Chimera (32 page)

“People’s memories improve things, Anteia. Proetus ended up believing he’d fathered Perseus on Danaë. My old tutor Polyeidus claims now that it was himself and not Poseidon who sired me on Eurymede. I never once made love to you, and you know it.”

The guard confidently raised her sword.

“Pig rhetoric,” Anteia growled. “In Tiryns a man doesn’t ‘sire a child on a woman’; she conceives it on a man. Position One in this polis is with the man underneath. You admit you’ve committed the crime of rape?”

“Not on you. On an Amazon lance corporal, twenty years ago, and I hated myself afterward. She was a dead ringer for your young attendant there: astonishing coincidence.”

“Put him away,” the Queen ordered. “You’re not going to the sky, Bellerophon. You’re going to Tartarus with your bloody prick stuffed down your lying throat.”

“Thorry, Dad,” Megapenthes said as they led me out. “Why not ‘feth up and be Mom’th thecthual thlave forever? Aunt Philonoë wouldn’t mind, if it thaved your life. We’re raithing her conthiouthneth.”

Anteia told him to be a good boy and stop nattering and go fetch her a glass of Phaedra. I was led down to a dungeon to wait my fate, burdened as much by the thwart of my ambition as by the prospect of torture, mutilation, death. An examination of my cell suggested no way either to escape or to kill myself. I spent a dreadful day under the eyes of my warden, Anteia’s attendant, who watched impassively as I sighed, paced the bare room, tried to nap, ate and drank, pissed and shat. Her resemblance to my lance corporal was truly remarkable: cropped dark hair, wiry build, brown skin and eyes, small breasts and buttocks—I wished I weren’t about to die, so that I might explore the coincidence undistracted, inquire whether her mother was perhaps an Amazon refugee in Corinth, et cetera. I did indeed ask whether her name was by any chance Melanippe: she neither replied nor turned away, but regarded me steadily while the footfalls of my executioner, as I supposed, came down the stair.

But Anteia merely bid the girl unlock my cell and entered, without visible instruments of emasculation or execution.

“Hi,” she said, standing just inside the closed door. Her tone was mild.

“Hello,” I answered carefully, and got up from the floor. “Have a seat.”

She smiled quickly and came over to the tiny barred window where I stood, but—as the floor was filthy and there was no bench or pallet—declined my invitation. Her breath was vinous. I kept my eyes on her face, trying to assess the situation. She mostly looked down, as if at my flaccid parts.

“You have to understand everything at once,” she declared. “I’m not able to talk about anything just now.”

“I understand nothing. Where’s Philonoë?”

“I didn’t want to come down here,” she said tersely. “I didn’t want to see you again at all, Bellerophon.”

“Same here. What’s up?”

“You’re not helping me,” she complained, whipping her head from side to side. “You’re not saying any of the right things.”

“Megapenthes isn’t my son,” I said. “And there’s no such thing as semidemigods. My only offense was not making love to you when you wanted me to, and that’s not against the law except in Themiscyra. Besides, I was trying to get through to Athene, to get my work done, and you kept interrupting. What’s more, Athene doesn’t like people making love in her temples: look at Medusa. You might be a Gorgon right now if I’d let you seduce me.”

“The way you turn away from me,” she complained, “you’d think I
was
a Gorgon.”

I explored this attitude. “That’s not so, Anteia. In the temple, that first night, you really excited me; I’m sure you saw it. But I was an ambitious young man, trying to become a mythic hero and purify myself at the same time, and worrying about the laws of hospitality. It was just the wrong place and the wrong time. I’m sorry about that.”

“Hmp.” But she went on, her voice still more injured than belligerent. “My sister worships you. It’s criminal the way she takes all your double-standardist crap with a smile. She should kick you in the balls.”

I made no reply; began restlessly to wonder about the pattern of incremental revelation in my case, whether it was going to follow sexual intercourse with a succession of women rather than, as in
Perseid,
successive nights with the same woman, and whether I was obliged to include Anteia in the lot or might proceed directly to Philonoë. But now, her tone gradually hardening, the Queen observed that she was about to enter what the Amazons called Last Quarter: her menses came only infrequently, soon would cease. Her daughters had turned out to be whores and freaks: one was dead of an overdose; the other two, after years of madness and scandalous behavior, had made bad marriages. Running the polls after Proetus’s death had been no picnic: like all wealthy widows, she’d been preyed upon by false seers and con-men of every description, until out of anger and desperation she’d founded the matriarchy. There was little in her life that gave her pleasure to recollect; it was a catalogue of abuses at the hands of men, from her coarse father Iobates through her rapist debauché of a husband to her cruel and faithless lovers—none more false than I.

“Megapenthes was the last straw,” she concluded bitterly. “When I saw how he was, I knew you were an impostor. But I stuck to the quarter-godhood story, for my own pride’s sake. Now you try to take
that
away from me. Damn you for coming back into my life!”

I despaired of setting right the wrong-headed inconsistencies of her complaint; only repeated, like Melanippe her name and unit, that I was no impostor, and that she and I had never been lovers.

Anteia’s manner grew broadly cunning: “We’re two of a kind, Bellerophon,” she chuckled. “Do you think I
believe
that nonsense about the Chimera? Even Philonoë admits there’s no proof that it wasn’t something you and Polyeidus dreamed up: another pig fantasy, killing the imaginary female monster. Nobody ever saw her, even! You conned Iobates the way Polyeidus tried to con your mother—and the worst-conned of all is Philonoë, who’s known all along you were a fake and loved you anyhow.”

“I
did
kill the Chimera,” I protested, much dismayed. “It was very real, Anteia: I saw the smoke and flame…”

“Who can’t make a little smoke in an old volcano?”

“I felt it bite my lance! I saw it flying in the smoke!”

“Which has wings?” Anteia pressed. “Lion, goat, or snake?”

“It left a perfect imprint on the rock!”

“Which nobody saw but you. Come off it, Bellerophon. Philonoë says you want to improve on your first achievements, like Perseus; I think you never achieved them in the first place. It wasn’t this phony Pattern that made you tell the Lycians to throw you out—” She flung at me the Polyeidic paper, confiscated earlier by the palace guard. “It was bad conscience. Your life is a fiction.”

Shaken, I shook my head. “I can see how it might seem that way to you. But there’s one thing even Philonoë doesn’t know about me…”

“She knows more than you think,” Anteia said contemptuously. “When she got word recently from the goatherds on Mount Chimera that the monster was back in business again up in the crater, she killed the story to cover up for you. Why do you suppose she was so anxious to get you out of town?”

“You’re lying! You keep contradicting yourself! I
did
sink the Carian pirates; I
did
drive off the Solymians and Amazons, and rape that poor lance corporal who had such high ambitions for herself and her people. And I did did
did
kill the Chimera! The high-tide thing was Philonoë’s trick, I admit, but it was a trick the gods favored and helped me with, just as Athene helped me bridle Pegasus. There’s proof enough that I’m for real: what about Pegasus?”

Anteia smiled triumphantly. “A fake, just like his master. Philonoë told me your cock-and-bull story about hippomanes: she even believed it! Well, I just happened to have some in the house, and to show her how blind she was to your phoniness I climbed aboard that sexist pig horse this afternoon and fed him my whole bag. Some stud! He keeled over dead.”

Sick at heart, helpless to tell what in her harangue were lies, what misapprehensions, what distressing truths, I argued no more, only leaned miserably against the stone wall of my cell, laid hold of my swinging yard, and said:
“Real
Amazons give a man his choice between death or emasculation. If you’re going to do both to me, please kill me first. For your sister’s sake, okay?”

“For her chicken-hearted sake,” Anteia said, “I’m going to let you both go back to Lycia, as a matter of fact—cock and balls, impostures, and all. On one condition.”

I looked at her suspiciously. She smiled.

“Make me pregnant.”

“Don’t be silly.”

“Draw your sword,” she said coolly to the Amazon, and to startled me, as she undid her chiton: “Never mind the odds against conceiving at my age, or all those diagrams you insulted me with before, or the fact that you find me unattractive. I’ll tell our son the demigod it was your last heroic labor, and you’re bloody well going to keep at it till it’s accomplished. Down on the floor, please.”

I shook my head. “We’ve had this conversation before, Anteia. A man can’t get it up just because he’s threatened.”

“So we’ll play awhile. Do you want Melanippe here for a teaser? I’m not proud.”

“You
are
Melanippe!” I cried to the guard, who stood by as expressionless as ever. “That’s a miracle!”

“Fuck or die, Bellerophon,” Anteia said. “We’ll do it any way you like; you can even be on top. But frig we must.”

I repeated, in plain honesty, that I could not, with her, under any circumstances. No personal slight or sexist snobbery intended: the phallus had a will of its own, as imperfectly harmonious with mine as Polyeidus’s magic was with his. See how it hung now, and no wonder, when so much hung on it…

Anteia refastened her armored placket and left the cell. “I want it cut off and broiled for dinner, Melanippe. I’ll send down some help.” She gave me a final scornful look. “And a little hors d’oeuvre tray.”

When she was gone I appealed desperately to the poker-faced young guard, who waited outside for her reinforcements. I could not plead innocent, I declared, to the charge of not having risen to the Queen’s original need (though surely there were mitigating circumstances); or of having sacrificed my family to my heroic ambition (but ditto); or of having relegated the women in my life to supportive roles (but how many people of either gender had transcendent callings? and how could Philonoë be said to have been coerced?). Certainly I was guilty of having blindly assaulted the only woman I’d ever met who
did
have such a calling: her proud, incredible self, not a day older than when, overcome with self-loathing at my late bestiality and later enlightenment, I’d flown her to Corinth and Hippolyta’s care. It was true, then, that certain Amazons had not only metamorphic but rejuvenating powers! For all my transgressions against womankind—not least my apparent inability to treasure one of their number above all else in life, as did many so-called sexist pigs—I was contrite, and did not expect absolution. If I was fated not to die, the gods would preserve me willy-nilly; otherwise I had misconstrued myself and had no wish to live, since my heroic vocation, not my life, was what I valued. But before she and the counterfeit Amazons with whom she consorted there in Anteia’s travesty of true Amazonia (for I knew authenticity from its opposite, both among those who called themselves Amazons and among the values they espoused) made a gelded corpse of me, I begged leave to say goodbye to (and ask a few questions of) my patient wife, who had loved me better than herself.

“Okay,” Melanippe said, and unlocked the door briskly, and strode off in a different direction from the Queen’s. When I recovered my wits, I followed, whispering loud thanks; she paused a moment to look back at me, still neutrally, then strode on. I could not assimilate the string of miracles: the coincidence of remeeting her, her apparent forgiveness of my crime against her person and her aspirations, her absolute agelessness. How trim her waist and hips were, shapely her legs (she eschewed the dotted-lozenge tights most Amazons wore), fine her shoulders in that fetching sleeveless chainmail blouse! We wound through corridors and back alleys; the night was still, dark, balmy—but I was goosefleshed in my nakedness and sundry emotions, and my scrotum shrank from its imminent leave-taking.

Turning a corner, we came upon the palace garbage-dump, at sight of which, despite the crying need for silence, a wail of grief escaped me: atop the peels and potsherds lit by the gibbous moon lay poor dead Pegasus, belly-up and wings aspread like a great shot gull, all four legs stuck straight toward the heaven he would never take me to. I swarmed through the crud to hug his neck, curse his poisoner, keen his praises: old soarer, stout companion of my hero-works, high-flown half-brother! Ah, he was not dead, only dying: one white primary-feather wiggled, and I heard a horsy heart throb faintly in my ear.

“Hippomanes!” I hissed to Melanippe, who (horse-lover herself like all Amazons) had put away her sword and rushed with me to check his pulse at the fetlock, peel back one eyelid (the white shone pupilless as a statue’s, or a minor moon), and even attempt mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. “Never mind Philonoë, I guess,” I guess I said: “we’ve got to get this horse some real hippomanes before you kill me, or he’s a goner!”

Melanippe sat back on her heels, wiped her mouth on her war-scarred forearm, mused a moment, handed me her sword. “I have some on me. All Amazons do, especially in their First Quarter. Why not kill me for it and escape?”

The voice was the same. I hesitated no longer than she’d mused, put my hands behind me. “Nope.”

“Rape me and escape?”

I closed my eyes, shook my head.

“Take it from me by force?”

I paused again. “No. I’m done with all that, Melanippe, I’ll just say please.”

She put down the sword and squinted up at me. “Are you really impotent?”

“Of course not.”

“I hate this town,” she said, suddenly loquacious. “Every Amazon does. It’s not just the misanthropy, which isn’t really Amazonian at all. Our prophets say that a woman of Tiryns whose name begins with Alpha will give birth to the greatest lady-killer of all tune: Heracles the Amazonomach. That’s why I’m stationed here: my assignment was to check out Megapenthes and kill him if he was really a semidemigod, which I saw he wasn’t. I knew what Stheneboeia’s real name was, and what her ambitions had always been; if you or any other god or demigod had made her pregnant, I’d have killed her. But I don’t think she’ll ever conceive now.”