opposite of death, but I see now they are more dead than anything, for they are unchanging, and can hold nothing in their hands.