with you, my son.”
Then, the winds returned, like Pegasus striking a fleet, and the horse was under the ship, lifting her onto a wave as high as the walls of Troy before their fall, and thrusting her straightaway toward a coast known only to Hera and her ally Poseidon, who had raised the waves at her august command.
Ascanius tried to watch his father comfort the men. They were driven by the sea. Comfort and not command was all he could give. He groped from bench to bench, he held the tiller’s hand when a wave—a hoof?—attempted to hurl him into the turbulence. As long as Ascanius saw his father, he would not need his coin. Storms had struck them in many seas.
But never Hera’s storm…
“Aphrodite, look after your son!” he prayed (“and grandson while you’re about it”). “I promise to ravish a virgin for you!” (“When I am older,” he added, for he was only ten and ravishing meant no more than a hug to him).
Then stillness, the Pegasus flown to his celestial haunt…an alien coast…the ship on a littered beach.
“Gallant Bear,” said Ascanius. “You brought us through!” Not I, not I…
But through to where?
Perhaps the shore of the Styx.
How often Aeneas had said to him, “Don’t be afraid, Little Bear. We’ve fought them for seven years, those jealous gods, and they aren’t going to get us now.” It was always “us”, he and his father, against the jealous gods.
“Well, Ascanius, we escaped them again. Her at least!” (“Her” being Hera; she hated Aeneas because he was a Trojan, as she had hated Troy, the city of Paris, who had proclaimed her—the Queen of the Gods, and for all Olympus to hear!—as less than Aphrodite.)
“But they did get Grandfather, didn’t they?” The old Dardanian king, Anchises, had demanded formality, and “grand” must be followed by “father”, and not “Papa”. Because he had been the lover of Aphrodite, who bore him Aeneas as a parting gift before she departed for another dalliance, he never forgot to demand respect. On Sicily, he had received a burial fit for a king.
“Age got him, not the gods.”
Ascanius lost his fear. At first he had hated the storm. Such fearful Pegasus hooves! Such a wind from the beating wings! But then his father had given him coins for Charon, the ferryman. When a hero says to his son, “Don’t be afraid,” well, you trust him even while spitting salt from your mouth, and endure the wind and the waves. And now they were safe if battered on the shore.
He looked at a pink, sandy expanse ablaze with sun. Sea-wrack surrounded them; holothurians, wrenched from the ocean floor; broken oars; configurations of coral like tiny, broken trays. The tide retreated behind them like a deserting host and left them forsaken in an alien land.
“Well,” said Aeneas. “Hera had done her worst—with Poseidon’s help. Divided us from our fleet. But failed to sink us. I guess my mother is keeping a watchful eye.” Slender and golden he looked in his loin cloth (Achilles had bulged with muscles, so it was said; Ajax was built like an ape). Armor was useless to men in a small and crowded ship. Nonetheless, he looked like a prince of Dardania joined to Troy, and the gold seemed to flow from his body and not the recovered sun.
Ascanius, like his father, believed implicitly in the gods; even a grandmother goddess, Aphrodite. But he had heard of her fickle ways and he did not trust in her help. (She seemed to spend inordinate time in trysts.) Trustful Aeneas, men said. Overtrustful, at times? Practicality fell to his son.
He whispered a consolation to the ship. “We’ll bind your wounds, old Bear. You brought us through!” Then to his father, “We don’t have a sail anymore. And Poseidon cracked our prow when he drove us onto the beach. Also, there may be Harpies in the place.” Harpies were far more murderous than a storm, the obverse of “parent” or “friend”. In the Strophades, those islets like shark teeth jutting from the sea, they had already fought the black-feathered, screeching women and almost lost their ships.
Aeneas shrugged. “Monsters perhaps. Giants or pygmies. Harpies, no. Not in Africa.” It was only the threat of a second and second-rate wife (after the first-rate first) which seemed to panic him. In fact, he had placed the women aboard the other ships. But Ascanius had his plans. Three, when his mother died in the fall of Troy, he had grown to a sturdy ten. It was time for another mother, however well he had loved the soft Creusa (he remembered little more than the softness of her voice, her scent of violets, and her parting words, “Grow up, Little Bear. Your father will need your love.”) More important, his father was lonely; he had grieved for seven years and he needed a woman in spite of himself (especially since he refused to couch with the women along their route and withstood the advances of the Trojan ladies aboard his other ships.)
Sometimes parents require a lot of care.
“And we lost the figurehead at the prow and the tail at the stern. One of her eyes is missing, too. At least, she squints.” Trojan ships, which combined both sexes just as they combined both male and female timbers, were built to resemble Hydras, Scyllas, lions, bears, and other dangerous creatures to terrorize a foe. The Gallant Bear had lost her gallantry. At best, she/he could frighten a squid.
“Well, it wasn’t much of a tail. More like a nub.”
“That’s not the point. A nub to a bear means as much as a long, snaky rump to a crocodile.” Ascanius was being neither childish nor whimsical. Every Greek or Trojan knew that a ship, built from the lordly timbers of a forest, retained its life and, while remembering its home, exulted in its freedom and assumed the characteristics of the beast for which it was named.
“Yes, we have work to do.” Aeneas was scanning the deck to see if the storm had hurt any men. (He had doubtless already made a count.) No, twenty crewmen, wet, bedraggled, but none of them harmed beyond a cut or a bruise. He always placed his men above his ship and even his mission, to found a second Troy, though founding a city was a command from the gods, who had supported Troy against the Greeks.
“A white sow and thirty piglets will show you the spot…” Thus, an oracle in Epirus had directed him.
“All right, Achates?”
“Tolerable, Aeneas. What about you?”
“A bruise or two, no more.”
Achates was a red-haired, freckled Trojan among a race of blondes (his father had owned a slave from the north). He had the look of a humorous child, which made him the butt of endless jokes and demanded a sharp tongue to defend his pride. He was, however, the kindest of men, next to Aeneas who loved him. Ascanius also loved him for being his father’s friend.
“All right. Nisus, Euryalus…?”
“Already dry from the sun.”
“Little Bear, we need some help. Provisions. I have heard of a Tyrian colony in these parts.”
“Carthage,” Ascanius said. Whatever the seamen said, he remembered word for word, including some words which would shock a whore (that was his favorite term. His father spoke of Helen as a “courtesan”: the sailors called her a “whore”). “They say that the queen is very beautiful—and a widow, of course. I expect she’s good in the couch.”
“What we need is a generous queen, however plain. Beautiful women tend to be vain and selfish. Look
