“But my mother was herself a daughter of Oceanus,” he said, and instantly knew that, in giving her light self-abuse an answer even so delicately serious, he had presumed.
Her brown eyes blazed with a force that struck from him all consciousness of her body; that shining form became the mere mounting of her angered divinity. “Yes,” she said, “and Philyra so loathed the monster she bore that rather than suckle you she prayed to be metamorphosed into a linden tree.”
He stiffened; with her narrow woman’s mind she had cut through to the truth that would give most hurt. But in recalling to him the unforgivable woman, Venus fortified him against herself. In contemplating the legend wherein on an island so tiny it seemed glimpsed through many refracting layers of water there lay neglected a half-furred and half-membranous squid of fear that was his infant self, in contemplating this story, one among many stories save that an unrecognized image in it bore his name, Chiron had arrived as an adult at a compassionate view, framed in his experience of creatures and his knowledge of history, of Philyra as a daughter of Oceanus and Tethys, more beautiful than bright, set upon by savage Kronos who, surprised by watchful Rhea, transformed himself into a stallion and galloped free to leave his interrupted seed work its garbled growth in the belly of the innocent daughter of the sea. Poor Philyra! His mother. Wise Chiron could almost reconstruct her face as, huge in tears, it begged a heaven whose very patterns had passed away to release her from the decree, antedating even the Hundred-handed and stretching backward to a time when consciousness was mere pollen drifting in darkness, that appointed the female copulation’s field of harvest, begged this cruel heaven to forgive her the ugly fruit of an assault but dimly comprehended and shamefully de sired: it was here, on the very lip of her metamorphosis, that Chiron most clearly envisioned his mother; and when as a youth in many moods of sadness and wonder he had gone to examine linden trees, a lusty scholar newly maned, glossily fleshed yet already slightly stiffened by the prudent dignity that he had willed to protect his wound and by the pious resolve that was to make him the guardian of so many motherless, Chiron standing embraced by the tree’s wide soft shade had believed himself to discover in the tentative attitudes of the low branches and in the quiver of the heart-shaped leaves some protest, some hope of return to human form, even some delight at finding her son fully grown, which, together with his eager and exact researches into the chemistry of the lime-flower’s quiet honey, enabled him to augment his vision with the taste, odors, and touch of a pathetic, too-docile personality betrayed by a few hysterical moments into the arboreal benevolence that, had she remained human, would have been his mother’s and would have branched into words of nonsense, calm attentions, and gestures of love. Then touching his face to the bark he had spoken her name. Yet, for all his painstaking work of reconciliation, often when he contemplated the fable of his birth an infantile resentment welled up bitterly within his mature reconstruction; the undeserved thirst of his first days poisoned his mouth; and the tiny island, not a hundred yards long, on which he, the first of a race by nature reared in caverns, had lain exposed seemed the image of all womankind: shallow, narrow, and selfish. Selfish. Too easily seduced, too easily repulsed, their wills wept self-indulgently in the web of their nerves and they left their dropped fruit to rot on the shore because of a few horsehairs. So, seen through one side of the prism he had made of the tale, the taunting small-faced goddess before him was to be pitied; and through the other, to be detested. In either case Venus was reduced. In a voice grave with composure he told her, “The linden has many healing properties”: a deferential rebuke if she chose to accept it; otherwise a harmless medical truth. His long survival had not been attained without a courtier’s tact.
She studied him as she passed the towel across her body; her. skin was transparently beaded everywhere. Her shoulders were lightly freckled. “You don’t like women,” she said. It seemed to be a discovery that did not excite her.
He made no answer.
She laughed; the brilliance of her eyes, through which a lavish Otherworld had poured, turned to an opaque animal lambency and, jauntily holding the towel about her with an arm crooked at her back, she stepped forward out of the pool and touched his chest with one finger of her free hand. Behind her, the water of the pool retreated in wide rings from her disturbing motion. It lapped low banks lined with reeds and narcissus and phallic, unflowered iris; the earth beneath her narrow, veined feet was a tapestry of moss and fine grass interwoven with violets and pale wood anemones sprung from the blood of Adonis. “Now had it been I,” she said, in a voice that curled around the whorls of his mind even as her carefully revolving fingertips intertwined with the bronze fleece of his chest, “I would have been pleased to play nurse to a creature combining the refinement and consideration of a man with”-her lids lowered; her amber lashes flared on her cheeks; the plane of her face demurely shifted, and he felt her gaze include his hindquarters-”the massive potency of a stallion.” His nether half, an imperfect servant of his will, preened of itself; his hind hooves cut two fresh crescents into the spongy pondside turf.
“A combination, my lady, often cancels the best of its elements.”
For the space of her smirk she seemed a rather common young flirt. “That would be true, brother, if your head and shoulders were those of a horse, and the rest human.”
Chiron, one of the few centaurs who habitually conversed with cultivated persons, had heard this jest often before; but her powerful nearness had so expanded him that its humor pierced him afresh. His laugh emerged a shrill whinny, in degrading contrast to the controlled timbre he had assumed with the girl, as her senior, and kin. “The gods would forbid such a freak,” he stated.
The goddess became pensive. “Your trust in us is touching. What have we done to deserve our worshippers?”
“It is not what the gods do that makes us adore them,” he recited. “It is that they are.” And to his own surprise he discreetly expanded his chest, so that her hand rested more firmly on his skin. In abrupt vexation she pinched him.
“Oh, Chiron,” she said, “If only you knew them as I do. Tell me about the gods. I keep forgetting. Name them to me. Their names are so grand in your mouth.”
Obedient to her beauty, enslaved to the hope that she would drop the towel, he intoned, “Zeus, Lord of the Sky; cloud-gathering king of the weather.”
“A lecherous muddler.”
“His bride Hera, patron of holy marriage.”
“The last time I saw her she was beating her servants because Zeus had not spent a night in her bed for a year. You know how Zeus first made love to her? As a cuckoo.”
“A hoopoe,” Chiron corrected.
“It was a silly cuckoo like in a clock. Tell me some more gods. I think they’re so funny.”
“Poseidon, master of the many-maned sea.”
“A senile old deckhand. His beard stinks of dead fish. He dyes his hair dark blue. He has a chest full of African pornography. His mother was a negress; you can tell by the whites of his eyes. Next.”
Chiron knew he should stop; but he secretly relished scandal, and at heart was half a clown. “Bright Apollo,” he announced, “who guides the sun and sees all, whose Delphinian prophecies regulate our political life and through whose overarching spirit we attain to art and law.”
“That prig. That unctuous prig always talking about himself, his conceit turns my stomach. He’s illiterate.”
“Come now; this you do exaggerate.”
“He is. He looks at a scroll but his eyes never move.”