Chimera

1

"Good night."

"Good night."

Some stories last longer than others. Now my wife's feelings were hurt, Philonoë's, and no wonder: for the occasion she's made ambrosia with her own hands, dismissed the servants early, donned her best nightie; it should have been one dessert after another. But Bellerophon, King of Lycia, at sundown on the eve of his birthday found floating in the marsh near his palace a Greek novella called Perseid, story of his model hero; by the time he got to its last words he was forty and too tired.

Thus begins, so help me Muse, the tidewater tale of twin Bellerophon, mythic hero, cousin to constellated Perseus: how he flew and reflew Pegasus the winged horse; dealt double death to the three-part freak Chimera; twice loved, twice lost; twice aspired to, reached, and died to immortality — in short, how he rode the heroic cycle and was recycled. Loosed at last from mortal speech, he turned into written words: Bellerophonic letters afloat between two worlds, forever betraying, in combinations and recombinations, the man they forever represent.

"You never criticize," I go on to carp shortly at the bedroom ceiling, dark.

"There's something wrong with a woman who never criticizes."

After a moment, pensive Philonoë beside me said: "Sometimes I criticize."

"No you don't. You're perfect; that's your trouble."

"My feelings are hurt, yes," Philonoë is represented here as having explained. "But there's no point in criticizing a person when he's obviously upset. Though why you're upset, I can't imagine."

"Upset upset. My life's a failure. I'm not a mythic hero. I never will be."

"You are!" Their dialogue conveys the general sense of our conversation, but neither establishes Philonoë's indomitable gentleness of spirit and body and her husband's punishing self-concern, nor achieves in proportion to its length enough simple exposition. Had I understood, when I consented at the end of this novella to be transformed by the seer Polyeidus into a version of Bellerophon's life, that I might be imperfectly, even ineptly narrated, I'd have cleaved to my original program: to fall from heaven into a thornbush, become a blind lame vatic figure, and float upon the marshy tide, reciting my history aloud, in my own voice, to Melanippe the Amazon — my moon, my muse, my final mortal love — as she ebbed and flooded me. And if Polyeidus the Seer had realized that this final and trickiest effort in the literary-metamorphosis way would be freckled and soiled with as it were self-criticism, he'd've let Bellerophon smack into the muck and bubble there forever, like Dante's Wrathful in the marshes of the Styx. Fenny father, old shape-shifter: here you are, then; even here. On with the story.

"It's perfectly obvious," Philonoë went on, her voice as gentle as her gentle body, whose beauty five-and-thirty years had scarcely scarred, "that Athene's still on your side. The Kingdom of Lycia is reasonably prosperous and politically stable despite our vexing military involvement with the Carians and their new alliance with the Solymians and Amazons. Our children are growing up satisfactorily, take it all in all — not like Proetus and Anteia's wayward daughters. Your fame as a Chimeromach seems secure, judging by your fan mail; even the Perseid, I gather from the excerpts you chose to read me, mentions you favorably a couple of times. Finally, our marriage (which, remember, is to me what your career as mythic hero is to you: my cardinal value and vindication, my raison d'être) is, if no longer fiery as Chimera's breath, affectionate, comfortable, and sexually steady, in the main. Certainly we've been spared the resentments that poisoned Perseus and Andromeda's relationship as they reached our age, and while we cannot be called innocent, surely we are rather experienced than guilty.

"Now, it may very well be that your most spectacular work is behind you — I've yet to read the Perseid, but what mythic hero isn't over the hill, as it were, by the time he's forty? However, it strikes me as at least likely that your best work may not be your most spectacular, and that it may lie ahead, if not be actually in progress: I mean the orderly administration of your country, your family, and yourself over the long haul; the patient cultivation of understanding into wisdom; the accumulation of rich experience and its recycling in the form of enlightened policy, foreign, domestic, and personal — all those things, in brief, which make a man not merely celebrated, but great; not merely admired, but loved; et cetera."

I compare to this the rich prose of the Perseid and despair. Sleep with its author, then, if Melanippe's style won't do! No, no, my love, it's not your style; you merely set the words down as they come, or long since came: once-living creatures caught and fossiled in the clay; bones displaced by alien mineral, grown with crystals, hued with the oxides of old corrosion, heaved and worn and rearranged by the eons' ebb; shards; disjecta membra, from which the sleeping dragon is ever harder to infer. You said it. Anyhow I slept, and woke unhappy as before. As always, Philonoë ungrudgingly forgave — Melanippe is no Philonoë. I didn't mean to imply that she is — aroused and made love to me, then permitted me a post-coital nap while she prepared with her own hands a birthday breakfast: spinach pie and feta cheese. With this woman, Polyeidus wonders, the man was unhappy? He shouldn't wonder, Bellerophon believes (echoing for a moment, if lamely, the prancing rhythms and alliterations of the Perseid), as it was he showed Bellerus as a boy the Pattern of Mythic Heroism, fourth quadrant of which calls for the mature hero's sudden and mysterious fall from the favor of gods and men; his departure, voluntary or otherwise, from the city of his own establishment; his mysterious apotheosis on a hilltop, symbolic counterpart of the place of his divine conception; et cetera.

Bellerophon is telling Polyeidus this? Whomever the buskin fits: Melanippe, too, perky priestess of his passions, shouldn't need reminding how the undauntable docility of the lady here featured as Philonoë, her absolute solicitude, her angelic, her invulnerable devotion — this is nauseating two-thirds of us — had long since made Bellerophon half-desperate, most particularly for the reason least appreciated by Philonoë herself in her reference to Andromeda, above. In a word, I was inescapably content — in my marriage, my children, my royal career — and because mythic heroes at that age and stage should become the opposite of content, my contentment made me wretched.

Pause. Melanippe the Amazon, let's say, is not at all sure she comprehends this sophistry. You were unhappy because you were happy?

The sophistry may be insufferable: the suffering was real. There was Perseus, risen from his misery and shining in the sky; here was Bellerophon, miserably content, holding his story in his hand.

For this you left your wife and family?

And my kingdom. And my empire. That's where my story starts, when I go wandering in the Aleïan marsh, "far from the paths of men, devouring my own soul," et cetera.

Wait while I write that plain: wretched because nothing was wrong.

Right.

Pause. It has been remarked that this state of spiritual affairs — the general malaise, I mean, not the specific etiology — is figured commonly in the myths by an objective correlative: one thinks of the miasma that hangs over Oedipus's Thebes, or Perseus's imagined petrifaction. Was there anything similar in Bellerophon's case?

I wonder how many voices are telling my tale. It seems to me that upon my first being transformed into the story of my life, at best a sorely qualified immortality, the narrative voice was clear and objective: in simple, disciplined prose it recounted my middle-aged distress, figured conveniently by Pegasus's inability to fly, voila. Briefly it rehearsed my vain attempts to foment rebellion in my children over the question of which should succeed me to the Lycian throne; exasperation in my wife by endless repetitions of the tale of my youthful exploits, including my affair with her older sister Anteia; sedition in my subjects by continuing and escalating the unpopular Solymian war — my children were filially pious, my wife adored me, the silent majority of Lycians supported my administration. Beginning in the middle, on the eve of my fortieth birthday, this original or best Bellerophoniad proceeded with unostentatious skill to carry forward the present-time drama (my quest for literal immortality) while completing the plenteous exposition of my earlier adventures — a narrative difficulty resolved by the simple but inspired device of making the second half of my life recapitulate ironically the first, after the manner of the Perseid, but with the number five (i.e., threes and twos) rather than seven as the numerical basis of the structure, and a circle rather than a logarithmic spiral as its geometric motif. It commenced, moreover, with an echo not only of Perseid's opening lines but of its dramatic construction as well: that is, not at the beginning of the hero's second series of adventures (Perseus's departure with cross Andromeda to revisit the scenes of his youthful triumphs in search of rejuvenation; cross Bellerophon's ditto with patient Philonoë in search of the magic herb hippomanes), but at their mid-point: Perseus, while always ultimately addressing the reader from heaven, tells most of his story immediately to his mistress Calyxa in Egypt; Bellerophon, it seems to me, while always ultimately addressing the reader from pages floating in the marshes of what has become Dorchester County, Maryland, U.S.A., used to begin by rehearsing his prior history to pretty Melanippe in the marshes of the river Thermodon, near Scythian Themiscyra. The narration was repeated daily and lasted all day: two tideslengths, to be exact, corresponding to the halves of my life and work. The First Flood, so to speak, covered my adventures from the death of my father and my brother, through the killing of the Chimera, to my marriage to Princess Philonoë — roughly from my nineteenth through my twenty-seventh year; the First Ebb discovered my reign in Lycia and the establishment of my family, through my growing discontentment with my contentment, to Pegasus's inability to get off the ground, twenty-eighth through thirty-sixth year; the Second Flood covered my adventures from the time of my leaving Lycia to consult the Old Man of the Marsh (actually the prophet Polyeidus), through my travels in search of the horsenip herb hippomanes, to my idyll with Amazonian Melanippe, thirty-seventh through forty-fifth year; the Second Ebb discovered my attempted flight to Olympus, through my long free-fall from Pegasus, to the end of my chronological life, forty-sixth through fifty-fourth year. The thirty-six-year period, divided into eighteen-year cycles and nine-year quarters, was a compromise as I remember between the Polyeidic "solar" life-calendar, a seventy-two-year span based on a three-hundred-sixty-day year of twelve thirty-day months, and the Melanippic or Amazonian "lunar" life-calendar, based on four quarters of approximately fourteen years each (though Amazons do not acknowledge annual units), metaphorically correspondent to the phases of the moon and the four stages of female sexuality (birth to puberty, puberty to sexual maturity, sexual maturity to menopause, menopause to death- the life expectancy of Amazons, reckoned in Polyeidic terms, is fifty-six "years"; they begin menstruating at age "fourteen," on the average, and cease about age "forty-two"). It was, finally, a distinguishing feature of this ideal Bellerophoniad that while the length and periodicity of the narration were constant, the amplitude of the narrative varied like the range of the tides with the narrator's energy, itself a function of his concentration or distraction. Yes, yes, the tale was told to its fullest heights and depths twice per lunar month, when the pulls so to speak of Polyeidus and Melanippe were perfectly aligned; at the summer-solstitial full moon in particular, I recollect, my tale achieved a pitch of eloquence- a phenomenon no doubt to be accounted for by the latitude and longitude of tidewater Maryland. Contrariwise, twice each month the narration was unusually flat and shallow, especially in the neighborhood of the equinoxes — and distracted, as though the pure Bellerophonic voice were tugged and co-opted now by Polyeidus this way, now Melanippe that; not to the end of dramatic harmony and tension, but discordantly, to stalemate and stagnation.

In posing the question, I now observe, I or someone has answered if. Full knowledge of the five tidal "constants" (geographic location, mean water-depth, configuration of shoreline, speed of Earth-rotation, friction of sea-bottom), the four periodic variables (relative positions of Sun and Moon to each other and to Earth, their respective distances from Earth, inclination of the lunar orbit to the Equator), and the three non-periodic variables (wind force, wind direction, barometric pressure) would doubtless afford a complete understanding of Bellerophoniad's narrative processes — but such comprehension, difficult to acquire, is impossible to crave. All I sense is the current neapness! If Bellerophon might rebegin, unclogged, unsilted! Time and tide, however, et cetera.

For God's sake, Melanippe, put this down: The winged horse won't fly! Would not, wouldn't! Vehicle of my glory, from whose high back I bombed Solymian and Amazon alike, in better days, from Bronze Age back to Stone, sank the Carian pirates, did to death the unimaginable Chimera — Pegasus can't get off the ground! Could not, couldn't! Turned out to pasture since his master's marriage, fat and tame now, my sweet half-brother in time grew loath even to lift his moonshaped hooves, much less strike well-springs with them for the Muses. Twenty years it had been my custom every morning, after breakfast, to take down from its place of honor over my throne the golden Bridle of Restraint, Athene's gift (Perseid reliefs, Series II, Panel 3), without which none can mount the steed sired by Poseidon on Medusa and foaled when Perseus beheaded her. My wife I'd perch athwart my pommel, and we'd make a high circuit of the empire, cheered by all we overlooked. Now, the Perseid under my belt, I burped to the paddock and was by the lackeys boosted into place; applied the heel, laid on the crop; clucked and chucked and urged and whistled: the beast no longer giddyapped, much less went vaulting starward; only grazed in circles, trailing horsefeathers where his wings like doused sails dragged by the board.

This Perseid is that heavy? No, no, love, it's I was heavy, drag-hoofed as this telling of my tale. Perseid takes off like its hero. Hum. Did Bellerophon's grounding happen all at once or gradually, over the years of his marriage? You know the story. I wish I were dead.

Melanippe, as she is here called, being an Amazon, is not conversant with the niceties either of marriage or of narrative construction. In her position as Bellerophon's lover and alleged chronicler, however, she makes the following suggestion: the "present" action of this part of the story (you used the term "First Ebb," I believe), must cover your attempts to deteriorate three separate relations- with your late children, your late wife, and your late subjects — and at the same time accomplish, at least in a preliminary way, as much as possible of the earlier, "First Flood" exposition: the story of your former life. Then why not attempt to alienate your children with anecdotes of your own childhood, your wife with the Anteia episode, the citizenry with boring accounts of your later adventures? Isn't that the way you said it's done in the mythical "ideal" Bellerophoniad? Correlate these internal narratives and Pegasus's descending altitude, with an eye to ending the First Flood at the "climax" of the First Ebb: i.e., the morning you couldn't get Peg up at all and struck out for the swamp. At the same time, since First Flood, First Ebb, and Second Flood themselves comprise an internal narrative framed by our affair here on the Thermodon, punctuate them wherever convenient with conversation between Bellerophon and Melanippe, "giving if possible a degree of dramatic development to our tidewater idyll. That is, unless drama and development on the one hand, idyll and immortality on the other, are not irreconcilable sets of notions. What do you think?

I think I'm dead. I think I'm spooked. I'm full of voices, all mine, none me; I can't keep straight who's speaking, as I used to. It's not my wish to be obscure or difficult; I'd hoped at least to entertain, if not inspire. But put it that one has had visions of an order complex unto madness: Now and again, like mazy marshways glimpsed from Pegasus at top-flight, the design is clear: one sees how the waters flow and why; what freight they bear and whither. Between, one's swamped; the craft goes on, but its way seems arbitrary, seems insane.

There, love: you flew. With Philonoë and the children?

Yes, yes. Yes, yes, yes. From the time our first was born he flew too, nestled in his mother's breast as she in mine, and so loved the ride that to my discomfort she named him Hippolochus: "dropped from a mare." Soon little Isander took his place; sturdy Hippolochus hung on astern. Came Laodamia, gentle as her mom: the ladies rode before, the boys behind, never once squabbling which should sit next after me, and the royal family daily went sky-high.

But not.

But not so high as formerly, or far, or fast. For this Philonoë thanked me on the children's behalf and hers, thinking I reined us in on their account; at the same time she grounded herself thenceforward, lest the late infrequency of our flights beyond the Lycian border be a cause of the rumored new alliance between the Carians and Solymians, our ancient enemies. But even without her, though his range and altitude increased, Pegasus never quite regained his former heights; as the children grew, we found ourselves down again to the olive-tops. Not to buzz and turd my subjects into disaffection, I bumped in turn Hippolochus, Isander, and Laodamia, each time reclimbing to a lower peak, like waves on a foreshore as the tide runs out. I watched the new constellations wheel far over my head — Perseus, Medusa, Andromeda, Cepheus, Cassiopeia — and turned sour.

"It is remarkable," I'd remark to Philonoë in the royal boudoir, as she kindly tried to rouse me, "what a toll pregnancy takes on teeth and muscle tone." Her hand would pause — Melanippe's does, too — for just a moment. Then she'd agree, cheerfully adding varicosity, slacked breast and vaginal sphincter, striation of buttock and thigh, and loss of hair-sheen to the list of her biological expenses in the childbearing way — all which she counted as nothing, since for three such princelets she'd've died thrice over. But as I was at it I should add, she'd add, the psychological cost of parentage, to ourselves individually and to the marital relationship: fatigue, loss of spontaneity, diminishment of ardor, general heaviness — a kind of accelerated aging, the joint effect of passing years, increased responsibility, and accumulated familiarity — never altogether compensated for by deeper intimacy. For her part (she would go on — what a wife this was!), she took what she was pleased to term the Tragic View of Marriage and Parenthood: reckoning together their joys and griefs must inevitably show a net loss, if only because like life itself their attrition was constant and their term mortal. But one had only different ways of losing, and to eschew matrimony and childbearing for the delights of less serious relations was in her judgment to sustain a net loss even more considerable. Nor, mind, did she regard this perspective (which she applied as well to everything from vacation trips to historical movements) as spiritually negative or bleak: to affirm it was to affirm the antinomy of the cosmos, which antimony she took to be not absurd contradiction but rich paradox, the pity and terror of the affirmation whereof effected in the human soul an ennobling catharsis. I can do it. Assuredly I can do it. That I can do it, I cannot doubt. That I cannot do it; that I can begin to imagine that I cannot do it; that I can begin to wonder whether perhaps after all I cannot do it; that I can begin to begin firmly to believe that I cannot do it; I cannot begin to imagine, I cannot begin to wonder, I cannot begin to begin. Beyond question I can do it.

Can I do it? I cannot do it.

Do it.

Pegasus and I flew lower. "You are descended," I told the children on Hippolochus's thirteenth birthday, "from a line of half-breed horse traders reaching back through Sisyphus and Autolycus to the shifty centaurs."

They sat round-eyed; tutors and governesses fled to summon Philonoë, who entered with her knitting and watched their faces as I spoke, but neither protested nor interrupted.

"Your Grandmother Eurymede was a leading member of the Corinthian wild-mare cult," I declared to them. "She claimed that Poseidon the sea-horse-god had humped her stallionwise one night as she was skinnydipping in the surf during her organization's annual harvest-moon orgy. But Dad — your Grandpa Glaucus? — accused her of adultery with the stable-master, if not with one of the stallions themselves, and after dragging the former to death behind his racing chariot, he banished male grooms and stonehorses from our spread."

Hippolochus cried "Hooray!" Isander asked to be given, on his thirteenth birthday, a pony. Laodamia climbed into my lap and sucked her thumb. Out in the paddock Pegasus whinnied. Philonoë purled.

"Horses remain a conspicuous motif in my biography," I guess I said, "beginning with the circumstances of my birth. Assuming Poseidon to be my father, I've a deal of actual horse-blood in my veins, and you in yours. Insofar as we're human, the equine traits may be regarded as recessive, but the chance that one of you may foal a centaur or sire a literal colt, while admittedly small, had as well be acknowledged. My interest in the subject of heredity, which needs no further explanation, has led me to sponsor research in this area, certain findings of which I'll impart to each of you on your wedding day."

Laodamia asked where babies came from. Isander decided to have two each of sons, daughters, trotters, pacers. Hippolochus, displeased with his adolescent appearance, hoped he could make use of my research to give his own offspring black manes and tails instead of bay. Philonoë smiled and said, "Bay is beautiful." What I'm experiencing cannot be called an identity-crisis. In order to experience an identity-crisis, one must first have enjoyed some sense of identity. The tradition of the mad genius in literature. The tradition of the double in literature. The tradition of the story within the story, the tradition of the mad editor of the text, the tradition of the unreliable narrator. "I come now," how beautifully all this is managed in the Perseid, "to the twin-business, how I more or less killed my father and my brother." Polyeidus, old charlatan, is that your best? No answer. But I know you're here between the lines, among the letters' curls and crooks, spreading through me like the water through this marsh. Thank heaven I get to swat you at my peak!

"Bellerus and Deliades," I'm saying to the children, back in Lycia; "Deliades and Bellerus. From the day we were born, the country quarreled over which of us should succeed to the throne of Corinth, and my brother and I quarreled over it ourselves, for fun and profit, just as you boys will when you drive me out of town."

O Bellerophon! "Bellerus it was then, and do stop bawling." All of you. "Twins we were; twin brothers; look-alikes and inner opposites; and Polyeidus was our tutor. Bellerus from toddlerhood passionate, impetuous, Aphrodite's ardent darling; Deliades circumspect, prudential, in all things moderate, a venerator of Athene. And Polyeidus was our tutor. Everyone thought Deliades legitimate, as he shared the famous gray-green eyes of Glaucus and his forebears; but my earliest memory is of Mom and Dad squabbling in the next bedroom over me, whether I was Poseidon's son or the horse-groom's: a bastard to be exposed on the hillside or a demigod destined for the stars."

Melanippe herself, though she loves her lover and is held to be recording his history faithfully, can be of two minds on this point when she hears him speaking to his children so. Yes, well, even Bellerus has his doubts; but though we teased and contested which was heir apparent, Deliades alone never questioned which was mortal: I liked the kid well enough; he worshipped me.

"And Polyeidus was your tutor," the children chorused. I'm sending them supperless to bed: Isander has announced that he hates this story because its words are too big and it lasts too long. Hippolochus has kissed him and promised to repeat it all in little words at nap-time. My curly darling Laodamia sleeps in my lap; Philonoë deftly replaces the thumb with a pacifier. Dead now, all of them: dead and dead and dead! Then do let them stay up awhile, Bellerophon, to hear the Polyeidus part.

"Our tutor he became, Polyeidus, Polyeidus, after being prophet laureate to the court of Corinth. Though featured in several other myths, on the strength of which Dad had hired him, he declared to us he had no memory of his pre-Corinthian past, or any youth. Some said he'd been Proteus's apprentice, others that he was some stranded version of The Old Man of the Sea himself. At such stories Polyeidus shrugged, saying only that all shapeshifters are revisions of tricky Proteus. But he dismissed the conventional Protean transformations — into animals, plants, and such — as mere vaudeville entertainment, and would never oblige us with a gryphon or a unicorn, say, howevermuch we pled, or stoop to such homely predictions as next day's weather. For this reason, among others, he was demoted to tutor; and he urged upon us, even as boys, a severer view of magic. By no means, he used to insist, did magicians necessarily understand their art, though experience had led him to a couple of general observations on it. For example, that each time he learned something new about his powers, those powers diminished, anyhow altered. Also, that what he "turned into" on those occasions when he transformed was not altogether within his governance. Under certain circumstances he would frown, give a kind of grunt, and turn into something, which might or might not resemble what if anything he'd had in mind. Sometimes his magic failed him when he called upon it; other times it seized him when he had no use for it; and the same was true of his prophesying. 'It will be alleged that Napoleon died on St. Helena in 1821,' he would announce, with no more notion than we of the man and place and date he meant, or the significance of the news; 'in fact he escaped to the Eastern Shore of Maryland, to establish his base for the Second Revolution.' Most disappointingly to Deliades and me, his transformations were generally into what he came to call 'historical personages from the future': this same Napoleon, for example, or Captain John Smith of the American plantation of Virginia: useless to our education. But no sooner did he see this pattern than he lost the capacity, and changed thenceforward only into documents, mainly epistolary: Napoleon's imaginary letter from King Theodore to Sir Robert Walpole, composed after the Emperor's surrender; Plato's Seventh Letter; the letter from Denmark to England which Hamlet transferred to Rosencrantz and Guildenstern; the Isidorian Decretals; the Protocols of the Elders of Zion; Madame de Staël's Lettres sur Jean-Jacques Rousseau; the 'Henry Letters' purchased for $50,000 by President Madison's administration from the impostor Compte de Crillon in 1811 to promote the War of 1812; the letter from Vice Admiral Sir Alexander Cochrane, commander of the British fleet at Halifax, to that same president, warning that unless reparations were made for the Americans' destruction of Newark and St. Davids in Canada, the British would retaliate by burning Washington — a letter said to be either antedated or intentionally delayed, as it reached its address when the capital was in ashes; the false letter describing mass movements of Indian and Canadian forces against Detroit, planted by the Canadian General Brock so that the U.S. General Hull would discover it, panic, and surrender the city; a similar letter dated September 11, 1813, which purported to be from Colonel Fossett of Vermont to General MacComb, advising him of massive reinforcements on the way to aid him against the Canadian General Prevost in the Battle of Plattsburg: it was entrusted to an Irishwoman of Cumberland Head whom the U.S. Secret Service, its actual author, knew to be loyal to the British; Prevost, when she dutifully turned it over to him, took it to be authentic and retreated into Canada, though no such reinforcements existed. Et cetera. Doctored letters. My brother and I were not very interested."

"Kill Granddad and Uncle Deliades, Daddy," Isander begged. His brother shushed him. All dead now, and sent supperless to bed. Hippolochus giddyaps happily upstairs on a fancied flying-horse to do battle with imaginary dragons, declaring to Isander, who gallops beside, that what might seem to be arbitrary and excessive punishment is in fact the stern discipline of mythic herohood, to which I am as lovingly apprenticing them as did Polyeidus me. So their mother has explained to him. Dead.

I want sons, Bellerophon. I want my belly full. Don't withdraw. I'm tired of Amazoning.

A novel in the form of artificial fragments. A novel in diary form, in epistolary form, in notebook form, in the form of notes; a novel in the form of annotated text; a novel in the form of miscellaneous documents, a novel in the form of the novel. The tradition that no one who believes himself to be losing his mind is losing his mind. The tradition that people who speak much of committing suicide are talking themselves out of committing suicide, or is it into committing suicide. Kill Glaucus and Deliades.

"Our apprenticeship in herohood was real enough — all at Deliades's instigation, for Bellerus never took it seriously. My brother drew Polyeidus out upon the subject, from love of me, never presuming to the role himself." My dead son's candles gutter in the uncut cake; I sit in the palace dark; my wife clicks serenely on; I don't know who my audience is.

" 'Hurrah!' cried Deliades — the Corinthian equivalent of our hooray — after one of Polyeidus's lectures: 'We don't have to hate Daddy any more!' Using, as usual, Cousin Perseus as his example, Polyeidus had enounced the first several requisites and features of the heroic vita: that the circumstances of conception be unusual; that the child be born to royal parents but be alleged to be the son of a god; that an attempt be made on his boyish life either by his maternal grandfather or his mother's spouse; et cetera. To Deliades, ever a peacemaker, this explained and excused Glaucus's jealous quarrels with Eurymede, which, as my brother loved us all, had been particularly painful for him to overhear.

" 'You merely have to fear him,' Polyeidus replied, 'your mother's father being already among the shades. At least Bellerus does, if we assume he's Poseidon's son.' I remember replying with a merry shrug that I feared no one. We were young men; Deliades was comely in a mortal way, but Bellerus, standing on the Isthmian strand, his copper curls lit by the descending sun — divine!

" 'We needn't fear him either,' Deliades maintained: 'You said yourself that the attempted murder never does more than leave a mark, usually on the hero's thigh or foot, by which he'll be recognized later in the cycle — and Perseus seems to've managed without even that. All we have to worry about is that Dad himself will get killed accidentally when the thing backfires' — as had been the would-be ancestral assassins of Perseus, Oedipus, and countless other heroes, some not to be born for generations yet, with whose biographies Polyeidus documented his point.

"Our tutor smiled. How describe a man who from semester to semester seldom resembled himself? That season, I believe, he was bald, shag-chinned, ill-odored, goatish; season before he'd been leonine; season to come — we'll come to that. He pointed out that to satisfy the prerequisites of herohood was not necessarily to be a hero; for every young Perseus or Moses boxed and shipped and rescued, scores of candidates must expire in their floating coffins, a menace to navigation and pollutant of the littoral. I hadn't proved I was the sea-god's son; Glaucus's attempt on my life might be successful. If it weren't, and I was a hero after all, the mythographical odds against his survival were great indeed: but he might, like Danaë's father Acrisius, live a long and useful life before retribution overtook him. For that matter, there was just a chance that the filicidal episode would be purely symbolic, a moment of peril in the company of my progenitor but not at his hands: young Odysseus's accidental goring by the boar while hunting with his Grandfather Autolycus would be a case in point when it came to pass. All the same, he said, one in my position did well to be wary — as did one in Glaucus's — especially as the attempt must be expected quite soon. We were well past puberty; actuarially speaking, it was overdue already.

" 'Tell us how it's going to turn out!' Deliades demanded, as would have little Isander had he heard this far. He would if he could, Polyeidus replied, but concentrate as he might, all he came up with were the images of two odd beasts: a lovely white winged stallion who had just that moment been born into the world, and a vague monstrosity in three parts, obscured from clearer view by the smoke of its own respiration. What these had to do with me and Glaucus, he couldn't say.

"Curling my lovely lip — how well I see me! — I said, 'A stallion would have to have wings to get into our stables!' Where, remember, there had been none since my conception — a policy I opposed as contrary to nature and conducive to nervousness in the mares. Deliades, as fond of horses as myself, was enchanted with the notion of a winged one; he wished Dad had it for the chariot events in the Argonauts' Funeral Stakes, to be run that night. Here I make a three-part digression. ."

Over my dead body. Yes. We're in a three-part digression already, sinking in exposition as in quickmire! The Deterioration of the Literary Unit: yes, well, things are deteriorating right enough, deteriorating; everything is deteriorated; deterioration everywhere. God knows I'm not what I used to be; no help for that. But never for want of words! Too much to say, that's my complaint: everything to get said, and all at once or I'll forget it. Already I've forgotten half what I'd in mind to write; pen can't keep up; I make mad side-notes, notes of notes for notes; each phrase begets two more, four; I can't sleep for them; my joints are stiff; it's cold and damp here; this moment I should be lying with my warm young friend; instead it's scribble scribble the night through, red-eyed, dizzy: fine shape I'll be in at tide-turn, when the long ebb ends! What was I saying? There, gone. Digression from digression will not lead to the main stream; it's the wrong way out of the swamp. "Float with the tide," I'm told. By whom? My mistress? Monstrous. I know who sticks in my throat.

"The Corinthian succession," I press on: "Over that we teasily disputed, Bellerus and Deliades, mocking the arguments of the polis. Deliades had been born first, by an hour or so, but as we were twins, primogeniture struck most people as a technicality. The issue more often hassled in the Corinthian bars and byways was the issue of legitimacy. No one denied that we had different fathers, whether because they accepted it that all twins do, or because our demeanors were dissimilar, or because the royal quarrels on that point were common gossip. What one might call the conservative position was that since Glaucus was King of Corinth, his legitimate son was his legitimate heir, regardless of who had been born first; on this view, the only question was which of us was legitimate, and as was established pages ago, nearly all inclined to Deliades by reason of his verdigris eyes. The more radical position was that if one of us had been sired by Poseidon, biological legitimacy and primogeniture were both superseded, or should be, and the proper problem was how to determine which if either of us was a demigod. Here the larger following was mine, though as the Glaucus-Deliades faction was fond of pointing out, popularity is not proof. Moreover, what was true in most such cases (Heracles and Iphicles, for instance) — that one twin was immortal and the other not — was not true in all; both might be either; therefore the experiment proposed in jest by Polyeidus and taken up seriously by others, of throwing us both into the Gulf of Corinth, say, and seeing who survived, was opposed as inconclusive as well as repugnant, since at best it would kill the King's legitimate son, and at worst terminate the dynasty without settling the dispute.

"These positions were fueled and complicated by political, historical, even logical considerations: the mare-cult itself, for example, was held to be a survival from a bygone matriarchal era, dating from the days before men realized that copulation, rather than magic, was the cause of pregnancy. The more militant votaries of the cult denied that even Glaucus had been the rightful king, and urged Eurymede to a coup d'état. Few favored an outright duumvirate of twins, but several groups called for joint rule by annual alternation, citing various actual and mythical precedents, as a peaceful resolution of the question. Even such apparently irrational expedients as the toss of a coin were seriously put forward: since only the gods knew whether one of us was a demigod and if so which, let the gods decide who should rule Corinth, et cetera.

"These arguments grew more heated every year, and more inextricable from political power-alignments. Glaucus, though he took no open measures against me and made every show of treating us equally, could not conceal his jealousy and alarm, especially after Polyeidus, pressed, admitted the risks involved in 'fathering' a demigod. Eurymede, for her part, loved both her sons and took no stand on the issue of succession; even in the matter of my paternity she was shrug-shouldered by comparison to Deliades. But on one point she brooked no question: that it was Poseidon and no other who had climbed her in the surf.

" 'A woman knows,' she would say firmly, and Glaucus tear his hair.

"On our thirteenth birthday" — shades of my sons, forgive me! — "asked by our parents what we wanted in the present-way, I requested the usual hunting gear, racing mares, new tunics; Deliades, secretly coached by Polyeidus, surprised the court by demanding our pedigree-papers. Glaucus blushed: 'They're blank. You know why. Ask for something else.' 'I want Polyeidus to fill in the blanks,' Deliades declared: 'Bring out our papers and make him turn himself into the answers.' Glaucus glowered at his seer. Eurymede sharply asked Polyeidus whether he could in fact make such a transformation; if so, why hadn't he long since, to quiet the country? Glaucus protested that any such stunt would amount to no more than another man's opinion, on the vexed question, which opinion, if Polyeidus had one, he could as well state plainly without recourse to the sort of circus tricks he famously disdained. Polyeidus nervously began a lecture on what he called the proto-existentialist view of ontological metamorphosis: within certain limits, everyone's identity was improvisable and responsible; man was free to create himself et cetera. A willful lad, I drew my sword: 'Fill in the blanks or die.' Polyeidus blinked, grunted like a costive, disappeared. Deliades kissed me and showed gleefully to the court a scroll that popped from nowhere into his hands: son of Glaucus and Eurymede, it read beneath his name, and under mine: out of Eurymede by Poseidon. "Thus ended, not the quarrel (which was fired additionally thenceforth by accusations of forgery and fraud), but Polyeidus's influence in the palace, at least with Glaucus; only the good offices of Eurymede, who was pleased with both her sons' behavior on this occasion, kept him on as our tutor. It was also the end, so far as anyone knew, of his 'animate' transformations, and the first of his documentary. It was not, however, as some allege, the invention of writing, though to Polyeidus rightly goes the credit for having introduced, some seasons earlier, that problematic medium to Corinth, where it never caught on. Writing itself, he told us in the Q & A after his act, would be invented some generations later by a stranded minstrel pissing in the sand of a deserted Aegean isle, making up endings to the Trojan War. It was the seer's limited capacity to read the future that enabled him to borrow certain ideas therefrom prior to their historical introduction. Why didn't he make use of this powerful ability to take over the world? Because knowledge, not power, was his vocation; he did not agree with Francis Bacon that the two are one; on the contrary, his own experience was that the more he understood, the less potent he became; the semantic and logical problems alone, to look no further, posed by such a stunt as stealing from the future, were a can of worms that no sane man would stir up unnecessarily. Et cetera. No one understood. 'Put it this way, then,' he grumbled: 'when I look back at the history of the future I see that Polyeidus in fact never capitalized on this trick. Since I didn't, I can't; therefore I won't.' 'Thanks for the present,' I said to my brother. 'Many happy returns,' he replied — not knowing, as he couldn't see seer-wise, there'd be but five."

The eyes of Melanippe's lover are gray-green: explain. Directly. Happy birthday, dead Hippolochus; happy birthday to you. Digression won't save them, dear Bellerophon; do come to it. Your eighteenth birthday. Sibyl. Chariot-race scene. The curse of God upon you, Polyeidus, snake in the grass, whom even as I bored kind Philonoë decades after with this tale I didn't know to be its villain!

"Eighteen, are we? On the beach? The horse race? Sibyl. Polyeidus had a daughter, who knows by whom. Sibyl. Younger than we. That summer she was our friend. Deliades adored her, she me. I screwed her while he watched, in a little grove down on the shore, by Aphrodite's sacred well. Honey-locusts grew there, shrouded by rank creepers and wild grape that spread amid a labyrinth of paths. There was about that place a rich fetidity: gray rats and blackbirds decomposed, by schoolboys done to death; suburban wild dogs spoored the way; part the vines at the base of any tree and you might find a strew of pellets and fieldmouse-bones disgorged by feasting owls. It was the most exciting place we knew; its queer smell retched us if we breathed too deeply, but in measured inhalations it had a rich, a stirring savor. There they played, Bellerus and Sibyl, while Dee-Dee watched: no spite intended, but it cut him up. I told her to let him in too; I didn't mind, and he was virgin. Nothing doing. I held her down for him to hump; he wouldn't even look.

The mad child offered to relinquish his claim to Corinth in my favor if she'd marry him. No deal. 'Bellerus can have Corinth the way he has me,' she would say sullenly: 'by taking it, whenever he wants to.' I decided what to give my brother for his birthday gift that night. Now it's afternoon: Deliades has drawn Polyeidus out on the hero-business, above, brought him to preliminary images of Pegasus and Chimera, mentioned the Argonauts' Funeral Stakes, here we go. Ignore the myths that locate Glaucus's death at Iolchis or Theban Pontiae on the occasion of Jason's funeral games for Pelias: it happened at the regular Isthmian games, which in those days we called the Argonauts' Funeral Stakes in memory of the Pelian originals. It was a big day on the Isthmus, especially for Deliades: as many former Argonauts as could make it were there, and assorted other stars; strolling through the locker rooms was like touring a Hall of Fame; Dee-Dee, ecstatic, knew the program by heart, pointed out to me everyone from Acastus to Zetes, rattled off biographies and box scores like a sports announcer, urged me to help him catch the winged horse in time for us to race as a team next year, bet his whole allowance for the lunar month on Glaucus, a very long shot, to win the unlimited chariot event.

" 'Not a chance,' I said. 'Those mares are crazy.' Deliades agreed, but loyally put his drachmae on the line; it would break Dad's heart, he said, to lose the biggest race on the card, which he'd placed and showed in in the two years previous and trained for all that season. We pressed Polyeidus for prediction. 'Don't be impudent,' he replied. In those days I drew sword readily. 'Your father by a quarter-furlong,' he crossly volunteered, 'with hippomanes and your help. I see you're meeting my daughter tonight in the grove again, which also happens to be on the far side of the finish line.' By full-moon-light, he declared, near the lip of the well, grew the potent herb, which only a votary of the goddess could find and pluck: a mild aphrodisiac and hallucinogen to males of several species, it had a graver effect on mares, and for that reason, though its sale, possession, and use were prohibited by law, it was much favored by the mare-maids for their mysteries. Sibyl having shown some talent, even as a child, for sniffing it out, Polyeidus had apprenticed her to Aphrodite and become Eurymede's exclusive dealer in the weed — the supply of which, however, was so small that for some years he had been able to meet the cult's demands only by transforming himself into an amulet of concentrated 'hip,' as they called it, to be sniffed by the company in turn. In order to ingratiate himself with Glaucus, he confessed, what a story, he had offered to become that amulet that night: at post time Dad would give his team a toke; the mares, long starved for love, would go mad for more; in the grove, where according to Sibyl a rare new crop had sprouted, I was to pluck it at the signal, step forth and crush it in my hands; one whiff of the fresh and the Glaucan mares would finish first. 'Hurrah!' cried Deliades. 'Why me?' I asked. Because, Dee-Dee explained, it was a symbolic surrogate for the attempted filicide required to satisfy the Pattern: the turned-on mares, Dad at the reins, would fly as if at me, but I'd have ample time to take cover with him and Sibyl in the grove. No one would be hurt; Glaucus would win handily; his gratitude for our help must overcome any residue of fear in him of me or ill will toward our tutor. Polyeidus paled, then gave my brother on the spot an alpha-plus for the semester in Mythology I.

" 'I hate fixed races,' I complained to Dee-Dee in the grove. 'Me too,' said Sibyl. 'Yes, well,' said Deliades. Full moon, scattered clouds, balmy; couldn't see a thing when the moon was hid except for the beach-fires flaring from the Argonautic cookout; then, between clouds, the grove glowed phosphor-green. I made the most of each obscurity to deal Dee-Dee in, preliminary to his birthday gift: with a hand on one of Sibyl's breasts I would put his hand on the other, or under her chiton, which she wore in the Amazonian manner. ."

Even then! exclaims Melanippe. Bellerophon wonders where she's been these several pages? Long before Anteia brought the style to Tiryns, we had real Amazons in Corinth to mind the horses after Glaucus's decree, and the fashion caught on with the younger women. That's why, when Bellerophon saw Melanippe among Anteia's dykes and falsies, he knew at once that she alone was the real thing. Melanippe herself is less certain — but let it go. He begs her pardon? No, please, let it go: go back to manhandling Sibyl; you're telling this to Philonoë?

I talk to myself. Mad Sibyl's dead, sweet Philonoë — everyone's dead except us cursed with immortality. Hum. "In every case," I run on, "she knew at touch whose hand was whose. Too bad for Dee-Dee. Now let's see. The chariots assembled down the strand. I decided we'd play a prank on Glaucus and not fix the race after all; Deliades objected; Sibyl went round about the well on hands and knees to pluck the herb, which we chewed till we were high as Helicon. I set her after more, promising to climb her in our pet fashion, stallionwise, when she was done, then whispered to Dee-Dee what I had in mind: he was to declare impatiently, for Sibyl's benefit, that he meant to take my place in Polyeidus's program, crushing hippomanes, while I dallied, to fetch the mares on behalf of Glaucus and his own investment; but at the moon's occlusion it was my place on Sibyl he'd take instead, humping her so ardently hind-to that she'd be nothing wiser till too late. Stoned and love-starved as he was, the boy refused. I told him that only if he took her, as my gift, would I fix the race — which just then started with a roar. Let's see. Hum, that stuff was strong; things went awry; Glaucus gave the mares their dose of amulet and they went crazy; Dee-Dee — damn you, Polyeidus! — Dee-Dee, let's see, we were stoned and hot as rocks from Mount Chimera; who knew who was who. Our father — Polyeidus, viper whose wriggles these words are! — he'd, let's see, he'd tricked us all; we'd all tricked one another; Polyeidus hadn't mentioned that hippomanes would drive those mares carnivorous. He couldn't lose, God curse him, howevermany of us went. Dad's team charged crazily out front, snapping and frothing toward the grove; that hand-crushed business was a trick; we reeked hip to the heavens. All hid behind the well; stoned Sibyl, still on all fours, cried for love. I guess I — well, I guess I bared her butt just about when the horses turned on Glaucus, going for the amulet; spilled him at grove's-edge and went at him. Sibyl made to make rescue — mad mares eat only men — but I rammed her flat into the honeysuckle. At first bite Glaucus shouted. My brother sprang to save him in my stead. The moon came out; I drove in; Polyeidus, not to be gobbled, changed from amulet-'round-Glaucus's-neck to ditto-'round-his-daughter's (and straightway lost the power of such mere spatial relocation); Sibyl shrieked 'Bellerus!' as I pumped home and my brother went under the hooves. The whole team crashed into the creepers then, having gutted Glaucus and battered my brother past anyone's knowing. Sibyl, mad from that moment forward, rose up and calmed them, crooning 'Bellerus! Bellerus!' as they nuzzled the amulet between her breasts. But I leaped for my life into the well, so banging my head on its old oak bucket that I bear yet a crescent scar there and hear a roaring in my skull like wind or time. That blow, well, turned my eyes gray-green, let's see, impaired my memory, hear how I falter. If there are discrepancies or lacunae in this account, you must fill in the blanks yourself. All night I trembled in the well with frogs and crawlies, would've gone under but for the bucket-rope, heard hubbub overhead. Toward morning, when things stilled, as I miserably watched one star wink like Medusa down my hole, Polyeidus cranked me up, stone-stiff. We couldn't make each other out.

" 'You're either a comer or a goner,' he advised me. By holding back and humping Sibyl, he declared, I had in effect murdered my father and my brother. If he himself bore no grudge against me, it was because while the shock had left his daughter more or less deranged, it seemed also to have occasioned her first experience of second sight, on the basis of which he meant to recommend to Eurymede that she be made priestess of the grove for life. Moreover, though it went without saying that he hadn't exactly foreseen this debacle in detail, he couldn't say either that it came as a total surprise: it fit the Pattern, clearly, against which, it being preordained by an order of things transcending even Zeus's power much to alter, it were vain for a mere seer much to kick. Still and all, things were hot in town for both of us: my brother's supporters and Glaucus's — especially those who'd lost their tunics at the races — were crying Regicide and Crooked Track, and went so far as to accuse Polyeidus of engineering my succession. My heroic nature, he daresaid, impelled me straight through the waiting lynch mobs and sundry ambuscadoes to assert my claim; but the same Pattern which certified that kingly right (not to mention good diplomacy) required that I defer it. Just as Perseus, even as he spoke, was completing the exile trip from Seriphos through Egypt and Joppa, killing a Gorgon and picking up a bride before returning to rule Mycenae, so I, in my tutor's opinion, must beat it out of Corinth for the present. 'Leave it to me to calm the country and look after your mother. Take a new name. Make the grand tour. Discharge a few labors, dispatch a monster or two, et cetera. You'll know when it's time to come home; they always do. Questions?'

"I asked for a copy of the Pattern, by way of autobiographical road map. After some pause he said he hadn't one on him just then, but would forward it me as soon as he could envision my next mailing address. To what name would he send it? He paused again. 'Bellerophon, of course. Is this a test?' We parted uncertainly in the dark. Let's see. I took off down the road. Bellerophon means Bellerus the Killer. Questions?"

But my dead darlings were abed long since; dead Philonoë was dropped off too in the drowsy dusk. Soon I'll wake and hurt her with the story of her sister. Questions?

Melanippe has several. Many, even, all disquieting. If she defers them, let's see, let's say it's because Medusa, in the Perseid, puts off hers till the epilogue. Not that a self-respecting Amazon in any respect resembles — but never mind.

Wake her.

Let her rest in peace; let them all. O I wish —

How high now are Bellerophon and Pegasus? Gorse-top low. Wave-top low. All but sea-leveled.

Wake her then; hurt her now. The sooner begun, et cetera.

"Here's the full story of my sexual adventure with your sister," I'd wake my wife to announce. No. Aye. O. Done.

"I" On. "I believe I'm familiar with the several standard versions," let's say she'd say, rubbing her eyes. "A classical myth, however, is yawn excuse me infinitely retellable, and the connoisseur's pleasure is in those small variations, discrepancies, and lacunae that invariably yawn obtain among renditions. Add to that my love for both principals in this particular episode in the grander narrative of your career, and you will yawn see that no amount of pain occasioned by the events themselves can altogether spoil my pleasure in their rehearsal. I'll make coffee."

O. Nevertheless I gnash my teeth and proceeded. "For a year or two after dropping out of Corinth I hiked across the Peloponnese, doing odd jobs, seeing the sights, reconstructing as best I could from memory the Pattern. I felt I'd completed, in the main, its first quarter, the quadrant of Departure: my conception and birth certificate were in order; Glaucus was dead; I had the regulation scar, if not in quite the regular place, to mark what could pass as his attempt to kill me; I'd crossed a sort of threshold, in proper darkness, got my travel orders at a well in a sacred grove from a certified Spielman, set out to westward under pseudonym. When I reached Sandy Pylos, on the coast, I supposed that the correct thing to do was ship on as oarsman, say, aboard the next boat west, to commence my second quarter — Initiation — with a night-sea journey.

"But the more I combed the beach, the more I came to question whether I'd got off after all on just the right foot. Even allowing for some flexibility in the Pattern, I doubted whether any mythic hero could commence his principal tasks with blood-guilt, as we call it, on his hands: Odysseus and Aeneas, to name only two of Polyeidus's 'personages from the future,' would be obliged to retrace their steps laboriously in mid-career merely to bury a graveless shipmate lost by accident. Nor was it clear, as it seemed to me it should be, what exactly I was aiming for, even ostensibly: no hero of my acquaintance went west merely for the Pattern's sake; indeed, as many as not began by going east, in order to return to a westward home. Since I was to my knowledge homeless but for Corinth, to make it on my present course would require circumnavigation of the globe — and Polyeidus had prophesied to us years past that not for centuries would it be speculated, much less demonstrated, that the earth is round. Finally, as I stood making idle water one forenoon on the strand (like that nameless minstrel Polyeidus mentioned), I thought I saw a winged white horse flap past out on the horizon. Could've been a gull — the distance was far, and I was preoccupied with making my name in imaginary letters — but it put me in mind of magic Pegasus, of Perseus's fancy sandals, and of my own lack of any gear besides the tool in hand, which had got me only into trouble. In short, I came to feel that at least three things were wanting before I could proceed with my career: clearer counsel on the matter of absolution; a more definite course of hero-work, with specific adversaries, goals, and labors; and a magic weapon, vehicle, or secret with which to address the work. For all three I must apply either to the prophet or to the gods; not to lose more time I applied to both, making prayer-stops at every temple of Athene along the way back to Polyeidus."

"Athene?" Why not Aphrodite?

To entertain wife and mistress at the same time with the same tale is hard. "Dee-Dee, Athene's pet, died, Philonoë, there in Aphrodite's grove, right?" "Well." And I'd been marinated, Melanippe, overnight in the sex-queen's hole. So? "It wasn't love Bellerophon needed, but advice. Come Tiryns — as close to Corinth as I felt it safe to go — I got both." "Um." Um.

Bellerophon wishes he had never begun this story. But he began it. Then he wishes he were dead. But he's not. Therefore he reconstructs it painfully for his darling Amazon, as he once pained with it patient Philonoë. Dee-Dee (dead) had daydreamed of riding that white horse till the night mares made hay of him, and on Polyeidus's advice had even fasted once five days and nights in Athene's Corinth temple, to find out how to find it. On the fifth — so he told me, right? — he thought he heard the goddess say: "Finding Pegasus is easy; he hangs around my sister's wells and bushes; I'm surprised you haven't seen him grazing down below. But to catch and ride him's another story: for that you need this." She fetched from around her tunic a fine gold bridle; even let him take it in his hand. But when he woke it was only his torpid tool he held, as I mine later — so he told me and Sibyl, stoned, next evening in the grove, right, the last of his life, when he let himself go, ran to Dad's rescue, got foddered. In the real Bellerophoniad this would be established in an earlier digression.

So: on the way to Tiryns it occurred to me to try again — i.e., Bellerophon decided to do what dead Dee-Dee'd done. The first two nights, nothing: those temples were roadside shrines, where all I could get was a fuzzy image in black and white of the horse himself, like that early one Polyeidus had picked up. On the third day I came to Tiryns, where King Proetus had a Naw AOhnhz

"There's room," said the King — a mild-mannered monarch, middle-aged, who fiddled with his flatware as I spoke. "And I imagine we can arrange a purification, if you really fault yourself for that fiasco on the beach — I must say I've heard more plausible accounts from my people up in Corinth. None of my business, I'm sure, but aren't you being a bit eager to take the blame?"

"I killed my brother," I insisted. "My dad too — I mean my foster father."

Proetus sighed. "O yes, the demigod thing."

I blushed, but held my tongue. Anteia — a sharp-featured woman somewhere between her husband's age and mine — said. "I think you've got a lot going for you in the hero way myself, Bellerophon. Here's hoping you get what you're after in Tiryns; we could use some excitement, God knows. And there's nothing wrong with a little ambition."

"Who's knocking ambition?" Proetus asked the company. "I was ambitious myself at his age: made war on my brother Acrisius; married me this beautiful Lycian princess here — the works. But I never went around telling people I was going to be a star, much less a constellation."

"Sour grapes," Anteia said.

"Nobody's satisfied nowadays to be a decent husband and father," the King went on, "or a reasonable administrator.

It's hero or nothing."

Mortified, I replied, what was simply true, that in my opinion ambition had less to do than definition with my ends. Estellation — as the examples of Orion, Heracles, Castor, and Pollux testified or would testify — was as natural a fate for mythic heroes as coronation was for princes, death in battle for combat soldiers, oblivion for ordinary men. I had not "chosen" to kill Glaucus and my brother, any more than I had chosen to be sired by Poseidon or would choose to slay monsters and the rest. It was the Pattern. .

"Ah-ah — " Proetus raised a finger. "You didn't choose your parents, obviously; and I'm glad to hear you admit that the mare-business was an accident, more or less. But nobody's obliging you to go after this winged horse, right? And you've acknowledged already that you're trying to decide what to do when you catch him."

The man was more tease than mock, but I couldn't readily refute him. I began to explain, reflecting on the matter for the first time myself, that in the case of heroes there seemed to be no choice of general destinies, they being foreordained as it were by the Pattern; but any given hero might at any point conceivably choose to turn his back on himself, so to speak, and sulk like Achilles in his tent instead of sallying forth to glory. Should he persist in such fecklessness, he'd become by definition no hero, just as a crown prince who declined accession would be no crown prince. Doubtless the point could be better put — "But that's not Bellerophon's business," Anteia said shortly to her husband. "Logic is for your type; his job is to be a mythic hero, period."

I agreed, wishing I'd said less. Proetus shrugged. "He makes a good case for himself, all the same. Pleasant dreams, boy; let's hope it won't cost you many more people to get to heaven."

Troubled sleep. In fine-tuned black and white I saw Pegasus grazing in the temple court; Athene, cowled, came up, belted with the famous bridle, and seemed to move her lips. At the sound of footfalls in the temple I lost the picture; woke to find a gray-cowled lady prowling in the precinct, near my pallet. My first theophany! I sprang up, dizzy at this evidence that I was on my way.

"Athene?" "Sorry." Anteia slipped back her hood and smiled. "Just checking to see if you're comfortable. Anything you need?" I thanked her, no. Couldn't sleep, she said, for thinking of my dinner tale. Spot of Metaxa? I groaned to get on with my dreamwork, but Queen was Queen. Neat? Bit of water in mine. "My husband's a coward," she said for openers; "no, not a coward, just minor league." "O?" We sat on a marble bench and sipped. "Time and again I've set him up to do something really big," she said. "Daddy loaned him half an army to knock off Acrisius — they were twins, like you-all? He blew it." "Ah." She smoothed her hair, swirled her liquor. "Half the fucking Lycian army. So I said Just up and kill the bastard, for god's sake — the way you did your brother? No thanks: too ballsy by half, that idea! Some seer, he claimed, told him Perseus is supposed to kill Acrisius as part of his hero-thing." "That figures, actually," I remarked, startled at her way of speaking and uncertain what to do.

"Hmp. So I do a little homework on their famous feud, okay? And guess what I find out: it started in the first place when His Royal Highness slipped it to Acrisius's daughter! His own niece, right here in my palace! So okay, we weren't married at the time, but still. It's a wonder to me he ever got it up for the little twat; he doesn't exactly beat me to death with it. Even so he comes out a loser: Acrisius sticks Danaë in a tower where nobody can see her but the gods; she sits around bare-ass naked all day to get their attention — have you seen the pictures? Zeus himself puts it to her, and bingo — Perseus! Who it turns out is like as not to kill Proetus and Acrisius both and take over the country. I swear. That's why it riled him when you started on the hero business: he's petrified of mythic heroes. More juice?"

I guessed not. Anteia downed hers with a wink and declared her frank envy of women like Danaë who were smart or lucky enough to take up with gods and heroes, never mind the consequences. Being nothing but queen was so goddamn boring, especially in a two-bit city-state like Tiryns: one lousy amphitheater and half a dozen restaurants, all Greek. I thought her unfairly critical of her husband, but was interested all the same: my first experience of overtures from an older woman.

"I suppose this sort of thing happens to you all the time," she said, in a different tone.

"No, ma'am." I wished I had asked What.

"Hm." We sat awhile. Metaxa. "Read any good books lately, Killer?"

Really, Bellerophon? At least I'm certain she called me Killer, for though I'd not read Aristotle's Nichomachean Ethics or for that matter any other books — their invention being still far in the future and myself at that time unable to read — I explained to her at some length my position on the moral aspect of Glaucus's and my brother's deaths, which I'd reasoned out between Corinth and Pylos with the aid of terms from the aforementioned work, known to me in bits and pieces via Polyeidus.

"Proetus," I declared, "says I'm innocent, and in the respect that my role in those deaths was not an example of proairesis (by which will be meant a voluntary act preceded by deliberation), I agree. Indeed, following Aristotle's classification of human actions according to the degree and nature of the agent's volition —

— my failure to spring to my kinsmen's aid and my preventing Sibyl from rescuing them might seem at first to share characteristics of both III-A-1 and III-B: on the one hand I was ignorant of the particular carnivorous effect of hippomanes on the mares and of Sibyl's ability to calm them; on the other hand I was 'compelled' in the sense of having no alternative, as I thought, but the futile sacrifice of Sibyl's life or my own. To the contrary it might be argued that my overmastering lust to cover Sibyl on the spot put my deed in the I-B category: psychologically voluntary but morally responsible. My own inclination, however, is to see it as a special variety of Category II, for while their death, particularly my role in it, breaks my heart and was half out of my hands, it fulfills the Pattern: I therefore affirm it, and therefore I'm culpable, morally if not legally, in the Aristotelian sense."

"You never got laid in your life," Anteia said, and left. The cock crew —

Melanippe too! But all that foregoing is in quotes: how did you speak the classificatory schema? Were there chalkboards in the Temple of Wisdom?

I'm writing. Melanippe is writing. Philonoë, Anteia, Sibyl — all mere Polyeidic inklings, written words.

"How'd you make out?" Proetus asked at breakfast. His children, three saucy little daughters, climbed all over us as I fasted and he ate. Dead now, who grew from frisky nymphlings into crazed wild whores, running mad and naked in the hills like gadflied Io. Don't start that. The Queen was sleeping in, Proetus said; but even as he said it she appeared, housecoat and curlers, hmping hmps. With any luck, I told him, a couple more nights should do it. Anteia hmped. "Most heroes I've heard of," Proetus remarked, "had a definite monster or task in mind when they set out. Doesn't your lack of one make you wonder whether you're really what you hope you are?" "Hmp," said Anteia, buttered a croissant, swatted a kid. Not at all, said I, though not so long before I'd have agreed with him: a review of the mythographic corpus would make clear that while the majority of demigods fit his description, a smaller but perhaps more interesting group did not: Aeneas, for example, would clarify gradually, by painful trial and error over a period of years, the details of his destiny and destination. And Perseus, if Polyeidus was correct, would in later life seek to overtake with understanding his present paragraph, as it were, by examining his paged past, and, thus pointed, proceed serene to the future's sentence, whatever those metaphors meant. Hmp.

"Little men talk," Anteia grumbled: "big men do." Proetus cocked an eyebrow at us. "I'm a young man with much to learn," I declared. "But never doubt I'll learn it." Assuming the half-tease tone of the day before, Proetus pointed out that my illustrations were drawn from the future and so lent substance to his own conviction that mythic heroes weren't what they used to be; that the present crop was small potatoes compared to the generation of their fathers — an age of gold, so to speak, succeeded by an age of brass. I denied this libel flatly: Cousin Perseus, I maintained, a man not many years my senior, would when all the returns were in be seen to be as dazzling a demigod as ever murdered monster. .

"Or pronged princess," added Anteia, raising her morning drink. "Or slew slanderer, okay?"

Proetus paled. "Forgetting about this fellow Perseus," he said evenly after a moment, "would you go so far as to say about yourself that if you don't come up with your hypothetical winged horse in a couple of days, we may conclude that you're a fraud and execute you for misuse of Athene's temple?"

Anteia sipped and grinned. Sweating, I reminded him that I was as yet unpurified of blood-guilt. In the absence of instructions from my mentor Polyeidus, to whom I'd dispatched a messenger just the previous day, I was merely assuming that the old fast-and-vision method was the right one for corralling Pegasus; that Athene was the proper goddess to apply to for shriving as well; and that the two objectives were concurrently pursuable. The evidence thus far supported these assumptions more than not, but for all I knew, absolution might be prerequisite to theophany; or Athene, who was most certainly on the verge of speaking to me, might instruct me when I found her voice to clear myself with Aphrodite or my father Poseidon before bridling the winged horse. For that reason I'd prefer at present not to commit myself absolutely to a timetable. Et cetera.

"Hah," Anteia said.

"Word came this morning already from Corinth," Proetus informed me: "Your coach Polyeidus has disappeared from sight."

Trying to conceal my consternation, I observed that periodic disappearance was an occupational characteristic of shape-shifters; Polyeidus had doubtless turned into some document or other, as was his recent tendency — perhaps that copy of the Pattern which he'd promised to send me.

"Perhaps." Proetus patted his mouth with a napkin, brushed crumbs and daughters from his lap, rose from table. "Though there was no mail for you by either the Corinthian post or ours, as of this morning, and in fact your mother vowed to our messenger that both her sons were dead. It was the royal dungeon, by the way, that Polyeidus disappeared from: Eurymede had sentenced him to death for fraud, imposture, false counsel, and lese majesty. Good morning."

The Queen was entertained by my discomfiture. I sprang up, declaring that my mother's judgment was no doubt impaired by the sudden loss of husband and son and my own apparent defection (which plainly accounted for her calling me dead); what was more, Polyeidus himself had often pointed out to us that true shape-shifting resembled imposture as fiction resembles lies. If I must manage for the present without his advice, so be it, I said, not at all certain I could in fact; if my procedure was mistaken or my faithful Polyeidus misplaced, I would trust in Athene herself to correct and advise me, and to replace my dead half-brother with my living one. Tears, mine, started at this idea, which hadn't occurred to me till I heard myself give it voice: that sweet-winged Pegasus bore the same relation to me as Dee-Dee, say; could even be said to be his deathless spirit. The inspiration made me eloquent, and reckless: One way or another, I vowed, I'd be in the mythic saddle by my deadline; if not, I was theirs to dispose of as they saw fit (and at their own risk). Proetus apologized for baiting me and exited to the throne room; Anteia hmped for coffee. I withdrew to the temple to fast and reflect all day on the bad news and my overboldness.

Famished nightfall, sound sleep and soundless images, for the first time now in living color: rose-pink Pegasus fed with the pigeons on the flags; off-white Wisdom held sternly forth one end of her waisted bridle, gold, and moved her lips in voiceless admonition. I snatched; she shook a free finger; I strained to learn her meaning; held fast but didn't dare the knot.

"Let me," said nightied Anteia, perched on my bed-edge, and undid. I let her go with a cry: "My dream!"

"My hero," she said dryly. "Let's get on with it."

My stomach growled. "You don't understand."

"So teach me." The Queen leaned on one elbow. "We're in Wisdom's temple, right?"

"Your Majesty, look here. ." I grew dizzy with distress.

"Look here yourself, Bellerophon. I'm queen of this place, remember? How do you think I feel, coming after you like this?" I restrained my impatience and disappointment; attempted to explain that my reaction had nothing particularly to do with her. "Don't rub it in," she interrupted; "my being here has nothing particularly to do with you, either, as a matter of fact." She sat up and drew together her gown. "I don't give a particular goddam about you one way or the other; but I want what's under your tunic, and I want it now."

I remarked that even if I were willing to transgress the rules of hospitality, as Proetus had done with Danaë, not I nor any man could erect himself on order.

"Excuses," said Anteia. "I'm not feminine enough for you, I suppose? Not seductive? Well, screw Feminine. Screw Seductive. Come on."

I begged for a moment to collect myself, at least. "I hate this," Anteia said.

"A man can always force a woman, but a woman can never force a man. Screw Nature. Screw Proetus. Screw you."

"If you feel like that," I asked, "why in the world should we make love?"

More calmly, as if in fact she found explanation as much of a relief as I, she declared herself misembodied: a heroical spirit trapped in a female frame. All her girlhood, she said, taking Artemis as her model, she had disdained passive feminine pursuits in favor of hunting, riding, wrestling; her ambition, in fact, had been to be a mythic hero; she scolded her mother for not having had adulterous relations with some passing god, to provide her with the right paternity; yet she adored her father, King Iobates, and went with him everywhere, even disguising herself as a boy to enlist in one of his perennial campaigns against the Solymians. The company captured a minor village, routinely sacked and burned it, put to the sword all but its younger female inhabitants, who were raped and enslaved. Shocked Anteia fled; hitching homeward, still disguised, she fell in with a young prince en route to Lycia to seek military aid from Iobates, and agreed to show him the way. Along the road she menstruated; pled diarrhea to explain her cramps and frequent disappearances into the bush. Fearing some trick, her companion followed her, saw she was female, jumped her; half an hour they grappled; then he pinned, bound, deflowered her, went his way to the court of Lycia. She appeared there next day, Iobates the day after. The suppliant, Proetus, recognized his victim, assumed he'd be put to death. Anteia married him instead.

"Since I couldn't be a hero," she told me, "I thought I'd be a hero's wife. Proetus seemed promising enough on paper: no demigod, but a bona-fide exiled prince out to reclaim his rightful kingdom, et cetera. By the time it was clear to me he'd never make it as a mythic figure, I'd borne him three kids and lost my own edge — too late to chuck it and start over. I even love him, believe it or not, much as I despise the rape-thing. He's as trapped in his role, as they say, as I am in mine, et cetera. But if I can't be a hero's wife, I'm damned well going to be a hero's mother, and since Proetus can't seem to turn out even an ordinary mortal son, I'm shopping around. Never mind what I've been reduced to to try to get Zeus or Poseidon to spend a night with me: obviously Danaë and company have something that I don't have. But I'm used by now to settling for less than Olympus: if I can't get a god to do me, a demigod'll do. Come on."

I replied: "I really sympathize with your story, ma'am. I really do. But as you know, only gods sire heroes every time on mortal women. If a demigod's what you're after in the mother way, another demigod like myself has only a fifty-fifty chance of turning one out."

"I'll take the chance!" Anteia cried. "Let the kid be a semigoddamndemigod; who cares? Even a one-eighth god's better than nothing!" She pounded the pallet. "Why can't men be raped by women? For pity's sake bang me, Bellerophon!"

But I could only point out to her, as Polyeidus had once to dead Dee-Dee when that child wondered whether he might qualify as quartergod, that semidemideities are genetically impossible: "Gods on gods breed only gods," I explained; "mortals mortals mortals; gods on mortals, demigods. As for gods on demigods, demigods on demigods, and demigods on mortals, the expectable results can be best represented by a diagram in which gg stands for god, mm mortal, gm (or mg) demigod, thus:

Semidemigodhood, as you see, doesn't happen. I presume you noted that while the issue of the first or upper group of pairings is absolutely certain, that of the second or lower group is a reckoning of probabilities, which over a very large number of instances takes on the force of natural law, but in individual cases is of less predictive value. For example, given the pairing you're interested in most immediately, demigod plus mortal, there's one chance in two that any child produced by such a union will be a demigod; but there's about the same likelihood of turning out four mortals and no demigods, say, as there is of you and Proetus having four daughters and no sons. In fact, since the diagram is drawn without respect to gender, if we correct for the fact that gm will mean demigoddess as often as demigod, the chances of your bearing a demi-god to me go down to one in four. This on the assumption that both parties are fertile; that a demigod's embrace, like a god's, never fails to impregnate; and that the pregnancy is successfully brought to term. But inasmuch as none of these is invariably the case, the odds against your getting what you want from me should be more accurately put at eight or ten or even twelve to one. It interests me to notice, by the way, that a demigod and demigoddess can do together something that Zeus himself, with a mortal mate, can't do: namely, turn out a full-blooded deity — full-ichored, I suppose one should say. Heh. That's also the only instance of genetical up-breeding in this scheme of possibilities — a child superior by nature to both parents — and the same pairing holds the only possibility of true down-breeding. Neither of these hypothetical possibilities, to my knowledge, has been realized in mythic history, but they make the coupling of a demigoddess and myself, for example, a good deal richer in geneticodramatic potential than the coupling of you and me, don't you think?"

Two women groaned from their utter bowels and fled: Anteia from the Tiryns temple, Philonoë from our Lycian boudoir. A third, groanwise these several pages their visceral sister, if she could set down what words she would would be said to have fled too, from this swampy nest of "love" and "narrative" on the Thermodon. Bellerophon, you are a bastard.

Q.E.D. But I remind the last-laid that the first-'s im-portunings imperiled my mortal life; the second-'s un-ditto my im-. If I could set down what words I would, would I speak in diagrams and hyphens? Would I draw blanks on my own account in ditto verse, ham-handeder than Heracles, tinner-eared Lygeia, clubbeder-foot gimp Oedipus? Die, Polyeidus, or let me!

Melanippe's here still, love; do indulge her; please go on.

"I'm back, love," Philonoë'd say some moments later. "Do excuse my u.-b. groan; just a touch of catharsis, I imagine: the purgation of my psyche through the emotions of pity and terror effected in it by your narrative. Please go on. My sister, I believe, comes back for more?"

"She'll come back," Proetus said at breakfast, after reporting to me that Anteia had disappeared during the night. "She gets wild spells now and then, goes up in the hills with her girlfriends for a day or so. I don't ask questions. Part of being happily married is knowing when to be incurious. Any luck with the horses?" As he spoke he cracked a soft-boiled egg and spooned it onto bread for one of his daughters, standing by. Another sat in his lap and played with his whiskers; the third crawled about somewhere beneath the table. Servants served and cleared the meal, but were apparently instructed to let the King feed the children himself. I nibbled bread, sipped water, yawned, shook my head.

"Couldn't sleep."

Proetus seemed to consider this, wiping jam from the sleeve of his purple robe, which the lap-child had used as a napkin. Presently he sighed. "You're not the first state visitor to complain that our temples aren't very private at night, and I'll tell you frankly that you'll find the same thing true of our guest-rooms here in the palace. I've learned to live with it. But look here: forget about the deadline on that horse-thing, if you're not sleeping nights; it's not good policy to kill a suppliant. Sorry I even mentioned it yesterday. My advice to you is to try another town, where you'll be left alone: there's a dandy acropolis over in Athens; if you're interested, my people will fetch you there."

Proetus's character wasn't clearly enough defined for me to judge how much he knew, or whether Anteia was really on a woodland spree or, for example, confined to quarters, or whether the proffered escort might be a murder-party. For want of a better tactic I asked permission to spend one night more in the temple, with a posted guard to insure my privacy. If I proved successful with Athene, I'd put myself and Pegasus at His Majesty's service for a reasonable term in the heroic-labor way; if not, I had no further business either in Tiryns or in the world at large, and was uninterested in my fate.

Again the King grew thoughtful. After some moments, breaking his custom, he had the children fetched away by their governess. When their bawling was sufficiently remote he said, "Look here, Bellerophon: you may think me a contemptible man, but I'm not an obtuse one. I'm perfectly aware that my wife's been going to you these past nights, as she's gone to others before you; judging from her temper, I gather you've turned her down, for one reason or another. Now let's not be naïve: suppliant or not, I could have you killed any time I wanted to and give your death out as accidental; about the gods I'm agnostic, but if they exist, their tolerance of injustice is high enough not to worry me overmuch: I have considerable credit in the obsequy and temple-building way. But as I remarked before, I've no particular interest in killing you, and wouldn't have even if you'd accommodated my wife. Who is Anteia? A girl I raped once, years ago, and married to get myself out of a tight spot. I'll keep her around for the kids' sake until her drinking and the rest get out of hand; then she goes. Meanwhile, if you want her, help yourself — I get my own amusement elsewhere. But don't get caught, or I'll have you killed for the usual public-relations reasons. In fact, given Mrs. Proetus's state of mind, I advise you to be nice to her if she shows up again. Insulting a First Lady is no joke: all she has to do is holler 'rape' and you're dead: I'd have no choice."

I sat dismayed.

"Nor would I have any particular compunction," Proetus went on. "Do you think it matters one fart to me whether you live or die? Now, let's look at this hero-thing. As you know, I once had aspirations in that line myself; so did my brother, and I think we might both have done fairly well if our feud hadn't eaten up our energies. Too late to bother about that now. But I've seen a couple of real winners in my time, and I must say you don't stack up very impressively against them, in my opinion. Sure, you're young and well put together, and I'll take your word for it you're Eurymede's boy (as for the demigod thing, that's never more than more or less metaphorical bullshit, right?): but you talk too much; you're not sure enough of yourself; you lack — I don't know, call it charisma. I can't imagine you doing in a real monster, for example, if there are such things.

"Still and all, as with the gods, I'm open-minded enough not to rule out the possibility that you're what you hope you are — you've got a kind of stubborn single-mindedness that seems to go unusually deep, and I've seen stubbornness get more results sometimes than intelligence, courage, talent, and self-confidence combined. It seems to me that some people choose their vocations by a sort of inspired default, you know? A passionate lack of alternatives. That's how you strike me: not so much an absolute apprentice hero as absolutely nothing else instead, if you see what I mean.

"So okay, I'll take a chance; what have I got to lose? Stay as long as you want; use all the temples you need; prong my wife if you care to — maybe it'll keep her off my back for a while. If Athene doesn't come across for you, be a good sport: get lost and keep your mouth shut. If she does, never mind the monster-princess-treasure rigmarole; just do me one small favor in the assassination way, okay?"

Thinking I knew what he had in mind, I observed that routine murder-for-hire, even of royalty, was not a feature of the heroical curriculum so far as I knew; in any case, killing Acrisius, so I understood, had been held by Proetus himself to be Perseus's destined business, not mine.

The King waved off this suggestion disdainfully. "Who cares about Acrisius? He grabbed the old man's kingdom; I grabbed half of it back with my father-in-law's lousy mercenaries. I fucked his daughter once, as I'm sure Anteia told you; he'll do the same to one of mine if he can still get it up when they're old enough. We bushwhack each other's shepherds and rustle sheep back and forth across the border. It's a way of life by now; neither of us takes it seriously any more. Never mind my brother; it's a certain bastard son of mine I want killed." He winked. "By little Danaë herself, believe it or not. Don't swallow that line about a rain of gold in a brass tower: Acrisius locked her up because I'd knocked her up, and he had to invent some cover-story for the reporters. Kill Perseus for me, friend: I'll give you Acrisius's kingdom and your choice of my daughters."

Appalled, I asked him why he wanted Perseus killed.

"Why in Hades d'you think?" Proetus said impatiently. "You call yourself a hero, and you never heard of oracles? The bastard's scheduled to kill me and Acrisius both! With his goddamn Gorgon's-head! Father and maternal grandfather, right? You think I want to be a frigging statue?"

"I understand your concern, sir," I said carefully. "But believe me, I've done considerable homework in the oracle field, and if yours was the usual You-will-be-killed-by-your-own-son thing, it seems to me you don't have much to worry about from my cousin. If he really were your son by Danaë, he wouldn't be a bona-fide mythic hero; however, the fact that he tricked the Gray Ladies and killed Medusa, et cetera, proves he is a mythic hero; therefore he can't be your son — he has to be the son of a god. But if he's not your son, the oracle doesn't apply. It's a simple sorites, actually."

The King's face set. "You won't kill him?"

"Not unless Athene tells me to. But as she's Perseus's advisor also, I can't imagine her doing that."

"And you expect me to let you use my temple, diddle my wife. ."

I replied that I expected nothing. If Pegasus should be granted me, I stood still ready to perform for my host any legitimate extraordinary services up to the number of, say, five; if in return for such services he chose to enrich me with half a kingdom and, upon her arrival at nubility, one of his daughters, I had no objection, that being the customary honorarium for hero-work. But my real objective and true reward was immortality, which was not Proetus's to bestow. As for the unhappy Queen, I'd be doubly obliged if he'd post a guard to prevent another interruption of my vision from that quarter. Finally, it was no doubt disagreeable to realize that one was fated to be killed by one's own son, legitimate, illegitimate, or putative: the overwhelming evidence, unfortunately, argued that such fates, once oracled, were inescapable — indeed (witness Glaucus), that attempts to avert them by homicidal or other means were as likely to precipitate as to delay their fulfillment. But except for that tiny minority of us destined for the stars, we must all expire in any case, and surely there must be some small compensation in dying at the hands of such a splendid chap as Perseus. That was itself a kind of immortality: were not the adversaries, human and monstrous, of great heroes almost as celebrated as heroes themselves? Petrifaction, particularly, struck me as a far from miserable end, assuming it overtook one reasonably well along in years: it was reported to be quick and apparently painless; it was in no way disfiguring; it spared the survivors the expense of an elaborate funeral-barrow, not to mention embalmment, and it furnished them and the general citizenry, free of charge, with an accurate and touching memorial of their late lord — provided the subject be not overtaken in an expression of panic, or eating, defecating, picking his nose, et cetera, which embarrassment a moderate alertness should render unlikely. Next to outright estellation, take it all in all, petrifaction by the Gorgon's gaze in a dignified position toward the evening of an honorable reign seemed to me as near an approach to immortality as any merely mortal monarch could be blessed with.

By my speech's end, speechless Proetus sat fixed and glassy, as if the anticipation of Medusa did for half her glance. I excused myself, strolled the city to kill the day, fed lucky pigeons peanuts from park benches when faintness overtook me from my fasting, turned in early and unsuppered.

Flicker, focus, fine-tune; a little bit of the old scratch and static; then a high hum and bright Athene, clear, appeared in the form of Polyeidus's daughter. But she was Sibyl with a difference! Gray-eyed, calm, reproachless, tall, she stood chastely off some meters from my bed and spoke more plainly than ever in Aphrodite's grove:

"That took a while. So it's Bellerophon now, is it?"

I strove to speak, for although it was quite clear in my vision that Sibyl was the goddess in disguise, I understood also that such masks had their own reality — Polyeidus, in manuscript form, could be read, revised, annotated — and I much desired to apologize for my past behavior and its distressing consequences. But my own voice failed as Athene's came clear.

"Poor Anteia," Sibyl said: "she's doing hippomanes up on the hill, out of desperation. Too bad she wasn't in the grove that night, instead of me. But you've certainly exercised restraint, if not human sympathy, and Restraint seems to be the name of this particular game. Here's the bridle." She tossed me the light gold chain. "You'll find Pegasus out back. I don't envy your life to come: I'd rather be dead, like your brother. One day you'll wish that too. 'Bye."

"No!" I found my voice, sat up to implore her to stay, I had so many things to ask, explain.

"Neigh!" Anteia whinnied madly about the pallet, full-moon-dappled, her weighty body bare; finally came at me hind-foremost and bent over, waggling her buttocks. The bridle was in my hand; I fled.

Why? What? Why. Why? So Philonoë sometimes asked, when I'd pained her to this point. "You had what you needed, and my poor sister was strung out. Why'd you run?" And being Philonoë, she'd offer reasons: respect for Proetus and the rules of hospitality; reluctance to offend Athene; concern that precious Pegasus might fly off; overwhelmment by the memory of those wild mares in the grove. . Well? Well, in keeping with my ongoing project to disaffect Philonoë I'd say, "Who could make it with a forty-year-old pickup? Especially one going to fat?" To which, herself late-thirtyish, she'd reply, "Some people can't admit to an honorable motive. You were shy with me too at first, remember?"

Being Amazon, Melanippe is torn between admiration for her lover's dead wife's large-heartedness and a great desire to bark her submissive shins. At least Anteia had spirit enough to call you a gelding, holler Rape, and do her best to have you killed; in Amazonia you'd have lost your balls for Sexual Refusal of the needy. It's a serious offense.

Bellerophon had his reasons — which you must know, if you know what happened before I tell it.

Why were you timid at first with Philonoë? You said you were a lusty youngster, Aphrodite's pet, but for the past three dozen pages you've been cunt-shy.

You don't see, then; I feared you were becoming Polyeidus, as people in this telling tend to do. All of Philonoë's reasons applied; others also; but mainly, I swear, I was out to be on with it: Anteia had no place in my hero-work, the only thing that mattered. If she'd been Melanippe herself, I'd've done the same thing.

You know how to disarm an Amazon. When you raped "Melanippe," then, a few months later, that was hero-work?

It was true rape, in any case, of a true Amazon, which even this Bellerophoniad will sog its way to sooner or later. As for the false rape of the false, Anteia cried it to the temple-tops; the palace guards, never there when I needed them, appeared now everywhere: some I directed in to aid the Queen, others to the rear of the temple, where I said I'd seen someone run, others off to summon Proetus. Thus for one moment I was alone in the marble forecourt, by a chuckling fountain: at once vast wingbeats came, and the horse of heaven. Heart near bursting, I lightly slipped the bridle over Brother, seized his great (near) pinion, swung astride, was off before the guards re-swarmed.

What a thing it is, to fly! His white wings spread and coursing easily, Pegasus drew up his legs and soared between the streetlamps and the stars. All fell into correct perspective: ships' lanterns, shepherds' watchfires, palace, temples, harbors, hills. Cold wind and dizzy altitude, night-loneliness — they were nothing: for the first time in my life I felt at home; I wanted never to come down. We lit on Athene's pediment after a splendid shakedown circuit of the suburbs.

"Proetus!" I called down to the plaza. Torched guards drew back amazed; the King came out with his sheeted wife. "Anteia's hipped out of her mind!" I cried. "Hallucinating! Don't believe her! Hi yo, half-brother! Away!"

"Poor dear sister!" Philonoë would lament. "Honestly, honey, for all it hurts to imagine you with another woman, I guess I like your other versions of this story better." For in some I had Anteia be a lovely woman, skin fragrant with sun, hair with sea-salt, as if she'd been day-sailing; she steals into the temple, where I lie dreaming lecherously of her cool brown thighs; suddenly her hand caresses my stomach; all my insides contract violently; I fairly explode awake; "Good Zeus!" I croak, and grab her — naked, unbelievable! — when she sits on my pallet-edge; I bury my face in her, so startled am I; pull her down with me, that electrifying skin against mine, and mirabile dictu! at the sheer enormous lust of it do indeed explode, so wholly that I'm certain liver, spleen, guts, lungs, heart, brains, and all have blown from me, and I lie a hollow shell without sense or strength, et cetera, until she restores me and we make repeated love; complaisant Proetus smiles on the ménage; Anteia is pleased when I lie to her that I was thitherto a virgin, but grows subject to fits of jealousy when I tell her later that I've raped an Amazon between our trysts, and breaks off the affair when she finds herself pregnant, but reinstitutes it some years later, I forget why, but breaks it off finally when she and Proetus go vacationing in Italy, et cetera, I forget. In another telling our initial intercourse is a paradigm of assumed inevitability: wittol Proetus leaves the polis on state business and bids me keep Anteia company in his absence; I spend the afternoon playing ball with their daughters in the palace, then stay to drink ale with Anteia during the evening; we talk impersonally and sporadically — mutual silences are neither unusual nor uncomfortable with that woman; on the face of it there is no overt word or deed that unambiguously indicates desire on the part of either of us; the Queen's manner, which I find attractive, is of exhausted strength: throughout the afternoon her movements have been heavy and deliberate, like those of a helot after two straight shifts; in the evening she sits mostly without moving, and frequently upon blinking her eyes keeps them shut for a full half-minute, opening them at last with a wide stare and a heavy expiration of breath; all this I admire, but really rather abstractly, and any sexual desire that I feel is also more or less abstract; at nine-thirty or thereabouts Anteia says, "I'm going to take a shower and go to bed, Bellerophon," and I say, "All right"; to reach the palace baths she has to go through a little corridor off the ale-room where we sit; to reach Athene's temple I must pass through this same corridor, and so it is still not quite necessary to raise eyebrows at our going to the corridor together; there, if she pauses to face me for a moment at the turning to the baths, who's to say confidently that good nights are not on the tips of our tongues? It happens that we embrace instead before we go our separate ways, and further (but I would not say consequently) that our separate ways lead to the same bed, where we spend a wordless, tumultuous night together, full of tumblings and flexings and shudders and such, exciting enough to experience but boring to describe; for the subjects' sakes I leave before sunrise, weatherless, et cetera; remorseful, Anteia soon declares to Proetus that I've seduced her; he obliges her, out of some mad craving for moral clarification, to repeat the adultery; presently she conceives, and fearful that the child will prove a parent-slaying demigod, considers suicide and abortion; I leave town on Pegasus and never see them again, but learn from my spies in Tiryns that the misadventure has produced a normal son and improved the marriage, et cetera. Yet another version —

Which was the truth?

"I quite understand," Philonoë used to say, "that the very concept of objective truth, especially as regards the historical past, is problematical; also that narrative art, particularly of the mythopoeic or at least mythographic variety, has structures and rhythms, values and demands, not the same as those of reportage or historiography. Finally, as between variants among the myths themselves, it's in their contradictions that one may seek their sense. All the same — not to say therefore — I'd be interested to know whether in fact you made love to my sister and wish you hadn't, or didn't and wish you had."

"What a horse!" I invariably replied. "I spent the whole night learning how to fly him and unstarving myself with moussaka at all-night restaurants. By morning I was able to make a perfect four-point landing atop the statue of Abas, Proetus's father, which stood in the breakfast-terrace of the palace. The children were delighted; Proetus blushed; Anteia flushed, hushed the kids, and hmped off with them from the table, giving her husband a last sharp look.

" 'We're at your service, sir,' I said. He bade me park my brother elsewhere, the pigeons were bad enough, then told me frankly that his wife, per program, was holding to her accusations and agitating for my life, motivated no doubt in part by some final urge, such as comes sometimes on ladies at her age and stage, to inspire jealous anger in her husband and prompt him to dramatic if not heroic action in her behalf. For himself, Q.E.D., if he believed her accusation and gave a damn, he'd arrange to have me done in quietly, with minimal fuss. But he was indifferent, except for the sake of public appearances. He therefore requested simply that I disappear. 'At the same time she's hollering for your head,' he said with a sigh, 'she's giving out already that she's eight hours pregnant with a semidemigod.' Doubly impossible, I told him. He raised his hand wearily: if I would not do him the service of assassinating Perseus, at least I might leave the Queen her delusions: fact was, she did show signs of being a couple months gone again, by himself or whomever, and that condition, which given her age et cetera might as possibly be menopause, perhaps accounted for her late irrationality. His p.r. people would do their best to minimize the gossip, but as Anteia was insisting that she'd been divinely raped (half-ravished, anyhow, by a demi-deity), the best thing I could do for him was not deny the child's paternity should she bring it to term, and in the meanwhile go and be a mythic hero — somewhere else.

"I shrugged. 'Set me a task.' 'Kill Perseus!' he whispered. 'Nope.' So he gave me a sealed letter to Iobates — diplomatic business, he declared — and asked me to deliver it to Lycia, air mail special, no peeking, no reply or return necessary, okay? 'Okay.' I took off, came back: 'Which way is Lycia?' He covered his eyes, pointed east-southeast-by-east; here I am; there it is. Philonoë'd say "Thanks for the story; you tell it better all the time." Those were the days. And "When can we visit my sister, Bellerophon? It's a pity the kids have never met their own cousins. Better get off to your lecture now; here's your notes. Kiss goodbye?" I'd tear my hair then, do now, one digression still to go, Zeus Almighty, half a hundred pages in and only launched. How does one write a novella? How find the channel, bewildered in these creeks and crannies? Storytelling isn't my cup of wine; isn't somebody's; my plot doesn't rise and fall in meaningful stages but winds upon itself like a whelk-shell or the snakes on Hermes's caduceus: digresses, retreats, hesitates, groans from its utter et cetera, collapses, dies.

Q: "What about the purification of your blood-guilt, sir?"

A: "Granted Pegasus, I inferred I was clear with Athene, who, Deliades having been her particular votary, I presumed to be the only god concerned."

Q: "How far up did Pegasus get this morning, sir?"

A: "Not above a meter. Our investigation of this problem, to which my administration gives the highest priority, continues, and you may expect a full report after the present digression."

Q: "In one of the earlier meetings of this course of lectures on the First Flood of the Distinguished History of Bellerophon the Mythic Hero, required of all members of the court of Bellerophon the King in hopes of alienating them from him in partial fulfillment of the fourth quadrant (Reign and Death) of the mythobiographic Pattern, describing your recent systematic abuse of Queen Philonoë, the Princes Hippolochus and Isander, and Princess Laodamia by prolix and tactless rehearsals of your childhood, you mentioned that writing — as a means of ordinary communication as opposed to a mode of magic — will not be introduced into Hellenic culture for some centuries yet except as borrowed in isolated instances from the future by seers like Polyeidus. Yet the 'labor' imposed on you by King Proetus was the delivery to your late father-in-law of a diplomatic message in epistolary form. Moreover, the lecture in which you made the aforementioned mention was itself, we recall with excitement, read from a written text, at least delivered from written notes, as have been all the lectures in this thrilling course — the very word lecture, I believe, comes from a barbaric root-verb meaning 'to read,' and reading, a priori, implies writing. Finally, our presence here in the University of Lycia's newly established Department of Classical Mythology, your stimulating requirement from us of term papers on The Story of Your Life Thus Far, et cetera, all suggest that we are, if not a literate society, at least a society to which reading and writing are not unknown. Is there not some discrepancy here?"

A: "Yes."

Q: "Several other things also perplex us, sir, researchers after truth that we are and in no way disaffected from our country, our king, or our university by, respectively, your prolongation of the Carian-Solymian war, your mistreatment of good King Iobates's gentle younger daughter, and your unseemly perversion of professorial privilege to the ends of self-aggrandizement and/or — abasement — all which we readily accept as the self-imposed rigors of the above-alluded-to Pattern. Are you not inclined, as we are, to see a seerly hand, perhaps Polyeidus's, in such apparent lapses of authorial control, even narrative coherence, as the presentation, before we've even heard today's lecture, of these Q's and A's, which in fact follow that lecture? Or the mysterious, to us very nearly unintelligible, text of the lecture itself, which reads:

"Good evening. On behalf of the mythic hero Bellerophon of Corinth, I would like to thank [supply name of university, publisher, sponsor of reading, et cetera] for this opportunity to put straight a number of discrepancies and problematical details in the standard accounts of his life and work; to lay to rest certain items of disagreeable gossip concerning both his public and his private life; and to respond to any questions you may wish to put concerning his fabulous career.

"My general interest in the wandering-hero myth dates from my thirtieth year, when reviewers of my novel The Sot-Weed Factor (1960) remarked that the vicissitudes of its hero — Ebenezer Cooke, Gentleman, Poet and Laureate of Maryland — follow in some detail the pattern of mythical heroic adventure as described by Lord Raglan, Joseph Campbell, and other comparative mythologists. The suggestion was that I had used this pattern as the basis for the novel's plot. In fact I'd been till then unaware of the pattern's existence; once apprised of it, I was struck enough by the coincidence (which I later came to regard as more inevitable than remarkable) to examine those works by which I'd allegedly been influenced, and my next novel, Giles Goat-Boy (1966), was for better or worse the conscious and ironic orchestration of the Ur-Myth which its predecessor had been represented as being. Several of my subsequent fictions — the long short-story Menelaiad and the novella Perseid, for example — deal directly with particular manifestations of the myth of the wandering hero and address as well a number of their author's more current thematic concerns: the mortal desire for immortality, for instance, and its ironically qualified fulfillment — especially by the mythic hero's transformation, in the latter stages of his career, into the sound of his own voice, or the story of his life, or both. I am forty.

"Since myths themselves are among other things poetic distillations of our ordinary psychic experience and therefore point always to daily reality, to write realistic fictions which point always to mythic archetypes is in my opinion to take the wrong end of the mythopoeic stick, however meritorious such fiction may be in other respects. Better to address the archetypes directly. To the objection that classical mythology, like the Bible, is no longer a staple of the average reader's education, and that, consequently, the old agonies of Oedipus or Antigone are without effect on contemporary sensibility, I reply, hum, I forget what, something about comedy and self-explanatory context. Anyhow, when I had completed the Perseid novella, my research after further classical examples of the aforementioned themes led me to the minor mythic hero Bellerophon of Corinth.

"As it was among other things the very unfamiliarity of Bellerophon's story, even to those acquainted with the myths of Menelaus and Helen or Perseus and Andromeda, that I found appropriate to my purposes, a brief summary might be helpful. Here is Robert Grave's excellent account in The Greek Myths, itself a collation of the texts of Antoninus Liberalis, Apollodorus, Eustathius, Hesiod, Homer, Hyginus, Ovid, Pindar, Plutarch, the Scholiast on the Iliad, and Tzetzes:

"a. Bellerophon, son of Glaucus. . left Corinth under a cloud, having first killed one Bellerus — which earned him his nickname Bellerophontes, shortened to Bellerophon — and then his own brother, whose name is usually given as Deliades. He fled as a suppliant to Proetus, King of Tiryns; but. . Anteia, Proetus's wife. . fell in love with him at sight. When he rejected her advances, she accused him of having tried to seduce her, and Proetus, who believed the story, grew incensed. Yet he dared not risk the Furies' vengeance by the direct murder of a suppliant, and therefore sent him to Anteia's father Iobates, King of Lycia, carrying a sealed letter, which read: 'Pray remove the bearer from this world; he has tried to violate my wife, your daughter.'

"b. Iobates, equally loth to ill-treat a royal guest, asked Bellerophon to do him the service of destroying the Chimaera, a fire-breathing she-monster with lion's head, goat's body, and serpent's tail. . Before setting about the task, Bellerophon consulted the seer Polyeidus, and was advised to catch and tame the winged horse Pegasus, beloved by the Muses of Mount Helicon, for whom he had created the well Hippocrene by stamping his moon-shaped hoof.

"c. . Bellerophon found [Pegasus] drinking at Peirene. . another of his wells, and threw over his head a golden bridle, Athene's timely present. But some say that Athene gave Pegasus already bridled to Bellerophon; and others that Poseidon, who was really Bellerophon's father, did so. Be that as it may, Bellerophon overcame the Chimaera by flying above her on Pegasus's back, riddling her with arrows, and then thrusting between her jaws a lump of lead which he had fixed to the point of his spear. The Chimaera's fiery breath melted the lead, which trickled down her throat, searing her vitals.

"d. Iobates, however, far from rewarding Bellerophon for this daring feat, sent him at once against the warlike Solymians and their allies, the Amazons; both of whom he conquered by soaring above them, well out of bowshot, and dropping large boulders on their heads. Next, in the Lycian plain of Xanthus, he beat off a band of Carian pirates led by one Cheimarrhus, a fiery and boastful warrior, who sailed in a ship adorned with a lion figurehead and a serpent stern. When Iobates showed no gratitude even then but, on the contrary, sent the palace guards to ambush him on his return, Bellerophon dismounted and prayed that while he advanced on foot, Poseidon would flood the Xanthian Plain behind him. Poseidon heard his prayer, and sent great waves rolling slowly forward as Bellerophon approached Iobates's palace; and, because no man could persuade him to retire, the Xanthian women hoisted their skirts to the waist and came rushing towards him full butt, offering themselves to him one and all, if only he would relent. Bellerophon's modesty was such that he turned tail and ran; and the waves retreated with him.

"e. Convinced now that Proetus must have been mistaken about the attempt on Anteia's virtue, Iobates produced the letter, and demanded an exact account of the affair. On learning the truth, he implored Bellerophon's forgiveness, gave him his daughter Philonoë in marriage, and made him heir to the Lycian throne. He also praised the Xanthian women for their resourcefulness and ordered that, in future, all Xanthians should reckon descent from the mother, not the father. .

"Those familiar with my fiction will recognize in this account several pet motifs of mine: the sibling rivalry, the hero's naïveté, the accomplishment of labors by their transcension (here literal), and the final termination of all tasks by the extermination (here figurative) of the taskmaster; the Protean counselor (Polyeidus means 'many forms'); the romantic triangle; et cetera. But it was the two central images — Pegasus and the Chimera — which appealed to me most profoundly. I envisioned a comic novella based on the myth; a companion-piece to Perseid, perhaps. To compose it I set aside a much larger and more complicated project, a novel called Letters — It seemed anyway to have become a vast morass of plans, notes, false starts, in which I grew more mired with every attempt to extricate myself. Hopefully I turned to the lesser project, labored at it unremittingly for a full year and a half — alas, it, too, metamorphosed into quicksand, not before much good spiritual money had been thrown after the bad. Followed my first real affliction by the celebrated ailment Writer's Block, a malady from which, in the hubris of my twenties and thirties, I had fancied myself immune; I examined it as one might a malignant growth, with sharp interest and dull fright. For a long time I could not understand it — though I did come to understand, to the heart, the lamentations of those mystics to whom Grace had been once vouchsafed and then withdrawn. To the world it is a small matter, rightly, whether any particular artist finds his powers sustained or drained from one year to the next; to the artist himself, however minor his talent, imaginative potency is as critical to the daily life of his spirit as sexual potency — to which, in the male at least, it is an analogue as irresistible as that of Grace, and as dangerous.

"Eventually I did come to understand what was ailing me, so I believe; in any case the ailment passed — for little better or worse from the world's point of view, but much to my own relief — and I found myself composing as busily as ever. What I composed is another story, of no concern to us here; I recount this little personal episode by way of introducing the subject of this afternoon's lecture: an altogether impersonal principle of literary aesthetics, the understanding of the nature of which illuminated for me my difficulty with Bellerophon's story and, so I must presume, set me free of both the mire and the myth.

"The general principle, I believe, has no name in our ordinary critical vocabulary; I think of it as the Principle of Metaphoric Means, by which I intend the investiture by the writer of as many of the elements and aspects of his fiction as possible with emblematic as well as dramatic value: not only the 'form' of the story, the narrative viewpoint, the tone, and such, but, where manageable, the particular genre, the mode and medium, the very process of narration — even the fact of the artifact itself. Let me illustrate:?"

A: "I am."

Q: "Sir?"

A: "I am inclined, with you, to sniff in this a certain particular seer, the full history and scope of whose treachery, however, I am still in no position to appreciate at this point in this rendition of this Bellerophoniad. The writer's language is not Greek; the literary works referred to do not exist — wouldn't I, of all people, know that Perseid if there were one? As for that farrago of misstatements purporting to be the story of my life, the kindest thing to be said about its first three paragraphs is that they're fiction: the brothers are too many and miscast; my name is mishistoried (though 'Bellerus the Killer' is not its only meaning); my acquisition of Pegasus is mislocated as to both time and place; the Bellerophonic missive read simply 'Pray remove the bearer of these letters from this world'; et cetera, d and e, perhaps, are slightly less inaccurate, if no less incomplete, and their events are out of order. I call your attention, earnestly, to the suspension-points following the fifth paragraph: that's where we are, have been, have languished since the first good night. There's the sink; there's the quag; there's the slough of my despond. Drive me out."

Q: "No, sir."

A: "That's a question?" The document disappointed me as much as my students' unwillingness to follow the Pattern. We're to the day before my fortieth birthday now, page before Page 1: this particular lecture-scroll I'd pinned great fresh hope upon; sealed with an impression of the Chimera, it was inscribed For B from P: Begin in the Middle of the Road of Our Life; I'd first come across it twenty years previously, in circumstances about to be set forth at length; newlywed Philonoë had taken it to be a posthumous wedding gift from newly dead Polyeidus, who'd expired in circumstances about to be et cetera, and interpreted its legend to mean either Open at the Midpoint of My Life or Open Halfway Through Our Married Life. Either way, reckoning from the Polyeidic calendar, it meant age thirty-six — four years too late already! I'd put the thing aside many years ago; forgot it existed; then it turned up accountably in my scroll-case this morning in place of my text for this final lecture in the First-Flood series. Crushing, to find it such a mishmash! "Drive me out, sirs, as you love me; exile me from the city; make me wander far from the paths of men, devouring my own soul, et cetera, till I meet my apotheosis in some counterpart of the Axis Mundi or World Navel: in a riven grove, say, where one oak stands in a rock cleft by the first spring of the last freshet on the highest rise of some hill or other." This is your best, Polyeidus?

"Here's how it was. As I came in on the glide-path over Halicarnassus into Lycia, Pegasus swept into a sudden curve and went whinnying around what I took to be the plume of a small volcano, in ever-diminishing circles like a moth around a candle, till I feared we must disappear up our own fundaments. When we finally touched down and the world quit wheeling, I found us inside the crater itself, not active after all except for smoke issuing from one small cave; there an old beardless chap in a snakeskin coat, that's right, was lighting papers one at a time and tossing them into the hole, where they combusted with enormous disproportion of smoke to flame. At sight of Pegasus the fellow panicked, and no wonder: willy-nilly we charged, and Peg nipped him up by the neck-nape. Better to grasp the bridle, I'd been holding Proetus's letter in my mouth; lost it when I hollered whoa; next instant the man was gone and it was that letter in the horse's mouth; instant after, when I snatched it from there, I found myself holding sidesaddle the same old man, himself holding the letter. 'I'm an unsuccessful novelist,' he muttered hastily: 'life's work, five-volume roman fleuve — goddamn ocean, more like it; agent won't touch it; I'm reading it aloud to the wild animals and burning it up a page at a time. Never attracted a winged horse before; mountain lions, mostly, at this elevation; few odd goats from lower down, et cetera. Dee dee dum dee dee.'

"What Pegasus held now instead, and chewed on placidly till I took it from him, was the amulet. 'Passing prophet hung that on me,' Polyeidus lied; 'said I ought to try something in the myth way, very big nowadays, three novellas in one volume, say: one about Perseus and Medusa, one about Bellerophon and the Chimera, one about — ' I squeezed him. 'Polyeidus!' 'That was his name, all right,' Polyeidus said: 'had a daughter very high on this Bellerophon fellow, said she goes around hollering Bellerus Bellerus all day, that sort of thing. You're Bellerophon, are you? Told me I should hang that gadget around my neck, fetch me better ideas. What do you hear from your mother?' When he saw it was for joy I pounded him, he admitted he was Polyeidus and congratulated me on my achievement of Pegasus, which he was pleased to take for a sign that his petitions to Athene on my behalf had not been inefficacious. The fatal amulet virtually was, these days — it was the smell of wild mares on it, more than hippomanes, that had attracted Pegasus — and if I'd oblige him with a lift back to the Lycian capital, where he was now employed by King Iobates, he'd be happy to discard it against future impediment to navigation.

" 'You've heard nothing from Corinth, you say?' 'Only that Mother had you arrested. What for?' 'Ugly business, that,' Polyeidus said, and pitched the amulet into the cave. The smoke diminished. 'Poor woman's quite out of her tree, I fear. I told her you'd be back one day to reclaim the kingdom; thought that would cheer her up? Not a bit of it! Patriarchal plot, she said: sexual imperialism, et cetera. Clapped me in the keep. I decided to turn into the vaulted cell itself so that the guards would think I'd escaped and leave the door open, whereupon I would escape. But something went wrong: I turned into a fierce she-monster here on this mountain, and all but ate myself alive before I could switch back. I just don't have it any more in the three-dimensional way.' His best explanation of the phenomenon, he went on to say as we winged off to the Lycian capital, was that Hermes, famous trickster and inventor of the alphabet, must be as well a lover of puns and practical jokes: in keeping with his recent tendency to turn into documents, Polyeidus had changed not directly into his dungeon cell but, intermediately, into a magic message spelling out that objective: I am a chamber. Finding himself instead a fire-breathing monster with lion's head, goat's body, and serpent's tail, dwelling in a cave in a dormant volcano called Mount Chimera on the Lycian-Carian border, he could only infer that the god had sported with the proximity of the names kamara/Chimera. But being nearly lost in translation was not the end of the difficulty: so violently had Polyeidus dissociated with the monster, his resumption of human form (sans hair and twenty kilos) had left the Chimera, as he now called his accidental creation, intact: the first such case in the history of magical transformation, so far as he knew, and he regarded it with mixed feelings. On the other hand, foreseeing that Amisidoros, the Carian king, would attempt to exploit the beast as a new secret weapon to guard the long-disputed boundary, he was able to forewarn Iobates and establish himself in the Lycian court as a special defense-minister; on the other hand, he was obliged not only to conceal his own responsibility for Chimera's existence, but to make periodic secret field trips to the crater to feed the beast a ream or so of specially composed tranquilizing spells, until he could devise a better way to neutralize her.

" 'So here we are,' he concluded; 'you keep my little secret, I'll keep yours' — by which he meant, you understand, my responsibility for the death of Glaucus and my brother. 'You've learned to read and write, I see?' He indicated the letter. I confessed I had not, except for an odd half-dozen alphabetical characters. 'Just as well,' he said; 'only mischief in letters — Q.E.D.! Look where the birth-certificate trick got us! I'll deliver this for you. Any idea what's in it?'

"I shook my head and, for shame, volunteered only that I was doing a kind of purificatory labor for King Proetus, perhaps unnecessary, but a good trial run in any case for whatever true labors lay ahead. At his suggestion we landed here in the main square of Telmissus, for maximum effect. A crowd assembled, also the court, to admire Pegasus; Polyeidus took several bows and introduced us to Iobates, describing me as a former protégé and an up-and-coming mythic hero. The King was cordial, inquired after Anteia and his granddaughters, thanked me for the letter, insisted on feasting me for nine days before opening it. He introduced me to his younger daughter, Philonoë, at age sixteen an undergraduate mythology major here at the University (though we had no department then, only a couple of course-offerings), who shyly asked me to autograph her syllabus. I drew a careful upper-case Beta, best I could do, with her curious writing tool, a lead-pointed stick Polyeidus had given her that made marks on things. A charming girl, by turns demure and bold, she sat next me at dinner; told me her father's nine-day custom drove her buggy — she always tore into her mail the second it arrived; bade me describe in detail her little nieces, whom she was dying to visit; confessed an absolute passion for the study of mythology; asked me would I visit her senior seminar if she okayed it with her professor — no need to prepare anything, just rap with the kids, et cetera; pressed me particularly for anecdotes about Perseus, her favorite among contemporaries in the field.

"In the days that followed we became great friends. My intellectual superior, she nonetheless deferred to me as an example of what she called 'the imaginative embodiment of otherwise merely intellectual conceptions, you know?' What I saw as small embarrassments — my then illiteracy, for example — she was pleased to interpret as marks of authenticity, though she volunteered to tutor me in writing if I'd give her flying lessons. Indeed, she told me frankly that the only thing that bothered her about me, hero-wise, was my articulateness and apparent gentleness of manner: heroes, she fancied, should be rougher-edged and less ready for speech. But she soon had it reasoned out that her preconceptions in this regard were no doubt due to the stylizing nature of the mythopoeic process itself, which simplified character and motive just as it compressed time and space, so that one imagined Perseus to be speeding tirelessly and thoughtlessly from action to bravura action, when in fact he must have weeks of idleness, hours of indecision, et cetera. Besides, who could stroll the palace gardens, play catch, sing duets, and have long talks with a mere Golden Destroyer?

"At her coaxing, King Iobates shortened the feasting period from nine days to seven, seven to five, in case the letter contained news from Anteia. But as it was after all government business, on the fifth evening he gave it to Polyeidus, his official state-message reader (Iobates shared my limitation), to read to him. The seer opened it, paled, glanced at me sharply, pled for a moment to consider the accurate Lycian equivalents of a few Tirynish idioms, then read what amounted to a note of introduction from Proetus in my behalf: Pray remove the bearer of these letters from the world of blood-guilt which he fancies himself to carry in consequence of his innocent role in the deaths of his father and brother; kindly permit him to do for you some heroic service, the more hazardous the better. Yrs, P. I had been anxious that the letter might allude to my contretemps with Philonoë's sister; at the news I smiled, thought better of Proetus, affirmed my willingness to attempt whatever Iobates wished. The company drank my health; Philonoë glowed; Polyeidus smiled, quite in command of himself now, and held a whispered conference with Iobates, who at first flushed angrily and seemed about to rise from table, then — on further whispers from the seer — composed himself and coolly requested me to rid the coast, if I would, of a band of Carian pirates lately infesting it. Perhaps I could set out immediately after dinner?

"His sudden change of mood perplexed me, but I took off on Pegasus without waiting for dessert, spent the night and morning talking with fishermen and merchant-skippers, located the chief pirate vessel by aerial reconnaissance with the aid of their descriptions, sank ship and company by bombardment with big rocks, knocked off the paddlers with low-level hoofing, returned to the palace by cocktail time. The King and Polyeidus, celebrating, seemed surprised; Philonoë kissed me. 'Nothing to it,' I said, hanging up my bridle: 'Captain's name was Chimarrhus, which I believe means goat? Red-bearded chap. Real fire-breather, judging from the way he hissed and gurgled going under. Their rig had a lion figurehead, serpentine taffrail: a nautical monstrosity. I wasted them. No big deal.'

" 'Hmp,' Iobates said, his elder daughter's father, glaring at Polyeidus, who rapidly declared that the great similarity between the old Carian pirate outfit and the new border-monster should not be taken as evidence that my testimony was fanciful: in his opinion it corroborated his opinion that the Chimera, while newly embodied up in the hills and a great fresh threat to Lycia, was a monster of long-standing Carian tradition: his genealogical visions and researches inclined him to believe her the offspring of Typhon and Echidne. The former, son of Earth and Tartarus, had been the largest monster ever: a serpent from the waist down, he featured hundred-league arms with serpent-heads for hands, an ass-head that touched the stars, sun-darkening wings, flaming eyes, and live-lava breath — hence Chimera's volcanic habitat. The latter, half lovely woman and half speckled serpent, a man-eater killed by hundred-eyed Argus, was one of the Phorcids, sister to the Gorgons and Graeae of Persean fame. Thus Chimera, interestingly, was in fact Medusa's niece, Pegasus's cousin, and, since the winged horse was my half-sibling, not altogether unrelated to me.

"Iobates rehmped, and with not so much as a congratulatory word to me, said he wondered now and then what was in some people's drinks. 'I take it you can back up this claim?' he asked me incordially. Surprised, I retorted that the numberless sharks had been my only body-counters; Philonoë protested to her dad that while trophy-fetching was a common enough feature of heroic expeditions, to put the burden of proof on the hero was unprecedented and discourteous. Polyeidus diplomatically suggested that just as I was still a novice at performing hero-tasks, the King was a novice at taskmastering; why not both of us try another? Detachments of the Solymian and Amazon military, he understood, were once again bivouacked along the border on opposite sides of Mount Chimera, a clear and present danger to our territorial integrity. How about a twin wonder, the single-handed repulse of both armies?

"Iobates made the family noise, but seemed interested. Philonoë showed alarm. 'Of course, if you think that's beyond you. .' Polyeidus offered. 'Nothing's beyond me,' I said. Then the King, all smiles, bade me have a nice dinner first, at which he specified, in the trophy way, a good-looking Amazon captive not older than twenty-five Polyeidic years or below the rank of first lieutenant, sufficiently intact for concubinage.

" 'That's disgusting, Daddy!' Philonoë said. 'Besides, any Amazon would die before she'd be a slave; we learned that in fourth grade.' Iobates chuckled and declared he'd take the chance. I remarked that while serial labors were not unusual for heroes, I knew of none whose tasks were imposed without so much as a night's sleep between. Polyeidus agreed, but seconded the King's timetable on the grounds that just as no literary classic is quite like any other literary classic, so no classical hero's biography exactly duplicated any other's; one attained such generality as the Pattern only by ignoring enough particular differences. This notion oddly troubled me. The Princess kissed my brow and said, 'Daddy's afraid to have you around because he sees I have a crush on you. Lots of kings are like that.' Iobates hmped; I took off blear-eyed but much aroused.

"I was, remember, a prime and healthy fellow, so preoccupied with my career that except for occasional chamber-maids or temple-prostitutes I'd had no women since Sibyl-in-the-grove. All the while I drowsily wrecked the Solymians (saturation-bombing of their encampment by moonlight with boulders from Mount Chimera — where I saw this time neither smoke nor monster — and sporadic high-level horse dung), I had ardent fantasies about Philonoë, so much more fetching than Anteia or Polyeidus's distracted daughter. At dawn, when I landed sleepily to verify the rout, I could scarcely concentrate on trampling the wounded for imagining the perky Princess (in Position One) on my temple pallet or among the creepers of the sacred grove. The camp was empty; indeed, the old chap I was absent-mindedly hoofing to death was the only sign of life; had I been less full of Philonoë I might have heard in time his protests that he was not Solymian but Carian, a goatherd whose flock the Solymian raiding party, taking him for a Lycian, had made off with at my first bomb-run from the hilltop. Declaring that he would have fled after them in hopes of stealing back his goats had he not slipped on a Pegasus-turd and turned his ankle, he cursed warriors in general and mythic heroes in particular, who in his opinion were worse than mercenaries in that we had not even the excuse of getting our daily bread by doing hired hurt to others, but performed our lethal offices for mere self-aggrandizement. This point I would have debated with him readily had he not expired upon making it; just as well, I reflected, recalling Philonoë's attitude toward overmuch rationality on the part of heroes. The recollection of her earnest face and dainty neck too aroused me for discourse anyhow; marveling tumescently at how my image of her worked to turn me into her image of me, I flew off to find the Amazons.

"Their rout was easily effected, for all their famous battle-courage, inasmuch as they were strictly horse soldiers, and their mounts, trained not to shy from the most clangorous conventional combat, bolted unmanageably at first sight of swooping Pegasus. The 'war party' reported by Lycian intelligence numbered no more than two dozen, mostly middle-aged: I learned later from Melanippe that they were in fact scouts sent to investigate the Chimera, distorted reports of whose existence and possible usefulness had come to Themiscyra from Lycian operatives. They were lightly armed and, far from home, more concerned with preserving their horses than doing battle with me, whom they took to be the monster. A few passes scattered them; had I been in their territory, they'd have regrouped, blindfolded their mounts, and come back to dispatch me at whatever cost.

As I wasn't, they returned to their base with reports (corroborated, so our own intelligence people subsequently confirmed, by the Solymian scouting and foraging party) that Chimera was a flying centaur in Iobates's service, not a fire-breathing dragon in Amisidoros's, and recommended withdrawal from the Carian alliance, as did the Solymians — Amisidoros, it turns out, knew nothing at all of the treble beast alleged to be his house pet and secret weapon.

"But they returned, the Amazons, minus one, the youngest-looking, whom I buzzed and harried several kilometers from the rest until her horse fell. She was pitched hard to the rocky ground; the horse, a black mare, sprang up and, less fearful now that Pegasus was landed, stood nervously by. The Amazon lay still. I fetched up her brazen bow and half-moon shield to club her with if she happened to be alive, and rolled her over with my foot. She seemed more dazed than dead, but required no further blows. I tied her wrists and ankles with her bowstring as she stirred, and stanched enough blood to try to judge her age and rank. She was very young, Philonoë's age at most, dark-skinned, short-haired, wiry, the most attractive of her kind I'd seen. Back in Corinth I'd heard the usual Amazon stories — that they burned their left breasts off to clear the bowstring; that they were actually men, a kind of Spartans in drag — and with my brother had teased in vain our Themiscyran horse-grooms for confirmation. Now, as my prisoner began to regain her senses, I did my own research: both breasts were there when I pulled her shirt open; little pomegranates by comparison with Philonoë's ripe pears or Sibyl's honeydews, but no less appetizing. I unbuckled her chiton and pulled down her spotted tights, ripped and dirtied from her fall: despite bruise and brush-burn, her thighs were lean and smooth to touch, her parts altogether female: neat and dainty, lightly fleeced. As I poked to learn whether she still had her hymen, she thrashed about and swore military oaths.

" 'Are you by any chance an officer?' I asked her.

" 'Lance Corporal Melanippe, Fifth Light Cavalry,' she answered furiously. 'Get your filthy hands off me!'

" 'That's under First Lieutenant, I suppose? No matter. Are you a virgin?'

"She replied, in a tighter voice, though still as if at least as angry with herself as with me, that the Second Rule for Amazonian Prisoners of War forbade her to give any information beyond her name, rank, and unit. I cordially pointed out that inasmuch as I'd been ignorant of that rule, she'd broken it already by informing me of its existence. Amazons do not weep, but their voices tremble. She requested that I kill her first.

" 'Before what?' Then I realized, rather to my own surprise, not only that I'd been totally erect ever since dismounting from Pegasus (who grazed and nuzzled peacefully with the black mare), but that I really did mean forcibly to have her. She put up a formidable resistance, particularly for one bound hand and foot and barely sensible after her fall: certain Amazons, I was to learn later, especially those named Melanippe or Leaping Myrine, have a kind of limited Protean capacity when sexually in extremis; my lance corporal, before I stuck her, turned briefly but unmistakably into a stone crab, a water snake, a hind, and a squid, in that order. Her undoing was that, frenzied, she could think only of what she hoped were frightening or swift beasts (and, at that, happened not to think of wild mares, which would have undone me), not realizing, what I knew from Polyeidus, that anything limbed she might turn into would be bound as she was — and that my acquaintance with shape-shifters somewhat immunized me to her effects. Had she turned into a cloud, say, or a stream of water, she might've got clear; as it was, I merely backed off from the crab and held it by a backfin against scuttling off on its other legs; seized the viper safely behind the head (my brother and I were great early terrifiers of little girls with snakes we caught in the grove); and actually entered, a tergo, the lassoed hind, knowing it must soon rebecome what I lusted for. Squealing, it turned squid, only two of whose five pairs of tentacles were tied: I'd've got out fast — that beak, you know, down by the sex-parts? — but the free six suckered me, not bad actually, from the same squiddy instinct which then inked the penis it might have bitten off. A moment later she was unmaidened Melanippe, held by the hair and howling under me as I gave her squirt for squirt. Once come, I was at once appalled at having twice been so overmastered by desire, this time replacing with unkindest force my kindless deception in the grove. I withdrew, contrite; squid ink, mixed with cherry-bright blood, smeared from my shrinking tool onto her hams and cheeks, still fiercely squeezed, initialing my shame in the strokes and diacritics of a barbarous alphabet.

" 'Pig! Pig!' she spat, choking with outrage. I saw no point in pointing out to her that that transformation, had she thought of it in time, would have been spitted as her hind.

" 'Awfully sorry,' I panted. 'Long time between women; got carried away. Say, that squid was a crackerjack!'

" 'Cut my throat,' she requested, speaking into the dirt.

" 'Don't be silly.'

" 'Disembowel me.'

" 'Nonsense.'

" 'I'd kill you if I could, you sexist swine.'

"There we lay. 'I shouldn't blame you,' I said. 'I've never deflowered anybody before, you know, much less committed rape. I'm thoroughly ashamed of myself. What shall I do to make it up to you?' Her suggestions were ill-humored and impossible to carry out without ending my career. We were still for a while.

" 'In my country,' she said presently, 'we'd cut your rapist cock off and choke you on it. We'd impale you up the ass on a hot stake. We'd make you eat your own balls. O! O! O!

"A third time I apologized for having forced her; despite her oaths, spits, and thrashes, then, I cleaned her up and put her clothes in order, saving only the armored chiton as evidence for Iobates. As I worked I recounted sympathetically Anteia's rape-story; her frustration at unfair nature's one-sidedness in this area; my admiration of the excellent horsemanship of the Amazons on our palace staff in Corinth, and her own fine fighting spirit; my resolve to see her back to her outfit instead of enslaving her to my taskmaster, for whom I had no particular affection, et cetera. Putting by the Second Rule for Prisoners, Melanippe then informed me, more calmly but still in a cool fury, of the First — to die in battle rather than be taken prisoner, since Amazons must expect to be raped by their Sexist Pig Captors — and the Third — if captured by surprise, to kill oneself as soon as possible, not to afford more gratification than necessary to those same SPC's. I reminded her that I had no intention of repeating that shameful violation, of her and of my own better nature. She spat at me, unimpressed, and said that as a point of honor no Amazon, once captured and sexually assaulted, ever returned to Amazonia unless with her assailant's severed parts strung on a lanyard, for though her people, contrary to popular belief, had a high regard for heterosexual as well as homosexual connections, and copulated vigorously and freely on their own initiative with males, they abhorred above all things being forced. Their moral education, their religion, their art, even their history and mythology, turned on this point: they traced their descent, for example, from a company of some two thousand virgins forcibly deflowered by an Asian despot who then transported them en masse to Scythia, bidding them remember him kindly as having relented in his vow to kill each one after raping her; instead, those who found themselves pregnant by him killed their children, and they established a militant gynocracy to oppose the forcible suppression of their sex. Amazon, she said, had a higher meaning than the vulgar one: though a zealous leader might literally lop one breast off for symbolic reasons — Melanippe herself had considered doing so — the single-breastedness implied by the name was metaphorical and positive: one half pure woman, one half pure warrior, et cetera. In consequence of all this, if as sometimes happened a raped Amazon had no chance to take revenge on her defiler before he released her, she was not obliged to kill herself, but she must live in exile, raising the consciousness of foreign women to the facts of their exploitation — hence the isolated instances of Melanippe's countrywomen in such places as Corinth, where, while doing yeoman service, they quietly subverted the patriarchy.

"But my victim herself, ambitious in her way as I, had aspired from earliest girlhood to the grand objective of leading her sisters victoriously back to the country of their legendary origin, Samarkand; deposing and castrating the male sexist pig despot, whoever that luckless fellow might be, and making the ancestral motherland a matriarchy. From this destiny, toward which her precocious attainment of lance-corporalship was a promising first step, one fall of her horse and thrust of my yard had barred her forever; as her whole heart and mind and soul was in Themiscyra, she would not live in exile; if I was too cowardly to follow up rape with murder, she would kill herself.

"I had been penitent; hearing my victim's most touching account and imagining how I'd have felt, even without the extra moral and historical resonances, if some bitter mischance (such as befell my brother) had nipped my career in the bud, I was inconsolable. I dared not turn her loose; neither could I leave her where she was or fly her to Themiscyra or back to Telmissus (where, perhaps, Philonoë's friendship would have soothed her, if not mine — but I did not trust Iobates); on the other hand, contrite as I was, I was not willing to emasculate myself for penance. Melanippe rejected angrily my offer to supply her with the genitalia of a certain dead goatherd over the hill, which she could represent back home as her violator's. At length, for want of better, though I was perishing for sleep I flew her across the Sporades and Cyclades, all the way to Corinth, binding her tightly across Pegasus's back to prevent her jumping off: we landed by night atop the royal horse-barns, astonishing two owls and the Amazon on watch — whom I recognized as fat Hippolyta, a friend of my youth, and saluted by name.

" 'No, not Prince Bellerus any longer,' I called down to her: 'Bellerophon. The Killer? I have a young sister of yours here: Lance Corporal Melanippe, Fifth Light Cavalry, a valiant soldier shamefully raped in Lycia while unconscious after a bad fall from her horse. So. Please see she doesn't harm herself, okay? And commend her to my mother and your comrades, et cetera. Also, tell Mom I'm fine and will come back to claim Corinth sooner or later. Also, that she was wrong about Polyeidus. I think. Thanks.' While amazed Hippolyta went to fetch a ladder and her comrades, I deposited Melanippe, too despondent to speak, gently on the roof; kissed her hair; reapologized. 'Best I could think of,' I said; 'you're among friends, anyhow. Subvert all you want to. Anything else I can do for you?' Why, yes, she responded: matter of fact she desired urgently to perform fellatio upon me then and there, on the roof, out of her vast gratitude for my not having killed as well as raped her. The voice was odd; and the particular phrasing of her motive. . I declined, embarrassed, and leaned over to unbind her wrists. Instantly she seized my legs and bit fiercely into my crotch; I jumped, slipped on the roof-tiles, very nearly tumbled off; she was after me, lunging as best she could with ankles still tied, clawing at my privates; I leaped clumsily onto Pegasus and dug in my heels; left her shrieking curses at me from the ridgepole.

"Shaken, I returned to the foothills of Mount Chimera, spent three days resting and recomposing myself. The blood-and-ink-stains on the lining of Melanippe's chiton were indelible, a ciphered execration. I had bad dreams. Every time I saw a snake (the woods there are infested), I imagined it a fleeing Amazon. When Solymian or Carian border scouts approached, I flew off with the jays and blackbirds; I searched out another patrol of Amazons and tried to tell them of Melanippe's courage and current circumstances; obliged to hover out of bowshot-range, I couldn't make myself heard. Much of the time I merely soared in high circles over the dead volcano like a misbegotten hawk, thinking dark thoughts about myself. Finally I returned to the plain of Xanthus and Iobates's city.

"The King was even more surprised than before, and openly displeased to see me. Polyeidus, too, appeared distressed. But Philonoë cried out for joy, hung on my neck, covered me with kisses, until she saw what black humor I was in and drew away.

" 'That took a while,' Iobates said sourly. 'Where's my Amazon?' I displayed the ruined chiton and gave it to Philonoë, whose delicate beauty and girlish ways seemed to me suddenly bizarre, affected, as if she were imitating a Phrygian faggot. 'Amazons don't permit themselves to be slaves,' I said. Iobates chuckled: 'But they're dandy captives while they last, eh?' Philonoë threw the chiton down and ran from the room; her displeasure with me put the King at once in brighter spirits. 'Seduction is for sissies,' he said; 'the he-man wants his rape. Heh heh. We used to prong 'em and then watch them kill themselves. How about lunch before you knock off King Amisidoros for me?' My repulse of the Solymians and Amazons, he declared, counted as but a single labor, especially since I'd brought him no proof at all of the former and only ambiguous evidence of the latter. Moreover, his spies in Caria reported that while Amisidoros was alarmed by the 'flying centaur' stories and the consequent weakening of his Solymian-Amazon alliance, and perhaps amenable therefore to a negotiated settlement of the boundary dispute, he was by no means frightened to the point of mere capitulation. My next task, then, proposed by Polyeidus in keeping with the classic pattern of ascending unlikelihood, was to fly directly to the Carian court, land before Amisidoros in broad daylight, and offer to destroy the capital city with everyone in it unless he ceded half of Caria to Lycia.

" 'Take the whole weekend if you need it,' he concluded. 'And save Amisidoros's queen for my Sanitation Workers' Brothel. Toodle-oo.'

"I responded: 'Nope. I'll do you one more labor — you call it the third; it's Number Five in my book, counting that special-delivery from Proetus — but it's got to be something extraordinary, not like those others. Pirates and outlaws, maybe, if they aren't in fact protesting injustices in the Lycian socioeconomic system — I wish I'd had a chat with Chimarrhus about that before I sank him. Rebels ditto, if they're mere adventurists making a power-grab. Invading armies sure. Et cetera. But no more imperialist aggression, okay? You'll have to come up with something better, or I quit. I've had my consciousness raised.'

"From the wings of the throne-room came the sound of two hands clapping. Philonoë returned, and looking at me levelly, told her father to stop pussyfooting around and send me after Chimera.

"I tried to gauge her feelings. 'The Chimera?' Polyeidus declared nervously that the definite article was optional.

" 'That's not a bad idea, Phillie,' her father said. 'Not bad at all. Then we'd still have our Flying Centaur, and Amisidoros wouldn't have his counter-monster. You say this Chimera's a sure killer, Polyeidus?'

" 'I never heard of its hurting anybody,' I said. 'For all I know, it may be minding its own business up there in the crater. Am I supposed to kill it just because it's monstrous? Besides, it's female. No more sexist aggression.'

"Polyeidus defended the monster's deadliness on genealogical grounds — both of its parents had been legendary man-killers — but acknowledged that the creature had not left its lair in Amisidoros's deadly service at least since tranquilized by the Polyeidic magic papers, and so could be said to be a threat only to vulcanologists or ignorant spelunkers, whom a posted guard could easily warn off. He agreed with me therefore that there was no particular need to kill it — or her, if I preferred.

" 'He's a chicken and you're a hustler,' Iobates hmped. 'If he wastes the Chimera you're out of the protection racket, right?'

" 'Don't kill her, then,' Philonoë suggested in a gentler tone. 'Bring her back alive for the University's Zoology Department. Okay, Bellerophon?' She grew excited at the idea: we could build Chimera an asbestos cage; her breath could be used to heat the whole zoo free of charge, maybe the poorer sections of the polis as well. 'You wouldn't have to hurt her,' she insisted, and added, blushing: 'But don't you get hurt, either.'

" 'Capital idea!' Iobates cried. 'Steal Amisidoros's secret weapon and make a public show of it for the hoi polloi, keep their minds off their troubles. Go to it, Bellerophon! If you get her, no more tasks; if she gets you — no more tasks! You can't lose. Of course, if you're afraid. .'

"I reflected for a moment, then declared I'd go after Chimera — with great reluctance, not on account of my personal safety, but because for all I knew, in my lately augmented awareness, monsters might have an important ecological function, be some crucial link in the food-chain, et cetera. Only the essential appropriateness of the labor, which it astonished me I'd not recognized two thousand words earlier, its perfect conformity to the Pattern, induced me to undertake it — and that same Pattern prescribed that she must not be captured, but slain. No mythic hero ever brought back anything alive, except his glorious self and an occasional beleaguered princess.

"Now Philonoë was at my arm, her late vexation passed, rationalizing for the both of us that in view of Chimera's famous respiration we could perhaps regard the monstermachy as an antipollution measure. What did Polyeidus think?

" 'Never mind what he thinks,' Iobates said happily: 'I'm still king around here, and I say go to it. May the better gladiator emerge victorious, et cetera. Dead or alive, it's all one to me — but no hearsay or half-measures this time: fetch the carcass back here, so I can see it with my own two eyes.'

" 'Impossible,' Polyeidus put in.

" 'So much the better.'

"But the seer explained, more confident now, that while dispatching Chimera was at least imaginable for a mythic hero of my stature, and so obviously appropriate that it went without saying he'd had it in mind from the beginning as my climactic labor — had even had previsions of it back in Corinth, as I might recall — no souvenir whatever of the monster would be salvageable, much less the whole carcass: it was the nature of the beast, as a fire expirer, on expiration to go up in smoke. What was needed, for purposes of verification, was an expert witness — who would, however, in the ordinary case be in greater peril than the Chimeromach himself, with his special equipage and prerequisite dispensation from Olympus. Only a witness with extrahuman powers of his own stood even a moderate chance of surviving the fury of a mortally smitten external-combustion monster. .

" 'You're elected,' Iobates said. 'If you both get wrecked, we'll put up a little plaque for you somewhere, okay?' He frowned. 'But if you both come back claiming the Chimera's done in — I'm supposed to take your word for it?'

" 'I'll prove it by going into the cave myself,' Philonoë said quickly, nor could any amount of paternal threat or expostulation dissuade her.

" 'I want to have a long talk with you when I come back,' I told her happily, and promised to return by dinnertime. Polyeidus asked for an hour to pack a few things and prepare the special spear he said I'd need to dispatch Chimera. Iobates, frowning still, went off to a meeting of the Lycian Home Defense Council. I ate lamb kabobs and olives with the Princess; told her a few things I'd learned about Amazons (to which she listened pensively but closely, saying such things as 'You seem to admire them very much'); asked her why her father, after his original welcome, had seemed to take so sudden a dislike of me upon the reading of Proetus's innocuous letter, at a time when she and I were no more than pleasant friends. Philonoë brightened up immediately and promised to check the letter, which, especially in Polyeidus's absence, she believed she had ways of getting access to. Why check the letter, I asked, whose contents had been plainly read to us?

"She smiled and said, 'Call it Woman's Intuition,' a term and phenomenon I was unacquainted with but had no time to inquire further about. We fondly kissed goodbye, she bade me take care of myself, I bridled pretty Pegasus, picked up Polyeidus, winged northwestward in high spirits.

"En route I chattered on about my excitement at confronting what according to the Pattern must be as glorious a moment as any in my career; I praised Philonoë's courage in volunteering to prove the Chimera's elimination, and her loyal resolve to find out what had turned her father against me. Surely my Sacred Marriage, which, if I remembered the Pattern rightly, followed hard upon completion of my labors, must be destined to be with her; I did hope so; her affectionate docility, now I reflected on it, was much more in keeping with the notion of a cunjunctio oppositorum at the Axis Mundi than would be, say, the more active mettle of that Amazon lance corporal whom I'd left in Eurymede's keeping some days past. Et cetera. Didn't he agree?

" 'I hate flying,' the seer said sourly, and gave me my instructions: we were not to attempt to sneak up on the monster, who could not be fooled, but rather fly directly to the crater's rim; at noon the Chimera regularly retired to her cave for a long siesta — doubtless that was why I hadn't seen her in my recent overflights — and the trick was to trap her there, where she lacked maneuvering-room. The late absence of smoke from the crater, which I had remarked, indicated that her breath was temporarily less fiery than usual (such things happened); but given her triple ferocity, this was small advantage. Just as Perseus, vis-à-vis Medusa, had made his enemy his ally, so I like a cunning wrestler must enlist my adversary's strengths against her. Hence the special spear he'd brought along, a larger version of the writing-tool he'd given Philonoë, which instead of a sharp bronze point had a dull one of lead. Depositing Polyeidus behind the cover of a rim-rock, I was to blindfold Pegasus, put upon my spear-tip several sheets of paper from the prophet's briefcase impregnated with a magical calorific, and thrust my spear deep into the cave. Chimera would attack it; the calorific would super-heat her breath (I was to shut my eyes and hold my own breath against the noxious smoke) and melt the lead, which then would burn through her vitals and kill her. 'Got it?'

" 'I don't get to see her?'

" 'You'll see her,' Polyeidus promised. 'But do it my way, or you're cooked. No need for your girlfriend to check out the cave tomorrow, incidentally; there'll be other evidence.' We landed on the rim, no monster in sight, only a bit of steam rising from one smallish hole, which Polyeidus identified as one of her vents and thus as good as any to attack her through. 'So have a nice battle,' he said when the spear and blindfold were prepared, 'and marry your princess and like that. I'm sure your brother would be pleased to know what a great success you turned out to be. Don't trust your father-in-law too much; he'd've put you away before now if I hadn't invoked the hospitality laws and set him up as your taskmaster instead. See you around, hero.'

"Well, so, I did all that, wondering why he spoke so curiously. Pegasus couldn't fly blind; I walked him to the hole, popped in the old spear, hit something anyhow: whoosh came the smoke, black billows, a certain stink, a sound like a horn-call. No thrash or struggle. I peeked to see whether I'd missed; withdrew my charred spear, its tip half-molten, and apprehensively rethrust, waiting for the bite. Instead, a kind of flapping came; I jumped back, slipped, very nearly fell from Pegasus as in the pall around us something large and obscure appeared to rise, rolling and spreading like the smoke itself, and buffet across the crater toward my prophet's perch. I unblinkered Pegasus and took off after, eyes running from the vapors, but before we overhauled the rim there was a whump: the mountain shook, and a smokeball rose from the spot upon its own black column. No sign of Polyeidus; only, on the rock-face, a blurred silhouette in soot of what I took to be the beast herself. With my cindered spear I sadly traced it, lion's head to serpent's tail, as down upon us gentle ashes — whose, if not my imperfectly combusted tutor's? — commenced to fall. I yearned to spell out his name there for the generations he had glimpsed ahead; would not have minded subscribing my own for those same readers, had I known one letter from another. I headed sadly back on slightly smutty Pegasus, resolved to learn from Philonoë how to write.

"I spied her on a beach not far from town, wearing of all things Melanippe's chiton and waving a flag at me. I landed, dismounted, kissed her, and said: 'Hi. I killed the Chimera. But she killed Polyeidus. What's up? Why are you wearing that? You don't look right in it.'

"She answered: 'Hi. Good. Good. An ambush. Because it's time to make war, not love. I thought you liked Amazons; no matter; I'll take it off after the battle.' She had an excellent memory, even as a teen-ager. What battle? Rapidly she opined that Polyeidus had been a traitor: according to her father, from whom she had demanded an explanation of his inhospitality on pain of eloping with me, the message from Proetus had been Pray remove the bearer of these letters from this world; he has tried to violate my wife, your daughter. But when, heartbroken, she had examined the document itself, she found it to contain in fact only the first of those two clauses. In any case, it made no mention of purificatory tasks, which Iobates freely admitted having imposed, on Polyeidus's advice, to get rid of me. Anteia's husband, he had declared to her, was no hero, but except in the area of his feud with Acrisius he was a reasonable man: whether or not I'd tried to rape Anteia, I must have mortally offended him in some way; therefore Philonoë was neither to see me again nor to interfere with the ambuscade of palace guards waiting to slaughter me should I return. Surely she had no use for a man who had murdered his father and brother, abandoned his mother, tried to rape her own sister, and in fact raped and murdered a helpless Amazon prisoner-of-war? Heh heh, et cetera.

" 'You might be right about Polyeidus,' I admitted. 'Sometimes I've wondered about him myself. But there is another way to read his role in all this. Proetus knows the truth about his wife and me. False letters! You'll have to teach me how to read and write. Thanks for warning me about the ambush. I didn't kill that Amazon; I took her home to Mother. The rest is pretty much true, and I admit it makes me look bad, at least on paper. There. How come you're here?'

"Philonoë answered: "Because I love you with all my heart and mind and soul. And body. My sister always wanted to be a mythic hero. I always wanted to be loved by one.' She fingered the chiton. 'Did you rape this poor girl?'

"I said: 'Yep. I was sorry afterward, but as my deed wasn't involuntary, that fact scarcely matters." She shuddered; murmured something about Rough Edges; inquired whether, we being alone there in a secluded spot and she unable to call for help, I intended to ravish her as well.

" 'I guess not. I say let's fly off to Corinth and take over the kingdom.'

"Philonoë considered. 'I don't think you tried to attack my sister. You wouldn't've had to; I know how she is. Did you sleep with her?' When I shook my head she squeezed me, wiped soot from Pegasus's muzzle, confessed happily that she'd have gone off with me, albeit unhappily, in any case, and as wife or mistress, even if my love for her didn't measure up to hers for me. Her late mother's advice — never to wed a man whom she loved more than he her — Philonoë regarded as sensible enough if it meant love should be equal, basely self-gratifying if it meant the opposite inequality; what it lacked in either case was the dimension of Tragedy, which in her view — but there'd be time enough for her view, and my rape-tale, and Corinth too, when we'd deposed her dad and taken charge of Lycia — which we could do by nightfall if we played our cards right.

" 'What are cards?'

" 'Figure of speech. While you were doing hero-work up on the hill, I wasn't sitting on my hands. My roommate at U.L. is a meteorology major and vulcanology minor: she predicts that this afternoon's tremors from Mount Chimera, together with the recently prevailing south winds, the time of day (almost low water), month (full moon), and year (vernal equinox), will produce an extraordinary flood tide a few pages from now. Interviews conducted by her and me a couple hours ago with certain Xanthian fishermen (my contact with whom I'll explain presently) confirm this prediction. Here's what I suggest: I'll fly home on Pegasus now, for effect, and announce to Daddy that unless he comes off it and does the daughter's-hand-and-half-my-kingdom thing, you'll come on like Poseidon and drown the city. You pray to your father (whom I really look forward to meeting after we're engaged) (your mother too) to lend us a hand, or at least excuse the trick. I believe we can count on the palace guard to fold: they're mostly uplanders, scared to death of water. At a certain point, when you and the tide are up over the Xanthian plain, a delegation of women from the fishing towns approaches Daddy and offers him politically to offer themselves to you sexually in return for your sparing the city, in return for his granting matriarchal home rule to the Xanthians, which their women's groups have agitated for for years. Got that? The minute I stepped out this afternoon with this chiton on, you see, their lobbyists approached me as a convert, and we worked all this out. Daddy'll go for the idea because he thinks you'll go for the idea because he thinks you're this horny rapist, okay? And I act as though I'm very upset at the prospect of my fiancé's laying all those women, which I am. But what you do, you chastely decline, just as you did with my sister, and I point out to Daddy that that proves the whole thing was forged by your former tutor, who's out to get you for some mysterious reason, which I think he is. Daddy agrees to everybody's conditions; you hold out till the moon's just overhead, that'll be tide-turn; then you agree not to flood the city and you ask Poseidon out loud to make the water go down. The point of walking up with the tide instead of flying on Pegasus, I forgot to mention, is to demonstrate Change of Pace — the way Perseus did when he rescued Andromeda without using the Gorgon's head? In my senior thesis I argue that mythic heroes do this now and then to show that it's the general favor of the gods that gives them their clout, rather than some particular item of gear, which could be lost, stolen, or neutralized. It's a debatable generalization, I know, but I had to get a prospectus in by mid-semester. I hope you'll take a look at my list of examples and counter-examples. All set? How do you make Pegasus go up and down? But maybe you don't want to do all this. .'

"I proposed marriage to her, she cried 'Hooray!' and accepted, we did all that, it worked and then some. Philonoë hadn't mentioned that the Xanthian women's-liberationists were the wild-mare kind; I cocked my spear and came up nicely before a beautiful surf that the hillbillies took hook line and sinker: then a great whinny came from the wall, and in the failing light I saw what looked like a dozen full moons or mad medusa-jellies charging toward me across the flat — the skirts-up tail-first business, paragraph d of the text-within-the-text et cetera. It was Corinth and Tiryns together; I dropped my spear and hit the breakers; we'd've lost the evening if salty Pegasus hadn't whiffed hippomanes on those prevailing southerlies, swooped unbridled from the battlement like a five-legged dragon, and cuckolded two Xanthian haulseiners before he realized that their fleeing wives were only playing horsie.

" 'My daughter's hand and safe passage to Corinth,' Iobates offered me.

" 'Don't be silly,' Philonoë said: 'he can have all of Lycia the way he can have me, just by taking it, whenever he wants to.'

" 'Her plus half the kingdom outright, okay? You can't ask for a better deal than that. Or her plus heirship to the whole operation, whichever you want.'

"I tipped tongue to make the theta of "That's just fine,' but Philonoë spoke faster: 'We'll take both.'

" 'Both!' Iobates whistled for his landlubbers up on the roof; I for Pegasus down on the beach; Philonoë for her prospective father-in-law out in the surf. 'You mean all three, don't you?' the King asked weakly, putting his daughter's hand in mine. 'Enjoy them in good health.' Philonoë kissed him, tossed away the chiton, leaned her head demurely on my arm. Our engagement was declared at once (together with matrilineal-but-patriarchal home rule for the Xanthians, a compromise grudgingly accepted by the shaken mare-cultists), the wedding to be held as soon as Iobates and the Home Defense Council returned from a verification-trip to Mount Chimera. Regrettably, the party was intercepted on their descent through the goat-slopes by a troop of vengeful Amazons, possibly acting on information leaked by the haulseiners: half a dozen high Lycian officials fell in the skirmish; half a dozen more, the King included, were taken captive and, one at a time, given a knife and their choice of relieving themselves therewith of either their lives or their intromittent organs. Of this latter six, the one who took the latter option (Chairman of the H.D.C.) was set free to report — with tears in his eyes, but not, as some vulgar historians have it, in a high voice — that eleven Lycian matrons were dishusbanded; that Philonoë was now orphaned and queened, myself defatherinlawed, uncabineted, and kinged; that the Chimera was to all appearances no more, and my account of its traces correct in all particulars except that no sooty silhouette was on the rock-face, only a sooty outline, beneath which was found (and here delivered to me by the valiant old officer) a sooty scroll sealed with a wax impression of Chimera rampant and inscribed on the outside (in soot) For B from P: Begin in the Middle of the Road of Our Life. It pleased me to conclude that Polyeidus was not dead, only transmogrified. Philonoë taught me how to read and write; I put the scroll away and forgot about it until this morning. Drive me out. We were married and crowned, and lived happily ever after. Drive me out. Exile me from the city. Pegasus was put out to pasture and now can scarcely clear the clover.

"In conclusion, I call your attention to the ambiguity of my official mythic history. I was never formally purified of my guilt in the matter of Glaucus and my brother. My behavior in Tiryns was at best questionable. Of the sinking of Chimarrhus and his Carian pirates, no observers save myself survived. To the rout of the Solymians and Amazons, the only possible witnesses were by me respectively stomped to death and raped-and-deported — I've never even bothered to inquire after that Amazon lance corporal in Corinth, a fact which also attests my apparent indifference to the welfare of my mother and my motherland. Not even that chiton is producible, since Philonoë took it off for keeps. Of the Chimera, no trace of either her existence or her demise except my tracing, which any schoolboy could duplicate on any wall. Of Polyeidus, the only other witness to the monstermachy, no further sign except the tedious text of this lecture. My only demonstrated wonder, the rising tide, I've shown to be more stratagem than miracle. Pegasus, unquestionably a marvel, was midwifed by Cousin Perseus, not by me, and merely lent me by Athene; moreover, he's not what he used to be. But the final proof, if any is needed, of my fraudulent nature is that on the eve of my fortieth birthday, when your typical authentic mythic hero finds himself suddenly fallen from the favor of gods and men, I enjoy the devotion of my wife, the respect of my children, the esteem of my subjects, the admiration of my friends, and the fear of my enemies — all which argues the protection of Olympus.

Throw me out."

Q: "That's an answer?"

A: "Pardon?"

Q: "We're pleased to announce, sir, that in recognition of this brilliant lecture series in particular, and in general appreciation of your patronage of the University and your distinguished contributions to the fields of heroical genetics and automythography, a committee of students, faculty, and administrators of the University of Lycia has voted unanimously to name you to the Iobates Memorial Throne of Applied Mythology, the most coveted chair in the University, newly established and funded by Queen Philonoë. Many happy returns, sir."

I fled to the marsh, heaved my breakfast and lecture-scroll into the spartina grass, remembered the handsome Chimera-seal on the latter, waded in to find and retrieve it from the ebbing tide, couldn't, slogged about till sunset, found then in its place, high and dry at low water, Perseid, which I fetched back dismally to Page One, read, "Good night" "Good night," et cetera, next A.M. fetched down the bridle after breakfast, burped to the horse-barns, was by lackeys boosted et cetera, clucked chucked et cetera: Pegasus flapped down on the tanbark like a fallen stork, here we are. In time Queen Philonoë, sitting pityingly by the paddock, read the Perseid and proposed:

"Let's take a trip! To all the places where you did your famous things? We'll start in Corinth: Eurymede won't believe how the kids have grown! Then Tiryns: I'll tease my sister about her old crush on you and that disagreeable trick with the Bellerophontic letters, which you call Bellerophonic. Cyprian Salamis is out, since the Solymians seem to be acting up again, but we can tour the Carian-Pirate Museum at Pharmacusa and make a state visit to the Amazons at Themiscyra. I maintain a friendly interest in the Women's Liberation Movement, though I've no particular desire to be 'emancipated' myself, as my neglect, since marriage, of intellectual activity, formerly a passion with me, unhappily testifies. Finally, what I guess I'd rather do than anything else in the world besides be embraced by you: we'll stand together on the exact spot where you killed the Chimera! It's disgraceful that I've spent my whole life not a hundred kilometers from that mountain and never once gone up to see your celebrated drawing, now a leading Lycian tourist attraction — one more sad bit of testimony to the way we women are apt to let everything else slide in our preoccupation with child-bearing and — rearing, till we find ourselves grown dull and uninteresting people indeed, just at the time when our husbands and marriages may most need a spot of perking up. We'll come home by way of the beach where I flagged you down and you proposed marriage to me and I accepted — the happiest moment of my nearly twoscore years. And so to bed.

"Now it goes without saying that this is merely a suggestion — both the general idea of a sentimental journey and the specific itinerary I've proposed. Possibly it strikes you as too directly imitative of the Perseid? However, it seems to me that surely no harm could come of such a trip, and perhaps some real good might, since, as you once remarked informally to my Senior Mythology Seminar, the archetypal pattern of mythic adventure is as it is and not otherwise: while we may not comprehend it, we cannot deny it, and heroes will-they nill-they follow it. What perhaps doesn't go without saying is that if in fact your adventure with Anteia, to name only one example, was less innocent than the official version maintains, and you feel it necessary to rehearse your past absolutely, you may depend on me as always to understand, even to honor, your decision: I count my own feelings as nothing beside my love for you and the importance of your career as mythic hero, et cetera."

Bellerophon senses, not for the first time, that this picture of his late lamented, distorted for accuracy like a caricature, is being drawn with a jealous pen, and wonders by whom. Why should, for example, Polyeidus the Seer be jealous of Philonoë? But the hero of this story is no longer confident that Polyeidus is its author. Polyeidus reminds him that Polyeidus never pretended authorship: Polyeidus is the story, more or less, in any case its marks and spaces: the author could be Antoninus Liberalis, for example, Hesiod, Homer, Hyginus, Ovid, Pindar, Plutarch, the Scholiast on the Iliad, Tzetzes, Robert Graves, Edith Hamilton, Lord Raglan, Joseph Campbell, the author of the Perseid, someone imitating that author — anyone, in short, who has ever written or will write about the myth of Bellerophon and Chimera. That's not easy to comprehend, or agreeable, and I'm working toward you, viper, toward you, gnat, and will swat you without fail. Could it be Amazonian Melanippe?

Melanippe, who has copied silently and without comment these many, these innumerable pages, imitates no one, except the honorable line whereof she is the namesake, dating back forever. And she is not not not any kind of author, sculptor, painter, nor even a student of classical mythology: please understand that, Bellerophon! In a word she is not Perseus's Calyxa, not not not, and will not imitate that odd, proud, vulnerable girl. She is at most an Amazon: i.e., she'll lend herself no further than to that imposture.

Imposture! Cute Melanippe was the only true Amazon in a courtful of falsies! See Second Flood, Second Phase!

When she says imposture, what she means of course is that in fact she is — she doesn't know exactly how to say it; even the phrase "human being, female" puts her already into two categories from which her self feels more or less distinct; herself itself puts her into one. In any event, while certainly an Amazon and pleased to be, she feels herself to be by no means comprehended by that epithet. A fringe benefit, she believes, of the Amazonian custom of doing without surnames and assigning to each newborn girl one of a dozen-odd given names is that beneath the apparent confusion which results (there are by her estimate six hundred Melanippes of all ages in Themiscyra at any given tune, who regard one another as sisters, and a similar number of Leaping Myrines, Penthesileas, Hippolytas, et cetera), is an actual clarification of identity. For distinct from her "Melanippe-self," — immortal because impersonal, Melanippe knows a private, uncategorizable self impossible for her ever to confuse with the name Melanippe — as Perseus, she believes, confused himself with the mythical persona Perseus, Bellerophon Bellerophon. .

Bellerophon acknowledges this wise, well-taken point, kisses its taker, but begs her pardon: for reasons to be discovered by Phase Three of the Second Ebb, my identification with "Bellerophon" is clear and systematic policy, not confusion — even as is, was, or imaginably could be the apparent chaos of this tale. Look me in the eyes. You know what I mean.

His mistress Melanippe, official recorder of this portion of his history, interrupts it for the last time in this telling to stand tenderly corrected on that point and to declare to whoever reads these words (of hers) that wherever they may lead and however end, she loves her lover to distraction.

He her ditto! And pernicious Polyeidus — not impossibly because we approach his re-entry — seems less obstructive now of the narrative channel. I feel my tale's tide flowing strong from the ocean of story; the magic feedbag is hung on: my winged half-brother can refly at last!

Aweigh?

Neigh. Slackwatered, back in Lycia, I climbed off foundered Pegasus, looked in the eye my rail-perched wife, said: "Okay, we'll do all that. You pack. I'm going to take a stroll out in the marsh; devour my own soul a bit, et cetera. If I'm not back in five days, go without me."

"Entendu, Green-eyes," Philonoë replied, and kissed my forehead. "Take this along in case you get bored between meals." She returned my cousin's history. "When I was into the myths and legends thing," she went on, "I found a sort of analogue to the shape-shifter motif in our Lycian folklore: the Xanthian muskrat-trappers and mussel-fishermen speak of an Old Man of the Marsh, a tidewater Proteus, more or less, who takes the form of any of the common species of wetland fauna and works mischief with their boats and gear; but if they happen to catch him accidentally in a crayfish-pot or a clam-rake — one chance in a million — he's at their service till the tide turns, et cetera. For generations this was no more than a pleasant little folk-belief, which the folk themselves pretended to believe in only for the sake of their grandchildren or tourists and eager students like myself. Since our marriage, however, reports of the O.M. of the M. have come in more frequently and seriously from the outlying districts, especially from the Aleïan marshes. Now, given the uncanny reappearance yesterday of that missing lecture-scroll and its apparent transformation last evening into this floating opus, I can't help making the obvious association with Polyeidus. I believe you quoted him once to the effect that all shape-shifters are versions of the Old Man of the Sea? It seems at least possible to me that Polyeidus foresaw our discovery of his double-cross of you and Daddy and took advantage of the Chimera episode to turn into that image on the rock, thence into the lecture-scroll, and thence into the dormant tradition of the Old Man of the Marsh, to lie relatively low until the next turn of your career. In sum, and not having seen myself this capital-Pi Pattern you always allude to, I read all the events of the last few days as exciting portents: the scroll, the Perseid, Pegasus's final grounding, the absolute peaking of your obnoxiousness to the children and myself and your tedious, boastfully self-critical harangues to your audiences, all coincident with your passing the midpoint of your life. Everything says it's time — past time! — for another conference with your Advisor, and that Polyeidus is about to turn up. My private conviction is that you're holding him in your hand, but inasmuch as his recent form seems to have been that of the Marsh Man, my intuition is that you're likelier to get through to him if you take the Perseid to the Aleïan swamp and go through the motions of looking through the snails and soft-crabs. Maybe cast the manuscript upon the waters? Remembering further what you've said and resaid about his documentary tendencies, especially that intermediate transformation into the kamara-message in his Corinthian prison cell, I hope you'll be able to persuade him to turn into the Pattern itself, for you to check out, before or after he takes 'human' form for you. Finally, when and if you do confer with him, I trust you'll be at least cognizant of my own skepticism regarding his good faith, whether or not you've come to share it. In any event, since the bring-down of Pegasus has been the principal image of what you're pleased to call your First Ebb, I'm sure we agree that finding out how to get him up again is your first order of business with Polyeidus. In addition, however, I'd be very interested to hear his opinion on the question whether, once the metaphorical tide has turned and you're airborne again, it's okay for you to be sweet to me and the children the way you used to be. That would make me happy enough to die, since, despite all, I love you as much now as I did the night we first went to bed together, and you gently deflowered me, and we slept in each other's arms till sunrise, et. . et cetera. Also give him my regards. 'Bye."

" 'Bye.' I did all that, went slogging out among the Littorinas and Melampuses, the Medusae drifting in like fallen moons; of mosquito, frog, and fiddler-crab I sought counsel, how to open my life's closed circuit into an ascending spiral, like the sand-collars on the beach, like the Moon-shells that I put to my ear for answers — keeping one eye always on the document in hand. I bedded down under a pine on a point of high ground between two creeklets; the sun set and rose a time or two; I considered Philonoë and the course of life, wished I were dead a bit. Hippolochus and Isander hiked out with a box-lunch; I shooed them home but chewed meditatively the chicken, deviled eggs, Greek salad. The marsh ticked, bubbled, soughed, cheeped, hummed, twittered: Polyeidus was in the neighborhood, all right. I put Perseid in the little wine-jug that came with lunch and, full of doubt, let the tide take it. Twelve hours fifty minutes later its like washed back with an odd but plainly Polyeidic letter:

On board the Gadfly, Lake Chautauqua, New York, 14 July 1971

To His Majesty King George III of England

Tidewater Farms, Redman's Neck, Maryland 21612

Your Royal Highness,

On June 22, 1815, in order to establish a new and sounder base of empire, I abdicated the throne of France and withdrew to the port of Rochefort, where two of my frigates — new, fast, well-manned and — gunned — lay ready to run Your Majesty's blockade of the harbour and carry me to America. Captain Ponée of the Méduse planned to engage on the night of July 10 the principal English vessel, H.M.S. Bellerophon, a 74-gunner but old and slow, against which he estimated the Méduse could hold out for two hours while her sister ship, with my party aboard, outran the lesser blockading craft. The plan was audacious but certain of success; reluctant, however, to sacrifice Méduse, I resolved instead like a cunning wrestler to turn my adversary's strength to my advantage; to reach my goal by means of rather than despite Your Majesty's navy; and so 1 addressed to your son the Prince Regent the following:

Isle of Aix, 12 July 1815

In view of the factions that divide my country and of the enmity of the greatest powers in Europe I have brought my political career to a close and am going like Themistocles to seat myself on the hearthstone of the British people. I put myself under the protection of English law and request that Protection of Your Royal Highness, as the most powerful, the most trustworthy, and the most generous of my enemies.

Having sent my aide-de-camp before me with this message and instructions to request from the Prince Regent passports to America, on Bastille Day I put myself and my entourage in the hands of Commander Maitland aboard the Bellerophon and left France. Alas, Your Majesty's own betrayal and confinement on the mischievous charge of insanity should have taught me that my confidence in your son and his ministers was ill-placed, more especially as it is with the Muse of the Past that I have ever gone to school for present direction. When therefore I learned that my destination was to be, not London and Baltimore, but St. Helena, like a derelict student I applied in vain to my old schoolmistress for vindication:

On board the Bellerophon, at Sea

. . I appeal to history. History will say that an enemy who waged war for twenty years against the English people came of his own free will, in his misfortune, to seek asylum under her laws. What more striking proof could he give of his esteem and his trust? But what reply was made in England to such magnanimity? There was a pretence of extending a hospitable hand to that enemy, and when he had yielded himself up in good faith, he was sacrificed.

My maroonment on that desolated rock I need not describe to one so long and even more ignobly gaoled. I, at least, had the consolation that my exile was both temporary and as it were voluntary; I needed no Perseus to save me; I could have escaped at any time, and waited seven years only because that period was needed for me to exploit to best advantage my martyrdom, complete the development of that stage of my political philosophy set down in the Memorial of St. Helena, and execute convincingly the fiction of my death in 1821; also for my brother Joseph in Point Breeze, New Jersey, my officers at Champ d'Asile in the Gulf of Mexico, and my agents in Philadelphia, Baltimore, New Orleans, Bloodsworth Island, and Rio de Janeiro to complete the groundwork for my American operations.

By means I will not here disclose (but which must bear some correspondence to those by which Your Majesty effected his own escape from Windsor), I departed St. Helena in 1822 for my American headquarters — first in a house not far from your own in the Maryland marshes, ultimately in western New York — an area to which my attention had been directed during my First Consulship by Mme de Staël (who owned 23,000 acres of St. Lawrence County) in the days before that person, like Anteia or the wife of Potiphar, turned against me. Here, for the last century-and-a-half, I have directed my operatives in the slow elaboration of my grand strategy, first conceived aboard the Bellerophon, whereof the time has now arrived to commence the execution: a project beside which Jena, Austerlitz, Vim, Marengo, the 18th Brumaire, even the original Revolution, are as our ancient 18-Pounders to an H-bomb, or my old field-glass to the Mount Palomar reflector: I mean the New, the Second Revolution, an utterly novel revolution.

"There will be no innovations in my time," Your Majesty declared to Chancellor Eldon. But the truly revolutionary nature of my project, as examination of the "Bellerophonic" prospectus (en route to you under separate cover) will show, is that, as the first genuinely scientific model of the genre, it will of necessity contain nothing original whatever, but be the quintessence, the absolute type, as it were the Platonic Form expressed.

The plan is audacious but certain of Reset Nothing now is wanting for the immediate implementation of its first phase save sufficient funding for construction of a more versatile computer facility at my Lilydale base, and while such funding is available to me from several sources, the voice of History directs me to Your Royal Highness, as the most powerful, the most trustworthy, and the most generous of my Reset Adversaries, we shook the world; as allies, who could withstand us? What might we not accomplish?

In 1789 Your Majesty "recovered" from the strait-waistcoat of your first "madness," put to rout those intriguing with your son to establish his Regency, and until your second and "final" betrayal by those same intriguers in 1811, enjoyed an unparalleled popularity with your subjects — as did I between Elba and St. Helena. Then let us together, from our Second Exiles, make a Second Return, as more glorious than our First as its coming, to a world impatient to be transfigured, has been longer. To the once-King of the Seas, the once-Monarch of the Shore once again extends his hand. Only grasp it and, companions-in-arms such as this planet has not seen, we shall be Emperours of the World.

N.

Of this obscurely touching epistle, its several familiar names glinting from their dark context like those shepherds' fires I'd seen on my first flight, I asked a few trial questions — Who am I? et cetera — and receiving no reply, sent it out with mixed feelings on the next tide. I hopefully presumed Polyeidus to be following a classic pattern himself, the pattern of graduated approach, as had Athene on my appeals to her (I mean Deliades's and mine) and Iobates in the matter of opening Proetus's letter; as three days had elapsed already of the five I'd bid Philonoë wait, I called after the departing amphora to please do its trick if possible in two more steps rather than, say, four, six, or eight. All that night I swatted bugs, studied stars, listened to my heart beat, wondered what a Bellerophonic prospectus was. My name, from endless repetition, lost its sense. Toward dawn a ship sailed by, unless I dreamed it. By and by the pot-red jug bobbed back, barnacled now and sea-grown as if from long voyaging, et cetera. I watched impassive till it fetched up at my feet, fished out its contents, the script in places run, et cetera.

To: Mr. Todd Andrews, Executive Secretary

Tidewater Foundation, Tower Hall

Marshyhope State University

Redman's Neck, Maryland, 21612

From: Jerome B. Bray

Lilydale, New York, 14752

July 4, 1974

Re: Reapplication for Renewal of Tidewater Foundation Grant for Reconstruction of Lilydale Computer Facility for Second Phase of Composition of Revolutionary Novel NOTES

Sir:

In as much as concepts, including the concepts fiction and necessity, are more or less necessary fictions, fiction is more or less necessary. Butterflies exist in our imaginations, along with existence, imagination, and the rest. Archimedeses, we lever reality by conceiving ourselves apart from its other things, them from one another, the whole from unreality. Thus Art is as natural an artifice as Nature; the truth of fiction is that Fact is fantasy; the made-up story is a model of the world.

Yet the empire of the novel, vaster once than those combined of France and England, is shrunk now to a Luxembourg, a San Marino. Its popular base usurped, fiction has become a pleasure for special tastes, like poetry, archery, churchgoing. What is wanted to restore its ancient dominion is nothing less than a revolution; indeed the Revolution is waiting in the wings, the Second Revolution, and will not stay for the bicentennial of the First, than which it bids to be as more glorious as its coming, to a world impatient to be Reset Now of "science fiction" there is a surfeit; of scientific fiction none. .

Another blank. The sheaf of papers was more bulky than Perseid itself, but though my reading skill was by that time fair enough, and I pored and repored through them, I comprehended most imperfectly what they signified, and despite a number of tantalizing references, could make no use of of what I could make sense. Overall, the document seemed to set forth its author's plan for completing a project that sometimes appeared to be a written work of some heroically unorthodox sort, at other times a political revolution; but interspersed with Bray's description of the project, the history of its first three years, and his prospectus for its completion, were literary polemics, political diatribes, autobiographical anecdotes and complaints, threats to sue a certain fellow-author for plagiarism, and pages of charts, mathematical calculations, diagrams, and notes of every sort. The hero described himself as descended "originally" from Jerome Bonaparte (brother of that Emperor so recurrent in Polyeidus's accidents) and a "Maryland" lady named Betsy Patterson to whom Jerome was briefly married; more immediately from a princess by the name of Ky-You-Ha-Ha Bray who claimed marriage "in the eyes of God and the Iroquois" to Charles Joseph Bonaparte, grandson of Jerome and Betsy, during his tenure as "U.S. Indian Commissioner under Theodore Roosevelt in 1902." There being alive at the time of his writing no "bona-fide Bonapartes" more closely related to the original Napoleon (whose name and honeybee insignia, even whose identity, he seemed sometimes to assume, as in the previous letter), Bray regarded himself as legitimate heir to the throne of "France" — whence his sobriquet "J.B. the Pretender." But for all his noble lineage, Bray's fortunes had been adverse as my own: the impostor rulers of the country France ignored his claims; like Polyeidus he was reduced to teaching, in a post far humbler than my honorary one at the U. of L., and to writing out for public sale a kind of myths called novels. His political enemies conspired to prevent publication of at least two of these latter, entitled The Seeker and The Amateur; worse, when he was visited (as was I by Athene) by a kind of deity — a minor goat-god named Stoker Giles or Giles Stoker — and vouchsafed, not a winged horse, but a sacred scripture called Revised New Syllabus, publication of which should have made him immortal, those same enemies contrived to plagiarize it entire, bring it out under a name with the same initials as its true editor's, and — most insulting of all — not only represent the R.N.S. as "fiction" but allege that Bray's touching foreword, which they pirated verbatim, was also fictitious, the work of a hypothetical author!

Disillusioned, Bray resigned his instructorship and left his family to "become as a kindergartener again," dedicating his energies to the solitary task of making a concordance to the writings of the goat-god George Giles, who is to our Pan as, say, Polyeidus to Proteus. Packing his few belongings into a sort of mechanical Pegasus named V. W. Beetle, he retreated to the Lilydale community of his letterhead, an entire polis of seers and sibyls; there he established himself in a sub-group called Remobilization Farm, supported by the eccentric Maryland millionaire Harrison Mack II, who either also was or at times fancied himself to be "George III, the mad monarch of England." (Noting that Mack II, mad, imagined himself not as George III sane, but as George III mad who in his madness imagined himself Mack II sane, Bray uses our word paradox.) When the group, "dishonored as are all prophets in their own country," later moved to "Canada," Bray stayed on, supported in part by the conscience-stricken author who had basely lent his name to the plagiarism plot, in part by side-efforts of his own as goat-farmer, fudge-maker, and skipper of the Lake Chautauqua excursion boat Gadfly, but principally by George III via Mack II's philanthropic organization, the Tidewater Foundation. As best I could make out, the Five-Year Plan for the ambiguous "Second Revolution" was conceived not by Bray directly but by a second ingenious machine, an automatic Polyeidus called Computer which Bray was using in his scholarly endeavors; it suggested to him one day that he might better vindicate himself to the world and attain his rightful place among its immortals by putting aside the tedious concordance in favor of a Revolutionary Novel — the "scientific fiction" aforementioned, which in Bray's letters to Mack II, perhaps also in his own mind, was either confused with or had aspects of a Novel Revolution.

In "Year N" of the project (ciphered 1971/2), having "called [his] enemy [George III] to [his] aid," Bray used the Tidewater Foundation grant to reconstruct his machine in such a way that, once a number of works by a particular author were fed into it, it could compose hypothetical new works in that author's manner. The results of his first experiments were in themselves more or less inept parodies of the writings of the plagiarist aforementioned, upon whom Bray thus cleverly revenged himself: they bore such titles as The End of the Road Continued; Sot-Weed Redivivus; Son of Giles, or, The Revised New Revised New Syllabus — in Bray's own cryptic words, "novels which mimic the form of the novel, by an author who mimics the role of Reset"; but they demonstrated satisfactorily the machine's potential. Most of the rest of the year Bray spent recuperating from a nervous disorder, the effect of a poisonous gas sprayed about the area by his enemies on the pretext of eliminating lake-flies; nevertheless he seems to have acquired a mistress — "a tough little Amazon" (how my heart leaped at that!) named Merope, whose initial distrust of him as a "White Anglo-Saxon Protestant" must have been overcome by the revolutionary nature of his work and his ardor in such causes as "the fight against DDT" — and to have altered radically his conception of that work itself. For in the Year O (code #1972/3) he began programming his machine to compose, not hypothetical fictions, but the "Complete," the "Final Fiction." Into its maw (more voracious if less deadly than Chimera's) he fed all the 50,000-odd entries in "Thompson's Motif-Index of Folk-Literature" the entire stacks of Lilydale's Marion Skidmore Library plus a reference work called Masterplots, elements of magical mathematics with such names as Golden Ratio and Fibonacci Series, and (I could not tell why; it seemed his mistress's suggestion) a list of everything in the world that came in sevens. Thus equipped, the machine was to analyze the corpus of existing fiction as might an Aristotelian lepidopterist the existing varieties of butterfly, induce the perfect form from its "natural" approximations, and reduce that ideal to a mathematical model, preliminary to composing its verbal embodiment. Such was Bray's genius, his machine began the year by producing such simple diagrams as this schema for the typical rise and fall of dramatic action —

— and ended it with such "perfected" alternatives as the "Right-Triangular Freitag" —

— and the "Golden-Triangular Freitag" —

— which prescribed exactly the relative proportions of exposition, rising action, and denouement, the precise location and pitch of complications and climaxes, the relation of internal to framing narratives, et cetera. Little wonder he describes himself as humming happily as the machine all summer, eager for the first trial print-out in the fall: I myself was as involved by this time in his quest as if it had been my own, and searched vainly, heart-in-mouth, among his technical appendices and catalogues to see whether they might include the Pattern for Heroes, which surely Polyeidus must have plagiarized from him — unless, as seemed ever less implausible, Computer itself was some future version of my seer.

But my disappointment was as nothing beside poor Bray's, in Year T, "the midpoint of [his] life," at that long-awaited print-out. The title, NUMBERS, bid fair enough: its seven capitals, ranged fore and aft of his central initial, reflected promisingly Bray's mathematical preoccupations, his friend Merope's own special contributions (two "ancient" literary-numerological traditions of her tribe, called gematria and notarikon), and "such literary precedents as the fourth book of the Pentateuch, held by the Kabbalists to have been originally a heptateuch, of which one book had disappeared entirely and another been reduced to two verses, Numbers 10:35,36." But alas, as he himself was obliged to acknowledge, he "had not got all the bugs out of [his] machine"; what followed was no masterwork but an alphabetical chaos, a mere prodigious jumble of letters! These quires of nonsense "shocked [Bray] numb" — another sense of the title? To make matters worse, that very evening, thinking to divert him, Merope took him into the parlor of a group of militant radical students drawn to Lilydale by rumors that it was the hot center of a grand revolutionary conspiracy. When at one point in the conversation they brandished spray-guns filled with a chemical with which they planned to "defoliate the Ivy League," Bray in his distracted anguish mistook them for his poisonous enemies and "narrowly escaped" (this part of the narrative is unclear) by means of a horrifying disguise, a venomous barb with which he struck down and temporarily paralyzed "[his] beautiful betrayer," and a mad flight on V. W. Beetle. Merope, upon her recovery, left him to join the revolutionaries in their obscure immediate project of "filling the office water-coolers of certain large corporations with Lake Erie water"; Bray, convinced now that she was responsible for the NUMBERS fiasco, sat for a long while despondent in the rains of his project — for which, shortly after, the Tidewater Foundation withdrew its support. He describes himself as "rudderless as a ship whose T has been crossed"; as "without weather"; as "stung." "Christmas, bah!" he snarls at the celebrants of Lilydale's principal religious festival; at Year Ts end ("July 3, 1974"), in a startling allusion to Medusa, he surveys the debris of his grand ambitions and writes: "My scrambled notes are turned to stone."

But the very next night, while steering the steamboat numbly around the lake, he is vouchsafed, whether by Computer or by V. W. Beetle, an astounding insight. Mourning the loss of Merope, he remembers her comparison of the NUMBERS print-out to the primordial lawbook of her tribe: according to some commentators, this Torah was originally a chaos of scrambled letters, which arranged themselves into words and sentences only as the events described by those sentences came to pass. At the same time he idly notes that notes is an anagram for stone and vice-versa, and is thus ("by this mild gematria") re-reminded of his former mistress. On the occasion of her reading out those thousands of narrative motifs for him to feed in enciphered form to Computer — quite as Polyeidus had fed the magic spells to Chimera — she had remarked: "Hey, they missed one: The Key to the Treasure. This fellow's born into this family where all the men for centuries have worn themselves out looking for this particular Secret Treasure, okay? So when he grows up, instead of chasing all over the world like they did, he reads all the books in the library about Quests and stuff and decides that the Treasure's probably somewhere in his own house — the Maeterlinck L'Oiseau Bleu thing, et cetera. That same night he dreams that there's this big apartment of rooms right in his basement, that he'd never suspected, and for some reason or other, in the dream, this news doesn't especially surprise him. When he wakes up he realizes that there isn't any such apartment, but there is an old toolshed or storage closet down there that he's never looked into, because the door's all blocked with piles of junk left by his ancestors, and he's absolutely certain that's where the Treasure must be. So with no sweat at all he gets further than the others did after years of adventures and dangers and such. But to locate the Treasure's one thing; to get it's something else: when he clears the junk away he finds the door locked like a bank vault. The lock's not jammed or rusty — in fact it's very well lubricated — but it positively can't be opened without the key, even by the best locksmith around. So he ends up having to search all over the world after all, right? But for the key instead of the treasure. He goes through the usual riddles and battles and monsters and clues and false trails and stuff and finally rescues this princess et cetera, and on their wedding night she finds this real pretty key in his own pants pocket. She thinks they ought to let it go at that, but he leaves her, rushes back to his own country and his old house, dashes down to the basement, unlocks the door, and finds the closet empty. Once he's left the girl and her country he can't go back, I forget why, so he throws the key away in despair and lives the rest of his life as a sour old hermit. On his deathbed, thinking about his adventures and his lost girlfriend and all, he sees that the Key to the Treasure was the Treasure, et cetera. It's a piece of male chauvinist phallus-worship, but not a bad story." At once, on his remembering this tale, everything is illumined for Bray in a series of flashes "like the fireworks reflected in Chautauqua Lake": not NUMBERS but NOTES is his novel's true title; 5, not 7, is its correct numerical base; what he'd thought a fiasco was the proper culmination of the first three-fifths of the project: a Five-Year Plan, so he realizes now, at whose "Phi-point" he presently stands ("NOT is to ES as NOTES is to NOT"). Those reams of random letters are a monstrous anagram for the Revolutionary Novel, to unscramble which will require no more than the "reprogramming" of Computer with these new insights.

To test his theory he feeds it a simple impromptu list of "fives": the fingers, toes, senses, and wits of Homo sapiens, the feet of pentametric verse and "Dr. Eliot's shelf of classics," the tones (Computer hiccoughed happily at this word) of pentatonic music, the great books and blessings of "China," the bloods of "Ireland," the nations of "Iroquois" and divisions of "the British Empire," the aforementioned Pentateuch, the days of the week, the vowels of the alphabet, the ages of man, the months of Odysseus's last voyage, the stories framed by "Scheherazade's Tale of the Porter and the Three Ladies of Baghdad," the letters of the word novel (three-fifths of which et cetera), and a few non-serial odds and ends such as quincunx, pentagon, quintile, pentacle, quinquennium, quintuplet, and E-string. These are as nothing beside the hundred-odd "sevens" already in the machine; yet with that meager priming, valiant Computer belches forth two remarkable observations: On the one hand, inasmuch as "character," "plot," and for that matter "content," "subject," and "meaning," are attributes of particular novels, the Revolutionary Novel NOTES is to dispense with all of them in order to transcend the limitations of particularity; like the coded NUMBERS it will represent nothing beyond itself, have no content except its own form, no subject but its own processes. Language itself it will perhaps eschew (in favor of what, is not clear). On the other hand, at its "Phi-point" ("point six one eight et cetera of the total length, as the navel is of the total height of human women") there is to occur a single anecdote, a perfect model-of a text-within-the-text, a microcosm or paradigm of the work as a whole: not (what I anticipated) the "Key to the Treasure" story, but (what fetched me bolt upright in the Spartina alterniflora) "a history of the Greek mythic hero Bellerophon; his attempt to fly on Pegasus to Olympus like Apollo's crew to the Moon; his sting; his free downfall to Earth like ditto's to the U.S.S. Hornet; his wandering alone in the marsh, far from the paths of men, devouring his own Reset."

Never mind that the events in this "quintessential fiction," as Bray called it, were out of order and somewhat fanciful, like those in the lecture-scroll synopsis; they bespoke the presence of Polyeidus, Polyeidus, whose name I called and recalled, without effect. All his original conviction restored, Jerome Bonaparte Bray heroically concludes his appeal to the Executive Secretary of the Tidewater Foundation with a prospectus of the task ahead: In Year E (#1974/5), assuming the Foundation renews its support, he will reconstruct and reprogram Computer to compose Bellerophoniad, which he now describes as "that exquisite stain on the pure nothingness of NOTES; the crucial flaw which perfects my imitation of that imperfect genre the novel, as the artful Schizura unicornis larva mimes not the flawless hickory leaf (never found in fact), but, flawlessly, the flawed and insect-bitten truth of real hickory leaves." In Year S, Computer will make the final print-out of the complete novel; the Second American Revolution will ensue at once upon its publication, and, like the First, trigger others, this time everywhere; J. B. Bray and H. Mack II will reassume their rightful names and thrones — the monarchies at first of France and England respectively, but eventually the emperorships of West and East; all existing stocks of DDT, pyrethrin, rotenone, and similar barbarous poisons will be destroyed, their manufacture prohibited forever; and the world will be restored to a New Golden Age.

I shivered with sympathy for the vision, loftier than my own in its redemption, not of a man, but of mankind — and for pity of the poor misfortunate visionary, his dreams struck down by a hand-scrawled cover-note to the application as lightly as the humming marsh-gnats I swatted with it:

File. Forget. Throw back in the river. No need to prosecute (or reply). T. A.

There was no aiding J. B. B. (as I thought then) across the eons — though he, perhaps, had aided me. Sadly I reposted Bray's prospectus on the tide and spent the buggy night considering my own history and objectives. In the morning, impatient for the next high tide to bring its message, I strolled the beach, sun-dried, sea-salted, and skipped shells across the water. When I rereached my starting point I found in the wrack along the high-tide line where sandfleas jumped not my familiar jug but, amazingly, a clear glass bottle, unlike any I'd ever seen, wreathed in eelgrass full of sand and tiny mussels. Around the outside, in letters raised in the glass itself, a cryptic message: NO DEPOSIT NO RETURN; inside, a folded paper. Trembling, I removed the cap and tipped the bottle down; the note wouldn't pass through the neck. I cast about for a straight twig and fished in the bottle with it, grunting at each near-catch.

"For pity's sake bust it!" cried a small voice from inside. Seizing the neck, I banged the bottle on a mossed and barnacled rock. Not hard enough. My face perspired. On the third swing the glass smashed and the note fell out: half a sheet of coarse ruled stuff, folded thrice. On its top line, when I uncreased it, I found penned in deep red ink:

TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN

On the next-to-bottom:

YOURS TRULY

The lines between were blank, as was the space beneath the complimentary close. In a number of places, owing to the coarseness of the paper, ink spread from the letters in fibrous blots. Heartsick, I flung the blank paper down — whereupon it turned at once into a repellent little person, oddly dressed, with a sty in his eye and a smell of urine and stale cakes.

"I swear," Polyeidus said, surveying himself with a sniff: "I tried your cousin Perseus — thought it would be appropriate? And look what I end up. I should stick to letters. How are things? Never mind; I know."

"My life's a failure," I told him matter-of-factly. "I'm not a mythic hero. I never will be. I'm forty years old already. I'm going to die and be forgotten, like the rest."

"Like your brother?"

"Never mind that. How do I get to be immortal fast?"

Polyeidus squinted. "You sure you trust me? Your wife seemed to think I was out to get you last time around."

"Maybe you were. But you didn't."

"Why should I go on helping you whenever you get stuck? You think it's been fun being Old Man of the Marsh all these years?" He swatted his arm. "Goddamn mosquitoes. And seafood makes me break out."

"Evidently you had no choice," I replied. "Zeus stuck you with the job, right? So it's to your interest to get me constellated like Perseus. Who remembers the helper if the hero doesn't make it?"

"Skip the arguments," Polyeidus said. "I already know how the story ends."

I pressed him urgently for that knowledge.

"Never mind. In this part I advise you, that's enough. You want to be a mythic hero, you follow the Pattern. You want to follow the Pattern, you leave town in the Fourth Quadrant, et cetera. You want to leave town and do the second-cycle thing like Perseus, you got to get Pegasus off the ground. You want Pegasus to fly like before, you're wasting your time with me and Athene." Whether I knew it or not, he declared, riding the winged horse had always involved the goodwill of two goddesses, not one, manifested in the beneficences appropriate to each. Athene's bridle was what reined him in and steered him; but what put him in the sky was Aphrodite's sacred herb.

"Hippomanes!"

"What else? As a young man you didn't need to think of that; what you had to go looking for was the bridle. Now you're all bridle and no hip, and believe me, at your age it's not easy to find."

How so? Didn't it grow by full moonlight at the lip of Aphrodite's well, et cetera?

Polyeidus winked. "Those were the days, eh?"

In the Stygian marsh, then, where Perseus had got his gear? Ought I to shut my eyes and follow my nose, not opening the former till I was obliged to —

"Reset. Don't be naïve; it's right under your nose — which doesn't mean you'll sniff it."

I scrabbled in the reeds and rushes.

"O boy," Polyeidus said. "I tell you what: forget about revisiting the places where you did your tricks, okay? This isn't the Perseid. Instead, look up all the women you've ever loved, in order; that's the sort of thing Aphrodite goes for. Somewhere along the line you'll come across the big H. I envy you. When you get the pattern, stick to it. See you in heaven."

I had more to ask: Once refueled, where ought Pegasus and I to fly? Assuming Corinth to be my first searching-place, ought Philonoë to accompany me there, or should I avoid her until her turn came in the series? For that matter, how many women comprised the series, and which ones? I could think offhand of only two — his daughter Sibyl and my wife — for whom I'd felt a considerable degree of passion for any length of time; but there were others — the Amazon lance corporal, for example — who had attracted me powerfully for a short while, and still others with whom I'd disported for an hour or a weekend. Which counted? But Polyeidus was transformed already from that nasty-looking little person to the precious Pattern —

— which I snatched from the mudflat, folded in the manner of the water-message, and fetched home.

"All aboard," I said to Philonoë, and lining up our children and cabinet ministers on the dock, declared: "No telling when or whether we'll be back. Here's my wedding ring, Laodamia: hang it on a string around your neck. If you boys should start to quarreling over which should usurp the kingdom in my absence, settle the question by seeing who can shoot an arrow through this ring. Heh heh. Got that, ministers?"

"We'll try to be good adolescent children," responded Hippolochus, Isander, and Laodamia in imperfect unison, more their mother's blood than mine, "avoiding the pitfall of rebelliousness for its own sake, to which the incompletely schooled passions of youth naturally incline, and honoring the accumulated experience of our forebears as embodied in cultural traditions and existing institutions, while at the same time always reviewing those traditions and institutions from the fresh perspective of our youth, with an eye, not to their destruction, but to their ongoing development. Have fun."

"Thanks for the ring, Dad," Laodamia added, bussing my cheek.

"If the royal traveling-account doesn't cover your expenses," my chancellor of the exchequer said discreetly, "don't forget that your endowed throne at the University includes an expense fund too. The Lycian economy's in excellent shape, thanks mainly to the combination of a considerable defense industry to protect us from the Carian-Solymian-Amazon conspiracy and little or no actual fighting with them. The tourist business at Mount Chimera National Park doesn't hurt, either. For these plums, a grateful citizenry and affluent ministry thank you. Bon voyage."

A horseshoe wreath of flowers was hung about my neck, another about Pegasus's who drooped between me and weeping Philonoë on the quarterdeck. Off we went. Polyeidus's observations to the contrary notwithstanding, I looked for a tempest to wreck our ship as in that remarkable sentence in Perseid where the t's of the approaching storm trip through the humming n's of inattention and are joined by furious s's to strike the vessel as Perseus struck Andromeda. But the wind held fair through the Sporades and Cyclades, and Philonoë, grieved as she was to leave Lycia and children for the first time, could not be quarreled with. The boat ride, the prospective reunion with her older sister, her excitement at my having secured Pattern and direction from Polyeidus — all kept her sunny as the weather. She praised my stratagem for averting faction between the boys (who, however, she was sure would not only rule in harmonious tandem should any accident befall us, but share the throne with their sister, all three loved one another so), kissed the white indented ring on my finger where the gold one had been for so many years, and removed (but carefully stored) her own wedding band, to give our second honeymoon, as she gaily called it, the air of an elopement. For she was convinced, and found the idea enchanting, that my search for hippomanes must lead ultimately to her and the rejuvenation of our love. Anon we ran up the Saronic Sea and ashore on the famous Isthmus. I said: "Here's where I leave you. The boat will take you back around the point to Tiryns and Anteia."

In a small voice, for she had been eager to meet my mother, she replied: "Well. Okay."

I saddled up. "No saying just when I'll see you again, Philonoë. You've been a very good wife and mother. And queen. Friend, too. I like your taste in music, food, myths. Clothes and furniture, so-so. You're very bright and, of course, extraordinarily gentle-spirited. Also, you've maintained your physical youthfulness fairly well, considering. And are noble-charactered. Let's see. O: I wish I were good at loving people, which it seems I'm not. So. In addition, it's too bad I wasn't a regular king and husband, without this immortality thing. You'd've been a lot happier, and you deserve that. Goodbye."

She wept again, not noisily, and as she couldn't reach my mouth (I was on Pegasus already), kissed the ring-place again, where I held the gold bridle, and disagreed with me as on the night before my birthday, when I'd said I was no hero. My heart was full of love, she declared; more than I wanted to admit: love for her and the children over many pleasant years; love above all for my late twin, who though I seldom mentioned him must have been a most extraordinary person, so driven was I by devotion to his memory.

I might have questioned this surprising observation, but Pegasus, less alert than in younger days, mistook my uneasy hmpf for giddyap and plodded down the gangway. Corinthians wondered as I hoofed into the old hometown. Nothing much was changed: some stores were different; couple of new schoolhouses. The palace seemed smaller, needed paint; shrubbery in the yard was overgrown; one tree we used to climb still stood — I went up it with my eye, limb by limb, a great catalpa rich in caterpillars and long seed-pods which we dried and smoked behind the stables. Another favorite was gone, as was my best-remembered of the outbuildings: a whitewashed combination toolshed/torture-chamber between the woodhouse and the privy in the slaves' quarters, where in my tenth year a laureled, loose-toga'd lady, my music teacher, whom I'd threatened to punish for cracking my knuckles with a ruler, had led me, put aside her five-stringed lyre among the rakes and dusty amphorae, knelt sweating to embrace my knees, and — while bees droned in the lattice as if on an ordinary summer afternoon — purchased clemency at a surprising price set by herself. I checked around: no sign of hippomanes there; anyhow the wench was doubtless dead. Some old dog woofed a warning from the dungheap near our hives, back among the hollyhock and mimosa. Steering clear, I espied a shrunk old Amazon, gone in the chest and toothless, whom I took to be my childhood friend or ancient nurse, I forget which, Hippolyta. I gave her Pegasus to stable, waiting with a smile for her to remember that night on the rooftop and recognize me; but she shuffled him off to a stall with no sign of having noticed even the great white wings. When I asked her, on her return, whether a former lance corporal named Melanippe was still among the stable-hands, she grumbled, "Help nowadays isn't worth a drachma; got to do every blessed thing my own self," and I recognized Mother's voice.

"I can't believe it!" I told Sibyl in the grove that night. "Her health is good, but she's simply shrunk; and her memory's so poor, it's a wonder she can manage the palace, much less the polis. Heh. For a long time she didn't recognize me; one minute she'd say she'd never had any sons, the next minute that they'd been dead for years. Later on, when she told me that she'd established matrilineal descent in Corinth after her menfolk had deserted her, I realized that either she was being bitter or the shock had affected her mind on this particular subject — she seemed clear enough on other matters — so I admitted I'd been a poor son in some respects and apologized for not getting in touch with her for twenty years. I'd assumed your father had explained to her what happened here in the grove that night; he was supposed to let her know about the mythic-hero business, how I had labors to do, et cetera, and would probably come from the east to reclaim the kingdom when I got the right sign, which I haven't yet, unless this hippomanes trip is it, which I wonder. But I gather that that bastard, excuse me, never did any of these things, and I'm really beginning to think that my wife might be right about him, because wow, when I mentioned his name, Mom came out with this wild story, how after the funeral-games for Glaucus and my brother, Polyeidus took her aside, asked her to marry him, and confessed that out of his love for her and his ambition to be king of Corinth he'd promoted the quarrels between her and Glaucus, Glaucus and me, me and my brother, et cetera, and set up the horserace trick so that some or all of us would get killed, and made up this Pattern thing as a way to get me out of town in case I were a mythic hero — though at the same time he claimed I was actually his son, because it hadn't been Poseidon in the form of a horse who'd made love to her in the surf that night, but himself in the form of Poseidon in the form of a horse. Got that? Now Polyeidus, when I picked him up off Mount Chimera that first time, told me she was crazy, and had had him arrested because she was imagining all this stuff; but I swear, Sib, she said it all perfectly calmly, and it was especially convincing that she hadn't even been incredulous or angry when your dad told her these things, just contemptuous, and had him locked up as a vulgar nut rather than as a dangerous traitor and murderer. What she says explains a lot about the things he's done since, too, you know? Like trying to kill me with one hand and hanging onto my coat-tails with the other. Yet Mom's obviously not quite right in the head: she had to admit, for example, considering the above, that she had had sons after all, and that only one of them had been killed along with her husband; but she couldn't keep straight which one of us it was; kept calling me by the wrong name; and pretty soon she was back to her first line: that Belleras was dead to the world and Deliades dead to her (she got it backward), and that this Bellerophon who claimed to be the killer of Belleras (she meant Belleras the Killer) was a total stranger; not a mythic hero but a myth. Well, I was all cut up. I said, 'Don't you recognize my voice, Ma?' and explained that as far as I was concerned, Bellerophon meant 'Bellerus's voice,' you follow me? And wasn't she pleased to know her son Belleras was going to be immortal, et cetera? She looked me in the eye and said sorry, her whole family was dead, kindly leave her alone or she'd call the guards. I thought of mentioning her grandchildren, but since she's never met them, and I left them back in Lycia, I doubted it would help. What a day. It's a pity how people get old. Hi, there. I guess you're pretty excited to see your childhood sweetheart Belleras again, right? Look at this scar where the well-bucket hit me and turned my eyes green; you can see it plainer now my hair's going. How's the sibylling business? Heh."

She squinted at me through the moonlight with glassy eyes and shook her frowsled head. "Belleras. O wow." Sibyl too had changed in twenty years, not apparently for the better. Granted that her vocation as sacred prostitute and prophetess involved considerable orgiastic activity, characteristically cryptic speech, the use of laurel and other mantic drugs, and a certain abandon in costume and coiffure, I saw no good reason why she couldn't come off it a bit with an old friend, especially as my own address to her was so informal and confiding. A far cry from my vision of her in Athene's temple, she was in my estimation not so much disheveled as wrecked, her hair wild, her clothes filthy and torn from the abuse of her current lover, who I was distressed to learn was not even a man, much less a deity or demigod, but the "boss dyke of the horsebarns," according to Sibyl: one of the few of our Amazons who had not drifted south to Tiryns, "where the action's at." At forty, the dream of my adolescence was overbreasted and underwashed, thick-thighed and — waisted, hairy of leg, lip, armpit; even when not officially entranced she swallowed, sniffed, and smoked large doses of her sundry herbals and talked seldom more than half-intelligibly; feast-day or not, she took on all comers to Aphrodite's well, regardless of number, rank, or gender, drew the line at no perversion, masturbated casually between visitors when not comatose. She also burped a lot. On the other hand, she was generous with her scanty means, let all sorts of bums and drifters share her stuffed grape-leaves as well as her pallet, seldom stole from drunks, and gave without charge to needy suppliants oracles neither more nor less enigmatic than those she dispensed to me.

I told her what I was in search of. "One stud's hippomanes is another's saltpeter," she declared. "But the first dose is free. Let's see what you've got under your toga these days."

When it became (relatively) clear that I must make love to her in exchange for a sample of the herb, I reluctantly did so — stallion-fashion at her insistence, "for old time's sake" — though the combination of her appearance and the memory of that old time was anaphrodisiac. Sibyl knew her trade: though I never saw the hippomanes itself, as I came I heard a whinny overhead and saw Pegasus erratically circling the grove, his first real flight in several seasons.

"Hooray!" I cried as he crashed into the creepers.

"Plus ça change," Sibyl incanted dryly. "Bellerus my ass. Again."

Crude as was the invitation, after a spell I managed to remount her briefly, and Pegasus briefly reflew. Overjoyed to have found so quickly what I sought, and eager to lay hold of it for good and learn its use, I stayed with Sibyl the night through, and the next and next, as had Perseus with cowled Medusa on the lakeshore, 11-F-1, but with opposite effect: instead of flying higher and farther each time we coupled, Pegasus rehearsed in four nights his pattern of four times four years, and my own potency diminished as rapidly.

"Dum dee dee," said Sibyl on the fifth, "heroes aren't what they used to be."

"Neither is hippomanes. Don't you have the kind that grew here in the old days?"

"One toke of the good stuff left," she said, tapping an amulet like the one her shifty father used to use. "Secret of my success in the whore and oracle way. When this is gone I'm out of business."

"Can it take me where I want to go, Sib? Where is that, anyway?"

It was a palpable hit, she replied in her fashion, and "would send a man like me skyhigh enough before his downfall to drop him into another world.

"Olympus? Olympus?" I asked excitedly. "That's a swell idea! But do I become immortal just by flying there?"

Sibyl scratched her rump and shrugged. "Not many immortals among my customers, you know? Anyhow, I don't remember saying I was going to make you a present of my last good high. What did you ever do for me?"

I agreed there was nothing for her in my apotheosis except what satisfaction she might derive from having been party to it — a reflected glory, to be sure, but apparently one not to be sneezed at: look how it had driven her father; look how (the late lamented) Deliades, in time past, had thriven in the glow of his twin's predestination; look how she herself, when we three disported in that grove in the bright mid-morning of our lives, had said, "Bellerus can have Corinth the way he has me: by taking it, whenever he wants to."

"Let's have it, Sib," I said.

"Are you kidding?"

"Please?"

She hooted. "You're self-centered enough to be a hero, at least! Don't you give a fart what happens to me? Or to your wife and kids when you go flapping off to heaven? You don't even remember that your mother's name is Eurynome, not Eurymede! And Jesus, it's not as if you're benefiting mankind! What good does it do anybody in this world if you make it to another one?"

"You're the sibyl," I said: "Figuring out things like that is not my line. My business is to be a Mythic Hero, period, and to do it I need the hippomanes in that amulet, so I guess I'll threaten you with this sword. I can show you the Pattern, if you want to see it; it was your dad who drew it up. Now please do the heart-of-gold thing and help your former boyfriend Bellerus become immortal, at whatever sacrifice to yourself. I'll appreciate it. As to Mom's name: some accounts give it as Eurymede, some Eurynome; that's a not-uncommon discrepancy in the case of accessory characters in a myth, for that matter, the hero himself will often have variant names: Deliades, for example, was also called Alcimedes, which I believe means 'big genitals,' and Alcmenes — 'mighty as the moon'? Also Peiren, after the Muses' well on our acropolis. So. I just call her Mom. Please?"

"A hero that says please," Sibyl said, but handed over the amulet with a yawn.

I kissed her (pocked) cheek. "Thanks a lot. I really mean it."

"Sure. Here's an airmail special for your hostess at the next stop. No peeking. Fuck off, now, and leave me to my dykes and winos."

It wasn't exactly Perseus's farewell to Medusa, but I thanked her again, promised to intercede in her behalf with Aphrodite when I got to heaven and delivered the letter (which was addressed simply with an upper-case Alpha), just as I meant to apply gratefully to Athene to do what she could for Eurymede/-nome and Philonoë. "Bye."

Sibyl brushed away the cloud of fruitflies that often as not hovered around her head and said: "Drop dead twice." Whether this most terrible of curses was directed at them or me I chose and will ever choose not to wonder; I broke open the amulet, swung a leg over Pegasus, put it to him, and hung onto the bridle for dear life when he bounced all over the vault of heaven like a mad moth in a closed room. First and last time I was ever airsick; Zeus knows where Sibyl came across that crop. I lost my bearings with my breakfast, commenced hallucinating, wow. Nowhere back in my flying youth did I ever have such a bring-down as when Pegasus now tailspun with a whinny into a lemon orchard just outside some town.

Not Olympus. I woke up bruised, headachy, sore; no sign of Pegasus, much less a cute Calyxa to priestess me back to life with love and egg-lemon soup. I was in the same rocky grove, bleeding mortal blood from half a dozen scrapes; even for the five minutes till I recognized the walls of Tiryns, I could not imagine my crashing place to be otherwhere than Earth. I groaned and, not to be suckered more than one-and-six-tenths times by the same device, tore open Sibyl's note. Pray bring the bearer of this letter to life, read its mean first clause; never mind the second till my Second Ebb. A pale dandy with limp-wristed shortsword and high-fashion armor stepped from behind a tree and lisped: "My name ith Megapentheth the themi-demigod, thon of Queen Ththeneboeia by the demigod Bellerophon and thlayer of the falth mythic hero Pertheuth. I order you to thurrender on pain of death — and thtop tearing up thothe thecret methageth, pleathe."

I groaned again. "Good grief!"

"Yeth, well. You think I'm homothecthual jutht becauthe I have a bad lithp. Let me tell you alpha that while it'th true that thome queenth affect thith impediment, ethpethially in vulgar joketh, in my cathe ath in many otherth the defect ith Congenital and hath nothing to do one way or the other with mathculinity; beta, neither thpeech defecth nor thecthual proclivitith thtrike me ath very rithible ecthept to the coarthetht thenthibilitith. And gamma, while it happenth that I am in fact homoerotic, tho are the warlike Thpartanth, tho there. Quit your thmirking: I may be gay, but I'm awfully handy with thith thyortthword."

Perhaps he was, but as I advanced to inflict on him, fairly or not, the full measure of my frustration, banged-up Pegasus staggered to me from where he'd wandered, favoring his near wing and off hind leg and shaking his head dizzily — a sight to make the fiercest faggot falter. I sprang on as a platoon of Amazons, one behind every bush, stepped forth fully armed to Megapenthes's rescue, but Peg went down under my weight as if back in Lycia.

Remembering what Amazons do to rapists and fearing that my former victim might have Immigrated to Tiryns with her just complaint, I drew my sword and prepared to fall on it rather than do battle with them or be taken alive, neither of which options I had taste for.

"Thtop!" Megapenthes cried, to the Amazon guard as well as to me. "That'th my father Bellerophon! You can tell by the winged horth. Do the Xthanthuth trick!"

Sure enough and woe was me, like the fishermen's wives on the plain of Xanthus all but one of the Amazons spun round, flipped up her chiton and down her tights, mooned meward. The dissenter, a crop-haired youngster, sheathed her sword and stalked off, disgusted. Me too: looking more closely, I doubted they were even real Amazons: their skins were too white; their hams and buttocks too soft-looking, their voices too feminine, their costumes too chic. Even Pegasus took one sniff and lost interest.

"I give up," I announced. "Everything's out of order. Tell King Proetus he's got company. And tell my wife that if this is her idea of a joke, I'm not amused."

Neither were my captors, as they proved after all to be. "Quiet, pig," their leader said, and ordered her company to bind my wrists and lead me by a rope around my neck to Queen Stheneboeia. "No funny stuff," she warned me, "or I'll kick you in the nuts."

"Take it eathy," Megapenthes complained in my behalf. "He'th my father the demigod. Hi, Dad."

"Be damned if I am," I said. "I don't even know anybody named Sthenewhatsername. Besides, semidemi-godhood doesn't happen. Where's Proetus? Let go my tunic, damn you!"

"Our orders are not to geld you unless we're provoked," said the captain of the guard, who though I was convinced now she was no Amazon, was formidable enough. "Frankly, the pleasure will be mine. Come along home now, Prince, and tell your mother we've caught her old boyfriend. We'll show him Proetus on the way."

Megapenthes pouted. Puzzled and distraught, but after all helpless, I was stripped and led into town. Shopkeepers and sidewalk-loiterers, all women, whistled and made coarse remarks about my manly parts. A few men peered with shy curiosity from behind half-drawn window hangings. Some others, young and heavily painted, smirked on the arms of their middle-aged female escorts or feigned embarrassment and hid their faces with their fans.

"Where's Anteia?" I demanded. "What's happened to this town?"

"The Queen will ask the questions," said my captor, thumbing the edge of her blade. "You shut up and listen."

Led into the familiar throne-room, I gasped at a sight straight out of Perseid: an armed (male) palace guard, a conference table of (male) ministers and advisors, various (male) tablewaiters, busboys, attendants, pages, musicians, and chamber-flunkies, three naked (female) dancers on the table, and, at its head, King Proetus himself, all gazed in our direction, frozen in postures of attack or alarm. I'd've thought them cunning statuary, but that their stances (save for that of one dancing girl, who shielded her breasts with one arm, her shame with the other) were not classical, and their eyes, unlike the eyes of our good Greek statues, were pupiled, gazing not on eternity but on the terrible intruder who must once have stood in my place. Poor Proetus had ignored my counsel and been petrified for posterity half off his throne, wiping his mouth with a stone napkin and spilling alabaster wine from his granite glass.

"Perseus was here?" I asked Megapenthes.

"Shut your pig mouth and curtsy fast," said the guard-captain. "Here comes the Queen."

Megapenthes, curtsying beside me (I'd never made that form of obeisance and was obliged to hold his elbow or fall), nodded and whispered: "The year I wath born. Then, a few yearth ago, he came back, like you, and I killed him to prove I wath a themidemigod."

"Nonsense!" The guard redrew her sword, but when I recognized the entering Queen (now about fifty, heavy-set and light-mustached, tricked out in armor and accompanied by the same young Amazon who'd left the scene of my capture), I stood up and cried, "Anteia! What's all this silliness?"

"Call me Stheneboeia," she said imperiously, taking the empty throne beside her stoned late spouse. "Anteia was my slave-name."

"Make them give me my clothes back, Anteia!"

"Not till we've had a look." She inspected me with a disdainful smile. "My my, we do age, don't we?"

"Never mind. Where's Philonoë?"

"Does it matter?"

"Of course it matters; it will always matter! Just because a man deserts a woman, it doesn't follow that he doesn't love her a lot. Especially if he's a — "

"Cut his cock off," she idly instructed the guards. "For impudence. Heh. You can use this famous conference table as a chopping block. Some conferences they used to be!" She permitted them to force me trembling to the table edge, draw out my edgeless tool, and raise their edged before she bade them wait. For the rest of our conversation I remained in this dreadful position. "Stheneboeia," returning to her throne, coldly informed me that not long after my flight from Tiryns twenty years before, she had found herself pregnant; inasmuch as she'd long since ceased to have intercourse with Proetus and was between established lovers at the time, it could be only my "repeated rape" of her in Athene's temple that had inspired her condition. While this "outrage, even by a demigod," still outraged her, and she looked forward to punishing me for it in the fashion of the Amazons, she had nonetheless spared "its issue, the semidemigod Megapenthes," not to offend "his grandfather Poseidon" and the goddess in whose temple he'd been "brutally engendered." But Proetus, "in his sexist pig way," had abused her as if the child were sprung from a love affair rather than a rape, and she was not displeased when Perseus, in fulfillment of his destiny, had come through town with his bride Andromeda and the Gorgon's head not long afterward, broken in on one of her husband's "swinish revels" — from which she'd been fortuitously absent out of disgust for them — and turned the whole court and elite guard to stone when panicked Proetus gave the order to attack.

"Not that Perseus wasn't a pig like all the rest of you," she made clear, "with his swaggering hubris and his baby-doll bride — as if he didn't owe everything to Athene and the poor woman whose head he'd cut off! But as pig heroes go, he was better hung than most, god knows, and had a decent streak. They stayed on a few months; I tried to raise Andromeda's consciousness on the subject of marriage as a sexist institution; we had a little fun à trois; and he let me do whatever I wanted to with the polis — not that he had any right to take it from me, but a pig is a pig."

What she'd done, I learned next, was seize the opportunity of the court's petrifation to install all the ministers' wives in their late husbands' places, train a female palace guard with the help of Amazon military advisors, reverse the genders of every law on the statute books and every custom in the city having to do with relations between the sexes, and convert Tiryns into an absolute matriarchy. That her success (like that of Mother's milder programs in Corinth, I now surmised) was owing to Perseus's benevolent hegemony over all of Argolis had rather rankled her than made her grateful, and when she'd heard he was retracing the course of his earlier adventures, she'd laid a simple trap for him with her son's help. Knowing that no pig chivalrist would challenge a woman, she had arranged for Megapenthes to challenge him, wait until he brandished Medusa's head and Athene's shield, and then counter with a mirrored shield of his own: caught in compounded reflection, Perseus's flesh had turned to stone, the stone into diamonds, the diamonds ultimately into stars, which the women of Tiryns nightly cheered the setting of. Too bad that Medusa herself — and Andromeda, Cassiopeia, and a few others — had had to go too, but one could not make souvlakia without killing lambs.

"That's all preposterous!" I cried. The guard looked to the Queen for leave to lop; was stayed with a head-shake; gave my glans a nasty pinch. Fingernails. I pointed out the discrepancy between this sordid account of Perseus's estellation and the glorious one I'd read in the document upon which I was modeling my own life story.

"My unliberated little house-mouse of a sister told me all about that," Anteia replied. (I could not call her Stheneboeia). "It's a lie. An utter fiction. It says that Pegasus is a constellation in Medusa's custody, for example: so who's the nag you flew in on?" Seeing me taken aback by this consideration, she went on to deride the male-supremist character of the great body of our classic myths, with which she revealed a fairly extensive acquaintance — Philonoë's influence, no doubt — and which she held to be the fabulated record of a bloody overthrow, by male pig patriarchs in ages past, of the original and natural matriarchy of the world. "Mythology is the propaganda of the winners," she declared, adding that the grand myth supported by all those particular mythlets was the myth of heroic maleness — not importantly in the matter of brute strength, where man's unquestionable superiority to woman was as nothing beside the dumb ox's to man, but in such virtues as courage, cunning, and sexual prowess, and most especially in the aspect of divine dispensation to greatness and immortality. "You're a lie!" she fiercely concluded: "We're going to rewrite you!"

Though I shivered for my organ's sake, I could not help remarking that she'd done much rewriting already, of Perseus's history and our own. I don't doubt that my idol had been there: petrified Proetus attested to that, and though the specific event was not recorded in Perseid, I recalled its noble narrator's "ending, by the death of both, the twinly old feud between Acrisius and Proetus," et cetera; moreover, the physics of the estellatory process as Anteia described it was similar to what transpired between the lovers' eyes at that story's climax. But as anyone not blindly hostile to the very concept of herohood must acknowledge, my version had the ring of authentic mythopoeia, hers the clatter of mere scurrilous iconoclasm. For the Pegasus discrepancy I could not account; for the subordinate role of women in mythic and actual history I did not feel particularly accountable; for my own contributions, voluntary and involuntary, to their cumulative exploitation and felt degradation, I was heartily sorry (perhaps she recalled the Aristotelian diagram?); about complex questions of nature versus nurture in the matter of sex and temperament, distinction versus valuation, or customary roles versus personal inclinations, and the rest, I had some curiosity but no firm opinion. But of my vocation as mythic hero and demideity I had no doubt whatever, whatever one might choose to make of it, any more than I had of Megapenthes's disqualification for that calling, and I would pursue it like my skyborne cousin until I was either dead or deathless.

"People's memories improve things, Anteia. Proetus ended up believing he'd fathered Perseus on Danaë. My old tutor Polyeidus claims now that it was himself and not Poseidon who sired me on Eurymede. I never once made love to you, and you know it."

The guard confidently raised her sword.

"Pig rhetoric," Anteia growled. "In Tiryns a man doesn't 'sire a child on a woman'; she conceives it on a man. Position One in this polis is with the man underneath. You admit you've committed the crime of rape?"

"Not on you. On an Amazon lance corporal, twenty years ago, and I hated myself afterward. She was a dead ringer for your young attendant there: astonishing coincidence."

"Put him away," the Queen ordered. "You're not going to the sky, Bellerophon. You're going to Tartarus with your bloody prick stuffed down your lying throat."

"Thorry, Dad," Megapenthes said as they led me out. "Why not 'feth up and be Mom'th thecthual thlave forever? Aunt Philonoë wouldn't mind, if it thaved your life. We're raithing her conthiouthneth."

Anteia told him to be a good boy and stop nattering and go fetch her a glass of Phaedra. I was led down to a dungeon to wait my fate, burdened as much by the thwart of my ambition as by the prospect of torture, mutilation, death. An examination of my cell suggested no way either to escape or to kill myself. I spent a dreadful day under the eyes of my warden, Anteia's attendant, who watched impassively as I sighed, paced the bare room, tried to nap, ate and drank, pissed and shat. Her resemblance to my lance corporal was truly remarkable: cropped dark hair, wiry build, brown skin and eyes, small breasts and buttocks — I wished I weren't about to die, so that I might explore the coincidence undistracted, inquire whether her mother was perhaps an Amazon refugee in Corinth, et cetera. I did indeed ask whether her name was by any chance Melanippe: she neither replied nor turned away, but regarded me steadily while the footfalls of my executioner, as I supposed, came down the stair.

But Anteia merely bid the girl unlock my cell and entered, without visible instruments of emasculation or execution.

"Hi," she said, standing just inside the closed door. Her tone was mild.

"Hello," I answered carefully, and got up from the floor. "Have a seat."

She smiled quickly and came over to the tiny barred window where I stood, but — as the floor was filthy and there was no bench or pallet — declined my invitation. Her breath was vinous. I kept my eyes on her face, trying to assess the situation. She mostly looked down, as if at my flaccid parts.

"You have to understand everything at once," she declared. "I'm not able to talk about anything just now."

"I understand nothing. Where's Philonoë?"

"I didn't want to come down here," she said tersely. "I didn't want to see you again at all, Bellerophon."

"Same here. What's up?"

"You're not helping me," she complained, whipping her head from side to side. "You're not saying any of the right things."

"Megapenthes isn't my son," I said. "And there's no such thing as semidemigods. My only offense was not making love to you when you wanted me to, and that's not against the law except in Themiscyra. Besides, I was trying to get through to Athene, to get my work done, and you kept interrupting. What's more, Athene doesn't like people making love in her temples: look at Medusa. You might be a Gorgon right now if I'd let you seduce me."

"The way you turn away from me," she complained, "you'd think I was a Gorgon."

I explored this attitude. "That's not so, Anteia. In the temple, that first night, you really excited me; I'm sure you saw it. But I was an ambitious young man, trying to become a mythic hero and purify myself at the same time, and worrying about the laws of hospitality. It was just the wrong place and the wrong time. I'm sorry about that."

"Hmp." But she went on, her voice still more injured than belligerent. "My sister worships you. It's criminal the way she takes all your double-standardist crap with a smile. She should kick you in the balls."

I made no reply; began restlessly to wonder about the pattern of incremental revelation in my case, whether it was going to follow sexual intercourse with a succession of women rather than, as in Perseid, successive nights with the same woman, and whether I was obliged to include Anteia in the lot or might proceed directly to Philonoë. But now, her tone gradually hardening, the Queen observed that she was about to enter what the Amazons called Last Quarter: her menses came only infrequently, soon would cease. Her daughters had turned out to be whores and freaks: one was dead of an overdose; the other two, after years of madness and scandalous behavior, had made bad marriages. Running the polls after Proetus's death had been no picnic: like all wealthy widows, she'd been preyed upon by false seers and con-men of every description, until out of anger and desperation she'd founded the matriarchy. There was little in her life that gave her pleasure to recollect; it was a catalogue of abuses at the hands of men, from her coarse father Iobates through her rapist debauché of a husband to her cruel and faithless lovers — none more false than I.

"Megapenthes was the last straw," she concluded bitterly. "When I saw how he was, I knew you were an impostor. But I stuck to the quarter-godhood story, for my own pride's sake. Now you try to take that away from me. Damn you for coming back into my life!"

I despaired of setting right the wrong-headed inconsistencies of her complaint; only repeated, like Melanippe her name and unit, that I was no impostor, and that she and I had never been lovers.

Anteia's manner grew broadly cunning: "We're two of a kind, Bellerophon," she chuckled. "Do you think I believe that nonsense about the Chimera? Even Philonoë admits there's no proof that it wasn't something you and Polyeidus dreamed up: another pig fantasy, killing the imaginary female monster. Nobody ever saw her, even! You conned Iobates the way Polyeidus tried to con your mother — and the worst-conned of all is Philonoë, who's known all along you were a fake and loved you anyhow."

"I did kill the Chimera," I protested, much dismayed. "It was very real, Anteia: I saw the smoke and flame. ."

"Who can't make a little smoke in an old volcano?"

"I felt it bite my lance! I saw it flying in the smoke!"

"Which has wings?" Anteia pressed. "Lion, goat, or snake?"

"It left a perfect imprint on the rock!"

"Which nobody saw but you. Come off it, Bellerophon. Philonoë says you want to improve on your first achievements, like Perseus; I think you never achieved them in the first place. It wasn't this phony Pattern that made you tell the Lycians to throw you out — " She flung at me the Polyeidic paper, confiscated earlier by the palace guard. "It was bad conscience. Your life is a fiction."

Shaken, I shook my head. "I can see how it might seem that way to you. But there's one thing even Philonoë doesn't know about me. ."

"She knows more than you think," Anteia said contemptuously. "When she got word recently from the goatherds on Mount Chimera that the monster was back in business again up in the crater, she killed the story to cover up for you. Why do you suppose she was so anxious to get you out of town?"

"You're lying! You keep contradicting yourself! I did sink the Carian pirates; I did drive off the Solymians and Amazons, and rape that poor lance corporal who had such high ambitions for herself and her people. And I did did did kill the Chimera! The high-tide thing was Philonoë's trick, I admit, but it was a trick the gods favored and helped me with, just as Athene helped me bridle Pegasus. There's proof enough that I'm for real: what about Pegasus?"

Anteia smiled triumphantly. "A fake, just like his master. Philonoë told me your cock-and-bull story about hippomanes: she even believed it! Well, I just happened to have some in the house, and to show her how blind she was to your phoniness I climbed aboard that sexist pig horse this afternoon and fed him my whole bag. Some stud! He keeled over dead."

Sick at heart, helpless to tell what in her harangue were lies, what misapprehensions, what distressing truths, I argued no more, only leaned miserably against the stone wall of my cell, laid hold of my swinging yard, and said: "Real Amazons give a man his choice between death or emasculation. If you're going to do both to me, please kill me first. For your sister's sake, okay?"

"For her chicken-hearted sake," Anteia said, "I'm going to let you both go back to Lycia, as a matter of fact — cock and balls, impostures, and all. On one condition."

I looked at her suspiciously. She smiled.

"Make me pregnant."

"Don't be silly."

"Draw your sword," she said coolly to the Amazon, and to startled me, as she undid her chiton: "Never mind the odds against conceiving at my age, or all those diagrams you insulted me with before, or the fact that you find me unattractive. I'll tell our son the demigod it was your last heroic labor, and you're bloody well going to keep at it till it's accomplished. Down on the floor, please."

I shook my head. "We've had this conversation before, Anteia. A man can't get it up just because he's threatened."

"So we'll play awhile. Do you want Melanippe here for a teaser? I'm not proud."

"You are Melanippe!" I cried to the guard, who stood by as expressionless as ever. "That's a miracle!"

"Fuck or die, Bellerophon," Anteia said. "We'll do it any way you like; you can even be on top. But frig we must."

I repeated, in plain honesty, that I could not, with her, under any circumstances. No personal slight or sexist snobbery intended: the phallus had a will of its own, as imperfectly harmonious with mine as Polyeidus's magic was with his. See how it hung now, and no wonder, when so much hung on it. .

Anteia refastened her armored placket and left the cell. "I want it cut off and broiled for dinner, Melanippe. I'll send down some help." She gave me a final scornful look. "And a little hors d'oeuvre tray."

When she was gone I appealed desperately to the poker-faced young guard, who waited outside for her reinforcements. I could not plead innocent, I declared, to the charge of not having risen to the Queen's original need (though surely there were mitigating circumstances); or of having sacrificed my family to my heroic ambition (but ditto); or of having relegated the women in my life to supportive roles (but how many people of either gender had transcendent callings? and how could Philonoë be said to have been coerced?). Certainly I was guilty of having blindly assaulted the only woman I'd ever met who did have such a calling: her proud, incredible self, not a day older than when, overcome with self-loathing at my late bestiality and later enlightenment, I'd flown her to Corinth and Hippolyta's care. It was true, then, that certain Amazons had not only metamorphic but rejuvenating powers! For all my transgressions against womankind — not least my apparent inability to treasure one of their number above all else in life, as did many so-called sexist pigs — I was contrite, and did not expect absolution. If I was fated not to die, the gods would preserve me willy-nilly; otherwise I had misconstrued myself and had no wish to live, since my heroic vocation, not my life, was what I valued. But before she and the counterfeit Amazons with whom she consorted there in Anteia's travesty of true Amazonia (for I knew authenticity from its opposite, both among those who called themselves Amazons and among the values they espoused) made a gelded corpse of me, I begged leave to say goodbye to (and ask a few questions of) my patient wife, who had loved me better than herself.

"Okay," Melanippe said, and unlocked the door briskly, and strode off in a different direction from the Queen's. When I recovered my wits, I followed, whispering loud thanks; she paused a moment to look back at me, still neutrally, then strode on. I could not assimilate the string of miracles: the coincidence of remeeting her, her apparent forgiveness of my crime against her person and her aspirations, her absolute agelessness. How trim her waist and hips were, shapely her legs (she eschewed the dotted-lozenge tights most Amazons wore), fine her shoulders in that fetching sleeveless chainmail blouse! We wound through corridors and back alleys; the night was still, dark, balmy — but I was goosefleshed in my nakedness and sundry emotions, and my scrotum shrank from its imminent leave-taking.

Turning a corner, we came upon the palace garbage-dump, at sight of which, despite the crying need for silence, a wail of grief escaped me: atop the peels and potsherds lit by the gibbous moon lay poor dead Pegasus, belly-up and wings aspread like a great shot gull, all four legs stuck straight toward the heaven he would never take me to. I swarmed through the crud to hug his neck, curse his poisoner, keen his praises: old soarer, stout companion of my hero-works, high-flown half-brother! Ah, he was not dead, only dying: one white primary-feather wiggled, and I heard a horsy heart throb faintly in my ear.

"Hippomanes!" I hissed to Melanippe, who (horse-lover herself like all Amazons) had put away her sword and rushed with me to check his pulse at the fetlock, peel back one eyelid (the white shone pupilless as a statue's, or a minor moon), and even attempt mouth-to-mouth resuscitation. "Never mind Philonoë, I guess," I guess I said: "we've got to get this horse some real hippomanes before you kill me, or he's a goner!"

Melanippe sat back on her heels, wiped her mouth on her war-scarred forearm, mused a moment, handed me her sword. "I have some on me. All Amazons do, especially in their First Quarter. Why not kill me for it and escape?"

The voice was the same. I hesitated no longer than she'd mused, put my hands behind me. "Nope."

"Rape me and escape?"

I closed my eyes, shook my head.

"Take it from me by force?"

I paused again. "No. I'm done with all that, Melanippe, I'll just say please."

She put down the sword and squinted up at me. "Are you really impotent?"

"Of course not."

"I hate this town," she said, suddenly loquacious. "Every Amazon does. It's not just the misanthropy, which isn't really Amazonian at all. Our prophets say that a woman of Tiryns whose name begins with Alpha will give birth to the greatest lady-killer of all tune: Heracles the Amazonomach. That's why I'm stationed here: my assignment was to check out Megapenthes and kill him if he was really a semidemigod, which I saw he wasn't. I knew what Stheneboeia's real name was, and what her ambitions had always been; if you or any other god or demigod had made her pregnant, I'd have killed her. But I don't think she'll ever conceive now."

I agreed, and informed her further (what I happened conveniently to know from Polyeidus) that the woman's name would be Alcmene ("mighty as the et cetera"), her lover Zeus himself, their tryst some generations yet to come. I hadn't heart to add that their son's bloody rendezvous in Themiscyra — as represented on an Attic black-figured amphiphoreus Polyeidus had once turned into when he was trying for Amphitryon by way of amphigouri back in our schooldays — was already a matter of the history of the future.

"Can you bring Pegasus back to life?" I pleaded.

She grinned. "Sure. You too. Stand back." With a quick modest motion, quite feminine in fact, she took from under her chiton a single tiny leaflet of the magic herb and bent to hold it to the horse's muzzle. Almost involuntarily — I was so close behind her, and moved, and curious — I rested my hands lightly on her hips. She smiled back up at me. "Be ready to jump on."

O, I was — and even as she surely felt it, Pegasus exploded to his feet in a whinnying swirl of feathers. I snatched the bridle, had as much as I could do to hold him down while she scrambled on and helped me get up before her. Time only for the fleetingest thought of Philonoë, sacrificed once more: Melanippe laughed merrily, hugged me about the waist to keep from falling as I dug my bare heels in and we rocketed from the dreck, even seized my grand standing phallus when we cleared Argolis at an altitude of five kilometers, Attica, Euboea — and boldly steered me with it across the black Aegean, under moon and stars too near, it seemed, to envy, toward Scythia, Themiscyra, the warm reedy banks of Thermodon.

There, let's see, she and Bellerophon lived happily ever after. She got the lead out of Pegasus and put it in her lover's Polyeidic pencil. These are her words; this is his life. Her hippomanes is out of sight; they fly three times a day. She will not explain the nature of her immortality (which, however, he infers to have a Lethe-like component, as she remembers few details of the ancient rape, fewer of her girlhood and early exploits in the Fifth Light Cavalry), but he feels bathed in it, younger by a dozen "years" at least, his tide reflooded. Let's see. She's an amazing lover, Melanippe — frisky, uninhibited, imaginative, lean and tight. They wrestle a lot. She likes to bite, usually not so it hurts. Bellerophon's okay too, though that quarter-hour on Anteia's chopping block took its toll on his genital self-confidence. He wonders sometimes how Philonoë and the kids are getting along, also his mother, and old Sibyl, and whatever happened to Polyeidus. But he comforts himself with that business at the end of Perseld about mortal and immortal parts; look it up.

What else. They go into Themiscyra on weekends, to do the restaurants and theaters and museums and such; week-days they spend in a little rented cottage out in the marsh, writing this story. Melanippe's return-from-exile visa, Bellerophon gathers, and his own status as former rapist and former king of their principal former enemy, impose these after all modest restrictions on their movement. Dum dee dee. O yes: he is altogether impressed with life among the Amazons: a truly emancipated people, they no more resemble their caricatures in Tiryns than a male passive-pederast resembles a woman. Lesbianism is not uncommon among them; bisexuality is commoner yet; but the majority are vigorous heterosexuals, and man-haters are rare. Males themselves are welcomed as visitors and treated cordially, though their visits are carefully supervised, and only in exceptional circumstances are they permitted to live and work in the polis. Bellerophon has made notes toward an anthropological treatise on the relations between the Amazons and their counterparts, the all-male society of Gargarensians, which with Melanippe's help he will no doubt write sometime in their timeless future: members of the two societies mate freely, for example, during two months every spring in the wooded mountains along their border, the impregnated Amazons returning home to bear their children; male babies are not killed or emasculated, but nursed lovingly, weaned, and turned over to the Gargarensians. As no one knows her parents (the Amazon collective and indefinite pronouns are feminine), the incest-taboo is foreign to them: when Bellerophon recounted to Melanippe the story of a certain future king of Thebes, she was distressed that he will accidentally kill his father, but thought it only right for him to marry his mother in recompense. Though marriage is forbidden (and very difficult for Amazon schoolteachers to explain to their tittering charges), love between women and men, even "permanent" relationships, are punished only by the stipulation that the lovers relinquish whatever positions they hold in their respective societies and live outside the city, as during mating season — indeed they regard such connections as a kind of permanent mating season, therefore a permanent daftness, and make gently deprecating jokes about the lovers' overappetitiveness, underimaginativeness, and irresponsibility. That mistress of Jerome B. Bray's, by the way, like the ladies of Anteia's court, must have been merely mimicking an Amazon: neither Melanippe nor anyone else hereabouts has ever heard of Torah, Pentateuch, Gematria, and the rest.

Et cetera. All that's another story, of no great concern to the characters in this, which Melanippe will wind up now, seal in an amphora, Bellerophon supposes, and run down the Thermodon on the tide, into the Black Sea, Propontis, Aegean, past fell Heracles's pillars, across Oceanus, et cetera. He likes to imagine it drifting age after age, nudged by great and little fishes, under strange constellations bobbing, bobbing, while the generations fight, sing, love, expire, et cetera. While towns and statues fall, gods come and go, new worlds and tongues swim into light, old perish, stuff like that. Let's see. Then it too must perish, with all things deciphered and undeciphered — no no, scratch that: it mustn't perish, no indeed; it's going to live forever, sure, the voice of Bellerus, the immortal Bellerophon, that's the whole point.

So, well: their love, Bellerophon's and Melanippe's, winds through universal space and time and all; noted music of our tongue, silent visible signs, et cetera; Bellerophon's content; he really is; good night.

2

"Good night is right," Melanippe said when she read Part One. "I can't believe you wrote this mess."

I asked her, hurt, how so; I thought it not half bad, considering.

"Because," she cried. "It's a lie! It's false! It's full of holes! I didn't write any of it; you did, every word. And you make out that I'm all emancipated and no hang-ups and immortal and stuff, and that's crazy. Content my ass! Content is a death-word in my book; if I were Medusa and I asked Perseus if he was happy to spend eternity with me and he said he was content, I'd spit in his eye! Okay, you got the Amazon business pretty straight, but I'm amazed at your picture of me: you know very well I'm not immortal except in that special way I told you about: the 'Melanippe-self' way. I'm on the verge of my Full Moon, and I feel every lunar month of it: just in the time it's taken you to write these pages I've gained ten kilos and aged five 'years.' That very first night in Tiryns, I told you how my nurse Hippolyta in Corinth told me that my mother was a crazy Amazon deaf-mute who killed herself when I was born, and my father a hero on a white horse who'd left her on the stable roof one night. Why pussyfoot around about it? I not only look young enough to be your daughter; just possibly I am your daughter, and if that doesn't bother me, it shouldn't bother you. I never held a grudge against you; I took it for granted you didn't know you'd made my mother pregnant. Even when I learned (from you) that she'd been the hottest prospect in Amazonia until you raped her, and I decided that that was what drove her crazy and made her kill herself, I excused you. But I don't fool myself about my reasons: I'd heard a lot about you in Argolis; I admire heroes and had never met one; I was disgusted with Stheneboeia, and I wanted out of Tiryns. I don't mean anything vulgar like screwing my way to the top (I never let Stheneboeia sleep with me); I really did fall for you, in a hurry. I honor and respect you, as you know. I even love you; you're the gentlest, sweetest lover I ever had, if not the most passionate, and the difference in our ages doesn't matter to me at all except when it takes the edge off your enthusiasm because you've done everything once already. Like getting married and having a family and building a house and buying furniture and stuff. If you want to know the truth, I think we're bogged down more than immortalized: you scribble scribble scribble all day, morning noon and night, and honestly, I believe it must be the greatest thing in the world to be a mythic hero and be immortalized in the story of your life and so forth — I really do appreciate that — but I love activity, you know? Philonoë was more your type — I mean that perfectly kindly. She liked books and myths and needlework and all; I'm used to an active life, and we never do anything! I'd sort of hoped we'd go down to Lycia after you'd got yourself together, not that I'm eager to be a queen, but just so we'd be doing stuff. It drives me crackers that we've got this winged horse right here to take us anywhere in the world, and all we do is spin around the saltmarsh after mealtimes — then back to your scribbling scribbling while I make dinner and twiddle my thumbs. I hate to say this, but I guess I'd be happier with less of a hero and more of a regular man. I don't mean that sarcastically. I'm tired of Amazoning; I'm tired of being a demigod's girlfriend, too, if it means hanging around this cottage till I die. But I'm also tired of bopping about with different lovers; what I want is a plain ordinary groovy husband and ten children, nine of them boys. Call me a cop-out if you want to; I ought to find some swinging young Gargarensian M.D. or lawyer next mating season who'll think I'm the greatest thing that ever happened to him, instead of just the recentest, you know? I might not love him as much, but I bet I'd be happier. I don't want to be around when my hippomanes doesn't work for you any more, Bellerophon; either you'll leave me like the rest or we'll both sit around wishing we were dead. You thought that that Pattern Polyeidus gave you for your Second Flood predicted three women, but by my count I'm the fourth: Sibyl, my mother, Philonoë, and me, right? But you said yourself that everything comes in fives in the Betterophoniad, so maybe you ought to start looking for that next one and get on with your career. Maybe this Chimera has turned into a pretty girl again, like Medusa in the Perseid. You should check and see if she's It, and if she isn't, kill her for real this time and see if that gets you where you want to go. Anyhow I know I'm not It for you, and you know it too, only you don't want to admit it. You're not getting any younger; neither am I: lots of Amazons look younger than they are because we don't count years, and it's the distinctions people acknowledge and condition themselves to look for that usually show, in my opinion. But the more I think about it, the more I'm sure that tonight's full moon is going to end my First Quarter, and you'll think I've aged fourteen years in one night. Will you still say I'm 'frisky and lean and tight' and so forth? I get tired too, you know; dead tired; sometimes I feel Last Quarter! Maybe I shouldn't go on like this; I know it's getting near my period, and that always makes me blue and a little bitchy. But I swear, this isn't immortality: it's suspended animation. Which brings me back to your story: despite all those clever things you have me say in it, the truth is I know zero about writing; but if I were to find this washed up on the beach and read it through, just as a plain story, I'd sure be pissed off that you never tell what happened to Polyeidus and Philonoë and Anteia and your mother and your kids, especially that ring business when you left home; and you don't say what the rest of Sibyl's letter said, or clear up that episode with the Chimera — whether she was real in the first place and whether she's back again — or explain all that fudging about your brother's death, et cetera. You even call it 'Part One,' but I don't see any Part Two. There are nice things in it, sure, a lot of nice things, once you get past that heavy beginning and move along; but if your immortality depends on this piece of writing, you're a dead pigeon."

A bad night. I couldn't speak to explain the difference between lies and myth, which I was but beginning to comprehend myself; how the latter could be so much realer and more important than particular men that perhaps I must cease to be the hero of my own, cease even to exist, cease somehow even to have existed. In fact I couldn't speak at all. Melanippe either, having spoken. Sadly and fiercely we made love: Medusa winked down at us; Pegasus snorted; my darling came as never in her life, sure sign of her passage. Me too. She slept; by full-moon light I wrote Part Two; just before dawn, as Perseus and company sank over Asia Minor, we gently made love again; she gave me the last of her First-Quarter hippomanes, an enormous stash, and bade me go kill Chimera for real.

"Are you sure you're not Polyeidus?" I asked her, and she responded: "Are you sure you're Bellerophon?"

Heh. I wrapped up in the prophet's Pattern the story thus far — which if less than Perseid-perfect was anyhow clear, straightforward, and uncorrupted at that time — hauled up on sleepy Pegasus, slipped him his quid of hip, winged west.

3

Polyeidus here: shape-shifting, general prophecy.

No one who sees entire the scope and variety of the world can rest content with a single form. Gods and seers have such sight; hence our propensity for metamorphosis. Yet Zeus in all his guises is still Zeus, "presiding god of classic Greek mythology"; I in mine only Polyeidus, advisor to, perhaps father of, a minor hero in that same local corpus. Being Old Man of the Marsh was irksome. I grew bored to death with Bellerophon. What Zeus sees I don't know, but I saw (in bits and pieces, to be sure, like runes on my scattered daughter's oak leaves or scrambled bits of satellite photography) the fore and aft of the whole vessel of human history; as I swatted spiders and pulled leeches off me there in the Aleïan flats, I came understandably to wish myself not only out of that particular swamp, but out of Greek myth altogether — that tiresome catalogue of rapes, petty jealousies, power grabs; that marble-columned ghetto of immortals. Why couldn't I turn myself, I wondered, not into another personage-from-the-future (no more than a disquieting anachronism), but into Scheherazade, "Henry Burlingame III," or Napoleon in his own time and place? Recollecting the odd document I'd briefly been on Bellerophon's second try (a happy chance; I don't by any means always read the pages I turn into), I petitioned Zeus himself to give me a hand (promising the customary quid pro quo, to spread his fame in the new world), concentrated as one must on a single image — that verbo-visual pun of a honeybee which appears on Napoleonic flags and, stitched in gold, on the violet pall of the casket that transported his alleged remains from St. Helena back to Paris — and grunted hard.

I woke up at the back door of heaven, an odious large insect, Tabanus atratus perhaps, with noisy wings and wicked mandibles, buzzing about a mound of godshit. Great Zeus (from my perspective) towered over me disdainfully and thundered: "You're a shape-shifter: think of it as transmogrified ambrosia. Heh heh."

Until one is beyond their reach, the Olympians' whims are our directives. I tried; no luck. No matter, either: my newly compound eyes showed me more aspects of the future — mine, Bellerophon's, the world's — than I'd ever seen. I tried to groan; Zeus grinned.

"Now you see it, eh, Heironymous? By imitating perfectly the Pattern of Mythic Heroism, your man Bellerophon has become a perfect imitation of a mythic hero. That sort of thing amuses us. But look again at your famous Pattern. It says Mystery and Tragedy: Mystery in the hero's journey to the other world, his illumination, his transcension of categories, his special dispensation; Tragedy in his return to daily reality, the necessary loss in his translation of the ineffable into sentences and cities, his fall from the favor of gods and men, his exile, and the rest. Now look at Bellerophon's story thus far: it's not Mystery and Tragedy, but confusion and fiasco, d'accord?"

A gadfly (so I was, Heironymous hight, imperfectly magicked once again, into a name without initial in our alphabet) doesn't quibble with the god of gods. I buzzed neutrally, shrugged some shoulders.

"All which is as it should be, in his case," Zeus rumbled on. "But see what's coming up! I've had Amazons in my time; take it from me, that girl Melanippe's hippomanes is the real thing. Look at Bellerophon climbing on that crazy horse, straight for heaven, a kilometer a minute! He's high enough already to see Mystery and Tragedy plain; give him a few more pages and he'll rise above both and be a star boarder here forever! That's the sort of thing we're not amused by, and there'll be no bugging out for you until it's taken care of."

"Mm."

He tested the zigzag edge of a thunderbolt with his thumb. "Pegasus, on the other hand, is my natural nephew and a pretty piece of horseflesh, just what I need for packing these bolts from the Cyclops' smithy when somebody's hubris wants a bit of smiting. But if I shoot down your Bellerophon with one of these babies, there'll be nothing left of the winged horse except a few hundred kilos of viande de cheval bien cuit. You follow me?"

"Mm."

"Okay: if you want an exit visa out of that pile, wait till your boy gets this far and then give Pegasus a bite in the crupper. The rest will take care of itself: new country, new language, new myths — three millennia from here. It's that or eat shit forever. Done?"

I readily M-hmm'd.

"Good. Then you only need to eat it while you wait. Mortals, I swear."

I swore too, in available nasals, as he left, rubbed my wings furiously with two back legs, and looked with all my eyes for ways to turn the letter of his law to my advantage, like a cunning wrestler his adversary's Reset But there were none, and lunchtime came, and I was famished, but dared not leave the sill for better fare. Presently the Queen of Heaven herself came out, under pretext of emptying the royal thundermug. As best one can in mm's and hm's I buzzed for pity.

"Don't worry," Hera said, breathing through her mouth. She set the pot aside and pointed down to Corinth. "See that sexy little white heifer grazing near Nemea? How'd you like to have her for lunch?" It was, I saw, Io, her husband's latest mistress, by him disguised: in my then condition (and by contrast with my doorsill menu) an appetizing morsel, the more so for its relish of revenge on my tormentor. "Bellerophon won't be here for a while yet, as you know," the Queen went on. "I'll cover for you. Go to it."

I did, made a long lunch of squealing Io from Dodona to the sea since named after her, across the Bosphorus ditto, up into the Caucasus (where big Z's buzzards made their lunch of foie Prométhe), back to Colchis, off to Joppa (crashing through Perseid 1-F-5 like a bull through a china shop), as far east as Bactria and India, then west through Arabia Deserta with a caravan of stories picked up along the way, to Ethiopia and down the Nile. At Chemmis, gorged, I let her go, paused to wash my mandibles at a drinking fountain near the empty temple, then sped burping up to Olympus just in time to see, with my left eyes, wrathful Zeus, thunderbolt in hand, sitting on the sill among the shit and shards of the celestial chamberpot, smashed either by himself in anger or by his overtaken wife in fright; and with my right, bold Bellerophon casting away the golden bridle, feeding Pegasus the final leaves of Melanippe's herb, and with the scroll-rolled Pattern for his riding crop, whipping the grand beast up those thin last leagues to heaven.

"Just in time!" I tried to call to both. "Let me give you a little goose there, Bell-boy! Heh! Sorry about Miss Io, Zeus, sir: your missus had me sort of cornered. But I saw to it she got to Egypt safely in time to have your child; she's in a nice little spiral temple down in Chemmis: pretty pictures on the wall, et cetera. I didn't bite her hard; just a tickle, really; not the way I'm going to bite this horse here, to put him over the old finish-line for you! Heh. Here goes!"

I dived in and gave Pegasus a good one under the tail, bleh, as Zeus raised his bolt and Bellerophon his Pattern-scroll. The god stayed his hand when the winged horse bucked and whinnied; not so the hero, who in the instant before he pitched from that seat forever let me have it, then let go all. Pegasus bolted to his final ditto'd master; I changed, postswatly, into a fading copy of the Greek seer Polyeidus, falling with his fallen son to death. Zeus laughed down after us (the drop from heaven takes a dizzy while):

"A hundred eyes, a hundred blind-spots, Polyeidus! We gods can't break our vows, but we can make you wish we could. One way or another, in that new world you're dropping in on, you'll be Old Man of the Marsh for keeps. And unless your son forgives the tricks you've played on him, you'll always be some version or other of his story. God knows why. Heh. 'Bye."

Spread-eagled, Bellerophon sailed over and called: "When he said I was your son, you sonofabitch, which twin did he take me for?"

I was too busy dying and plotting to answer directly: dying forever to the form of Polyeidus; plotting to my best interest this dénouement — how I might begin by becoming the terminal interview which follows; grow thence into all of Part Three and ultimately permeate (at least when the moon was on my side) the whole Bellerophoniad; grow narratively on in death like hair and fingernails until I comprehended the entire Bellerophonic corpus and related literature; con my son the imitation hero, as Admetus conned his wife Alcestis, into taking my place, or part of it, in death's company by becoming his own life story, the myth of Bellerophon. One way or another, if I was obliged to be Old Man of the Marsh, I would make the world my oyster. With an expiratory grunt I changed, for openers, into these fluttering final pages, written (so help me Muse) in "American":

Polyeidus: Ah so. As you see, our stars are falling fast. In the manner of the Perseid, mutatis mutandis, would you care to end this tale by answering freely as we fall five questions for posterity?

Bellerophon: Perseid may be your model; I have none any longer. That's one for you. My first is the last I asked before you changed format: when Zeus called me your son, whom did he take me for?

P.: Bellerophon, of course. Who else? N.Q. When you swatted me with the Pattern, you fulfilled the prophecy first laid on me as I humped your mother in the surf: that I would die by my son's hand unless he agreed to take my place, et cetera. The usual. And I scarcely expect you to do that, even though you'll die anyway when you make your hard landing a few questions from now, whereas a paginated form like mine can expect a certain low-impact afterlife. So what've you been up to since you left Themiscyra at the end of Part Two? Please speak directly into the page.

B.: A funny thing happened on the way to Mount Chimera. Melanippe's hip sent me higher than I've ever been, and I saw the ends of all the supporting characters in my story. I saw my mother in Corinth, bitter and senile, dying at the graves of Glaucus and Bellerus, cursing Poseidon for not taking better care of his by-blows and Bellerophon for not taking better care of her. There was your daughter, out of her head altogether, wrecked by the goddess who should've honored her: in a mantic stupor in the grove she was crying "Bellerus! Bellerus!" while her lover sold her frowsy favors to frightened fourteen-year-olds at a drachma per. Worse yet, that lover, Sibyl's last, was Melanippe, the first Melanippe: not a suicide after all, but a gross and bitter bull-dyke who had taken Hippolyta's name and place to raise her daughter, Melanippe Two. Whether I was that daughter's father, my second sight was kindly blind to: once I'd deflowered Melanippe mere and nipped the bud of her career, she'd turned promiscuous as Sibyl, but out of self-spite: a predator with heart of flint. Over in Tiryns I saw her bitter bullish like, Anteia, forcing docile girls into tribadism while Megapenthes plotted coup d'état and double-theta'd sodomocracy. I saw Philonoë: heartbroken but gentle still after brief romances with other men and suicide, she had withdrawn to a lonely Lycian retreat-house to live out her days in bookish solitude and infrequent masturbation. Of the high-altitude kisses I showered on her head, she was as mercifully unaware as of the wreckage of our children and our state. Those former were grown not into semidemideities (an impossibility) but into commonplace adults, grasping, doomed. The boys, per program, had taken the ring-bait, quarreled over whose child should be shot through it to determine my successor, and been finessed by their clever sister, who volunteered her own child Sarpedon; this was her son by a high-school dropout who'd seduced her in the guise of Zeus-disguised-as-a-high-school-dropout, oldest trick in the book: it duped her brothers into relinquishing their claims in her favor as easily as it had her into relinquishing her favors to the dropout's claims. Zeus himself, unduped and unamused, then commissioned Artemis to cut my dear daughter down for this imposture, and Ares (count on Z for overkill) to dispatch my sons in the ten-millionth bloody skirmish of our endless war with the Carians and Solymians. Dead, dead, dead. The kingdom, then, was ruled by greedy viceroys, my former students, in the infancy of Sarpedon, who will himself grow up to die on the losing side in the Trojan War.

This latter vision was my first clear evidence that I was flying now above mere panorama, into prescience: fearfully therefore I turned my eyes to the banks of the Thermodon, and beheld the final horror: straightforward as always, my dauntless darling had put me through the ordeal of Part Two by way of testing her conviction that it was not her mortal self I loved, so much as some dream of immortality of which I fancied her the cute incorporation; not one to toy with either life or death, upon my flight she'd washed face and hands, brushed teeth, combed hair, made up our bed, lain down upon it, and passed the time by singing to herself as many Amazon campfire songs as she could remember from her girlhood until, as she'd expected, her first Full-Moon menstrual flow commenced, about midafternoon; at that evidence that she was after all not pregnant by me, without expression or hesitation she drove her knife hilt-deep into her perfect little left brown breast. Whatever blinders I still steered with thereupon fell from me, and I saw the chimera of my life. By imitating perfectly the Pattern of Mythic Heroism, I'd become, not a mythic hero, but a perfect Reset I was no Perseus, my tale no Perseid — even had we been, I and it, so what? Not mortal me, but immortality, was the myth.

P.: That asks and answers your second question.

B.: Who cares?

P.: Come come. You've wrecked a certain number of good women, my daughter by who knows whom included, and you're heroically chastened by the wreckage — small comfort to them! But you admit you're new at second sight, which at its clearest is foggier than first: what if I told you that your view was strictly from your viewpoint? That in her "mortal part" at least (per Perseid), Philonoë remembers you with much affection and some gentle amusement as her first real lover, regrets (but no longer bitterly) your deserting her for Melanippe, but has come rather to enjoy and even prefer her more or less solitary life? And that while Melanippe, a more demonstrative young woman, did indeed stick herself with the dagger, she was saved from Hades by a passing Gargarensian, a handsome young visiting surgeon of promise who heard her cries, rushed to the rescue, took her with him on a tour of the Mediterranean to cheer her up, subsequently married her, and made her the happy mother of ten beautiful children, nine of them sons?

B.: I'd like it fine, god damn you. So much for your third, fourth, and fifth. Is it true?

P.: Who knows? All I see when I look in that direction is their (relatively) immortal part, this endless story of yours. So let's not count rhetorical questions. What about Chimera, my greatest invention? I hope you don't think you've killed an image like that with the line "I saw the chimera of my life."

B.: Not at all. What I saw was that it's not a great invention: there's nothing original in it; it neither hurt nor helped anyone; it's preposterous, not monstrous, and compared to Medusa or the Sphinx, for example, even its metaphoric power is slight. That's why, up there in the crater, it cooperated in its own destruction by melting the lead on my lance-point: its death was the only mythopoeic thing about it. Needless to say, the moment I understood that was the moment I really killed Chimera. No need to go to Lycia then; I changed course, chucked Athene's bridle, dug in my heels, and made straight for Olympus.

P.: Whatever for, your dying father asks obligingly, inasmuch as you'd already decided that immortality is a bad trip? Megalomania? Ambitious affirmation of the absurd?

B.: Certainly I was ambitious, all along; but to call ambition on that epic scale mere vanity is a double error. For while it's true that Bellerophon's aspiration to immortality was without social relevance, for example, and thoroughly elitist — in fact, of benefit to no one but himself — it should be observed that it didn't glorify "him," either, since the name he's called by is not his actual name, but a fictitious one. His fame, then, such as it was, is, and might have been, is as it were anonymous. Moreover, he does not, like an exiled tyrant or absconder, enjoy his fortune incognito; even had his crazy flight succeeded, he'd not have known it: there'd be another constellation in the sky, bearing the name he'd assumed — but Perseid to the contrary notwithstanding, it's hardly to be imagined that those patterns we call "Perseus," "Medusa," "Pegasus" (There he is! Sweet steed, fly on, with better riders than myself!) are aware of their existences, any more than are their lettered counterparts on the page. Or, if by some mystery they are, that they enjoy their fixed, frigidified careers. Got that, Dad? For you are my dad — old pard, old buck, old worm! — I don't question that: only Polyeidus's son could have mimed a life so well, so long.

P.: So. Well. So long is right. And so much for Poseidon's name on your birth certificate.

B.: False letters spell out my life from first to last. But not Bellerus's.

P.: Here it comes. You down there: wake up for the anagnoresis!

B.: What marsh did you say we're falling into? Do the people speak my language?

P.: Forget it. The present tenants are red-skinned, speak Algonkian, and have a mythology but no literature. At the rate we're falling, by the time we land they'll be white and black, speak more or less in English, and have a literature (which no one reads) but no mythology. On with the story: even in Greek it's muddy enough, but I've known what's coming for two hundred pages. In any language, it's Sibyl's Letter's Second Clause.

B.: Right. POSEIDON'S SON HE ISN'T. I'm not star-bound Bellerus, but starstruck Deliades. Bellerus died in the grove that night, in my place, while I humped (half-sister!) Sibyl in holy his. I was his mortal killer; therefore I became his immortal voice: Deliades I buried in Bellerophon, to live out in selfless counterfeit, from that hour to this, my brother's demigoddish life. It's not my story; never was. I never killed Chimarrhus or Chimera, or rode the winged horse, or slept with Philonoë, or laid my head between Melanippe's thighs: the voice that spoke to them all those nights was Bellerus's voice. And the story it tells isn't a lie, but something larger than fact. .

P.: In a word, a myth. Philonoë guessed all this, you know, back in First-Ebb days. And Melanippe long before she wrote the horse-race episode. As for me, it goes without saying that this and everything else you say goes without saying? I knew it before it was true, and if I'm astonished now it's because seers see past and future but not et cetera — everything takes your true prophet by surprise. So, you blew your big scene. That's no Elysium rushing up at us: it's Dorchester County, Maryland, Upsilon Sigma Alpha, and will be for several generations yet. When you hit it, you'll go deeper underground than your brother.

B.: How many questions left?

P.: One for me, two for you. Now that I've answered you, one apiece.

B.: Can you turn me into this story, Polyeidus? Let me be Bellerus's voice forever, an immortal Bellerophoniad.

P.: Out of the question.

B.: It's what you've tried to trick me into for half a dozen pages! I'm offering to take your place! Don't tell me it's impossible!

P.: Quite impossible — in the naïve way you mean. I can't turn anybody but myself into anything.

B.: Then I'm dead. Good night, Bellerus. Good night, all.

P.: What I might manage — not because I owe you any favors, but for reasons of my own — is to turn myself from this interview into you-in-Bellerophoniad-form: a certain number of printed pages in a language not untouched by Greek, to be read by a limited number of "Americans," not all of whom will finish or enjoy them. Regrettably, I'll have to have a certain role in the thing also — not beating Zeus out on that. But since I'll be there as an aspect of you, so to speak, I'll be free enough to operate in a few aspects of my own: "Harold Bray," perhaps, or his nonfictional counterpart, the legitimate heir to the throne of France and impresario of the Second Revolution, an utterly novel Reset No Perseid, I grant you, but it's the best I can do in what tune we have left. That tidewater's coming up fast.

B.: I don't like the sound of it. I'd rather fall into a thornbush; become a blind lame vatic figure; avoid the paths of men; float upon the marshy tide forever, reciting my Reset

P.: Stop gnashing your teeth. Take it or leave it.

B.: I'll take it.

P.: Done. Heh. Any last words to the world at large? Quickly.

B.: I hate this, World! It's not at all what I had in mind for Bellerophon. It's a beastly fiction, ill-proportioned, full of longueurs, lumps, lacunae, a kind of monstrous mixed metaphor —

P.: Five more.

B.: It's no Bellerophoniad. It's a

THE END