‘Now I owed my life to the fact that Jason son of Aeson had been fostered and tutored by the centaur Cheiron, the greatest physician of his age. As there was a risk of my healing in a deformed posture, being so soft and mangled, he resorted to “crucifying”me: nails were driven through both my legs and straps were tied to them, then belayed around two blocks on a pole at the end of the bed, and Jason tied a heavy sandbag to the end of each strap. Next, slings were placed under my knees which were then hoisted up, each weighed down by a sandbag. It took me two weeks to get used to the “cross” from which I was to hang for four months altogether. All that time I suffered from a nagging ache in the nail holes, though this was alleviated when I drank the wine that Iphenoa brought me every morning.
‘Before Jason could crucify me he had to bore holes through my legs below the knees, using a fairly hefty drill for the job. Apparently I told Jason that it would prove hard to drill through the bones of a man who had been granted the gift by blue-haired Poseidon of being impervious to sharp weapons. This proved correct, for the drill got stuck for an age in the bone, and one handle after another snapped off, but Jason broke through in the end and immediately started on the other leg.
‘But it was not only the toughness of my legs that betrayed my past. During the struggle to heal myself my body reverted to the shape it used to have before my metamorphosis sixteen years earlier. I myself wasn’t aware of this until one of the girls who helped me to breathe held up a mirror below my belly. I saw that my penis had shrunk until it exactly resembled the penis of a five-year-old boy, both in size and behaviour, and its proportion to a man’s body was like what you would see on a Renaissance sculpture (at last I understood why the nurses had been giggling at me). Moreover I had moulted like a wolf in spring. My chest was white and soft again — with the swell of maidenly breasts.
‘Yes, once I was a girl. My name was Caenis and I did as I pleased. We lived in Thessaly. My father, Elatus, was king of the Lapiths. He was a conventional man and the day I reached marriageable age he began to pester me to wed. It would certainly have been an easy task for the king to find me an eligible bridegroom — such as a hero who was both heir to a kingdom and a monster-slayer to boot — for I was famed throughout the lands for my intellect and radiant beauty. Indeed, I was so intelligent and fair that my half-brother Polyphemus used to call me Thena or Dite in an attempt to get a rise out of me. But as is often the case with independent girls, I paid little heed to my father’s talk of marriage: like the grass that bears hermaphroditic flowers and fertilises itself, I bloomed for myself alone.
‘King Elatus found the situation most unfortunate, and the same could be said of the suitors who had waited full of anticipation for the day when the princess would be offered up for grabs. The greatest champions on earth had gathered there, bold men and true; I would get to know many of them in my new life as a man since several were destined to be my shipmates on the Argo.
‘I was allowed to have my own way. The host of heroes moved on to the next country and commenced wooing the king’s daughter there. My father turned to more agreeable tasks than bickering with his daughter. And who knows, my existence might have continued in this satisfactory state had news of the obdurate girl in Thessaly not carried beyond our mortal world.
‘Not far from the city I had a secret refuge, a small cove that I liked to visit at the kindling of the morning star. At that hour there was nothing more translucent under heaven than the shallow sea between the rocks. The seabed was everywhere visible and the water, blue as an eye, grew lighter the closer you got to the surface, until it turned green, then vanished — and I breathed it in.
‘It was there that the god found me.
‘The cove emptied of seawater. It was as if a wet quilt had been stripped from the ocean floor. There’s a pretty shell, I thought to myself and walked over to a sugar-pink snail’s house that lay on the sand. I bent down, picked up the conch and weighed it in my hand: well, I never, here’s a gift for Eurydice.
‘Then the heavy wave broke over me.
‘The surf raged in Poseidon’s deep, cold eyes as he flung me flat on my back and crushed me beneath his weight. I tried to scream for help but he forced my teeth apart with his blue fingers and spat a mouthful of raw wet seaweed inside. I tried to wriggle out from beneath him but at the slightest movement my flesh and skin were lacerated by the coral that covered his thighs, the barnacles that grew on his palms; it was better to lie still while the god laboured away on top of me, the shark oil oozing from his hair into my eyes. He did not cease until all the air had been knocked from my maidenly lungs and my veins were emptied of blood: then with a spasm of his hips he filled my body with seawater — his climactic groan echoed with the despairing cries of a thousand drowning men.
‘The briny sea flooded every inch of my body: my belly and heart, my joints and limbs, every sinew, every muscle, every lymph node and nerve — and wherever it went it felt like molten iron poured into the out-stretched hand of a child.
‘Poseidon was well satisfied with his rut, and in return for my maidenhead he offered me one wish. I curled up where I lay on the shore and whimpered:
‘“I wish I were a man so I need never again endure such an ordeal.”
‘These last words emerged in a deep masculine timbre, for the god had been as good as his word. And now that I was a man, Poseidon was generous to me, saying that from this time forth my nature would be such that no metal could harm me. He must have fore-seen that I would have to take part in many a duel to defend my honour against men and giants who doubted my prowess because I had once been a maid.
‘In my male shape I was given the name of Caeneus, and I remained in that form until the day war broke out between the Lapiths and the Centaurs, which was when the latter drank themselves into a frenzy at the wedding of Pirithous and Hippodamia. A great battle was fought that you can read about in many books for it was considered one of the mightiest clashes of antiquity. When the centaurs had given up trying to shoot me with javelins and arrows or run me through with swords and knives — and I had managed to kill their leader Latreus — they resorted to bombarding me with rocks and huge tree trunks. I don’t know whether tales of how badly I had been injured on Lemnos gave them this idea, but they piled so much of the forest on top of me that I was forced to change shape or perish.
‘Long afterwards the poet Naso quoted my brother-in-arms and former shipmate on the Argo, the seer Mopsus, as saying that a dun-coloured bird had flown up from the pile and soared high into the sky in a wide circle above the battlefield. There it mewed sorrowfully before flying away.
‘It was a young herring gull that had not yet acquired its adult plumage.
‘It was I, Caeneus.’
X
It was nearly one in the morning on Easter Day when Caeneus broke off his story so that someone could comfort the purser’s lady friend who had burst into tears when he described the rape of Caenis. At first she had borne up bravely, clamping her hand hard over her mouth and gesturing to the mate not to worry about her but to carry on, she would get over it. But when he said, ‘It was I, Caeneus’, a paroxysm of sobbing escaped from behind her hand and she wailed:
‘Oh, I can’t bear it!’
The purser clasped an arm tightly around his lady friend’s shoulders. She buried her face in his chest and wept there a while. He stroked her hair gently, crooning something consoling, humming so deep in his chest that the melody vibrated low against her ear. The ensuing quiet gave me a chance to observe my dining companions’ reactions to this heart-warming spectacle: