"These arguments grew more heated every year, and more inextricable from political power-alignments. Glaucus, though he took no open measures against me and made every show of treating us equally, could not conceal his jealousy and alarm, especially after Polyeidus, pressed, admitted the risks involved in 'fathering' a demigod. Eurymede, for her part, loved both her sons and took no stand on the issue of succession; even in the matter of my paternity she was shrug-shouldered by comparison to Deliades. But on one point she brooked no question: that it was Poseidon and no other who had climbed her in the surf.
" 'A woman knows,' she would say firmly, and Glaucus tear his hair.
"On our thirteenth birthday" — shades of my sons, forgive me! — "asked by our parents what we wanted in the present-way, I requested the usual hunting gear, racing mares, new tunics; Deliades, secretly coached by Polyeidus, surprised the court by demanding our pedigree-papers. Glaucus blushed: 'They're blank. You know why. Ask for something else.' 'I want Polyeidus to fill in the blanks,' Deliades declared: 'Bring out our papers and make him turn himself into the answers.' Glaucus glowered at his seer. Eurymede sharply asked Polyeidus whether he could in fact make such a transformation; if so, why hadn't he long since, to quiet the country? Glaucus protested that any such stunt would amount to no more than another man's opinion, on the vexed question, which opinion, if Polyeidus had one, he could as well state plainly without recourse to the sort of circus tricks he famously disdained. Polyeidus nervously began a lecture on what he called the proto-existentialist view of ontological metamorphosis: within certain limits, everyone's identity was improvisable and responsible; man was free to create himself et cetera. A willful lad, I drew my sword: 'Fill in the blanks or die.' Polyeidus blinked, grunted like a costive, disappeared. Deliades kissed me and showed gleefully to the court a scroll that popped from nowhere into his hands: son of Glaucus and Eurymede, it read beneath his name, and under mine: out of Eurymede by Poseidon. "Thus ended, not the quarrel (which was fired additionally thenceforth by accusations of forgery and fraud), but Polyeidus's influence in the palace, at least with Glaucus; only the good offices of Eurymede, who was pleased with both her sons' behavior on this occasion, kept him on as our tutor. It was also the end, so far as anyone knew, of his 'animate' transformations, and the first of his documentary. It was not, however, as some allege, the invention of writing, though to Polyeidus rightly goes the credit for having introduced, some seasons earlier, that problematic medium to Corinth, where it never caught on. Writing itself, he told us in the Q & A after his act, would be invented some generations later by a stranded minstrel pissing in the sand of a deserted Aegean isle, making up endings to the Trojan War. It was the seer's limited capacity to read the future that enabled him to borrow certain ideas therefrom prior to their historical introduction. Why didn't he make use of this powerful ability to take over the world? Because knowledge, not power, was his vocation; he did not agree with Francis Bacon that the two are one; on the contrary, his own experience was that the more he understood, the less potent he became; the semantic and logical problems alone, to look no further, posed by such a stunt as stealing from the future, were a can of worms that no sane man would stir up unnecessarily. Et cetera. No one understood. 'Put it this way, then,' he grumbled: 'when I look back at the history of the future I see that Polyeidus in fact never capitalized on this trick. Since I didn't, I can't; therefore I won't.' 'Thanks for the present,' I said to my brother. 'Many happy returns,' he replied — not knowing, as he couldn't see seer-wise, there'd be but five."
The eyes of Melanippe's lover are gray-green: explain. Directly. Happy birthday, dead Hippolochus; happy birthday to you. Digression won't save them, dear Bellerophon; do come to it. Your eighteenth birthday. Sibyl. Chariot-race scene. The curse of God upon you, Polyeidus, snake in the grass, whom even as I bored kind Philonoë decades after with this tale I didn't know to be its villain!
"Eighteen, are we? On the beach? The horse race? Sibyl. Polyeidus had a daughter, who knows by whom. Sibyl. Younger than we. That summer she was our friend. Deliades adored her, she me. I screwed her while he watched, in a little grove down on the shore, by Aphrodite's sacred well. Honey-locusts grew there, shrouded by rank creepers and wild grape that spread amid a labyrinth of paths. There was about that place a rich fetidity: gray rats and blackbirds decomposed, by schoolboys done to death; suburban wild dogs spoored the way; part the vines at the base of any tree and you might find a strew of pellets and fieldmouse-bones disgorged by feasting owls. It was the most exciting place we knew; its queer smell retched us if we breathed too deeply, but in measured inhalations it had a rich, a stirring savor. There they played, Bellerus and Sibyl, while Dee-Dee watched: no spite intended, but it cut him up. I told her to let him in too; I didn't mind, and he was virgin. Nothing doing. I held her down for him to hump; he wouldn't even look.
The mad child offered to relinquish his claim to Corinth in my favor if she'd marry him. No deal. 'Bellerus can have Corinth the way he has me,' she would say sullenly: 'by taking it, whenever he wants to.' I decided what to give my brother for his birthday gift that night. Now it's afternoon: Deliades has drawn Polyeidus out on the hero-business, above, brought him to preliminary images of Pegasus and Chimera, mentioned the Argonauts' Funeral Stakes, here we go. Ignore the myths that locate Glaucus's death at Iolchis or Theban Pontiae on the occasion of Jason's funeral games for Pelias: it happened at the regular Isthmian games, which in those days we called the Argonauts' Funeral Stakes in memory of the Pelian originals. It was a big day on the Isthmus, especially for Deliades: as many former Argonauts as could make it were there, and assorted other stars; strolling through the locker rooms was like touring a Hall of Fame; Dee-Dee, ecstatic, knew the program by heart, pointed out to me everyone from Acastus to Zetes, rattled off biographies and box scores like a sports announcer, urged me to help him catch the winged horse in time for us to race as a team next year, bet his whole allowance for the lunar month on Glaucus, a very long shot, to win the unlimited chariot event.
" 'Not a chance,' I said. 'Those mares are crazy.' Deliades agreed, but loyally put his drachmae on the line; it would break Dad's heart, he said, to lose the biggest race on the card, which he'd placed and showed in in the two years previous and trained for all that season. We pressed Polyeidus for prediction. 'Don't be impudent,' he replied. In those days I drew sword readily. 'Your father by a quarter-furlong,' he crossly volunteered, 'with hippomanes and your help. I see you're meeting my daughter tonight in the grove again, which also happens to be on the far side of the finish line.' By full-moon-light, he declared, near the lip of the well, grew the potent herb, which only a votary of the goddess could find and pluck: a mild aphrodisiac and hallucinogen to males of several species, it had a graver effect on mares, and for that reason, though its sale, possession, and use were prohibited by law, it was much favored by the mare-maids for their mysteries. Sibyl having shown some talent, even as a child, for sniffing it out, Polyeidus had apprenticed her to Aphrodite and become Eurymede's exclusive dealer in the weed — the supply of which, however, was so small that for some years he had been able to meet the cult's demands only by transforming himself into an amulet of concentrated 'hip,' as they called it, to be sniffed by the company in turn. In order to ingratiate himself with Glaucus, he confessed, what a story, he had offered to become that amulet that night: at post time Dad would give his team a toke; the mares, long starved for love, would go mad for more; in the grove, where according to Sibyl a rare new crop had sprouted, I was to pluck it at the signal, step forth and crush it in my hands; one whiff of the fresh and the Glaucan mares would finish first. 'Hurrah!' cried Deliades. 'Why me?' I asked. Because, Dee-Dee explained, it was a symbolic surrogate for the attempted filicide required to satisfy the Pattern: the turned-on mares, Dad at the reins, would fly as if at me, but I'd have ample time to take cover with him and Sibyl in the grove. No one would be hurt; Glaucus would win handily; his gratitude for our help must overcome any residue of fear in him of me or ill will toward our tutor. Polyeidus paled, then gave my brother on the spot an alpha-plus for the semester in Mythology I.