by John Barth
“Ah-ah—” Proetus raised a finger. “You didn’t choose your parents, obviously; and I’m glad to hear you admit that the mare-business was an accident, more or less. But nobody’s obliging you to go after this winged horse, right? And you’ve acknowledged already that you’re trying to decide what to do when you catch him.”
The man was more tease than mock, but I couldn’t readily refute him. I began to explain, reflecting on the matter for the first time myself, that in the case of heroes there seemed to be no choice of general destinies, they being foreordained as it were by the Pattern; but any given hero might at any point conceivably choose to turn his back on himself, so to speak, and sulk like Achilles in his tent instead of sallying forth to glory. Should he persist in such fecklessness, he’d become by definition no hero, just as a crown prince who declined accession would be no crown prince. Doubtless the point could be better put—“But that’s not Bellerophon’s business,” Anteia said shortly to her husband. “Logic is for your type; his job is to be a mythic hero, period.”
I agreed, wishing I’d said less. Proetus shrugged. “He makes a good case for himself, all the same. Pleasant dreams, boy; let’s hope it won’t cost you many more people to get to heaven.”
Troubled sleep. In fine-tuned black and white I saw Pegasus grazing in the temple court; Athene, cowled, came up, belted with the famous bridle, and seemed to move her lips. At the sound of footfalls in the temple I lost the picture; woke to find a gray-cowled lady prowling in the precinct, near my pallet. My first theophany! I sprang up, dizzy at this evidence that I was on my way.
“Athene?” “Sorry.” Anteia slipped back her hood and smiled. “Just checking to see if you’re comfortable. Anything you need?” I thanked her, no. Couldn’t sleep, she said, for thinking of my dinner tale. Spot of Metaxa? I groaned to get on with my dreamwork, but Queen was Queen. Neat? Bit of water in mine. “My husband’s a coward,” she said for openers; “no, not a coward, just minor league.” “O?” We sat on a marble bench and sipped. “Time and again I’ve set him up to do something really big,” she said. “Daddy loaned him half an army to knock off Acrisius—they were twins, like you-all? He blew it.” “Ah.” She smoothed her hair, swirled her liquor. “Half the fucking Lycian army. So I said Just up and kill the bastard, for god’s sake—the way you did your brother? No thanks: too ballsy by half, that idea! Some seer, he claimed, told him Perseus is supposed to kill Acrisius as part of his hero-thing.” “That figures, actually,” I remarked, startled at her way of speaking and uncertain what to do. “Hmp. So I do a little homework on their famous feud, okay? And guess what I find out: it started in the first place when His Royal Highness slipped it to Acrisius’s daughter! His own niece, right here in my palace! So okay, we weren’t married at the time, but still. It’s a wonder to me he ever got it up for the little twat; he doesn’t exactly beat me to death with it. Even so he comes out a loser: Acrisius sticks Danaë in a tower where nobody can see her but the gods; she sits around bare-ass naked all day to get their attention—have you seen the pictures? Zeus himself puts it to her, and bingo—Perseus! Who it turns out is like as not to kill Proetus and Acrisius both and take over the country. I swear. That’s why it riled him when you started on the hero business: he’s petrified of mythic heroes. More juice?”
I guessed not. Anteia downed hers with a wink and declared her frank envy of women like Danaë who were smart or lucky enough to take up with gods and heroes, never mind the consequences. Being nothing but queen was so goddamn boring, especially in a two-bit city-state like Tiryns: one lousy amphitheater and half a dozen restaurants, all Greek. I thought her unfairly critical of her husband, but was interested all the same: my first experience of overtures from an older woman.
“I suppose this sort of thing happens to you all the time,” she said, in a different tone.
“No, ma’am.” I wished I had asked What.
“Hm.” We sat awhile. Metaxa. “Read any good books lately, Killer?”
Really, Bellerophon? At least I’m certain she called me Killer, for though I’d not read Aristotle’s Nichomachean Ethics or for that matter any other books—their invention being still far in the future and myself at that time unable to read—I explained to her at some length my position on the moral aspect of Glaucus’s and my brother’s deaths, which I’d reasoned out between Corinth and Pylos with the aid of terms from the aforementioned work, known to me in bits and pieces via Polyeidus. “Proetus,” I declared, “says I’m innocent, and in the respect that my role in those deaths was not an example of proairesis (by which will be meant a voluntary act preceded by deliberation), I agree. Indeed, following Aristotle’s classification of human actions according to the degree and nature of the agent’s volition—
—my failure to spring to my kinsmen’s aid and my preventing Sibyl from rescuing them might seem at first to share characteristics of both III-A-1 and III-B: on the one hand I was ignorant of the particular carnivorous effect of hippomanes on the mares and of Sibyl’s ability to calm them; on the other hand I was ‘compelled’ in the sense of having no alternative, as I thought, but the futile sacrifice of Sibyl’s life or my own. To the contrary it might be argued that my overmastering lust to cover Sibyl on the spot put my deed in the I-B category: psychologically voluntary but morally responsible. My own inclination, however, is to see it as a special variety of Category II, for while their death, particularly my role in it, breaks my heart and was half out of my hands, it fulfills the Pattern: I therefore affirm it, and therefore I’m culpable, morally if not legally, in the Aristotelian sense.”
“You never got laid in your life,” Anteia said, and left. The cock crew—
Melanippe too! But all that foregoing is in quotes: how did you speak the classificatory schema? Were there chalkboards in the Temple of Wisdom?
I’m writing. Melanippe is writing. Philonoë, Anteia, Sibyl—all mere Polyeidic inklings, written words.
“How’d you make out?” Proetus asked at breakfast. His children, three saucy little daughters, climbed all over us as I fasted and he ate. Dead now, who grew from frisky nymphlings into crazed wild whores, running mad and naked in the hills like gadflied Io. Don’t start that. The Queen was sleeping in, Proetus said; but even as he said it she appeared, housecoat and curlers, hmping hmps. With any luck, I told him, a couple more nights should do it. Anteia hmped. “Most heroes I’ve heard of,” Proetus remarked, “had a definite monster or task in mind when they set out. Doesn’t your lack of one make you wonder whether you’re really what you hope you are?” “Hmp,” said Anteia, buttered a croissant, swatted a kid. Not at all, said I, though not so long before I’d have agreed with him: a review of the mythographic corpus would make clear that while the majority of demigods fit his description, a smaller but perhaps more interesting group did not: Aeneas, for example, would clarify gradually, by painful trial and error over a period of years, the details of his destiny and destination. And Perseus, if Polyeidus was correct, would in later life seek to overtake with understanding his present paragraph, as it were, by examining his paged past, and, thus pointed, proceed serene to the future’s sentence, whatever those metaphors meant. Hmp.
“Little men talk,” Anteia grumbled: “big men do.” Proetus cocked an eyebrow at us. “I’m a young man with much to learn,” I declared. “But never doubt I’ll learn it.” Assuming the half-tease tone of the day before, Proetus pointed out that my illustrations were drawn from the future and so lent substance to his own conviction that mythic heroes weren’t what they used to be; that the present crop was small potatoes compared to the generation of their fathers—an age of gold, so to speak, succeeded by an age of brass. I denied this libel flatly: Cousin Perseus, I maintained, a man not many years my senior, would when all the returns were in be seen to be as dazzling a demigod as ever murdered monster …
“Or pronged princess,” added Anteia, raising her morning drink. “Or slew slanderer, okay?”
Proetus paled. “Forgetting about
this fellow Perseus,” he said evenly after a moment, “would you go so far as to say about yourself that if you don’t come up with your hypothetical winged horse in a couple of days, we may conclude that you’re a fraud and execute you for misuse of Athene’s temple?”
Anteia sipped and grinned. Sweating, I reminded him that I was as yet unpurified of blood-guilt. In the absence of instructions from my mentor Polyeidus, to whom I’d dispatched a messenger just the previous day, I was merely assuming that the old fast-and-vision method was the right one for corralling Pegasus; that Athene was the proper goddess to apply to for shriving as well; and that the two objectives were concurrently pursuable. The evidence thus far supported these assumptions more than not, but for all I knew, absolution might be prerequisite to theophany; or Athene, who was most certainly on the verge of speaking to me, might instruct me when I found her voice to clear myself with Aphrodite or my father Poseidon before bridling the winged horse. For that reason I’d prefer at present not to commit myself absolutely to a timetable. Et cetera.
“Hah,” Anteia said.
“Word came this morning already from Corinth,” Proetus informed me: “Your coach Polyeidus has disappeared from sight.”
Trying to conceal my consternation, I observed that periodic disappearance was an occupational characteristic of shape-shifters; Polyeidus had doubtless turned into some document or other, as was his recent tendency—perhaps that copy of the Pattern which he’d promised to send me.
“Perhaps.” Proetus patted his mouth with a napkin, brushed crumbs and daughters from his lap, rose from table. “Though there was no mail for you by either the Corinthian post or ours, as of this morning, and in fact your mother vowed to our messenger that both her sons were dead. It was the royal dungeon, by the way, that Polyeidus disappeared from: Eurymede had sentenced him to death for fraud, imposture, false counsel, and lese majesty. Good morning.”
The Queen was entertained by my discomfiture. I sprang up, declaring that my mother’s judgment was no doubt impaired by the sudden loss of husband and son and my own apparent defection (which plainly accounted for her calling me dead); what was more, Polyeidus himself had often pointed out to us that true shape-shifting resembled imposture as fiction resembles lies. If I must manage for the present without his advice, so be it, I said, not at all certain I could in fact; if my procedure was mistaken or my faithful Polyeidus misplaced, I would trust in Athene herself to correct and advise me, and to replace my dead half-brother with my living one. Tears, mine, started at this idea, which hadn’t occurred to me till I heard myself give it voice: that sweet-winged Pegasus bore the same relation to me as Dee-Dee, say; could even be said to be his deathless spirit. The inspiration made me eloquent, and reckless: One way or another, I vowed, I’d be in the mythic saddle by my deadline; if not, I was theirs to dispose of as they saw fit (and at their own risk). Proetus apologized for baiting me and exited to the throne room; Anteia hmped for coffee. I withdrew to the temple to fast and reflect all day on the bad news and my overboldness.
Famished nightfall, sound sleep and soundless images, for the first time now in living color: rose-pink Pegasus fed with the pigeons on the flags; off-white Wisdom held sternly forth one end of her waisted bridle, gold, and moved her lips in voiceless admonition. I snatched; she shook a free finger; I strained to learn her meaning; held fast but didn’t dare the knot. “Let me,” said nightied Anteia, perched on my bed-edge, and undid. I let her go with a cry: “My dream!”
“My hero,” she said dryly. “Let’s get on with it.”
My stomach growled. “You don’t understand.”
“So teach me.” The Queen leaned on one elbow. “We’re in Wisdom’s temple, right?”
“Your Majesty, look here…” I grew dizzy with distress.
“Look here yourself, Bellerophon. I’m queen of this place, remember? How do you think I feel, coming after you like this?” I restrained my impatience and disappointment; attempted to explain that my reaction had nothing particularly to do with her. “Don’t rub it in,” she interrupted; “my being here has nothing particularly to do with you, either, as a matter of fact.” She sat up and drew together her gown. “I don’t give a particular goddam about you one way or the other; but I want what’s under your tunic, and I want it now.”
I remarked that even if I were willing to transgress the rules of hospitality, as Proetus had done with Danaë, not I nor any man could erect himself on order.
“Excuses,” said Anteia. “I’m not feminine enough for you, I suppose? Not seductive? Well, screw Feminine. Screw Seductive. Come on.”
I begged for a moment to collect myself, at least. “I hate this,” Anteia said. “A man can always force a woman, but a woman can never force a man. Screw Nature. Screw Proetus. Screw you.”
“If you feel like that,” I asked, “why in the world should we make love?”
More calmly, as if in fact she found explanation as much of a relief as I, she declared herself misembodied: a heroical spirit trapped in a female frame. All her girlhood, she said, taking Artemis as her model, she had disdained passive feminine pursuits in favor of hunting, riding, wrestling; her ambition, in fact, had been to be a mythic hero; she scolded her mother for not having had adulterous relations with some passing god, to provide her with the right paternity; yet she adored her father, King Iobates, and went with him everywhere, even disguising herself as a boy to enlist in one of his perennial campaigns against the Solymians. The company captured a minor village, routinely sacked and burned it, put to the sword all but its younger female inhabitants, who were raped and enslaved. Shocked Anteia fled; hitching homeward, still disguised, she fell in with a young prince en route to Lycia to seek military aid from Iobates, and agreed to show him the way. Along the road she menstruated; pled diarrhea to explain her cramps and frequent disappearances into the bush. Fearing some trick, her companion followed her, saw she was female, jumped her; half an hour they grappled; then he pinned, bound, deflowered her, went his way to the court of Lycia. She appeared there next day, Iobates the day after. The suppliant, Proetus, recognized his victim, assumed he’d be put to death. Anteia married him instead.
“Since I couldn’t be a hero,” she told me, “I thought I’d be a hero’s wife. Proetus seemed promising enough on paper: no demigod, but a bona-fide exiled prince out to reclaim his rightful kingdom, et cetera. By the time it was clear to me he’d never make it as a mythic figure, I’d borne him three kids and lost my own edge—too late to chuck it and start over. I even love him, believe it or not, much as I despise the rape-thing. He’s as trapped in his role, as they say, as I am in mine, et cetera. But if I can’t be a hero’s wife, I’m damned well going to be a hero’s mother, and since Proetus can’t seem to turn out even an ordinary mortal son, I’m shopping around. Never mind what I’ve been reduced to to try to get Zeus or Poseidon to spend a night with me: obviously Danaë and company have something that I don’t have. But I’m used by now to settling for less than Olympus: if I can’t get a god to do me, a demigod’ll do. Come on.”
I replied: “I really sympathize with your story, ma’am. I really do. But as you know, only gods sire heroes every time on mortal women. If a demigod’s what you’re after in the mother way, another demigod like myself has only a fifty-fifty chance of turning one out.”
“I’ll take the chance!” Anteia cried. “Let the kid be a semigoddamndemigod; who cares? Even a one-eighth god’s better than nothing!” She pounded the pallet. “Why can’t men be raped by women? For pity’s sake bang me, Bellerophon!”
But I could only point out to her, as Polyeidus had once to dead Dee-Dee when that child wondered whether he might qualify as quartergod, that semidemideities are genetically impossible: “Gods on gods breed only gods,” I explained; “mortals mortals mortals; gods on mortals, demigods. As for gods on demigods, demigods on demigods, and demigods on mortals, the expectable results can be best represented by a diagram in which gg stands for god, mm mortal, gm (or mg) d
emigod, thus:
Semidemigodhood, as you see, doesn’t happen. I presume you noted that while the issue of the first or upper group of pairings is absolutely certain, that of the second or lower group is a reckoning of probabilities, which over a very large number of instances takes on the force of natural law, but in individual cases is of less predictive value. For example, given the pairing you’re interested in most immediately, demigod plus mortal, there’s one chance in two that any child produced by such a union will be a demigod; but there’s about the same likelihood of turning out four mortals and no demigods, say, as there is of you and Proetus having four daughters and no sons. In fact, since the diagram is drawn without respect to gender, if we correct for the fact that gm will mean demigoddess as often as demigod, the chances of your bearing a demi-god to me go down to one in four. This on the assumption that both parties are fertile; that a demigod’s embrace, like a god’s, never fails to impregnate; and that the pregnancy is successfully brought to term. But inasmuch as none of these is invariably the case, the odds against your getting what you want from me should be more accurately put at eight or ten or even twelve to one. It interests me to notice, by the way, that a demigod and demigoddess can do together something that Zeus himself, with a mortal mate, can’t do: namely, turn out a full-blooded deity—full-ichored, I suppose one should say. Heh. That’s also the only instance of genetical up-breeding in this scheme of possibilities—a child superior by nature to both parents—and the same pairing holds the only possibility of true down-breeding. Neither of these hypothetical possibilities, to my knowledge, has been realized in mythic history, but they make the coupling of a demigoddess and myself, for example, a good deal richer in geneticodramatic potential than the coupling of you and me, don’t you think?”
