Chimera by John Barth
“Here’s how it was. As I came in on the glide-path over Halicarnassus into Lycia, Pegasus swept into a sudden curve and went whinnying around what I took to be the plume of a small volcano, in ever-diminishing circles like a moth around a candle, till I feared we must disappear up our own fundaments. When we finally touched down and the world quit wheeling, I found us inside the crater itself, not active after all except for smoke issuing from one small cave; there an old beardless chap in a snakeskin coat, that’s right, was lighting papers one at a time and tossing them into the hole, where they combusted with enormous disproportion of smoke to flame. At sight of Pegasus the fellow panicked, and no wonder: willy-nilly we charged, and Peg nipped him up by the neck-nape. Better to grasp the bridle, I’d been holding Proetus’s letter in my mouth; lost it when I hollered whoa; next instant the man was gone and it was that letter in the horse’s mouth; instant after, when I snatched it from there, I found myself holding sidesaddle the same old man, himself holding the letter. ‘I’m an unsuccessful novelist,’ he muttered hastily: ‘life’s work, five-volume roman fleuve—goddamn ocean, more like it; agent won’t touch it; I’m reading it aloud to the wild animals and burning it up a page at a time. Never attracted a winged horse before; mountain lions, mostly, at this elevation; few odd goats from lower down, et cetera. Dee dee dum dee dee.’
“What Pegasus held now instead, and chewed on placidly till I took it from him, was the amulet. ‘Passing prophet hung that on me,’ Polyeidus lied; ‘said I ought to try something in the myth way, very big nowadays, three novellas in one volume, say: one about Perseus and Medusa, one about Bellerophon and the Chimera, one about—’ I squeezed him. ‘Polyeidus!’ ‘That was his name, all right,’ Polyeidus said: ‘had a daughter very high on this Bellerophon fellow, said she goes around hollering Bellerus Bellerus all day, that sort of thing. You’re Bellerophon, are you? Told me I should hang that gadget around my neck, fetch me better ideas. What do you hear from your mother?’ When he saw it was for joy I pounded him, he admitted he was Polyeidus and congratulated me on my achievement of Pegasus, which he was pleased to take for a sign that his petitions to Athene on my behalf had not been inefficacious. The fatal amulet virtually was, these days—it was the smell of wild mares on it, more than hippomanes, that had attracted Pegasus—and if I’d oblige him with a lift back to the Lycian capital, where he was now employed by King Iobates, he’d be happy to discard it against future impediment to navigation.
“ ‘You’ve heard nothing from Corinth, you say?’ ‘Only that Mother had you arrested. What for?’ ‘Ugly business, that,’ Polyeidus said, and pitched the amulet into the cave. The smoke diminished. ‘Poor woman’s quite out of her tree, I fear. I told her you’d be back one day to reclaim the kingdom; thought that would cheer her up? Not a bit of it! Patriarchal plot, she said: sexual imperialism, et cetera. Clapped me in the keep. I decided to turn into the vaulted cell itself so that the guards would think I’d escaped and leave the door open, whereupon I would escape. But something went wrong: I turned into a fierce she-monster here on this mountain, and all but ate myself alive before I could switch back. I just don’t have it any more in the three-dimensional way.’ His best explanation of the phenomenon, he went on to say as we winged off to the Lycian capital, was that Hermes, famous trickster and inventor of the alphabet, must be as well a lover of puns and practical jokes: in keeping with his recent tendency to turn into documents, Polyeidus had changed not directly into his dungeon cell but, intermediately, into a magic message spelling out that objective: I am a chamber. Finding himself instead a fire-breathing monster with lion’s head, goat’s body, and serpent’s tail, dwelling in a cave in a dormant volcano called Mount Chimera on the Lycian-Carian border, he could only infer that the god had sported with the proximity of the names kamara/Chimera. But being nearly lost in translation was not the end of the difficulty: so violently had Polyeidus dissociated with the monster, his resumption of human form (sans hair and twenty kilos) had left the Chimera, as he now called his accidental creation, intact: the first such case in the history of magical transformation, so far as he knew, and he regarded it with mixed feelings. On the other hand, foreseeing that Amisidoros, the Carian king, would attempt to exploit the beast as a new secret weapon to guard the long-disputed boundary, he was able to forewarn Iobates and establish himself in the Lycian court as a special defense-minister; on the other hand, he was obliged not only to conceal his own responsibility for Chimera’s existence, but to make periodic secret field trips to the crater to feed the beast a ream or so of specially composed tranquilizing spells, until he could devise a better way to neutralize her.
“ ‘So here we are,’ he concluded; ‘you keep my little secret, I’ll keep yours’—by which he meant, you understand, my responsibility for the death of Glaucus and my brother. ‘You’ve learned to read and write, I see?’ He indicated the letter. I confessed I had not, except for an odd half-dozen alphabetical characters. ‘Just as well,’ he said; ‘only mischief in letters—Q.E.D.! Look where the birth-certificate trick got us! I’ll deliver this for you. Any idea what’s in it?’
“I shook my head and, for shame, volunteered only that I was doing a kind of purificatory labor for King Proetus, perhaps unnecessary, but a good trial run in any case for whatever true labors lay ahead. At his suggestion we landed here in the main square of Telmissus, for maximum effect. A crowd assembled, also the court, to admire Pegasus; Polyeidus took several bows and introduced us to Iobates, describing me as a former protégé and an up-and-coming mythic hero. The King was cordial, inquired after Anteia and his granddaughters, thanked me for the letter, insisted on feasting me for nine days before opening it. He introduced me to his younger daughter, Philonoë, at age sixteen an undergraduate mythology major here at the University (though we had no department then, only a couple of course-offerings), who shyly asked me to autograph her syllabus. I drew a careful upper-case Beta, best I could do, with her curious writing tool, a lead-pointed stick Polyeidus had given her that made marks on things. A charming girl, by turns demure and bold, she sat next me at dinner; told me her father’s nine-day custom drove her buggy—she always tore into her mail the second it arrived; bade me describe in detail her little nieces, whom she was dying to visit; confessed an absolute passion for the study of mythology; asked me would I visit her senior seminar if she okayed it with her professor—no need to prepare anything, just rap with the kids, et cetera; pressed me particularly for anecdotes about Perseus, her favorite among contemporaries in the field.
“In the days that followed we became great friends. My intellectual superior, she nonetheless deferred to me as an example of what she called ‘the imaginative embodiment of otherwise merely intellectual conceptions, you know?’ What I saw as small embarrassments—my then illiteracy, for example—she was pleased to interpret as marks of authenticity, though she volunteered to tutor me in writing if I’d give her flying lessons. Indeed, she told me frankly that the only thing that bothered her about me, hero-wise, was my articulateness and apparent gentleness of manner: heroes, she fancied, should be rougher-edged and less ready for speech. But she soon had it reasoned out that her preconceptions in this regard were no doubt due to the stylizing nature of the mythopoeic process itself, which simplified character and motive just as it compressed time and space, so that one imagined Perseus to be speeding tirelessly and thoughtlessly from action to bravura action, when in fact he must have weeks of idleness, hours of indecision, et cetera. Besides, who could stroll the palace gardens, play catch, sing duets, and have long talks with a mere Golden Destroyer?
“At her coaxing, King Iobates shortened the feasting period from nine days to seven, seven to five, in case the letter contained news from Anteia. But as it was after all government business, on the fifth evening he gave it to Polyeidus, his official state-message reader (Iobates shared my limitation), to read to him. The seer opened it, paled, glanced at me sharply, pled for a moment to consider the accurate Lycian equival
“His sudden change of mood perplexed me, but I took off on Pegasus without waiting for dessert, spent the night and morning talking with fishermen and merchant-skippers, located the chief pirate vessel by aerial reconnaissance with the aid of their descriptions, sank ship and company by bombardment with big rocks, knocked off the paddlers with low-level hoofing, returned to the palace by cocktail time. The King and Polyeidus, celebrating, seemed surprised; Philonoë kissed me. ‘Nothing to it,’ I said, hanging up my bridle: ‘Captain’s name was Chimarrhus, which I believe means goat? Red-bearded chap. Real fire-breather, judging from the way he hissed and gurgled going under. Their rig had a lion figurehead, serpentine taffrail: a nautical monstrosity. I wasted them. No big deal.’
“ ‘Hmp,’ Iobates said, his elder daughter’s father, glaring at Polyeidus, who rapidly declared that the great similarity between the old Carian pirate outfit and the new border-monster should not be taken as evidence that my testimony was fanciful: in his opinion it corroborated his opinion that the Chimera, while newly embodied up in the hills and a great fresh threat to Lycia, was a monster of long-standing Carian tradition: his genealogical visions and researches inclined him to believe her the offspring of Typhon and Echidne. The former, son of Earth and Tartarus, had been the largest monster ever: a serpent from the waist down, he featured hundred-league arms with serpent-heads for hands, an ass-head that touched the stars, sun-darkening wings, flaming eyes, and live-lava breath—hence Chimera’s volcanic habitat. The latter, half lovely woman and half speckled serpent, a man-eater killed by hundred-eyed Argus, was one of the Phorcids, sister to the Gorgons and Graeae of Persean fame. Thus Chimera, interestingly, was in fact Medusa’s niece, Pegasus’s cousin, and, since the winged horse was my half-sibling, not altogether unrelated to me.
“Iobates rehmped, and with not so much as a congratulatory word to me, said he wondered now and then what was in some people’s drinks. ‘I take it you can back up this claim?’ he asked me incordially. Surprised, I retorted that the numberless sharks had been my only body-counters; Philonoë protested to her dad that while trophy-fetching was a common enough feature of heroic expeditions, to put the burden of proof on the hero was unprecedented and discourteous. Polyeidus diplomatically suggested that just as I was still a novice at performing hero-tasks, the King was a novice at taskmastering; why not both of us try another? Detachments of the Solymian and Amazon military, he understood, were once again bivouacked along the border on opposite sides of Mount Chimera, a clear and present danger to our territorial integrity. How about a twin wonder, the single-handed repulse of both armies?
“Iobates made the family noise, but seemed interested. Philonoë showed alarm. ‘Of course, if you think that’s beyond you…’ Polyeidus offered. ‘Nothing’s beyond me,’ I said. Then the King, all smiles, bade me have a nice dinner first, at which he specified, in the trophy way, a good-looking Amazon captive not older than twenty-five Polyeidic years or below the rank of first lieutenant, sufficiently intact for concubinage.
“ ‘That’s disgusting, Daddy!’ Philonoë said. ‘Besides, any Amazon would die before she’d be a slave; we learned that in fourth grade.’ Iobates chuckled and declared he’d take the chance. I remarked that while serial labors were not unusual for heroes, I knew of none whose tasks were imposed without so much as a night’s sleep between. Polyeidus agreed, but seconded the King’s timetable on the grounds that just as no literary classic is quite like any other literary classic, so no classical hero’s biography exactly duplicated any other’s; one attained such generality as the Pattern only by ignoring enough particular differences. This notion oddly troubled me. The Princess kissed my brow and said, ‘Daddy’s afraid to have you around because he sees I have a crush on you. Lots of kings are like that.’ Iobates hmped; I took off blear-eyed but much aroused.
“I was, remember, a prime and healthy fellow, so preoccupied with my career that except for occasional chamber-maids or temple-prostitutes I’d had no women since Sibyl-in-the-grove. All the while I drowsily wrecked the Solymians (saturation-bombing of their encampment by moonlight with boulders from Mount Chimera—where I saw this time neither smoke nor monster—and sporadic high-level horse dung), I had ardent fantasies about Philonoë, so much more fetching than Anteia or Polyeidus’s distracted daughter. At dawn, when I landed sleepily to verify the rout, I could scarcely concentrate on trampling the wounded for imagining the perky Princess (in Position One) on my temple pallet or among the creepers of the sacred grove. The camp was empty; indeed, the old chap I was absent-mindedly hoofing to death was the only sign of life; had I been less full of Philonoë I might have heard in time his protests that he was not Solymian but Carian, a goatherd whose flock the Solymian raiding party, taking him for a Lycian, had made off with at my first bomb-run from the hilltop. Declaring that he would have fled after them in hopes of stealing back his goats had he not slipped on a Pegasus-turd and turned his ankle, he cursed warriors in general and mythic heroes in particular, who in his opinion were worse than mercenaries in that we had not even the excuse of getting our daily bread by doing hired hurt to others, but performed our lethal offices for mere self-aggrandizement. This point I would have debated with him readily had he not expired upon making it; just as well, I reflected, recalling Philonoë’s attitude toward overmuch rationality on the part of heroes. The recollection of her earnest face and dainty neck too aroused me for discourse anyhow; marveling tumescently at how my image of her worked to turn me into her image of me, I flew off to find the Amazons.
“Their rout was easily effected, for all their famous battle-courage, inasmuch as they were strictly horse soldiers, and their mounts, trained not to shy from the most clangorous conventional combat, bolted unmanageably at first sight of swooping Pegasus. The ‘war party’ reported by Lycian intelligence numbered no more than two dozen, mostly middle-aged: I learned later from Melanippe that they were in fact scouts sent to investigate the Chimera, distorted reports of whose existence and possible usefulness had come to Themiscyra from Lycian operatives. They were lightly armed and, far from home, more concerned with preserving their horses than doing battle with me, whom they took to be the monster. A few passes scattered them; had I been in their territory, they’d have regrouped, blindfolded their mounts, and come back to dispatch me at whatever cost. As I wasn’t, they returned to their base with reports (corroborated, so our own intelligence people subsequently confirmed, by the Solymian scouting and foraging party) that Chimera was a flying centaur in Iobates’s service, not a fire-breathing dragon in Amisidoros’s, and recommended withdrawal from the Carian alliance, as did the Solymians—Amisidoros, it turns out, knew nothing at all of the treble beast alleged to be his house pet and secret weapon.
“But they returned, the Amazons, minus one, the youngest-looking, whom I buzzed and harried several kilometers from the rest until her horse fell. She was pitched hard to the rocky ground; the horse, a black mare, sprang up and, less fearful now that Pegasus was landed, stood nervously by. The Amazon lay still. I fetched up her brazen bow and half-moon shield to club her with if s
“ ‘Are you by any chance an officer?’ I asked her.
“ ‘Lance Corporal Melanippe, Fifth Light Cavalry,’ she answered furiously. ‘Get your filthy hands off me!’
“ ‘That’s under First Lieutenant, I suppose? No matter. Are you a virgin?’
“She replied, in a tighter voice, though still as if at least as angry with herself as with me, that the Second Rule for Amazonian Prisoners of War forbade her to give any information beyond her name, rank, and unit. I cordially pointed out that inasmuch as I’d been ignorant of that rule, she’d broken it already by informing me of its existence. Amazons do not weep, but their voices tremble. She requested that I kill her first.