Page 106 of Circe

I said, “Scylla was not born a monster. I made her.”

His face was in the fire’s shadows. “How did it happen?”

There was a piece of me that shouted its alarm: if you speak he will turn gray and hate you. But I pushed past it. If he turned gray, then he did. I would not go on anymore weaving my cloths by day and unraveling them again at night, making nothing. I told him the whole tale of it, each jealousy and folly and all the lives that had been lost because of me.

“Her name,” he said. “Scylla. It means the Render. Perhaps it was always her destiny to be a monster, and you were only the instrument.”

“Do you use the same excuse for the maids you hanged?”

It was as if I had struck him. “I make no excuse for that. I will wear that shame all my life. I cannot undo it, but I will spend my days wishing I could.”

“It is how you know you are different from your father,” I said.

“Yes.” His voice was sharp.

“It is the same for me,” I said. “Do not try to take my regret from me.”

He was quiet a long time. “You are wise,” he said.

“If it is so,” I said, “it is only because I have been fool enough for a hundred lifetimes.”

“Yet at least what you loved, you fought for.”

“That is not always a blessing. I must tell you, all my past is like today, monsters and horrors no one wants to hear.”

He held my gaze. Something about him then reminded me strangely of Trygon. An unearthly, quiet patience.

“I want to hear,” he said.

I had kept away from him for so many reasons: his mother and my son, his father and Athena. Because I was a god, and he a man. But it struck me then that at the root of all those reasons was a sort of fear. And I have never been a coward.

I reached across that breathing air between us and found him.

Chapter Twenty-six

THREE DAYS WE STAYED upon that shore. We made no oars and patched no sails. We caught fish and picked fruit, and looked for nothing but what we found at our fingers’ ends. I laid my palm on his stomach, feeling it rise and fall with his breath. His shoulders were wiry with muscle, the back of his neck roughened with sunburn.

I did tell him those stories. By the fire, or the morning’s light, when our pleasures were set aside. Some of it was easier than I thought it would be. There was a kind of joy in drawing Prometheus for him, in making Ariadne and Daedalus live again. But other parts were not so easy, and sometimes as I spoke an anger would come over me, and the words would curdle in my mouth. Who was he to be so patient, while I spilled my blood? I was a woman grown. I was a goddess, and his elder by a thousand generations. I did not need his pity, his attention, anything.

“Well?” I would demand. “Why don’t you say something?”

“I am listening,” he would answer.

“You see?” I said, when I was finished with the tale. “Gods are ugly things.”

“We are not our blood,” he answered. “A witch once told me that.”

On the third day he cut new oars, and I transformed waterskins and filled them, then gathered up fruit. I watched him rig the sail with easy competence, check the hull for any leaks. I said, “I don’t know what I was thinking. I cannot sail a boat. What would I have done if you hadn’t come?”

He laughed. “You would have gotten there eventually, it just would have taken some of your eternity. Where do we go next?”

“A shore, east of Crete. There is a small cove, half sand, half rocks, and a scrub forest in sight, and hills. Overhead, at this time of the year, the Dragon seems to point the way.”

He raised his eyebrows.

“If you get me close enough, I think I will be able to find it.” I watched him. “Are you going to ask what is there?”

“I do not think you want me to.”