Capítulo 6 6

Enormous waves keep crashing against the hull of your ship, and you all scramble to keep yourselves tethered to the deck, or you'll be lost for good, drowned, feast for whatever lurks underneath the surface of this sea.

You can no longer see Poseidon, but you can feel his wrath. It batters your ship, soaks your hair and skin with salt water, fills your lungs until you can no longer breathe.

And when you are certain that this is your final hour, that your ship will surely sink this time, the storm abates at once, as suddenly as it started.

You find yourself on calm waters again. The clouds disperse and the sun shines above, slowly drying your skin, your hair, your clothes. Your crew right themselves one by one, timidly, reluctantly, as if unable to believe you made it out alive.

Then, you see.

"Oh no," you hear Circe say. "No no no no no."

At first, you mistake what you see around you for kelp floating just under the surface of the water. Pieces of a shipwreck, perhaps, or driftwood sculpted by the salt-laced craft of the sea.

But then your mind catches up to your eyes, and then you make out the sunken faces, the shriveled skin, the nibbled toes, the tangles of hair still attached to decaying scalps.

"Talk to me, Circe," you say to the sorceress, because she seems to know where you are, what it is that's going on.

"We're in the Sirens' land," she says. "Dreadful creatures–half women, half beasts. They call them the Binders, the Entanglers. These poor wretches were caught by their song. They say that the Sirens' song bestows perfect knowledge and intense pleasure. But this," she gestures at the pieces of humans floating all around you, as far as your eye can see, "this is the price you pay."

"How did they get to be this way?" Polyxena asks.

"They were regular women, once. Some goddess punished them for their poor choices..." She trails off. You both see Polyxena is about to launch into a long and impassioned discussion of what "regular women" are or do, and there is clearly no time for that. "I don't actually know the details," Circe hastens to add. "Only what my grandmother told me when I was growing up."

"Can't we just sail around them?" Ajax asks.

"No," says Circe. She points at a cluster of jagged rocks up ahead. "The currents here are such that any ship caught has to drift by their shores. If we try to go against them, we'll be crushed against those rocks."

Demodocus turns to you. "What are we going to do, Trahice?" he asks. "We've already survived so much. Perhaps our fortune has finally run out."