Stories last longer than men, stones than stories, stars than stones. But even our stars' nights are numbered, and with them will pass this patterned tale to a long-deceased earth.
Nightly, when I wake to think myself beworlded and find myself in heaven, I review the night I woke to think and find myself vice-versa. I'd been long lost, deserted, down and out in Libya; two decades past I'd overflown that country with the bloody Gorgon's head, and every drop that hit the dunes had turned to snake -- so I learned later: at twenty years and twenty kilometers high, how could I have known? Now there I was, sea-leveled, forty, parched and plucked, every grain in my molted sandals raising blisters, and beleaguered by the serpents of my past. It must have been that of all the gods in heaven, the two I'd never got along with put it to me: sandy Ammon, my mother-in-law's pet deity, who'd first sent Andromeda over the edge, and Sabazius the beer-god, who'd raised the roof in Argos till I raised him a temple. Just then I'd've swapped Mycenae for a cold draught and a spot of shade to dip it in; I even prayed for the rascals. Nothing doing. Couldn't think where I'd been or where was headed, lost track of me entirely, commenced hallucinating, wow. Somewhere back in my flying youth I'd read how to advertise help wanted when you're brought down: I stamped a whopping PERSEUS in the sand, forgot what I was about, writing sets your mind a-tramp; next thing I knew I'd printed PERSEUS LOVES ANDROMED half a kilometer across the dunes. Wound up in a depression with the three last letters; everything before them slipped my mind; not till I added USA was I high enough again to get the message, how I'd confused what I'd set out to clarify. I fried awhile longer on the dune-top, trying to care; I was a dying man: so what if my Mayday had grown through self-advertisement to an amphisbane graffito? But O I was a born reviser, and would die one: as I looked back on what I'd written, a fresh East breeze sprang from the right margin, behind, where I'd been aiming, and drifted the A I'd come to rest on. I took its cue, erased the whole name, got lost in a vipered space between object and verb, went on erasing, erasing all, talking to myself, crazy man: no more LOVES, no more LOVE, clean the slate altogether -- me too, take it off, all of it. But I'd forgot by that time who I was, re-lost in the second space, my first draft's first; I snaked as far as the subject's final S and, frothing, swooned, made myself after that seventh letter a mad dash --
"And that's all you remember?" asked Calyxa.
"That was it, till I woke up here in heaven, in the middle of the story of my life. Would it please you if I kissed your navel once again?"
"Take a chance!" I blushed and did. Here's how it was: some lost time since I'd died as I imagined with my name, I opened eyes upon a couch or altar, a velvet gold rectangle with murex-purple cushions, more or less centered in a marble chamber that unwound from my left-foot corner in a grand spiral like the triton-shell that Dedalus threaded for Cocalus, once about the bed and out of sight. Upon its walls curved graven scenes in low relief, each half again and more its predecessor's breadth, to the number of seven where the chamber wound from view -- which scenes, when I had come fully home to sense, I saw depicted alabasterly the several chapters of my youth, most pleasing to a couched eye. The first, no wider than the bed from whose sinistral foot it sprang, showed Mother Dana? brazen-towered by vain Acrisius my grandfather for contraceptive reasons, lest she get the son predestined to destroy et cetera; Granddad himself, with Grandmother Aganippe, stroked horses fondly in the court, unaware that up behind them Zeus in golden-showerhood rained in upon their frockless daughter, jackpotting her with me. A pillar divided this mural from the next, as it were on my port quarter: Acrisius had judged Mom's story counterfeit, called me his twin-brother's bastard, and set suckler and suckled adrift in a brassbound box; the scene itself was the beach of Cycladean Seriphos: there was young Dictys with his net; he'd fished us in, opened the chest, and stood agape at the sight of sweet-nursing Dana?, in mint condition despite her mal-de-mer. In the background was fairly copied the palace of Dictys's brother, King Polydectes. The third relief, a-beam of and as long as my altar-couch, was set in Samos: twenty years were passed with the fluted pillar; back in Seriphos the King lusted after Mother, and had rused my rash late-teenhood with a pledge to marry someone else instead if I'd contrive to bring him Medusa's head as a wedding gift.
"You're sure it was Zeus and not your uncle up in that tower?" I'd asked Dana? one last time -- for she'd admitted an early defloration by Proetus, Acrisius's twin.
"I was sixteen," she replied, "but I knew a slug from a shower of gold." My father, she reassured me, was a lap-deep drench of drachmae.
"And you don't want to marry King Polydectes?"
"Small change."
So, banking on Dictys to safekeep her, I'd set out for Samos on a tip from half-sister Athene, to learn about life from art: for represented in her temple murals there (and so reditto'd here in mine) were all three Gorgons -- snakehaired, swinetoothed, buzzardwinged, brassclawed -- whereof, as semiSis was pointing out, only the middle one, Medusa, was mortal, decapitable, and petrifacient. Already holding the adamantine sickle Hermes had lent me and Athene's polished shield, I stood listening, a handsome auditor I was then, to her hard instructions. Sword and shield, she said, would not suffice; one thing depended on another; just as Medusa was prerequisite to Mother's rescue, so to kill Medusa required not only the Athenian strategy of indirection but other gear: namely, Hermes's winged sandals to take me to Gorgonsville in far-off Hyperborea, Hades's helmet of invisibility to escape from the snake-girl sisters, and the magic kibisis to stow her head in lest she petrify all posthumously. But these accessories were in the care of Stygian nymphs whose location was known not even to my canny sister: only the grim gray Graeae could tell it, and they wouldn't.
My first task, then, clear-cut in the fourth panel, had been to hie me from Samos to Mount Atlas, where sat the crony trio on their thrones, facing outward back to back and shoulder shoulder in a mean triangle. Some way off from its near vertex (which happened to be between terrible Dino and Pemphredo the stinger), I hid behind a shrub of briar to reconnoiter and soon induced, concerning the single eye and tooth they shared, their normal mode of circulation. Right to left things went around, eye before tooth before nothing, in a kind of rhythm, as follows: Pemphredo, say, blind and mute, sat hands in lap while Dino, on her right, wore the eye just long enough to scan her sector and Enyo, on her left, the tooth just long enough to say "Nothing." Then with her right hand Pemphredo took the eye from Dino's left, clapped it in place, and scanned, while Dino with her right took tooth from Enyo's left, popped it in to say "Nothing," then passed it on to Pemphredo, who passed the eye around to Enyo, put in the tooth, and said "Nothing." Thus did report follow observation and meditation report, except that (as I learned some moments later) at the least alarum any gray lady could summon by a shoulder-tap what either other bore. For, having grasped the cycle, I moved closer in a cautious gyre, keeping ever abaft the eye, at the vertex between speaker and meditator; but when I rustled a pebble underfoot, then-blank Enyo, her right hand out for the eye from Pemphredo, whacked Dino into reverse and fetched the tooth as well! I lunged to her right, Pemphredoward, just as she clapped the organ in; by the time she was toothed to cry "Something!" Pemphredo had eared me at her feet and tapped Enyo for the eye, at the same time reaching right for the her-turn tooth. Dino, unable to reply that she'd returned the tooth to Enyo, swatted back both ways; twice-tapped Enyo got her hands crossed, giving Pemphredo the eye and Dino the tooth; I dived through thrones to the center; all clapped all; eye and tooth flipped round in countercircles but could be by none installed before doubly summoned. By deftly interposing at a certain moment my right hand between Dino's ditto and Enyo's left I short-stopped eye; no problem then, as Pemphredo made to gum home their grim incisor, simply to over-shoulder her and excise it. The panel showed me holding both triumphantly aloft while the grieving Graeae thwacked and flopped and croaked in vain, like crippled herons.
Its Stygian successor in my judgment was less successful, artistically speaking, for while it curved some thirteen meters round behind my bedhead to the Graeae's eight, both the task and its representation were much simpler: having learned from the furious trio where the Stygian Nymphs abode (perforce returning tooth for angry Pemphredo to speak with, but retaining eye by way of insurance against Gray-Lady-bites) it was simply a matter of going there, holdig my dose thus agaist the biserable sbell those girls gave off, ad collectig frob theb the helbet, wallet ad wigged saddles.
"What did they smell like?" asked Calyxa.
"Your opposite," I said. "But if, immortal that you are, you'd perspired through all eternity rank sweat here where I ab bost fod of kissig, dor ever washed id all that tibe --"
"I'm twenty-four," Calyxa said, "until next week. That feels okay."
But I couldn't tell her where took place that easy feat upon the wall, for just as Lethe's liquid is a general antidote to memory, the Styx-girls' stench proved specific against recollection of its source. All Pemphredo said was to shut my eyes and follow my nose, not opening the former till I was obliged to close the latter. No time at all till I had lapped the team of toolwardens there depicted and winged off, don't ask me whence.
"If she hasn't anyone to wash herself for her," primly declared Calyxa, "a girl should wash herself herself."
The penultimate panel, on my entire right hand, was most eventful and my favorite. Itself septuple in proportions similar to the whole's of which it was sixth episode, its first scene, Hyperborean, showed me holding aloft the Gorgon's dreadful head, which, catching her napping, I'd snuck in shielded to cut from her reflected neck; the second, Hesperidean, my petrifaction of inhospitable Atlas; the third, fourth, and fifth, all Joppan, respectively my backhand slaying of sea-beast Cetus, threatening Andromeda on the cliff; the post-rescuary nuptials, held over Cassiopeia's protest, whereat I'd recited to the wedding guests my history thus far; and the splendid battle in the banquet hall when my rival Phineus, who lusted after Andromeda as had Proetus Dana?, broke up the reception; the mural showed me turning into stone with all his company that avuncular nepophile. In the heptatych's sixth panelet, climax of the climax, back in Seriphos, I had once again called my enemy to my aid, rescuing Mother and ending my tasks by the petrification of taskmaster Polydectes. The seventh represented a mere and minor mishap some time later, at the Larissan track-and-field meet, where a zephyr slipped my straight-flung discus into a curve and frisbee'd down to Hades Granddad Acrisius in the stands; it was as overlong for its substance as was its grand counterpart in the whole heptamerous whorl, which for all its meters (thirty-three and then some) showed but my wife and me throned in Argos, surrounded by our gold bright children, a shower of Perseidae.
Daily, hourly, since first waking on my Elysian couch, I reviewed those murals, wondrous, as faithful to my story and its several characters as if no chiseling sculptor, but Medusa herself, had rendered into veined Parian, from her perch in the great sixth panel, our flesh and blood. That image was of the lot most welcome to me: all golden muscle, hard as marble, I stood profiled on the Gorgon's corpse in the model glory of twenty years; the magic sandals were strapped to just below my calves; my left knee bent to bound me next moment skyward; held back at right mid-thigh was Hermes's falchion, declined from horizontal as were my knee, my penis (see below), and my eyes -- not to meet, through the golden locks that curled from under Hades's helmet, those of Medusa, whose dripping head I held aloft in my left hand. Despite two small departures on the heavenly sculptor's part from classic realism (though I grant it was a moment far from aphrodisiac, he had, I'm certain, undersized my phallus; and Medusa's face, unaccountably, was but for the herpetine coiffure a lovely woman's!), it was a masterpiece among masterpieces, that panel: it it was my eye first fell on when I woke; it it was I was still transfixed by muchwhile later when my radiant nurse-nymph first entered from beyond the seventh mural to kneel smiling at my bedside as if before an altar.
My voice still scratchy from the dunes, I said: "Hello."
She whispered: "Hi," and on my asking who she was, responded: "Calyxa. Your priestess."
"Ah, so. I've been promoted?"
She raised to me brighter eyes than any I remembered having seen on Earth and said enthusiastically: "Here you've always been a god, Perseus. All my life I've worshipped you, right along with Ammon and Sabazius. You can't imagine what it means to me to see and speak to you like this."
I frowned, but touched her cropped dark hair and attempted to recall the circumstances of my death. Calyxa was neither white, like most other nymphs of my acquaintance, cinnamon-dark like Ethiopish Cassiopeia, nor high-chrysal like my handsome widow of panels Six-C through -E and Seven, but sun-browned as a young gymnasiast through her gauzy briefs -- which showed her too to be lean-hipped and -breasted like an adolescent Artemist, as against Andromeda's full-ripe femalehood, say, or the cushy amplitude of -- there, my memory, with my manhood, stirred, giving the lie to elsewise-marvelous Six-A.
"Is this Elysium, Calyxa, or Olympus?"
"It's heaven," she replied, brow to my hip.
I'd never heard, from Athene or the several accounts of fellow-heroes which I'd studied in the past decade, of erections in Elysium, whereas the Olympians seemed as permanently tumesced as the mount they dwelt on: I was elevated, then! Still stroking as I considered this rise my nice nymph's nape, I noticed that while the mural began at my bedpost, the spiral it described did not, but curved on in and upward in a golden coil upon the ceiling to a point just above where my head would be if I moved over one headswidth left; when I raised me up to watch whither hot Calyxa now, I saw the same spiral stitched in purple on the bed. And -- miracle of miracles! -- when the sprite sprang nimbly aspread that nether spiral and drew to her tanned taut tummy dazzled me, I perceived that her very navel, rather than bilobular or quadrantic like the two others I best knew, was itself spiriferate, replicating the infinite inward wind both above and below the finite flesh on which my tongue now feast.
Godhood was okay. However, I was twice disturbed to find myself impotent: twice in that, one, I twice tried Calyxa then and there, that "afternoon" (I'd not supposed the sun set on us immortals), and despite or owing to her own uncommon expertise was twice unmanned; two, it was the second time in as many weeks and women (so it came back to me the second time) I had thus flopped, after never once failing done Andromeda in seven thousand nights-- an alarming prospect for the nymphed eternity ahead.
"It doesn't matter," insisted sweet-sweat Calyxa, several times in each of the days and nights that followed. "It's just being with you I love, Perseus; it really is one of my dreams come true."
There was another thing: used as I was, as long and mythic hero, to a fair measure of respect, I was unused to reverence: I could not make water without my votary's adoring view (I had not known gods pissed like mortals); she literally licked clean the plates she fed me back to strength from (not ambrosia after all, but dates, figs, roast lamb, and retsina, as at home) (I insisted she wash them after); licked me clean too, like a cozy cat, in lieu of bathing, and toweled me with her hair (too short for the job): sport enough when one was in the sportive mood, as Calyxa seemed more or less continuously to be; a mere embarrassment when one was not. Truly I believe she would have reliquaried my stools if I'd allowed her (I hadn't guessed gods shat).
"You divinities take sex too seriously," she chided when I swore at that second slump. I supposed to her, not unbitterly, that nymphs like herself were accustomed to a rounder rogering from the deities they attended, and made clear, perhaps overprotested, that I myself was unused entirely to impotence, could not account for it.
"O, you'll be heavenly once you're aroused, I can see that," she soothed. Not her fault at all, I assured her; indeed, never since my first nights with Andromeda, so long years past, had I couched so lively, lean, and tight a miss; moreover, Andromeda and I, I fondly recollected, had begun as equal amateurs and learned love's lore together, whereas Calyxa's skill bespoke much prior experience . . .
Gaily she enjoined me from pout. "Believe it or not, I was a virgin until twenty-two." Cheerfully she acknowledged then that all her girlhood she'd so adored myself, Sabazius, and horny Ammon, and had in addition been so preoccupied with sports and studies, she'd let no ordinary mortal know her (I'd not heard mortals could lay hands on nymphs); then one evening, as she was sweeping out the sheep-god's shrine (shrines in heaven? dust on Mount Olympus?), which she ministered along with mine and Beer-Boy's, Ammon himself had appeared and to her great delight had rammed her. Thus initiate, she'd gladly become not merely tender of our three temples but priestess-prostitute as well, holily giving herself, in the honorable tradition of her earthly counterparts, to the truest of our male admirers between tuppings by two-thirds of the deities themselves.
"Sabazius too!" I protested. Ammon I could be purely jealous of, despite my old grievance concerning his advice to Cassiopeia, for the images I'd seen of him in Joppa showed a fine-fettled fellow with handsome ram's-horns coiling from his swarthy curls. But not only had Sabazius fermented no end of trouble for me back in Argos; I winced to picture that old priapist a-puff on my neat nymph.
She giggled. "You think you're impotent! But don't make so much of it, Perseus!" Along with swimming and foot-racing, she candidly admitted, she liked few pleasures more than the chains of orgasms Ammon and one or two of her mortal partners could set her catenating. She and Sabazius, on the other hand, made do with beery conversations, burps, and blow-jobs, which, the first being long and friendly, the last short and sweet, pleased her in their way quite as well as Ammon's frisk fierce fucks.
"You worry too much," she told me on the second night, when, flaccid once again, I'd advised her vexedly to forsake me and revert to Ammonism. "In the first place, I've never stopped being an Ammonite and never will -- or a Sabazian, either, even though neither of them keeps in touch with me any more." I was not, she gently reminded me, the only god in her pantheon; on the other hand, it made fier happy beyond imagine merely to be with me on my altar-couch; to know her deity -- any of her private trinity -- as a "warm human person," "off his pedestal," in her terms. Besides, was I really so na?ve as to equate love-making, like a callow lad, with mere prolonged penetration?
Yes. "I'm a hero!" I indicated with a sweep of my relieved glories, whose first extension she had revealed to me that day. "Virtuoso performance is my line of work!"
She removed my dexter hand, it being an article of her creed, even with deities, to allow no sheepish, merely dutiful clitorizing. "The more you think of sex as a performance," she advised me, "the more you'll suffer stage fright on your opening nights. Just hug up close, now, and fill me in on what I showed you today."
Sigh, I did, curled up behind my wise cute tutor as the temple's great second whorl, to which she'd noonly introduced me, enconched the first. As I'd come to hope and fancy, the Perseid reliefs and my altared view were not coterminous there where I sat regnant with Andromeda; a second series -- correspondent to the first in relative proportions, but of grander breadth to fit the scale of their enormous revolution -- commenced just after, at the pillar on that farther wall aligned quite with my left-foot bedpost and Calyxa's navel-point.
"You saw how it was," I said: "The kids were grown and restless; Andromeda and I had become different people; our marriage was on the rocks. The kingdom took care of itself; my fame was sure enough -- but I'd lost my shine with my golden locks: twenty years it was since I'd headed Medusa; I was twenty kilos overweight and bored stiff. With half a life to go, I felt fettered and coffered as ever by Dana?'s womb, the brassbound chest, Polydectes's tasks. In fact -- please keep your face straight -- I became convinced I was petrifying, and asked my doctor if it mightn't be the late effects of radiation from Medusa. 'Just aging of the old joints,' the fool declared, correctly, told me to forget about the Gorgon, give up ouzo, get more exercise. But hare-hunts can't hold a candle to monstermachy: I stayed up too late, drank too many, traded shameless on my authority to bore each night a captive audience with the story of my life. 'Change of scene, then,' the doctor ordered: 'bit of a sea-trip, do you oodles.' He even winked: 'Take the Missus along: second honeymoon, et cetera.' "
"Sometimes," Calyxa said, "I really wonder about doctors."
"Me too. But I proposed it, and Andromeda said sure right off: park the kids in Argos, sail down to Joppa for a visit with her folks; twenty years since she'd seen Cepheus and Cassiopeia. 'Not quite what I had in mind,' I told her; 'We'll stop off there when the time comes, but let's go the route: drop in on King Dictys in Seriphos, say hello to Samian Athene, run over to Mount Atlas, where I short-circuited the Graeae -- you've never seen Mount Atlas -- then a quick stop at Chemmis on the Nile, where I landed for a drink before I saved your life.' By the way, Calyxa, --" I had unwound to follow with my eye those furled episodes along the wall.
"Please don't stop," she pled, and taking her to mean, despite her policy, the idle handiwork that went with my recital, I resumed.
"So, it was a battle from the outset, even though I'd dropped Styxnymphsville, Hyperborea, and Hesperia from my itinerary to give us an extra week in Joppa and time for a quick look-see at Thessalian Larissa. 'Joppa period,' Andromeda said."
"I think she was being unreasonable," said Calyxa.
I cleared my throat. "Well, now, perhaps it was a bit vain of me to want to retrace my good young days; but it wasn't just vanity; no more were my nightly narratives: somewhere along the way I'd lost something, took a wrong turn, forgot some knack, I don't know; it seemed to me that if I kept going over it carefully enough I might see the pattern, find the key."
"A little up and to your left," Calyxa whispered. But I was lost now in my story. "Ever since that run-in with your pal Sabazius," I said, "things hadn't been the same between Andromeda and me." I told her how the bellied beer-god, using his Dionysian alias, had come bingeing from Naxos into Argos with his new wife Ariadne --
"He told me about her, last time I saw him," Calyxa confessed. "At first I was mad with jealousy, but he was so happy, and she was sweet. . ."
"Everybody was mad," I said: "the older women especially, drink drink drink, and when I tried to close the bars he talked them into eating their babies till I gave in. Honestly. I'd've held out awhile -- you've got to draw the line somewhere -- but Andromeda claimed it was his fame I couldn't abide. . ." Truth was, I declared, I did envy the upstart god his enthusiasts, the more as my own glory had not increased since I'd given up heroism for the orderly administration of Argolis; on the other hand, though not a prude, mind, I quite believed in order, measure, self-discipline, and was opposed on principle to indiscriminate housewife orgy, not to mention pedophage. I was no less than Sabazius a son of Zeus, and if no god (owing to Mother's mere mortality), I had the vita of a gold-haired hard-tasked hero, whereas Sabazius so far as I could see did nothing but booze and ball all day. . .
"Better say 'guzzle and go down,' " Calyxa said comfortably. She too, she added, had no taste for orgies unless among especially valued friends -- such as, say, (the notion made her stretch), Ammon, Sabazius, and me -- her general policy being to offer herself to others, corporeally and otherwise, to the extent of her esteem for them. Nevertheless she'd gone along with group-grope, gang-bang, daisy-chain, and other perversions for her plump pal's sake, deferring her preferences to his -- just as, with Ammon, she smoked hemp and humped hind-to, although left to herself, so to speak, she'd choose light palm-wine and Position One more often than not. In both instances, her pleasure in theirs not only gratified her beyond her own preferences (a mere martyr's reward, in her view) but made distinctly pleasurable, just in those circumstances, the acts themselves. In short, she was by no means blind to Sabazius's shortcomings, but they were without effect on her worship of him. "We really used to talk, he and I."
It occurred to me to ask why, in view of the foregoing, she had removed my hand in one previous paragraph and limped me with her laughter in another when I'd asked permission to kiss her navel. Her reply was a quiet, short, and serious kiss that messaged clearly even subtless me. I stirred against her nether cheeks very near to Ammonite erection, shrank from the adjective, re-cupped her, resumed my tale:
"I liked Sabazius okay too," I admitted, "despite the trouble he'd caused me; once I'd agreed to build him a temple to keep the housewives happy, we drained many a goblet together Before he moved on. But there was no peace after that with Andromeda: now she claimed I'd given in out of weakness, or to curry favor on Olympus: was I pandering to public opinion, yielding to the pedophagic protest groups, or kicking over my traces like a foolish forty-year-old? Fame and kingship had changed me, changed me, she declared, and not for the better, et cetera."
"Excuse me for saying so," Calyxa said, "but I don't think I care for Mrs. Perseus. Now watch you back up and defend her."
Well, I did: none of these unpleasant accusations but had its truth, as I saw when I wasn't defending myself against them, and its contrary side, as I saw when I was. But one fact was inescapable, however read or rationalized: Perseus the Hero prevailed or perished; Perseus the King had swallowed self-respect and not even compromised with, but yielded to, his adversary.
"It was all downward after that," I concluded: "squalls and squabbles; flirtations, accusations; relovings and relapses, let's not relive it, you know the story, it's all in that pillar between the last panel yonder," where Andromeda and I shared our loveseat throne ringed by little princelets, "and the one today," in which my scold-faced queen sat throned far right and sullen I far left, our grownlings wondering between and a ship making ready in the marble foreground.
"I went weekending once with Ammon down the Nile to Pharos," Calyxa remarked. "We swam a lot. It's the only time I've fucked under water."
"It's not so great, actually, didn't you find?" I asked her in her humor, delving at the same time down to recollection. "The natural lubricants get washed off, and it sort of hurts. I knew this sea-nymph once. . ."
"I liked it anyhow," Calyxa said.
Next night, too, we made less progress with each other than with the templed exposition. "If only Medusa had petrified just that part!" my priestess sighed -- but would not let me repeat what she declared went without saying, that what fired my bolt like a green recruit's before the issue was fairly joined was not inexperience of artful love but inexperience of novel partners. "You're like some of the holiday tourists we get," she once declared: "bold as brass back home but all tinsel and tiptoe here."
When I had been Perseus proper, I told her then, I'd flown the known world over, Hyperborea to Hesperia, yet never heard of tourists to the country of the gods. Part of every morning, afternoon, and evening Calyxa disappeared into the temple's outer whorls with strict instructions, as she said from Zeus, that I was not to follow past whichever mural she'd last laid on me. Where did she go? I asked her now. What do? Was she slipping off to Ammon and Sabazius, or tourist-tupping in my heavenly precinct?
She was not annoyed until I apologized (at once) for my impertinence. "If you're going to be quarrelsome, be quarrelsome: don't take one step forward and two back."
I apologized for my apology, attributing my too-tameness to long years of Andromeda's house-training, and that in turn to her father's domination by Cassiopeia, while at the same time admitting that, as Andromeda herself had charged in the Sabazius affair, a better man would in the first place never --
"Stop that!" Calyxa cried. I did, began to apologize, stopped that, reflected a moment, and then declared her under no obligation to attend me if she found my manner, mind, or manliness disappointing; but if she chose to stay she must accept me on my terms -- which for better or worse included (unlike Sabazius's or Ammon's, I daresaid) permitting me to accept her on hers. No drachma but had its other side: Andromeda in my opinion had near henpecked me out of cockhood; but I had learned from her what few men knew, fewer heroes, and no gods: that a woman's a person in her Independent right, to be respected therefor by the goldenest hero in heaven. If my pet priestess was unused to parity as was I to novelty, then we had each somewhat to teach the other.
Calyxa sat up and closed me in her lap (these conversations were all postcoitally, anyhow epiclimactically, couched); but all I could get from her was "You, you! You're leaving something out."
"No help for that."
"Those letters, Perseus, that she threw overboard . . ." I groaned. Had voyage in nautic history, I asked rhetorically, ever begun so crossed as ours whose wreckage that day's mural had fixed forever? We'd set out when spring gave way to summer, neither of us yielding to the other. Andromeda stormed at me it must be Joppa without sidetrips, or she'd go it unburdened of her had-been hero; I stormed back, If she'd wanted a lackey instead of a lord, she should've stuck with her Uncle Phineus. Thus we raged and counterbaited as we cleared the port. I perhapped our problem to be mixed marriage: Argives and Ethiopians were oil and vinegar, I declared, palatable when right-proportioned but never truly mixable. Pah, she spat: all marriages were mixed, a man and a woman; but there was my insufferable ego again, proposing three parts Perseus to one Andromeda, when in truth it was her rescue from monstrous Cetus had made the reputation I'd grown so purled upon: she had as it were laid her life on the line to make me famous! I replied, not unfairly I think, that even the bards who sang our story were wont to call her both the cause of my labor and its reward -- which was but putting prettily (I went on less fairly) that had I by-passed Joppa altogether I'd've spared myself two hard battles (with Cetus and with Phineus's gatecrashers), plus the sustained one of our recent years together, and found me a more congenial princess somewhere else, whereas she'd've been fishfood. That always got to her: she bawled back that what I'd freed her from were but the chains in which my forebears caused her to be put (she meant Uncle Poseidon, who'd given Ammon word to cliff her when the jealous Nereids complained to him of Cassiopeia's boast et cetera); she owed me nothing, more especially since I'd manumitted her into the bondage of my tyrant vanity, a mere bedpartner and accessory to my fame: it was but a matter, in her view, of exchanging shackles for shekels, or iron manacles for gold. That always got to me: I stormed back, unfairly now, that even read as I read them the poets were wrong: freeing Mother Dana?, not Andromeda, had been my mission; regaining my lost kingdom; resolving, by the death of both, the twinly old feud between Acrisius and Proetus, which dated from the womb. To this end Medusa, not fishy Cetus, had been my true adversary and chief ally; I hadn't even employed her in the Cetus engagement, to dispatch which wanted but my trusty sickle and a bit of shadow-feinting. In short, the whole Joppan adventure, charming as it was, could be regarded as no more than a couple of sub-panels, as it were, in the mural of my life: an interlude in, indeed a diversion from, my hero-work proper.
"Dana? Dana?!" then had shouted Andromeda. "You should have married your mother!"
Calyxa clucked her tongue. "You two really went at it, didn't you?"
I agreed, my face burning afresh. "That's when she pounced upon the brassbound sea-chest on the poop," I said. "We had lots of traveling-bags, but I'd decided to do the trip right -- my trip -- and had packed my things in the same old trunk that Granddad had shipped me off in, forty years past. For one thing, I thought Seriphean Dictys would be pleased to see it again, so I'd kept in it all my souvenirs: a piece of the net he'd fished us ashore with, the crescent scabbard of Hermes's sickle, couple of rocks from giant Atlas after I'd stoned him, fern-corals from Joppa (I'd laid Medusa's head on seaweed while I skewered Cetus), Andromeda's leg-irons, the Larissan discus, and the letters."
"Those letters, Perseus. . ." I was left-flanked on the couch; naughty Calyxa, propped on her elbows at my hip, amused herself as I spoke by scribing capitals on her forehead with my flopped tool as with an infirm pen. R, S, Something, P: the scramble uncials of my name.
"Fan letters, mostly," I said. "Nut mail, con letters, speaking invitations, propositions from women I never heard of -- sort of thing every mythic hero gets in each day's post. I swear I didn't save them out of vanity, as she claimed; I almost never answered them."
"Mm."
"It was partly habit, I'm afflicted with orderliness, they were even alphabetized, starting with Anonymous. Partly for amusement, to pick me up when I was feeling down, remind me I'd once got a few things done worth doing. But mainly, I swear, it was for a kind of research, what I mentioned once before: certain letters especially I read and re-read: half a dozen or so from some dotty girl in Chemmis, Egypt. They were billets-doux, I admit it -- but along with the hero-worship was a bright intelligence, a lively style, and a great many detailed questions, almost as if she were doing a dissertation. How many had been the Stygian Nymphs? Had Medusa always been a Gorgon? Was it really her reflection in Athene's shield that saved me from petrifying, or the fact that Medusa had her eyes closed; and if the latter, why'd I need the shield? How was it I'd used the helmet of invisibility only to flee the other Gorgons and not to approach them in the first place? Did everything that saw Medusa turn to stone, or everything Medusa saw? If the former, how explain the sightless seaweed? If the latter, how came it to work when she'd been beheaded? Was my restriction to the adamant sickle and the shadow-trick in the Cetus episode self-imposed or laid on by Athene, and if the former, was my motive to impress Andromeda with skill and valor rather than with magic? And if the latter, why? Considering the crooked sword, the Graeaean subterfuge, the rear-view approaches to Medusa and Cetus, the far-darting Hermean sandals, even the trajectory of the discus that killed Acrisius, would it be fair to generalize that dodge and indirection were my conscious tactics, and, if so, were they characterological or by Athenian directive? Similarly, considering Dana?'s brass tower, the sea-chest, the strapping tasks of Polydectes, Dana?'s bondage to him, and Andromeda's manacles on the one hand, and on the other, my conquests of Atlas, Phineus, Polydectes, and the rest by petrification, could not one say that my goal for myself and gift to others was typically release from immobility, and my punishment -- of both my Medusa'd former enemies and my latterly tied-down self -- typically its opposite? O Calyxa, this nameless girl, she had no end of insightful questions! Which I pondered and repondered as I've done these murals, to find if I could their meaning, where they pointed, what it was I'd lost. One question alone -- whether I felt my post-Medusan years an example of or an exception to the archetypal pattern for heroic adventure-- set me to years of comparative study, to learn what that pattern might be and where upon it I currently was. Thus this endless repetition of my story: as both protagonist and author, so to speak, I thought to overtake with understanding my present paragraph as it were by examining my paged past, and thus pointed, proceed serene to the future's sentence. My trustiest aid in this endeavor was those seven letters, at once so worshipful and wise; I'd've given much to spend an evening with their author! Hence my fury when Andromeda, herself unhinged by wrath, tore open the chest-lid just off Hydra and threw them to the fish. For the first time in our life, I struck her."
My eyes filled at the double memory; Calyxa curled me in her way until my salt tears filled her navel. Post-swatly, I went on, I took from the chest my only correspondence with Andromeda, love-letters written during my youthful trip to Larissa, and posted them with the others in the Gulf of Argolis. Then Andromeda, in a perfect tempest of outrage, fishfed the entire contents of the chest: shore me of my valiant past as a steering drover ballocks a bull.
"I could listen all night to the way you talk," Calyxa said.
"We were so busy storming at each other," I went on, "and the crew and galley slaves enrapt in our battle royal, none noticed the natural tempest till it struck astern like the fist of a god, as if Father Zeus were counter-punching for smote Andromeda. All quarrels went by the board with mast and tiller; we were stove in a trice, sunk and drowned -- all save my wife and me, who, still wrestling with the relatched ruin of my chest, were washed with it the way of its contents. Empty, it floated; our grapple became a grip; the storm passed, the sharks were patient; two days the currents easted us, as in your picture, clutched and quarreling in the Sea of Candia; on the third, as if caught in a repeating dream, we were netted by a fine young fisherman, more the image of my golden youth than my own sons were. He congratulated us on our survival, complimented Andromeda on her brined beauty, introduced himself as Danaus Dictys's son, and home-ported us with the rest of his catch to Seriphos."
Calyxa squeezed me. "When I drew that panel for the sculptor from your sister's sketches, I was afraid you and Andromeda were embracing over the sea-chest."
Embarrassed, she acknowledged under my amazed interrogation that all the murals in the temple were rendered from her drawings, after careful instructions delivered her from time to time over the years by couriers from Athene. She was not, then, merely maid, minister, and mistress of her deities, their temples, and devotees, but artful chronicler of their careers as well! I refrained from asking whether Sabazius and Ammon were similarly shrined, but praised her artistry to the skies.
"I'm no artist," she demurred. "Anyhow, I'm not interested in me."
But I would not let her off so modestly; with real appreciation I kissed her from crown to sole, which flexily she enjoyed, and pressed her tell me how far the murals went -- for while I myself could predict, I thought, the next couple of panels, my memory of an odd dark passion in the desert just prior to my demise was still obscure to me, as was the manner of my death itself.
She shook her head. "Tomorrow, or the next night, maybe, I'll tell you, if you haven't guessed." Her tone grew graver. "What do you think the next panel will be?"
I supposed it would portray the famous "sculpture museum" at Seriphos, now the isle's chief tourist attraction, which we foursomed -- Andromeda, Danaus, Dictys, and I -- soon after, in what became the cycled dream's continuation. King Dictys himself was in declining age and health, but overjoyed to review the source and cause of his ascendancy. Andromeda, unsalted and refreshed, seemed to have lost five years and kilos in the sea; she basked in the gallantries of her yet-younger life preserver. The famous statues, of course, were no sculptured likenesses at all, but the stoned originals of Polydectes and his court, fixed forever in their postures of insult and abuse which I had countered with the Gorgon's head. There in the center sat the false king himself, still gloating at his declaration that my whole laborious adventure had been but his ruse for my riddance; that he had never intended to bed any but my gold-girt mother, whom presently he was starving from her sanctuary with Dictys in Athene's temple. Those had been his last words: fascinated, I pointed out to my companions that his tongue was still tipped to his teeth to make the theta of Naw AOhnhz, to whose eta he would never come.
"Remarkable," young Danaus had agreed, and added with a trace of tease in his own teeth-tipped tongue: "If Uncle P. was forty when you froze him, and has been lisping that same theta for twenty years, you and he must be about the same age now."
Andromeda laughed, her first mirth in months; then the two of them went off at smart Danaus's suggestion to find something less boring to look at than his petrified progenitors. Dictys and I watched them go, my wife merrily accepting her escort's elbow, and then went round the remaining figures pensively summoning names and patronymics from that glorious morning for half the afternoon. Returning at last to the now-cool shadow of Polydectes, we sipped from silver beakers of Hippocrene and traded troubles.
"I can't manage the boy," Dictys said; "it's because he never had a mother, and I was too busy running the government to be a proper father."
I sympathized, reflecting on my own son's growing rebellion, and asked who was Dictys's queen; at his hem and haw I dropped the subject, inferring with some satisfaction that young Danaus was illicit. He suggested we ought to interrupt their tête-à-tête; but I asked for more wine instead, and two beakers later was confiding to him my domestic problems and my conviction I was petrifying.'
Dictys shook his head. "Just ossifying, like the rest of us." Too bad about Andromeda, he said; he was just as pleased never to have wed the only woman he'd ever loved, seeing how seldom the sentiment withstood the years' attrition. For the rest, there was no help for it, he advised me to resign myself to lovelessness and decline; he'd ship me off to Samos, Joppa, or wherever I wished -- but all voyages, he reminded me, come soon or late to the same dark port.
"Better late, then," said I, and announced to the gathered company at dinner, I was determined to resume the retracement of my ancient route. If Andromeda would not retrace it with me. . .
Her eyes flashed. "Joppa, period."
"At least consult Athene," old Dictys implored me.
"I will," said I. "Where I did before, in her shrine in Samos."
"Where he learned about life from art," Andromeda mocked me; "for represented in her temple murals there were all three Gorgons -- snakehaired, swinetoothed, blah blah blah. I know it by heart. I'm staying here."
Young Danaus fiddled smiling with his flatware. "I've heard it said," he said, "that when you were done with Medusa last time, Athene put her back together again, with a difference: nowadays she turns stone to flesh instead of vice-versa: makes old folks spry again. You and Dad should look her up."
At this impertinence there was a general pause, and general relief when I merely thanked him, level-voiced, for the report. If she declined to go with me, I told Andromeda next day, she must abide in Seriphos under Dictys's chaperonage until my return: I would not have her travel unescorted. She replied she was her own woman, would as she would. Very well, I countered, reminding her however that independence had its limits; that, given our particular tempers and past, the more she became her own woman, the less mine.
"Amen," Andromeda said, a Joppan expression.
"So I went it alone," I said to Calyxa, "and my guess is that tomorrow's mural shows us there in the haE of statues: Danaus grinning, Andromeda and I glaring at each other, Dictys shaking his head, and Polydectes still lisping Naw AOhnhz."
I was mistaken, my artist informed me -- not only about next day's scene (which pillared all I'd just rehearsed) but about the nature of parity between the sexes as well.
"I know," I sighed, mistaking her. "Andromeda was right."
"That's not what I mean!" Calyxa sprang to her nimble knees. "Look at me, for instance: would you call me dependent? I go my own way, lonely or not; that's why I've never married. But don't you get the point?"
"No."
She flipped my flunked phallus; "I swear, I'll have to draw you a picture."
Instead, she showed me one, next day: myself in conference already with the hooded woman in Athene's temple, beneath the familiar frieze of Gorgons, winged Pegasus grazing just outside.
"Remarkable!" I scrutinized my companion-in-relief. "The resemblance. . ."
"With the cowl it's hard to tell," Calyxa said; "but if that's Athene, then Athene's the one who's brought me the instructions for all these scenes over the years, and finally brought you here in person from the desert. She's always been very polite to me, but she never explains the pictures."
"I'll be glad to: at first I thought her a fellow-suppliant --"
But Calyxa reminded me of our little rule, explication only after forn. We went to bed early, I did better, fairly entered her, though for less than heroical time and space; I was chided for sighing; she held me between her pretty legs and said: "Aphrodite's a woman and so am I. Does that make me her equal?" Andromeda's fallacy, in her view, was an equivocation on the term equality: she Calyxa frankly regarded herself as superior in numerous ways to numerous men and women --
"I think you are too."
"Do don't flatter now; I'm serious." Her dark eyes were, past doubt; I'd have moved off-top, to beside her, better to manifest our parity, but she had extraordinary grip.
"I mean, they're mortals, and you're a nymph," I said limply.
"Never mind that." The point was, she asserted, it went without saying, in her opinion, that to say men and women were equal was to say nothing. She herself admired excellence wherever she found it; she was far from servile by nature, knew herself to be uncommonly intelligent, witty, healthy, athletical, articulate, brave, and a few other adjectives --
"Pretty," I suggested. "Sexually adroit. . ."
She stopped my mouth. "But I happen to know men and women quite superior to me in all these things, and not only wouldn't I dream of calling myself their equal, I happen to prefer them to myself and my equals. You reminded me once that you're a mythic hero, but you keep forgetting it yourself. Were you always psychosexually weak, or is that Andromeda's doing?"
Truly I wished to withdraw, and being at least her muscular match, managed to. She grinned and bussed my forearm.
"No man's a mythic hero to his wife," I said. But Calyxa took spirited issue: no woman remained a dream of nymphhood to her husband either, she daresaid, but real excellence in any particular should be excellent even qualified by comparison, long familiarity, and non-excellence in other particulars. That permanent relationship was fatal to passion was perhaps inevitable, and as she preferred to love passionately she would never marry; but having been more than once abused by those she loved, she knew for a fact that her admiration of their excellence was invulnerable. "Ammon's a real bastard, often as not," she said; "but I'd die for him tomorrow if he asked me too. I'm good, but he's great. Who does Andromeda think she is?"
I'd hear no more such criticism. "My question to Athene," I said, "was Who was I? I made proper sacrifices, prayed she'd appear and counsel me how not to turn to stone. If there was a new Medusa, let a new Perseus be resickled, -shielded, -sandaled, and the rest, to reglorify himself by re-beheading her. It wasn't Mother Dana? wanted rescuing now, but Dana?'s son."
Calyxa snugged against me with a kind of fond exasperation. I went on to recount how, as I'd recounted to Athene my apprehensions, a hooded young woman had appeared beside me at the altar, whom I took to be a fellow-suppliant until from the corner of my eyes I saw a radiance from hers -- which, however, like all her features, were cowled from view in the temple dusk. And when she said to me, "Your brother was right: there is a New Medusa," I recognized the voice as no mortal's: Athene had come to me, as was her wont, in suppliant's guise. I reminded her I had no mortal kin, only scores of divine half-siblings like herself, got by Zeus upon his scores of bedmates.
She touched my arm and softly undeceived me. "Dictys and Dana? were closeted a long while in the Seriphos temple before you rescued them. But think again, Perseus, what Polydectes was saying: it wasn't the theta of Naw AOhnhz, but the sigma of Naw Ajrodithz. He really did lisp, and your mother's shelter was Love, not Wisdom. . ."
In short, she said, young Danaus my rescuer and current rival was half my brother! And fortunate it was -- she went on at once, to check my flabbergasted ire -- King Dictys and my mother had chosen Aphrodite's shrine instead of Athene's for their besieged amour, since Athene would have sorely punished them for sacrilege. Such exactly ( I could not get in my outrage edgewise!) had been innocent Medusa's original sin: was I aware of the circumstances of her Gorgonizing?
I surrendered.
"Me too," Calyxa said.
She'd been a pretty young girl, went on the cowled apparition: a daughter of the sea-god Phorcys and thus kid-sister to the grim Gray Ladies and cousin to the pretty Nereids. She'd been well brought up by her mother Ceto, was in fact as proper a sea-nymph as ever swam: discreet of her person, pretty as the April moon, a regular churchgoer and comforter of the drowned. Her only failing, if it could be so called, was a maiden's pride and interest in her budded beauty -- in particular her naturally wavy hair, proof against sea-salt and so comely withal that it fired the passions of the admiralty-god himself, her Uncle Poseidon. . .
"Uncles, I swear," Calyxa said. "That's three in this story. And two hair-things. I'm glad I'm a crew-cut orphan."
"She came one morning to this temple, to sacrifice to Athene," Athene went on, oddly referring to herself in third-persons, "and catching sight of her reflection in the goddess's shield, left off her obsequies for a moment to pin up her hair. Next thing she knew, there was a smell of seaweed; wet lips pressed to her neck-nape, and Poseidon put her under. Shocked Athene turned away, Medusa did too, but my, her eyes were fastened on the shield's reflection: as the blue-eyed scallop resists the greedy star, but at length is pried and gobbled, so she saw herself shucked and forked by the mussled god. When he was done she redid through her tears her hair, to look more becomingly ravished, and called on Athene to avenge her. But that goddess, in her wisdom, punished the victim for the crime. Me -- Medusa she banished to chilly Hyperborea with her sisters, whom she'd cursed into snakehaired frights; the very sight of them was enough to turn Medusa's suitors to stone when they approached her. It was a perfectly dreadful time."
"Just a minute," I interrupted.
"I was wondering too," Calyxa said.
"I know," said my sister's surrogate. "But Medusa didn't, back then. There were no mirrors, you see, in their stony cave, and her swinetoothed sisters could only grunt. After a few years of seeing her would-be boyfriends freeze in their tracks when she made eyes at them, she decided that if she was ever to have a lover she'd have to pretend in the cave what had been no pretense in the temple: not to know he was approaching. One day the seagulls on the statues of her bouldered beaux told her that Perseus himself was winging herward, a golden dream; she lulled her sisters to sleep with a snake-charm song she'd learned and then feigned sleep herself. Softly he crept up behind; her whole body glowed; his hand, strong as Poseidon's, grasped her hair above the nape. Her eyes still closed, she turned her neck to take his kiss. . ."
"O wow," Calyxa said. "Do you know what I think?"
"I know what I felt," said I. "But how was I to know?"
"I wish I'd known," I said shamefaced to the hooded one, who replied it was no matter: if she'd known herself to be as Gorgon as her sisters, Medusa would have begged to have her head cut off. In any case, when the Perseid tasks were done and the hero's gear returned (except the crescent scabbard, given Perseus as a souvenir, and the Graeae's eye, which unfortunately he'd dropped into Lake Triton on his Libyan overflight), Hermes had kept the adamantine sickle, restored their tooth to the aggrieved Graeae, and forwarded the helmet, sandals, and kibisis to the Stygian Nymphs; Athene retrieved her bright shield and affixed to its boss the Gorgon's scalp.
"Then there's no New Medusa? You said there was."
"There is," she said. "Athene reckoned she'd punished the girl nearly enough, so she rejoined her head to her body, revived her, and restored her original appearance. What's more, as a kind of compensation, she allows her some freedom of motion and took away her sculpting glance for the most part, as long as she abides by certain strict conditions. . ."
"Never mind those," I said. "Can she unstone me before I'm too far gone?"
The girl hesitated. "Perhaps. Under certain very strict conditions. . ."
But I would none of reservations and conditions; begged only to be outfitted as before and directed how to head off my recapped adversary. I paced about the temple, impatient to be off; already I felt younger, more Perseus than I'd been in a dozen years. No good her telling me things had changed; I was a new man; only regird me with shield and sickle, it was a decade's petrifaction in myself I'd cut off first, then Medusa's head to melt away another, then upstart Danaus's and confront Andromeda with a better Perseus than had first unscarped her.
"That's really what you want?" the hooded lady asked then, and simultaneously later Calyxa: "That's really what you wanted?"
I yessed both; let there be no talk of past past capture, I was growing younger by the moment in both temples, hers with anticipation, mine with recapitulation.
Very well, then, said my coiffed counselor: she'd advise me as before. But the case was truly altered, and so must be both my equipage and my address. From beneath her mantle she produced a golden dagger the length and straightness of my phallus fairly drawn. I was dismayed, for what might never lose in love would never win in war.
"No adamantine sickle?"
"Just this," she said, "and your bare hands."
"I like your bare hands," Calyxa said. "But I see your point."
The point was, I was told, I must proceed this time with neither armor nor disguise. Why did I imagine Hades himself no longer used the helmet of his youth, if not that not it nor any other charm could work invisibility once one passed a certain point of fame? As for the polished shield, it itself was changed, aegissed with the former Gorgon's former power: hence its absence from the temple, lest self-reflection petrify its beholders.
"Magic wallet?" I asked, heartsunk.
"That may be useful," she said. "Not to put the New Medusa's head in, since you're not to cut it off --"
"Not cut it off!" But then I remembered and remarked that her deGorgonization made the kibisis unneeded. "All she has to do is look at me, then, and I'm twenty again? Or is it whoever looks at her? I was asked that question about the old Medusa, in a letter from a girl in Chemmis, Egypt --"
"It's not that simple, Perseus," my advisor warned, and my priestess: "You didn't answer the question."
Nor did she, I said, except to say that the New Medusa's probationary sti