How are the Mighty fallen

by Thomas Burnett Swann

  “ I chose to die in place of Nathan, my friend, but little good it did me.”

  “Let me tell you a story.”

  “Stories are for children.” He looked like a frightened child.

  “What about this one? You are not Saul’s son.”

  “Not Saul’s son…?”

  She could read his thoughts: Not the son of a marauding desert chieftain who believes that to rule means to conquer cities or to take a concubine and father stalwart sons…

  “Whose then?”

  “You are twenty but you haven't a beard.”

  “I don’t want a beard. It would be dangerous in battle. An enemy could seize it and cut my throat.”

  “Other Israelite boys grow beards long before they are twenty.”

  “It will come in time.” He shrugged. “What has that to do with my father?”

  “Look at my back.” She bared her shoulders and stood in the light of a large lamp, a cruse of oil with seven wicks like the tongues of salamanders.

  “Wings,” he gasped. “Like mine.”

  “Did you ever wonder how you got them?”

  He struggled to speak his thoughts. “When I was a small child, you taught me never to show them. A deformity, I thought. Or worse, the work of a demon. I supposed the others would kill me if they knew. Samuel would hack me to pieces as he did King Agag and then blame Yahweh.”

  “They are natural characteristics of your race. In the Golden Age, our wings were built for flight. Now they are petty things. But all things dwindle in these paltry times.”

  He looked incredulous. To an Israelite, a creature with wings was either a demon or an angel. The demon was wicked; the angel, terrifying and full of Yahweh’s wrath.

  “Have you never wanted to fly?”

  “Haven’t all men?”

  “No. Some men want to sail ships to the Misty Isles or the Dusky Sea. Others, like Saul, want to trample enemies and raze cities. When they catch one enemy, they find another.”

  “Mother,” he pleaded. ‘Tell me who I am.“ His eyes were green and questioning. The forest was in them, the fresh new green of spring-awakened grass; shy, tentative, not yet assured of winter’s departure. The ocean was in them, halcyon-still above a reef of coral.

  I was a queen, Jonathan, in my own land, and my lovers were as numerous as the cells in a honeycomb. My people, the Sirens, had come to Crete-the island you call Caphtor-. in the Golden Age; come from their northern home to live in that southern land with the Wanderwooders, the Satyrs and the Dryads, the Leogryphs and the Telesphori. Wings to fly, legs to walk, webbed toes to swim: the ideal race, were we not? But we had angered the Goddess and she had driven us from our palaces of sculptured propylus; stunted our wings and shut us from the sky; exiled us to the alien south. Still, I was a queen. Honey Hair I was called.

  Before we came to the island, human men had lived in harmony with the Wanderwooders. Kindly men, the original Cretans and their allies, the Philistines, who worshipped the Goddess with libations of milk and decked her forest shrines with seashells and anemones. But earthquakes toppled their palaces and drove them to flee to the mainland in their goose-prowed ships.

  After our exile, we had swum from the north to Crete; without ships; without tools; weary, homeless, hapless. We did not build new palaces. The ruined palaces of the Cretans, sprawling over the land and into the sea, gave us a home, a hive, where a queen could rule her drones and workers and propagate the race. Stone columns bristled with barnacles. The great facades, leaping with bulls and worshippers, had cracked in the sun. Field mice had burrowed where Cretan youths had danced the Dance of the Cranes. No longer could you hear the jangle of the sistrum like the shake of a coin pouch, the beat of drums, the rustle of belled skirts on flagstones, the chatter of blue monkeys in the enclosed gardens of lotus and papyrus. But we made of those half-sunken palaces a place of warmth and delight. We glazed the walls with the rich red clay of the island and painted frescoes of our northern home, the forests of fir and pine, the fleet-toed deer; we swam in the sunken rooms and festooned the floors with seashells and bits of amber and climbed on the ledges to dry our golden hair; we tended herds of sea cows to give us milk and loved them almost as much as the dolphins with which we played.

  I was only a child when the first Cyclopes came to the island. I had become a queen when they threatened you, my son of five years.

  “Mama,” you cried, springing into my arms from the giant tortoiseshell from which I had made your bed. “What is that terrible roar? It sounds like a Minotaur.”

  “A Cyclops, Bumblebee.” That was my name for you before I came to Israel.

  “A giant?”

  “Yes, the sons of Poseidon, the sea king. They stand as tall as a mast and peer through a single eye at a world which seems to them created only to be destroyed.”

  “Can he hurt us?”

  “Not as long as we have our palaces and spears, and our bears to warn and guard us.”

  “Let’s show them we’re not afraid. Let’s walk in the forest and look for mushrooms! Well tiptoe so the Cyclopes can’t hear us.”

  It seemed to me then that the Goddess had forgiven my people: she had given me you. Doubly armed, I with a spear, you with a little knife, both of them dipped in the venom of the Jumper, that deadliest of spiders, we stepped into the light. I felt like a morning glory as it greets the sun. The workers, as always, toiled at their various jobs, returning with nectar from a field of saffron crocuses; manufacturing wax with the help of propylus secreted from their mouths; storing honey against the winter sleep. The drones, arm in arm, meandered through the avenues where Cretan gallants had walked in the smile of the Goddess. At the mating time, when buds were greening the winter-forlorn trees, they would follow me in the nuptial flight-or swim, I should say, since the punishment of the Goddess denied us the sky-and I would choose as my mate the drone whom I wished to crown. We would meet and embrace and my consort, stricken by love, would fall like a broken boat to the bottom of the sea, even while his soul ascended to the Celestial Vineyard. Meanwhile, the drones must seek each other for love. My workers lived only for work. Neither did they beget children nor receive lovers, but the drones were passionate beings, and who was I to deny them the love of their friends? The Goddess never decreed that men should lie only with women. All of the races which worship her-the Wanderwooders, the Cretans, the Philistines, the Canaanites, the Phoenicians- accept the love between two men as one more affirmation of the divine plan, the tide which rises and falls to the moon’s compulsion, the inevitability of the seasons, the certainty that those who love will meet, after death, in the Celestial Vineyard. A man’s love for a man is neither more nor less than a man’s love for a woman, it is only different.

  “Honey Hair!” A young drone with a white tunic caught by a belt of tourmalines had called my name. He was small and trim like an ivory dancer from the workshop of the Sea Kings. His name, Myiskos, meant “Little Mouse.” He released the arm of his friend and bowed to me.

  “Yes, Myiskos?”

  “Please don’t leave the hive without an escort.

  “My spear will keep us from harm, my son and me.”

  “Beautiful things get broken.”

  “Dear Little Mouse,” I said. “Perhaps I will choose you for my next king.”

  He smiled wistfully. “If only you could choose Hylas at the same time. Even the Celestial Vineyard would seem lonely without him.”

  I looked at the young drone who was waiting for Little Mouse. Like most of his friends, he was smooth and beardless, with a saffron glow to his skin. But his tunic revealed a sturdy frame; he was quick with a spear, strong to wrestle, swift to swim. It is folly to think that men who love men are mincing and high-voiced like the eunuchs of Egypt. More often they are brothers in battle, comrades under the deaf, indifferent stars.

  “I could not spare the both of you.”

  They resumed their walk and paused to examine a flower which had sprung between the cob
blestones.

  “A mustard flower,” said Hylas. “I am glad that our sandals did not crush her.”

  In perilous times they could speak of flowers. Yet, under attack from the Cyclopes, they were valorous warriors; the two of them fought as one.

  It was good to walk in the forest, among the yearning oaks which remembered the reign of Father Saturn, that wise old king who, it was said, had nested swallows in his mosslike beard. The latticed branches formed a wizardry of light and shade. Woodpeckers drummed against Dryad oaks.

  “Mama, let’s visit Alecto. I can hear the breakers. We’re near her home.”

  Alecto was also a Siren, but she was a solitary queen, like the bees which never build hives. She spent her time in the sea disporting with dolphins or lying on beaches where the crackle of shells would warm her of an approaching Cyclops.

  An oaken wilderness yielded to a carob grove, cultivated by the Cretans, now forsaken along with a summer house of blue-rimmed windows and a rusting bronze plow. Beyond the grove, the land fell away to purple rocks, where the tide, withdrawing, had bared a multitude of treasures and trifles- murexes with fragile spines; starfish with broken legs; flotsam from — the foreign galleys which sometimes plied the coast. I held your hand and we clambered over the rocks until the waves broke at our feet in diamonds of foam.

  “Out there lies Philistia,” I said. “Sometimes her sailors still return to this island, once their home. And beyond them, so I am told, are the Israelites, a race of warrior-farmers led by a young king named Saul.”

  “I want to go there,” you said, staring across the green, disheveled waters. The look in your eyes was old and wise and full of journeys; it was the way of our race, sometimes, to remember what we had never seen, and to foretell what we were yet to see.

  Then we spied Alecto, the Siren called Silvergilt because of her hair, which looked like foam in the sun. She had heard our approach, recognized us as friends, and continued to sun her tresses on a rock. She opened her arms and you dropped my hand and pressed your face against her opulent breast You liked her scent of foam and ambergris. I tried to hide my concern. It was the solitary queens like Alecto who, in our northern homeland, had eaten some little sailor boys and brought upon us the wrath of the Goddess, to say nothing of a bad reputation with mariners.

  She reached to her throat and removed from her necklace a tourmaline in the shape of a bee, which she presented to you as a gift.

  “It came from the sea,” she said. “A treasure from the dolphin folk. It will bring you luck one day.”

  She released you with some reluctance, rather as one foregoes a banquet, and turned to me.

  “Honey Hair, I’m glad you’ve come. You see, I’m going away.”

  “Where are you going?” I cried, envious of her free and wandering life.

  ‘To Philistia. Perhaps to Israel.“

  “You can’t fly,” I reminded her.

  “I'll swim. It will take me at least a week. But I can rest on the sea like a gull.”

  “You were close to tears. You did not want to lose your friend. ”Don’t go away from us, Silvergilt!“

  “Dear little Bumblebee, I have to go. A Cyclops killed my sister Electra only last week.”

  “The Cyclopes,” I repeated, shuddering. “Yes, they are dreadful beasts. I fear for my palace at times-”

  “Only if you scorn us.”

  The voice boomed and reverberated among the rocks.

  “Goliath,” Alecto screamed and, quick as a diving gull, she dove in the water and disappeared in a maelstrom of foam. Clutching you by the hand, I sprang after her; I beat my wings in frantic flurries and barely escaped Goliath’s hairy fist as it slapped the sand behind us even as we reached the surf. He waded into the water up to his hips, but in spite of his parentage, no Cyclops can swim; heavy as elephants from Nubia, they sink at once to the bottom of the sea. Remember how Polyphemus stood on the shore and hurled boulders at Odysseus’ ship He couldn’t swim after him.

  “Come back to me, Honey Hair,” Goliath pleaded with a voice which tried to be intimate and succeeded in being sinister. His single red eye glowed like an open wound. “We have no females. The Dryads are much too small and most of the Sirens have fled the island. I would give my eye for a woman like you.”

  At a safe distance from the shore, I treaded water, you beside me, both of us more curious than frightened, and studied his features. His hair was matted with sores and dirt. He seemed all mouth and eye; mouth ferocious with crooked teeth, eye unblinking and cold as an undersea cave. He reminded me of a shark.

  “Your hair is spun out of honey,” he said. “Your breasts are ripe pomegranates.” Cyclopes pretend to be poets, but they steal their metaphors from our Siren songs. The stench of him, dried blood and goat’s hair, wafted over the waves. He ought to write scurrilous satires, I thought, instead of lyrics.

  “Mama, let’s go home,” you pleaded. “He smells like a goat.”

  “If you trouble me again,” I said, “I'll gouge your eye with my spear.”

  He wrenched a stone from the beach and hurled it into the sea to splatter foam in my face.

  In the following days, day turning into month, spring ripening into summer, Silvergilt did not return to the rocks beside the sea. She has swum to Philistia, I thought She has made her escape. But I must see to my hive.

  Meanwhile, the time had come for the Dance of the Bears. The bears or Artori of Crete were our special friends in the forest, our allies against the Cyclopes and other beasts. Small, white, and delicate in appearance, disconcertingly fierce when aroused, they worshipped the Goddess in a ritual dance performed on the shortest night of summer, and we inevitably and joyfully joined them. The workers remained in the palace. To them, dancing was idleness and sin. But the drones, Myiskos and Hylas among them, were prompt to accept the invitation in spite of a threatened storm, and the bears greeted us as if I had promised them a glimpse of Honey House, the place where they go after death. We met in a meadow trodden by the hooves of Satyrs. “I will play the flute,” Myiskos cried. “And I will beat the drum,” said his friend. To accompany flute and drum, the forest blended her many voices: wind in the branches of carob trees, stream carousing with rocks and fish, thump of woodpecker beaks on aged oaks. Even the plain little nightingales opened their throats in the songs which were their one loveliness.

  The bears began to dance. Heads swayed from side to side. Left foot to the left. Right foot to the right. Return. Repeat. Advance. Retreat White fur in the light of the moon. Molten fur in a sea which expanded, shrank, pulsing as if to the moon’s commands. I watched you join the bears, agile among the dancers, and laughed as if baby Pan had joined the festival.

  “I watched you join the bears, agile among the dancers.”

  Then it began to rain. It was one of those sudden rains which rapidly become a tempest. Lightning made of the sky a great parchment of bold hieroglyphics.

  “Boreas out of the north,” I cried. “No more dancing tonight.” I tried to shelter you from the big cold drops.

  The bears scrambled for shelter among the trees. Fearless of Cyclopes, they feared the lightning above all natural dangers because it singed their fur.

  “Myiskos, Hylas,” I called. “Back to the hive.”

  “Honey Hair!”

  I knew the voice before I saw the face.

  Goliath stood in our path. The noise of the storm had hidden his approach. The rain and trees hid most of his body, but I saw that his red eye had fixed me in its baleful glare.

  Remembering wings, I whispered around him, you in my arms, and fled toward the hive, only to see a sight more terrible than a Gorgon’s stare. The palace was under attack. The workers were making a gallant defense with their poison spears, but Cretan palaces have no walls, and the bears had scattered among the trees. I looked behind me for Myiskos and Hylas, who had waited to wrap their musical instruments in cloths against the storm.

  Myiskos raised the stick with which he had beaten
the drum. It was a pathetic weapon. Goliath snapped it between his fingers and clutched Myiskos around the waist Hylas ran at him with no weapon but his flute, which he tried to use as a dagger; Goliath, whose skin was as tough as that of a Hydra, seized him with his free hand, thrust him above his head with Myiskos, and flung them against each other and then to the ground.

  What must I do? What could I do? I could not get to the palace. I could not save my drones. I could only save my son. The sea, I remembered. The sea… Jonathan can swim like a fish…

  It was my last sight of the hive. I thought that the waves would shred our wings. I thought that weariness would turn us into lead and sink us among the crabs and the Hydras. But we did not fight the waves, you and I, we rolled with them; we used them to buoy us like two little boats. Thus we rode with the storm, long, long-how many turns of the hourglass? — scarcely using our arms and legs.

  The storm subsided like a placated god. The Great Green Sea enfolded us in his silver fleece: whitecaps, spray, the aftermath of Poseidon’s wrath. Had he sent the storm to conceal the attack of his sons, the Cyclopes?

  We could not see our island.

  “It’s that way,” you gasped.

  “I know,” I said, but the current swept us inexorably from our hive, our home.

  There were halcyon times when we rested between the waves. We lived on seaweed and, being Sirens, drank the water in spite of its salt It was a dangerous journey, it was a desperate journey; but the current, at first inimicable, became our friend and carried us toward the mainland and the coast of Philistia…

  We climbed from the sea and fell, exhausted, onto a bed of broken shells.

  “Mama,” you asked. “Where are we?”

  In the distance, a city coruscated with slender temples and laden wharves, goose-prowed ships and cockleshell fishing boats. Around us, white sand was punctuated with wizened bushes of sea-grapes and driftwood as black as timbers from a burned galley.

  “Philistia, I think.”

  “Will the Philistines shelter us?”

  “I’m afraid they would take us captive and put us in cages to show in their temples.”