The Wildside Book of Fantasy: 20 Great Tales of Fantasy by Fritz Leiber, Gene Wolfe, Robert E. Howard, Paul di Filippo, Lin Carter, Tanith Lee, Clark Ashton Smith, E. Hoffmann Price, Thomas Burnett Swann, Brian Stableford, John Gregory Betancourt, Brian McNaughton, Nina Kiriki Hoffman, Lawrence Watt-Evans, Clive Jackson, Darrell Schwetizer, Achmed Abdullah

sailed to Hesperia, when Egypt straddled the Nile like a golden sphinx, I lived, a queen, in Knossos. It was a time for queens, and for the goddess they served, the Great Mother. On Crete itself and in her far-flung colonies, it was the king who died to make the fields grow fertile, the queen who raised the sacrificial knife. Then came the men from the north, the yellow-haired conquerors, scornful of women, scorning the Goddess, bringing gods of their own, Zeus and Poseidon, Hades and haughty Apollo. Knossos itself fell to their ragged fleet. With the women of my court, I fled to Aeaea. Years passed. Tranquil years. Then they began to find us—lusting captains and swinish mariners, warriors and wanderers—and each in turn, except Odysseus, I met and charmed and enchanted as he deserved. Still they came, and once again I fled—this time to Libya. I lost one ship in a storm—the wreck you found—and built another and sailed at last to the Island of Oleanders. Men have tried to follow me. No man has found me—till now. My friends saw to that, the Harpies, the Sirens, the pygmies. Cruel and misshapen, yes, but loyal to me, loyal to the Goddess. Then you came. My pygmies watched you from the time you met the Harpies. Their jungle drums signaled your approach. At last you reached this island. ‘I will show him his dream,’ I thought. ‘I will show him death.’ But first, as I told you, I spoke with the boy:

    “I wish you no harm,” I said. “You may return to the sea.” He looked at me, frightened, but not for himself. I wanted to hold him, that helpless, motherless boy not yet a man, not yet a conqueror, with sea-green eyes and courage beyond his years.
    “Have you hurt my friend?” he asked.
    “Friend? He will leave you, my dear. He will come to me.”
    “No,” he said with absolute certainty. “No. He is Bear!”

    Were you really his friend, I asked myself, and therefore worthy to live? I came to you not as your dream but as in your heart you secretly wished me to be. The Corn Maiden. Most men dream of temptresses—and marry maidens. I thought that for me, you would scorn your friends. You have proved me wrong, and I am glad.”
    “The house of oleanders,” I said wistfully. “You never meant to build it at all.”
    “I am much too late for love. And so were you, dear Bear—I thought. All your life you have steered for the Isles of the Blest. But now, at last, you have chosen the dolphin and not the deep. Go to your friends and never regret your choice. I will send Astyanax after you.”
    “Circe,” I asked, “what are you really like? Maiden or enchantress?”
    “Let that be my secret. Think of me as the Maiden.”
    She clapped her hands. Pygmies sprang from the house and, silent as hunters stalking a lion, led me from the garden. “Bear,” she called.
    I turned and faced her. She smiled; hardly a woman she seemed—a girl, no more, with crocuses in her hair.
    “I could have loved you—once.”
    Above my head the palm trees swelled with dates, and under my sandalless feet, seashells crumbled a path which was somehow soft. At the edge of the bay the pygmies bowed and left me. My ship rode at anchor: bird of loss and bird of finding, of perilous ports and a memorable voyage. I loved the blue of her hull and her red furled sail, the cut of her timbers, the deck house, warm with wicker, and Tages, her wooden god; not because she went but because she was, and for those she carried with her.
    Then I heard tears. A young woman crouched on the sand at the edge of the water. Her bare body was whiter than amaranth. Circe’s hair was hyacinths; hers was sunflowers, rippling yellow petals. She cried hopelessly and did not hear me approach.
    I knelt beside her. “Why are you crying?” I asked.
    She looked at me, appalled, and covered her breasts with her arms. “Bear, Bear,” she sobbed. “She has shrunk me to ugliness and cast me onto the shore. My lovely flanks are hollowed and cupped till I