Circe

by Madeline Miller

The thought was this: that all my life had been murk and depths, but I was not a part of that dark water. I was a creature within it.

“Nothing is empty void, while air is what fills all else. It is breath and life and spirit, the words we 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.

“Circe,” he said, when he saw me. Just that, as if you might say: foot.

thought I would die of such pain, which was not like the sinking numbness Aeëtes had left behind, but sharp and fierce as a blade through my chest. But of course I could not die. I would live on, through each scalding moment to the next. This is the grief that makes our kind choose to be stones and trees rather than flesh.

For I was like any dull ass who has ever loved someone who loved another. I thought: if only she were gone, it would change everything.

I had a wild thought there, beneath that sky. I will eat these herbs. Then whatever is truly in me, let it be out, at last. I brought them to my mouth. But my courage failed. What was I truly? In the end, I could not bear to know.

I will not be like a bird bred in a cage, I thought, too dull to fly even when the door stands open.

But there was something in me that was sick of fear and awe, of gazing at the heavens and wondering what someone would allow me.

“Do you always talk to pigs when I am gone?” Hermes stood in his traveling cloak, his broad-brimmed hat tilted over his eyes. “I like to think of it the other way around,” I said. “What brings you out in the honest daylight?” “A ship is coming,” he said. “I thought you might want to know.” I stood. “Here? What ship?” He smiled. He always liked seeing me at a loss. “What will you give me if I tell you?” “Begone,” I said. “I prefer you in the dark.” He laughed and vanished.

It made me dizzy to realize that this was but a fraction of a fraction of all the men the world had bred. How could such variation endure, such endless iteration of minds and faces? Did the earth not go mad?

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 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

That old sickening feeling returned: that every moment of my life I had been a fool.

“I told them,” he said to me. “I told them and told them. When there is rot in the walls, there is only one remedy.” The purple bruise at my throat was turning green at its edges. I pressed it, felt the splintered ache. Tear down, I thought. Tear down and build again.

He had a cold eye and a coiling tension. Like a snake, the poets might say, but I knew snakes better by then. Give me the honest asp, who strikes me if I trouble him and not before.

It reminded me suddenly of those old tests Hermes used to set me. Would I be skimmed milk or a harpy? A foolish gull or a villainous monster? Those could not still be the only choices.

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.”

Even the best iron grows brittle with too much beating.

“Why?” “The gods have their own reasons, which they have not seen fit to share.” “Will there never be an end to it?” His voice was raw. His face was like a wound that had opened again. My anger drained away. He was not my adversary. His road would be hard enough without the hurt we might do each other.

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…

Beneath them was the place I truly dwelt, a cold eternity of endless grief.

Each man or woman who passed, she knew their history and would tell it to me, for she said that you must understand people if you would rule them.”

I should have used the sword instead. I have never known such ugly, drawn-out deaths. I will see their feet twisting the rest of my days. Goodnight, Lady Circe.”

At the time I had been boasting, showing off my ruthlessness. I had felt untouchable, filled with teeth and power. I scarcely remembered what that was like.

Two children he had had, and he had not seen either clearly. But perhaps no parent can truly see their child. When we look we see only the mirror of our own faults.

He would rather be cursed by the gods than be No one.

“Gods pretend to be parents,” I said, “but they are children, clapping their hands and shouting for more.”

The anger stood out plain and clean on his face. There was a sort of innocence to him, I thought. I do not mean this as the poets mean it: a virtue to be broken by the story’s end, or else upheld at greatest cost. Nor do I mean that he was foolish or guileless. I mean that he was made only of himself, without the dregs that clog the rest of us. He thought and felt and acted, and all these things made a straight line. No wonder his father had been so baffled by him. He would have been always looking for the hidden meaning, the knife in the dark. But Telemachus carried his blade in the open.

“I think I would not have been a bad king.” “Telemachus the Just,” I said. He smiled. “That’s what they call you if you’re so boring they can’t think of something better.”

I had kept away from him for so many reasons: his mother and my son, his father and Athena. Because I was a god, and he a man. But it struck me then that at the root of all those reasons was a sort of fear. And I have never been a coward. I reached across that breathing air between us and found him.

But though I looked and sounded like a mortal, I was a bloodless fish. From my water I could see him, and all the sky behind, but I could not cross over.

“When we fought over Athena, how did you know to kneel to me? That it would shame me?” “Ah. It was a guess. Something Odysseus said about you once.” “Which was?” “That he had never met a god who enjoyed their divinity less.”

It was so simple. If you want it, I will do it. If it would make you happy, I will go with you. Is there a moment that a heart cracks? But a cracked heart was not enough, and I had grown wise enough to know it. I kissed him and left him there.

we would take pleasure in the simple mending of the world. The vision blossomed, vivid as the cool grass beneath me, as the black sky over my head.

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.

He does not mean that it does not hurt. He does not mean that we are not frightened. Only that: we are here. This is what it means to swim in the tide, to walk the earth and feel it touch your feet. This is what it means to be alive.

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.