Sirens and Other Daemon Lovers

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.