Chimera

by John Barth

  “ ‘Before what?’ Then I realized, rather to my own surprise, not only that I’d been totally erect ever since dismounting from Pegasus (who grazed and nuzzled peacefully with the black mare), but that I really did mean forcibly to have her. She put up a formidable resistance, particularly for one bound hand and foot and barely sensible after her fall: certain Amazons, I was to learn later, especially those named Melanippe or Leaping Myrine, have a kind of limited Protean capacity when sexually in extremis; my lance corporal, before I stuck her, turned briefly but unmistakably into a stone crab, a water snake, a hind, and a squid, in that order. Her undoing was that, frenzied, she could think only of what she hoped were frightening or swift beasts (and, at that, happened not to think of wild mares, which would have undone me), not realizing, what I knew from Polyeidus, that anything limbed she might turn into would be bound as she was—and that my acquaintance with shape-shifters somewhat immunized me to her effects. Had she turned into a cloud, say, or a stream of water, she might’ve got clear; as it was, I merely backed off from the crab and held it by a backfin against scuttling off on its other legs; seized the viper safely behind the head (my brother and I were great early terrifiers of little girls with snakes we caught in the grove); and actually entered, a tergo, the lassoed hind, knowing it must soon rebecome what I lusted for. Squealing, it turned squid, only two of whose five pairs of tentacles were tied: I’d’ve got out fast—that beak, you know, down by the sex-parts?—but the free six suckered me, not bad actually, from the same squiddy instinct which then inked the penis it might have bitten off. A moment later she was unmaidened Melanippe, held by the hair and howling under me as I gave her squirt for squirt. Once come, I was at once appalled at having twice been so overmastered by desire, this time replacing with unkindest force my kindless deception in the grove. I withdrew, contrite; squid ink, mixed with cherry-bright blood, smeared from my shrinking tool onto her hams and cheeks, still fiercely squeezed, initialing my shame in the strokes and diacritics of a barbarous alphabet.

  “ ‘Pig! Pig!’ she spat, choking with outrage. I saw no point in pointing out to her that that transformation, had she thought of it in time, would have been spitted as her hind.

  “ ‘Awfully sorry,’ I panted. ‘Long time between women; got carried away. Say, that squid was a crackerjack!’

  “ ‘Cut my throat,’ she requested, speaking into the dirt.

  “ ‘Don’t be silly.’

  “ ‘Disembowel me.’

  “ ‘Nonsense.’

  “ ‘I’d kill you if I could, you sexist swine.’

  “There we lay. ‘I shouldn’t blame you,’ I said. ‘I’ve never deflowered anybody before, you know, much less committed rape. I’m thoroughly ashamed of myself. What shall I do to make it up to you?’ Her suggestions were ill-humored and impossible to carry out without ending my career. We were still for a while.

  “ ‘In my country,’ she said presently, ‘we’d cut your rapist cock off and choke you on it. We’d impale you up the ass on a hot stake. We’d make you eat your own balls. O! O! O!

  “A third time I apologized for having forced her; despite her oaths, spits, and thrashes, then, I cleaned her up and put her clothes in order, saving only the armored chiton as evidence for Iobates. As I worked I recounted sympathetically Anteia’s rape-story; her frustration at unfair nature’s one-sidedness in this area; my admiration of the excellent horsemanship of the Amazons on our palace staff in Corinth, and her own fine fighting spirit; my resolve to see her back to her outfit instead of enslaving her to my taskmaster, for whom I had no particular affection, et cetera. Putting by the Second Rule for Prisoners, Melanippe then informed me, more calmly but still in a cool fury, of the First—to die in battle rather than be taken prisoner, since Amazons must expect to be raped by their Sexist Pig Captors—and the Third—if captured by surprise, to kill oneself as soon as possible, not to afford more gratification than necessary to those same SPC’s. I reminded her that I had no intention of repeating that shameful violation, of her and of my own better nature. She spat at me, unimpressed, and said that as a point of honor no Amazon, once captured and sexually assaulted, ever returned to Amazonia unless with her assailant’s severed parts strung on a lanyard, for though her people, contrary to popular belief, had a high regard for heterosexual as well as homosexual connections, and copulated vigorously and freely on their own initiative with males, they abhorred above all things being forced. Their moral education, their religion, their art, even their history and mythology, turned on this point: they traced their descent, for example, from a company of some two thousand virgins forcibly deflowered by an Asian despot who then transported them en masse to Scythia, bidding them remember him kindly as having relented in his vow to kill each one after raping her; instead, those who found themselves pregnant by him killed their children, and they established a militant gynocracy to oppose the forcible suppression of their sex. Amazon, she said, had a higher meaning than the vulgar one: though a zealous leader might literally lop one breast off for symbolic reasons—Melanippe herself had considered doing so—the single-breastedness implied by the name was metaphorical and positive: one half pure woman, one half pure warrior, et cetera. In consequence of all this, if as sometimes happened a raped Amazon had no chance to take revenge on her defiler before he released her, she was not obliged to kill herself, but she must live in exile, raising the consciousness of foreign women to the facts of their exploitation—hence the isolated instances of Melanippe’s countrywomen in such places as Corinth, where, while doing yeoman service, they quietly subverted the patriarchy.

  “But my victim herself, ambitious in her way as I, had aspired from earliest girlhood to the grand objective of leading her sisters victoriously back to the country of their legendary origin, Samarkand; deposing and castrating the male sexist pig despot, whoever that luckless fellow might be, and making the ancestral motherland a matriarchy. From this destiny, toward which her precocious attainment of lance-corporalship was a promising first step, one fall of her horse and thrust of my yard had barred her forever; as her whole heart and mind and soul was in Themiscyra, she would not live in exile; if I was too cowardly to follow up rape with murder, she would kill herself.

  “I had been penitent; hearing my victim’s most touching account and imagining how I’d have felt, even without the extra moral and historical resonances, if some bitter mischance (such as befell my brother) had nipped my career in the bud, I was inconsolable. I dared not turn her loose; neither could I leave her where she was or fly her to Themiscyra or back to Telmissus (where, perhaps, Philonoë’s friendship would have soothed her, if not mine—but I did not trust Iobates); on the other hand, contrite as I was, I was not willing to emasculate myself for penance. Melanippe rejected angrily my offer to supply her with the genitalia of a certain dead goatherd over the hill, which she could represent back home as her violator’s. At length, for want of better, though I was perishing for sleep I flew her across the Sporades and Cyclades, all the way to Corinth, binding her tightly across Pegasus’s back to prevent her jumping off: we landed by night atop the royal horse-barns, astonishing two owls and the Amazon on watch—whom I recognized as fat Hippolyta, a friend of my youth, and saluted by name.

  “ ‘No, not Prince Bellerus any longer,’ I called down to her: ‘Bellerophon. The Killer? I have a young sister of yours here: Lance Corporal Melanippe, Fifth Light Cavalry, a valiant soldier shamefully raped in Lycia while unconscious after a bad fall from her horse. So. Please see she doesn’t harm herself, okay? And commend her to my mother and your comrades, et cetera. Also, tell Mom I’m fine and will come back to claim Corinth sooner or later. Also, that she was wrong about Polyeidus. I think. Thanks.’ While amazed Hippolyta went to fetch a ladder and her comrades, I deposited Melanippe, too despondent to speak, gently on the roof; kissed her hair; reapologized. ‘Best I could think of,’ I said; ‘you’re among friends, anyhow. Subvert all you want to. Anything else I can do for you?’ Why, yes, sh
e responded: matter of fact she desired urgently to perform fellatio upon me then and there, on the roof, out of her vast gratitude for my not having killed as well as raped her. The voice was odd; and the particular phrasing of her motive… I declined, embarrassed, and leaned over to unbind her wrists. Instantly she seized my legs and bit fiercely into my crotch; I jumped, slipped on the roof-tiles, very nearly tumbled off; she was after me, lunging as best she could with ankles still tied, clawing at my privates; I leaped clumsily onto Pegasus and dug in my heels; left her shrieking curses at me from the ridgepole.

  “Shaken, I returned to the foothills of Mount Chimera, spent three days resting and recomposing myself. The blood-and-ink-stains on the lining of Melanippe’s chiton were indelible, a ciphered execration. I had bad dreams. Every time I saw a snake (the woods there are infested), I imagined it a fleeing Amazon. When Solymian or Carian border scouts approached, I flew off with the jays and blackbirds; I searched out another patrol of Amazons and tried to tell them of Melanippe’s courage and current circumstances; obliged to hover out of bowshot-range, I couldn’t make myself heard. Much of the time I merely soared in high circles over the dead volcano like a misbegotten hawk, thinking dark thoughts about myself. Finally I returned to the plain of Xanthus and Iobates’s city.

  “The King was even more surprised than before, and openly displeased to see me. Polyeidus, too, appeared distressed. But Philonoë cried out for joy, hung on my neck, covered me with kisses, until she saw what black humor I was in and drew away.

  “ ‘That took a while,’ Iobates said sourly. ‘Where’s my Amazon?’ I displayed the ruined chiton and gave it to Philonoë, whose delicate beauty and girlish ways seemed to me suddenly bizarre, affected, as if she were imitating a Phrygian faggot. ‘Amazons don’t permit themselves to be slaves,’ I said. Iobates chuckled: ‘But they’re dandy captives while they last, eh?’ Philonoë threw the chiton down and ran from the room; her displeasure with me put the King at once in brighter spirits. ‘Seduction is for sissies,’ he said; ‘the he-man wants his rape. Heh heh. We used to prong ’em and then watch them kill themselves. How about lunch before you knock off King Amisidoros for me?’ My repulse of the Solymians and Amazons, he declared, counted as but a single labor, especially since I’d brought him no proof at all of the former and only ambiguous evidence of the latter. Moreover, his spies in Caria reported that while Amisidoros was alarmed by the ‘flying centaur’ stories and the consequent weakening of his Solymian-Amazon alliance, and perhaps amenable therefore to a negotiated settlement of the boundary dispute, he was by no means frightened to the point of mere capitulation. My next task, then, proposed by Polyeidus in keeping with the classic pattern of ascending unlikelihood, was to fly directly to the Carian court, land before Amisidoros in broad daylight, and offer to destroy the capital city with everyone in it unless he ceded half of Caria to Lycia.

  “ ‘Take the whole weekend if you need it,’ he concluded. ‘And save Amisidoros’s queen for my Sanitation Workers’ Brothel. Toodle-oo.’

  “I responded: ‘Nope. I’ll do you one more labor—you call it the third; it’s Number Five in my book, counting that special-delivery from Proetus—but it’s got to be something extraordinary, not like those others. Pirates and outlaws, maybe, if they aren’t in fact protesting injustices in the Lycian socioeconomic system—I wish I’d had a chat with Chimarrhus about that before I sank him. Rebels ditto, if they’re mere adventurists making a power-grab. Invading armies sure. Et cetera. But no more imperialist aggression, okay? You’ll have to come up with something better, or I quit. I’ve had my consciousness raised.’

  “From the wings of the throne-room came the sound of two hands clapping. Philonoë returned, and looking at me levelly, told her father to stop pussyfooting around and send me after Chimera.

  “I tried to gauge her feelings. ‘The Chimera?’ Polyeidus declared nervously that the definite article was optional.

  “ ‘That’s not a bad idea, Phillie,’ her father said. ‘Not bad at all. Then we’d still have our Flying Centaur, and Amisidoros wouldn’t have his counter-monster. You say this Chimera’s a sure killer, Polyeidus?’

  “ ‘I never heard of its hurting anybody,’ I said. ‘For all I know, it may be minding its own business up there in the crater. Am I supposed to kill it just because it’s monstrous? Besides, it’s female. No more sexist aggression.’

  “Polyeidus defended the monster’s deadliness on genealogical grounds—both of its parents had been legendary man-killers—but acknowledged that the creature had not left its lair in Amisidoros’s deadly service at least since tranquilized by the Polyeidic magic papers, and so could be said to be a threat only to vulcanologists or ignorant spelunkers, whom a posted guard could easily warn off. He agreed with me therefore that there was no particular need to kill it—or her, if I preferred.

  “ ‘He’s a chicken and you’re a hustler,’ Iobates hmped. ‘If he wastes the Chimera you’re out of the protection racket, right?’

  “ ‘Don’t kill her, then,’ Philonoë suggested in a gentler tone. ‘Bring her back alive for the University’s Zoology Department. Okay, Bellerophon?’ She grew excited at the idea: we could build Chimera an asbestos cage; her breath could be used to heat the whole zoo free of charge, maybe the poorer sections of the polis as well. ‘You wouldn’t have to hurt her,’ she insisted, and added, blushing: ‘But don’t you get hurt, either.’

  “ ‘Capital idea!’ Iobates cried. ‘Steal Amisidoros’s secret weapon and make a public show of it for the hoi polloi, keep their minds off their troubles. Go to it, Bellerophon! If you get her, no more tasks; if she gets you—no more tasks! You can’t lose. Of course, if you’re afraid…’

  “I reflected for a moment, then declared I’d go after Chimera—with great reluctance, not on account of my personal safety, but because for all I knew, in my lately augmented awareness, monsters might have an important ecological function, be some crucial link in the food-chain, et cetera. Only the essential appropriateness of the labor, which it astonished me I’d not recognized two thousand words earlier, its perfect conformity to the Pattern, induced me to undertake it—and that same Pattern prescribed that she must not be captured, but slain. No mythic hero ever brought back anything alive, except his glorious self and an occasional beleaguered princess.

  “Now Philonoë was at my arm, her late vexation passed, rationalizing for the both of us that in view of Chimera’s famous respiration we could perhaps regard the monstermachy as an antipollution measure. What did Polyeidus think?

  “ ‘Never mind what he thinks,’ Iobates said happily: ‘I’m still king around here, and I say go to it. May the better gladiator emerge victorious, et cetera. Dead or alive, it’s all one to me—but no hearsay or half-measures this time: fetch the carcass back here, so I can see it with my own two eyes.’

  “ ‘Impossible,’ Polyeidus put in.

  “ ‘So much the better.’

  “But the seer explained, more confident now, that while dispatching Chimera was at least imaginable for a mythic hero of my stature, and so obviously appropriate that it went without saying he’d had it in mind from the beginning as my climactic labor—had even had previsions of it back in Corinth, as I might recall—no souvenir whatever of the monster would be salvageable, much less the whole carcass: it was the nature of the beast, as a fire expirer, on expiration to go up in smoke. What was needed, for purposes of verification, was an expert witness—who would, however, in the ordinary case be in greater peril than the Chimeromach himself, with his special equipage and prerequisite dispensation from Olympus. Only a witness with extrahuman powers of his own stood even a moderate chance of surviving the fury of a mortally smitten external-combustion monster…

  “ ‘You’re elected,’ Iobates said. ‘If you both get wrecked, we’ll put up a little plaque for you somewhere, okay?’ He frowned. ‘But if you both come back claiming the Chimera’s done in—I’m supposed to take your word for it?’

  “ ‘
I’ll prove it by going into the cave myself,’ Philonoë said quickly, nor could any amount of paternal threat or expostulation dissuade her.

  “ ‘I want to have a long talk with you when I come back,’ I told her happily, and promised to return by dinnertime. Polyeidus asked for an hour to pack a few things and prepare the special spear he said I’d need to dispatch Chimera. Iobates, frowning still, went off to a meeting of the Lycian Home Defense Council. I ate lamb kabobs and olives with the Princess; told her a few things I’d learned about Amazons (to which she listened pensively but closely, saying such things as ‘You seem to admire them very much’); asked her why her father, after his original welcome, had seemed to take so sudden a dislike of me upon the reading of Proetus’s innocuous letter, at a time when she and I were no more than pleasant friends. Philonoë brightened up immediately and promised to check the letter, which, especially in Polyeidus’s absence, she believed she had ways of getting access to. Why check the letter, I asked, whose contents had been plainly read to us?

  “She smiled and said, ‘Call it Woman’s Intuition,’ a term and phenomenon I was unacquainted with but had no time to inquire further about. We fondly kissed goodbye, she bade me take care of myself, I bridled pretty Pegasus, picked up Polyeidus, winged northwestward in high spirits.

  “En route I chattered on about my excitement at confronting what according to the Pattern must be as glorious a moment as any in my career; I praised Philonoë’s courage in volunteering to prove the Chimera’s elimination, and her loyal resolve to find out what had turned her father against me. Surely my Sacred Marriage, which, if I remembered the Pattern rightly, followed hard upon completion of my labors, must be destined to be with her; I did hope so; her affectionate docility, now I reflected on it, was much more in keeping with the notion of a cunjunctio oppositorum at the Axis Mundi than would be, say, the more active mettle of that Amazon lance corporal whom I’d left in Eurymede’s keeping some days past. Et cetera. Didn’t he agree?