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COPYRIGHT INFORMATION
Copyright © 1977 by Thomas Burnett Swann.
Published by Wildside Press LLC.
www.wildsidebooks.com
CHAPTER ONE
“…and you will wed your uncle, the priest of Melkart, as befits a princess of Tyre.”
The words of her brother, the king, inscribed on papyrus-thin ivory, screeched in her ears like a cry of marauding Harpies. She, fifteen-year old Dido, to marry a plump, middle-aged man with a shaved head who collected babies for the belly of Baal and reeked in his shapeless robes of smoke and blood! The custom of consanguineous marriages—brother and sister, niece and uncle—was borrowed from Egypt and honored throughout the East. After all, her brother was wifeless, childless, and sterile, and she was expected to wed a suitable husband and bear a son to inherit the throne. But to marry an uncle whom she despised because he never sacrificed lambs when babies were in supply, to please a brother whom she abhorred because he thought of her as a link in a royal chain and imprisoned her in a palace (or so he thought) to preserve her virginity…well, it was time to revolt.
Her father had been an explorer-prince; her mother—or so it would seem from the daughter’s amber hair and certain stories told in the marketplace—had been a Nereid whom he met on a voyage to Utica, a colony lodged among barbarous black kings and kingly elephants. That her father had been a prince did not impress her, but his valorous explorations, his loving a nymph of the sea, gave her a sense of mission, yes, importance. She rarely looked in a mirror, she often looked at a map, and neither an uncle nor a brother figured in her plans…
She had pledged her heart to a green-haired sailor boy, a Glaucus from the Aegean, and she fled toward his ship to tell him of her news. Thanks to her sister Anna, she had hidden her amber hair in a plain gray snood and borrowed the homespun robe of a chamber slave; thanks to Anna and other slaves—friends in her thought (friends in truth?)—she had left the palace without alerting the guards at the brass, lion-flanked gate, and now she neared the ships.
A narrow isthmus, traversed by an avenue of basalt blocks, connected island Tyre with the mainland of Asia and that particular region known as Canaan to Tyrians or Phoenicia to foreigners. Berths were cut in the isthmus to accommodate ships which lingered for sails to be mended or decks to be caulked, or simply to wait for a cargo of rubies from Ind or roc eggs from Araby. Glaucus’ bireme, briefly awaiting a cargo of cedars for the temples of Egypt, sat at anchor between the citadel of Tyre, “the city dreamed by the gods,” and the forests of Mt. Carmel which climbed into haunts of lion and bear and runaway slave. She did not look behind her at the city, rising ring upon ring in red-roofed houses and temples with cedar pillars (she never looked behind her, now or at any time); she looked at the pointed slippers which slowed her flight, kicked them into the sea, and ignored the murex shells, bleached, broken, and robbed of their dye, which cut and bruised her feet. She was not a boyish girl; she was an angry girl.
“Little Mother!” one of the sailors cried. They were used to her frequent visits to the docks; a snood and homespun could not deceive their trained and far-seeing eyes. Only one man had ever molested her, though she mingled with harlots who came to lie with the seamen; once a tiller, drunk on the wine of dates, had seized her arm and torn her gown, and his mates had boiled him in pitch intended for caulking their ship. Usually she brought a basket of sweetmeats for beggars and fishwives, and golden shekels for sailors from many lands; dwindling Egypt, rising Assyria, beleagured Troy, especially the city-states of Phoenicia, Sidon, Byblos, and Tyre, the little giant.
I am plain, she thought, and thus I am safe from men. But none of the sailors seemed to agree with her. Not from the look in their eyes: Dido plain…she with the amber hair and the murex-purple eyes? In truth, she was loved for her giving—not the gifts themselves, which were little things—but her wanting to give and listen and talk. Still, she was beautiful.
“Arion,” she cried. “I am looking for Glaucus, my friend.”
“He is hard to lose, sweet Dido.” His ebony hair was caught in a ring; his strong, semitic nose commanded his face.
“Here!” Glaucus rose from mending a sail, purple canvas stamped with the Sphinx of Tyre, and caught her in his arms. She felt like a ship which has found a pharos in the midst of a storm (for ships could feel, love, and hurt; even the unimaginative Tyrians treated them as a living race; they were metamorphosed forests which remembered their roots).
She cradled his head against her full and womanly breast, oddly reversing the role of savior and saved. “Glaucus, I am to—”
“Dido, thy brother’s men will see thee!”
Was no one deceived by her careful disguise? Why, the guards at the palace gate must have known from the first of her frequent flights!
The sail made a tent above them. Before the shadows eclipsed the light, she saw the supple body, the forest of green and labyrinthine hair (a miniature Mt. Carmel in which her fingers could play and explore), and more than his gentle spirit stirred in her blood.
She told him about the betrothal…
Glaucus at seventeen, though universally liked by his mates, was a common sailor and not an officer. He could not sail her to Rhodes, the island of roses and palms, nor to Crete, where lizards played in the baths of forgotten queens and untrod stairways spiraled into the sea. He belonged to the Glauci, a maritime race who took their name from a god of the Greeks and resembled the fish-tailed Tritons, though their bodies ended in proper human legs and they breathed through lungs and not Tritonian gills. Perhaps his people descended from the folk who, at the end of the Golden Age, had fled to the sea and changed themselves into dolphins, except that the Glauci had never completed the change. Caught between sea and shore, they were wistful and pessimistic and prone to adoring attachments with humans, secure on the land, or Nereids, born to the waves. Glaucus had lost his parents to a shark; a kindly sailor, now dead, had brought him aboard his ship and taught him sailoring. Dido loved him for his lostness and need, and mothered him with the delicacies which she stole from the palace kitchen or the mantles and loin cloths which she wove on her warpweighted loom. She also yearned for the strangeness of his beauty, the green hair and the greener eyes, slanted like those of certain Eastern folk; the broad chest and slender thighs of a swimmer; and she desired him with a virgin’s guilt and confusion, in a kingdom where girls less royal devoted their maidenheads to Astarte, queen of the sky, at the start of their puberty. To be apart from him was sometimes to fall upon jagged nautilus shells; sometimes to make a ladder from Astarte’s rainbow and climb to the gates of the goddess’ paradise; and to meet with him only to talk was no less cruel and no less enthralling to her.
“Thou cannot marry so evil a man,” he said, in the slow and formal manner of Glauci who learn Phoenician, enunciating with perfect clarity. A boy at court, he sounded, a sailor boy, he looked, smudged with tar, clad in sandals and ragged loin cloth (so lately trim from her loom). His formal speech offended her ear; the sailor made her envy the prostitutes.
“No, my dearest.” She clasped his hand (and felt the nautilus shards of unassuaged desire). “My uncle Sychaeus worships his nephew, the King. Any son I bear will follow their ways. Sacrifice babies and fill the coffers of Tyre. I will run away from this greedy place. I had thought of climbing the mountain if you would come with me. We could live in a cave with the bears. My brother has shut me into a prison which he calls ‘The Princess’ palace.’ I have a hundred slaves but not a single use. I am not even decorative like a spun-glass bowl!”
“Dido, Dido, look at yourself in a mirror!”
“I did this very day. To see if my hair was hidden under my snood.”
“It is, except for a tiny wisp.” He touched the escaping curl with his fingertip.
“Well, no one will notice a wisp. And no one will miss me when I am gone, except as a possible mother for an heir.”
Glaucus spuddered. “The snow on the mountain would kill me.”
“But