I will give you vengeance, it promised, and power, my daughter—if you only choose to live.
Springtime cupped my island with merciful hands. Winter thawed away, and at once our forest and fields burst with new life, earlier and stronger than I’d ever seen the season come before. The lush spring promised an excellent harvest by late summer. That would have lifted my spirits, if the bright-green bounty spilling all around hadn’t made the Ithacans more comfortable than ever. Over the course of the winter, they had transformed their slapdash huts into more substantial cabins. They had rooted in place, and I could discern no way to dig them up like the weeds they were.
I had retreated to my chamber since the winter solstice, hiding my face from the women who had once been so loyal to me. I occupied my hands with spinning—I never set aside spindle or distaff anymore, except to sleep, or when Odysseus took them from me—but my mind was never on the wool. Morning and evening I spun, and my mind roved in turns over the two terrains that had become so familiar to me: dark brooding over my misfortune, and the promise of revenge. Thoughts of vengeance were dark to me, but sweet and sustaining. Always I watched the moon, noting the cyclic advance and recession of its power, tracking the way it stirred tides and weather, leaf and seed. I was counting the months until the child arrived, of course, but my communion with the lunar cycle had a purpose of its own. The more I watched the moon—the more attention I paid to its comings and goings—the clearer the voice became within my heart. Each month, as the moon waxed to its fullness, the voice within strengthened. Soon it was no whisper, but a shout. And then it was no longer a shout, but a wild, rushing roar, as a river in flood, or the typhoon winds. My power—whatever that power may be—was growing.
Strength surged in my spirit, higher and hotter with each passing day—yet I was still Odysseus’s captive. My isolation was complete: my friends and I were all but strangers now. I did not even see or hear the wolf pack anymore. Odysseus had stripped me of the freedom I’d enjoyed. At his hands, I had finally met the fate Heliodoros had long ago intended. I was an exile in truth, isolated on the lone rock of my grief and bitterness, surrounded by a sea of desolation. I cursed Heliodoros as I spun my wool; I twisted my hate for my father, and the brothers who had abandoned me to rumors and lies, into the substance of my threads. But my very bitterness seemed to nurture the flame inside me. It licked up hotter with the ripening of every moon, until at last, one night, the very element of my pain burst into a conflagration of power.
That night I spun, as always, beside the small window of my chamber. Moonlight spilled in, brushing my skin with its cool fingers as I perched on my hard chair, working the wool between my fingers. The moon was full—silver and round, as round and great as I was, and as ripe and heavy with quiet, peculiar magic. A distant but compelling sound caught and stole my attention, so the spindle slowed in its rotation and hung trembling from a forgotten thread. I listened. What was that mournful music, the long, jagged harmony? I hadn’t heard it for months. The sound died away, then rose again.
The wolves. Caicias and his pack were howling. They had survived that hard winter, too—how long ago it seemed now. They called to me, lifting their voices in unified song, urging me to come to them, to step out into the full, lavish power of moonlight.
I pushed myself up from my chair, levering my heavy body with care. The child had grown quite large. In a few more weeks, it would arrive—squalling and unwanted in a cruel world. Bearing that awkward weight before me, I left the quiet house and went out into the night. The burden of the child lifted as I walked past the quiet Ithacan encampment and stepped beneath the black roof of the forest. Odysseus’s curse was becoming easier to bear.
I wandered the woodland trails, brushing my hands over the sweet-smelling foliage of late summer, tangling my fingers in dew-beaded spider’s webs. I had no destination in mind; I only listening to the crying of the wolves, going where their songs of freedom led. I had not walked this way for many months—unfettered by grief, glad in the privacy of darkness, the gentle comfort of shadow.
I found myself at the shoreline, and abruptly, as if they thought their work well done, the wolves ceased their singing. I stood still, gazing about, breathing in the clean, crisp salt of the night air, feeling the rhythm of wave against stone. This was not the shore where Odysseus’s ship still waited, abandoned after a long year of torpor. This was the shore where I’d landed upon my arrival at Aeaea. Perhaps, I thought, smiling to myself, the coarse sand still held the first footprint I’d left here, eight years ago. Tonight, I had set aside the sorrow that had plagued me while the Ithacans had occupied my island. I cannot say what had freed me so completely from my ever-present anger, my patient expectation of revenge. It may have been the growing power of motherhood—of a woman’s ultimate magic, to bring forth life. Something lifted the fire within me until it became, not a consuming blaze, but a torch to guide my steps.
My steps across my beach, upon my island. It was still mine, whatever Odysseus might think. I had imbued this place with my very presence, had nurtured it with the labor of my body and the sweat of my brow. The island belonged to me as much as I belonged to it. No arrogant man could undo that magic; no king could take away my birthright.
As I stood on the shore, contented and confident for the first time in more than a year, I was struck suddenly by the tingling knowledge that I was not alone. I concentrated, listening, staring this way and that along the strand. After a few moments I discerned a strange murmur, lifting and breaking—not the song waves, for this sound was less rhythmic, more ragged. On the northern edge of the beach, at the foot of a high, black cliff, a circle of boulders stood, crusted with barnacles and hung with shreds of leathery kelp. I followed the sound to those rocks, moving silently over the sand, stepping as lightly over the pebbles of my beach as any nine-months-pregnant woman could.
Inside the ring of stones, Odysseus crouched at the edge of the water. His hands pressed hard against his face, then tore his dark hair in a sudden excess of agony. He was weeping.
“Odysseus.”
He did not start when I spoke his name. He turned slowly and looked up at me, nodding lightly, as if he had expected me to come—as if my sudden intrusion on his grief was righteousness itself. But as he stared at me, his expression changed. The twisted mask of anguish fell away. A terrible, quaking awe came over him. His eyes and mouth widened with a kind of sacred, holy dread. I seemed to see myself through his eyes—wrapped in my pure-white robe, luminous with moonlight, my face stern in judgment and my body bursting with the generative power of woman—the magic of creation no man, no matter how strong or cunning, could ever hope to tame.
The torch that guided me flared. The calm of certainty came upon me: the moment of my deliverance had come. Silently, I prayed: Hekate, Mother, mistress of my heart…give me the words you wish me to speak. Lead me to my power, my victory.
“You know,” I said to Odysseus. “You know you have done evil to me.”
He hung his head. A tear, pearlescent in the moonlight, fell from his lashes. “I know it.”
To see him brought low before me, penitent and small, filled me with a wild rush of strength. I wanted to make him suffer, as he had made me suffer. “Tell me what you did,” I demanded. I would not allow him to hide from his wrongs. “Name your crime. I will hear it from your own lips.”
Odysseus swallowed hard. For a moment, I thought he would not speak, but then the words came, trembling and faint. Regretful. “I…I forced you to lay with me.”
“Not only once, but many times.” More times than I could count.
“Yes,” he said.
Relief shook me—relief that he did not deny it, that he knew how he had erred. For a moment, I trembled with the force of it. Then I said simply, “Why?”
Odysseus choked on a ragged sob. “Circe—Lady. I have asked myself that same question, a thousand times over.”
“And how did you answer, Odysseus?”
He shoo
k his head, muted momentarily by the force of his grief. “War…war. It is the only answer I can think to give you—or to give myself. War changes a man—warps him.”
My brows lifted in surprise. “When were you at war?” We were isolated here on Aeaea, but surely my friends and I would have heard news of war from the men who came to trade.
“We left Troy almost two years ago,” Odysseus said, quieting in the grip of his misery. “But before that, it was ten years.”
“Ten years since the previous war, you mean.”
He shook his head slowly. He stared far beyond me, into the depths of the forest. “We held Troy under siege for a decade.” He sighed. “Agamemnon, his pride and folly—gods, what a folly it all was. I can see that now…I can see it now.”
I waited for him to speak on.
“Men are made for fighting, for killing—aren’t we? I always believed it was so. I never thought warfare could do to me what it does to weaker men.”
“What does it do to weaker men?”
“It breaks them,” Odysseus said simply.
I considered him, huddled on the strand, weeping like a child despite his strength and arrogance. “I don’t believe war breaks weak men—or, not only weak men.”
“It shatters us all. That’s what I’ve learned—all of us, meek and powerful alike. And when we try to put the pieces back together, we are remade. We are something new—strangers inhabiting familiar bodies.” He drew a deep but ragged breath. “Ten years of fighting, of killing…it turned me into the kind of man I never thought I could be. Every day, it seems I encounter a new version of myself—stumble across these apparitions, these creatures who look like Odysseus, but are not Odysseus. They spring up where I least expect to find them. And each one is more horrible than the last. The man I once was is gone forever. Odysseus is dead. He will never come back to life.”
Again, I waited. He had more to say—I could sense it—but he did not know how to marshal his words, how to explain the horror of the anthroparion—the specter that wore his face, lived in his body, yet was not Odysseus, could never be.
“I would never have forced a woman. Never,” he insisted with sudden force. He held my gaze, for the first time that night, and I could see that he believed what he said. “The real me, the true Odysseus. I never could have done it. I love women, of course; I lie with them as often as I can. I always have. But the greatest pleasure a man can have is in a woman’s ecstasy. There is no pleasure to be had in forcing.”
“Or in using,” I said, unable to keep the venom from my tongue. “In assumption, in possession. In repeated and unwelcome abuse.”
“That’s so,” he said softly, lowering his eyes to the gravel again.
A strained silence fell between us, relieved only by the hissing of waves across the beach. I struggled, grasping for more to say, but no fitting words came to me. I held my tongue.
“I have a wife, you know,” Odysseus said suddenly.
I folded my arms, resisting the urge to say, How proud she would be, if she knew how you’ve treated me.
“Her name is Penelope.” That name alone was enough to soften Odysseus’s expression. All the hard lines of self-loathing fell away; for a moment, he seemed to fold himself in the welcome embrace of fond memories. “She is the most beautiful, the warmest, the most loyal woman the gods ever made. I never deserved her goodness or her sweet nature, even back when I was myself—before the war.”
Before. At last, I understood all those cryptic stories Odysseus had told while he slipped into sleep beside my rigid, aching body.
“Does she still live,” I asked, “your Penelope?”
“I believe she does, back in Ithaca—a worthy queen ruling in my place, for the gods know I am not fit to hold the throne. If she has perished, I haven’t heard the news. May the gods grant I never hear such a thing.”
Queen or no, I wouldn’t have traded places with Penelope for every last speck of gold in the world. But perhaps Odysseus was right. Perhaps he was a different man now, changed utterly from the man he’d been before. Wasn’t it possible that Penelope had known a different Odysseus? Perhaps she had even loved him—had found him worthy of love.
“Why do you not return to Penelope?” I said. “Now that your war is over, what keeps you from Ithaca, and the woman you love?”
“I’m afraid,” Odysseus said simply.
I said, “You fear you will bring back this man—the one you have become.”
“Yes.” A pause. “I cannot go back to her, Circe. Not like this.”
“And yet, you cannot stay here.”
Odysseus stood. He reached out to me, his hands trembling and pleading. “If I swear never to touch you again without your leave—”
I stepped back, out of his reach. “Look at me. Look at my body, Odysseus. See how large I am. I will birth this child very soon. Do you really want to see it? Do you want to be here when this baby is born? Would you look into the face of a child you made by force?” I laughed bitterly. “Do you truly want to raise this child? Every time he calls you Father, it will be an accusation, a dagger in your heart. And every moment you spend in my presence, you will know my agony—for it is I who cannot escape my curse, Odysseus, not you. I must care for the unwanted thing, and hold it to my breast as if I were glad of it.”
A cry strangled in his throat. Odysseus covered his face with his hands, tears flowing freely. I let him weep uncomforted. He deserved no comfort; he deserved to feel every slash and stab of that pain.
At length, Odysseus calmed himself enough to look at me again, though he winced at the sight of me—at the white glow of my manifest power. “Where shall I go, then? I cannot stay here, nor return to Penelope—”
“Go to Hades,” I said coarsely, relishing the fresh gout of pain it caused him. “Go to Hades, for all I care.” But in the next moment, I relented. If I did not point him in some direction and shove him hard from my shore, neither he nor his men would leave. I pointed over the little bay toward the open sea. The moonlight limned the low, round shoulders of a few distant islands. “Look, Odysseus. Do you see those islands there, beneath the dog star? Sail straight toward those islands, you’ll reach the mainland in one full day. Or, if you go southeast, in ten days’ time you will find Thebes, and the blind prophet called Tiresias. If you truly think you cannot go home to Ithaca and Penelope, Tiresias will scry for you, and find a new destination. You may find warmer welcome than here on Aeaea.”
Odysseus gazed at the nearby islands for a moment, with the dog star sinking low and blue above. Then he turned, southeast. A wind stirred his cloak and mine. He took one step in that direction, then another, as if the wind directed him. “It sounds like a good plan,” he said dully. “As good a plan as any. But I’ll need some time to prepare the ship. It has been grounded for so long; I can’t make it ready again right away, though I know you wish me gone, Circe.”
“You have three weeks before the child is born,” I said. “You must be gone by that time.”
He nodded, still gazing southeast. Then he glanced at me, his face dark with shame. “Will you forgive me,” Odysseus said, “and grant me your blessing?”
The moon whispered in my heart. “If you were I, would you forgive Odysseus?”
I watch the distant ship for a moment longer as it skims southeastward, moving swiftly over the waves. The voice speaks inside my head, my heart, giving its imperative command. I listen to the voice of Hekate, my true mother. I have found her at last, now that I am a mother myself.
Act now, Hekate says. Work your magic now, daughter. The time is ripe, ripe as the leaf and seed in their season of gathering, ripe as the blood of the womb. This is the season of transformation. Strike now, and have your vengeance.
My women weep with fear, even brave, loyal Anthousa. But I have not come here to slay my son. I lower the spear; it glimmers, consecrated by moonlight, imbued with lunar magic. I pry open my child’s soft, tiny hand, fit his fingers around the spear’s shaft.
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br /> “Your name is Telegonus,” I say, hard and fierce, loud enough for all the world to hear. “Your fate is set in the stars, my son—in current and wave, in the billow of your father’s sail. This spear I place in your hand will thirst for the blood of Odysseus. That thirst will never be quenched, until you have grown to manhood, and plunged my curse into your father’s heart. Live, and be Revenge.”
My infant son did not cry then, but far below, on my island’s rocky strand, the wolves howled, high and long.
The Siren’s Song
Amalia Carosella
Their song, so beautiful and stunning, broke even my old warrior’s heart. And as we sailed past them, I strained against the ropes, shouting for the men to slow. Of course, Circe had prepared us, and my men knew their duty, besides. But I saw the Siren girl, mad with grief and desperation at her failure, throw herself into the water. And where her body cut into the sea, a new rock jutted up, sharp and biting.
* * *
Whatever treasures they hoarded upon their island, taken from the ships they had drawn into the trap of their sweet songs, those jagged rocks promised we would never discover it. Not without destroying ourselves, too. And in the end, that above all, was what sustained me. The knowledge that I must find my way home, still. I must find my way back, Penelope, to you.
—Odysseus
I
Aglaope had dreamed of her wings ever since she had first heard the story, told by her mother’s mother, by the driftwood fire as it sparked and snapped in rainbow hues. She dreamed of soaring through the skies, all across the earth in an endless, grief-stricken search for their lost goddess, their glorious and beautiful Persephone.
A Sea of Sorrow Page 20
