I wanted the next crew to come, so I might see again their tearing flesh.
There was always a leader. He was not the largest, and he need not be the captain, but he was the one they looked to for instruction in their cruelty. He had a cold eye and a coiling tension. Like a snake, the poets might say, but I knew snakes better by then. Give me the honest asp, who strikes me if I trouble him and not before.
I did not send my animals away anymore when men came. I let them loll where they liked, around the garden, under my tables. It pleased me to see the men walk among them, trembling at their teeth and unnatural tameness. I did not pretend to be a mortal. I showed my lambent, yellow eyes at every turn. None of it made a difference. I was alone and a woman, that was all that mattered.
I set my feasts before them, the meats and cheese, the fruits and fish. I set as well my largest bronze mixing bowl, filled to the brim with wine. They gulped and chewed, seized dripping cuts of mutton and dangled them down their throats. They poured and poured again, soaking their lips, slopping the table with red. Bits of barley and herbs stuck to their lips. The bowl is empty, they would say to me. Fill it. Add more honey this time, the vintage has a bitter tang.
Of course, I said.
The edge came off their hunger. They began to look around. I saw them notice the marble floors, the platters, the fine weave of my clothes. They smirked. If this was what I dared to show them, imagine what might be hiding in the back.
“Mistress?” the leader would say. “Do not tell me that such a beauty as yourself dwells all alone?”
“Oh, yes,” I would answer. “Quite alone.”
He would smile. He could not help it. There was never any fear in him. Why should there be? He had already noted for himself that there was no man’s cloak hanging by the door, no hunter’s bow, no shepherd’s staff. No sign of brothers or fathers or sons, no vengeance that would follow after. If I were valuable to anyone, I would not be allowed to live alone.
“I’m sorry to hear it,” he said.
The bench would scrape, and he would stand. The men watched with bright eyes. They wanted the freeze, the flinch, the begging that would come.
It was my favorite moment, seeing them frown and try to understand why I wasn’t afraid. In their bodies I could feel my herbs like strings waiting to be plucked. I savored their confusion, their dawning fear. Then I plucked them.
Their backs bent, forcing them onto hands and knees, faces bloating like drowned corpses. They thrashed and the benches turned over, wine splattered the floor. Their screams broke into squeals. I am certain it hurt.
I kept the leader for last, so he could watch. He shrank, pressed against the wall. Please. Spare me, spare me, spare me.
No, I would say. Oh, no.
When it was over it remained only to drive them out to the pen. I raised my staff of ash wood and they ran. The gate closed after them and they pressed back against the posts, their piggy eyes still wet with the last of their human tears.
My nymphs said not a word, though I suspected they watched sometimes through the crack of the door.
“Mistress Circe, another ship. Shall we go back to our room?”
“Please. And pull out the wine for me before you go.”
From one task to another I went, weaving, working, slopping my pigs, crossing and recrossing the isle. I moved straight-backed, as if a great brimming bowl rested in my hands. The dark liquid rippled as I walked, always at the point of overflow, yet never flowing. Only if I stopped, if I lay down, did I feel it begin to bleed.
Brides, nymphs were called, but that is not really how the world saw us. We were an endless feast laid out upon a table, beautiful and renewing. And so very bad at getting away.
The rails of my sty cracked with age and use. From time to time the wood buckled and a pig escaped. Most often, he would throw himself from the cliffs. The seabirds were grateful; they seemed to come from half the world away to feast on the plump bones. I would stand watching as they stripped the fat and sinew. The small pink scrap of tail-skin dangled from one of their beaks like a worm. If it were a man, I wondered if I would pity him. But it was not a man.
When I passed back by the pen, his friends would stare at me with pleading faces. They moaned and squealed, and pressed their snouts to the earth. We are sorry, we are sorry.
Sorry you were caught, I said. Sorry that you thought I was weak, but you were wrong.
On my bed, the lions rested their chins on my stomach. I pushed them off. I rose and walked again.
He asked me once, why pigs. We were seated before my hearth, in our usual chairs. He liked the one draped in cowhide, with silver inlaid in its carvings. Sometimes he would rub the scrolling absently beneath his thumb.
“Why not?” I said.
He gave me a bare smile. “I mean it, I would like to know.”
I knew he meant it. He was not a pious man, but the seeking out of things hidden, this was his highest worship.
There were answers in me. I felt them, buried deep as last year’s bulbs, growing fat. Their roots tangled with those moments I had spent against the wall, when my lions were gone, and my spells shut up inside me, and my pigs screamed in the yard.
After I changed a crew, I would watch them scrabbling and crying in the sty, falling over each other, stupid with their horror. They hated it all, their newly voluptuous flesh, their delicate split trotters, their swollen bellies dragging in the earth’s muck. It was a humiliation, a debasement. They were sick with longing for their hands, those appendages men use to mitigate the world.
Come, I would say to them, it’s not that bad. You should appreciate a pig’s advantages. Mud-slick and swift, they are hard to catch. Low to the ground, they cannot easily be knocked over. They are not like dogs, they do not need your love. They can thrive anywhere, on anything, scraps and trash. They look witless and dull, which lulls their enemies, but they are clever. They will remember your face.
They never listened. The truth is, men make terrible pigs.
In my chair by the hearth, I lifted my cup. “Sometimes,” I told him, “you must be content with ignorance.”
He did not like that answer, yet that was the perversity of him: in a way he liked it best of all. I had seen how he could shuck truths from men like oyster shells, how he could pry into a breast with a glance and a well-timed word. So little of the world did not yield to his sounding. In the end, I think the fact that I did not was his favorite thing about me.
But I am ahead of myself now.
A ship, the nymphs said. Very patched, with eyes upon the hull.
That caught my attention. Common pirates did not have the gold to waste on paint. But I did not go look. The anticipation was part of the pleasure. The moment when the knock came, and I would rise from my herbs, swing wide the door. There were no pious men anymore, there had not been for a long time. The spell was polished in my mouth as a river stone.
I added a handful of roots to the draught I was making. There was moly in it, and the liquid gleamed.
The afternoon passed, and the sailors did not appear. My nymphs reported they were camped on the beach with fires burning. Another day went by, and at last on the third day came the knock.
That painted ship of theirs was the finest thing about them. Their faces had lines like grandfathers. Their eyes were bloodshot and dead. They flinched from my animals.
“Let me guess,” I said. “You are lost? You are hungry and tired and sad?”
They ate well. They drank more. Their bodies were lumpish here and there with fat, though the muscles beneath were hard as trees. Their scars were long, ridged and slashing. They had had a good season, then met someone who did not like their thieving. They were plunderers, of that I had no doubt. Their eyes never stopped counting up my treasures, and they grinned at the tally they came to.