Apollo's Daughter

In my life, I have gathered that there are years where summer is a bright afternoon, stretching her paws in patches of sunlight, full of sliced oranges and floating breezes and sweet honey. And there are years where summer feels like deep midnight; brimming with rolling thunderstorms, the feeling of the earth as your toes dig into dark, rich soil, and the tartness of pomegranate dripping down your chin. This was a year of midnight summer.

My mother always told me I would make a good changeling. As a child I was unabashedly ugly, my unbrushed hair wild and eyes feral with excitement as my pudgy hands raked through the blueberry bushes that sat squatly in the wood behind our cottage. I would climb trees with pockets full of jerky and nuts to coax out the squirrels and the racoons, who would eat from my outstretched hands. I had row upon row of jars filled with potions I had created, which really was just dirt and moss and berries I had found, but I knew in my mind what each jar was capable of: that one turned you into a frog, that one let you hear the thoughts of birds, and that one let you taste sun-sweetened berries when you chewed on stalks of grass.

I was often naked in those woods, shedding both clothes and apprehension as I entered the trees. I sang when I spoke, which was never only when I was spoken to, and held eye contact with the few adults I had met for too long. I spilled my interests from my teeth like they burned my mouth and laid them out in a quilt for anyone who gave me more than a moment. My mother found me used books from travelers passing through the village a day’s walk from our home. She let the stray cats and the possums I found hang out in our gardens. “Let the mice and ticks meet our guests,” she would say, and I often caught her placing scraps of food outside the door.

The cats would twist between her legs as she carried baskets of laundry to the hang, but she never seemed to trip over them. I remember thinking she looked like a dancer that I saw in one of my books, long and lithe and moving to the rhythm of the earth. I heard that rhythm, too, and I would try to move like she did. But my scraggly limbs weren’t yet graceful, my belly not womanly, and my little face smiled widely at the effort. Her head would tilt back with laughter and she would drop the shirt or sheet she was hanging when she saw me and hold out her hands. We would spin and sing until we laid on our back in the meadow, watching the sun dip below the golden aspen.

She had actual jars of herbs and potions that lined our kitchen shelves. “That one will burn your skin, lovely,” she would mention casually as my sticky fingers reached towards a jar of amber glass. I knew she wasn’t lying to me. “Try this one,” she would say, as she pulled down a container full of rose petals and lavender and something musky. I would dip my fingers in, place them on my tongue, and close my eyes. When I opened them, pink swirls moved through the air, trailing sparkles where they flew. I could smell salt and sand, and heard water crashing. The ground beneath me seemed to soften and move, and I felt like I was floating. The pink swirls passed through me, caressed my hair and face, and filled me with warmth.

Other times, she would pour a spoon full of liquid that looked and tasted like honey. I would let it melt on my tongue and find myself riding upon the back of a giant bumblebee, giggling as she soared through the air and bumped into the flowers. The smell of lilac would overwhelm me, and I swore I could reach out and touch the petals as they passed. But my very favorite was when she would give me a drink of an inky purple malt that glittered as I swirled it in the candle light. The spiced liquid burned my throat but quickly turned to ice in my belly. I would open my eyes and stretch my wings, feel them as they pushed through the air around me. I flew silently on massive feathers, weightless and lethal. My talons stretched in anticipation, and I would turn into a steep dive. The whole time I laughed. I was free.

“Again!” I would squeal, and she would smile and say, “Soon enough, but no more this evening.” Then she would carry me to bed and kiss my forehead as she laid me on the straw mattress we shared. I would watch her linger in the doorway for a moment, then hear the padding of her footsteps through the living room and the oak door of our home would open and close.

Slowly, my scraggly limbs became strong and graceful and my belly tightened with muscle, but my wild hair and feral eyes stayed the same. All at once, my childhood had become dusk, fading quickly while I tried to savor its golden light. The blue hour of woman hood was upon me – I could feel its weight, feel its moonlight rising over me, stirring something deep within the recesses of my body. When my mother and I danced, I no longer felt clumsy and childish. I felt powerful - in my mind I moved like one of our cats, twisting and spinning, drumming my feet with the earth, letting the wind guide me through that field of grass. She cupped my face with her calloused hands, smiling brightly at me. There were words that rested on her tongue, I could sense them, yearning to leap forth from her throat, but she never freed them. Give them to me, I wanted to say, Let me hold them with you. But I knew she wasn’t so quick to free knowledge I wasn’t ready for.

Soon, I stood taller than her, a full head over her strong body. I was almost completely immersed in the midnight of womanhood, and the “almost” disappeared one summer evening, a strong full moon overhead. The blood of the womb came, flowing from me like a river.

I hated it. I had never longed to be a child more than I had in those first days. Let me be ugly and pudgy and wild again, I pleaded to the mountains around me, Let me be unknown and unabashed forever. But of course the mountains didn’t change me, they just stood silently and hugged me in their shadows.

My mother started taking me with her at night. She showed me the plants of our forest and made me memorize their names and uses. We picked some of them and returned to our kitchen to shred and cut and mix together. Slowly, I learned the contents of each of her jars and how to reproduce them. Something in me shifted. I began creating my own concoctions, quickly surpassing her collection. I couldn’t get enough of the smells, the experiences, the people and creatures I could conjure. I longed for something I couldn’t explain.

I began to dream of faraway places I had never been. Of conversations I knew had not yet been uttered. Sometimes, I dreamt of events; minor ones, really, without much weight to the process of the world. But without fail, those events took place in the coming days. The way a squirrel chattered above me, or the way the sunlight fell on a glen in the woods. How a bird flitted, the exact hand of the clock that was followed by a popping of flame, the way my mother would look at me then accidentally dropped a fork she was holding. I had experienced all of these things as I slept, only to live them out days later. The dreams began to whine at me, begging me to follow them.

One night, I dreamt of a forest that seemed familiar but I could not place. I stood alone on a trail I knew I had walked, lined with toadstools and nightshade in the dim evening light, but all of reality had felt shifted a hair's breadth to the right. I looked up to see a barn owl watching me with her black eyes, as deep and full of wonder as my mother’s. Her head tilted towards me and her beak opened. She screamed, and I woke up panting, all the covers cast off of the bed.

During the fifth full moon, and my fifth blood, my mother woke me. Her bright face peered over mine. I could sense those heavy words on her tongue again. I began to part my lips, to ask her to let them fall. She pressed a finger gently against my mouth, her eyes glittering like embers. She turned and seemed to fly from our room. I followed.

Her cloak billowed behind her as she made her way to the forest path. An owl’s bark greeted us at the tree line. She seemed to move faster. I wondered what we looked like – probably mad in the moonlight, me in nothing but my white night shift, her in that velvet green cloak, seeming to fly through the forest. Were we being chased? Or were we the ones chasing? Something in me knew it was the latter.

Faster and faster we moved, feet skimming the ground, our curly hair streaming behind us. She hooked left, seemingly by the force of some unknown spirit. I slid to a stop, turning down the game trail she was already halfway through. The owls were louder now, they seemed to surround us, calling out into the night. I caught up to her as she stood at the edge of the trees, trying to slow my breaths. Without looking at me, she reached for my hand. We stepped forward into a meadow, glistening with dew.

The grass was lit as if the sun had decided it would rest right beneath our feet. Gold light poured upwards from the ground, defying the world I had known so intimately. The stars seemed to revolve until the inky sky appeared as though some god had pulled a brush through them, sweeping their light around us. I let go of the breath I didn’t realize I was holding, the air forced out of me as if I were the one being spun and scattered. I looked at my mother, who was staring intently at me. Her brown eyes held depths I thought I would never understand, and questions I thought I would never come to utter. She reached into the folds of her cloak and handed me a messenger bag of the same green velvet. I heard the familiar clinking of glass as I placed it over my shoulder. I didn’t have to look to know what was inside.

She pulled another jar from her sleeve this time, a dark liquid cradled in amber glass. She handed it to me. Protect this one, her eyes said, and slid it into the bag.

Her calloused hands rose to my face, as they had so many times before. With eyes as deep as midnight pools, her lips parted and at once I knew she was going to release the words that patiently sat on her tongue.

“You are not entirely of this Earth,” she whispered, as if afraid of being heard by some invisible entity lying hidden in the golden field. I searched her face for answers, waiting. “You have divine blood in you, Brisae,” she was speaking quickly now, almost as quickly as her feet had carried her. The words fell with urgency, as she told me of spells, of the young wolf she had found nineteen years ago, bloodied and unable to walk, arrows sticking out from his flanks. How she had saved it, nursed it back to health, poured elixir after elixir down its throat, willing it to live. How the wolf one day shimmered and became a man, standing at her hearth with a lyre and bow slung across his back.

“Apollo,” she had breathed, the god moving towards her with steady strides. How he blessed her, stayed for one night, and left before she woke the next morning. I was born months later, golden and screaming. She began to tell me of when I was nine, how on one of her nightly walks through the forest she came upon this glen. She had sat by the stream that wandered through its center and touched its water. My mother had seen a prophecy of me, of this moment. I waited, breath held in my throat like a scream trying to tear free.

The stars circling us sped up. Her voice became lost in the wind that howled around us, the light from the ground scorched the bottom of my feet, blinded me. Faster and faster the world turned, the soil frothing below my feet, trees swaying and weaving together like a great basket around us. Wind screamed in my ears, and my mother pitched forward and back, watching me with wild eyes. And then… silence. The deafening sort, where it felt as if I was thrown into pitch black water, squeezing forth the human in my body, pushing it down into a silty bottom.

I opened my eyes, which I had not realized were shut. I felt the soil still beneath my feet, saw the trees as still as marble, and my vision adjusted to the golden light rising upwards from the grass. I did not see my mother. Instead, a man with a bow across his back and a lyre in his hand towered above with skin that glowed the same as the earth we stood upon. He was taller than I was, which I was not used to as I stood at least eye to eye with the men I knew in the village. I gazed up at him.

“I know who you are,” I whispered.

“I would hope so.” His voice was like velvet. No, a spring brooke, swelling with snow melt. Or maybe, a songbird trilling above us. His eyes, intense and dark as a raven, bore into me.

“The prophecy. My mother wasn’t finished.”

He smiled, “I couldn’t let a human claim all of the glory.”

I felt something rise up within me. I knew my mother was human, but the way he drew out the word, as if with a stick in mud, angered me.

“Speak then.”

“Are you always so indignant?” He raised his eyebrows, a genuine question.

“Yes.”

He smiled a little, “I suppose it would only be right, as my blood, to see if you may see the truth before it is spoken.”

He walked to the brook and we knelt over the dark pool, side by side.

I had always wondered who my father was. When I had asked my mother as a child, she would smile and say, “A traveling poet with glittering eyes.” Now I understood that each word was curated; she had let me taste the truth without any of its poison reaching my belly. My father, Apollo the Olympian.

He pointed to the center of the water. It seemed to shiver as I set my eyes upon its depth. I reached out with my left hand, letting my fingers skim its surface. As if waiting on bunched haunches, the water sprung forward like shattering glass. It became cloudy, pulsing. I saw myself on a ship, surrounded by rocks, holding a bow as large as myself, arrows dripping with a silver liquid, a sword hung on my hip. A young man I did not know stood beside me. A monstrous head, then another, and another filled the pool, descending upon the ship like a storm. Row upon row of teeth filled the creature’s maws. Six heads in all, I counted. One after another the arrows raged forth from my bow.

The water cleared. “Scylla,” Apollo smiled, but there was something slightly sinister about it.

“I have heard of her,” I say blankly. Apollo stood and held a hand to me. I looked at it, and I saw the expectations in his eyes. My mother, what of her? I wanted to say. But I knew I would get no answer from him. He did not care for her the way I did; gods do not care for mortals, even if they bore their child. I glanced at the spot I knew she would have been before Apollo appeared. I took his hand.

The world spun again. I was numb to it. I could only think of my mother, and the future waiting for me. The prophecy told me nothing about succeeding or failing, only that I had no choice but to go. When the earth settled, we stood in the evening light of a forest I thought I knew, on a path that seemed so familiar, lined with toadstools and nightshade. Everything about reality had shifted a hair’s breadth to the right. I looked up. A barn owl screamed at me, her dark eyes piercing my soul. I longed to wake up in my bed, my mother breathing evenly from across the room.

I did not wake up. Apollo looked at me and smiled, “Prophecy has come to you in sleep, I see.” I could not hide from him. I nodded and touched the green velvet bag that hung from my shoulder – all that I had to remember my mother.

He walked to a laurel tree that shadowed the path we stood upon. He began to sing of strength, change, and courage. The great tree shuddered and seemed to dance under his voice. At last, he reached out and grasped something, then seemed to peel it from the tree. In one hand was a massive bow, intricately carved and perfectly balanced. In the other hand were six arrows. For six heads. I thought. He handed them to me quietly.

“No one but you will be able to shoot this bow,” he said.

I nodded and looked down the path ahead of me, trying to avoid his gaze. “What of the ship we saw? How will I get to Scylla?” My eyes stayed steadily ahead of me.

“Walk down this path. You will find your answers.”

I looked over to where he should have been standing, but he was gone. I longed to be home in our garden, with our cats and blueberry bushes. For our rows of jars and our warm hearth and my mother’s smile. But that had disappeared like mist. I began to walk.

The sun had almost set when I came upon the ocean. I gazed upon rocky sand and salt water for the first time in my life. It was almost exactly like the pink liquid my mother let me taste as a child. The evening air should have chilled me, as I was still only in the white night shift I had gone to bed in – was that only hours ago? – but I thought nothing of the prickling skin. A ship, proud and long, bobbed in the waves, and a young man laid in the sand near the water’s edge. I could only see the top of his head, his rust colored hair flowing onto the sand. The owl flew toward him, and landed upon the rock beside him. He glanced lazily up at it, greeting his familiar. Then the owl barked in my direction, and the young man jumped. I stood still and unwavering as he turned to look at me.

“You,” he mouthed. Me, I thought to myself. I strode toward him. We stood eye to eye, but I wished I towered over him. “You’re real,” he said.

“As real as the waves you rely upon,” I answered.

“Yes, but waves are only as real as they wish to be.” He smiled, bemused at my answer. His gray eyes peered into mine, waiting.

“You know who I am, then?”

“No, I have only seen you in a dream.”

“A dream.” I raised my eyebrows, “How did it end?”

“I suppose we will have to find out.” His name was Erichthonius, foster son of Athena, son of Hephaestus. I should have known he wouldn’t be entirely mortal either. I told him of the prophecy to which he nodded solemnly. “Our maiden voyage, then,” he said, gazing toward the horizon. He whistled loud and clear. Twelve men appeared on the deck and eyed me. “My crew.”

We cast off at sunrise. The owl sat on the mast as we sat in the captain’s quarters, a map of the isles spread on the table. Alecto, Erichtonius’ first mate, and Leto, a boy who looked no more than fifteen, joined us.

“Here is where Scylla lies,” I said, pointing to a small island.

“It is five days from here, if the winds would have us,” Alecto said. As if in answer, the winds picked up, jolting the boat forward. All of them looked at me. I shrugged, it’s not as if I controlled the winds.

We set our course and tried not to show our fear to each other. I quickly learned each boy’s name. Alecto, Leto, Makarios, Nereus, Photine, Sethos. These were the few that acknowledged me. The others barely glanced in my direction. I could say their names and they would respond as if I were speaking to the wind.

Alecto and Nereus were brothers. Nereus was tender hearted and shared his last fig with me. Sethos danced for us as Photine played the small flute he brough. Makarios was boastful and jesting, but told us story after story as if he was a bard, of the war of Troy and of Odysseus and Circe. He even pointed to Aeiea as we passed it, uninhabitable and covered in vines. We were getting close.

Erichthonius and I often stood close to one another. We spoke of strategy, of all the men that had been eaten by Scylla, of our childhoods and our favorite memories. He told me that he loved to paint the olive trees around his home, and that aunts would braid his long hair as they sat around in the evenings. He told me of Athena, how she appeared in front of him two nights ago speaking of a woman in a white shift coming from the forest, and to go where she directed.

At night, the thoughts raced through my mind. How many will die? Who will be unburied, forced to wander in between the realm of the living and the dead for the rest of time? What will happen after? Erichthonius, who shared my cot, reached over and took my hand. I let him. This may be the only time I hold a man’s hand.

During the day I shot the bow, over and over again. Each arrow landed with a thud in the center of the target I lined up. Each twang of the string became a tick of time, one beat closer to Scylla.

On the morning of the fifth day, the ocean showed us how high its waves could reach, how easily it could shift us off course. The jagged rocks that rose out of the ocean bore down upon us, and the strait where Scylla hunted came into view. I wished to hear my mother’s voice, have her cup my face. Two dolphins leapt from the water. Apollo.

Into the strait we crashed, all the crew holding a spear or a bow. Would it matter? I cursed the prophecy, for the lives we might lose, that it might all be in vain. I opened the green velvet bag, the amber jar sitting on top. Below it were healing salves, sleeping potions, truth tellers. I lifted the dark glass and unscrewed the top. It reeked of iron and rot. The silver liquid smoked as it met the air. I dipped each arrow in the jar, coating it in dripping silver.

Everything dropped to silence. The men looked up at me. I pressed my finger to my lips. The mist rolled around us, obscuring us in gray. A screech sliced through the air as a massive head seemed to fly at us from above. I knocked an arrow. Leto screamed, and the monster’s open jaws snatched him. The bow sounded with a twang, the arrow protruding straight through the monster’s eyes. Leto’s body rolled onto the deck, Photine rushed from the shadows to drag him to safety.

The next head and mouth of teeth descended upon us. The men scattered, Alecto threw the spear he held. It glanced off, bouncing onto the deck, but it was enough to distract her for a moment. I shot upwards. The arrow buried itself in the back of her throat. Another screech ran out in frustration. Three heads came from the mist, each gnashing its teeth. Erichthonius and Makarios shot arrows at one, while Sethos and two other men launched spears at another. The last locked eyes with me. It screamed as it raced towards me. I loosed an arrow, and watched as it buried itself between the monster’s nostrils. The head fell with a massive thud.

I looked up as the two men with Sethos fell down Scylla’s gullet. Three dead. I thought. Another arrow. Another thud.

Makarios and Erichthonius parried with the monster, evading its blows but failing to land their own. The sixth head seemingly snaked out of the water itself. Makarios screamed and was no more. Four. Erichthonius began to run up the deck, but the two heads cornered him. I shot one through the eyes and he clambered up the ropes, trying to distance himself from the monster. The sixth head struck at the group of men at the front of the ship, on the other side from me. I knocked the arrow and shot. It whistled past the monster's head, into the water beyond.

I missed. The three men disappeared behind her rows of teeth. I ran to one of the heads on the deck and tried to pull the arrow from the beast. The live head snaked towards me, I could smell its breath as it screamed. I wrenched the arrow and threw it into the mouth hovering above me, and hoped there was enough poison left on that arrow. Somehow, there was. The head fell.

All returned to silence for a moment. The owl barked and I exhaled. The relief was short lived as a woman’s head the size of our ship appeared from above the mist, shrieking and terrible. I ran for arrows, the surviving men ran for cover. Erichthonius ran to my side with arrows he had pulled from the heads. Scylla screamed terrors that made each of our ears bleed. I ran towards her, loosing arrow after arrow but to no effect. I reached for the amber jar and unscrewed it. The look in her eyes held no humanity. She screamed again and for a moment my muscles refused to work. I threw the jar towards her, which shattered against her face. I ran across the ship, distancing us. Her voice raged unintelligible curses as the oily skin began to melt, but it only seemed to anger her. She lunged toward me. I shot another arrow that landed in her cheekbone. Another in her forehead, but she didn’t stop.

I looked up to see the barn owl soaring above my head, in its talons a sword. The metal dropped and I caught its hilt. Scylla raged forward, I swung upwards and felt the metal catch on flesh. The screaming became a gurgle as the blood poured from her throat. The ship lurched as her head fell, then her body from its cave above. It slipped into the water behind us, bubbling.

We lost eight men. But Scylla would never kill another.

Our journey back took only two days. We reached the sandbar I found Erichthonius at only a week prior, yet I felt I had aged a lifetime. He looked at me when we stepped off the ship. “Stay,” he whispered, holding my hand to his heart. I could see a life with him, but I would forever live in his shadow. I would be forced to speak sweetly to nobles and dance in ballrooms and keep a house. I would bear a few children for him and we would sit over silent dinners, the only thing connecting us would be Scylla. I shook my head and I saw the sadness in his face, but understanding, too. I turned into the edge of the trees.

Apollo stood there, where the remaining men couldn’t see him. I gazed at him fully.

“Your mother is dead,” he said.

“Take me home,” I answered.

He was not lying. Her headstone rested in the same clearing of the forest where the grass had turned golden. I stood silently as tears gathered in my throat. I poured the remaining jars on the earth laying above her. Flowers and trees and vines grew until a massive garden had formed, fully in bloom in the clearing. All of the liquid was emptied, except for one: a shimmering purple elixir. I walked to the pool I had watched the prophecy in. I had completed what I was born to do. I emptied the glass and watched the water change, stripping my clothes and laying the bow on the ground beside me. The water enveloped me as I lowered my body into its depths.

I opened my eyes and flew silently on massive feathers, weightless and lethal. My talons stretched in anticipation, muscles flexing as I kept myself aloft. I did not laugh, but I was free.