Perseus had pretended to be a warrior, a man capable of killing. But it was I who had taken that step. I was a girl, but I was also a Gorgon – which side of myself was the true one? Was I going to have to pick, or was it already a permanent kind of blend? There was nothing good about killing someone. If you do that to a person, you carry it inside yourself for the rest of your life, a prison sentence of its very own kind. Years later, Euryale would still talk about what I did to Perseus as being justified. Whenever she said this, a raven wing would beat upon my heart. As your life unfurls, what makes you so sure your reasons are the right ones? You don’t ever know for sure. You’re simply trying to survive.
As the years passed, however, I would remember the feel of that sword in my skin more than I ever remembered Perseus. Once he raised that sword against my flesh, one of us was not going to get out of that cave alive. When Perseus came at me, I must have realised something: I was not going to let him destroy me for who I was, or who he thought I was, for his own ends. It was simply unacceptable.
‘Perseus, son of Dana?,’ I said now, addressing the statue. I thought he would like his mother mentioned. ‘You’re in Elysium now, I’m sure.’
‘I think we should go,’ said Euryale. ‘If you don’t want to break him up, then fine, but I think it’s a bad idea to leave him out here. You’re making a memorial that could incriminate you. Let’s put him back inside the cave.’
‘No,’ I said. ‘He stays on the cliff.’
‘Medusa …’ Euryale began, but Stheno silenced her with a glance.
‘Do you think we’ll ever come back?’ I asked. ‘To remember what happened?’
‘Perhaps,’ said Stheno, but she looked doubtful.
‘Are we always going to be on the run?’ I said.
Stheno took me in her arms and held me tight. ‘No. From this day on, there’s no more running away.’
That said, it was Stheno’s idea to take Perseus’s boat. We didn’t want the bad memories of this island. And to take the boat made sense, she said, because we didn’t know how far we were to go, and my sisters could not carry me forever. And the boat would only rot in the cove, attracting barnacles to its hull. Here was a little wooden reef of grief that we could rescue into happiness.
We took Orado, of course, alongside Argentus. At first, Orado was reluctant, giving out little yips of pain as he realised he was being removed from his position at the statue’s feet. But how would he survive, with no one to feed him, trying to snap at seagulls, no company to keep? It felt like I was stealing him from Perseus, but I was growing accustomed to this new sensation of uncomfortable compromises, of living in the grey areas of life, rather than the starker strips of black and white I’d believed in as a child.
We threw the sword and the shield and the helmet into the sea, watching them submerge, to rust and grow as homes for creatures we would never see.
I hadn’t been on a boat in over four years, but as soon as I stepped on deck, memories came back to me, from the times before Poseidon. I remembered how to sail. I remembered how to listen to the wind, to feel it on my face, to tack this way and that as my sisters flew above my head as lookouts. I was from Oceanus. I was the sailor poet. Out on the water, between no land and on no border, I was finally home.
I couldn’t wait to get the nets out.
Raising the anchor that first sunny morning, I felt a sense of courage, a thrill of power, a slither of potential. While sailing was familiar, these feelings were new to me. We set off, and now I was the traveller on the boat, and Perseus was up there, stranded sightless on the cliff. Life offers you strange mirrors.
I hadn’t been in the water for so long – because I’d been scared of Poseidon. But he no longer frightened me. What Poseidon did to me that night long ago has formed only one small brick in the house of me. It is a huge house, which I’ve built and lived in and made beautiful, despite his worst intentions. And in fact, Poseidon didn’t give me nothing – he gave me the knowledge that, whatever happened to me, I was still Medusa.
The changes he and Athena had wrought upon me had left me feeling out of my own control for years, but when Perseus had come for me in that cave with his sword, something had shifted. I was proud of who I was, and I had as much right to be alive as Perseus did. They’d all tested me; they’d all tried to see if I would break. But I was tired of men and gods and goddesses dictating the ebb and flow of my happiness, my state of mind.
I’d trusted Perseus. I had thought he was my one true hope. But it turned out my one true hope was me.
Out at sea, my snakes loved the sense of movement. They were everywhere, straining this way and that to look at the dolphins and porpoises, the curious mermaids with shells threading their hair, bobbing up from the depths to stare at me in wonder. It really is something when a mermaid is the one to stare at you in wonder – but when they did, I waved, and to my utter delight, they waved back.
I felt majestic and terrifying, and I felt how I had as a little girl – that I belonged to myself. Whatever I said or whatever I did was in perfect synthesis with my soul inside. As the serpent eats its tail, every day I died with the sun, but by morning I gave birth to myself again. And where did my sisters and I go? Not towards the lands of mist and melancholy, nor to those of blood and smoke. I’d had enough of all of that, and nor did I wish to be one of those souls who wandered the world in search of something always out of reach. We stayed on the waters, and sailed.
Once upon a time I would have thought we looked like freaks – my sisters high in the sky, their wingspans wide; me down on the deck, snakes streaming like ribbons; the dogs either side of the prow, their fur so gold and silver in the sun. But now I know that we looked glorious.
In the early years after we left the island, sometimes I’d remember Perseus and I’d dream badly, waking with my mind full of Dana? and Driana wondering where their beloved boy had gone. Had Dana? been forced to marry Polydectes, or had she managed to escape such a fate? I hoped she had. I thought I could write to them. I could even visit Seriphos – maybe they would understand? But I couldn’t risk it. A mother’s grief would see the monster in me, not the girl who’d handed over her trust to a boy who didn’t know what to do with it.
I did not want Perseus’s end to be an extinction of my hopes of love. I worried, after what had happened on my island, that love only worked when you couldn’t truly see the other. Was love only perfect when one of you was hiding behind a shield or a rock, or when one of you was dead, unable to answer back? We’d made each other in our own images – but in our case, Perseus hadn’t bargained on a head of snakes, just as I hadn’t bargained on a swinging sword. I knew now that we could never have been together, because he was unable to accept me for who I was. Stheno was right that I should tell Perseus, because in the end, he saved me from a lifetime of assuming that romance would rescue me. Did he love me? How can you love someone and want to chop off their head? Call me naive, but that’s a strange kind of love. Perseus was lonely. He was drawn to me, as I was to him. But in the final reckoning, something else louder than love spoke to him that day.
If I do fall for someone, and tell them the truth of my power, the agony will be mine when he decides to leave. For how can I explain to a man that I truly want him to see me, but that he will pay for such a pleasure with his life? To kiss him will be to kill him, and I couldn’t trust that he would listen to my warning. Perseus had not listened. He thought he knew what he was doing. Maybe there is a man out there who will be able to keep a comfortable distance. Only the gods know that.