me.
‘The surf raged in Poseidon’s deep, cold eyes as he flung me flat on my back and crushed me beneath his weight. I tried to scream for help but he forced my teeth apart with his blue fingers and spat a mouthful of raw wet seaweed inside. I tried to wriggle out from beneath him but at the slightest movement my flesh and skin were lacerated by the coral that covered his thighs, the barnacles that grew on his palms; it was better to lie still while the god laboured away on top of me, the shark oil oozing from his hair into my eyes. He did not cease until all the air had been knocked from my maidenly lungs and my veins were emptied of blood: then with a spasm of his hips he filled my body with seawater – his climactic groan echoed with the despairing cries of a thousand drowning men.
‘The briny sea flooded every inch of my body: my belly and heart, my joints and limbs, every sinew, every muscle, every lymph node and nerve – and wherever it went it felt like molten iron poured into the out-stretched hand of a child.
‘Poseidon was well satisfied with his rut, and in return for my maidenhead he offered me one wish. I curled up where I lay on the shore and whimpered:
‘“I wish I were a man so I need never again endure such an ordeal.”
‘These last words emerged in a deep masculine timbre, for the god had been as good as his word. And now that I was a man, Poseidon was generous to me, saying that from this time forth my nature would be such that no metal could harm me. He must have fore-seen that I would have to take part in many a duel to defend my honour against men and giants who doubted my prowess because I had once been a maid.
‘In my male shape I was given the name of Caeneus, and I remained in that form until the day war broke out between the Lapiths and the Centaurs, which was when the latter drank themselves into a frenzy at the wedding of Pirithous and Hippodamia. A great battle was fought that you can read about in many books for it was considered one of the mightiest clashes of antiquity. When the centaurs had given up trying to shoot me with javelins and arrows or run me through with swords and knives – and I had managed to kill their leader Latreus – they resorted to bombarding me with rocks and huge tree trunks. I don’t know whether tales of how badly I had been injured on Lemnos gave them this idea, but they piled so much of the forest on top of me that I was forced to change shape or perish.
‘Long afterwards the poet Naso quoted my brother-in-arms and former shipmate on the Argo, the seer Mopsus, as saying that a dun-coloured bird had flown up from the pile and soared high into the sky in a wide circle above the battlefield. There it mewed sorrowfully before flying away.
‘It was a young herring gull that had not yet acquired its adult plumage.
‘It was I, Caeneus.’
X
It was nearly one in the morning on Easter Day when Caeneus broke off his story so that someone could comfort the purser’s lady friend who had burst into tears when he described the rape of Caenis. At first she had borne up bravely, clamping her hand hard over her mouth and gesturing to the mate not to worry about her but to carry on, she would get over it. But when he said, ‘It was I, Caeneus’, a paroxysm of sobbing escaped from behind her hand and she wailed:
‘Oh, I can’t bear it!’
The purser clasped an arm tightly around his lady friend’s shoulders. She buried her face in his chest and wept there a while. He stroked her hair gently, crooning something consoling, humming so deep in his chest that the melody vibrated low against her ear. The ensuing quiet gave me a chance to observe my dining companions’ reactions to this heart-warming spectacle:
One word was written on all their faces:
‘DEFEAT!’
Indeed, though the tune was meant for the purser’s lady friend alone, the song and the weeping were for all of us. Four years had passed since the end of the great conflict but we still
‘The surf raged in Poseidon’s deep, cold eyes as he flung me flat on my back and crushed me beneath his weight. I tried to scream for help but he forced my teeth apart with his blue fingers and spat a mouthful of raw wet seaweed inside. I tried to wriggle out from beneath him but at the slightest movement my flesh and skin were lacerated by the coral that covered his thighs, the barnacles that grew on his palms; it was better to lie still while the god laboured away on top of me, the shark oil oozing from his hair into my eyes. He did not cease until all the air had been knocked from my maidenly lungs and my veins were emptied of blood: then with a spasm of his hips he filled my body with seawater – his climactic groan echoed with the despairing cries of a thousand drowning men.
‘The briny sea flooded every inch of my body: my belly and heart, my joints and limbs, every sinew, every muscle, every lymph node and nerve – and wherever it went it felt like molten iron poured into the out-stretched hand of a child.
‘Poseidon was well satisfied with his rut, and in return for my maidenhead he offered me one wish. I curled up where I lay on the shore and whimpered:
‘“I wish I were a man so I need never again endure such an ordeal.”
‘These last words emerged in a deep masculine timbre, for the god had been as good as his word. And now that I was a man, Poseidon was generous to me, saying that from this time forth my nature would be such that no metal could harm me. He must have fore-seen that I would have to take part in many a duel to defend my honour against men and giants who doubted my prowess because I had once been a maid.
‘In my male shape I was given the name of Caeneus, and I remained in that form until the day war broke out between the Lapiths and the Centaurs, which was when the latter drank themselves into a frenzy at the wedding of Pirithous and Hippodamia. A great battle was fought that you can read about in many books for it was considered one of the mightiest clashes of antiquity. When the centaurs had given up trying to shoot me with javelins and arrows or run me through with swords and knives – and I had managed to kill their leader Latreus – they resorted to bombarding me with rocks and huge tree trunks. I don’t know whether tales of how badly I had been injured on Lemnos gave them this idea, but they piled so much of the forest on top of me that I was forced to change shape or perish.
‘Long afterwards the poet Naso quoted my brother-in-arms and former shipmate on the Argo, the seer Mopsus, as saying that a dun-coloured bird had flown up from the pile and soared high into the sky in a wide circle above the battlefield. There it mewed sorrowfully before flying away.
‘It was a young herring gull that had not yet acquired its adult plumage.
‘It was I, Caeneus.’
X
It was nearly one in the morning on Easter Day when Caeneus broke off his story so that someone could comfort the purser’s lady friend who had burst into tears when he described the rape of Caenis. At first she had borne up bravely, clamping her hand hard over her mouth and gesturing to the mate not to worry about her but to carry on, she would get over it. But when he said, ‘It was I, Caeneus’, a paroxysm of sobbing escaped from behind her hand and she wailed:
‘Oh, I can’t bear it!’
The purser clasped an arm tightly around his lady friend’s shoulders. She buried her face in his chest and wept there a while. He stroked her hair gently, crooning something consoling, humming so deep in his chest that the melody vibrated low against her ear. The ensuing quiet gave me a chance to observe my dining companions’ reactions to this heart-warming spectacle:
One word was written on all their faces:
‘DEFEAT!’
Indeed, though the tune was meant for the purser’s lady friend alone, the song and the weeping were for all of us. Four years had passed since the end of the great conflict but we still
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