Maybe the true surprise, I thought, was that it had not happened sooner. My uncles’ eyes used to crawl over me as I poured their wine. Their hands found their way to my flesh. A pinch, a stroke, a hand slipping under the sleeve of my dress. They all had wives, it was not marriage they thought of. One of them would have come for me in the end and paid my father well. Honor on all sides.
The light had reached the loom, and its cedar scent was rising in the air. The memory of Daedalus’ white-scarred hands, and the pleasure I had taken in them, was like a hot wire pushed through my brain. I dug my nails into my wrist. There are oracles scattered across our lands. Shrines where priestesses breathe sacred fumes and speak the truths they find in them. Know yourself is carved above their doors. But I had been a stranger to myself, turned to stone for no reason I could name.
Daedalus had told me a story once about the lords of Crete who used to hire him to enlarge their houses. He would arrive with his tools, begin taking down the walls, pulling up the floors. But whenever he found some problem underneath that must first be fixed, they frowned. That was not in the agreement!
Of course not, he said, it has been hidden in the foundation, but look, there it is, plain as day. See the cracked beam? See the beetles eating the floor? See how the stone is sinking into the swamp?
That only made the lords angrier. It was fine until you dug it up! We will not pay! Close it up, plaster over. It has stood this long, it will stand longer.
So he would seal that fault up, and the next season the house would fall down. Then they would come to him, demanding back their money.
“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.
They came, I cannot say why. Some revolution of the Fates, some change in trade and shipping routes. Some scent upon the air, wafting: here are nymphs, and they live alone. The boats flew to my harbor as if yanked on a string. The men splashed to shore and looked around, pleased. Fresh water, game, fish, fruits. And I thought I saw hearth smoke above the trees. Is that someone singing?
I could have cast an illusion over the island to keep them away, I had the power to do it. Drape my gentle shores in an image of staving rocks and whirlpools, of jagged, unscaleable cliffs. They would sail on, and I would never need to see them, nor anyone, again.
No, I thought. It is too late for that. I have been found. Let them see what I am. Let them learn the world is not as they think.
They climbed up the trails. They crossed the stones of my garden path. They all had the same desperate story: they were lost, they were weary, they were out of food. They would be so grateful for my help.
A few of these, so few I can count them on my fingers, I let go. They did not see me as their dinner. They were pious men, honestly lost, and I would feed them, and if there was a handsome one among them I might take him to my bed. It was not desire, not even its barest scrapings. It was a sort of rage, a knife I used upon myself. I did it to prove my skin was still my own. And did I like the answer I found?
“Leave,” I told them.
They knelt to me on my yellow sands. “Goddess,” they said, “at least give us your name so we may send you our thankful prayers.”
I did not want their prayers, nor my name in their mouths. I wanted them gone. I wanted to scrub myself in the sea until the blood showed through.
I wanted the next crew to come, so I might see again their tearing flesh.
There was always a leader. He was not the largest, and he need not be the captain, but he was the one they looked to for instruction in their cruelty. 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.
I did not send my animals away anymore when men came. I let them loll where they liked, around the garden, under my tables. It pleased me to see the men walk among them, trembling at their teeth and unnatural tameness. I did not pretend to be a mortal. I showed my lambent, yellow eyes at every turn. None of it made a difference. I was alone and a woman, that was all that mattered.
I set my feasts before them, the meats and cheese, the fruits and fish. I set as well my largest bronze mixing bowl, filled to the brim with wine. They gulped and chewed, seized dripping cuts of mutton and dangled them down their throats. They poured and poured again, soaking their lips, slopping the table with red. Bits of barley and herbs stuck to their lips. The bowl is empty, they would say to me. Fill it. Add more honey this time, the vintage has a bitter tang.
Of course, I said.
The edge came off their hunger. They began to look around. I saw them notice the marble floors, the platters, the fine weave of my clothes. They smirked. If this was what I dared to show them, imagine what might be hiding in the back.
“Mistress?” the leader would say. “Do not tell me that such a beauty as yourself dwells all alone?”
“Oh, yes,” I would answer. “Quite alone.”
He would smile. He could not help it. There was never any fear in him. Why should there be? He had already noted for himself that there was no man’s cloak hanging by the door, no hunter’s bow, no shepherd’s staff. No sign of brothers or fathers or sons, no vengeance that would follow after. If I were valuable to anyone, I would not be allowed to live alone.
“I’m sorry to hear it,” he said.
The bench would scrape, and he would stand. The men watched with bright eyes. They wanted the freeze, the flinch, the begging that would come.
It was my favorite moment, seeing them frown and try to understand why I wasn’t afraid. In their bodies I could feel my herbs like strings waiting to be plucked. I savored their confusion, their dawning fear. Then I plucked them.
Their backs bent, forcing them onto hands and knees, faces bloating like drowned corpses. They thrashed and the benches turned over, wine splattered the floor. Their screams broke into squeals. I am certain it hurt.
I kept the leader for last, so he could watch. He shrank, pressed against the wall. Please. Spare me, spare me, spare me.
No, I would say. Oh, no.
When it was over it remained only to drive them out to the pen. I raised my staff of ash wood and they ran. The gate closed after them and they pressed back against the posts, their piggy eyes still wet with the last of their human tears.
My nymphs said not a word, though I suspected they watched sometimes through the crack of the door.
“Mistress Circe, another ship. Shall we go back to our room?”
“Please. And pull out the wine for me before you go.”
From one task to another I went, weaving, working, slopping my pigs, crossing and recrossing the isle. I moved straight-backed, as if a great brimming bowl rested in my hands. The dark liquid rippled as I walked, always at the point of overflow, yet never flowing. Only if I stopped, if I lay down, did I feel it begin to bleed.
Brides, nymphs were called, but that is not really how the world saw us. We were an endless feast laid out upon a table, beautiful and renewing. And so very bad at getting away.
The rails of my sty cracked with age and use. From time to time the wood buckled and a pig escaped. Most often, he would throw himself from the cliffs. The seabirds were grateful; they seemed to come from half the world away to feast on the plump bones. I would stand watching as they stripped the fat and sinew. The small pink scrap of tail-skin dangled from one of their beaks like a worm. If it were a man, I wondered if I would pity him. But it was not a man.