Of course she had heard them; not even a whisper escaped a Siren’s ears. “It pleases you to call me a whore,” she said without anger. “And you are right. Long ago I learned that I have one gift. I am neither quick nor clever. I can weave a basket of rushes and grow a passable garden, but I keep house more to the satisfaction of mice than men. All in all, I would make a barely tolerable wife and a forgetful mother. But Ashtoreth has seen fit to give me an ample body and, I hope, a not unpleasing face. Since they are my best possessions, I use them to best advantage. If I were proud, I might call myself by the high-sounding name of courtesan and make you think that I had lain with kings, or better yet, I could pretend to be a widow who was waiting to marry the brother of her deceased husband. But pride goeth before a fall, and I have fallen far too many times already to risk another bruise. I am, as you say, a whore. The question that remains is this. Do I please you-either or both-and have you the wherewithal to engage my lodging and my person for the night? That is to say, if either of you pleases me. I have yet to decide.”
Blue Eyes opened a pouch at his belt and withdrew a handful of the flat copper shekels.
“I have decided,” she said.
“My friend wishes to engage you for the night,” said Blue Eyes.
“Can’t he speak for himself?”
“I wish to engage you for the night,” said Green Eyes, though she quickly surmised that he would prefer his friend. It was not mat he was foppish or fey. His voice was deep and manly in spite of his shyness, his figure straight as the mast on a galley. He was probably a stalwart warrior. Nor was he brash and assertively male, the lover who tries to conceal his inclinations with boasts and extravagant compliments. It was the way he looked at her which revealed his secret: as if she were his sister. She felt that he liked her but loved his friend; certainly he loved his friend. They stood so inseparably close that their arms must be touching beneath their robes.
Well, no matter. She was used to pleasing men, from virgins to masochists. Fathers had brought her their sons and asked her to teach them the art of love, and old graybeards had visited her for reassurance that they could still serve Ashtoreth as well as Yahweh. It was a point of pride that she could satisfy any man of any race, even if he was impotent or a lover of other men. After all, she was a Siren, and Sirens-their persons as well as their possessions and their arts-were the ultimate aphrodisiacs.
To Blue Eyes she said, “There’s an inn down the road. It'll do for the night, if you don’t mind fleas and thieves. That is, unless you want to come with us and watch.”
Blue Eyes laughed and a red tendril of hair escaped from his hood. “I’m a doer, not a watcher.” Then to his friend, “I’ll see you in the morning. If the evening doesn’t go well, come any time you like.”
The two engaged in whispered conversation.
“But what do I do? I mean, to get started. She’ll expect compliments and gewgaws and who knows what amorous tricks.”
“Ask her price. Give her the shekels in advance and make clear they’re all you have, so you won’t be robbed in your ‘Then-?”
“Compliment her. Treat her like a bride. Don’t make her feel you’re buying her but wooing her ”
“I get tonguetied when I have to compliment a strange.
“You can be as eloquent as Samuel when you want to Now get on with it before you change your mind.”
“Alecto’s hut had earned her the local name ‘the Witch of Endor.’”
She looked intently into Green Eyes’ face and took his hand. “You will do nicely, my dear,” she said and led him, shivering, into what, on the outside, was indistinguishable from the other rounded huts of wattle and brick, which resembled a crooked row of horseshoe crabs. The inside of Alecto’s hut, however, had earned her the local name “the Witch of Endor.”
The boy gasped. “It’s like a seacave.” A fisherman’s net hung like a tapestry on the far wall, and she had strung it with murexes, conch shells, and starfish. The masthead of a Philistine galley, a great wooden goose, presided over the room like a guardian god, but the true god was the Goddess, whose image in terra-cotta, life-sized, stood beside the goose as if to say: “I am the one who really sails the ships-or sinks them.” She was exquisitely carved and expertly painted with red ocher and powdered lapis lazuli, and Alecto was very proud that a priest who was also a sculptor, Philistine needless to say, since there were no Israelite sculptors, had called her image “lovelier than any in Gaza or Gath, and almost as lovely as you.” She had not charged him a shekel for the night.
The other walls hung with the shields which Philistine sailors fastened to the hulls of their ships, the shields which, staring like dragon eyes, had struck demonic terror into the hearts of the Egyptians when the Philistine war galleys had first invaded their waters. The couch rested on a framework of oars carved with tiny figures of sailors and fishermen. The pillows danced with embroidered tarpons. The drinking cups leaped with flying fish. A fresh salty scent pervaded the room, and Alecto noticed with pleasure that a look of wonderment had come into the boy’s eyes, as if he were remembering sea-girt islands and malachite seas.
The better to admire the room, he thrust the robe away from his face and revealed a luxuriance of hair so yellow that it seemed to have been woven on looms within the sun. How could she fail to recognize the prince of Israel? His beauty and bravery were as famous as his friendship with David, who, she realized, had been his blue-eyed friend.
She could not restrain the cry, “Bumblebee!”
He looked at her in astonishment. “You know me?”
“Yes, my dear. I knew you as a little child. And I know why you must come to me, a whore, though the women of Israel clamor for your attention. Has your mother told you about our race, the Sirens?“
“A little.”
“Then she has told you that there is only one mature female, the queen, and many drones-the workers don’t count — in each of our hives, and the males must console each other, except in the nuptial flight.”
“The Tragic Exaltation, Mama called it But it holds no attraction for me. And that’s why I still cleave to men instead of women.”
“And the present man being David, I may not be able to help you. He looks like a harvest god. That glory of flaming hair! It positively aureoles him.”
He smiled with pleasure at her praise of his friend, and she warmed with the sweetness of him.
“I’m glad I found you. Mama would have sought you a long time ago except for my father-that is, stepfather. She was afraid she would endanger you-reveal you as a sorceress, a Cretan, a Siren. He never lets her talk about her old life. She didn’t even tell me about my past until a few weeks ago, when I met David and-”
“Loved him? And thought you had committed a terrible sin, the Sin of Sodom?”
“Yes. Before I had even touched him, I felt like a leper. But now we are lovers.”
“Then why do you need me?‘
“David is going to marry my sister.” He might have said: “David is going to die.”
“And you are hurt and angry and want to show him you can possess a woman too?”
“No,” he said. “I’ve come for practice. One day I will probably have to marry too-to produce an heir, don't you see. And I have to know what to do. My bride will undoubtedly be a virgin, and if I’m as ignorant as she is, well probably spend our wedding night playing draughts. I’ve never been with a woman. I think you are very beautiful, but even so I don’t want to-I don’t know how to-”
“Lie with me, Jonathan? The first thing is to feel that you don’t have to. If we spend the whole night in conversation, why, nothing is lost, and no one will ever know that you were not the most exhilarating lover of my life. First, though,
I shall, cook you a supper. Love languishes on an empty stomach.“
In spite of her disavowal of domesticity, she prepared a succulent dinner of quail cooked in figs, wheaten bread in which raisins swam like minnows, and a pudding whose ingredients she carefully withheld from him because they included a generous amount of powdered mandrake roots, the strongest aphrodisiac in Israel. “Now for some beer,” she said. “I expect you don’t often get that, do you?”