Eyes cleared entirely, he confirmed as we limped palace-ward that Andromeda and young Danaus were there shacked up; that Cassiopeia, furious at her own Galanthis's flirtations with her daughter, was nagging him Cepheus again with Ammon-oracles fishy as the first; that (what I hadn't heard before) it was she who'd set Phineus to disrupt my wedding, out of general jealousy.
I was stopped cold. "Why do you put up with her, Cepheus?"
He fingered an earlobe; glanced at me sidewise; declared he'd been of course long since distressed that he wasn't loved by the woman whose beauty he still so honored, but that he'd never reckoned himself especially lovable, and assumed it was not for no reason that women like his wife, who did not begin so, became what they became; concluded with a shrug: "You'll learn."
"I think not. Where's Andromeda?"
He chinned his beard at the house ahead. "In the banquet hall, waiting to say goodbye." By means he'd been unable to discover, he explained (certainly not his own intelligence department, always last to know anything, or the Royal Ethiopian Post, which moved at sea-snail pace), reports of my arrival had preceded me to Joppa, caused general alarm in the palace, and brought on, he could only assume, his fearful trance. "But the reports were wrong; they said you'd lost ten years."
Wrong I replied was right: I'd lost twice ten, my wife as well, and felt ten older for the loss. We reached the banquet hall, Cepheus lagging some meters behind with vague complaints: damp ground, old bones. At the threshold I paused to let my eyes accommodate to the famous scene, I-F-5 in 3-D, an alabaster shambles. On the marble floor, in pools of marble blood, lay those done in before I'd fetched Medusa out to marble alclass="underline" skewered Rhoetus, the first to die; Athis the mind-blown catamite pinned under Lycabas, the sickled Assyrian bugger; Phorbas and Amphimedon shishkabobbed on a single spear; granite Erytus, bonged by me to Hades with a sculptured drinking bowl; the sharp-tongued head of old Emathion, unaltered on the altar as if still hurling disembodied imprecations; Lampetides the minstrel, weddings and funerals a specialty, fingering forever on a limestone lyre the chord of his dying fall. Standing among these were those I'd rocked in vivo: Ampyx and Thescelus, cocked to spear me; false-mouthed Nileus; Aconteus my too-curious ally; and one hundred ninety-six others — chief among them Phineus, Andromeda's first-betrothed, whom I'd memorialized last in a posture of tunic-wetting terror to remind my wife how luckier she was to have me. Relocating him took some moments, in part because he was but one among so many, in part because — as I saw now when she smoothed her hair — the white-gowned woman standing before him, back turned meward, was not Exhibit 201 but live Andromeda.
"Nuisance to keep dusted, all this," Cepheus murmured behind me. I shushed him, not to miss the odd soliloquy my wife addressed to her uncle's statue:
"Poor Phineus. I'm as old as you are now, and Perseus is older. The man who stoned you's gone to seed; I'll soon go too; I don't scorn your last words to him any more." It was the cringer's seniority-over-merit plea she meant: that while I'd done more to deserve her, he'd known her longer. I considered wrath, but was touched instead by curiosity and complex jealousy: the timbre of her voice was so familiar I could not distinguish it for comparison with Medusa's, soft and throaty, or crisp Calyxa's; Cepheus perhaps was right about her harried face, but, dizzy at thought of Danaus, I remarked as I hadn't in years how slightly pregnancies and time had told on the rest of her — not much less trim than what I'd salvaged off the cliff.
"Trial enough," she went on to her skinflint uncle, "being a life-partner to a Dream of Glory; but what a bad dream I woke up to! Thin-haired, paunchy, old before his time, dwelling in and on his past, less and less concerned with me and the family. ." Her voice was hard-edged, a tone I winced from; now it softened. She touched the statue's averted cheek; had she ever touched mine so? "Thoughtful Phineus, gentle Phineus, weak-willed Phineus! With you I'd have been strong. . and would have yearned, I guess, for somebody like — Perseus!"
Through this last she'd wept; my eyes stinging too, I'd drawn my dagger and called her name across the hall. At her cry it was as if the statues came to life, or shed live men from their dead encasements, and I saw too late the unnatural nature of her monologue: Danaus, armed and shielded, stepped from behind Phineus; half a dozen others in Seriphean garb from Astyages, Eryx, and the rest — and from a nearer door, a somewhat larger number of the palace guard, led by a rodent-faced young man and followed by grim-visaged Cassiopeia.
"O my," said Cepheus, "they've set a trap for you, Perseus. Sorry."
I moved to stick him as he to draw his antique sword, but was diverted by a fresher threat from Danaus, who roared upon me. Happy interruption! For Cepheus, in fact contrite, ordered the palace guard to kill my ambushers, except Cassiopeia and Andromeda. For a moment all were caught in the commands and countermands: Cassiopeia called on the guards to follow Galanthis in killing the lot of us, Andromeda and Cepheus included; Galanthis amended her directive with an order that Andromeda be spared; at the same time Danaus exhorted them to join the Seripheans in killing me, Galanthis, and their own king and queen, after which they themselves could govern Ethiopia by junta; Andromeda meanwhile screamed at everyone in general to kill no one, and at me in particular that she'd had no part in the conspiracy. Danaus's javelin whistled over my shoulder into the couch first speared by Phineus twenty years past, ending the suspension. Cepheus himself pulled it out and feebly hurled it at Galanthis; the gigolo side-stepped, a guard behind deflected it idly with his shield, and to all's surprise it punched into the Queen's decolletage. Dismayed, she sat down hard and died, drumming her heels upon the floor; Andromeda shrieked; Cepheus with a groan went at Galanthis, Danaus with a grin at me, the guards and Seripheans randomly at each other. Even shield-and-sworded I'd have had hard going, for I was out of practice, short of wind, and overweight; with Athene's mere dagger I had no chance. Danaus therefore took time to taunt: "Not a bad lay, old boy, your wife; plenty life in her yet; all she needed was reminding what beds are for."
I'd felt a moment of Phinean panic at my death to come, displaced next moment by red rage. But my helplessness itself gave me a third for self-collection. As Danaus jibed on — calling Danaë the mother of whoredom for having been first to spread her legs for coin, myself therefore the original whoreson and a paper drachma — I knew what I assumed would be my final satisfaction: that despite the inequity of our arms it was partly awe that hesitated him, inspired by the Perseus whose legend he'd cut his teeth on. My last chance to write a fit finale, however different in style, to that golden book came to me clear as Calyxa's art: declaring (what in another sense was true) that I preferred an even contest, I tossed away dagger and stalked him barehanded.
"Empty bravado," Danaus scoffed, and retreated one step. That was the only victory I could hope for, for (as I told him calmly above the din) we were born of one mother; mere inexperience of hero-murder delayed his hand. His pallor I knew was momentary; even as I spoke his color returned, his sword went up — "Ah, Andromeda (I can't say whether I said aloud or to my swoony self)! He is a fine lad, your lover; a young Perseus!" At this instant two things flew together from the free-for-alclass="underline" a massive silver goblet, knocked from the altar-of-Emathion, spun to my feet; and Andromeda dashed between us to clutch her friend's knees. Shield? Stay? Embrace? Supplication? Frantic, Danaus pushed and shouted at her, slipped his helmet, got himself tangled and turned around. In moments fewer than these words, I snatched up the great goblet, more welcome to my hand than its prototype beside long-smashed Erytus, and while my half-brother half-wept and swore at his handsome hobble, I fetched him such a clout aside his head that the goblet gonged.