Arcadian Nights

by John Spurling

  ‘Brilliant!’ said Perseus, with his winning smile.

  Hermes smiled back and gave him the shield.

  ‘But how shall I know which of the three is Medusa?’

  ‘The other two have grey complexions, Medusa’s is much redder. And she generally sits in the middle.’

  ‘Generally? What if …?’

  ‘As soon as her head is off, you must put it in that satchel and pull the neck of the satchel tight, then you must take to the air and I hope my sandals will be fast enough. The other two Gorgons will be after you and they have wings. You may need to dive and duck to evade them, but try to rise above them or, like falcons, they will stoop with a speed you cannot match and get their talons into you. And make sure when you’ve escaped them that you fly in the right direction or you will be lost over the endless unchanging expanse of Okeanos, where even gods might miss their way.’

  ‘And then?’

  But Hermes was no longer there. Perseus, still holding the polished shield, turned it to reflect the moon and stars and practised looking at the reflections but not at the sky. Then, tired, he laid it on the ground and, having carefully covered it with palm fronds, afraid that even in that deserted place somebody might see it shining with the moon’s light and steal it, slept under his cloak.

  He rose at dawn and, setting up targets of branches in the sandy soil, spent an hour or two rehearsing with the shield, the sickle, the helmet and the winged sandals, until he was confident that he had mastered all the skills he would need for his formidable task. The cutting power of the glittering glassy sickle particularly delighted him. It severed thick branches as if they were blades of grass. Not knowing that adamant could be found only in Hades’ kingdom, he wondered why men were content with bronze when they could cut swathes through forests or enemy armies with axes or swords made of this magical mineral.

  When he was ready he took to the air and flew along the coast looking for the Gorgons’ island. The Graiai had told him that it was shaped like a tooth, but upside-down. Their sisters, they said, lived in the hollow between the protruding roots of the tooth-like rock, which was also gleaming white like a tooth. Perseus had some doubts about their simile, considering that since their lives were entirely focussed on their eye and their tooth they probably thought every island on earth was shaped like one or the other. Also, their own tooth was yellow, not white, though with only the one eye between them they had probably not seen their tooth since it was white many centuries ago. But after some time he spotted what from a distance did indeed resemble an upside-down tooth, gleaming white and set in a circle of foam. Before going any closer he practised his aeronautics, diving and soaring, turning at speed, sliding sideways, even looping the loop, so as to be prepared for his escape.

  Finally, gyrating in smaller and smaller circles, he approached the island and saw that it was not made of white rock as appeared from a distance, but almost entirely covered with bird shit, the accumulated droppings of the innumerable sea birds that shared the island with the Gorgons. Only the cleft between the twin pinnacles was clear of guano, a patch of dark-grey rock littered with small bird-shaped rocks. As Perseus landed among them he realised with a shiver that these were once living birds which had looked at the Gorgons and been turned to stone. There were also occasional larger rocks, man-shaped – sailors no doubt who had come ashore here out of curiosity or after being wrecked. He was careful now, advancing softly and invisibly with the sun behind him, to look at nothing but the ground or the surface of his shield, which he turned this way and that to mirror whatever was in front of him. Anyone observing him would have seen only the weird phenomenon of a polished bronze disc moving slowly and jerkily a metre or two above the ground.

  Suddenly the shield reflected what he had come for. Squatting on a broad terrace of rock, basking in the sunlight, were three monstrous creatures resembling huge birds with folded wings and legs and feathered bodies, but with arms and heads more like those of humans except for the bronze claws where their hands should be and the bronze tusks that stuck forward out of their mouths. Perseus stopped and waited, getting his breath, watching the reflections. The Gorgons seemed to be asleep, at any rate their eyes were closed, though their hair was moving as if ruffled by the sea breeze. No, Perseus saw in his shield as he went closer, it was not the breeze, it was the hair itself, scores of small serpents writhing and hissing on each of the three heads. They had seen this strange object approaching even if their owners had not.

  Now he studied the three faces. The face to his left was certainly grey, but so was the one in the middle. It was the face to his right which was red. Could this be correct? Was Medusa not sitting in the middle, as Hermes had suggested, but on the right, or was the light playing tricks with him? He looked again and was sure. And now another doubt made him pause. Reflections in mirrors, surely, turned right to left and left to right? Was the Gorgon with the red complexion really sitting on the left? The more he thought about it, the more confused he became. He felt a terrible urge to look at the group directly in order to check. He fought it down and moved stealthily to his right, so as to mount the terrace from that side, the side where the reflection told him Medusa was seated, and as he came nearer and nearer he saw that the shield had not deceived him. This creature on the right of the group as he looked at it, but on the left from her own opposite point of view, and now from his own point of view as he stood beside her and slowly drew the adamantine sickle from his belt, was indeed the Gorgon with the red complexion.

  The hissing serpents were now in a frenzy of alarm, but, anchored by their tails in her head, could not reach the intruder. Medusa shook her head as if her sleep was disturbed by their noise and movement and Perseus raised the sickle in his right hand, looking for the first time not at the reflection in the shield, but, since he was no longer in front of her but just behind her and could not see her face, at the neck itself. Then he struck. The adamantine blade, visible now that it had left his person and sparkling like an arc of solid light, cut through the bone and tendons of the neck as if they were rotten wood. Medusa uttered a single shriek as her head fell to the ground. Blood spouted from the severed neck as Perseus quickly replaced the sickle in his belt, laid the shield on the ground, slipped the bat skin satchel from his shoulder, opened it and stooped to seize the head by its snaky hair, relieved to find as he did so that the snakes themselves were as dead as their host and could no longer bite him. All this took no more than a few moments, but the other two Gorgons had been woken by their mortal sister’s shriek. Perseus had just time to push the head into his satchel, draw the top of it tight, loop the strap over his shoulder, pick up the shield and jump off the terrace and into the air, before the two monsters, shrieking in their turn, were unfolding their wings and rising after him. They could not see him but they could see the shield and possibly also the satchel slung over his shoulder – Perseus wasn’t sure if that was visible or not.

  He soared upwards and they followed. He could hear the beating of their powerful wings, and it seemed to be getting closer. Now was the time for all the aerial dives and dodges he had practised, but the satchel over his shoulder was heavy – he had not allowed for that – and the Gorgons were as quick and agile as he was. He soon found that between the two of them, working from either side, he was being forced downwards. Nor did he dare look at them, except with the aid of the shield – another problem in this all-round space which he had not foreseen. He found it easier to keep his eyes closed and guess where they were by their wingbeats. His best hope, he realised, was to jettison the shield. Unlike the helmet, the satchel and the sickle, he had not been told to return it, and he hoped that Athene and Hermes would not be angry at its loss. As it fell, spinning and throwing back the sun’s rays, the two Gorgons pursued it and Perseus surged upwards and away.

  He was beginning to feel almost safe and to look about for the coastline when it suddenly occurred to him that the sun was not in his eyes but warming his heels. He was heading in th
e wrong direction, out across fathomless Okeanos instead of back towards the Atlas Mountains. He turned at once and, aiming north-eastwards, so as not to pass near the Gorgons’ island, came at last to a coast he did not recognise. It looked bleak and inhospitable, but he was exhausted, so he landed as soon as he could, on top of a mountainous promontory. There he lay down in the shade of a rock, with the bat skin satchel and its deadly contents at his side, and was soon fast asleep.

  5. THE PRINCESS

  All the storytellers agree that after escaping the Gorgons, Perseus flew over Libya, which for the ancient Greeks meant the continent of Africa and in particular North Africa, the only part they knew of, and reached the coast of Ethiopia. But it seems unlikely that he drifted so far out of his way, considering that his main purpose now was to return to Seriphos, deliver Medusa’s head to Polydektes and rescue his mother. What the storytellers were probably trying to do was reconcile Perseus’ story with that of various even more ancient stories of Egyptian and Middle Eastern gods and heroes – a fruitful field for anthropology, but a blight on fiction, much as though one had to reconcile Perseus with James Bond. I prefer to take a leaf out of the English storyteller Thomas Malory’s Morte d’Arthur. Whenever Malory wanted to insert material into his narrative which was not in his French sources he would remark slyly, ‘as the French book saith’.

  So, as the Greek book saith, Perseus woke up to find himself on the Rock of Gibralter, roughly where his descendant Herakles would later set up one of his Pillars to mark the western limit of the Mediterranean. He was able to drink from a spring but had nothing to eat except a few crusts left in his lunch-bag and was famished. Putting on the helmet of Hades and slinging the heavy bat skin satchel containing Medusa’s head over his shoulder, he leapt from the cliff and, following the coast, began searching for a village or even a shepherd’s hut where he might be hospitably received. Quite soon he heard a voice in his ear:

  ‘Forget about breakfast, Perseus! There’s no time to spare. Turn eastwards and cross the sea to Sicily. I will set you on your course.’

  The god grasped his hand and they flew together over the sea at such a speed that it was as if they arrived almost as soon as they had started. In many ways our modern technology is still inferior to the powers of the Greek gods.

  ‘What is it I’m to do now?’ Perseus asked, but got no immediate reply, and as they approached a line of cliffs, Hermes withdrew his hand.

  ‘Look about you and do what your heart tells you!’ he said and was gone.

  Perseus had not flown far before he saw something very strange on one of the rocky outcrops below. It appeared to be a naked person. Dropping lower he saw that it was a naked woman. Dropping lower still he saw that it was a young and lovely naked woman and that she was tied to the rock by a rope knotted into bronze rings. Then he noticed that there was a large crowd of people, clothed, on the cliffs overlooking the outcrop.

  ‘This seems to be some kind of sacrifice,’ he said to himself and, diving down to land on the cliff quite near the crowd, removed his helmet and approached.

  ‘What’s going on?’ he asked an elderly man with a sad face who was standing slightly apart from the others.

  ‘Altogether frightful!’ said the man with relish. ‘Andromeda is about to be devoured by a sea monster.’

  ‘Who is Andromeda and what has she done?’

  ‘She’s done nothing at all. It was her mother, Queen Cassiopeia, who was vain enough to claim that she and her daughter were more beautiful than the Nereids. The Nereids complained to the sea god Poseidon and he sent a series of inundations which destroyed houses and crops and cattle and took many lives, together with a sea monster which has been regularly eating up the fishermen. King Cepheus consulted an oracle and this was what it recommended: their daughter Andromeda must be put out as a tasty tit-bit for the monster.’

  ‘Why does she have to be naked?’

  ‘Presumably the monster doesn’t want the trouble of spitting out her clothes before biting into the tender flesh.’

  Apart from the unpleasantness of the explanation, Perseus found the man’s lip-smacking tone unsettling. In fact he was the local storyteller and was already beginning to assemble the titillating story he would relate to his audiences. Perseus edged his way through the crowd towards the king and queen standing at the front, near the edge of the cliff. As he did so, the whole crowd began to stir and shout and some of the women to shriek in terror.

  ‘It’s there! It’s coming! Look! Look!’

  Perseus looked with the rest at where people were pointing and saw, still some way out to sea, huge black coils breaking the surface of the sea, then a mighty tail thrashing spray from the waves, then the monster’s scaly, dragon-like head, rising as it eyed its prey, sinking again as it thrust through the water towards her. Reaching the front of the crowd, Perseus could see Andromeda quite clearly. She was shivering either with fear or cold, or both together, but her face did not show fear. Rather, she seemed to have an expression of determined courage, her lips closed, her jaw set, her eyes open. Her only sign of nervousness was that with one roped hand she kept brushing away her streaming golden hair, blown by the wind across her face and body. Perseus had never seen the Nereids – they were visited many generations later by his descendant Herakles – but he was sure they could not be as beautiful as Andromeda, and he knew from his own experience that she was much more beautiful than the Stygian Nymphs. He was careful to keep the thought to himself. Even gods cannot read people’s thoughts, unless they show them on their faces.

  Now the monster was only a hundred and two metres away from its prey, and Perseus, in love with the girl at first sight and with no time to spare for preliminaries, went straight up to the king and queen.

  ‘Will you give me the hand of your daughter?’ he said.

  They were appalled.

  ‘What did you say?’ asked Queen Cassiopeia.

  ‘Is this some sort of joke?’ said King Cepheus. ‘Who are you and how dare you come here at this moment and make such a crude and cruel suggestion?’

  ‘My name is Perseus, from the island of Seriphos in Greece. Yesterday I beheaded the Gorgon Medusa and today I will do the same for that monster if you will give me your daughter’s hand in marriage.’

  ‘You’re mad!’ said the king, his face turning red with fury. ‘How could anyone kill Medusa? How could anyone kill that monster? He’d have to have wings. Someone get this lunatic out of my sight!’

  ‘You have only moments to agree,’ said Perseus, shaking off the hands that were beginning to grasp him and pointing at the monster, now within 50 metres of the rock. ‘Give Andromeda to me or give her to the monster! Look at these, if you can’t believe me!’

  He showed the king his winged sandals, he drew the adamantine sickle and flourished it so that it sparkled like diamonds, then he put on the helmet and disappeared, only to remove it and reappear a moment later.

  ‘In here,’ he said patting the bat skin satchel, ‘is Medusa’s head, but if I showed you that you’d be turned to stone.’

  ‘This is a god,’ said the queen. ‘Let him save her! Let him marry her!’

  ‘Very well!’ said the king. ‘If you save her, you can have her!’

  Perseus jumped straight off the cliff, putting on his helmet as he flew, so that the astounded spectators first saw a man transformed into a bird and then empty air, as if he had fallen to his death. Many were peering at the bottom of the cliff in search of his body, when somebody shrieked:

  ‘Look!’

  They saw the girl shrink back against the rock as the monster’s huge head reared up towards her and, almost simultaneously, with a sudden flash of light from the adamantine sickle, they saw the monster’s head fall away in a spray of blood, while its tail lashed the sea into a whirlpool of foam and its black coils sank slowly into the depths. Then they saw Perseus, his helmet in one hand, his sickle in the other, alight on the ledge beside the naked princess and speak to her for a moment be
fore cutting the ropes that bound her to the rock.

  Some storytellers have it that Perseus, after decapitating the monster, turned it to stone with the Gorgon’s head. But how could that be when the monster no longer had eyes to see with, and where was the need? Perseus might, of course, have used the head rather than the sickle in the first place, but suppose the monster had had eyes only for the princess or the princess herself had also seen the face of Medusa? A stone princess would have been little better than a swallowed princess. No question, then, that the adamantine sickle was the weapon of choice and that the monster was not turned to stone but fed the fishes.

  Perseus was by no means certain that his winged sandals would carry them both across the narrow gap between the outcrop and the cliff, especially since the cliff was much higher, but the way she looked at him with her green eyes and sweet smile, the mere thought of holding her naked body in his arms, made him determined to try. He had to put on his helmet again in order to have both arms free, so that all the crowd on the cliff saw was their naked princess rising through the air towards them, slowly but surely, her shapely bottom first, as the invisible Perseus, clasping her in a fireman’s lift over one shoulder, willed his sandals not to fail him.

  He got there, but made a poor landing, stumbling to his knees and almost dropping Andromeda. The queen’s ladies-in-waiting hurried to take her from his arms and cover her with a cloak. Perseus removed his helmet and rose to his feet and as he did so the crowd drew back, muttering that this was indeed a god, most likely Hermes to judge by the winged sandals.

  ‘Are you a god?’ asked King Cepheus.

  ‘No, I am not a god,’ said Perseus, ‘nor anything approaching one. But I give thanks to the immortals who lent me these sandals, this helmet, this sickle and this satchel, who directed me to this place and helped me do what I have done. They gave me no warning of your daughter’s sacrifice, but since I arrived only just in time to save her, I don’t think that can have been chance.’