"What Pegasus held now instead, and chewed on placidly till I took it from him, was the amulet. 'Passing prophet hung that on me,' Polyeidus lied; 'said I ought to try something in the myth way, very big nowadays, three novellas in one volume, say: one about Perseus and Medusa, one about Bellerophon and the Chimera, one about — ' I squeezed him. 'Polyeidus!' 'That was his name, all right,' Polyeidus said: 'had a daughter very high on this Bellerophon fellow, said she goes around hollering Bellerus Bellerus all day, that sort of thing. You're Bellerophon, are you? Told me I should hang that gadget around my neck, fetch me better ideas. What do you hear from your mother?' When he saw it was for joy I pounded him, he admitted he was Polyeidus and congratulated me on my achievement of Pegasus, which he was pleased to take for a sign that his petitions to Athene on my behalf had not been inefficacious. The fatal amulet virtually was, these days — it was the smell of wild mares on it, more than hippomanes, that had attracted Pegasus — and if I'd oblige him with a lift back to the Lycian capital, where he was now employed by King Iobates, he'd be happy to discard it against future impediment to navigation.
" 'You've heard nothing from Corinth, you say?' 'Only that Mother had you arrested. What for?' 'Ugly business, that,' Polyeidus said, and pitched the amulet into the cave. The smoke diminished. 'Poor woman's quite out of her tree, I fear. I told her you'd be back one day to reclaim the kingdom; thought that would cheer her up? Not a bit of it! Patriarchal plot, she said: sexual imperialism, et cetera. Clapped me in the keep. I decided to turn into the vaulted cell itself so that the guards would think I'd escaped and leave the door open, whereupon I would escape. But something went wrong: I turned into a fierce she-monster here on this mountain, and all but ate myself alive before I could switch back. I just don't have it any more in the three-dimensional way.' His best explanation of the phenomenon, he went on to say as we winged off to the Lycian capital, was that Hermes, famous trickster and inventor of the alphabet, must be as well a lover of puns and practical jokes: in keeping with his recent tendency to turn into documents, Polyeidus had changed not directly into his dungeon cell but, intermediately, into a magic message spelling out that objective: I am a chamber. Finding himself instead a fire-breathing monster with lion's head, goat's body, and serpent's tail, dwelling in a cave in a dormant volcano called Mount Chimera on the Lycian-Carian border, he could only infer that the god had sported with the proximity of the names kamara/Chimera. But being nearly lost in translation was not the end of the difficulty: so violently had Polyeidus dissociated with the monster, his resumption of human form (sans hair and twenty kilos) had left the Chimera, as he now called his accidental creation, intact: the first such case in the history of magical transformation, so far as he knew, and he regarded it with mixed feelings. On the other hand, foreseeing that Amisidoros, the Carian king, would attempt to exploit the beast as a new secret weapon to guard the long-disputed boundary, he was able to forewarn Iobates and establish himself in the Lycian court as a special defense-minister; on the other hand, he was obliged not only to conceal his own responsibility for Chimera's existence, but to make periodic secret field trips to the crater to feed the beast a ream or so of specially composed tranquilizing spells, until he could devise a better way to neutralize her.
" 'So here we are,' he concluded; 'you keep my little secret, I'll keep yours' — by which he meant, you understand, my responsibility for the death of Glaucus and my brother. 'You've learned to read and write, I see?' He indicated the letter. I confessed I had not, except for an odd half-dozen alphabetical characters. 'Just as well,' he said; 'only mischief in letters — Q.E.D.! Look where the birth-certificate trick got us! I'll deliver this for you. Any idea what's in it?'
"I shook my head and, for shame, volunteered only that I was doing a kind of purificatory labor for King Proetus, perhaps unnecessary, but a good trial run in any case for whatever true labors lay ahead. At his suggestion we landed here in the main square of Telmissus, for maximum effect. A crowd assembled, also the court, to admire Pegasus; Polyeidus took several bows and introduced us to Iobates, describing me as a former protégé and an up-and-coming mythic hero. The King was cordial, inquired after Anteia and his granddaughters, thanked me for the letter, insisted on feasting me for nine days before opening it. He introduced me to his younger daughter, Philonoë, at age sixteen an undergraduate mythology major here at the University (though we had no department then, only a couple of course-offerings), who shyly asked me to autograph her syllabus. I drew a careful upper-case Beta, best I could do, with her curious writing tool, a lead-pointed stick Polyeidus had given her that made marks on things. A charming girl, by turns demure and bold, she sat next me at dinner; told me her father's nine-day custom drove her buggy — she always tore into her mail the second it arrived; bade me describe in detail her little nieces, whom she was dying to visit; confessed an absolute passion for the study of mythology; asked me would I visit her senior seminar if she okayed it with her professor — no need to prepare anything, just rap with the kids, et cetera; pressed me particularly for anecdotes about Perseus, her favorite among contemporaries in the field.
"In the days that followed we became great friends. My intellectual superior, she nonetheless deferred to me as an example of what she called 'the imaginative embodiment of otherwise merely intellectual conceptions, you know?' What I saw as small embarrassments — my then illiteracy, for example — she was pleased to interpret as marks of authenticity, though she volunteered to tutor me in writing if I'd give her flying lessons. Indeed, she told me frankly that the only thing that bothered her about me, hero-wise, was my articulateness and apparent gentleness of manner: heroes, she fancied, should be rougher-edged and less ready for speech. But she soon had it reasoned out that her preconceptions in this regard were no doubt due to the stylizing nature of the mythopoeic process itself, which simplified character and motive just as it compressed time and space, so that one imagined Perseus to be speeding tirelessly and thoughtlessly from action to bravura action, when in fact he must have weeks of idleness, hours of indecision, et cetera. Besides, who could stroll the palace gardens, play catch, sing duets, and have long talks with a mere Golden Destroyer?
"At her coaxing, King Iobates shortened the feasting period from nine days to seven, seven to five, in case the letter contained news from Anteia. But as it was after all government business, on the fifth evening he gave it to Polyeidus, his official state-message reader (Iobates shared my limitation), to read to him. The seer opened it, paled, glanced at me sharply, pled for a moment to consider the accurate Lycian equivalents of a few Tirynish idioms, then read what amounted to a note of introduction from Proetus in my behalf: Pray remove the bearer of these letters from the world of blood-guilt which he fancies himself to carry in consequence of his innocent role in the deaths of his father and brother; kindly permit him to do for you some heroic service, the more hazardous the better. Yrs, P. I had been anxious that the letter might allude to my contretemps with Philonoë's sister; at the news I smiled, thought better of Proetus, affirmed my willingness to attempt whatever Iobates wished. The company drank my health; Philonoë glowed; Polyeidus smiled, quite in command of himself now, and held a whispered conference with Iobates, who at first flushed angrily and seemed about to rise from table, then — on further whispers from the seer — composed himself and coolly requested me to rid the coast, if I would, of a band of Carian pirates lately infesting it. Perhaps I could set out immediately after dinner?