"You're sure it was Zeus and not your uncle up in that tower?" I'd asked Danaë one last time — for she'd admitted an early defloration by Proetus, Acrisius's twin.
"I was sixteen," she replied, "but I knew a slug from a shower of gold." My father, she reassured me, was a lap-deep drench of drachmae.
"And you don't want to marry King Polydectes?"
"Small change."
So, banking on Dictys to safekeep her, I'd set out for Samos on a tip from half-sister Athene, to learn about life from art: for represented in her temple murals there (and so reditto'd here in mine) were all three Gorgons — snakehaired, swinetoothed, buzzardwinged, brassclawed — whereof, as semiSis was pointing out, only the middle one, Medusa, was mortal, decapitable, and petrifacient. Already holding the adamantine sickle Hermes had lent me and Athene's polished shield, I stood listening, a handsome auditor I was then, to her hard instructions. Sword and shield, she said, would not suffice; one thing depended on another; just as Medusa was prerequisite to Mother's rescue, so to kill Medusa required not only the Athenian strategy of indirection but other gear: namely, Hermes's winged sandals to take me to Gorgonsville in far-off Hyperborea, Hades's helmet of invisibility to escape from the snake-girl sisters, and the magic kibisis to stow her head in lest she petrify all posthumously. But these accessories were in the care of Stygian nymphs whose location was known not even to my canny sister: only the grim gray Graeae could tell it, and they wouldn't.
My first task, then, clear-cut in the fourth panel, had been to hie me from Samos to Mount Atlas, where sat the crony trio on their thrones, facing outward back to back and shoulder shoulder in a mean triangle. Some way off from its near vertex (which happened to be between terrible Dino and Pemphredo the stinger), I hid behind a shrub of briar to reconnoiter and soon induced, concerning the single eye and tooth they shared, their normal mode of circulation. Right to left things went around, eye before tooth before nothing, in a kind of rhythm, as follows: Pemphredo, say, blind and mute, sat hands in lap while Dino, on her right, wore the eye just long enough to scan her sector and Enyo, on her left, the tooth just long enough to say "Nothing." Then with her right hand Pemphredo took the eye from Dino's left, clapped it in place, and scanned, while Dino with her right took tooth from Enyo's left, popped it in to say "Nothing," then passed it on to Pemphredo, who passed the eye around to Enyo, put in the tooth, and said "Nothing." Thus did report follow observation and meditation report, except that (as I learned some moments later) at the least alarum any gray lady could summon by a shoulder-tap what either other bore. For, having grasped the cycle, I moved closer in a cautious gyre, keeping ever abaft the eye, at the vertex between speaker and meditator; but when I rustled a pebble underfoot, then-blank Enyo, her right hand out for the eye from Pemphredo, whacked Dino into reverse and fetched the tooth as well! I lunged to her right, Pemphredoward, just as she clapped the organ in; by the time she was toothed to cry "Something!" Pemphredo had eared me at her feet and tapped Enyo for the eye, at the same time reaching right for the her-turn tooth. Dino, unable to reply that she'd returned the tooth to Enyo, swatted back both ways; twice-tapped Enyo got her hands crossed, giving Pemphredo the eye and Dino the tooth; I dived through thrones to the center; all clapped all; eye and tooth flipped round in countercircles but could be by none installed before doubly summoned. By deftly interposing at a certain moment my right hand between Dino's ditto and Enyo's left I short-stopped eye; no problem then, as Pemphredo made to gum home their grim incisor, simply to over-shoulder her and excise it. The panel showed me holding both triumphantly aloft while the grieving Graeae thwacked and flopped and croaked in vain, like crippled herons.
Its Stygian successor in my judgment was less successful, artistically speaking, for while it curved some thirteen meters round behind my bedhead to the Graeae's eight, both the task and its representation were much simpler: having learned from the furious trio where the Stygian Nymphs abode (perforce returning tooth for angry Pemphredo to speak with, but retaining eye by way of insurance against Gray-Lady-bites) it was simply a matter of going there, holdig my dose thus agaist the biserable sbell those girls gave off, ad collectig frob theb the helbet, wallet ad wigged saddles.
"What did they smell like?" asked Calyxa.
"Your opposite," I said. "But if, immortal that you are, you'd perspired through all eternity rank sweat here where I ab bost fod of kissig, dor ever washed id all that tibe — "
"I'm twenty-four," Calyxa said, "until next week. That feels okay."
But I couldn't tell her where took place that easy feat upon the wall, for just as Lethe's liquid is a general antidote to memory, the Styx-girls' stench proved specific against recollection of its source. All Pemphredo said was to shut my eyes and follow my nose, not opening the former till I was obliged to close the latter. No time at all till I had lapped the team of toolwardens there depicted and winged off, don't ask me whence.
"If she hasn't anyone to wash herself for her," primly declared Calyxa, "a girl should wash herself herself."
The penultimate panel, on my entire right hand, was most eventful and my favorite. Itself septuple in proportions similar to the whole's of which it was sixth episode, its first scene, Hyperborean, showed me holding aloft the Gorgon's dreadful head, which, catching her napping, I'd snuck in shielded to cut from her reflected neck; the second, Hesperidean, my petrifaction of inhospitable Atlas; the third, fourth, and fifth, all Joppan, respectively my backhand slaying of sea-beast Cetus, threatening Andromeda on the cliff; the post-rescuary nuptials, held over Cassiopeia's protest, whereat I'd recited to the wedding guests my history thus far; and the splendid battle in the banquet hall when my rival Phineus, who lusted after Andromeda as had Proetus Danaë, broke up the reception; the mural showed me turning into stone with all his company that avuncular nepophile. In the heptatych's sixth panelet, climax of the climax, back in Seriphos, I had once again called my enemy to my aid, rescuing Mother and ending my tasks by the petrification of taskmaster Polydectes. The seventh represented a mere and minor mishap some time later, at the Larissan track-and-field meet, where a zephyr slipped my straight-flung discus into a curve and frisbee'd down to Hades Granddad Acrisius in the stands; it was as overlong for its substance as was its grand counterpart in the whole heptamerous whorl, which for all its meters (thirty-three and then some) showed but my wife and me throned in Argos, surrounded by our gold bright children, a shower of Perseidae.