John Barth - Chimera

What she'd done, I learned next, was seize the opportunity of the court's petrifation to install all the ministers' wives in their late husbands' places, train a female palace guard with the help of Amazon military advisors, reverse the genders of every law on the statute books and every custom in the city having to do with relations between the sexes, and convert Tiryns into an absolute matriarchy. That her success (like that of Mother's milder programs in Corinth, I now surmised) was owing to Perseus's benevolent hegemony over all of Argolis had rather rankled her than made her grateful, and when she'd heard he was retracing the course of his earlier adventures, she'd laid a simple trap for him with her son's help. Knowing that no pig chivalrist would challenge a woman, she had arranged for Megapenthes to challenge him, wait until he brandished Medusa's head and Athene's shield, and then counter with a mirrored shield of his own: caught in compounded reflection, Perseus's flesh had turned to stone, the stone into diamonds, the diamonds ultimately into stars, which the women of Tiryns nightly cheered the setting of. Too bad that Medusa herself — and Andromeda, Cassiopeia, and a few others — had had to go too, but one could not make souvlakia without killing lambs.

"That's all preposterous!" I cried. The guard looked to the Queen for leave to lop; was stayed with a head-shake; gave my glans a nasty pinch. Fingernails. I pointed out the discrepancy between this sordid account of Perseus's estellation and the glorious one I'd read in the document upon which I was modeling my own life story.

"My unliberated little house-mouse of a sister told me all about that," Anteia replied. (I could not call her Stheneboeia). "It's a lie. An utter fiction. It says that Pegasus is a constellation in Medusa's custody, for example: so who's the nag you flew in on?" Seeing me taken aback by this consideration, she went on to deride the male-supremist character of the great body of our classic myths, with which she revealed a fairly extensive acquaintance — Philonoë's influence, no doubt — and which she held to be the fabulated record of a bloody overthrow, by male pig patriarchs in ages past, of the original and natural matriarchy of the world. "Mythology is the propaganda of the winners," she declared, adding that the grand myth supported by all those particular mythlets was the myth of heroic maleness — not importantly in the matter of brute strength, where man's unquestionable superiority to woman was as nothing beside the dumb ox's to man, but in such virtues as courage, cunning, and sexual prowess, and most especially in the aspect of divine dispensation to greatness and immortality. "You're a lie!" she fiercely concluded: "We're going to rewrite you!"

Though I shivered for my organ's sake, I could not help remarking that she'd done much rewriting already, of Perseus's history and our own. I don't doubt that my idol had been there: petrified Proetus attested to that, and though the specific event was not recorded in Perseid, I recalled its noble narrator's "ending, by the death of both, the twinly old feud between Acrisius and Proetus," et cetera; moreover, the physics of the estellatory process as Anteia described it was similar to what transpired between the lovers' eyes at that story's climax. But as anyone not blindly hostile to the very concept of herohood must acknowledge, my version had the ring of authentic mythopoeia, hers the clatter of mere scurrilous iconoclasm. For the Pegasus discrepancy I could not account; for the subordinate role of women in mythic and actual history I did not feel particularly accountable; for my own contributions, voluntary and involuntary, to their cumulative exploitation and felt degradation, I was heartily sorry (perhaps she recalled the Aristotelian diagram?); about complex questions of nature versus nurture in the matter of sex and temperament, distinction versus valuation, or customary roles versus personal inclinations, and the rest, I had some curiosity but no firm opinion. But of my vocation as mythic hero and demideity I had no doubt whatever, whatever one might choose to make of it, any more than I had of Megapenthes's disqualification for that calling, and I would pursue it like my skyborne cousin until I was either dead or deathless.

"People's memories improve things, Anteia. Proetus ended up believing he'd fathered Perseus on Danaë. My old tutor Polyeidus claims now that it was himself and not Poseidon who sired me on Eurymede. I never once made love to you, and you know it."

The guard confidently raised her sword.

"Pig rhetoric," Anteia growled. "In Tiryns a man doesn't 'sire a child on a woman'; she conceives it on a man. Position One in this polis is with the man underneath. You admit you've committed the crime of rape?"

"Not on you. On an Amazon lance corporal, twenty years ago, and I hated myself afterward. She was a dead ringer for your young attendant there: astonishing coincidence."

"Put him away," the Queen ordered. "You're not going to the sky, Bellerophon. You're going to Tartarus with your bloody prick stuffed down your lying throat."

"Thorry, Dad," Megapenthes said as they led me out. "Why not 'feth up and be Mom'th thecthual thlave forever? Aunt Philonoë wouldn't mind, if it thaved your life. We're raithing her conthiouthneth."

Anteia told him to be a good boy and stop nattering and go fetch her a glass of Phaedra. I was led down to a dungeon to wait my fate, burdened as much by the thwart of my ambition as by the prospect of torture, mutilation, death. An examination of my cell suggested no way either to escape or to kill myself. I spent a dreadful day under the eyes of my warden, Anteia's attendant, who watched impassively as I sighed, paced the bare room, tried to nap, ate and drank, pissed and shat. Her resemblance to my lance corporal was truly remarkable: cropped dark hair, wiry build, brown skin and eyes, small breasts and buttocks — I wished I weren't about to die, so that I might explore the coincidence undistracted, inquire whether her mother was perhaps an Amazon refugee in Corinth, et cetera. I did indeed ask whether her name was by any chance Melanippe: she neither replied nor turned away, but regarded me steadily while the footfalls of my executioner, as I supposed, came down the stair.

But Anteia merely bid the girl unlock my cell and entered, without visible instruments of emasculation or execution.

"Hi," she said, standing just inside the closed door. Her tone was mild.

"Hello," I answered carefully, and got up from the floor. "Have a seat."

She smiled quickly and came over to the tiny barred window where I stood, but — as the floor was filthy and there was no bench or pallet — declined my invitation. Her breath was vinous. I kept my eyes on her face, trying to assess the situation. She mostly looked down, as if at my flaccid parts.

"You have to understand everything at once," she declared. "I'm not able to talk about anything just now."

"I understand nothing. Where's Philonoë?"

"I didn't want to come down here," she said tersely. "I didn't want to see you again at all, Bellerophon."

"Same here. What's up?"

"You're not helping me," she complained, whipping her head from side to side. "You're not saying any of the right things."

"Megapenthes isn't my son," I said. "And there's no such thing as semidemigods. My only offense was not making love to you when you wanted me to, and that's not against the law except in Themiscyra. Besides, I was trying to get through to Athene, to get my work done, and you kept interrupting. What's more, Athene doesn't like people making love in her temples: look at Medusa. You might be a Gorgon right now if I'd let you seduce me."

"The way you turn away from me," she complained, "you'd think I was a Gorgon."

I explored this attitude. "That's not so, Anteia. In the temple, that first night, you really excited me; I'm sure you saw it. But I was an ambitious young man, trying to become a mythic hero and purify myself at the same time, and worrying about the laws of hospitality. It was just the wrong place and the wrong time. I'm sorry about that."