6.3 The Shetland Witch, or, Atropos Wants Her Shears Back

Zeus was no longer smiling. Klotho staggered as if she had been slapped, but she remained upright.

The god glowered. ‘This is why I called you here. You will agree. All of you will. Your services, your calling, are still required. But at my side. At my command. To serve my ends.’

‘I do not understand,’ Lakhesis began. ‘You have taken away our calling. Mine has gone. I can no longer measure the length of lives.’

‘Mine too,’ Atropos thought. ‘I have the shears, but I cannot feel them. I cannot use them. I don’t know how to hold them.’

Zeus held out a hand. With a gasp Atropos felt her shears pulled from her, from the place beside her heart where they were always kept. Suddenly they were in Zeus’s grasp.

Silver winked from between his huge fingers. The white bone handles were fragile in his heavy grip.

‘I have long wondered,’ he said, ‘how these work.’

Atropos watched his vast hands. The handles of the shears were heart-breakingly slender. She tensed at the thought of their breakage, as if a sliver of bone had run into her hand.

He looked closely at the blades. ‘These are made of a curious substance. Shining, and ragged. Sharp. Oh yes, very sharp. What is it?’

‘Stone,’ she said.

He considered.

‘A curious stone. Smoother than flint. Blacker than night.’

She said nothing.

Then Zeus suddenly drew a breath, as if surprised.

‘The blade that cuts the thread of life is sharp,’ he said.

Silver drops were welling up from the slice in his finger. He watched with calm interest as the wound sealed itself without a scar.

‘His ichor dries in the air like a web,’ Atropos thought. ‘He is like a slug, his vast body supported by stuff that disappears in sunlight.’

She felt ill. Voices were crowding around her.

‘Close the shears, O Zeus,’ said Klotho, unruffled and serene. ‘The dying are calling for their threads to be cut.’

When the shears had opened Atropos had begun to hear the voices in her head. Now, already, there were too many. They were a dam bursting, a vast release of pent-up lives flooding over her, keening to be released. Shrieks hung in her ears, and her arms moved involuntarily as if to embrace the suffering bodies and to push their torment away.

Zeus continued to study the shears, holding them lightly in one hand while he fingered the blades and handles. They were a toy in his vast palm. He leaned against the arm of the great throne and looked lazily at the winking light on the silver handles, turning the shears idly with his fingers.

‘You will still use them, for me. Your great office has not ended,’ he said. ‘You will come to Olympus, and when I require you to take a life, you will cut it short.’

‘I will not,’ Atropos said.

Now she felt the slap, the lazy heft of his hand, and the stinging on her skin that felt like a burn. Her blood throbbed in her face. She stood up again.

He raised the shears. They looked wrong in his massive hand. Atropos felt suddenly as if majesty had been diminished, as if he had fallen from the throne in soiled robes with a drooling mouth.

‘I will show you,’ he said, ‘what I want -’

He opened the shears. And with that movement the shears moved again into that strange but familiar place where the dying hung, waiting for Atropos to make the cut. The screaming in her head made her groan aloud. She shuddered, feeling the lives caught between life and death, trapped in unending pain, closing in around her head like fire. Their shrieks were pressing in on her again, ringing in her ears. Men who were drowning sank perpetually, their lungs pressed tight unendingly without air, without merciful unconsciousness. Babies screamed under the crow’s sharp beak on the empty hillside. Women with knives in their bellies sank down on their knees, bleeding in agony, shrieking for the end that was withheld from them. Bodies writhed forever on deathbeds, and victims suffered under unending blows from robbers on lonely tracks. She could do nothing for them. Her hands twitched crazily, but she had no relief to give them.

Abruptly, Zeus made the cut. Then he drew in his breath with a slow gasp of devouring pleasure.

But the shears were crushed in his hand. Atropos could see that the blades were warped. She felt nothing. There was nothing left of herself to feel.

The screaming had stopped. The voices had all gone. The space where they had waited was as empty as if it had never been full. They would never wait there again.

‘Is it like that, every time?’ Zeus asked, greedily.

The three sisters looked at him.

He drew himself up in his chair. A strange light was in his eyes. ‘I will make it last longer this time. I will take another, to taste it.’ And he moved to open the shears again.

Atropos tried to explain, ‘No, there won’t be another time. You’ve broken the shears.’

He looked enraged. ‘They die under the shears! It has always been so.’

She looked at him. ‘You’ve broken the shears. You’ve broken the balance.’

‘You are lying.’

The coldness in his voice was a frozen roar.

‘You have released the dying, Zeus,’ Lakhesis said, her voice a little ragged. ‘They are lining up at the Styx now in hundreds of thousands and Charon is cursing you because there are too many.’

He looked at her, angry and without comprehension. Then suddenly he was standing at the doors at the far end of the temple.

‘You are still emissaries of my will. You will leave your grove, and come to Olympus, to cut the threads of life at my command. At my pleasure. Bring your tools.’

He was gone.

Ishabel was patting her arm. ‘Come out of it now, Hazel. We’re back.’

Hazel opened her eyes, and she tried to swallow. Her throat was dry. ‘I need a drink.’

Maggie was carefully pouring more tea all round, her face set.

‘We see now, of course,’ Ishabel said to Atropos. ‘It is what we saw under the stone, last night. So we understand why you are here.’

There were finger-tip indentations in the table top where Ishabel had been sitting. She ran her fingers over the wood and it slowly filled out again.

‘I have run from him for so long.’ Atropos lifted her hands in despair, and dropped them again on the table. ‘We must stop him.’

‘And then what?’ Maggie asked. ‘Do we have to kill him? Can a god be killed?’

Ishabel eyed her. ‘Maybe. We’ll see.’

Episode 6.4 will follow.

The Shetland Witch © Kate Macdonald 2024.

Please get in touch if you want to reproduce any part of this or any other published episode.

The Shetland Witch is a reader-supported publication. As well as taking out a free subscription for the novel, you can subscribe to the paid tier for In Achaea and Mrs Sinclair and the Haa, the two worldbuilding novellas that unpack and develop some aspects of the story and characters. In Achaea tells Atropos’s story: part of which is repeated here.