Circe

He lifted his hands, let them drop. “The world is an unjust place. Look what happened to that counselor of Agamemnon’s. Palamedes, his name was. He served the army well, but fell in a pit while on a night watch. Someone had set sharpened stakes in the bottom. Terrible loss.”

His eyes glittered. If good Patroclus had been there he might have said, Sir, you are no true hero, no Heracles, no Jason. You speak no honest speeches from pure heart. You do no noble deeds in the gleaming sunlight.

But I had met Jason. And I knew what sort of deeds could be done in the sun’s sight. I said nothing.

The days passed, and the nights with them. My house was crowded with some four dozen men, and for the first time in my life, I found myself steeped in mortal flesh. Those frail bodies of theirs took relentless attention, food and drink, sleep and rest, the cleaning of limbs and fluxes. Such patience mortals must have, I thought, to drag themselves through it hour after hour. The fifth day, Odysseus’ awl slipped and punctured the pad of his thumb. I gave him salves and worked my charms to drive off infection, but it still took half a moon to heal. I watched the pain passing over his face. Now it hurt, and now still it hurt, and now, and now. And that was only one among his discomforts, stiff neck and acid stomach and the ache of old wounds. I ran my hands over his ribbed scars, easing him as I could. The scars themselves I offered to wipe away. He shook his head. “How would I know myself?”

I was secretly glad. They suited him. Enduring Odysseus, he was, and the name was stitched into his skin. Whoever saw him must salute and say: There is a man who has seen the world. There is a captain with stories to tell.

I might have told him, in those hours, stories of my own. Scylla and Glaucos, Aeëtes, the Minotaur. The stone wall cutting into my back. The floor of my hall wet with blood, reflecting the moon. The bodies I had dragged one by one down the hill, and burned with their ship. The sound flesh makes when it tears and re-forms and how, when you change a man, you may stop the transformation partway through, and then that monstrous, half-beast thing will die.

His face would be intent as he listened, his relentless mind examining, weighing and cataloguing. However I pretended I could conceal my thoughts as well as he, I knew it was not true. He would see down to my bones. He would gather my weaknesses up and set them with the rest of his collection, alongside Achilles’ and Ajax’s. He kept them on his person as other men keep their knives.

I looked down at my body, bare in the fire’s light, and tried to imagine it written over with its history: my palm with its lightning streak, my hand missing its fingers, the thousand cuts from my witch-work, the gristled furrows of my father’s fire, the skin of my face like some half-melted taper. And those were only the things that had left marks.

There would be no salutes. What had Aeëtes called an ugly nymph? A stain upon the face of the world.

My smooth belly glowed beneath my hand, the color of honey shining in the sun. I drew him down to me. I was a golden witch, who had no past at all.

I began to know his men a little, those unsteady hearts that he had spoken of, those leaky vessels. Polites was better-mannered than the rest, Eurylochos stubborn and sulky. Thin-faced Elpenor had a laugh like a screechy owl. They reminded me of wolf pups, their griefs gone when their bellies were full. They looked down when I passed, as if to be sure their hands were still their own.

Every day they spent at games. They held races through the hills and on the beach. They were always running up to Odysseus, panting. Will you judge our archery contest? Our discus throw? Our spears?

Sometimes he would go off smiling with them, but sometimes he would shout, or strike them. He was not so easy and even as he pretended. Living with him was like standing beside the sea. Each day a different color, a different foam-capped height, but always the same restless intensity pulling towards the horizon. When the rail broke on his ship he kicked it out in fury and threw the pieces into the sea. The next day he went grimly to the forest with his axe, and when Eurylochos offered to help him, he bared his teeth. He could still marshal himself, show the face he must have worn each day to harness Achilles, but it cost him, and after he was prone to moods and tempers. The men would slink away, and I saw the confusion on their faces. Daedalus had said to me once: Even the best iron grows brittle with too much beating.