Sappho (46 page)

What would she do if this were told? Deny? Laugh? What? But Doricha would not speak of Samos. It would destroy Khar's love for her, and perhaps in her pride she still imagined she might marry into the noble house of Skamandronymos—had she told the cooks how to slice the peppers? And had she mentioned the caraway seeds? Khar liked his bread baked with caraway seeds. If only she could rest a moment against her Endymion, against her sleeping lover. If only his eyes would never waken. “O my Muses, where have you led me, on what wild shore have you abandoned me?”

A runner flung himself at her feet. “Lady, the Lord Kharaxos comes. He is even at the gate, led by your servants, whom he detained and made accompany him, that he might surprise you.”

Sappho with a glad cry ran down the wide stone stairs to meet her brother at the entry of her home, wash his feet, and bid him welcome.

The double doors were flung wide, slaves knelt and threw confetti, a pathway of embroidered purple cloth was quickly laid and as quickly covered with flowers. Kharaxos handed down from a chariot a woman of blond roselike beauty. One question had been answered.

As Kharaxos came toward her, a kind of presentiment descended on Sappho's mind. She felt the light eyes of the White Rose, and over her brother's shoulder met their calculating gaze. The next instant she was holding him. “Khar? Are you come home?”

“Sister.”

“Enter with welcome and blessings.”

Doricha Rhodopis was only a step behind with her women. This was the moment. Sappho stepped before her. “You, Thracian, may not enter, though you offered up a hundred iron obeli to your own glory in the temple of Pythian Apollo at Delphi.”

The beautiful woman looked her full in the face. Even through time they knew each other. The glance of the White Rose slid to Khar.

“Sappho…” Khar's voice, when it controlled violence, was very terrible. “She must enter, and you must bid her welcome. I told you when I left that I would marry her. All my heart is toward her, and you, beloved Sappho, must hymn the wedding songs and rejoice with me.”

Sappho was conscious of the White Rose watching with a show of disinterest, as though she knew how it would go.

Disregarding her, Sappho addressed her brother. “It may not be. I know you purchased her at great price…”

“And gave her freedom.”

She ignored this. “You are, even as I, of the noble house of Skamandronymos. Our line traces unblemished from Orestes and Agamemnon. You may not marry such a one. You have given the woman freedom, Brother, but you cannot change the obsequious nature of a slave, who with every orifice of her body entertained the navy and the army, too.”

The White Rose appeared untroubled by these insults; she continued to gaze expectantly at Khar.

“What are you saying?” Khar was beside himself. “You sent your slaves and chariot as welcome, knowing Doricha was with me.”

“I did not know.”

“I told you.”

“I did not believe you would bring her to my very house. I did not believe you had so little thought for our good name.”

“What thought have you had of it? Doricha had masters over her, and in spite of it rose to great prominence. The oracle at Delphi purified her, so that she comes to me like a virgin. It is you, daughter of shame, who, hiding behind your great renown, wantonly lured here innocent maids and deflowered them.”

“Is it my brother speaking to me?” Sappho gasped. “What lying words have you listened to?” She turned on Doricha, who continued to keep herself removed from the exchange. “I see it is you, bitch,” Sappho spat at her, “who has shattered the harmony between a brother and a sister.” She approached her menacingly.

A sharp blow across Sappho's chest made her stagger and fall backward. Slaves with drawn swords on the instant surrounded her brother.

“Hold!” she cried. “No hand shall be raised against him in my house.”

Khar stood over her. Ares, that terrible god of vengeance, had hold of him. His nostrils extended and deflated in rapid succession, while his face had a look of such fury that only in her own had it been mirrored.

Kharaxos wasn't through. “Eurygyos and Larichos persuaded me to leave a servant to act as my eyes and open them to your indiscretions.”

“You spied on me?” she asked with indrawn breath.

“I know of your disgusting affair with a common sailor. I thought, because we are alike in defying society, we would continue the old affection and stand by each other. But it seems you find it easy to moralize, as though you were a paragon of virtue. It is you who are the whore, Sappho, and that's how you will be remembered. And an old whore at that!”

She got to her feet by the help of a portico. “Take that filth from my house”—she choked out the words—“her of the false buttocks. And when she is gone I will burn sulfur and make my home clean.”

The White Rose did not flinch—why should she? Khar brushed roughly past Sappho to her side. “Forgive me, Doricha, I brought you to a madwoman.”

Doricha smiled at Khar, and spoke to him for Sappho's ears. “It is very sad, Kharaxos, to be met by an Erinye in the form of a sister, whom once you held dear. Is it true that she debases herself with a sponge diver, who in years could be her son?”

Sappho watched them depart. She felt unwholesome, like a leper. The words of such a woman have power to defile. And what of a brother's words, the words of kindred blood?

Khar had struck her. No one had ever struck her. And spied on her! Of everything he had done, that was the worst. Her women brought her inside and put Gilead balm on the bruise that was showing on her breast, but it could not penetrate to where the wrongs lacerated. “Oh, if there could be medicine for grief like mine!”

Only Phaon could comfort her. Why had she stayed away from his ship to be brought to her knees, to be called vile names?

Her hair, which had become disarrayed, was brushed with incense and freshly done with flowers. Spikenard of Tarsos was rubbed into her legs, Egyptian metopion anointed her breasts, marjoram of Kos thickened her lashes. Lastly, a Persian sapphire was lowered into place.

Sappho called for her chariot. Hastening to the wharf, she found Phaon's Nubian slave asleep in his small boat. She woke him and he rowed her toward the ship.

She climbed to the deck as Phaon watched. For the first time he did not leap to help her. Here, too, was change. Things were falling away from her. The young captain who had been her lover, held her with devotion, listened to her songs with awe and wonder, stood and watched her with an expression she could not read. Was it disdain? Mockery? What emotion butchered his face, turning his lips ugly?

“Phaon?” she questioned.

“I was in the tavern just now.”

“Are you drunk?”

“No, quite sober. I have
been
drunk, I think, or bewitched. Did you use bought charms on me, or pour something into my drink?”

Discord hung between them as when the strings of her lyre went slack. She said slowly, “I hear your words. I do not understand them.”

“I talked to men off your brother's ships, or rather—listened. They did not know I knew you. But it was of you they spoke. They called you old. Are you old? I never thought about it. But I can see now…”

“Yes,” she challenged him. “What do you see?”

He did not answer directly, but heaped his hurt on her. “They said you were bored with seducing young girls, that you now haunted the piers and low places and bought love from any man who could raise his mast, even though he were scrofulous or a slave.”

Sappho's hand went to her heart.

Phaon took a step toward her. “What is it?”

“You have struck me.”

“I have not.”

“A blow more terrible than Khar's.”

“I have not touched you,” he reiterated.

“I know,” she answered and held out her arms to him.

He did not move.

She stood before him in a welter of tears. “If I have to…” And she began tearing off the gold ornaments from her arms, the sapphire from her throat. She threw her jeweled girdle at his feet, pried off her rings of great worth, even the rings of her ears and toes. “Now I order you. Give me the love I have paid for.”

Phaon's breath came unevenly, and he stumbled over his words. “I did not say they were true, these things I heard. I only said that I heard them.”

“I paid you,” she said again through clenched teeth. “By the double portals of Tartarus, you shall love me!”

He came to her and grabbed her about the knees. His head was bowed and his tears fell on the caulked planking. “I love you,” he said.

Sappho pulled free. “Crabbed age and youth cannot together … live.”

“Those things they said, they are not true things.”

“Of course they are true things. Zeus's lightning has ripped you from my arms, my body.” She climbed back down the ship's ladder. “Row,” she commanded the Nubian. And once on land, ordered her own slave to beat the beasts that pulled toward her villa.

“Wait!” she told the driver when they reached her door. “We have a further journey to make.” She ran into the house, light-headed as though there was no substance in anything, as though she were a shade. But she knew clearly what she was doing.

She went directly to her treasure room and took fistfuls of jewels, which she rammed into sacks, and as many lion-faced Samian coins as her servants could carry. She had them loaded into the cart. Niobe tried to stop her, but she pushed her aside. “To Eresos!” she told the driver.

All night the road was taken, and the next day and much of the day after that. When they arrived at the town of her birth, she told the driver, “To the Street of Women!”

He demurred. “Lady…”

“To the most wretched, the poorest prostitute who plies her trade, a woman who will accept any, a leper even, if he has the price.”

The driver, in fear for his life, obeyed her, for surely his mistress had lost her senses. He stopped only to ask the way, then drove into an evil-smelling, decayed part of the village where at the windows female faces peered. He stopped at a wooden door, half off its hinges. “Lady…” he pleaded once more.

But Sappho sprang down. “Follow me with this.” She waved toward the sacks.

“This? This treasure beyond worth?”

“Pick it up and come.”

Sappho pushed open the door, which fell against the wall to reveal a room with dirt floor and filthy straw in a corner. Never had she been in such a room. She heard grunts, and at first thought animals were stabled there. Then, as her eyes became used to the faint light, she saw a deformed beggar and an old crone copulating.

“Whip the man from her!” she ordered.

Her driver laid down the pouches and went back for his whip.

The woman looked up, but the male was half blind and addled in the wits, and continued riding her.

The driver reentered and Sappho, who could scarcely breathe for the stench, simply nodded.

The lash flicked the creature's bared rump, and again. There followed great confusion as the man rolled from the woman, evading the blows by crawling toward the entrance, and the crone huddled, drawing her extremities out of the path of the welt-raising thong.

“Stand at the door!” Sappho commanded her driver. “See that none enter.” Then turning to the festering, vile thing crouched in her rags, “Get up. Do as I say. Get to your feet.”

“Pity, Great One. Pity me. Let me live.”

“You? Such a one as you wishes to live? Tell me your name.”

“It is Neara.”

“It is Sappho.” Sappho spoke with absolute authority.

“The great lady is pleased to speak in riddles.”

Sappho kicked one of the pouches toward her. “Open it.”

The woman worked at the knot with crooked fingers. When she loosed it and coins and jewels spilled on the dirt floor, she dared not move or even lift her eyes.

“Can you hear me?” Sappho asked.

The woman nodded.

“And understand me?”

She nodded again.

“Here is treasure beyond counting. It is yours if for the rest of your life you say one thing.”

“Lady?”

“When any asks who you are, you must reply: ‘I am Sappho of Lesbos.' Repeat it.”

“I … I … am … Sappho of Lesbos.”

“And if you say it not, these riches will be taken from you, and your head lopped off, and boys will use it as a ball to kick to each other in the street. Say then, once more. Woman, who are you?”

The creature trembled as though shaken by wind, but she replied stoutly enough: “I am Sappho of Lesbos.”

“Remember the bargain.” And Sappho left the place. Expelling the tainted air from her lungs, she breathed deeply. She was contending with gods, and what mortal had ever won at that game?

Yet it was possible. “Aphrodite, it is you I call, be my witness. A fortune in gold, and jewels unnumbered, I have heaped on the scapegoat.
She
is the other Sappho, who has taken on my sins, my iniquities upon herself. It is
she
who is selfish and unthinking, who wants, wants, wants, and is never satisfied.
She
is the one who must have more, more love, more songs, more wealth, more everything. It is
she
who drove her daughter away, her brother, too, and all who loved her, by her uncompromising nature.

“I, on the other hand stand before you, unsullied as you when you stepped from Sea's foam newly made. O Kyprus-born, accept the scapegoat with her great heap of wrongdoings. And let me be pure that the gods may love me and bring back him I hold dearer than the world.”

Then more recklessly, “You must accept the scapegoat. I have nothing else to give. Say that it is acceptable, for the tears of mortals are your common drink.”

Would Aphrodite hear her, aid her?

*   *   *

The journey back was a blur; she didn't know if she slept, fainted, or lay prostrate. What would happen to her now? What was the penalty for bargaining with a goddess?