Voice of the Fish by Lars Horn

Author:Lars Horn [Horn, Lars]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781644450895
Publisher: Graywolf Press
Published: 2022-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

Judgement Run Down as Waters

In his Histories, Herodotus recounts a failed alliance between Amasis II, pharaoh of Egypt, and Polycrates, tyrant king of Samos. As legend has it, Amasis, concerned by Polycrates’ unnaturally good fortune, counselled the king against injuring the gods—jealous creatures that they are. Thus, the pharaoh advised Polycrates to cast away the item he considered most precious so that, by his suffering, he might escape the otherwise certain ruin that awaited him. Seeing this advice to be good, Polycrates long considered that which he valued most. Eventually, the king ordered a fifty-oared boat far out to sea, took an emerald-set signet ring from his finger, and hurled it into the chop. Returning to shore, the king grieved his loss.

Several days later, a local fisherman landed an exceptionally large fish. After salting and wrapping the flesh in muslin, the fisherman slung the beast across his back, carried it through dust, banding heat. At the palace, he made an offering of the fish to Polycrates, who immediately ordered it to be prepared for table. It was then, in the bowels of the palace kitchen, the fish gutted by a scullion, that the signet ring was recovered—wet, gleaming—from within the fish’s belly. Polycrates saw divine will in these events, and wrote of his fortune to Amasis. But Amasis, seeing not divine will, but the tightening grip of fate, broke off an alliance with the king, who, as it turned out, would be murdered by a false ally, his body crucified and left to decay in the heat.

In another version of this myth, so angered are the gods by Polycrates’ offering, they return the ring as before, in the stomach of a great fish, only to then take his son in a single night of illness, the boy suffocating as his lungs drown in fluid.

Created second only to light and darkness, its body divided to arc the heavens, water retains its celestial origins: The blue violence of unknowable knowledge. Tides that mete out archaic, Old Testament justice.

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