He was a striking young man with long, curly blonde hair and wide-set, gray eyes – eyes so light that they almost lacked color, or, one might say, they always reflected the color of the object they were looking at.
When Narcissus’s eyes looked at the sky, they were a passionate blue. When clouds passed over, or when it rained, they dulled to gray.
One day, washing his face above a wooden bucket outside his house in the seaside village of Mimas, they were as brown as the bottom when he caught the reflection of himself in the water. He froze, looking at his mirror image. His blonde hair fell around his face toward the rim of the bucket. The reflection looked like the sun: round cheeks, large eyes, a bright, clean face surrounded by beams of yellow hair.
His mother, Liniope, noticed him standing there, fixated. “Narcissus,” she said. “Look up at me.”
He didn’t move. Had he heard her? He was still bent over the bucket, staring down.
She reached into the water, splashed it into his face, and handed him a cloth to dry off. “There must be some enchantment,” she told him, afraid lest the boy’s own mind be the thing that had frozen him there.
The boy looked away, dried himself off, and smiled at his mother. That evening she cut his blonde locks.
“Get up, Narcissus, the fishing fleet returns today.” Liniope shook her son and walked over to the hearth, where she knelt, blowing the embers to burning coals.
“They return today?” the boy repeated, wiping sleep from his eyes. He smiled. “Father is with them.”
He picked up the wooden bucket and left the house to go to the spring. It was dawn, yet there were already neighbors in the streets, preparing – like Narcissus – for the return of the fleet from a week’s fishing in the Aegean.
The day was clear and cool. As they approached the Mimas shoreline, two boats had already been spotted on the horizon. The clear sea waters lapped softly on the rocky shore. The bay shimmered: an array of greens, purples and – where shoals lurked just below the surface – dark browns.
The ship of Narcissus’s father, Ctephissus, was the fourth to appear in view. The boy ran up and down the beach, waving his arms, dancing with excitement. His eyes were sea-green now: joyful, exulting. The first boats had beached, and the fishermen were unloading their catch.
He stopped along the beach. The water around his father’s boat was brown. A loud crunch sounded offshore. The heavily laden boat of Ctephissus had veered off course and had struck a shoal a few hundred meters from shore.
The fishermen abandoned ship. The waters around them teemed with scaly fins. Several of the men began swimming toward the beach where the Mimasians called to them.
Narcissus’s father splashed desperately above the sinking boat, struggling with nets that held him. He broke free and swam toward the shore. He was about halfway to the beach when he slowed. His head bobbed in the water, and he wore a look of desperation.
Narcissus ran into the water, his eyes wide with fright. He couldn’t swim. He couldn’t move. He met his father’s eyes, and he called to him, “Come home, father!” Someone behind him called for a rescue boat.
Ctephissus leaned forward in the water and moved slowly toward the shore.
He was barely swimming.
He was really sinking.
One hundred meters from shore, he stopped moving and rested face-down in the water.
He didn’t look up again.
A half hour later, low waves pushed his body into the shallows where Narcissus and Liniope waited. They dragged it to shore and began a death wail.
“A naiad pulled the boat off course.” Liniope paused her work at the loom and looked out the window toward the sea, her eyes squinting and her lips pursed. “Your father and his men know every rock on this coastline, and yet the boat crashed and sank. That’s the only explanation.”
Narcissus looked up. “A naiad?” he asked. Then he repeated, “What is a naiad?”
“A spirit of the waters,” his mother replied. “Mostly they mind their own business, but they can be vengeful. They lure sailors off course or push ships onto the rocks. I always told Ctephissus to leave the naiads alone.”
She walked to the door and looked outside. Her eyes scanned the street toward the shore, hoping Ctephissus would return. “Did he fall for the tricks of one – or was it another fisherman they were after?”
“There’s no such thing as mermaids – or naiads, as you call them,” scoffed a neighbor woman who had come to help Liniope with the weaving. “Stop filling your boy’s head with superstitions.”
“Something grabbed that boat and forced it off course–”
“A current in the sea,” came the answer. “Or a sailor asleep at the tiller.”
“You saw the slosh of the naiads’ fins as they sank the boat.”
“Fish splashing free of the nets.”
“It’s a curse, I tell you Ctephissus had a curse on him.” Liniope reached up and tapped a blue, glass eye that hung in the middle of the hut. It swung sadly back and forth, the eye rotated from side to side as it swung, scanning all sides of the room.
“Something hated father,” Narcissus said. “He was fine. He was swimming. And then he was gone.”
“The sea hated him.” His mother sobbed. “The sea.”
“I hate the sea,” Narcissus said, eyes still dark with mourning. “Not just naiads. It has sharks and crabs with pinchy claws … and monsters. Why, two years ago, a wave rose out of the sea and destroyed half of Mimas. Now the waters have taken my father.”
“I understand, son. But what will you do? Your father was a fisherman. So was your grandfather. The sea takes, and the sea gives life to our town of Mimas.”
“I will go to the hills. I will be a hunter.”
“Beware the naiads, my son. They linger near waters – even those you’ll find in the hills.”
Over the next few weeks, Narcissus bartered the family’s remaining nets and sold his father’s share in another fishing boat.
When he bade Liniope goodbye, he carried a sturdy bow and a quiver full of bronze-tipped arrows. A sturdy leather bag carried arrowheads, knives and enough gear to last a month in the hills from which he would learn his living hereafter.
His eyes were gray with farewell – two round storm clouds above a sunny, wide smile. He reached out to give his mother a last hug.
“Wait a minute,” she told him. She took a pair of shears and clipped his blonde hair, grown long again, close to his handsome head.
As the spring days bloomed the landscape, Narcissus learned the ways of wildlife, and he found the best hunting near the high, mountain pools that collected spring water and held it year-round. Heeding his mother’s warning about naiads, and careful not to get too close, he would wait nearby until a thirsty boar or shy deer approached to drink. When they bent over the pool, he would strike.
Narcissus was tracking a deer in the north of the peninsula when he met the girl. She stepped into the path between him and his prey. When he saw her, his grip on his bowstring slackened. His eyelids rose from the squint of the hunter to the gaze of the beguiled
.She was a girl of the highlands: wild, with uncut, untamed, unwashed auburn-red hair and clothes made of furs.
“H-hello,” Narcissus stammered.
She smiled. She did not approach. She stood in the path like a doe, her eyes fixed on his, her legs twitching, ready to turn and rush into the undergrowth at the first sign of danger. “Hello,” she repeated.
“You surprised me,” he said.
“You surprised me,” she repeated. Her voice was feral: her vowels round and unrefined, her consonants clunky, harsh.
“I am hunting,” Narcissus said. “What are you doing?”
The girl tried to mouth the words before she said them. “Wh- what are you doing?” She paused and put a finger to her lips, trying to find the next words. She smiled, bright as an Aegean sunset. “I want to pick flowers. They grow at the top.” She pointed to the ridge above them.
He followed, intrigued by this young woman of the wild. They scurried up a steep cliff, following a trail known to the girl. At the top, they found a field of paperwhite daffodils, and they sat together, shaded by high, gray cliffs.
The girl was named Echo. Her father was a tin miner deep in the hills, and Narcissus was one of the first people she had ever met. She loved the words he used – she had never had anyone to talk to, so she often repeated what he said, adding her own, subtle responses to his words through pauses and mispronunciations.
Narcissus loved Echo’s words. They were often his words, yet they seemed new to him. Beautiful.
He had felt so awkward in the hills, this boy from the sandy seashore. Then Echo had spoken, and he had found his footing on the rocky mountain paths.
He followed her to secret mountain glades where waterfalls tumbled into mountain pools – he was careful to never get too close to the water. He directed Echo with his words, and she helped with the hunt and processed the game that he caught. They had free time now, such was the success of their partnership, and they spent it in the soft meadows that lay between the rocky hills and the seashore.
As winter approached, Narcissus grabbed Echo’s hand as they sat close to a fire of thorn branches. “The days are growing shorter. Colder. I want to return to the seaside for the winter.”
Echo looked at the place where the valley widened and fell towards the sea. “You want to return to the sea?” she asked. “I thought you hated it there. Your father died.”
“It will be warmer there,” Narcissus replied. He squeezed her hand. “I wish to see my family and spend the season with them. I want you to return with me.”
“With you? To the sea?” Echo paled. “It is never silent there, not like here. You said the sea whispers constantly, and the gulls cry day and night. I do not wish to go.”
Narcissus frowned. “You must go. In the same way you taught me to live among the hills, I want to show you how I live beside the sea.”
Echo untied the knot of their joined hands. “I will not go. I will stay in the hills.”
Narcissus rose and began stuffing his possessions into his hunting bag. Echo watched him. For twenty minutes he ignored her.
When he returned to the fire, he looked at her again. “You must go to the sea with me. If you don’t, I…” He lowered his eyebrows and set his jaw. “I will never speak to you again!”
Three days later Narcissus returned to Mimas.
Echo followed.
They took a path that wound its way down from the hilltops to a plateau that overlooked the coast. There a gorge plunged straight to the sea. They followed the gorge, scaling some steep waterfalls until they were at the shore. They followed the shoreline southward until they reached Mimas.
As Echo walked with Narcissus into the village, people gaped at her appearance. Who was this wild girl who held the hand of the heartbroken boy? Her hair. Her clothes contained no woven cloth – only skins.
Liniope met Narcissus at the door to their hut. “Who is this?” she demanded.
Narcissus smiled, and his sincere smile warmed his mother’s heart. “This is Echo,” he said. “She is my friend. We go together.”
“We go together,” Echo repeated. She smiled. It was the purest, whitest feature on her dirty, freckled face. “And we will stay together.”
Liniope’s face set into a stern frown. “Not in this house you won’t.” She looked at Narcissus, who was unpacking his hunting bag. “Son, come inside. I want to talk with you.”
Echo waited outside in the street as words slipped through the thatched walls of the hut. “She’s dirty,” Liniope said. She didn’t lower her voice. “Why did you bring home a girl so dirty?”
“She’s beautiful, mother,” came the reply. “I couldn’t leave her in the hills.”
“She got no manners, no common sense.”
“Look at these skins, all this extra meat. We will eat well this winter. I bring months worth of meat and warm skins for the cold nights. I must have what I want, and I want Echo to stay with us.”
Liniope walked to the corner of the room, picked up the brown bucket, and carried it to Echo, who was still waiting to come in. She took the girl’s bag, handed her the bucket, and asked her to fill it at the well at the end of the street.
Liniope turned and addressed her son. “She can’t stay.”
“She will stay,” Narcissus answered. “I must have her here with me.”
“Narcissus, you’re a beautiful boy. Can’t you see?” She reached out and stroked his dirty, blond locks, grown long over the summer and autumn.
“I understand what you mean when Echo looks at me,” he said. “I am beautiful.”
“That’s not what I meant.”
“She seems different in a seaside town like Mimas,” he continued. “She’s a girl from the hills. She’s never felt a wave grab her feet and try to pull her away – she’s never tasted fish.” He looked past his mother. Echo was returning from the well, struggling to carry the full bucket. “She will,” he added. “With me, she will.”
Echo approached the door, both hands gripping the bucket. “Could someone help?”
Narcissus looked at his mother. She didn’t move. “It’s open,” he said.
There were four bumps low on the door before it slid open. Echo’s face was flushed. She stood in the door, holding the bucket and looking questioningly at Narcissus
Liniope stood, took the bucket from the girl, and placed it on a table at the back. “Wash up,” she told the girl. “We’ll eat in a few minutes.”
Narcissus took the bucket and placed it on a table near the window, and Echo went first. She bent down over the bucket and caught her reflection there: the bright, brown eyes, the hair falling around her face, a dark face – “dirty” Liniope had called it. Strange, she thought. Narcissus had called her “beautiful.”
She splashed water on her face, wiped behind her ears and across the base of her throat. The water cleansed her. A new girl looked up from the wash bucket, the reflection dulled by the dirt from Echo’s face.
She straightened and looked across the room. Bright, red cheeks smiled at Narcissus and his mother now. She picked up an apron and moved to help Liniope with the preparations.
An hour later, with the meat stew warmed, Echo turned to look for Narcissus. He had hardly moved since she and Liniope had started supper preparation. He was bent over the water bucket, his long, golden locks draped like a curtain. “Narcissus,” Echo called. “Narcissus!”
Liniope brushed past her, reached into the bucket and splashed her son’s face. “Meal’s ready,” she grunted. To Echo she rolled her eyes and added, “An hour at the wash bucket, and his face still isn’t clean.”
Narcissus just stood silent, his eyes brown and wide with shock. He sat down and ate quietly, his mind elsewhere. That night, as he and Echo lay together, he felt rigid in her arms, unfeeling, cold.
The next morning when he woke, his eyes were gray again. They smiled at Echo and her eyes – always brown – smiled back.
On a cold, rainy evening, as they huddled inside the house together, eating winter stew, Echo spoke of her own accord. “It will soon be solstice,” she observed.
“Solstice?” Narcissus asked.
“The longest night of winter,” Echo added. “I want to see my father. I wish to spend solstice with him.”
“You must stay with me,” Narcissus said. “Why would you wish to see your father?”
“He is alone.”
“You never saw him after you met me.”
Echo was silent.
“I told you not to see him.”
When Echo looked up, she focused on Liniope. She couldn’t meet Narcissus’ glare.
“We were near his camp several times.” She paused, her voice just above a whisper. “I slipped away to see him.”
Narcissus threw his bowl. Stew splattered and oozed down the wall. “You did what?”
“He knows about you.”
Narcissus’s face was red, his breathing heavy. His mother looked anxiously from Echo to her son.
Echo spoke – louder, firmer. “I will go to my father, Narcissus. I will go for the solstice, and I will rejoin you in the hills when spring comes.”
“You will go.” Narcissus took a deep breath. “You will go, all right. And you will leave this house now!”
Echo reached for a pitcher of water on the table, picked it up, and hurled the water into her lover’s face.
His wide eyes blinked, but his appearance didn’t change – not like the other time she had seen Liniope splash him back to himself.
“All right,” she said. “I will go...”
She looked around, but she had nothing to take with her. She still wore her sleeveless summer dress. She took a quilt and wrapped herself. She advanced to the door and took a final look back at Narcissus and Liniope.
“I will go now.”
The door closed, and Narcissus wiped the water from his face, his eyes were red-brown: the color of anger, embarrassment, and shame.
One month later Narcissus shuffled out of Mimas, his hunting bag over his shoulder, his blonde locks tucked under a knit cap. He had been to the shore that morning, remembering his father.
Waiting at the top of the first low ridge was Echo. She had bathed, and her auburn hair had been combed, pulled back, and tied in a daffodil chain. She wore a long, green dress.
Narcissus’s mouth was set with a frown. He marched past without casting a second glance at Echo.
“Hello?” she called after him, “Did I surprise you?”
She rushed to catch up to him. “Are you hunting?”
Narcissus didn’t answer. He held out his bow between them and kept marching toward the mountain.
She took off her daffodil crown and threw it in his path. “Oops,” she called flirtatiously, “could you give me….”
He trod on the yellow blooms, grinding them into the mud.
Echo gasped. “Please answer me, Narcissus. Please.”
Narcissus raced down the hill in stony silence.
The sound of a deep wail chased him into the valley. It rose in pitch, slowly, until it became a scream. He climbed the far hillside, slipped, and fell backwards into a shrub of holly oak. Looking back at the far hilltop, he could see Echo, her wild hair loosed, silhouetted in the rising sun.
“Just speak to me!” she screamed.
“Speak to me! Speak to me! Speak to me!” Narcissus froze to the spot. The words seemed to come from everywhere – the valley, the far cliffs, everywhere. The three words surrounded him. They attacked from every direction.
He looked back. The figure at the top of the hill – the girl he had loved – tore her new, green dress and fell to her knees, weeping. The voice on the hill fell to a rasp and went out.
At the moment Echo’s voice broke, her cry was heard by another. The goddess, Nemesis, on her way back to Smyrna from a visit to Olympos, listened to the broken-hearted girl and watched the beautiful boy slinking through the brush towards the creek. And the goddess, who brings the mighty low and raises the meek, swore to wreak vengeance.
Narcissus never saw Echo again. He never quit hearing her voice.
“Speak to me!” The only place he could escape the words was by the sea, her voice drowned by the roar of waves and the evil hum of naiads waiting offshore to drown him as they had drowned his father. He raced madly from the hills to the sea and back.
He returned to a mountain glade where he had killed his first boar. He waited three days. There was no sign of game, no sign of life. Not even a sparrow entered the area as he waited.
The scream, he thought. Echo scared the animals away.
“Speak to me!” If only he had. He remembered their treks together the previous summer, the easy hunting, the free hours spent together. “Enchantment,” his mother had called it.
Narcissus climbed out of the glade and followed the stream to a narrow canyon. A smaller pool lay above a trickling waterfall. He hoped to find game there.
As he started to climb, he heard a sound behind him. The tread of a creature, he thought. His hunting senses were on full alert.
There was no second sound.
“Hello?” he called out.
“Hello - hello -lo - lo” came the reply.
“Is someone there?” he said.
“Someone there - omeone there - one there” was all that came back.
“Echo!”
“Echo - echo - cho -oh.”
Narcissus pounded the rock wall with his fists until they bled. Now the tears came. “Echo,” he called again, and the name resounded softer and softer until he repeated it again and it filled the canyon with her name – her presence.
“Echo, speak to me.” He had said it. She had said it back. She spoke only in answers.
He hunted the hills for three more weeks. He hunted in vain: no boar, no deer, no rabbit, not even a lizard could be found on the entire Karaburun Peninsula. He decided to return home. His hair had grown long and golden in the spring sunshine.
Tired, hungry, and very, very thirsty, he crested a last low hill and looked down on the village of Mimas and the sea beyond. His eyes were blue-green with thoughts of home. He thought of his father, the horrible crash, and the unerasable sight of him sinking into the calm, clear waters of the sea.
Narcissus stood, lonely and unseen, at the place where he had last seen Echo, her “speak to me” still ringing in his ears.
Just below the hilltop, he passed through an olive grove. The sound of a gurgling spring reached his ears. As he approached, a fawn, drinking at the pool below the spring, looked up at him, locking its eyes on his. Narcissus reached down for his bow, but when he looked up again, the fawn was gone, ripples on the surface of the pool were the only sign of its presence there.
Narcissus threw down his bow and his bag. Usually he steered clear of pools, filling his waterskin in fast-running water. Alone, unseen, the hunter strode to the pool, knelt and leaned over the water.
Two eyes looked back at him, eyes he hadn’t seen before. They looked so weary. Lost. His past, his soul, his longings were captured in the gaze that looked back at him from below the water.
Narcissus struck the water, and the face vanished. “No!” he cried out.
“No - no - oh” echoed from the vale just above the spring..
He cupped his hands, bent over the pool to drink. As they went below the water, Narcissus felt a tug. He looked into the water. Were there four hands in the water – his and two more – or was it the reflection?
He strained and pulled his hands back. The water let go and his own hands broke free, splashing his face.
The image was there in the water: a beautiful face. His face. Echo’s face. Someone’s. The first living face he had seen in four weeks in the hills. It smiled back at him.
The spring whispered to his right. Words. The words his father had heard just before the boat crashed:
There is neither when nor then,
There is only now.
He bent toward the pool, closer to the longing urgency in those eyes. "There is only now," he heard again, closer this time, welling in his chest like his heartbeat.
His hair fell around the sides of his head. As he bent his neck closer to the surface, those eyes came closer to his.
The fawn emerged from the underbrush, its eyes – the eyes of Nemesis – narrowed on its prey.
Narcissus’s hair touched the water, surrounding his face. He brought his lips together, and the surface of the water kissed them back.
His face entered the water.
It sank.
It never left
The next autumn, villagers entered the grove to pick olives. They found there the remains of Narcissus next to the pool, the head in the water, surrounded by long, blonde locks. His beautiful face had somehow been preserved below the surface, the eyes still open, dappled gray-green like the rocks on the bottom of the pool, frozen wide with wonder, pinched at the sides with regret.
They found a yellow flower growing on the other side of the little pool – its head bent over the water as if it, too, was looking down – and they named it Narcissus, after the boy who had drowned.
Far away, a few leagues from the city of Smyrna, a place few from Mimas ever ventured, a new priestess entered the Temple of Nemesis on the slope of Mount Pagos. Visitors noticed her long, wild auburn hair, but she spoke to no one. When asked to speak, she touched her throat and mouthed soundless words.
Legends grew around the sad boy and his lost companion, Echo. Those legends endure today, even as Narcissus’s spring still flows in the hills above Mimas (shaded by a stone grotto, lest another vain person see their reflection and share Narcissus’ fate).
Echo still haunts the hills of the Karaburun Peninsula. And though no one has seen her, they continue to call her name wherever there is wild beauty and the embrace of the mountains. And – always – she answers back.
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