‘Oh, please …’
‘– and you can’t stand it.’
Stheno shouldn’t have said that. She really shouldn’t have said that. The truth is – and I should know, I’ve suffered both – that words can wound you deeper than a sword cut.
And so it proved.
On hearing these words, the hot burn in Athena’s face turned cold. Her skin was almost blanched. She was staring at me with the most spine-chilling look of intent I’ve ever seen on god or mortal, before or since. The hairs on the back of my neck began to rise. I knew something bad was coming straight in my direction.
Is it possible, I wondered, that even goddesses let this sort of comment bother them?
Apparently they do. Apparently goddesses are just like me and you.
Athena’s gaze seared my skin, her fury covered me like a shroud. As her power entered me, the moon on the edge of Night and the moonlight in my soul were eclipsed by the size of her rage. These were the last moments of our lives when my sisters and I could consider ourselves anywhere near normal.
I falter in my recollection here – for this was where my story broke apart, a whale skeleton left to rot upon the shore. How could I ever explain to Perseus what happened in my final meeting with Athena? How could I explain these snakes on my head, or tell him that I was a girl who was also a Gorgon?
I shook my head at the memory, and my snakes stirred. Echo and Callisto untwined themselves and bobbed around in the air. I realised a strange thing: I complained about them all the time, I resented them, and when it came to Perseus I thought they were a massive liability – but I knew I would miss them if they were taken away. They were part of me now; there was no going back. For a long time after Athena transformed me, I had hoped that Echo, Callisto, Daphne, Artemis and the others were just a temporary whim of a goddess; that I could return to how I looked before. But it never happened. Nothing I could beg or promise would take me back.
Artemis snapped lazily at a passing fly. And would you want to go back now, I wondered to myself, despite it all?
Yes, I missed the starlight at the edge of Night, but what was there for me except a reputation unfairly in tatters, hated as a beauty and probably even more so as a hag, and a bunch of neighbours unwilling to change their minds about me? At least here I had some freedom to roam, to be myself, without the pokes and prods and commentary from strangers and acquaintances alike.
Euryale was right: I could breathe on this island. On this island we lived as we pleased. No one called me a monster, and no one attacked me for being too pretty. I’d come to love the rocks, changing colour as the sun moved – pale orange, almost-scarlet, powder of vermilion to the touch. Yes, they were jagged, but their sides were smooth. I loved to lie on them and watch their shifting shades.
I’d told Perseus that I was hiding, but maybe I wasn’t at all. Maybe I had found my space to simply be.
Maybe I hadn’t realised it, but I’d found a kind of peace.
And now he’d said he loved me. Maybe certain impossibilities were not so impossible, after all.
CHAPTER TEN
That night, I dreamed of another woman. It was Driana, stalking the passageways of my mind – or at least, a girl I thought of as Driana, for I’d never asked Perseus what she looked like. She was dressed as a bride, standing quite alone on the edge of a cliff, holding a bouquet of thyme and octopus tentacles. Her dark hair, dark as mine had once been, encircled her head with a neat coil. She was pacing, waiting for someone. There was a roaring rush of wind and her veil whipped off, turning itself into a ship’s sail, attached to a boat that moved far off into the horizon.
I followed the boat in my mind’s eye, and when I turned back towards the land, Driana and her bouquet had gone.
I woke to see Stheno sitting alone by the mouth of our cave. Her legs were crossed, her wings half extended, billowing gently in the breeze. She was very upright. If Euryale was the doer of that duo, Stheno was its thinker. Such a silhouette against the light of the sun! – the shape of which I’d doubt you’d see in Seriphos. She was so still I could have mistaken her for a statue.
Since the day I was born, Stheno had loved and protected me with a tenderness to match Euryale’s ferocity. Euryale was strong and proud of herself, but I always felt that Stheno somehow better understood my fears of being different. I knew that what I’d said to my sisters in anger – that they didn’t know what love was – was unfair. Looking at Stheno, her head now bowed, I felt terrible. For when Stheno had been looking after me, who had been looking after Stheno?
‘Are you all right?’ I asked.
My sister turned to me, the folds of her ragged dress fanning out upon the cave floor, her face drawn and pale. ‘Good morning,’ she said with a shy smile. ‘Another bad dream? You didn’t stop tossing and turning.’
‘Where’s Eury?’
‘Out.’
‘Out where?’
‘Just … flying.’
Her evasion, so unusual, gave me a prickle of fear, loosening my stomach.
‘Come here,’ Stheno said gently, and I obeyed as if I were four years old, half of my mind on her, the other half outside the cave wondering where Euryale had got to. Stheno gestured for me to sit. ‘My darling,’ she said. ‘Are you well?’
‘I’m fine.’
‘I don’t know if that’s true.’ She held up one hand as I made to protest. ‘I know that life has not always been easy for you, Medusa. There must be things that you miss. Things you worry you might never have.’
‘I don’t miss anything,’ I said, crossing my legs beside her, feeling the heat from the ground even this early in the day.
My sister looked away. ‘You’ve seemed absent at our dinners,’ she said quietly. ‘And then there was the dream of … Poseidon.’
‘Stheno, it was just a dream. Just emptying my head out at the end of the day.’
‘But why is he in your head again in the first place? You know it’s never just a dream. It means something.’
I thought of Driana, standing on the cliff, her veil flying out towards the sea. ‘Dreams are just dreams,’ I said. ‘They don’t mean anything.’
Stheno frowned. ‘Sometimes I think we should never have come here. We should have stayed on the edge of Night. At least there was life back home. Other girls …’ She hesitated. ‘And boys.’
‘They didn’t like me much before Athena transformed me, and they certainly wouldn’t have liked me after.’
‘You don’t know that.’
‘We did live in the same village, didn’t we?’ I said, and Stheno laughed sadly. ‘There’s life enough here, sister,’ I went on. ‘Trust me.’
‘But it’s different for me and Eury,’ she said. ‘We have … all of life – and you have one life.’ She gestured outwards with one arm and I heard the dry rustling of her feathers. ‘And you’re spending it here.’
‘You did what you had to do. We all did.’
Suddenly Stheno got to her knees and placed her hands either side of my face. She stared into my eyes. It was a long time since we had truly looked at each other, and I remembered how her irises were much bluer than Euryale’s, and flecked with sea green and gold. I could have dived into Stheno’s eyes and felt safe forever, but I had learned the hard way that not even Stheno could protect me entirely. It was a truth that both paralysed me and set me free.
‘Promise me, Medusa,’ Stheno said, as if she had read my mind. ‘Promise you’re not doing anything that might put you in danger?’
‘I would never do that,’ I said. I held my sister’s solemn gaze. ‘I’m happy here. Truly.’
‘Medusa, is there something you’re not telling me?’
My stomach turned over. ‘Why would you think that?’
‘Why are you happy here?’ she said. ‘What, on this barren island, could possibly make you happy?’
‘Being with you. Being with Euryale.’
She gave me a doubtful look. ‘Euryale was right. You are different these last few days.’
‘I’m fine.’