Sappho (6 page)

The miscreants looked at one another, unable to believe this clemency. There was a stir among them. Her brother went up to Pittakos and clasped his arm. Even Alkaios said to him, “You have spoken well.”

Sappho said nothing, not to Pittakos or her companions. Alkaios, in high spirits at their reprieve, reached for her hand, which she tore from his.

“Do not meddle with the Pebble.”

*   *   *

Sappho was bitter at being the recipient of Pittakos's leniency and angry with Alkaios for treating Pittakos as an equal. She was altogether out of sorts.

This was the moment her mother chose to speak to her of the young men who, with encouragement, might become suitors. “But,” her mother continued in gentle reproof, “a girl who behaves so outspokenly will end up becoming what Aphrodite abhors most, an old virgin.”

“I could always go to the priestesses of Dionysos and live in a cave with the sacred snakes,” Sappho teased.

“Sappho, I am trying to have a serious talk with you.” Nevertheless Kleis shuddered. She was afraid of those priestesses who communed with gods and knew the hour of each person's death. She sighed at her inability to oppose her small, imperious daughter.

A second person sought Sappho that day whom she treated no better.

“I have not forgotten my anger, Alkaios. Why are you here?”

“Sappho, stop playing the part of a spoiled child. Great happenings can be brought about.”

She looked at him with curiosity.

“Would you still bring down the Tyrant Mysilos and his henchman Pittakos?”

Immediately she was on her feet. “Not here in the house. Come, walk with me by the columns of the loggia and tell me what is in your mind.”

In the sunshine she felt free from prying ears and eyes. “You have some word of your brother?”

“You are shrewd, Sappho.”

“But how? He has not had time to reach Egypt.”

“He left a message that I just found.”

“What is it?”

Alkaios hesitated. “The gods know, now that I am here I am afraid to tell you.”

She laughed at him. “For what do you fear? Your heart or your head?”

“My heart you have danced on with heedless feet until it is squashed flat with no life in it at all. But I have given some thought to the creeping poison they say Mysilos uses.”

She tossed her dark hair. “I do not fear him. And I don't believe there is a message.”

He drew a folded sheet of papyrus from his breast and showed it to her.

She looked from it to him. “What is it? A map of the city?”

“First, is this my brother's genuine name-stamp and seal?”

She frowned over it. “Yes, of that I am quite certain. But these round dots?” Her frown deepened as she studied the sketch. “Could they be the stone markers pointing to the entrance of Mitylene?”

He nodded. “And the cross?”

She shook her head, puzzled.

“It has to be the spot that holds the body of Melanchros.”

She grabbed his hand with all her strength, her eyes enormous in her face. “Alkaios, by the gods … Where was this hidden and why did you not find it sooner? Perhaps the papyrus was placed there by Pittakos?”

“You recognized Atreus's seal. The map was hidden under the sundial in my garden, a spot he and I used when we were boys.”

“Why did you not look there at once?”

“It has been so many years. I told you, we were boys. But in thinking of it, it occurred to me that perhaps he had left a message, and I looked in the old place.”

Sappho was double-listening—to him, and inside herself. “It could be a trap,” she said. “Atreus could have been forced. It might be the price for a passage to Egypt.”

Alkaios rejected this angrily. “My brother is of my house and lineage. He would not betray us.”

Sappho threw her arms wide, abandoning herself to joy. “Then we have brought down Pittakos and his straw man!” Her voice dropped to a whisper, and she brought her face close to his. “Alkaios, what would you say to a decayed body wrapped in its poor winding sheet, left moldering in the very center of the market square for all Mitylene to see?”

Alkaios did not share her enthusiasm. “A moldering body? You mean … dig him up? Surely that is not a job for two poets.”

“Why not? It is the highest duty of the poet to fight for freedom.”

He shook his head. “I have no taste for this enterprise. If you want to know, the thought of what we may find turns my stomach. And you, Sappho, are”—he searched for an inoffensive word—“delicate.”

She glared at him. “Small. That's what you mean, small. It doesn't matter—we will bring the others.”

“There are too many to trust with the secret.”

“Khar, then. Khar will help us.”

Alkaios still wavered. “Suppose you are right and Atreus was forced? They will be watching the spot.”

“We won't do it tomorrow, or the next day, or the day after that. Eventually they will grow tired and not watch.”

“O Sappho of the violet hair. Why must we always be serious? If we are not engaged in plots, we are analyzing the work of Ionian Mimnermos, or Terpander of Antiss, or experimenting with lines based on different sounds and lengths. Why can't I take you in my arms like any other girl? Do you know I have never kissed you?”

A smile touched Sappho's lips, and she began to twist a coronet of thyme, interspersed with hyacinth. “You are my dear friend. We have too much to risk by such nonsense. Besides, you have your young lads. That was a sweet lay you wrote to the mole on the boy's throat.”

“Yes. Well, all I know is, I am going to get drunk. Why wait for lamplighting time? The day has but a finger's length to go.”

*   *   *

Sappho determined to be prudent, cautious and above all patient, traits for which she had not hitherto been known. She avoided Alkaios. She even avoided being alone with Khar. She developed the habit of smiling suddenly, disconcertingly. It was a dangerous smile that focused on nothing at all. She let the days pass, opening herself to all around her. She heard the partridge's call, listened to the shepherd's pipes and the bleat of flocks. She watched mules drag thick pines down from the mountain where they grew. She knew it took twenty such to make a boat, for she was of a seafaring race. She crouched beside the first yellow crocus, not yet unfolded, and touched its furled petals.

The festival of the joy-god Dionysos was upon them. Five days of theater, dancing, poetry, and all manner of drinking contests, knucklebones, trials of strength, and revelry. A messenger from the priestesses would come, as they had for two years past, asking her to lead the chorus with new works, and she must be ready. She wandered alone in sacred groves. When she had drunk in the world, the world would spill out again—the pale ash, the round silver leaves of the beech, the aromatic scent from lentisk and samphire.

She wished it were still possible to mingle with the gods as in the days before the quarrel between Zeus and Prometheus. She would seek out the Muses, those nine daughters of Zeus and Memory whose hearts were set on music and poetry. If she could speak to only one, it would be Erato, who sang on a golden lyre of sweet lyric love. It seemed to Sappho that lyric poems, more than any others, said your inmost thoughts.

Toward day's end she plunged into the river like a naiad. Then, drying her body with the soft cambric of her robe, she hurried home. There was a man lingering by the whitewashed stones outside the city gate. She walked faster to her house and locked herself in her room. Once inside, she forgot the man.

She communed a few moments with herself and then made earnest supplication:

Hither now,

tender Graces

and lovely-haired Muses

They descended, and Erato pressed these lines into her senses.

Now the Earth with many flowers

puts on her spring embroidery

She made it firm in her memory and went to sleep. The man she had seen by the whitewashed stone appeared to her as a kentaur, that half-man creature. She smiled her unexpected smile as she slept. So simple-hearted were her verses, so dangerous her smile. Kentaur or man, she recognized him even in her dream as a servant of Pittakos.

The next morning she did not leave her chamber. In preparation for the ode she would write to Dionysos, she thought of the world as it had been before he or any god inhabited it. She closed her eyes and, after a while, looked into an unmeasurable abyss. Darkness with Chaos brooding her bore two children: black-winged Night and Erebus the unfathomable, in whose bosom was laid a windblown egg. From this the Seasons rolled, and the Seasons created Love, who, holding within her Dionysos and Aphrodite, made Light and banished wild confusion.

With greater effort, looking closer, Sappho saw the disk of Earth divide into equal parts. Beyond where it flowed was cloud-wrapped mystery.

Some things were known. There were always seven wise men in the world and they told that at the back of the North Wind was a blissful land where Hyperboreans lived. To the South, Ethiopians held joyful banquets in their halls. The blessed dead lived by Ocean's sand. But the fearful Kimmerians lived no one knew where, and day was never there—so it had been told and sung to her. Therefore, not priests but poets were closer to the beginning of the world and the meaning that ever emerged.

It was Dionysos himself who showed her these things. Within her small frame a great cauldron spilled sentences, seemingly calm, but when you looked hard, the words seared; not raging, but rage invoking. Her lips formed what the young god dictated:

While the full moon rose, young girls

took their place around the altar.

In old days Cretan girls danced

supplely around an altar of love,

crushing the soft flowering grass

Sappho swayed with abandon, repeating the verse. This year, too, she would lead the choral dance of Arkadia.

*   *   *

The message Sappho had been expecting came to her from the priestesses of the caves. It was brought by a young novice, a graceful girl of Sappho's age, with delicate waist and shapely ankles. Sappho delighted in looking at her and offered her a cup of Pramnian wine and grated goat's cheese into it herself with a bronze grater, while a slave threw in barley meal. The girl, lovely, virginal, and shy, kept her eyes down as she drank, only gradually daring to look at Sappho.

She is not used to a great house, Sappho concluded, and spoke kindly to the girl, who, for all that she was a novice of the powerful sisterhood, was still a simple country maid. “Come, have another cup of the wine I have prepared for you. Then you will tell me your message.”

The wine brought a flush to the girl's face and courage to begin. “I am come…”

“Yes?” Sappho smiled.

“I am come…”

“Ah, it is the great festival of Dionysos!”

The girl darted a grateful glance at her.

Sappho continued to spare her shyness. “They, the priestesses, wish me to compose a verse.”

“Yes, oh yes.”

Sappho laughed. “It is difficult to talk with someone who knows me, but whom I do not know. Tell me your name.”

“Doris. It is Doris.”

“Well then, Doris, the verse is written. Shall I teach it to you, or am I to instruct the chorus?”

“The initiates, the holy priestesses of Dionysos Zagreus, son of Zeus, wish you to instruct and lead the chorus as you did last year.”

“And,” Sappho prompted, watching her, “these priestesses of Dionysos, what do they say of Sappho?”

“Those who listen to the joy-god whose heart All-Father Zeus swallowed to produce him anew, that he might destroy the Titans by lightning and from their ashes create man…” This litany, recited in a small, clear voice, left Doris short of breath. She began again, hands folded in her lap. “They say there is witchery in your words. That to produce them you enter into divine madness. They say you are our sister.”

“Ah,” Sappho breathed. She shared her mother's fear of this society of women who alone knew how to appease the powers below, the Khthonians, Lords of Death. “Actually, you see, it is all very simple with me. That is, crickets sing at noon and I sing back. Or I see a garden of cyclamen bordered with red-flowering oleander, and I stand outside myself and in joy grow with them. Do you see?”

The novice nodded her head. “It is ever so. Do you think she at Delphi knows the words that pass her lips? The sisterhood say your utterances are so passionate they are made in flames.”

Sappho looked at the serene young face, unshakable in its knowing, and wondered if indeed her words struck so close.

*   *   *

She heard a zither, the strains floating up from the street.

Standing by my bed

In gold sandals

Dawn that very

moment woke me

She stretched her arms above her head and her heavy, well-molded lips curved with inward thought. Dionysos the spring-god signaled the time of year for his festival, when the long days begin, when animals are in foal, the earth newly bedecked, and the vine puts out young shoots.

I long and I yearn

The words were spoken aloud in furious joy, a hymn to herself. This was the first day of the celebration. Theater was part of it, and she, a participant, was temporarily a holy person, a servant of Dionysos. She savored the importance of it: Dionysos, master of magic and illusion. Last year he caused a vine to grow from the penis of the statue of a senator in the public square. It was a pompous statue, and as the vine lengthened the laughter grew.

Sappho's coan robe, made for the occasion, was purple, that most costly of colors, with circles of saffron. Even at this early hour slaves were searching for roses of the same hue for her hair. She remembered to give thanks to the poet Arion, who first costumed the chorus.