Chimera

1

Good evening.

Stories last longer than men, stones than stories, stars than stones. But even our stars' nights are numbered, and with them will pass this patterned tale to a long-deceased earth.

Nightly, when I wake to think myself beworlded and find myself in heaven, I review the night I woke to think and find myself vice-versa. I'd been long lost, deserted, down and out in Libya; two decades past I'd overflown that country with the bloody Gorgon's head, and every drop that hit the dunes had turned to snake — so I learned later: at twenty years and twenty kilometers high, how could I have known? Now there I was, sea-leveled, forty, parched and plucked, every grain in my molted sandals raising blisters, and beleaguered by the serpents of my past. It must have been that of all the gods in heaven, the two I'd never got along with put it to me: sandy Ammon, my mother-in-law's pet deity, who'd first sent Andromeda over the edge, and Sabazius the beer-god, who'd raised the roof in Argos till I raised him a temple. Just then I'd've swapped Mycenae for a cold draught and a spot of shade to dip it in; I even prayed for the rascals. Nothing doing. Couldn't think where I'd been or where was headed, lost track of me entirely, commenced hallucinating, wow. Somewhere back in my flying youth I'd read how to advertise help wanted when you're brought down: I stamped a whopping PERSEUS in the sand, forgot what I was about, writing sets your mind a-tramp; next thing I knew I'd printed PERSEUS LOVES ANDROMED half a kilometer across the dunes. Wound up in a depression with the three last letters; everything before them slipped my mind; not till I added USA was I high enough again to get the message, how I'd confused what I'd set out to clarify. I fried awhile longer on the dune-top, trying to care; I was a dying man: so what if my Mayday had grown through self-advertisement to an amphisbane graffito? But O I was a born reviser, and would die one: as I looked back on what I'd written, a fresh East breeze sprang from the right margin, behind, where I'd been aiming, and drifted the A I'd come to rest on. I took its cue, erased the whole name, got lost in a vipered space between object and verb, went on erasing, erasing all, talking to myself, crazy man: no more LOVES, no more LOVE, clean the slate altogether — me too, take it off, all of it. But I'd forgot by that time who I was, re-lost in the second space, my first draft's first; I snaked as far as the subject's final S and, frothing, swooned, made myself after that seventh letter a mad dash —

"And that's all you remember?" asked Calyxa.

"That was it, till I woke up here in heaven, in the middle of the story of my life. Would it please you if I kissed your navel once again?"

"Take a chance!" I blushed and did. Here's how it was: some lost time since I'd died as I imagined with my name, I opened eyes upon a couch or altar, a velvet gold rectangle with murex-purple cushions, more or less centered in a marble chamber that unwound from my left-foot corner in a grand spiral like the triton-shell that Dedalus threaded for Cocalus, once about the bed and out of sight. Upon its walls curved graven scenes in low relief, each half again and more its predecessor's breadth, to the number of seven where the chamber wound from view — which scenes, when I had come fully home to sense, I saw depicted alabasterly the several chapters of my youth, most pleasing to a couched eye. The first, no wider than the bed from whose sinistral foot it sprang, showed Mother Danaë brazen-towered by vain Acrisius my grandfather for contraceptive reasons, lest she get the son predestined to destroy et cetera; Granddad himself, with Grandmother Aganippe, stroked horses fondly in the court, unaware that up behind them Zeus in golden-showerhood rained in upon their frockless daughter, jackpotting her with me. A pillar divided this mural from the next, as it were on my port quarter: Acrisius had judged Mom's story counterfeit, called me his twin-brother's bastard, and set suckler and suckled adrift in a brassbound box; the scene itself was the beach of Cycladean Seriphos: there was young Dictys with his net; he'd fished us in, opened the chest, and stood agape at the sight of sweet-nursing Danaë, in mint condition despite her mal-de-mer. In the background was fairly copied the palace of Dictys's brother, King Polydectes. The third relief, a-beam of and as long as my altar-couch, was set in Samos: twenty years were passed with the fluted pillar; back in Seriphos the King lusted after Mother, and had rused my rash late-teenhood with a pledge to marry someone else instead if I'd contrive to bring him Medusa's head as a wedding gift.

"You're sure it was Zeus and not your uncle up in that tower?" I'd asked Danaë one last time — for she'd admitted an early defloration by Proetus, Acrisius's twin.

"I was sixteen," she replied, "but I knew a slug from a shower of gold." My father, she reassured me, was a lap-deep drench of drachmae.

"And you don't want to marry King Polydectes?"

"Small change."

So, banking on Dictys to safekeep her, I'd set out for Samos on a tip from half-sister Athene, to learn about life from art: for represented in her temple murals there (and so reditto'd here in mine) were all three Gorgons — snakehaired, swinetoothed, buzzardwinged, brassclawed — whereof, as semiSis was pointing out, only the middle one, Medusa, was mortal, decapitable, and petrifacient. Already holding the adamantine sickle Hermes had lent me and Athene's polished shield, I stood listening, a handsome auditor I was then, to her hard instructions. Sword and shield, she said, would not suffice; one thing depended on another; just as Medusa was prerequisite to Mother's rescue, so to kill Medusa required not only the Athenian strategy of indirection but other gear: namely, Hermes's winged sandals to take me to Gorgonsville in far-off Hyperborea, Hades's helmet of invisibility to escape from the snake-girl sisters, and the magic kibisis to stow her head in lest she petrify all posthumously. But these accessories were in the care of Stygian nymphs whose location was known not even to my canny sister: only the grim gray Graeae could tell it, and they wouldn't.

My first task, then, clear-cut in the fourth panel, had been to hie me from Samos to Mount Atlas, where sat the crony trio on their thrones, facing outward back to back and shoulder shoulder in a mean triangle. Some way off from its near vertex (which happened to be between terrible Dino and Pemphredo the stinger), I hid behind a shrub of briar to reconnoiter and soon induced, concerning the single eye and tooth they shared, their normal mode of circulation. Right to left things went around, eye before tooth before nothing, in a kind of rhythm, as follows: Pemphredo, say, blind and mute, sat hands in lap while Dino, on her right, wore the eye just long enough to scan her sector and Enyo, on her left, the tooth just long enough to say "Nothing." Then with her right hand Pemphredo took the eye from Dino's left, clapped it in place, and scanned, while Dino with her right took tooth from Enyo's left, popped it in to say "Nothing," then passed it on to Pemphredo, who passed the eye around to Enyo, put in the tooth, and said "Nothing." Thus did report follow observation and meditation report, except that (as I learned some moments later) at the least alarum any gray lady could summon by a shoulder-tap what either other bore. For, having grasped the cycle, I moved closer in a cautious gyre, keeping ever abaft the eye, at the vertex between speaker and meditator; but when I rustled a pebble underfoot, then-blank Enyo, her right hand out for the eye from Pemphredo, whacked Dino into reverse and fetched the tooth as well! I lunged to her right, Pemphredoward, just as she clapped the organ in; by the time she was toothed to cry "Something!" Pemphredo had eared me at her feet and tapped Enyo for the eye, at the same time reaching right for the her-turn tooth. Dino, unable to reply that she'd returned the tooth to Enyo, swatted back both ways; twice-tapped Enyo got her hands crossed, giving Pemphredo the eye and Dino the tooth; I dived through thrones to the center; all clapped all; eye and tooth flipped round in countercircles but could be by none installed before doubly summoned. By deftly interposing at a certain moment my right hand between Dino's ditto and Enyo's left I short-stopped eye; no problem then, as Pemphredo made to gum home their grim incisor, simply to over-shoulder her and excise it. The panel showed me holding both triumphantly aloft while the grieving Graeae thwacked and flopped and croaked in vain, like crippled herons.

Its Stygian successor in my judgment was less successful, artistically speaking, for while it curved some thirteen meters round behind my bedhead to the Graeae's eight, both the task and its representation were much simpler: having learned from the furious trio where the Stygian Nymphs abode (perforce returning tooth for angry Pemphredo to speak with, but retaining eye by way of insurance against Gray-Lady-bites) it was simply a matter of going there, holdig my dose thus agaist the biserable sbell those girls gave off, ad collectig frob theb the helbet, wallet ad wigged saddles.

"What did they smell like?" asked Calyxa.

"Your opposite," I said. "But if, immortal that you are, you'd perspired through all eternity rank sweat here where I ab bost fod of kissig, dor ever washed id all that tibe — "

"I'm twenty-four," Calyxa said, "until next week. That feels okay."

But I couldn't tell her where took place that easy feat upon the wall, for just as Lethe's liquid is a general antidote to memory, the Styx-girls' stench proved specific against recollection of its source. All Pemphredo said was to shut my eyes and follow my nose, not opening the former till I was obliged to close the latter. No time at all till I had lapped the team of toolwardens there depicted and winged off, don't ask me whence.

"If she hasn't anyone to wash herself for her," primly declared Calyxa, "a girl should wash herself herself."

The penultimate panel, on my entire right hand, was most eventful and my favorite. Itself septuple in proportions similar to the whole's of which it was sixth episode, its first scene, Hyperborean, showed me holding aloft the Gorgon's dreadful head, which, catching her napping, I'd snuck in shielded to cut from her reflected neck; the second, Hesperidean, my petrifaction of inhospitable Atlas; the third, fourth, and fifth, all Joppan, respectively my backhand slaying of sea-beast Cetus, threatening Andromeda on the cliff; the post-rescuary nuptials, held over Cassiopeia's protest, whereat I'd recited to the wedding guests my history thus far; and the splendid battle in the banquet hall when my rival Phineus, who lusted after Andromeda as had Proetus Danaë, broke up the reception; the mural showed me turning into stone with all his company that avuncular nepophile. In the heptatych's sixth panelet, climax of the climax, back in Seriphos, I had once again called my enemy to my aid, rescuing Mother and ending my tasks by the petrification of taskmaster Polydectes. The seventh represented a mere and minor mishap some time later, at the Larissan track-and-field meet, where a zephyr slipped my straight-flung discus into a curve and frisbee'd down to Hades Granddad Acrisius in the stands; it was as overlong for its substance as was its grand counterpart in the whole heptamerous whorl, which for all its meters (thirty-three and then some) showed but my wife and me throned in Argos, surrounded by our gold bright children, a shower of Perseidae.

Daily, hourly, since first waking on my Elysian couch, I reviewed those murals, wondrous, as faithful to my story and its several characters as if no chiseling sculptor, but Medusa herself, had rendered into veined Parian, from her perch in the great sixth panel, our flesh and blood. That image was of the lot most welcome to me: all golden muscle, hard as marble, I stood profiled on the Gorgon's corpse in the model glory of twenty years; the magic sandals were strapped to just below my calves; my left knee bent to bound me next moment skyward; held back at right mid-thigh was Hermes's falchion, declined from horizontal as were my knee, my penis (see below), and my eyes — not to meet, through the golden locks that curled from under Hades's helmet, those of Medusa, whose dripping head I held aloft in my left hand. Despite two small departures on the heavenly sculptor's part from classic realism (though I grant it was a moment far from aphrodisiac, he had, I'm certain, undersized my phallus; and Medusa's face, unaccountably, was but for the herpetine coiffure a lovely woman's!), it was a masterpiece among masterpieces, that panel: it it was my eye first fell on when I woke; it it was I was still transfixed by muchwhile later when my radiant nurse-nymph first entered from beyond the seventh mural to kneel smiling at my bedside as if before an altar.

My voice still scratchy from the dunes, I said: "Hello."

She whispered: "Hi," and on my asking who she was, responded: "Calyxa. Your priestess."

"Ah, so. I've been promoted?"

She raised to me brighter eyes than any I remembered having seen on Earth and said enthusiastically: "Here you've always been a god, Perseus. All my life I've worshipped you, right along with Ammon and Sabazius. You can't imagine what it means to me to see and speak to you like this."

I frowned, but touched her cropped dark hair and attempted to recall the circumstances of my death. Calyxa was neither white, like most other nymphs of my acquaintance, cinnamon-dark like Ethiopish Cassiopeia, nor high-chrysal like my handsome widow of panels Six-C through — E and Seven, but sun-browned as a young gymnasiast through her gauzy briefs — which showed her too to be lean-hipped and — breasted like an adolescent Artemist, as against Andromeda's full-ripe femalehood, say, or the cushy amplitude of — there, my memory, with my manhood, stirred, giving the lie to elsewise-marvelous Six-A.

"Is this Elysium, Calyxa, or Olympus?"

"It's heaven," she replied, brow to my hip.

I'd never heard, from Athene or the several accounts of fellow-heroes which I'd studied in the past decade, of erections in Elysium, whereas the Olympians seemed as permanently tumesced as the mount they dwelt on: I was elevated, then! Still stroking as I considered this rise my nice nymph's nape, I noticed that while the mural began at my bedpost, the spiral it described did not, but curved on in and upward in a golden coil upon the ceiling to a point just above where my head would be if I moved over one headswidth left; when I raised me up to watch whither hot Calyxa now, I saw the same spiral stitched in purple on the bed. And — miracle of miracles! — when the sprite sprang nimbly aspread that nether spiral and drew to her tanned taut tummy dazzled me, I perceived that her very navel, rather than bilobular or quadrantic like the two others I best knew, was itself spiriferate, replicating the infinite inward wind both above and below the finite flesh on which my tongue now feast.

Godhood was okay. However, I was twice disturbed to find myself impotent: twice in that, one, I twice tried Calyxa then and there, that "afternoon" (I'd not supposed the sun set on us immortals), and despite or owing to her own uncommon expertise was twice unmanned; two, it was the second time in as many weeks and women (so it came back to me the second time) I had thus flopped, after never once failing done Andromeda in seven thousand nights- an alarming prospect for the nymphed eternity ahead.

"It doesn't matter," insisted sweet-sweat Calyxa, several times in each of the days and nights that followed. "It's just being with you I love, Perseus; it really is one of my dreams come true."

There was another thing: used as I was, as long and mythic hero, to a fair measure of respect, I was unused to reverence: I could not make water without my votary's adoring view (I had not known gods pissed like mortals); she literally licked clean the plates she fed me back to strength from (not ambrosia after all, but dates, figs, roast lamb, and retsina, as at home) (I insisted she wash them after); licked me clean too, like a cozy cat, in lieu of bathing, and toweled me with her hair (too short for the job): sport enough when one was in the sportive mood, as Calyxa seemed more or less continuously to be; a mere embarrassment when one was not. Truly I believe she would have reliquaried my stools if I'd allowed her (I hadn't guessed gods shat).

"You divinities take sex too seriously," she chided when I swore at that second slump. I supposed to her, not unbitterly, that nymphs like herself were accustomed to a rounder rogering from the deities they attended, and made clear, perhaps overprotested, that I myself was unused entirely to impotence, could not account for it.

"O, you'll be heavenly once you're aroused, I can see that," she soothed. Not her fault at all, I assured her; indeed, never since my first nights with Andromeda, so long years past, had I couched so lively, lean, and tight a miss; moreover, Andromeda and I, I fondly recollected, had begun as equal amateurs and learned love's lore together, whereas Calyxa's skill bespoke much prior experience. .

Gaily she enjoined me from pout. "Believe it or not, I was a virgin until twenty-two." Cheerfully she acknowledged then that all her girlhood she'd so adored myself, Sabazius, and horny Ammon, and had in addition been so preoccupied with sports and studies, she'd let no ordinary mortal know her (I'd not heard mortals could lay hands on nymphs); then one evening, as she was sweeping out the sheep-god's shrine (shrines in heaven? dust on Mount Olympus?), which she ministered along with mine and Beer-Boy's, Ammon himself had appeared and to her great delight had rammed her. Thus initiate, she'd gladly become not merely tender of our three temples but priestess-prostitute as well, holily giving herself, in the honorable tradition of her earthly counterparts, to the truest of our male admirers between tuppings by two-thirds of the deities themselves.

"Sabazius too!" I protested. Ammon I could be purely jealous of, despite my old grievance concerning his advice to Cassiopeia, for the images I'd seen of him in Joppa showed a fine-fettled fellow with handsome ram's-horns coiling from his swarthy curls. But not only had Sabazius fermented no end of trouble for me back in Argos; I winced to picture that old priapist a-puff on my neat nymph.

She giggled. "You think you're impotent! But don't make so much of it, Perseus!" Along with swimming and foot-racing, she candidly admitted, she liked few pleasures more than the chains of orgasms Ammon and one or two of her mortal partners could set her catenating. She and Sabazius, on the other hand, made do with beery conversations, burps, and blow-jobs, which, the first being long and friendly, the last short and sweet, pleased her in their way quite as well as Ammon's frisk fierce fucks.

"You worry too much," she told me on the second night, when, flaccid once again, I'd advised her vexedly to forsake me and revert to Ammonism. "In the first place, I've never stopped being an Ammonite and never will — or a Sabazian, either, even though neither of them keeps in touch with me any more." I was not, she gently reminded me, the only god in her pantheon; on the other hand, it made fier happy beyond imagine merely to be with me on my altar-couch; to know her deity — any of her private trinity — as a "warm human person," "off his pedestal," in her terms. Besides, was I really so naïve as to equate love-making, like a callow lad, with mere prolonged penetration?

Yes. "I'm a hero!" I indicated with a sweep of my relieved glories, whose first extension she had revealed to me that day. "Virtuoso performance is my line of work!"

She removed my dexter hand, it being an article of her creed, even with deities, to allow no sheepish, merely dutiful clitorizing. "The more you think of sex as a performance," she advised me, "the more you'll suffer stage fright on your opening nights. Just hug up close, now, and fill me in on what I showed you today."

Sigh, I did, curled up behind my wise cute tutor as the temple's great second whorl, to which she'd noonly introduced me, enconched the first. As I'd come to hope and fancy, the Perseid reliefs and my altared view were not coterminous there where I sat regnant with Andromeda; a second series — correspondent to the first in relative proportions, but of grander breadth to fit the scale of their enormous revolution — commenced just after, at the pillar on that farther wall aligned quite with my left-foot bedpost and Calyxa's navel-point.

"You saw how it was," I said: "The kids were grown and restless; Andromeda and I had become different people; our marriage was on the rocks. The kingdom took care of itself; my fame was sure enough — but I'd lost my shine with my golden locks: twenty years it was since I'd headed Medusa; I was twenty kilos overweight and bored stiff. With half a life to go, I felt fettered and coffered as ever by Danaë's womb, the brassbound chest, Polydectes's tasks. In fact — please keep your face straight — I became convinced I was petrifying, and asked my doctor if it mightn't be the late effects of radiation from Medusa. 'Just aging of the old joints,' the fool declared, correctly, told me to forget about the Gorgon, give up ouzo, get more exercise. But hare-hunts can't hold a candle to monstermachy: I stayed up too late, drank too many, traded shameless on my authority to bore each night a captive audience with the story of my life. 'Change of scene, then,' the doctor ordered: 'bit of a sea-trip, do you oodles.' He even winked: 'Take the Missus along: second honeymoon, et cetera.' "

"Sometimes," Calyxa said, "I really wonder about doctors."

"Me too. But I proposed it, and Andromeda said sure right off: park the kids in Argos, sail down to Joppa for a visit with her folks; twenty years since she'd seen Cepheus and Cassiopeia. 'Not quite what I had in mind,' I told her; 'We'll stop off there when the time comes, but let's go the route: drop in on King Dictys in Seriphos, say hello to Samian Athene, run over to Mount Atlas, where I short-circuited the Graeae — you've never seen Mount Atlas — then a quick stop at Chemmis on the Nile, where I landed for a drink before I saved your life.' By the way, Calyxa, — " I had unwound to follow with my eye those furled episodes along the wall.

"Please don't stop," she pled, and taking her to mean, despite her policy, the idle handiwork that went with my recital, I resumed.

"So, it was a battle from the outset, even though I'd dropped Styxnymphsville, Hyperborea, and Hesperia from my itinerary to give us an extra week in Joppa and time for a quick look-see at Thessalian Larissa. 'Joppa period,' Andromeda said."

"I think she was being unreasonable," said Calyxa.

I cleared my throat. "Well, now, perhaps it was a bit vain of me to want to retrace my good young days; but it wasn't just vanity; no more were my nightly narratives: somewhere along the way I'd lost something, took a wrong turn, forgot some knack, I don't know; it seemed to me that if I kept going over it carefully enough I might see the pattern, find the key."

"A little up and to your left," Calyxa whispered. But I was lost now in my story. "Ever since that run-in with your pal Sabazius," I said, "things hadn't been the same between Andromeda and me." I told her how the bellied beer-god, using his Dionysian alias, had come bingeing from Naxos into Argos with his new wife Ariadne —

"He told me about her, last time I saw him," Calyxa confessed. "At first I was mad with jealousy, but he was so happy, and she was sweet. ."

"Everybody was mad," I said: "the older women especially, drink drink drink, and when I tried to close the bars he talked them into eating their babies till I gave in. Honestly. I'd've held out awhile — you've got to draw the line somewhere — but Andromeda claimed it was his fame I couldn't abide. ." Truth was, I declared, I did envy the upstart god his enthusiasts, the more as my own glory had not increased since I'd given up heroism for the orderly administration of Argolis; on the other hand, though not a prude, mind, I quite believed in order, measure, self-discipline, and was opposed on principle to indiscriminate housewife orgy, not to mention pedophage. I was no less than Sabazius a son of Zeus, and if no god (owing to Mother's mere mortality), I had the vita of a gold-haired hard-tasked hero, whereas Sabazius so far as I could see did nothing but booze and ball all day. .

"Better say 'guzzle and go down,' " Calyxa said comfortably. She too, she added, had no taste for orgies unless among especially valued friends — such as, say, (the notion made her stretch), Ammon, Sabazius, and me — her general policy being to offer herself to others, corporeally and otherwise, to the extent of her esteem for them. Nevertheless she'd gone along with group-grope, gang-bang, daisy-chain, and other perversions for her plump pal's sake, deferring her preferences to his — just as, with Ammon, she smoked hemp and humped hind-to, although left to herself, so to speak, she'd choose light palm-wine and Position One more often than not. In both instances, her pleasure in theirs not only gratified her beyond her own preferences (a mere martyr's reward, in her view) but made distinctly pleasurable, just in those circumstances, the acts themselves. In short, she was by no means blind to Sabazius's shortcomings, but they were without effect on her worship of him. "We really used to talk, he and I."

It occurred to me to ask why, in view of the foregoing, she had removed my hand in one previous paragraph and limped me with her laughter in another when I'd asked permission to kiss her navel. Her reply was a quiet, short, and serious kiss that messaged clearly even subtless me. I stirred against her nether cheeks very near to Ammonite erection, shrank from the adjective, re-cupped her, resumed my tale:

"I liked Sabazius okay too," I admitted, "despite the trouble he'd caused me; once I'd agreed to build him a temple to keep the housewives happy, we drained many a goblet together Before he moved on. But there was no peace after that with Andromeda: now she claimed I'd given in out of weakness, or to curry favor on Olympus: was I pandering to public opinion, yielding to the pedophagic protest groups, or kicking over my traces like a foolish forty-year-old? Fame and kingship had changed me, changed me, she declared, and not for the better, et cetera."

"Excuse me for saying so," Calyxa said, "but I don't think I care for Mrs. Perseus. Now watch you back up and defend her."

Well, I did: none of these unpleasant accusations but had its truth, as I saw when I wasn't defending myself against them, and its contrary side, as I saw when I was. But one fact was inescapable, however read or rationalized: Perseus the Hero prevailed or perished; Perseus the King had swallowed self-respect and not even compromised with, but yielded to, his adversary.

"It was all downward after that," I concluded: "squalls and squabbles; flirtations, accusations; relovings and relapses, let's not relive it, you know the story, it's all in that pillar between the last panel yonder," where Andromeda and I shared our loveseat throne ringed by little princelets, "and the one today," in which my scold-faced queen sat throned far right and sullen I far left, our grownlings wondering between and a ship making ready in the marble foreground.

"I went weekending once with Ammon down the Nile to Pharos," Calyxa remarked. "We swam a lot. It's the only time I've fucked under water."

"It's not so great, actually, didn't you find?" I asked her in her humor, delving at the same time down to recollection. "The natural lubricants get washed off, and it sort of hurts. I knew this sea-nymph once. ."

"I liked it anyhow," Calyxa said.

Next night, too, we made less progress with each other than with the templed exposition. "If only Medusa had petrified just that part!" my priestess sighed — but would not let me repeat what she declared went without saying, that what fired my bolt like a green recruit's before the issue was fairly joined was not inexperience of artful love but inexperience of novel partners. "You're like some of the holiday tourists we get," she once declared: "bold as brass back home but all tinsel and tiptoe here."

When I had been Perseus proper, I told her then, I'd flown the known world over, Hyperborea to Hesperia, yet never heard of tourists to the country of the gods. Part of every morning, afternoon, and evening Calyxa disappeared into the temple's outer whorls with strict instructions, as she said from Zeus, that I was not to follow past whichever mural she'd last laid on me. Where did she go? I asked her now. What do? Was she slipping off to Ammon and Sabazius, or tourist-tupping in my heavenly precinct?

She was not annoyed until I apologized (at once) for my impertinence. "If you're going to be quarrelsome, be quarrelsome: don't take one step forward and two back."

I apologized for my apology, attributing my too-tameness to long years of Andromeda's house-training, and that in turn to her father's domination by Cassiopeia, while at the same time admitting that, as Andromeda herself had charged in the Sabazius affair, a better man would in the first place never —

"Stop that!" Calyxa cried. I did, began to apologize, stopped that, reflected a moment, and then declared her under no obligation to attend me if she found my manner, mind, or manliness disappointing; but if she chose to stay she must accept me on my terms — which for better or worse included (unlike Sabazius's or Ammon's, I daresaid) permitting me to accept her on hers. No drachma but had its other side: Andromeda in my opinion had near henpecked me out of cockhood; but I had learned from her what few men knew, fewer heroes, and no gods: that a woman's a person in her Independent right, to be respected therefor by the goldenest hero in heaven. If my pet priestess was unused to parity as was I to novelty, then we had each somewhat to teach the other.

Calyxa sat up and closed me in her lap (these conversations were all postcoitally, anyhow epiclimactically, couched); but all I could get from her was "You, you! You're leaving something out."

"No help for that."

"Those letters, Perseus, that she threw overboard. ." I groaned. Had voyage in nautic history, I asked rhetorically, ever begun so crossed as ours whose wreckage that day's mural had fixed forever? We'd set out when spring gave way to summer, neither of us yielding to the other. Andromeda stormed at me it must be Joppa without sidetrips, or she'd go it unburdened of her had-been hero; I stormed back, If she'd wanted a lackey instead of a lord, she should've stuck with her Uncle Phineus. Thus we raged and counterbaited as we cleared the port. I perhapped our problem to be mixed marriage: Argives and Ethiopians were oil and vinegar, I declared, palatable when right-proportioned but never truly mixable. Pah, she spat: all marriages were mixed, a man and a woman; but there was my insufferable ego again, proposing three parts Perseus to one Andromeda, when in truth it was her rescue from monstrous Cetus had made the reputation I'd grown so purled upon: she had as it were laid her life on the line to make me famous! I replied, not unfairly I think, that even the bards who sang our story were wont to call her both the cause of my labor and its reward — which was but putting prettily (I went on less fairly) that had I by-passed Joppa altogether I'd've spared myself two hard battles (with Cetus and with Phineus's gatecrashers), plus the sustained one of our recent years together, and found me a more congenial princess somewhere else, whereas she'd've been fishfood. That always got to her: she bawled back that what I'd freed her from were but the chains in which my forebears caused her to be put (she meant Uncle Poseidon, who'd given Ammon word to cliff her when the jealous Nereids complained to him of Cassiopeia's boast et cetera); she owed me nothing, more especially since I'd manumitted her into the bondage of my tyrant vanity, a mere bedpartner and accessory to my fame: it was but a matter, in her view, of exchanging shackles for shekels, or iron manacles for gold. That always got to me: I stormed back, unfairly now, that even read as I read them the poets were wrong: freeing Mother Danaë, not Andromeda, had been my mission; regaining my lost kingdom; resolving, by the death of both, the twinly old feud between Acrisius and Proetus, which dated from the womb. To this end Medusa, not fishy Cetus, had been my true adversary and chief ally; I hadn't even employed her in the Cetus engagement, to dispatch which wanted but my trusty sickle and a bit of shadow-feinting. In short, the whole Joppan adventure, charming as it was, could be regarded as no more than a couple of sub-panels, as it were, in the mural of my life: an interlude in, indeed a diversion from, my hero-work proper.

"Danaë Danaë!" then had shouted Andromeda. "You should have married your mother!"

Calyxa clucked her tongue. "You two really went at it, didn't you?"

I agreed, my face burning afresh. "That's when she pounced upon the brassbound sea-chest on the poop," I said. "We had lots of traveling-bags, but I'd decided to do the trip right — my trip — and had packed my things in the same old trunk that Granddad had shipped me off in, forty years past. For one thing, I thought Seriphean Dictys would be pleased to see it again, so I'd kept in it all my souvenirs: a piece of the net he'd fished us ashore with, the crescent scabbard of Hermes's sickle, couple of rocks from giant Atlas after I'd stoned him, fern-corals from Joppa (I'd laid Medusa's head on seaweed while I skewered Cetus), Andromeda's leg-irons, the Larissan discus, and the letters."

"Those letters, Perseus. ." I was left-flanked on the couch; naughty Calyxa, propped on her elbows at my hip, amused herself as I spoke by scribing capitals on her forehead with my flopped tool as with an infirm pen. R, S, Something, P: the scramble uncials of my name.

"Fan letters, mostly," I said. "Nut mail, con letters, speaking invitations, propositions from women I never heard of — sort of thing every mythic hero gets in each day's post. I swear I didn't save them out of vanity, as she claimed; I almost never answered them."

"Mm."

"It was partly habit, I'm afflicted with orderliness, they were even alphabetized, starting with Anonymous. Partly for amusement, to pick me up when I was feeling down, remind me I'd once got a few things done worth doing. But mainly, I swear, it was for a kind of research, what I mentioned once before: certain letters especially I read and re-read: half a dozen or so from some dotty girl in Chemmis, Egypt. They were billets-doux, I admit it — but along with the hero-worship was a bright intelligence, a lively style, and a great many detailed questions, almost as if she were doing a dissertation. How many had been the Stygian Nymphs? Had Medusa always been a Gorgon? Was it really her reflection in Athene's shield that saved me from petrifying, or the fact that Medusa had her eyes closed; and if the latter, why'd I need the shield? How was it I'd used the helmet of invisibility only to flee the other Gorgons and not to approach them in the first place? Did everything that saw Medusa turn to stone, or everything Medusa saw? If the former, how explain the sightless seaweed? If the latter, how came it to work when she'd been beheaded? Was my restriction to the adamant sickle and the shadow-trick in the Cetus episode self-imposed or laid on by Athene, and if the former, was my motive to impress Andromeda with skill and valor rather than with magic? And if the latter, why? Considering the crooked sword, the Graeaean subterfuge, the rear-view approaches to Medusa and Cetus, the far-darting Hermean sandals, even the trajectory of the discus that killed Acrisius, would it be fair to generalize that dodge and indirection were my conscious tactics, and, if so, were they characterological or by Athenian directive? Similarly, considering Danaë's brass tower, the sea-chest, the strapping tasks of Polydectes, Danaë's bondage to him, and Andromeda's manacles on the one hand, and on the other, my conquests of Atlas, Phineus, Polydectes, and the rest by petrification, could not one say that my goal for myself and gift to others was typically release from immobility, and my punishment — of both my Medusa'd former enemies and my latterly tied-down self — typically its opposite? O Calyxa, this nameless girl, she had no end of insightful questions! Which I pondered and repondered as I've done these murals, to find if I could their meaning, where they pointed, what it was I'd lost. One question alone — whether I felt my post-Medusan years an example of or an exception to the archetypal pattern for heroic adventure- set me to years of comparative study, to learn what that pattern might be and where upon it I currently was. Thus this endless repetition of my story: as both protagonist and author, so to speak, I thought to overtake with understanding my present paragraph as it were by examining my paged past, and thus pointed, proceed serene to the future's sentence. My trustiest aid in this endeavor was those seven letters, at once so worshipful and wise; I'd've given much to spend an evening with their author! Hence my fury when Andromeda, herself unhinged by wrath, tore open the chest-lid just off Hydra and threw them to the fish. For the first time in our life, I struck her."

My eyes filled at the double memory; Calyxa curled me in her way until my salt tears filled her navel. Post-swatly, I went on, I took from the chest my only correspondence with Andromeda, love-letters written during my youthful trip to Larissa, and posted them with the others in the Gulf of Argolis. Then Andromeda, in a perfect tempest of outrage, fishfed the entire contents of the chest: shore me of my valiant past as a steering drover ballocks a bull.

"I could listen all night to the way you talk," Calyxa said.

"We were so busy storming at each other," I went on, "and the crew and galley slaves enrapt in our battle royal, none noticed the natural tempest till it struck astern like the fist of a god, as if Father Zeus were counter-punching for smote Andromeda. All quarrels went by the board with mast and tiller; we were stove in a trice, sunk and drowned — all save my wife and me, who, still wrestling with the relatched ruin of my chest, were washed with it the way of its contents. Empty, it floated; our grapple became a grip; the storm passed, the sharks were patient; two days the currents easted us, as in your picture, clutched and quarreling in the Sea of Candia; on the third, as if caught in a repeating dream, we were netted by a fine young fisherman, more the image of my golden youth than my own sons were. He congratulated us on our survival, complimented Andromeda on her brined beauty, introduced himself as Danaus Dictys's son, and home-ported us with the rest of his catch to Seriphos."

Calyxa squeezed me. "When I drew that panel for the sculptor from your sister's sketches, I was afraid you and Andromeda were embracing over the sea-chest."

Embarrassed, she acknowledged under my amazed interrogation that all the murals in the temple were rendered from her drawings, after careful instructions delivered her from time to time over the years by couriers from Athene. She was not, then, merely maid, minister, and mistress of her deities, their temples, and devotees, but artful chronicler of their careers as well! I refrained from asking whether Sabazius and Ammon were similarly shrined, but praised her artistry to the skies.

"I'm no artist," she demurred. "Anyhow, I'm not interested in me."

But I would not let her off so modestly; with real appreciation I kissed her from crown to sole, which flexily she enjoyed, and pressed her tell me how far the murals went — for while I myself could predict, I thought, the next couple of panels, my memory of an odd dark passion in the desert just prior to my demise was still obscure to me, as was the manner of my death itself.

She shook her head. "Tomorrow, or the next night, maybe, I'll tell you, if you haven't guessed." Her tone grew graver. "What do you think the next panel will be?"

I supposed it would portray the famous "sculpture museum" at Seriphos, now the isle's chief tourist attraction, which we foursomed — Andromeda, Danaus, Dictys, and I — soon after, in what became the cycled dream's continuation. King Dictys himself was in declining age and health, but overjoyed to review the source and cause of his ascendancy. Andromeda, unsalted and refreshed, seemed to have lost five years and kilos in the sea; she basked in the gallantries of her yet-younger life preserver. The famous statues, of course, were no sculptured likenesses at all, but the stoned originals of Polydectes and his court, fixed forever in their postures of insult and abuse which I had countered with the Gorgon's head. There in the center sat the false king himself, still gloating at his declaration that my whole laborious adventure had been but his ruse for my riddance; that he had never intended to bed any but my gold-girt mother, whom presently he was starving from her sanctuary with Dictys in Athene's temple. Those had been his last words: fascinated, I pointed out to my companions that his tongue was still tipped to his teeth to make the theta of Naw AOhnhz.

"Remarkable," young Danaus had agreed, and added with a trace of tease in his own teeth-tipped tongue: "If Uncle P. was forty when you froze him, and has been lisping that same theta for twenty years, you and he must be about the same age now."

Andromeda laughed, her first mirth in months; then the two of them went off at smart Danaus's suggestion to find something less boring to look at than his petrified progenitors. Dictys and I watched them go, my wife merrily accepting her escort's elbow, and then went round the remaining figures pensively summoning names and patronymics from that glorious morning for half the afternoon. Returning at last to the now-cool shadow of Polydectes, we sipped from silver beakers of Hippocrene and traded troubles.

"I can't manage the boy," Dictys said; "it's because he never had a mother, and I was too busy running the government to be a proper father."

I sympathized, reflecting on my own son's growing rebellion, and asked who was Dictys's queen; at his hem and haw I dropped the subject, inferring with some satisfaction that young Danaus was illicit. He suggested we ought to interrupt their tête-à-tête; but I asked for more wine instead, and two beakers later was confiding to him my domestic problems and my conviction I was petrifying.'

Dictys shook his head. "Just ossifying, like the rest of us." Too bad about Andromeda, he said; he was just as pleased never to have wed the only woman he'd ever loved, seeing how seldom the sentiment withstood the years' attrition. For the rest, there was no help for it, he advised me to resign myself to lovelessness and decline; he'd ship me off to Samos, Joppa, or wherever I wished — but all voyages, he reminded me, come soon or late to the same dark port.

"Better late, then," said I, and announced to the gathered company at dinner, I was determined to resume the retracement of my ancient route. If Andromeda would not retrace it with me. .

Her eyes flashed. "Joppa, period."

"At least consult Athene," old Dictys implored me.

"I will," said I. "Where I did before, in her shrine in Samos."

"Where he learned about life from art," Andromeda mocked me; "for represented in her temple murals there were all three Gorgons — snakehaired, swinetoothed, blah blah blah. I know it by heart. I'm staying here."

Young Danaus fiddled smiling with his flatware. "I've heard it said," he said, "that when you were done with Medusa last time, Athene put her back together again, with a difference: nowadays she turns stone to flesh instead of vice-versa: makes old folks spry again. You and Dad should look her up."

At this impertinence there was a general pause, and general relief when I merely thanked him, level-voiced, for the report. If she declined to go with me, I told Andromeda next day, she must abide in Seriphos under Dictys's chaperonage until my return: I would not have her travel unescorted. She replied she was her own woman, would as she would. Very well, I countered, reminding her however that independence had its limits; that, given our particular tempers and past, the more she became her own woman, the less mine.

"Amen," Andromeda said, a Joppan expression.

"So I went it alone," I said to Calyxa, "and my guess is that tomorrow's mural shows us there in the haE of statues: Danaus grinning, Andromeda and I glaring at each other, Dictys shaking his head, and Polydectes still lisping Naw AOhnhz."

I was mistaken, my artist informed me — not only about next day's scene (which pillared all I'd just rehearsed) but about the nature of parity between the sexes as well.

"I know," I sighed, mistaking her. "Andromeda was right."

"That's not what I mean!" Calyxa sprang to her nimble knees. "Look at me, for instance: would you call me dependent? I go my own way, lonely or not; that's why I've never married. But don't you get the point?"

"No."

She flipped my flunked phallus; "I swear, I'll have to draw you a picture."

Instead, she showed me one, next day: myself in conference already with the hooded woman in Athene's temple, beneath the familiar frieze of Gorgons, winged Pegasus grazing just outside.

"Remarkable!" I scrutinized my companion-in-relief.

"The resemblance. ."

"With the cowl it's hard to tell," Calyxa said; "but if that's Athene, then Athene's the one who's brought me the instructions for all these scenes over the years, and finally brought you here in person from the desert. She's always been very polite to me, but she never explains the pictures."

"I'll be glad to: at first I thought her a fellow-suppliant — "

But Calyxa reminded me of our little rule, explication only after forn. We went to bed early, I did better, fairly entered her, though for less than heroical time and space; I was chided for sighing; she held me between her pretty legs and said: "Aphrodite's a woman and so am I. Does that make me her equal?" Andromeda's fallacy, in her view, was an equivocation on the term equality: she Calyxa frankly regarded herself as superior in numerous ways to numerous men and women —

"I think you are too."

"Do don't flatter now; I'm serious." Her dark eyes were, past doubt; I'd have moved off-top, to beside her, better to manifest our parity, but she had extraordinary grip.

"I mean, they're mortals, and you're a nymph," I said limply.

"Never mind that." The point was, she asserted, it went without saying, in her opinion, that to say men and women were equal was to say nothing. She herself admired excellence wherever she found it; she was far from servile by nature, knew herself to be uncommonly intelligent, witty, healthy, athletical, articulate, brave, and a few other adjectives —

"Pretty," I suggested. "Sexually adroit.. "

She stopped my mouth. "But I happen to know men and women quite superior to me in all these things, and not only wouldn't I dream of calling myself their equal, I happen to prefer them to myself and my equals. You reminded me once that you're a mythic hero, but you keep forgetting it yourself. Were you always psychosexually weak, or is that Andromeda's doing?"

Truly I wished to withdraw, and being at least her muscular match, managed to. She grinned and bussed my forearm.

"No man's a mythic hero to his wife," I said. But Calyxa took spirited issue: no woman remained a dream of nymphhood to her husband either, she daresaid, but real excellence in any particular should be excellent even qualified by comparison, long familiarity, and non-excellence in other particulars. That permanent relationship was fatal to passion was perhaps inevitable, and as she preferred to love passionately she would never marry; but having been more than once abused by those she loved, she knew for a fact that her admiration of their excellence was invulnerable.

"Ammon's a real bastard, often as not," she said; "but I'd die for him tomorrow if he asked me too. I'm good, but he's great. Who does Andromeda think she is?"

I'd hear no more such criticism. "My question to Athene," I said, "was Who was I? I made proper sacrifices, prayed she'd appear and counsel me how not to turn to stone. If there was a new Medusa, let a new Perseus be resickled, — shielded, — sandaled, and the rest, to reglorify himself by re-beheading her. It wasn't Mother Danaë wanted rescuing now, but Danaë's son."

Calyxa snugged against me with a kind of fond exasperation. I went on to recount how, as I'd recounted to Athene my apprehensions, a hooded young woman had appeared beside me at the altar, whom I took to be a fellow-suppliant until from the corner of my eyes I saw a radiance from hers — which, however, like all her features, were cowled from view in the temple dusk. And when she said to me, "Your brother was right: there is a New Medusa," I recognized the voice as no mortal's: Athene had come to me, as was her wont, in suppliant's guise. I reminded her I had no mortal kin, only scores of divine half-siblings like herself, got by Zeus upon his scores of bedmates.

She touched my arm and softly undeceived me. "Dictys and Danaë were closeted a long while in the Seriphos temple before you rescued them. But think again, Perseus, what Polydectes was saying: it wasn't the theta of Naw AOhnhz,Naw Ajrodithz.

In short, she said, young Danaus my rescuer and current rival was half my brother! And fortunate it was — she went on at once, to check my flabbergasted ire — King Dictys and my mother had chosen Aphrodite's shrine instead of Athene's for their besieged amour, since Athene would have sorely punished them for sacrilege. Such exactly (I could not get in my outrage edgewise!) had been innocent Medusa's original sin: was I aware of the circumstances of her Gorgonizing?

I surrendered.

"Me too," Calyxa said.

She'd been a pretty young girl, went on the cowled apparition: a daughter of the sea-god Phorcys and thus kid-sister to the grim Gray Ladies and cousin to the pretty Nereids. She'd been well brought up by her mother Ceto, was in fact as proper a sea-nymph as ever swam: discreet of her person, pretty as the April moon, a regular churchgoer and comforter of the drowned. Her only failing, if it could be so called, was a maiden's pride and interest in her budded beauty — in particular her naturally wavy hair, proof against sea-salt and so comely withal that it fired the passions of the admiralty-god himself, her Uncle Poseidon. .

"Uncles, I swear," Calyxa said. "That's three in this story. And two hair-things. I'm glad I'm a crew-cut orphan."

"She came one morning to this temple, to sacrifice to Athene," Athene went on, oddly referring to herself in third-persons, "and catching sight of her reflection in the goddess's shield, left off her obsequies for a moment to pin up her hair. Next thing she knew, there was a smell of seaweed; wet lips pressed to her neck-nape, and Poseidon put her under. Shocked Athene turned away, Medusa did too, but my, her eyes were fastened on the shield's reflection: as the blue-eyed scallop resists the greedy star, but at length is pried and gobbled, so she saw herself shucked and forked by the mussled god. When he was done she redid through her tears her hair, to look more becomingly ravished, and called on Athene to avenge her. But that goddess, in her wisdom, punished the victim for the crime. Me — Medusa she banished to chilly Hyperborea with her sisters, whom she'd cursed into snakehaired frights; the very sight of them was enough to turn Medusa's suitors to stone when they approached her. It was a perfectly dreadful time."

"Just a minute," I interrupted.

"I was wondering too," Calyxa said.

"I know," said my sister's surrogate. "But Medusa didn't, back then. There were no mirrors, you see, in their stony cave, and her swinetoothed sisters could only grunt. After a few years of seeing her would-be boyfriends freeze in their tracks when she made eyes at them, she decided that if she was ever to have a lover she'd have to pretend in the cave what had been no pretense in the temple: not to know he was approaching. One day the seagulls on the statues of her bouldered beaux told her that Perseus himself was winging herward, a golden dream; she lulled her sisters to sleep with a snake-charm song she'd learned and then feigned sleep herself. Softly he crept up behind; her whole body glowed; his hand, strong as Poseidon's, grasped her hair above the nape. Her eyes still closed, she turned her neck to take his kiss. ."

"O wow," Calyxa said. "Do you know what I think?"

"I know what I felt," said I. "But how was I to know?"

"I wish I'd known," I said shamefaced to the hooded one, who replied it was no matter: if she'd known herself to be as Gorgon as her sisters, Medusa would have begged to have her head cut off. In any case, when the Perseid tasks were done and the hero's gear returned (except the crescent scabbard, given Perseus as a souvenir, and the Graeae's eye, which unfortunately he'd dropped into Lake Triton on his Libyan overflight), Hermes had kept the adamantine sickle, restored their tooth to the aggrieved Graeae, and forwarded the helmet, sandals, and kibisis to the Stygian Nymphs; Athene retrieved her bright shield and affixed to its boss the Gorgon's scalp.

"Then there's no New Medusa? You said there was."

"There is," she said. "Athene reckoned she'd punished the girl nearly enough, so she rejoined her head to her body, revived her, and restored her original appearance. What's more, as a kind of compensation, she allows her some freedom of motion and took away her sculpting glance for the most part, as long as she abides by certain strict conditions. ."

"Never mind those," I said. "Can she unstone me before I'm too far gone?"

The girl hesitated. "Perhaps. Under certain very strict conditions. ."

But I would none of reservations and conditions; begged only to be outfitted as before and directed how to head off my recapped adversary. I paced about the temple, impatient to be off; already I felt younger, more Perseus than I'd been in a dozen years. No good her telling me things had changed; I was a new man; only regird me with shield and sickle, it was a decade's petrifaction in myself I'd cut off first, then Medusa's head to melt away another, then upstart Danaus's and confront Andromeda with a better Perseus than had first unscarped her.

"That's really what you want?" the hooded lady asked then, and simultaneously later Calyxa: "That's really what you wanted?"

I yessed both; let there be no talk of past past capture, I was growing younger by the moment in both temples, hers with anticipation, mine with recapitulation.

Very well, then, said my coiffed counselor: she'd advise me as before. But the case was truly altered, and so must be both my equipage and my address. From beneath her mantle she produced a golden dagger the length and straightness of my phallus fairly drawn. I was dismayed, for what might never lose in love would never win in war.

"No adamantine sickle?"

"Just this," she said, "and your bare hands."

"I like your bare hands," Calyxa said. "But I see your point."

The point was, I was told, I must proceed this time with neither armor nor disguise. Why did I imagine Hades himself no longer used the helmet of his youth, if not that not it nor any other charm could work invisibility once one passed a certain point of fame? As for the polished shield, it itself was changed, aegissed with the former Gorgon's former power: hence its absence from the temple, lest self-reflection petrify its beholders.

"Magic wallet?" I asked, heartsunk.

"That may be useful," she said. "Not to put the New Medusa's head in, since you're not to cut it off — "

"Not cut it off!" But then I remembered and remarked that her deGorgonization made the kibisis unneeded. "All she has to do is look at me, then, and I'm twenty again? Or is it whoever looks at her? I was asked that question about the old Medusa, in a letter from a girl in Chemmis, Egypt — "

"It's not that simple, Perseus," my advisor warned, and my priestess:

"You didn't answer the question."

Nor did she, I said, except to say that the New Medusa's probationary stipulations allowed for one special circumstance in which petrifaction might occur as of old, and one in which not only its contrary but a kind of immortality might be accomplished. As a possible safeguard against the former, I was advised to borrow once again the kibisis, to use not as a totebag but as a veil: Medusa herself would explain it when she came to me, "and I," I said to Calyxa, "when I come to her, in panel Six-A of your second series." What I asked Athene then was how to deal this time with the Gray Ladies, who though eyeless were not blind to my former strategy. Or might I skip them altogether and follow my own nose to the Nymphs' sour seat? In any case, surely I must borrow Hermes's sandals again as well, to fly to Hyperborea, or I'd die of old age before I ever reached Medusa.

The woman shook her head. "Athene said to remind you she has other relatives to look after too; that's why she couldn't speak to you here in person today. She's taken a great shine to a cousin of yours named Bellerophon — "

"Never heard of him," I said, and Calyxa: "I have; they say he's great."

"Never mind him," I told her, and the hooded girl me: "You will, soon enough; your sister has big plans for him. Her exact words were: I'll always have a soft spot for dear old Perseus, but do remind him he's not the only golden hero in Greece.' I'm sorry."

"So am I," said Calyxa. "I see now why it upset you about Ammon and Sabazius. Let me ask you one question. ."

"Hold on, I'm almost done." She did; the cowled messenger then summoned Pegasus from the court, stroked and purred to the pretty beast as to a favorite child, and set forth candidly, at times apologetically, Athene's new orders and instructions. I might borrow the winged horse, but strictly on a standby basis, since Bellerophon had first priority and could call for him at any moment. I should fly directly, not to Mount Atlas, but to the lakeshore of Libyan Triton. There I'd find the Graeae, helpless and cross enough to bite my head off; but I was to introduce myself plainly, endure with patience their threats and insults, and offer to skindive for their long-lost eye if they'd redirect me to the Stygian Nymphs. In general, she concluded, my mode of operation in this second enterprise must be contrary to my first's: on the one hand, direct instead of indirect — no circuities, circumlocutions, reflections, or ruses — on the other, rather passive than active: beyond a certain point I must permit things to come to me instead of adventuring to them.

Stung a bit still at being bumped by Bellerophon, I protested that direct passivity was not my style. It had grown by then as dark in that temple as now is this; I could discern my companion no more clearly than Calyxa. But a resonance in her reply — she observed that before the point aforementioned, initiative was mine to take — aroused me oddly through my new dismay and old-husband habit; I realized not merely that I was alone in the dark with a sympathetic and perhaps attractive young woman not after all Athene — but also that I hadn't put myself in the way of such realization for many years. Abruptly I embraced her; Pegasus skittered; she, too, was startled, and for some reason I when she neither protested nor pushed away. Simply she stiffened; I as well; thanked her for her counsel; prepared to unarm her with some mumble. She disarmed me with a murmur instead, how it had been long since she'd been embraced. Impetuously then I ran hand under habit; she drew off, not offended however, and from her bosom took a light gold bridle. "This is for Pegasus," she said, "to restrain him." Smiling, she led me therewith courtward, where she turned and straightway came to me, reminding me it wasn't Naw Ajrodithz we'd been in, but Naw AOhnhz

"And by the novelty," Calyxa said, "and by your fear you wouldn't get it up for her, which of course you didn't. No need to go on about ample young body wide-hipped et cetera; I get the picture."

"Excuse me."

"Don't apologize."

"Sorry."

No more that night, Calyxa insisted, and turned away, pouting as it were with her very scapulae, her back's small small, pouting I declare with her lean little buttocks.

"No need to go on about small smalls and lean little buttocks."

Sorry, love, and good evening. I was sorry at once, reached to caress those same et ceteras and remarked, not ungently I hope, that just as Perseus was not the sole gold-skinned Greek hero, and the Calyxan religion not monotheistic, so she might allow that lean small what-had-she's were not the only you-know's deserving admiration. She spun to me merry-faced and tear-eyed and kissed me hard enough to fetch me at last full-length into her precinct proper — if only for a moment, as I'd threshold once again my offertory. But we were pleased,

"You're getting better," she said. "Now tell me how you know you'll meet Medusa in Series Two, Mural F, Panel One."

I replied, I thought I had the picture, but would withhold hypotheses until next day — when, if I was not far wrong, II-D (using her system of enumeration) would show my ignominious Gray-Ladying at Lake Triton.

Calyxa smiled. "We'll see." I was not; we did: I fetched her couchward from the scene swiftly as Pegasus had me Lake Triton Samos and, lacking that splendid stone-horse's Bridle of Restraint, yet again fired surely but too soon. I was right, I told her eagerly: as the mural showed, I had been wrong to wrong the Gray Ladies in despite of the cowl-girl's counsel. But old habit had died hard: even passing over Seriphos, en route to North Africa at an altitude of forty stadia, when it had occurred to me to drop in unexpectedly and check on Andromeda, it had been my.impulse I checked instead, deciding to surprise her less directly by coming back rejuvenated from Medusa. And when Pegasus touched down at Triton, I could not bring myself to tell my old victims straight out who I was. There they railed, craned, and cooted on the beach, old past aging, and gummed their breakfast; I altered my voice and asked crisply, "May I be of service, ladies?" What flap, cackle, and plop ensued! "Pah!" said Pemphredo; "Perseus!" said Enyo; "Puncture him!" said Dino — vituperating serially as they took the tooth.

"Not at all," said I, side-stepping their pecks. "Self-centered Perseus is my enemy as much as yours. I understand he dropped your eye somewhere hereabouts? I'll find it for you if you'll tell me where the Styx-Nymphs are."

Pre-payment was my hope, for the lake though shallow was wide, and I despaired of finding in it an eye lost twenty years before. But "Pfui!" said Pemphredo, "Fool!" Enyo, and Dino "Find it first!" So we coracled off in all directions, the Graeae blindly paddling, I pondering, and Pegasus grazing back on shore.

"See it?" asked Pemphredo; "Sure he does!" Enyo; and Dino, "Say something, silly!"

"I see it," I said. "But I won't dive for it until you tell me where the nymphs are."

Alas, I was so banking on that desperate deceit I failed to cloak my voice.

"Tooth-thief!" Pemphredo cried at once; "Eye-dropper!" Enyo added; and Dino, "Ditch him!" In a jiffy they had me jettisoned; the air-waves were my medium, not the sea-; I sank like a stone — and saw clearly, just before I drowned, not mere folly, but three eyes peering eerily from the weedy bed, whereof one — useless miracle! — was disembodied, the very Graeae's. Dropped from the high point of my hubris, it winked now from the depths. I clutched it, closed my own, and gave up hope, not knowing my life was to be —

"Continued in the next installment," Calyxa put in. "Do you remember now what happened then?"

"Three days ago," I said, "I'd've said I was fetched here from my drowning in Two-D, if I'd remembered even that. But One-E reminds me that I wasn't. Now answer me a question: how far do these murals go?" For I'd seen, belatedly, how each in the second whorl echoed its counterpart in the first, behind which it stood — yet no amount of examining the final panels in Series One called anything to mind from my late mortality. Calyxa, however, declined reply: I'd slept a night on my hypothesis; she demanded equal time.

And sleep she did, or feigned to, but I couldn't: like a bard composing, who reviews each night his day's invention in order to extend it on the morrow, I studied wide-eyed in the dark my recollection of I-E, (the acquisition of my gear from the odorous nymphs) and imagined its correspondence in next morning's scene.

We stood before it gravely, II-E, a relief as vast and nearly empty as the desert and deserted shore it showed. Owing to the spiral's grand proportion, the thirteen meters of I-E were stretched to near two hundred; yet in all that stadium but two things caught one's eye, even mine, who had caught the Graeae's: Pegasus, winging off to the upper left corner with Pemphredo astride his neck, grin-toothed Enyo sidesaddle, and Dino leering backward over his crupper; and, on the lakeshore far down right, myself looking mournfully up after, a drip-dry-hooded lady by my side.

"Same one as in the temple?" Calyxa asked. "Or a Styx-Nymph?"

I wondered how to tell her. "That's what I wondered when she rescued me," I said. "But don't forget our rule." We gazed awhile longer, until Calyxa let go my hand, said flat: "It was an easy picture to draw," and went back inside. I sneaked one preview over my shoulder of II-F-1, which quickened certain sluggish memories and dredged up others, then followed after, and found her not naveled on-center as usual, but briefed still and cross-legged on the couch, in her lap a gameboard.

"I'm bored with fucking," she announced. "Let's play chess."

"Are you jealous, Calyxa?"

"Whatever of?"

But she mated me in no time, four games straight, declaring frankly and frequently that I made stupid moves, rooking and queening me unmercifully until I put by board and pieces, bolstered her firmly by the shoulders, and ditto'd her. Dutifully she opened, but looked away the while, none of her usual frank inspection of our coupled parts. Therefore, perhaps, I did okay, if still briefly, even eliciting a minor moan of pleasure from her toward our pleasure's end. When we rolled, still a-clip, to rest sweating on our sides, she twirled a finger in my chest-hair and said, "I thought you said Styx-Nymphs stank."

"On the other hand," I retorted, "sea-nymphs douche with every stroke. You must remember how it was with Ammon, in the Nile?"

She apologized then for sulking and merely asked whether, as she supposed, it was Medusa herself who'd salvaged me, and in whose embrace I would be stranded in the panel to come.

"That's putting it disagreeably."

Sorry — my words, not hers, but we know what she meant. No point in further false suspense; I told her it was, or turned out to be, the one I sought.

"All I knew at first was that she was a sea-nymph, that pair of green eyes down with the Graeae's gray. She must have beached and insufflated me; when I came to we were mouth to mouth under her cowl. I couldn't see a thing; when I opened my eyes she kept them covered with her hand till she'd moved off and veiled herself. Not a half-veil, mind, like some Joppa-girls wear, but a regular bag, with the hood over that."

"Hmp."

"When I thanked her, she reminded me I'd flouted Athene's orders, hence my dunking, and advised me to return the eye at once, unconditionally, to the Gray Ladies, by this time shoaled some way downshore. I did, beginning to wonder whether my lifeguard was perhaps amphibian, the same who'd briefed me in Athene's temple and bridled me in her court."

"Your horse-metaphor's ass-backward," Calyxa said dryly. "It's you who were in the saddle."

I was no poet, I reminded her; merely a man with a tale to tell. If I might get on with it? How, introducing myself to Pemphredo as Perseus, son of Zeus, I'd plunked the eye in her palm and pled to all three for triangulation; how, eyed, she'd eyed me, clapped for tooth from Dino, snarled "Nothing!" and taken off in a trice on Pegasus with her cronies, in the direction of Mount Atlas.

"So much for my sister's wisdom," I said to the hood-girl, excused myself, and waded into the lake, asking her please not to interrupt this time my drowning. No map no Styx-Nymph, no nymph no wallet, no wallet no Medusa, no Medusa no relief from calcification.

She waded behind. "Why do you want rejuvenating, Perseus? Do you really think you'll win back Andromeda?" I was in deep, couldn't think of a right reply. "Or is it simply to be able to do hero-work again?" "That too, mainly." "Then wait!" She clutched me by the tunic-top, now shoulder-deep.

"I wondered too," Calyxa said. "How can Being Perseus Again be your goal, when you have to be Perseus to reach it?"

I was twice fetched up, by the cowl-maid and Calyxa's question, which I'd not considered. I uncouched and considered her. "When you were mortal, Calyxa, did you write those seven letters?" Her lip-bite attested authorship; I could scarcely tell on, so many epistolary details came crowding on me. I repeated Athene's counsel, which the veiled one repeated to me: "Past a certain point sit tight, hang loose, stand fast, let things come." Don't fret about Pegasus, she advised me: Athene had recalled him for young Bellerophon, who was ready to commence now his own career. I should camp on the beach, at least for the night; since the Styx-girls were off the map and I seemed not to know where I was either, perhaps they were not far distant, might even come looking for me. She, at least, would return before morning to see; why not trust my nose for news and get some shut-eye?

I was certain then she was Athene's handmaid, the same I'd courted in Samos. I cloaked out on the shore and watched the stars wheel, not so many then as now, making stories from their silent signs and correspondences. The night was chill; I was stiffer than ever.

"Come on," Calyxa said: "she came."

"Right. It was a camper's wet-dream; she stole from the lake by starlight and slipped under my cloak, her own still sopping. She was all a-shiver; I helped her off with it, up to the cowl and veil, which she'd not remove. But I was right: I'd've known that body anywhere — "

"Ample soft wide-hipped small breasted blah."

"You're being Andromeda," I chided Calyxa. "Sorry." "Don't apologize. She confessed she was the Styx-Nymph, her veil the kibisis, which she'd as leave keep on till morning if I didn't mind. We didn't get much done."

"You said she was Stygian, I believe?" "Stop that. She was innocent, had had only one man before, Poseidon, he left his traces, never an orgasm." "I had orgasms long before I ever had a man." "She wasn't like you, for better and worse, but she was sweet, sweet, my lifesaver; I was grateful, she was impetuous and shy at once, I was flattered — but she was stiff with me, out of inexperience, and I limp with her. ." "Out of practice." "You did write those letters! Anyhow, she was Athene's aide, I reminded myself, not Aphrodite's. I was eager to see her face, which she promised to unveil when the time was right; if her neck, which especially pleased me, was any indication. ."

Calyxa sat up and requested a change of subject. She was past her pout, even teasy, but would not be touched by my retumescence, inspired as it was not altogether by herself. "We all know it was the New Medusa," she said. "Is that why she kept the bag over her head?"

"Don't be crude. Do I ask you what the point of Ammon's horns is, who put them on him?"

She turned sober. "I'm afraid of tomorrow, Perseus."

I was astounded, and explained that my Styx-Nymph, toward dawn, had said quite the same thing, which I'd explain in the morning. I comforted both: assured the sea-girl that I had more to fear than she, since without Pegasus to fly me to Hyperborean Medusa, the kibisis was useless; endeavored in Calyxa's case to change the subject to her Perseid letters, which could be said to be responsible for the narrative in hand, its source and omphalos. Had she died in Egyptian Chemmis — drowned while skindiving with Ammon in the Nile, perhaps, or been crocodiled in the deeps of love — and elevated posthumously? Or was her heavenhood a kind of prize for authorship, as Delphinus had been starred by Poseidon for his winning speeches? Speaking of Chemmis —

But she'd speak no more, only clung to me most close that night as Medusa, still mantled, was shown clinging to me on the beach in the morning's mural. II-F, like its counterpart, was septuple, but so grander in scale that its several panels were each broader than the broadest in the inner series and could be viewed only individually. I asked Calyxa whether, in Zeus's timetable, the whole of it might be seen that day, or we were obliged to give a week to its several panelets.

"Are you in such a hurry?"

"No no no," I assured her; "well, yes. For one thing I can't remember a thing after the week I spent with Medusa on Lake Triton, and I want to know exactly when and how I died. But what really interests me is the way this temple of mine is unfolding." What I meant, I explained when we returned to bed, was that given on the one hand my rate of exposition, as it were — one mural per day — and on the other the much rapider time-passage between the scenes themselves, we had in six days rehearsed my life from its gold-showered incept to the nearly last thing I remembered. It followed that soon — any day now, perhaps — the marmor history must arrive at the point of my death and overtake my present transfiguration. What was she drawing currently, I demanded of Calyxa, if not herself and me in spirate heaven, reviewing the very murals she was drawing?

After some pause she answered: "I'm not ready to answer that tonight." But she bid me consider two things: first, that, immortality being without end, one might infer that the temple was as well, from our couch unwinding infinitely through the heavens; on the other hand, it was to be observed that as the reliefs themselves grew longer, the time between their scenes grew shorter: from little I-B, for example (Dictys netting the tide-borne chest), to its neighbor I–C (my first visit to Samian Athene), was a pillared interval of nearly two decades; between their broad correspondents in the second series, as many more days; and from II-E to II-F-1, about the number of hours we ourselves had slept between beholdings. Mightn't it be, then, that like the inward turns of the spiral, my history would forever approach a present point but never reach it? Either way, it seemed to her, the story might be presumed to be endless.

"But it's all exposition! Where's the real-time drama? Where's the climax?"

Calyxa smiled seriously. "I think we'll come to it very soon. Together."

"Hmp."

You sound like her; please don't be critical. The evening was, I sensed: for one thing, Calyxa announced then, at first augustly, that next day, the ninth since the sun's entry into Leo, was the twenty-fifth anniversary of her birth and the twentieth of another red-letter day on the calendar of her life, which she'd tell me about tomorrow. By way of celebration, it being presently by her estimate an hour or so from midnight, she suggested we reverse our usual order and enjoy narration before copulation, so that she might arrive at the quarter-century mark in my arms. I was much touched — and troubled by another implication of her news — but I observed to her that the gloss on II-F-1 would be malapropos and anaphrodisiac in those circumstances, since, as she knew, that morning's scene had represented my tryst with Medusa. Should we not just skip it? Game of backgammon? Hour's nap?

"No," Calyxa said positively. "I'm okay now. I want to hear it."

"Okay, I guess she is okay. I'm still jealous, but I won't be critical any more."

Good. She was okay, certainly, that night, as I told the tale. I hope she's okay now. "It was in the morning," I told her, "Medusa told me she was Medusa. We'd tried again, not a whole lot better; she'd drawn up hind-to to me — please don't turn over — still wearing the kibisis alone, and bade me not turn her over till she'd told her tale. First came the story of her life, part of which she'd exposed to me in Samos: her pretty girlhood, Poseidon's rape, Athene's punishment, her ignorance of her Gorgonhood and mistaking me for her lover instead of her destroyer." Very difficult to tell this part, especially with you listening.

"But do, please. You owe it to me."

Very well: "Her eyes had been opened, she told me, by my sword at her neck, and her last sight had been her reflection in my shield — the same she'd set her hair by in Athene's temple. It so mortified her she was pleased to die; she knew no more until Athene had scalped, rebodied, and revived her — whereupon her first request was to re-die at once if she was Gorgon still. An odd thing was that, once brought back, she could recall all her dead head's doings, and did so with mixed feelings. To be perfectly frank, despite my having killed her she still loved me, and had lived, during her death, for those moments when I raised her by the hair and she withered my enemies with a glance. This declaration moved me; I begged her to unbag and let me kiss the pretty head — she had said it was pretty? — I'd so ill-used to such good effect in its former state.

"But she stayed my hand with a recital of the hard conditions of Athene's amnesty: first, should she ever again look at her reflected image, she'd see a Gorgon, not a girl; second, should she show her face to anyone, she'd instantly return to Gorgonhood."

"That's not fair," Calyxa said. "For all she could tell — "

"Exactly. But there was one compensation and one escape-clause. Athene granted her the power to juvenate or depetrify, just once, whomever she gazed uncowled at or whoever uncowled and gazed at her; but the conferral of this boon on the beholder must be at her own cost, since by the earlier stipulation she'd be reGorgoned."

"Ay," Calyxa said. "Your sister doesn't give anything away free."

"She's not the goddess of justice. I asked Medusa what the escape-clause was, but for a time she wouldn't say. I believe I mentioned she was shy; what I've told here in two pages took me days to coax from her. Between confessions — which I prompted by confiding my own troubles, at an exchange rate of seven to one — we strolled the beach, swam and fished, talked about life in general."

"And made love," Calyxa said.

"And tried to make love. She was pleased enough; Poseidon, that time in the temple, had been rough on her; you know how gods are." "Yup." "Nobody'd ever done the forepleasures with her properly, or showed her what to do with herself. ."

"I promise not to say anything critical," Calyxa said. "I kind of like Medusa now. But I thought most of those things were instinctive." "Nope." "Well. . hadn't she read anything? You know."

"Reading was what she did most," I replied, "especially the old myths and legends; it was what we mainly talked about. However, as you may have noticed, myth isn't reality: it was agreeable to teach her how love is made, but her inexperience was as off-putting in its way as your expertise. What's more, I was naturally concerned over Athene's stipulations, as I learned them. ."

"In short, you were impotent, like with me a few days ago." "Yes." "Not the whole time, I hope? I'm on Medusa's side now."

"Did she really say that, Perseus?"

She really did. "Just the first few times," I answered. "We got a bit better each night, just like us. It turned out she was afraid I wouldn't want her when I learned she'd been a Gorgon, and been raped by Poseidon, and given birth to Pegasus." "Hear me not saying anything?" "But I told her, honestly, that those things didn't bother me at all. The fact was — no other way to say it in a first-person narrative — Medusa really loved me, her first experience of that emotion, and I realized I hadn't been loved since the old days with Andromeda. What's more, she truly was a kindred spirit; we had jolly conversations. ."

"Don't beat about the bush," Calyxa said. "Did you love her or not?"

I answered, forgive me, I was plagued by doubts about us both. "How could I be sure what was behind her veil?" I answered. "And wasn't it likely my attraction was mainly relief after all my troubles, or mere vanity at being loved?"

"What you really wanted," Calyxa said, "was to be twenty with Andromeda again. Can we get to the escape-clause?"

I was astounded by her insight. "That's what we got to, on the fifth night. We'd finally had a proper love-making; she'd learned to let herself go a little, even felt her first bit of orgasm; it was clear we'd be all right soon enough if we kept at it, just as we'd be; while we clung together in the dénouement, I declared I loved her and asked what Athene's last condition was, for I wanted very much to see the face that spoke in such a gentle voice and topped such a pretty neck, excuse me." Excuse me. "At last she got it out: if the man who uncowled her, and on whom she laid her one-shot grace, were her true lover, the two of them would turn ageless as the stars and be together forever. But since she hadn't known herself a Gorgon before, and couldn't view herself now, for all she or I could know she might be Gorgon still, and Athene's restoration a nasty trick. In short, whoever unveiled and kissed her must do so open-eyed, prepared to risk petrifaction forever in a Gorgon's hug. 'I'm willing, Perseus,' she told me at the last, 'but you'd better think it over.' "

Calyxa shook her head. "I can't remember any analogues for that motif."

"I couldn't either. Next day she was quieter than usual, and that evening she told me very gently just what you said a while ago: in effect, that I loved her less than she me, and was still bound with half my heart to Andromeda. I wished then I'd had a kibisis for myself, to hide my shame; I swore I did love her, if anyone, as much as I could, not really knowing her and all — "

"O boy, Perseus."

"Yes, well. She wept a bit, near as I could tell; I was all cut up, yet at the same time stirred; lots of sex in this story: I touched her; she flowed at once, most womanly; I managed almost as well as with Andromeda. Medusa was in rapture; I don't say this out of vanity. ."

"I know why you say it," Calyxa said. "But how about you, Perseus? Were you in rapture? I think about us, last night, on the very edge. ."

I told her, what was true in the other case as well, I was still too preoccupied to feel rapture of the kind I'd been accustomed to with Andromeda in better days. Pleasure, yes, and some satisfaction, but as yet no rapture, quite, of the free transporting sort, nor would I likely, until we rose unfettered to the same high altitudes.

"If ever."

I shrugged. "In any case, Medusa came at last; there was the moment to discover her." "Yes."

"Yes."

Yes. "But I didn't, merely held her fast until I fell asleep. Next morning she was gone; I woke alone. ." "Perseus?" "Yes?" "It's after midnight. I'm twenty-five and scared. Will you make love to me?"

I did; she did; there is a surfeit of sex in the story; no help for it; we verged on much and didn't cross the verge. No more my merry priestess, Calyxa solemnly sat up and by the light of the altar-lamp watched me drip from her to the spiraled spread.

"I like my life," she said, as if addressing the little puddle. "I come and go as I please. It's a free, independent life. I wouldn't be tied down to any man. You and I don't really relate. I can't turn you on. We'd probably drive each other crazy if we stayed together. You're not in heaven, Perseus. Neither of us is."

One finger was permitted to touch her thigh. "Chemmis?"

She nodded.

"And alive, then." "Yes." Pause. "I wondered how it was you could have a birthday."

Pause. We both watched her flex to stop my flow from her, in vain for all her able musculature. "When you stopped here on your way to Joppa the first time, it was my fifth birthday," she said. "They let us out of summer kindergarten to see the gold-skinned flying hero who'd cut off the Gorgon's head. You only took a drink of water from the public fountain and flew off, but all through school we studied you and the other Greek heroes, along with Ammon and Sabazius and our native ones." She sat cross-legged on the spermy point, her tears running too. "I could stop this if I closed my eyes and legs," she declared, and didn't. "At first the town council put a little bronze plaque on the water fountain; Ammon and Sabazius were local favorites. Later on, when I thought I might like to be a scholar, I wrote a thesis on the three of you: my heroes." She smiled, sniffed, fingered the pudlet. "In fact, that was my thesis: that since of the local heroes only Perseus was technically a hero, and a first-rank one at that, whereas the others were technically gods, but secondary ones, you were as deserving of a temple as they were. It was a stupid essay."

"I don't know."

She shook her head. "I can't do scholarship. Or write or draw or anything. I've got this great IQ and I can't do anything. I'd been working in Ammon's and Sabazius's temples to support my studies, and then Ammon screwed me, and I liked it, so I let Sabazius in too, and pretty soon I was in charge of all three temples. It's not bad work; I meet a lot of people; I just wonder sometimes if I'm getting anywhere that matters. The three of you are married; Ammon and Sabazius have loads of other girlfriends. In a way, I guess, you were my last hope; when Medusa brought you here, I couldn't help wishing. ." Idly she flicked semen at the lamp-flame. Missed. "So it turns out even you've got a girl already."

"Not any more," I said. "Not even I." But I did, if I was alive, have a wife (I regarded her — young, naked, and lovely, chained to the cliff in I-F-3), to whom I'd better be getting back. "I wondered why Chemmis was the only scene missing. So tomorrow's mural — "

"Just the desert, as you'll see on your way out. But Perseus. ."

Surprisingly, for I thought her vexed, or self-sorrowing, or both, she slid over and put my head in her lap. "I might as well be the bastard who breaks the news: Andromeda's left you. For keeps."

I'd been enjoying close-up her lamplit navel. At this announcement my heart skipped as in poor poetry, and my eyes closed without my closing them.

"Medusa told me when she fetched you from the desert," Calyxa said. "You're wife's gone on to Joppa with Danaus."

I unlapped and found my missing voice. "I'll kill him."

But Calyxa observed, calmly, that killing Danaus would change nothing; he meant no more to Andromeda than she Calyxa me: a mere diversion, a refreshment. Andromeda wanted rid of me, and that was that; if I examined my heart, I must see that I was finished with her as well. Such things happened. Wasn't that the case?

I spoke with difficulty, into her stomach. "I suppose." Now my eyes were wet as well.

"Do you love Medusa?"

"I don't know."

Calyxa rubbed two fingertips in closing circles where gold curls formerly grew. "If you wanted to stay on here. . I mean indefinitely. . I'd like that."

We spent a sweet half-hour; then she slept imperiously as a child while I tossed the night through, galed by emotions sundry as the II-B winds. The image of Danaus abed with Andromeda one moment made me retch and sweat with rage; the next I was euphoric with relief to be at last unchained, free to be Perseus, starred or stoned as the issue might prove, but my own man. Followed grief at the lost past, my one young-manhood; then sympathy sharp as pain for my Andromeda, mine no more — so fine and dainty in the bed still (rerage at young Danaus! fresh fury!), unbearable as myself every other where. Toward dawn I went round with the guttery lamp, reviewing for the last time the first revolution of my story; lamp-oil, night, and heroic youth ran out together; I came back to Calyxa, stroked her out of dreams into drowsy liquefaction, here it comes again, climbed with her to our first full fillment. She held my face close for examination while we finished pulsing.

"I was sure you'd gone."

When I didn't answer she held fast yet a moment, blinked once, then let go all and turned her face away.

"I may be back," I said. Further: "Thanks an awful lot, Calyxa. For everything." I might even have gone on to say, "I really mean it," had not a throat-lump spared her that final gaucherie. A tunic, prose-purple, hung in the passage behind I-A; I donned it, left my priestess leaking love, and tiptoed out, pausing just a moment at her final sketch (not yet graven), the second panelet of II-F. She'd blocked across it as on a billboard PERSEUS LOVES —---, a slight inaccuracy. A few early tourists approached from the vast blank spaces which in time would be II-F-3 through 7 and II-G. Not having entered my story yet, they didn't recognize its hero; and I (I recognized an hour later, dhowing down the pea-green Nile) neglected in turn to notice whether any man among them looked deserving of its artful chronicler, and my gentle, cosmic jealousy.

"Do you still feel that way?"

I shall eternally; can't help it. Sorry.

"I didn't ask you to apologize."

I shall eternally; can't help it.

"Joppa period," I told the boatman, who proposed a Memphis rest-stop and a tour of the river's seven mouths. On the beach at Pharos like a bearded beacon stood the Old Man of the Sea, but I had no need of navigation-aid: oriented, by falling-starlight I surely steered us east. Two-thirds of my tale was told, its whence and where; as to its whither, I knew only that I would once more and finally confront Andromeda: whether to kiss or kill, hello goodbye, her whomever, I'd known when I was II-F-3'd. Calyxa was behind; I assumed I was bereft of New Medusa too, despite her having yet again saved my life, since love and gratitude, in the clutch, had been kibisised by doubt. Don't say it, I'm not apologizing, I told myself it was just as well: let my second tale be truly a second, not mere replication of my first; let a spell of monologue precede new dialogue. .

"Okay. I'll say no more."

Not till the epilogue; may its hour hasten. My scruffy boatman, next morning when we landfell Joppa, pointed out the cliff where fair Andromeda had been snacked for Cetus till mighty Perseus et cetera. She wasn't fair, I corrected him. One in every boatload, he rejoined, I having paid him in advance for the night's journey: had I been there, as he had? To preserve my anonymity I let the seedy salt run on; even when he described, in lewdest terms, my bride-to-be's nakedness, to ogle which he claimed had been my motive for going down, I didn't dagger him — only vowed to post Calyxa this further hair-thing in my history, thitherto forgot: how I'd thought Andromeda a marble statue till the sea breeze stirred her hair. The seaman mistook my smile for smirk and reported what he said was coastwise knowledge: that that same Andromeda was currently whoring it in Joppa with a new boyfriend; that one Galanthis, said to be Cassiopeia's gigolo, was out to hump her as well; that the elder queen was so smote with jealousy she'd hecatombed Ammon to send another Cetus, which remonstration would permit her to re-sacrifice her roundheel daughter; that — but that that was the last he thatted: passivity be damned, I dirked and sharked him, dhowed to port alone.

That day I prowled the town in hopes of reconnoiter, hooded like my desert darling — till I recollected her advice, near on to evening. I doffed my mantle then, went straight to the palace gate, told the dusky guard I was King Perseus, out of my way, strode into the court, where I sat on the nearest bench to let come what would. Came, from behind the hedge behind me where old Cepheus grew his greens, his antique voice, I knew it.

"Good evening, good evening, I believe. I presume there's someone there? Eyes and ears aren't what they used to be. ."

I went through the hedge. "It's I, old man." Much shrunk with years, Cepheus sat on the vegetable ground, not addressing me after all, but as it were the sprouts themselves, and went on as if I weren't beside him.

"Seems to me I've been here forever. I make a kind of circuit of our fields, I guess; rotate like my crops; after a while one's much like another. Pity, that. Caught me nap- "

I'd tapped his shoulder.

"I was about to say," he said, "you caught me napping, as one night Perseus will. ."

"Sir, I am Perseus! Perseus?" My eyes welled up; his blanked on through me.

"But I wasn't really asleep, only drowsing. Old folks don't need much sleep; the night ahead keeps us awake. I, I'm always first one up, never really go to bed, prowl house and grounds the night through, napping and nibbling. O I fret about the wife and kids, national debt, salad garden; talk to myself, go round in circles. ."

I squatted before him. "Old fellow, are you blind and deaf?"

"Excuse me," he said. I gripped his arm. "Used to be," he said, "I'd have a lackey do the introductions when I held an audience. No need now, I can start the story anywhere; it goes right along, you'll see, hangs together like a constellation if you know the stars, how to read them. My name's Cepheus — the Ethiopian king? My wife'll be along presently, Cassiopeia; she's down washing her hair. Andromeda, too, Perseus, all the rest, they'll come by, you'll see them."

I moved my hand before his moveless eyes.

"To be king of Ethiopia, you know, it isn't easy; to be husband to a queen and father to a princess, that's harder yet; but to be father-in-law to a gold-haired conquering hero is hardest of all. Myself, all I ever craved was a quiet life: to mind the traffic, keep the books, pacify the gods, make a decent marriage for my daughter, tend my shrubbery, play with my grandchildren, leave Ethiopia no worse than I found it. Too long a list."

Except that her stonework never wept, I was fixed as by the first Medusa.

"But I never was a king," Cepheus said, "only consort to a queen. Cassiopeia, her majesty, that's the whole story; that's why we're all here, for better or worse. By heaven, she is beautiful! I can remember as if it were yesterday the first time — I forget. Andromeda? It was your mother! I forget." He frowned, seemed about to clear his head. "No, I remember, I remember! Zeus Ammon, it comes together!"

"You know where you are now, Cepheus?"

"Minding my business," he said, but in not just the right tone. "Out in the gardens, sure, late summer, grapes and tomatoes setting nicely, beans need another rain. I fret about Andromeda, why she and Perseus split up after all these years, what Cassiopeia's brewing." Now it was he took me by the shoulder, but blank as ever, confiding as if to a royal crony: "Children, I swear, you think you've got them settled at last and bang, home they come with a clutch of new grief. Not that I wasn't glad to see my girl, even with her new young man in tow — "

I groaned. "Where are they, Cepheus?"

"We've always got on, Andromeda and I, despite the Wife. I wish she'd brought the kiddies too, they'd like the beach this time of year. Don't forget, she's my only child: it left a hole in the house, I tell you, when Perseus fetched her off, happy as I was to see her saved. Just me and Cassiopeia then, in this big place. I don't know."

Hand on dagger I made to leave; but Cepheus held my robe for the moment it took to reinstruct myself in patience.

"It isn't the separation upsets me so," he declared.

"Oh?"

"They aren't kids any more; their kids aren't even kids; I keep forgetting. And often as Cassiopeia and I have wished we'd never met. . Though even at the worst we've stuck together, marriage isn't what it used to be, youngsters nowadays. Faw! Andromeda's near forty, showing it too, eyelines mainly, all those worries, got that from me. It's like I told Perseus — "

"What'd you tell Perseus, Father?"

Again he frowned beside me. "You. . you can't have two women in the same palace." "I believe it."

"So do I."

Love, please, we're a way from the epilogue. "That's what I told Perseus," Cepheus said, "right after the wedding. Taps me on the shoulder, wants to know how'd it all really start. I took him aside, put it to him straight: 'How does it always? Two women under one roof. Cass brags about her hair, natural curl, pretty as a goddess's, Andromeda's lucky to have it too, et cetera. Hundred times I'd told her: you got your natural curl, don't make waves. Sure enough, comes word from the oracle: Nereids in a pout, somebody's got to pay or it's Cetus forever — and you know, Perseus, place like Joppa, once your fishery goes under, your whole economy goes.' Something like that."

I recalled the moment, sensed opportunity, quoted young Perseus: " 'Then how is it you cliffed Andromeda instead of your wife?' "

"There he had me," Cepheus replied. "All I could say was, 'It's a choice no man should ever have to make; anyhow, orders are orders.' But you put nothing over on Perseus, not in those days. ."

I tried again. " 'Whose orders, Dad? Did Ammon speak to you personally, or did you take your wife's word for it?' "

Cepheus almost smiled. "Thank Zeus it was just then Phineus and company crashed the party! By the time they were stoned, you'd forgot what you'd been asking."

"I remember, I remember!" I resquatted, holding both his shoulders. "You do too, now?"

Cepheus shook his head ambiguously. "Twenty years later I'm still in misery over it, weeding out my chickpeas and cursing myself for a coward, to let history repeat itself. ."

"You never were a coward, Cepheus! I-F-5, the Battle in the Banquet Hall, remember?"

"No, by Zeus," he agreed, I hanging on his pronouns, "not quite a coward, just deadly henpecked, and there you are — "

"Perseus! This is Perseus!"

"Come to a man's fight, I always held my own." He let me help him to his feet; my own knees were scarcely less stiff. "I don't excuse myself," he said.

"Don't apologize! You know me now?"

"You can imagine how I felt when the time came, rambling in the bean hills, tapped once again, and there stands Perseus, asking me what's Cass cooking up this time, and where's Andromeda, and what's she up to, as if twenty minutes had gone by instead of twenty years!"

I squeezed. "That's what I'm asking, Cepheus! Look at me!" His eyes were moving now, more like a frightened man's than a blind. I laughed and slapped my gut and pate. "See? It has been twenty years: I'm fortier than your daughter- stout and stiff, half turned to stone. ."

Cepheus closed his eyes. "Perseus. . stout, stiff, or ill. ." He pursed a small smile. "Is Perseus still. Night air's bad for the arthritis. Let's go in, son."

Eyes cleared entirely, he confirmed as we limped palace-ward that Andromeda and young Danaus were there shacked up; that Cassiopeia, furious at her own Galanthis's flirtations with her daughter, was nagging him Cepheus again with Ammon-oracles fishy as the first; that (what I hadn't heard before) it was she who'd set Phineus to disrupt my wedding, out of general jealousy.

I was stopped cold. "Why do you put up with her, Cepheus?"

He fingered an earlobe; glanced at me sidewise; declared he'd been of course long since distressed that he wasn't loved by the woman whose beauty he still so honored, but that he'd never reckoned himself especially lovable, and assumed it was not for no reason that women like his wife, who did not begin so, became what they became; concluded with a shrug: "You'll learn."

"I think not. Where's Andromeda?"

He chinned his beard at the house ahead. "In the banquet hall, waiting to say goodbye." By means he'd been unable to discover, he explained (certainly not his own intelligence department, always last to know anything, or the Royal Ethiopian Post, which moved at sea-snail pace), reports of my arrival had preceded me to Joppa, caused general alarm in the palace, and brought on, he could only assume, his fearful trance. "But the reports were wrong; they said you'd lost ten years."

Wrong I replied was right: I'd lost twice ten, my wife as well, and felt ten older for the loss. We reached the banquet hall, Cepheus lagging some meters behind with vague complaints: damp ground, old bones. At the threshold I paused to let my eyes accommodate to the famous scene, I-F-5 in 3-D, an alabaster shambles. On the marble floor, in pools of marble blood, lay those done in before I'd fetched Medusa out to marble all: skewered Rhoetus, the first to die; Athis the mind-blown catamite pinned under Lycabas, the sickled Assyrian bugger; Phorbas and Amphimedon shishkabobbed on a single spear; granite Erytus, bonged by me to Hades with a sculptured drinking bowl; the sharp-tongued head of old Emathion, unaltered on the altar as if still hurling disembodied imprecations; Lampetides the minstrel, weddings and funerals a specialty, fingering forever on a limestone lyre the chord of his dying fall. Standing among these were those I'd rocked in vivo: Ampyx and Thescelus, cocked to spear me; false-mouthed Nileus; Aconteus my too-curious ally; and one hundred ninety-six others — chief among them Phineus, Andromeda's first-betrothed, whom I'd memorialized last in a posture of tunic-wetting terror to remind my wife how luckier she was to have me. Relocating him took some moments, in part because he was but one among so many, in part because — as I saw now when she smoothed her hair — the white-gowned woman standing before him, back turned meward, was not Exhibit 201 but live Andromeda.

"Nuisance to keep dusted, all this," Cepheus murmured behind me. I shushed him, not to miss the odd soliloquy my wife addressed to her uncle's statue:

"Poor Phineus. I'm as old as you are now, and Perseus is older. The man who stoned you's gone to seed; I'll soon go too; I don't scorn your last words to him any more." It was the cringer's seniority-over-merit plea she meant: that while I'd done more to deserve her, he'd known her longer. I considered wrath, but was touched instead by curiosity and complex jealousy: the timbre of her voice was so familiar I could not distinguish it for comparison with Medusa's, soft and throaty, or crisp Calyxa's; Cepheus perhaps was right about her harried face, but, dizzy at thought of Danaus, I remarked as I hadn't in years how slightly pregnancies and time had told on the rest of her — not much less trim than what I'd salvaged off the cliff.

"Trial enough," she went on to her skinflint uncle, "being a life-partner to a Dream of Glory; but what a bad dream I woke up to! Thin-haired, paunchy, old before his time, dwelling in and on his past, less and less concerned with me and the family. ." Her voice was hard-edged, a tone I winced from; now it softened. She touched the statue's averted cheek; had she ever touched mine so? "Thoughtful Phineus, gentle Phineus, weak-willed Phineus! With you I'd have been strong. . and would have yearned, I guess, for somebody like — Perseus!"

Through this last she'd wept; my eyes stinging too, I'd drawn my dagger and called her name across the hall. At her cry it was as if the statues came to life, or shed live men from their dead encasements, and I saw too late the unnatural nature of her monologue: Danaus, armed and shielded, stepped from behind Phineus; half a dozen others in Seriphean garb from Astyages, Eryx, and the rest — and from a nearer door, a somewhat larger number of the palace guard, led by a rodent-faced young man and followed by grim-visaged Cassiopeia.

"O my," said Cepheus, "they've set a trap for you, Perseus. Sorry."

I moved to stick him as he to draw his antique sword, but was diverted by a fresher threat from Danaus, who roared upon me. Happy interruption! For Cepheus, in fact contrite, ordered the palace guard to kill my ambushers, except Cassiopeia and Andromeda. For a moment all were caught in the commands and countermands: Cassiopeia called on the guards to follow Galanthis in killing the lot of us, Andromeda and Cepheus included; Galanthis amended her directive with an order that Andromeda be spared; at the same time Danaus exhorted them to join the Seripheans in killing me, Galanthis, and their own king and queen, after which they themselves could govern Ethiopia by junta; Andromeda meanwhile screamed at everyone in general to kill no one, and at me in particular that she'd had no part in the conspiracy. Danaus's javelin whistled over my shoulder into the couch first speared by Phineus twenty years past, ending the suspension. Cepheus himself pulled it out and feebly hurled it at Galanthis; the gigolo side-stepped, a guard behind deflected it idly with his shield, and to all's surprise it punched into the Queen's decolletage. Dismayed, she sat down hard and died, drumming her heels upon the floor; Andromeda shrieked; Cepheus with a groan went at Galanthis, Danaus with a grin at me, the guards and Seripheans randomly at each other. Even shield-and-sworded I'd have had hard going, for I was out of practice, short of wind, and overweight; with Athene's mere dagger I had no chance. Danaus therefore took time to taunt: "Not a bad lay, old boy, your wife; plenty life in her yet; all she needed was reminding what beds are for."

I'd felt a moment of Phinean panic at my death to come, displaced next moment by red rage. But my helplessness itself gave me a third for self-collection. As Danaus jibed on — calling Danaë the mother of whoredom for having been first to spread her legs for coin, myself therefore the original whoreson and a paper drachma — I knew what I assumed would be my final satisfaction: that despite the inequity of our arms it was partly awe that hesitated him, inspired by the Perseus whose legend he'd cut his teeth on. My last chance to write a fit finale, however different in style, to that golden book came to me clear as Calyxa's art: declaring (what in another sense was true) that I preferred an even contest, I tossed away dagger and stalked him barehanded.

"Empty bravado," Danaus scoffed, and retreated one step. That was the only victory I could hope for, for (as I told him calmly above the din) we were born of one mother; mere inexperience of hero-murder delayed his hand. His pallor I knew was momentary; even as I spoke his color returned, his sword went up — "Ah, Andromeda (I can't say whether I said aloud or to my swoony self)! He is a fine lad, your lover; a young Perseus!" At this instant two things flew together from the free-for-all: a massive silver goblet, knocked from the altar-of-Emathion, spun to my feet; and Andromeda dashed between us to clutch her friend's knees. Shield? Stay? Embrace? Supplication? Frantic, Danaus pushed and shouted at her, slipped his helmet, got himself tangled and turned around. In moments fewer than these words, I snatched up the great goblet, more welcome to my hand than its prototype beside long-smashed Erytus, and while my half-brother half-wept and swore at his handsome hobble, I fetched him such a clout aside his head that the goblet gonged.

As if at that bell, the fighting ceased. Danaus dropped dead. Stunned at my own salvation, I turned its instrument in my hand: of newer manufacture than the Erytus model, its reliefs depicted the earlier donnybrook in that same hall. Further, as though Calyxa herself had drawn the day, while distraught Andromeda lovingly cupped her late lad's head, I remarked that the wound she wept on, intaglio'd in his temple, was the image of his bowled foredropper. Now she stood, my wife, wild-eyed, to keen general grief: besides Cassiopeia and Danaus, all the Seripheans and sundry palace guards were slain- including Galanthis, whom Cepheus had had the satisfaction to dispatch and posthumously geld. Fresh flesh lay everywhere among the petrified. Slightly wounded, Cepheus wept by Cassiopeia's corpse; a guard tapped my shoulder and deferentially put himself and his surviving comrades at my orders: was it my pleasure that Cepheus and Andromeda be killed at once, or reserved for torture?

Before I could reply that they were on pain of flaying to obey henceforth no other than their ancient king, Cepheus entreated me to spare his daughter's life, but denied that any Ethiopian could take his, which was already flown to Hades with his black queen's shade. Fetching up Athene's dirk (scuffled himward as his cup had me-), he hilted it to heart, spat blood, rolled eyes, and died as he had lived, at Cassiopeia's feet. Andromeda wailed from her perished paramour dead-dadward, even washed with tears her hard mother's hair, root and follicle of our misfortunes. Then she rose above all, still regally herself, faced me from the fear-chased figure of chicken Phineus, and invited me to kill her as I had everything she prized.

"Sorry about your folks," I said. "Danaus too." But she'd none of my apology: as I well knew, she declared, she hadn't loved my young half-brother, only consoled herself with him; it was I she'd loved — Perseus the man, not gold-skin hero or demigod — and wedded we, till I had by lack of heart-deep reciprocity murdered marriage and love alike. "You never did love me," she charged, "except as Mythics might mere mortals."

"She talks like you."

Two more pages? My soul winced from her words; the fact remained, however — my fact, felt first to the auricles in the heart of Calyxa's shrine — I was, ineluctably and for worse as much as better, one of the Zeusidae, a bloody mythic hero.

"You're free, Andromeda," I told her.

No thanks. "I've always been!" she cried. "Despite you! Even on the cliff I was free!" I couldn't follow her, let it go. Spear her or spare her, she declared, she wanted no more of me; would remain in Joppa if alive, fetch from Argos our younger children —

Unpleasant middle Perseus, who had dwelt stonily between the young Destroyer and the New-Medusa'd man, interrupted her to sneer, "And find another Phineus?" — his last words, as I put him to death promptly and forever on hearing me speak them. Therefore I didn't bother with apology when thereby Andromeda was inspired to perfect wrath. In the first place, she raged, her uncle had been a kind and tactful fellow, no doubt no hero, but a better man in other ways than myself; in the second, be me reminded I wasn't the only g-s'd hero in the book: she could if she chose most surely find another, even goldener; but (in the third place — and how her mother's regal eyes flashed in her face!) the last thing she cared to do was to subject herself to another man, heroic or humble: no Cassiopeia she, all she wanted, in what years were left her, was to build as best she could a life of her own. What I craved, on the other hand, she dared say, was a votary, a mere adorer, not a fellow human; let me find one, then: the sea was shoaled with young girls on the make for established older men.

"Like your girlfriend with the hood," she ended bitterly, pointing at the door behind me. "Do what you please; I've stopped caring; just leave me alone."

Till that last imperative she was in possession of herself; alone undid her: she threw her arms around Phineus's neck and salted his shoulder with fresh tears. My own flowed too, no want of eyewash in this episode. I un-Cepheus'd my dagger, considered which of us to kill. Motionless as her renditions on the walls of Chemmis, but in my tear-flood swimming as at my submarine first sight of her, gentle Medusa stood just beyond the threshold. Half the four chambers of my heart surged: one ventricle, perhaps, would stay forever vacant, like a dead child's chair, in memory of my mortal marriage and late young-manhood; one auricle, as yet unpledged, shilly-shallied on the verge of choice. If only she'd beckon, summon, relieve me of doubt, reach forth her hand! But of course she wouldn't, ever. For a pulseless moment I stood halfhearted in this transfixion, as if she were the simply baleful Old and not the paradoxic precious New Revised Medusa. Then (with this last, parenthetical, over-the-shoulder glance at Andromeda and my fond dream of rejuvenation: difficult dead once-darling, fare you well! Farewell! Farewell!) I chucked wise dagger, strode over sill, embraced eyes-shut the compound predications of commitment — hard choice! soft flesh! — slipped back mid-kiss her problematic cowl, opened eyes.

"Now may we talk?"

My heart: all night.

"The night's half done."

So was my life. I.e.:

"Okay. We've half a night ahead." And ditto the next and next and next, till even our stars burn out. Half of each I'll unwind my tale to where it's ours, and half of every we'll talk. There's much to say.

"But much goes without saying."

And half of forever is forever. How long do you suppose we've been up here, love? Three nights? Three thousand years? Why do you imagine —

"You're asking all the questions. Shan't we take turns? I've seven.''

I too. One:

"Least first. I love our story and the way it's told, but I wonder about one or two things. The alliteration, for example?"

No help for that; I'm high on letters. Look at II-F-2, my Saharan scribble, or the Perseid epistles posted between II-A and — B. .

"Basta. One?"

We're not alone. Who else is here?

"Everyone who matters. No help for that, either. My eyes, you see. . Athene's conditions. . everyone I looked at in that last sentence turned to stars — except stone Phineus, who returned to flesh and blood. Don't ask me why."

I think I know, and thank you.

"Cepheus is overhead; he comes up first, talking to himself. Cassiopeia's with him; I put her a bit lower down. ."

Good show. You needn't really have included my ex-in-laws, but I did like old Cepheus. I wonder whether he's repeating his monologue.

"Perhaps we all are. I thought you'd want the whole cast out. Even Cassiopeia has her bright spots, if you look for them. Pegasus is flying off upper-leftward — "

It's good you have custody.

"Perseus. ."

I wonder what ours would have looked like. Not a question.

"I know. So. Andromeda's at his flank, just over my head, looking either at her father or at her mother's hair."

Above us. .

"In chains again, too, but don't mistake my motives. She's on top only in the night's first half, and her chains are jewels — temples, nipples, loins, and shanks, if you want to know, where she did wear jewels when you first met her."

Ah.

"Don't be cross: those bonds she hated are what define her, from your story's point of view. I mean her immortal part, which can't be offended, whatever her mortal part might feel."

I'm not nettled; I thank you for the shining image, Medusa. What's her mortal part doing these days?

"You're out of turn. Cetus, finally, is below your left foot. Even she has a story, if one cared to tell it: it's a monstrous fate to be born beastly."

Now who's hung up on letters? Not a question.

"It's you I'm hung on. Shall I say how bright your stars are? N.Q."

Just Delta Persei, please. Its magnitude?

"That doesn't count."

Do answer, then. I haven't forgotten Calyxa's mistake in I-F-1. Who did the Chemmis stonework, by the way?

"If you want to make me happy, please forget both picture and artist. Her subject matter, anyhow, I remind you, came from me. As for the star you vulgarly inquire of: its magnitude is sufficient and fairly constant, you may take my word, as it stands directly in my line of sight all night long till the end of time. More than that you'd be in sorry taste to ask, since for all you know I may be with you from the neck up only."

Not even to be able to see you! Just from the corner of my eye I glimpse a twinkle now and then. . You're not winking at someone out there?

"Really, Perseus, it is my turn! For your information — but I'm counting this, so I get to ask two in a row — my right eye, unlike your precious Delta P., has a variable magnitude. If I'm winking at anyone, it's the whole wretched world down there, which I'm glad to be out of. Back to your story-telling now: much as I et cetera, isn't it just possible the style is too mannered?"

Excellent Medusa, sweet salvatrix: leave such questions. I don't mind sleeping with a critic now and then, but I wouldn't spend eternity with one. That's two. Three?

"You're the monster in this ménage! Do reflect, darling, that if the Perseid weren't my favorite fable I'd have starred us in a different one, with a more nattering role for me and a less for you. Now I will ask another literary question: that business just before the climax, where Andromeda flings herself between you and Danaus. . You'll agree it's melodramatic?"

Heavens yes. In fact, from this perspective, a clumping klitsch. As is the whole story nowadays, I daresay. But that's how it was, and at the time we were archetypes, not stereotypes; reality, not myth. Your own stonework, so realistic in its day; I'll bet it's legendary now. So it goes.

"I yield."

And I pass, until you've done questioning my narrative technique.

"I do have one more tiny one. The auricle-ventricle business at the story's climax? I'm not sure of that metaphor, quite."

No more was I then of my heart.

"And now?"

Now it's my turn. Let's see. Why does Cassiopeia spend half the night with her head in the ocean?

"If you could ask her, she'd say she's washing her hair. Athene made me put her where she'd have to soak her head now and then, to mollify the Nereids. Your heart's not in that question."

Well. What ever happened to Cousin Bellerophon?

"That's another story. Look, I'm counting two halfhearted questions as one whole. Do ask a real one; you've only four left."

Calyxa?

"Must you, Perseus? No question."

Calyxa.

"It was brutal of you, darling! Brutal to jump from my arms into hers, when I'd rescued you; brutal again to compare us in bed, as if my awkwardness were anything but innocence, loving innocence, which you should have treasured! Don't reply. And brutal finally to dwell on her the way you did and do. Don't you think I have feelings?"

No question. I'm more or less contrite. But look here: in the first instance, don't forget I thought I'd lost you. .

"Your own fault."

Quite. In the second, although my friend Calyxa isn't at the heart of the story, it's her fate — her immortal part's fate — to spend eternity at its navel, where it and I both came to light. Have you done something dreadful with her?

"Sweetheart, you are a perfect prick!"

R.S.V.P.

"Only if you promise you'll never ask this question again for all eternity. One of the jewels, if you must know, in one of the manacles on one of Andromeda's wrists — make it her navel, you're such a fetishist — happens to be a spiral nebula, and that nebula happens to be your little friend. It also happens to be quite striking, I'm sorry to report, like fossil ammonite done in gold: in fact, a smasher. On the other hand, you may be sure I've seen to it she's simply oodles of light-years from us; out of our galaxy altogether."

Thank you, Medusa.

"Don't mention it. Now tell me, P.P. — "

"Prince Perseus?"

"A pretty presumption. How comes it to pass, sweet — what all this lit-crit's been building up to — that in a drama whose climax and dénouement consists ostensibly of your choice however belated and three-quarter-hearted, of Yours Truly for eternity's second half, the two female leads are Andromeda and What's-Her-Name, that bit of fluff in your Egyptian omphalos? That strikes me as a weakness in your plotting, to say the least."

The less said the better: they're the ones I speak of; you're the one I chose.

"I withdraw all restrictions. Ask me anything."

How long have we been here, Medusa?

"Can't tell. What you're really asking me is — "

Yes. All this about mortal and immortal parts. Out there, in the world, are Andromeda and Phineus. .

"Truly, Perseus, I don't know. And truly, do excuse me, that isn't our affair."

I withdraw the question.

"Sorry: you touched the piece. And my intuitions tell me you'd better ask your Number Seven before I my Six."

Beloved voice; sweet Medusa whom I cannot hold and couldn't see even when I could: not long since, you exhorted me to forget panel I-F-1 in a certain mural in some temple along the Nile, together with its first-draughtsman; but our arrangement here, whereof yourself are sole designer, suggests that that same scene may be still graved in your own imagination. What have you done to us? In what condition are we? Have you indulged yourself in a monstrous martyrdom to gratify what would be in me a perverse, unspeakable vanity? I retch, I gag at that idea! To see nothing; to feel nothing of you but your hair in my left hand! Why is it I look at empty space forever, a blank page, and not at the woman I love?

"Let me assume you mean myself. ."

I'm not being clever, Medusa.

"No more am I. At that last moment in the banquet hall — it's not easy for me to say these words, Perseus — when you discovered me and kissed me open-eyed. . what I saw reflected in your pupils was a Gorgon."

In the name of Athene, love, don't forget her conditions! Eyes are mirrors!

"I've forgotten nothing. Quite possibly it was a false reflection. Just as possibly your tricky sister never un-Gorgoned me at all. ."

What an idea!

"I entertain it with deadly calm, let me assure you. But even assuming you'd abandoned your childish wish for rejuvenation — "

You know I had!

"— and granting a measure of vanity in my own wish — that you'd love me enough to throw everything overboard to have me. ."

Please, please, please, please, please, please, please.

". . it nonetheless remains a distinct and distinctly unpleasant third possibility that your kiss was in complete bad faith: an act not of love but of suicide, or a desperate impulse to immortality-by-petrification. In that event, I revealed my 'beauty' to the wrong man and became a Gorgon forever."

Pause. Hear how quietly, how calmly I reply. To give that unmentionable hypothesis one moment out of eternity, which is one more than it deserves: suppose it true. How would you feel?

"Sorry: your questions are all used up, and I haven't come to mine. When you opened your eyes, Perseus; when you saw me. . what exactly did you see?"

My Medusa: I've thanked you for the pretty memory of Andromeda; for my own estellation; for all the selfless, supererogatory gifts you've showered on me, from bright Calyxa to a four-star likeness of my crescent blade. I even thank you for unstoning Phineus, and wish him and his companion well. Now listen and believe me, if there's any truth in words: it wasn't you who discovered your beauty to me, but I who finally unveiled it to myself. And what I saw, exactly, when I opened my eyes, were two things in instantaneous succession, reflected in yours: the first was a reasonably healthy, no-longer-heroic mortal with more than half his life behind him, less potent and less proud than he was at twenty but still vigorous after all, don't interrupt me, and grown too wise to wish his time turned back. The second, one second after, was the stars in your own eyes, reflected from mine and rereflected to infinity — stars of a quite miraculous, yes blinding love, which transfigured everything in view. Perhaps you find the image trite; I beg of you not to say so.

"Pause. Long pause. I can't say anything."

You've one last question.

"It'll have to wait. . I'm raining on half the zodiac. . poor Cetus, swim again while you can. ."

If I had one, I'd ask about your and my mortal parts.

"No use: those parts are private, like Andromeda's and Phineus's; not for publication. We didn't die down there at the climax, I can tell you that; simply we commenced our immortality here, where we talk together. Down there our mortal lives are living themselves out, or've long since done — together or apart, comic tragic, beautiful ugly. That's another story, another story; it can't be told to the characters in this."

So be it. Last question?

"Are you happy, Perseus, with the way this story ends?"

Infinite pause. My love, it's an epilogue, always ending, never ended, like (I don't apologize) II-G, which winds through universal space and time. My fate is to be able only to imagine boundless beauty from my experience of boundless love — but I have a fair imagination to work with, and, to work from, one priceless piece of unimagined evidence: what I hold above Beta Persei, Medusa: not serpents, but lovely woman's hair. I'm content. So with this issue, our net estate: to have become, like the noted music of our tongue, these silent, visible signs; to be the tale I tell to those with eyes to see and understanding to interpret; to raise you up forever and know that our story will never be cut off, but nightly rehearsed as long as men and women read the stars. . I'm content. Till tomorrow evening, love.

"Good night."

Good night. Good night.