Andrew J. Peters's Blog, page 4

Nerites

It’s story time again here, and this week’s installment comes from one of my very favorite Greek myths.

I wouldn’t be surprised if most people haven’t heard of Nerites. He didn’t make it into Edith Hamilton’s seminal work on Greek mythology, and though he earned a Wikipedia entry, it’s pretty sparse. According to the Theoi Project, a comprehensive glossary of mythological figures, his story comes from the Greek historian Aelian (c. 2 A.D.) who wrote about how a spiral shell of exceptional beauty came to be called a nerite. He claimed the story was well-known among sailors.

Nerite shells, image retrieved from Wikipedia commons

Aelian told the story thusly: Nerites was the son of Nereus, a sea-god, sometimes referred to as the Old Man of the Sea, and Doris, a river goddess who was the daughter of the titan Oceanus. Nereus and his sea nymph daugthers the Nereids were previously noted by several of Aelian’s predecessors. Homer mentions Achilles’ mother Thetis as a Nereid, as is Calypso from The Odyssey, for example. There are said to be fifty Nereids, but only one Nerites, which was one of the curiosities that led me to retell a little story about him. What would it be like to grow up with fifty sisters?

After that brief introduction, Aelian tells two different versions of Nerites’ tale. Both involve Aphrodite and Poseidon, but the outcome of their dealings with Nerites differ.

Both versions say Nerites was a beautiful youth beyond compare (among many other young heartthrobs like Ganymede and Narcissus in fact), and he attracted the interest of Aphrodite who offered him wings if he would be her lover. Nerites refused the goddess, and to put him in his place, Aphrodite turned him into a snail.

Nerites’ sisters begged the god Poseidon to change him back, and he obliged. The mighty sea god was smitten from the sight of the boy, and he offered to make him his charioteer. Nerites agreed, and Aelian says they lived together happily ever after as companions and lovers, even mentioning that the word for mutual, requited love – anteros – derives from Poseidon and Nerites’ love affair.

I thought that was sweetly sentimental and refreshing. I can’t recall any stories of things going well when a god falls in love with a mortal, or a demi-god. In most cases their love interest is forcibly taken. So it goes with the most famous same-sex myth about Zeus and Ganymede, and in others, like Apollo and Hyacinth, the mortal ends up getting killed.

Well, that’s one version. Aelain also recounts a different story in which Aphrodite isn’t the villain, but it’s the god Helios who was jealous, either because he didn’t like Nerites challenging his notoriety for driving a magical chariot, or because the beautiful boy couldn’t be coerced to serve him. So Helios turned Nerites into a snail.

I like the other version better.

Telemachus and His Mother’s Suitors

Hey folks! Continuing with my retold myth project for 2018, I’m posting my next recently completed story: “Telemachus and His Mother’s Suitors.”

I remember reading The Odyssey in high school and being much more enchanted and engrossed than I had been with its partner required text The Iliad. I liked The Iliad for its style and language, the interplay between gods and mortals, and some bits of drama (the Achilles vs. Agamemnon storyline stayed with me the most). But you’ve got to admit: the battle scene passages of “he smote him, and he smote him…” go on and on and are mind-numbing. For me, they kind of took away from the more interesting dynamics between the characters.

Sorry Homer. Everyone’s a critic, right?

The Odyssey on the other hand struck me as a more imaginative, full-fledged adventure. I didn’t even need the Cliff Notes to participate in class discussion or write my paper about it. The story had me glued. I’ve often thought of characters and storylines that would be fun to slash, subvert and reboot, though this is the first time I put fingers to keyboard to do it.

Margaret Atwood wrote a fine re-telling from Penelope’s point-of-view with the Penelopiad, and I suppose I can trace my interest in Telemachus from there. In the original story, Telemachus is a rather impossibly virtuous, ever-loyal son, who scours the world, risks his life to find his absent father. That’s sweet, I guess, but I never really bought it. Atwood gives Telemachus a bit more humanity, though she still portrays him as fiercely loyal to Odysseus, and I found her version, while intentionally and admirably centered on Penelope, who was very much in need of more dimension, at the same time somewhat neglectful of the inner life and motivations of her son.

So here is what I re-imagined for Telemachus. It’s not much more than a brief portrait. Who knows. One day I might take it further.

Pablo E. Fabisch, illustration for Aventuras de Telémaco by François Fénelon, retrieved from Wikipedia Commons

They had overtaken the parlors, overtaken the courtyard, even overtaken the larder Telemachus discovered when he went to fetch a jar of pickled fish to serve the rowdy guests. Stumbling at the portal to the storeroom, he found instead the backside of one of the men. The gentleman’s tunic was unfastened from his shoulder, pooled around his ankles, and he was plunging between the pale and outstretched legs of a girl Telemachus gradually recognized as one of his mother’s laundrymaids. He stood wooden, afraid to make a sound, eyes widening from the sight of the man’s thick and hairy thighs, his starkly bare bottom, his urgent, rutting motions. Then he turned around very quickly and scurried the other way with his head bowed to hide the flush on his face.
The men were beasts, as gluttonous as swine, as horny as the dogs who skirred along the roadway to town, noses to the ground, sniffing out some opportunity. And they were brash and loud and foul-mouthed, and, young Telemachus hated to admit, they were woefully appealing with their clothes undraped while they staggered through the hallways and lay across every bench, divan, and table in the house. He tried to avert his gaze from bare chests, hardened arms, roguishly handsome faces. Some of the men had even thrown up the skirting of their robes to dance around like woodland satyrs.
It was a feast for his eyes, yet a terrible affliction. What kind of man was he, to desire his enemy? They had pushed into the house with no regard for its owners, and if he were not so girlish, he would do something about it. His mother had locked herself up in her bedroom. By right, Telemachus was master of the house. He knew he should protect his family’s honor, to stand up for himself for that matter. But he shrank from the thought of challenging the men, rousing a fight. He was one, a youth of nineteen years, whose awkward tries to raise his fists, heft a sword for martial training had exhausted his tutors’ patience and drawn laughter from his peers. The guests were dozens, some of them soldiers, some twice his age, some twice his size. Who would heed his command?
This was his father’s doing, or was it his own? Telemachus could not say, and it left him feeling as useless as a skittish cat. All he could think to do was to appease the guests and hope they would leave him be.
Grasping for some purpose, he went to the cellar to drag up another amphorae of wine. There was no one else to do it. The servants had abandoned the house with the exception of some of the maids, and those that remained were carousing with the guests, sitting on their laps, laughing while the men nuzzled at their breasts, and playing games of chase around the courtyard. No, he was not even as consequential as a skittish cat. He was a ghost amid a party to which he had not been invited.
His grandfather had foreseen his inadequacy. He had told his mother: Without a father, how is he supposed to grow into a man? This, when Telemachus was just a child, and before Laertes fell ill, unable to become a surrogate for an absent father. His father had sailed off to the war in Troy when Telemachus was just a baby. That had been nearly twenty years ago. Already, three years past, the first warship had returned to harbor hailing the victory of the Achaean alliance, yet his father had never returned.
They had said Odysseus survived the battle. Two men avowed he had been among them when they celebrated the sack of Troy with a great victory feast. Odysseus the Wise, they had called him. They had said his father had conceived the strategy which had led the Achaeans to victory.
At the time, the soldiers had beseeched his mother not to despair. The voyage home had been difficult. Angered by the defeat of the Trojans, mighty Poseidon had beset their ships with rail of wind and waves. Could be Odysseus had been forced to make harbor along the way, awaiting gentler conditions to try the sea again.
His mother had not despaired, but they both knew three years was an awfully long time to wait to make a journey home. Sometimes, Telemachus wondered if word of him had travelled to his father, and he had decided to make a family elsewhere due to the shame of him. He wasn’t wise, nor brave, nor strong, nor skilled in military arts. He certainly was not fit to be king of Ithaca, and meanwhile the country needed a king.
Two big jugs of wine, the height of Telemachus’ chest, were left in the cellar. Telemachus heaved and dragged one of them up the stairs to the kitchen and hunched over himself to catch his breath. The floorboards were gritty with dirt. They had been unswept for days. Everything was in disarray—vegetable peels strewn on the counter, piles of plates and cups in the wash basin, cupboards thrown open revealing bare shelves. It was a terrifying situation when Telemachus thought about it, so he tried not to. What would happen when all the food was eaten and the last amphorae of wine had been drank?
Straining his legs and his back, he hefted the wine jug into the clamor of the courtyard. The men spotted him and raised their voices in a hearty cheer. Telemachus turned his face from them, smiled and blushed. Well, he could not help but be enchanted by that nod to him belonging in their fraternity.
One of the guests stood up from his stool and swaggered toward him. Telemachus tensed up, expecting trouble, and equally abashed by the sight of him. The man was only clad in a tunic skirted around his waist. Telemachus tried not to look upon him directly, but his damnable eyes were always thirsty. The fellow was admirably built, in the prime of manhood. Broad-shouldered. Brown-berry nipples. A thatch of curled hair in the cleft of his chest. The man’s face was a further delicious horror: square-jawed, probing, dark-browed eyes, an auburn beard flecked with gold, and a rakish smirk. Telemachus was excruciatingly aware of the courtyard quieting and attention fixing on him, the queen’s son.
The man clasped his shoulder in a brotherly way. His big, warm hand sent a melting sensation through Telemachus’ body. He pried out a square look from Telemachus, and he winked at him. Then he brought out a coring knife from a leather holster strapped around his thigh and helped uncork the jug so the men could refill their goblets.
A glimmer of mirth passed over the man’s face, and he looked out to the courtyard. “If we cannot have the queen, perhaps we should have her son?” He whopped Telemachus on the bottom with the outstretched palm of his hand, sending Telemachus teetering, nearly doubling over himself.
The courtyard brayed with laughter. The man wriggled his eyebrows at Telemachus and strode back to his companions. Telemachus stole into a darkened corner of the courtyard, burning even hotter in the face. The sparks from the man’s wallop lingered, and he was stiff between the legs. He discreetly fanned the skirting of his princely chiton, shifted his weight, trying to relieve that painful ache before anyone caught a glimpse of it.
When it was gone, he drew up to a spot where he could see his mother’s bedroom. A single house guard was posted at the door, scowling at the commotion below. The man had been employed since before Telemachus had been born and would lay down his life to protect his mother, but he had grayed and turned soft-bodied. He was hardly a barrier if the guests decided to storm the queen’s quarters. Every other house guard had run off in a mutiny, likely corrupted by the men who had invaded the house. The men’s commotion felt charged, ready to explode with violence.
Telemachus snuck up the stairs to have a word with his mother.
~
The shutters had been drawn in his mother’s bedroom, perhaps to drown out the noise below. It was not a particularly cool, late summer evening, and the room was musty. She had lit a pedestal of candles on the table nearest to her bed, and it filled one corner of the room with a warm, fiery glow. Telemachus swam through a lacuna of darkness to her bedside. Her room was drenched in a pleasant lavender scent. Telemachus would always associate that fragrance with his mother, an olfactory memory of comfort and confession.
She was bedded with a funereal shroud on her lap, staring at the woven fabric as though it held wise secrets to decipher. She had finished the shroud one week ago, a pretext for putting off her marriage.
After a year of his father’s absence, the elder council of Ithaca had appealed to his mother, saying it was time Odysseus was declared dead, or—what most had judged—delinquent. Every Ithacan soldier had returned from Troy, whether on his own two feet or on a funeral bier. Ithaca needed a king thus Penelope must marry. In worldly cities like Athens, where free men voted as one body, they had even established laws to permit remarriage after a year of husbandly abandonment.
Penelope was not a woman who bowed to the opinions of councilors, however. She had announced she would not entertain any offer of matrimony until she had finished the shroud for her father-in-law Laertes, who was not long for the world. Meanwhile, she had ripped apart her progress each evening to start anew. By providence, Laertes had held on for years. Not so Penelope’s scheme. They knew not who had revealed the truth. Her body servant? A spiteful maid? Well, it did not matter. The ruse was over, and now their house was under siege by every man of marriageable age across the island.
Telemachus stood beside his mother for a moment before she turned to him as though suddenly awakened to his presence. She smiled at him in her easy manner. They said she was not beautiful like his aunt Helen who had roused the world to war, but she was beautiful to Telemachus. And when she looked at him so warmly, so proudly, he felt beautiful too. She reached out to touch his arm and patted the bed, inviting him to sit.
She read the worry on his face. “What is it, little lamb?” He sat down, faced away from her. They could hold no secrets from one another, even in silence, and what worried him was hard to say.
“How long will you hide yourself?”
It came out harsh, accusatory. She sat up, took his arm, pulled him gently toward her, but he resisted. Her lavender scent, mixed with the smell of her worn bedsheets, surrounded him.
“You have to choose,” he said.
She leaned against him, her face above his shoulder, trying to nudge out his gaze. Not succeeding, she picked at the ends of his wavy, flaxen hair. “Must I, little lamb? Would that you had been born a girl. Then we’d simply marry you off and have a prince-in-waiting to succeed the widowed queen.”
He shrugged away from her.
She laughed. He knew she had not meant to mock him. His mother was never cruel in that way. Teasing and bossy, perhaps, but never cruel. They only had each other in the world.
But she needed to act. The horde of men below them would only contain themselves for so long. Their hollers and bawdy chatter carried through the house, and some of them had risen up in a chorus, calling out his mother’s name.
Her warm hand clasped his arm. “Who would you choose for me?” she said. “A handsome man like Antinous, the horse-trainer? A wealthy man like Amphinomous, who owns the shipyard? Or Eurymachus, a man more like your father, always tinkering with his gadgets and playing at being a philosopher?”
Telemachus grinned in spite of himself. If it were he entertaining suitors, he would choose the auburn bearded man who had slapped his bottom. His skin was still alive from the man’s touch, and he was quickly blushing again. But a son did not choose his mother’s husband.
He scolded her, “This is not a game.”
“It is precisely a game,” she insisted. “Do you believe each one of those men downstairs has been stricken by my beauty and come to win my heart? No, they’ve come for my father’s dowry. What little is left of it. Or, they’ve come for the power to rule. For kingship of Ithaca. Of which they will be similarly disappointed.”
Their farmland had been untilled for months. The house was starting to look a shamble, and in terms of country, Telemachus followed somewhat. Ithaca counted for little in the world, particularly now that the war was over, and the Achaeans had returned to their tribal states. Men sought greater fortunes on the mainland: Sparta, Corinth, Thebes. Ithaca was an island of fishermen and peasants.
“I’ve had enough of marriage,” she went on. “One year was plenty.”
He turned to her and scowled.
She eased up beside him, held his shoulder. “Do not be moody. You know I would not have traded being your mother for all the riches in the world. But if I had had to live with Odysseus all these years…” She shivered from the thought and came back to Telemachus again. “I believe your father and I had the perfect marriage. Men and women should not be forced to live together for longer than a year. I think I shall suggest that to the elder council. A new statute for Ithaca: every husband must be sent to war no more than one year after the consummation of his nuptials.” She laughed. “What do you think of that?”
He frowned. His mother was so strange. She hadn’t a romantic notion in her head. Did not people fall in love? It was said his aunt Helen had. She ran off to another country to be with the man she loved, rather than settle on a marriage to the man her father favored. His mother told that story as though her sister had done a very foolish thing, as everyone in the world did foolish things in her estimation. But it used to keep Telemachus up at night imagining golden-haired Paris, wondering if a man like him would ever steal him away to a faraway kingdom.
“I see I have not convinced you,” she said. She sat up, smoothed out her smock. “Well then. Do you want another father?”
He shook his head.
“Good. It’s settled. No husband for me. No father for you. We run wild, as cats.” She smiled, glanced at him, contrived a more serious look. “Though I shall not stand in the way if you should like to marry. You’ve nineteen years. A respectable age. Should you like me to start looking for your wife?”
He gaped at her. “No.”
“Splendid,” she proclaimed. “Then we shan’t ever have to send you away to war.” She took his hand, squeezed it. “That makes me the luckiest mother in the world. To have a son who will never leave her.”
He squeezed her hand back. He had not thought of leaving her, in any practical way. Though a man does leave his mother someday, doesn’t he? Gray thoughts returned to him. “What will you do?”
She took on a playful air. “What shall I do?” she repeated. “Enact a contest to win my hand? What do you think? A round-robin bout to the death?”
He smirked at her reproachfully.
“Too gory? Well then…” An idea flashed in her eyes. “I do love an archery contest. And it is said an archer has the soul of the centaur. Always wanting the freedom to roam. Never setting down roots.” She sat up straighter, gaining inspiration. “Let us enact a challenge. Have we still your father’s axes in the backhouse? The ones with eyes on their heads?”
Yes, he remembered seeing them. There were twelve ornamental axes hung up on one wall, some dusty collection that must have passed down to his father. They had never been used.
“Let us set them up, eye to eye, and see who can send his arrow true through all of them.”
Telemachus tried to picture it. “That’s impossible.”
“Oh no. I do not think so,” she said. “It is a feat that can be done by the deftest and most honorable of men. A man who has been blessed by Artemis, the mighty huntress herself. Each contestant shall get one try, and whoever succeeds can claim me, along with the throne of Ithaca.”
He scoffed and awaited her laughter. It did not come.
“In the morning,” she told him. “Go to Eumaeus, the swineherd. Tell him what I have planned and that we need wood to build a rack. He will help. For some reason, known only to the gods, he was always fond of your father.” She added: “Do not encourage Eumaeus too much. Lest we be tending pigs the rest of our lives.”
She smiled at her little jest. He wondered how he had turned out so meek, so uninspired while she was clever and fearless, and his father, by rumor at least, was wise and bold. The swineherd’s farm was down the hill from their estate. He would go to him at dawn and waste no time in getting his mother’s enterprise underway.
Telemachus sat up from the bed and nodded. Then he left his mother to spy upon her guests.
~
The men had quieted by a measure when he returned downstairs. Someone was plucking a lazy, melancholy melody on a kithara in one of the front parlors, and mad, girlish laughter traveled from another room. Telemachus nearly tripped upon a man who had laid down on the dusky side of the courtyard. Stepping around the body, he saw no blood, no injury, and he heard drowsy, nasal breaths. The fellow must have overdrunk his fill.
Telemachus breathed air into his lungs, smoothed out his chiton. If what he was to do was to be done, he could not think about it too long, allowing faintheartness to overwhelm him.
So he edged around the courtyard, taking account of a cluster of men rolling dice. The number of guests had dwindled and those who remained were heavy-shouldered, glassy-faced. He recognized Antinous, who his mother had spoken of. The fair-haired equestrian was slumped against a beam, his eyes shrunken to a squint. Some of his mates bantered around him. They were all too preoccupied, too slow from drink to notice Telemachus slip by.
A terrible thought occurred to him. Had he returned too late?
He looked in on a front parlor and quickly stole past the door. A trio of naked maids were swaying in a clumsy dance, and he had seen two, maybe three shadowed men strewn around the room, staring at the girls deliriously. Possibly, most of the guests had gone home for the night, though there were other parts of the house for Telemachus to investigate.
While he dallied, a big, brute stepped out of the water closet across the way. His gaze found Telemachus, who was temporarily stricken to stone by his discovery. The gruesome bounder looked him up and down. A wolfish grin sewed up on his face. He called out, and Telemachus got his legs moving again, hastily retreating toward the kitchen, and then crossing the way beneath the staircase where he hoped the man would not find him. He listened and peeked back to the front of the house. It seemed the man had decided not to pursue him.
Now he was sweating and felt very foolish. He ought to abandon this dangerous endeavor, go up to his bedroom and bolt the door for the night. Yet that was not the man he wanted to be, at least for once. He dried his brow with a kerchief and looked around the yard again.
Some paces away, the door was open to a bedroom which had been the quarters for the male servants before those traitors had left him and his mother to fend for themselves. The faint glow of an oil lamp spilled out to the yard. Telemachus heard low voices. He stepped lightly over to see.
A small company of men were distributed around the pallets, slumped and weary, passing around an urn of wine. They slurred a conversation, which seemed of little consequence. One fellow collapsed onto his back. The others laughed, tossed back more drink. Staring keenly, Telemachus beheld a man in one corner shaving a brick of wood with a hand knife. Light was stingy in the little chamber, but he recognized the size, the shape of his bare shoulders, his dark, romantic eye brows, the timbre of his beard.
What to do? Four other men were in the room, and if any of them should see him, they might decide to try some mischief with the queen’s son. Telemachus had spent his life steering well aloft of gangs of soldiers who doled out miseries to timid, unaccompanied members of their gender. He steeled himself and stared at the auburn bearded man, imagining him lifting his gaze and looking to the door.
The moment came. Maybe he had harkened to a displacement beyond the room or noticed a shift in lighting from the doorway. Maybe he had a preternatural sense, feeling the young man’s eyes upon him. He dropped his woodwork onto his lap and blinked. A grin bedeviled Telemachus, and he composed himself with one hand on the doorframe, fluttering his eyes as a forest nymph might beckon a handsome stranger (had he truly been so bold?). The man took a quiet account of his companions and came back to Telemachus with a question mark on his face. The prince gazed over his shoulder, raised one corner of his mouth, and then he snuck slowly down the hall.
His heart pounded in his chest. Would the man follow him? His stomach was strung up tight, and his head was so terribly scrambled, he could not tell if a footfall traveled after him or he was imagining it. Into the darkened kitchen, he heard what sounded like dragging steps behind him. What had he done? Seducing his father’s enemy? Did that not make him a traitor? Yet what loyalty did he owe Odysseus? His father had not shown loyalty to him. No, this was what he wanted, and if he did not do it now, then when?
Telemachus stepped into the larder. By grace, the storeroom was vacant. Only the disorder from its previous occupants remained: shelves topped from walls, tins and jars spilled and broken on the floor. This was the place where he would have his own tryst, and whether it blossomed into a love affair that would change his life forever or counted as no more than a stolen moment of happiness, well, so be it.
He turned back to the portal and set his eyes on a dusky silhouette in the door frame. The man stood still for an excruciating moment, and then he closed in on Telemachus. Their mouths found one another, and they tore at each other’s clothes.

# # #

If there’s a classic myth you’d like me to try my hand at, let me know! You can also pick up my story “Theseus and the Minotaur” at Smashwords.

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Werecat #1 hits 10,000 downloads!

I thought I’d share this big milestone, as I’ve posted previously over the year about my progress with new marketing strategies for my Werecat series. You can find my first post from last summer here, and another update from last September here. I recently received my royalty statement from the second half of 2017, and the big update is that The Rearing (Werecat #1) has now been downloaded 10,000 times at e-retailers!

It’s true the great bulk of those occurred after the e-book went permafree in late June 2017, and that the great bulk of the downloads were at Amazon, where my publisher has spent the most time tweaking tags and advertising. That title soared to #1 in its category at the Kindle store (“gay fiction”) pretty soon after it went free, and it hovered in the top ten through most of 2017. More recently, downloads have slowed down a bit, but it has stayed between #20-40, with occasional spikes, so that’s been nice to see.

There’s definitely been an increase in buy-throughs with the series as books 2-4 have been getting more sales compared to the previous year. A lot of the time, I see a jump in the sales ranking of all three books, which is an indication that people are buying the series all together. So in my opinion, bundling works.

Another thing I’ve gone after is reviews, and for sure there’s been some progress there. The Rearing had all of nine reviews at Amazon before it went permafree in June 2017, and now it’s up to twenty-three. The uptick is even more dramatic at Goodreads, where it started at twenty-one ratings/reviews and now is at seventy-four. The other titles have gotten reader reviews here and there, though it hasn’t been as brisk as I would have liked to have seen.

The series has gotten some nice industry reviews, and I’ll share a few recent ones:

From Underground Book Reviews – Werecat: The Trilogy

From Scattered Thoughts and Rogue Words – The Sim Ru Prophecy (Werecat #4)

I’m hoping to keep the momentum up and surely do appreciate your help! If you read the books, you can share your rating and review. Anywhere you talk about books is helpful. Amazon is probably the best place from my perspective, and Goodreads is great too.

And it’s out as an e-book

Dudes and dudettes, you’ve probably seen that I shared a (long) short story here over the past two weeks. You can of course read it for free, and here are some neato, helpful linkies just for you:

Theseus and the Minotaur, Part One

Theseus and the Minotaur, Part Two

Theseus and the Minotaur, Part Three

But that’s a little inelegant perhaps as a way to read the story from start to finish. So, I recently put it all together in an e-book and published it at Smashwords.

Lo and behold…

I priced it at $.99, and through March 25th you can use coupon code:  KX47C, and you don’t have to pay one red cent. That’s just the kind of guy I am. You’re welcome.

Theseus and the Minotaur, Part Two

This week I’m posting the second installment in my retold story: Theseus and the Minotaur. If you missed Part One, you can read it here.

In this section, Ariadne enters as a full-fledged supporting character. She may be the most intriguing figure in the myth in that, unlike the famous romances of Paris and Helen, and Perseus and Andromeda, her relationship with the hero Theseus is curiously unfulfilled. Did she help Theseus because she loved him? If so, why didn’t she continue with him to Athens? Did he abandon her at an island along the way to get rid of her, or thinking he would protect her (as described in conflicting stories, neither of which seems true to Theseus’s character)? Or did something happen to sour their relationship? The accounts of that part of her story are strangely unclear, and good fodder for the imagination.

Illustration by William Pogany, from “The Golden Fleece and the Heroes who Lived before Achilles” by Padraic Colum, retrieved from Wikipedia Commons

THAT NIGHT, a troop of slaves brought a feast on railed beds down to the beach where the Athenians had decamped. A man in officious robes preceded them to say the meal was courtesy of the king.
The prince’s countrymen sneered at first as they looked upon the many platters of foods that had been carted down from the palace. Theseus beseeched them to forsake their doubts and prejudices, to enjoy the king’s bounty. Minos had no reason to poison him. If he did, he would not enjoy the spectacle of sending Theseus to his labyrinth of death. Besides, he told them, there was no dishonor in helping themselves to what the king had provided. True, it as a false gesture of friendship designed to show off his wealth, to rub their noses in it. But never did a starving man avenge a richer enemy by starving himself.
Theseus said it in a jolly way. It had never been in his nature to play the cynic, but the dilemma he had created was peeling open layers of himself, or perhaps forcing a rapid maturation of his sensibilities. The sailors, who looked to the prince with perhaps more deference than was his due, shrugged and peeked at the meal. The truth was: they would otherwise be dining on ropes of salted meat and stale bread.
They brought the foods to their bonfire and gathered round, reaching over one another to grab at dishes of fish in sauce, roasted lamb, ears of fried breads, pickled vegetables, olives, nuts, and candied dates. There were even urns of a light red wine, which they all agreed was inferior to that of their homeland, but they drank it anyway.
The mood turned merry in the manner of bested men who could do no more than laugh about their misfortune. They joked about the pompous king, his tiresomely grand reception, and his queen who favored sharing her bed with a bull rather than her dull, bombastic husband! They even laughed about the king’s feast being a ploy to fatten up Theseus for the Minotaur’s dinner, and then they jested over which parts of Theseus the monster might prefer to devour first and which parts they might bring back to Athens (his cock and balls were the most popular guesses in both cases). Some wondered aloud if they all might be sent back to their country as charred corpses or odd and ends from a butcher’s table. Who could trust a man who hurled firebombs at fishing villages for fun?
Theseus chuckled along with his shipmates while the sand crusted cold, the night air turned crisp, and a universe of stars twinkled overhead. He would never have imagined he would feel so loose and gay the night before he was to be thrown into a pit to fight a man-bull to the death. Yet why should it not be so? He gained nothing by sulking or pacing about with worries.
In quieter, somber moments, his companions suggested strategies – dodging his opponent until it tired out, aiming his blade for the brisket, which was known to contain the bovine heart – but no man among them had ever fought such a beast. Would it charge at him on all fours or would it stand as a man in hand-to-hand combat? They could only speculate. No man who had faced the Minotaur had lived to speak of its nature, its tendencies, its weakness.
Theseus figured he would use his speed and his dexterity as he did with any martial challenge. In his brief time in Athens, he had outfought most of his contemporaries in skirmishes, and around the gymnasium, he was praised as a fine boxer and a wrestler. Though he had never seen battle. He did not know how it felt to be face-to-face with man who sought to kill him, nor how to steel his heart to strike out for death. It was said that instinct was borne in every man, that it would come to him when he needed it. Theseus surely hoped it would be so. He knew of hunting and had not hesitated to slash the neck of an arrow-struck stag, at least after the first time his father had urged him forward to do so. But that was hardly the challenge he could expect with the Minotaur.
Yes, he would need to be quick and clever and merciless, and otherwise, he imagined he would need some luck, which only the goddess could provide.
The men called out for him to challenge Kallinos, a veteran in their company and the tallest and thickest-built man among them. Theseus had spent day and night in practice bouts ever since he had declared himself to face the Minotaur. Only a fool would not. One last exercise to sharpen his skills certainly seemed advisable. The two men gathered wooden swords and walked up the beach into a pool of shadow, which might in some respect simulate the contest the prince must win in the darkened passages of King Minos’s battleground.
Theseus tried to hone his vision, hold back the bigger man’s attack, and Kallinos did not spare the prince any pity, quickly bullying him farther down the beach, forcing him to exert all of his strength. It was not enough. A series of clashes enfeebled Theseus’s wrists and had his legs wobbly from absorbing the assault. He tried to back away and lost his balance, toppling on his bottom. Kallinos pounced upon him, socking the breath from his lungs, pressing the length of his blade into his neck.
Kallinos helped him to his feet, and they sparred a second and then a third and a fourth time. The results were the same by and large. Theseus could not find a way out of a defensive posture, batting back the bigger man’s thrusts and swipes, ceding ground, wearing through his limbs’ endurance. If there was a lesson to be learned, he would have to avoid challenging the beast directly. His only chance was to use the creature’s habitat to his advantage: find hiding places, stalk the predator and ambush him. Yet how to do it when the beast knew those hiding spots much better than he?
He would need every gift the goddess could grant him.
They returned to the center of the camp, and Theseus called everyone together. He led his company in lifting their goblets of wine and spilling a bit onto the earth before they drank in tribute to wise Athena. Afterward, they tossed branches of her sacred olive tree into the fire and sang the anthem of their country with hearty voices to be heard far inland, hopefully as far as the king’s bedchamber.
The hour was late. Theseus told the men he needed sleep lest he be crawling to the labyrinth in the morning, though truly he was not tired. Each man came around to grip arms with him, look him grimly, firmly in the eye, share words of encouragement. Then Theseus went to bed himself in his captain’s tent.
~
HE HAD just stripped off his cuirass and shoes when he hearkened to a curious commotion around the camp. Voices travelled in a mixture of tones, some defensive, some ribald and taunting, but too indistinct to decipher the words. Theseus drew up to the flap of his tent, endeavoring to overhear what drunken intrigue had broken out.
It sounded mild and light-hearted at first. Then the voices, the heckling fell away, and he heard instead a scuffle of footsteps in the sand. Hairs stood up on his neck. Unless he was mistaken, that footfall was gaining up on his tent. It was one steady plod through the sand and then a lighter patter. Some of his sailors trying to catch him by surprise, to play a prank? Though they could see he had not yet extinguished his lamp for the night. An enemy instead?
Theseus thought about retrieving his blade from the floor, but before he could do so, he heard the voice of Padmos, first admiral in the company, just beyond the lip of his tent.
“You’ve a visitor.”
The man sounded sober. Resigned? Who would visit him? He was a stranger in a foreign country.
Theseus shook out his tunic, tried smoothing it out. The garment was gritty from his spar with Kallinos on the beach and soaked through with his sweat. There was no method to amend that. He wiped his hands, drew open the flap of the tent, and peered into the night.
He perceived the silhouette, the dutifully bowed head of the admiral. There were two others. Each one scarcely decipherable. They were shorter than the admiral and covered from head to toe in hooded cloaks.
Padmos gestured to one of the hooded strangers. “The Princess Ariadne,” he said.
Theseus was deeply astounded. He was astounded even more to see the foreign princess curtsey and to hear her lovely voice.
“May I come in, Your Grace?”
She barely waited for him to nod and make way for her. Her covered head turned to her companion, who must have been her lady escort, and she told the woman to wait for her. Then she brushed past Theseus and went into his tent. Theseus and his admiral exchanged sheepish shrugs. Certainly he could handle himself alone with a young woman.
He followed her into the tent, let the flap resettle behind him. His reckoning of the situation was several steps behind the shock of the king’s daughter abandoning the palace in the middle of the night to walk among enemies, the respect that was due to the daughter of a king who held the future of Athens in his hands. She pulled back her hood, removed her veil, and unfastened the collar of her bounteous cloak. Her thick, dark brown hair had been pulled back and braided so as to be concealed in her hood. She was fragrant with violet and some kind of appealing, musky spice. She wore just a touch of onyx on the lashes and brows of her warm, chestnut colored eyes, and a hint of some rare cosmetic that brought a sheen to her cheeks. He liked her this way more so than when he had seen her on the king’s stage.
“It must be true that Attica breeds the most brave and honorable men,” she told him.
This, another surprise from the princess. Theseus did not know what to say.
“Do not be humble on my account,” she said. She eased up closer, leaving only a narrow gap between them. “I saw how you stood up to my father. I have never seen a man be so bold.”
“I had no choice,” he told her. “Your king would have my country hand over children for slaughter.”
His pointed declaration returned no rebuke. Instead, Ariadne gazed at him with admiration.
“Yes, you are a man of valor and nobility. You must have no shortage of women vying for your companionship. Even more so when you return to Athens, a savior of the children.”
Theseus was not sure what she meant. He was only eighteen years old. Female companionship had only crossed his mind in a distant, hypothetical manner. He supposed, like all men, he would marry some day and raise sons, though it was hard to picture it for himself. The princess confused him. Her people had declared war on Athens, yet her bearing, her words were kind and adoring, almost making him forget they stood on separate sides.
The princess closed the space between them, clasped one of his hands to her bosom and groped to find him between the legs. She breathed in his ear, “Would you take me with you before you leave?”
Many things happened to Theseus at once. He gasped and squirmed from her touch, and his face broke out in a searing blush. He had no experience with women. No hand had ever touched him there besides his own, and then, well, this situation thrust upon him had not been what he had pictured in those private moments.
Though while her warm body was pressed against his, he felt like he was melting, and his worries scattered from his head. His body responded on its own volition. He cupped her breast, squeezed gently, merely because he could, and it did feel nice. Then the strangeness of it all halted him.
He quieted her hand, backed away, made her raise her eyes to his. “What did you say?”
She held his shoulders, stepped closer, jostled her hair. “Take me with you. You have captured my heart.”
He snorted absurdly and steadied her hands before she could go at him again. He told her, “That presumes quite a lot, don’t you think? I’m to face the Minotaur in the morning.”
Ariadne picked at the frayed collar of his tunic. A coy glance. “I can help you,” she said. A firmer look. “But you must promise you will take me away on your ship.”
Help was useful. That was certain. Though was this some kind of trick? A plot she was enacting for her father to hamper his performance at the contest? It occurred to him, later than it should have, the king would surely have him killed if he discovered him carrying on so intimately with his daughter.
Theseus drew a breath and backed away from her. He needed to understand.
“We’ve just met. Why would you want to run away with me?”
Ariadne’s expression shifted. Perhaps she had seen he was too smart to be plied by her advances. “Because I must,” she said. She skirted his gaze. “My father is a monster.” Her pretty eyes returned to him. “You stand for justice. You stand for those, like the children of your country, who haven’t any way to avoid their plight. I am no more than my father’s prisoner. You have doubtless heard the stories of what goes on in his palace, and you can believe they are only fragments of the truth. Help me escape from this place of madness.”
He could see her point. Her father was a cruel tyrant. Her mother was unspeakably deranged. Her half-brother was a man-beast. Yes, she had perceived he had a sympathetic heart, but he sealed himself in stone. He owed her nothing. They were from warring countries, sworn to different gods. Her misfortunes were her own.
His doubt must have shown on his face. She fixed on him again. “Take me away. If not for me, then to save your own life. You will not survive my brother’s lair on your own. No man ever has.”
This he had heard many times, though to hear it spoken by the princess, who must have seen scores of men sent to their deaths, it gave the words a crushing weight. Theseus did not want to be eaten alive by a man-beast. For a delicate moment, he thought it might be best to sit down on his bed.
Ariadne pried out his gaze. “Yes, you want to live. Let me help you. All I ask in return is my safe passage. To another land. I care not where.”
Well, what harm in listening? He swiped his face, which had begun to perspire. He nodded to her eagerly.
“The labyrinth is vast, and it is not only my brother you need to mind. The passages are riddled with many dead ends and trap doors to deeper pits where a man can fall and break his limbs, or land on a bed of nails. Many have perished in its deadly snares or simply gotten lost in its cold, dark veins, sealed forever beneath the ground at nightfall. My father sent his engineer through a secret hatch this night to make sure all of the labyrinth’s devices were oiled and armed to entrap you.”
She reached inside her cloak, brought out something fist-sized from her pocket. Theseus could not see it clearly at first in the dim light of his tent. She took his hand and placed the item in his palm. “I have brought this to help you.”
He raised his hand to his face and beheld a bobbin of string. Useful for fishing. Theseus looked back at the princess blankly.
“It is a method for minding your path, finding your way out,” she explained. Theseus blinked, following now. “Keep to the sides of the walls.” The princess added: “Mainly. There are spikes and traps on every surface of the maze, but not as many on the walls as on the floor. The Minotaur keeps to the very heart of the maze. You will find it there.” A moment’s hesitation, and then her expression hardened. “Kill it, and you will be able to retrace your way back to the entrance.”
The Minotaur, she called it. Not her brother as she had said before. Their kinship counted as a flimsy allegiance, which Theseus supposed he could not fault her for. Or had she just now forsworn their bond in resignation to her brother’s fate? She believed he could kill the monster? That was the most encouraging news he had heard all night.
“And how am I to repay you?” he asked her. “To smuggle you aboard?”
She glanced over her shoulder, came back to him. “There is a cave on the north side of the beach. Go there before you launch to sea. I will be waiting, hidden in a cedar chest. You will receive a bounty of them when you win the contest. You only have to load the chest on your boat as though it were another trove of gifts for your victory.”
A daring ploy. He wondered how she would accomplish it, but he decided he did not need to know. There was however a stark flaw in her plan.
“Your father will send his warships after me as soon as he discovers you’re gone,” he said.
“No. He will never notice.”
Theseus screwed up his face. Her gaze drifted away, and she held herself speechless for a private moment. He sensed there were grave thoughts on her mind, not merely lies to lead him into doing a foolish thing. Yes, something grave had overcome her, something that brought her shame.
At last, she asked him. “You have heard of moppets?”
He had. In stories. They were dolls, which could be inspirited by dark magic. He had never seen one, only heard of them from sailors who had travelled to the Orient. Though sailors spoke of many outlandish things.
“My father’s high priest has created one of me,” Ariadne said. “So that my father will believe I have taken ill and cannot leave my bed.” She impressed on him in her assured manner, “It is a powerful sorcery. Though the moppet is only wood and cloth, my father will believe it is me, languishing, beyond the cure of medicine.”
Theseus remembered Minos’s priest. He had certainly looked capable of sorcery, and in a house that worshipped a dark god, in which a queen had been enraptured to lie with a bull and bear a monster, well, it did not seem so hard to believe such magic could be done. Theseus was afraid for a moment to be part of it. Would the goddess damn him for consorting with such dark arts?
On the other hand, the circumstances tempted a more benevolent superstition. He had prayed to wise Athena to provide him with some way to survive the contest. And now the princess had materialized to offer him precisely that, just hours before dawn.
He looked to the bobbin of string, and then he faced Ariadne. “If I survive, I will bear you away.”
She smiled and pulled him into an embrace again, burying her head in his chest. Theseus found himself less enchanted on the second round. However just her cause, however generous she had been with him, he could not help but wonder if she might try enticing one of his countrymen in the same way. She had, after all, approached him, a stranger, and she might buy herself insurance from another man if he should not survive tomorrow.
Maybe it was unfair to despise her for that, yet he did for a moment, like a child who demands the sole attentions of his mother. And his desire for the princess was all vanity, not love nor lust, whereas a different kind of man, like many of his sailors to hear them talk, would want to horde her for her plunder.
What a strange world he had entered. Ariadne in her own way no less dangerous than her father or her brother. She could lead his crew into a mutiny, killing one another to claim her. Theseus gently broke off their embrace and sent her out into the night.

 

 

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Introducing…Theseus and the Minotaur (Part One)

If you saw my earlier post this month, my New Year’s resolution is to share more of my work with my website visitors. I also started a project to create short stories based on classical mythology, which might some day parlay into a collection. My first piece is ready to share with you.

I’ve always loved the story of Theseus and the Minotaur, which is credited to second century B.C.E. historian Apollodorus of Athens in Edith Hamilton’s Mythology, and Plutarch and Ovid elsewhere. It’s so imaginative, and it’s been an enduring inspiration source for artwork, fantasy, and gaming. I remember walking through Tuileries Garden in Paris and stopping in my tracks when I discovered a nineteenth century neo-classical statue of the two, and naturally I had to take some photos of it. Years before that trip, I confess I was briefly addicted to the RPG Neverwinter Nights, which includes a labyrinth filled with stalking minotaurs. The story is so irresistible, I suspect it figured into just about every Greek mythology-based TV series, from Hercules to Xena to Olympus. I know it was in an episode of the BBC’s short-lived Atlantis series. Given that wide access point, I thought it was a great place to start with my project.

Here, I hoped to give more dimension to the characters, and some spin. I had always thought of Theseus as a pretty dull, do-gooder, the archetypical, epic hero like Jason and Perseus, admirable but not so relatable to the reader. He certainly was depicted that way in the big screen bomb Immortals. But when I re-read some of the classical myths about him to reorient myself, I found a hint of personality. Theseus used his brains as well as his gods-given physical abilities. I wanted to expand on that, in addition to how he might have truly felt about his heroic quests as well as his unusual origins.

I had no idea it would turn into such a long, short story. It’s really just five scenes, but I found myself digging pretty deep with each of them. I was entranced by how Theseus might have experienced his trip to Crete, and I hope you will be too. So I’m going to release the story here in three, fairly long installments. The entire story is a little over 16,000 words.

Now, without further ado, here is Theseus and the Minotaur, Part One.

Illustration by Willy Pogany, from “The Golden Fleece and the Heroes who Lived Before Achilles” by Padraic Collum; retrieved from Wikipedia Commons

THE GREAT hall of the king’s palace was vast enough to house a fleet of double-sailed galleys, and its grey, fluted columns, as thick as ancient oaks, seemed to tower impossibly beyond a man’s ken. Prince Theseus had been told, he had been warned of the grandeur of the Cretans, how it was said they were so vain, they forged houses to rival the palace of Mount Olympus. Yet to see was to believe. For a spell, the sight of the great hall stole the breath from his lungs and made his feet drag to a stagger. Should not he, a mere mortal, prostrate himself on his knees in a place of such divine might, such miraculous invention? It felt as though he had entered the mouth of a giant who could swallow the world.
No, he reminded himself: this was all pretend, a trick to frighten him and his countrymen, though he only half-believed that. Silenos, an aged tutor who Theseus’s father had hired to teach him all things befitting a young man of the learned class, had cautioned him not to trust his eyes, that these pirates of Crete used their riches to build a city of illusions so any navy that endeavored to alight at its shores would be hopelessly confounded and turn back to sea in terror.
Theseus forced a dry swallow down his throat and retook his steps to keep pace with the soldiers who escorted his party into the hall. He had brought two of his father’s naval captains to accompany him, and the king had sent three men for each one of them to meet them at the beach where they had rowed ashore. From there, they had been conveyed up a steep, zigzagging roadway to the palace. The armored team looked like an executioner’s brigade rather than a diplomatic corps. They were hard-faced warriors with spears and clad in bronze-plated aprons and fringed, blood red kilts.
He tried to look beyond many wonders and train his gaze on the distant dais where the king and his court awaited him. Yet curiosity bit at Theseus. Oil-burning chandeliers seemed to hover in the air, hung from chains girded to a sightless ceiling. No terraces had been built to bring in daylight, nor doorways to other precincts of the statehouse, unless they were hidden. The walls shimmered with a metallic reflection of the room’s massive columns, affecting the appearance that the hall went on to infinity. The diamond-patterned carpet on which he trod was one continuous design stretching from the vaulted doorway where he had entered all the way to the other end. Such a carpet was surely large enough to cover the floors of every house in Athens!
As he neared the stately dais, he beheld the king’s high-backed throne of ebony, and he glimpsed very briefly the man himself along with the shadowy members of his court. Theseus lowered his gaze to disguise his impressions. He supposed it also counted as a gesture of respect. He followed the soldiers into a lake of light which glowed from thick-trunked braziers on either side of the hall’s carpeted, shallow stage.
Their steps ended some ten paces in front of the room’s dignitaries, including of course the king himself. The armored men knelt on one knee, drummed down the handles of their spears on the floor, and bowed their helmet-capped heads as one company.
That left Theseus and his consorts standing and wondering what to do with themselves for a worrisome moment. To kneel to the king was to surrender Athens’ sovereignty, and that had not been his father’s bargain. Though his princely leather cuirass and his laurel crown felt countrified, almost absurd while he stood before the king, Theseus did not break. He glanced to each of his companions so they would know they should neither kneel nor bow.
Righteousness grew inside Theseus, arisen from the unsurpassed conviction of a youth of eighteen years whose dealings in the world thus far had not acquainted him with indignity, the shock of being cut down to size. As an infant, he had been sent to live in his mother’s village, which was countries apart from the political fray and urban discontents of Athens. This, no excess of fatherly protection, but a testament to his father’s severity, later spoken of in the ennobling light of superstition, an augury of the night sky or some such. Aegeus had decreed: if his son was worthy to succeed him, he must earn the right on his own terms.
For most of his life, Theseus had not known his father. He had not even known of his paternity, though he had lived quite well as a handsome, rugged lad among country folk who required no more than that to smile upon him, fetch him apples, give him a rustle on the head when he passed by, a proud acknowledgement he was one of their own. Then came his mother’s confession, and his storied trek to present himself at his father’s court, which he had made on foot across Arcadia, an ungoverned, forested land that had been said to be rampant with all manner of bandits, ogres and mythical beasts. In Athens, he had been a newcomer, an adventurer, and a fawn-haired swain, all of which had earned him magnanimous gossip. Men made way for him, and women smiled and idled when he passed by.
Naturally, young Theseus was aware of none of this as a favored flower does not question why it thrives in sunlight, has a gardener always at the ready for its succor, while others of its kind turn spiny and dull from negligence. Or, it should be said, a glimpse of his place in the world, past and present, was only just then taking form while he stood in King Minos’s great hall. He did not like how it made him feel.
He shook off the sinking sensation. He would be bold, for he alone stood for Athens in this house of tyranny. These foreigners had butchered his countrymen, raped their women, taken their daughters and sons as slaves, and burned their fields. He alone would end the war, and in truth it did not matter if he returned to Athens on a white-sailed galley to herald a hero’s return or if a black-sailed ship should come back to his father, signaling that Crete had been his final resting place. So had he decided. He looked to King Minos to begin.
The Cretan king returned his gaze, appraising, taunting, and then he perched in his seat and craned his neck to see beyond the prince, to turn a querulous eye at the head men of his squadron. “Where is Athens’ tribute?” he spoke. He looked to be no more advanced in years than the prince’s father, a sturdy, dispassionate age. The similarity wore through at that. The king’s dark brown beards were plaited and shone with oil, and he wore a miter banded with red-gold. He was clad in raiment of deep cerulean dye and a draped, red stole, all adorned with fine embroidery and fringe. Theseus had never seen a man so richly clothed and groomed. His father, the wealthiest man in all of Attica, had only a sheep’s fleece and a laurel crown to say he was king.
“King Aegeus has sent me, his son, Theseus of Attica, to answer your request,” Theseus spoke.
Minos pursed his lips, sucked his teeth. “I asked for children.”
Such had been the compact signed by Theseus’s father to end the war: seven boys and seven girls surrendered to Minos in return for nine years of peace, during which the Cretan king had pledged he would call back his warships.
It was a war begun while Theseus still lived with his mother in the countryside, years before his mother had taken him to an unfarmed field outside the village and shown him his father’s buried sword, from which he came to know his origins. Theseus had only arrived in Athens one season past and been apprised of the history. This heartless war borne from a tragic misunderstanding.
Two years ago, Minos had sent his son Androgeus to Athens on a friendly embassy, and while Theseus’s father had taken the youth on a hunt to see somewhat of his country’s pastimes, Androgeus had been thrown from his horse, and landed headfirst on a rock. No physician nor priest could restore him. His spark of life had been extinguished all at once.
Aegeus had returned the prince’s body to Crete with all due sacraments and compunctions. His priests had washed Androgeus to prepare him for his passage to the afterworld, and the king had sent him across the sea on a bier of sacred cypress, ferried on his finest ship, oared by his best sailors, and with a bounty of funereal offerings, gold and silver, which was many times more than his kingdom could afford. Yet Minos declared treachery and turned fire and fury against Athens.
Three seasons the war had raged, and after a decisive battle on the Saronic Gulf, Minos had claimed that vital sea passage and installed a naval blockade, robbing Athens of her trade routes, slowly starving her. Aegeus had appealed to the Cretan king for an armistice. An emissary from Crete had returned with the tyrant’s reply: fourteen innocent lives for the price of his son. This, after Crete had already extracted the lives of hundreds of fighting men in payment for his one son, whose death could only be blamed on the cruel, mysterious Fates. Would Minos continue his assault until every man and woman of Attica had been exterminated? Who could stop an army empowered by the God of the Sea?
Aegeus had decided he had no choice but to agree to the king’s terms, and his council, one and all, had supported him. The Athenian navy was no match for the foreigners by the numbers nor by the craftsmanship of their vessels. The Cretans flung barrels of fire from catapults. Their triremes were faster and their battering rams were more potent, carving apart a galley on a single run. The Athenian fleet had dwindled to a dozen vessels. Their forests were stripped of lumber, and even if they had the resources, their ship builders could not assemble new warships fast enough. Food shortages had depleted their force of able-bodied men to defend the city. Without a reprieve from war, the next attack on Athens would be the last.
But after the lottery had been held, and weeping fathers from all parts of the country brought their sons and daughters to the naval pier where they would be ferried across the sea, Theseus could not bear it. He looked upon the children, who were as stunned as lambs without their mothers, and he had wept for them, and wept for his country, and wept for the shame of being part of this abomination.
Then, in a rush of rage, Theseus had attacked the sailors who would lead the children to the ship. He had come to know them as friends, yet all he saw were blank-faced monsters. By grace, he had only had his fists, and no man had raised a blade to stop him. Theseus had shoved, struck, and menaced perhaps a dozen before they overtook him and held him fast by his neck and arms. A terrible blackness ate up his vision, and inspirited with a daemon’s strength, Theseus had thrown off his captors. He turned his fury at his father who stood at the landside end of the quay with his councilors.
Theseus had shouted at them vicious oaths he had not known were in his vocabulary, and he spat at them. Did they not know what they were doing was an offense to the goddess? It was a betrayal of every free man of Attica. His throat was scorched from shouting, his voice hoarse, and he fell to his knees, dropping his bonnet, weeping and pulling at his thick, curled hair.
He looked up at his father. “Please, send me.”
Now Theseus faced King Minos intrepidly. “I have been chosen to stand for the children. I have only eighteen years, turned just this past season, and I am my father’s only son. I will face your contest.” He realized only then he had forgotten the honorifics, which Silenos had taught him. In Athens, men spoke to their king as freely as they spoke to their own fathers, and for the prince, that person was one and the same. No matter. It was never a mistake to put one’s enemy off balance. He could see the king was alarmed, as though his lack of manners had been intentional.
Theseus continued, “Accordingly, should I fail, you shall grant Athens nine years without hostility so that my country may grieve my death. And, should I succeed, no man of Crete shall sail upon Athens’ seas within the same period of time. This has been sworn to in your covenant with my father. This is what I have come to do.”
The hall fell as silent as a winter forest. Only the king’s courtiers shifted a bit like the stiff branches of February trees. They were wondering no doubt what reckoning the king would make of this prince, offering himself in defiance of the terms of the compact. It had to make for a tempting proposal. How better for Minos to show off his might and humiliate Aegeus? He could say he had coerced the great king of Athens to sacrifice his beloved, only son, and kings from around the world would rush to pay him tribute lest he demand the same of them. Theseus needed it to be so. Nothing from the man’s history suggested he could be persuaded by mercy. It was said that when he had sacked the wealthy trade-city of Khirokitia on Cyprus, he had ordered his sailors to rape every one of the Cypriot king’s eleven daughters, some as young as five, and then to bind them to the hull of their ship so the girls would drown on the voyage back to Crete.
Theseus felt the cruel king’s eyes upon him. He scrutinized the sword holstered from the prince’s belt, the broadness of his shoulders, the musculature of his arms and legs, which showed outside his short-sleeved, thigh-length chiton. The prince was still a thin-hipped youth, though his limbs had hardened from martial training. The whiskers of his cheeks and chin remained downy, and his face had not yet fully shed the glow, the plumpness of boyhood.
“You will face my stepson in his lair?” Minos spoke, a glint of humor in his eyes. “With only a blade to defend yourself?”
The prince nodded. The Minotaur. Sired by the snow-white bull that pulled the god Poseidon’s chariot, and borne from the king’s mad wife Pasiphae. The legend held that Minos kept the creature in a subterranean labyrinth, and it only fed on the flesh of men.
Theseus noticed a strange man who stood aside the king’s throne taking account of him. The gruesome fellow was nearly naked and glistening with oils. His grey skin hung from the bone and was creased with age. He wore a feathered headdress, a swath of fabric as a pagne, and a heavy necklace of horns draped on his flat chest in tribute to the fearsome god he worshipped: Poseidon, Roiler of the Sea.
On the other side of the king was a woman dressed in a layered gown of widow black, and with a veil covering her face. The king’s queen, Theseus guessed. Still in mourning for the death of Androgeus.
He turned to a fair girl on the stage who stood beside the queen. She had vigorous locks of black hair heaped upon her head, and her face had been painted in ochre and rouge in an Asiatic style. Her clothes were colorful and immaculate, entirely foreign to the young prince. She wore an elegant corselet that pushed up her modest breasts and bell-shaped skirts, which widened her hips, affecting the proportions of a fowl though he could see she was slimly built.
Their eyes met, and the girl’s expression was restrained, perhaps even sympathetic. Theseus had only hatred in his heart for any man or woman of Crete, but he felt himself veering toward her for a moment. She looked to be his contemporary. Minos’s daughter Ariadne, whose beauty was hailed around the world?
The king glanced at his priest, a silent exchange, and the horrible savage made an arcane gesture with his bony hands, grinned thirstily at Theseus, and bowed.
Minos declared, “If this is King Aegeus’s will, so shall it be done.” He gazed at Theseus like a lion with its prey beneath its paw. “But the terms of our agreement shall stand. You are but one son. Tomorrow, should you not emerge from the labyrinth with the beast’s collar by nightfall, it shall be sealed and your father shall owe me six sons and seven daughters of Attica to try the contest. I will not be denied what was promised to me. Or else I will turn my armada against Aegeus once again.”
In truth, the possibility of not surviving the contest had never lingered in Theseus’s head. His cause was just, and that was all. But now he pictured a black sailed ship wallowing through fog-banked waters toward harbor. Fathers huddled with their children on the pier, turning their heads away from the sight. His own father taking in the knowledge his son had failed and sentenced innocent children to certain deaths. His claim to save Athens no more than a foolish boast.
Theseus grasped for some counteroffer to the king. He could think of nothing.
The greedy king looked like he might break out in laughter. He knew Theseus had no leverage to negotiate further, and now that he had the king of Athens’ son in his clutch, he would likely devise more treachery to ensure the prince would not survive the contest.
~ ~ ~

Stop back on February 20th for Part Two of the story.

 

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Coming soon: Retold Classical Shorts

It can now all be revealed. The reason I haven’t posted in a while is that I’ve been working on a super sekrit project. Very soon I’ll be sharing that project with you, dear reader.

Here’s the story: a little bit before the new year, I was puzzling to myself (does one puzzle to oneself? I don’t know. That sounds like sloppy wordsmanship, but I’m going with it), anyway, I was thinking: it’s awfully hard keeping this website fresh and dynamic when I’m publishing like one, or maybe two novels per year. Those new releases are exciting (to me at least), and I’ve shared some excerpts and book extras over the years. But the sad truth is I don’t have a ton of creative content for visitors to get to know my writing.

That’s actually an easy fix if you click on one of my buy links and click through to make a purchase, which you totally CAN DO if you haven’t tried it. Really. But that’s not the main point I’m trying to make here.

So back to the origins of this project, it occurred to me:

A. What about writing some short stories and posting them on my website?

and,

2. How about doing something I love, like retelling stories from classical mythology, most likely from a queer POV?

which led to,

III. Herm…if that goes well after a couple of stories, maybe I can take requests from readers on what myths or legends they’d like to see me rewrite.

plus,

dd. Well, if that goes super well, maybe some day I can package the stories together in a Super Sekrit Classical Mythology Short Story Collection!

therefore,

v. I’m going to do this goddamn it and it’s going to be Awesome, or maybe awesome with a little a, or maybe awesome said in a tiny, quivering voice that you think is coming from your floorboard, but you can’t be sure, it might just be the heat coming up the pipes.

Yep, that’s my thought process from alpha to omega, and you’ll just have to tune in and see how it turns out.

First up will be a retelling of Theseus and the Minotaur. I won’t reveal too much of where I’m going with the story since that would kind of kill the super sekritness. But I can report that I’ve been working on it for the past three weeks, and it’s morphed into a longish short that will probably require releasing it here in segments.

The story is presently with beta readers, and I’m hoping, really hoping to have it out in February. It’s written in a classical style and a classical time period, but I’m thinking about experimenting in the future with some contemporary retellings and maybe even some humorous retellings. I’m looking forward to sharing how that turns out.

Meanwhile, if you’re dying, really dying to ask me to slash your favorite classical myth, for christ’s sake, just ask me. I’m totally reasonable about things like that.

 

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2017 in Books

I was inspired to write this post by Goodreads’ Your Year in Books feature, which is a really nice way of cataloging your reading, and is this the first year they did that for users? I hadn’t noticed it before. Though I am known to be unobservant at times!

Anyway, here’s my year as tricked out and analyzed by Goodreads. My less tricked out summary: I read thirteen books in 2017, which is strangely the exact same number I had for 2015 and 2016. So I’m pretty solidly a one book per month reader. I don’t know how I’d find time to do more than that without sacrifcing my writing time.

This was probably my most purposeful year reading-wise. I wanted to read as many gay fantasy books as I could to expand my cred as somewhat of an authority in that genre. For a rather specific niche, there’s a huge universe of gay fantasy titles, but when you start digging into it, it’s kind of like nine out of ten are really romance, and really formulaic MM romance, where the story is about a relationship between two guys, with lots of titilating scenes, and the fantasy world and whatever quest the guys have to accomplish are much, much, much in the background.

Those kind of stories are not my scene, so the real challenge for me is finding gay fantasy titles that aren’t first and foremost romance and erotica. I get recs from Goodreads and Amazon and awards programs and LGBT sci fi/fantasy blogs, though it does take some additional research to try to gauge whether a title is going to be up my alley.

I didn’t read gay fantasy exclusively in 2017, so I’ll start with the non-fantasy titles.

I picked up Geoffrey Ryman’s Was because I thought it might be a bit like Gregory Maguire’s Wicked series (also based on The Wizard of Oz). Turned out: not so much. The story is reimagined and speculative for sure, but from the point-of-view of a realistic Dorothy Gale in late 19th century Kansas, as well as a young Judy Garland and an invented character who is a washed up actor, obsessed with The Wizard of Oz, and dying of AIDS. If all of that sounds depressing, you are right on the money! It’s a book with three, interwoven tragic stories, but I found it to be definitely worth the read. Ryman is an encyclopedia of knowledge about the history of Kansas, Judy Garland, and the filming of The Wizard of Oz. He’s an excellent writer, and the details about all three of those topics were engrossing. The characters — none of which could be described as likeable on the surface — have important stories to tell, and I love flawed heroes.

I also read Rahul Mehta’s realistic No Other World for personal reasons. It’s a coming of age story, set in upstate New York, in the 1980s, with a gay, Southeast Asian lead! Ding, ding, ding! You may not know this about me, but I’m really fond of Southeast and Near Eastern authors. Hanif Kureishi and Shyam Selvadurai are two of my very favorites. So, Mehta had big shoes to fill so to speak, and I ended up digging the book. Not a fan of the narrative structure (does every work of literary fiction have to play around with fractured storylines?), but overall, I thought it was quite a poignant and illuminating portrait of growing up with intersecting identities.

I had one oddball, esoteric title on my list: a translation of Petronius’ 1st century A.D. novel The Satyricon. From its description and the literary criticism I read about it, it looked like another ding, ding, ding! for me; really compulsory reading for any writer who espouses to have any gay fiction cred, or ancient world historical cred. And it’s described as high satire – the author’s irreverent answer to the treacly romance novels that were popular at the time. (Another disclosure: I have a book coming out that is a gay re-telling of Chariton’s 1st century A.D. Callirhoe, which I sped through while bursting with ideas for bringing the story into the 21st century).

For me, lightning did not strike twice. The Satyricon is a strange story, and it feels even strangely modern with its focus on a group of marginal, vagrant characters who drift from one illicit situation to the next, like drug addicts from the 1960s in a William Burroughs novel, or even a bit thematically like the work of Bret Easton Ellis, Jay McInerny and Joan Didion, a story of apathetic excess. That would seem to be perfect for me, but I just couldn’t get into the story. Similar to Callirhoe, and–from what I’ve read about the style of the era–most ancient Greek and Roman novels, there was very little development of the characters, and they didn’t hold my interest. I’m embarrassed to say I gave up on it less than halfway through.

Now, the gay fantasy titles I read in 2017…

Hands down, my favorite discovery was Daniel Heath Justice’s The Way of Thorn and Thunder. Epic fantasy inspired by Indigenous American folklore! Amazing stuff. I wrote a lot more about it on Goodreads which you can check out here.

Chaz Brenchley’s The Tower of the King’s Daughter was another happy find. I had to track it down through inter-library loan as it’s out of print. A punchy, high stakes adventure in a medieval, Crusades-like world. I liked it so much, I added it to my Intro to Gay Fantasy list.

I continued with Samuel Delaney’s Neveryona saga, whipping through Return to Neveryon and confirming that my literary life was nothing until I discovered Delaney.

And I read Steven Harper’s Iron Axe, two sci fi titles: Carol Holland March’s The Tyro and Hal Duncan’s Vellum, and a trio of books I wanted to read to see what all the hoopla was about: Jesse Hajicek’s The God Eaters, Mercedes Lackey’s Magic’s Pawn, and C.S. Pascat’s Captive Prince.

Plus one non-gay fantasy title. I had been wanting to read Guy Gavriel Kay for a while, and I dug in with Sailing to Sarantium this year.

I have a lot more gay fantasies on my TBR list, so I’m going to be staying with that genre in 2018. I’m always looking for epic fantasy and ancient world historicals with gay themes, so let me know about any books you think I should be reading!

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Happy Holidays and Reflections on 2017

via GIPHY

It’s been such a busy time of year, I’m not going to do any better than putting up one post this month. It’s my annual Happy Holidays post, and I’m reminded of how much I have to be grateful for this year. As a writer, I could not keep at it without my family, friends, readers, writing colleagues, and publishing house staff cheering me on. I am incredibly fortunate to have so many supportive people behind me!

2017 has also been a difficult year for many of us, but I’ll focus on the good stuff first.

In late 2016, my novel The City of Seven Gods came out, and–as humbly as I can say–2017 was the year when I could add: “award-winning author” to my biography. Early in 2017, The City of Seven Gods was shortlisted for 2016 Sci Fi/Fantasy Book of the Year in the Foreword INDIES, and then, in August, it won Best Fantasy/Horror in the 2017 Killer Nashville Awards. On a night I will always remember, I attended a literary awards program for the first time in my life, and was called up to the podium to accept the prize and give a victory speech.

Another big highlight of the year was the release of The Sim Ru Prophecy in June, the fourth and final book in the Werecat series. It was gratifying to bring Jacks’ story to completion, a project that began in 2012 and was brought to life by Vagabondage Press. Working with VP publisher Fawn Neun and my editor N. Apythia Morges, we put together a new marketing plan that reinvigorated the series, including re-releasing the first installment The Rearing as permafree. The books soared in the charts throughout the last half of the year with The Rearing holding a spot on Amazon’s top ten best sellers in gay fiction for several months.

I also placed a new novel with a new publisher, to be released in late 2018. I’ll have more news to share about that in the coming months! Meanwhile, I’ve been working on a follow-up to The City of Seven Gods. I hope to have that out in the world in 2019.

Personally, it was also a great year for friend reunions and celebrations. In July, Genaro and I visited our good friend Jorge in Mexico City, and he hosted us at his fabulous B&B The Red Tree House. We celebrated Genaro’s big 5-0 just a few weeks back on a Caribbean cruise with some of our closest friends, including Jurgen and Thorsten from Germany.

LGBT Queens Book Night!

I’m really happy to be featured in this year’s LGBT Queens Book Night next Wednesday, November 15th at Queens Pride House in Jackson Heights. The annual event showcases local authors who have recently published fiction, poetry or non-fiction, and brings together writers and readers in the LGBT community.

I’ll be joined by Russell Ricard, author of The Truth About Goodbye, and a resident of Forest Hills. Fun Fact: we’re both married with cats. (Not married to cats; that was supposed to be a play on ‘married with children’).

So what can you expect if you come out to the event? Unbridled literary mayhem. All right, that’s probably promising a bit more than we can deliver. But from past events, I can tell you that it’s a great, laid-back, homegrown event that gets a fairly equal number of writers and fans who are enthusiastic about LGBT literature as well as local pride. Did you know best-selling author Robin Cook grew up in Queens? And Patricia Highsmith. I won’t mention the borough’s most notorious offspring because we’re not exactly proud of him, nor does he qualify as literary. (ugh)

The panel will be moderated by community activist Demetrius Bagley and you can RSVP, see directions, a little more info over at the Facebook event page. I’ll be reading from The Sim Ru Prophecy and talking about the Werecat series and the role of LGBT writers in the era of resistance, among other things. I hope you can check it out!

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