To know I was treasured, adored and celebrated; to be allowed, encouraged to shine, to feel perfect in the majestic mirror of someone else’s gaze – could such a life ever be mine? Maybe Perseus was the one to tell me.
Please, I urged the gods – and one goddess in particular. You’ve done so much to punish me. Athena, please let me have this sliver of moon.
I waited. But Athena did not answer.
CHAPTER FIVE
That night, I dreamed of Athena, the goddess who had changed everything.
Even in my sleep, and even though what happened was four years ago, my body still recalled the pain she’d inflicted. Up it came, piercing the soles of my feet and calves, my backside, into my spine, a cyclone in my guts and lungs. Ice and fire, that was Athena, clutching my heart, shooting up my throat, back down my arms, freezing my mortal fingers.
Perhaps I tried to wake, but I was trapped in the nightmare. I could hear my sisters screaming, the uncomfortable sensation of power surging through my blood, wave after furious wave like molten metal. As a girl, I’d never felt this way – as if my feet could kick harder than a god’s, as if my mouth would pour forth truths so blinding that no one who listened to me would ever be the same again.
And yet, I was monstrous. Was I monstrous? What was monstrous? Is what Athena did to me a punishment or a prize?
I couldn’t have told you. The gods are mad at best.
Suddenly, and still in sleep: my head. Oh, my head – freezing cold, as if Athena had plunged me into the ocean’s deepest waters. I didn’t know how long it lasted – seconds, minutes, days? My eyes hard as diamonds, everything crystalline – but I kept blinking, hoping to see how I’d seen before. No use: I couldn’t – I could never go back to how I was. Athena made sure of that.
Hissing, heard for the first time, like waters poured on hot stone. A heaviness on my scalp, dropping past my ears – cool, solid, coiling on my shoulders, over and over. My head feeling double its weight. I looked to my right. A snake’s head, gazing at me as if waiting for my order, its body writhing from my scalp.
From my scalp.
Next to it, another snake – then more and more, more and more – and I realised my hair was gone, and in its place was a crown of serpents, sinewy, strong, all colours of the rainbow.
The pain, as quickly as it had transfigured me, slithered away. My sisters stared in silence, and I returned their look of horror at the wings now sprouting from their backs.
For the first time in my life, I felt that I could really see. Stheno finally spoke, her voice haggard. ‘What have you done to us?’ she asked the goddess.
‘Three girls, or three Gorgons?’ replied Athena.
‘Gorgons?’ said Euryale. ‘You’ve turned us into Gorgons?’
‘Medusa,’ the goddess continued. ‘Listen well. Woe betide any man fool enough to look upon you now!’
‘What do you mean?’ I whispered, barely able to speak, but Athena saw no need to give me an answer.
I woke to the dying sound of her laugh. Just a dream, I told myself, my hands making their way to my head.
Ah. Not a dream. All true.
‘Stheno? Eury?’ I called. As my serpents roused themselves, I lay on my back, letting them uncurl, and I wondered what Athena had really, truly meant about woe for a man foolish enough to look at me. Since the snakes, no man ever had. I’d never put her warning to the test – but I believed her all right. I believed that something terrible would happen to anyone who caught sight of me. Why else would she say it?
After Athena had turned us into Gorgons, my sisters and I had taken nothing with us from our village except Argentus, tucked inside Euryale’s folded arm. Their new wings, courtesy of Athena, skimmed against the wind, and I remember my hand in Stheno’s as she lifted me over land and water.
Stheno liked her wings, I could tell. She was graceful with them. My reality, however, was a nest of serpents writhing in excitement over my scalp. Stheno was too polite to indulge her pleasure in the face of my despair, but Euryale had had no such scruples, doing loops all through the dark till dawn.
I sat up, banishing these difficult memories. The cave was empty, save for the slumbering shape of Argentus; my sisters were already gone for the day, out over the seas. What else they did when not gathering food, I didn’t ask. Sometimes diving deep, probably, to gambol with the dolphins. But all those other hours? Part of me suspected it was better not to know. Gorgon-stuff. The making of a myth. They loved it, but I would have swapped it all for a head of normal hair.
Perseus had risen early. He was calling for me – ‘Merina, Merina, are you there?’ – from the other side of the entrance rock.
‘Coming,’ I called.
I wondered if he’d seen my sisters fly off on the hunt for food. As a son of Zeus, perhaps he wouldn’t bat an eyelid at the fact that they could fly, but I couldn’t be sure.
Perseus was playing an instrument that sounded like a flute. It was very melodious, and I wondered where he’d learned. He stopped and must have laid it down in the dirt, resting for a moment in the sun. Only one of his hands was visible to me from where I was standing. One hand, browned by the sun, resting in the gravel. Fine hairs, golden in the light. In seconds I could have grasped it, kissed it, felt the warmth of his flesh, those bones and knuckles more precious than a catch of pearls.
I almost did it. But I remembered.
‘Good morning,’ I said instead. Argentus loped to my side, taking the role of guard dog. Hearing Perseus spring to his feet, I shrank into the shadows.
‘Can I come in?’ he called back. No mention of my flying sisters.
‘Not today,’ I said.
How long could I keep him at bay like this? Since he’d arrived, I’d not been able to stop thinking about the moment Athena transformed my hair into snakes. The truth was, before he’d turned up I’d almost stopped considering them as anything strange, but now he was here, I had been made aware again of how my outside self appeared. I felt displaced from myself, as if my heart and soul had been moved off-centre.
I could tell my snakes didn’t much like this mood of mine. Some of them were twitchy, jerky, others were strangely catatonic. Absent-mindedly I combed them where they’d knotted through the toss and turn of bad dreams and thoughts, Artemis and Echo twined like lovers lost in sleep.
‘I just don’t understand why I can’t see you,’ Perseus said. ‘This is weird.’
‘Neither do I,’ I said to him, untwisting my serpents’ bodies. How many gnomic answers could I give him, before I had to confess?
There was a pause, so long I could taste Perseus’s disappointment inside it. ‘Did you not sleep well?’ he asked. ‘You sound weary, Merina.’
Perseus was the first person I’d ever met who seemed able to understand me without seeing me. ‘I’m … fine,’ I said. ‘Just a bad night’s sleep.’
‘I didn’t sleep very well either,’ he said. ‘I think this island’s haunted.’
‘Haunted? By what?’
‘I don’t know. A witch?’
We laughed: to talk of witches in such sunshine – what a joke. Yes, I wanted to tell him. This island is haunted, but by something far more powerful than a witch: my story, my exile, the reason I am here. It was I who echoed in these rocks and pathways, inside the roofs of these caves. It was my memories that acted as signposts to draw Perseus in my direction, but what might happen when he reached his final destination?
‘So,’ said Perseus. ‘How about we go down to the sea and look at the rock pools?’
‘That would be lovely, but—’
‘Or we could go for a swim? It’s such a lovely day.’