The captain was close now. I could feel the heat of his skin. His face was rutted, cracked like old streambeds. I kept waiting for him to speak some ordinary thing, to offer thanks, ask a question. Somewhere in her palace, my sister was laughing. You have been tame your whole life, and now you will be sorry. Yes Father, yes Father—see what it gets you.
My tongue touched my lips. “Is there—” The man threw me back against the wall. My head hit the uneven stone and the room sparked. I opened my mouth to cry out the spell, but he jammed his arm against my windpipe and the sound was choked off. I could not speak. I could not breathe. I fought him, but he was stronger than I had thought he would be, or maybe I was weaker. The sudden weight of him shocked me, the greasy push of his skin on mine. My mind was still scrambled, disbelieving. With his right hand, he tore my clothes, a practiced gesture. With his left, he kept his weight against my throat. I had said there was no one on the island, but he had learned not to take chances. Or perhaps he just didn’t like screaming.
I don’t know what his men did. Watched maybe. If my lion had been there, she would have clawed down the door, but she was ash upon the winds. Outside I heard the pigs squealing. I remember what I thought, bare against the grinding stone: I am only a nymph after all, for nothing is more common among us than this.
A mortal would have fainted, but I was awake for every moment. At last, I felt the man tremble, and his arm loosened. My throat was crushed inward like a rotted log. I could not seem to move. A drop of sweat fell from his hair onto my bare chest, and began to slide. I became aware of his men speaking behind him. Is she dead? one of them was saying. She better not be dead, it’s my turn. A face loomed over the captain’s shoulder. Her eyes are open.
The captain stepped back and spat at the floor. The jellied glob quivered on the stone. The drop of sweat slid onwards, carving its slimy furrow. A sow shrieked in the yard. Convulsively, I swallowed. My throat clicked. I felt a space open in me. The sleep-spell I had been going to say was gone, dried up, I could not have cast it even if I wanted to. But I did not want to. My eyes lifted to his rutted face. Those herbs had another use, and I knew what it was. I drew breath, and spoke my word.
His eyes were muddy and uncomprehending. “What—”
He did not finish. His rib cage cracked and began to bulge. I heard the sound of flesh rupturing wetly, the pops of breaking bone. His nose ballooned from his face, and his legs shriveled like a fly sucked by a spider. He fell to all fours. He screamed, and his men screamed with him. It went on for a long time.
As it turned out, I did kill pigs that night after all.
Chapter Fifteen
I PICKED UP THE overturned benches, wiped the soaked floors. I stacked the platters and carried them to the kitchen. I had scrubbed myself in the waves with sand till the blood came through. I’d found the glob of spit on the flagstone and scrubbed that too. It did nothing. With every movement I could feel the prints of his fingers.
The wolves and lions had crept back, shadows in the dark. They lay down, pressing their faces to the floor. At last, when there was nothing else to clean, I sat before the hearth ash. I was not shaking anymore. I did not move at all. My flesh seemed to have congealed around me. My skin stretched over it like a dead thing, rubbery and vile.
It was shading to dawn, when the silver horses of the moon go to their stables. My aunt Selene’s chariot had been full all night, her light strong in the sky. By the brightness of her face I had dragged those monstrous carcasses down to the boat, struck flint, and watched the flames leap up. She would have told Helios by now. My father would appear any moment, the patriarch outraged at the insult to his child. My ceiling would creak as his shoulders pressed against it. Poor child, poor exiled daughter. I should never have let Zeus send you here.
The room turned gray, then yellow. A sea breeze stirred, but it was not enough to push away the stink of burnt flesh. My father had never spoken that way in his life, I knew it. But surely, I thought, he would still have to come, if only to reproach me. I was no Zeus, I would not be allowed to strike down twenty men in a moment. I spoke out to the pale edge of my father’s rising chariot. Did you hear what I did?
The shadows moved across the floor. The light crept over my feet, touched the hem of my dress. Each moment stretched into the next. No one came.
Maybe the true surprise, I thought, was that it had not happened sooner. My uncles’ eyes used to crawl over me as I poured their wine. Their hands found their way to my flesh. A pinch, a stroke, a hand slipping under the sleeve of my dress. They all had wives, it was not marriage they thought of. One of them would have come for me in the end and paid my father well. Honor on all sides.
The light had reached the loom, and its cedar scent was rising in the air. The memory of Daedalus’ white-scarred hands, and the pleasure I had taken in them, was like a hot wire pushed through my brain. I dug my nails into my wrist. There are oracles scattered across our lands. Shrines where priestesses breathe sacred fumes and speak the truths they find in them. Know yourself is carved above their doors. But I had been a stranger to myself, turned to stone for no reason I could name.
Daedalus had told me a story once about the lords of Crete who used to hire him to enlarge their houses. He would arrive with his tools, begin taking down the walls, pulling up the floors. But whenever he found some problem underneath that must first be fixed, they frowned. That was not in the agreement!
Of course not, he said, it has been hidden in the foundation, but look, there it is, plain as day. See the cracked beam? See the beetles eating the floor? See how the stone is sinking into the swamp?
That only made the lords angrier. It was fine until you dug it up! We will not pay! Close it up, plaster over. It has stood this long, it will stand longer.
So he would seal that fault up, and the next season the house would fall down. Then they would come to him, demanding back their money.
“I told them,” he said to me. “I told them and told them. When there is rot in the walls, there is only one remedy.”
The purple bruise at my throat was turning green at its edges. I pressed it, felt the splintered ache.
Tear down, I thought. Tear down and build again.
They came, I cannot say why. Some revolution of the Fates, some change in trade and shipping routes. Some scent upon the air, wafting: here are nymphs, and they live alone. The boats flew to my harbor as if yanked on a string. The men splashed to shore and looked around, pleased. Fresh water, game, fish, fruits. And I thought I saw hearth smoke above the trees. Is that someone singing?
I could have cast an illusion over the island to keep them away, I had the power to do it. Drape my gentle shores in an image of staving rocks and whirlpools, of jagged, unscaleable cliffs. They would sail on, and I would never need to see them, nor anyone, again.
No, I thought. It is too late for that. I have been found. Let them see what I am. Let them learn the world is not as they think.
They climbed up the trails. They crossed the stones of my garden path. They all had the same desperate story: they were lost, they were weary, they were out of food. They would be so grateful for my help.
A few of these, so few I can count them on my fingers, I let go. They did not see me as their dinner. They were pious men, honestly lost, and I would feed them, and if there was a handsome one among them I might take him to my bed. It was not desire, not even its barest scrapings. It was a sort of rage, a knife I used upon myself. I did it to prove my skin was still my own. And did I like the answer I found?
“Leave,” I told them.
They knelt to me on my yellow sands. “Goddess,” they said, “at least give us your name so we may send you our thankful prayers.”
I did not want their prayers, nor my name in their mouths. I wanted them gone. I wanted to scrub myself in the sea until the blood showed through.