“Yes, Myiskos?”
“Please don’t leave the hive without an escort.
“My spear will keep us from harm, my son and me.”
“Beautiful things get broken.”
“Dear Little Mouse,” I said. “Perhaps I will choose you for my next king.”
He smiled wistfully. “If only you could choose Hylas at the same time. Even the Celestial Vineyard would seem lonely without him.”
I looked at the young drone who was waiting for Little Mouse. Like most of his friends, he was smooth and beardless, with a saffron glow to his skin. But his tunic revealed a sturdy frame; he was quick with a spear, strong to wrestle, swift to swim. It is folly to think that men who love men are mincing and high-voiced like the eunuchs of Egypt. More often they are brothers in battle, comrades under the deaf, indifferent stars.
“I could not spare the both of you.”
They resumed their walk and paused to examine a flower which had sprung between the cobblestones.
“A mustard flower,” said Hylas. “I am glad that our sandals did not crush her.”
In perilous times they could speak of flowers. Yet, under attack from the Cyclopes, they were valorous warriors; the two of them fought as one.
It was good to walk in the forest, among the yearning oaks which remembered the reign of Father Saturn, that wise old king who, it was said, had nested swallows in his mosslike beard. The latticed branches formed a wizardry of light and shade. Woodpeckers drummed against Dryad oaks.
“Mama, let’s visit Alecto. I can hear the breakers. We’re near her home.”
Alecto was also a Siren, but she was a solitary queen, like the bees which never build hives. She spent her time in the sea disporting with dolphins or lying on beaches where the crackle of shells would warm her of an approaching Cyclops.
An oaken wilderness yielded to a carob grove, cultivated by the Cretans, now forsaken along with a summer house of blue-rimmed windows and a rusting bronze plow. Beyond the grove, the land fell away to purple rocks, where the tide, withdrawing, had bared a multitude of treasures and trifles- murexes with fragile spines; starfish with broken legs; flotsam from — the foreign galleys which sometimes plied the coast. I held your hand and we clambered over the rocks until the waves broke at our feet in diamonds of foam.
“Out there lies Philistia,” I said. “Sometimes her sailors still return to this island, once their home. And beyond them, so I am told, are the Israelites, a race of warrior-farmers led by a young king named Saul.”
“I want to go there,” you said, staring across the green, disheveled waters. The look in your eyes was old and wise and full of journeys; it was the way of our race, sometimes, to remember what we had never seen, and to foretell what we were yet to see.
Then we spied Alecto, the Siren called Silvergilt because of her hair, which looked like foam in the sun. She had heard our approach, recognized us as friends, and continued to sun her tresses on a rock. She opened her arms and you dropped my hand and pressed your face against her opulent breast You liked her scent of foam and ambergris. I tried to hide my concern. It was the solitary queens like Alecto who, in our northern homeland, had eaten some little sailor boys and brought upon us the wrath of the Goddess, to say nothing of a bad reputation with mariners.
She reached to her throat and removed from her necklace a tourmaline in the shape of a bee, which she presented to you as a gift.
“It came from the sea,” she said. “A treasure from the dolphin folk. It will bring you luck one day.”
She released you with some reluctance, rather as one foregoes a banquet, and turned to me.
“Honey Hair, I’m glad you’ve come. You see, I’m going away.”
“Where are you going?” I cried, envious of her free and wandering life.
‘To Philistia. Perhaps to Israel.“
“You can’t fly,” I reminded her.
“I'll swim. It will take me at least a week. But I can rest on the sea like a gull.”
“You were close to tears. You did not want to lose your friend. ”Don’t go away from us, Silvergilt!“
“Dear little Bumblebee, I have to go. A Cyclops killed my sister Electra only last week.”
“The Cyclopes,” I repeated, shuddering. “Yes, they are dreadful beasts. I fear for my palace at times-”
“Only if you scorn us.”
The voice boomed and reverberated among the rocks.
“Goliath,” Alecto screamed and, quick as a diving gull, she dove in the water and disappeared in a maelstrom of foam. Clutching you by the hand, I sprang after her; I beat my wings in frantic flurries and barely escaped Goliath’s hairy fist as it slapped the sand behind us even as we reached the surf. He waded into the water up to his hips, but in spite of his parentage, no Cyclops can swim; heavy as elephants from Nubia, they sink at once to the bottom of the sea. Remember how Polyphemus stood on the shore and hurled boulders at Odysseus’ ship He couldn’t swim after him.
“Come back to me, Honey Hair,” Goliath pleaded with a voice which tried to be intimate and succeeded in being sinister. His single red eye glowed like an open wound. “We have no females. The Dryads are much too small and most of the Sirens have fled the island. I would give my eye for a woman like you.”
At a safe distance from the shore, I treaded water, you beside me, both of us more curious than frightened, and studied his features. His hair was matted with sores and dirt. He seemed all mouth and eye; mouth ferocious with crooked teeth, eye unblinking and cold as an undersea cave. He reminded me of a shark.
“Your hair is spun out of honey,” he said. “Your breasts are ripe pomegranates.” Cyclopes pretend to be poets, but they steal their metaphors from our Siren songs. The stench of him, dried blood and goat’s hair, wafted over the waves. He ought to write scurrilous satires, I thought, instead of lyrics.
“Mama, let’s go home,” you pleaded. “He smells like a goat.”
“If you trouble me again,” I said, “I'll gouge your eye with my spear.”
He wrenched a stone from the beach and hurled it into the sea to splatter foam in my face.
In the following days, day turning into month, spring ripening into summer, Silvergilt did not return to the rocks beside the sea. She has swum to Philistia, I thought She has made her escape. But I must see to my hive.
Meanwhile, the time had come for the Dance of the Bears. The bears or Artori of Crete were our special friends in the forest, our allies against the Cyclopes and other beasts. Small, white, and delicate in appearance, disconcertingly fierce when aroused, they worshipped the Goddess in a ritual dance performed on the shortest night of summer, and we inevitably and joyfully joined them. The workers remained in the palace. To them, dancing was idleness and sin. But the drones, Myiskos and Hylas among them, were prompt to accept the invitation in spite of a threatened storm, and the bears greeted us as if I had promised them a glimpse of Honey House, the place where they go after death. We met in a meadow trodden by the hooves of Satyrs. “I will play the flute,” Myiskos cried. “And I will beat the drum,” said his friend. To accompany flute and drum, the forest blended her many voices: wind in the branches of carob trees, stream carousing with rocks and fish, thump of woodpecker beaks on aged oaks. Even the plain little nightingales opened their throats in the songs which were their one loveliness.
The bears began to dance. Heads swayed from side to side. Left foot to the left. Right foot to the right. Return. Repeat. Advance. Retreat White fur in the light of the moon. Molten fur in a sea which expanded, shrank, pulsing as if to the moon’s commands. I watched you join the bears, agile among the dancers, and laughed as if baby Pan had joined the festival.
“I watched you join the bears, agile among the dancers.”