THE CREEK
You all know me, boys. I am Demetrios the Adequate, hunter. I kill beasts for a living. I strive to kill the most dangerous ones before they kill me. So far, so good. The wife’ll tell you I’m more beastly than the beasts I kill. Most days, I can’t rightly say she’s wrong.
And long have I dreamed of telling my tale to a roomful of sodden twaddlers like yourselves, grim deluded dribblers who would lose a battle of wits to a bunch of drunk chimps. Don’t know if I should thank the gods or curse them for giving me this chance, but my tale will make one thing perfectly clear: I am an absolute master of ineptitude at guessing the will of the divine ones. But I can guess your will: you brainsick deviants want my tale to start with a fabulous naked woman bathing in a creek.
And so it shall, boys. So it shall.
Early one summer morning, I leave our cabin at the edge of the woods and go looking for the day’s meat. At first, I see or hear or smell nothing unusual. The forest is always the forest, beautiful and forever, always changing yet somehow always remaining the same, comforting and terrifying at the same time. The day will be moistly icky-sticky—normal for this time of year—so I go out at dawn, while it’s still a little cool and the beasts of the forest are still a little active. If I go out later, I won’t catch anything because the animals will hear me sweat. They’ll also be napping, which will make them especially hard to find because I’ll probably be napping too.
Then I hear the singing.It is a lone female voice, like no music I’ve ever heard before. It fills me, it calms me, I come in here to hunt but now all thoughts of killing anything are forgotten. All desires are dissolved like they never existed and I hear only that blessed voice. I smile and can’t stop. I move towards the source of the song, couldn’t stop myself even if I wanted to, my feet no longer mine to command. I don’t understand any of the words, I cannot identify the language, or even if it is any language at all, but still I know the song’s meaning, it’s a paean to the sheer joy of bathing in a cool crystal-clear creek on a quiet summer morning. I don’t walk, I float, or so it seems, towards the creek. I smell the pine scent of cypress, even though none grows anywhere near this ashwood forest. I also smell the ghostly sweetness of asphodels. They don’t grow around here either. Apart from the music, the wood is oddly silent, as no lark sings, no warbler warbles, no doves coo, either from respect for the singer or because they too are captivated by a song they know is even sweeter than their own. Even the insects have stopped buzzing, as if they too esteem a song so sweetly sung. The crows, who know they are not musical but usually squawk once or twice to let the others know that they see me and they don’t like the looks of me, are also unusually silent, with their heads all turned in the direction of the creek, all still as stone. That in itself is creepy, a hundred crows in a tree and not one of them squawks, like they’re plotting something. The song has captured them and they’re smart enough to just shut up and listen.
Just as the singer comes into view, I regain control of my feet and stop myself before I get close enough for her to see me. From behind a kea bush, I hunker down. When I see the singer, I cannot look away.
I have never seen such immaculate perfection. It terrifies and thrills me. She bathes in the creek. I first notice her skin, naked milky purity, as if she’s never been in the sun in her life, no scars, no blemishes, not even a freckle or a wrinkle. There she glows. Nothing sags. Nothing hangs. Her damp hair is golden honey, tinged with cinnamon, her eyes wide and green. Her breasts are full but not overly large, her thighs slender but strong. Her shoulders are wider than women usually have, but nonetheless feminine. She’s at least six feet tall. This is an athlete so perfect that if she wasn’t moving her hands, and if she wasn’t singing, you’d think she was a sculpture, a woman imagined by an artist but too perfect to actually exist, unchanging, unflawed, an unattainable ideal. I cannot help but imagine the fine sons that this unparalleled specimen of womanhood would give some lucky fellow.
She sits on a rock and runs her wet hands over her left thigh, slowly, enjoying it, then her hands move to her calf, and then her foot. She then does the same with her right leg, slowly from thigh to calf to foot. She finishes her song, then closes her eyes and moans softly as she bathes herself. When she moans, I too feel a wave of pleasure.I am in awe. All I can do is watch her. I can’t look away. I would speak to her but I freeze. I am long past the age when a man gets spontaneously hard at the sight of a naked woman, regardless of her beauty, but hard I am. I can’t help myself. If she wanted to couple with me this very moment, I would do it, I couldn’t not do it. I fantasize about kissing her neck, fondling her breasts, licking her thighs, kissing her everywhere. I lust for this woman even though I have no chance with her. She’s worthy of a great warrior or a king. More than that: she’s worthy of a god. She’s not human.
And this is the exact moment I finally recognize the obvious. She’s. Not. Human. She’s too perfect. I am ogling a goddess. I must stop right this second. It is beyond inappropriate. If this offends her, then I am dead—if I’m lucky. I’ve heard what Olympians do to humans who displease them. Poor Io wanders the earth with a stinging gnat constantly attacking her. Sad Kassandra was doomed to make prophecies that were never believed even though they always came true. She foresaw her own murder and could do nothing to stop it. Niobe’s fourteen children were killed in front of her after she’d boasted of being a better child-bearer than the demi-goddess Leto. Losing one child is traumatic enough, but just imagine losing fourteen children, one after another, in a matter of minutes. And all Niobe did was say something stupid. She probably would have repented, if given the chance, but the immortals are not big on forgiveness. Any blasphemy, no matter how ordinary, must be punished. So I must go far, far away and hope this goddess hasn’t seen me yet.
It is physically painful to turn away. I close my eyes and I get a sudden headache, like a dagger rammed into my skull. Still, I make myself walk, but with my eyes closed I don’t look where I step and something tries to bite me. A rock adder! I’m lucky, it sinks its fangs into the leather on my sandal but doesn’t penetrate to the skin. The snake’s reaction to me is similar to my reaction to it. It slithers off in a panic. I would too, if I could. But unlike the snake, I yelp, just once, one little squeak of a peep of a yelp, a squelp, but it’s enough.
If I’m lucky, the goddess doesn’t hear me over her own singing. It was just a tiny yip, barely a sound at all. But were you to know my whole life story, boys, my endless archive of earthly annoyances, you would not hear the story of a man much endowed with luck. I don’t look back at the goddess, but I suddenly can’t move. I’m a statue. This may be my punishment.
“What did you just do to Fidi?” a voice says to me. I don’t hear it so much as have it hammered, like a carpenter’s nail, directly into my brain.
I can’t speak. “Look at me, worm,” she says.
I have my back to her but she turns me around using only her will. I move closer to her, even though I don’t want to. She stands naked before me and is much taller than I thought, close to nine feet tall. The pool in the creek now looks too small for her to fit into, so she must have somehow compacted herself to bathe in it.
Don’t stare at those heavenly breasts, I silently tell myself. Don’t gawk at her honey-golden pudendum. And don’t have an erection, idiot.
But telling myself not to do those things only makes me do them even more.
“Um…apologies, Despoina,” I say. “I don’t know who Fifi is.”
My voice, which I’ve been told by others is a smooth baritone, sounds like a scrapy squawk compared to hers. A scrawk.
“Not Fifi, idiot. Fidi. The poor little fellow you almost killed.”
I’m so terrified that my mind freezes. It is a few seconds that seem like hours under her daggered gaze before I realize she’s talking about the snake.
“Um...apologies, Despoina,” I finally say. “It was an accident. I did not see Fidi beside me. I don’t believe I hurt him.”
“How can you not know there’s a dangerous serpent a foot away from you? How stupid are you?”
I start to stammer and yammer a bunch of inanities, but she answers her own questions. “Never mind. You’re a human, and even worse, a man. And the only creature dumber than a man is a man with an erection. By the way, what are you planning to do with that?”
"Apologies, Despoina,” I say. “It’s involuntary. In your presence, every single bit of me is…um…heightened.”
“Say another word about your penis and I’ll take it away from you. And stop calling me Despoina. I’m not the mistress of your house.”
“Apologies, Goddess, I’m not—”
“And stop apologizing, oaf! Fidi tells me that his little brush with you was unintentional. I will therefore not kill you for that.”
“I thank you, Goddess, for your wisdom and mercy. If it’s okay with you, then, I’ll just be on my way…”
“Not so fast, Demetrios. There is still the matter of your insolent gawking.”
She knows my name even though I haven’t told her. She still stands before me naked. She doesn’t dry herself off because the drops of creek water fall away from her almost as though she commands them to. I’m still hard and wish I wasn’t. At my age, erections are never this insistent, or very frequent, but I’m in the presence of a goddess, where men’s bodies and desires are no longer ruled by their own nature. Or by their own minds.
“I’m weak, Goddess,” I say. “Your song drew me to you as if you had me on a leash.”
“Yet you still kept your eyes open. Do you think I’m just some toothless hillbilly girl you can ogle at will? Some backwoods whore? Do you not know who I am?”
I drop to my knees, fully aware that I do it only because she allows me to. “Forgive me, Goddess,” I say. “I have never been in the presence of an immortal before, so I don’t know how to behave. I can’t control my physical reactions. I’m a man of no particular fortitude, so I have absolutely no ability to resist the sound of your honeyed song or the sight of your peerless beauty. I stared at you, I admit it, but I looked away when I realized it was disrespectful. I’m also glad I didn’t hurt Fidi.”
“Don’t lie to me!”
“I’m not lying, Goddess, although I admit that my concern for Fidi has more to do with what you would do to me in retribution rather than with the snake’s well-being. But I don’t intentionally hurt snakes because I know that if I avoid them, they avoid me.”
I hold her gaze because she won’t let me do otherwise. Then, it seems to me, the green eyes smile, even though the mouth does not. She’s now toying with me, which is probably better than having her angry, but this can still end badly for me.
“You did not answer my question,” she says. “Do you know who I am?”
I must get this right. I know the Olympian reputation for punishing those who cannot name them correctly. Olympians take offense easily. The goddess in front of me is slender and athletic, so she’s not the voluptuary Aphrodite. She is relatively young in appearance, no older than twenty-five or twenty-six if she was human, so that rules out Hera or Demeter. Her tunic, hanging from a tree branch beside the creek, is forest-green, so she’s a nature goddess. I see a bow and a quiver of arrows but no sword, shield, or breastplate, so this isn’t Athena. Hestia is not known to venture into forests, and or to ever leave Olympus, so it’s likely not her either. The only Olympian who can be this comfortable in a forest is Artemis. The hair colour isn’t what I’d expect—she’s always depicted in artworks as black-haired—but then again, those artworks are created by men who have never actually seen her.
“Your beauty overwhelms me, goddess,” I say. “And my judgement is foggy to begin with. But if I was to guess, I would say you were fair-ankled Artemis.”
Fair-ankled. Now there’s a piece of semantic blufflegub for you. If I was to say hot-assed or fine-titted Artemis, it would be considered disrespectful. Blasphemous. Yet fair-ankled is the euphemism we always use when we want to say a goddess is sexually appealing, and how can they not know it’s our way of saying she’s hot-assed or fine-titted? The truth is that no man cares what a woman’s ankles look like. Whoa, look at them bodacious ankles, what fine ankles her daughters and sons will have is a phrase that no man has ever uttered, with the exception of me just now being sarcastic to a bunch of drunk hyenas. No one has ever said, I kicked her out of bed because her ankles were far from fair.
Homer is the first one I’ve heard use the term fair-ankled. When he was here on Lesvos a few years ago, I had a chance to ask him what he meant by it. We were in the wine-shop after the last day of his recital here.
“Poetic license, my friend,” says Homer. “I recite my Iliad fifty or sixty times a year. You think I want to risk the wrath of a goddess every time by talking about her eye-boggling bodily attractiveness? I asked Athena herself how I should refer to her. She’s the one who came up with fair-ankled.”
“You spoke to the goddess Athena?” I say.
“I can’t prove that I did,” he says with a wink. “But you can’t prove that I didn’t. Now shut up and bring me another cup of wine."
Did you know that Homer, widely believed to be blind, can see as well as any of us? The rumour started because after he finishes reciting his Iliad, which takes him four evenings, he usually gets blind drunk. After each recital, someone almost always asks, how’s Homer doing? The response is almost always he’s blind again.
Back to the forest with Artemis: holding her gaze is like staring at the sun, so I force my eyes downward. I feel that I’ve got it wrong and these are my last few moments alive. My only hope now is that death comes quickly.