Two women groaned from their utter bowels and fled: Anteia from the Tiryns temple, Philonoë from our Lycian boudoir. A third, groanwise these several pages their visceral sister, if she could set down what words she would would be said to have fled too, from this swampy nest of "love" and "narrative" on the Thermodon. Bellerophon, you are a bastard.
Q.E.D. But I remind the last-laid that the first-'s im-portunings imperiled my mortal life; the second-'s un-ditto my im-. If I could set down what words I would, would I speak in diagrams and hyphens? Would I draw blanks on my own account in ditto verse, ham-handeder than Heracles, tinner-eared Lygeia, clubbeder-foot gimp Oedipus? Die, Polyeidus, or let me!
Melanippe's here still, love; do indulge her; please go on.
"I'm back, love," Philonoë'd say some moments later. "Do excuse my u.-b. groan; just a touch of catharsis, I imagine: the purgation of my psyche through the emotions of pity and terror effected in it by your narrative. Please go on. My sister, I believe, comes back for more?"
"She'll come back," Proetus said at breakfast, after reporting to me that Anteia had disappeared during the night. "She gets wild spells now and then, goes up in the hills with her girlfriends for a day or so. I don't ask questions. Part of being happily married is knowing when to be incurious. Any luck with the horses?" As he spoke he cracked a soft-boiled egg and spooned it onto bread for one of his daughters, standing by. Another sat in his lap and played with his whiskers; the third crawled about somewhere beneath the table. Servants served and cleared the meal, but were apparently instructed to let the King feed the children himself. I nibbled bread, sipped water, yawned, shook my head.
"Couldn't sleep."
Proetus seemed to consider this, wiping jam from the sleeve of his purple robe, which the lap-child had used as a napkin. Presently he sighed. "You're not the first state visitor to complain that our temples aren't very private at night, and I'll tell you frankly that you'll find the same thing true of our guest-rooms here in the palace. I've learned to live with it. But look here: forget about the deadline on that horse-thing, if you're not sleeping nights; it's not good policy to kill a suppliant. Sorry I even mentioned it yesterday. My advice to you is to try another town, where you'll be left alone: there's a dandy acropolis over in Athens; if you're interested, my people will fetch you there."
Proetus's character wasn't clearly enough defined for me to judge how much he knew, or whether Anteia was really on a woodland spree or, for example, confined to quarters, or whether the proffered escort might be a murder-party. For want of a better tactic I asked permission to spend one night more in the temple, with a posted guard to insure my privacy. If I proved successful with Athene, I'd put myself and Pegasus at His Majesty's service for a reasonable term in the heroic-labor way; if not, I had no further business either in Tiryns or in the world at large, and was uninterested in my fate.
Again the King grew thoughtful. After some moments, breaking his custom, he had the children fetched away by their governess. When their bawling was sufficiently remote he said, "Look here, Bellerophon: you may think me a contemptible man, but I'm not an obtuse one. I'm perfectly aware that my wife's been going to you these past nights, as she's gone to others before you; judging from her temper, I gather you've turned her down, for one reason or another. Now let's not be naïve: suppliant or not, I could have you killed any time I wanted to and give your death out as accidental; about the gods I'm agnostic, but if they exist, their tolerance of injustice is high enough not to worry me overmuch: I have considerable credit in the obsequy and temple-building way. But as I remarked before, I've no particular interest in killing you, and wouldn't have even if you'd accommodated my wife. Who is Anteia? A girl I raped once, years ago, and married to get myself out of a tight spot. I'll keep her around for the kids' sake until her drinking and the rest get out of hand; then she goes. Meanwhile, if you want her, help yourself — I get my own amusement elsewhere. But don't get caught, or I'll have you killed for the usual public-relations reasons. In fact, given Mrs. Proetus's state of mind, I advise you to be nice to her if she shows up again. Insulting a First Lady is no joke: all she has to do is holler 'rape' and you're dead: I'd have no choice."
I sat dismayed.
"Nor would I have any particular compunction," Proetus went on. "Do you think it matters one fart to me whether you live or die? Now, let's look at this hero-thing. As you know, I once had aspirations in that line myself; so did my brother, and I think we might both have done fairly well if our feud hadn't eaten up our energies. Too late to bother about that now. But I've seen a couple of real winners in my time, and I must say you don't stack up very impressively against them, in my opinion. Sure, you're young and well put together, and I'll take your word for it you're Eurymede's boy (as for the demigod thing, that's never more than more or less metaphorical bullshit, right?): but you talk too much; you're not sure enough of yourself; you lack — I don't know, call it charisma. I can't imagine you doing in a real monster, for example, if there are such things.
"Still and all, as with the gods, I'm open-minded enough not to rule out the possibility that you're what you hope you are — you've got a kind of stubborn single-mindedness that seems to go unusually deep, and I've seen stubbornness get more results sometimes than intelligence, courage, talent, and self-confidence combined. It seems to me that some people choose their vocations by a sort of inspired default, you know? A passionate lack of alternatives. That's how you strike me: not so much an absolute apprentice hero as absolutely nothing else instead, if you see what I mean.
"So okay, I'll take a chance; what have I got to lose? Stay as long as you want; use all the temples you need; prong my wife if you care to — maybe it'll keep her off my back for a while. If Athene doesn't come across for you, be a good sport: get lost and keep your mouth shut. If she does, never mind the monster-princess-treasure rigmarole; just do me one small favor in the assassination way, okay?"
Thinking I knew what he had in mind, I observed that routine murder-for-hire, even of royalty, was not a feature of the heroical curriculum so far as I knew; in any case, killing Acrisius, so I understood, had been held by Proetus himself to be Perseus's destined business, not mine.