Anthousa returned that day, stiff with fury, with a cast of falcons, tossed at once into the sky and scattering the seabirds far and wide. The falcons began to dive upon them, then, knocking the poor, terrified creatures from the air, and hauling their bodies back to the handmaiden’s skiff. She crooned and praised them, offering choice bits of meat for every seabird dropped at her feet, and Aglaope had no choice but to watch it all, her voice going thin and reedy as she sang her song.
Akheloios, come to me...
“Sing, Siren,” Anthousa called out. “Sing for the birds you’ll never see again. It will be a long winter for you here upon this rock without their eggs and no ships at all to feed you.”
“Do you take such delight in the death of an old woman?” Aglaope called back. “One who had nothing to do with the loss of your lady’s ship, but suffers for it all the same.”
“Does she not sing?” the handmaiden said. “Has she not sat upon that spire in her turn? And worse, birthed the woman who gave life to you!”
“I’ll kill your falcons just as I did the last,” Aglaope shouted, her song forgotten now.
“And I will bring more again on the morrow, if you should! Perhaps they will take the eyes from your grandmother while you sing upon your spire.”
Aglaope hissed, fumbling for her sling and the small hoard of rocks she’d collected after her last success. But her arm was not so steady this time, her aim not as sharp, whatever gift the gods had given had been stolen away as if it had never been. Every stone she threw missed, each one more wildly than the last, and the falcons circled above her head, ready to dive at Anthousa’s sign.
But the woman only laughed, waving the falcons back to their true work. “My lady would not wish me to give you so easy a death as a fall,” she said. “And why should I risk her falcons on you when you’ll be too weak to fight them soon enough. When the day comes that you are too tired to even raise your arm, your body skin and bone, then I will let them feast upon your liver, upon your eyes and your innards.”
“I will throw myself into the sea before it comes to that,” she swore, tears of frustration burning behind her eyes.
“So you say, now,” Anthousa responded. “Only wait, Siren. Only wait.”
She whistled sharply to her falcons and the birds wheeled up, up, up. Aglaope held her breath, watching them dance and soar—and then dive. Not for the seabirds this time, for they flew straight through the flock without so much as clipping one. But down, down toward the thin line of smoke from the fire, where her grandmother lay, weak as a newborn chick just struggled from its egg.
“No!” Aglaope cried, hurrying down from the spire, desperate now. “Akheloios, save us! Save her!”
She slipped and slid, scraping her palms upon the rock, her nails breaking when she scrabbled for the handholds she had missed. When she finally reached the ground, she ran on trembling legs, racing for the fire, to her grandmother’s side.
The birds tore at Thelxiope, at her face and eyes and throat, blood upon sharp hooked beaks and breasts and talons. So many she could barely see her grandmother’s body between their half-spread wings and bobbing, flesh-tearing heads.
“No,” she said again, falling to her knees upon the furs, and scattering the falcons with her sudden arrival.
Too late to do any good.
Too late to stop them.
The tears came then, hot and burning down her cheeks as she took her grandmother’s thin and bloodied hand. She could not bear to look upon her face. To see the torn flaps of skin, the dark, leaking gashes where she’d once had eyes.
One last, labored breath, and Thelxiope was gone.
Aglaope did not climb back up the spire that day, and even though she did not sing, her voice was raw and broken by nightfall.
“You must stop this,” her mother said. “This weeping and wailing—it will leave you without a voice at all if you are not careful. Grieve as you must, but do not carry on. Thelxiope would not have wanted you to ruin yourself in such a manner. Not for her sake.”
They had wept together. Clinging and crying, at first. But Ligeia had torn herself away before long, swallowing her tears and her grief while she washed and prepared the corpse. Not for the pyre or the tomb, as they did upon the mainland or perhaps might have risked during a time of plenty even on their small sad island, but rather for the food and meat it might provide them through the long, looming winter.
“Will you help me?” Ligeia had asked, and Aglaope had done so—her tears mixing with the blood as they carved and cut flesh from bone, most to be hung and smoked in the cave, and some to be cooked for Thelxiope’s funeral feast. One thigh bone, and a share of the hard cartilage would be given up to the gods with desperate prayers for good, clean rains and the hope of an early spring with a multitude of ships.
But Aglaope felt sick.
“It is my fault,” she told her mother, the words hoarse. “It is my fault she has died this way, today.”
Ligeia sighed, not lifting her gaze from her careful work—they could ill afford to waste even a morsel of flesh with no other supplies to see them through the winter. “The fates alone choose our time, Aglaope. And if not even the gods can stop them, how could you?”
“I taunted her. Anthousa. I threw stones at her birds. It was not the fates who reached out to steal her breath, Mama. It was Circe’s falcons. Circe’s handmaid.”
“Then she has done us a favor, unwitting though she is,” Ligeia said, her tone sharpening. “Thelxiope will provide us with the strength we need, now, to see us through, and with one less body to feed we will survive that much longer.”
Aglaope’s eyes burned. “How can you be so callous? Speaking of her as if she were nothing but a burden before she is even cold!”
“Perhaps her body is not cold, but it is well-carved,” Ligeia said. “And Thelxiope would not want her life wasted with grief and sorrow. She knew the gift she could give us—would have cut her own throat had it come to that, if it meant you lived on. And all the more quickly if she thought it would bring your Akheloios!”
She shook her head, but the truth of Ligeia’s words would not be so easily disregarded. She felt them like barbs beneath her skin, worming toward her heart. Thelxiope would have sacrificed herself. And even if she had not said as much to Aglaope, she had certainly spoken of her own body as their nourishment after her death. That much she could never argue—for they all three had known what came next, should any of their bodies succumb to disease or injury. Corpses and carrion had fed them all well.