Page 69 of Circe

I waited all morning, tensed, but no answer came. It was done, I finally realized. We were free. Not just from Athena, but from all of them. The spells hung on me, yet I felt weightless. For the first time, Aiaia was ours alone. Giddily, I knelt and unwrapped my fighting son. I set him down upon the earth, free. “You are safe. We may be happy at last.”

What a fool I was. All those days of my fear and his constraint were like a debt that must be paid. He careered across the island, refusing to sit, or even stop for a moment. Athena had been barred, yet there still remained all the ordinary dangers of the island, rocks and cliffs and stinging creatures that I had to pry from his hands. Whenever I tried to reach for him, he would run, darting and defiant, towards some precipice. He seemed angry at the world. The stone he could not throw far enough, his own legs, which did not run fast enough. He wanted to scale the trees like the lions did, in a great leap, and when he could not he would beat at their trunks with his fists.

I would try to take him in my arms, telling him, Have patience, your strength will come in time. But he arched away from me screaming, and nothing could console him, for he was not one of those children whom you may wave something shiny at and they will forget. I gave him soothing herbs and possets, even sleeping draughts, but they did nothing. The only thing that calmed him was the sea. The wind that was as restless as he was, the waves filled with their motion. He would stand in the surf, his small hand in mine, and point. The horizon, I named. The open sky. The waves and tides and currents. He would whisper the sounds to himself all the rest of the day, and if I tried to pull him away, show him something else, fruits or flowers, some small spell, he would leap from me, twisting up his face. No!

The worst were the days when I had to shape those two spells again. He ran from me whenever I wanted him, but the moment I took up my work, he would drum at the floor with his heels, crying for my attention. Tomorrow I will take you to the sea, I promised. But that was nothing to him, and he would tear apart the house to draw my eye. He was older by then, too big to be slung to my chest, and the disasters he could cause had grown with him. He toppled over a table filled with plates; he climbed up the shelves and smashed my phials. I would set the wolves to watch him, but he was too much for them, and they fled to the garden. I could feel my panic rising. The spell would run out before I could cast it. Athena would arrive in her rage.

I know what I was in those days: unsteady, inconstant, a badly made bow. Every fault in me his raising laid bare. Every selfishness, every weakness. One day, when the spells were due, he picked up a great glass bowl and broke it in shards on his bare feet. I came running to pluck him away, to sweep and scrub, but he battered at me as if I had taken his dearest friend. At last I had to put him in a bedroom and shut the door between us. He screamed and screamed, and there came a pounding like his head against the wall. I finished my cleaning and tried to work, but my own head was beating at itself by then. I kept thinking that if I let him rage long enough, he must at last wear himself out and sleep. But he only went on, wilder and wilder as the shadows lengthened. The day was passing and the spell not done. It would be easy to say that my hands moved on their own, but that is not how it was. I was angry, burning hot.

I had always sworn to myself that I would not use magic on him. It seemed like something Aeëtes would do, setting my will over his. But in that moment I seized the poppy, sleep-drugs, all the rest, brewed them till they sizzled. I went to the room. He was kicking the pieces of shutter that he had torn from the windows. Come, I said. Drink this.

He drank and went back to his tearing. I did not mind now. It was almost a pleasure to watch. He would learn his lesson. He would understand who his mother was. I spoke the word.

He fell like a toppled stone. His head hit the floor so loudly I gasped. I ran to him. I had thought it would be like sleep, his eyes gently closed. But his whole body was rigid, frozen mid-movement, his fingers curled into claws, his mouth open. His skin was cold beneath my fingers. Medea had said she did not know if those slaves in her father’s halls could perceive what happened to them. I knew. Behind his blank eyes, I could feel his confusion and terror.

I cried out in horror, and the spell broke. His body sagged, then he scrambled away, staring wildly back at me like a cornered beast. I wept. My shame was hot as blood. I’m sorry, I told him, again and again. He let me come to him, take him in my arms. Gently, I touched the lump that had risen where he had struck his head. I spoke a word to ease it.

The room was dark by then. Outside, the sun was gone. I held him in my lap as long as I dared, murmuring to him, singing. Then I carried him to the kitchen and gave him dinner. He ate it, clinging to me, and revived. He slid down and began to run again, slamming doors, pulling everything from the shelves that he could reach. I felt a weariness in me so great I thought I would sink into the earth. And every moment that passed, the spell against Athena went undone.

He kept looking at me over his shoulder. As if he were daring me to come at him, to witch him, to hit him, I did not know. Instead I reached up to the highest shelf for the great clay honey jar he was always yearning for. Here, I said. Take it.

He ran to it, rolling it in circles until it broke to pieces. Then he wallowed in the sticky puddles, and raced off, trailing threads for the wolves to lick. And so I finished the spells. It took a long time to bathe him and carry him to bed, but at last he lay beneath the quilts. He held my hand, his small warm fingers curled around mine. Guilt and shame sawed at me. He should hate me, I thought. He should flee. But I was all he had. His breath began to drag, and his limbs slackened. “Why can you not be more peaceful?” I whispered. “Why must it be so hard?”

As if in answer, a vision of my father’s halls drifted up: the sterile earth floor, the black gleam of obsidian. The sound of the game pieces moving on their board, and my father’s golden legs beside me. I had lain quiet and still, but I remembered the ravening hunger that was in me always: to climb into my father’s lap, to rise and run and shout, snatch the draughts from the board and batter them against the walls. To stare at the logs until they burst into flame, to shake him for every secret, as fruits are shaken from a tree. But if I had done even one of those things there would have been no mercy. He would have burnt me down to ash.

The moon lay on my son’s forehead. I saw the smudges that water and cloth had not quite scrubbed away. Why should he be peaceful? I never was, nor his father either, when I knew him. The difference was that he was not afraid to be burnt.

In the long days that followed I clutched that thought like a spar that would save me from the waves. And it did help a little. For when he stared at me, furious and defiant, his whole spirit drawn up against me, I could think of it and take one more breath.

A thousand years I had lived, but they did not feel so long as Telegonus’ childhood. I had prayed that he would speak early, but then I was sorry for it, since it only gave voice to his storms. No, no, no, he cried, wrenching away from me. And then, a moment later, he would climb over my lap, shouting Mother until my ears ached. I am here, I told him, right here. Yet it was not close enough. I might walk with him all day, play every game he asked for, but if my attention strayed for even a moment, he would rage and wail, clinging to me. I yearned for my nymphs then, for anyone that I might seize by the arm and say, What is wrong with him? But then in the next moment, I was glad no one could see what I had done to him, letting all those early months of my terror batter at his head. No wonder he stormed.

Come, I coaxed. Let’s do something fun. I will show you magic. Shall I change this berry for you? But he flung it away and ran off to the sea again. Every night when he slept, I stood over his bed and told myself: tomorrow I will do better. Sometimes it was even true. Sometimes, we would run laughing down to the beach and he would sit snug in my lap as we watched the waves. His feet still kicked, his hands pulled restlessly at the skin of my arms. Yet his cheek lay on my chest, and I felt the swell and fall of his breath. My patience overflowed. Scream and scream, I thought. I can bear it.

Will it was, every hour, will. Like a spell after all, but one that I had to cast upon myself. He was a great river in flood, and I must have channels ready every moment to safely draw his torrent. I began to tell him stories, easy things of a rabbit who looks for food and finds it, of a baby waiting, whose mother comes. He clamored for more, so I went on. I hoped such gentle tales would soothe his fighting soul, and maybe they did. One day I realized that the moon had come and gone since he had thrown himself to the earth. Another moon passed, and somewhere in those months was the last time he ever screamed. I wish I could remember when it was. No, I wish rather I could have told myself when it would come, so all those hopeless days I could have looked to its horizon.

His mind put forth leaves, thoughts and words that seemed to spring out of the air. Six years old, he was. His brow had cleared, and he would watch me working in the garden, hacking at some root. “Mother,” he said, putting his hand to my shoulder, “try cutting here.” He took out a little knife he had begun to carry, and the root gave way to him. “See?” he said, gravely. “It is easy.”

He still loved the sea. He knew every shell and fish. He made rafts out of logs and floated in the bay. He blew bubbles into the tidal pools and watched the crabs skitter. “Look at this one,” he would say, towing me by the hand. “I have never seen a larger, I have never seen a smaller. This is the brightest, this is the blackest. This crab has lost one claw, and here its other is growing larger to take its place. Is that not clever?”

Once again, I wished that someone else were there on the island. Not to commiserate now, but to cherish him with me. I would say, Look, can you believe it? We have come through the rocks and winds. I failed him, yet he is a sweet wonder of this world.

He made a face, for he saw that my eyes were wet. “Mother,” he said, “the crab will be fine. I told you, the claw is already growing back. Now come here and look at this one. It has spots like eyes. Can it see from them, do you think?”

At night, he no longer wanted my stories, he made up his own. I think it is where his wildness went, for every tale was filled with outlandish creatures: griffins and leviathans and chimeras who came to feed from his hands, whom he led on adventures or else bested with clever stratagems. Perhaps any child with only his mother for company would have been so imaginative. I cannot say, but his face was rapt as he conjured those visions. He seemed to age with every day, eight and ten and twelve. His gaze grew serious, his limbs tall and strong. He had a habit of tapping one finger on the table as he gave out morals like an old man. He liked best the stories of courage and virtue rewarded. And that is why you must never, you must always, that is why one should be sure to…

I loved his certainty, his world that was an easy place of right action divided sharply from wrong, of mistake and consequence, of monsters defeated. It was no world I knew, but I would live in it as long as he would let me.

It was one of those nights, summer, the pigs truffling softly below our window. He was thirteen. I laughed and said, “You have more tales in you than your father.”

I saw him hesitate, as if I were a rare bird he feared to put to flight. He had asked about his father before, but I had always said, Not yet.

“Go on,” I said, and smiled at him. “I will answer you. It is time.”

“Who was he?”

“A prince who came to this island. He had a thousand and one tricks in him.”

“What did he look like?”