cries were drowned
by the roar of the mob. I struggled for breath, shouted for the goddess, but no help came. Some man at my
back growled bitterly,
“Corinth is cursed. We were fools to come.” Another
voice answered,
“Everywhere’s cursed.” I craned my neck to see who’d
spoken,
but they all looked alike, their tanned hides toughened
by gale and salt
to the thickness of a twice-baked galley biscuit. At their
necks hung daggers
with thong-wrapped handles and serried blades. On
their wrists, brass sheaths
ornate with dragons and monsters of the deep. Then
someone seized
my shoulder — so fierce that my arm went numb and
I shouted — and without
a glance, he shoved me away and down. In horror I
felt myself
falling to the mud, my spectacles dangling,
precariously hooked
by one ear. I squealed like a rat incinerated, my mind all terror, my left hand clutching at my
spectacles, right hand
stretching to snatch some hold on the sweatwashed back
of the giant
in front of me. I fell, sank deep in the mud; the
maniacal
crowd came on, stepping on my legs, battering my ribs. On the back of my left hand, blurry as a cloud, fell
a scarlet drop
of blood. “Dear goddess!” I whimpered. I’d surely gone
mad. It was
no dream, surely, this jangling pain! A foot sank, blind, on the four fingers of my thin right hand and
buried them;
thick yellow water swirled where they’d been, then
reddened with blood.
My mind grew befuddled. My vision was awash. Then hands seized me, painfully jerked me upward, at
the same time
heaving back at the crowd. I gave myself up to the
stranger,
clinging still to my spectacles. My rescuer shouted, struck at the crowd with his one free arm like a
wounded gorilla.
We came to a wall, a doorway; he dragged me inside,
put me down
on a pile of skins, and scraped the bloodstained mud
from my face.
Gradually, my vision cleared. I remembered my
spectacles
and, finding a part of my vest still dry, I wiped them, as well as I could. One lens was cracked
like a sunburst,
a small piece missing. The other was whole. My rescuer,
seeing
what I struggled to do, though he had no faintest idea
what it meant,
brought me water in a jug, poured it on the lenses,
then offered
a cloth. When at last I could see again, we looked at
each other.
He was young; not intelligent, or so I suspected, his face
defeatured
in its lionish, square-jawed frame. His small gray eyes
were round
with amazement. I might have been an elf, a merman,
a unicorn’s child.
Behind him, three women and a man, in the robes of
shop-people,
bent at the waist to stare at me. And still, outside, in the blinding brightness, the rioting sailors pressed
and shouted.
The young man turned, following my gaze. Then all
at once
some change came over the crowd. There were cries
of alarm, loud questions.
The crowd rolled back, retreating from the pressure in
front. The women
and the bearded man — his beard came nearly to his
knees — came bustling
to the door, peeked timidly out, their silhouettes
blocking the light.
They gave sharp yells, all four of them at once, and
rushed to us, reaching,
chattering gibberish — some argot Greek or Semitic
tongue
I couldn’t identify — and pushed us farther from the
door into darkness.
I caught a glimpse — as I plunged with them in past
bolts of cloth,
calfskins, wickerwork, leather — of Kreon’s police force,
armed
with naked swords and whips, great helmets like mitres
that shone
brass-red. Each time a whip flashed out, some man fell
screaming
to the yellow mud, his torn arms clenching his head.
Then darkness;
we’d come to a deeper stall, the air full of spices — aloes, cloves and saffron and cinnamon … They whispered in the language foreign to me. We waited for a long
time.
My eyes adjusted to the dimness a little, and I saw the
old man
was as thin and ashen as an old wood spoon. His
marmoset face
was covered like a cheap plaster wall with bumps and
nodes like droppings
of mason’s grout; his tiny eyes were like silver coins. He pulled at his beard with his fingers, watching in
secret alarm
(as I watched him) for signs that I might prove
dangerous.
His wife was brown and swollen, sullen, the others buxom and dimpled, country odalisques with dull, seductive eyes. All four of them watched
me in fear,
exactly as they’d watched the crowd, the Corinthian
police. I grinned.
The four grinned back, and the man who’d saved me;
a glow of teeth
in the cavern-dark of wares. The merchant brought
wine. We drank.
When the streets were quiet, we crept back out, down
wynds and alleys
to a silent square — fother by the walls, abandoned
winejugs,
wases of straw and faggots, wrecked carts … It was
dusk. Here and there
men lay still, as if asleep, sprawled out in the mud,
on cobblestones,
drawn up onto the stoops of shops that stared at the
empty
twilit square like lepers waiting for blessing. We went— the man who had saved my life and I — to a man who sat some twenty feet from the door of the shop that
protected us.
He sat with his face in his drawn-up knees, as if
weeping, or sick.
I touched his shoulder. He fell over slowly, indifferently,
dead.
My friend looked at me and nodded. He held out his
hand, palm up.
I understood, put my palm on his. He nodded again, unsmiling; and so we parted.
I had no desire now
to climb that hill to Kreon’s palace. My body ached from the soles of my feet to the crown of my head.
My clothes were ragged,
damp and bespattered, mud-stained. My right-hand
fingers were numb
and misshapen; broken, I believed. However, I climbed
as far
as the first of the palace pools, where I meant to wash
the blood off,
caked on my hands and face. I studied my reflection,
amazed:
hat battered like a tramp’s, the pockets of my suitcoat
ripped,
my nose grotesquely swollen, the spectacles tilted, bent. I straightened my glasses as well as I could, then tucked
them in my pocket.
In the stone gray sky above, bats circled. The city was
still.
Then someone spoke to me. “See it to the end.” I wiped
the water
from my eyes and looked. He stared gravely at nothing
— the ancient
seer of Apollo whom I’d seen, long since, with Jason.
I hooked
my spectacles over my ears and looked more closely:
a man
so calm he seemed to encompass Time like a vase.
He said:
“See it to the end. The gods require it.” He turned
away,
and I saw only now the boy with him, his guide. I
struggled