Circe

I went out to my garden. I weeded the same weeds that always grew, and planted the herbs I had gathered on Dicte. They looked strange away from their moonlit hollows, crowded in among my glossy, bright beds. Their hum seemed fainter, their colors faded. I had not considered that perhaps their powers could not survive transplanting.

In the years I had lived on Aiaia, I had never chafed at my constraint. After my father’s halls, the island seemed to me the wildest, most giddy freedom. Its shores, its peaks, all of them yawned out to the horizon, filled up with magic. But looking at those fragile blooms, for the first time I felt the true weight of my exile. If they died, I could harvest no more. I would never walk again the humming slopes of Dicte. I could not draw water from its silver pool. All those places Hermes had told me of, Araby, Assur, Egypt, they were lost forever.

You will never leave, my sister had said.

In defiance, I threw myself into my old life. I did what I liked, the moment that I thought of it. I sang upon the beaches, rearranged my garden. I called the pigs and scratched their bristled backs, brushed the sheep, and summoned wolves to lie panting on my floor. The lion rolled her yellow eyes at them, but she behaved herself, for it was my law that all my animals bear each other.

Every night, I went out to dig my herbs and roots. I did whatever spells came to mind, just to feel the pleasure of them knitting in my hands. In the morning I cut flowers for my kitchen. In the evenings after dinner, I set myself before Daedalus’ loom. It took me some time to understand it, for it was like no loom I had ever known in the halls of the gods. There was a seat, and the weft was drawn down rather than up. If my grandmother had seen, she would have offered her sea snake for it; the cloth it produced was finer than her best. Daedalus had guessed well: that I would like the whole business of it, the simplicity and skill at once, the smell of the wood, the shush of the shuttle, the satisfying way weft stacked upon weft. It was a little like spell-work, I thought, for your hands must be busy, and your mind sharp and free. Yet my favorite part was not the loom at all, but the making of the dyes. I went hunting for the best colors, madder root and saffron, the scarlet kermes bug and the wine-dark murex from the sea, and alum powder to hold them fast in the wool. I squeezed them, pounded, soaked them in great bubbling pots until the stinking liquids foamed up bright as flowers: crimson and crocus yellow and the deep purple that princes wear. If I had had Athena’s skill, I could have woven a great tapestry of Iris, goddess of the rainbow, flinging down her colors from the sky.

But I was not Athena. I was happy with simple scarves, with cloaks and blankets that lay like jewels upon my chairs. I draped my lion in one and called her the Queen of Phoenicia. She sat, turning her head this way and that, as if to show off how the purple made her fur shine gold.

You will never see Phoenicia.

I rose from my stool and made myself walk the island, admiring the changes every hour brought: the water-striders skimming over the ponds, the stones rolled green and smooth by river currents, the bees flying low, freighted with pollen. The bays were full of lashing fish, the seeds broke from their pods. My dittany, my lilies from Crete, they thrived after all. See? I said to my sister.

It was Daedalus who answered. A golden cage is still a cage.

Spring passed into summer, and summer into fragrant autumn. There were mists now in the morning and sometimes storms at night. Winter would come soon with its own beauty, the green hellebore leaves shining amid the brown, and the cypresses tall and black against the metal sky. It was not ever truly cold, not as Mount Dicte’s peak, but I was glad for my new cloaks as I climbed the rocks and stood among the winds. Yet, no matter what beauties I sought, what pleasures I found, my sister’s words followed me, taunting, worming deep in my bones and blood.

“You are wrong about witchcraft,” I told her. “It does not come from hate. I made my first spell for love of Glaucos.”

I could hear her mink-voice as if she stood before me. Yet it was in defiance of our father, in defiance of all those who slighted you and would keep you from your desires.

I had seen the look in my father’s eyes when he knew at last what I was. He was thinking he should have snuffed me in my crib.

Just so. Look how they stopped our mother’s womb. Have you not noticed how easily she twists Father and our aunts?

I had noticed it. It seemed to go beyond beauty, beyond whatever bed-tricks she might know. “She is clever.”