The vision blossomed, vivid as the cool grass beneath me, as the black sky over my head. We would visit the Lion Gate of Mycenae, where Agamemnon’s heirs ruled, and the walls of Troy, their stones chilled by winds from ice-peaked Ida. We would ride elephants and walk in the desert night beneath the eyes of gods who had never heard of Titans or Olympians, who took no more notice of us than they did of the sand beetles toiling at our feet. He would say to me that he wanted children, and I would say, “You do not know what you are asking of me,” and he would say, “This time you are not alone.”
We have a daughter, and then another. Penelope attends my birthing bed. There is pain, but it passes. We live on the island when the children are young and visit often after. She weaves and casts spells while nymphs glide around her. However gray she gets she never seems to tire, but sometimes I see her eyes turn to the horizon where the house of the dead and its souls wait.
The daughters I dream to life are different from Telegonus, and different from each other. One chases the lions in circles, while the other sits in a corner, watching and remembering everything. We are wild with our love for them, standing over their sleeping faces, whispering about what she said today, what she did. We bring them to meet Telegonus, throned among his golden orchards. He leaps from his couch to embrace us all and introduces us to his captain of the guard, a tall, dark-haired youth who never leaves his side. He is not married yet, he may not ever be, he says. I smile, imagining Athena’s frustration. So polite he is, yet firm and immovable as one of his own city walls. I do not worry for him.
I have aged. When I look in my polished bronze mirror there are lines upon my face. I am thickened too, and my skin has begun growing loose. I cut myself at my herbs and the scars stay. Sometimes I like it. Sometimes I am vain and dissatisfied. But I do not wish myself back. Of course my flesh reaches for the earth. That is where it belongs. One day, Hermes will lead me down to the halls of the dead. We will scarcely recognize each other, for I will be white-haired, and he will be wrapped in his mystery as Leader of Souls, the only time he is solemn. I think I will enjoy seeing that.
I know how lucky I am, stupid with luck, crammed with it, stumbling drunk. I wake sometimes in the dark terrified by my life’s precariousness, its thready breath. Beside me, my husband’s pulse beats at his throat; in their beds, my children’s skin shows every faintest scratch. A breeze would blow them over, and the world is filled with more than breezes: diseases and disasters, monsters and pain in a thousand variations. I do not forget either my father and his kind hanging over us, bright and sharp as swords, aimed at our tearing flesh. If they do not fall on us in spite and malice, then they will fall by accident or whim. My breath fights in my throat. How can I live on beneath such a burden of doom?
I rise then and go to my herbs. I create something, I transform something. My witchcraft is as strong as ever, stronger. This too is good fortune. How many have such power and leisure and defense as I do? Telemachus comes from our bed to find me. He sits with me in the green-smelling darkness, holding my hand. Our faces are both lined now, marked with our years.
Circe, he says, it will be all right.
It is not the saying of an oracle or a prophet. They are words you might speak to a child. I have heard him say them to our daughters, when he rocked them back to sleep from a nightmare, when he dressed their small cuts, soothed whatever stung. His skin is familiar as my own beneath my fingers. I listen to his breath, warm upon the night air, and somehow I am comforted. He does not mean that it does not hurt. He does not mean that we are not frightened. Only that: we are here. This is what it means to swim in the tide, to walk the earth and feel it touch your feet. This is what it means to be alive.
Overhead the constellations dip and wheel. My divinity shines in me like the last rays of the sun before they drown in the sea. I thought once that gods are the opposite of death, but I see now they are more dead than anything, for they are unchanging, and can hold nothing in their hands.
All my life I have been moving forward, and now I am here. I have a mortal’s voice, let me have the rest. I lift the brimming bowl to my lips and drink.
Cast of Characters
Titan Divinities
Ae?tes: Brother of Circe and the sorcerer-king of Colchis, a kingdom on the eastern edge of the Black Sea. Ae?tes was also the father of the mortal witch Medea, and the keeper of the Golden Fleece, until it was stolen by Jason and the Argonauts with Medea’s help.
Boreas: The north wind personified. He is responsible, in some myths, for the death of the beautiful youth Hyacinthos. His brothers were Zephyros (the west wind), Notos (the south wind), and Euros (the east wind).
Calypso: A daughter of the Titan Atlas who dwells on the island of Ogygia. In the Odyssey, she takes in the shipwrecked Odysseus. Having fallen in love with him, she keeps him on her island for seven years, until the gods command her to release him.
Circe: A witch who lived on the island of Aiaia, daughter of Helios and the nymph Perse. Her name is likely derived from the word for hawk or falcon. In the Odyssey, she turns Odysseus’ men into pigs, but after he challenges her, she takes him as a lover, allowing him and his men to stay with her and aiding them when they depart again. Circe has had a long literary life, inspiring writers such as Ovid, James Joyce, Eudora Welty, and Margaret Atwood.
Helios: Titan god of the sun. Father of many children, including Circe, Ae?tes, Pasipha?, and Perse, as well as their half-sisters, the nymphs Phaethousa and Lampetia. He was most often depicted in his chariot of golden horses, which he drove across the sky each day. In the Odyssey, he asks Zeus to destroy Odysseus’ men after they kill his sacred cows.
Mnemosyne: A goddess of memory, and mother of the nine muses.
Nereus: An early god of the sea, overshadowed by the Olympian Poseidon. Father of many divine children, including the sea-nymph Thetis.
Oceanos: In the poetry of Homer, Oceanos is the Titan god of the great fresh-water river Oceanos, which the ancients imagined encircled the world. In later times, he became associated with the sea and salt-water. He is Circe’s maternal grandfather, and the father of numerous nymphs and gods.
Pasipha?: Circe’s sister, a powerful witch who marries Zeus’ mortal son Minos and becomes queen of Crete. She has several children with him, including Ariadne and Phaedra, and also contrives to become pregnant by a sacred white bull, giving birth to the Minotaur.
Perse: An Oceanid, one of the nymph daughters of Oceanos. The mother of Circe and wife to Helios. In later stories, she was associated with witchcraft herself.
Perses: Circe’s brother, associated in some stories with ancient Persia.
Prometheus: A Titan god who disobeyed Zeus to help mortals, giving them fire and, in some stories, teaching them the arts of civilization as well. Zeus punished him by chaining him to a crag in the Caucasus Mountains, where an eagle came every day to tear out and eat his liver, which then regenerated overnight.
Proteus: A shape-shifting god of the sea, guardian of Poseidon’s flocks of seals.
Selene: The goddess of the moon, Circe’s aunt and Helios’ sister. She drove a chariot of silvery horses across the night sky, and her husband was the beautiful shepherd Endymion, a mortal enchanted to eternal, ageless sleep.
Tethys: Titan wife to Oceanos, and Circe’s grandmother. Like her husband, she was initially associated with fresh-water but was later depicted as a goddess of the sea.
Olympian Divinities
Apollo: God of light, music, prophecy, and medicine. Apollo was the son of Zeus and the twin brother of Artemis, and a champion of the Trojans in the Trojan War.
Artemis: Goddess of the hunt, a daughter of Zeus and sister to Apollo. In the Odyssey, she is named as the killer of the princess Ariadne.
Athena: The powerful goddess of wisdom, weaving, and war arts. She was a fierce supporter of Greeks in the Trojan War, and a particular guardian of the wily Odysseus. She appears often in both the Iliad and Odyssey. Said to be Zeus’ favorite child, she was born from his head fully formed and armored.