A bad night. I couldn't speak to explain the difference between lies and myth, which I was but beginning to comprehend myself; how the latter could be so much realer and more important than particular men that perhaps I must cease to be the hero of my own, cease even to exist, cease somehow even to have existed. In fact I couldn't speak at all. Melanippe either, having spoken. Sadly and fiercely we made love: Medusa winked down at us; Pegasus snorted; my darling came as never in her life, sure sign of her passage. Me too. She slept; by full-moon light I wrote Part Two; just before dawn, as Perseus and company sank over Asia Minor, we gently made love again; she gave me the last of her First-Quarter hippomanes, an enormous stash, and bade me go kill Chimera for real.
"Are you sure you're not Polyeidus?" I asked her, and she responded: "Are you sure you're Bellerophon?"
Heh. I wrapped up in the prophet's Pattern the story thus far — which if less than Perseid-perfect was anyhow clear, straightforward, and uncorrupted at that time — hauled up on sleepy Pegasus, slipped him his quid of hip, winged west.
3
Polyeidus here: shape-shifting, general prophecy.
No one who sees entire the scope and variety of the world can rest content with a single form. Gods and seers have such sight; hence our propensity for metamorphosis. Yet Zeus in all his guises is still Zeus, "presiding god of classic Greek mythology"; I in mine only Polyeidus, advisor to, perhaps father of, a minor hero in that same local corpus. Being Old Man of the Marsh was irksome. I grew bored to death with Bellerophon. What Zeus sees I don't know, but I saw (in bits and pieces, to be sure, like runes on my scattered daughter's oak leaves or scrambled bits of satellite photography) the fore and aft of the whole vessel of human history; as I swatted spiders and pulled leeches off me there in the Aleïan flats, I came understandably to wish myself not only out of that particular swamp, but out of Greek myth altogether — that tiresome catalogue of rapes, petty jealousies, power grabs; that marble-columned ghetto of immortals. Why couldn't I turn myself, I wondered, not into another personage-from-the-future (no more than a disquieting anachronism), but into Scheherazade, "Henry Burlingame III," or Napoleon in his own time and place? Recollecting the odd document I'd briefly been on Bellerophon's second try (a happy chance; I don't by any means always read the pages I turn into), I petitioned Zeus himself to give me a hand (promising the customary quid pro quo, to spread his fame in the new world), concentrated as one must on a single image — that verbo-visual pun of a honeybee which appears on Napoleonic flags and, stitched in gold, on the violet pall of the casket that transported his alleged remains from St. Helena back to Paris — and grunted hard.
I woke up at the back door of heaven, an odious large insect, Tabanus atratus perhaps, with noisy wings and wicked mandibles, buzzing about a mound of godshit. Great Zeus (from my perspective) towered over me disdainfully and thundered: "You're a shape-shifter: think of it as transmogrified ambrosia. Heh heh."
Until one is beyond their reach, the Olympians' whims are our directives. I tried; no luck. No matter, either: my newly compound eyes showed me more aspects of the future — mine, Bellerophon's, the world's — than I'd ever seen. I tried to groan; Zeus grinned.
"Now you see it, eh, Heironymous? By imitating perfectly the Pattern of Mythic Heroism, your man Bellerophon has become a perfect imitation of a mythic hero. That sort of thing amuses us. But look again at your famous Pattern. It says Mystery and Tragedy: Mystery in the hero's journey to the other world, his illumination, his transcension of categories, his special dispensation; Tragedy in his return to daily reality, the necessary loss in his translation of the ineffable into sentences and cities, his fall from the favor of gods and men, his exile, and the rest. Now look at Bellerophon's story thus far: it's not Mystery and Tragedy, but confusion and fiasco, d'accord?"
A gadfly (so I was, Heironymous hight, imperfectly magicked once again, into a name without initial in our alphabet) doesn't quibble with the god of gods. I buzzed neutrally, shrugged some shoulders.
"All which is as it should be, in his case," Zeus rumbled on. "But see what's coming up! I've had Amazons in my time; take it from me, that girl Melanippe's hippomanes is the real thing. Look at Bellerophon climbing on that crazy horse, straight for heaven, a kilometer a minute! He's high enough already to see Mystery and Tragedy plain; give him a few more pages and he'll rise above both and be a star boarder here forever! That's the sort of thing we're not amused by, and there'll be no bugging out for you until it's taken care of."
"Mm."
He tested the zigzag edge of a thunderbolt with his thumb. "Pegasus, on the other hand, is my natural nephew and a pretty piece of horseflesh, just what I need for packing these bolts from the Cyclops' smithy when somebody's hubris wants a bit of smiting. But if I shoot down your Bellerophon with one of these babies, there'll be nothing left of the winged horse except a few hundred kilos of viande de cheval bien cuit. You follow me?"
"Mm."
"Okay: if you want an exit visa out of that pile, wait till your boy gets this far and then give Pegasus a bite in the crupper. The rest will take care of itself: new country, new language, new myths — three millennia from here. It's that or eat shit forever. Done?"
I readily M-hmm'd.
"Good. Then you only need to eat it while you wait. Mortals, I swear."
I swore too, in available nasals, as he left, rubbed my wings furiously with two back legs, and looked with all my eyes for ways to turn the letter of his law to my advantage, like a cunning wrestler his adversary's Reset But there were none, and lunchtime came, and I was famished, but dared not leave the sill for better fare. Presently the Queen of Heaven herself came out, under pretext of emptying the royal thundermug. As best one can in mm's and hm's I buzzed for pity.
"Don't worry," Hera said, breathing through her mouth. She set the pot aside and pointed down to Corinth. "See that sexy little white heifer grazing near Nemea? How'd you like to have her for lunch?" It was, I saw, Io, her husband's latest mistress, by him disguised: in my then condition (and by contrast with my doorsill menu) an appetizing morsel, the more so for its relish of revenge on my tormentor. "Bellerophon won't be here for a while yet, as you know," the Queen went on. "I'll cover for you. Go to it."