Chimera (24 page)

“His sudden change of mood perplexed me, but I took off on Pegasus without waiting for dessert, spent the night and morning talking with fishermen and merchant-skippers, located the chief pirate vessel by aerial reconnaissance with the aid of their descriptions, sank ship and company by bombardment with big rocks, knocked off the paddlers with low-level hoofing, returned to the palace by cocktail time. The King and Polyeidus, celebrating, seemed surprised; Philonoë kissed me. ‘Nothing to it,’ I said, hanging up my bridle: ‘Captain’s name was Chimarrhus, which I believe means goat? Red-bearded chap. Real fire-breather, judging from the way he hissed and gurgled going under. Their rig had a lion figurehead, serpentine taffrail: a nautical monstrosity. I wasted them. No big deal.’

“ ‘Hmp,’ Iobates said, his elder daughter’s father, glaring at Polyeidus, who rapidly declared that the great similarity between the old Carian pirate outfit and the new border-monster should not be taken as evidence that my testimony was fanciful: in his opinion it corroborated his opinion that the Chimera, while newly embodied up in the hills and a great fresh threat to Lycia, was a monster of long-standing Carian tradition: his genealogical visions and researches inclined him to believe her the offspring of Typhon and Echidne. The former, son of Earth and Tartarus, had been the largest monster ever: a serpent from the waist down, he featured hundred-league arms with serpent-heads for hands, an ass-head that touched the stars, sun-darkening wings, flaming eyes, and live-lava breath—hence Chimera’s volcanic habitat. The latter, half lovely woman and half speckled serpent, a man-eater killed by hundred-eyed Argus, was one of the Phorcids, sister to the Gorgons and Graeae of Persean fame. Thus Chimera, interestingly, was in fact Medusa’s niece, Pegasus’s cousin, and, since the winged horse was my half-sibling, not altogether unrelated to me.

“Iobates rehmped, and with not so much as a congratulatory word to me, said he wondered now and then what was in some people’s drinks. ‘I take it you can back up this claim?’ he asked me incordially. Surprised, I retorted that the numberless sharks had been my only body-counters; Philonoë protested to her dad that while trophy-fetching was a common enough feature of heroic expeditions, to put the burden of proof on the hero was unprecedented and discourteous. Polyeidus diplomatically suggested that just as I was still a novice at performing hero-tasks, the King was a novice at taskmastering; why not both of us try another? Detachments of the Solymian and Amazon military, he understood, were once again bivouacked along the border on opposite sides of Mount Chimera, a clear and present danger to our territorial integrity. How about a twin wonder, the single-handed repulse of both armies?

“Iobates made the family noise, but seemed interested. Philonoë showed alarm. ‘Of course, if you think that’s beyond you…’ Polyeidus offered. ‘Nothing’s beyond me,’ I said. Then the King, all smiles, bade me have a nice dinner first, at which he specified, in the trophy way, a good-looking Amazon captive not older than twenty-five Polyeidic years or below the rank of first lieutenant, sufficiently intact for concubinage.

“ ‘That’s
disgusting,
Daddy!’ Philonoë said. ‘Besides, any Amazon would
die
before she’d be a slave; we learned that in fourth grade.’ Iobates chuckled and declared he’d take the chance. I remarked that while serial labors were not unusual for heroes, I knew of none whose tasks were imposed without so much as a night’s sleep between. Polyeidus agreed, but seconded the King’s timetable on the grounds that just as no literary classic is quite like any other literary classic, so no classical hero’s biography exactly duplicated any other’s; one attained such generality as the Pattern only by ignoring enough particular differences. This notion oddly troubled me. The Princess kissed my brow and said, ‘Daddy’s afraid to have you around because he sees I have a crush on you. Lots of kings are like that.’ Iobates hmped; I took off blear-eyed but much aroused.

“I was, remember, a prime and healthy fellow, so preoccupied with my career that except for occasional chamber-maids or temple-prostitutes I’d had no women since Sibyl-in-the-grove. All the while I drowsily wrecked the Solymians (saturation-bombing of their encampment by moonlight with boulders from Mount Chimera—where I saw this time neither smoke nor monster—and sporadic high-level horse dung), I had ardent fantasies about Philonoë, so much more fetching than Anteia or Polyeidus’s distracted daughter. At dawn, when I landed sleepily to verify the rout, I could scarcely concentrate on trampling the wounded for imagining the perky Princess (in Position One) on my temple pallet or among the creepers of the sacred grove. The camp was empty; indeed, the old chap I was absent-mindedly hoofing to death was the only sign of life; had I been less full of Philonoë I might have heard in time his protests that he was not Solymian but Carian, a goatherd whose flock the Solymian raiding party, taking him for a Lycian, had made off with at my first bomb-run from the hilltop. Declaring that he would have fled after them in hopes of stealing back his goats had he not slipped on a Pegasus-turd and turned his ankle, he cursed warriors in general and mythic heroes in particular, who in his opinion were worse than mercenaries in that we had not even the excuse of getting our daily bread by doing hired hurt to others, but performed our lethal offices for mere self-aggrandizement. This point I would have debated with him readily had he not expired upon making it; just as well, I reflected, recalling Philonoë’s attitude toward overmuch rationality on the part of heroes. The recollection of her earnest face and dainty neck too aroused me for discourse anyhow; marveling tumescently at how my image of her worked to turn me into her image of me, I flew off to find the Amazons.

“Their rout was easily effected, for all their famous battle-courage, inasmuch as they were strictly horse soldiers, and their mounts, trained not to shy from the most clangorous conventional combat, bolted unmanageably at first sight of swooping Pegasus. The ‘war party’ reported by Lycian intelligence numbered no more than two dozen, mostly middle-aged: I learned later from Melanippe that they were in fact scouts sent to investigate the Chimera, distorted reports of whose existence and possible usefulness had come to Themiscyra from Lycian operatives. They were lightly armed and, far from home, more concerned with preserving their horses than doing battle with me, whom they took to be the monster. A few passes scattered them; had I been in their territory, they’d have regrouped, blindfolded their mounts, and come back to dispatch me at whatever cost. As I wasn’t, they returned to their base with reports (corroborated, so our own intelligence people subsequently confirmed, by the Solymian scouting and foraging party) that Chimera was a flying centaur in Iobates’s service, not a fire-breathing dragon in Amisidoros’s, and recommended withdrawal from the Carian alliance, as did the Solymians—Amisidoros, it turns out, knew nothing at all of the treble beast alleged to be his house pet and secret weapon.

“But they returned, the Amazons, minus one, the youngest-looking, whom I buzzed and harried several kilometers from the rest until her horse fell. She was pitched hard to the rocky ground; the horse, a black mare, sprang up and, less fearful now that Pegasus was landed, stood nervously by. The Amazon lay still. I fetched up her brazen bow and half-moon shield to club her with if she happened to be alive, and rolled her over with my foot. She seemed more dazed than dead, but required no further blows. I tied her wrists and ankles with her bowstring as she stirred, and stanched enough blood to try to judge her age and rank. She was very young, Philonoë’s age at most, dark-skinned, short-haired, wiry, the most attractive of her kind I’d seen. Back in Corinth I’d heard the usual Amazon stories—that they burned their left breasts off to clear the bowstring; that they were actually men, a kind of Spartans in drag—and with my brother had teased in vain our Themiscyran horse-grooms for confirmation. Now, as my prisoner began to regain her senses, I did my own research: both breasts were there when I pulled her shirt open; little pomegranates by comparison with Philonoë’s ripe pears or Sibyl’s honeydews, but no less appetizing. I unbuckled her chiton and pulled down her spotted tights, ripped and dirtied from her fall: despite bruise and brush-burn, her thighs were lean and smooth to touch, her parts altogether female: neat and dainty, lightly fleeced. As I poked to learn whether she still had her hymen, she thrashed about and swore military oaths.

“ ‘Are you by any chance an officer?’ I asked her.

“ ‘Lance Corporal Melanippe, Fifth Light Cavalry,’ she answered furiously. ‘Get your filthy hands off me!’

“ ‘That’s under First Lieutenant, I suppose? No matter. Are you a virgin?’

“She replied, in a tighter voice, though still as if at least as angry with herself as with me, that the Second Rule for Amazonian Prisoners of War forbade her to give any information beyond her name, rank, and unit. I cordially pointed out that inasmuch as I’d been ignorant of that rule, she’d broken it already by informing me of its existence. Amazons do not weep, but their voices tremble. She requested that I kill her first.

“ ‘Before what?’ Then I realized, rather to my own surprise, not only that I’d been totally erect ever since dismounting from Pegasus (who grazed and nuzzled peacefully with the black mare), but that I really did mean forcibly to have her. She put up a formidable resistance, particularly for one bound hand and foot and barely sensible after her fall: certain Amazons, I was to learn later, especially those named Melanippe or Leaping Myrine, have a kind of limited Protean capacity when sexually in extremis; my lance corporal, before I stuck her, turned briefly but unmistakably into a stone crab, a water snake, a hind, and a squid, in that order. Her undoing was that, frenzied, she could think only of what she hoped were frightening or swift beasts (and, at that, happened not to think of wild mares, which would have undone me), not realizing, what I knew from Polyeidus, that anything limbed she might turn into would be bound as she was—and that my acquaintance with shape-shifters somewhat immunized me to her effects. Had she turned into a cloud, say, or a stream of water, she might’ve got clear; as it was, I merely backed off from the crab and held it by a backfin against scuttling off on its other legs; seized the viper safely behind the head (my brother and I were great early terrifiers of little girls with snakes we caught in the grove); and actually entered, a tergo, the lassoed hind, knowing it must soon rebecome what I lusted for. Squealing, it turned squid, only two of whose five pairs of tentacles were tied: I’d’ve got out fast—that beak, you know, down by the sex-parts?—but the free six suckered me, not bad actually, from the same squiddy instinct which then inked the penis it might have bitten off. A moment later she was unmaidened Melanippe, held by the hair and howling under me as I gave her squirt for squirt. Once come, I was at once appalled at having twice been so overmastered by desire, this time replacing with unkindest force my kindless deception in the grove. I withdrew, contrite; squid ink, mixed with cherry-bright blood, smeared from my shrinking tool onto her hams and cheeks, still fiercely squeezed, initialing my shame in the strokes and diacritics of a barbarous alphabet.

“ ‘Pig! Pig!’ she spat, choking with outrage. I saw no point in pointing out to her that that transformation, had she thought of it in time, would have been spitted as her hind.

“ ‘Awfully sorry,’ I panted. ‘Long time between women; got carried away. Say, that squid was a crackerjack!’

“ ‘Cut my throat,’ she requested, speaking into the dirt.

“
‘Don’t be silly.’

“ ‘Disembowel me.’

“ ‘Nonsense.’

“ ‘I’d kill you if I could, you sexist swine.’

“There we lay. ‘I shouldn’t blame you,’ I said. ‘I’ve never deflowered anybody before, you know, much less committed rape. I’m thoroughly ashamed of myself. What shall I do to make it up to you?’ Her suggestions were ill-humored and impossible to carry out without ending my career. We were still for a while.

“ ‘In my country,’ she said presently, ‘we’d cut your rapist cock off and choke you on it. We’d impale you up the ass on a hot stake. We’d make you eat your own balls. O! O! O!

“A third time I apologized for having forced her; despite her oaths, spits, and thrashes, then, I cleaned her up and put her clothes in order, saving only the armored chiton as evidence for Iobates. As I worked I recounted sympathetically Anteia’s rape-story; her frustration at unfair nature’s one-sidedness in this area; my admiration of the excellent horsemanship of the Amazons on our palace staff in Corinth, and her own fine fighting spirit; my resolve to see her back to her outfit instead of enslaving her to my taskmaster, for whom I had no particular affection, et cetera. Putting by the Second Rule for Prisoners, Melanippe then informed me, more calmly but still in a cool fury, of the First—to die in battle rather than be taken prisoner, since Amazons must expect to be raped by their Sexist Pig Captors—and the Third—if captured by surprise, to kill oneself as soon as possible, not to afford more gratification than necessary to those same SPC’s. I reminded her that I had no intention of repeating that shameful violation, of her and of my own better nature. She spat at me, unimpressed, and said that as a point of honor no Amazon, once captured and sexually assaulted, ever returned to Amazonia unless with her assailant’s severed parts strung on a lanyard, for though her people, contrary to popular belief, had a high regard for heterosexual as well as homosexual connections, and copulated vigorously and freely on their own initiative with males, they abhorred above all things being forced. Their moral education, their religion, their art, even their history and mythology, turned on this point: they traced their descent, for example, from a company of some two thousand virgins forcibly deflowered by an Asian despot who then transported them en masse to Scythia, bidding them remember him kindly as having relented in his vow to kill each one after raping her; instead, those who found themselves pregnant by him killed their children, and they established a militant gynocracy to oppose the forcible suppression of their sex.
Amazon,
she said, had a higher meaning than the vulgar one: though a zealous leader might literally lop one breast off for symbolic reasons—Melanippe herself had considered doing so—the single-breastedness implied by the name was metaphorical and positive: one half pure woman, one half pure warrior, et cetera. In consequence of all this, if as sometimes happened a raped Amazon had no chance to take revenge on her defiler before he released her, she was not obliged to kill herself, but she must live in exile, raising the consciousness of foreign women to the facts of their exploitation—hence the isolated instances of Melanippe’s countrywomen in such places as Corinth, where, while doing yeoman service, they quietly subverted the patriarchy.