The Beastly Bride

THE CHILDREN OF CADMUS Ellen Kushner

The daughters of Cadmus have a duty to their father’s house, and so do all of the sons, as well. And thus it is that we can never be truly happy, my brother and I.

For he loves the night, the strange time when all men are asleep. He loves the swoop and glitter of the stars that the gods have set in the heavens, loves to watch the heroes and the monsters cartwheel their way across the sky until rosy-fingered Aurora strokes them away before Apollo’s chariot. Only then will he fall into bed, my big brother, sprawled out on his couch half the day until the sun has passed the zenith of the heavens, when he comes lumbering out of his chamber, blinking and rubbing his eyes, looking for something to eat. I can usually find him something.

It’s a wonder my brother and I ever meet at all. For I love the cold gray dawn, when the grass is still wet with dew. I love to be up before everyone except the household slaves, and the keepers of the hounds, readying for the hunt, which I love best of all. The chase through the woods in the waking dawn, the dappled trees and morning shadows, pursuing the sweet, swift animals that we love even as we seek to break them and bring them to their knees to furnish our tables and our bellies and our feasts. I love to run with my spear and my hounds in my short chiton, legs free and arms free.

But those days are finished for me. I am Creusa, the daughter of Autonoë, the daughter of Cadmus, king of Thebes. I am of an age to be married, now.

You will have heard of our grandfather, Cadmus: he who sowed the serpent’s teeth, and brought forth a race of warriors to build our fair city of Thebes. He did not do all this alone. The god Phoebus Apollo told Cadmus where to find his fate, and Pallas Athena herself stood by him as he scattered the dragon’s teeth across the fields of Boeotia. The gods love our grandfather Cadmus.

And we, in return, must love and honor them.

And so I do. I make my sacrifices to Zeus the Thunderer, to Hera of the Hearth, and to red Mars, fierce in War, who is father to my grandmother Harmonia, whose mother is sea-born Aphrodite.

But it is Artemis, virgin goddess of the hunt, I love. And that is my despair.

My sister Creusa is quite mad. I said as much to my tutor, Chiron the Centaur, and he chided me, as he so often does. He is always whisking his tail at me — it stings but does not really hurt. And I would take ten times that sting to remain his pupil. For while Cadmus and my parents think the great centaur is teaching me hunting, we left that behind long ago. Chiron is a noble archer, true, and I’m not a bad shot thanks to him. But Chiron is a master of the art of healing and knows the movements of the stars.

The stars tell stories. Some of the stars are our own people, taken from the pains of this life up into the heavens. The stars make patterns, too, and surely it all means something. Here on earth, there is pain and blood and strife. But the stars move in an orderly way, pacing out a huge dance across time that no man has seen the end of.

If I watch long enough, I think I might learn.

As it is, I am often forced out of my bed into a cold and drippy day and expected to run about, shouting, following smelly dogs howling to wake the dead. They are perfectly nice dogs, ordinarily, but they become monsters when we hunt. And so I run after poor wild beasts that never did me any harm, to open great wounds in their sides with my spear or my arrows — if the dogs’ teeth don’t get to them first — to rip open their sleek and beautiful hides and ruin them forever, letting out their life’s blood in the process while the poor animals writhe and froth trying to escape.

When I leave this earth, I would not mind becoming a star, or even a full constellation. People will look up at me and tell my story. And I will become part of the great pattern, the great dance.

Chiron says that I should not mock my sister’s dreams. He says that our dreams are our truth, even if we cannot achieve them. He says that I should help my sister, if I can, to bear whatever fate the gods choose for her. I’ll try.

I cannot bear it. I cannot bear to think, because I am a girl, almost a woman now, that my fate will be to become the wife of any man. I wish to follow the goddess. I wish to run with her in the hunt by day, and lie with her and her nymphs by night.

Instead, a man’s hands on me? A man’s mouth on my lips, a man’s body on mine?

The only rough hair and rough skin I want anywhere near me is that of my kill. Rather than yield to a man’s touch, I would become a lion, a boar, a hare, or a deer, myself.

Such transformations are not unheard of. The stories abound of men and women turned to animals, to trees or flowers or even stars, in order to escape a more terrible fate. The gods can be cruel, but they have always helped our house.

Whom shall I pray to, then?

To Phoebus Apollo, who desired and chased the fair nymph Daphne, she who ran from him — as I would run, even from a god — screaming for help? Just as his hands reached her, Daphne turned into a laurel tree. Her toes became roots, her skin bark, her hair leaves, leaving the god unsatisfied. I don’t want to be a tree. I want to run, and run free.

To the great Zeus, lover of the beautiful mortal Io? The god was powerless when his angry wife, Hera, turned pretty Io into a cow, afflicted by flies and unable to speak her torment.

No help from the gods, then, and what goddess would hear my prayers? Hera, goddess of wives and hearths, wants me for her own. Wise Athena would mock me. And Aphrodite. her kind of rapturous love is not for me. Only Artemis the Hunter can save me.

All my life I have prayed to her. But if she has heard me, she does not care.

Is it because of my impiety? Do I love the goddess Artemis too much? There is a marble statue in her temple, with high round breasts and long white thighs. Once, when I was alone there, I reached out and touched them, running my fingers along all that whiteness, cool as stone but smooth as perfect flesh. Nobody saw me, I’m sure. I dream of touching them again. But I’m afraid of how even the thought makes me feel, all hungry with a hunger there is no food for, and aching like pain, only strangely sweet. All I have to do is think about touching her, to feel that way again. I don’t think there’s even a name for how I feel. It fills me utterly, and I am almost powerless before it. So I dare to call it love. Maybe this is why Zeus could not leave pretty Io alone, though it meant her doom. Or why Apollo ran after the screaming Daphne.

Maybe the goddess does not want such love from me. But it is hers, all the same.

My sister grows pale. It is terrible to see. She weeps and spins, and burns herbs at the altar of Artemis. Now Creusa wants to build her own special altar to the goddess. Yesterday she begged me to bring her horns from a mighty stag, the finest in the forest.

I’ll do a lot for poor Creusa. So I suppose I’ll take a good sharp saw, and hack away at the next deer we kill. It’s not really the season for the great-horned stags. The older ones are cunning in the hunt, and the young ones not yet grown. But for my sister, I will make a stag appear, if I can. If it will make her happy.

The suitors are coming. Four from the north, three from the south, and two from the east. They will expect hospitality befitting the House of Cadmus. I must be here to welcome them when they come.

Or I must flee.

What will I do, oh, what will I do? Choose the least horrible of them, and submit?

Or could I leave the safety of our city and of my mother’s house, to live outcast and alone in some wasteland without people? Live all by myself in a cave by a spring, devoting my life and my virginity to her who hunts by day and shines by night? My hair would grow tangled, my clothing the skins of the beasts I caught. I would drink only water, eat the flesh of my prey. The only fire I’d ever see would be my own, the only voice the voices of my dogs, and of my kills. Can I do it?

I found Creusa with a knife in her hand, lifting her blade to her own neck.

“Stop!” My hand is so much bigger than hers, now. It was not hard to circle hand and knife in my grasp. “Sister, I beg you! No matter how hard this life is, it is better than wandering with the starless shades.”

“You big star-gazing ox,” she said, but she wasn’t angry. “I was just cutting my hair.”

She wore a short chiton, and her cloak was on the chest next to her, even though the weather is very hot.

I saw it then. “You’re going?”

“Yes,” she whispered. “It is my fate.”

“A nameless, homeless wanderer? Oh, Creusa, no!”

“What else can I do? Grandfather will not let me dedicate myself to Artemis and live chaste. While I am under his roof, I must obey his will.” She patted my hand, releasing her knife into it. “And so I’m leaving. I will seek the goddess all my life, and maybe she will take pity on me and let me find her.”

“And if she doesn’t? Creusa, what then?”

Her eyes filled with tears. “I don’t know. I don’t know what else to do.”

I took both her hands. They were so cold. I looked hard into her eyes, which shone with unshed stars. “Don’t go. Not yet. Once you have gone, you can never come back. There’s still time.”

“Time for what?”

“I’ll think of something,” I promised her. “I’ll watch the skies. There is a pattern, there is a dance. ”

She shook her head. She doesn’t believe the night skies hold any answers. But she put her knife down, pinned up her hair again, and folded up her cloak.

What a fool I’ve been! The answer to my escape has been before me all along.

As I sat spinning under the great tree in the courtyard, in he walked, grandfather’s old friend, gray and gnarled as the staff he stretches before him to find his way.

The seer Tiresias.

I flung myself at his feet, kneeling in supplication, clutching the hem of his robe. I would not rise, but made the old seer bend down to hear my whispered plea: “Prophet, blinded by the gods for what you saw — I beg you, tell me the secret of your transformation!”

“Rise,” he said, “and sit with me. Does the daughter of the House of Cadmus wish to become a prophet? Or blind, or old? Those last two may be easily achieved, given enough years and patience.”

“I don’t have years!”

“Nor patience, either, it would seem.”

I picked up my spindle and put it down. But then I placed it in his hands. “Remember this?” I said. “Remember when you wore a woman’s body as your own?”

I had always doubted the tale. Tiresias is so dry, so unlovely, so gnarled and hairy and male. But when he took the spindle from me, he naturally maintained the tension and the twist with a sureness no man’s hands could ever know.

“It’s true,” I marveled. “You were a woman seven years, before you came again to your manhood.”

“But it is not my manhood you seek, little princess.”

“Yes, it is!” The prophet eased away from me in his seat uncomfortably, and I laughed. “Not that. Never that.”

Tiresias shrugged, and laughed himself. “What, then?”

“I wish to leave my father’s house.”

“And so you shall, when you are wed.”

“I do not wish to marry. I wish to follow the goddess.”

“Have you asked your family’s permission?”

“They only laugh at me. They say a girl never knows her own mind.” The old man nodded. “But when I say I do know, they tell me a princess must wed, to carry on her noble line.”

“You think they are wrong?”

I hung my head, ashamed of what I must ask. “Is it possible, Seer, for someone to be born into the wrong body?” I waited, tense, to see if he would pull away. But he turned the spindle in his hands. He did not spin.

“Go on.”

I leaned closer, whispered in the grizzled hair that fell over his ears. “I don’t want what women want. I don’t want a husband, or children, or a house. I want — what I want is what men want!” There. I had said it. My heart hammered, and my cheeks were hot. But I felt strangely glad, and lighter, now. The words came tumbling out of me: “I want to run free, to hunt, to kill, to glory in my fleetness and my strength! If I can’t have them as a woman, then let me have them as a man!” Hardly knowing what I was doing, I grasped his old shoulders between my hands. “Tell me your secret! Tell me what you did, how you changed your shape, and how I may do it, too!”

Tiresias did not move. But his blind eyes turned up to mine. “And if I do? What is it you hunt, Child of Cadmus? What is your true desire?”

“Artemis,” I whispered, her very name a prayer I breathed into his face. “I would seek Artemis of the Hunt.”

I don’t know where he found the strength to push me away. It was as if another touched me, threw me backward to the ground. Tiresias towered above me, his staff raised, a howl like an animal’s coming from his throat: “Woe! Woe to the House of Cadmus! Blood and terror, terror and blood and the great deer running!”

“Stop!” I crawled to the edge of his robe, pulling on it to draw his attention, but it was as if I were not even there.

“O terrible transformation!” He flung up his arm again, as though to hide the vision from his sightless eyes. “The hunter hunted and the terror loosed! Alas for a house made barren! Alas for a seed made cold!”

The prophecy was terrible enough. But what if people heard the shouting, and came running to listen?

“I didn’t mean it,” I babbled. “I beg you, stop, I didn’t mean it—”

Slowly, the prophet lowered his staff until he was leaning his full weight on it. His knees were shaking. “Oh, little princess, what I saw!” Slowly, he lowered himself to his knees before me. “I beg you, for your grandfather’s sake and mine, do not pursue the goddess. Such a terrible transformation. Death and madness. Terrible, terrible. ”

The old man was weeping at my feet. I had to kneel before him myself, and clasp his ankles and promise I would never seek to become other than that I am.

But what is that?

My sister rose in the middle of the night to tell me of the bloody prophecy. She found me up on the roof, where I’d gone to watch the progress of Saturn as it met for the first time in my life with Alpha Serpentis.

Her face was the color of the moon, silver, all the blood washed away by starlight. She did not weep, but I held her by her stiff shoulders to comfort her anyway, in the cold night air.

“I dare not go,” she said. “I dare not run.” She looked out over the sleeping fields to the woods beyond. “And yet, I almost wish I could. To seek the goddess, to look on her once before I die…”

“Creusa!”

“It’s the way I feel. I can’t explain.”

“No need,” I said. “I just don’t want you to die, that’s all.”

She smiled, and touched my cheek. “You big star-gazing ox.”

That’s when I realized how I could help her. I was a fool not to have thought of it before. Chiron was right: the gods decide our fate, but it is ours to look squarely on it, to take up what we have been given, and to use it the best way that we can.

If fate decreed me for a hunter, why then, I would hunt. But my quarry would be for my sister’s sake. The goddess loves one who hunts with spirit and true purpose.

Creusa yawned. She really isn’t much good at night. “I’d better get to bed,” she said sadly. “The suitors are coming, and I have household matters to attend to.”

“I’d better get to bed, myself.” I forced a yawn, too. “The hunt starts bright and early, and I’ve got a lot of meat to catch for all your suitors.”

She said, “I hope they like rabbit; it’s all you’re likely to get this time of year.”

“Whatever it is, I’ll dedicate my catch to you, and to your future happiness.”

That’s what I told her. But my true quarry, that I’ll keep a secret, until I can return to my sad sister with news to turn her pale cheeks bright with joy.

Actaeon is gone. He’s been gone for five days and four nights. The skies have been clear. Maybe he has finally wandered off, star-struck, star-gazing, at last.

His companions say they lost him on the second day of the hunt. They’d been running hard, and their nets and spears were full of the blood of the wild animals they’d caught. It was midday, sunny and hot, and even in the tangle of bushes and scrub, the shadows were short. Hunting was over for the day. They cast themselves down in whatever shade they could find, and drank from streams and cleaned their nets. They’d begin again early the next morning.

They say my brother wandered away, following the music of a rocky stream that led deep into the shady wood. They saw him disappear into a grove of pines and cypress, and that was all.

Hours passed, and he did not return. They thought he’d fallen asleep in the shade somewhere, and let him be. Then a wonderful thing happened so late in the day: a huge stag came running out of the pines, scattering bright drops of water from its brows. The dogs were excited; it was as if they’d been waiting all day for this particular stag, as if they’d already had its scent. Weariness forgotten, all gave it chase.

The stag ran blindly, crashing through the brush in terror. But the fierce dogs were always on its trail, never resting or letting go. When the great stag finally turned to face the dogs, instead of attacking them with its horns, it stretched out its neck and bellowed, as if its voice were calling them to stop! The dogs fell back, confused, but the men surrounded it, urging them on.

“Where’s Actaeon?” they cried. “He really should see this. Actaeon! Actaeon!” The forest rang with my brother’s name.

The deer turned its head then, and cried again, a noise almost like a human voice. Its eyes rolled wildly from one to the other of them, looking for escape, but the circle was too tight.

As the hounds closed round it, the deer fell to its knees, for all the world as though begging them to spare it. But the dogs brought it down at last, tearing at its flanks until it could cry no more. There really was nothing to save, by the time the dogs were done; the men were distracted, calling for my brother, who never came, not even to see the kill.

But then, I know he never really liked hunting. He was just pretending, so as not to shame our house.

They have tried setting the dogs to follow his scent. But the dogs will only go so far into the grove of pine and cypress before they become confused and frightened and lose the trail. They keep returning to the place they slew the deer. Silly creatures.

Chiron has searched the stars. My brother is not there among them.

Artemis has come to me at last.

She came in all her beauty, bathed in moonlight so clear it looked like water — or was it water so bright it was like the moon? I saw her body clearly through it, curved and strong like a bow.

“Follow me now,” she said, “if you will.”

I rose from my couch and followed her on the moon’s path, which led from my chamber window to the meadow beyond my grandfather’s house. Where her feet trod, night flowers bloomed, and small animals, the mice and voles and even rabbits — for she carried no bow but the moon’s curve on her brow — looked up to adore her.

At the edge of the wood, the goddess paused.

“Here, I am the only light. Will you follow?”

I nodded.

The woods were dark, but she was the moon, and I moved fearless by the light of her body between the trees. I heard the sound of rushing water, then. A fountain, gushing naturally from the rock, formed a sweet pool where ferns grew among the stones.

Artemis stood at the edge of the pool. The water reflected her brightness now so strongly that I could hardly see. One foot was in the water, the other on a rock. She turned her back to me, and smiled over her shoulder as she undid one sandal, and then the other. The curve of her back, drawn like a bow, the hair pulled up from the nape of her neck.

“Look your fill, virgin daughter of the House of Cadmus. To such as you, nothing is forbidden.”

I felt the hungry ache I had known for so long grow in me a hundred hundredfold. The more I gazed on her, the more it grew, until my legs shook so I could hardly stand. The silver water stood between us.

The goddess held out her hand. “Will you cross the water and come to me?”

I would have crossed fire for her. I set one foot on the edge of the pool.

“But remember,” she said, “there is a price to be paid by mortals who look upon the goddess in her nakedness. Will you remember that?”

I nodded. She dipped one white hand in the water. Moon-struck drops flew through the air into my face.

My whole body shivered. I felt my skin shudder on my bones, as if trying to shake them off. I felt strange, and light, and my balance left me. I pitched forward but caught myself on the edge of a stone.

And then I saw my own face in the pool.

I screamed, and heard a deer’s cry tear the night air. Saw the black mouth and black tongue of a doe parting to give that cry again.

The goddess leapt on my back. Her thighs straddled my flanks like fire, and her weight on my spine was a terrible glory. I fled through the night woods, more terrified than I have ever been, and more completely consumed by a happiness I hope I never feel again.

It might have been hours, or it might have been years. I remember nothing of where I’ve been. Until she guided me back to the pool, urging me on until I submerged my panting, sweating, hairy body in its icy silver waters, and came to, gasping and trembling and choking to the surface of the water, in my own form again.

“You shiver, daughter of Cadmus.”

I tried to hide my nakedness with my hands, my hair. I was so ashamed. Ashamed of what I’d been; ashamed of what I was.

The goddess took my face in her hands and kissed me. I felt the deer’s power coursing through my veins, the deer’s joy in its own wildness running in my own body. But my hands were my hands, my voice my voice as I moaned my pleasure. It might have been heartbeats, it might have been years. My aching turned to sweet pain, and then only to sweetness. And so, finally, I knew what it was to have my strange hunger satisfied.

The goddess cradled my head in her hands. “In the full heat of the day, when I rested with my maidens, and bathed in the cool water, your brother came to me here.” Her lips spoke against my lips. “And so he saw what is forbidden men to see. And paid the price. Do you remember the price, Child of Cadmus? Do you understand what I say?”

I understood. Woe to the House of Cadmus, the terrible transformation. I tasted my own tears on both our lips.

“Do you understand, then, that his own dogs savaged him while his friends looked on and cheered?”

Woe to the House of Cadmus, the terror and the blood. I felt my own groan twist against her body.

“But before the power of human speech left him, he cried out your name. And before his hands became hooves, he held them out, begging me to pity him. And so I came to find you, and to tell you of your brother’s fate.”

Her arms were around me then, holding what was left of me together while I shivered into little pieces.

“You should have come to me,” the goddess said. “You should never have sent a man to do your work for you.”

I heard a high mewing keen like the lost birds that fly in from the sea.

“Do you still wish to be my votary? To serve me all your days?”

She had given me everything I thought I ever wanted, and taken from me what I held most dear. The gods love our house, and we must love them.

“Speak,” she said. “You still have the power of human speech.”

My voice was hoarse. “I do.”

“And?”

“I will be your servant always.”

“Will you come with me into the woods? I will make you forget all human sorrow, and your name will be a whisper on the wind.”

I yearned for her. “And my brother’s name?”

“The same.”

“I must go home. They are waiting for him. I must speak of my brother’s fate, that all may mourn him, and know what price is paid for your terrible glory.”

“Go, then, Child of Cadmus. I accept your service. And serve me still.”

Her kiss on my brow burned like silver horns, the twin crests of the moon.

I felt no different when I returned to Cadmus’s house. But the suitors were all sent quietly away, with gifts. I serve the goddess now, as she has promised. I sing songs in her honor, and keep the fires lit at my brother’s shrine. I hunt what I can: the flies that buzz around sleeping babies’ eyes on hot days; the sun that robs the color of our wool; the mice that steal the grain. I speak for the goddess, and no one contradicts me.

There seem to be two ELLEN KUSHNERs: the public radio personality who hosts the national series PRI’s Sound & Spirit, in which she explores the music and myth, traditions and beliefs that make up the human experience around the world and through the ages; and the author who wrote the “mannerpunk” novels Swordspoint and The Privilege of the Sword, and the mythic novel Thomas the Rhymer, among others. Some people are shocked to discover they both inhabit the same body, taking along with them the Ellen who performs live shows, lectures, teaches writing, and loves riding trains. Ellen Kushner grew up in Cleveland, Ohio, and now lives in New York City. She has two younger brothers and is married to Delia Sherman.

All is revealed at her Web site, www.ellenkushner.com.

We love Greek tales of gods and heroes; but the gods can be cruel, and the greatest tales can be fraught with great injustices.

When I was six, I had just learned to read when my dad took us all to live in France for a year. We had very few books in English, and I was desperate for more. So were my parents, I guess; my father went down to the American Library and bought some old volumes they were clearing off the shelves. I glommed onto a pale blue clothbound volume with a broken spine (published in London before I was born), a retelling of Greek myths mostly taken from the Roman poet Ovid’s collection, Metamorphoses. Checking the title page now, I see it was called Men and Gods, by Rex Warner — but I just thought of it as My Blue Greek Book, and I read it over and over. I loved the tragedies the best.

For The Beastly Bride I have turned back to one of my favorites, the terrible story of Actaeon. Several Ancient Greek writers wrote their own versions of Actaeon’s story, each offering a different rationale for his cruel punishment. In some of them, it’s because he was intentionally spying on the goddess Artemis to see her naked. In Ovid, he is just a poor luckless guy who wanders into the wrong place at the wrong time.

In all of them, the young prince Actaeon is an enthusiastic hunter.

None of them mentions any sister.