Chimera (19 page)

“ ‘You’re either a comer or a goner,’ he advised me. By holding back and humping Sibyl, he declared, I had in effect murdered my father and my brother. If he himself bore no grudge against me, it was because while the shock had left his daughter more or less deranged, it seemed also to have occasioned her first experience of second sight, on the basis of which he meant to recommend to Eurymede that she be made priestess of the grove for life. Moreover, though it went without saying that he hadn’t exactly foreseen this debacle in detail, he couldn’t say either that it came as a total surprise: it fit the Pattern, clearly, against which, it being preordained by an order of things transcending even Zeus’s power much to alter, it were vain for a mere seer much to kick. Still and all, things were hot in town for both of us: my brother’s supporters and Glaucus’s—especially those who’d lost their tunics at the races—were crying Regicide and Crooked Track, and went so far as to accuse Polyeidus of engineering my succession. My heroic nature, he daresaid, impelled me straight through the waiting lynch mobs and sundry ambuscadoes to assert my claim; but the same Pattern which certified that kingly right (not to mention good diplomacy) required that I defer it. Just as Perseus, even as he spoke, was completing the exile trip from Seriphos through Egypt and Joppa, killing a Gorgon and picking up a bride before returning to rule Mycenae, so I, in my tutor’s opinion, must beat it out of Corinth for the present. ‘Leave it to me to calm the country and look after your mother. Take a new name. Make the grand tour. Discharge a few labors, dispatch a monster or two, et cetera. You’ll know when it’s time to come home; they always do. Questions?’

“I asked for a copy of the Pattern, by way of autobiographical road map. After some pause he said he hadn’t one on him just then, but would forward it me as soon as he could envision my next mailing address. To what name would he send it? He paused again.
‘Bellerophon,
of course. Is this a test?’ We parted uncertainly in the dark. Let’s see. I took off down the road.
Bellerophon
means Bellerus the Killer. Questions?”

But my dead darlings were abed long since; dead Philonoë was dropped off too in the drowsy dusk. Soon I’ll wake and hurt her with the story of her sister. Questions?

Melanippe has several. Many, even, all disquieting. If she defers them, let’s see, let’s say it’s because Medusa, in the
Perseid,
puts off hers till the epilogue. Not that a self-respecting Amazon in any respect resembles—but never mind. Wake her.

Let her rest in peace; let them all. O I wish—

How high now are Bellerophon and Pegasus? Gorse-top low. Wave-top low. All but sea-leveled.

Wake her then; hurt her now. The sooner begun, et cetera.

“Here’s the full story of my sexual adventure with your sister,” I’d wake my wife to announce. No. Aye. O. Done.

“I” On. “I believe I’m familiar with the several standard versions,” let’s say she’d say, rubbing her eyes. “A classical myth, however, is yawn excuse me infinitely retellable, and the connoisseur’s pleasure is in those small variations, discrepancies, and lacunae that invariably yawn obtain among renditions. Add to that my love for both principals in this particular episode in the grander narrative of your career, and you will yawn see that no amount of pain occasioned by the events themselves can altogether spoil my pleasure in their rehearsal. I’ll make coffee.”

O. Nevertheless I gnash my teeth and proceeded. “For a year or two after dropping out of Corinth I hiked across the Peloponnese, doing odd jobs, seeing the sights, reconstructing as best I could from memory the Pattern. I felt I’d completed, in the main, its first quarter, the quadrant of Departure: my conception and birth certificate were in order; Glaucus was dead; I had the regulation scar, if not in quite the regular place, to mark what could pass as his attempt to kill me; I’d crossed a sort of threshold, in proper darkness, got my travel orders at a well in a sacred grove from a certified
Spielman,
set out to westward under pseudonym. When I reached Sandy Pylos, on the coast, I supposed that the correct thing to do was ship on as oarsman, say, aboard the next boat west, to commence my second quarter—Initiation—with a night-sea journey.

“But the more I combed the beach, the more I came to question whether I’d got off after all on just the right foot. Even allowing for some flexibility in the Pattern, I doubted whether any mythic hero could commence his principal tasks with blood-guilt, as we call it, on his hands: Odysseus and Aeneas, to name only two of Polyeidus’s ‘personages from the future,’ would be obliged to retrace their steps laboriously in mid-career merely to bury a graveless shipmate lost by accident. Nor was it clear, as it seemed to me it should be, what exactly I was aiming
for,
even ostensibly: no hero of my acquaintance went west merely for the Pattern’s sake; indeed, as many as not began by going
east,
in order to return to a westward home. Since I was to my knowledge homeless but for Corinth, to make it on my present course would require circumnavigation of the globe—and Polyeidus had prophesied to us years past that not for centuries would it be speculated, much less demonstrated, that the earth is round. Finally, as I stood making idle water one forenoon on the strand (like that nameless minstrel Polyeidus mentioned), I thought I saw a winged white horse flap past out on the horizon. Could’ve been a gull—the distance was far, and I was preoccupied with making my name in imaginary letters—but it put me in mind of magic Pegasus, of Perseus’s fancy sandals, and of my own lack of any gear besides the tool in hand, which had got me only into trouble. In short, I came to feel that at least three things were wanting before I could proceed with my career: clearer counsel on the matter of absolution; a more definite course of hero-work, with specific adversaries, goals, and labors; and a magic weapon, vehicle, or secret with which to address the work. For all three I must apply either to the prophet or to the gods; not to lose more time I applied to both, making prayer-stops at every temple of Athene along the way back to Polyeidus.”

“Athene?” Why not Aphrodite?

To entertain wife and mistress at the same time with the same tale is hard. “Dee-Dee, Athene’s pet, died, Philonoë, there in Aphrodite’s grove, right?” “Well.” And I’d been marinated, Melanippe, overnight in the sex-queen’s hole. So? “It wasn’t love Bellerophon needed, but advice. Come Tiryns—as close to Corinth as I felt it safe to go—I got both.” “Um.” Um.

Bellerophon wishes he had never begun this story. But he began it. Then he wishes he were dead. But he’s not. Therefore he reconstructs it painfully for his darling Amazon, as he once pained with it patient Philonoë. Dee-Dee (dead) had daydreamed of riding that white horse till the night mares made hay of him, and on Polyeidus’s advice had even fasted once five days and nights in Athene’s Corinth temple, to find out how to find it. On the fifth—so he told me, right?—he thought he heard the goddess say: “Finding Pegasus is easy; he hangs around my sister’s wells and bushes; I’m surprised you haven’t seen him grazing down below. But to catch and ride him’s another story: for that you need this.” She fetched from around her tunic a fine gold bridle; even let him take it in his hand. But when he woke it was only his torpid tool he held, as I mine later—so he told me and Sibyl, stoned, next evening in the grove, right, the last of his life, when he let himself go, ran to Dad’s rescue, got foddered. In the real
Bellerophoniad
this would be established in an earlier digression.

So: on the way to Tiryns it occurred to me to try again—i.e., Bellerophon decided to do what dead Dee-Dee’d done. The first two nights, nothing: those temples were roadside shrines, where all I could get was a fuzzy image in black and white of the horse himself, like that early one Polyeidus had picked up. On the third day I came to Tiryns, where King Proetus had a N
αῷ
’A
θἠνηϛ
large enough for the greatest reception. There he and Queen Anteia received me as a suppliant; over a five-course meal (but I was fasting) I told them the story of my life (First Flood, Part One) and asked permission to fast and sleep for the next three nights in the temple.

“There’s room,” said the King—a mild-mannered monarch, middle-aged, who fiddled with his flatware as I spoke. “And I imagine we can arrange a purification, if you really fault yourself for that fiasco on the beach—I must say I’ve heard more plausible accounts from my people up in Corinth. None of my business, I’m sure, but aren’t you being a bit eager to take the blame?”

“I killed my brother,” I insisted. “My dad too—I mean my foster father.”

Proetus sighed. “O yes, the demigod thing.”

I blushed, but held my tongue. Anteia—a sharp-featured woman somewhere between her husband’s age and mine—said. “
I
think you’ve got a lot going for you in the hero way myself, Bellerophon. Here’s hoping you get what you’re after in Tiryns; we could use some excitement, God knows. And there’s nothing wrong with a little ambition.”

“Who’s knocking ambition?” Proetus asked the company. “I was ambitious myself at his age: made war on my brother Acrisius; married me this beautiful Lycian princess here—the works. But I never went around telling people I was going to be a star, much less a constellation.”

“Sour grapes,” Anteia said.

“Nobody’s satisfied nowadays to be a decent husband and father,” the King went on, “or a reasonable administrator. It’s hero or nothing.”

Mortified, I replied, what was simply true, that in my opinion ambition had less to do than definition with my ends. Estellation—as the examples of Orion, Heracles, Castor, and Pollux testified or would testify—was as natural a fate for mythic heroes as coronation was for princes, death in battle for combat soldiers, oblivion for ordinary men. I had not “chosen” to kill Glaucus and my brother, any more than I had chosen to be sired by Poseidon or would choose to slay monsters and the rest. It was the Pattern…

“Ah-ah—” Proetus raised a finger. “You didn’t choose your parents, obviously; and I’m glad to hear you admit that the mare-business was an accident, more or less. But nobody’s obliging you to go after this winged horse, right? And you’ve acknowledged already that you’re trying to decide what to do when you catch him.”

The man was more tease than mock, but I couldn’t readily refute him. I began to explain, reflecting on the matter for the first time myself, that in the case of heroes there seemed to be no choice of general destinies, they being foreordained as it were by the Pattern; but any given hero might at any point conceivably choose to turn his back on himself, so to speak, and sulk like Achilles in his tent instead of sallying forth to glory. Should he
persist
in such fecklessness, he’d become by definition no hero, just as a crown prince who declined accession would be no crown prince. Doubtless the point could be better put—“But that’s not Bellerophon’s business,” Anteia said shortly to her husband. “Logic is for your type; his job is to be a mythic hero, period.”

I agreed, wishing I’d said less. Proetus shrugged. “He makes a good case for himself, all the same. Pleasant dreams, boy; let’s hope it won’t cost you many more people to get to heaven.”

Troubled sleep. In fine-tuned black and white I saw Pegasus grazing in the temple court; Athene, cowled, came up, belted with the famous bridle, and seemed to move her lips. At the sound of footfalls in the temple I lost the picture; woke to find a gray-cowled lady prowling in the precinct, near my pallet. My first theophany! I sprang up, dizzy at this evidence that I was on my way.

“Athene?” “Sorry.” Anteia slipped back her hood and smiled. “Just checking to see if you’re comfortable. Anything you need?” I thanked her, no. Couldn’t sleep, she said, for thinking of my dinner tale. Spot of Metaxa? I groaned to get on with my dreamwork, but Queen was Queen. Neat? Bit of water in mine. “My husband’s a coward,” she said for openers; “no, not a coward, just minor league.” “O?” We sat on a marble bench and sipped. “Time and again I’ve set him up to do something really big,” she said. “Daddy loaned him half an army to knock off Acrisius—they were twins, like you-all? He blew it.” “Ah.” She smoothed her hair, swirled her liquor. “Half the fucking Lycian army. So I said Just up and
kill
the bastard, for god’s sake—the way
you
did your brother? No thanks: too ballsy by half, that idea! Some seer, he claimed, told him
Perseus
is supposed to kill Acrisius as part of his hero-thing.” “That figures, actually,” I remarked, startled at her way of speaking and uncertain what to do. “Hmp. So I do a little homework on their famous feud, okay? And guess what I find out: it started in the first place when His Royal Highness slipped it to Acrisius’s daughter! His own niece, right here in my palace! So okay, we weren’t married at the time, but still. It’s a wonder to me he ever got it up for the little twat; he doesn’t exactly beat
me
to death with it. Even so he comes out a loser: Acrisius sticks Danaë in a tower where nobody can see her but the gods; she sits around bare-ass naked all day to get their attention—have you seen the pictures? Zeus himself puts it to her, and bingo—Perseus! Who it turns out is like as not to kill Proetus and Acrisius both and take over the country. I swear. That’s why it riled him when you started on the hero business: he’s petrified of mythic heroes. More juice?”

I guessed not. Anteia downed hers with a wink and declared her frank envy of women like Danaë who were smart or lucky enough to take up with gods and heroes, never mind the consequences. Being nothing but queen was so goddamn
boring,
especially in a two-bit city-state like Tiryns: one lousy amphitheater and half a dozen restaurants, all Greek. I thought her unfairly critical of her husband, but was interested all the same: my first experience of overtures from an older woman.

“I suppose this sort of thing happens to you all the time,” she said, in a different tone.

“No, ma’am.” I wished I had asked What.

“Hm.” We sat awhile. Metaxa. “Read any good books lately, Killer?”

Really, Bellerophon? At least I’m certain she called me Killer, for though I’d not read Aristotle’s
Nichomachean Ethics
or for that matter any other books—their invention being still far in the future and myself at that time unable to read—I explained to her at some length my position on the moral aspect of Glaucus’s and my brother’s deaths, which I’d reasoned out between Corinth and Pylos with the aid of terms from the aforementioned work, known to me in bits and pieces via Polyeidus. “Proetus,” I declared, “says I’m innocent, and in the respect that my role in those deaths was not an example of
proairesis
(by which will be meant a voluntary act preceded by deliberation), I agree. Indeed, following Aristotle’s classification of human actions according to the degree and nature of the agent’s volition—