Stone Blind

by Natalie Haynes

Genres: Dragons & Mythical Creatures; Fairy Tales, Folk Tales, Legends & Mythology; Ancient

Synopsis

Longlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction 2023

This audio edition is read by the author, Natalie Haynes.

In Stone Blind, the instant Sunday Times bestseller, Natalie Haynes brings the infamous Medusa to life as you have never seen her before.

'Natalie Haynes energizes the melodrama of ancient Greek gods with a divine level of storyteller’s flair...Listeners who enjoy transformative retellings of Greek myths will find much to relish in this production.' - AudioFile

'Witty, gripping, ruthless' – Margaret Atwood via Twitter

'Beautiful and moving' – Neil Gaiman

‘So to mortal men, we are monsters. Because of our flight, our strength. They fear us, so they call us monsters’

Medusa is the sole mortal in a family of gods. Growing up with her Gorgon sisters, she begins to realize that she is the only one who experiences change, the only one who can be hurt.

When Poseidon commits an unforgiveable act against Medusa in the temple of Athene, the goddess takes her revenge where she can: on his victim. Medusa is changed forever – writhing snakes for hair and her gaze now turns any living creature to stone. She can look at nothing without destroying it.

Desperate to protect her beloved sisters, Medusa condemns herself to a life of shadows. Until Perseus embarks upon a quest to fetch the head of a Gorgon . . .

Release date: February 7, 2023

Publisher: HarperCollins

Print pages: 384

Sample

Panopeia

As far towards the evening sun as it is possible to travel, there is a place where the sea winds inland in a narrow twist. You are where Ethiopia meets Oceanos: the furthest land and the furthest sea. If you could fly above it, see it as the birds see it, this channel (which is not a river because it flows the wrong way, but you may see this as part of its magic), coils like a viper. You have flown past the Graiai, although you may not have noticed, as they keep to their cave to avoid stumbling on their rocky cliffs and falling into the wild sea. Would they survive such a fall? Of course: they are immortal. But even a god doesn’t want to be battered between the waves and the rocks for all eternity.

You have also sped past the home of the Gorgons, who live not so very far from the Graiai, their sisters. I call them sisters, but they have never met. They are connected – though they do not know, or have long forgotten – by the air and the sea. And now, also by you.

You’ll need to travel to other places too: Mount Olympus, of course. Libya, as it will come to be called by the Egyptians and later, the Greeks. An island named Seriphos. Perhaps this seems too daunting a journey. But the place you have found yourself means you are already at the end of the earth, so you’ll need to find your way back. You’re not far from the home of the Hesperides, but they won’t help you, I’m afraid, even if you could find them (which you can’t). So that means the Gorgons. It means Medusa.

 

Metis

Metis changed. If you had been able to see her in the moments before she realized the threat, you would have seen a woman. Tall, long-limbed, with thick dark hair plaited at the back. Her large eyes were ringed with kohl. There was a quickness in the way her gaze seemed to fall on everything at once: even when she was still, she was alert. And she had her defences, what goddess did not? But Metis was better prepared than most, even though she was not armed with arrows, like Artemis, or with thinly contained rage, like Hera.

And so when she sensed – rather than saw – that she was in danger, she changed into an eagle and flew high, the gentle south wind ruffling the feathers of her golden wings. But even with these sharp eyes, she could not see what it was that had made the short hairs pulling at the edge of her plait prickle when she was in human form. She circled in the air a few times, but nothing revealed itself to her and eventually she flew down and settled on the top of a cypress tree, curving her muscular neck in every direction, just in case. She perched there, thinking.

She dropped down from the high branches onto the sandy ground, her talons scratching small furrows in the dust. And then she was not an eagle any more. Her hooked beak retracted and her feathered legs disappeared beneath her. As one muscled body became another, only the intelligence in the slit of her eyes remained constant. Now she slithered over the stones, a brown zig-zag stripe along her dorsal scales, her belly the colour of pale sand. She flickered across the ground as quickly as she had flown through the sky. And as she paused beneath a large prickly pear, she pressed her body into the earth, trying to feel the source of unease that she had not been able to spot as an eagle. But even as the rats that lived on scraps from the nearby temple raced away from her, she could not feel the footsteps of the creature she should be fleeing. She wondered what to do next.

She stayed under the cactus for a long time, enjoying the heat of the ground, allowing her hooded eyes to move, but nothing else. She was almost invisible, she knew. She was faster than most other creatures, and her bite was venomous, devastating. She had nothing to fear. But still she did not feel safe. And she could not stay here, a snake for ever.

She uncurled herself from the base of the cactus, and moved into the shade of the cypresses. Suddenly she reared up, and transformed again. The zig-zag on her scales fractured and became spots, the scales themselves softening to a coarse fur. Ears sprouted, clawed feet appeared at the end of muscular legs. The panther was beautiful, swishing her tail to send the flies spinning. She moved slowly at first, sensing each individual stone beneath the pads of her paws. Again, she felt

Sthenno

Sthenno was not the older sister, because they didn’t think of time in that way. But she was the one who had been less horrified when the baby was left on the shore outside their cave. Euryale had been equal parts baffled and appalled: where had the child come from? What mortal would ever dare to approach the Gorgons’ lair to abandon it there? Sthenno had no answers to her questions, and for a while, they both stared at the creature and wondered what to do.

‘Could we eat it?’ asked Euryale. Sthenno thought for a moment.

‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I suppose we could. It is quite small, though.’ Her sister nodded glumly. ‘You can have it,’ Sthenno said. ‘I already . . .’ She didn’t need to finish. Her sister could see the pile of cattle bones lying beside her.

The sisters did not eat from hunger: Gorgons were immortal, they had no need for food. But their sharp tusks, their powerful wings, their strong legs: all were designed for the hunt. And if you were going to hunt, you might as well eat your kill. They looked at the baby again. It lay on its back in the sand, its head propped up on a tuft of grass. Sthenno did not need her sister to say the words out loud: it looked like a deeply unsatisfying kill. It wasn’t running away, it hadn’t even tried to hide in the longer grass.

‘Where could it have come from?’ Euryale asked again. She raised her huge head, her bulbous eyes searching the rocks above them. There was no sign of anyone.

‘It must have come from the water,’ Sthenno replied. ‘Mortals can’t find their way without divine assistance. And even if they could, they wouldn’t dare to come here. The baby was brought to us from the sea.’

Euryale nodded, beating her wings. She scanned the ocean in every direction. No vessel could have sailed out of sight in the time it had taken the two of them to find the baby. They had heard a sound and it had roused them and they had left the cave together. No ship, no swimmer could be invisible to them so quickly.

‘I don’t know,’ Sthenno said, hearing her sister’s thoughts. ‘But look.’ She pointed at the baby and now Euryale noticed the circle of damp sand beneath the child and the seaweed-strewn trail leading back to the water’s edge.

They sat in silence, thinking.

‘It couldn’t have been left there by . . .’ Euryale glanced at her sister, not wanting to feel stupid.

Sthenno shrugged her broad shoulders, her wings catching the edge of the breeze. ‘I don’t know who else could have done it,’ she replied. ‘It must have been Phorcys.’

Euryale’s bulging eyes widened. ‘Why would he do that?’ she asked. ‘Where would he have got a mortal child from? A shipwreck?’

The Gorgons knew very little about their father. An old god, he lived in the depths of the ocean with their mother, Ceto. They had many offspring besides Euryale and Sthenno: Scylla, a nymph with six dog heads and their six vicious mouths, who lived in a high cave over the sea from which she would appear to eat passing sailors. Proud Echidna, half-nymph, half-snake. The Graiai – three sisters who shared a single eye and a single tooth – who dwelt in a cave somewhere even the Gorgons would hesitate to go.

Sthenno and her sister were gradually closing in on the child. The sea whispered behind them. The baby had been left far above the tide’s reach. Sthenno pointed to the wet trail that led to it: there were paired indentations on either side.

Euryale nodded. ‘It was Father,’ she said. ‘Those are the marks of his claws, surely.’

As they drew nearer, Sthenno noticed that the child was sleeping on a messy pile of dead seaweed: had her father scooped it up to form a sort of bed? Everything she could see and everything she thought she knew were battling one another in her mind. The thought of Phorcys doing anything as – Sthenno hunted for the word – mortal as laying a baby in a handmade crib was impossible. And yet, here were the marks of his claws, each side of the wide path made by his fish tail. And there was the baby lying safely beyond the water, sleeping on a thick pile of translucent dead weeds. Like empty skins snakes left behind in the sand, she thought.

It was only when they were right on top of the child, and Euryale was eyeing it as an unwanted visitor and an undersized meal, that the two sisters understood that Phorcys had delivered it to them for a reason.

‘She has . . .’ Euryale dropped into a low crouch, tilting her head for a better view of the child’s shoulders. They could see only a little of her back through the seaweed, but her sister was right. The baby had wings.

* * *

It took the Gorgons a whole day to accept that they had acquired another sister, a mortal one. It took them several more days to learn not to kill her by accident.

‘Why is it crying?’ Euryale asked her sister, prodding the baby with her hand, talon curled carefully into her palm so she wouldn’t injure her.

Sthenno looked at her sister in alarm. ‘I don’t know,’ she said. ‘Who knows why mortals do anything?’ Both tried to think of mortals they might have seen behaving similarly, but neither could bring one to mind. In fact, they couldn’t remember seeing any human children, but Euryale suddenly thought of a cormorant’s nest in the rocks nearby. The cormorant had chicks, she told Sthenno, who nodded as though she remembered.

‘The chicks made a terrible noise,’ Euryale said. ‘And the mother fed them.’ Her wide mouth split into a grin. She flew a little way inland until she came to the nearest settlements. She flew back with a stolen sheep under each arm. ‘Milk,’ she said. ‘They give babies milk.’

And so even though they were goddesses, they learned to feed their sister. After a while, Sthenno found she couldn’t remember what their home had looked like without a small flock of curve-horned sheep scrambling over the rocky ground with ease. Even Euryale – who had once combed the skies searching for prey, seizing it in her mighty jaws and crunching its bones for the sheer pleasure of the sound – seemed to enjoy looking after them. One day, an eagle tried to pick off one of their lambs, and Euryale rose in the air to defend it. The eagle was too fast for her, and she returned empty-handed, a few of the bird’s feathers falling to the sand behind her. But still it did not dare to try again.

In the early days, Sthenno wondered if Phorcys might return to explain his behaviour or to bring a message from their mother, Ceto, but he never came. The two Gorgons felt differently about this: Euryale was proud that their parents had entrusted the strange mortal child to them to look after. Sthenno wondered if her father had left the child with them hoping they would fail. It was impossible for gods to look at mortals and not feel some revulsion. Sthenno loved her new sister as much as she loved Euryale. But she still had to repress a shudder when she caught sight of her sister’s horrifyingly small hands and feet, her revolting little fingernails. And yet, even if something had gone wrong with her birth, Medusa was a Gorgon too. And perhaps she would improve with time.

Because this was the next upsetting development. The baby kept changing: growing, shifting as they watched, like Proteus. No sooner had they adapted to some inexplicable feature of her than she developed a new one. ...