Hunger's Brides (26 page)

A sorry Zeus, while unwilling to oppose her, gave Tiresias as a measure of recompense clearer sight within than others have without, and left the prophet with his heightened sense to walk the roads of Greece through endless night.

When one day Zeus appeared as a bull to my daughter, Iynx, she reacted with neither laughter nor aversion but circumspection, for his polymorphous appearances always accompanied some perversion or other. And when Zeus then sent me, her mother, to regale Hera with some drawn-out story, I still thought Iynx his quarry. Yet I had no cause to worry—Iynx, the budding sorceress, had quickly cast a spell and made Io, who was Hera's own priestess, the new object of Zeus's vicious tenderness. But so consumed was I by anxiety that my usually agile tongue
stumbled over some unwonted infelicity and Hera grew suspicious. Soon she found Zeus toiling over Io in a shady wood. Not good at all. Not good.

Iynx, my chaste and clear-eyed child, for her reckless incantations Hera cast into exile as a wry-neck, a vulgar snake-bird condemned to long migrations. Io she turned into a piebald cow beating a trail to Egypt with a cloud of gadflies at her tail.

But my punishment was special, neat. The ugly body she let me keep, but the clever wagging tongue that'd made her laugh and weep, Hera now made to echo the last few words of whatever I heard anyone speak no matter how stupid, rash or weak.

So while Narcissus was making his way towards me in a zigzag peregrination, I was hiding in the Cretan woods avoiding insipid conversations. Sweet Narcissus … son of Leiriope, a violet-eyed nymph, and Cephisus, the river god, who'd caught her in his liquid coils and
ravished
her, I think's the word. Narcissus had his mother's eyes and his father's fluid grace. Few had seen so beautiful a face. Not since Apollo's ganymede, Hyacinthus—whose face was smashed in by a jealous West Wind one day, as the boy was learning to play with the sun god's golden … discus.

Narcissus was beautiful, yes, but like all rape seed, so hard of heart. Leiriope took her motherly misgivings to blind Tiresias, the boy's future course to chart. Would Narcissus grow old, content and tender-hearted? she asked. But the blind man's prophecy was just as sure as it was then obscure to her: Only if himself he never know, the seer answered sad and slow. (He'd just foreseen that he himself would lose both daughters to Apollo.)

Narcissus grew up a hunter and a collector. Starting out with butterflies, then on to trophy heads and trophy hides, then on again to the still-beating hearts of lovers. At Narcissus's latest departure on one of his hunting trips, a jilted pale Ameinius called with quivering lips after the arrogant archer, “May you never be able to love another, but only yourself in hell!”

Nemesis, resting in the cover of a nearby stand of ash, heard him well….

So it was I heard them approaching one day with yells and shouts and vulgar speech. Narcissus and a group of louts, swinish and hirsute—Theban sea raiders on shore leave—with a brace of beautiful white Gabriel hounds, tall, graceful and unflagging in pursuit.

If you could have seen Narcissus then—what beauty! To see him was to love him. And love made no exceptions. Not even among ugly nymphs of a certain age and utterly lacking in discretion. The coiling of muscle beneath his golden hide, the cold-eyed serpentine grace as with bow and spear and net he plied his trade….

I followed him for days. Irises sprang up in the green bruises where he stepped or stopped to rest awhile on crushed meadow grasses—here a violet scar, another there. I wove a purple chaplet for my hair and followed still more closely as he got separated from the pack. As the baying of the hounds grew distant, Narcissus taken aback called out to his companions, “Wait an instant—wait for me!”

“Wait for me,” I echoed.

“I'd wait for
you,”
said he. A trace of pout—those sweet-petalled lips drooped as though in drought as he called after the unheeding group.

“I'd wait for you.”
Forever
.

“Wait, come back!”

“Come …” I sighed.

“Who's here with me?” Narcissus called, still not knowing where to look.

“Back here, with me.”
Forever
.

I could hear the hounds returning as he turned to me at last, but still he didn't see. “What
is
this?”

“Is this …”
My chance?
It was stupid and insane but they were coming back—now or never—I wouldn't get this chance again. I rushed forward and threw my eager arms around his neck.

“Is this some kind of trick? Are they playing a joke on me?” he said looking—anywhere but at me—for his ribald yokel friends to come running from the woods in glee.

“A joke, on me,” I moaned.

“Let go of me. Let go!”

I saw disgust flood across his face. To him I was some grasping, mindless hag.

“Don't touch me,” he cried, “leave me alone!”

“Don't leave me alone,” I cried after him as he fled into the trees. “Touch me….”

What else could I do but follow? And at each place he stopped to rest I swooped in, like some squawking crow raiding a still-warm nest, and pecked more purple flowers for my dark brow. But what hurts more than all the rest is how I trailed him lowing like some loathsome cow.

Just as he was rejoining his asinine companions at last, with much braying all round and slapping of sweaty backs, the Gabriel hounds started up a pure, white stag and started running it to ground.

“We've got it backed against the cliffs!” Narcissus cried, already having forgotten me.

At the foot of those colossal cliffs on whose brooding brow perched the palace of Cnossus—the Cretan seat of power—the white stag darted into a thick and tangled bower that had long concealed from nymphs and men what appeared to be the den of a bear or a lion. Surrounded on three sides, hard-pressed by hounds, the stag overcame its fright and in one bound leapt from leafy day to stony night—half a jump ahead of the fast-closing dogs, who unlike greyhounds hunted not just by sight alone but by their noses, and ahead too of the hunters flushed with blood lust, blinded to the danger.

Inside, it grew clear even as the light grew dim that this was no mere cave. The smooth walls in their stony regularity, the hidden turnings in their perverse ambiguities, the blind alleys and the forking paths all bore the stamp of an uncanny energy and plan. This lion's den must be the work of man.

Echoing from floor to roof all through these spiralling halls the clatter of cloven hooves, the deep baying of startled hounds reduced to a kind of yelping sound, the blaring calls of triton shells retreating, the amazed shouts and curses of bewildered men. I wondered with a shudder of fear if the Minotaur who'd stalked these passageways might still be near, but he'd been dead for years.

The din receded and dispersed, leaving me sifting the dying echoes, and leaving Narcissus with his jilted suitor's unflagging curse. Which in its cryptic drift carried him, the son of river god and water nymph, down towards the liquid core of things. Down to the heart of the labyrinth, to a chamber through whose lofty ceiling angled one broad shaft of sunlight—with just a glimpse of blue above the cliffs—a wondrous place that glittered with minerals, metallic veins, flakes of gold and crystal. And at the heart of that fabulous vault welled a clear and perfect spring never fouled by bird or man or animal. A spring of faultless royal blue—ultramarine where the sun shot through.

By threading a course along just those paths from which there came no echo, I made my own way to the silent place at the edge of the spring and found Narcissus kneeling. He had stripped to bathe and bent to
drink from the spring, when in its convex, welling surface he found the face of his curse and prophecy.

That face wore now an expression of numb amazement. Perfect beauty ensnared in a faultless spring … among sharp, glittering pillars rising and falling to the faint shrill keening chatter—just audible now—of furious dog-headed bats. The blind rush of water up from soundless depths … the bright still coolness of the vault … I stood and stood—if only I could have stood and watched forever. Then he began to speak.

“O bright child—”

Bright Child
, I murmured near silently. I longed to shout the words, but the only way to make him talk to me was not to let myself be heard.

“Bright child, I find the contents of my deepest fears disguised in your bright eyes. You strike a spark where all these years so many others, so despised, have left me strong and cold. Now you shudder when I try to hold you—don't flee, I give you power over me.”

I give you power over me …

“In your eyes I see a love like mine invested in a brighter, better self. Yet though my love darkly mirrors yours, you seem to love without needing words … whereas my purest love for you is tainted as, shabbily, I yearn to be held by you, to be talked to.”

To be held by you, talked to …

“O divine boy, for you must be divine, is this how you must love? Are you to love me without need, am I to love you without hope of love's reply?”

Without hope of love's reply …

“But don't you see? What you give I have no way of getting. And what you need I have no way of giving!”

No way of giving …

“So either I must love deluded, or without hope. Is this all you have to offer me—this cold and perfect love?”

Cold and perfect love …

“Has anyone been so cursed as to love with a love like mine? For this love surely is a curse: a love unreturned is worse, far worse than any kindred hatred. Why have you seduced me, O heartless boy, why waste my heart?”

Waste my heart …

“Your eyes like fevered suns devour me even as I bend to drink you in. But still you do not come, you will not bend. I try to slake my thirst in
you, but your image will not yield. For you, I've killed all the other hungers once within me—even my love for Ceres, sweet goddess of the corn, my hope, my shield. Every other urge for food or drink have I purged, unable to think, to see straight…. I am poisoned by this thing, towards vileness urged.”

I am poisoned by this thing …

“What cause have you to mock me, bright child, who inflicts his burning image on my depths? My beauty is not wanting—princes and goddesses and nymphs have wanted me. So what stands between us but this weightless veil—the thinnest veil of water … which I cannot lift or penetrate though I plunge my arms up to my chest, up to my eyes. A thin veil that in vain I try to rend in twain
as my arms cleave the azure's crystal drift
, but even as they do, it flows back again without a rift.
⁴⁴
With all my fury I strike but glancing blows. Then your image glides back behind the veil and mocks me from below. How can you let such a slender thing come between us?”

Slender, a thing come between us …

“All oblique your gliding gaze even at its centre, while through a kind of haze I glimpse a garden sere and bleak because you will not enter. How I am deceived by those eyes, betrayed by this bright child who lay down with me!”

Bright Child … lay down with me …

“But couldn't we be friends at least? You reach out, yet do not touch me.
Some friendly promise in your face I view. You smile when I smile and answer tears with tears
. Your lips speak when I speak to you, but the words I cannot hear.”

The words I cannot hear…
. Witless fool I felt myself drawn blundering forward. He can't
hear
me, I told myself. I was about to spoil it all again. But even as I edged closer to the pool, in its convex, cool and silvered surface I saw his face bloated by tears. And in that face a flickering of troubled recognition, a sense of some tremendous mystery not yet revealed but just barely concealed beneath that lying reflection. Closer now, I could see him struggling with some clue, then the dawning knowledge of his fatal miscue, his misstep—even as the image of a sardonic, grinning bull seemed to surge up from the depths—

“No, not you! Is this the joke my fate has wrought? Is this my due? Is personality my fate? I am the one?—that one is you, the one I long to hate!”

As he struck at the pool with weak and hapless blows, I stepped forward to console him and broke the shaft of light that angled past his face. The surface of the pool below went black—

“Get back! Get back behind me. You foul the image.”

Foul, the image …

“You have driven him away!”

Driven him away …

He turned to me, at last. He might at least have shown some gratitude. Still so sunk was he in his deluded visions—I could see him desperately eyeing my unruly waves of gorgon's hair, the chaplet bristling with sharp-petalled flowers, the sunlight on my burly shoulder's, my ugliness—the recent object of his scorn—he sought anything that might have caused the appearance of those horns, anything to show the image he'd seen was not his own.

And in that instant, my dearest daughter, I would have given him anything, the whole wild sun-soaked world. But I couldn't speak unless spoken to, like some over-tutored child. What he needed then I could not give, and the only one who could have … lay dying beneath him in that spring.

The moment passed, the power of illusion crumbled. The face he turned back to his lover was filled with horror at how he had been humbled, with sorrow at how he'd been brought low. To become the freakish object of his own derision …

He sat desolate in his rage, beaten, before the surface of a brazen image he could not dispel, a visage now engraved upon his eyes.

And before
my
eyes my bronzed, exalted demigod, gone pale as marble, began to shatter as though some dark chisel had struck a secret fault. Yet even as cracks turned to shards, they started downward as frosted candlewax, to strike the pool as incandescent oil.