The Mask of Circe

by Henry Kuttner

  “Jason, breaker of vows, murderer and thief—my mother Hecate commands me and I hate you! But Jason, look at me. Jason, who are you? Jason, when these spells of madness are on you and another man looks out of your eyes—Jason, who is that man?”

  Who could it be but myself, Jason of Iolcus? I felt the surge of long-remembered anger as I met her searching gaze. Circe, enchantress, lovely and beloved, why do you deny me? Why do you cling to me only to demand an answer I cannot give you? Forget this dream of yours and thrust me back no longer. There is no one here but Jason, who desires you.

  “Jason, who is that man I glimpse in the moments of your madness, when you are no longer Jason?”

  Rage swept over me again—strangling rage that this woman of all women should resist the irresistible Argonaut, this one woman whom I desired more strongly because she would not embrace me like other women, but held me off and cried out her answerless question over and over again. There is no woman alive or dead whom I would not put aside to follow my lovely ship, my Argo, my beautiful galley. But Circe, who will not have me, must learn not to deny Jason of jolcus!

  Madness? What was this madness she spoke of? How did she know about those shadow of dizzy bewilderment that could sweep now and again over the clouded mind of even the hero Jason, moments when the brain thickened in the skull and another man’s memories moved like madness through my own?

  Crash! My mind split with a thunder of the brain louder than a lightning-stroke. Pain danced in my skull shudderingly for one desperate moment, and I knew.

  I was Jason! I was Jay Seward! I was both men together! And I had for one terrible glimpse looked through the mind of Jason three thousand years dead, and through the cloud of his madness, and through a rift in the cloud.

  And seen, as in a sudden mirror—my own face!

  Then the rift closed. Then the memory faded. Jason was gone, leaving me half-empty and shaking with weakness in the solitude of my brain. But I knew a little more, a little clearer.

  So Jason, too, had been troubled as I was troubled, with the mysteries of a double mind. In his skull, as in mine, the double memories moved. How and why I did not know. Perhaps I would never know. But some inexorable bond linked us over the hundreds of generations, we two out of all the countless lives between us shared a single chain of the mind. He had not understood. How could he? To him these thoughts of my distant era must have seemed sheer insanity. To me, at least, the names of Jason and Argo and Circe were familiar. But as for him—no wonder rage and fear swept over him when the recollection was forced upon him unbidden.

  And Circe had known. Circe with her powers over magic and the mind—she alone, perhaps, had sensed the stirring of mystery in the thoughts of this man who desired her, this man she hated and had reason to hate. But this man who gave her at odd times glimpses of another man she did not hate. A man she did not hate at all!

  Panyr’s words came back to me. “Something strange happened between you. What was it that set Circe on fire for you? What was it made her hate Jason?”

  Could it be possible that the enchantress of three thousand years past had looked through Jason’s eyes as through a lens, and met mine and—No! It sounded incredible to say, “She loved me.” And yet could it be the only answer? What answer fitted better the puzzles that had confronted me in this world? Why else should she call me back?

  Only through Jason could she call. Only through her Mask and the priestesses of the Mask.

  Chapter VII

  Slave-Girl's Plea

  Music shrilled softly through the air, I came to myself with a jolt. I had not been here. I had stood with Jason in Circe’s palace, clasping her lovely, unresponsive body in my arms and trying in vain to evade her searching eyes. I had stood again in Hecate’s temple on Aeaea hearing the sweet voice calling me, “Jason, beloved!” But if my suspicion were right, it was not Jason she meant. She had no name to use except Jason, but the man she spoke to was—

  A soft hissing of breath sounded. I turned, to see that between two pillars the shroud of darkness had parted, and a glistening ebon face above a silver collar was watching me. It was the face of the little Nubian slave-girl. I saw her eyes shift as she glanced around the room. Then she slipped between the columns, soft-footed, and came toward me across the mossy carpet.

  “I was listening,” she said. “I heard your promise.” Oddly, she had changed. The servility was no longer in her voice nor the delicate impudence on her face. I looked at her more closely this time, seeing the fine modeling of her features, the tilt of her nose, the soft redness of her small mouth. Arrogance was on that face now, but it was no less a pretty face, and it did not look like the face of one who had for very long been a slave.

  I had no time for further thought on the matter, for the girl stepped back one step, braced herself on her bare feet, and swung up her silver-ringed arm. Her hand caught me flatly across the face.

  The crack of her blow was loud in the quiet room. Caught off balance, I fell back on the divan and sat there gaping up at her in utter amazement. In that instant a number of half-coherent thoughts raced through my mind.

  “She’s a messenger from Circe’s people,” I told myself. “She heard me promise—it was clever of them not to wait. Phrontis won’t expect to hear from them until he’s settled me in my new quarters. This was the time for them to speak now, fast, before he expects it. But why?”

  My cheek stung where that angry blow had caught it. I lowered the hand that had risen automatically to touch the spot. Then my mind stopped working altogether as I stared at my blackened palm.

  Moving like an automaton, I touched my cheek again and looked at the fresh smear that came off on my fingers.

  I looked at the girl. Her eyes were wide. She was looking in terror at my face. She turned up the palm that had struck me and we both stared at her streaked pink flesh where the moisture of the clenched hand had made that dark pigment run.

  Her eyes rose again to mine, stretched wide in fright and dismay. My arm shot out. I seized her wrist below the silver bracelet and rubbed the moist palm with mine. It turned whitely rosy beneath my touch.

  Still gripping her wrist, I drew the back of my hand across my own cheek, wiping away the dark paint her blow had left. Her eyes did not swerve from mine. She was breathing fast, but she did not speak a word.

  “How long were you going to wait before you told me?” I asked.

  She caught her breath. “I—I don’t know what you mean. I only—”

  “You heard my bargain with Phrontis,” I said harshly. “You came in to punish me if you could. What was the plan? Lead me out somewhere on a pretext of finding the Circe, and push me off the wall when you saw your chance?” I let her wait a moment, her eyes hoping desperately that I had finished, before I said deliberately, “Maybe you never did mean to tell me who you are.”

  She wrenched at her wrist futilely. “Let me go,” she said in an angry whisper. “I don’t know what you mean.”

  It was a gamble. I had nothing to lose by it, and a great deal to gain, and some instinct deeper than reason told me I was right.

  ‘You’re the young Circe,” I said.

  Her eyes searched mine frantically, hoping to find uncertainty there. The longer she delayed her denial, the surer I grew.

  I went on in a confident voice, “You couldn’t have escaped the sacrifice without help from inside the temple. That stands to reason. And if they haven’t found you in the city, for all their searching, the logical answer is that you weren’t there. You’ve been here under their noses all along—here with whoever it was that helped you from the first. The best hiding-place is the most dangerous, and you’ve found it. Who helped you?”

  She shook her turbaned head violently. “I’m not! it isn’t true! Oh, let me go—let me go!” Hysteria sounded in her voice, and I saw the tears beginning to gather along her lower lids.

  I said, “Careful! Remember that paint runs when it’s wet.”<
br />
  She paused in her struggle, looking at me uncertainly. “Does that matter now?” she asked, still in her desperate whisper. “Aren’t you going to give me up?”

  I hesitated. I’d promised Phrontis, yet—

  “Come over here,” I said. “Sit down. No, here!” I laughed and dropped to the sofa, pulled her down urgently so that she fell across my knees. It was a loverlike embrace I held her in, but my hand was firm upon her wrist. I knew if I once let her go I’d never see her again in a guise I could be so sure of recognizing. And I was not yet sure which side I meant to play on.

  “Don’t fight me—you’re all right,” I said. “Now we can talk without looking suspicious if Phrontis comes back. And we have a lot of talking to do, my girl. Circe—do I call you that? Or have you a name of your own?”

  “I—I’m Cyane,” she told me, leaning quite motionless in my arms now and looking up at me with steady, lustrous eyes, hazel like running water in the sun and ringed by lashes that cast a velvety shadow on her cheeks. I was trying to picture her without the dark body-paint and remembering Panyr’s words about her.

  “Cyane?” I repeated. “All right, tell me your story now, and do it fast before Phrontis comes. How did you escape the sacrifice? Who helped you? Is there someone here you can trust?”

  “Not you!” she said, a spark coming into the hazel eyes very near mine. “I—don’t know whom I can trust. I heard you promise Phrontis to betray me, and I—I came to you just now to beg your help, in spite of what you told the priest.”

  “You plead forcefully,” I said, rubbing my cheek.

  She turned her shoulder to me. “Well, I found I couldn’t stoop to that. Instead of going on my knees to you, the thought of it—that knowledge that you had sworn to betray me—very well! I slapped you! It’s been three days now in the temple, and I’ve had nearly—nearly all I can stand. I don’t care much what happens!”

  A tremor shook the slender, darkly painted body across my knee. She bit her soft underlip and drew a deep breath. “I’ll tell you, because I must. Maybe if you hear the story—but I’m not going to ask you to help me! It was one of the priests who set me free.”

  “Phrontis?” I asked her quickly.

  She shook her head. “I don’t know. In the temple, at the time of sacrifice, all priests look alike. And I was—frightened.”

  “Tell me.”

  “I was lying across the altar, under the gold cloth, waiting,” she said almost quietly, her eyes going unfocused as she looked back upon that terrifying memory. “I could hear them coming. There was music and singing. And then someone in a priest’s robes came out from behind the altar and unlocked the golden shackles that are chained to the altar. I was too dizzy to speak. He hurried me through a little door and into an anteroom, and a woman waited there with slave-trappings and a pot of paint. No one said anything.

  “Before the paint was dry on me I could hear through the wall the commotion when they found the altar empty. The priest slipped out. I think—” She hesitated. “No, I know he went to bring another girl for the sacrifice. A slave. They put my insigne on her and the word went out that I had died. But rumors move fast in a place like this.”

  “Since then I’ve had a room in the slave quarters. Eight of us tend these apartments, where the highest ranks among the priesthood live. The rumor went out that they were bringing a man from Aeaea and I came. I thought it might be someone smuggled in to help me. But when I listened—” She writhed in my arms so that she faced me fully, and her eyes were grave.

  “Tell me the truth,” she said. “When you made that promise, you meant to keep it.”

  I could have lied to her. I didn’t. “Yes,” I said quietly. “I meant to keep it.” I shifted her on my knee, taking a firmer grip on her wrist. “Tell me one thing more,” I said. “Who am I?”

  She shook her head, her gaze unswerving on my face. “I don’t know.”

  “How long did you listen to what Phrontis and I were saying?”

  “Only from your bargaining. I—I lost my head then. I’d counted so much on your coming here to help me. Perhaps if I’d pleaded with you instead of striking you—” She waited, but I didn’t answer. Sighing, she went on: “Well, there are those in the city who would help me if I could reach them, but how much they could do—I don’t know. That, perhaps, is what their war is about, though I’m not sure. And I must get free—I must! The mother-goddess needs me, and the Circe who rules now is too old to fight.”

  “And you? What could you do, if you were there again?”

  “On Aeaea, you mean?” she said, with dignity. “Myself, I could do little. But with the Mask of Circe, and the power of Hecate, I think I could face Apollo himself!”

  A little breeze of chill seemed to me to move briefly through the room as she spoke. There were powers in leash here at which I could only guess, even through Jasons memories. This girl knew more than I about too many things.

  I considered what she had said. An idea was beginning to take vague shape in my mind. “The city’s well guarded, is it?” I asked her.

  She gave me a grim little smile. “So well guarded that I was surprised when I thought even Hecate herself had managed to smuggle in an envoy to help me. There’s war between the gods. You can guess from that how closely Helios’ walls are watched.”

  “If I should decide to help you,” I said, “what chance have we of escaping?”

  I felt her slender body droop in my arms. “So little chance,” she told me, “that I might as well have died on Apollo’s altar. I was a fool to strike you. Even if you would, you couldn’t help me now. And you won’t. You promised Phrontis.”

  Yes, I had given my word to the priest, which might have been a mistake. I wasn’t sure now. It had been easy enough at the time, when I remembered how I was being pushed, pawnlike, about the board of a war-game here. But at this moment, holding the young Circe in my arms, watching her thick lashes shadow the eyes like sunny brook-water, it was a different matter entirely to think of giving her up to Phrontis and the altar.

  But I had to do one thing or the other. I had to make up my mind. I thought, Is there any hope of helping her? But there was none. I knew too little. Jason, whose memories moved so bewilderingly through my mind when I did not want them, had nothing to offer out of his age-old store of knowledge now in the hour when I needed his help most.

  I thought with sudden desperation, Give me the answer, Jason! Help me if you can! And deliberately I made my mind blank.

  There was—no Jason. There was, in reality, no subtle, untrustworthy ghost of the old hero hovering in my brain. Only his buried memories lay there, deep under incredibly many layers of superimposed lives. But between that age-old mind and mine so close an affinity existed that I could tap his memories, and he—strangely, magically, out of that past which was his future—had completed the time-cycle by tapping mine. Whether or not that was the true answer I did not know. I could only accept it and search with all my mind’s strength for the aid I needed.

  Dimly it began to come. The room faded around me. I locked my grip around Cyane’s wrist and waited…

  A word, a picture, swam uncertainly to light and submerged again. Fiercely I dredged after it. A glow, something Jason had fought for and won long ago. Something with a secret in it Jason could tell me, if I searched his memories deeply enough.

  Golden—gleaming—hanging on a strange tree in a strange, dangerous place—

  “The Fleece!” I heard my own voice saying in surprise. “The Golden Fleece!”

  A violent wrench at my hand startled me out of my daze. I heard a gasp and the thud of bare feet on the floor. I blinked in bewilderment at Cyane, my captive a moment before, now standing a dozen feet away and looking at me with wide, angry eyes.

  “Jason!” she whispered. Her teeth showed white against the darkness of her painted face in a grimace of amazement and revulsion. “You must be Jason! I might have guessed it! Who but Jason wo
uld choose so wrong a time to answer the summons of thousands of years!”

  I scrambled to my feet, the sweat of my remembering still cold upon me, my mind not yet steady as Jason’s memories ebbed away. Ebbed? Not wholly. There was anger in my brain to answer Cyane’s anger, and I think it was Jason who voiced a soundless cry to me.

  Catch her, you fool! Don’t let her get away!

  She must have seen something of the thought in my face, for she danced away from me backward as I stumbled toward her, my hands out.

  “Wait,” I said. “There’s something! I think I know a way.”

  She laughed scornfully. “Trust Jason? Medea trusted him—Creusa trusted him, and Queen Hypsipyle and how many others? But not Cyane!”

  I felt smooth words bubbling up in my mind like water in a fountain, soothing arguments, phrases bland as oil. But as I caught my breath to speak. the air shivered around us to the music of an unseen harp, and behind Cyane I saw the darkness between two pillars open like a rift in thunderclouds.

  “Cyane?” Phrontis’ voice said. “Who speaks of Cyane?”

  Tall and golden, he came through the darkness into the room. There were priests behind him, peering curiously across his shoulder. Cyane spun to look, then wheeled again, her eyes imploring me in the smooth dark face.

  It seemed to me that my mind turned over upon itself, spilling every crowding thought into utter confusion. Lightning-flashes of plot and counterplot darted through it. Phrontis’ eyes rested inquiringly upon mine.

  “This is Cyane,” I heard myself saying calmly. “The slave-girl here. Catch her—quick!”

  Chapter VIII

  Hecate Speaks

  I followed Phrontis down a golden corridor in silence. My mind was still in turmoil, but the foremost among the thoughts that seethed in it now was the prospect of surcease—soon—in another hour at most. Phrontis had promised me. For I followed him to the room where the ceremonies of freeing my mind from Jason’s would begin.