Circe

“No!” He slammed the table between us. “I will not do it! There is nothing for me here. Even if another ship comes and I beg you to let it land, what then? A few days’ respite, then they will leave, and I will still be trapped. If this is life, then I would rather die. I would rather Athena kills me, do you hear? At least then I will have seen one thing in my life that was not this island!”

My vision went white.

“I do not care what you would rather. If you are too stupid to save your own life, then I will do it for you. My spells will do it.”

For the first time, he faltered. “What do you mean?”

“I mean you would not even know what you missed. You would never think of leaving again.”

He took a step backwards. “No. I will not drink your wine. I will not touch anything you give me.”

I could taste the venom in my mouth. It was a pleasure to see him frightened at last. “You think that will stop me? You have never understood how strong I am.”

His look I will remember all my life. A man who has seen the veil lifted and beholds the true face of the world.

He wrenched open the door and fled into the dark.

I stood there a long time, a bolt-struck tree scorched to its roots. Then I walked down to the shore. The air was cool but the sand still held the day’s heat. I thought of all the hours I had carried him there, his skin against mine. I had wanted him to walk freely in the world, unburnt and unafraid, and now I had gotten my wish. He could not conceive of a relentless goddess with her spear aimed at his heart.

I had not told him of his infancy, how angry and difficult it was. I had not told him the stories of the gods’ cruelty, of his own father’s cruelty. I should have, I thought. For sixteen years, I had been holding up the sky, and he had not noticed. I should have forced him to go with me to pick those plants that saved his life. I should have made him stand over the stove while I spoke the words of power. He should understand all I had carried in silence, all that I had done for his safekeeping.

But then what? He was somewhere in the trees, hiding from me. So easily those spells had risen in my mind, the ones that would let me cut his desires from him, like paring rot from fruit.

I ground my jaw. I wanted to rage and tear myself and weep. I wanted to curse Hermes for his half-truths and temptations—but Hermes was nothing. I had seen Telegonus’ face when he used to look into the sea and whisper, horizon.

I closed my eyes. I knew the shore so well, I did not have to see to walk. When he was a child I used to make lists of all the things I would do to keep him safe. It was not much of a game, because the answer was always the same. Anything.

Odysseus had told me a story once about a king who had a wound that could not be healed, not by any doctor, not by any amount of time. He went to an oracle and heard its answer: only the man who had given the wound could fix it, with the same spear he had used to make it. So the king had limped across the world until he found his enemy, who mended him.

I wished Odysseus were there so I could ask him: but how did the king get that man to help him, the one who had struck him so deep?

The answer that came to me was from a different tale. Long ago, in my wide bed, I had asked Odysseus: “What did you do? When you could not make Achilles and Agamemnon listen?”

He’d smiled in the firelight. “That is easy. You make a plan in which they do not.”

Chapter Twenty

I FOUND HIM IN the olive grove. The blankets were tangled around him, as if he had fought on against me in his dreams.

“My son,” I said. The words were loud in the still air. It was not dawn yet, but I felt it coming, the great rolling wheels of my father’s chariot. “Telegonus.”

His eyes opened, and his hands flew up, to ward me off. The pain was like a dagger’s point.

“I come to say that you may go, and I will help you. But there must be conditions.”

Did he know how much those words cost me? I do not think he could. It is youth’s gift not to feel its debts. The joy was already washing over him. He threw himself upon me, pressed his face to my neck. I closed my eyes. He smelled like green leaves and running sap. We had breathed only each other for sixteen years.

“Two days’ delay,” I said. “And three things within them.”

He nodded eagerly. “Anything.” Now that I had lost, he was pliant. At least he was gracious in victory. I led him to the house and filled his arms with herbs and bottles. Together we carried them clinking down to his ship. There upon his deck I began chopping, grinding, mixing my pastes. He surprised me by watching. Usually he drifted away when I did spells.

“What will it do?”

“It is a protection.”

“Against what?”

“Whatever I can think of. Whatever Athena can summon—storms, leviathans, a split hull.”

“Leviathans?”

I was glad to see him pale a little.