Lavanya Vasudevan
It is a long way from Crete to Athens, the skies are blooming with thunder, and even eloping young couples must stop to eat. They find a kapeleion on Naxos, where the wine flows hot, and the serving boys look like the sons of lesser gods. Soon, the princess has waded three or four cupfuls deep, and the hero is drunk on water, and the doubts that were stayed by sun and glory now rise up around them like the silt dredged up by a storm. Was he the first man she sent in with a ball of string to fight her bull-headed brother, or only the first to come out alive? When he emerged, choking on the monster's bloody stench, still clutching the thread she had unspooled for him, did he weep tears of joy that she had saved his life, or rage that he needed her aid? Their voices flash and spark in the combustible air, and their attendant begins rushing them through their courses, bringing the next almost before they are through with the first. Away with the tomatoes struck dumb with honey, the peas tangled up in their own blushing shoots; onward to the nectarines that ripen themselves and part their lips for a taste of melting butter poured from a curving jar, a sight that prompts her to wonder whether she had mistaken the hero's gratitude for love, and him to suggest that princesses were known to be fickle, to leave their lovers the minute they turned their backs, at which she flings her drink full in his face, the stain spreading scarlet across his cheeks and down his throat, and he flees to the relative calm of the turbulent coast, leaving her alone with the serving boy, who puts his soft, warm hand on her elbow, so that she looks up at him, at his bare shoulders in the candlelight, his black curls running down his back like roads she might follow anywhere, and realizes that he is no boy at all, but the god of the vine, and that it is not pity that gleams in his dark eyes, nor anger that quickens her heart, while the hero, alone on his mighty ship, loses his sail to the wind, and the entire length of papyrus falls on the battered shore of the beach, casts itself over the jagged teeth of the rocks, and sprawls out into the sodden path until it reaches the rough-hewn stone of the tavern floor, where, having looped and wound and knotted itself around vessels and vases and tables and stools, it arrives, abruptly and without pretense, at the princess' foot. The frayed end of the rough cloth flaps timidly against her toes, as if it were trying to tell her something, something that tugs at her like a half-forgotten string that she herself had tied once, around the fourth finger of her left hand, but it is so difficult, after all this time, after all that wine, to remember exactly what.