He hung his head. A tear, pearlescent in the moonlight, fell from his lashes. “I know it.”
To see him brought low before me, penitent and small, filled me with a wild rush of strength. I wanted to make him suffer, as he had made me suffer. “Tell me what you did,” I demanded. I would not allow him to hide from his wrongs. “Name your crime. I will hear it from your own lips.”
Odysseus swallowed hard. For a moment, I thought he would not speak, but then the words came, trembling and faint. Regretful. “I…I forced you to lay with me.”
“Not only once, but many times.” More times than I could count.
“Yes,” he said.
Relief shook me—relief that he did not deny it, that he knew how he had erred. For a moment, I trembled with the force of it. Then I said simply, “Why?”
Odysseus choked on a ragged sob. “Circe—Lady. I have asked myself that same question, a thousand times over.”
“And how did you answer, Odysseus?”
He shook his head, muted momentarily by the force of his grief. “War…war. It is the only answer I can think to give you—or to give myself. War changes a man—warps him.”
My brows lifted in surprise. “When were you at war?” We were isolated here on Aeaea, but surely my friends and I would have heard news of war from the men who came to trade.
“We left Troy almost two years ago,” Odysseus said, quieting in the grip of his misery. “But before that, it was ten years.”
“Ten years since the previous war, you mean.”
He shook his head slowly. He stared far beyond me, into the depths of the forest. “We held Troy under siege for a decade.” He sighed. “Agamemnon, his pride and folly—gods, what a folly it all was. I can see that now…I can see it now.”
I waited for him to speak on.
“Men are made for fighting, for killing—aren’t we? I always believed it was so. I never thought warfare could do to me what it does to weaker men.”
“What does it do to weaker men?”
“It breaks them,” Odysseus said simply.
I considered him, huddled on the strand, weeping like a child despite his strength and arrogance. “I don’t believe war breaks weak men—or, not only weak men.”
“It shatters us all. That’s what I’ve learned—all of us, meek and powerful alike. And when we try to put the pieces back together, we are remade. We are something new—strangers inhabiting familiar bodies.” He drew a deep but ragged breath. “Ten years of fighting, of killing…it turned me into the kind of man I never thought I could be. Every day, it seems I encounter a new version of myself—stumble across these apparitions, these creatures who look like Odysseus, but are not Odysseus. They spring up where I least expect to find them. And each one is more horrible than the last. The man I once was is gone forever. Odysseus is dead. He will never come back to life.”
Again, I waited. He had more to say—I could sense it—but he did not know how to marshal his words, how to explain the horror of the anthroparion—the specter that wore his face, lived in his body, yet was not Odysseus, could never be.
“I would never have forced a woman. Never,” he insisted with sudden force. He held my gaze, for the first time that night, and I could see that he believed what he said. “The real me, the true Odysseus. I never could have done it. I love women, of course; I lie with them as often as I can. I always have. But the greatest pleasure a man can have is in a woman’s ecstasy. There is no pleasure to be had in forcing.”
“Or in using,” I said, unable to keep the venom from my tongue. “In assumption, in possession. In repeated and unwelcome abuse.”
“That’s so,” he said softly, lowering his eyes to the gravel again.
A strained silence fell between us, relieved only by the hissing of waves across the beach. I struggled, grasping for more to say, but no fitting words came to me. I held my tongue.
“I have a wife, you know,” Odysseus said suddenly.
I folded my arms, resisting the urge to say, How proud she would be, if she knew how you’ve treated me.
“Her name is Penelope.” That name alone was enough to soften Odysseus’s expression. All the hard lines of self-loathing fell away; for a moment, he seemed to fold himself in the welcome embrace of fond memories. “She is the most beautiful, the warmest, the most loyal woman the gods ever made. I never deserved her goodness or her sweet nature, even back when I was myself—before the war.”
Before. At last, I understood all those cryptic stories Odysseus had told while he slipped into sleep beside my rigid, aching body.
“Does she still live,” I asked, “your Penelope?”
“I believe she does, back in Ithaca—a worthy queen ruling in my place, for the gods know I am not fit to hold the throne. If she has perished, I haven’t heard the news. May the gods grant I never hear such a thing.”
Queen or no, I wouldn’t have traded places with Penelope for every last speck of gold in the world. But perhaps Odysseus was right. Perhaps he was a different man now, changed utterly from the man he’d been before. Wasn’t it possible that Penelope had known a different Odysseus? Perhaps she had even loved him—had found him worthy of love.
“Why do you not return to Penelope?” I said. “Now that your war is over, what keeps you from Ithaca, and the woman you love?”
“I’m afraid,” Odysseus said simply.
I said, “You fear you will bring back this man—the one you have become.”
“Yes.” A pause. “I cannot go back to her, Circe. Not like this.”
“And yet, you cannot stay here.”
Odysseus stood. He reached out to me, his hands trembling and pleading. “If I swear never to touch you again without your leave—”
I stepped back, out of his reach. “Look at me. Look at my body, Odysseus. See how large I am. I will birth this child very soon. Do you really want to see it? Do you want to be here when this baby is born? Would you look into the face of a child you made by force?” I laughed bitterly. “Do you truly want to raise this child? Every time he calls you Father, it will be an accusation, a dagger in your heart. And every moment you spend in my presence, you will know my agony—for it is I who cannot escape my curse, Odysseus, not you. I must care for the unwanted thing, and hold it to my breast as if I were glad of it.”
A cry strangled in his throat. Odysseus covered his face with his hands, tears flowing freely. I let him weep uncomforted. He deserved no comfort; he deserved to feel every slash and stab of that pain.