PHAON

In the years following the dispersal of the band of her fair friends, Sappho was sculpted on friezes, her likeness painted on terra-cotta vases; she was even cast in bronze according to a new technique. Sappho, the pride of Eresos, of Mitylene, of Lesbos—even Syracuse claimed her. Solon, great ruler and wise man of Athens, sent gifts. She was called the Tenth Muse, daughter of Aphrodite and Eros, nursling of the Graces, companion of Apollo.

But the world, her world, was changing. Pittakos was waylaid and murdered. Rumor had it that he simply tired of his life and arranged the assassination himself. In the empire of the Persians, Cyrus rose to power. In Egypt, Amasis now ruled. King Alyattes of Lydia died and his son Croesus became monarch there. Sappho felt alien. All she had known was going fast. New names were everywhere and the old lay in the dust.

Aphrodite, that laughter-loving goddess, had withdrawn from Sappho’s courtyard and taken with her the dove and the swan, although sometimes a sparrow or two hopped about. It seemed to her the prevailing North Wind was colder than in other years. Eagles and vultures glided over her home. This they had always done, but they swept lower and their wings of ill omen shadowed the ground. The halls of her home held silence and emptiness. It was a place which joy no longer visited.

The three Graces were gone with her hetaerae, especially Euphrosyne, ruler of mirth, and Thalia, goddess of good cheer. Only Aglaia, she of splendor, still presided over the gardens, the groves, and the fields.

Many times, listening to the stillness, Sappho remembered the clash of Armenian cymbals, the quick modulations of lotus flutes, the waving of fennel wands in graceful dance. Though the flutes with their piercing voices were silent, images recurred. Like a column of flame Atthis was leading the chorus, her luxuriant hair braided with ivy.

Now there was neither sistra or sambyke. Torches no longer threw back slender shapes. Nor was there the sound of feet, quick and dainty, flying up the stairs, both inside and out. She did not plait her hair with lavender and roses, nor did waves of joy any longer pour over her.

She lost herself in earlier times. Sappho thought back to the child Sappho:

I want, I want, I want!

And later:

I desire, I desire, I desire!

Had she wanted unreasonably? Desired too much? And her lovers, each so dear to her, but so quickly gone—what had that wild quest meant?

She believed to be bonded with another was the highest good a human can know, and if one encounters the perfect mate, it is the ultimate. Many times with her many lovers she had glimpsed the ultimate. But the Muses alone had lifted her, never wavered or faltered. Only in song was she truly Sappho. To her Muses she had been constant and unflagging—and they to her.

For the first time she stood aloof, judging her work. She was amazed by the raw force she could still employ. Her words she knew were the way in which the world entered her and the way in which she entered the world:

If the battleground were of words,

I could fight gods!

She never ventured timidly but plunged her entire self into work, offering up what she had lived, like a votary, with both hands. Her written books by now reached a total of six.

And I shall leave for thee …

As a widow she was free to look in on any event, and her loneliness drove her to occasional parties, galas, festivities, where Sappho listened with pleasure to the sound of a lyre plucked in the Egyptian manner with a quill. It seemed to her that no matter where she went, she met again and again a young man who stationed himself always in her path. If she graced an evening with song, he above all others was entranced. Sappho finally asked his name, and was told Dionesus, who made a good record at the last Olympiad.

One evening he waylaid her, stepping from behind a colonnade where he must have waited hours, and stumbled through an obviously prepared speech, declaring his love.

Sappho looked at the young man more closely. He was twenty years her junior. Had he any idea of this? Or did celebrity erase such differences?

Sappho smiled sadly at him. She even patted his hand as she discouraged his hope.

That night in her chamber she gazed long and thoughtfully into her mirror. The life she had lived, the loves she had loved, the great joys and desires, the losses—all were there to be read.

She saw how a young man might be attracted to her, for the eyes smoldered with words unsung, and her body was as sensual as a young girl’s, while the mark of aristocracy was carved into the delicacy of wrists and ankles. But the lines in her face were scars of battles fought and lost. Why had her nine sisters allowed a white swath to steal into her black hair? Who else had they to so skillfully interpret them? “Soon I will be old enough for death. To whom then will you turn, Undying Ones?” She hated being forty-four years old.

*   *   *

Sappho was not to sit out her life in her garden dedicated to the Nine. A messenger with a berried bay leaf in his hair, to indicate he carried good news, knelt at her feet.

“What news,” she asked, “do you bring?”

“The fleet of your brother, the Lord Kharaxos, has been sighted. He will this day lie within the twin home harbors of Mitylene.”

Blessings were on her lips for the messenger and for the gods. The seven mouths of the fine-sanded Nile had returned him! Forgotten was her brooding fear of age, and the loneliness in which she lived. Like a young girl she ran about the house, ordering a feast as in the old days.

Niobe hummed again at her work. As chief among the slaves she directed their tasks; some she sent into the fields, some to the flower stalls of the city, some to raise the more mature wines from the cistern. A robe was made ready for Khar. “Softer than a light wrap, whiter than milk” were Sappho’s instructions. Golden sandals for Khar’s feet were purchased, studded with rich gems, a wreath woven for his hair, a garland for his neck. She found time to whisper to the gods in gratitude that she was able to welcome her brother as a prince. Music, feasting, drink—what honor she would show him, the only one of her family left.

She oversaw her dressing with great care and not a little concern. Niobe worked with meticulous attention, drawing the face she wished her brother to see. It did not reflect her recent despondency, nor her solitary life. It showed a fine and handsome woman with great dark eyes that pierced with their own particular seeing.

“All servants, all slaves, and especially those trained in music upon various instruments—in fact, my whole household shall accompany me to the dock, except only the watchers and guards of the house.”

Her finest chariots were brought around, decked and ready, even to the polished hooves of the horses and chains of blooms thrown over their proud throats. Sappho, watching, made a note:

More skittish than a mare

The merry troop with flute and tambourine and the beat of drums wended its way through the streets of Mitylene. Alkaios, having received a messenger from Sappho, joined her with a retinue of his own. It saddened Sappho to look on Alkaios these days. The poet had gone to fat and carried a wobbly belly before him, but his height was imposing. His age was ten years greater than hers. Yet if Alkaios was old, Sappho was old. She perceived a man almost as close to sixty as fifty, who was in no way venerable, but constantly laid himself open to jokes and ridicule. In his case, however, they were guarded, for though his wits were usually addled by wine and his eyes rheumy and unfocused, there were occasions when he struck a well-aimed blow with his staff or devastated his opponent with a well-chosen sarcasm. He was wealthy, and so had young boys aplenty, but in all the world there were only two people whom he truly loved, Sappho and Khar. They embodied for him the sweet days of his youth.

Sappho was pleased to see that for her sake he had refrained from drink. His iron-gray hair had been freshly curled and there were glimpses of the Alkaios he might have been. They embraced warmly, with fond greeting, and she read approval of herself in his eyes.

“Enchanting Sappho.”

The smile she turned on him was filled with such happiness that he knew she had not heard the rumor. He himself could not speak of it—let someone else, let Khar, if it were true. In the public houses one heard all sorts of things, but this particular bit of gossip was so persistent that he put credence in it and pitied Sappho, for he knew her pride.

At the quay the lead ship was already slipping into quiet waters. Nubians with blue-black bodies jumped from its decks to the mole, securing the dancing bark with strong hawsers. A plank for conveying the goods of the voyage was run to the vessel. Ignoring this, Kharaxos sprang upon the dock. In his manner and grace he was still young, a virile man—and beautiful.

He swept Sappho to his breast, then Alkaios, his old companion, who seemed more like his father.

Kharaxos knelt and blessed the land of Lesbos, giving thanks to the gods for his safe return. Sappho raised her voice with his; by their protection and favor he had once more won through the perilous passage.

When at last they arrived at her house and her guests were seated, with food spread upon the inlaid tables, she asked her brother, “Tell me, dear Khar, why must you spend your days in far lands, even that of Egypt?”

“So I may receive such welcome when I come home,” he laughed, and raising his glass to her, “You do not know the admiration in which you are held, Sappho, or what honor it brings me abroad to be your brother.”

“Even in Egypt?”

“In Egypt the Aeolic dialect is known. Your songs are as much sung in Naukratis as here.”

“If I have brought any good to your life, I am content.”

Khar behaved as though he had not lived seven years among Barbarians, as though it were a pleasure cruise to sail the hundreds of stadia that threaded the islands of the Aegean. However, of the open sea between Crete and North Africa, he was silent. But Sappho managed to get him to talk somewhat of his journey.

“More than the pathless sea my sailors dreaded the desert coast by the Canopic mouth of the Nile. Lack of water necessitated forays upon land to sites where wells were marked by other Hellenic merchantmen. Near these cisterns Libyan tribesmen hid to attack and plunder shore parties such as ours. Fortunately my fleet carries many men, and in these battles we got not only water but slaves.”

Sappho called on Kalliope, elder sister of the nine Muses, to listen to these tales. But Khar turned the conversation. “And where,” he asked, “are all the beautiful maids that surrounded you with music and dance when I was here last?”

“I sent them away years ago.”

“But why?”

“I grew weary, that is why. It seemed to me their young voices were out of place here, where Sappho grows old.”

“Time dares not touch great Sappho,” Alkaios said.

“My slaves were at some pains to make you think so.”

Khar put in indignantly, “Old! How can you say that? Why you are but two years older than myself, and I am about to be married.”

“Married?”

Alkaios stared attentively at his plate. He had guessed rightly, Sappho had heard no word.

Sappho said, perhaps a shade too lightly, “You could not pine for a girl from Lesbos seven years. It must be someone you met beneath the shade of the palms of Naukratis?”

“Even so, Sister. And I tell you this, the many mouths of the Nile have never washed up at the feet of one so beautiful.”

“She would be a Barbarian then? An Egyptian?”

“She is Thracian. You will love her as a sister. Not only is she exceedingly beautiful, but pious as well. She made a pilgrimage to the temple at Delphi, navel of the world, and gave away a tenth of her possessions. The most magnificent gift consisted of quantities of iron spits, such as are used for roasting oxen whole.”

“She must be a wealthy woman to have made the trip to the slopes of Parnassus. And the gift of such obeli is indeed magnanimous.”

“Yes,” Khar said carelessly, “she is used to luxury.”

“And the name of this prize among women?”

“She is called Doricha Rhodopis.”

For a shocked second the wings of a giant bird beat, replacing the beat of her heart. The pause between brother and sister lengthened.

When Sappho spoke it was slowly and with care. “You disturb my peace, Khar, for there was on the island of Samos a young slave girl belonging to Iadmon, whose invitation to attend the freeing of Aesop was brought by you. It happened that the name of his most accomplished slave was also Doricha. They called her the White Rose.”

“It is the same. He sold her for great price to a certain Xanthes, a merchant, who took the girl to Naukratis and set her up as a courtesan.”

Sappho looked at him, unbelieving. “Answer and tell me, am I losing my mind? Has Lyssa, goddess of madness, overcome my brain? I thought I heard my brother say he is marrying a slave and a courtesan.”

Khar’s hand closed over the goblet he was holding and, in anger, broke it. “I did not expect such judgment from you. The girl did not choose the life she led.”

“But apparently made a good thing of it. Will her present master, Xanthes, sell her to you?”

“That is why I returned, to raise what I can on my lands, my villa, my cattle. Each night, for many nights, I wrote an offer on the seawall and each morning it was rejected.”

“But one morning it was not?”

“Thanks be to the gods.”

Sappho smiled her most sweet smile.

“I think I did misunderstand you, Khar. I thought you spoke of marriage. But my mind is much relieved now I see she is to be your concubine, your slave.”

“Not slave. I will free her and marry her. I shall return to Lesbos with the White Rose and make her my wife.”

There was nothing to indicate that a moment before Sappho had been smiling. “You cannot do this thing, Brother. I know the gods make sensible men to become senseless where a woman is concerned, but there are no slaves in our family. It is a proud lineage. You cannot sully it.”

Khar, like his sister, was unused to opposition. “Sappho, the life you’ve led has not been so conventional that you can tell others how to live.”

Control was very near slipping from her. “So, you take the part of Eurygyos and Larichos against me!”

“That you know I have never done. But because you have suffered from gossip, I expect you to be understanding.”

“Khar, have the gods blinded you that you do not see? It is her business, her profession, to make men love her. How do you know she is not using you simply to purchase her freedom? Such a woman feigns love easily.”

“You do not know her, and you are ready to assume the worst.”

“I know her!”

Alkaios looked up sharply, and Sappho continued more cautiously, “That is, I know of women like her.”

“None is like her. She is unique, and I am fortunate that she has agreed to have me.”

Sappho turned to Alkaios for reinforcement. “Alkaios,” she pleaded, “you are a man of the world. Even her gift at Delphi, of unbending rods, is appropriate to her profession. This Doricha has used her ploys on my brother and he is so infatuated that he will ruin himself for her.”

Alkaios waved both hands in denying the role she forced on him. “No, no, do not place me in the middle of a family quarrel. I know nothing of the matter. But I think, Sappho, it is possible that you yourself met Doricha when you journeyed to Samos.”

“If I did, I do not remember. Why should I remember a slave?”

“When I return to Naukratis, she will be as free as you are.” Khar threw his mantle over his shoulder in token that he was leaving.

“Very well, Khar. Buy her. I will even help you. But do not, by those of our family, both on the ground and under it—do not, I pray you, marry such a one.”

“And do you not insult my wife-to-be, Sister.”

“Khar…” Sappho’s voice made him pause. “I lied just now because I feared to hurt you. I did know of Doricha Rhodopis in Samos. All did. For though almost a child, she was infamous even then.”

Khar looked as though he would strike her. “I will hear no more.”

“But you will, Khar, and not from me only, if you make this slave your wife.”

He strode to the door. “I will return to Egypt without seeing you again.”

“And you are right. While you hold to this course there can be no understanding between us.”

As her brother left, Alkaios clambered over several cushions with a goblet of wine. “Drink, my comrade. Better to fall on the floor through drink than through sorrow. So, you know the White Rose? I hear she is quite good with peacocks.”

“I know nothing of all that.” Her tart tone told Alkaios what he wanted to know.

Sappho bowed her head to her hands and said, her voice shaking in disbelief, “I am alienated from my brother.”

“He may not go through with the marriage. He may not even buy her. By the time he is returned, the price may have gone up. Or Doricha Rhodopis may have found someone richer.”

“But not as gullible as Khar. He is a leader of men, but of women he knows nothing. From the age of ten she was a prostitute. It is horrible to think of the hands she has passed through, the performances she has given. Every officer in the Attic fleet must have rammed coins into her. My poor brother is surely bewitched.”

That night she pressed out and sent to Kharaxos these words:

… with whom in vagrant love you are united

and suppose that to be beautiful

which is public property

There was no reply.

*   *   *

Kharaxos stayed in Mitylene long enough to sell or mortgage everything he possessed. Sappho heard from time to time how he had disposed of a piece of land, an orchard, even a grove of olives. But when word reached her he intended to sell the home they had grown up in, the villa of their aunt Tyro, she went to him.

Khar had her admitted, but looked at her with a frown. “I thought we had nothing more to say to each other. Except, perhaps, I may look for my sister’s blessing?”

“You have my rich blessing, Khar, in all things, but not in the union you contemplate.”

“I will marry Doricha.”

“And beggar yourself as you are doing? She won’t have a poor husband, you know. She is used to the finery of her kind.”

“I forbid you to talk about her, especially as I have heard in detail from our brothers about your own parade of girl lovers.”

“Khar, I did not come to quarrel. I came as your elder sister to ask you not to sell the home of our youth, the home of our good aunt, who loved us as her own children.”

“It must go.”

“Why? Is it not grand enough for her?”

“No, it is not.”

“How can one man’s fortune satisfy her, when she is used to many?”

“I told you not to speak of her. I forbid it.”

“I speak as I am minded. But none speak so to Sappho.”

“Except she be female, young, and desirable. It is you who have dishonored our house, Sappho.”

“Are you leaving on a journey, perhaps of years, with those words for me? Unsay them, Khar.”

“Only if you can unsay their truth.”

“You know me, Khar. You know Sappho is incapable of ugly acts, for I have all my life loved dainty and delicate things.”

“So I thought. But you have no charity for the woman I love because of circumstances forced on her, while you, of your own self, indulged in what Doricha has never heard of.”

“Doricha has heard of every practice there is, and engaged in them.”

“Enough. I will not listen to more.”

“And so we part.”

Sappho left the villa she had known so well and the brother she had loved. Her stomach felt as it had when she saw the small feet of Gongyla dangling in the air. Tears are too weak to wash away such moments. There was no help for her, not in prayer or sacrifice, for whatever god ruled this hour had hold of her brother’s heart and mind.

Khar sailed without a token. When she heard of his departure, Sappho locked herself in her room. She hadn’t believed it would come to this. Suppose he should die on the sea as Kerkolas had? To banish the ill of such a thought, she spilled the sweet wine of Lesbos, the same Khar carried on his ships, to the god of the blue hair.

Still, to have parted from him so, to have let him go with angry words between them—but what could she have done?

It was ghastly to her that she had held in her own arms the woman her brother was enamored of. What if he found out?

Was an unclean whore who performed obscene tricks and approached her lover on her belly, was this slave to enter into the first house of Lesbos whose proud ancestry stemmed from great Orestes? How they would laugh at a son of noble Skamandronymos! It would not happen, she assured herself.

*   *   *

To ensure that Khar would come to his senses, Sappho assembled a tenth of all on her estate and by oxcart made her way to the mountain fastness of the priestesses of Dionysos, thinking as she went that she might glimpse Kleis.

It took the better part of the day to arrive at the caves, where she saw to the unloading of animals, grain, and wine. All was piled before the entrance. She knelt in the dust and spoke her prayer. “Soften my brother’s heart toward me, O god who sports with dolphins. You know I love Khar well. Bring him back in health and strength, that the quarrel may be undone, the words unspoken—and the hold that woman has on him broken.”

Dionysos returned no answer, although she stayed on her knees and waited. Yet perhaps in his way he did. For after the visit to the caves there was a change in her. She found it hard to stay as before in the sanctuary of her home and took to roaming as she had when a child.

Her walks led her into the streets of Mitylene. She found she was diverted by the many colors, the movement of people, the sounds of trade and barter. She made an occasional small purchase, something from the stall of the flower merchant, or an opal caught her fancy and she would have it. Shopkeepers bowed, mothers pointed her out to their children, men turned to stare, and girls put their heads together. Later they would say, “I saw Sappho with these eyes.”

She sought out the Street of Women and looked curiously at the immodest and ornate costumes. They make of themselves another commodity, she thought. This put her in mind of Doricha, so she left.

Upon her return a runner from Alkaios waited. She was invited to a small dinner party. At first she was inclined to go—there was no one left from her old life except Alkaios—but she knew before the evening was out her friend would be snoring on the floor. She sent the servant away, saying she could not manage it. But the incident evoked a trail of memory. She recalled his first poem to her:

Innocent Sappho

of the violet

hair

and sweet

smile

When Alkaios invited her a second time, she accepted. He had hired a ship for the occasion. Lighted with tapers and festooned with flowers, it glided out of the harbor. The captain, in special greeting and honor, bathed her feet and spread a lotion on them. He was a powerful young man, yet graceful. And as he knelt, she looked down on a crown of chestnut curls. How beautiful the young are, she thought.

The feast was in progress and Alkaios already quite drunk. She didn’t mind, but enjoyed the Samian performers who with naked feet trod out the dances of their land. Mostly she enjoyed the fresh breeze stirred by Sea, and the slap of waves as they rocked the craft. It was pleasant upon the water, and the evening passed quickly.

Thereafter she was drawn to the harbor, she supposed because she felt closer to Khar there. One day she recognized the ship Alkaios had hired for their dinner party and looked to see if the captain who had removed her sandals was aboard.

She saw him in the bow speaking with a merchant. Was he arranging to fill his craft with water and wine for another such evening? She continued to enjoy his profile against the sea. It was strong, the forehead sloping to the nose with scarcely an indentation. And the mouth might have been drawn by a master artisan for an Apollo figure. The thickness of his upper arms and shoulders showed the sailor, used to handling rigging and rough work. The litheness about him she supposed was youth. She watched from dockside as he did business with the merchant.

In the days that followed, she went again and again seaward, to the harbor. Usually the ship rode at anchor, but there were times when it had slipped its mooring and was gone. When this happened she spent a restless night and hurried back in the morning to make sure the boat was there. It always was, for its journeys were short. When Sappho realized this she felt light as air.

She conceived a longing, a desire to engage the boat herself. A gala, a party even, was not what she had in mind. Rather it was to lean back against skins and cushions, and floating on dark waters call upon the Muses and make songs, for surely songs sung under such circumstances would be wonderful indeed. Why should she not gratify this wish? It was a simple one, to smell the salt, feel the faint breeze that hovers over water, and hymn her verses old and new.

Sappho sent a runner to make inquiry about the boat and to discover if the young man was indeed the owner. “Find out what you can about him,” she instructed, and turned her back, pretending an interest in material for a new shawl.

The slave returned. “His name is Phaon, Lady. He is master of the vessel, and it is for hire for galas, parties, picnics, and the like.”

“How does he live when his boat is not hired?” Sappho asked.

“Lady, he is a sponge diver.”

“I see.” She sent the slave back to Phaon to negotiate a price and designate an evening.

Shortly after this, her servants announced that a messenger approached with bay leaf in his hair. Sappho’s heart raced—it is Khar! Khar has sent this man with a token that he loves me as before and will forget the woman.

When the man went on his knees before her, she said, “Speak—who sent you?”

“My master, O great Sappho, is the wise man and ruler of Athens, even noble Solon, whose fame has spread through all the cities of the Hellenes.”

Sappho was astounded. Solon was not a lover of women, although on previous occasions he had sent costly oils and more recently a gift of a silver chalice on which the nine sisters were incised. A very handsome present, but a personal message was of another magnitude. “Solon, ruler in Athens, has business with me?”

“He salutes great Sappho. And on learning that she is making books of her songs, he would obtain them for himself at any cost. He asks if a scribe of highest integrity might be quartered in your home and given access to the material, that it may be copied to bring pleasure to his leisure. For of all pleasures my master knows, listening to the immortal songs of Sappho brings him most joy.”

Sappho was much affected by such a message from this mighty ruler, who was one of the seven wise men in the world. In her reply she assured Solon that utmost hospitality would be given his scribe, that he would be lodged with her household until his task was done, adding proudly, “I have six books, which represent the songs I have sung from a girl until now.” And she thanked him for the honor he did her.

When a fresh messenger had been sped on his way, Sappho closeted herself in her chamber and took from her woman’s chest her most highly polished and true-reflecting mirror. All my fame does not make me a year younger, she thought.

Into her mind came a vision sent by the gods of the beautiful young Phaon, diver after sponges. His was a body powerful as Pittakos’s when he returned the hero of Lesbos from the ten-year war with Athens. “How madly my heart once beat for him.”

She laughed even now, thinking of the lampoons Alkaios had sung of him. But she recalled well what a hold he had over her, and how he himself had broken the spell, setting her free when he exiled her.

Her ruminations led her to conclude that she was not as averse to the male as she had told her hetaerae. She had grown up at a time when men were absent altogether from Mitylene.

She considered her husband. It had been a long time since she had thought of him wandering in the house of Hades. He had been, she realized now, too indolent for her taste, too foppish with his constant pursuit of new amusements. He had not known how to fan the fires in her. Many were the times he remonstrated with her for her lack of passion, never considering that his own brief thrust was not sufficient to call forth what blazed in Sappho.

If her husband had been inadequate as a lover, it was not necessarily an indictment of the entire sex, but one man only. Perhaps her womanhood had been cheated, perhaps her first instinct toward the might of Pittakos had been of the gods. Or it may be the other Sappho, her second self, who now desired.

Sappho put aside her mirror, in fact buried it at the bottom of her chest. But that night she thonged the door to her room and retrieved it. This time it was by the tapers that flared in the night-darkened chamber that she examined herself. It was quite amazing how softened the lines in her brow were and those wrinkles about her eyes that told of too many days of merriment and carefree laughter. As for the streak of white in her hair, it could be dyed with the juice of dark berries and the bark of trees well steeped in boiled water.

The time had definitely come to use the mastics her mother had employed. Such artifices worked very well for a number of hours. And Niobe knew of others: fomentation, sulfur over a low fire mixed with klanet, that rare plant, combined with litharge, a paste which remained on the face and neck three hours. Then the skin was bathed with laten, and the milk of a woman nursing a girl-child was brought to cleanse all. These were followed by oil of almonds, tincture of hydromel, and a decoction of honey and water. Ah, these small alabaster boxes of illusion. What were these cosmetics but fraud and lies? She did not care.

She might be young again, without the reality of youth. In such pretense there was the possibility of a final love. Once more, after these many years, she spilled to Aphrodite and, forgetting her quarrel with the goddess, urgently asked to feel the arms of a lover, to rouse another’s body with her own.

The hetaerae had been her delight. But might there not be waiting for her a final untapped joy in the arms of a man who knew how to love? Not a man of her own class with his oboe player and string of boy lovers, but a rough sailor whose forearms were brawny and whose legs were as pillars. Phaon, who stepped with such surety in his rocking craft, whose shoulders were as a wrestler’s, but whose waist was slender as a girl’s. She smiled to herself, thinking he would have no way of knowing the tricks she was made of, that she was all illusion, even as her songs; a made thing, for the moment only, lasting while song lasted.

All depended on art and torches, for she would never hire his high-curved boat except by night. Light is joy, she thought ruefully, for all but me. Her patroness in this venture would be Selene, the Moon goddess. “And with Heaven’s help…”

Her slave settled details with the young ship’s captain for an evening three nights hence. During the intervening time, a constant train of laden beasts traveled between her villa and his boat, carrying woven rugs and pillows, pelts of tiger and panther. Stringed instruments came next, a harp with a carved Sphinx atop it, a zither, and a lyre. Also taken aboard were alabaster boxes, from which strange and exotic scents emerged.

On the day itself, jars of wine and baskets of delicate foods covered by fine linen with the fragrance of lavender were loaded on deck. Finally flowers arrived, the bark was flanked with them. They were braided to its sides and strung along the mast, they ran along the ropes and trailed the water. As though an afterthought, several torches were secured fore and aft. Slaves also laid at the feet of the speechless captain sandals of gold and a himation of purest cambric, white as Egyptian lyssus.

As night fell, a Nubian slave rowed a cloaked figure to the ship. Phaon leapt to hand in the single form, whose cloak parted, revealing a gossamer wrap. He was unsure whether he touched a statue or a woman of flesh and blood. He dared not raise his eyes to find out, but kept them on the planks of his ship.

“I have inquired and know that your name is Phaon.”

The voice held the sounds of lyre and cymbals. He had never heard his name said in that fashion.

“I know further that you are a freeman and have an honest reputation. Therefore does Sappho of Lesbos place herself in your stewardship and depend on your ability to deal with what Poseidon sends.”

Phaon bent before her. “Lady, I will do my best to please you.”

“I believe it.”

“And I thank you for the lending of this beautiful garment and for the sandals of gold.”

“They are not lent, but given.”

He murmured something, he knew not what. He still dared not look on her, except to observe how tiny her feet were, how perfect her toes, and that on the twinkling sandals were silver bells.

“Lead me, O Phaon, to the place my people have made ready for me that I may compose in the quiet of your ship.”

“Yes, Lady.” And from the diaphanous tarentine veil, a hand freed itself and clasped his … but such a hand. He had never seen a hand like it; his own swallowed it up as a hawk would a small wood dove. The daintiest fingers and smallest wrist he had ever felt lay inside his palm, trusting him as a guide. And when the lady moved at his side, it was the sliding of water, it was the swaying stalk of a narcissus. His own feet, even in sandals of gold, made the deck creak; hers made no sound except for the merry bells. Phaon led her to the piled luxury of skins and rugs and pillows.

“Will I be able to watch you from here as you ply your ship?”

“Assuredly.” Then, worried, he added, “Your servants set up this place for you, but if you would be more private…”

“No, no, I may need you. You see, I am quite alone.” She smiled through the filmy gauze into his face, directly into it. And it was as though great Zeus threw a thunderbolt and struck him full; his wits seemed addled and he himself befuddled as though from drink.

He again lowered his eyes, but Sappho had seen what she needed to know. Her magic was truer far than those love potions once sold by the witch Andromeda.

“The boat is so unsteady,” she said, and the next moment she was against him body to body. Instinctively his arms were about her and she felt the hardness she caused in him—he felt her softness, her up-tilted breasts. The next moment he was swallowed by a cloud of aroma and knew a goddess had been in his arms.

“Pardon, Lady.” He braced his legs and laid her back against the array of colors and textures skillfully blended. Though the full weight of her hung in his hands for only a second, he saw the aureole of rosy breasts, the fullness of thighs, yet a waist so slender he believed he could span it with his two hands and touch finger to finger. Phaon felt dizzy from the scents she seemed to radiate, but he managed to say, “I pray the Muses bless your efforts, Lady.” And he saluted her.

“I pray so too.” She picked up her lyre, which Phaon took as a dismissal, for he turned to his duties.

She strummed softly; her eyes, seeming closed, watched all he did.

Nimbly he cast off their mooring stone, made fast the oar thongs, and rowed past anchored craft whose silhouettes showed darkly. Once clear of the harbor he swung his body against the ropes that ran up the sail. The male form exuded an excitement in activity that was comparable to the female in dance. The virility of his person, his coordination, lightness, the harmony of movement that characterized his actions, all stirred her, so that her usual plea to the Muses, Add passion to my song, was not needed, although she recited the formula.

The night was warm, unlocking fragrances whose loosened stoppers made the senses reel. There was no longer much for Phaon to do. The wind did his job for him, and he continued to lean against the ropes. Even in a posture of relaxation his body held the hint of dynamic power.

Sappho continued to sing to herself. He strained to hear. She smiled; he also wanted to say, “I heard Sappho sing.”

The moon rose, gibbous, as though squeezed from its perfect form by the hand of a child. Night engulfed them. They moved silently, parting black waters. “Phaon,” she called.

He was by her in a moment. “Lady?”

“We will return now.”

She could feel his disappointment, for he was as transparent as her youngest hetaera.

“It was satisfactory … the sailing?”

“It was completely satisfactory, but I have finished my song. However, it is certain the nine Muses travel with me and have enjoyed the outing, even as I. This boat of yours shall be hired again.”

“Tomorrow night?”

“I do not know. I will send word.”

“You were comfortable, Lady? And you had all you wished?”

“It was very pleasant.”

“Then I shall not disturb the rugs and cushions, but leave them as they are.”

She nodded; the point was too trivial to discuss. They rethreaded the passage. He furled the sails and lowered the mast beside them, rolling them together into a compact bundle. She knew everything that he did, memorized each motion. When he handed her into the small cockleshell, she thought his fingers lingered over hers.

*   *   *

Sappho sent word by a slave that it was not convenient to come the next day, or even the two days past that. This she did because she was mad to be there. For such desire had leapt upon her as she had not known since the golden days of her hetaerae. She could think of nothing but Phaon, and spent the time until she saw him reconstructing all his movements and everything he had said. Closing her eyes she felt again the lingering fingers that had not wished to leave hers. She began to plan their next encounter.

None knew love’s strategy better than Sappho. And what was Aphrodite’s strategy? Had the goddess given her a chance to relive her youth? Or was it a cruel taunt?

“I know the path of my wisdom!” she flung at the Kyprian-born, but knew she would not follow it. My brain is blighted, she told herself, because what started in a light, carefree manner had laid hold of her heart. “The chain of Fate binds all.” Was Phaon disappointed that she put off the day? Did he think of her as she did of him? Did he think of her at all?

Another question followed closely. “Is it possible,” she asked in wonder, “that I love again?”

*   *   *

Once again her slaves made processional and Phaon’s craft was filled with fresh incense, even more glorious clusters of flowers, fine soft Amorgos drapery, all magic that presaged her presence.

The small, light vessel danced impatiently, and the same Nubian slave rowed her to it.

As before, Phaon raised her to his ship. He was more beautiful than she remembered, his lashes sweeping his cheek as sweetly as any girl’s. He found courage to look directly in her face, but only for a moment. Once again he stared at the planking. “Welcome, O Sappho.”

“Peace to you, Phaon.”

He did not release her hand but kept it as he led her to the place prepared for her. When she seated herself upon the skins and rich materials, he said haltingly, “Since you so love flowers, Lady…” and held out to her a woven garland of violets and crocus.

To accept it she must remove the mantle and coan veil.

Phaon was spellbound, for Sappho’s chiton revealed her form—even to the mound of Aphrodite, which her women had plucked clean of hair, rouging and outlining the nether lips.

Sappho lowered her head that he might slip the chain of flowers over her more easily. He knelt to perform this service, and her breasts with their delicately tinted paps swung against him. Phaon jumped back as though he had touched fire.

Coolly, she said, “I give you thanks, Phaon. The flowers were a pretty thought.”

She drew the coan wrap about her. It did not obscure, but only lay another fold between them, making her filmy and unreal. Her body seemed shot through with the gold of a constantly disappearing thread. Phaon retreated to his oars and guided the bark from the harbor.

Sappho picked up her lyre and sang as before, very softly to herself. When Phaon secured the sail, she called to him, saying, “O Captain, I would have a companion to share a goblet of white wine with me.”

As he came toward her, she was conscious of his male smell even among the perfumes and sweet oils. It disturbed her. It had always disturbed her.

“Will you pour?” she asked, handing him a flagon. It was encrusted with jewels as shells at the sea bottom were encrusted with barnacles. He took the decanter almost reluctantly and spilled to Poseidon.

Sappho frowned slightly. “I see through some oversight my servants put in only one goblet.” Her expression changed as though she had at that instant solved some weighty problem. “Therefore you must sit, that we may share it.”

“I am not worthy…” he protested in real agony.

She smiled sweetly on him. “I make you worthy by my request.”

He sat—Sappho desired it, what else could he do? Many scents wafted over him and his head reeled, encompassed as he was by a garden of strange delights.

Sappho sipped from the single goblet, around which ran a frieze of Dionysian dancers. She regarded him over the rim, leisurely.

Aware of her scrutiny, he evaded her glance by lowering his, but that brought his eyes along her body and he quickly raised them again. She passed the cup to him without a word, and without a word he drank. Then exclaimed, “Is this wine?”

She laughed softly in her throat. “Of course not. It is nectar stolen from Clymene, shapely daughter of Ocean, who bedded with Iapetus and gave birth to Prometheus and Atlas and Epimetheus.”

Phaon stopped drinking. “Epimetheus,” he said, “brings bad luck to those who must toil for their bread.”

“Not bad luck, just luck—both good and bad.”

“By your hire of my boat I have been granted better luck than I ever knew before.”

“Is the pay generous? I did not inquire.”

“I did not mean the pay. In your presence, O great Sappho, the world is remade.”

She laughed. “By your talk, Captain, I think I was right, and that this simple wine you drink surely is not from grapes trod out by oxen led round the millstone.”

“What then?” he asked.

“My ladies may have packed, by mistake, something stronger, a Thessalian brew, perhaps, concocted by Cotytto herself, made of incantations and special potions.”

“If witchcraft is your meaning, then is there no need to drink, for I am under Sappho’s spell.” He seemed to hold his breath as he waited to see what effect the boldness of his words would have.

“Did my music please you then?”

“Yes … no … you, yourself. I never saw a lady of your rank so … close before.”

“Oh, if that is all. There are many with more grace than I.”

“I believe your veracity, great one, but not your judgment.”

Sappho laughed musically, like the cadence of bells. “Tonight I want company, Phaon. Listen and I will sing you a tale.” Sappho chose an epic such as would fascinate a man. Her song was about Theseus, who, after slaying the Minotaur, freed from the monster seven boys and seven girls.

Phaon was enraptured. He listened at her feet as she chanted. He is like a child, she thought, a beautiful child. And she wove her stories and songs about him, with each binding him more surely.

She told of King Priam of Ilium when he received the news that his son Hector was returning with a bride, the daughter of the King of Cilian Thebes:

With power and speed to his legs came the herald,

Idaeus, announcing this wonderful news …

Phaon watched her face and she whispered to him, “These tidings spread all over Asia and turned to legend forever.”

Hector and all his companions are bringing

from sacred Thebes and the plains of Placia,

over the salty sea by ship,

a delicate dark-eyed girl: Andromache.

Many the golden bracelets

and purple stuffs the winds are bringing

and trinkets bespangled;

numberless, too, the silver cups and ivory chasings.

So uttered the herald, and Hector’s dear father

nimbly arose as the news

sped to their friends through the ample city.

Then the people of Ilium

harnessed their mules to the smoothly moving cars;

and all the women in one,

with the prettily ankled girls,

ascended—the daughters of Priam apart.

The men had the horses yoked

to the chariots; every youth

was there; till a mighty people moved

mightily along.

And the charioteers drove

their jingling horses on …

She glanced at Phaon. He had not moved. He begged her not to stop, and she told him of the warriors returning after the fall of Troy.

“It is a bedazzlement to hear you,” the young sailor said in awe.

Sappho stretched her arms lazily above her head. “I am weary. Take me back.”

“Must I?”

She smiled gently at him. “Yes.”

“But you will visit my boat another time? Not to hire it, but as an honored guest?”

She studied him a moment, as though making up her mind. “That would be delightful,” she said, playing the great lady—when she wanted to press him, mouth him, frenzy him.

He suggested a day. She replied that she would study her commitments and send an answer.

*   *   *

She spent the time at home working out an ode in the epic vein, for this is what fascinated him. She decided to retell in her own way the tale of Prometheus and his theft of fire. When humankind received this godlike gift, Zeus and his race, in vengeance, had no more face-to-face dealings with either man or woman but came thereafter only in dreams and portents.

Sappho was pleased with her story, certain that Phaon would like it. So, she was to be his guest. Guest-lover, she whispered fiercely to herself. For she could not again keep her body from his.

She had conceived a superstition that semen from his young and powerful loins entering her, would act as a potion and keep her young. She needed his youth and beauty, and although he did not know it, he needed her not at all.

She was reminded of a favorite love poem, that of Selene, the Moon, in which it was said that the goddess saw by her pale light a fair young shepherd boy sleeping near the entrance to a cave on Mount Latmos. And she, being enamored of his grace and comeliness, determined to keep him there, just as he was, forever asleep and forever young. She fed her passion for him nightly, rousing him with her kisses, exciting him with her touch, so sensual that in his sleep he moaned and cried out and his erection lasted until she slid from him at morning. The name of the youth was Endymion. And though she possessed him each night and seduced and inflamed him, Selene never let him wake. And he never saw her, who was the mistress of his slumbering body. She allowed him the most erotic dreams of her, and pictured herself to him as she would be: a maiden both wanton and pure, who by accident it seemed, tripped and fell across his prone figure, tearing her chiton so that it did not protect her. She then cajoled the East Wind into stripping Endymion of his clothing. Her lust for him was never ending and never satisfied. And Endymion knew sensations that only gods know when they mate.

“Come to me, Moon goddess, and advise me in my sleep,” Sappho murmured. And in the morning, more strongly than ever, she knew she must keep Phaon forever asleep, allow him to see her only by dim torchlight, spin him tales of heroes and bring delight to his body.

She could do this magic because she was Sappho. And magic was the main ingredient of her small self that stretched to encompass what she wished.

So on the night agreed upon, she commanded Niobe to fetch her most skillful women and with consummate art was again prepared. Very lovely she seemed, and enticing. “Yes,” she told her women, “I am the Moon.”

They looked at one another without comprehension. Niobe alone smiled; her mistress often spoke in such fashion. Riddles, it seemed to the others, but Niobe knew she spoke with gods.

Sappho was driven to her Endymion, who stood in the bow of his long ship straining his eyes toward shore. She was handed down from the chariot and, light-footed, ran to the small boat where the enormous Nubian waited to row her out.

Phaon lifted her to the deck and was instantly wrapped in a cloud of scents, both tranquil and disturbing. “You are like a thistle, Lady. Welcome.”

“Thank you. I feel welcome.”

He led her to her bower, but this time he had provided the picnic.

“How lovely,” she exclaimed at the care with which each item had been arranged. The food was poorer and coarser than she had tasted since high Pyrrha, but it was served with flowers as beautiful as any she had ever gathered.

“It is only Lesbian wine—” he began.

She interrupted. “Than which there is none better. My brothers are both growers and sellers.”

“Sit then, Lady, and once the craft is free of the harbor, we will taste of it.”

“So grant the gods.” And to herself she promised to taste other things as well.

Tonight he did not run up the sail, but let the ship rock gently as he came to her side. They poured to the gods and then he poured for her from the mixing bowl. “May every good attend you, most dazzling of women.”

“And to you, good.”

They drank, watching each other as they did.

“I have thought these many days on the wonderful stories that you told. It must be like entering another world to be inside your head.”

“There are many conflicts there. Sometimes disturbing … as you are disturbing to my peace.”

“I? How can that be?”

Sappho jumped to her feet. “Stand up. Look me in the face as friend to friend, lover to lover.”

Like one in a trance he obeyed. And she managed that when he was on his feet, she was almost in the same place. His eyes traveled the transparency of her peplos, feather-woven by Amathusians, and viewed the marvels of her exquisite body, which seemed to palpate toward him. Sappho met the glance of his deep-fringed eyes. “Touch me—for I am consumed by you.”

She whispered the words rapidly at him, but he stood still, uncertain. A lady of high station, the songstress of Lesbos—had he heard correctly?

Was it a lurch of the ship, had either moved? She was in his arms, pressed against him in a way that revealed the differences of their two sexes.

“You are as fire, driven over me by wind,” she whispered and did not close her eyes when he kissed her. He closed his. “Ah, Phaon…” She undid his garment and her fingers glided his nakedness.

He was rigid and upstanding as a column, and ashamed that it was so. Sappho dropped to her knees to worship.

He groaned aloud with the pleasure of what she made him feel and, with urgency, carried her to the piled cushions, where he crushed her with his weight.

But she would not be still to allow him his way. Her delicately oiled body ever indicated new possibilities of love. Before he could pin her, she evaded, to expose herself in yet another position. She lay upon him head to head, then head to feet. She presented her rounded buttocks and as he reached for her, turned and hovered above him.

Quick as a panther, he had her, nor could she escape to tease in a new way. Now it was she who moaned. A volcano erupted in her, hot lava coursed over her, and she strained for every last sweet drop with which he filled her.

“You are my shepherd boy,” she whispered and licked him clean of his own sperm, then massaged gently with unguents which combined the pith of the pomegranate, eggs, honey, the soft part of crabs, the undersides of snails, mussels, and a trace of nettle-seed—all secret restoratives, for she meant to have him again this night. For this reason she wore the right testicle of an ass in a broad silver bracelet on her left wrist. She left nothing undone that would excite his liver again to desire and sexual prowess. Unobtrusively she slipped a piece of southernwood beneath their cushions, for that also strengthened the male for frequent copulations.

“You are not woman,” he gasped, when he had his breath, “but goddess.”

“It is true, the gods are very close to me in that I am sister to the Muses. But I am mortal woman, and all my nature turns to you.”

“I have never felt … never known…”

“Of course not. I did not say I was an ordinary woman. I am Sappho. And all that I do is with passion.”

“I would die for you,” he said, and then, “I think I almost did die.”

“I also. Your flesh scorches me. Your mouth burns like a wound. Athene must have sent a heron to our right hand.”

Phaon laughed. “No heron that, but a seagull.”

“Then they are lucky, too.”

“It must be so, for you are here—unless I dream.”

“I am here.” She twined hyacinths in his curls and murmured soft words that did not make sense, or need to.

She told him that the Nine were born in Pieria. He did not know even simple things like that. “Hesiod says they are all of one mind, their hearts set upon song, as mine is set upon love.”

“For me?” he asked in wonder.

“For who but you? Am I here or elsewhere? Answer and tell me.”

“You … are here. Although I cannot believe it. Nor do I understand.”

“Seek not to understand. It is a gift the gods have given us.” And her insatiable mouth was open to his. He responded lazily, letting her play with him as she would.

Her famished mouth at last moved the sailor to lose himself once more on the tide of passion.

When it was possible to lie quietly, Phaon spoke. “I do not know anymore if I am you or myself,” he said hoarsely.

“You are always Phaon, which is why my eyes adore you and my heart is toward you.”

“Yet I have heard…” He had begun impulsively, unthinkingly, and checked himself.

A chill descended on her. “No, no, you must tell me what you heard. In all things we must be open with each other, nor keep anything back.”

“It is because the gods visit you that tongues wag. It is envy. It is nothing.”

“I would know this nothing.” And she poured down his throat the strong red wine of Lesbos.

“It is of the girls they speak, that for so many years stayed on your estate.”

“Yes, my hetaerae, my fair companions. What of them?”

He shook his head. “It is but the talk of taverns and unworthy of being repeated.”

She said lightly, “All this is not new to me. I have many enemies. Fame starts tongues clacking. They say I had lovers among them.” She laughed. “Which were mentioned by name?”

Phaon hung his head, unwilling to answer. “They did mention an Anaktoria, and beautiful Kydro, and a girl called Atthis.”

Sappho enjoyed the inaccuracy. Atthis, of course they had guessed Atthis. She picked up her lyre and, gazing out over the water, sang as though to it:

Neither in the girls of Pyrrha or Metyma nor

in any of Lesbos do I take any more delight

Did he notice the past tense?

She put aside the lyre. “We lived together in innocence, singing lessons from the wonderful Isle of Thought, studying Sky by night. By day we danced ritual steps in the sand, anointing one another with cenanthium from the mountains of Kypros. Many times my Muses would carry me from my friends, and I would sing poems to those fair spirits. It was a small repayment, for happy is she whom the Muses love.”

“You are half divine, O matchless Sappho. I cannot believe your love could turn toward a common sailor, a man of no distinction, when all Lesbos, the entire Hellenic world court you.”

“There is no reason in love—do not look for reason. It is a holy gift.” And she told him the story of Dionysos, who each spring goes crowned with blossoms and ivy to the valleys of Lydia, to the far mountains sacred to him. And of Prometheus she told how he concealed the sacred fire in a hollow reed.

Some of the things Phaon wanted to hear about were very strange. He was interested in the mechanics of her bath. He had never heard of pipes buried in the ground that carried water from the spring to the fire pit in the kitchen, from whence they passed into the satyr’s head, which slaves turned to fill her marble bath.

“That is from the gods.” He spoke in a reverent voice.

“No god at all,” she laughed, “but one of my slaves designed it. In Syracuse all the great houses have such arrangements.”

“And the wastes,” he asked, “could they not be carried from the house through the same kind of pipe and deposited in a pit some distance from it?”

Sappho laughed with delight that such topics as “waste” intrigued him as he lay upon the couch of love, but decided it was for these mysterious reasons she loved him.

*   *   *

They met every night. They could not be away from each other. She sent him trinkets of gold or hid them on his ship, so he need not risk his life for sponges.

Once, winds swept down from Heaven and waves pounded their boat and broke over the deck. Phaon laughed. But Sappho, terrified that her well-painted face and juiced hair had become blotched, turned from him and asked him to erect a temporary tent.

He thought it was modesty, as her wet chiton clung to her, and was well pleased to do as she wished. Behind the improvised screen she hastily repaired the damage and threw a kerchief over her hair. And so the charade went on.

Phaon was the center of her world. She loved and ravished him and could not have enough of him. But the magic was always spun. There were stories to entertain him and poems sung for his enjoyment.

“Your songs would charm even the wild beasts, could they hear you,” he declared.

“If they charm you, lord of my heart, I am content.”

One night she came and saw as he lifted her in his arms that his eyes were haunted and sad. When she questioned him, he put his head in her lap and wept. “I have lost a dear friend, Pelagon, son of Meniskos, who, like me, was a fisherman and diver after sponges.”

“What happened?”

“So many things can go wrong in the dark of Poseidon’s kingdom. One sees a catch a bit farther down, another kick of the feet and you will have it. Instead blood pours from your eyes. This happened to my friend.”

Sappho soothed him with kisses, but he lay listless and despondent against her.

After some time Sappho spoke. “Yet your dear companion will not die unnoticed, for listen, Sappho has made an ode to his poor shade.” She sang:

In memory of Pelagon, a fisherman,

his father Meniskos placed

here a fishbasket and oar:

tokens of an unlucky life

Phaon kissed her hands. “He will not be forgotten—great Sappho gives him life!” And he remembered his manhood.

Returning late to her home, she found a messenger outside the gate. He dared not enter, for his tidings were ill. There were no leaves of bay in his hair.

Quickly, under her breath she intoned, “Father Zeus, let it not be Khar!” Then to the messenger: “Say what you must.”

“In Athens, O incomparable Sappho, the wise and noble Solon lies dying. He wishes not to die until he has heard your last songs.”

“Poor man. I have already heard of one death tonight. Like an accursed hound it is ever at our heels. Enter in the gates. I shall not sleep until I’ve gathered the smell of meadows, the brightness of flowers, the sound of water falling onto stones. I will send all this to Solon and ease his going forth.”

She went over her work but could find little that was new. The Muses, jealous of Phaon, stayed away. She didn’t care. The passion she brought to her verse, she now brought her lover.

She collected any writings that might have been overlooked at the time Solon’s scribe had copied so diligently.

She stopped to read:

… nor ever did the gathering sounds of

early spring

fill any wood with the chorus of

the nightingale

but you wandered there with me

“Atthis, Atthis, you held so much of my life. Sometimes I wish for death.” She was amazed to hear herself say such a thing. Had she said it? Was it true?

It would be true when the moment came that Phaon looked at her and saw that she was old. For then she would be. And life finished.

Every time those deeply blue eyes of her young sailor looked into hers, she trembled that she would be found out, that the white lead on her face would crack at a wrinkle, or along a laugh line … and he would perceive her as old. If that should happen, and it must happen, Sappho was no more.

In the morning she sped the messenger on his way, sending with him a sheaf of poems in one of her slim vessels to Athens.

*   *   *

There was news of Khar in the agora. His fleet had been sighted making for Lesbos. Sappho could not disentangle the emotions this set up in her.

Did he come alone?

With her?

As slave or wife?

She was so nervous that she sent word to Phaon she was unwell and could not visit him. Then, changing her mind, went after all, to find him absent from his ship. Where was he? Carousing in some tavern? Perhaps courting a girl his own age, or playing lover-lad to some wealthy judge or prince? She knew nothing of his life. His life was there on the boat with her. That he had any other existence had not concerned her. Suddenly she was mad with jealousy. Where was he this night when he should have been with her?

Was there a girl? How old? Fifteen? Sixteen? O uncaring gods, what tortures you reserve for me! In her room she scrubbed the paint from her face and looked at herself with revulsion, crying at the disfigurement of wrinkles, which only caused new and uglier lines to appear. Her body sagged. The gift of herself that she presented to Phaon was worn, used up. “O Aphrodite, I was wrong. I had forgotten. Cannot these fires in me be quenched? Can you not see how tormented I am? I long and I yearn … and it may not be. There is nothing before me but humiliation.” She sobbed, as broken in her being as a dropped pot.

She sent servants to the dock to await Khar’s arrival and bid him come to her. Bordering on physical collapse, she must still see to everything herself. Each detail of the welcoming of her brother was discussed with Niobe. Leaving nothing to chance, she hurried to the kitchen, selected capons, made changes in the menu. In the garden she directed which buds be tied so they would not open until presented to Khar. She inspected the cleaning and polishing, and hesitated a dozen times over the wardrobe she had selected.

She kept a runner at the twin harbors so when the curved ships were sighted she would have sufficient warning. Khar had gone away angry. But now surely he must realize that his sister’s words came from love and concern for him and his welfare.

But she was Sappho, and knew that passion could dissolve the stoutest heart and dissipate the sturdiest resolutions. She must prepare herself for the presence of Doricha Rhodopis. Sappho worried that if Khar kept her as a slave, out of spite the Thracian might reveal she had slept between her legs in an orgy that culminated when the great bird, with outspread dazzling tail and frantically flapping wings, debauched her. Sappho had only to close her eyes to see the creature hopping about, the girl’s white body hanging from his feathered one.

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?

She no longer felt the cart beneath her. The jolting caused the many pictures of Phaon to break apart and become jumbled. New images were juxtaposed against a moving network of branches flying overhead and a countryside that flowed as with a strong current.

They told him I was old, his drinking companions in the tavern. They laughed at the fool who was beguiled by an old woman. Against laughter, magic crumbles.

Would the foam-born goddess close Phaon’s eyes to her years? For she had not worked all her guile on him, nor told all her stories, nor sung all her songs. She had so much more to pour out to him. Would he forgive her stripping every last trinket of gold from her body and throwing them at him? Would he forgive her arrogance?

He must. For it was no longer she who had done this thing, but the scapegoat. Had she not gone to the town of her birth and bestowed her name—a great and famous name, none more so—on that loathsome creature who sold the hole in her body for a loaf of bread, a crust even?

Sappho laughed wildly. What would the woman do with all her wealth, the flashing gems, the ancient coins of fine workmanship, the many ornaments of precious metals heavily embossed? She would set herself up as chiefest of the prostitutes, a second Doricha. She, too, someday would purchase virtue with iron spits! Her laughter was uncontrollable, like rumbling thunder unloosed.

She wanted to fly to Phaon, go at once to his ship. But how carefully he would scrutinize her now! She must be able to endure his closest inspection. She needed Niobe and her women. She needed a warm bath, oils from many lands, and royal essences, also the whites of eggs and mastic and white lead. She needed all of that to hide behind. And the goddess, Kyprus-born, before whom she made herself as nothing—she needed her intervention most of all.

Aphrodite would make Phaon the sleeping child he had been, loving her, listening to her tales, filled with her enchantments.

When the jolting at last ended and she was at her own door, her eunuch did not recognize the disheveled person as his mistress. He stepped forward to bar her entrance.

She laughed in his face, the wild laugh recently born in her.

Niobe, when she saw her, began murmuring prayers. She led Sappho to her bath.

“O Niobe, good friend … do you not know … I made a bargain with a goddess.”

“Hush,” Niobe breathed as though to a young child.

Sappho fell asleep in her marble pool. But on taking a deep breath, she inhaled the good and rare scent with which they were rubbing her palms and the bottom of her feet. Her hair, too, was washed and perfumed. A sponge was plunged into a jar of Athenian oil and passed over her body. A smile appeared on her face, though her eyes were not open. She had never been so weary. They rubbed and massaged her limbs, and she knew no more.

Was this rosy-ankled and golden Dawn, the Dawn that followed the night of her return? She sprang up as one reborn. No sin, no stain was on her. She looked into her heart and found it was the heart of a child. She could forgive Khar anything, even the blow, even the White Rose.

Breakfast was brought, and she called Niobe. “I am feeling well after my good night’s sleep; the world is smiling.”

But Niobe did not smile, nor did she tell her mistress it had not been an ordinary sleep, but one of two days, during which she lay like one drugged.

Sappho did not notice her silence. “Prepare me, Niobe. I would myself look like a goddess. I am willing to spend the entire day to accomplish this.”

Niobe stood unmoving before her.

“There is something you want to say, Niobe? Tell me, but do not let the telling interrupt your hands. I am in a hurry to begin our preparation.”

“There is no need to hurry, Mistress. He is gone.”

Her heart began to beat crazily against her sides, an uneven pounding. “Who?”

She knew, but she listened while Niobe told her that her brother had entered Phaon’s ship. “He did not stay long. Of what he spoke, you know. For after Lord Kharaxos departed, Phaon laid in supplies for a long trip, they say to Ithaca. And two days ago he raised the square sail and was gone from Lesbos.”

The world slid away.

“Lady? Lady?”

She fought her way up from the nether world of Tartarus, past the River Styx. “Niobe, ready me. I will see this brother of mine, this traitor, a final time. Does he forget we are of one house?”

Niobe’s hands flew about her; slaves knelt holding precious ointments and jewels from which to choose.

“Good Niobe, you followed me into two exiles. And when I wanted to give you freedom, you would not take it. Niobe, make a last journey with me. Ready the chests for Sea. Take from here all goods that may be carried, and those retainers who are loyal. Provision my fleetest ship. This day we sail after Phaon!”

“Lady!” Niobe’s despair shook her voice.

“Do you fear the anger of Lord Kharaxos? Stay then, and learn who is stronger.”

“I fear only for you, Lady.”

“For me? Surely not for me. I am sister to the Muses. I am Sappho.”

“Strange portents scourge the air, Lady. Your brother’s wife hates you…”

“His wife?”

“They were married, with all your family gathered. It was a lavish wedding, but it lacked greatly, for it lacked the songs of Sappho.”

“All my family present? Eurygyos and Larichos can forgive Khar his born slave, his prostitute … and they cannot forgive me?”

“That is not the worst, Lady. There are ominous signs. Word comes from Eresos that a woman of the streets, vile past description in her reputation, is telling everyone that she is Sappho of Lesbos. And this creature, who was wretched before, now has riches past counting.”

Sappho nodded her head. “What do you make of it, Niobe?”

“I do not know, Lady.”

“Know this, then, that we go to Ithaca, to Sicily, to Poseidon’s kingdom, to the gates of Hades’ domain if necessary. My swifter Syracusan craft will overtake Phaon.”

“And then, Lady?”

Sappho struck Niobe full in the face. “Are you saying you cannot make me young again? You cannot make me beautiful? Well, you shall! You hear me, you shall!”

Niobe wept, but not for the blow.

“Do not pity me!” Sappho screamed at her. “I am blest of the Muses. They walk at my side. So, too, does the Kyprus-born. Forces and powers have I more than my brothers. And there is no mortal who can separate me from Phaon. He did not sail away from me, Niobe, but went in fear of the Prince Kharaxos. And he was right to go—he is only a diver after sponges. He cannot stand against the might of my house.

“But I will see this brother I was ready to forgive, who makes a slave a wife and censoriously denounces me and sends off the man I hold dearer than the world. Yes, I shall see this brother. Let him look at me, whom he has so wronged.”

“Lady, perhaps if you spoke with Lord Alkaios, he might help or at least prevent…”

“Lord Alkaios is drunk in some public house. It is not Alkaios but my brother I will see. And you, meanwhile, make ready for the journey, and never think to see this house, or these fields and orchards again, for you will not. Nor your children either. Now, have you finished? Am I beautiful? Good. Then bring the driver.”

The fellow did not come willingly, but was beaten to his post. On Sappho’s order they drove off.

Like one of the Erinyes she appeared at her brother’s estate, putting his servants into a quandary. “One does not announce a sister,” she told them and walked into the main hall, where Doricha and Khar lounged together with a zither player, who sang songs other than hers. They had been laughing, drinking wine, pelting each other with flowers. At sight of her they stopped.

Sappho called on her brother by name. “You shall suffer for what you did to me!”

“Phaon? He was lucky I didn’t dispatch him on the spot and leave him to rot on his own mast, run up like a bloodied sail.”

“What evil daimone possesses you, that you want to destroy not only yourself, but me? I have only loved you, Khar. Countless are the sacrifices and prayers I sent after you. Costly purple I spread at your feet on your return. What did I ever do to you except warn you against this Medea? Do you know what you have done? Call the Persian mourners, the Cissian wailers, for you have sent your sister out on the wild Sea.”

Khar leapt to his feet as though he would seize hold of her and stop her. “Sappho, are you mad to think of chasing after that boy?”

“They are my ships, and you cannot prevent it.”

“In what a twisted way you persist in seeing things, Sappho. I am not your enemy. I spared his life, and by sending him on his way, I spared your dignity. If now you will forget him and return to your house, the scandal will be forgotten. But if you go after him, where once you were revered, you shall be laughed at.”

Sappho smiled at him the smile he had been afraid of since he was an infant. “I’ve taken care of my posterity. I promise you when I die, I shall not be forgotten. Six books I leave to Alkaios on which will depend the fame of our age. For this was Sappho’s time upon Earth, and I took it all tender and green to my breast. It was my child. I have no other. And if at any moment you are still my brother, bring offerings in my name to the priestesses of Dionysos. I would not want Kleis to go hungry—although I’ve thought recently that she is dead.… You did me much harm, Khar. I never did you any.”

“I have saved your reputation, that is what I have done.”

“You have driven me from Lesbos. We will not see each other again in life.”

As she left, Khar called after her, using her childhood name, “Little Pebble!”

She did not turn.

Niobe and her people were already aboard the ship, and being stowed were what remained of Sappho’s worldly possessions. A wool mantle was placed around her shoulders by Niobe’s eldest daughter, and for the last time she was rowed from the twin harbors.

In open sea the route to Ithaca was by way of Corinth. They sailed past Chios and Andros, and the desolate island of Leucas, where they had put in on her journey to Syracuse.

At Corinth she inquired everywhere along the harbor for word of Phaon’s slower vessel. No one, however, could be sure if he had even passed that way. His small and undistinguished craft was not remembered. Sappho gave the order to reprovision the vessel and make straight for Ithaca. She was prepared to sail until they came to Sea’s rim and plunged over it.

The second day a fog descended and all landmarks were obscured. The captain prayed aloud to Poseidon of the blue hair and to Hecate, who gives aid to men who sail dark and treacherous waters.

Sappho did not pray to anyone. She spoke directly to the gods as men used to do. “If wanting to embrace his hands, his calves, feel his firm round arms about me, if this makes me dissolute … then the world has changed since Zeus himself loved. My heart is eager. You, Hera, oversaw it. You, Aphrodite, ordained it.”

She did not seek the shelter of the tent, but stood alone in a shrouded, unknowable world. It occurred to her that perhaps at moments like this one saw it best, not suborned by its pretty broidery in which the gods dressed it to beguile human senses. This blankness was as true a picture as sunny fields. Was one more true than the other? The world held all indifferently in spite of libations poured and prayers sent up in perfumed smoke.

For this blasphemy, they were driven back upon the route they had traversed. They were pitched northward almost upon the inhospitable bluffs of Leucas. The white fog seemed to harden before her eyes. But it was not fog, it was the rock of desperation, that monstrous white wall of stone rising between Earth and Heaven. For the second time a ship under her steered for the small hidden cove and beached there.

Anything repeated had, for Sappho, great mystery. Why did the lapping waves wash her up here again, all these years later? It was no accident, for calm and storm were under Poseidon’s control.

She remembered the shrine to Apollo that she had climbed at the start of her exile to Syracuse. Was it really twenty-five years ago? Had Apollo, who never lied, a message for her? Perhaps Phaon had been blown by a like wind to this very shore. It might be he had left some word at that lonely place of worship, which surmounted the great cliff. She knew this was impossible, and yet it would explain the strange sense of destiny that had taken hold of her.

“I will visit the shrine,” she said to Niobe.

“Day will be toward its finish when you reach the god Apollo, Lady,” Niobe cautioned.

“I will go.”

“Then take a taper for the descent.”

“My eyes are cat’s eyes; they see well in the dark.”

“I do not like this place, Lady. The sailors say that criminals were once thrown from the top to be dashed upon the rocks.”

“Yes,” Sappho replied, recalling the tale, “with birds tied to their shoulders so that if by some chance innocent … they should not die, but be borne gently down.”

“You have no birds, Lady.”

Sappho smiled. “Nor need of any.”

She climbed, remembering the springing steps that once carried her like a young goat up the trail. The way seemed to her now much longer. Her breath was short and seemed to desert her. She took in air by mouth and this made her light-headed. Sweat was crawling on her brow like a fly. She brushed it away. She thought she detected the edge of Gongyla’s milk-white dress as she slipped around a bend. But she saw now, it was little Timas, precious giver—and she laughed at the purple kerchief tied about her statue’s head.

She stopped to pick flowers, and Atthis bent to pick them with her, as the two of them had done so often. A heavy braid fell over Atthis’s shoulder. “Atthis? O Atthis, there is a corner of my heart for you—”

Farther on, she discovered a wild and thorny rose, which she plucked with care and added to the bunch that Apollo might have a token from her. Her heart was pounding. How long it had taken her to understand that love with sorrow is mated. “It’s all right,” she told Kleis. Kleis had come to take care of her. Tears rolled down her cheeks. Kleis had come. “Thank you, darling.”

And she turned to Khar; she could always turn to Khar because they had shared an exile. “Khar, the Moon is white in a sky that still belongs to Day, and neither the dead nor the living can I shake from my head. They climb with me, even Alkaios, a young Alkaios full of pranks.” She was young, too. She smiled indulgently at the young Sappho, the young Alkaios.

The last few paces were a scramble. She stood breathless at the summit. Far beneath, breaking white at the base of the cliff, Sea sent up spume.

Sappho knelt at Apollo’s shrine, among the broken columns, and laid there the tattered roses that had survived the winds. There were no other offerings. None had recently passed this way.

She addressed the rock-throned god: “You see before you, O healer, a woman. A poet … but a woman. Until this moment I thought I came in pursuit of love. But since you are a god and know all, you know it is a vain and foolish quest.”

She hummed a moment, a snatch of song, for her Way-Muses were with her. “I had a youth so full by day and night of delicate and dainty things, of dear loves and fair companions. And ever at my side the slender-ankled maidens. O my hetaerae, toward you this heart of mine will never change.

“Why am I here at your feet on this unlikely height?” she asked the god. “Phaon at the last opened his eyes and looked me in the face, and what he saw I do not wish to know. But I am not here because of Phaon. I am here because I cannot go forward and I cannot go back.” She smiled at the weathered god as she had smiled at Khar, it was a big sister smile. “We are wrong, I think, to envy the immortals. You must grow very weary.”

Slowly she stood and began to sing:

They say that Leda once

found hidden an egg

of hyacinth color

Atthis, I loved you long ago,

when my own girlhood was still all flowers

Earth of the many chaplets

puts on her embroidery

Love coming from Heaven

throws off his purple mantle

She wandered to the very edge of the precipice, drawn there step by step. From this distance, the billows seemed comfortable. The rocks could not be seen:

I shall put you to rest

on soft cushions.

You shall lie

on cushions new

She raised her arms. There were no birds on her shoulders. But winged words of many loves and many garlands woven held her a moment.

Sappho was surrounded by fair companions. She reached out to the unlimited.

Yet I could not expect to touch Heaven

with my two arms

She took one step more over air, calling to her nine sisters:

I long and I yearn

Rushing through vast air to a new exile, a new freedom, she was Sappho.

Someone hereafter, I tell you

will remember—

*   *   *

Crafts of all sizes, from small fishing boats to Kharaxos’s and Sappho’s own fleets, dredged as close as they dared to the awesome white Leucadian cliff against which Poseidon spewed his might. Silent slaves, fishermen, and young sponge divers with the grace of an Apollo or a Dionysos sprang again and again into the black waters. They were casting with nets.

On the shore Kharaxos walked with Alkaios. Alkaios was sobbing, Khar’s face was ashen as the cliff and looked carved from it. “If you love me, do not speak to me more, for I killed her. I sent her on this mad chase that has ended here. In love myself, I had no pity for her love, that last desperate flaring up. She would have shortly seen … but I drove the boy away.”

Alkaios sank deeper into misery, nor did he try to comfort his friend. Some ills there are that may not be cured. They walked the small crescent of sand shore in silence and retraced their steps under the high, commanding granite.

A sudden shout went up.

“They’ve found her!” Khar said.

A light boat was rowed in and beached. A diver, dripping water, lifted the small body ashore. Her brother and Alkaios approached and looked. Every bone was smashed so that the skin was no more than a sack for the pieces. A blanket was placed on the sand and the remains put into it. Khar knelt and tried to make an outline with the semblance of human form, but he could not even set the limbs straight. “Those awful virgins, the Gray Women, know I did not mean this. I swear by all the gods that be, I would give up everything, Doricha, anything at all, to have you breathe your grace upon me.” He abandoned his effort to smooth the rubble under the skin and looked distractedly at Alkaios.

His friend’s hand fell heavily to his shoulder. “I tell you this: Time will not break the meshes of her greatness.”

What seemed to comfort Alkaios, comforted Khar not at all. He turned again to the pitiful heap that, except for the raven hair with its white streak, was unrecognizable. What he saw was another time and another Sappho. With an iron knife he cut a lock of hair as dark as hers and commingled them. “Voyage with a fair breeze, Little Pebble.”

Alkaios continued staring at what had been Sappho of the violet tresses. “Not all the streams of all the rivers that flow below and on Earth can wash away this life.” He cut a lock of his own gray curls, as Khar had done, and laid it upon her.

A bowed form of an old woman wrapped in a mantle the color of the sand shore, moved. It was almost as though one of the rocks on the beach moved. Niobe walked to the blanket and stood looking down at her mistress. “You told me, Lady, to accompany you in this exile.” And before any knew what she would do, thrust a knife deep in her bowels.

Her corpse was laid respectfully at the feet of the poet.

Alkaios began a dirge, his voice stumbling so that only some of the words were heard, although the cadence was felt. Rough sailors who had lent their help in recovering the body of Sappho of Lesbos stood and wept and tried to hear Alkaios’s ode:

… Misfortune …

a sharer in sorrows …

Khar’s tears fell on the misshapen bundle at his feet, and he tore his clothes. Alkaios went on:

… for the incurable decline of life is at hand but

panic springs up in the terror-stricken breast of the

hart … maidens … ruin … the coldness of sea

waves …

The funeral chant ceased, but no one moved. They remained frozen in attitudes of grief and desolation as though they had been mourning figures captured on a temple frieze or on a black vase.

At last from the crowd a gnarled, weathered fisherman stepped forward. He had foraged a little way up the trail that led to Apollo’s shrine and found wild roses growing in a declivity between sand and stone. With coarse, reddened hands he laid them on Sappho’s distorted form, and in the soft Lesbian accent said simply:

Though few

they are roses