Chimera (14 page)

“I think not. Where’s Andromeda?”

He chinned his beard at the house ahead. “In the banquet hall, waiting to say goodbye.” By means he’d been unable to discover, he explained (certainly not his own intelligence department, always last to know anything, or the Royal Ethiopian Post, which moved at sea-snail pace), reports of my arrival had preceded me to Joppa, caused general alarm in the palace, and brought on, he could only assume, his fearful trance. “But the reports were wrong; they said you’d lost ten years.”

Wrong I replied was right: I’d lost twice ten, my wife as well, and felt ten older for the loss. We reached the banquet hall, Cepheus lagging some meters behind with vague complaints: damp ground, old bones. At the threshold I paused to let my eyes accommodate to the famous scene, I-F-5 in 3-D, an alabaster shambles. On the marble floor, in pools of marble blood, lay those done in before I’d fetched Medusa out to marble all: skewered Rhoetus, the first to die; Athis the mind-blown catamite pinned under Lycabas, the sickled Assyrian bugger; Phorbas and Amphimedon shishkabobbed on a single spear; granite Erytus, bonged by me to Hades with a sculptured drinking bowl; the sharp-tongued head of old Emathion, unaltered on the altar as if still hurling disembodied imprecations; Lampetides the minstrel, weddings and funerals a specialty, fingering forever on a limestone lyre the chord of his dying fall. Standing among these were those I’d rocked
in vivo:
Ampyx and Thescelus, cocked to spear me; false-mouthed Nileus; Aconteus my too-curious ally; and one hundred ninety-six others—chief among them Phineus, Andromeda’s first-betrothed, whom I’d memorialized last in a posture of tunic-wetting terror to remind my wife how luckier she was to have me. Relocating him took some moments, in part because he was but one among so many, in part because—as I saw now when she smoothed her hair—the white-gowned woman standing before him, back turned meward, was not Exhibit 201 but live Andromeda.

“Nuisance to keep dusted, all this,” Cepheus murmured behind me. I shushed him, not to miss the odd soliloquy my wife addressed to her uncle’s statue:

“Poor Phineus. I’m as old as you are now, and Perseus is older. The man who stoned you’s gone to seed; I’ll soon go too; I don’t scorn your last words to him any more.” It was the cringer’s seniority-over-merit plea she meant: that while I’d done more to deserve her, he’d known her longer. I considered wrath, but was touched instead by curiosity and complex jealousy: the timbre of her voice was so familiar I could not distinguish it for comparison with Medusa’s, soft and throaty, or crisp Calyxa’s; Cepheus perhaps was right about her harried face, but, dizzy at thought of Danaus, I remarked as I hadn’t in years how slightly pregnancies and time had told on the rest of her—not much less trim than what I’d salvaged off the cliff.

“Trial enough,” she went on to her skinflint uncle, “being a life-partner to a Dream of Glory; but what a bad dream I woke up to! Thin-haired, paunchy, old before his time, dwelling in and on his past, less and less concerned with me and the family…” Her voice was hard-edged, a tone I winced from; now it softened. She touched the statue’s averted cheek; had she ever touched mine so? “Thoughtful Phineus, gentle Phineus, weak-willed Phineus! With you I’d have been strong… and would have yearned, I guess, for somebody like—Perseus!”

Through this last she’d wept; my eyes stinging too, I’d drawn my dagger and called her name across the hall. At her cry it was as if the statues came to life, or shed live men from their dead encasements, and I saw too late the unnatural nature of her monologue: Danaus, armed and shielded, stepped from behind Phineus; half a dozen others in Seriphean garb from Astyages, Eryx, and the rest—and from a nearer door, a somewhat larger number of the palace guard, led by a rodent-faced young man and followed by grim-visaged Cassiopeia.

“O my,” said Cepheus, “they’ve set a trap for you, Perseus. Sorry.”

I moved to stick him as he to draw his antique sword, but was diverted by a fresher threat from Danaus, who roared upon me. Happy interruption! For Cepheus, in fact contrite, ordered the palace guard to kill my ambushers, except Cassiopeia and Andromeda. For a moment all were caught in the commands and countermands: Cassiopeia called on the guards to follow Galanthis in killing the lot of us, Andromeda and Cepheus included; Galanthis amended her directive with an order that Andromeda be spared; at the same time Danaus exhorted them to join the Seripheans in killing me, Galanthis, and their own king and queen, after which they themselves could govern Ethiopia by junta; Andromeda meanwhile screamed at everyone in general to kill no one, and at me in particular that she’d had no part in the conspiracy. Danaus’s javelin whistled over my shoulder into the couch first speared by Phineus twenty years past, ending the suspension. Cepheus himself pulled it out and feebly hurled it at Galanthis; the gigolo side-stepped, a guard behind deflected it idly with his shield, and to all’s surprise it punched into the Queen’s decolletage. Dismayed, she sat down hard and died, drumming her heels upon the floor; Andromeda shrieked; Cepheus with a groan went at Galanthis, Danaus with a grin at me, the guards and Seripheans randomly at each other. Even shield-and-sworded I’d have had hard going, for I was out of practice, short of wind, and overweight; with Athene’s mere dagger I had no chance. Danaus therefore took time to taunt: “Not a bad lay, old boy, your wife; plenty life in her yet; all she needed was reminding what beds are for.”

I’d felt a moment of Phinean panic at my death to come, displaced next moment by red rage. But my helplessness itself gave me a third for self-collection. As Danaus jibed on—calling Danaë the mother of whoredom for having been first to spread her legs for coin, myself therefore the original whoreson and a paper drachma—I knew what I assumed would be my final satisfaction: that despite the inequity of our arms it was partly awe that hesitated him, inspired by the Perseus whose legend he’d cut his teeth on. My last chance to write a fit finale, however different in style, to that golden book came to me clear as Calyxa’s art: declaring (what in another sense was true) that I preferred an even contest, I tossed away dagger and stalked him barehanded.

“Empty bravado,” Danaus scoffed, and retreated one step. That was the only victory I could hope for, for (as I told him calmly above the din) we were born of one mother; mere inexperience of hero-murder delayed his hand. His pallor I knew was momentary; even as I spoke his color returned, his sword went up—“Ah, Andromeda (I can’t say whether I said aloud or to my swoony self)! He
is
a fine lad, your lover; a young Perseus!” At this instant two things flew together from the free-for-all: a massive silver goblet, knocked from the altar-of-Emathion, spun to my feet; and Andromeda dashed between us to clutch her friend’s knees. Shield? Stay? Embrace? Supplication? Frantic, Danaus pushed and shouted at her, slipped his helmet, got himself tangled and turned around. In moments fewer than these words, I snatched up the great goblet, more welcome to my hand than its prototype beside long-smashed Erytus, and while my half-brother half-wept and swore at his handsome hobble, I fetched him such a clout aside his head that the goblet gonged.

As if at that bell, the fighting ceased. Danaus dropped dead. Stunned at my own salvation, I turned its instrument in my hand: of newer manufacture than the Erytus model, its reliefs depicted the earlier donnybrook in that same hall. Further, as though Calyxa herself had drawn the day, while distraught Andromeda lovingly cupped her late lad’s head, I remarked that the wound she wept on, intaglio’d in his temple, was the image of his bowled foredropper. Now she stood, my wife, wild-eyed, to keen general grief: besides Cassiopeia and Danaus, all the Seripheans and sundry palace guards were slain—including Galanthis, whom Cepheus had had the satisfaction to dispatch and posthumously geld. Fresh flesh lay everywhere among the petrified. Slightly wounded, Cepheus wept by Cassiopeia’s corpse; a guard tapped my shoulder and deferentially put himself and his surviving comrades at my orders: was it my pleasure that Cepheus and Andromeda be killed at once, or reserved for torture?

Before I could reply that they were on pain of flaying to obey henceforth no other than their ancient king, Cepheus entreated me to spare his daughter’s life, but denied that any Ethiopian could take his, which was already flown to Hades with his black queen’s shade. Fetching up Athene’s dirk (scuffled himward as his cup had me-), he hilted it to heart, spat blood, rolled eyes, and died as he had lived, at Cassiopeia’s feet. Andromeda wailed from her perished paramour dead-dadward, even washed with tears her hard mother’s hair, root and follicle of our misfortunes. Then she rose above all, still regally herself, faced me from the fear-chased figure of chicken Phineus, and invited me to kill her as I had everything she prized.

“Sorry about your folks,” I said. “Danaus too.” But she’d none of my apology: as I well knew, she declared, she hadn’t loved my young half-brother, only consoled herself with him; it was I she’d loved—Perseus the man, not gold-skin hero or demigod—and wedded we, till I had by lack of heart-deep reciprocity murdered marriage and love alike. “You never
did
love me,” she charged, “except as Mythics might mere mortals.”

“She talks like you.”

Two more pages? My soul winced from her words; the fact remained, however—
my
fact, felt first to the auricles in the heart of Calyxa’s shrine—I
was,
ineluctably and for worse as much as better, one of the Zeusidae, a bloody mythic hero.

“You’re free, Andromeda,” I told her.

No thanks. “I’ve
always
been!” she cried. “Despite you! Even on the cliff I was free!” I couldn’t follow her, let it go. Spear her or spare her, she declared, she wanted no more of me; would remain in Joppa if alive, fetch from Argos our younger children—

Unpleasant middle Perseus, who had dwelt stonily between the young Destroyer and the New-Medusa’d man, interrupted her to sneer, “And find another Phineus?”—his last words, as I put him to death promptly and forever on hearing me speak them. Therefore I didn’t bother with apology when thereby Andromeda was inspired to perfect wrath. In the first place, she raged, her uncle had been a kind and tactful fellow, no doubt no hero, but a better man in other ways than myself; in the second, be me reminded I wasn’t the only g-s’d hero in the book: she could if she chose most surely find another, even goldener; but (in the third place—and how her mother’s regal eyes flashed in her face!) the last thing she cared to do was to subject herself to another man, heroic or humble: no Cassiopeia she, all she wanted, in what years were left her, was to build as best she could a life of her own. What
I
craved, on the other hand, she dared say, was a votary, a mere adorer, not a fellow human; let me find one, then: the sea was shoaled with young girls on the make for established older men… “Like your girlfriend with the hood,” she ended bitterly, pointing at the door behind me. “Do what you please; I’ve stopped caring; just leave me alone.”

Till that last imperative she was in possession of herself;
alone
undid her: she threw her arms around Phineus’s neck and salted his shoulder with fresh tears. My own flowed too, no want of eyewash in this episode. I un-Cepheus’d my dagger, considered which of us to kill. Motionless as her renditions on the walls of Chemmis, but in my tear-flood swimming as at my submarine first sight of her, gentle Medusa stood just beyond the threshold. Half the four chambers of my heart surged: one ventricle, perhaps, would stay forever vacant, like a dead child’s chair, in memory of my mortal marriage and late young-manhood; one auricle, as yet unpledged, shilly-shallied on the verge of choice. If only she’d beckon, summon, relieve me of doubt, reach forth her hand! But of course she wouldn’t, ever. For a pulseless moment I stood halfhearted in this transfixion, as if she were the simply baleful Old and not the paradoxic precious New Revised Medusa. Then (with this last, parenthetical, over-the-shoulder glance at Andromeda and my fond dream of rejuvenation: difficult dead once-darling, fare you well! Farewell! Farewell!) I chucked wise dagger, strode over sill, embraced eyes-shut the compound predications of commitment—hard choice! soft flesh!—slipped back mid-kiss her problematic cowl, opened eyes.

“Now may we talk?”

My heart: all night.

“The night’s half done.”

So was my life.
I.e.:

“Okay. We’ve half a night ahead.” And ditto the next and next and next, till even our stars burn out. Half of each I’ll unwind my tale to where it’s ours, and half of every we’ll talk. There’s much to say.

“But much goes without saying.”

And half of forever is forever. How long do you suppose we’ve been up here, love? Three nights? Three thousand years? Why do you imagine—

“You’re asking all the questions. Shan’t we take turns? I’ve seven.’’

I too. One:

“Least first. I love our story and the way it’s told, but I wonder about one or two things. The alliteration, for example?”

No help for that; I’m high on letters. Look at II-F-2, my Saharan scribble, or the Perseid epistles posted between II-A and -B…

“Basta.
One?”

We’re not alone. Who else is here?

“Everyone who matters. No help for
that,
either. My eyes, you see… Athene’s conditions… everyone I looked at in that last sentence turned to stars—except stone Phineus, who returned to flesh and blood. Don’t ask me why.”

I think I know, and thank you.

“Cepheus is overhead; he comes up first, talking to himself. Cassiopeia’s with him; I put her a bit lower down…”

Good show. You needn’t really have included my ex-in-laws, but I did like old Cepheus. I wonder whether he’s repeating his monologue.

“Perhaps we all are. I thought you’d want the whole cast out. Even Cassiopeia has her bright spots, if you look for them. Pegasus is flying off upper-leftward—”

It’s good you have custody.

“Perseus…”

I wonder what ours would have looked like. Not a question.

“I know. So. Andromeda’s at his flank, just over my head, looking either at her father or at her mother’s hair.”