Danae

by Laura Gill

  Alas, he spoke again. “I brought you gifts.”

  “I won’t accept anything meant for a princess. What would I do with gold and scarlet? Wear a queen’s robes to do my laundry? Don a gold diadem to fetch water?” What I should have said was that I refused to accept anything, period, but by now Polydektes was deaf to those entreaties. “And I certainly don’t want your presents if you’re going to neglect your aunt and brother. They deserve your generosity far more than me.”

  His hearty chuckling confounded and annoyed me. “Has anybody ever told you what a sense of humor you have? I like a woman who can laugh.”

  I groaned aloud. No matter what I did or said, he took it as a compliment. “Do you hear me laughing?”

  “No, but you should.” I heard shifting and settling, and imagined Polydektes sitting upon the threshold with his back against the door. “You ought to spend your days lounging in the palace garden, gossiping and sewing with the ladies of the court, not drawing water and scouring clothes like a peasant woman.”

  A memory of the highborn ladies of Argos congregating in the garden court surfaced and was suppressed. Crouching down, I challenged him, “And what’s wrong with working? I’ve been fending for myself since I was eight years old.”

  “Laboring like a menial is beneath you,” Polydektes said. “Your father was a cruel, shortsighted man.”

  “You, too, can be cruel. I’ve seen that side of you,” I countered. “Who are you trying to impress? Not me, surely, because I’ve never given you reason to believe it would work. And your followers would mock you for making a love-stricken fool of yourself over a mere woman. Maybe they’re doing it already. You’re not the lovesick type, so you have some other motive for continuing with this spectacle. Is it the kings of Argos and Tiryns that you’re trying to impress? That’s a dangerous game you’re playing. Your liege-lord of Tiryns would never give his consent, and King Acrisius would as soon as have you murdered than allow you to marry me and beget sons to plague him.”

  To this, Polydektes could make no credible answer except, “Now you fancy you know something about politics?”

  This was the real Polydektes I was hearing, the schemer and rough seducer of women. “I’m not ignorant.”

  “Then you know how some of my vassals would rather Diktys became king. Not because he outshines me with his kingly qualities—gods, no, the way he reeks of fish and familiarity with the commoners.” Polydektes’ derisive snort came across clearly even through the thick door. “No. The fisherman was born a prince when my mother was queen, whereas I was born to a mere concubine.” Self-deprecation did not suit him. “I know how they approach him with their plots, those malcontents and traitors, and how he refuses, but I suppose if he were somehow to become king, perhaps tomorrow, you would marry him in an instant.”

  My face burned with anger. “If I know nothing about politics, then for your part you know absolutely nothing about me, never mind what your spies tell you,” I retorted. “If I wanted a husband, I would have married Diktys a long time ago. You think he hasn’t asked?”

  Polydektes harrumphed. “You are a strange, difficult woman, Danaë. You make marriage to me sound like an ordeal.”

  “Says the king who has no wife.”

  “Only because my mother—”

  “What are you doing here?” Another voice: muffled, but male and recognizable as Diktys. I scrabbled to my feet. Would there be a fistfight?

  Polydektes bumped against the door; his soles scuffed the path as he rose. “Do you not have business to attend to? Fish to scale, fish guts to cleans, barnacles to scrape—whatever it is that you fishermen do?”

  “If you’ve come to violate the sanctuary...” Diktys’s voice became ever clearer and louder. I imagined him climbing the path with a club in hand. “Isn’t it obvious even to you by now that she’s not interested?”

  “Actually, dear brother, we were having the most interesting conversation when you so rudely interrupted.”

  I unbarred the door and threw it open, nevertheless being careful to remain beyond Polydektes’ reach. “That’s enough, both of you.” Diktys was not holding a weapon except for the fists bunched at his sides. Polydektes wore sober colors, his only jewel the seal stone slung around his neck. “Diktys, your brother hasn’t tried to batter down the door. King Polydektes, it’s perhaps best that you leave. I have unfinished work in the weaving house.”

  The king of Seriphos did not protest, merely inclined his head as if to a noblewoman of the court. “May I kiss your hand?”

  I stood firm. “Good day, Polydektes.”

  He left his gifts on the threshold: a strand of agate and amethyst beads, and an indigo shawl of feather-soft wool. Gathering them up, I took the former to the altar as a thank-offering to the deities for permitting me to claim sanctuary; the latter I took home to Klymene. Diktys said nothing along the way, until we reached the yard of the weaving house where Panope with her reddened, chapped hands was wringing out bales of wet fleece.

  “My brother never learns. When anybody tells him no, he hears yes.”

  Unspoken questions hung between us. “Diktys,” I said bluntly, “nothing happened. We spoke through the door.”

  Placing a hand on my arm, he turned me about to face him. “I don’t care what courtesies and flatteries he makes. It’s just that he doesn’t know when he’s defeated, when to stop.” His pause fell as an ominous silence. “The day will come when respecting the sanctity of the sanctuary by speaking to you through the door won’t suffice anymore.”

  I nodded. “I know, but that day isn’t today.”

  PART FIVE

  PERSEUS

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  “Ho, what do we have here!” exclaimed the man in the first chariot. “The lovely fishwives of Pelargos, and who can this skinny old creature be but the exceptionally beautiful Lady Dorea?” Sarcasm undercut his voice, mingled with the menace of something else, too, that made a shiver scurry down my spine.

  Three vehicles surrounded us where we had been laundering clothes in the neighborhood stream. Six men, including the king’s two eldest bastard sons. Adeimon and Demaratos were tall, husky young men, resembling their father most in the cruelness of their eyes and their penchant for harassing unmarried maidens and respectable matrons all over Seriphos. They drove by regularly to hoot and holler at their fisherman uncle and to tease the women. At first, all of us women used to run for the sanctuary, as the village’s youngest women still did whenever they saw the princes’ colorful chariots and the dust clouds the wheels raised, but as time elapsed and they did no harm except to sling words, we matrons and fishwives decided they were not going to keep us from our daily tasks.

  Displaying fear or anger only encouraged their teasing. I straightened, squared my shoulders, and met their leering with a chilly stare. “What do you want?”

  “Ah, she asks what we want.” Demaratos, at nineteen the eldest of the king’s illegitimate sons, exchanged a conspiratorial glance with seventeen-year-old Adeimon, and both snickered as if at some lascivious jest.

  “Why so disappointed to see us? Have we got dirt on our faces?” Adeimon asked. “We dressed especially for you.”

  Cold silence from us women. Demaratos tsk-tsked them. “Oh, come, not even an offer of hospitality?”

  “If you want food or drink, go home,” I retorted. “We’ve no time for you, unless you care to do laundry.” I indicated my chapped hands and the wet clothes lying on the rocks and spread out on the ground.

  “We can help you make time.” The charioteers and companions unanimously laughed at Demaratos’s comment. Then he alit from the chariot and came around, swaggering like the tough man he thought he was. Adeimon followed. “We don’t require much in the way of hospitality. Maybe just a kiss from our dearest aunt?”

  I reflexively fingered the knife thrust into my rope belt, but decided against it. Certainly by now the village sentries would be aware that the king’s sons had come. Until they came, calm
, cold reasoning remained my best defense. “Does your father know you’re here?” What would Polydektes say to their harassing me? Yet where another woman would have immediately dropped his name and claimed his protection, I was no hypocrite.

  Demaratos laughed outright; his younger brother followed suit, as did the charioteers who egged them on. “Oh, come now! Do you really think we want to rape a skinny thing like you?” Snorts and snickers from the men. He set a proprietary hand on my arm; it was all I could do not to flinch. “You do claim Zeus’s protection, don’t you? And isn’t he the patron of strangers and hospitality?”

  My instincts screamed for me to draw my knife, throw a punch, or run away; it took every fiber of will to remember what had befallen me the last time I had fought back against a group of men bent on malice.

  “Shame on you!” shouted Baukis, Selenos and Luktia’s brawny eldest daughter. “Guests don’t demand.”

  Adeimon roared back, “Shut up, slut!” Grabbing me from his half-brother’s grasp, he planted a violent kiss on my lips. His tongue forced its way into my mouth. Suppressing the urge to bite off his tongue, I pushed him away instead.

  Someone wrenched him back. I stumbled, narrowly escaping from Demaratos’s clutches. All around, the scene had turned into a brawl. This was terrible, the worst thing that could have possibly happened. “Stop!” I cried. No one was paying attention. A charioteer, blood welling from his cheek, wrestled a fishwife into the stream; he had her by the hair and was trying to drown her. Baukis punched Adeimon. Water and dust flew everywhere, and scores of feet trampled the laundry. If only Luktia’s daughter had not said anything.

  A woman jostled me. “Go, Dorea!” She shoved me in the direction of the village. “Get the sentries.”

  Scarcely had I turned to run when a hand seized my breast and squeezed. Whirling around, I encountered neither a charioteer nor a prince, but the man who had occupied the third chariot.

  “C’mere, you!” he snarled.

  As I reflexively recoiled, and he held on, my smock tore. Woolen fabric ripped as easily as onionskin. Cool air raised pebbles against my bare left shoulder and breast.

  “LEAVE MY MOTHER ALONE!”

  A heavy body charged past me and, bellowing like a raging bull, rammed into my would-be rapist. Eurymedon’s face was contorted with rage as he hammered the man with his meaty fists. Blood spattered, scarlet spread across the ground. I heard bones crunching. Oh, Goddess, no! My fifteen-year-old son was going to kill one of the companions. The princes and charioteers were already drawing their weapons to hack him to pieces; the fishwives were all but forgotten.

  “No! Don’t kill him! Stop! Eurymedon, stop!” I threw myself onto his back to grab his arm and restrain him. I might as well have tried to ride a bucking bull; he shrugged me off as easily as if I were a gadfly, and I landed heavily on my backside.

  “EURYMEDON!” Diktys, leading a cadre of village sentries, raced to engage the princes and charioteers.

  Eurymedon, soaked and spattered with blood, at first did not react to Diktys’s command or subsequent attempt to pinion his arms and haul him away; it took three more men to subdue my son, and even then he dragged them along like stone anchors while simultaneously cursing the name of Polydektes. Meanwhile, bronze clashed and men struggled, and the fishwives harangued the interlopers from the sidelines.

  I chanced a glance toward the man on the ground, and immediately wished I had not. Where his face had been, he was no longer recognizable as human. My gorge rose. All this violence, just because Polydektes’ followers had touched me? Because Adeimon had actually kissed me against my will? They probably would not have gone any farther than that. As for the man dead at my feet, he had not gotten around to raping me. I was trembling all over, with one hand clamped over my mouth against the increasing urge to vomit. Did Eurymedon really have to beat the man to a pulp just to make his point?

  Anger swiftly replaced revulsion. Now that Diktys and the sentries had him under some kind of control, I marched over to confront my son. “That’s enough! Do you hear me, Eurymedon? It’s over!” I simultaneously wanted to slap him and burst into tears. The corded muscles of his thick neck strained. His eyes, black with rage, bulged, and his face was purple. Spittle flecked his mouth. Never before had he exhibited such rabid fury. Even if I could have brought myself to strike him, the blow probably would not have even fazed him.

  Calming him was tantamount to soothing a raging bull; he needed to exhaust himself before common sense prevailed. I urged the men to keep holding on, before turning to find that, while I was distracted, the brawl had ended. The other sentries, all bruised and bleeding, had wisely disengaged and backed away. I saw Demaratos sporting a bloody nose, his younger brother a gash to the cheek and a blackened eye.

  Diktys marched straight over to his bastard nephews to harangue them. “You’re nothing but troublemakers, bullies, failures as men. Do you think us helpless and stupid? Now take your followers and get out of here.”

  Demaratos made a nasally protest. “You savage bitches.” Blood seeped between his fingers; his expensive raiment, spattered with scarlet droplets, had been torn along the embroidered bands on his shoulders and neck.

  Diktys threw his nephew’s necklace, which had ripped free during the brawl, in his face. “Go home,” he said, “and tell my brother that he ought to beat you more often.”

  I thanked the gods when the troublemakers limped back to their chariots and left. The whole incident left me shaken, but I was more concerned for Eurymedon. He had calmed down enough that awareness had returned to his gaze and the alarming color had left his face. The men could safely release him, though even now he was not necessarily calm. He paced and swung his arms, exhilarated where I bemoaned his tactlessness.

  “They got what they deserved!” His shout echoed, following the cloud of dust retreating toward Chora.

  They had, I agreed, but there would be severe consequences for assaulting the king’s sons and followers, as Diktys reiterated when he took Eurymedon by the arm and marched him home. “Here’s a lesson for you: never get into a brawl unless you’re prepared to face the other man’s kinsman and pay compensation.”

  My son spent the afternoon neglecting his work to spend his energy on chopping wood. I remonstrated with him. “You killed a man.” Eurymedon kept going, a silly grin spread across his face. “Don’t you dare think this is funny.”

  At that, he stopped and dragged his arm across his sweaty brow. His knuckles, I noticed, were bruised. He still wore his bloody tunic. “Did I say it was funny? That man tried to rape you. Now he’s waiting for the ferryman in the underworld.”

  “And you take too much pleasure in it.” Unlike him, I felt sick and horribly wrung out, worried by consequences he failed to appreciate. “What would the gods think?”

  I bit my tongue the moment that slipped out, for my son sometimes knew very well what his immortal father thought of his behavior. Eurymedon claimed to have occasionally encountered strangers whom he recognized as gods in disguise, although no one ever witnessed these meetings and he never brought these strangers home despite my urgings. My innate dread of Zeus had never truly diminished, notwithstanding the kind regards he sent home with Eurymedon. I knew better than to make Semele’s mistake of demanding to see the god in the flesh, but I would have been content with a dream-vision, meeting a stranger, any vehicle by which I could have questioned him about my son’s unruliness. For Eurymedon, while not necessarily dishonest, was careless as youths often were, and apparently never addressed the subject with his father.

  “The gods?” He picked up the axe again. “They instruct me to honor and protect you.” A single blow from his axe threatened to turn kindling into splinters. Eurymedon towered two hands above me, and I was not a shrinking lily. That, and his powerful physique meant that others who did not know his true age often mistook him for a young man of twenty.

  “Of course,” he added disdainfully, “if you’d just marry Diktys and be respecta
ble, they wouldn’t bother.”

  That my son saw fit to counsel me in matters beyond his concern irritated me. “How many times must I tell you that I don’t choose to marry?”

  “Well, when I’m a grown man you’ll have to marry him,” he huffed, replacing the wood on the block. “I command it.” Taking up the axe, he swung hard; the impact shuddered through his muscles, setting them to rippling.

  “You command?” Disturbingly, he had that right as my nearest kinsman, as his grandfather had disowned me, and his great-uncle of Tiryns had not troubled himself with the matter since sending his ambassador a decade ago. “You’re getting too far above yourself. And how exactly do you think you’re going to force me to marry, anyway?”

  Eurymedon avoided meeting my gaze by concentrating on his work. “It’s what’s best for you, Mother.”

  “Oh, and now you know what’s best for me?”

  “That’s what my father says you should do,” he mumbled. A flush colored his face. Making speeches was not among my son’s talents.

  Yet whenever he conveyed a message from Zeus, it always gave me a start. That he might be dissembling never occurred to me after he had, a handful of years ago, relayed a prediction from Hermes: Iolanthe’s husband Hilarion would break his neck by night, which the unfortunate man did two nights later when he fell overboard and was hanged in the weighted nets.

  “He does, does he?” I kept my tone neutral. Marry Diktys? Better had the god sent me that message years ago. “And of course you told Diktys all this?” Despite my effort, a tremor crept into my voice.

  “Of course. Why not? You’re practically husband and wife, anyway.” Eurymedon leaned the axe against the block so he could wipe beads of perspiration from his forehead. “I told him he has my permission.”

  An ironic sputter of laughter escaped my lips. The day’s excitement had gone straight to Eurymedon’s head. “Your permission?”