Daily, hourly, since first waking on my Elysian couch, I reviewed those murals, wondrous, as faithful to my story and its several characters as if no chiseling sculptor, but Medusa herself, had rendered into veined Parian, from her perch in the great sixth panel, our flesh and blood. That image was of the lot most welcome to me: all golden muscle, hard as marble, I stood profiled on the Gorgon's corpse in the model glory of twenty years; the magic sandals were strapped to just below my calves; my left knee bent to bound me next moment skyward; held back at right mid-thigh was Hermes's falchion, declined from horizontal as were my knee, my penis (see below), and my eyes — not to meet, through the golden locks that curled from under Hades's helmet, those of Medusa, whose dripping head I held aloft in my left hand. Despite two small departures on the heavenly sculptor's part from classic realism (though I grant it was a moment far from aphrodisiac, he had, I'm certain, undersized my phallus; and Medusa's face, unaccountably, was but for the herpetine coiffure a lovely woman's!), it was a masterpiece among masterpieces, that paneclass="underline" it it was my eye first fell on when I woke; it it was I was still transfixed by muchwhile later when my radiant nurse-nymph first entered from beyond the seventh mural to kneel smiling at my bedside as if before an altar.
My voice still scratchy from the dunes, I said: "Hello."
She whispered: "Hi," and on my asking who she was, responded: "Calyxa. Your priestess."
"Ah, so. I've been promoted?"
She raised to me brighter eyes than any I remembered having seen on Earth and said enthusiastically: "Here you've always been a god, Perseus. All my life I've worshipped you, right along with Ammon and Sabazius. You can't imagine what it means to me to see and speak to you like this."
I frowned, but touched her cropped dark hair and attempted to recall the circumstances of my death. Calyxa was neither white, like most other nymphs of my acquaintance, cinnamon-dark like Ethiopish Cassiopeia, nor high-chrysal like my handsome widow of panels Six-C through — E and Seven, but sun-browned as a young gymnasiast through her gauzy briefs — which showed her too to be lean-hipped and — breasted like an adolescent Artemist, as against Andromeda's full-ripe femalehood, say, or the cushy amplitude of — there, my memory, with my manhood, stirred, giving the lie to elsewise-marvelous Six-A.
"Is this Elysium, Calyxa, or Olympus?"
"It's heaven," she replied, brow to my hip.
I'd never heard, from Athene or the several accounts of fellow-heroes which I'd studied in the past decade, of erections in Elysium, whereas the Olympians seemed as permanently tumesced as the mount they dwelt on: I was elevated, then! Still stroking as I considered this rise my nice nymph's nape, I noticed that while the mural began at my bedpost, the spiral it described did not, but curved on in and upward in a golden coil upon the ceiling to a point just above where my head would be if I moved over one headswidth left; when I raised me up to watch whither hot Calyxa now, I saw the same spiral stitched in purple on the bed. And — miracle of miracles! — when the sprite sprang nimbly aspread that nether spiral and drew to her tanned taut tummy dazzled me, I perceived that her very navel, rather than bilobular or quadrantic like the two others I best knew, was itself spiriferate, replicating the infinite inward wind both above and below the finite flesh on which my tongue now feast.
Godhood was okay. However, I was twice disturbed to find myself impotent: twice in that, one, I twice tried Calyxa then and there, that "afternoon" (I'd not supposed the sun set on us immortals), and despite or owing to her own uncommon expertise was twice unmanned; two, it was the second time in as many weeks and women (so it came back to me the second time) I had thus flopped, after never once failing done Andromeda in seven thousand nights- an alarming prospect for the nymphed eternity ahead.
"It doesn't matter," insisted sweet-sweat Calyxa, several times in each of the days and nights that followed. "It's just being with you I love, Perseus; it really is one of my dreams come true."
There was another thing: used as I was, as long and mythic hero, to a fair measure of respect, I was unused to reverence: I could not make water without my votary's adoring view (I had not known gods pissed like mortals); she literally licked clean the plates she fed me back to strength from (not ambrosia after all, but dates, figs, roast lamb, and retsina, as at home) (I insisted she wash them after); licked me clean too, like a cozy cat, in lieu of bathing, and toweled me with her hair (too short for the job): sport enough when one was in the sportive mood, as Calyxa seemed more or less continuously to be; a mere embarrassment when one was not. Truly I believe she would have reliquaried my stools if I'd allowed her (I hadn't guessed gods shat).
"You divinities take sex too seriously," she chided when I swore at that second slump. I supposed to her, not unbitterly, that nymphs like herself were accustomed to a rounder rogering from the deities they attended, and made clear, perhaps overprotested, that I myself was unused entirely to impotence, could not account for it.
"O, you'll be heavenly once you're aroused, I can see that," she soothed. Not her fault at all, I assured her; indeed, never since my first nights with Andromeda, so long years past, had I couched so lively, lean, and tight a miss; moreover, Andromeda and I, I fondly recollected, had begun as equal amateurs and learned love's lore together, whereas Calyxa's skill bespoke much prior experience. .
Gaily she enjoined me from pout. "Believe it or not, I was a virgin until twenty-two." Cheerfully she acknowledged then that all her girlhood she'd so adored myself, Sabazius, and horny Ammon, and had in addition been so preoccupied with sports and studies, she'd let no ordinary mortal know her (I'd not heard mortals could lay hands on nymphs); then one evening, as she was sweeping out the sheep-god's shrine (shrines in heaven? dust on Mount Olympus?), which she ministered along with mine and Beer-Boy's, Ammon himself had appeared and to her great delight had rammed her. Thus initiate, she'd gladly become not merely tender of our three temples but priestess-prostitute as well, holily giving herself, in the honorable tradition of her earthly counterparts, to the truest of our male admirers between tuppings by two-thirds of the deities themselves.
"Sabazius too!" I protested. Ammon I could be purely jealous of, despite my old grievance concerning his advice to Cassiopeia, for the images I'd seen of him in Joppa showed a fine-fettled fellow with handsome ram's-horns coiling from his swarthy curls. But not only had Sabazius fermented no end of trouble for me back in Argos; I winced to picture that old priapist a-puff on my neat nymph.
She giggled. "You think you're impotent! But don't make so much of it, Perseus!" Along with swimming and foot-racing, she candidly admitted, she liked few pleasures more than the chains of orgasms Ammon and one or two of her mortal partners could set her catenating. She and Sabazius, on the other hand, made do with beery conversations, burps, and blow-jobs, which, the first being long and friendly, the last short and sweet, pleased her in their way quite as well as Ammon's frisk fierce fucks.
"You worry too much," she told me on the second night, when, flaccid once again, I'd advised her vexedly to forsake me and revert to Ammonism. "In the first place, I've never stopped being an Ammonite and never will — or a Sabazian, either, even though neither of them keeps in touch with me any more." I was not, she gently reminded me, the only god in her pantheon; on the other hand, it made fier happy beyond imagine merely to be with me on my altar-couch; to know her deity — any of her private trinity — as a "warm human person," "off his pedestal," in her terms. Besides, was I really so naïve as to equate love-making, like a callow lad, with mere prolonged penetration?