“I am a virgin.” she said, a confession and not a boast in a city whose patron goddess was worshipped with maidenheads.
“So too am I,” said Glaucus without the slightest shame (and he a man!) “Except for thee, I have never yearned after human girls. But both of us, thou and I, are Peoples of the Sea.” He approached her and shyly opened his arms, manliness with a maiden’s reticence. “I think it is thus.…”
Their embrace, though not their first, was awkward because it must lead to the marriage couch, a heap of silks and linens thoughtfully left by the captain in the darkest part of the tent. Their noses bumped and their lips refused to meet (not that she minded a moist ear).
“Dido,” he said. “Call on thy queen of love. Give us into her hands.”
“I expect she is angry because I have waited so long.”
“That is not what she told the captain. Enduring love: a rarity in her eyes.”
“Well then…” and Astarte heard her prayer.
The warm sun of morning was on them, and they on milky sands, and then a tumble of waves (but welcome to folk of the sea), and then the ebb of the tide, and Dido thought, “Love is as sweet as my dream.” (Why did she add “almost”?)
Glaucus murmured not “Love” but “Little Mother”, and Dido sighed and smiled, “Mother first, my husband? Never mind. I am, as I am.” But she minded more than she said and even more than she thought, and remembered Helen, unscarred by wars and time and loved by gods and men.
The light which blinded them did not come from Astarte. The awning was jerked from the deck; Pygmalion’s soldiers had ringed them with blazing spears.
“Virgin,” taunted the captain. “‘She shall play no more on the docks,’ said the King to me, when I told him what I had heard. ‘Flights from the palace, disguises, talk with the scum of the docks. No one will harm a princess of Tyre. But she must have a husband, and I an heir.’ But now she has lain with a common sailor, a Glaucus at that!” If his spear was a shaft of sun, his sword was sculptured night. His men were like figureheads on a beached and silent ship.
She did not see the blade which pierced her husband’s heart; she fell to her knees and felt him die, however; the leap of the stricken body: the ebbing of life. She saw the spirit depart from his lips, and wanted to immaterialize and join its flight, but not from fear.
Fury possessed her ahead of grief. “I shall leave this city,” she cried. “I shall find a place where babies can grow to men, and maidens can marry them.”
“Leave?” laughed the captain, cleansing his blade on a cloth from the wedding couch. “How, may I ask? In a cockleshell?”
“In a fleet, how else? And if I could, I would send a wave against Tyre and drown my brother and men who serve him like you!” As long as she raved, grief was a crouching lion; she did not want him to spring at her throat.
The silent men began to whisper and shuffle and move away from her.
Even the captain quailed before her threat. For everyone knew the story of her birth. Dido, born of a nymph, a sorceress of the sea…
“Come,” he blurted. “The King is waiting for you.”
But sailors lined the isthmus and one of them called to her (Arion? She could not see through her tears.) “Little Mother, when you have need of us…”
Carthage was born of a wedding and a death.
CHAPTER TWO
Ten years later, aboard Aeneas’ ship, “The Gallant Bear”
Ascanius looked at the sky and could not find a cloud; the rowers toiled at their oars for lack of wind but did not begrudge the work, because they rowed for his father, Aeneas, the wandering hero from Troy. They were eager (he knew) to return to the sea and search for a land to build their second Troy. They wished to forget the burial on the island, proud Anchises, Aeneas’ aged father, an exiled king. The sail, windless, looked as limp and bedraggled as a sleeping bat. Behind them, Sicily was a diminishing coast, ragged with mountains; then a silhouette; then unbroken, unruffled sea. Aeneas stood like Apollo, slender of build, but bronze from the sun, as if he wore armor instead of a loin cloth, and clapped his hands to guide the beat of the oars.
The storm fell upon them like a horse with wings, a Pegasus; black and big as a town. Wings eclipsed the sun; hoofbeats rent the mast. Snap, snap, snap! The twenty oars were broken and kicked into the sea. The other vessels dissolved in the dark (devoured?). The sound of the waves as they struck the hull was like the clashing of rocks. They did not seem liquid, but hard; solid in fact, and some of them swept the deck and struck him in his eyrie under a rower’s bench.
Then, a fleeting lull, the eye of the storm, blackness around and above them, but they in a tiny calm.
“Little Bear,” Aeneas said, binding him under his bench, for the ship had no cabin; its awning had flown with its sail. “These thongs will hold you against the wind and the waves. If the ship should begin to sink, why, here, you pull this cord and release yourself.”
“Papa,” gasped the child. “The Gallant Bear has lost her sail and her oars—her teeth and claws. How can she fight?”
“It is Hera’s storm. I must pray to my mother, Aphrodite.”
“What does she know about storms?” Hera was Zeus’ queen; she commanded the elements. Aphrodite, or so he had thought, could only command the heart. “Papa!”
“Yes, Little Bear?”
“Kiss me, will you? It may be the last time. It will be like a coin with which to pay Charon, the gray ferryman.”
Aeneas enclosed the child in his arms. He kissed him on either cheek.
“Forehead too!”
“I am your coin. Go where you will, and I am with you, my son.”
Then, the winds returned, like Pegasus striking a fleet, and the horse was under the ship, lifting her onto a wave as high as the walls of Troy before their fall, and thrusting her straightaway toward a coast known only to Hera and her ally Poseidon, who had raised the waves at her august command.
Ascanius tried to watch his father comfort the men. They were driven by the sea. Comfort and not command was all he could give. He groped from bench to bench, he held the tiller’s hand when a wave—a hoof?—attempted to hurl him into the turbulence. As long as Ascanius saw his father, he would not need his coin. Storms had struck them in many seas.
But never Hera’s storm…
“Aphrodite, look after your son!” he prayed (“and grandson while you’re about it”). “I promise to ravish a virgin for you!” (“When I am older,” he added, for he was only ten and ravishing meant no more than a hug to him).
Then stillness, the Pegasus flown to his celestial haunt…an alien coast…the ship on a littered beach.
“Gallant Bear,” said Ascanius. “You brought us through!” Not I, not I…
But through to where?
Perhaps the shore of the Styx.
How often Aeneas had said to him, “Don’t be afraid, Little Bear. We’ve fought them for seven years, those jealous gods, and they aren’t going to get us now.” It was always “us”, he and his father, against the jealous gods.
“Well, Ascanius, we escaped them again. Her at least!” (“Her” being Hera; she hated Aeneas because he was a Trojan, as she had hated Troy, the city of Paris, who had proclaimed her—the Queen of the Gods, and for all Olympus to hear!—as less than Aphrodite.)
“But they did get Grandfather, didn’t they?” The old Dardanian king, Anchises, had demanded formality, and “grand” must be followed