“I heard,” Hermes said, “that she had an unnatural love for the creature. She would go often to its cage and speak softly to it through the bars, and offer delicacies from her own table. Once, she got too close, and its teeth caught her shoulder. She escaped and Daedalus sewed up the wound, but it left a scar at the base of her neck, in the shape of a crown.”
I remembered her face as she said, my brother. “Was she punished? For helping Theseus?”
“No. She fled with him after the creature was dead. Theseus would have married her, but my brother decided he wanted her for himself. You know how he loves the ones with light feet. He told Theseus to leave her on an island, and he would come to claim her.”
I knew which brother he meant. Dionysus, lord of ivy and the grape. Riotous son of Zeus, whom mortals call Releaser, for he frees them from their cares. At least, I thought, with Dionysus she would dance every night.
Hermes shook his head. “He came too late. She had fallen asleep, and Artemis killed her.”
He spoke so casually that for a moment I thought I’d misheard. “What? She is dead?”
“I led her to the underworld myself.”
That lithe and hopeful girl. “For what reason?”
“I couldn’t get a straight answer out of Artemis. You know how ill-tempered she is. Some incomprehensible slight.” He shrugged.
My witchcraft was no match against an Olympian, I knew it. But in that moment, I wanted to try. To summon up all my charms, to throw my will upon the spirits of the earth, the beasts, the birds, and set them after Artemis, until she knew what it was to be truly hunted.
“Come,” Hermes said. “If you cry every time some mortal dies, you’ll drown in a month.”
“Get out,” I said.
Icarus, Daedalus, Ariadne. All gone to those dark fields, where hands worked nothing but air, where feet no more touched the earth. If I had been there, I thought. But what would it have changed? It was true what Hermes said. Every moment mortals died, by shipwreck and sword, by wild beasts and wild men, by illness, neglect, and age. It was their fate, as Prometheus had told me, the story that they all shared. No matter how vivid they were in life, no matter how brilliant, no matter the wonders they made, they came to dust and smoke. Meanwhile every petty and useless god would go on sucking down the bright air until the stars went dark.
Hermes came back, as always. I let him. When he glittered in my hall, my shores did not feel so narrow, the knowledge of my exile did not weigh so heavy. “Tell me the news,” I said. “Tell me of Crete. How did Pasiphaë take the Minotaur’s death?”
“She went mad, is the rumor. She wears nothing but black now in mourning.”
“Don’t be a fool. She is only mad if it suits her,” I said.
“She is said to have cursed Theseus, and he is plagued and plagued since then. Did you hear how his father died?”
I did not care about Theseus, I wanted to hear of my sister. Hermes must have been laughing as he fed me tale after tale. How she had forbidden Minos from her bed, and her only joy was her youngest daughter, Phaedra. How she was haunting the slopes of Mount Dicte, digging up the whole mountain searching out new poisons. I hoarded every tidbit like a dragon guards its treasure. I was looking for something, I realized, though I could not say what.
Like all good storytellers, Hermes knew to save the best for last. One evening, he told me of a trick Pasiphaë had played upon Minos in the early days of their marriage. Minos used to order any girl he liked to his bedchamber in front of her face. So she cursed him with a spell that turned his seed to snakes and scorpions. Whenever he lay with a woman, they stung her to death from the inside.
I remembered the fight I had heard between them. A hundred girls, Pasiphaë had said. They would have been serving maidens, slaves, merchants’ daughters, anyone whose fathers would not dare raise a fuss against the king. All extinguished for nothing but petty pleasure and revenge.
I sent Hermes from me, and closed my shutters as I never did. Anyone would have thought I was casting a great spell, but I reached for no herbs. I felt a weightless joy. The story was so ugly, so outlandish and disgusting, that it felt like a fever breaking. If I was trapped on this island, at least I did not have to share the world with her and all her kind. Pacing by my lion, I said, “It is done. I will think of them no more. I cast them out and I am finished.”
The cat pressed her cheek upon her folded paws and kept her eyes upon the floor. So perhaps she knew what I did not.
Chapter Thirteen
IT WAS SPRING AND I was down on the eastern slope, picking early strawberries. The sea-winds blew strongly there, and the sweetness of the fruits was always tinged with salt. The pigs began squealing, and I looked up. A ship was making its way towards us through the slanting afternoon light. There was a headwind against it, yet it did not slow or tack. The oarsmen drove it straight as a well-sent arrow.
My stomach turned over. Hermes had given me no warning, and I could not think what that might mean. The vessel was Mycenaean in style, and bore a figurehead so massive it must have altered the draught of the ship. A pair of black-rimmed eyes smoked on its hull. I caught a strange, faint odor on the wind. I hesitated a moment, then wiped my hands and walked down to the beach.
The ship was close to shore by then, its prow casting a shadow like a needle over the waves. I counted some three dozen men aboard. Later, of course, there would be a thousand who claimed they were there, or who invented genealogies to trace their blood back. The greatest heroes of their generation, that crew was called. Bold and unshakable, masters of a hundred wild adventures. Certainly, they looked the part: princely and tall, big-shouldered, with rich cloaks and thick hair, raised up on the best their kingdoms had to offer. They wore weapons the way most men wear their clothes. No doubt they’d been wrestling boars and slaying giants from their cradles.
Yet their faces at the rail were pinched and tense. That smell was stronger now, and there was a heaviness in the air, a dragging weight that seemed to hang from the mast itself. They saw me, yet they made no sound and gave no signs of greeting.
The anchor dropped with a splash and the plank followed. Above, gulls circled, crying. Two descended, arms touching, heads bowed. A man, broad and muscular, his dark hair lifting in the late breeze. And—it surprised me—a woman, tall and wrapped in black, a long veil flowing down behind her. The pair moved towards me gracefully and without hesitation, as if they were expected guests. They knelt at my feet and the woman held her hands up, long-fingered and bare of any adornment. Her veil was arranged so that not one strand of hair showed beneath it. Her chin stayed resolutely down, concealing her face.
“Goddess,” she said, “Witch of Aiaia. We come to you for aid.” Her voice was low but clear, with a musicality to it, as if it were used to singing. “We have fled great evil, and to escape it we have done great evil. We are tainted.”
I could feel it. That unwholesome air had thickened, coating everything with an oily heaviness. Miasma, it was called. Pollution. It rose from unpurified crimes, from deeds done against the gods, and from the unsanctified spilling of blood. It had touched me after the Minotaur’s birth, until Dicte’s waters washed me clean. But this was stronger: a foul, seeping contagion.
“Will you help us?” she said.
“Help us, great goddess, we are at your mercy,” the man echoed.
It was not magic they asked for, but the oldest rite of our kind. Katharsis. The cleansing by smoke and prayer, water and blood. It was forbidden for me to question them, to demand their transgressions, if transgressions they were. My part was only yes or no.