The Mask of Circe

by Henry Kuttner

  From astern the cries of the pursuers were as loud as they had been at the beginning of the chase, hours ago now. The clashings of their weapons were like the clash of metallic teeth in a dragons jaws, stretched to devour us. When the golden ship’s lookout sighted the cypress trees in the fog he must have signaled for redoubled speed, for I heard the sharp crack of whips, and the blinding vessel fairly leaped forward. She was overhauling us fast, though Orpheus’ disembodied lyre screamed out in rhythms that made the pulses pound in answer, and the ghostly oarsmen bent their sinewy backs desperately over the oars.

  For one flashing moment the golden ship stood almost alongside, and I could look with halfblinded eyes across her shining decks and see the men in shining armor that matched their ship, straining across the rails and shaking swords and javelins at us.

  Then she sprang ahead. There was an instant when the blaze of her blotted out that dark island before us. Suicidally she shot across our bows, and I could see the tense, excited faces of her crew turned toward us, pale against the dazzle of their shining mail

  Orpheus’ lyre broke the rhythm of the stroke for one heartbeat. Then the shadowy fingers swept those magical strings and a scream of hatred and vengeance leaped from the lyre. It shrieked like a living thing, like a Fury ravening for the kill.

  All around me I saw the voiceless shout of answer sweeping the Argo’s crew. I saw the bearded heads go back, grinning with effort and triumph, and I saw the brawny backs bending as one in a last tremendous pull that shot their craft forward—forward straight into the golden side looming before us.

  For one heartbeat I realized vividly how vulnerable I was—I alone, among all this bodiless crew to whom destruction could mean nothing. Argo and I were real, and the golden ship was real, and the ghostly Argonauts were driving us both to what looked like certain doom.

  I remember the terrific, rending crash as we struck. The deck jolted beneath me and there was a blaze/ ahead as if the golden ship were incandescent and flashing into flame with its own brilliance in that moment of disaster. I remember shouts and screams, the clash of weapon on shield, and above it all the wild, shrill keening of lyre-strings swept by no mortal hands.

  Then Argo fell apart beneath me and the cold seas met above my head…

  Chapter III

  Temple in the Grove

  A voice was calling through billows of thinning mist. “Jason of Iolcus,” it cried very sweetly in my dreams. “Jason of Thessaly—Jason of the Argo—waken—waken and answer me!”

  I sat up on the pale, cool sand and listened. Waves lapped a shore still marked with the track where I must have dragged myself out of the placid surf. My clothes were stiff with brine, but dry. I must have lain here a long while.

  The dark cypress trees rustled secretly together, hiding whatever lay behind them. There was no other sound. No sign of survivors from the golden ship, no sign of the ship itself. The Argo I had last felt shattering asunder beneath my feet might have returned with its ghostly crew to the land of ghosts for all I could see of it now. I was alone on the pale sands of Aeaea, which was the Enchantress’ Isle.

  “Jason of the Argo—answer me, come to me—Jason, Jason! Do you hear?”

  The voice had a clear, inhuman sweetness, as if the island itself were calling me by name. And the call was compelling. I found myself on my feet, and swaying a little, without knowing I had risen. The summons seemed to come from between the cypresses directly at my back. I floundered up the sand and plunged into the grove, only partly of my own volition, so sweetly compelling was that cry from the misty depths of the isle.

  I could see only a little way ahead, for the fog seemed to hang in veils among the trees. But I thought that I was no longer alone. There was deep silence all around me, but a listening and watching silence. Not inimical—not menacing. Interested—that was it. Detached interest watched me on my way through the mist-drenched grove, eyes that followed me aloofly, not caring, but interested to see what my fate would be.

  In that silence punctuated by the dripping of mist and moisture from the trees, and by no other earthly sound, I followed the calling voice through fog and forest, to the very heart of the island.

  When I saw the white temple looming against the dark trees I was not surprised. Jason had been here before. He knew the way. Perhaps he knew who called, but I did not. I thought when I saw the face of the speaker, I would not feel surprised either, but I could not picture her yet.

  Motion stirred among the pillars of the temple as I crossed the misty clearing. Robed and veiled figures came out from the shadow of the columns and bent their hidden heads in greeting. No one spoke., I knew, somehow, perhaps with Jason’s age-old knowledge, that while that voice called from the temple, no one on the island must speak but the Voice itself—and I?

  “Jason of Thessaly,” the voice was saying in a low, caressing cadence. “Jason, my lover—enter! Come to me, Jason, my beloved.”

  The robed figures stepped back. I went under the shadow of the portico and into the temple.

  Except for the flame that moved restlessly upon the altar, it was dark here. I could see a tall triple image looming up majestic and terrible behind the fire, and even the fire was strange, burning greenish, with a cold flickering cadence, and its motion more like the ceaseless, uneasy twisting of serpents than the warm flicker of ordinary firelight.

  The woman before the altar was completely robed, like the others. I thought she moved with an odd sort of stiffness in her concealing garments. At the sound of my foot on the marble she swung around, and when I saw her face I forgot for a timeless moment her curious slowness of movement, and the altar fires, and even the identity of that triple figure above us, whose dark import I knew well.

  It was a pale face, inhumanly pale and smooth, like a face of alabaster. There was the purity of alabaster in the long, sloping planes of the cheeks and the modeling of the eye-sockets and the delicately flattened brow. But a warmth burned beneath the smoothness, and the lips were dark red and warmly full. And the eyes burned with a lambent flame as green and strange as the strange fire on the altar.

  Black brows swept in a winged arc above them in a look of delicate surprise, and her hair was glossily black, lustrous with purple highlights, dressed elaborately in a stately display of ringlets. But I found that Jason knew that hair unbound, how it fell in a shining black river over her shoulders as smoothly curved as the alabaster of her face, and each separate hair of it burning the flesh like a blue-hot wire when he brushed it with his hand.

  Jason’s memories welled up in my brain and Jason’s voice filled my throat with Jason’s own words in his own Grecian tongue.

  “Circe—” I heard myself saying thickly. “Circe, my beloved.”

  The fire leaped upon the altar, casting green highlights upward on her beautiful, terribly familiar face. And I could have sworn that a fire leaped green in her eyes to match it. The shadows in the temple swayed, and emerald flickerings ran shivering over the walls, like the light reflected from water.

  She stepped back away from me, toward the altar, putting out both hands stiffly in a strangely awkward gesture of renunciation.

  “No, no,” she said in that rich, sweet voice. “Not yet—not yet, Jason. Wait.”

  She turned away from me and faced the image above the flame. And this time I looked at it fully, and let my memories and Jason’s together tell me what goddess it was who stood tri-formed in her temple.

  Hecate.

  Goddess of the dark of the moon, as Diana was the bright goddess of the light of the moon. Hecate: She-Who-Works-From-Afar, mysterious patroness of sorcery about whom only half-truths have ever been known. Goddess of the crossways and the dark deeds, tri-formed to face the three ways at her sacred crossroads. Hellhounds follow her abroad by night, and when the dogs bay, Hellenes see her passing. Hecate, dark and alien mother of Circe the Enchantress.

  Circe’s robed arms moved about the flames in a ritual gestu
re. She said, quite softly, “Now he is come to us, Mother. Jason of Iolcus is here again. Surely my task is done?”

  Silence. The green light crawled upon the walls, and the goddess’ faces looked impassively into nothingness. On the altar in the stillness that followed, the fire sank very low, sank to a soft greenish ember over which the light moved restlessly—coiling—twining slowly.

  Circe turned to face me, her robed shoulders drooping. The greenlit eyes met mine and there was infinite sadness and infinite sweetness in her voice.

  “It is not the hour,” she murmured. “It is not the place. Farewell for a little time, my beloved. I wish—but the hour will not be mine. Only remember me, Jason, and the hours of our love!”

  Before I could speak she lifted both hands to her head and moved long fingers across her face. Her head bent and the lustrous curls swung forward to hide her eyes. There was an inexplicable movement.

  For the second time I felt the separate hairs lift on my own head. Because I was watching the impossible. I was watching Circe raise her head from her shoulders in both hands, and watching the head come free—

  It was a mask. It must have been a mask. She lowered it in her hands and looked at me above the lifeless alabaster features, the clustering dark curls. There was something shocking about the eyes that met mine in her altered face, but for the moment I was staring speechlessly at that impossibly severed head. All of it was there, the elaborate curls whose touch I half remembered, the warm red lips closed on a line of secret, smiling knowledge, the eyes that could burn so green closed, too, behind pale lids and thick shadowy lashes. It had lived and spoken. Now it slept and was only a waxen mask.

  Slowly I raised my eyes to the face of the woman who had worn the mask And I saw gray hair, thin over a gray scalp, weary black eyes netted in wrinkles, a tired and wise and subtly terrified face grooved with the lines of old, old age.

  “You are—Jason,” she said in a cracked voice, thin and weary. “But Kronos has shaken the cup till the dice reverse themselves. The same dice, yes—but with new numbers upward.”

  Something seemed to click over in my brain as she stood there speaking, so that I heard her words only dimly in the sudden, appalling realization that this was I—Jay Seward—here on an incredible island facing an incredible altar.

  Perhaps it was the very matter-of-factness in that tired old voice that wakened me at last to my own predicament.

  Kronos, she had said. The time-god. Had time swept backward three thousand years? Had the Argo really borne me back into the gray mists of the past, to a world that had been legend for all the ages while Hellas rose and crumbled at the feet of Rome? While Rome itself sent out its walking walls across Europe—while Kronos watched the sands trickling through his eternal fingers?

  No, it was not the whole answer. Some alien hand had stooped over this world. Strangeness whispered in the earth and waters and wind. Perhaps there is in men’s very flesh a certain buried sense that will warn him when he has left the world from which Adam’s flesh was shaped. For I knew that much.

  This was not—Earth.

  I remembered briefly how Euripides had closed his terrible story of Medea and Jason, and the lines seemed to ring with prophetic force in my mind now.

  —to man strange dooms are given…

  And the end men looked for cometh not,

  And a path is there where no man thought…

  A path that had led me—where? To the Earth of legend, perhaps! A long-forgotten world where the Isle of the Enchantress lay on some mystic Aegean, worshipping the tri-formed goddess.

  Until now I had been caught in the grip of forces almost beyond my control. Quite beyond, if you consider that one such force lay across my mind like a spur and a rein combined—Jason’s memories. It was dreamlike. And in that dream it had seemed right to me that I bend to the wind’s will, the wind that filled Argo’s sails and carried Circe’s voice to me under the dark cypresses. Man bows always to the thralldom of enchantment, in his superstitious soul. Especially the man of long ago—of now—whose daily life was peopled with the gods and demons of his own fear-wrought imaginings.

  Fear.

  The word roused me.

  I knew quite suddenly what it was that brooded like a thunderous shadow above Jason’s memories. Fear—of what? Why was I there?

  Memories of the ancient wisdom of Euripides stirred in my mind again. What had it been that—

  —over sundering seas

  Drew me to Hellas, and the breeze

  Of midnight shivered, and the door

  Closed of the salt unsounded water…

  I looked around me with suddenly frightened eyes. The green light that crawled upon the altar showed me every detail of Hecate’s temple, and every detail was alien. Panic rose in my throat and the floor sloped beneath my feet downward into a black abyss.

  I knew with a sudden unanswerable terror that this was impossible. Either I was sane or I was frantically insane, and in either case it was horrible! Night mare—The old woman’s eyes were upon me, and I thought the closed lids of the living head she held flickered to look, too.

  I whirled and ran.

  Perhaps I ran because I was sane again. Perhaps because the memories of Jason overwhelmed me. I seemed to feel again the planks of the Argo shattering beneath me.

  Nothing was solid.

  Nothing was real.

  There was a stirring among the robed figures at the door of the temple. I heard a thin, cracked voice crying behind me,

  “Panyr—Panyr! After him!”

  And I remember hearing a loud staccato of footsteps ringing hollowly in the still temple. Then I was out among the cypresses and running, running-

  What I ran from I don’t know. From this fantastic world itself, perhaps, or from Jason. Yes, that was it. I ran from Jason, who clung inexorably to the fabric of my mind, pouring the black blind panic of his fear into my soul. Such fear as we have no name for today!

  It was terror that only primitive peoples know, assailed by the vastness of the unknown. A fear like an ecstasy that used to fall upon men in the old days when Pan himself peered out at them, homed and grinning, through the trees.

  Panic they called it, because they knew that homed head by name.

  I ran toward the distant murmur of the sea. Mist drew its soft veils before me, blurring the way. And behind me, muffled by the pounding of my own feet, I heard the clatter of feet that followed. A clatter like hoofbeats thudding upon turf and stone—after me!

  I could feel the aching pound of my heart crashing against my ribs. My breath sobbed between dry lips. I ran blindly, wildly, not knowing where I ran or why—until I could run no more.

  Utterly spent at last, I dropped by a bubbling green pool in a little glade where all quiet seemed to dwell. Exhausted with flight and terror, I buried my face in the sward and lay breathing in racking gasps.

  Someone—something came quietly up beside me, and paused.

  Within me some last extremity of terror—Jasons terror—bade me cower here in the grass forever, if need be, before I lifted my head and looked the terror in the face. But my own mind, swallowed up in Jason’s, roused a little at that, and rebelled. Whatever Jason’s experiences in life might have been, Jay Seward knew better than that.

  There are no fears in any man’s life which cowering can solve.

  With an infinite effort that seemed to crack the rebellious muscles of my neck, I lifted my face so that I could see who stood beside me.

  Chapter IV

  Trust Not a Faun

  Later, I came to know Panyr very well. But he never seemed less strange to me than in that first moment when our eyes met by the pool. The barrier of his alienage always had power to make me pause a little in sheer disbelief. Yet most of him was—human. I think if he had been less nearly human he would have been easier to accept.

  Goat-horns and goat-legs—that was the measure of his diff
erence from the rest of mankind. Everything else was normal enough on the surface. Perhaps his bearded face, with the slant yellow eyes and the snub nose, held a wisdom and a queer, malicious kindness unknown to ordinary men. He did not look old. His tangled curls were black and glossy, but his eyes were betraying.

  “So now the fear has gone?” he asked in his strangely deep voice, looking down on me with a faint grin. His tone was conversational. He was squatting on his hairy haunches very comfortably and his eyes were at once amused and understanding.

  “There’ll be a song to sing about Panyr,” he went on, and suddenly laughed, a flat bray of sound. “Panyr the Mighty. So terrible even the hero Jason flees from him like a frightened boy ”

  I watched in silence, swallowing the indignation that swelled in my throat, knowing he had the right to laugh. But at Jason, not at me. Did he know that? He rose on his crooked legs and walked, with an odd, rocking gait, toward the pool, stood looking down at his own reflection thoughtfully.

  “My beard wants combing,” he said, scratching it with strong, hairy fingers. “Should I summon a dryad from that olive tree yonder—I wonder, now, Jason. Would you fly in terror from a young dryad, too? Perhaps I’d better not risk it. The pretty thing would weep, thinking you scorned her, and then I would have to console her—and to tell you the truth, Jason of jolcus, I’m a little tired after the run you gave me.”

  I think that from that moment I trusted Panyr—strange product of a strange, lost world. Even when I saw his yellow goat-pupiled eyes glancing toward the wood across, my shoulder, saw the look of fleeting satisfaction cross his face. I thought then it was a dryad he watched, his talk had been so casually convincing. Yes, I trusted Panyr, with his snub nose and mocking grin, and those curved horns rising from the tangled curls. Even if the fear had not left me already, I believe Panyr’s words and his smile would have dispelled it.

  “Is the fear gone now?” he asked, suddenly quiet and unsmiling.