Night fell and there was no moon and I’d have worried about losing the track if there had been a track but as it was I just kept walking down. The wind seemed to be saying something that I could never quite make out, and I thought of the ghosts whispering among the branches, of the maenads’ songs, of the first time I saw him, shining in the firelight, with his wine-stained mouth and skewed crown of myrtle. I thought I’d walk forever but when the false dawn first lit the bowl of cloud above me I found I’d come to the end; the granite walls of Pessinus glittered on the plain below me, and past it the sun gleamed on the untranquil sea in shifting discs of gold.
I must have looked rough because the guard at the gate took one look at me and told me to get back on the road. Weary beyond anger, I said, “I am Midas, the heir. I went away, but now I’m back, so go tell my father.”
“Gordius died nine months ago,” said the guard wonderingly, and then he added, “Sir.” I sat in the wind-lee of the wall while he hurried off to the palace. Until he got back I was uncommitted, and the momentum of events reversible, but I had nowhere else to go.
The city was smaller and shabbier than I remembered, even with the grace the new snow lent the tenements, the empty lots, the vacant husks of burned-out houses. The vizier met me in the palace’s cold hall; he squinted into my face, then embraced me and asked me where I’d been. I told him the truth, though he and my father had hated Dionysos, had locked the gates against him when he came to Pessinus long ago, and I was afraid he’d speak to me as a man speaks to a boy, but he only said, “Very well—it’s very well thus, and truth be told it’s often thus, but that time is over now, and now your life begins.” He paused, said, “The old man asked about you, at the end. I didn’t think you were coming back,” and I didn’t have the heart to say I hadn’t meant to. It was a relief to retreat to my old room, which felt like a child’s but at least had a fire and a lock on the door. There had been no mirrors on the road, and as I shaved I was shocked by the gaunt stranger staring back at me and the dark pouches under his eyes, the ruined blood vessels in his cheeks, the white hairs at his temple. For a moment I was angry, as though I’d been robbed, for I hadn’t expected to get older, had thought people aged because they’d made a mistake.
I woke shivering in late morning to a despair tempered only by the recollection that I was finally king and could do what I liked. I found the vizier in the treasury, the iron key to its thick door hanging on a string around his neck as he polished a golden dagger. The accumulated wealth of six generations gleamed dully in the cold light; snow drifted through the barred windows to stencil white rectangles on the floor. “I’ve decided I’m going back,” I said, “so I’ll need soldiers, and horses, and supplies for at least a year. We’re leaving today, or at the latest tomorrow. I last saw him near Mount Caucasus, I think, so we have a long way to go.”
“Impossible,” he said. “We have few soldiers these days, barely enough for the garrisons, and in any case winter has closed the roads.”
“Then I’ll raise more men when the thaw comes.”
“Impossible. Pessinus is poor, and the men are needed in the fields.”
“I see wealth enough,” I said, taking in the shining miscellany.
He regarded me flatly for a moment, and then in a measured voice meant to hide his exasperation said, “This dagger is from your grandmother’s dowry; her marriage to your grandfather made Tiryns our ally, and it’s for the sake of that alliance that you’ll soon be marrying one of their princesses. Your great-grandfather stripped that golden cuirass from a fallen prince of Sidon—you can see the rent above the heart where he got his death-wound—and is the first root of the innumerable causes that are bringing us to war with the Phoenicians,” and as his catalog went on my mind wandered until finally the force of his conviction brought me back as he concluded, “What you see here is not wealth but memory, the tangible symbols of host-right and guest-right and blood-debt left festering.”
“I need soldiers more than symbols,” I said, “and in any case these things have nothing to do with me.”
“In fact they’re you entirely,” he said, slapping the iron key onto my palm and striding out the door. His certainty was such that for a moment I tried to feel some sense of coming into my birthright, but I only felt numb, and oppressed by all this cold inert mass.
That afternoon the court officials welcomed me with a succession of long speeches and the boredom was incredible as I sat there with a fixed smile and stared out the window at the drifting snow when I thought no one was looking. The iron key was cold in my hand and I thought of trying to hire men for my expedition, but the smallest bowl in the treasury was worth a village, and even if I chose to outrage the ancientry and spend my wealth I could buy nothing smaller than large estates and the friendship of kings. I wanted to walk away from the hall and go off into the hills, but I wasn’t sure of the way, and winter was harsh that year, and I was afraid I’d find nothing but emptiness and snow.
* * *
That evening I visited my father’s tomb, a snow-covered mound beyond the city walls. I’d hated him, but hadn’t expected him to die. I tried to imagine the black cavity behind the bricked-up door, his body laid out in desiccating linen, forever staring up at a lightless stone sky.
It was still dark when they woke me for the hunt, my valet hustling me into a jerkin and pressing hot wine into my hand and then the day full of frozen sweat, horses floundering through snowbanks and far too many dogs, all culminating in the filth and misery of a dying animal. Afterwards there was a dinner where I saw men and women who’d been my friends years ago but had all somehow been transformed into stolid citizens who could talk only of their children, their horses and real property. I drank too much, but not enough to make life bearable, and that night I dreamed of Dionysos.
We were running headlong through a forest without beginning or end as the wind blew through the black branches. It seemed that our motion was tending toward some final goal that we’d always pursue but never attain, and I said, Will it be like this forever? and as he turned to me I noticed for the first time how young he was, how he hadn’t aged at all, and the forest was silent and lightless as he said, Everything changes, but nothing ends. I realized I was holding the dagger from the treasury, and had been carrying it with me all along, and he looked at me with affection and real contempt as he closed my hand around the blade which then incandesced, the light so bright I saw the darkness of my finger-bones through my ember-red flesh, the after-image floating before my eyes as the dagger blurred, sagged and then melted, a viscous rain of incandescent metal dripping through my fingers, shining drops falling through the air to spatter into luminous circles on the wet black dust, and I couldn’t look away as their heat and light faded, like a new constellation darkening, an image that stayed with me long after he was gone.
I woke to a glassy calm so deep I felt like I was dreaming as I walked through the silent corridors in the predawn chill. The smith answered my knock with a bleary scowl that turned to worry when he recognized me.
The bellows wheezed as he heated the furnace and filled the smithy with ruddy light. Gripping the golden dagger with blackened tongs, he looked at me again to make sure I was in earnest and then put the blade into the radiant inferno where I watched it soften and slump languidly. Among the smithy’s bric-a-brac I found a mold for making bronze pommels, opened it and used a rusty nail to inscribe my name in each concavity. I couldn’t keep from smiling foolishly as the smith ladeled up the molten metal, and soon I held a handful of cooling golden discs, gleaming in the firelight, unsettling in their sameness, their absence of history.
Eventually the vizier burst into the smithy, totally outraged, tears glistening in the poor man’s eyes, but I couldn’t seem to hear what he was saying as I watched my last golden tripod melt away.
Later my weightlessness gave way to stirrings of regret so that night I drank until my oppression lifted and then I had soldiers light bonfires and broach wine-cas
ks in the streets. I pressed brimming cups into the hands of strangers and threw handfuls of gleaming coins high into the air. “The old world is gone forever,” I shouted into the staring reddened faces, “and nothing will ever be the same!” Some didn’t want to drink but I compelled them and soon, despite the cold, bare skin glowed in the firelight and cries and desperate laughter sounded in the alleys and there was a feeling that some great thing was coming. I led a procession through the streets where red wine flowed in the gutters and as we sang a paean I opened the gates. I’d thought I’d find Dionysos waiting, but in the event there was nothing there at all. The procession fell silent behind me, and as the wine wore off and the cold deepened they deserted one by one. I stayed for hours but there was only the road, the snow-bound hills, the empty night.
In spring I exhumed old maps from the palace basements and memorized the reliefs of far-away mountains and the branching lines of distant roads as though they would somehow reveal my friend’s trajectory. I hired soldiers and cavalry and led them as far as the city wall but when the gates swung open I balked, appalled by the world’s distances, and put it off until next year.
I’d thought the coins I spent would wind up in locked chests and buried jars but the people seemed to find money more convenient than bartering chickens for pottery and the like and soon it was the standard in the market. When I couldn’t sleep I’d rise at dawn and walk through the marketplace watching my coins becoming wine, or swords, or chess, or a voyage to someplace else, and for a moment feel a stirring of the old euphoria.
I sent envoys to find news of him. The harbor was full of ships that summer, all come to trade goods for coin, and there was always one departing for the neighboring kingdoms, for the islands, for countries so distant they were little more than names.
The few envoys who returned were hollow-eyed, emaciated, deeply marked by the rigors of the world. They said he’d been seen in India, or Gaul, or Hyperborea, or that he’d died years ago and been buried long since, but none of them had set eyes on him or met anyone who had.
I decided to mount a great expedition to find him, and sent strong men to scout the wildest countries and ships to far-off seas. By then I’d learned that haste meant failure, and that action would ripen in its own good time, so I set aside years to plan and to gather money against the enormous cost. None of my forefathers could have borne the expense but my wealth had risen in a flood-tide since I’d built my mint and bought all the gold-mines in Lydia.
Years passed, and I dreamed of the day my soldiers and ships would finally venture forth but that day remained in the future. Meanwhile I found that money had made the world as mutable as water as my castles became islands, then fleets, then vineyards, then armies, and every transformation left me richer, and I came to wonder if anyone had ever had as much. I spent the days in my countinghouse, writing gains and losses in a book and managing my interests, and it seemed strange I’d once tramped across the Indus with a disreputable, hard-drinking stranger and his rabble of prostitutes.
Gold, they say, has no history, as it’s endlessly reforged and melted down. This came to mind when my coins came back from distant countries, clipped and dented, my image worn past recognition. In the beginning I’d studied their erosion and scars and tried to infer their recent histories but I stopped when I realized that whatever ships, slaves, cities they had been were no more than the varied forms of a single essence, which is money.
36
PENTHEUS
Pentheus was the king of Thebes and the grandson of Cadmus. He was known for his dedication to duty. When Dionysos and his cult came to Thebes, Pentheus resisted them.
That night I see torches in the woods. I’ve been watching from the battlements, awaiting my moment, for Dionysos has plagued Thebes long enough. I take the ten soldiers who are at hand and lead them out the postern gate, moving carefully, listening.
The woods are eerie, like some place I’ve never known, though I’ve roamed them since I was a boy. In the distance are cries which could mean pain or pleasure or just intensity. Dionysos claims to be a god, which I don’t believe, but some say he’s a sorcerer, which gives me pause, and I’m ashamed to be glad my men are with me.
There’s singing ahead, and pipes, and the light of a bonfire glows through gaps in the leaves. My men and I share a look, creep close, and unsheathe our swords painstakingly.
We rush in and I immediately tackle a celebrant and am about to pommel him when I see its my own castellan staring up at me, stupefied with shock and wine, and then I’m standing and sheathing my sword in disgust, for the firelight reveals nothing more sinister than a few dozen of my citizens, not young, naked but for leaves and leopard skins, stinking drunk, their fixed leers fading through puzzlement into shame. My own mother is there, the breasts that nursed me bared to the night.
One of my men drags their leader before me and throws him to the ground. He’s terrified, and his cheeks have the drinker’s bloom—this is no sorcerer, just an old fraud out of his depth.
“Cunt,” I say, trembling—I never speak coarsely, but am outside myself with rage. “You come here? You break my laws? I’ll geld and blind you. You’ll see how we deal with charlatans in Thebes,” I say, though torture is the custom of barbarians and beneath true Greeks.
He begs stutteringly for his life through tears and streaming mucus—so much for Dionysos the god. This, I think, is where right conduct has led me, to this idiot libertine mewling at my feet, to my weak-minded citizens sneaking off into the night, delightedly breaching their marriages and duty.
“Get out of here,” I say, sick of him, them, all of it. “Go.”
He stands, meeting my eyes for a moment—he’s suddenly perfectly calm, and younger than I’d thought, and much prettier than he’d seemed, almost like a girl—and then he vanishes into the wood.
The bonfire has faded to embers, and I’m alone in the clearing—even my soldiers are gone—and the wind speaks in the branches.
There are lights among the trees. Are there lights? The wind gusts as though it will lift the forest away.
Apparently all it takes to break my men’s training is the prospect of mounting a housewife in the bracken. What’s surprising is that I expected better—they’re just kids, and obey my law, and all laws, sluggishly. The city seems very thin tonight.
It’s cold, and I can’t see the lights of Thebes through the branches.
There’s a leopard skin on the ground. I pick it up, wrap myself in its warmth.
Music comes from deep within the wood, high and wild.
I look back toward the dark where Thebes is. Are my people ingrates? Have I wasted my life enforcing empty forms? Leaving aside long-standing habit, do I have reason to go back?
Something is moving in the darkness, something immense, just behind the trees.
I go toward it.
PART VI
APOLLO
37
DAPHNE
Daphne ran laughing through the wood with Apollo on her heels. Catching her, he pressed her wrists into the trunk of a laurel but she turned her face away from his and said, “Wait.” He hesitated; she was an ordinarily pretty girl, but at the peak of her bloom, and he was unwilling to violate the rules of the game.
“I’m unique,” she said, looking full into his amber eyes, moved by her own daring. “There’s never been anyone like me, and there never will be again, but let me live forever and I’ll give you what you want.”
Apollo said, “I swear by Styx5 your essence will be undying.”
An hour later, he vanished. She never saw him again.
As the years passed she married, bore children, grew old, buried her husband, dandled her grandchildren, and finally died.
Now other ordinarily pretty girls run laughing through the same wood with Apollo on their heels.
38
ACTAEON
Actaeon was a prince of Thebes. He befriended Artemis, goddess of the hunt and youngest of the Olympians. Apollo was h
er elder brother.
The sun’s lassitude and salt on his lips as the white road wound on and then through the trees he heard water. He pushed into the dense pines, the darkness and the dappled light, oppressed by the noon silence and the uncanniness. He dropped his spear and bow before they could snag on the branches. There was cold water on the air and then the path opened onto sunlight on ripples and a thin girl in the green pool, white and bare, fixing him with eyes like pale moons.
She swept a handful of water at his face, and he watched stupefied as the sun caught the droplets in the air; the cold was shocking, and welcome, and when he’d wiped his eyes he saw she was smiling at him, and then she ran out of the water and into the trees that shivered in her wake. He plunged after her, floundering across the pool and then running through a winding tunnel of heat and shadows, ignoring the boughs that lashed his face, but she stayed ahead, a flash of white among the branches.
He found her sitting in a clearing, wearing a ragged tunic, rocking back and forth in the sun. A bow and quiver lay by her hand. I’m going hunting, she said. You come hunt too. He stood in the sun thinking, then said he couldn’t, he was due home soon, but his words lacked conviction, and then the clearing was empty.
* * *
They became good friends. It was summer and they swam in the streams and coursed over the bare hills and through the haunted woods and saw sunlight even in their dreams. In the deep places in the mountains they sometimes heard his brothers calling and the belling of their dogs but never saw them.
Metamorphica Page 11