by Laura Gill
His mouth twitched, perhaps with the realization that he, not yet a man, was contradicting his mother. “Well, and the god’s, too.”
If Zeus wanted this, he could have told me himself. Would it have mattered if he had, though? Yielding now, after spending so many years content to remain chaste, struck me as a kind of defeat, acknowledgment that I had been wrong. Diktys and I enjoyed our comfortable arrangement. We were brother and sister. And yet, so much trouble might have been avoided if we had married. For one, today would not have happened.
What mattered now was putting my son in his place before his notions of manhood became overbearing. “You and Diktys will do nothing without my permission, do you hear me?” I silenced Eurymedon’s burgeoning protest with a curt gesture. “Respect your elders, young man. I’m still your mother.”
At least he had the decency to look abashed. “Mother, I just want you and Diktys to be happy together.”
“We are happy.” Though I spoke strictly for myself, not knowing whether Diktys might have confided otherwise to his nephew. Far be it for me to ask him directly, no matter that threads of gray webbed his hair, and that arthritis sometimes plagued his joints, especially when the wind blew from the north.
Not surprisingly, Polydektes visited later, in the mellow hour before sunset. As always, he allowed me ample time to reach the safety of the sanctuary. A closed door no longer separated us; we had an unspoken agreement that he would not cross the threshold, and that I would take his gifts of wine and perfumed oil to the offering table.
“Your son attacked one of my sons’ followers this morning. I am sure it will not surprise you to learn the man is dead.”
His bones creaked as he took the footstool I had set outside on the aithousa. If middle-age toyed with his younger brother, it had utterly claimed Polydektes. His beard and elaborately coiffed hair were entirely gray and deep furrows dragged at his mouth, afflicting him with a perpetual scowl.
“And did your sons also tell you what they were doing here?” My position just inside the door prevented me from observing much of the outside. Nonetheless, my senses strained for any sign that Eurymedon, who was prone to skulking about whenever the king paid a visit, lurked nearby. Hopefully, Diktys had noticed Polydektes’ arrival and had taken my son elsewhere.
Polydektes evaded the question. “You realize Eurymedon will have to compensate the man’s family?”
“For defending his mother against a would-be rapist?” I shot back. “Let your sons pay the compensation. If not for their foolishness and menace, today’s incident would never have happened.” Polydektes’ hard expression did not change. I tried a different tack. “Why did you bother coming? To torment me with threats of punishing my son? You speak to me of affection and friendship, yet you allow your bastards to harass me?”
Now, uncrossing his arms from his breast, Polydektes stirred. “Enough. You cannot have it both ways. If you wanted the security and respect due a respectable woman, you should have accepted my marriage proposal. As it is, I no longer have need of you. So sorry.” He spread his hands. “I have decided to take a wife. And no, it is not you.”
“Then who is the fortunate woman?” I let a hint of sarcasm creep through, to obscure my confusion. After ten years of hounding me, could it be that Polydektes had actually gotten it through his thick skull that I would never marry him?
Polydektes favored me with a disingenuous smile. “Lady Hippodamia, the gracious princess of Pisatis.”
I recognized the name. “She of the jealous father? Do you plan to take up his challenge to outdistance him in a chariot race to Corinth?” Many had tried to win the princess’s hand and failed—including Klymene’s son, the sea captain Eioneus, who if the tales of Oenomaus’s harshness were to be believed, had lost his life as well as the race; his severed head joined those of the other defeated suitor decorating the Pisatan king’s doorpost. Whatever the truth behind the stories, the news had pushed Klymene’s already-failing health beyond recovery and she had died last winter. She was buried above the dunes.
“Do you think me the fool my half-brother was?” Gathering his cloak around him, he sharply inclined his head, indicating that the meeting was finished. “Tell Eurymedon to expect a visit from my officials.”
*~*~*~*
Polydektes expected all his subjects to contribute to the lavish bride-gift to be sent to Pisatis: magnificent horses from Argos, where the finest specimens were bred. Each town and village had to contribute one animal, the purchase of which would be supervised by officials knowledgeable about horseflesh. Personally I thought it an excessively extravagant gesture, especially as Polydektes could simply have bought the princess’s hand with the island’s natural wealth of precious metals, and the rare green quartz Seriphos was famous for.
Horses, it must be, to honor the maiden whose name meant “she who releases the horses.” And because everyone had to send for the merchandise through Tiryns, horse merchants flooded into Livadi, where a bustling equine market soon sprang up in the port town. As the village elder most knowledgeable about horseflesh, Diktys took charge of making the purchase and caring for the beast until such time as Polydektes’ officials came to take possession.
Eurymedon had wanted to accompany his uncle to Livadi to learn the tricks of selecting and negotiating for horse flesh, but after the incident neither Diktys nor I would countenance the excursion. Naturally, he fumed and asserted that he had done nothing wrong, and sulked for an afternoon before mysteriously backing down. Meek compliance ill became him. Diktys and I both suspected that he had visited the marketplace alone.
“We can scold him for disobeying, and forbid him from ever going again, but I doubt it’ll do any good,” Diktys said to me that evening. “He’s practically a man. I’ll talk to him instead about behaving himself when he’s there.”
We both knew there was no guarantee that Eurymedon would listen. Diktys did possess one advantage, though, and that was his horse knowledge. Eurymedon wanted very much to learn how to choose, care for, and handle horses; he dreamt of owning a team of Argive-bred horses and driving a chariot—an unfortunate result of the makeshift nobleman’s education Diktys and I had scraped together and provided him. Diktys had taught him to fight with the sword and spear he kept stored away, and we had both instructed him in reading, writing, and tallying figures. As a child, he had been such an avid student, mastering his lessons with an unnatural speed and precision, yet nowadays I could not help wondering whether we had done right by him. Had we fostered unrealistic expectations? Eurymedon sometimes mentioned plans to leave the island and become a successful sailor-adventurer like Diktys’s long-dead father and uncle.
Magnes and Makednes had been Thessalian nobles helping their father manage his small estate before they were banished for some unspecified offense—Diktys had never obtained a straight answer from either of them—and had gone overseas to seek their fortune. Magnes had raided Seriphos several times before it occurred to him to slaughter the royal family and set himself up as king. The village elders who remembered the takeover confessed that it had been violent, women and children killed along with the men, revolts ruthlessly suppressed.
“Here, it wasn’t so terrible,” Luktia told me, “but they had a tough time of it in the mountains. Whole villages burned.” Where the old dynasty of kings was still remembered with fondness, Magnes and Polydektes were a new breed of ruler. Decisive. Ambitious. Vigorous in increasing the island’s wealth through trade but ruthless in defending their territory and exercising their prerogatives. Argive kings would have felt at home on Seriphos.
Diktys rarely talked about his father’s and uncle’s worst outrages, yet even if he had it probably would not have made much difference to a youth like Eurymedon. While he kept frustratingly silent whenever Diktys and I inquired about his plans, he clearly wanted to rise above his fisherman’s status, establish his own domain, whether as a sea captain commanding his own ship, or by seizing a far-off kingdom.
D
eep in my heart, I feared that he meant to fulfill the prophecy and claim Argos. Acrisius was nothing to him, after all, but a cruel old man who had tried to have him killed as a child. Eurymedon cherished about as much filial piety for his Argive grandfather as Zeus had for his own father Chronos. I dared not dwell on the speculation that Zeus had planted the notion in the boy’s mind.
Right now, other worries threatened. The royal official came down from Chora to assess Eurymedon’s holdings, which were none, and explain the terms of the compensation owed the kinsmen of the man my son had killed.
I found the official disdainful, from the way he sniffed at the air to his nasal hauteur. “Seventeen bales of wool, two pithoi of olive oil, and a horse to the dead man’s kinsmen,” he pronounced, reading from a diptych.
“That’s outrageous, Kretheus.” Diktys insisted on being present for the accounting, both to represent his nephew’s interests and control him if violence threatened. I held my breath throughout, simultaneously praying against the latter while hoping without much real hope that Polydektes would be merciful and waive some of the fees. “What do the kinsmen propose to do if Eurymedon cannot make payment?”
Kretheus twitched his nose; he had the hairiest nostrils I had ever seen. “Then it’s the usual outcome,” he replied dismissively.
Eurymedon started to protest; from his closed-fist stance, probably to challenge the kinsmen to come at him. I nudged him in an attempt to silence him, but he ignored me. Fortunately, Diktys interjected, “Then this visit is strictly a formality, and we should prepare for violence?”
Kretheus’s scrawny shoulders heaved an indifferent shrug. “You should have thought of that possibility before you let the boy run wild.”
“They won’t get a single olive pit from me,” Eurymedon snarled. “Killing that man was my pleasure, and what he deserved for threatening my mother.”
I pinched him because I dared not do anything else. What outraged me was not so much that Eurymedon refused payment, or even that he had killed a man to defend me—no, what set my teeth to grinding was his confession of pleasure in the killing.
Again, Diktys spoke for him, making amends where Eurymedon should have done it himself. “Ignore what you heard,” he told Kretheus. “My nephew is an impetuous youth, but he is not yet a man capable of refusing of his own accord. Tell the family that he will compensate them, even if it takes him twenty years.”
Kretheus scratched some notes into the fresh clay with his stylus, then left. Eurymedon waited merely until the supercilious official was beyond earshot to vent. “If you think I’m going to slave away twenty years for something that I’m not ashamed—”
Diktys shoved his broad chest. “Do you want them to come and kill you, to burn us out of our house?” he shouted. “Do you think they’d stop with murdering you? What about your mother?” He gestured to me. “They’d slaughter her, too, and maybe do much worse, because you beat their kinsman to death on her account when you didn’t have to. You could have intimidated them just by your presence, reasoned with them, and waited for me and the others. But no, you ran on ahead like a charging bull, senselessly.”
Eurymedon seized his uncle’s wrist in what could have been a crushing grip had Diktys been an enemy. “They’re not coming for me because I’m not staying around to be slaughtered. They want compensation, they’ll get the compensation of sharp bronze. In a year or two, when I have my own followers, I’ll come back and—”
“What are you saying?” But I already knew; he had spoken of it before. “You’re not going to become a mercenary!”
“If you think you’re going to come back in a year or two as a captain of men, you’re deluded.” Diktys adopted a tone of low, quiet menace. “You think being a mercenary leader is merely a matter of puffing your chest out, waving your sword, and barking orders? Do you know what it means to raid? Mercenaries are utterly ruthless. They rape, pillage, and slaughter. Women, children, the elderly. Life is cheap to them. Why, they’d kill their own grandmothers if you paid them enough. If you did become a mercenary, you’d forget coming home within a month.” He calmly extricated himself from Eurymedon’s grasp. “Such men quickly abandon their piety and lose all their respect for their elders—if they ever possessed it to begin with.
“If you must leave Seriphos, go to sea as an oarsman on a merchant ship. If you become a mercenary, don’t bother coming home.”
When Eurymedon, suddenly torn, appealed to me, I only crossed my arms over my breasts and reiterated what Diktys said. “Make up your mind, young man. I won’t call a murderer of women and children son. It would break my heart. Mercenaries are the wastrels of mortal men. Animals. I’d like to think we raised you better than that.”
Yet he did not decide then; he left the house in a huff to pace the sea dunes. Although my experiences with him had taught me that growing boys chafed at authority and craved adventure, I nevertheless could not comprehend why youths like my son wanted to become mercenaries so badly. Pillaging towns and raping women. Scum of the earth. Even those bred to a life of raiding rivals and defending their territories, like the noblemen of Argos and Tiryns, looked down on mercenaries. Without divulging the details, Diktys sometimes confessed to feelings of profound remorse over his youthful adventures with his uncle.
Eurymedon had always been willful, difficult, but his capability for violence was something else altogether. Sometimes, even in the sanctuary, I entertained sacrilegious thoughts about my child: was this how a son of Zeus was expected to behave, as a bloodthirsty villain? If he fancied himself a hero, then the hero-stories followed those lines—Bellerophon slaying a kinsman, Ormenion defiling Ares’ sanctuary. How would the bards remember my son? Eurymedon, unacknowledged grandson of Acrisius, raised by fishermen, at the tender age of fifteen slew a charioteer to protect his mother’s honor, only to abandon her—that sad, most noble princess—to the savage vengeance of their kinsmen and the wrath of the king of Seriphos when he refused to pay compensation?
Heroes never made good ends. Better for Eurymedon that he swallow his overweening pride, compensate the family, and not become the subject of bards’ songs.
That night, an idea struck me. “Why not ransom the chest?” I asked Diktys. “Surely it must be worth something.”
He contemplated the notion for several moments, but his answer offered scant hope of resolution. “It might have been worth something ten years ago, but now, I highly doubt it.” Diktys spread his hands. Ten years. The tale of the lost Argive princess and her baby ceased to entertain. Curiosity seekers had long since stopped their pilgrimages to Pelargos; even my overzealous admirer had settled down and married. These days, people wanted to hear about the unlucky suitors of Hippodamia and the insanity of the Lydian king, Tantalus, who had apparently sacrificed his own son to Zeus.
“There are always the ornaments the king gave me. I kept some of them back, should we fall on difficult times. A lapis and gold necklace, a pair of gold bracelets.”
Frowning, Diktys stared into the fire. “Polydektes might learn of it.”
“What of it?” I set out the household deities for the evening offerings. Hopefully, Eurymedon would return before the libations. “He knows I have no use for his trinkets. Will they buy a horse? Better to purchase them now, while the merchants are still in Livadi, than wait later and have to send to Tiryns for them.”
When he returned, and after we honored the household deities, Eurymedon voiced his complete contempt for the proposal. “That’s shameful, letting my own mother redeem my debts with her jewels. Absolutely not, no.” He was calmer now; those hours spent in solitary contemplation had done him good. “I won’t let you, Mother.”
“My jewels?” I laughed heartily. “When have I ever worn them? They’re the king’s trinkets. Polydektes himself is going to redeem you, though he doesn’t know it yet.”
Eurymedon smiled, but his attitude was apologetic. “Mother, I know I should have waited for Diktys and the sentries, but when I saw that man te
aring at your clothing all I saw was red. What was I supposed to do?”
Diktys cleared his throat. “You did the wrong thing for the right reason. Now, let’s eat.” He nodded toward the dish of lentils and leeks.
That Polydektes would learn that I had aided my son, I had no doubt. Diktys’s trip to the horse market the next morning to exchange the gold jewelry for a horse attracted attention. Within a day, one of the king’s officials approached him bearing a message. Diktys paraphrased it for me later. “Polydektes is willing to negotiate a compromise, but Eurymedon must bring the horse to the palace himself and swear binding oaths that he won’t accept help from anyone else when he fulfills the rest of the bargain.” His expression grew clouded. “I don’t like it.”
“Neither do I. Eurymedon might lose his temper and cause another incident.” I laid aside the spindle, which I had been plying while cooking supper, and followed him outside to inspect the horse, an excellent dun-colored mare. After some cautious introductions, she was boarded in the enclosure the villagers had erected for the gift horse purchased earlier.
That evening after supper, Diktys drew Eurymedon aside to explain the situation and obtain his solemn vow that he would behave before the king. “I expect Polydektes, his sons, and nobles will make humiliating comments at your expense. They’ll probably ridicule your fisherman’s status, your mother’s honor, your personal habits. He’s done it often enough with me. You don’t react to their jests, boy, but rise above them. Remember, your true father is the protector of strangers.” I raised an eyebrow; we rarely alluded to Eurymedon’s semi-parentage. “Behave as a proper guest would, honoring Polydektes’ gods, accepting his bread and salt if he offers them, but never demanding anything. A good man never has to proclaim his goodness. Let them make fools of themselves.”
Who was more anxious the next day, the men or I? None of us slept well the night before, even though Diktys had excused himself and Eurymedon from the midnight run; we each lay supine on our individual cots staring into the darkness, feigning sleep. Bleary-eyed, we spent more effort honoring and entreating the household gods than in eating breakfast, however much I urged the men to keep up their strength. Eurymedon looked nauseous, deathly pale. Heading to the king’s palace to face a coterie of tormentors would have unsettled my stomach, too.