It had let go its hold.
“We must leave,” I said. “Now. There will be more.” Before the words were out, the dragging sound had begun again.
Telemachus cried out a warning. The leg smashed so close to our stern it sucked the rail half beneath the waves. I was knocked to my knees, and Telemachus thrown from his seat. He managed to cling to the oars, and with effort wrested them back to their places. The waters around us seethed with wash, the boat pitched up and down. In the air over our heads, Scylla cried and thrashed. The weight of the fallen legs had pulled her further down the cliff. The heads were within range now, but she paid no attention to us. She was biting at the limp flesh of her legs, savaging it. I hesitated a moment, then wedged the spear-haft against our supplies so it would not roll in the chaos. I seized one of Telemachus’ oars. “Go.”
We bent ourselves to rowing. The dragging sound came again and another leg fell, its great surge soaking the deck, slewing the prow towards Charybdis. I caught a glimpse of its whirling chaos that ate ships whole. Telemachus grappled at the rudder, trying to turn us. “A rope,” he shouted.
I scrabbled one out from our stores. He looped it around the rudder, yanking at it, fighting to point us back out of the straits. Scylla’s body swayed two mast-lengths above us. The legs were still falling, and each impact pulled the dangling trunk further down.
Ten, I counted. Eleven. “We have to go!”
Telemachus had righted the prow. He tied off the rudder, and we scrambled back to the oars. Beneath the cliff the boat tossed back and forth in the chopped waters like a fallen leaf. The waves around us were stained yellow. Her remaining leg stretched back up the cliff face. It was all that held her, pulled grotesquely taut.
She let go. Her massive body struck the water. The wave ripped the oars from our hands, and my head was buffeted by cold salt. I caught a glimpse of our stores washing into the sea, and vanishing with them into the white, Trygon’s spear. I felt the loss like a blow to my chest but there was no time to think of it. I seized Telemachus’ arm, expecting any moment the deck to crack beneath us. But the stout planks held, and the rope on the rudder too. The wash of that last great wave shoved us forward, out of the straits.
The sound of Charybdis had faded, and the sea lay open around us. I got to my feet and looked back. At the base of the cliff, where Scylla had been, was a hulking shoal. The outline of six snaky necks was still visible upon it, but they did not move. They would never move again. She had turned to stone.
It was a long way to land. My arms and back ached as if they had been whipped, and Telemachus must have been worse, yet our sail was miraculously intact and it bore us on. The sun seemed to drop into the sea like a falling plate, and night rose over the water. I sighted land through the star-pricked black, and we dragged the boat onto its beach. We had lost all our fresh water stores, and Telemachus was dull-eyed, nearly speechless. I went to find a river and carried back a brimming bowl I’d transformed from a rock. He drained it, and afterwards he lay still so long I began to be afraid, but at last he cleared his throat and asked what food there was. I had gathered a few berries by then, and caught a fish which was spitted over the fire. “I am sorry I put you in such danger,” I said. “If you had not been there, we would have been smashed to pieces.”
He nodded wearily as he chewed. His face was still drawn and pale. “I confess I am glad we will not have to do it again.” He leaned back upon the sand, and his eyes drooped closed.
He was safe, for our camp was backed into the corner of a cliff, so I left him to walk the shore. I thought we were on an island, but I could not tell for certain. There was no smoke rising above the trees, and when I listened, I heard nothing but night birds and brush and the hiss of the waves. There were flowers and forests growing thickly inland, but I did not go look. I was seeing before me again that rocky mass that had been Scylla. She was gone, truly gone. For the first time in centuries, I was not lashed to that flood of misery and grief. No more souls would walk to the underworld written with my name.
I faced the sea. It felt strange to have nothing in my hands, no spear-haft to carry. I could feel the air moving across my palms, salt mingling with the green scent of spring. I imagined the gray length of the tail, sinking through the darkness to find its master. Trygon, I said, your tail comes home to you. I kept it too long, but I made good use of it at last.
The soft waves washed across the sand.
The darkness felt clean against my skin. I walked through the cool air as if it were a pool I bathed in. We had lost everything but the pouch of tools he had worn at his waist, and my spell bag, which had been tied to me. We would have to make oars, I thought, and lay in new stores of food. But those thoughts were for tomorrow.
I passed a pear tree drifted with white blossoms. A fish splashed in the moonlit river. With every step I felt lighter. An emotion was swelling in my throat. It took me a moment to recognize what it was. I had been old and stern for so long, carved with regrets and years like a monolith. But that was only a shape I had been poured into. I did not have to keep it.
Telemachus slept on. His hands were clasped like a child’s under his chin. They had been bloodied at the oars, and I had salved them, their warm weight resting in my lap. His fingers had been more calloused than I imagined, but his palms were smooth. So often on Aiaia, I had wondered how it would feel to touch him.
His eyes opened as if I had spoken the words aloud. They were clear as they always were.
I said, “Scylla was not born a monster. I made her.”
His face was in the fire’s shadows. “How did it happen?”
There was a piece of me that shouted its alarm: if you speak he will turn gray and hate you. But I pushed past it. If he turned gray, then he did. I would not go on anymore weaving my cloths by day and unraveling them again at night, making nothing. I told him the whole tale of it, each jealousy and folly and all the lives that had been lost because of me.
“Her name,” he said. “Scylla. It means the Render. Perhaps it was always her destiny to be a monster, and you were only the instrument.”
“Do you use the same excuse for the maids you hanged?”
It was as if I had struck him. “I make no excuse for that. I will wear that shame all my life. I cannot undo it, but I will spend my days wishing I could.”
“It is how you know you are different from your father,” I said.
“Yes.” His voice was sharp.
“It is the same for me,” I said. “Do not try to take my regret from me.”
He was quiet a long time. “You are wise,” he said.
“If it is so,” I said, “it is only because I have been fool enough for a hundred lifetimes.”
“Yet at least what you loved, you fought for.”
“That is not always a blessing. I must tell you, all my past is like today, monsters and horrors no one wants to hear.”
He held my gaze. Something about him then reminded me strangely of Trygon. An unearthly, quiet patience.
“I want to hear,” he said.
I had kept away from him for so many reasons: his mother and my son, his father and Athena. Because I was a god, and he a man. But it struck me then that at the root of all those reasons was a sort of fear. And I have never been a coward.
I reached across that breathing air between us and found him.