Sirens and Other Daemon Lovers

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.”