I remembered how gentle Glaucos’ words had sounded when he had first spoken to me. I had taken it for a sign.
“It is not common,” he said, “but sometimes lesser nymphs are born with human voices. Such a one are you.”
“Why did no one tell me? And how could it be? There is no mortal in me, I am Titan only.”
He shrugged. “Who can ever explain how divine bloodlines work? As for why no one said, I suspect they didn’t know. I spend more time with mortals than most gods and have grown accustomed to their sounds. To me it is only another flavor, like season in food. But if you are ever among men, you’ll notice it: they won’t fear you as they fear the rest of us.”
In a minute he had unraveled one of the great mysteries of my life. I raised my fingers to my throat as if I could touch the strangeness that lay there. A god with a mortal’s voice. It was a shock, and yet there was part of me that felt something almost like recognition.
“Play,” I said. I began to sing, and the lyre followed my voice effortlessly, its timbre rising to sweeten my every phrase. When I finished, the flames were down to their coals and the moon veiled. His eyes shone like dark gems held to light. They were black, one of the marks of deep-running power, from the line of the oldest gods. For the first time it struck me how strange it was that we divide Titans from Olympians, when of course Zeus was born from Titan parents, and Hermes’ own grandfather was the Titan Atlas. The same blood runs in all our veins.
“Do you know the name of this island?” I said.
“I would be a poor god of travelers if I did not know all the places in the world.”
“And will you tell me?”
“It is called Aiaia,” he said.
“Aiaia.” I tasted the sounds. They were soft, folding quietly as wings in the darkened air.
“You know it,” he said. He was watching me closely.
“Of course. It is the place where my father threw his strength to Zeus and proved his loyalty. In the sky above this place, he vanquished a Titan giant, drenching the land with blood.”
“It is quite a coincidence,” he said, “that your father would send you to this island among all the others.”
I could feel his power reaching for my secrets. In the old days I would have rushed forth with a brimming cup of answers, to give him all he wanted. But I was not the same as I had been. I owed him nothing. He would have of me only what I wanted to give.
I rose and stood before him. I could feel my own eyes, yellow as river-stones. “Tell me,” I said, “how do you know that your father is not right about my poisons? How do you know I will not drug you where you sit?”
“I do not.”
“Yet you would dare to stay?”
“I dare anything,” he said.
And that is how we came to be lovers.
Hermes returned often in the years that followed, winging through the dusk. He brought delicacies of the gods—wine stolen from Zeus’ own stores, the sweetest honey of Mount Hybla, where the bees drink only thyme and linden blossoms. Our conversations were pleasures, and our couplings were the same.
“Will you bear my child?” he asked me.
I laughed at him. “No, never and never.”
He was not hurt. He liked such sharpness, for there was nothing in him that had any blood you might spill. He asked only for curiosity’s sake, because it was his nature to seek out answers, to press others for their weaknesses. He wanted to see how moonish I was over him. But all the sop in me was gone. I did not lie dreaming of him during the days, I did not speak his name into my pillow. He was no husband, scarcely even a friend. He was a poison snake, and I was another, and on such terms we pleased ourselves.
He gave me the news that I had missed. In his travels he passed over every quarter of the world, picking up gossip as hems gather mud. He knew whose feasts Glaucos drank at. He knew how high the milk spurted in Colchis’ fountains. He told me that Aeëtes was well, arrayed in a cloak of dyed leopard skin. He had taken a mortal to wife, and had a babe in swaddling and another in the belly. Pasiphaë still ruled Crete with her potions, and had in the meantime whelped a ship’s crew for her husband, half a dozen heirs and daughters both. Perses kept to the East, raising the dead with pails of cream and blood. My mother had gotten over her tears and added Mother of Witches to her titles, swanning with it among my aunts. We laughed over all of it, and when he left, I knew he told stories of me in turn: my dirt-black fingernails, my musky lion, the pigs that had begun coming to my door, truffling for slops and a scratch on the back. And, of course, how I had thrown myself upon him as a blushing virgin. Well? I had not blushed, but all the rest was true enough.
I questioned him further, where Aiaia was, and how far it was from Egypt and Aethiopia and every other interesting place. I asked how my father’s mood waxed, and what the names of my nieces and nephews were, and what empires flourished new in the world. He answered everything, but when I asked him how far to those flowers I had given Glaucos and Scylla, he laughed at me. Do you think I will sharpen the lioness’s claws for her?
I made my voice as careless as I could. “And what of that old Titan Prometheus on his rock. How fares he?”
“How do you think? He loses a liver a day.”
“Still? I have never understood why helping mortals made Zeus so angry.”
“Tell me,” he said, “who gives better offerings, a miserable man or a happy one?”
“A happy one, of course.”
“Wrong,” he said. “A happy man is too occupied with his life. He thinks he is beholden to no one. But make him shiver, kill his wife, cripple his child, then you will hear from him. He will starve his family for a month to buy you a pure-white yearling calf. If he can afford it, he will buy you a hundred.”
“But surely,” I said, “you have to reward him eventually. Otherwise, he will stop offering.”
“Oh, you would be surprised how long he will go on. But yes, in the end, it’s best to give him something. Then he will be happy again. And you can start over.”
“So this is how Olympians spend their days. Thinking of ways to make men miserable.”
“There’s no cause for righteousness,” he said. “Your father is better at it than anyone. He would raze a whole village if he thought it would get him one more cow.”
How many times had I gloated inwardly over my father’s heaping altars? I lifted my cup and drank, so he would not see the flush on my cheeks.
“I suppose you might go and visit Prometheus,” I said. “You and your wings. Bring him something for comfort.”
“And why should I do that?”
“For novelty’s sake, of course. The first good deed in your dissolute life. Aren’t you curious what it would feel like?”
He laughed, but I did not press him further. He was still, always, an Olympian, still Zeus’ son. I was allowed license because it amused him, but I never knew when that amusement might end. You can teach a viper to eat from your hands, but you cannot take away how much it likes to bite.
Spring passed into summer. One night, when Hermes and I were lingering over our wine, I finally asked him about Scylla herself.
“Ah.” His eyes lit. “I wondered when we would come to her. What would you know?”
Is she unhappy? But he would have laughed at such a mewling question, and he would have been right to. My witchcraft, the island, my lion, all of them sprang from her transformation. There was no honesty in regretting what had given me my life.
“I never heard what happened to her after she dived into the sea. Do you know where she is?”
“Not far from here—less than a day’s journey by mortal ship. She has found a strait she likes. On one side is a whirlpool that sucks down ships and fish and whatever else passes. On the other, a cliff face with a cave for her to hide her head. Any ship which would avoid the whirlpool is driven right into her jaws, and so she feeds.”