The Fountain Goddess
Under the fountain’s liquid tree
A goddess lies asleep
Where Naiads scatter bergamot,
And when the waters leap
With rainbows, yellow-jasper dreams
Have kindled her blue shade
(Or should a Naiad brush her cheek,
Perhaps a-dream of jade!).
Turbid, the fountain says she wakes,
But if the waters meet
With singing, Naiads dance for her
On swallow-nimble feet.
The song was charming,” said Chiron, “if overlong. Now may I have my beer? I will take it instead of the tea.” Then he looked to the door. Marguerite and Oryx had entered the room. They paused, returned his gaze, and waited for him to speak.
“Ah,” sighed Chiron. “The troublemakers. I thought I was rid of them once.”
“Without them, I would be dead,” said Silver Bells. “If they hadn’t attracted the Sphinx—”
“I have brought some garlands,” Melissa said. “First for Silver Bells because of our love for him. Then for Oryx because I love him best.” Rare white violets for Silver Bells, richer yellow for Oryx. She had wrapped them in damp moss to protect the flowers.
“And I wore the moss like gloves. I never touched a petal. Wear them for luck,” she said. “My two favorite men!” But she looked at Oryx with misty eyes. It was his sadness that he must grow and die; hers, that she could not grow and claim his desire. It was their gladness that they could love each other as friends. “I gathered the flowers myself, and butterflies flecked them with pollen dust. Only the white, of course. The others are gold already.”
“Child,” said Chiron. “Watch if you like, but make yourself scarce. Better, invisible. You might enjoy yourselves behind the screen. I have always said that children are meant to be seen—on occasion—but never to interrupt their king. Take Eunostos to play with you.”
“I’m much too old to play,” Eunostos announced. “I grew to a man, you see, when I went in search of my uncle. I have even captained a ship!”
“He did the work of a man,” his uncle was quick to say. “And showed the courage too.”
“At eight? Oh, very well. Stay if you must, Eunostos. But I fear you will miss the best of the conversation. That is to say, my aphorisms. I have a dozen poised on my tongue. Some are extremely profound, and not for a child’s”—a warning look from Silver Bells—“a young man’s ears. But now to our captives. Silver Bells, you ought to have let the Tritons dispose of them. Now I must plan their fate before I sup. I hate to think at such times. It gives me a stomach ache.”
“Chiron,” said Moschus. He was drunk of course, but he chose his words with care and spoke without a slur. “I am your first cousin once removed.”
“True.”
“And we sometimes drink together.”
“True.”
“And wench.”
“Er, let us say that you help me to choose my wives.”
“And concubines. And light o’ loves. Well, I won’t.”
“Won’t what?”
“Anything if you exile our Human friends. They aren’t all bad, you know, those Humans we hate and mistrust. Just as the Beasts are not all good. They have their greedy merchants and heartless crowds. We have our Harpies and Tritons and Sphinxes.”
“I’m proud of you, Moschus,” I whispered. Why, he might have been sober, the eloquent Beast! “AND I” (a loud and commanding voice; being a queen had added command) “WILL NOT—EVER—ENTERTAIN A BEAST WHO EXILES MY FRIENDS, NOT EVEN A KING.”
“Where is the beer?” sulked Chiron.
“We are waiting your judgment, of King of Kings,” said Thyme, in a small but resolute voice. “Of course you may have some tea while you decide. Marjoram, pour a cup for our mightiest guest.”
“Tea? Tea? Oh, very well. Let them stay. But forever, you understand. They can’t change their minds and return to their people and tell.”
“Why would we want to return?” smiled Marguerite. “I have forgotten my trade. I would have to marry a Cretan and wait on his ship. An Egyptian and wait on his caravan. An Achaean and see him carried home on a shield. And all the while, sit at a spinning wheel and think up tasks for my slaves.”
“And I have forgotten to skulk,” said Oryx. “Or hide. Or hit a man on the head. I am quite unsuited to life in the world at large. Can you see me as a gardener or a fisherman?”
“Besides,” she concluded, “our friends are here.”
“You will have to work,” said Chiron. “Build your own house. Grow your own food.”
“I’ll help,” I said “They can live in one of my trees until they have built their house.”
“And I will teach them to garden,” Eunostos said. “Radishes. Carrots. Everything they will need.”
“And I
“And I. . . .”
“Forever,” smiled Silver Bells.
“But Humans die,” said Melissa.
“All of us die,” I said. “After awhile.”
“But they die so quickly, don’t they?”
“Time,” said Marguerite, “is measured by deeds, not years. If Oryx and I are happy half of the time, and never hopeless or bitter even the other half, why then our lives shall seem very long.”
“Like Zoe’s,” Oryx said.
“Uncle,” Eunostos asked. “Sing us one of your songs Or if you like, I could sing a song of my own. An epic about our battle with the Sphinx.”
“Silver Bells is your elder,” I interposed. “He shall sing first. Then, if we still have time, which I doubt—”
“On with the song!” (Rude little Girls to interrupt! And me, who had captained them on the Triton seas!)
“There’s plenty of time,” said Eunostos. “There always is at a Naiad party.”
“On with the song,” I cried.
And Silver Bells sang:
THE SNOW AND THE SEED
The snow brought slumber in his quiet hands
“Oblivion is kind,” he said, “lie still.”
The seed gave one sharp cry:
“Strange snow, I dread your chill!”
And ceased to grow.
But when rough spring had made his green demands
That buried life should labor into light
And supplicate the sky,
The seed remembered night
And thanked the snow.
Silver Bells started the song with his usual resonance but paused, it seemed to me, unduly long before he reached the conclusion. In fact, I feared that Eunostos might finish the song. But Silver Bells coughed and touched his throat and resumed in a softer voice, almost a whisper, like an echo from an empty, forgotten well. I was angry with spring; I disliked the snow; I pitied the reawakened seed.
“What’s the point?” asked the king. “It isn’t even raunchy. Bring on the beer!”
“It was much too sad for a party,” I said. “What we need is a drinking song.”
“But it isn’t sad,” Eunostos protested. “It’s simply— true.”
“Silver Bells had better have some tea,” said Melissa. He looks—she groped for a gentle word—“tipsy.”
“Tipsy or sick?” I demanded, taking a closer look at the russet skin which had faded to white.
“My uncle has never been drunk,” Eunostos protested. “Except when Alyssum died. He must be sick.”
Silver Bells swayed, clutched for support but, finding neither a couch nor a chair, lurched against a wall and subsided onto the floor. I was much too surprised to give him a hand. He was our pillar; he was our paragon. Had he not defeated the Sphinx?
“I need some air,” he gasped. “The room is so hot. Especially around my neck.” He tore the wreath from his throat. “Forgive me, Melissa. Forgive me, everyone. . . .”
(Forgive you? Forgive me, my dearest, for being less than Alyssum! She would have known how to medicine you.)
No, not even Alyssum. . . .
&
nbsp; I do not remember how I ran from the room, staggered out of the tunnel and into the dying light.
I do not remember, except that I saw them with cruel clarity: two butterflies, side by side on the ground between the dragon guards. I knew them behind their disguise, Alyssum and her friend from the Cretan arena. Sphinxes; yes, even Alyssum, the Lamia, who had fooled the best of us; and both had come to destroy Silver Bells.
“No!” I cried.
But truth is a goddess who is inescapable. Words were inadequate for her harsh demands. She paraded pictures before my resistant mind. . . .
The Sphinxes learn from the Harpies of Silver Bells, noblest of his race, nature’s opposite to the worst of their race: Alyssum. Intolerable! Alyssum, cany and heartless, assumes a Naiad’s shape and sails in the Nilus to Crete. The Tritons guide her into our cove. She pretends they have killed her crew. She is welcomed under the fountain—unlike a Sphinx, a Lamia likes the water—and she wins the love of the forest and Silver Bells. Why not become a Sphinx and kill him at once? But the Beasts of the Country would never let her escape. She has learned how to wait She has learned how to plot. Stealth allows her to practice her guile. Remember, she is a Lamia, hater of men. She will wed the Beast she intends to kill! How she intended to kill him, who can say? But a wife has a hundred ways, hemlock poured in the ear while her husband sleeps, a sudden fire, a fall, and she, the widow, she, the pitiless, wins the pity of unsuspecting friends.
Then, the unexpected. She strays to the edge of the forest, yearning perhaps for a desert, a lack of trees, a want of grass. She is caught in the gamemaster’s net. She, not he, is the first to die. She returns as a butterfly to calculate ways to kill a Minotaur. The Harpies report the reversal to her people in Libya.
Another Sphinx arrives on the island, and not to search for Oryx and Marguerite. (They hid in a pool, remember, and masked their scent. They were never seen, they fled from a foe who never knew of them.) Silver Bells in the ring . . . a second Sphinx, a second chance. . . . Failing, evil dwindles into a butterfly.
She joins Alyssum in the Country to wait . . . to look for a way . . . to waylay a Bear Girl, plucking flowers for a wreath. They gather the Deadly Nightshade’s slow-acting poison; dip their wings in its pollen—every part of the plant is lethal to Beasts, as to butterflies. They would surely have known that the yellow and rarer flowers were meant for Oryx, Melissa’s favorite; the white for Silver Bells. Their bodies wither and die but a fatal wreath, in the paws of a little girl, is placed around Silver Bell’s neck.
I studied them in the greenness of moss; their broken bodies and tattered wings. I started to grind them under my sandals’ weight, but paused and watched them return to chrysalis, saffron muted to brown, hardened secretion, enclosing a pulpy core. In miniature, woman returning to Sphinx.
I ran, I ran. . . .
How many turns of the hour-glass did I stay in my father tree? I will never emerge, I thought. Here I am fathered, at least. Here I am shut from the smoke of the funeral pyre, the weeping of those who loved him, but not too deeply for tears.
But grief accepts no parents; she shuts you into a desert and hides the path to the trees. Gray sand, gray rocks . . . a sun which never sets, which burns instead of warms. What is the sound of surf in a secret cove? What is the color of a phoenix wing? What are the words of Silver Bells’ song? “That buried life should labor into light.” No, he was wrong! If burning life could burrow into night . . . If burning life. . . .
Kindly voices hailed me from the ground, Melissa, Moschus, Phlebas.
“Zoe, you must eat.”
“Go away,” I called. “Or bring me snow. You are speaking to the dead.”
“You have a fever, Zoe. We have brought you a brew of Meadow-sweet and fennel. Oryx has taken a bowl to Marguerite.”
“Ghosts cannot eat. Ghosts become butterflies.”
I willed my arms to billow into wings and lift me from my house and dash the horror of me—shape of murderers, shape of death—against the grateful ground.
“Aunt Zoe.”
“Go away.”
“Aunt Zoe, it’s Eunostos.” The little boy in him had climbed my tree and wriggled through the window like a snake.
“I know who it is.”
“May I hug you, Aunt Zoe?”
“Quickly, child.” We were companions in a common grief. How could I wound him by refusing his hug?
“We love him, don’t we?”
“You’re all alone, now, aren’t you, dear? You may come to live with me here in my tree. Give me a little time, though.”
“Thank you, Aunt Zoe. I would like to live with, you.”
“Give me a little time. . . .”
“First,” he persisted, “I have a gift for you.”
“What, child?”
“Outside the tree.”
“No! The winding-stairs. . . .”
“Please. You needn’t be afraid. Here. I’ll steady you.”
“Oh, very well.”
“You brought me from my tree to see a snake?”
“Snakes are good luck.”
“We have lost our luck, you and I.”
“This one is special, I think.”
Smooth, russet, agile, he raised his head and flicked his narrow tongue. I have no fear of snakes. Only the Israelites, that curious desert tribe, dislike them because of an ancient tale. (Egyptians fear but also worship them.) For us a snake is fortune and fertility, perhaps a man’s imperishable soul.
“A horned viper,” I said. “Poison in Egypt. Harmless here on Crete.”
“Now you must kneel.”
“Kneel? My dear, I can hardly stand. If I kneel, I shall surely collapse.”
“I’ll steady you. There. Do you see?”
“His horns are like little antlers, aren’t they? Is that what you meant me to see?”
“Bend your ear to him. What do you hear?”
“Hear? You sound as if you expect him to speak! Snakes don’t talk, they hiss.”
“Closer.”
“Why, it sounds like tiny bel1s.”
“Silver bells.”
I felt a breeze in my face. I did not even need Eunostos’ help to stand.
“I must see to our sick,” I said. “After all, we run an Asklepion, don’t we?”
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Scanned and Proofed by Amigo da Onça
Cry Silver Bells Page 14