Sappho (31 page)

That night she murmured into tangled curly hair that shared her pillow. “You scorch me…” The rest of the sentence ended in kisses. She pressed a golden-ankled drinking cup into Gongyla's hands. They sipped from it as one. Spilling drops, they laughed.

“It is not an Olympic or a Pythian year,” Sappho whispered. “It is much more: it is the year that Gongyla loved me that is the most important year of my life.” And she kissed the palms of her lover's hands. “Surely Erato, loveliest of Muses, watches over our night. Answer, and tell me—do you love me, Gongyla?” She must hear it again and again; nor was she ever satisfied. She adored all parts that made up Gongyla, and murmured, “You are dowered with beauty by the gods.” And Sappho gently traced the pretty belly and the three folds of Kypris.

To amuse her, she sang new songs:

The yearning-voiced messenger of spring,

the nightingale …

And when Gongyla wearied of songs, she told stories of Syracuse and of her travels.

“Did you love your husband, Kerkolas?” Gongyla asked unexpectedly.

Sappho took some time in answering. “The Graces do not lend such prettiness to a man as to you. When girls love and lie together, the patron goddesses of leisure, enjoyment, and happiness are present. But to accept caresses from a man means more likely than not that one must tie too tight the band across the stomach, and know much pain. There is no pain here … only delight.”

*   *   *

Sappho was wrong. But prophecy was not her domain. She did not know the air was crowded with calamity, so crowded that there remained not one chink into which to push a blade of grass. Death, hovering in a cloud over Mitylene, descended swiftly. The houses became dark-chambered sepulchres for pestilence to enter. Acolytes began pilgrimages to the healing shrines of Apollo, but silent-footed Thanatos traveled with them. Father Zeus gazed in another direction, and was absent altogether. “Sing woe. Sing woe.”

Sappho called on her hetaerae to purify themselves by ritual absolution. After which:

The moon rose full and the maidens took their stand

about the altar …

She herself sank to Earth, calling on Persephone to spare this house dedicated to song. For she believed the poet, not the priest, had greatest influence with Heaven. She prayed also to gray-eyed Athene to make her words winged and well received: “Let not the soaring eagle of death sweep down onto the timid hare or lamb. Spare these gentle girls.” And she promised hekatombs:

To thee will I burn the rich fat of a white goat

They staked out a scapegoat onto which they piled their own sins that they might be left pure and the gods protect them. They made further sacrifice, pouring wine, scattering flowers and perfumes, burning sandalwood, and singing odes to the undying. It had been fifteen years since the daimones of plague were released from the hideous wrinkled declivity in which they had been shut. In the city they said that a dog urinated at the entrance to that dread cavern, and shortly after a man relieved himself at the exact spot. Furious, Disease leapt out.

Even those who had not seen a stricken person knew the symptoms: the extremities became cold, the urine brackish; the ill person wandered in his mind and vomited blood.

Sappho closed the wooden shutters against Sun's rays. She and her girls would hide until the scourge was past. Who knew? The pretty beams of streaming sunshine, the bright motes themselves might be messengers sent to seek out fresh victims.

The stillness from the city, the absence of its sound, reached them. No business was conducted. Only Death was busy. A slave with her forehead pressed to the floor trembled before Sappho. So lowly was this thrall that Sappho had never seen her. She must have been sent from the bowels of the kitchens, the most menial low-born that could be found.

Sappho stared at her misshapen ugliness, gross body and shriveled limbs. She seemed the personification of Disease itself. “Who are you?” Sappho gasped. “Why are you here?”

“I was sent, O high-born … I have to tell you…” The woman choked in terror.

“Yes? Yes? Tell it!”

“The poet Erinna … she…”

“No more! And never let me look on you again!”

The creature crawled away and the world closed around Sappho.

Erinna, whom she had injured, neglected, almost forgotten, first in her passion for Dika and now Gongyla, was to punish her with her death. Erinna was not strong, that she knew, but she would not let this happen! “Artemis of the bow, Lion among women … give her strength.” To her servants she called, “Bring armfuls of sweet clover to the chamber of Erinna, and dainty anthrysc.” Snatching up her lyre of seven strings, she crossed the compound, taking a way she had once used so often. Her mind was filled with strengthening broths. She would order goat's milk and duck eggs, she …

When she saw Erinna, she knew it was too late. None had dared tell her until now. It seemed a Titan had smashed a great fist upon the creature in the bed. She was like one caught between colliding Sky and Earth in the night of Creation. It was the shell of Erinna that lay there, her hair braided with sweat. Sappho stood motionless. The many times she had braided those same locks with hyacinth and violets.

There was a gurgling sound from Erinna's mouth, and from her nostrils red drops rolled down. Sappho was terrified. She forced herself to the bed. No strengthening broths, no eggs of duck or peahen, no milk of goat, nothing could call this pale shade back. She had begun the long march toward the land of the dead. But those eyes, those ringed sockets moved, they looked on her face.

“A priestess of Apollo will come presently with healing herbs.” Where had she found voice to utter this lie? “You will be well and sound of limb, O Erinna. Together we will go to the black sand shore and search for moonstones and agates, as we used to do. Remember?”

Those terrible orbs regarded her without change of expression. Sappho raced on, hardly thinking what she said. “And we will sit before the scrolls where our work jointly lies, and recall the times we scratched letters with the ivory stylus. Your words are deathless, Erinna. Such philosophy you found in the spinning, twirling distaff. You called it the twisting thread of Destiny. Humble things grew fresh dimension when you sang of them.”

She fell on her knees beside the bed. “We will analyze meters. Your preference was for the Ionic, yet how skillfully you used the alcaic and dactylic … O my Erinna, forgive your Sappho. Some thymos descends on me. I do not know what happens. I follow after a fair face or comely form. But with no one else did I ever speak as I did with you. We shared the melodious sweetness of the Muses, and I have never shared it since with any other. You thought yourself forgotten. But it was never so. I cannot explain, I was distracted…” And she was distracted now, for she bent so close that the mold of the sickness and its stench almost made her faint. Her hands tightened on her lyre; she commanded her lips to smile at the widening black sockets of the eyes that pierced her. She began to sing. Erinna's gaze clung to her as though she were the only thing in the cosmos with which she still had contact.

Sappho's voice came uncertain and wavering.:

Upon the eyes

Night's dark slumber

poured down …

It was the old lullaby. Did one sing a lullaby to Death? Sacred Muses, she begged, help me to go on.

The accursed children of Night were moving in Erinna, a film was spreading over her eyes. “Erinna, I will give up Gongyla. I will not see her more. Only live, live and do not leave me alone!” Then seeing that she was losing against forces no mortal could contend with, she wiped the blood from her friend's face and whispered, “It is the agony of the struggle that reveals the person. So they say of the great Olympic contests. And what can be greater than the one you fight? Erinna, a word, a gesture, so that I may know you have forgiven your friend, your lover, your Sappho.”

The air carried to her two words. “Kiss me…”

Sappho drew back.

Erinna's fixed irises reproached her. She wanted to offer the final endearment Erinna craved, she wanted to give this proof of love. But in that moment of hesitation a dam broke somewhere in Erinna's head, the flood poured over them both. Sappho screamed without sound.

Her women came to her to pick her up. She looked at them with a countenance so terrible their wailing filled the air. Sappho clutched and pulled down her hair, tore at her clothes and lacerated her flesh. Like an Erinye she ran to the house of Gorgo, where her daughter lodged. For the source of this hideous death, this not-to-be-borne misfortune, was plain to her.

She broke in upon Kleis, who sat with another girl before a meal. Sappho in a frenzy dashed the raised cup to the floor. The dishes she hurled at the wall, screaming imprecations that sent the friend gliding from the room like a shadow, as though she had never been there at all.

Kleis was transfixed. Was this dread Circe in her mother's guise?

“She is dead!” Sappho screamed at her. “Erinna, without forgiving me. A daughter's curse did this thing. A curse my only child laid on me, my life, my art, and all who love me. No dog's pissing, no man's urgency laid low the city of Mitylene, but
you
have set the many to mourning and lit the funeral pyres one sees at night. Now I tell you this: I, who gave life to you, want never to see you. Keep away from me.” And Sappho raised her arm and struck her child, who cringed against the wall and fled into the night.

Sappho lifted her voice in lamentation and beat her breasts that had given suck. It was a mercy from the gods when she crumpled on the floor.

As so often happened with her, her mind was double. She was stomach-sick for her words to Kleis, her golden little daughter whom she cried for even as she did for the statue of the stone child in the garden. But the other Sappho in her remained hard, and her eyes were dry.

When the second death happened, none dared tell her. Not the lowliest slave could be beaten into going to her. But there was no need; somehow she knew. The walls themselves seemed to breathe and whisper “Death.”

Hermes came to her in a dream, and she said, “O Master, I am utterly lost. Your coming I take as a sign, O Blessed One. And I swear if my girls are spared, I will go with you to the lotus-covered banks of Acheron.”

It was Gongyla who roused her, speaking gently. “It is Timas. This time it is little Timas.”

Sappho became very still. “Some say the souls of the dead live again in flowers. Do you believe that, Gongyla?”

“I do not know. I hope it.”

“Yes, I hope it too.” She struggled to get up, but Gongyla's hand held her back.

“You cannot spare me, Gongyla. I must look on her. I must say good-bye.”

Gongyla saw she could not dissuade her and so helped her to her feet. Sappho leaned heavily on her friend, but did not know she did. The loss was too big; too much had been swept too suddenly from her world, her world where garlands were strung and conch shells sought on the sand shore.

Timas was not the piteous sight Erinna had been. She was washed, her limbs laid straight. The body was oiled and perfumed and her fair hair caught back with ringlets escaping, just as always. She looked like Timas sleeping as she had seen her many nights.

Looking down she made an epitaph:

This dust is little Timas,

who having died before marriage,

was received into Persephone's

dark bridal chamber, and though

she faded away from here,

all her fair companions

cut off with the knife

the lovely hair of their heads

She motioned to a serving woman, who brought the ceremonial knife, and Sappho cut a lock of her own hair, laying it on Timas's breast. “In death,” she assured the small, still form, even as her mother had assured her, “there is a happy place.”

“She died asleep,” Gongyla whispered.

Sappho nodded. “Slain by a silver arrow shot by Artemis, who gives a swift and painless death to women she loves. And who could not love precious Timas? Do you remember the gift she gave my statue? Her purple handkerchief she tied around the head.” She laughed at the recollection. But Sappho could not long indulge her memories; she was mistress here and there was much to do. “Set out the death jars that all may rinse and purify themselves. Then bring the bodies to the sand. The ashes of little Timas shall be returned to her people, yes, to Phokaea, the northernmost city of Ionia, and those of Erinna must to Rhodes and on to Telos.”

Called together, the hetaerae followed in a long line of sorrow, wending their way, letting the death hymns rise:

When for them

Night long overtakes

their senses

They stopped where the waves seemed not to break. All things were suspended in time, as though the world died when the poet Erinna and the little Ionian maid were laid at their length.

Slaves had built twin funeral pyres, and each girl was placed before the one that would consume her. Lovers and friends passed silently, weeping, and on each laid a lock of their hair—dark and blond, chestnut and black. Straight and in curls, they clustered on the breasts of the dead.

Sappho worried about Timas, she was always getting mixed up about directions. “The water of the Styx is the tenth stream,” she whispered, wanting her to find her way and not be frightened. She was so easily frightened. Sappho looked a last time; and piling woe on woe, she passed to the form of Erinna.

The agony had been erased from her face and form with special preparations. Sappho had no last word for her because of the way they had parted. She knew she was not forgiven. And the sight of the deep bosom in which she had so often nestled, but which was covered now with the locks of the girls, brought unbearable pain. She laid a lock of her own violet-black hair with theirs. She was afraid to say “I love you, Erinna,” although it was true. She was afraid of the shade of the poet.