“And will you?” The nymph who spoke clutched her hands beneath her chin. She had been one of my sister and Perses’ dearest companions, her round face lacquered with malice, but now speaking to Glaucos even she was transformed, open, ripe as a pear.
“We will see,” he said, “what they offer me.” Sometimes when he was very pleased, his feet turned to a flipping tail, and now it was. I watched it sweep along the marble floor, shining palest gray, its overlapping scales faintly iridescent.
“Is your father truly dead?” I said, when they were gone.
“Of course. He deserved it, for his blasphemy.” He was polishing a new trident, a gift from Poseidon himself. During the days, he lounged on couches, drinking from goblets large as his head. He laughed like my uncles did, open-mouthed and roaring. He was not just some scraggled lord of crabs, but one of the greater sea-gods who might call whales to his beck if he wanted, rescue ships from reefs and shoals, lift rafts of sailors from the drowning waves.
“That round-faced nymph,” he said, “the beautiful one. What is her name?”
My mind had drifted. I was imagining how he might ask for my hand. On the beach, I thought. That shore where we had first glimpsed each other.
“Do you mean Scylla?”
“Yes, Scylla,” he said. “She moves like water, does she not? Silver as a flowing stream.” His eyes lifted to hold mine. “Circe, I have never been so happy.”
I smiled back at him. I saw nothing but the boy that I loved shining at last. Every honor lavished on him, every altar built in his name, every admirer who crowded him, these felt like gifts to me, for he was mine.
I began to see that nymph Scylla everywhere. Here she was laughing at some jest of Glaucos’, here she was touching her hand to her throat and shaking out her hair. She was very beautiful, it was true, one of the jewels of our halls. The river-gods and nymphs sighed over her, and she liked to raise their hopes with a look and break them with another. When she moved she clattered faintly from the thousand presents they pressed on her: bracelets of coral, pearls about her neck in strings. She sat beside me and showed them to me, one by one.
“Lovely,” I said, scarcely looking. Yet there she was again at the next feast, her jewels doubled, trebled, enough to sink a fishing boat. I think now she must have been furious that it took me so long to understand. By then she was holding her pearls, big as apples, up to my face. “Are they not the greatest marvel you have ever seen?”
The truth is, I had begun to wonder if she was in love with me. “They are very fine,” I said faintly.
At last she had to set her teeth and say it straight.
“Glaucos says he will empty the sea of them, if it would please me.”
We were in Oceanos’ hall, the air sickly with incense. I started. “Those are from Glaucos?”
Oh, the joy on her face. “All of them are. You mean you have not heard? I thought you would be first to know, you are so close. But perhaps you are not the friend that you think you are to him?” She waited, watching me. I was aware of other faces too, giddily breathless. Such fights were more precious than gold in our halls.
She smiled. “Glaucos asked me to marry him. I have not decided yet what I will say. What is your counsel, Circe? Should I take him, blue skin, flippers, and all?”
The naiads laughed like a thousand plashing fountains. I fled so she would not see my tears and wear them as another of her trophies.
My father was with my river-uncle Achelous, and frowned to be interrupted. “What?”
“I want to marry Glaucos. Will you allow it?”
He laughed. “Glaucos? He has his pick. I do not think it will be you.”
A shock ran through me. I did not stop to brush my hair or change my dress. Every moment felt like a drop of my blood lost. I ran to Glaucos’ palace. He was away at some other god’s hall so I waited, trembling, amid his overturned goblets, the wine-soaked cushions from his latest feast.
He came at last. With one flick of his hand, the mess was gone, and the floors gleamed again. “Circe,” he said, when he saw me. Just that, as if you might say: foot.
“Do you mean to marry Scylla?”
I watched the light sweep across his face. “Is she not the most perfect creature you have ever seen? Her ankles are so small and delicate, like the sweetest doe in the forest. The river-gods are enraged that she favors me, and I hear even Apollo is jealous.”
I was sorry then that I had not used those tricks of hair and eyes and lips that all our kind have. “Glaucos,” I said, “she is beautiful, yes, but she does not deserve you. She is cruel, and she does not love you as you might be loved.”
“What do you mean?”
He was frowning at me, as if I were a face he could not quite remember. I tried to think of what my sister would do. I stepped to him, trailed my fingers on his arm.
“I mean, I know one who will love you better.”
“Who?” he said. But I could see him start to understand. His hands lifted, as though to ward me off. He, who was a towering god. “You have been a sister to me,” he said.
“I would be more,” I said. “I would be all.” I pressed my lips to his.
He pushed me from him. His face was caught, half in anger, half in a sort of fear. He looked almost like his old self.
“I have loved you since that first day I saw you sailing,” I said. “Scylla laughs at your fins and green beard, but I cherished you when there were fish guts on your hands and you wept from your father’s cruelty. I helped you when—”
“No!” He slashed his hand through the air. “I will not think on those days. Every hour some new bruise upon me, some new ache, always weary, always burdened and weak. I sit at councils with your father now. I do not have to beg for every scrap. Nymphs clamor for me, and I may choose the best among them, which is Scylla.”
The words struck like stones, but I would not give him up so easily.
“I can be best for you,” I said. “I can please you, I swear it. You will find none more loyal than me. I will do anything.”
I do think he loved me a little. For before I could say the thousand humiliating things in my heart, all the proofs of passion I had hoarded, the crawling devotions I would do, I felt his power come around me. And with that same flick he had used upon the cushions, he sent me back to my rooms.
I lay on the dirt, weeping. Those flowers had made him his true being, which was blue, and finned, and not mine. I thought I would die of such pain, which was not like the sinking numbness Ae?tes had left behind, but sharp and fierce as a blade through my chest. But of course I could not die. I would live on, through each scalding moment to the next. This is the grief that makes our kind choose to be stones and trees rather than flesh.
Beautiful Scylla, dainty-doe Scylla, Scylla with her viper heart. Why had she done such a thing? It was not love, I had seen the sneer in her eyes when she spoke of his flippers. Perhaps it was because she loved my sister and brother, who scorned me. Perhaps it was because her father was a nothing river, and her mother a shark-faced sea-nymph, and she liked the thought of taking something from the daughter of the sun.
It did not matter. All I knew was that I hated her. For I was like any dull ass who has ever loved someone who loved another. I thought: if only she were gone, it would change everything.
I left my father’s halls. It was the time between the sun’s setting and my pale aunt’s rise. There was no one to see me. I gathered those flowers of true being and brought them to the cove where it was said Scylla bathed each day. I broke their stems and emptied their white sap drop by drop into the waters. She would not be able to hide her adder malice anymore. All her ugliness would be revealed. Her eyebrows would thicken, her hair would turn dull, and her nose would grow long and snouted. The halls would echo with her furious screams and the great gods would come to whip me, but I would welcome them, for every lash upon my skin would be only further proof to Glaucos of my love.
Chapter Six
NO FURIES CAME FOR me that night. None came the next morning either, or all that afternoon. By dusk I went to find my mother at her mirror.