Read an extract from CIRCE by Madeline Miller

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I did not send my animals away anymore when men came.

I let them loll where they liked, around the garden, under my tables. It pleased me to see the men walk among them, trembling at their teeth and unnatural tameness. I did not pretend to be a mortal. I showed my lambent yellow eyes at every turn. None of it made a difference. I was alone and a woman, that was all that mattered.

I set my feasts before them, the meats and cheese, the fruits and fish. I set as well my largest bronze mixing bowl, filled to the brim with wine. They gulped and chewed, seized dripping cuts of mutton and dangled them down their throats. They poured and poured again, soaking their lips, slopping the table with red. Bits of barley and herbs stuck to their lips. The bowl is empty, they would say to me. Fill it. Add more honey this time, the vintage has a bitter tang.

Of course, I said.

The edge came off their hunger. They began to look around. I saw them notice the marble floors, the platters, the fine weave of my clothes. They smirked. If this was what I dared to show them, imagine what might be hiding in the back.

‘Mistress?’ the leader would say. ‘Do not tell me that such a beauty as yourself dwells all alone?’

‘Oh yes,’ I would answer. ‘Quite alone.’

He would smile, he could not help it. There was never any fear in him. Why should there be? He had already noted for himself that there was no man’s cloak hanging by the door, no hunter’s bow, no shepherd’s staff. No sign of brothers or fathers or sons, no vengeance that would follow after. If I were valuable to anyone, I would not be allowed to live alone.

‘I’m sorry to hear it,’ he said.

The bench would scrape, and he would stand. The men watched with bright eyes. They wanted the freeze, the flinch, the begging that would come.

It was my favourite moment, seeing them frown and try to understand why I wasn’t afraid. In their bodies I could feel my herbs like strings waiting to be plucked. I savoured their confusion, their dawning fear. Then I plucked them.

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Their backs bent, forcing them onto hands and knees, faces bloating like drowned corpses. They thrashed and the benches turned over, wine splattered the floor. Their screams broke into squeals.

I am certain it hurt.

I kept the leader for last, so he could watch. He shrank, pressed against the wall. Please. Spare me, spare me, spare me.

No, I would say. Oh, no.

When it was over it remained only to drive them out to the pen.

I raised my staff of ash wood and they ran. The gate closed after them and they pressed back against the posts, their piggy eyes still wet with the last of their human tears.

My nymphs said not a word, though I thought they watched sometimes through the crack of the door.

‘Mistress Circe, another ship. Shall we go back to our room?’

‘Please. And pull out the wine for me before you go.’

From one task to another I went, weaving, working, slopping my pigs, crossing and recrossing the isle. I moved straight-backed, as if a great brimming bowl rested in my hands. The dark liquid rippled as I walked, always at the point of overflow, yet never flowing. Only if I stopped, if I lay down, did I feel it begin to bleed.

Brides, nymphs were called, but that is not really how the world saw us. We were an endless feast laid out upon a table, beautiful and renewing. And so very bad at getting away.

The rails of my sty cracked with age and use. From time to time the wood buckled and a pig escaped. Most often, he would throw himself from the cliffs. The seabirds were grateful. They seemed to come from half the world away to feast on the plump bones. I would stand watching as they stripped the fat and sinew. The small pink scrap of tail-skin dangled from one of their beaks like a worm.

If it were a man, I wondered if I would pity him. But it was not a man.

When I passed back by the pen, his friends would stare at me with pleading faces. They moaned and squealed, and pressed their snouts to the earth. We are sorry, we are sorry.

Sorry you were caught, I said. Sorry that you thought I was weak, but you were wrong.

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On my bed, the lions rested their chins on my stomach. I pushed them off. I rose and walked again.

He asked me once, why pigs. We were seated before my hearth, in our usual chairs. He liked the one draped in cowhide, with silver inlaid in its carvings. Sometimes he would rub the scrolling absently beneath his thumb.

‘Why not?’ I said.

He gave me a bare smile. ‘I mean it, I would like to know.’

I knew he meant it. He was not a pious man, but the seeking out of things hidden, this was his highest worship.

There were answers in me. I felt them, buried deep as last year’s bulbs, growing fat. Their roots tangled with those moments I had spent against the wall, when my lions were gone and my spells shut up inside me, and my pigs screamed in the yard.

After I changed a crew, I would watch them scrabbling and crying in the sty, falling over each other, stupid with their horror.

They hated it all, their newly voluptuous flesh, their delicate split trotters, their swollen bellies dragging in the earth’s muck. It was a humiliation, a debasement. They were sick with longing for their hands, those appendages men use to mitigate the world.

Come, I would say to them, it’s not that bad. You should appreciate a pig’s advantages. Mud-slick and swift, they are hard to catch.

Low to the ground, they cannot easily be knocked over. They are not like dogs, they do not need your love. They can thrive anywhere, on anything, scraps and trash. They look witless and dull, which lulls their enemies, but they are clever. They will remember your face.

They never listened. The truth is, men make terrible pigs.

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