Banished Sons Of Poseidon

by Andrew J. Peters

  I didn’t have nursemaids like my sisters, but my mother doted on me. I knew I was her favorite. In my alone times, I would stare at the door of my bedroom chamber, listening for the sound of her arrival. When I heard the trail of her footsteps, my heartbeat would quicken like the wings of a tiny bird. Each morning, she would look upon me with an enormous smile, and she would lift me into her arms and press warm kisses against my face. She was my first love. For a time, I believed I was hers, as devoted to me as she was. It was a blessed childhood.

  As I grew older, that little, cozy world expanded in frightening ways. Older boys were introduced to me as my tutors. I’m embarrassed to say I tried to hide from them at first, crawling behind the divans of the parlors or slipping behind the bunting that decorated the walls. I had only known my mother and my sisters. My father had been like a god, swooping into my life on the gilded wings of fortune. I loved and admired him, but his nature had been ungraspable to me. Besides, a new adventure always called him away. He never stayed with us for more than a season.

  Those tutors seemed like a strange breed of creatures with their squared and rangy bodies and hairy arms and legs. But my mother insisted that I needed to have my lessons in letters, and I needed to train in the arts of war if I was to become my father’s rightful legacy.

  I overcame my shyness around those earnest young men and even enjoyed their company, particularly the ones whose faces I had begun to recognize as handsome and those who rewarded a good recital of my lessons with a fond grin. But during that time, the household changed. I came to understand that I was the cause of that, though I did not know why. One by one, each tutor disappeared from my life, replaced by strangers whom I was loath to trust. By the time I had gotten used to this or that new teacher, he would disappear just as the one before him had.

  I cried to my mother over the cruelty of it. What had I done to be forsaken without even the thought of saying good-bye? My mother had stories about each of the men who had left me. He had an ailing parent to care for or been betrothed to a wife with whom he would start a family, or he had a sudden errand to attend to abroad. Even as a child, I perceived a hollow timbre in her explanations. I could only reason that I was a very stupid and untrainable boy. Barring that, I had to be an intolerable companion.

  My desolation deepened as I realized I had made my mother a liar. She offered me those stories like bouquets of pruned and budded lilies. It was because my mother knew I was inferior, and she feared I could not withstand the truth. My heart veered away from her. She saw me as a moppet, crafted in my father’s image but never destined to be the man he was. In my young mind, I blamed my mother for my inadequacy. Her coddling felt like a mockery of me, and I wondered if she had ever really wanted to bear a boy.

  I began to recognize my mother’s other habits. My uncle Gadir turned up as a frequent visitor to our home. Though he bore my father’s likeness, my uncle was a prim pheasant to the strutting peacock of my father. He would stay after suppers when I was put to bed. Curious, I would listen from my room while the servants cleared the platters and trenchers. The noise from the grand atrium, between the men’s and women’s side of the palace, would fall away to quiet chatter and little bursts of laughter. I could not hold the words that passed between my mother and my uncle long enough in my head to understand what they were saying, but I recognized them as much gentler and more familiar than any conversation I had ever heard between my mother and my father.

  Those nights, a tight pit formed in my stomach. I knew nothing of love between a woman and a man, but as the simplest of creatures is born with instincts, I knew those visits were improper. My thoughts wound back to my faults again. Had the shame of me turned my mother away from my father? Was she planning on making a better son with my uncle?

  When my father next returned, my parents had an awful row that put the whole house on edge. I was certain my father had confronted my mother about my uncle, and I worried over whose side I should take. I felt it would be right if my mother was exposed and punished, but I was frightened of what would happen to me. My mother could be turned out of the house with her children so my father could take another wife. I had heard such stories in my morals lessons. I could have pled for my father to take me with him, but I was afraid of that as well. He was Atlas the Golden. He traveled with an entourage of gruff and hardy military companions and a strange assortment of foreigners whom he had won over on his adventures. The only ones with whom I felt a kinship were the pretty slave boys whom I resembled with my slight build and timid inclination. The notion of me proving myself as a second to my father was unthinkable.

  A few days later, a clamor of activity burst from the women’s harem. I had been told not to leave my father’s compound, so I could not spy upon the noise. When I looked out from the terrace of my bedchamber, I saw a line of horse-drawn carriages that had been brought into the yard inside the palace gates.

  My mother came to me at midday and told me the news. My father had ordered my sisters confined to an apple orchard in the northern countryside. I had never set foot beyond the palace walls. My sisters might as well have been ferried across the sea. My mother and I wept together like widows. For a while, I scarcely wondered about the cause. Having my sisters taken away from the palace was like carving out a lobe of my heart.

  Later, I wondered about many things. Had it been my mother’s punishment? I had made many hateful, silent oaths against her, and I thought it was possible the gods had heard them and brought my spite to life. Part of her was broken after that day. Forever after, she was surrounded by a pale aura of grieving. It shames me to remember I despised her more for that. I was a heartless youth. I wanted her to stand up to my father and refuse his cruel commandment. If he could banish my sisters, what was to say he would not banish me?

  You are wondering now how this all relates to my meeting Eudoros. Perhaps I have been long-winded in getting to that part. But as a planter must understand what conditions will favor this or that crop to grow from the earth, so must you understand the climate in which our love affair took bud.

  A season of winter and summer had passed since my sisters had been taken away when I first met Eudoros. I had outgrown the height of my mother, and my martial training had begun to shed the fat from my boyish body and strengthen my limbs. My father decreed that the kingdom would hold a spectacle of games and feasts to celebrate my passage to manhood. You know such ceremonies now as a Panegyris. I was the first prince to be feted in such a lavish manner.

  It was a new terror for me. My training in formalities and athletics was to be handled privately as it always had, but I would hold the reins of my father’s chariot at a grand procession to the splendid temple that had been built to preserve the memory of my grandfather. A priest was hired to train me in the oaths and oblations of the temple ceremony.

  He was a stalky and awkward young man, and not at all appealing to me at first. I pray it does not offend you, but the sight of his stark, bare scalp made me worry that he was cursed or diseased. I had never met a priest before. I did not know about your rites of grooming and certainly had no understanding of what purpose those habits served. We were both cautious around each other.

  In those days, since I had grown too old to be looked after by my mother, a bodyguard had been assigned to chaperone my lessons. He was a bullish man named Kanos whose face was nearly entirely concealed by a coarse, sable beard. I think his presence made Eudoros nervous. After our third or fourth meeting, Kanos would leave the two of us alone for stretches of time. It might have been because he took pity on Eudoros. Kanos may have been bored of his lessons. Maybe he just sensed that my welfare was hardly at risk in the company of such a slight and unremarkable young man.

  In our privacy, I took account of the priest more freely. His features and his mannerisms, which I had found so feeble, became more intriguing to me. Mischievous, I asked Eudoros questions about his life beyond the palace just to draw out a pained, uncertain look from his face. He had be
en indoctrinated in the private manner of your kind, but he could not refuse to answer a prince. Did you know he had been orphaned like yourself? Everything about him fascinated me. My other tutors, bookish as they were or handsome as they were, seemed very ordinary in comparison. It was as though Eudoros had been plucked into this world from another realm. I saw that sadness in his eyes. From that sympathy grew affection.

  I challenged his teachings about the spirit realm, from whence burst out such outlandish things as winged tigers and gorgon women who froze men to stone. I was a skeptical and moody child who had seen practically nothing of the world. As the son of the Great Poseidon, my father was said to be a demi-god, but my sight had begun to penetrate the glamour that surrounded him. Mostly, I simply enjoyed teasing my new companion and drawing out the mornings we spent together. I said before instincts were born in me that needed no cultivation to bloom. They needed only time and the occasion to present themselves. During my lessons with Eudoros, the coy arts of courtship came to me as naturally as putting one foot in front of the other.

  It perplexed me mildly that a man should evoke such tendencies in me. My mother had spoken to me about one day taking a wife. My father had never dallied on his visits to discuss such things with me. I had grown to believe that happiness and marriage were notions far removed from one another in any case. Eudoros made me happy. That was all.

  I noticed Eudoros leaning toward courtship in his own shy way. He had always been dour and careful around me. Allowing himself to break a grin seemed to be a tremendously reckless thing for him to do, but he did grin in my company. He allowed me to draw nearer to him as we sat together on the fleece of my father’s salon room, or beneath a shade tree in the gardens when my protests to feel the breath of springtide wore him down.

  We were to have a dozen lessons at the extreme. As you well know, the vows and offerings of a boy’s Panegyris are fairly rote. I could have sworn them to memory in a day. Beyond appearances, there was no need for Eudoros to be profuse. I was the grandson of Poseidon, after all!

  Still, I pretended to forget my oaths and begged Eudoros that I needed more time. With nearly as fine a dressing, Eudoros threatened he would have to report to my father I refused to take instruction and let my mind wander too freely. By the grace of the Fates, my father’s return from abroad was delayed by the squall of the sea. Naturally, a spectacle in my honor could not take place without him. Eudoros and I were free to meet until the day when my father’s sails would be sighted cresting the horizon beyond the city harbor. My mother made no effort to interfere with the time we spent together. It could not have gone unnoticed. As much as she was lost in her unhappiness, I do believe she was complicit in our deceit. She had her own reasons to tempt my father’s ire.

  One day when Eudoros and I took our visit in the salon while rain pattered down on the gardens, a delicious aching clutched my heart. I clasped Eudoros’ hand and brushed my cheek against his. I told him that I loved him.

  Delicately, he guided me beyond his reach. I was stricken, and I asked him, “Do you not love me?”

  He did not answer. Scalded by the thought that I had presumed too much, I asked him: “Do you not love me because I am a boy?”

  I did not know what to make of the gaze that fell upon me. It made me feel more childish than I had ever felt in my life, yet it was moist with fearful tears. Then he spoke words that exhumed a buried horror. He brought me to a fancy looking-glass that had been fashioned for my father and installed on the wall of the salon. There, he told me to undress. He turned his back to me for the sake of my modesty.

  A season before, my mother had taught me to bind my breasts. She had said that it would stop them from blossoming so that the rest of my body could catch up while I was growing into the body of a man. Before that, when I had bled and cried out for her, she had taken me by the hand very firmly and dragged me to my bedchamber. There, she had shushed me and helped me clean myself. She had told me that I must have broken the flesh from my exercises. She had brought me a special tea steeped with very potent and unsavory herbs and instructed me to drink daily to heal the wound.

  Some years earlier, I had stolen into my mother’s dressing room and discovered on the sill a pretty silver locket encircled in burnt sage and cast in the dawning light of the sun. It was identical to the trinkets that each of my sisters wore. My mother had commissioned those keepsakes from our jewelry-maker to bless each of the girls on the days of their births. The locket I had found looked as though it had been set aside in remembrance, and it was inscribed with the name Calaeno. I had stumbled away from the discovery at the time, thinking I had uncovered a private tragedy my mother had kept from me.

  I had studied likenesses of men and women on the painted walls of our home, particularly the unclad warriors my father favored. I had wondered when that male part of me would grow. Still, I was a boy. That was what I had always been told. Everything I had believed peeled away as I stood before the looking-glass. Glaring back at me was a girl I had never known.

  A shriek rose up in me, but for the sake of Eudoros, I willed myself to calm and merely covered myself. I shrank from him and prayed the sky would fall and forever shroud me from the eyes of men. Eudoros left me to myself. I took to my bed and did not speak to anyone for many days, feigning fever and fatigue.

  Meanwhile, my mind was adrift like my father’s storm-tossed galley. My life had been a lie. In a distant way, I understood my parents’ scheme. They wanted a son so that the bloodline of my father wouldn’t end with him. Nearer to my heart, however, was the question of how they could hate me so much to have raised me to show off like one of my father’s silver steeds. They could have just as well chosen one of my other sisters. Alcyone, Merope, and Electra all had fair hair like my father. But I was the one who had been dressed up as his replica like an actor in a play.

  In peaks of that private storm, I felt unleashed. I finally realized the reason I had always felt unable to be my father’s heir. It was nature.

  But I was still bound to my father. A frightening future splayed out before my eyes. The truth of me would have to forever be a secret. I would be sealed off from the world and never know the intimacy of companionship and certainly never love. I realized that my sisters had been taken away from the palace not for any misdeed on their part or on my mother’s part. It was to keep them from perceiving they had another sister rather than a brother. For the same reason, my tutors had been dismissed, if not hanged, so they would not come to understand my nature too well. I could not guess how my parents planned to continue the charade as I grew to womanhood. But at my Panegyris, I would be announced to the world as Atlas’ son. Thereafter I would be imprisoned in the lie, someday even to succeed my father as a king.

  I realized I could only talk to one person about these things. I emerged from the mire of my bedchamber and called for my mother. I told her that I was fit to resume my lessons with Eudoros.

  A delicate part of me feared he would not return after having exposed my parents’ conspiracy. It had been immensely dangerous for him to do so, and I had seen men who were much stronger and more audacious than he dance delicately around my father for fear of suffering his wrath. I prayed the world was not so cruel. I had desperate plans on my mind if Eudoros abandoned me.

  He arrived the next day, and we repaired to the quiet of the men’s salon. As soon as Kanos left us, I could not help the tears from returning to my eyes. I told him everything I had reckoned about my parents’ deceit, and I begged him to believe I had not been part of it. I spoke of my terror about going through with my father’s festival, a ceremony to seal my fate. I told Eudoros that I could not do it, especially since it would mean forsaking our companionship.

  Eudoros sheltered me in his arms. He said he loved me as well, and he knew a way to rescue me from my fate. He told me about a place where we could go and never be discovered. He pressed into my hands a drawing of a path through the woods beyond the palace. I was to meet him there at full dark
.

  Of course, you know the rest of the story. He had shown me the way to the magic gates to the underworld. There, I shed my life as my father’s son and started anew as Calaeno, which was the name my mother had promised me but set upon a sill in ashes. Eudoros was my savior. He had shown me what I was and still he loved me.

  Chapter Four

  The story held Dam in a spell for some time after Calaeno stopped speaking. He had never been coerced to pretend to be anyone other than himself, but her troubles fitting into the world of men aroused a sense of kinship. He had also known the falseness and cruelty of palace society. He had turned away from it himself, though he had been a boy of no consequence.

  Calaeno had refused her father, the mighty Atlas, and jeopardized his line of kings. Dam wasn’t sure if that made her love affair more or less honorable. In any case, he kept his thoughts to himself.

  Many interesting tales must have followed Calaeno’s flight to the underworld, but Dam was anxious to know the finish to the story. “Why did it end between you and Zazamoukh?”

  “I could blame the Oomphalos. As it corrupted the New Ones, so it poisoned Eudoros with greed. Our joyful time together ended when I learned how he had discovered the underworld. As a novice priest, I daresay about your age, he had tripped upon a portal and been ensnared in a pact with the serpent-men. They promised him immortality if he would bring them the stone, which the Old Ones had banished to the above-world so that it would not be misused. Eudoros did that, but he was never paid for the deed. Instead, they tempted him to be their slave trader. For each man Eudoros brought them, they allowed him to bask in the stone’s life-giving energies for a short while.