Sirens and Other Daemon Lovers: Magical Tales of Love and Seduction

No Human Hands to Touch Elizabeth E. Wein

WHEN MEDRAUT STEPPED OFF the merchants’ ship I had not seen him since Artos, his father the high king, had taken him from me at ten. I knew him now by his hair and eyes; but he was an exotic in this wintry archipelago of islets where my brother the high king has banished me. His dress was foreign, his face and hands burnt to copper in the African sun and on the sea, and his hair was so sun-bleached that it was as blindingly and unnaturally fair as it had been in his babyhood. He had been a slender and shapeless child; now, at five-and-twenty, he was taller than my husband. It seemed to me that he must have trained his body to match his will, until they had become alike in their iron surety.

He kissed me formally when he greeted me, and held my hands in his own.

“My child.” I welcomed him. “You have changed a great deal since I sent you off.”

“Godmother,” he answered warmly, “but you are exactly the same, and all as beautiful as I remember.”

Since I had seen him I had borne two more children, five in all, not counting those not carried to term. My husband, King Lot of the Orcades, flung words like hag and crone in my face when he wanted to hurt me. Yet I had never known Medraut to say a doing he did not believe to be true.

He sat by me as we feasted him on his first night back in the home of his childhood. He shared a plate with me. His left hand rested quiet and still upon his thigh, while he broke his bread and handled his meat only with the right. He did it deftly, and without making a show of it; I only noticed because I was fascinated by the curious beauty of his long, dark hands. My own hands had grown thin and wiry over the years of birthing and cutting and healing and killing; they were now lean and taut as a man’s. Medraut’s hands were like replicas of my own, but larger, stronger.

“Have you hurt your hand?” I asked, and touched his left very lightly. “You do not use it.”

“It is only habit. It is very rude to eat with your left hand in Aksum.”

I clasped his fine fingers beneath mine. He tolerated this patiently, but did not return the endearment. His first ten years had taught him to beware my attention.

“How long were you ambassador there?” I asked.

His look turned suspect a moment. It was exactly the expression he had worn at seven, apprehensive that he was about to endure another humiliating catechism: Why do I have you beaten in place of my husband’s sons, Medraut? Why do I place the fault at your feet when you did no wrong? Why is it meet that the high king’s bastard should wait on King Lot’s children?

Now I laughed at his look, very gently. He joined me, laughing at himself, suddenly at ease; or attempting to be. His hand lay still beneath mine.

“I was in Aksum a little longer than three years,” he said. “Which of these young men are my cousins?”

He called them cousins, not brothers or half-brothers, for it is a secret that I am his mother. He had been taken from me when he was born and then, after an occult series of maskings to hide the truth of his birth, given back to me a little later to “foster” for his father the high king. It would have been profanity to allow the people to know that the high king’s only child was born of incest. Medraut had never heard the truth from me.

“I think I can guess Gareth and Agravain,” Medraut continued, “but I don’t recognize Gwalchmei at all. Agravain’s hair is so like yours.”

“And Gareth’s like yours,” I said.

He shot me a swift, startled frown. So: He knew what I meant. How could he not, with my eyes and my hands and my cool, collected glance? But Artos must have told him.

“Gwalchmei has more of his father’s look than mine,” I added calmly, as though nothing had passed between us in that moment of subtle testing and recognition. “There he is, at the opposite end of the other long table. And Gaheris is on his right. Gaheris is devoted to him.”

“Artos wants to offer them all places in his court,” Medraut said.

Perhaps he meant it only as a polite and honorable invitation. It was sheerly threatening. Well, I thought, so he declares his loyalty.

“And you,” I said gently. “Have you a place there?”

“Always,” he said warmly, reverent and unguarded.

I felt the same surge of jealousy and hatred that I had known when he was a child. It made me want to strike him, as it always had. What a spirit he had had then, how he had endured my dominion over him in silent stoicism, how he had clung pridefully, quietly, to the knowledge of who his father was, and to the hope that Artos would rescue him from the northern hell that was his childhood. And here he was back within my grasp, his loyalty confirmed, himself no longer a child.

“Neither Gaheris nor Gareth was born when I left,” said Medraut lightly. “I have been away longer than it seems.”

I had striven so to create him, this living weapon against my brother. I remembered the seduction and the labor, the intrigue and the exile, and felt myself haggard with age and strain. I thought I had lost him.

“Medraut,” I said, “stay with me a while before you return to your father in Camlan.”

His idle hand turned suddenly over. The long, beautiful fingers folded around mine in apology. He could have crushed my hand.

“I can’t stay here.”

The seven-year-old I had fought with and beaten and solaced regarded me through the poised and guarded gaze of the young man. He looked down at our thin hands entwined and smiled ruefully. “I only came because I did not think I would have another chance to see you. But I am bound for Camlan. I have been doing too much. There’s nothing for me here. I need to act. I need to learn.”

He had been important in Aksum. He had been feared and loved and admired as an administrator, and for his skill as a warrior and a hunter. He had taken great cats of strange and wild strains on the African plains, and brought me gifts of lion and leopard skin.

“You could learn much from me,” I said.

He looked up. It was like staring at my own gray eyes in a glass to look into his calm and shuttered gaze. “How much do you mean that, I wonder,” he said. He had never been anyone’s fool. “You have always kept your knowledge jealously concealed.”

“I have only ever wanted one apprentice,” I said. “I have been waiting.”

“Waiting for me?” He laughed. “You never told me so. Do you mean to say that in thirty years you have taught no one else any of your physician’s skill?”

“And lose my reputation as a sorceress?” I said playfully. “I am revered for it.”

“And abhorred, some would say.”

“You are as bold with me as you ever were.”

He was silent a moment. “I did not mean to be rude. But I feel as though I am being tempted not for my good will, but to your own purpose, Odysseus ensnared by Circe.”

I laughed lightly. “The traveler and the witch.”

“You suckled me on Greek legend,” he made excuse. “And the old stories have been much on my mind in my journeys, seeing the famous places for myself.”

“I did not suckle you,” I corrected gently. “But I am glad you remember the stories. You do not really fear me, do you?”

“Of course not,” he answered swiftly

“Then stay here,” I said. “Prove to me your courage. I have much to teach you.”

I felt like one who wants to trap and cage a little bird, and after years of waiting and luring and baiting finds that she must do no more than hold out her hand, and the finch lands on her finger and does not fly. You scarcely dare to move. It rests on your hand whole and free, foolishly trusting and infinitely courageous. It will never be more beautiful.

“I’ll do it,” he said.

My pig of a husband had long since ceased to share a bed with me. I think by now he must have guessed that the only thing that stopped me lacing his ale with aconite was my brother’s threat to have me executed for regicide if he heard rumor that Lot had died unnaturally and in my presence. “Well, you’ve a new toy now,” Lot said to me at the end of the evening. “Perhaps this season you won’t find it necessary to drug all the townsfolk at the Lammas festival.”

“You are idle as I am.”

“Take a lover,” my husband said.

“None of your fawning retainers is to my taste. Let you rut like a wild boar, without choosing, the nearest thing on heat. I can better satisfy myself.”

“Then do so,” Lot said cruelly. “Wait much longer to choose a man and none will have you. Go to bed, old woman.”

Easy, easy, easy to twist the knife.

That night I stood still and aching in the antechamber of my empty apartment and thought of my dearest bid for power: of my brother the young king, over twenty-five years ago, and how barren a life he had then condemned me to. It was an old and stale ache. So I had a new toy, as Lot said, something to amuse me during the short days; but the northern nights would ever be as long. Years ago, on such a night, I would have had a handmaid sleep with me, for warmth and for the semblance of companionship. But now I hated my ladies-in-waiting for their careless youth and petty beauty, and for knowing they would rather have my husband’s favor than my own.

I let fall my mantle and stood before the dressing table. Silvered glass and polished bronze mirrors in many lengths held my frame and face for my inspection, and I reflected bitterly: I am still beautiful. The lines of my belly have changed, my face is thinner. But my skin is smooth, my breasts are full, my eyes are a clear color between smoke and slate … My teeth are better than any of my stupid servants’. How can it be possible that the lines around my eyes and the spotting on my hands have marred me so much?

I sat naked in the taper light before the gentle and truthful mirrors and slowly pulled the brooches from my hair. A waterfall of fire, a shower of gold rain. So must have Danaë looked when the god Zeus poured himself inside her … I combed my hair about me with one hand to watch the gold rain in the mirrors, the other hand beginning to move between my legs. This was an old and sweet fancy for me, the rape of Perseus’s mother; how lonely it must be to have Zeus for a lover, no lips to kiss, no human hands to touch.

I glanced at my own hand in the mirror: and saw instead my son’s. There it was, in a peculiar instant of illusion, the same spare masculine beauty, the hard, strong lines. I held the hand still, staring, enchanted.

What would it feel like, I dared to guess in that hot, strange moment, what would I think, to hold Medraut’s long fingers crushed and cocooned inside my thighs like this?

The secret dream brought a sudden, startling pleasure that drowned the thought of taboo.

Medraut sent word to his father that he would stay with me throughout the coming year, and I began his tuition. I was pressed to keep apace of him. Secure in my degree of expertise, I had forgotten how quickly one learns when one is new to knowledge. He made me feel young and vigorous, intelligent and alluring, not the sorcerous old mother spider that my husband made me out to be. I liked teaching him. I liked arguing with him. I did not tell him that I dreamed of his hands.

Never mind that Medraut had been Britain’s ambassador to one of the world’s greatest civilizations. He was modest and moderate, and made no complaint at sleeping on the floor of Lot’s hall with the rest of our retainers. But after a month he retreated to the cot in my surgery. I granted him this privilege. I tested him often and harshly, and felt that this little privacy I could give him was a fair exchange for his being woken hours past midnight to minister at a birth, or to have to help put out a brush fire and then tend burns on the shepherds and slaughter dying sheep for the next day and a half without sleep. Our court grew used to Medraut’s being there; my young sons liked and admired him, although Agravain was envious of the attention I gave him. My handmaidens adored him.

“Your long-legged Teleri is annoying me,” he commented during his second month in the Orcades. “She is very persistent.”

“Then bed her,” I said lightly. “She is very pretty.”

“I have a friend in Africa who would not like it,” he answered in the same light tone.

“No woman in this court will expect you to keep faith with a girl four thousand miles away for very long.”

“All the same, I am not going to lie with Teleri.”

“Has she suggested it?”

“Suggested!” The word came out in a short burst of laughter. “Well, she has not spoken of it exactly, but she has twice tried to climb into bed with me.”

“I’ll punish her for you, if you like,” I said.

He set down the vial he was scouring and gave me his sharp, serious frown. “Don’t do that. She’s done nothing wrong.”

“Don’t complain of it to me if you don’t want me to end it,” I said. “I have little sympathy with such shallow affairs.”

“You might try scolding her before you have her beaten,” he said shortly.

One evening in his third month he told me he was going with Gwalchmei and Agravain and a few other young nobles who wanted to join the fishermen of our capital in their yearly seal spearing. They would be gone a month, boating and camping in the far reaches of the islands and the skerries. Medraut was a passionate huntsman; he missed the strange and dangerous challenges he had known on the plains of Africa.

“You will be whaling next, and off northward to the Ice for a season,” I protested.

“I couldn’t afford so much time. I am only here for a year,” he said. And I could not help feeling that he said it to assert his independence, and that he knew it would incense me.

“You’ll learn nothing in a year in any case,” I said, and instantly regretted that I should stoop to so petty a retort.

“Sometimes I think I have already learned too much,” he answered distantly, his voice unaccountably bleak.

“Why, Medraut!”

“I do not like your methods. I do not like the way you use me, or the way you use other people. I do not like the way you punish your servants with purges and sedatives. I do not like to know it is happening, and to have to keep it as your secret.”

“Then leave.”

“I only thought to hunt with the sealers for a little while, and so you tell me to leave!”

“You will not find lost nerve for this work out in the far skerries.”

He glared at me through narrowed eyes. His blue-gray gaze looked black in the dim light of the oil lamp.

“I’ve not lost my nerve.”

“Prove it.”

He was silent a moment, then said, “Why must you make a test of every little thing?”

“Because you would cross me in so many little things, and I am unsure of you. I do not want to waste my time on your instruction if you are not going to see it through.”

“I am your pupil,” he said slowly, “but I am not your apprentice. I am not bound to you. I am no longer even your foster child. I am hunting with the sealers for this month, Godmother.”

I lay awake hours into the night in irrational panic, thinking that I should go mad if I should lose him so soon. I knew it would be folly to forbid him to go; well, as he said, I could not forbid him. But if I made him regret the decision later on, he might as easily leave in anger then. Nothing bound him. Even my husband was afraid of me, but I had nothing with which to bind Medraut.

I thought, finally, that I must give him my blessing and let him go on his voyage, that it was the only answer he would respect, and a risk that I must take. And still unable to sleep, I felt that I must tell him now.

It was dark, too dark to see him when I entered the chamber where he worked and slept; I did not need a light to find my way around these rooms. I sat on the edge of his cot and lightly stroked his hair, to wake him.

“Teleri?” he said, and reached out a hand which touched my leg. “You are overdressed this time.”

I was wrapped in a gown and mantle, of course, having been walking in the cold halls of my husband’s holding. That Medraut should mistake me for one of my handmaidens amused me. I grasped his hand and held the palm to my face, that he should know me.

But he did not. He let me hold his hand there against my throat and chin, cupping my jaw. He said gently, “Get out of my bed. I do not want you any more tonight than I did last—”

His fingers and palm were cold. Their light touch sent gooseflesh across my shoulders. How could he not know me—

Truly, truly, I was only trying to shock him into recognition, but I drew his hand down inside my gown, and then suddenly I was reeling with the insanity and sheer delight of his taut, long fingers at once disdaining and tempted by my failing body. He thought I was Teleri — his sure hand held by me reluctantly a moment against my breast, and still he thought I was young. I shivered with bottled laughter, delighted by this game.

“Get out of my bed,” he said again, his voice harder this time, more irritated and less patient.

How reluctant are you, I wondered, and drew his hand lower down my body.

God, his hands!

I was at once besotted with the flattery in their blindness, and blind myself with their cool, burning touch.

Again he hissed at me to leave, and added, “You are lovely, you are arousing, you are all you wish to be. But Teleri, I’m tired, I’m short of temper, and you are not the lover I would choose—”

I shook with laughter. I could scarcely contain myself, but I knew that if he heard my voice the game would be over. In the dark, groping, I bent to kiss him somewhere along his naked ribcage.

“Out!” he hissed. I could not bear that I did not know exactly how excited he was, and reached down to feel the taut rod between his legs. Aroused, indeed.

At this crude invasion of his privates he lost all patience with me, and threw me out of his bed.

No one who knew me would have dared such a thing.

I sat for a moment shaken and trembling in an undignified heap on the floor; then hooked vicious fingernails into his back, which he had turned on me in an exaggerated gesture of dismissal, and tore open his shoulder.

His hand locked around my wrist in a grip of iron, hard and fast. He dragged me up from the floor and back into the bed, and pinned me so between hard knees. His face close to my ear, with one hand hitching up my robes, he hissed in dreadful quiet, “Do you want me so much? Do you really think you want me so much? Do you think I love kindly?” And then he pinned me further with an elbow cruelly pressed against my throat, and as I gasped for breath, he in all fury plunged his lean, hard body into mine.

I screamed silently, strangled by his elbow, unable to warn him of the fearful thing he was doing.

“You’re not Teleri!” he gasped hollowly, enjoying none of this, concentrating on his retributive abuse of me. “Who are you?”

I could scarcely breathe, so how could I speak? I had come to give my son permission to leave me and ended in being raped by him — the thought made me wheeze with choking and hysterical laughter. Suddenly, as suddenly as the livid anger had taken him, he stopped his cold, punishing ploughing of me and let go of my throat. He whispered again, “Who are you?”

“You know who I am,” I gasped.

“Aiee!”

He made a choking noise something like a muffled scream, and struggled frantically to untangle our cleaving bodies.

“Beast,” I flung at him, accusing and wounded as a green girl.

“I!” he cried. “I! You tear my back to ribbons, and call me a beast! Have you any idea what pain—”

“Have you?” I snapped.

That silenced him for a moment, reminding him of his uncharacteristic and mindless brutality. He bent over me still, awkwardly, trying not to touch me, trembling.

“You have not said who you are,” he whispered. “Tell me yourself.”

I had not ever meant for such a thing to happen. But I, of all, ought to have known that it could: I, who bore him by my brother; I, who had suckled him on Greek myth, as he said.

“You know who I am,” I repeated.

His voice was full of horror. “I did not know. I did not know!”

“You did not know me,” I said, nearly as shaken as he, “but you knew what you were doing.”

“This is what happened to my father,” he said through his teeth.

“No,” I said coldly. “I invited him. You forced me.”

“You deceived me!”

“I deceived Artos, as well,” I said. “But your father would never use any woman so ruthlessly as you have used me.” I shivered, scarcely able to believe what he had done. “You are not like your father.”

“No,” he said, still speaking through clenched teeth. “I am like you.” He hovered over me, close but not touching me, intimate but not invasive. Caught in the nightmare of his own fury and recklessness, he added in a fierce, icy whisper, “I am not so easily toyed with as my father. I might desire more of you.”

I am sure he meant it only as a threat; but I realized then that I had him trapped, that the finch was mine forever, if I took this to its logical conclusion.

“Do you?” I asked.

He wrenched at my hair in frustration.

“So, so, so.” I touched his wiry hand, and men lightly caressed his hair, calming him in the same warning and assured way I would have calmed him as a child. It was automatic, and eerie in how surely it worked on him. “Medraut, don’t hurt me.”

He let go of my hair with a soft sigh. “I was not thinking. I am not thinking. I don’t know what to do.”

“Don’t try to think.” I twined an arm around his neck to draw him down to me until his mouth was breathing hotly against mine, and then he lost all reason, and we clung and kissed frantically. I could not stop shaking, nor could he cease his choking sobs, until he tore our mouths apart and moaned, “What am I to do?”

“You need not do anything. Nothing has come of it. Let go of me, and I’ll go back to my chamber and you’ll go back to sleep—”

“Nothing has come of it!”

“Not unless you finish what you began,” I said softly. “Is it true that you cannot love kindly? Show me. You owe it me.”

“I will not finish! I was wrong, I acted evilly—”

“Must I command you?” I said in a voice that he surely knew not to challenge.

He gave a wordless cry of disbelief and said in bafflement, “You cannot want this!”

“What do you fear?”

“The wrath of the gods,” he answered swiftly.

“You said I was beautiful.”

“Yes, but …” He sighed. “And arousing, as I said. I am lost.”

“Come,” I said. “You are not Odysseus. There are no gods that care. Prove to me your courage.”

A long moment of absolute stillness, and then his whispered assent.

“I’ll do it.”

He moved inside me slowly and sweetly, tentative this time, exploring rather than invading. It was as though he expected me act of incest to be different, somehow, from the same act with any other woman. And when we were entwined softly and comfortably and he began to accept that indeed he was not about to be struck down by a blow of lightning, he murmured at my ear, “Godmother, have I grown too old for you to begin to suckle me?”

“Do it, do it,” I murmured in return.

“This is madness,” he said, and laughed, and closed his mouth over my breast.

He would not know until too late how thoroughly I had caged him. I would clip his wings, and train him to sing at my command, and pinion him if he tried to fly.

I was thinking only of how I should triumph over my brother by this act, but I had not realized how sweet it would be to have Medraut as a lover.

I say we were lovers, but love — I think I do not know what love is — I have trained all my sons to revere me in some cross between fear and devotion. What binds Medraut to me is deeper and harsher even than that, though, tempered with his clear-sighted understanding for what I am and why I do the things I do, and tainted with the lust that brought us to quivering ecstasy in each other’s arms for nearly two years. He always thought of our love as tainted. He could not ever put aside the knowledge that what was between us was a universal evil, an immortal sin; and still he took me to his bed.

All of it, all of it comes back when I think of him: child and man. How once, when he was six, he had been made to kneel all night on one knee at the foot of my bed, naked and with his head bowed, because he had dared to contradict me. Again, twenty years later, his silver head between my legs, his hungry mouth and tongue in the secret places of my body, his long and gentle fingers. How he would look up at me men, with the eager, half-frightened expression I knew so well from his babyhood: Have I pleased you, Godmother, is it enough, will I not be punished this time? He would by day hunt fiercely, work in the fields, drive himself as hard as he had ever done; and then he would come to me for instruction. How much of yourself, of your soul, are you willing to barter for today’s scrap of arcane information?

“Kiss me and I’ll tell you.”

Sometimes I said it lightly. Sometimes he did it. More often the exchange was unspoken; what I give you today, you will pay me for tonight.

“This will cost you a great deal …” I could feel myself smiling as I spoke. And his eyes would narrow and his hands would clench, but every now and then he would smile too:

“A small price to pay.”

I forgot that I was in exile. I forgot that I was aging. I forgot I had a husband; I forgot my other sons. Even, for a time, I forgot that I was training Medraut to go back to his father with his loyalties shifted and slanted.

Out of respect for the man who had fostered him Medraut did not habitually sleep in my bed, but otherwise we made no attempt to hide our affair. No one knew the truth of Medraut’s birth, as I have said, and I doubt anyone would have dared raise question even if it had been known. The court was growing to fear Medraut even as they feared me, out of guesswork, out of self-interest, because we were so close. We ate together. We combed each other’s hair. We worked in consultation.

But still we battled. I could tell of so many battles, so many little ways in which we teetered between tenderness and spiteful torment of each other. Never had I dreamed of an apprentice or lover so diligent, so passionate and craving, and yet so difficult to manage. I threatened him, made love to him, and hurt him. I cozened him. I coddled him. What a way to learn to minister to the afflicted.

He came storming into my apartment at daybreak one morning. He still affected foreign dress in the first year he lived with us, and in the gray dawn light of my antechamber he seemed very alien and unappeasable. But he spoke calmly and directly. “Godmother, I want no more of your tuition if I must come by it in waiting upon poisoned children.”

I find it difficult to answer such directness. One feels so sly, one wants to laugh, one wants to lie. To acknowledge or deny the accusation is to accept that one has done some kind of evil.

I said, “Tell me this story.”

“If you have wondered where I was tonight,” he said, “I have spent the last half day ministering to my old nurse’s grandson, who has been vomiting himself inside out after sharing his evening bread with Gaheris and Gareth. He had not eaten anything else since before noon. Neither of your sons suffered—”

“How can you possibly know what Fercos had eaten between noon and supper?” I said, but I meant the question as a test, not a defense.

“I don’t,” said Medraut shortly. “But I know what poisoned him, and how it may be administered.”

“You will not know the symptoms if you do not see it happen,” I said.

“Then poison your own children,” he snapped.

“Medraut,” I said, and laid a hand on his shoulder, to make him sit down. “Do you mean that?”

He looked up into my face. His expression struck me to my very core: the frightened, stubborn look of rebellion that he had given me as a boy, so sure that he was right, so afraid of what I might do to him.

“No,” he said. “I would not see Gareth suffering as Fercos did last night.”

“Agravain, then,” I said softly.

“Not even he,” said Medraut immediately, peevish with suspicion.

“Then you have a choice,” I said, turning my back to him. I played with the face paints on the dressing table, watching my hands in the mirrors.

He said nothing, suspect, waiting.

“Quit me now,” I said, “or I will visit these tests on your own body.”

He was silent for so long that it grew lighter while I waited for his answer. I did not insult him by repeating or rephrasing the challenge. One chance: one answer only.

“I’ll stay another year. I’ll do it,” he said.

“Will you? Or will you come asking for solace and mercy as you do now?

“I’ll do it!”

“Prove me this.”

“Ah, my God,” he growled. “What must I do?”

I turned to look at him, my hands behind my back. His face was set in a familiar grimace of bleak, defiant determination.

“Give me your hand.”

For a moment he did not move. Then he nodded once, and held out his right.

“Your other hand,” I said mildly, which ought to have warned him.

His eyes never left mine. He held out his left hand, palm up. He was calm; the hand I held now was relaxed; but I saw the twitch in his jaw as he braced himself against the unknown blow.

The blade I used was so thin, so keen, that I do not think he at first felt anything. Then he lowered his eyes to stare at his wrist. A slow glance at me, then down again at the bloody slash that scored his inner forearm.

He lost precious seconds and a good deal of blood in registering how seriously I had hurt him. Then he snatched at the wrist with his other hand, choking off the pumping vein, raising his forearm above his head. It was expertly done, but it was not enough, and he lost another few precious seconds before he realized that. Now in utter calm, as if there were no hurry, he stood up and reached for the tongs in the brazier. No longer expert, but anyway efficient, he sealed the wound with a glowing coal, and laid the tongs down, and fainted at my feet.

I knelt trembling at his shoulder to examine his arm, but he had done the trick; he had saved himself. The first coherent thought that came to me after that was that he would never get the bloodstains out of his white linen shamma. And I was meanly glad of it, because the leopard skin that covered the floor was ruined also, and I hated and envied Medraut’s African dress as the badge of his freedom.

He lay profoundly insensible for perhaps twenty minutes, and awoke bewildered and pathetic. He lifted his arm languidly, and stared at the seared skin, and let the arm fall. “God, what a mess.”

I was kneeling at his head like a harpy.

“You will need to change your clothes,” I said.

“I think I will pass out if I try to sit up.”

“There will be no hunting for you for a few days,” I said softly. “Are you thirsty? You will need to drink.”

He hesitated. “Would you help me now?”

“For a fee.”

He lay flat on his back on the ruined leopard skin he had given me, his body drained of blood and his burnt arm blistering, and spoke with patient resignation: “Come. I’ll drink of you.” The languid hand reached up to touch my knee. “Here, you must ungirdle yourself, this time. I have not the strength to wrestle with your skirts.”

“If I say you must?” I murmured, but gathered my skirts aside.

“I’ll weep with frustration. You would not have me weep, would you?”

“Not if it distracts you.” And now my legs were free, and he turned his head toward me and parted his lips.

“Come nearer,” he whispered. I threw one leg across his chest, so that his pale head rested against the inner thigh of my other leg, and laying my hands on the top of his head I pressed his mouth against and into the soft, wet slot where he had started life—

— I knew, I knew that eventually I must give him up, but I never, ever tired of this. And he had said he would stay another year.

Medraut did not tire of it, either. The long winter nights, which had always seemed endless to me, were no longer time enough. But as our liaison continued and grew increasingly cruel and complex, his mind began to rebel more and more against his tireless body. He mourned the betrayal of his unwitting love in Africa. Though he had agreed to it, he so resented my testing new medicines on him that he experimented against it, and countered me with skill and untold intuition. Somehow I kept the upper hand, and had my way of him, but the damage to his body began to show itself in his weariness, in a slight faltering of his hands.

“Come here,” I said to him one night early in his third summer in the Orcades, as he cleared away the herbs we had been grinding.

He came, and knelt at my side.

“Give me your hands.”

He did not look at me. I held his hands lightly in my own, gazing in wonderment at their spare grace, their taut strength, their harsh beauty.

“I hate for you to be so submissive,” I said softly.

“I am only obeying you in deed,” he said. “In spirit I defy you, and all this business.”

“You defy me!” I scoffed. “You lust for me.”

“I hate you.”

“Medraut, you are cruel.”

He leaned against my knee, and I stroked his hair. “Godmother,” he said, distractedly, “I do not understand why I am made to desire you so.”

“You choose to.”

He sighed, miserable beneath my fingertips. “Our lovemaking would be evil even if we were strangers. We are so hurtful to each other. As it is—”

“It has always been your choice. You have always been free to end it, free to go. I am the one who is imprisoned in this place. You called me Circe on your first day here, but I am more like Calypso, alone on my island, waiting for a lover.”

“Calypso!” He gave a short bark of laughter. “Godmother, you are more like Medea, who slew her sons, or Jocasta, who married hers—”

“Jocasta never knew what she was doing,” I said quietly. “I have known all along. As have you.”

“I must stop this,” he said. “I am destroying myself.”

“You are an idiot to use the narcotics the way you do. You are becoming addicted to the poppy.”

He blazed at me, “I am addicted to you.”

The following night I could not wake him when I came to his bed. He was utterly unconscious, sunken in a sleep deeper than sleep. For a few moments I feared for him, and then knew that he had done this to himself. Poppy again, perhaps, or nightshade. I could smell nothing in his breath but the faintest trace of wine, which was not so unusual. He had been careful. He had been exact. I had taught him well.

I said nothing, the next day, when I found him hollow-eyed and clumsy at his work, but that night I fed him a stimulant that would both keep him awake and punish him if he tried to counter it. No fool, he was on his knees over a bucket trying to vomit when I came to him, bringing up nothing, shaking with strain. I sat on the floor and took him by his trembling shoulders, and drew his head down into my lap. He clutched at me blindly, gasping, defeated again.

“You must wait it out,” I told him, and let my hands move idly over his hair while he sweated and sobbed and the poison ran its course.

When he had recovered enough to speak he repeated indistinctly, his face muffled against my belly, “I hate you.”

“Do you so?” I said sadly.

“You deal with me as coldly as if I were a bird, a fish—”

I laughed.

“Tear out the hook and throw the creature back. You will bait it again when it is older and more worth your while. Its torn face will have healed by then. It is only a fish.”

I bent over him, and said softly at his ear, “Little fish, do you know what bait I used on you tonight?”

He was quiet a moment, men said slowly, “I thought it must be foxglove and water hemlock.”

“I have only taught you a fraction of my own knowledge,” I said, and gripped his hair to pull his head up a little. “I will not be crossed by you, Medraut. You cannot best me at this game.

“Now touch me,” I ordered icily, and let go of his hair. He sank his face against my thigh, staring bleakly across the floor at nothing. His right hand still clutched at the skirt of my gown; but with his left he sorted through the linen folds until his long fingers found the inside of my thigh, and then I had to snatch at his hair again to brace myself at the untold pleasure his hands lit in me.

He winced as I pulled at his hair, and gasped aloud: “Do you think Jocasta used her son so?”

“Medraut,” I murmured, “Do not call me Jocasta, or I will let you borrow my brooches and you can put your own eyes out with them, and end this yourself, as her son did. Touch me!”

It was the last for a long time. The following day he dealt himself injuries more complete, more ugly, more evil, than any hurt I had ever done him.

They told me he was dead. And, God, I knew him so intimately by then that all I need do was glance once at his eyes to know he lived, but in the instant when three hysterical househands came reporting his death to me, I believed it. That instant in itself was his revenge, the dart he had aimed at me. That instant, and the time it took me to come to his side — seconds of unheard of nightmare for me, which he paid for, of his own volition, for the next three months.

He looked as close to death as any living thing could seem. His face was set in an agonized snarl, his teeth bared and his jaw clenched, and the rest of his utterly ruined body was set so tightly that he was still gripping his hunting knife in his right hand — they had not been able to pry it from his iron clutch. The other hand was crushed, the fingers so dreadfully mutilated that they only rested on, but could not grip, the broken shoulder he was trying to protect. But his gaze blazed purely triumphant when I knelt at his side in shock and grief. Nothing of pain in the dark blue eyes, nothing of fear. There was only victory.

He caught me wordless. I knelt by him and found myself mirroring his grimace. Never had I been so betrayed, never had I been so deeply wounded, never had I been so angry. I knelt with my hands hovering over this broken thing that had been my work of art, not knowing where to begin, what to touch, how to mend it.

Speechless, I asked him in a gesture of my hands: What, why?

His eyes blazed defiance into mine. His lips curled back, barely, and he croaked at me: “I do not need your brooches.”

Then I, awash with grief and hatred, gathered my skirts and turned from him, so that I could find a place alone and mourn his ruined body in dignity.

They had gone stag hunting, on foot, with spears. They told me this later; it wearies me to tell it over again. He had been first, and had set upon the stag with his hunting knife alone. There was no reason for it. He had acted in pure fearless and witless pride, to challenge himself, to prove it could be done. He had been trampled in wrestling it to the ground, and torn by its hoofs nearly as soundly as he himself had stabbed at the wild beast; and when he finally finished with it and cut its throat, his legs were caught beneath the dead and crushing weight of its massive body. His own body had become such a wreck that we could not tell where all the damage had come from, or how it could possibly have happened.

I worked over his crushed hand for so long that my eyes began to burn, and my head to ache. I must have sat there for half a day trying to piece his fingers back together. Others came and went around me, waiting on me, bringing me clean linen and thread and new salves, and the occasional cup of wine; and Medraut drifted in and out of ken, sometimes aware of me, sometimes not. The fourth time my physician Huarwar advised me to rest and let him spell my watch a while, I sent them all from my sight, and sat finally alone with my broken son and my worthless, bootless skill. Medraut, deep in his self-induced fever, said clearly, “Godmother, you lied to the high king’s messenger.”

Twenty years ago, nearly twenty years ago I had punished him for saying that.

“Child,” I said, as I had said then, “You will not cross me—” And I snapped apart the fractured bone I had just set.

It woke him. He stared at me in full comprehension, and utter disbelief. His other arm was bound at his side; the shoulder was broken. His legs were bound to heavy splints. There was nothing free but this hand, which I held between my own.

“I will teach you to cross me—” I spoke through my teeth, and broke apart another balanced fracture.

He gave a soundless scream, neck arched in agony, gasping for air. He looked as though he were drowning. The fish hooked one final time—

I began to weep, now, myself, as I finished the work he had begun, methodically twisting and cracking the bones in his hand beyond any hope of repair.

I know, I know, how ugly a vengeance this was. I am sorry I did it. But even in my regret I am selfish. I am not sorry that I punished Medraut; I am only sorry that I so thoroughly destroyed the hand I loved so well. I still dream of his hands. They are whole, in my dreams.

I bound and bandaged the hand in its wrecked state, and it took Medraut three days of begging and pleading and threatening Huarwar, and the others who tended him, before he was able to convince them to go against my ordinance and remove the bindings. When they discovered what had I had done they banished me from his side for over a month. Oh, they could not have stopped me seeing him if I had insisted, but he never asked for me in all that time, and I felt I must wait.

He never did send for me, but he overruled my exile at last. I came to his bedside one afternoon like a visitor to a convalescent in a monastery. For all my anger I ached at seeing how helpless he was still; he had not attempted to walk since his legs had been broken, the shattered shoulder was not strong enough to bear his weight when he tried to raise himself up on one elbow, and the hand, the hand—

“They cut your hair,” I said.

“Fever.”

I leaned over and ran my fingers through the short and tangled mane. The lightness of it made him look like a child. “Don’t,” he said, wincing away from my touch.

I drew back a little. “I used to plait it for you,” I said.

He tried to shrug, then uttered bitterly, “But usually I had to plait it myself, and that would be difficult now.”

“Yes,” I said slowly. “That is true. Is the hand healing?”

“As may be,” he muttered.

“Let me see.”

He held it out to me in defiance, stubbornly battling fear. I carefully undid the bandages and removed the splints. He held very still as gently, gently, I tested the tendons, felt the setting bones, examined the newly healed scars.

“Your hands are beautiful,” I said at last.

“I had been vain of them,” he whispered.

“The scars will fade in time,” I said. “Who reset the last three fingers?”

“I did.”

“That was bravely done,” I said, and bent again over the hand, in admiration. “I taught you well. Those fingers are straight and whole as they ever were, except that they do not bend.”

“You tore the tendons,” he said bitterly “The joints were ruined beyond repair.”

I let his hand fall back onto his chest, but did not let go of it.

“I could have done that to your wrist, which I set also,” I said softly, “Or your legs.”

He closed his eyes and drew a sharp, haggard breath. I saw the shiver go through him. “Why didn’t you?” he said.

“Medraut, you are the most beautiful and splendid lover I have ever had. And you are my son. I could not cripple you.”

“Your lover and your son,” he repeated in quiet. “You have crippled me.”

There was one time, still before Medraut was able to walk, when I thought I would go mad with knowing that he lay so close to me day in, day out, and that I could not hold his powerful and comely body pulsing inside mine yet one more time. When I came to him, as ever, he could neither deny nor hide how quickly his passion for me kindled; but it was a strange and sad thing to find his frame and form so changed with illness, and I wish I had not forced him. Pitiably cautious, he held his arm carefully away from our bodies as we pressed against each other in this last lovemaking, too fearful of jarring his damaged hand to lose himself in desire.

It was well into October before he could walk any distance, and he came to me then to tell me he was leaving. I turned from the dressing table where I was seated before the candles and the mirrors, and asked him when.

“Tomorrow morning. I will take passage to the mainland with one of the fishermen.”

“It’s too late to travel to Camlan this year.”

“I won t stay.”

He did not say it, but I could well imagine that he was thinking: I would rather freeze to death in a snowstorm in the Caledonian highlands than risk another winter of suffering and slaving at your hands.

I closed my eyes, and sighed deeply.

“You are polite and gracious as ever to dare to bid me goodbye.”

“Well, Godmother,” he said in a quiet voice, “I can scarcely bear to think of leaving you. But even Odysseus left Calypso at last.”

He could have called me so many evil names, and chose Calypso. Calypso, the sea nymph, the lover. Calypso, who let Odysseus go his way at last. I bowed my head against my hand, leaning on the dressing table, and could not answer him. He stood gazing at me, unmoving, his sound right hand gripping the back of a chair, because he was still unsteady on his feet.

The silence was complete. One of the tapers guttered on the iron tine that held it, and I put it out by crushing its flame beneath two outstretched fingers. I held my hand still like that for a few moments, fingertips resting in hot wax, but did not flinch; as if somehow Medraut’s words were burning into me as well, through the quenched flame.

I folded my hands in my lap and raised my head.

“Well, I think we should bid one another goodnight, then.”

I stood up and began putting out the candles one by one, dousing all their flames between my fingers or beneath the palm of my hand, and then began killing the lights in the oil lamps with the same self-destructive vehemence.

Medraut said gently, “Godmother, you will hurt your hands,” and took them in his own, the hands I had crippled. “Now stop,” he said. “Just stop.”

I turned my face to his, and he let go of my hands.

“You truly mean to go.”

“I must,” he said.

I raised my hand, and he flinched. Still he flinched.

But all I did was to kiss the tips of my sootblackened fingertips and touch his lips with them.

“All right. Good night.”

“Goodbye.”

“Good night now, and goodbye in the morning.”

I do not understand why I should feel so betrayed and abandoned now that he has gone. Have I not sent him off to do my bidding, trained him in poison, tutored him in the art of fear? Have I have not twisted and torqued his stubborn loyalty to his father with a tormented loyalty to me: his father’s sister, his mother, his lover? I still dream of his hands.