Her eyes flashed. "Joppa, period."
"At least consult Athene," old Dictys implored me.
"I will," said I. "Where I did before, in her shrine in Samos."
"Where he learned about life from art," Andromeda mocked me; "for represented in her temple murals there were all three Gorgons — snakehaired, swinetoothed, blah blah blah. I know it by heart. I'm staying here."
Young Danaus fiddled smiling with his flatware. "I've heard it said," he said, "that when you were done with Medusa last time, Athene put her back together again, with a difference: nowadays she turns stone to flesh instead of vice-versa: makes old folks spry again. You and Dad should look her up."
At this impertinence there was a general pause, and general relief when I merely thanked him, level-voiced, for the report. If she declined to go with me, I told Andromeda next day, she must abide in Seriphos under Dictys's chaperonage until my return: I would not have her travel unescorted. She replied she was her own woman, would as she would. Very well, I countered, reminding her however that independence had its limits; that, given our particular tempers and past, the more she became her own woman, the less mine.
"Amen," Andromeda said, a Joppan expression.
"So I went it alone," I said to Calyxa, "and my guess is that tomorrow's mural shows us there in the haE of statues: Danaus grinning, Andromeda and I glaring at each other, Dictys shaking his head, and Polydectes still lisping Naw AOhnhz."
I was mistaken, my artist informed me — not only about next day's scene (which pillared all I'd just rehearsed) but about the nature of parity between the sexes as well.
"I know," I sighed, mistaking her. "Andromeda was right."
"That's not what I mean!" Calyxa sprang to her nimble knees. "Look at me, for instance: would you call me dependent? I go my own way, lonely or not; that's why I've never married. But don't you get the point?"
"No."
She flipped my flunked phallus; "I swear, I'll have to draw you a picture."
Instead, she showed me one, next day: myself in conference already with the hooded woman in Athene's temple, beneath the familiar frieze of Gorgons, winged Pegasus grazing just outside.
"Remarkable!" I scrutinized my companion-in-relief.
"The resemblance. ."
"With the cowl it's hard to tell," Calyxa said; "but if that's Athene, then Athene's the one who's brought me the instructions for all these scenes over the years, and finally brought you here in person from the desert. She's always been very polite to me, but she never explains the pictures."
"I'll be glad to: at first I thought her a fellow-suppliant — "
But Calyxa reminded me of our little rule, explication only after forn. We went to bed early, I did better, fairly entered her, though for less than heroical time and space; I was chided for sighing; she held me between her pretty legs and said: "Aphrodite's a woman and so am I. Does that make me her equal?" Andromeda's fallacy, in her view, was an equivocation on the term equality: she Calyxa frankly regarded herself as superior in numerous ways to numerous men and women —
"I think you are too."
"Do don't flatter now; I'm serious." Her dark eyes were, past doubt; I'd have moved off-top, to beside her, better to manifest our parity, but she had extraordinary grip.
"I mean, they're mortals, and you're a nymph," I said limply.
"Never mind that." The point was, she asserted, it went without saying, in her opinion, that to say men and women were equal was to say nothing. She herself admired excellence wherever she found it; she was far from servile by nature, knew herself to be uncommonly intelligent, witty, healthy, athletical, articulate, brave, and a few other adjectives —
"Pretty," I suggested. "Sexually adroit.. "
She stopped my mouth. "But I happen to know men and women quite superior to me in all these things, and not only wouldn't I dream of calling myself their equal, I happen to prefer them to myself and my equals. You reminded me once that you're a mythic hero, but you keep forgetting it yourself. Were you always psychosexually weak, or is that Andromeda's doing?"
Truly I wished to withdraw, and being at least her muscular match, managed to. She grinned and bussed my forearm.
"No man's a mythic hero to his wife," I said. But Calyxa took spirited issue: no woman remained a dream of nymphhood to her husband either, she daresaid, but real excellence in any particular should be excellent even qualified by comparison, long familiarity, and non-excellence in other particulars. That permanent relationship was fatal to passion was perhaps inevitable, and as she preferred to love passionately she would never marry; but having been more than once abused by those she loved, she knew for a fact that her admiration of their excellence was invulnerable.
"Ammon's a real bastard, often as not," she said; "but I'd die for him tomorrow if he asked me too. I'm good, but he's great. Who does Andromeda think she is?"
I'd hear no more such criticism. "My question to Athene," I said, "was Who was I? I made proper sacrifices, prayed she'd appear and counsel me how not to turn to stone. If there was a new Medusa, let a new Perseus be resickled, — shielded, — sandaled, and the rest, to reglorify himself by re-beheading her. It wasn't Mother Danaë wanted rescuing now, but Danaë's son."
Calyxa snugged against me with a kind of fond exasperation. I went on to recount how, as I'd recounted to Athene my apprehensions, a hooded young woman had appeared beside me at the altar, whom I took to be a fellow-suppliant until from the corner of my eyes I saw a radiance from hers — which, however, like all her features, were cowled from view in the temple dusk. And when she said to me, "Your brother was right: there is a New Medusa," I recognized the voice as no mortal's: Athene had come to me, as was her wont, in suppliant's guise. I reminded her I had no mortal kin, only scores of divine half-siblings like herself, got by Zeus upon his scores of bedmates.
She touched my arm and softly undeceived me. "Dictys and Danaë were closeted a long while in the Seriphos temple before you rescued them. But think again, Perseus, what Polydectes was saying: it wasn't the theta of Naw AOhnhz,Naw Ajrodithz.
In short, she said, young Danaus my rescuer and current rival was half my brother! And fortunate it was — she went on at once, to check my flabbergasted ire — King Dictys and my mother had chosen Aphrodite's shrine instead of Athene's for their besieged amour, since Athene would have sorely punished them for sacrilege. Such exactly (I could not get in my outrage edgewise!) had been innocent Medusa's original sin: was I aware of the circumstances of her Gorgonizing?
I surrendered.
"Me too," Calyxa said.
She'd been a pretty young girl, went on the cowled apparition: a daughter of the sea-god Phorcys and thus kid-sister to the grim Gray Ladies and cousin to the pretty Nereids. She'd been well brought up by her mother Ceto, was in fact as proper a sea-nymph as ever swam: discreet of her person, pretty as the April moon, a regular churchgoer and comforter of the drowned. Her only failing, if it could be so called, was a maiden's pride and interest in her budded beauty — in particular her naturally wavy hair, proof against sea-salt and so comely withal that it fired the passions of the admiralty-god himself, her Uncle Poseidon. .
"Uncles, I swear," Calyxa said. "That's three in this story. And two hair-things. I'm glad I'm a crew-cut orphan."
"She came one morning to this temple, to sacrifice to Athene," Athene went on, oddly referring to herself in third-persons, "and catching sight of her reflection in the goddess's shield, left off her obsequies for a moment to pin up her hair. Next thing she knew, there was a smell of seaweed; wet lips pressed to her neck-nape, and Poseidon put her under. Shocked Athene turned away, Medusa did too, but my, her eyes were fastened on the shield's reflection: as the blue-eyed scallop resists the greedy star, but at length is pried and gobbled, so she saw herself shucked and forked by the mussled god. When he was done she redid through her tears her hair, to look more becomingly ravished, and called on Athene to avenge her. But that goddess, in her wisdom, punished the victim for the crime. Me — Medusa she banished to chilly Hyperborea with her sisters, whom she'd cursed into snakehaired frights; the very sight of them was enough to turn Medusa's suitors to stone when they approached her. It was a perfectly dreadful time."