Troubled sleep. In fine-tuned black and white I saw Pegasus grazing in the temple court; Athene, cowled, came up, belted with the famous bridle, and seemed to move her lips. At the sound of footfalls in the temple I lost the picture; woke to find a gray-cowled lady prowling in the precinct, near my pallet. My first theophany! I sprang up, dizzy at this evidence that I was on my way.
"Athene?" "Sorry." Anteia slipped back her hood and smiled. "Just checking to see if you're comfortable. Anything you need?" I thanked her, no. Couldn't sleep, she said, for thinking of my dinner tale. Spot of Metaxa? I groaned to get on with my dreamwork, but Queen was Queen. Neat? Bit of water in mine. "My husband's a coward," she said for openers; "no, not a coward, just minor league." "O?" We sat on a marble bench and sipped. "Time and again I've set him up to do something really big," she said. "Daddy loaned him half an army to knock off Acrisius — they were twins, like you-all? He blew it." "Ah." She smoothed her hair, swirled her liquor. "Half the fucking Lycian army. So I said Just up and kill the bastard, for god's sake — the way you did your brother? No thanks: too ballsy by half, that idea! Some seer, he claimed, told him Perseus is supposed to kill Acrisius as part of his hero-thing." "That figures, actually," I remarked, startled at her way of speaking and uncertain what to do.
"Hmp. So I do a little homework on their famous feud, okay? And guess what I find out: it started in the first place when His Royal Highness slipped it to Acrisius's daughter! His own niece, right here in my palace! So okay, we weren't married at the time, but still. It's a wonder to me he ever got it up for the little twat; he doesn't exactly beat me to death with it. Even so he comes out a loser: Acrisius sticks Danaë in a tower where nobody can see her but the gods; she sits around bare-ass naked all day to get their attention — have you seen the pictures? Zeus himself puts it to her, and bingo — Perseus! Who it turns out is like as not to kill Proetus and Acrisius both and take over the country. I swear. That's why it riled him when you started on the hero business: he's petrified of mythic heroes. More juice?"
I guessed not. Anteia downed hers with a wink and declared her frank envy of women like Danaë who were smart or lucky enough to take up with gods and heroes, never mind the consequences. Being nothing but queen was so goddamn boring, especially in a two-bit city-state like Tiryns: one lousy amphitheater and half a dozen restaurants, all Greek. I thought her unfairly critical of her husband, but was interested all the same: my first experience of overtures from an older woman.
"I suppose this sort of thing happens to you all the time," she said, in a different tone.
"No, ma'am." I wished I had asked What.
"Hm." We sat awhile. Metaxa. "Read any good books lately, Killer?"
Really, Bellerophon? At least I'm certain she called me Killer, for though I'd not read Aristotle's Nichomachean Ethics or for that matter any other books — their invention being still far in the future and myself at that time unable to read — I explained to her at some length my position on the moral aspect of Glaucus's and my brother's deaths, which I'd reasoned out between Corinth and Pylos with the aid of terms from the aforementioned work, known to me in bits and pieces via Polyeidus.
"Proetus," I declared, "says I'm innocent, and in the respect that my role in those deaths was not an example of proairesis (by which will be meant a voluntary act preceded by deliberation), I agree. Indeed, following Aristotle's classification of human actions according to the degree and nature of the agent's volition —
— my failure to spring to my kinsmen's aid and my preventing Sibyl from rescuing them might seem at first to share characteristics of both III-A-1 and III-B: on the one hand I was ignorant of the particular carnivorous effect of hippomanes on the mares and of Sibyl's ability to calm them; on the other hand I was 'compelled' in the sense of having no alternative, as I thought, but the futile sacrifice of Sibyl's life or my own. To the contrary it might be argued that my overmastering lust to cover Sibyl on the spot put my deed in the I-B category: psychologically voluntary but morally responsible. My own inclination, however, is to see it as a special variety of Category II, for while their death, particularly my role in it, breaks my heart and was half out of my hands, it fulfills the Pattern: I therefore affirm it, and therefore I'm culpable, morally if not legally, in the Aristotelian sense."
"You never got laid in your life," Anteia said, and left. The cock crew —
Melanippe too! But all that foregoing is in quotes: how did you speak the classificatory schema? Were there chalkboards in the Temple of Wisdom?
I'm writing. Melanippe is writing. Philonoë, Anteia, Sibyl — all mere Polyeidic inklings, written words.
"How'd you make out?" Proetus asked at breakfast. His children, three saucy little daughters, climbed all over us as I fasted and he ate. Dead now, who grew from frisky nymphlings into crazed wild whores, running mad and naked in the hills like gadflied Io. Don't start that. The Queen was sleeping in, Proetus said; but even as he said it she appeared, housecoat and curlers, hmping hmps. With any luck, I told him, a couple more nights should do it. Anteia hmped. "Most heroes I've heard of," Proetus remarked, "had a definite monster or task in mind when they set out. Doesn't your lack of one make you wonder whether you're really what you hope you are?" "Hmp," said Anteia, buttered a croissant, swatted a kid. Not at all, said I, though not so long before I'd have agreed with him: a review of the mythographic corpus would make clear that while the majority of demigods fit his description, a smaller but perhaps more interesting group did not: Aeneas, for example, would clarify gradually, by painful trial and error over a period of years, the details of his destiny and destination. And Perseus, if Polyeidus was correct, would in later life seek to overtake with understanding his present paragraph, as it were, by examining his paged past, and, thus pointed, proceed serene to the future's sentence, whatever those metaphors meant. Hmp.
"Little men talk," Anteia grumbled: "big men do." Proetus cocked an eyebrow at us. "I'm a young man with much to learn," I declared. "But never doubt I'll learn it." Assuming the half-tease tone of the day before, Proetus pointed out that my illustrations were drawn from the future and so lent substance to his own conviction that mythic heroes weren't what they used to be; that the present crop was small potatoes compared to the generation of their fathers — an age of gold, so to speak, succeeded by an age of brass. I denied this libel flatly: Cousin Perseus, I maintained, a man not many years my senior, would when all the returns were in be seen to be as dazzling a demigod as ever murdered monster. .
"Or pronged princess," added Anteia, raising her morning drink. "Or slew slanderer, okay?"
Proetus paled. "Forgetting about this fellow Perseus," he said evenly after a moment, "would you go so far as to say about yourself that if you don't come up with your hypothetical winged horse in a couple of days, we may conclude that you're a fraud and execute you for misuse of Athene's temple?"
Anteia sipped and grinned. Sweating, I reminded him that I was as yet unpurified of blood-guilt. In the absence of instructions from my mentor Polyeidus, to whom I'd dispatched a messenger just the previous day, I was merely assuming that the old fast-and-vision method was the right one for corralling Pegasus; that Athene was the proper goddess to apply to for shriving as well; and that the two objectives were concurrently pursuable. The evidence thus far supported these assumptions more than not, but for all I knew, absolution might be prerequisite to theophany; or Athene, who was most certainly on the verge of speaking to me, might instruct me when I found her voice to clear myself with Aphrodite or my father Poseidon before bridling the winged horse. For that reason I'd prefer at present not to commit myself absolutely to a timetable. Et cetera.