O. Nevertheless I gnash my teeth and proceeded. "For a year or two after dropping out of Corinth I hiked across the Peloponnese, doing odd jobs, seeing the sights, reconstructing as best I could from memory the Pattern. I felt I'd completed, in the main, its first quarter, the quadrant of Departure: my conception and birth certificate were in order; Glaucus was dead; I had the regulation scar, if not in quite the regular place, to mark what could pass as his attempt to kill me; I'd crossed a sort of threshold, in proper darkness, got my travel orders at a well in a sacred grove from a certified Spielman, set out to westward under pseudonym. When I reached Sandy Pylos, on the coast, I supposed that the correct thing to do was ship on as oarsman, say, aboard the next boat west, to commence my second quarter — Initiation — with a night-sea journey.
"But the more I combed the beach, the more I came to question whether I'd got off after all on just the right foot. Even allowing for some flexibility in the Pattern, I doubted whether any mythic hero could commence his principal tasks with blood-guilt, as we call it, on his hands: Odysseus and Aeneas, to name only two of Polyeidus's 'personages from the future,' would be obliged to retrace their steps laboriously in mid-career merely to bury a graveless shipmate lost by accident. Nor was it clear, as it seemed to me it should be, what exactly I was aiming for, even ostensibly: no hero of my acquaintance went west merely for the Pattern's sake; indeed, as many as not began by going east, in order to return to a westward home. Since I was to my knowledge homeless but for Corinth, to make it on my present course would require circumnavigation of the globe — and Polyeidus had prophesied to us years past that not for centuries would it be speculated, much less demonstrated, that the earth is round. Finally, as I stood making idle water one forenoon on the strand (like that nameless minstrel Polyeidus mentioned), I thought I saw a winged white horse flap past out on the horizon. Could've been a gull — the distance was far, and I was preoccupied with making my name in imaginary letters — but it put me in mind of magic Pegasus, of Perseus's fancy sandals, and of my own lack of any gear besides the tool in hand, which had got me only into trouble. In short, I came to feel that at least three things were wanting before I could proceed with my career: clearer counsel on the matter of absolution; a more definite course of hero-work, with specific adversaries, goals, and labors; and a magic weapon, vehicle, or secret with which to address the work. For all three I must apply either to the prophet or to the gods; not to lose more time I applied to both, making prayer-stops at every temple of Athene along the way back to Polyeidus."
"Athene?" Why not Aphrodite?
To entertain wife and mistress at the same time with the same tale is hard. "Dee-Dee, Athene's pet, died, Philonoë, there in Aphrodite's grove, right?" "Well." And I'd been marinated, Melanippe, overnight in the sex-queen's hole. So? "It wasn't love Bellerophon needed, but advice. Come Tiryns — as close to Corinth as I felt it safe to go — I got both." "Um." Um.
Bellerophon wishes he had never begun this story. But he began it. Then he wishes he were dead. But he's not. Therefore he reconstructs it painfully for his darling Amazon, as he once pained with it patient Philonoë. Dee-Dee (dead) had daydreamed of riding that white horse till the night mares made hay of him, and on Polyeidus's advice had even fasted once five days and nights in Athene's Corinth temple, to find out how to find it. On the fifth — so he told me, right? — he thought he heard the goddess say: "Finding Pegasus is easy; he hangs around my sister's wells and bushes; I'm surprised you haven't seen him grazing down below. But to catch and ride him's another story: for that you need this." She fetched from around her tunic a fine gold bridle; even let him take it in his hand. But when he woke it was only his torpid tool he held, as I mine later — so he told me and Sibyl, stoned, next evening in the grove, right, the last of his life, when he let himself go, ran to Dad's rescue, got foddered. In the real Bellerophoniad this would be established in an earlier digression.
So: on the way to Tiryns it occurred to me to try again — i.e., Bellerophon decided to do what dead Dee-Dee'd done. The first two nights, nothing: those temples were roadside shrines, where all I could get was a fuzzy image in black and white of the horse himself, like that early one Polyeidus had picked up. On the third day I came to Tiryns, where King Proetus had a Naw AOhnhz
"There's room," said the King — a mild-mannered monarch, middle-aged, who fiddled with his flatware as I spoke. "And I imagine we can arrange a purification, if you really fault yourself for that fiasco on the beach — I must say I've heard more plausible accounts from my people up in Corinth. None of my business, I'm sure, but aren't you being a bit eager to take the blame?"
"I killed my brother," I insisted. "My dad too — I mean my foster father."
Proetus sighed. "O yes, the demigod thing."
I blushed, but held my tongue. Anteia — a sharp-featured woman somewhere between her husband's age and mine — said. "I think you've got a lot going for you in the hero way myself, Bellerophon. Here's hoping you get what you're after in Tiryns; we could use some excitement, God knows. And there's nothing wrong with a little ambition."
"Who's knocking ambition?" Proetus asked the company. "I was ambitious myself at his age: made war on my brother Acrisius; married me this beautiful Lycian princess here — the works. But I never went around telling people I was going to be a star, much less a constellation."
"Sour grapes," Anteia said.
"Nobody's satisfied nowadays to be a decent husband and father," the King went on, "or a reasonable administrator.
It's hero or nothing."
Mortified, I replied, what was simply true, that in my opinion ambition had less to do than definition with my ends. Estellation — as the examples of Orion, Heracles, Castor, and Pollux testified or would testify — was as natural a fate for mythic heroes as coronation was for princes, death in battle for combat soldiers, oblivion for ordinary men. I had not "chosen" to kill Glaucus and my brother, any more than I had chosen to be sired by Poseidon or would choose to slay monsters and the rest. It was the Pattern. .
"Ah-ah — " Proetus raised a finger. "You didn't choose your parents, obviously; and I'm glad to hear you admit that the mare-business was an accident, more or less. But nobody's obliging you to go after this winged horse, right? And you've acknowledged already that you're trying to decide what to do when you catch him."
The man was more tease than mock, but I couldn't readily refute him. I began to explain, reflecting on the matter for the first time myself, that in the case of heroes there seemed to be no choice of general destinies, they being foreordained as it were by the Pattern; but any given hero might at any point conceivably choose to turn his back on himself, so to speak, and sulk like Achilles in his tent instead of sallying forth to glory. Should he persist in such fecklessness, he'd become by definition no hero, just as a crown prince who declined accession would be no crown prince. Doubtless the point could be better put — "But that's not Bellerophon's business," Anteia said shortly to her husband. "Logic is for your type; his job is to be a mythic hero, period."
I agreed, wishing I'd said less. Proetus shrugged. "He makes a good case for himself, all the same. Pleasant dreams, boy; let's hope it won't cost you many more people to get to heaven."