Chimera

But Anteia merely bid the girl unlock my cell and entered, without visible instruments of emasculation or execution.

"Hi," she said, standing just inside the closed door. Her tone was mild.

"Hello," I answered carefully, and got up from the floor. "Have a seat."

She smiled quickly and came over to the tiny barred window where I stood, but — as the floor was filthy and there was no bench or pallet — declined my invitation. Her breath was vinous. I kept my eyes on her face, trying to assess the situation. She mostly looked down, as if at my flaccid parts.

"You have to understand everything at once," she declared. "I'm not able to talk about anything just now."

"I understand nothing. Where's Philonoë?"

"I didn't want to come down here," she said tersely. "I didn't want to see you again at all, Bellerophon."

"Same here. What's up?"

"You're not helping me," she complained, whipping her head from side to side. "You're not saying any of the right things."

"Megapenthes isn't my son," I said. "And there's no such thing as semidemigods. My only offense was not making love to you when you wanted me to, and that's not against the law except in Themiscyra. Besides, I was trying to get through to Athene, to get my work done, and you kept interrupting. What's more, Athene doesn't like people making love in her temples: look at Medusa. You might be a Gorgon right now if I'd let you seduce me."

"The way you turn away from me," she complained, "you'd think I was a Gorgon."

I explored this attitude. "That's not so, Anteia. In the temple, that first night, you really excited me; I'm sure you saw it. But I was an ambitious young man, trying to become a mythic hero and purify myself at the same time, and worrying about the laws of hospitality. It was just the wrong place and the wrong time. I'm sorry about that."

"Hmp." But she went on, her voice still more injured than belligerent. "My sister worships you. It's criminal the way she takes all your double-standardist crap with a smile. She should kick you in the balls."

I made no reply; began restlessly to wonder about the pattern of incremental revelation in my case, whether it was going to follow sexual intercourse with a succession of women rather than, as in Perseid, successive nights with the same woman, and whether I was obliged to include Anteia in the lot or might proceed directly to Philonoë. But now, her tone gradually hardening, the Queen observed that she was about to enter what the Amazons called Last Quarter: her menses came only infrequently, soon would cease. Her daughters had turned out to be whores and freaks: one was dead of an overdose; the other two, after years of madness and scandalous behavior, had made bad marriages. Running the polls after Proetus's death had been no picnic: like all wealthy widows, she'd been preyed upon by false seers and con-men of every description, until out of anger and desperation she'd founded the matriarchy. There was little in her life that gave her pleasure to recollect; it was a catalogue of abuses at the hands of men, from her coarse father Iobates through her rapist debauché of a husband to her cruel and faithless lovers — none more false than I.

"Megapenthes was the last straw," she concluded bitterly. "When I saw how he was, I knew you were an impostor. But I stuck to the quarter-godhood story, for my own pride's sake. Now you try to take that away from me. Damn you for coming back into my life!"

I despaired of setting right the wrong-headed inconsistencies of her complaint; only repeated, like Melanippe her name and unit, that I was no impostor, and that she and I had never been lovers.

Anteia's manner grew broadly cunning: "We're two of a kind, Bellerophon," she chuckled. "Do you think I believe that nonsense about the Chimera? Even Philonoë admits there's no proof that it wasn't something you and Polyeidus dreamed up: another pig fantasy, killing the imaginary female monster. Nobody ever saw her, even! You conned Iobates the way Polyeidus tried to con your mother — and the worst-conned of all is Philonoë, who's known all along you were a fake and loved you anyhow."

"I did kill the Chimera," I protested, much dismayed. "It was very real, Anteia: I saw the smoke and flame. ."

"Who can't make a little smoke in an old volcano?"

"I felt it bite my lance! I saw it flying in the smoke!"

"Which has wings?" Anteia pressed. "Lion, goat, or snake?"

"It left a perfect imprint on the rock!"

"Which nobody saw but you. Come off it, Bellerophon. Philonoë says you want to improve on your first achievements, like Perseus; I think you never achieved them in the first place. It wasn't this phony Pattern that made you tell the Lycians to throw you out — " She flung at me the Polyeidic paper, confiscated earlier by the palace guard. "It was bad conscience. Your life is a fiction."

Shaken, I shook my head. "I can see how it might seem that way to you. But there's one thing even Philonoë doesn't know about me. ."

"She knows more than you think," Anteia said contemptuously. "When she got word recently from the goatherds on Mount Chimera that the monster was back in business again up in the crater, she killed the story to cover up for you. Why do you suppose she was so anxious to get you out of town?"

"You're lying! You keep contradicting yourself! I did sink the Carian pirates; I did drive off the Solymians and Amazons, and rape that poor lance corporal who had such high ambitions for herself and her people. And I did did did kill the Chimera! The high-tide thing was Philonoë's trick, I admit, but it was a trick the gods favored and helped me with, just as Athene helped me bridle Pegasus. There's proof enough that I'm for reaclass="underline" what about Pegasus?"

Anteia smiled triumphantly. "A fake, just like his master. Philonoë told me your cock-and-bull story about hippomanes: she even believed it! Well, I just happened to have some in the house, and to show her how blind she was to your phoniness I climbed aboard that sexist pig horse this afternoon and fed him my whole bag. Some stud! He keeled over dead."

Sick at heart, helpless to tell what in her harangue were lies, what misapprehensions, what distressing truths, I argued no more, only leaned miserably against the stone wall of my cell, laid hold of my swinging yard, and said: "Real Amazons give a man his choice between death or emasculation. If you're going to do both to me, please kill me first. For your sister's sake, okay?"

"For her chicken-hearted sake," Anteia said, "I'm going to let you both go back to Lycia, as a matter of fact — cock and balls, impostures, and all. On one condition."

I looked at her suspiciously. She smiled.

"Make me pregnant."

"Don't be silly."

"Draw your sword," she said coolly to the Amazon, and to startled me, as she undid her chiton: "Never mind the odds against conceiving at my age, or all those diagrams you insulted me with before, or the fact that you find me unattractive. I'll tell our son the demigod it was your last heroic labor, and you're bloody well going to keep at it till it's accomplished. Down on the floor, please."

I shook my head. "We've had this conversation before, Anteia. A man can't get it up just because he's threatened."

"So we'll play awhile. Do you want Melanippe here for a teaser? I'm not proud."

"You are Melanippe!" I cried to the guard, who stood by as expressionless as ever. "That's a miracle!"

"Fuck or die, Bellerophon," Anteia said. "We'll do it any way you like; you can even be on top. But frig we must."

I repeated, in plain honesty, that I could not, with her, under any circumstances. No personal slight or sexist snobbery intended: the phallus had a will of its own, as imperfectly harmonious with mine as Polyeidus's magic was with his. See how it hung now, and no wonder, when so much hung on it. .