“They are natural characteristics of your race. In the Golden Age, our wings were built for flight. Now they are petty things. But all things dwindle in these paltry times.”
He looked incredulous. To an Israelite, a creature with wings was either a demon or an angel. The demon was wicked; the angel, terrifying and full of Yahweh’s wrath.
“Have you never wanted to fly?”
“Haven’t all men?”
“No. Some men want to sail ships to the Misty Isles or the Dusky Sea. Others, like Saul, want to trample enemies and raze cities. When they catch one enemy, they find another.”
“Mother,” he pleaded. ‘Tell me who I am.“ His eyes were green and questioning. The forest was in them, the fresh new green of spring-awakened grass; shy, tentative, not yet assured of winter’s departure. The ocean was in them, halcyon-still above a reef of coral.
I was a queen, Jonathan, in my own land, and my lovers were as numerous as the cells in a honeycomb. My people, the Sirens, had come to Crete-the island you call Caphtor-. in the Golden Age; come from their northern home to live in that southern land with the Wanderwooders, the Satyrs and the Dryads, the Leogryphs and the Telesphori. Wings to fly, legs to walk, webbed toes to swim: the ideal race, were we not? But we had angered the Goddess and she had driven us from our palaces of sculptured propylus; stunted our wings and shut us from the sky; exiled us to the alien south. Still, I was a queen. Honey Hair I was called.
Before we came to the island, human men had lived in harmony with the Wanderwooders. Kindly men, the original Cretans and their allies, the Philistines, who worshipped the Goddess with libations of milk and decked her forest shrines with seashells and anemones. But earthquakes toppled their palaces and drove them to flee to the mainland in their goose-prowed ships.
After our exile, we had swum from the north to Crete; without ships; without tools; weary, homeless, hapless. We did not build new palaces. The ruined palaces of the Cretans, sprawling over the land and into the sea, gave us a home, a hive, where a queen could rule her drones and workers and propagate the race. Stone columns bristled with barnacles. The great facades, leaping with bulls and worshippers, had cracked in the sun. Field mice had burrowed where Cretan youths had danced the Dance of the Cranes. No longer could you hear the jangle of the sistrum like the shake of a coin pouch, the beat of drums, the rustle of belled skirts on flagstones, the chatter of blue monkeys in the enclosed gardens of lotus and papyrus. But we made of those half-sunken palaces a place of warmth and delight. We glazed the walls with the rich red clay of the island and painted frescoes of our northern home, the forests of fir and pine, the fleet-toed deer; we swam in the sunken rooms and festooned the floors with seashells and bits of amber and climbed on the ledges to dry our golden hair; we tended herds of sea cows to give us milk and loved them almost as much as the dolphins with which we played.
I was only a child when the first Cyclopes came to the island. I had become a queen when they threatened you, my son of five years.
“Mama,” you cried, springing into my arms from the giant tortoiseshell from which I had made your bed. “What is that terrible roar? It sounds like a Minotaur.”
“A Cyclops, Bumblebee.” That was my name for you before I came to Israel.
“A giant?”
“Yes, the sons of Poseidon, the sea king. They stand as tall as a mast and peer through a single eye at a world which seems to them created only to be destroyed.”
“Can he hurt us?”
“Not as long as we have our palaces and spears, and our bears to warn and guard us.”
“Let’s show them we’re not afraid. Let’s walk in the forest and look for mushrooms! Well tiptoe so the Cyclopes can’t hear us.”
It seemed to me then that the Goddess had forgiven my people: she had given me you. Doubly armed, I with a spear, you with a little knife, both of them dipped in the venom of the Jumper, that deadliest of spiders, we stepped into the light. I felt like a morning glory as it greets the sun. The workers, as always, toiled at their various jobs, returning with nectar from a field of saffron crocuses; manufacturing wax with the help of propylus secreted from their mouths; storing honey against the winter sleep. The drones, arm in arm, meandered through the avenues where Cretan gallants had walked in the smile of the Goddess. At the mating time, when buds were greening the winter-forlorn trees, they would follow me in the nuptial flight-or swim, I should say, since the punishment of the Goddess denied us the sky-and I would choose as my mate the drone whom I wished to crown. We would meet and embrace and my consort, stricken by love, would fall like a broken boat to the bottom of the sea, even while his soul ascended to the Celestial Vineyard. Meanwhile, the drones must seek each other for love. My workers lived only for work. Neither did they beget children nor receive lovers, but the drones were passionate beings, and who was I to deny them the love of their friends? The Goddess never decreed that men should lie only with women. All of the races which worship her-the Wanderwooders, the Cretans, the Philistines, the Canaanites, the Phoenicians- accept the love between two men as one more affirmation of the divine plan, the tide which rises and falls to the moon’s compulsion, the inevitability of the seasons, the certainty that those who love will meet, after death, in the Celestial Vineyard. A man’s love for a man is neither more nor less than a man’s love for a woman, it is only different.
“Honey Hair!” A young drone with a white tunic caught by a belt of tourmalines had called my name. He was small and trim like an ivory dancer from the workshop of the Sea Kings. His name, Myiskos, meant “Little Mouse.” He released the arm of his friend and bowed to me.
“Yes, Myiskos?”
“Please don’t leave the hive without an escort.
“My spear will keep us from harm, my son and me.”
“Beautiful things get broken.”
“Dear Little Mouse,” I said. “Perhaps I will choose you for my next king.”
He smiled wistfully. “If only you could choose Hylas at the same time. Even the Celestial Vineyard would seem lonely without him.”
I looked at the young drone who was waiting for Little Mouse. Like most of his friends, he was smooth and beardless, with a saffron glow to his skin. But his tunic revealed a sturdy frame; he was quick with a spear, strong to wrestle, swift to swim. It is folly to think that men who love men are mincing and high-voiced like the eunuchs of Egypt. More often they are brothers in battle, comrades under the deaf, indifferent stars.
“I could not spare the both of you.”
They resumed their walk and paused to examine a flower which had sprung between the cobblestones.
“A mustard flower,” said Hylas. “I am glad that our sandals did not crush her.”
In perilous times they could speak of flowers. Yet, under attack from the Cyclopes, they were valorous warriors; the two of them fought as one.
It was good to walk in the forest, among the yearning oaks which remembered the reign of Father Saturn, that wise old king who, it was said, had nested swallows in his mosslike beard. The latticed branches formed a wizardry of light and shade. Woodpeckers drummed against Dryad oaks.
“Mama, let’s visit Alecto. I can hear the breakers. We’re near her home.”
Alecto was also a Siren, but she was a solitary queen, like the bees which never build hives. She spent her time in the sea disporting with dolphins or lying on beaches where the crackle of shells would warm her of an approaching Cyclops.
An oaken wilderness yielded to a carob grove, cultivated by the Cretans, now forsaken along with a summer house of blue-rimmed windows and a rusting bronze plow. Beyond the grove, the land fell away to purple rocks, where the tide, withdrawing, had bared a multitude of treasures and trifles- murexes with fragile spines; starfish with broken legs; flotsam from — the foreign galleys which sometimes plied the coast. I held your hand and we clambered over the rocks until the waves broke at our feet in diamonds of foam.
“Out there lies Philistia,” I said. “Sometimes her sailors still return to this island, once their home. And beyond them, so I am told, are the Israelites, a race of warrior-farmers led by a young king named Saul.”
“I want to go there,” you said, staring across the green, disheveled waters. The look in your eyes was old and wise and full of journeys; it was the way of our race, sometimes, to remember what we had never seen, and to foretell what we were yet to see.
Then we spied Alecto, the Siren called Silvergilt because of her hair, which looked like foam in the sun. She had heard our approach, recognized us as friends, and continued to sun her tresses on a rock. She opened her arms
