Ensemble

unforgiving—though he was still allowed one last temple, not much more than a flower-bedecked stall in a horse-barn, really, in a remote impoverished corner of his former fiefdom where the citizens hadn’t realized yet how his divinity had been devalued.

  He drained his goblet and considered his latest downfall. She was just a scabby-kneed village girl, after all. She smelled not so much of the goats there as goat-cheese, and seemed even denser than the average human. He thought of how she had fled from him as if she’d seen Arachne sprout eight legs before her very eyes, as if he were Medusa reborn. Why he was so attracted to this particular girl totally perplexed him: unlike the other vestal virgins she was inordinately dark, with a dusky bloom upon her cheeks like a boy’s first beard. Besides that, she was just the tiniest bit squat, her hair was always knotted with briar as if she had been lolling with the satyrs, and her big feet with their big toes in her big sandals were caked with the gray earth of his sacred hills. An otherwise charmless girl, and even so she could turn him to wood as surely as Daphne became a laurel.

  In the Parnassian dining hall, he saw Venus lean heavy-breasted over the table to pass a tankard to Mars; surely there was something going on there yet again. Garrulous old Tiresias had been invited to the feast, had himself invited a herd of centaurs—and they were making an awful mess of the tiles. Castor and Pollux—twins, brothers, lovers, eternal bores—were drunk as usual, completing each other’s sentences and caressing their own mirrored images. To the delight of a school of fauns, Hermaphroditus, ingeniously entwined with Salmacis, was giving convoluted lessons in a torch-lit alcove. Under a bower of mock-roses, that master mocker Momus, in powdered peruke and thespian pancake, separated from the fickle muse he’d been fingering and, feeling envious eyes upon his person, winked at the observer. Other heads turned. It seemed then that half the hall burst into harsh laughter like a startled flock of crows, while every other denizen of the heavens was pointing at him as rudely as might the Roman hoi polloi. Pan, randy as ever, blew him a kiss and his comrade Bacchus used his nether vent for a trumpet. And there was runty little stumpy-winged snot-nosed busybody Cupid, the boy who had shot his beloved full of arrows tipped in lead while piercing him straight through the heart with one of purest gold. Already Cupid was blindly zinging arrows about and thumbing his button nose at anyone the brat annoyed. How he hated Venus’ bastard son! He spat at Cupid and stumbled from his couch and cushions to leave before the full effect of the aphrodisiacal arrows and ambrosial petits fours would sink in and the real orgy begin.

  At dawn he visited his shabby altar within the horse-barns just in time to see his favorite laying out that morning’s offerings in rather tarnished serving dishes. Charred venison again: how revolting. He saw that she looked more unwashed than ever, one of the straps of her sandals was broken, and there were berry—or perhaps wine—stains upon her wrinkled tunic. A fine vestal virgin was she! And yet he was still certain that he wanted her with all his might.

  As usual, he daydreamed of ways he could “carry her away,” as more modest accounts so discreetly put it. He could become a bed of the softest, greenest, coolest moss, carpeting a chamber of the sacred root cellars, inviting her to rest upon himself in the heat of the day. On such green velvet she would tear off her vestments and she would ravish him, he ravage her thoroughly and completely. Her cries would stir the envious barn-swallows from their eaves and farm-boys and dryads would giggle in the haystacks. Desperately he longed for a day when he wouldn’t have to restrict himself to this vegetable abduction! He’d become a bull-moose and scoop her up onto his antlers, or better yet a catamount who would chase her down like a common hare. He would change her into a flock of geese, and he would be the whirlwind in their midst. Reduce her to a block of salt and lick her up like a maddened forest boar. Why not steal other gods’ tricks and become a shower of coins or a sexy prize ox or an immaculately white swan strong enough for her to straddle his downy back? He could be the lantern and she the moth, he the hive and she the bees—but here he realized he was descending into clichés worthy only of lesser deities and even lesser myths.

  Lost in his reverie, the morn dissolved into midday; the sky grew hazy, then unreal as a faded fresco above the gladioli and squash-flowers in the sacred kitchen garden, and one by one her comelier sisters, who for hours had been weeding along the farm’s stone walls, disappeared into the marble-like coolness of the stables. She alone remained in the sun, braiding her ratted hair between her fingers and chewing on a sprig of sassafras. Eventually Phoebus lulled her to sleep with the warmth of his breath, and she made a pretty snoring sound as liquid and joyous as a mountain rill.

  He had rooted himself to the spot and begun to twist about her almost without forethought. Rapidly as darning needles he darted green fingers over and around and under her plump thighs, breasts, and shoulders; he laced his tendrils through her thick hair—carefully, carefully, so as not to rouse her any more than one mosquito might—and clasped her with leaves like myriad hands, hands like wings like leaves, all up and down her sleeping body. Quick as a spider he cocooned her body in thickening green lianas, teasing the hem of her petticoat with a tentative green branch, fanning her sweating brow with a quiver of his leaves. She was now bound as hopelessly as Laocoön by the sea serpents, Hercules by the python. Oh, but so much more tenderly! He wished to do her no real harm; on the contrary… From the thickest part of his stalk he sent forth a new kind of flower: one not found elsewhere in nature: heart-shaped, radiantly white with an impressive blood-red stamen that burst forth from its swollen cluster of damp petals. For a moment the blossom hovered in the still, sun-drenched air, throbbing and bobbing and alive with a honeysuckle-infused scent that would make even lumberjacks giddy ...And then he lunged under her patchwork girdle, and then he drove the spear of his lust deep within her, and then he powdered her with sweet sugary pollen while all his birdlike leaves pressed upon her at once. For one immortal half-moment, before she screamed, it seemed they might have been specimens motionless under a crystal bell jar, so hushed and hot it was with the sun at its zenith and the zephyrs asleep and all the farmyard silenced. Of course she woke—and with her the world.

  The majority of this next paragraph would be, following scholarly tradition, best left untranslated in a demure footnote, though we may summarize: Jumping right out of the hayloft windows and crashing through barn-doors, stable-doors, cellar-doors and across the dusty yard, five strong sisters came to her rescue, shouting “Eheu!” and other classical ejaculations. They tore at his vines, ripped apart his embracing leaves, and crushed the monstrous flower under their sandals, while she, dizzied and dazed by the noonday sun, wept and clutched at her breasts and rent her own garments even though he had been careful not to ruffle them any more than a breeze might have. The sisters of course understood what had been going on instantly, and as they soon noticed there was no blood, slapped her cheeks and flung dirt into her eyes—as if it had been her fault, as if she had willed this rapist vine into action, as if she had never been a virgin at all! “Meretrix!” they cursed her. Slut! Harlot! “Perite,” she answered them, taking their blows but gathering in her sobs—Go kiss Pluto’s lips! With the tears already dry upon her cheeks, she backed slowly away from her sisters, retreating across the barnyard and through the flocks of geese and chickens, out under the rose trellis and through the hollyhock-garlanded gates… and then she ran back down the gravel road to the edge of the sacred waterfall, still feeling that heat pulsing inside her, still choking back the rage which now seemed to be caught in her throat like a peach-pit.

  It was his misfortune that a barn-owl with insomnia had been watching from under the roof of the stables; the owl soon whispered this to Minerva, who told Apollo, who told Jove, and, still hurting from having been trampled so ignominiously in the mud, he was sentenced without trial. Since he was already so good at impersonating members of the plant kingdom, he was ordered to stand on a granite-capped crest overloo
king hillsides devoted to pasturing sheep and cattle. Quicker than hairs erupting on a pubescent’s chest, bark covered his; his feet plunged deep into the rocky earth; his arms lengthened and twisted, and clusters of coniferous fronds burst from his fingertips, stretching and fanning out above as if to summon every bird and squirrel; his head ascended yet farther into the air to reach for sunlight and graze the clouds—and he had become with little effort a giant pine tree. A majestic and broad-limbed white spruce— picea glauca in your textbooks—wide enough to shelter a team of bullocks and tall enough to fear lightning. There was no other pine such as he for several counties, and his silhouette marked this range of hills as surely as any manmade monument might have; farmers would even use him to orient strangers, as in “Take yonder path up ’cross the millstream an’ past th’ abandoned mill, don’t stop for the moose-waller, and turn left when you see that big ol’ piney tree on the high ridge o’er your shoulder.” Such a stranger might very well see stretched out