Cruel Enchantment

by Janine Ashbless

  I am a merciful goddess, however, and those years are few.

  My house, to their eyes, is a narrow cave in the yellow rock, from whose entrance the cold stream trickles even in the height of summer. It is a long walk from their nearest village, and they do not come very often. And they are afraid of me. They keep their eyes fixed upon the ground, upon their worn leather sandals, and they do not bear torches into the darkness of the cave’s interior. There they work in the pitch black, offering up their small sacrifices, before hurrying away, never looking back. They know how terrible is my divine beauty. Some even approach with their eyes squeezed closed.

  They never see me standing at the back of the temple, before the door which they could not find. I accept their sacrifices graciously but I do not disclose myself; the sight would be too much for them. Behind the inner door is the chamber within which dwell my sisters, Stheno and Euryale, but they do not often venture out. There is our bed. No mortal has seen this place.

  I spend much time in my house, weaving at the great loom or conversing with my sisters. But sometimes a restlessness comes upon me and I choose to walk the dry, pine-cloaked hills, or follow the small streams down to the sea. Sometimes I walk into the villages of my subjects, or join the crowds gathered for religious festivals. I feel a curiosity about these people, and am amused by their strange, ignorant ways and their rough practices. I like to watch the dancing, though I do not join in.

  Of course, such mingling takes preparation on my part. I cannot hide my divine glory as my sisters can – that is the work of the jealous Owl Queen – so I must resort to mundane subterfuge. I bind my long black hair, which is my greatest pride, so that it no longer undulates and hisses about my head in a cloud like living thunder. And I go up among the rocks above my house to a cave where the wild bees make their pendent nests. I have learned to take the waxen comb and melt it by lamp-flame, fashioning it into a mask that might pass for mere mortal beauty. When I tie that over my own features I may walk among men, unremarked except for the stillness of my expression and the fact that I am a stranger – a woman arriving alone and leaving wordless. The men of these parts are not like the truly civilised folk who confine their wives within the walls of the house for all their days – they are rude peasants for the most part, even their kings, and, among them, all must work if all are to eat. But they do not let their women walk alone. When I join a crowd, always I am noticed, and watched, and coveted by their men. My figure is fair beyond any mortal maiden’s.

  This pleases me.

  When I slip away from the celebration, or leave the press of the market, very often a man follows me. If I like his form, if his face is unmarked and his manner not too reminiscent of the beasts, I will let him follow me into the groves. Or sometimes I come upon a young shepherd with his flock in the hills, and I amuse myself by dalliance with him. Mortal flesh is hot to the touch and coarse, filled with swiftly changing tides of blood and strength. They smell like goats, and they have no more stamina in their love-making than in the pitifully brief span of their lives, but some few of them have a strange sweetness that moves me upon occasion; the briefness of their flowering only accentuates their beauty. They are like morning glories that wither upon the vine; but who is to say they are less fair for all that?

  I, who have loved the Earth Shaker himself, delight in the childish simplicity of a tremulous, eager, mortal man.

  The problem, my curse, of course is the mask. In the dusk, or under moonlight, my foolish lovers may not notice its artificiality – but the wax is thin and may easily be broken during our embraces. It melts when it comes into contact with hot, flushed flesh. The cords tear free. Then my glory is revealed and, like Semele before the Thunderer, they are struck down and destroyed. This has caused me much distress and frustration, just as the Owl Queen desired, I suppose; and the pitiful remains of my lovers are scattered about the countryside here, in quiet valleys and secluded copses, bedded down in the pine-needles or in isolated meadows. Sometimes I go back to visit those to whom some fond memory clings, and I gain a melancholy pleasure from their beauty preserved so terribly; they remain like flotsam cast up on the sands when the great wave of my desire has been spent, clean and smooth as sea-worn shells.

  One whom I still visit frequently is the body of a shepherd youth. He was named Hermias, if I remember rightly; tall and well-knit for a shepherd, I imagine that he may even have been the son of some petty king or noble, for it is their practice that even the highest must work to put food upon their tables. He had eyes of the deepest cornflower blue and the first curls of his manhood’s beard upon his cheeks. Ah; he was a delight. His skin was soft as a girl’s, his hands quick and eager and strong, his lips hot upon me. He stands now on a shaded hillside above a stream, leaning back against a tree, his hands on the bark behind him, his head drooping with exhaustion. His skin is cold now and glimmers white through the gloom under the trees, the black rings of his hair now pale as bone, never stirring in the breeze. Tree-bark is growing over his fingers. On his face is still frozen the first suggestion of the shock and terror that gripped him when I raised my face from his thighs and met his eyes – and the mask slipped. Even the tiny beads of sweat on his forehead have been perfectly captured. His phallus is a perfect curve, like a white bow strung for battle. I remember it growing cold in my mouth, how it knocked against my teeth as I withdrew. I even wept a little for him, for I was not yet satiated. I regret his loss. I come to caress the hard lines of his chest sometimes, and sigh for his unexplored perfection.

  Ivy has grown around his feet now, and tendrils coil up the muscular planes of his thighs. One small strand clasps tightly to the plump arc of his phallus, tiny roots clinging on the marble. His testes peep from a nest of green leaves and his hard buttocks are crisscrossed with the questing lines of the plant. His lower parts thus clothed, he resembles a satyr; leaf-bearing rather than goat-skinned, he is a better genius of the woodland than is the reality.

  But even like this their loveliness is transient. They are blurred by the wind and grow green with algae. Their features crumble and melt with the decades. Hermias will wear away in time. I endure, alone.

  It pains me that I live like this, here in the far West, among a half-barbarian people. Once my altar stood in the precincts of the temple of the Owl Queen herself and I was her attendant, the guardian of her door. But I dishonoured her holy sanctuary and she has cast me out, and taken from me the divine power to dissemble. Like all the great gods she is vindictive; there would be no forgiveness from her even if I were to stoop low enough to beg it – which I shall not.

  I am still a goddess.

  The Earth Shaker came to me when I was in her temple. I was alone, my glory veiled, within the inner sanctuary. As I remember, I was tending the offerings upon her great altar-stone – harvest offerings of wine and fruit and grain, and an amphora of finest olive oil. My back was to the door and I did not hear him enter, but he spoke my name. No mortal would have been able to see me. I turned, and recognised him at once, and felt my heart stop within my breast.

  He stood in the centre of the hall, dressed simply in a plain chiton; a chlamys of eggshell-blue trailed from his arm across the marble flagstones. He brought with him a smell of sea air and the faint sound of horns blowing. I had never seen the Earth Shaker this close before, but I knew it was he for I had in the past wandered to the shore and spoken with his daughters as they played among the rocks. They were wild-spirited maidens, very different from my silent sisters, and I enjoyed their light speech of the sea and of distant lands. But one day their laughing and splashing ceased even as I spoke to them, and they slipped silently back into the depths with looks of fear. I turned then to see that I was being watched from the sands; a stallion stood fetlock-deep in the waves, a horse blue-grey as the ocean under a storm sky, unbridled, his mane tangled and long. He raised his head and snorted, and the white gulls wheeling overhead all cried in alarm. I recognised at once who he was and fled back to the sanctuary o
f my Owl Queen’s house. I knew there was no fondness between them and that she would protect me.

  Here in manly guise, the Earth Shaker was a man in the prime of his maturity, broad-shouldered and deep of chest, his hair and beard flowing in disordered locks. I saw that the lines of a habitual frown lingered between his piercing eyes, though he was not frowning now. He smiled. The cloak slid from his arm to the floor.

  I turned my back on him then and laid my hands upon the altar, my heart in my mouth. I heard him speak my name again, his voice very deep and soft, like the murmur of the sea. I could have called upon the Owl Queen; I should have. She would have heard my cry, there in her own temple, and she would have rescued me. But I held my silence. I heard him walk up the length of the hall to me, and I said nothing.

  Why? I know why. Because her rescue would have been indistinguishable from her wrath; I would have spent eternity as a nightingale or an owlet. Unravished, yes, but … no longer a goddess.

  I was the guardian of the temple. They used to sacrifice poisonous snakes to me.

  And because … because my virtue as the virgin companion of the inviolate goddess was a tedium and a burden. I desired other things.

  Because I wanted the Earth Shaker.

  Not that for a moment I expected devotion from him. He is no different from his Olympian brother. They are brutal and grasping, no more given to selflessness than the thunderbolt or the salt ocean. What they want, they take, unless one has the power to flee them or trick them. I would get no more from him, I knew, than a moment’s lust. But he was one of the great lords; and his majesty awed me; and his desire flattered me.

  Strangely, since my disgrace he has continued to visit me in my new house, upon occasion. We share my carved bed and my sisters stand at the foot, speechless, in witness.

  I remember the coldness of the altar stone beneath my palms. I remember the wick of the lamp spitting a little. He came up behind me, slid his large hands about my waist and pulled me back against him. I could smell the sea. One of his hands rested against my stomach and I felt my belly knot inside me. We stood for a long time like that; his face bowed to my neck, his arms surrounding me. I felt very small in his embrace. His lips were hot on my throat. His long hair washed over me with a shock like the cold salt-wave, making me shudder. I was so tense that even his firm grasp did not cause me to yield against his body; he must have thought me afraid.

  Gently, his paired hands moved on my frame, never releasing me. The thin cloth of my peplos was no barrier to him. He cupped and lifted my breasts, moulding them in hands that had killed titans, squeezing and pressing them together. I did not move. My head drooped to one side. He whispered my name once more, his voice slurred with pleasure. My flesh responded to his every touch; to the tickle of his fingertips across my hardening nipples, to the firm pressure of his palm flat upon my navel and my mons, to the caress that was half stroking, half pinching; I wanted to writhe against him, to make him touch me anew – but I could not move. Here was the power that destroyed cities and wrecked ships, concentrated on my shaking, gasping form with terrifying purpose.

  His hands dropped to my hips and he pulled me back against his groin. I could feel his erection, hard as rock; it jabbed my soft flesh. The heat between my thighs was molten. I moaned a little. He pressed hard against me, fingers biting into my skin fiercely enough to bruise, and rubbed his thick member up and down. His teeth closed on my earlobe; I could feel his breath coming fast and shallow.

  Then he pushed me away. The gap between us was like the void of Tartarus, filled with loss; I would have turned, but his hands, still on my hips, pinned me in place. One palm went to my right buttock, comforting my torment. My throat was so dry I could not speak. He stooped to gather the long skirt of my peplos, drew it up in handfuls to my waist. The brush of air upon my skin told me I was naked, my arse exposed, and the skin across my rounded behind tightened. He touched me again, one hand holding my dress up while the other explored the softness of my flawless flesh before delving smoothly into the cleft between. He found the diamond of flesh that cannot be hidden, cannot be concealed, however I might stand or twist – and the liquid warmth within it. I jerked and started when his fingers opened the folds of my sanctum. He laughed softly at me. Still holding me against the altar, he withdrew his hand from my slippery petals and replaced it with the blunt spearhead of his phallus. It was the first time I had felt such a thing upon my naked skin. It was hot and thick; he did not try to pierce me straight away but slid it up and down my furrow, teasing me, slathering it with my juices.

  I found my voice. I cried out and turned suddenly to face him, breaking his grasp and knocking his member aside.

  I could see by the look on his face that he expected me to try and flee then; he grabbed me hard at the waist. But I furled my arms about his neck and offered my lips to his instead. My mouth yielded to his invasion. His kiss was wild as a gale, and tasted of salt. He crushed me against him, his trident pinned between us, pressed achingly against my mons; and his hands were rough now. He tore the clasps of my peplos so that he could bare my breasts and seize them in his mouth. Then, breaking off from his devouring kisses that were almost bites upon my nipples, he reached past me and swept with his broad arm everything that was on the altar, all the votive gifts to the Owl Queen, to the floor. He lifted me and laid me upon the broad stone, then mounted above me. He parted my legs.

  Olympus: but there has never been, there could not be anything to match that fearful mingling of our bodies. Not even the Foamborn and the Warlord can have coupled with such savage delight. He was like a stallion upon a mare, a ship under full sail upon the sea, a spear piercing my entrails. His phallus felt as thick as a branch and as hard as bronze; it ploughed into me like the ram of a ship cutting the waves. I melted, I flowed, I engulfed him. He rode me upon the sacred altar of the Owl Queen. I cried and twisted under him, and he shouted above me, lips drawn back from bared teeth. I tore at his back and kissed his throat and lifted my hips so that he could thrust deeper and deeper yet, slapping me back against the marble. My black hair was spilt in a wave across the white stone. Tears ran from my eyes and I sobbed, pleading shamelessly with him for more, for faster, for deeper, for harder – for the completion of my ruination – until he covered my mouth with his and stopped my breath and I felt myself turn to light. The fire of my ecstasy roared around him, and he became incandescent also, both blazing in divine flame that lit the temple from end to end.

  Even a mortal would have seen our glory and been blinded by it, if any had been present.

  He held me for a time while the numinous glow faded, and then he left me. I lay motionless, dress torn, legs splayed, breasts marked pink by tooth and nail, lips swollen – and my eyes full of awe. When I had recovered myself enough to sit up, from my puffy sexual bowl a libation of our mingled moistures poured out upon the altar.

  It did not occur to me until later that he had engineered everything in order to insult the Owl Queen. They had been enemies ever since she defeated him in the contest for the fealty of Athens.

  Bitch. She did not forgive me for desecrating her altar. When she found out, my own was broken. Her curse was cruel.

  I have never borne him a child. I wonder at that; I have never heard of his seed failing to come to harvest elsewhere.

  In my house, I weave these things upon my loom. My sisters spin for me. My yarn is dried grasses and cobwebs, wool found snagged upon the thorns and our long hairs, black and ash-grey and white. I weave the Owl Queen, cold and terrible with eyes that seem to glitter, accoutred with helmet and aegis. I weave the Earth Shaker, proud as a bull. I weave myself and my sisters – and I weave the pale, forsaken monuments that are left of those whom I have loved.

  Sometimes, though, I have used my curse deliberately, and it has not been chance that froze a man for an alabaster eternity. I am the goddess of this place, lowly as that station may be, and it is not fitting to skulk in the shadows as if I were ashamed. But it also pleases
me to be merciful and to show pity to my subjects. One year when I walked upon the shingles of their narrow shore, there came around the headland a great ship of fifty oars, filled with men. I heard the horns blowing the alarm in the town upon the hill, and saw that the people were running back to the walls to defend their homes from these pirates. I met them where the road bends round through the olive-trees, stepping out to greet them and drawing the folds of the chlamys from my head. They had anticipated ambush, I think, but not like this. Not one of them got the chance even to loose a spear. Forty men died on that path, forty sun-hardened warriors with bronze helmets and shields of bull-hide, vanquished silently and almost instantly. The doves in the canopy overhead did not even notice the slaughter, so quiet was it, and their songs and jostlings went on undisturbed. I stepped between the motionless ranks of men, admired the chasings on their armour, fingered a fluttering tunic which had some fine embroidered edging, and then made my way back through the vineyards to my house among the untended hills. As the sun went down that night, I stood upon the great flat rock and danced my victory.

  What my subjects did with those warriors I do not know; smashed them to make rubble for some road, I suppose. Most of the pale bodies I leave in my wake stay undisturbed, either lost in the wilderlands or shunned out of piety and fear. I have seen them treated by the peasants with wonder and even fear. There is one in a grove of cypresses by the river, not far from the royal palace of their little king, which is well known and often visited by the womenfolk. Perhaps they mistake my old lover for Priapus. They bring offerings of fruit and garlands of flowers, and make requests for happy marriages and many children.