‘They’re in the sea,’ said Euryale.
‘Who is they?’
‘Our parents. You have two parents, a mother and a father.’
Medusa frowned. ‘Are they fish?’ she asked.
Euryale considered the question. ‘No,’ she said. ‘Not fish.’
The little girl began to cry. The two sisters looked at one another in alarm. They had grown accustomed to her precarious moods, but it still seemed odd to weep over not having fish for parents. The more perplexed they became, the harder Medusa sobbed.
‘You wouldn’t want fish for parents,’ said Sthenno, putting her arm around her child. ‘How would you tell one fish from another? You wouldn’t know if it was your father or not.’
‘But fish are the only things that live in the sea!’ Medusa wailed.
‘No they aren’t,’ Euryale said. ‘Why would you say that? Because fish are all you have seen in the sea, because they come closest to the shore where you live. But the sea extends far beyond what you can see from here. It is wide and deep and full of creatures and places you have never imagined. Phorcys and Ceto live in the deepest realms of the ocean.’
‘But I couldn’t live there?’
‘No,’ said Sthenno quickly. ‘You would drown if you tried. Promise you will never go past the rocks you know.’ She pointed at the huge rocks that formed the sides of their bay.
Medusa nodded. ‘I promise. Could you live in the sea?’
Every answer created more questions. Euryale flexed her wings. ‘I don’t think so,’ she said. ‘Wet wings would be too heavy to fly, I think.’ Sthenno nodded in agreement, because she had no idea.
‘And that’s why we all live here together?’ Medusa asked. ‘Because we can’t live in the sea and they can’t live on the land?’
‘That’s right,’ Euryale said.
‘Even though they aren’t fish?’
‘They aren’t fish.’
‘What do they look like?’ Medusa asked. ‘Are they like you?’
Euryale thought for a moment. ‘No, not like us,’ she said. ‘They are not Gorgons. Phorcys is a sea god, he doesn’t have wings. He has scales. And huge claws instead of legs. Ceto is—’ Euryale raised her bushy eyebrows at Sthenno, who had no answer for her. ‘I don’t know exactly how to describe Ceto,’ Euryale said. ‘We have never seen her.’
‘Never?’
‘She lives in the depths of the ocean, Medusa. None of her children have ever seen her.’
Medusa sat quietly, her questions finally stilled. And her sisters hoped once again that they had kept her from feeling what they knew to be true: that she was a freak whose birth had horrified both parents. Sthenno was immortal, Euryale was immortal, their parents, grandparents, siblings were immortal. Everyone was immortal except Medusa, and creatures that no Gorgon would ever pay any heed.
But now, here they were. Euryale tending her flocks like a shepherd boy. The two of them anxiously discussing the milk yield. Sthenno hanging the dried skins of cattle across the front of their cave so that Medusa could keep warm at night, driving them into the rock with her hard talon. Everything about their days had become different once they took on the task of raising Medusa.
And how could anyone have prepared Sthenno for the change it had caused? She did not know where to site the pain she felt; she resented feeling it at all. But somewhere in her body was a strange new ache, which she eventually concluded was fear. Fear! In a Gorgon! The idea was absurd, infuriating. But that was what it was; she could not keep pretending to herself it was anything else. She lived with this throbbing, this constant nagging twinge that Medusa might not be safe. So not only was she – a Gorgon – experiencing fear, but she was feeling it on behalf of another Gorgon who should be as impervious as she herself once had been. Euryale felt it too, though she was too ashamed to mention it. Sthenno could see the same fluttering anxiety in her sister that she saw in herself. No wonder Phorcys had deposited the baby with them. No sea god would want to feel so weakened. A shudder ran through Sthenno as she thought of what she had lost: the sweet sense of owning herself and her feelings, of having no concerns at all, or only the very mildest kind. All of this was gone, exchanged without warning for a cold, gripping panic whenever a child stumbled or hid or cried.
This, she knew, was love. And she felt it even though she did not want it.
Hera
Amid the lofty grey peaks of Mount Olympus, Hera could see that something was wrong. Zeus was irritable at the best of times, but he was not usually as malevolent as this. The king of the gods had stalked Olympus for days, threatening one deity after another for the most minor infractions. The rock beneath his feet had shuddered at his step, the pine trees lower down the mountain cowered together. Usually, Zeus could manage to be civil to Apollo and Artemis. And yet there had been the most spectacular argument between the three of them earlier. And over nothing, really: Apollo was playing his lyre, which was annoying, certainly, but hardly a novelty. And Zeus sometimes cared for music. Hera preferred silence to everyone fawning over the pristine archer, but unusually she hadn’t started the fight.
Apollo had been playing the instrument quietly, with only his sister cooing at his skill. He was, Hera thought, being quite tolerable. Then he had played a wrong note and Artemis had laughed. Rather winsomely, in Hera’s opinion, but when did Zeus ever mind that? And yet her husband had shouted with rage, had blasted one thunderbolt after another in their direction. They were so shocked, they didn’t even mock him for his atrocious aim. The columns supporting their lovely colonnades needed a little repair work, and the oak trees in the distance were briefly illuminated then blackened. The stench of burning leaves angered Zeus still further. He had been so furious that Hera almost delayed her revenge for the Metis affair.
Of course he had done as she hoped, and wiped the smug goddess from the face of the earth. But Hera resented that it had happened at all. It was not enough to have punished Metis, she needed to punish Zeus. And she knew one way to do that. Well, she smiled to herself as she stared at her reflection in a shallow pool and found nothing wanting, she knew countless ways to do that.
Hera and Zeus were ideally matched, at least in terms of their capacity to antagonize one another. There were days when she believed he could scarcely rise from his bed without seducing or raping someone. The time and effort it then took her to harass every goddess, woman or nymph he had molested? Well, it grew no less draining the more she did it. Quite the opposite, in fact. And on this occasion, she had decided Zeus’s punishment should fit his particular, habitual wrongdoing. He had impregnated Metis, even if the child, god or demi-god, had not appeared. Hera paused to consider the awful possibility that there was a bastard infant somewhere which she had failed to locate and persecute. No. Her large brown eyes gave the misleading impression of a sweet-natured creature. A deer, say, or a cow. But she was as sharp-eyed as any predator. She had missed nothing.
So, where was the child? It infuriated her that she didn’t know. But she could hardly ask him. And none of her usual sources of information （nymphs trying to keep on her good side, in case the worst should happen to them） had been able to give her an answer. She would puzzle it out. But first she would punish him.