"I reflected for a moment, then declared I'd go after Chimera — with great reluctance, not on account of my personal safety, but because for all I knew, in my lately augmented awareness, monsters might have an important ecological function, be some crucial link in the food-chain, et cetera. Only the essential appropriateness of the labor, which it astonished me I'd not recognized two thousand words earlier, its perfect conformity to the Pattern, induced me to undertake it — and that same Pattern prescribed that she must not be captured, but slain. No mythic hero ever brought back anything alive, except his glorious self and an occasional beleaguered princess.
"Now Philonoë was at my arm, her late vexation passed, rationalizing for the both of us that in view of Chimera's famous respiration we could perhaps regard the monstermachy as an antipollution measure. What did Polyeidus think?
" 'Never mind what he thinks,' Iobates said happily: 'I'm still king around here, and I say go to it. May the better gladiator emerge victorious, et cetera. Dead or alive, it's all one to me — but no hearsay or half-measures this time: fetch the carcass back here, so I can see it with my own two eyes.'
" 'Impossible,' Polyeidus put in.
" 'So much the better.'
"But the seer explained, more confident now, that while dispatching Chimera was at least imaginable for a mythic hero of my stature, and so obviously appropriate that it went without saying he'd had it in mind from the beginning as my climactic labor — had even had previsions of it back in Corinth, as I might recall — no souvenir whatever of the monster would be salvageable, much less the whole carcass: it was the nature of the beast, as a fire expirer, on expiration to go up in smoke. What was needed, for purposes of verification, was an expert witness — who would, however, in the ordinary case be in greater peril than the Chimeromach himself, with his special equipage and prerequisite dispensation from Olympus. Only a witness with extrahuman powers of his own stood even a moderate chance of surviving the fury of a mortally smitten external-combustion monster. .
" 'You're elected,' Iobates said. 'If you both get wrecked, we'll put up a little plaque for you somewhere, okay?' He frowned. 'But if you both come back claiming the Chimera's done in — I'm supposed to take your word for it?'
" 'I'll prove it by going into the cave myself,' Philonoë said quickly, nor could any amount of paternal threat or expostulation dissuade her.
" 'I want to have a long talk with you when I come back,' I told her happily, and promised to return by dinnertime. Polyeidus asked for an hour to pack a few things and prepare the special spear he said I'd need to dispatch Chimera. Iobates, frowning still, went off to a meeting of the Lycian Home Defense Council. I ate lamb kabobs and olives with the Princess; told her a few things I'd learned about Amazons (to which she listened pensively but closely, saying such things as 'You seem to admire them very much'); asked her why her father, after his original welcome, had seemed to take so sudden a dislike of me upon the reading of Proetus's innocuous letter, at a time when she and I were no more than pleasant friends. Philonoë brightened up immediately and promised to check the letter, which, especially in Polyeidus's absence, she believed she had ways of getting access to. Why check the letter, I asked, whose contents had been plainly read to us?
"She smiled and said, 'Call it Woman's Intuition,' a term and phenomenon I was unacquainted with but had no time to inquire further about. We fondly kissed goodbye, she bade me take care of myself, I bridled pretty Pegasus, picked up Polyeidus, winged northwestward in high spirits.
"En route I chattered on about my excitement at confronting what according to the Pattern must be as glorious a moment as any in my career; I praised Philonoë's courage in volunteering to prove the Chimera's elimination, and her loyal resolve to find out what had turned her father against me. Surely my Sacred Marriage, which, if I remembered the Pattern rightly, followed hard upon completion of my labors, must be destined to be with her; I did hope so; her affectionate docility, now I reflected on it, was much more in keeping with the notion of a cunjunctio oppositorum at the Axis Mundi than would be, say, the more active mettle of that Amazon lance corporal whom I'd left in Eurymede's keeping some days past. Et cetera. Didn't he agree?
" 'I hate flying,' the seer said sourly, and gave me my instructions: we were not to attempt to sneak up on the monster, who could not be fooled, but rather fly directly to the crater's rim; at noon the Chimera regularly retired to her cave for a long siesta — doubtless that was why I hadn't seen her in my recent overflights — and the trick was to trap her there, where she lacked maneuvering-room. The late absence of smoke from the crater, which I had remarked, indicated that her breath was temporarily less fiery than usual (such things happened); but given her triple ferocity, this was small advantage. Just as Perseus, vis-à-vis Medusa, had made his enemy his ally, so I like a cunning wrestler must enlist my adversary's strengths against her. Hence the special spear he'd brought along, a larger version of the writing-tool he'd given Philonoë, which instead of a sharp bronze point had a dull one of lead. Depositing Polyeidus behind the cover of a rim-rock, I was to blindfold Pegasus, put upon my spear-tip several sheets of paper from the prophet's briefcase impregnated with a magical calorific, and thrust my spear deep into the cave. Chimera would attack it; the calorific would super-heat her breath (I was to shut my eyes and hold my own breath against the noxious smoke) and melt the lead, which then would burn through her vitals and kill her. 'Got it?'
" 'I don't get to see her?'
" 'You'll see her,' Polyeidus promised. 'But do it my way, or you're cooked. No need for your girlfriend to check out the cave tomorrow, incidentally; there'll be other evidence.' We landed on the rim, no monster in sight, only a bit of steam rising from one smallish hole, which Polyeidus identified as one of her vents and thus as good as any to attack her through. 'So have a nice battle,' he said when the spear and blindfold were prepared, 'and marry your princess and like that. I'm sure your brother would be pleased to know what a great success you turned out to be. Don't trust your father-in-law too much; he'd've put you away before now if I hadn't invoked the hospitality laws and set him up as your taskmaster instead. See you around, hero.'
"Well, so, I did all that, wondering why he spoke so curiously. Pegasus couldn't fly blind; I walked him to the hole, popped in the old spear, hit something anyhow: whoosh came the smoke, black billows, a certain stink, a sound like a horn-call. No thrash or struggle. I peeked to see whether I'd missed; withdrew my charred spear, its tip half-molten, and apprehensively rethrust, waiting for the bite. Instead, a kind of flapping came; I jumped back, slipped, very nearly fell from Pegasus as in the pall around us something large and obscure appeared to rise, rolling and spreading like the smoke itself, and buffet across the crater toward my prophet's perch. I unblinkered Pegasus and took off after, eyes running from the vapors, but before we overhauled the rim there was a whump: the mountain shook, and a smokeball rose from the spot upon its own black column. No sign of Polyeidus; only, on the rock-face, a blurred silhouette in soot of what I took to be the beast herself. With my cindered spear I sadly traced it, lion's head to serpent's tail, as down upon us gentle ashes — whose, if not my imperfectly combusted tutor's? — commenced to fall. I yearned to spell out his name there for the generations he had glimpsed ahead; would not have minded subscribing my own for those same readers, had I known one letter from another. I headed sadly back on slightly smutty Pegasus, resolved to learn from Philonoë how to write.