Of Sea and Stone and Sovereignty

SARPEDON, NOW

They will say she made me a monster out of vengeance.

But there were four witnesses: one of them me, and the other three divine. Divinity does not deign to relay their triumphs or misdeeds. Their stories are distorted from the start, fantasied from the slanted perceptions of historians, poets, and bards.

Those educated men will apply their vast intelligence to cast roles for the jealous, pitiless Goddess, the irreproachable God, and the redeeming hero who has come to outwit me. They will squint out over the ocean, inspired by the ghostly form of Sarpedon shifting behind the morning mist, and muddy blank pages with their speculative pens.

But they did not taste the honeyed kiss of those sun-soaked figs; his fruits were private love notes to my tongue. Poseidon did not tangle them in his seagrass or drown them in his salt. They could never know that Athena's curse was a mercy, because they have never needed a balm for such wounds.

As for their records of me, they will be sparse—every chronicle will preeminently and singularly state that I was once beautiful, and became ugly.

And it may be their only accuracy, the astute keepers of records that they are. I have a living, hissing nest where there once were silken curls. Sharp talons protrude from hands that are knotted well past my years. My skin, once pillowy golden like pelanos dough, is rough and gray and thin over my bones. My body reads like the clawed and barren Junipers twisting up from the grounds of this ever-growing statuary.

I wonder, will these failed heroes who met my halting gaze crumble to ash after I am gone? Or will their stone faces crack like tiny earthquakes to reveal blood-kissed skin beneath, their limbs animating at last, all at once loosed from my horrid spell?

Will they stay this way—just like this—eternal decorations for my grave?

This question has circled my mind since the owl's last visit. What I am thinking about now, standing on the beach of my banishment, watching specs of ships appear on the horizon, is that the answer is and always will be impossible for me to know.

I pick up a silver mirror from the sand. I move closer to the shore, let the waves kiss my feet, and find peace in standing above the ocean. As the fleet gets closer, I retreat to my leafless garden and wait there, alone, for my lover.

DELPHI, THEN

The first time I brought Perseus to my bed was a sacred rite.

As a priestess at the Temple of Athena Pronaia, it was my service at Delphi. I was an open doorway to divinity, with flecks of gold on my tongue and fire in the seat of my belly; a blessed channel of union for mortal men to feel Godly, and for Gods to feel vulnerable.

But for the son of Zeus, our devotion did not ebb with the worship's close. Nor did it recede when his caravan was called back to sea. Our longing flowed like stars pouring out of the falling sky, and for forty days it triumphed over the obligations of wretched forces more powerful than he or I.

He used to come to her temple and lay with me in the mask of the night. In the morning, he would leave behind offerings at my door. Bowls of peaches and pears and figs to soak my mouth, garlands of iris and dianthus to crown my head, and once, a perfect reed flute with a poem that likened the rhythm of my breath to a song.

Ours was no punishable offense in the eyes of civility. My sisters and I were permitted the luxury of a private life, of literacy, of lovers. Relative freedom was an elusive perk of our station.

But Perseus was forfeiting on a debt that was owed. He had pledged his duty to a spiteful God, and then abandoned it to lay in my arms. It was Poseidon, not Athena, who made me the object of his vengeance.

The last night I ever saw Perseus, I lay prostrate and sanguine in my sheets, awaiting his arrival. But a foreign visitor came to me first. I did not see him; I did not hear him enter. Although the door to my chamber was unopened, I was suddenly immersed in darkness. His name roared itself inside of me, choking out the melody of my breath and pulling me into an invisible undertow. Vicious tidal waves doused my sacral flame, the rotten stench of sulfur invaded my sinuses, his acrid salt desiccated my burning tongue.

I was drowning in the rolling seas, an entire ocean forcing itself to fit inside of my unrelenting frame. I do not recall the passing of time, with no sense of how long my limbs were restricted by some invisible, itching cord, or whether it was moments or hours before I washed ashore, soaked and cold to the bone.

When Perseus discovered me, he splashed through the darkness in horror, reaching out to hold me...

But his hands felt like sandpaper against my skin. I was stripped bare by his gaze. Even in his tenderness, I only wished I could retreat from his witness and never be seen again.

I was inaccessible to him, already an island away, violated and robbed of the agency that had been my most precious gift.

I only know that I begged for him to leave me, and that, however much sorrow he must have felt, he left.

I laid there alone in hollow darkness, in a bed that no longer felt like my own, until I heard the cutting swoop of wings slicing through the stale air. Wind whistled like magic between four walls, and my Goddess was with me.

She never visited me like this before or since. Not corporeally, not with manifest intent. But she had visited all of us at the temple in her own subtle ways—as the breeze rustling through the olive groves of Amfissa, the owl plucking the scavengers out of our temple gardens, the snake sunning itself on the rocks of the gorge. It was she we channeled at night in our beds, her power that led rituals to guide armies towards justice, her sacred words that spelled a pathway to freedom.

I was her devotee, and as she filled my chamber with a shadowless glow, I lay in her lap and wept.

She received me, stroking my hair and my face, her fingers once feeling cool like smooth river stones, then soft like tickling feathers, then warm and cleansing like a bubbling spring. My grief yawned through the silence, and she shared in it with me.

After some time, my heart iced with new awareness.

"I can no longer serve you," I whispered into her lap, but the emptiness inside of me was screaming. Whatever conduit I had been, I no longer was.

"My child, your fearsome strength shall serve me in battles that have not yet come to pass. Hush now. You will reclaim what you have lost," she told me, with sonorous sympathy. "But I am afraid the only way out is through. I will give you back your agency. However unjust, the rest of the work is yours to do."

SARPEDON, THEN

The island of Sarpedon was small enough that when it was still, I could hear whispers of the waves from its center.

The warm air smelled of sulfur and salt, and when it stormed, its shores became littered with blankets of seagrass.

I cannot say how many times I cast my head to the sky and wailed in rage at the inescapable memory of my violation. There were countless nights that I lay awake manifesting armies to flood those noisy shores in the hundreds, just so I could cast each one of them down and feel the redeeming grace of so many unrealized predators.

But the men who came for my life were regrettably few. Most days, my only visitor was a barn owl which sometimes took roost in a hollow of the island's largest Juniper tree. I would watch her for hours, perched atop the branches, and she would watch me back in recognition, impervious to the weapon of my stare.

I spoke to her often, sometimes in a fury, sometimes imploringly, often in sardonic languor.

"Athena, what redemption is this?"

"Athena, why have you put me here?"

"Athena, in your infinite wisdom, how is it that the serpents on my head do not need to feast on meals of their own with their tiny, toothy mouths?"

"O', Athena, do you suppose we should count the grains of sand on the West beach, today?"

"Athena, how does one silence the sound of the sea?"

"Athena, I cannot bear this any longer."

"Athena, release me."

The owl only ever replied with a fixed stare. Her glassy, black, unblinking eyes became a riddle that I yearned to decipher. I inferred that the island was her temple; I was her singular, savage priestess.

Any offering I made to her, however, she would not take. I placed seashells and twig-woven effigies at the foot of her tree. I tried to feed her roasted rabbit and earthy tubers, but she never ate from my hand or my plate.

It gradually became clear to me that she did not want to be the target of my devotion. And once, when the owl scooped up one of my crude effigies and dropped it at the foot of my bed, I reached an irrefutable conclusion that Athena was goading me: the only target of my devotion... should be me.

The owl left after that, for a long while.

One of my failed murderers—a cleverer one, to his credit—brought a silver mirror so that he might find me in its reflection. In a way, I used it to find myself, instead. I had never seen my new face before then. I was first shocked, then repulsed, and later relieved to find that my eyes were the only feature that was unchanged. I expected them to be golden or black, beady little slits. Not the familiar hazel orbs that once hosted a very different complexion.

Perhaps my essence, whatever that was, remained intact. "You will reclaim what you have lost," she had said.

I watched myself in that mirror often, and witnessed my eyes unbuckling under their own gaze.

I recognized that there was a new power inside of me; where once there was a vast and holy channel, there was a barred door, only alike in the sovereignty they gave me. When I wished to be open, I was blissfully open. When I willed myself untouchable, no one could reach me. My Goddess understood, in her wisdom and her cunning and her infinite shrewdness, that only my sovereignty could save me.

The night before the owl returned, there was a violent storm that shook the sea and flooded my bed with rainwater. I laid there shivering until dawn and rose with the sun, caked in mud and dirt.

Although I had not slept, I felt as though I had been roused from a dream. My senses were alert in a way that I hadn't felt since the night of his crime. The irony of my curse turning men to stone was that in this form, I often felt like stone, myself. Today was different. The rain, it seemed, had rinsed away my stiff and frozen parts. It felt as though a dam had finally broken against one final torrent of grief.

The storm had passed and the early day was already warm. Mist rose from the wet ground in the hazy, purple light of morning. I sprinted through it, weaving between the claw-like Junipers and the statues of stilled warriors, my sure feet finding purchase in each muddy step, until the mud turned to sand, until the sand turned to sea, until the sea rose to embrace me. And I, it.

I scrubbed my skin clean with saltwater. I took the water in my mouth and spit it out again. I grabbed fistfuls of seagrass that had been swept in from the storm's currents. I ripped some of them to pieces. I wore some of them around my neck and my wrists like jewelry. I stood on the shore and laughed at the retreating tide.

When I returned to my dwelling, the barn owl was there.

From the white moon of her face, beneath the harsh V of her beak, I thought she might be smiling. The Goddess of war admiring a battle finally won.

We shared a meal together for the first time that afternoon. As the sun was setting, I felt something stirring inside of me that I thought I might never know again.

"Athena, would you bring Perseus to me?"

SARPEDON, NOW

Perseus arrives with the wind at my back. In my mirror, I watch him emerge from the thicket of branches that guards my home from the shore.

His touch on my shoulder is gentle and warm.

We greet each other in our reflections. His is soft, and sad, and hopeful. Mine is an open door. As I stare into the eyes of the man I once loved, who I miraculously love still, I no longer care what becomes of Sarpedon or the relics of misled heroes who journeyed here to slay me.

"I'm ready."

With our gaze held in the mirror, Perseus raises his sword, and I find myself free.