Chimera (8 page)

My voice still scratchy from the dunes, I said: “Hello.”

She whispered: “Hi,” and on my asking who she was, responded: “Calyxa. Your priestess.”

“Ah, so. I’ve been promoted?”

She raised to me brighter eyes than any I remembered having seen on Earth and said enthusiastically: “Here you’ve always been a god, Perseus. All my life I’ve worshipped you, right along with Ammon and Sabazius. You can’t imagine what it means to me to see and speak to you like this.”

I frowned, but touched her cropped dark hair and attempted to recall the circumstances of my death. Calyxa was neither white, like most other nymphs of my acquaintance, cinnamon-dark like Ethiopish Cassiopeia, nor high-chrysal like my handsome widow of panels Six-C through -E and Seven, but sun-browned as a young gymnasiast through her gauzy briefs—which showed her too to be lean-hipped and -breasted like an adolescent Artemist, as against Andromeda’s full-ripe femalehood, say, or the cushy amplitude of—there, my memory, with my manhood, stirred, giving the lie to elsewise-marvelous Six-A.

“Is this Elysium, Calyxa, or Olympus?”

“It’s heaven,” she replied, brow to my hip.

I’d never heard, from Athene or the several accounts of fellow-heroes which I’d studied in the past decade, of erections in Elysium, whereas the Olympians seemed as permanently tumesced as the mount they dwelt on: I
was
elevated, then! Still stroking as I considered this rise my nice nymph’s nape, I noticed that while the mural began at my bedpost, the spiral it described did not, but curved on in and upward in a golden coil upon the ceiling to a point just above where my head would be if I moved over one headswidth left; when I raised me up to watch whither hot Calyxa now, I saw the same spiral stitched in purple on the bed. And—miracle of miracles!—when the sprite sprang nimbly aspread that nether spiral and drew to her tanned taut tummy dazzled me, I perceived that her very navel, rather than bilobular or quadrantic like the two others I best knew, was itself spiriferate, replicating the infinite inward wind both above and below the finite flesh on which my tongue now feast.

Godhood was okay. However, I was twice disturbed to find myself impotent: twice in that, one, I twice tried Calyxa then and there, that “afternoon” (I’d not supposed the sun set on us immortals), and despite or owing to her own uncommon expertise was twice unmanned; two, it was the second time in as many weeks and women (so it came back to me the second time) I had thus flopped, after never once failing done Andromeda in seven thousand nights—an alarming prospect for the nymphed eternity ahead.

“It doesn’t
matter,
” insisted sweet-sweat Calyxa, several times in each of the days and nights that followed. “It’s just
being
with you I love, Perseus; it really is one of my dreams come true.”

There was another thing: used as I was, as long and mythic hero, to a fair measure of respect, I was unused to reverence: I could not make water without my votary’s adoring view (I had not known gods pissed like mortals); she literally licked clean the plates she fed me back to strength from (not ambrosia after all, but dates, figs, roast lamb, and retsina, as at home) (I insisted she wash them after); licked
me
clean too, like a cozy cat, in lieu of bathing, and toweled me with her hair (too short for the job): sport enough when one was in the sportive mood, as Calyxa seemed more or less continuously to be; a mere embarrassment when one was not. Truly I believe she would have reliquaried my stools if I’d allowed her (I hadn’t guessed gods shat).

“You divinities take sex too seriously,” she chided when I swore at that second slump. I supposed to her, not unbitterly, that nymphs like herself were accustomed to a rounder rogering from the deities they attended, and made clear, perhaps overprotested, that I myself was unused entirely to impotence, could not account for it.

“O, you’ll be heavenly once you’re aroused, I can see that,” she soothed. Not her fault at all, I assured her; indeed, never since my first nights with Andromeda, so long years past, had I couched so lively, lean, and tight a miss; moreover, Andromeda and I, I fondly recollected, had begun as equal amateurs and learned love’s lore together, whereas Calyxa’s skill bespoke much prior experience …

Gaily she enjoined me from pout. “Believe it or not, I was a virgin until twenty-two.” Cheerfully she acknowledged then that all her girlhood she’d so adored myself, Sabazius, and horny Ammon, and had in addition been so preoccupied with sports and studies, she’d let no ordinary mortal know her (I’d not heard mortals
could
lay hands on nymphs); then one evening, as she was sweeping out the sheep-god’s shrine (shrines in heaven? dust on Mount Olympus?), which she ministered along with mine and Beer-Boy’s, Ammon himself had appeared and to her great delight had rammed her. Thus initiate, she’d gladly become not merely tender of our three temples but priestess-prostitute as well, holily giving herself, in the honorable tradition of her earthly counterparts, to the truest of our male admirers between tuppings by two-thirds of the deities themselves.

“Sabazius too!” I protested. Ammon I could be purely jealous of, despite my old grievance concerning his advice to Cassiopeia, for the images I’d seen of him in Joppa showed a fine-fettled fellow with handsome ram’s-horns coiling from his swarthy curls. But not only had Sabazius fermented no end of trouble for me back in Argos; I winced to picture that old priapist a-puff on my neat nymph.

She giggled. “You think
you’re
impotent! But don’t make so
much
of it, Perseus!” Along with swimming and foot-racing, she candidly admitted, she liked few pleasures more than the chains of orgasms Ammon and one or two of her mortal partners could set her catenating. She and Sabazius, on the other hand, made do with beery conversations, burps, and blow-jobs, which, the first being long and friendly, the last short and sweet, pleased her in their way quite as well as Ammon’s frisk fierce fucks.

“You worry too much,” she told me on the second night, when, flaccid once again, I’d advised her vexedly to forsake me and revert to Ammonism. “In the first place, I’ve never stopped
being
an Ammonite and never will—or a Sabazian, either, even though neither of them keeps in touch with me any more.” I was not, she gently reminded me, the only god in her pantheon; on the other hand, it made fier happy beyond imagine merely to be with me on my altar-couch; to know her deity—
any
of her private trinity—as a “warm human person,” “off his pedestal,” in her terms. Besides, was I really so naïve as to equate love-making, like a callow lad, with mere prolonged penetration?

Yes. “I’m a
hero
!” I indicated with a sweep of my relieved glories, whose first extension she had revealed to me that day. “Virtuoso performance is my line of work!”

She removed my dexter hand, it being an article of her creed, even with deities, to allow no sheepish, merely dutiful clitorizing. “The more you think of sex as a performance,” she advised me, “the more you’ll suffer stage fright on your opening nights. Just hug up close, now, and fill me in on what I showed you today.”

Sigh, I did, curled up behind my wise cute tutor as the temple’s great second whorl, to which she’d noonly introduced me, enconched the first. As I’d come to hope and fancy, the Perseid reliefs and my altared view were not coterminous there where I sat regnant with Andromeda; a second series—correspondent to the first in relative proportions, but of grander breadth to fit the scale of their enormous revolution—commenced just after, at the pillar on that farther wall aligned quite with my left-foot bedpost and Calyxa’s navel-point.

“You saw how it was,” I said: “The kids were grown and restless; Andromeda and I had become different people; our marriage was on the rocks. The kingdom took care of itself; my fame was sure enough—but I’d lost my shine with my golden locks: twenty years it was since I’d headed Medusa; I was twenty kilos overweight and bored stiff. With half a life to go, I felt fettered and coffered as ever by Danaë‘s womb, the brassbound chest, Polydectes’s tasks. In fact—please keep your face straight—I became convinced I was petrifying, and asked my doctor if it mightn’t be the late effects of radiation from Medusa. ‘Just aging of the old joints,’ the fool declared, correctly, told me to forget about the Gorgon, give up ouzo, get more exercise. But hare-hunts can’t hold a candle to monstermachy: I stayed up too late, drank too many, traded shameless on my authority to bore each night a captive audience with the story of my life. ‘Change of scene, then,’ the doctor ordered: ‘bit of a sea-trip, do you oodles.’ He even winked: ‘Take the Missus along: second honeymoon, et cetera.’ ”

“Sometimes,” Calyxa said, “I really wonder about doctors.”

“Me too. But I proposed it, and Andromeda said sure right off: park the kids in Argos, sail down to Joppa for a visit with her folks; twenty years since she’d seen Cepheus and Cassiopeia. ‘Not quite what I had in mind,’ I told her; ‘We’ll stop off there when the time comes, but let’s go the route: drop in on King Dictys in Seriphos, say hello to Samian Athene, run over to Mount Atlas, where I short-circuited the Graeae—you’ve never seen Mount Atlas—then a quick stop at Chemmis on the Nile, where I landed for a drink before I saved your life.’ By the way, Calyxa,—” I had unwound to follow with my eye those furled episodes along the wall.

“Please don’t stop,” she pled, and taking her to mean, despite her policy, the idle handiwork that went with my recital, I resumed.

“So, it was a battle from the outset, even though I’d dropped Styxnymphsville, Hyperborea, and Hesperia from my itinerary to give us an extra week in Joppa and time for a quick look-see at Thessalian Larissa. ‘Joppa period,’ Andromeda said.”

“
I
think she was being unreasonable,” said Calyxa.

I cleared my throat. “Well, now, perhaps it was a bit vain of me to want to retrace my good young days; but it wasn’t
just
vanity; no more were my nightly narratives: somewhere along the way I’d lost something, took a wrong turn, forgot some knack, I don’t know; it seemed to me that if I kept going over it carefully enough I might see the pattern, find the key.”

“A little up and to your left,” Calyxa whispered. But I was lost now in my story. “Ever since that run-in with your pal Sabazius,” I said, “things hadn’t been the same between Andromeda and me.” I told her how the bellied beer-god, using his Dionysian alias, had come bingeing from Naxos into Argos with his new wife Ariadne—

“He told me about her, last time I saw him,” Calyxa confessed. “At first I was mad with jealousy, but he was so happy, and she was sweet…”

“Everybody
was mad,” I said: “the older women especially, drink drink drink, and when I tried to close the bars he talked them into eating their babies till I gave in. Honestly. I’d’ve held out awhile—you’ve got to draw the line somewhere—but Andromeda claimed it was his fame I couldn’t abide…” Truth was, I declared, I
did
envy the upstart god his enthusiasts, the more as my own glory had not increased since I’d given up heroism for the orderly administration of Argolis; on the other hand, though not a prude, mind, I quite believed in order, measure, self-discipline, and was opposed on principle to indiscriminate housewife orgy, not to mention pedophage. I was no less than Sabazius a son of Zeus, and if no god (owing to Mother’s mere mortality), I had the
vita
of a gold-haired hard-tasked hero, whereas Sabazius so far as I could see did nothing but booze and ball all day…

“Better say ‘guzzle and go down,’ ” Calyxa said comfortably. She too, she added, had no taste for orgies unless among especially valued friends—such as, say, (the notion made her stretch), Ammon, Sabazius, and me—her general policy being to offer herself to others, corporeally and otherwise, to the extent of her esteem for them. Nevertheless she’d gone along with group-grope, gang-bang, daisy-chain, and other perversions for her plump pal’s sake, deferring her preferences to his—just as, with Ammon, she smoked hemp and humped hind-to, although left to herself, so to speak, she’d choose light palm-wine and Position One more often than not. In both instances, her pleasure in theirs not only gratified her beyond her own preferences (a mere martyr’s reward, in her view) but made distinctly pleasurable, just in those circumstances, the acts themselves. In short, she was by no means blind to Sabazius’s shortcomings, but they were without effect on her worship of him. “We really used to talk, he and I.”

It occurred to me to ask why, in view of the foregoing, she had removed my hand in one previous paragraph and limped me with her laughter in another when I’d asked permission to kiss her navel. Her reply was a quiet, short, and serious kiss that messaged clearly even subtless me. I stirred against her nether cheeks very near to Ammonite erection, shrank from the adjective, re-cupped her, resumed my tale:

“
I
liked Sabazius okay too,” I admitted, “despite the trouble he’d caused me; once I’d agreed to build him a temple to keep the housewives happy, we drained many a goblet together Before he moved on. But there was no peace after that with Andromeda: now she claimed I’d given in out of weakness, or to curry favor on Olympus: was I pandering to public opinion, yielding to the pedophagic protest groups, or kicking over my traces like a foolish forty-year-old? Fame and kingship had changed me, changed me, she declared, and not for the better, et cetera.”

“Excuse me for saying so,” Calyxa said, “but I don’t think I care for Mrs. Perseus. Now watch you back up and defend her.”

Well, I did: none of these unpleasant accusations but had its truth, as I saw when I wasn’t defending myself against them, and its contrary side, as I saw when I was. But one fact was inescapable, however read or rationalized: Perseus the Hero prevailed or perished; Perseus the King had swallowed self-respect and not even compromised with, but yielded to, his adversary.

“It was all downward after that,” I concluded: “squalls and squabbles; flirtations, accusations; relovings and relapses, let’s not relive it, you know the story, it’s all in that pillar between the last panel yonder,” where Andromeda and I shared our loveseat throne ringed by little princelets, “and the one today,” in which my scold-faced queen sat throned far right and sullen I far left, our grownlings wondering between and a ship making ready in the marble foreground.