The Wildside Book of Fantasy: 20 Great Tales of Fantasy (8 page)

After we had eaten, I made a little speech. I thanked my friends for their loyalty and counted the dangers we had faced: Harpies, pygmies with blowguns, thirst, and near starvation.

“Shall we end our search?” I asked. “Circe, it seems, doesn’t want us.” Of course, I could guess their answer.

“We never expected an invitation,” said Aruns. “Which is the sweetest apple on the tree? The one on the topmost branch, defended by angry bees. As Sappho put it:

At the end of the bough—its uttermost end,

Missed by the harvesters, ripens the apple,

Nay, not overlooked, but far out of their reach,

So with all best things.

It’s the difference between a wife and courtesan. The wife is there; the courtesan, a good one anyway, has to be fetched.”

Frey and Balder looked scandalized at this talk of courtesans. Their Scandian heritage had not prepared them for the realities of Etruscan and Greek society. But Astyanax, without hesitation, agreed with Aruns: “The apple at the end of the end of the bough.”

Then we heard the singing, blown to us from the island, soft, intimate, intimating. Women or goddesses singing in an unknown tongue which somehow spoke to us. To me, they sang of Circe. A powerful enchantress, she climbed the path to her palace. Her robes were like woven sunlight, and malachite moons twinkled above her breasts. A large, sleepy-eyed bear prowled at her heels. To the others, who can say? Of onyx and lapis lazuli; of sandarac heaped on altars; of wings and wind and star giants tall in the sky. What each of them wanted most, a place he had been, a place he was going, a person he loved or wished to love. For a long time we listened in silence. When the voices stopped we had no wish to speak. With nodded goodnights we went to our quarters—Aruns to sleep on deck with Balder and Frey. Astyanax took a swim and afterward stretched at my feet. I pressed his hand; it was chill—from his swim, I thought. I fell asleep.

I awoke to singing. I felt as if wild honey were trickling into my ears. By the light of the owl-shaped lamp above my couch, I saw that Astyanax had gone. Had the music called him? I hurried on deck and circled the ship, scanning the moon-bleached waters. Atthis and two of her friends dozed fitfully on the surface. I roused Aruns. No, he had not seen Astyanax. The singing grew loud and almost fierce; it surged instead of oozed. I thought,
He has gone ashore to find the singers
. I lowered myself from the gunwale and swam to Atthis.

“Astyanax is gone,” I said. “Will you take me to the island?” Her heart beat wildly; she sensed my fear and throbbed it back to me. With desperate speed we broke the moon’s white mirror.

At last I trailed through the soft sand of the beach, skirted a pool like the rounded pad of a water lily, and climbed over rocks which greened me with their moss. I found the singers. They sat beside an arm of the sea, their long tails coiled in the moonlight like silver cornucopias. Hair—or was it seaweed?—entangled their white shoulders, a forest spilling on marble. One of them held Astyanax in her arms and sang as if to her child. But something trembled behind the coaxing tones: the hint of a scream. I thought of the Cretan arena and athletes gored as they spun above the bulls; of women shrieking with terror and ecstasy.

“Astyanax,” I called. He did not answer. The singers looked at me without expression and then, in a wash of moonlight, I saw their faces. It is true that they were beautiful, with foreheads of perfect alabaster and lips like cinnabar. But their eyes revealed them, a fish’s eyes, cold and lidless. They might have been sharks staring at me through smoky depths; as alien and as evil.

The one with Astyanax raised an object above his head. At first I took it for ivory; no, it was bone, and sharpened into a blade. I lunged and struck her hand. I caught Astyanax in my arms and hurled him, with rough desperation, out of her reach. Her tail, like a coiling asp, entangled my legs and brought me to the ground. Her shark’s eyes held me motionless; her breath smelled of scales and sea-slime, flesh decayed and corrupted. She was strong but clumsy; the sea, not the shore, was her element. I wrenched myself from her paralyzing eyes. I flailed with my arms, and my fingers fell on an object, hard and cold. I grasped it and beat at her face. She gasped, like a fish sucking air, and released me. The object, a human skull, rolled between us. Her sisters tore at my legs but I kicked them viciously—their scales cut my feet—and reached Astyanax. He crouched full-length on the ground, still dazed by the roughness of my thrust. I caught him in my arms and, stumbling over the rocks, reeled toward the beach.

Breathless and spent, we fell onto sand which stretched like a cool moist coverlet. They had not followed us. Beside their pool, they laughed and then they sang. Their song was red like blood.

Astyanax shook in my arms. I held him until he could speak.

“I went for a swim and heard them singing. One of them called my name. ‘Astyanax, my son,’ she said. I swam ashore and wriggled over the rocks. She took me in her arms. I thought she was my mother.”

“They are Sirens,” I said. “A different race from yours. Fish with human faces. She didn’t call your name; she bewitched you to think she had.” I rose to my feet. “Now we must swim to the ship.”

The pygmies leveled their blowguns.

V: CIRCE

I awoke to darkness. Pains knifed me like poison darts. I heard, far away—or close but muffled—the howl of animals—the high, feminine wail of a cat, the baying of dogs, the deep-throated roar of a lion. I groped in the dark for Astyanax. The emptiness seemed a palpable enemy.

“What have you done with my friend?” I shouted. The darkness had no answer. The cold possessed me with damp, enfolding wings…I slept or fainted.

I opened my eyes in a sun-dappled arbor, where trellises rose into jungles of swelling grapes. The scent of the fruit, wounded by insects and oozing purple juices, cloyed my nostrils. I lay on a mat of rushes, and when I sat, the grapes seemed to fly at my face like swarms of hornets. My head cleared slowly; I did not yet trust my feet. Beyond the arbor a three-story house, with a portico of crimson columns, climbed in lavender walls and oblong windows. Rows of brick-colored moons divided the floors, and a date palm leaned like a lintel across the doorway.

At last I struggled to my feet and grasped a trellis. Grape juice moistened my fingers and bees assaulted the stains. Gently I flicked them away—they are valiant creatures and bringers of luck—and steadied my swaying body. Last night I had swum ashore nude; this morning, it seemed, I wore a loincloth, with a large metal ring like a belt which squeezed my waist and cramped my lungs.

Cranes with tufted heads wheeled and slanted above me. Then, with raucous cries, they dropped toward the grass and lowered their long stilt legs. I saw what had drawn them: she came toward me from the house, a girl with a lavender tunic falling above her knees and held at the waist by a girdle of antelope leather. Her hair was like tumbling hyacinths, and yellow crocuses mingled with the flower-like folds.
Persephone,
I thought. The Greeks call her Maiden, the corn girl, who walks the fields, invisible, and touches the barley into bending gold.

She approached me with the familiarity of long friendship. Her fingers, like the feelers of a snail, whispered over my cheeks.

“Dear guest,” she said, “dear Arnth, are you well? I fear my pygmies were rough. When you charged them like a bear, what could they do but defend themselves?” She spoke the same tongue as the Harpies and pygmies—archaic Greek. Perhaps Odysseus had taught her, and she had taught her friends.

Her face and manner said, “I am your host and equal.” But a great enchantress, however smiling, might blast me with thunderbolts if I failed in respect. I fell to my knees.

“Circe,” I said, “queen and enchantress. What have you done with my friend?”

She touched my shoulders. “He is well and happy,” she said, smiling. “And you mustn’t kneel. If anything, I should kneel to you, who have come so far to find me.” She sat on the grass and, sweet with spikenard, drew me down beside her. “I think you are surprised. You expected—another kind of Circe?”

“Yes,” I admitted.

“A temptress with beasts at her side. A woman like the sun who glittered when she walked and burned your eyes. You expected a queen and found—“

“A girl in a lavender tunic with hair like hyacinths.”

“And you are justly disappointed. Your dream is broken. Like an eagle fallen from the sky.”

“No, I am happy. The temptress I could have worshiped. The girl I can love.”

“Love,” she sighed. “Love is a banquet, no? Thrushes and tongues of flamingoes, wine dipped from silver kraters and roses to garland the head. I am not such a banquet, Arnth.”

“Love is also a picnic, where the hills run down to the sea like racing deer. Grape juice in place of wine, grass for a couch, and yellow gagea to garland our brows.”

“Bear,” she said, caressing the word with her lips, “I talked with Astyanax while he ate his breakfast—do you never feed him? He ate like a colt! He told me your secret name. Prowling, sleepy-eyed Bear. Perhaps you will fall asleep in my arms. I should like that, I think. It would mean you trusted me. Do you trust me, Bear?”

The cranes circled us in the grass and their lank shadows fell across our faces. “I am not sure,” I said.

She clapped her hands; a pygmy scuttled from the house with vessels of wine. “Drink,” she said, handing me a silver cup with dancers in raised relief. “The wine will refresh you.”

Phrases whirred in my brain: “With evil drugs administered…” “Round that place lay the beasts of the mountain…” “Goddess it may be she is or a woman.”

“I am not thirsty.”

She laughed, artlessly, playfully, and drank from both of the cups. “Did you think I was giving you poison—the milk of oleanders or the venom of adders? Take your choice. It is wine from my own grapes, sweetened with the manna of tamarisk trees.”

“But the pygmies in the dugout,” I cried. “They came to attack us. The captain shouted, ‘Seek her at your peril.’ And the Sirens last night—“

She answered with patient assurance. “The man who cannot meet obstacles does not deserve my love. I sent the pygmies to test your courage. And the Sirens, you ask? I never meant you to fall into their hands. I tolerate them because they help to defend my island. There are hostile tribes along the coast. My pygmies, you see, are doubtful protectors. I keep their enemies, the cranes, from attacking them. In return they serve me—for the moment.”

I drank the wine and a sudden coolness, like a breeze from the ocean, seemed to blow along my limbs.

“Why did you come here, Bear?”

“To love you.”

“No,” she sighed. “Because I was distant. Because in your heart you believed you would never find me. It is easy to love a dream.”

“But now I have found you.”

“You will tire of me, as you have of others.”

“The others were ghosts.”

“I will try to be more than a ghost. I will build you a house of oleanders, and sunbirds will nest in the walls. I will spin you robes as soft as a spider’s silk. I will give you tamarisk flowers like falling snowflakes, and the hyacinths of my own hair for your fingers to weave into meadows. You shall call me Kore, the Maiden, and forget that other one, Circe. Shall these things hold you, Bear?”

I held her in my arms and her maiden’s slenderness stabbed me with sweet bewilderment, and her hands, like searching swallows, fluttered at my face. I held her, and in my heart summer trembled to spring, but a spring without wandering or need to wander, where boughs of quince put forth their quivering leaves. I buried my face in her tumbled hyacinths and sobbed that beauty and brevity must be inseparable.

Laughing, she drew me into the palace, under the high lintel, from room to courtyard, garden to corridor, from shadows to shadows, fragrance…tapestries blue as waves, and the smell of salt and dunes…sunbirds wheeling in roofless chambers and rushes under our feet…the orange embers of a phoenix throbbing in green dusk—or did I dream, remembering cedar woods? She held my hand, but always she seemed immeasurably far ahead of me, elusive, irrecoverable. She moved to a deep-toned music, neither lyres nor flutes, but drums like a giant heartbeat and the sighing of many waters. It seemed to have no source; it welled from the throats of beasts. I fell among cushions sweet with spikenard and palm-oil, marjoram and essence of thyme. I lay on my back, and her face, like a distant moon, laughed in the sky.

“You have bewitched me,” I said.

Her voice broke the silence like the rasp of an arrow. “I will send supplies and water to your crew. Then you may tell them goodbye.”

I looked at her, astonished. “But I want them to stay with me. They have no home, except Aruns. I am their friend, and you must be.”

Surprise flickered in her eyes. “I like Astyanax. I think I would like your other friends—the white dolphin, Aruns, and the brothers. But they cannot stay with us, Bear. I came here to lose the world. Would you thrust it upon me again? You I have welcomed and loved. Not the others.”

“They are friends,” I said stubbornly. “How can I send them away?”

“Love for a friend”—she shrugged—“need not be eternal. Give it a season, a year, and then forget it. But the love of a man and a woman…Have you seen an island erupt from the sea, with thunder and foam and lashing waves? So love erupts in the heart. Does the sea protest? Does it say to the island, ‘Return to the ocean floor’?”

“Indeed,” I said, springing to my feet, “you have thrust an island into my heart. I reel with the beauty and suddenness of it. But I have other islands, and I will not let you sink them.”

She stood and faced me. “You have made your choice?”

“I chose or was chosen—I am not sure which—before I found you.”

In a sudden burst of sunlight I saw the tightness around her lips, as if laughter were alien to them. And the eyes, were they young after all? In their violet labyrinths, what minotaurs crouched, what captives groped for the light?

“I would have killed you,” she said, “if you had forsaken your friends.” Lightly she pointed to the cranes that watched and circled us. “My birds would have crushed your skull. Their strength is formidable. I have seen them kill pygmies with a single blow of their beaks.”