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Once when I was young I asked what mortals looked like. My father said, “You may say they are shaped like us, but only as the worm is shaped like the whale.”
“Will you tell me, what is a mortal like?” It was a child’s question, but he nodded gravely. “There is no single answer. They are each different. The only thing they share is death. You know the word?” “I know it,” I said. “But I do not understand.” “No god can. Their bodies crumble and pass into earth. Their souls turn to cold smoke and fly to the underworld. There they eat nothing and drink nothing and feel no warmth. Everything they reach for slips from their grasp.” A chill shivered across my skin. “How do they bear it?” “As best they can.”
“Exactly,” he said. “And for what? Prometheus is punished anyway. Let me give you some advice. Next time you’re going to defy the gods, do it for a better reason. I’d hate to see my sister turned to cinders for nothing.”
This is the grief that makes our kind choose to be stones and trees rather than flesh.
“That was only the flowers,” I said. “They grant creatures their truest forms.” He turned his philosopher’s eye on me. “You do not think it convenient that their truest forms should happen to be your desires?”
I had always hated it. Let it stay and rot.
It was large enough to hold a dozen goddesses, and indeed I kept expecting to find nymphs and cousins around every turn. But no, that was part of my exile. To be utterly alone. What worse punishment could there be, my family thought, than to be deprived of their divine presence?
Among those empty, perfect rooms, I felt—I could not say. Disappointed. There was a part of me, I think, that had hoped for a crag in the Caucasus after all, and an eagle diving for my liver. But Scylla was no Zeus, and I was no Prometheus. We were nymphs, not worth the trouble.
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.
There I discovered at last the limits of my power. However potent the mixture, however well woven the spell, the toad kept trying to fly, and the mouse to sting. Transformation touched only bodies, not minds.
Does no one have the courage? Will no one dare to face me? So you see, in my way, I was eager for what came.
“So this is how Olympians spend their days. Thinking of ways to make men miserable.”
“I meant to tell you,” he said. “I heard a prophecy of you. I had it from an old seeress who had left her temple and was wandering the fields giving fortunes.” I was used to the swift movements of his mind, and now I was grateful for them. “And you just happened to be passing when she was speaking of me?” “Of course not. I gave her an embossed gold cup to tell me all she knew of Circe, daughter of Helios, witch of Aiaia.” “Well?” “She said that a man named Odysseus, born from my blood, will come one day to your island.” “And?” “That’s it,” he said. “That’s the worst prophecy I’ve ever heard,”
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Of all the mortals on the earth, there are only a few the gods will ever hear of. Consider the practicalities. By the time we learn their names, they are dead. They must be meteors indeed to catch our attention. The merely good: you are dust to us.
She had it from… Thebes, I thought. Thebes of Egypt, some admirer there, some beast-headed god.
A memory drifted through me. My father speaking our old hopeless law to Glaucos: no god may undo what another has done. But I was the one who had done it.
“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.”
“But you did not dare, did you? You know how your dear father Zeus dotes on such creatures. How else can all his bastard heroes win their reputations?”
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.
Daedalus laughed. “Don’t believe a word. He looks sweet as cream, but he does what he wants.”
“And where would you go, if you might escape?” “Wherever would have me. But if I may choose, Egypt. They are building things that make Knossos look like a mudflat. I have been learning the language from some of their traders on the docks. I think they would welcome us.”
She hated our family? She had always seemed to me their distillation, a glittering monument to our blood’s vain cruelty.
I thought of another dim room, with another prisoner. He had been a craftsman also. On the foundation of his knowledge civilization had been built. Prometheus’ words, deep-running as roots, had waited in me all this time. “We bear it as best we can,” I said.
I have it still. It stands near my hearth, and has even found its way into the songs. Perhaps that is no surprise, poets like such symmetries: Witch Circe skilled at spinning spells and threads alike, at weaving charms and cloths. Who am I to spoil an easy hexameter?
I wished then that we had conceived a child together, to be some comfort to him. But that was a young and silly thought: as if children are sacks of grain, to be substituted one for another.
A deep understanding of the notion of fungibility.
I knew which brother he meant. Dionysus, lord of ivy and the grape. Riotous son of Zeus, whom mortals call Releaser, for he frees them from their cares.
I felt a weightless joy. The story was so ugly, so outlandish and disgusting, that it felt like a fever breaking. If I was trapped on this island, at least I did not have to share the world with her and all her kind. Pacing by my lion, I said, “It is done. I will think of them no more. I cast them out and I am finished.”
In his mind, he was already telling the tale to his court, to wide-eyed nobles and fainting maidens. He did not thank Medea for her aid; he scarcely looked at her. As if a demigoddess saving him at every turn was only his due.
“Jason would never listen to such slander! I delivered him the fleece! He loves me!” She stood fixed in her outrage, bright and defiant. All my hammering had only made her harder. Just so must I have seemed to my grandmother when she said to me: Those are two different things.
Someone will come, I thought. All the ships in the world, all the men. Someone must.
“No,” he said, “you are not. You are being very dull. Use your imagination, they must be good for something. Take them to your bed.” “That is absurd,” I said. “They would run screaming.” “Nymphs always do,” he said. “But I’ll tell you a secret: they are terrible at getting away.”
Oooof
At least, I told myself, it was not their brothers, who would have bragged and fought and hunted down my wolves. But of course that was never a real danger. Sons were not punished.
I remember what I thought, bare against the grinding stone: I am only a nymph after all, for nothing is more common among us than this.
As it turned out, I did kill pigs that night after all.
If it were a man, I wondered if I would pity him. But it was not a man.
After I changed a crew, I would watch them scrabbling and crying in the sty, falling over each other, stupid with their horror. They hated it all, their newly voluptuous flesh, their delicate split trotters, their swollen bellies dragging in the earth’s muck. It was a humiliation, a debasement. They were sick with longing for their hands, those appendages men use to mitigate the world. Come, I would say to them, it’s not that bad. You should appreciate a pig’s advantages. Mud-slick and swift, they are hard to catch. Low to the ground, they cannot easily be knocked over. They are not like dogs,
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“Your wife sounds like a clever woman.” “She is. I cannot account for the fact that she married me, but since it is to my benefit, I try not to bring it to her attention.” It surprised me to a huff of laughter. What man spoke so? None that I had ever met.
“Most men do not know me for what I am.” “Most men, in my experience, are fools,” he said. “I confess you nearly made me give the game away. Your father, the cowherd?”
“Do you know,” I said, “Hermes told me a prophecy about you once.” “Oh? And what was it?” “That you were fated to come to my halls.” “And?” “That was all.” He lifted an eyebrow. “I’m afraid that is the dullest prophecy I’ve ever heard.”
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.
“When I was a boy and everyone played at wrestling monsters like Heracles, I dreamed of being Daedalus instead. It seemed the greater genius to look at raw wood and iron, and imagine marvels. I was disappointed to find out I did not have the talent for it. I was always cutting my fingers open.” I thought of the white scars on Daedalus’ hands. But I held back.
“You did not like him,” I said. Some inward amusement touched his face. “I appreciated him, in his way. But he made a terrible soldier, however many men he could bleed. He had a number of inconvenient ideas about loyalty and honor. Every day was a new struggle to yoke him to our purpose, keep him straight in his furrow. Then the best part of him died, and he was even more difficult after that. But as I said, his mother was a goddess, and prophecies hung on him like ocean-weed. He wrestled with matters larger than I will ever understand.”
These were no songs to sing before a court, no tales from the great golden age. Yet somehow in his mouth they did not seem dishonorable, but just and inspired and wisely pragmatic.
If good Patroclus had been there he might have said, Sir, you are no true hero, no Heracles, no Jason. You speak no honest speeches from pure heart. You do no noble deeds in the gleaming sunlight. But I had met Jason. And I knew what sort of deeds could be done in the sun’s sight. I said nothing.
I was smooth as oil, calm as windless water. I drew him out, asked him for stories of his travels among foreign lands and men. He told me of the armies of Memnon, son of the Dawn, king of Aethiopia, and the Amazon horsewomen with their crescent shields. He had heard that in Egypt some of their pharaohs were women dressed in men’s clothes. In India, he’d heard, there were ants the size of foxes who dig up gold among the dunes. And to the far north were a people who did not believe that Oceanos’ river circled the earth, but instead it was a great girdling serpent, thick around as a boat and
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The words slid into me, smooth as a polished knife. I had known he loved her from the moment he’d spoken of her weaving. Yet he had stayed, month after month, and I had let myself be lulled. Now I saw more clearly: all those nights in my bed had been only his traveler’s wisdom. When you are in Egypt, you worship Isis; when in Anatolia, you kill a lamb for Cybele. It does not trespass on your Athena still at home.
He went on with his memories. Telemachus’ first bite of bread, his first word, how he loved goats and hiding beneath chairs, giggling to be found. He had more stories of his son from a single year, I thought, than my father had of me in all eternity.
His eyes were brown and warm as summer earth. His words were simple. They had no art to them, which of course was also art. He always knew how to show himself to best advantage.
And last of all, still in its cedar box: silphium ground with wormwood, the draught I had taken each moon since the first time I lay with Hermes. Each moon except the last.
I touched my hand to my belly. Your father said once that he wanted more children, but that is not why you live. You are for me.
