Monsters of Greek Mythology, Volume Two by Bernard Evslin

Author:Bernard Evslin
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781497667075
Publisher: Open Road Media

7

The Stretching

That night Palaemona heard no screams. She was very pleased. The silence was like a song sung to her by Melampus, who sang no more.

The next day Melampus’s steward visited the Bullman and was given a sack of gold. Some hours later a great ox-drawn wagon loaded with empty wine casks went forth from the castle. When it rolled back through the gates that evening the casks were full.

The banquet hall rocked with revelry that night. Melampus made up for a week’s drought by drinking off cup after cup of undiluted wine. He drank himself into a stupor, finally into insensibility. Fragments of song drifted up to Palaemona in her chamber. She listened only for his voice threading among the shouts and the sounds of breaking crockery. She heard the loud braying laughter of the oreades. She fell asleep clinging to his voice.

Melampus was sick and disgusted when he woke up the next morning—a lovely sunny day it was, but the brightness only made his head ache. Just as he was dragging himself out of bed he heard Palaemona laughing. The clear, joyous sound went through his head like a lance. He rushed from his room and roared at her as she danced down the hallway.

“What are you laughing at? I don’t see anything funny.”

The girl stopped laughing. She looked at him as if she had never seen him before. She turned swiftly and ran out of his sight. From that hour no one in the castle heard her laugh again.

There was nothing for her now but silence. The comic dance of leaf shadows was blown away by the blast of his voice. The joke of young things—of puppy, lamb, and puffed-up frog—was darkened by his anger. Streams hissed instead of giggling; the birds did not sing but mourned in different voices.

She took to following him everywhere to spy upon the force that had robbed her of laughter. So light was her foot—she flitted so quickly from tree to tree and knew so well how to melt into shadows—that he never actually saw her following. He felt the pressure of a witness nevertheless, and his mood grew heavier. Indoors, too, she followed him and was hard to catch. She darkened the mirrors so that she could hide. Calling to him rarely, her voice was like bells in the cold glass. Fingering his bedclothes, she tied one knot, almost by accident, but that was enough to give him strangling dreams.

He was easy only among his oreades, finally. Early each morning he went to the stable and whistled. A mountain nymph appeared, stretching her long arms and laughing at the sky. She grasped him about the waist, lifted him over her head, and set him solidly on her shoulders. For that first instant, astride one of his magnificent tall nymphs, the bewildered pain slipped from his face. He grasped the reins of her hair, and she galloped away. And Palaemona wandered by herself in the garden, trying to match things up.

“How he dotes on them,” she thought.

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