It was not piteous, as it might have been in a mortal. We gods eat as we sleep: because it is one of life’s great pleasures, not because we have to. We may decide one day not to obey our stomachs, if we are strong enough. I did not doubt Prometheus was. After all those hours at my father’s feet, I had learned to nose out power where it lay. Some of my uncles had less scent than the chairs they sat on, but my grandfather Oceanos smelled deep as rich river mud, and my father like a searing blaze of just-fed fire. Prometheus’ green moss scent filled the room.
I looked down at the empty cup, willing my courage.
“You aided mortals,” I said. “That is why you are punished.”
“It is.”
“Will you tell me, what is a mortal like?”
It was a child’s question, but he nodded gravely. “There is no single answer. They are each different. The only thing they share is death. You know the word?”
“I know it,” I said. “But I do not understand.”
“No god can. Their bodies crumble and pass into earth. Their souls turn to cold smoke and fly to the underworld. There they eat nothing and drink nothing and feel no warmth. Everything they reach for slips from their grasp.”
A chill shivered across my skin. “How do they bear it?”
“As best they can.”
The torches were fading, and the shadows lapped at us like dark water. “Is it true that you refused to beg for pardon? And that you were not caught, but confessed to Zeus freely what you did?”
“It is.”
“Why?”
His eyes were steady on mine. “Perhaps you will tell me. Why would a god do such a thing?”
I had no answer. It seemed to me madness to invite divine punishment, but I could not say that to him, not when I stood in his blood.
“Not every god need be the same,” he said.
What I might have said in return, I do not know. A distant shout floated up the corridor.
“It is time for you to go now. Allecto does not like to leave me for long. Her cruelty springs fast as weeds and must any moment be cut again.”
It was a strange way to put it, for he was the one who would be cut. But I liked it, as if his words were a secret. A thing that looked like a stone, but inside was a seed.
“I will go then,” I said. “You will…be well?”
“Well enough,” he said. “What is your name?”
“Circe.”
Did he smile a little? Perhaps I only flattered myself. I was trembling with all I had done, which was more than I had ever done in my life. I turned and left him, walking back through those obsidian corridors. In the feasting hall, gods still drank and laughed and lay across each other’s laps. I watched them. I waited for someone to remark on my absence, but no one did, for no one had noticed. Why would they? I was nothing, a stone. One more nymph child among the thousand thousands.
A strange feeling was rising in me. A sort of humming in my chest, like bees at winter’s thaw. I walked to my father’s treasury, filled with its glittering riches: golden cups shaped like the heads of bulls, necklaces of lapis and amber, silver tripods, and quartz-chiseled bowls with swan-neck handles. My favorite had always been a dagger with an ivory haft carved like a lion’s face. A king had given it to my father in hopes of gaining his favor.
“And did he?” I once asked my father.
“No,” my father had said.
I took the dagger. In my room, the bronze edge shone in the taper’s light and the lion showed her teeth. Beneath lay my palm, soft and unlined. It could bear no scar, no festering wound. It would never wear the faintest print of age. I found that I was not afraid of the pain that would come. It was another terror that gripped me: that the blade would not cut at all. That it would pass through me, like falling into smoke.
It did not pass through. My skin leapt apart at the blade’s touch, and the pain darted silver and hot as lightning strike. The blood that flowed was red, for I did not have my uncle’s power. The wound seeped for a long time before it began to reknit itself. I sat watching it, and as I watched I found a new thought in myself. I am embarrassed to tell it, so rudimentary it seems, like an infant’s discovery that her hand is her own. But that is what I was then, an infant.
The thought was this: that all my life had been murk and depths, but I was not a part of that dark water. I was a creature within it.
Chapter Three
WHEN I WOKE, PROMETHEUS was gone. The golden blood had been wiped from the floor. The hole the manacles had made was closed over. I heard the news from a naiad cousin: he had been taken to a great jagged peak in the Caucasus and chained to the rock. An eagle was commanded to come every noon and tear out his liver and eat it steaming from his flesh. Unspeakable punishment, she said, relishing each detail: the bloody beak, the shredded organ regrowing only to be ripped forth again. Can you imagine?
I closed my eyes. I should have brought him a spear, I thought, something so he could have fought his way through. But that was foolish. He did not want a weapon. He had given himself up.
Talk of Prometheus’ punishment scarcely lasted out the moon. A dryad stabbed one of the Graces with her hairpin. My uncle Boreas and Olympian Apollo had fallen in love with the same mortal youth.
I waited till my uncles paused in their gossip. “Is there any news of Prometheus?”
They frowned, as if I had offered them a plate of something foul. “What news could there be?”
My palm ached where the blade had cut, though of course there was no mark.
“Father,” I said, “will Zeus ever let Prometheus go?”
My father squinted at his draughts. “He would have to get something better for it,” he said.
“Like what?”
My father did not answer. Someone’s daughter was changed into a bird. Boreas and Apollo quarreled over the youth they loved and he died. Boreas smiled slyly from his feasting couch. His gusty voice made the torches flicker. “You think I’d let Apollo have him? He does not deserve such a flower. I blew a discus into the boy’s head, that showed the Olympian prig.” The sound of my uncles’ laughter was a chaos, the squeaks of dolphins, seal barks, water slapping rocks. A group of nereids passed, eel-belly white, on their way home to their salt halls.
Perses flicked an almond at my face. “What’s wrong with you these days?”
“Maybe she’s in love,” Pasipha? said.
“Hah!” Perses laughed. “Father cannot even give her away. Believe me he’s tried.”
My mother looked back over her delicate shoulder. “At least we don’t have to listen to her voice.”
“I can make her talk, watch.” Perses took the flesh of my arm between his fingers and squeezed.
“You’ve been feasting too much,” my sister laughed at him.
He flushed. “She’s just a freak. She’s hiding something.” He caught me by the wrist. “What’re you always carrying around in your hand? She’s got something. Open her fingers.”
Pasipha? peeled them back one by one, her long nails pricking.
They peered down. My sister spat.
“Nothing.”
My mother whelped again, a boy. My father blessed him, but spoke no prophecy, so my mother looked around for somewhere to leave him. My aunts were wise by then and kept their hands behind their backs.
“I will take him,” I said.
My mother scoffed, but she was eager to show off her new string of amber beads. “Fine. At least you will be of some use. You can squawk at each other.”
Ae?tes, my father had named him. Eagle. His skin was warm in my arms as a sun-hot stone and soft as petal-velvet. There had never been a sweeter child. He smelled like honey and just-kindled flames. He ate from my fingers and did not flinch at my frail voice. He only wanted to sleep curled against my neck while I told him stories. Every moment he was with me, I felt a rushing in my throat, which was my love for him, so great sometimes I could not speak.