Metamorphica

by Zachary Mason

  * * *

  When I rose from the grass she was gone. I’d closed my eyes for a little while but it didn’t seem like it could have been very long, and I could still see the depression in the grass where she’d lain. Then I remembered I was racing for my life, which might be forfeit already. I threw on my tunic and tore through the trees to the road and though the sun was lower in the sky there was still no sign of him but for all I knew he’d long since come and gone. It occurred to me to run away and not come back but it wasn’t in me to flee and I told myself to make the best of my disadvantages and ran flat out for home. When I finally saw the gate-post he wasn’t there, in fact no one was there at all; it was just another day, the cattle lowing in their paddock, and somewhere children shouting. I nocked an arrow and waited for him all that day, determined to wreck him, but he didn’t come that evening or the next or in any of the long days of the summer which was the sweetest I’d known, as sweet as the wine I started drinking, as sweet as the mouths of the girls and the boys. I was more often in company, and ran less, and it wasn’t long before I noticed that my wind wasn’t what it had been, and I wondered if somewhere I’d made a mistake, but soon I was distracted because against all expectation I married, for love, I thought, but love faded, but it didn’t matter because by then I had a daughter to whom I gave everything, and she looked much like me, if not quite so tall, but soon enough she ceased to need me, and once I heard her tell her friends that her mother had been an athlete once, though now it was hard to see. She married and went away, and then my husband died, and I spent my days working in my garden and walking in the hills where I’d once run, until the day I came home and found Death waiting at the gate-post.

  49

  MYRRHA

  Myrrha crept into her father’s bed one night, inspired by Aphrodite. Myrrha’s son by her father was Adonis.

  Aphrodite says, “Padding footsteps’ soft approach and the hiss of her body sliding in beside you. The cold air, her heat beneath you, and her skin tastes like lemons and summer. Still asleep, you see the white moonlight on her wide, stricken eyes which tear as she looks up at you. You feel as though you’ve been reprieved, that time has restored what it took away—you thought you’d never see your wife again, but here she is, young again, though she’s been dead twenty years, lost giving birth to your daughter. Inference stirs sluggishly but doesn’t quite surface, and you remember that a city is like a circle of light where laws govern the lives of men, and even now you are leaving that illumination and going out into the night, and you know you must stop, but then I’m there and my breath is like fire as I whisper, All laws are lies but mine, and as the girl’s thigh spasms you go sifting down into the dark. Soon it will be day and you will wake alone, wash carefully, and there might never have been a night.”

  50

  ADONIS

  Adonis was the lover of both Aphrodite, the goddess of love, and Persephone, the goddess of death. He got Aphrodite pregnant. He ended up dividing his time between them.

  Light filters through the oaks as cicadas drone the day away and my lassitude is such I think I’ll never move again. But then, in the hottest part of the day, she’s there with me, all golden hair and hunger, and the sweat and heat are all but intolerable. Finally I wade in the frigid brook and when I turn back she’s gone and night’s coming.

  Under the moon the world turns to bone and with spear in hand I course tirelessly over the undulating hills. A clattering in the bracken, then a deer’s silhouette on a ridge; I give chase and soon bring it down. The deer’s fat crackles over the fire and my shadow looms long on the trees; every nocturnal thing must see me, but there’s nothing I fear in the night.

  Then I see her, the pale one, very still as she watches me through the low branches. She strokes my hair and kisses my scratches with cold lips, puts my arrowheads in her mouth and coats them with black venom. She tries to draw me away with her but I tell her I love another; she says this is a mere passing affair, and will end soon. When she goes the sun is rising.

  One morning I drowse with my head on my golden lover’s smooth thighs, her fingers tangled in my hair, and I see her stomach is distended. I touch her but there’s none of the heat and tautness of infection. What does this mean, I ask, and she says it means things are changing. No change, I say. Let everything remain exactly as it is. It can’t, she says. It must, I say. There’s always a way.

  That night I go to the chalk valleys (the pale woman’s yellow eyes follow me from the trees) and flush a black boar with tusks like dirty white sickles. Reeds breaking, creek’s churn, and my arrows piercing only earth as he flies into a copse atop a hill. I rush in with spear raised but the trees end and beyond them there’s a wide plain, white under the moon. A long road like a silver river cuts across the plain and leads to a faint shimmering in the farthest distance. The pale woman is beside me then, her fingertips brushing my arm. She says it’s her city at the end of that road, and she’ll wait for me there.

  The dawn is sticky and hot and I wait by the brook but my golden lover doesn’t come, not even when the sun is high in the sky. I look for her but find only bird-song and deer-trails and the cicadas’ drone. Without her the forest is a waste and I’m restless, sitting in the shade, pitching stones in a brook, and finally I go to the hill and watch the road. In the distance I see a plume of dust and I know I’ll soon be going.

  51

  AENEID

  Aeneas was a prince of Troy and the son of Aphrodite. When Troy fell he fled to Italy and founded Rome.

  Many centuries later the Roman poet Virgil recounted Aeneas’ exploits in his Aeneid. The emperor Augustus was Virgil’s patron.

  His mother’s bloom was as the springtime, but Aeneas had gotten old. He was a good suzerain to the kingdom he’d carved out of Italy, but privately he was detached, aware that any one of his carls could play the part as well, and that everything that made him Aeneas—the duel with Diomedes, the flight from Troy’s ashes with his father on his back, sending Turnus sprawling to spill his lifeblood on the white Latin dust—was in the past.

  His mother was watching when he hung his sword on the wall for good, and when he gave his favorite horse to his grandson; the gelding, feeling her presence, rolled his eyes and whickered at the mares. She watched him sleep some nights, pitying his old man’s wheeze and rattle. Mortal mothers, she reflected, miss the season of their sons’ decline.

  One day as he walked through the dusty oaks around his fields a weight seemed to strike him in the chest and he fell to his knees among the acorns. The speckling of sun through the leaves overhead faded to spattered light in darkness and as at a distance he saw the cowherd who found him, the fingers probing his neck, the hand checking for breath and then closing his eyes, his wife wailing in the forest, the contained grief of his sons, the eldest of whom held a torch to a pyre of dry sticks and just as the world turned to flame his mother swept him into her arms and away.

  There were white clouds and blue sky and wind with a hint of the sea. She carried him as easily as if he’d been a child, his cheek sinking into her breast, and he was ashamed at how much he was comforted. Should pride, he wondered, survive death? “Zeus loves me well,” she said, kissing him. “For you, my only son, I begged the boon of immortality—once is enough, I said, to pass through the bitter gates of Hell.6 Zeus said, Seize him before his soul takes flight and take him to the marches of the underworld. There submerge him in the Styx, which will wash away every mortal part of him—what is left will live forever.” Aeneas opened his mouth to speak but wind ripped the words away as they hurtled down through shining gulfs of air and nothingness into dark canyons full of bats and sulfur and the smell of old stone and finally to low banks of black sand beside the glass-smooth Styx.

  Its water swirled around her flushed calves as she pushed him under the swift flow which churned and ran red, and she cried out as his body dissolved like wet paper. Her wicked mind filled with blood and she thought of the wretched, humiliating passi
ons to which even the strongest of the gods could be subjected. Then she saw the written sheets drifting away from where her son had been; she gathered up as many as she could but some were carried off by the current and others reached the black beach where a shade, or not a shade but a dreaming sleeper’s ghost stooped, picked one from the flow, and looked at her with lucid eyes. At last, she understood. She said, “All for you, my Virgil.”

  52

  AUGUSTUS

  Gaius Octavius Augustus was the first emperor of Rome. He was prone to sleeplessness and bad dreams. He exiled Ovid.

  Snow swirls over the fires of the legion in the high mountain pass. There’s no sound but the wind’s moan, the tents’ rattle; the legionnaires’ eyes follow Augustus as he walks past them toward the peak.

  Cresting the pass, the plain opens up below him, ablaze with the flickering campfires of the Gauls, their army so vast its innumerable fires seem to reach the horizon where they commingle with the stars. The nearest barbarians are so close he can see their seamed and bearded faces, which show not rancor but resignation—they stare up at him as though to say, With so many pushing behind us, what can we do but go on?

  He tries in vain to count their multitudes, hoping his trembling will be attributed to the cold. He imagines Rome sacked and smoldering, for Rome, however great, is but a single city, while the northern forests are illimitable, and how can so many be overcome?

  The fire-light glitters on the glass jewels and crude weapons of the Gauls, who are brave men but simple, and he remembers that even their chieftains are afraid of storms, eclipses, witchcraft and ghosts, greedy for minted gold and the voluptuousness of cities, that they make war on Rome out of envy as much as ambition, and then he has it: instead of slaughtering them, or trying to, he’ll found new Romes, other Romes on the far side of the Alps to absorb the tribes and make them citizens, and each wave of invaders will become a bulwark against the next, and instead of slowly crumbling the Roman frontier will move north over the black and dripping forests, the jagged mountains, the boundless tundra, and then over seas and down centuries to remote islands, distant continents …

  But if Rome goes from a single city to a constellation of cities where Latin is a temple language and the eagle standard is taken for the votive of some raptor-hearted god then has he secured Rome’s glory or just its dissolution, and how will he be remembered, and will his life and empire have meant nothing?

  Now he’s down on the plain in what had been the far distance. The barbarians are restive shadows and looking up he realizes that what he’d taken for stars are something else, are in fact the shining ranks of the glorious dead. They loom over him, radiant and still. Will he one day be among them? Now one burns so brightly he thinks it’s the rising sun, but no, its light is cold—it’s Alexander.

  53

  EPISTOLARY

  Ovid was a Roman poet. Augustus exiled him to the Black Sea. Ovid never saw Rome again.

  Ovid is finishing a letter. The wind from the plain slips through the cracks in the walls and the pen trembles in his hand as he writes out the last words and his thoughts turn toward home. He seals it and addresses it to the emperor of Rome—once an intimate, now almost a fiction of his memory—and hands it to the courier waiting by the door. Ovid stands in the street, watching the grey plume of the courier’s dust rise up, dissolve.

  The courier rides swiftly across the plain, his face set, his strength such that it seems he must soon reach his destination, but in fact everything is against him—the broken roads, the sun like a hammer, the night sky rent by thunderstorms that saturate the dust and send floods foaming through the washes and arroyos. He fords trunk-entangled rivers, wakes shivering in dripping, wind-tormented woods, comes to rain-swept cross-roads where loitering renegades oil knives beneath black gallows.

  The letter suffers on the road, soaked in rain, stained with silt, slashed by the thief he left face-down in milky ditch-water. By the time he finds the squat tower of unmortared stones where the next courier waits, his face is gaunt, his quiver empty, the soiled letter coming apart.

  The new courier’s road winds up through a dry, dreary country of starry nights and empty desert space. Miles from anything, he notices that the letter’s seal has rotted and fallen off. His conscience flares, flickers, dies; opening it, he finds the letter water-stained and mildewed, some lines blurred irretrievably, but still he can discern a story of exile and despair, of a message transformed in its passage through many hands on its way to a reader who is most likely a mirage.

  He has the letter by heart, or nearly, when he finds the next courier by a dry well in an oasis. (In dreams he sees it written in letters of light on pages of wavering flame.) Only when his successor can recite the letter verbatim does he give him the rotting, sporadically legible scrap of paper and send him off.

  Weeks pass before the new courier rides into a town and once the key for the Inn of the Couriers has been found and the inn opened (the townsmen had come to think of it as a crypt, or the temple of some dead religion) he finds pen and paper among the dusty rooms and transcribes what he remembers though he fears the falsity of memory and that the words have been shifted, transposed, rearranged. The original has disintegrated by the time he finds the next courier who takes the new letter and heads toward the mountains and away.

  It isn’t long before the letter has passed out of Latin and into the native tongues of the couriers or of the peoples they ride past—the men who worship fire, the ones who wear peaked caps and live in excavated mountains, the ones who dwell in houses built by riverbanks on stilts. Some regard this as an outrage, though others claim that the letter was never in Latin at all, that Ovid had in fact adopted the barbarous tongue of the Getae or the harsh lingua franca of the mercantile Greeks. Some couriers, carrying the letter only in their memories, find they have no tongue in common with their successors, and for a moment the letter passes out of language altogether and into gestures—they pretend to weep, to wrestle with brigands, to fend off the short, sharp arrows of the Scythians—or even objects—arrows laid in parallel in the dust, a broken plume, stones piled up in the semblance of a city.

  Countless letters are in circulation now, and some trace their ancestry to the original, but all, by now, are corrupt, little more than florilegia of ghost stories, quotations out of context, fragments of geography. Through the incessant operation of chance some few have come to resemble their original, but there’s no way to find them.

  The false and worthless letters are as numerous as the grains of sand in a desert but not even one has come within a hundred miles of Rome, or even a thousand, or even to a city where they fear the eagle-standard, where Rome is more than a rumor. In fact, it’s generally agreed that Rome has long since fallen, that the city on the Tiber is no more than a ruin where goats browse on thistle among toppled colonnades. Some insist that Rome never existed at all, that there was only ever the idea of an empire, of a city as desirable as it is remote, ruled over by an emperor sitting in his summer palace, chin in hand, gazing out into the evening as the settling dimness swallows the city, the roads, the arbors, and at his elbow sits a letter unnoticed. If ever he were to open it (but his mind is elsewhere, and he almost certainly won’t) he would read of a poet who was once almost an intimate, finishing a letter with shaking hand as, without hope, his thoughts turn toward home.

  NOTES

  NOCTURNE

  Elpenor fell from the roof of Circe’s house on Aiaia and broke his neck. His ghost wandered restlessly until he was buried.

  ARACHNE

  Ovid thought the gods were absurd—at one point he has Athena pole-vault out of a scene on her spear. I, too, am unlikely to invoke Athena Nike in time of crisis, but I’m interested in the gods as primes and essences, and have more regard for the dignity of these faded but august imaginary beings.

  NEMESIS

  Witches’ duels are problematic—if both combatants can take any shape they like, the fight seems necessarily inconclusive�
�how does one do harm in such a battle, and why does Zeus, for all his power, act like a boorish mortal prince?

  ATHENA I

  If the world is Zeus’ dream, the things he can’t forget will tend to persist.

  Traditionally, Athena sprang fully armed and armored from Zeus’ skull after he swallowed the titan Mnemosyne.

  IDEOGRAPH

  I’ve always wanted there to be myths about language—what could be more fundamental?

  ICARUS

  In the original, Icarus melted the wax that held his wings together by flying too close to the sun. In Ovid’s day no one had been higher than a mountaintop, or knew it was a journey of about ninety-three million cold, vacuous miles to the sun. My Icarus keeps trying to break out of the atmosphere, like a bird dashing itself against a window—he gets as far as its boundary, which is, I admit, not possible with no oxygen and a pair of home-made wings.

  MINOS

  The math in this story is abstract and magical. In essence it’s a locked-room mystery about friendship and identity.

  In the original, Minos tracked down Daedalus by offering a reward to anyone who could thread a string through a nautilus shell. Daedalus did it by tying a string to an ant and sending the ant through the shell. Minos went to the city where Daedalus was staying but was killed in his bath.

  DAEDALUS

  An irrational number is an infinite abyss, though they’re present even in simple geometric objects like circles and squares. The ancient Greeks knew this, and were horrified.

  PHILEMON AND BAUCIS

  In the original, Philemon and Baucis were turned into trees immediately, which seems like a poor reward.