"I spied her on a beach not far from town, wearing of all things Melanippe's chiton and waving a flag at me. I landed, dismounted, kissed her, and said: 'Hi. I killed the Chimera. But she killed Polyeidus. What's up? Why are you wearing that? You don't look right in it.'
"She answered: 'Hi. Good. Good. An ambush. Because it's time to make war, not love. I thought you liked Amazons; no matter; I'll take it off after the battle.' She had an excellent memory, even as a teen-ager. What battle? Rapidly she opined that Polyeidus had been a traitor: according to her father, from whom she had demanded an explanation of his inhospitality on pain of eloping with me, the message from Proetus had been Pray remove the bearer of these letters from this world; he has tried to violate my wife, your daughter. But when, heartbroken, she had examined the document itself, she found it to contain in fact only the first of those two clauses. In any case, it made no mention of purificatory tasks, which Iobates freely admitted having imposed, on Polyeidus's advice, to get rid of me. Anteia's husband, he had declared to her, was no hero, but except in the area of his feud with Acrisius he was a reasonable man: whether or not I'd tried to rape Anteia, I must have mortally offended him in some way; therefore Philonoë was neither to see me again nor to interfere with the ambuscade of palace guards waiting to slaughter me should I return. Surely she had no use for a man who had murdered his father and brother, abandoned his mother, tried to rape her own sister, and in fact raped and murdered a helpless Amazon prisoner-of-war? Heh heh, et cetera.
" 'You might be right about Polyeidus,' I admitted. 'Sometimes I've wondered about him myself. But there is another way to read his role in all this. Proetus knows the truth about his wife and me. False letters! You'll have to teach me how to read and write. Thanks for warning me about the ambush. I didn't kill that Amazon; I took her home to Mother. The rest is pretty much true, and I admit it makes me look bad, at least on paper. There. How come you're here?'
"Philonoë answered: "Because I love you with all my heart and mind and soul. And body. My sister always wanted to be a mythic hero. I always wanted to be loved by one.' She fingered the chiton. 'Did you rape this poor girl?'
"I said: 'Yep. I was sorry afterward, but as my deed wasn't involuntary, that fact scarcely matters." She shuddered; murmured something about Rough Edges; inquired whether, we being alone there in a secluded spot and she unable to call for help, I intended to ravish her as well.
" 'I guess not. I say let's fly off to Corinth and take over the kingdom.'
"Philonoë considered. 'I don't think you tried to attack my sister. You wouldn't've had to; I know how she is. Did you sleep with her?' When I shook my head she squeezed me, wiped soot from Pegasus's muzzle, confessed happily that she'd have gone off with me, albeit unhappily, in any case, and as wife or mistress, even if my love for her didn't measure up to hers for me. Her late mother's advice — never to wed a man whom she loved more than he her — Philonoë regarded as sensible enough if it meant love should be equal, basely self-gratifying if it meant the opposite inequality; what it lacked in either case was the dimension of Tragedy, which in her view — but there'd be time enough for her view, and my rape-tale, and Corinth too, when we'd deposed her dad and taken charge of Lycia — which we could do by nightfall if we played our cards right.
" 'What are cards?'
" 'Figure of speech. While you were doing hero-work up on the hill, I wasn't sitting on my hands. My roommate at U.L. is a meteorology major and vulcanology minor: she predicts that this afternoon's tremors from Mount Chimera, together with the recently prevailing south winds, the time of day (almost low water), month (full moon), and year (vernal equinox), will produce an extraordinary flood tide a few pages from now. Interviews conducted by her and me a couple hours ago with certain Xanthian fishermen (my contact with whom I'll explain presently) confirm this prediction. Here's what I suggest: I'll fly home on Pegasus now, for effect, and announce to Daddy that unless he comes off it and does the daughter's-hand-and-half-my-kingdom thing, you'll come on like Poseidon and drown the city. You pray to your father (whom I really look forward to meeting after we're engaged) (your mother too) to lend us a hand, or at least excuse the trick. I believe we can count on the palace guard to fold: they're mostly uplanders, scared to death of water. At a certain point, when you and the tide are up over the Xanthian plain, a delegation of women from the fishing towns approaches Daddy and offers him politically to offer themselves to you sexually in return for your sparing the city, in return for his granting matriarchal home rule to the Xanthians, which their women's groups have agitated for for years. Got that? The minute I stepped out this afternoon with this chiton on, you see, their lobbyists approached me as a convert, and we worked all this out. Daddy'll go for the idea because he thinks you'll go for the idea because he thinks you're this horny rapist, okay? And I act as though I'm very upset at the prospect of my fiancé's laying all those women, which I am. But what you do, you chastely decline, just as you did with my sister, and I point out to Daddy that that proves the whole thing was forged by your former tutor, who's out to get you for some mysterious reason, which I think he is. Daddy agrees to everybody's conditions; you hold out till the moon's just overhead, that'll be tide-turn; then you agree not to flood the city and you ask Poseidon out loud to make the water go down. The point of walking up with the tide instead of flying on Pegasus, I forgot to mention, is to demonstrate Change of Pace — the way Perseus did when he rescued Andromeda without using the Gorgon's head? In my senior thesis I argue that mythic heroes do this now and then to show that it's the general favor of the gods that gives them their clout, rather than some particular item of gear, which could be lost, stolen, or neutralized. It's a debatable generalization, I know, but I had to get a prospectus in by mid-semester. I hope you'll take a look at my list of examples and counter-examples. All set? How do you make Pegasus go up and down? But maybe you don't want to do all this. .'
"I proposed marriage to her, she cried 'Hooray!' and accepted, we did all that, it worked and then some. Philonoë hadn't mentioned that the Xanthian women's-liberationists were the wild-mare kind; I cocked my spear and came up nicely before a beautiful surf that the hillbillies took hook line and sinker: then a great whinny came from the wall, and in the failing light I saw what looked like a dozen full moons or mad medusa-jellies charging toward me across the flat — the skirts-up tail-first business, paragraph d of the text-within-the-text et cetera. It was Corinth and Tiryns together; I dropped my spear and hit the breakers; we'd've lost the evening if salty Pegasus hadn't whiffed hippomanes on those prevailing southerlies, swooped unbridled from the battlement like a five-legged dragon, and cuckolded two Xanthian haulseiners before he realized that their fleeing wives were only playing horsie.
" 'My daughter's hand and safe passage to Corinth,' Iobates offered me.
" 'Don't be silly,' Philonoë said: 'he can have all of Lycia the way he can have me, just by taking it, whenever he wants to.'
" 'Her plus half the kingdom outright, okay? You can't ask for a better deal than that. Or her plus heirship to the whole operation, whichever you want.'
"I tipped tongue to make the theta of "That's just fine,' but Philonoë spoke faster: 'We'll take both.'
" 'Both!' Iobates whistled for his landlubbers up on the roof; I for Pegasus down on the beach; Philonoë for her prospective father-in-law out in the surf. 'You mean all three, don't you?' the King asked weakly, putting his daughter's hand in mine. 'Enjoy them in good health.' Philonoë kissed him, tossed away the chiton, leaned her head demurely on my arm. Our engagement was declared at once (together with matrilineal-but-patriarchal home rule for the Xanthians, a compromise grudgingly accepted by the shaken mare-cultists), the wedding to be held as soon as Iobates and the Home Defense Council returned from a verification-trip to Mount Chimera. Regrettably, the party was intercepted on their descent through the goat-slopes by a troop of vengeful Amazons, possibly acting on information leaked by the haulseiners: half a dozen high Lycian officials fell in the skirmish; half a dozen more, the King included, were taken captive and, one at a time, given a knife and their choice of relieving themselves therewith of either their lives or their intromittent organs. Of this latter six, the one who took the latter option (Chairman of the H.D.C.) was set free to report — with tears in his eyes, but not, as some vulgar historians have it, in a high voice — that eleven Lycian matrons were dishusbanded; that Philonoë was now orphaned and queened, myself defatherinlawed, uncabineted, and kinged; that the Chimera was to all appearances no more, and my account of its traces correct in all particulars except that no sooty silhouette was on the rock-face, only a sooty outline, beneath which was found (and here delivered to me by the valiant old officer) a sooty scroll sealed with a wax impression of Chimera rampant and inscribed on the outside (in soot) For B from P: Begin in the Middle of the Road of Our Life. It pleased me to conclude that Polyeidus was not dead, only transmogrified. Philonoë taught me how to read and write; I put the scroll away and forgot about it until this morning. Drive me out. We were married and crowned, and lived happily ever after. Drive me out. Exile me from the city. Pegasus was put out to pasture and now can scarcely clear the clover.