Later, Aeëtes told me I smiled as I slept. It was my smile that damned me.
Heliodoros shut me in my old chamber in his grand house—the one I had inhabited as a girl. The one I had shared with Pasiphaë. The door slammed hard behind him when he left me there, a testament to his anger. My father had not said a single word to me on the long walk from my husband’s home to his own. But my bruised, aching wrist (by which Heliodoros had grabbed me, hauling me from my bed and from the sanctuary of dreams) spoke plainly enough. If I had expected the sympathy due a new widow, I would not receive it from my father.
The chamber had been stripped of most of its old things. Woven rugs and tapestries Pasiphaë and I had chosen to brighten the chamber of our girlhood were long gone. Floor and walls alike were bare as clean-picked bones. One of the beds had been removed; a single sleeping couch, hard and narrow, stood in the middle of the room. It was morning, but well could I imagine the shadows of night drawing in around me, circling on all sides, as I huddled beneath that unfriendly bed’s thin sheets. There was one cedar chest tucked into a corner, a tiny clay lamp perched on its lid, my only source of light in the darkness. Beside the chest stood a pot for my night soil. I could hardly have found myself in a bleaker place if I’d been shut up in the black vault of a tomb.
At least I had some company in my prison cell, while I waited to learn what my father would do with me—and what had kindled his anger in the first place. Anthousa had recently been hired into Heliodoros’s household. She was scarcely older than I—little more than a girl—but her tall stature and strong shoulders had made her almost as useful as a strapping young man. As she was near my own age, Heliodoros had pulled Anthousa from the kitchens, where she had been cutting up onions for that night’s stew, and sent her off to my chamber to see to my needs. I believe Heliodoros had some notion that Anthousa’s height and strength would intimidate me, and keep me from plotting an escape. Instead, I found the sympathy my family had denied me in the young woman’s arms.
“My lady,” she’d said, reaching out to comfort me, “we have all heard what happened. The wolves are terrible this year. Some say it’s because of the drought in the east; it has driven the wolves out of their usual places, and they are hungry and desperate. But I suppose that’s no comfort to you.”
I sniffled, wiping away my tears. No matter how kind she seemed, I didn’t dare confess to this stranger that I did not weep for Lycus. My tears were all for my confusion—the strange mist and mire of Heliodoros’s rage, and the stoic silence my two brothers had kept as they’d helped march me back to our father’s home.
“When will Heliodoros set me free?” I asked Anthousa. “Do you know?”
“I have not heard, my lady. But I will be here with you all the while, to cheer you and bring you anything you need. And whenever other duties call me away, there will be other girls to take my place. Demetria, Eumelia, Chrysomallo—they are all very pleasant and kind. We’ll keep the nightmares away.”
“But why should my father hold me here? I’ve done no wrong.”
Anthousa looked down at the toes of her sandals. She shifted uncomfortably from one foot to the other.
“You know something,” I said. “Tell me what you know.”
“I have heard…a rumor, my lady.” She looked up at me, speaking with a sudden rush of passion. “But I don’t believe it. None of us do—we younger women. We know it’s all foolishness—men’s silly fears, and nothing more. But when has a woman ever succeeded in talking sense into a frightened man?”
“Tell me,” I said again. My body had gone cold; my mind was very still, calm with acceptance.
Anthousa sighed. “This morning I heard that two of Lycus’s men ran here in the night, and had Heliodoros wakened long before the sun was up. They told the master that you had worked some dark magic on your husband, and poisoned him while he was too weak to fight you off. They called you a witch.”
A silence. At length, I said, “I see.”
“But none of us believe it,” she insisted again. “Men are fools, the whole lot of them. We know you’ve done no wrong, my lady…for whatever servants’ confidence may be worth to you.”
I forced a smile. “It is worth a good deal to me, just now. My father does not trust me, as you can clearly see. Even my brothers seem to have turned their backs on me.”
The chamber had two small windows; one looked out across the hills, past the temple shrine where Pasiphaë and I had made our offerings as children, to the ancient cemetery on a green slope dotted with pines. Anthousa joined me at the window; as the sun sank ever lower in the deep blue of an afternoon sky, we watched my husband’s funeral procession. Tiny as ants, Heliodoros, my brothers, and Lycus’s friends bore the body I had washed and anointed up the windy hill. They gathered around his grave while someone—Heliodoros, I assume—recited the funerary rites. When Lycus was properly consigned to the earth, the distant men began to trickle back down the slope toward the long pale snake of the road, and Anthousa and I turned away.
The gods—no, the goddesses—had shown me both favor and clemency thus far. They were similarly merciful in the swiftness of my judgment. Heliodoros did not make me wait, lingering in the bare chamber with uncertainty and anxiety clamoring all about like demons. As soon as he returned from Lycus’s burial, my father sent for me, and within minutes I stood before his chieftain’s chair in the feast hall, hanging my head, hiding my face behind the dark fall of my hair. Far too many people were assembled in the hall for my comfort. My brothers stood beside Heliodoros’s chair, neither of them willing to meet my eye. Throngs of men—some pledged to my father, others to Lycus—were scattered about the room. Their low murmurs swirled around me like the currents of a cold, treacherous river.
“Circe.” My father’s voice was cold as a sword and twice as sharp. Silence descended on the hall. “I am appalled and shamed by what you have done.”
It’s useless to defend myself, I thought, clear-headed with despair. He has already decided I am a witch, and a danger to his household. I may be guilty of causing Lycus’s death—hadn’t I prayed for Artemis to remove him?—but I never did it through witchcraft. I know nothing of the sinister arts.
Heliodoros went on. “I took you into my household—you, a whelp with no rightful claim on me and mine. I raised you as I did my own true, legitimate daughter. This is how you repay my generosity? By poisoning the husband I gave you?”
I shook my head in denial, but I did not lift my face to meet my father’s eye.
“Lycus was better than you deserved, better than a woman of your circumstances had any right to expect.”
Now I found I could not hold my tongue. I spoke, still staring at the floor. “My lord and chieftain, Lycus was a foul, disrespectful man. He hated me, and treated me poorly. He—”
“Do not speak!” Heliodoros bellowed. “He was your husband. You were his to treat as he saw fit—to do with as he pleased. You have brought immeasurable shame on my house, Circe—on my reputation, merely by having the audacity to speak against the man to whom you were married.”
My face flushed so hot that my skin burned and my eyes prickled with tears, but I did not dare contradict Heliodoros again.
“For you to poison him,” Heliodoros continued, “to work against him, to actually plan his death…!”
He fell silent. A ripple of sound passed through the hall, a shifting and sighing of men. Heliodoros must have been purple-faced with rage, to cause such a reaction in his onlookers.
After a moment, with his temper more or less controlled, he spoke again. “There is no sense in asking whether you have some defense. Two workers from Lycus’s holding already swore they saw you give your husband potions while he was weak and ailing.”
“Herbs,” I said weakly. “Only herbs. To heal him.”
Heliodoros thundered on, as if I had never spoken. “They swore, too, that Lycus called you a witch and pleaded with his men to keep you away. Lycus knew you planned to harm him.”<
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I shook my head again. Tears fell from my eyes; I watched them patter on the stones of the floor between my feet, dark spots among pale dust.
“These men have told me that you occupy your time gathering plants and roots to make potions, to work charms and sorceries. Do you deny it?”
“I…I gather plants, but only to heal. I know nothing of charms or sorcery! Please, Father—I have always tried to be a good daughter, a good wife…a good woman.” I looked up at my brothers. “Tell him, Aeëtes, Perses! Tell him I am good and obedient. You know I am.”
Aeëtes’ face was as long and harrowed as if he’d witnessed his own death. Perses sighed heavily, an agonized sound, and passed a hand over his eyes.
“Perses has told me enough already,” Heliodoros said. “He has sworn to me that three nights ago, just before your husband was attacked by wolves, you told him you wished Lycus dead. Perses said that you prayed often for Lycus to die. Do you deny that? Will you call my true son Perses a liar?”
“Why, Perses?” I cried. “Why would you tell him such things? Do you believe me wicked—evil?”
Perses would not answer. Affected by my pain and humiliation, shamed by the part he had played, he hung his head and turned away.
I rounded on my younger brother. “Aeëtes, tell him! Tell Father I’m not a witch. You know I’m not.”
“Sister,” Aeëtes said softly, “I’m sorry. I—”
Heliodoros rose from the chieftain’s chair with one swift, powerful movement. “Silence! No one is to speak. I have heard enough already—more than enough. With time, Sarmatia would have thrown off the usurper Mnason; Lycus would have been recalled to his throne. He would have been indebted to me for the kindness I showed him, and better still, he would have been tied to me by blood—by marriage to you, and by the children you should have borne him. You have destroyed that alliance, Circe. You have undone all my plans.”
I swallowed hard, waiting for my father to pronounce his judgment.
“I have already consulted with the priestess of Hestia. I thought Hestia would declare your life forfeit, for all the damage you have done to my carefully laid plans—and for your audacity, in murdering your husband. But it seems the goddess has other plans for you.”
I looked up at last, full into my father’s face. His small, dark eyes were narrow with disgust, with hatred.
“I dare not upset order,” Heliodoros said coldly. “You have done quite enough of that already. But neither will I keep you under my roof…not any longer. I see now that I never should have taken you in the first place. I should have left you to starve at your dead mother’s breast.”
At such cruelly casual talk of the mother I never knew, my chest tightened with a sudden, fierce pain.
“You shall not remain on this land, either. You are banished not only from my territory, but from Colchis entirely. If any other chief thinks to harbor you, I will make war on him. I will hunt him to the ends of the earth, and slaughter him and all his men like rabid dogs. I will leave their corpses to rot beneath the sun.”
The hall was eerily silent. Heliodoros’s men had heard his pledge; they would be honor-bound to carry it out, to make bloody and relentless war on any Colchian tribe that offered me the least succor. Aeëtes’ face was red; he looked as if he might weep. Perses seemed to wilt beside my father’s chair.
After a moment, I dared to speak. “Where shall I go, then?”
Heliodoros stared at me in silence. His brows lowered. Then he said, slowly, stiffly, “I would send you off to the Underworld if I could—if Hestia permitted. As it is, I cannot contrive to send you that far. But I can put plenty of distance between you and Colchis. Tell that servant girl to pack your chest. You will be at the riverbank when the sun rises. I’ve a ship that will carry you to a fitting home for one such as you.”
We were eight, all told, when we left Colchis forever—we women who came to call this small island, Aeaea, our wild and lonesome home.
When I returned to my prison-chamber red-eyed but resolute, Anthousa swore without a moment’s hesitation she would journey with me. “There is nothing for me here,” she’d said, already packing the cedar chest with needful things. “What shall I do—content myself with a servant’s life forever? If I accompany you, my lady, at least I shall see new sights.” The other servant-girls, friendly with Anthousa, were just as quick to pledge their companionship. Demetria, Eumelia, and Chrysomallo were quickly joined by Agathe and Galene, whose lives in the kitchen were little better than the lives of slaves.
To my surprise and pleasure, the hard-working maid of my husband’s house, young Ligeia, arrived with a great basket stuffed with my collection of herbs, roots, and scrolls. “I know you are no witch, my lady,” she’d said, handing the heavy basket to me. “Where you go, I shall go, too, if you will have me.” I was touched by her loyalty—more deeply moved still by her thoughtfulness in secreting my most prized possessions from Lycus’s home.
My father and my silent, shame-faced brothers saw me to the river bank the next morning, with the sun’s first blush. Like a prisoner condemned to die, I stood subdued between Aeëtes and Perses while Heliodoros squared my passage with the ship’s captain and gave him stern instructions on how I was to be handled. Then I was bundled aboard, shut up in a small, airless cabin as black as the sky between stars, and left alone, without a word of farewell. But as soon as I could be certain my family had returned to the shore, I smiled. For I heard Anthousa there on the river bank, negotiating passage for herself and the other six young women. They had disguised themselves as priestesses of Hestia—fitting, I’d thought wryly when Anthousa had informed me of her plan—and thus had slipped away from Heliodoros’s household unnoticed. Within minutes, they had ascended the boat’s narrow ramp and secured all our goods on the deck.
When dawn came and the boat left the shore behind, I was permitted to exit my cabin. I stood among the priestesses of Hestia, watching Colchis vanish in the wake of our ship.
The journey to Aeaea was long and exceedingly trying. Even now, years later, I cringe at the memory. We sailed for a full turn of the moon, and several days more, crossing the vast Black Sea, passing through the narrow straits of the Dardanelles. Beyond, we faced more hostile waters. The Mesogeios Sea was restless, beaten to froth by the hundreds of islands that broke its gray-green surface. Day and night, our ship bucked and rocked upon its waves, and all of us fell ill, even all-enduring Anthousa. Our food was poor—hard bread, flavorless cheese, and a handful of dried fruit, allotted to each of us every third day. The captain stopped at many islands, trading and calling upon his business associates. At each port, I wondered whether this was to be my place of exile. But the journey dragged on, and the captain, well paid by Heliodoros, refused to let me go ashore until we had reached my far destination.
I shall never forget my first sight of Aeaea. Days before, we had rounded a great, rocky peninsula and tracked steadily up its western coast. The islands that had filled the Mesogeios were sparse here; between the green-black shoulders of land, the sea stretched unbroken toward the western horizon, lost in a pale, distant mist. Wrapped in a thick woolen cloak against the salt-tinged chill, I had watched the sun set on that very horizon, and now I marveled at the strange, malignant beauty of the twilight waves. Their crests were touched by purple light, their troughs dark as the blood that had pooled between Lycus’s fingers. Now and then—far from our ship, thank the gods—a great plume of spray erupted from the surface of the sea, and hung like a banner of mist above the waves before it dissipated in the gathering darkness. With a shiver, I realized the plumes were the breaths of impossibly large creatures, churning and roiling in the water. In the last fading flush of sunset, I could just make out the dark, serpent-like coils of their bodies curving among the tossing waves.
Frightened of what the huge serpents might do to our ship, I turned away—and a lone island caught my attention. It seemed to stand out from the sea with forceful clarity, limned in the light of a
rising moon. It was small, and stood well apart from the other islands, which were clustered somewhat nearer to the stony peninsula. A high, pointed promontory rose from its eastern side. I forgot the great, black creatures arcing through the waves, forgot the ceaseless heaving of the ship and my own illness, weak and shivering from a month of sailing. I knew, with a thick, sinking certainty, that my travels were over. My exile had begun.
The captain beached his ship on the rocky strand; a grating roar rattled through my bones as the boat’s hull dug into the shoreline. In short order, he had lowered a slim ladder made of ropes and dowels over the ship’s rail. “Climb ashore,” he said to me, never looking at my face, “and I’ll be glad to see the back of you. It’s dangerous to sail with a witch aboard, ten times worse than sailing with an ordinary woman. Gods know how we made it this far without any ill luck.”
Anthousa stepped forward. “We’re going ashore here, too.”
The captain stared at her. “What on earth for? There’s nothing on this island—certainly no shrine to Hestia.”
“We’ll make our own shrine to Hestia, wherever we find ourselves,” Anthousa said. A few of the other women laughed quietly to themselves. “We go with Lady Circe.”
He shrugged and turned away. “Suit yourselves. Mad bitches, the lot of you.”
One by one, we climbed down the ladder to the strand. We stood in the shallow waves—colder than the grave, as they lapped around our feet and soaked the hems of our simple chitons—while the ship’s crew lowered our chests and baskets in a net made of sturdy ropes. The captain shouted at us to hurry; freed from the curse of women aboard his vessel, he was eager to be off as soon as possible. We carried our possessions far up the beach, out of reach of the waves, then stood huddled together in the darkness. Long oars ran out from the ship’s sides, pushing and levering against the shore until the ship backed off into the waves. It turned, the great, black bulk of its side blotting out all sight of the moon, and slid around the curve of the island. We were left stranded and alone.
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