Sapphic Erotica Festival

ANANKE by trilby else ([email protected]) Codes: FF myth -------------------------------------------------------------------- 1. Ananke waited, but Clio had duties first. The Muse of history knelt over the sleeping couple, her hand on each of their heads. It had been a hectic day, and tomorrow, with the harvest still not yet in, would be another. But these two, the storytellers of this clan, had sat up long and late with Clio, and they would recall what they and their neighbors had seen and done. This harvest would be remembered centuries from now. They would sing it in heroic cadences more familiar to Clio's sister Calliope, perhaps, so it would be easier for the youngest to remember and sing in their turn. But this epic would be real. The Muse sighed as she rose. Centuries from now, the youngest who heard it would not hear the lesson in it, and they would be busy otherwise. She looked at the wattled walls and through them, and saw the sunlit field full of torn bodies that would be here, then, as clearly as she saw the moonlit expanse of yams that owned it now. In time this would be a desert anyway. The Fates had spun the spoiling of that field, and the lives wasted on it. Ananke herself saw it happen and what came next. Clio's part was only to stand with those who watched, and try to help them tell the truth. At least with Ananke, she could talk of it, when their time together was about talking. Clio sighed again. That was all as nothing to these two storytellers, who slept now in the weariness of farming that field. Then she just stepped back and left them. Ananke waited for her. A moment and a continent away, she strode up the path from the shore, stopping at a break in the trees to feel the wind off the Great Sea. Wherever history took Clio in the lands beyond, and whatever the people there called this sea if they even knew it was here, she still missed this. She looked out, but the horizon was blue and clear. She was Clio, and she knew what could cross that horizon, blown on this vibrant wind. Ships of heroes, sackers of cities, slaves dying as their homes receded, rats in the grain thoughtless of the plague their fleas nursed. No threat to her or her sisters, or any guest of theirs here, but finding victims elsewhere. Not for the first or the millionth time, she closed her eyes to let the breeze stroke her. The breeze was blameless for what it blew hither. Footsteps rose in her hearing and she stayed still and sightless, recognizing their grace even that faintly. Stillness was better when Terpsichore was near, because anyone else's movement seemed like feeble imitation--or so it felt to Clio, more at home in stillness anyway. Her own mortals' dance was within them, deeper than most. Then she looked, because Terpsichore the dancer was too pretty not to look at, even at rest. She swayed slightly as she stood, finding rhythms in birdsong and leaf-rustle, even the pulse of the tide that was to Clio only a distant call. Resplendent in her nudity, she gazed fondly at her scholarly sister. "Someday," Terpsichore said, "I'll teach you to dance. They'll be reft of words at the sight of you--maybe Euterpe will be equal to describing it." *Or Thalia would write a comedy about it.* "Apollo gave each of us enough to tend to," Clio told her instead. She let her gaze linger in Terpsichore's supple curves, and saw the gleam of exertion. "Where have you been?" Terpsichore smiled. "On another shore. Not too far from here, when the day's over." "Ah." Clio recognized the smile. "Yes. The delight of your eye. "You were watching a Serpent dance for her sisters." Clio had seen that, herself, and loved the way the women moved, as the sun moved on them. They were not wholly of the mortal world the Muses were charged with, but Apollo's charge was that they ward and guide beauty and truth where these could be found. She knew her own enjoyment of the Serpent's wild, joyous winding was only a drop in the ocean of Terpsichore's. But . . . "I know." Terpsichore put a hand on her cheek. "My quiet sister, the historian. You know what doom befalls the Serpent clan. The shadow on that bright beach, as Euterpe might say it. "I can put it aside and walk to another dance." Clio smiled, to think of her doing anything as prosaic as *walking,* but Terpsichore went on. "Calliope can clothe it in stirring verse and Melpomene can call it up to teach older lessons. "But all you see, dear one, are the massacres. And you find wise and foolish chroniclers to tell them what they've done. And they go on doing it." *They have to,* Clio would have said. But she'd heard truth that long ago, lying with Ananke after love. Going to Ananke now, she had to summon something brighter than Ananke's own sad wisdom, to give her lover between the caresses. Now Clio covered Terpsichore's hand with her own. "Sometimes they read, and remember. Sometimes they survive." She lifted it and kissed the palm. "And you teach them to dance, and they do listen. They move, and they live." Terpsichore kept her hand and they walked up toward the temples together. 2. It was a smaller mountain the Muses shared as their own, far from thunderous Olympus or even Parnassus, more urbane but still a court. This, too, was a place of gods, but gentle enough that mortal devotees could visit, drawn each by their Muse, and feel brave enough to work their own gift. Truthfully, the Muses preferred it here to Zeus' court. Their father seldom offered critical opinion, but he could be crushingly absolute. It was seldom that everyone was here. Calliope, perhaps, might be on the continent where Clio had been, helping someone dream of the *Mwindo* saga that would be so unlike the quiet oral history Clio had sealed in the farming village. Or she might be deep in the future, building the epic of the great flying ships, the legend for those who dreamed of living over the sky, where no one had gone before. The others . . . Clio felt Terpsichore skip a little to a new beat only she could hear. Then Clio, too, heard divine runs on the lyre and the flute, and then echoes, nearly as good, mortals' hands following the Muses' lead. Erato and Euterpe were here. This close to her sisters, under their gentle spell, Clio knew even the earthborn could achieve Apollo's ideal. She squeezed Terpsichore's hand and then let go. Terpsichore leaped away into the bower where their sisters and their pupils sat. Their eyes, Muse and mortal, lit up to see her body move, turning even Euterpe's idle piping air into something like flight. Terpsichore's liquid inrush was never an interruption--more like an unexpected sunbeam, something to drop everything and love. Euterpe and her pupil looked at each other and then played together, and Clio leaned against a tree and watched as Terpsichore mounted the flute melody and rode it. Erato's pupil stared at the Muse of dance as though she'd forgotten anything else existed, and her fingers caressed the lyre she held without looking. Clio looked at her, a striking woman suddenly lovely in her absorption, and knew she was playing the song her heart was beating. *To see my sister dance is to love her, and this one is in love, a little bit.* Clio traded a smile with Erato, seeing Terpsichore bewitch the mortal lyrist. Erato was serene. The woman was still hers, and while it was rarer, the Muse of love poetry had distracted her share of dancers in turn, whispering in the pauses of their breath. And then in a flash of sleek brown limbs Terpsichore was gone, perhaps to a courtyard to tempt the nymphs there to join her in a round dance, or lead them shrieking like maenads down the slope to the olive groves. The shrieking would fade to laughter, and the laughter to soft cries, and for hours afterward the Muses would take turns gathering dazed happy nymphs from the trees. Little would get done for the rest of the day, but no one had ever minded. Euterpe's pupil stared after her now, holding the flute to her lips and kissing it absently. The woman by Erato looked too, her eyes clear, already stroking the lyre more thoughtfully, her lips moving. "Are you trying," Erato asked her softly, "to recall her dance that so you can sing it to others?" "No," the woman said, ending her play and holding the lyre as though soothing it quiet. "I could never do that. It was--" Her startling eyes lit up. "I was trying to remember what my heart felt, to see Her dance." Erato beamed at her, and kissed her. "I marvel that I won you from Euterpe, but I am glad, so glad." The woman smiled down at the lyre and then looked up through her lashes at the erotic Muse. "What?" Erato was prettily bemused. Her sister Euterpe glanced over, helping her own pupil find new fingering without needing to look. "Oh, we've dallied, that one and I. Hm?" The woman with her lyre kept smiling, though her blush was attractive even in the bower's shade. "But at last," she said, "I recalled the story of Marsyas, when he challenged Apollo, pipe against lyre. "No matter how good you are, there's no way to sing, when you must keep blowing." Erato looked startled, then shuddered. "I recall Marsyas, too, though I didn't watch--and even hearing it was hard. When I knew what would happen, when Apollo sang over his playing." Clio recalled too, and wondered about how deeply their patron-god adhered to the reason he prescribed for others. She'd never seen Marsyas' skin displayed among Apollo's things, the forfeit of his daring wager. Apollo liked to lecture about hubris and its costs, but . . . Erato shook it off. "But yes. No way to sing. And you, dear, *have* to sing. You must." The woman inclined her head, and Clio smiled to see gentle Erato seem so abashed at having given even such a mild command. Then Erato turned to see Clio, and looked happy for a distraction. She touched her pupil, who looked up at yet another Muse, more somber than the two poetic spirits in the bower. They both rose. Erato led the mortal to Clio, and Clio could see that this pupil kept her intensity even when the song was done. The world was alive for her, and she saw it, lived it with endless songs she'd never have time to put to her lyre. Clio smiled, seeing why this one had so smitten Erato. Now, the woman looked with thoughtless devotion at her own Muse, and Clio saw that however Terpsichore had charmed in the dance's moment, however she'd dallied with Euterpe--this mortal, for her part, had been Erato's, forever. "My sister," Erato said, gesturing to Clio. "And this is Sappho." 3. The woman bowed with great grace and then looked up, her eyes shining into Clio's. Clio took her hand, and held it. She could feel Sappho's heat and see the roiling in her. It was alien to the streams whose flow Apollo had charged her with. She thought of the days well-spent with her hand on Thucydides' shoulder, feeling that cold deliberation, the structure that spared no one, even himself. That was her own nature, too, but this attracted her in a different way. It delighted her. She saw Erato smile and knew her sister was no more jealous of her than of Terpsichore, as they both fascinated the mortal poet--Terpsichore with her endless hypnotic motion and Clio, one of the quietest of the Muses, with her lack of it. Erato was too proud of this woman to mind. Sappho dropped her eyes a little. "I feel at a loss. More so than when I met Her of the epic--Lady Calliope. You, Lady, watch over things that are great. Empires, the rise and fall of kings and queens. Forgotten peoples. "I do not sing of these, Lady." Clio did not hear shame in the confession, only clarity, and she was glad. "Much that I see *is* great," she told the poet. "Very little of it reaches papyrus. Or any of the things history is inscribed on." She stroked Sappho's hair. "Poetry is where it does emerge. It is not mine to guide a poet in her poesy, but I rejoice that there *are* poets, to inscribe the other things. The small moments. "It is as important to history to know how people loved as it is to know how they hated." The poet's eyes narrowed as she heard Clio's wistfulness. She bowed again. "I thank you, Lady. And . . . I thank the gods, as well, that I am not driven to sing of what is in *your* charge." Clio saw in the poet's eyes a reflection of what her own showed her, too often--the long chronicle of disaster, waiting for an austere soul like Thucydides to enumerate the dead and parse the blame. Sappho was being honest, not impertinent. Clio embraced her. Mortal footfalls rushed up and stopped, someone suddenly abashed to find two Muses and one of their chosen. They all looked to see a younger woman in a short tunic, frozen like a startled fawn beside the same tree where Clio had stood to see Terpsichore dance. It was Sappho who said, "Eurydice! My heart. Come." She reached out her arm. Eurydice hesitated, but stepped forward and grasped her hand, turning as Sappho's arm encircled her. Eurydice looked at Clio, taking courage from the older poet's touch. "My own pupil," said Sappho with pride and desire, and when she looked at the girl's profile Clio saw her forget herself again, as she had when the dance had enraptured her. Holding Eurydice's nervous warmth, smelling her sun-kissed hair, the poet forgot even Erato and knew no muse but her. "A poor one," Eurydice murmured. "A surpassing one," Sappho said, and there was judgment, not just love, in her voice. "There is something here," Erato said, smiling fondly at her two mortal charges, "that spoke to me of your realm, sister. History can see them. It must." Clio saw Sappho look at the other Muse and then at her, and it struck her again how forthright the poet was. She did not beg history's favor or even its notice, though she would meet either one graciously. "It has," Clio said, and no more. Erato knew her constraints, and Sappho simply accepted them. Eurydice looked at Sappho, standing a little straighter. Then the three erotic poets stepped back into the bower, to hear Sappho sing. Clio stayed long enough to hear that she sang of a girl in Lydia, but she saw Eurydice was not jealous either. 4. Ananke waited. Clio looked down the mountain, far enough above the temples that the wind carried their sound away. The sea glittered in the dusk, and the clouds were few enough that the sky was full of stars, enough for Urania to count. The Muse of astronomy, whose study and whose pupils were the most remote from passion, was the one of her sisters Clio most often sought when she was troubled. Urania seldom spoke much. One of her longest comments was about the man Pythagoras and why he had insisted on turning simple mathematical verities into mysticism. It offended the clean aesthetic of what Urania did, but she continued to inspire him. "Everything," she had concluded quietly, "takes time." Then she had gazed back up at the sky. Clio did not look for Urania now. Her disquiet was different. She looked down again, thinking of the poets and musicians and dancers, and knew they, too, would make little of what she would try to explain. Then she faced upward, at the further spur of the mountain. In the gathering dark she couldn't see the dwelling no one else spoke of but everyone knew was there. She was the only Muse who looked there often, where the Fates lived, much less went there. Melpomene had been there, to speak of her tragedies, but it was different, and her questions to them were discrete, almost ceremonial. Clio felt more like an inept apprentice than a guest when she was there. She turned away, thinking of the cold light in Lachesis' eyes as she measured the threads Clotho spun and decided where Atropos would cut them. An endless, deliberate satisfaction in deciding when a war or a song or a life would end. Clio could meet Lachesis' gaze, and sometimes stare her down. History could understand even Fate, sometimes. But Clio had to flee to placid times after that, gentle quiet places like the yam-farmers' field, where even the Fates could find little, yet, to pique their ironic hunger. Clio wondered, too, if Thucydides or the other chroniclers, the dawntime oral reciters squatting in mud or the strange ones deep in the future who never trod on land at all, thought they saw that light in *her* eyes, when she came to them. If they feared History enjoyed their struggles, not just recorded them. Ananke knew how that felt. Clio hugged herself. She'd come too near to Ananke's house to turn back, and her own need was on her now, but it might still be too soon. Ananke would hold her and they would lie together without complaint, but Clio might still be too full of her own darkness to bear away Ananke's, and Ananke had no one else, really. Clio walked further, and was almost to the house when she heard feet on the path behind her and turned to see Sappho. "Lady," the poet said. She was deferential but brave enough not to stop, and when the Muse paused the poet came to stand beside her. She looked frankly at Clio, and in the dimming light her eyes shone like pools. Clio could not recall their color from the daytime, but just now the pools were inviting, and despite herself she thought twice about swimming there. "I wanted to give Eurydice to my Muse for tonight," Sappho said. "We'll return soon, and it is something she needs." Clio nodded. Eurydice had looked into those eyes, once, and blissfully drowned in them. "Erato will be with her," she said. "As she will with you. All your lives. My sister would not have smiled on you or on her that way, otherwise." Sappho nodded gratefully, suddenly weaker where it concerned her protege. She saw Clio notice this and breathed in deeply. Intimacy with this new, pensive Muse was opening her like an unexpectedly soft caress. The poet, too, seemed to soften as she yielded to speaking about her lover. "Her sun shines even more brightly than mine, I think." Sappho's smile was rueful. "I have thought that perhaps my greatest fame will be as the one who gave Eurydice a lyre, and showed her she could play." Clio regarded her. "You do not write for fame." Sappho's gaze was naked, and she did not cover it. "No, Lady." She swallowed. "I do it because I am so besotted by Lady Erato I can do nothing else. And the ones to whom I sing . . ." Clio inclined her head, venerating the passion in her. Ananke had touched this woman, too, with need, and Sappho had met that need with helpless magnificence. But Ananke still waited, and Clio still wondered if this night would serve her. "Lady, there is something, is there not?" Clio looked up. "You are bound somewhere, and I would not detain You. But You seem unhappy." Sappho said this with surprise, as though in all the poetry she'd heard and made, she had never heard of a troubled goddess. Perhaps never one standing before her, on a mountain path above the sea. Sappho was, perhaps, not the only one disrobing her soul, here on the evening path. Clio put an arm around her, closing her eyes to feel the intensity again, the brilliant mind so free. Her historians' genius plowed the sea like ships but this one soared in dimensions they knew not. Clio thought about Ananke, and the gift of bathing in the pools of Sappho's eyes. She made the decision even before she let herself feel how firm and warm the mortal woman was. "Come." The poet pressed against her, not questioning. 5. They came to the house, and were close before they saw the lamplight, closer before they could hear the quiet weeping. "Who dwells here?" Sappho asked but Clio put a finger to her lips and led her around the building, which was larger than it had seemed. They stepped into a room open to the evening and Clio stood in the middle, seeing things in the glow of a lamp there. "The old nursery," she whispered. She stepped to a table and smiled at the things on it, child-sized but perfectly crafted by the child who'd made them: a wheel on an axle, a lever between two beveled rocks, four other things harder to see in the flicker of the lamp, as the shadows swung across the surfaces. "Why does she weep?" Clio turned and saw Sappho's eyes glowing in the light, regarding her. The Muse held her closer as they left the room, and the weeping again became audible. She said nothing for a few steps, then spoke. "That was where Mechane grew up." Clio gestured back to the wind-cooled room they'd left. "She still keeps here those things Mechane first contrived, when she was still only a baby." "Mechane," Sappho murmured. "Invention herself--was a child here. Then--?" "This is Ananke's house." "Ananke?" Sappho gasped and leaned into her. "Necessity?" she whispered. "Lives here?" Clio paused and let her lean. It wasn't quite dread, but no mortal faced Necessity easily. Then she felt Sappho's resolve go through her, and she heard the woman's breathing slow as she listened to the sound with new ears. The Muse could feel the poet change, accepting the idea of Necessity crying. Clio was amazed and moved. She had not thought any mortal could adapt that quickly, or in that direction. She waits, Clio thought. For Sappho, though neither one knows it yet. "She weeps," she said aloud, as Sappho leaned against her. "Mechane prospers, and Mechane is special among her daughters. But Necessity loves all her children. "All." Clio blinked as she repeated it, and now it was Sappho who pulled her close, sensing the Muse's disquiet more clearly. It disoriented Clio to feel that understanding. None of Clio's sisters could bear to think long about all of Ananke's children. Melpomene thought she did, and her tragedians spoke often of both the noble and the base. But it was not always Melpomene's to see the quiet valleys as clearly as she saw the bright peaks. "Why does She grieve?" Sappho might already be seeing it. Her question seemed more like a protest. "Necessity tends to what she must," Clio whispered as they rounded the house again. "But even she must fall idle now and again, and then she thinks of them." The crying had faded, and now Clio led the poet around to the door. "Necessity is the mother of Invention, and Invention delights her, but she weeps because many of her other children are dead. "Sacrifice, Courage, Endurance." Clio stopped and looked out, and Sappho followed her eyes. They watched night fall on the Great Sea. "Others grieve with her then. My sisters celebrate them. Even joyful Terpsichore has danced for them. The bright ones, the shining ones. "But they are not the only children Necessity bore." Speaking of it was harder than Clio had expected. This was not for words, but for silent consolation with Ananke in her arms. She held tighter to Sappho, and as the poet pressed gently to her, she marveled that this mortal could enable her to speak of it at all. "The rest of Ananke's children are not dead but disgraced, or living meanly, far from here. "Betrayal. Surrender. Expedience. They are as much hers as their happier sisters. "Necessity understands them." Sappho looked at her, tentatively raising a hand to Clio's arm. "And--You do, Lady." She blinked. "Yes. Poets may mourn Necessity's coming, or try to pretend She turns aside. "But History knows Necessity. Understands Her. Enough to . . ." She looked up into the dark where the Fates' house loomed invisibly on its peak. Clio wondered who had told her what it was and who lived there. "I had thought of Her as one of Them. A creature of the Fates, Their axe on our necks. *"I* misunderstood Her." Clio met her gaze. "Easy to do. Ananke does not oversee what must be, any more than I. She rules how we must meet it. Often it is quiet, a small need and a small fulfillment. "But when it is not, and someone in the world must rise or fall and there is only their own heart to choose--there is Necessity. Waiting to see how that mortal will meet the extremity. Standing outnumbered as a larger army charges forward. Tested as a witch with survival only a friend's name away. Sitting in the silent room with the baby who will not cry again. Necessity waits to see which of her children will look back at her, then. "If it is an artful or a strong one, she may rejoice. A brave one, she may mourn, but so will the rest. "Even the base ones are hers, and she turns her face away from none of them. For her sake, I do not turn away from them either, no matter what *I* see them do. "No one else will own them. When Ananke weeps for them, she weeps alone." "But not tonight," Sappho said, looking at the Muse wide-eyed. Then she nodded, realizing she'd made a promise. Clio looked at her and they walked into Necessity's house. 6. Ananke looked young, even her eyes. But she stood in with a balance that denied youth, though it was too graceful to deny hope. It always made Clio's heart pause to see her, and so it did now, as she rose from her hearth and embraced the Muse. Then solemnly she studied Sappho. "She is not one of your historians, beloved." Her voice was low and calm. Clio had never heard it raised, not even at the worst of times. She felt its strength, and saw Sappho sway to hear it plain for the first time. All mortals heard her voice in their lives and had to answer, and meeting its owner herself was no light thing. But the poet was strong, too, and met Necessity's gaze with her own. "Sappho is a poet," Clio said. "She sings of love. She teaches others to sing of it, too, and it is . . . real. Not what mortals imagine passes between gods, but what they live. She reminds their souls why life is worth living." "She is welcome," Ananke said. "And she is lovely." *Thank you,* her eyes told the Muse. *I had hoped only for you, tonight, but you bring more beauty to me, and this one is more than just her beauty.* *Did you worry, love, that you were not enough?* Clio only gazed back at her, since there was never an answer to that unless they were touching. Sappho had heard only the spoken words, and her blush was sweet and visible even in the glow from Ananke's hearth. She took Ananke's hand and kissed it, and Ananke drew the mortal to her. "I feel small," Sappho said. "I thought before, when I opened my eyes to Erato . . . but now . . ." "Will you watch the night with me?" Ananke asked, allaying the fear without naming it. Sappho knelt to her, leaving her hand in Ananke's so it floated above her in a suppliant gesture. "Sometimes I have felt," she murmured, "that I was Your daughter, too." She closed her eyes while Ananke caressed her hair. "Like a daughter I sought wisdom elsewhere. I learned at Aphrodite's knee and not Yours. "Or so I thought. I felt Your need, and took it for granted. I let it lead me." Sappho smiled up at Ananke then. "Need--Necessity--led me to many places, many soft embraces, and I regret none. "None." Necessity looked down at her and nodded. "A splendid daughter." Clio said nothing to break the spell, to take away Ananke's absorption in the pretty mortal. To see Ananke smile so easily was worth giving up an embrace--worth giving up a long slick night in her arms, if it cost that . . . Sappho swallowed, waking a little to where she was, what she was doing, to whom she knelt. But she kept to her knees, and asked quietly, "Lady, how do they worship You?" The surprise in Ananke's eyes surprised the poet. "Who worships Necessity, my dear? I am everywhere, and I have no altar." She spoke just as quietly, explaining winter to a spring-born child. "My oracles are clear without any need to ask, and I cannot be propitiated. I show no favor. Libations slake no thirst of mine." Clio watched Sappho, saw the poet think of Courage giving her last breath to save another, and of Surrender sinking wretchedly under the victor's heel to buy the chance of another breath. Of Ananke, mother to both, heart torn to see them doing only what she'd borne them to do. "No one worships me," Ananke told her. Sappho shook her head without knowing she did it, refusing that. "I shall." She leaned forward and put her head to Ananke's belly. Ananke closed her eyes to feel the mortal's touch. Then Sappho leaned back, and gently drew her hand from Ananke's and put it to the demigoddess' tunic, pulling the cloth up, away from her thighs. She gazed up at Ananke once more, waiting until Ananke opened her eyes and looked back before she bowed her head and then looked before her. Clio saw the firelight in her eyes as she stared at Necessity's flower, and they shone with longing for it. She leaned forward, taking Ananke's hips very lightly but without shifting her gaze from her goal. Then she closed her eyes and gave her mouth to Ananke. Sappho shook to taste her, and lost herself in the heat, her head moving with quick grace as her tongue darted inward, upward. Ananke stood over her, her face moving with the pleasure the poet's tongue lavished on her, and Clio knew her lover's look enough to know how deeply Sappho was pleasing her. But Ananke found a way to reach down and very gently touch the mortal's head, delicately as though she were a newborn, and push her away. Sappho's lips still worked and her tongue slid between them as her head lolled back, and even when she opened her eyes they were blank and blind for a moment. When she could see again she gazed yearningly up at Ananke, thirsting for her more than ever, slain with the pain of parting. She could give only a small cry. Loving Ananke for that small eternity had taken even her words with its need, and the poet could no longer speak. 7. Ananke leaned down to kiss her forehead and then looked at Clio. The Muse stepped closer, caught up in how tenderly Ananke controlled the mortal who had adored her. They each took a hand, and raised Sappho to stand unsteadily. They led her to Necessity's bed. Coming back to herself, she tried to protest as they unwound her garment, not wanting to be waited on by heaven-born, but Clio kissed her lips closed and Ananke stroked her back as the linen fell away. Then the poet sighed, and Clio felt the woman give herself up to them, body and soul melting in trust. Ananke felt it too and they held Sappho as she wilted under their kisses, her offered breasts soft and pliant to their tongues. They laid her on the bed so gently she may have dreamed she floated, and as Clio drew the chiton down from her legs Ananke gently parted them. Muse and demigoddess turned to each other and kissed, and as always Clio left the choice to Necessity. Necessity dipped her head to the fragrant tuft where Sappho's thighs met, and Clio smiled as she slid up to hold the poet and nuzzle her. Sappho writhed, and Clio worried at her breasts, but mostly she returned to lie face to face with her, sharing a kiss, drinking the woman's frantic breaths as Ananke's tongue slowly drove her mad. Whenever Sappho's eyes cleared, even for only a heartbeat before the pleasure glazed them again, they had Clio's to look into. And when her face twisted with the divine agony and her mouth hung open, Clio looked again with wonder, as she had for ages, at what seemed so painful and yet was so pleasurable. She held Sappho and sought her tongue and felt the surprising strength as the mortal clung to her. Sappho still trembled, forcing her eyelids up and breathing fast but shallowly. As Ananke eased herself up to lie beside them, Sappho gazed up at her. Her voice was childlike now, and naked with hurt. "Worship . . ." She stared desperately at Ananke. "Sacrifice . . . ?" "No," Ananke said, her hands light and warm now on Sappho. "I do not require anyone to become less, to make me more. "I am not that sort of goddess." Sappho's eyes flamed. "Not," she gasped. "Enough." Her eyes closed and she forced them open. "For . . . You!" She looked up at Ananke with such urgency that Clio was afraid for her. But Ananke was serene. Instead of kissing Sappho when she leaned to hold her, Ananke just touched her head to the mortal woman's, and Clio, lying against her, could feel Sappho relax, safe now from questions and grief. They were all still then, and Clio still held the poet, stirred to guard her by her utter limpness. She kissed Sappho's eyelids, and her hair, now matted with sweat. A touch gave her Sappho's breast, more still now as her panting subsided, and behind it the fading gallop of her heart. She stroked the exhausted woman and felt Sappho stir under the caress, making a pleased soft noise. So spent, but so eager to give. One of the mortals' gifts to the gods was the ardor they brought, and ardent Sappho burned with it. As though she knew she would only pass in a short time across the sky, and would make her arc memorable, a blazing meteor that would leave wonder long after it went dark forever. Clio had felt this in mortals, and understood, a little, why it so obsessed the gods to possess it. Mortals could be lovely to behold, like this daughter of the isle of Lesbos lying bonelessly lovespent against her, but it was that passion inside that gods needed to savor. Few seemed to know how. Not Zeus or Apollo, chasing the daughters of humanity like idiot children tearing blossoms from the stem, always angry when the scent faded. Clio knew what they wanted, had been privileged to taste it tonight, but she was as sadly clueless now as ever about why they grasped at it so. Clio smiled down at Sappho, one of the favored mortals who knew that excellence but sensed it instead in others, and sang to it in their name. She put her lips once more to the hot, moist skin and savored its taste, with its heat. Even in her sleep, this one smoldered. She would never have had the patience to be a goddess. 8. Clio saw Ananke looking fondly at their bedmate too, and was still, enjoying the peace in Ananke's eyes, the way her body relaxed. She'd known this was right, but she hadn't known how good it would feel. She was so glad she'd kept on to visit Ananke when Sappho met her on the path, hadn't taken her back to the temples below. To have denied Necessity this . . . She rubbed Sappho's smooth, soft belly and the woman bent a little, trying in her sleep to curl around the gentle handling. Clio grinned and leaned down to kiss her mouth, and felt her thighs clench as she tasted Ananke on another woman's lips. She looked up into the eyes of Necessity herself and held them. Ananke's lips gleamed with Sappho's honey. They curved with the pleasure of having drawn it from her. "She did not expect this, love." Clio whispered it, more from reverence than for fear of waking Sappho, who barely moved as she breathed. Ananke nodded, neither speaking nor licking her lips, and they leaned together over the sleeping poet, each one feeling her warmth against her own belly. This time their kiss was long, and they savored the taste of Sappho on each other's tongues. When they parted, Ananke said, "This young one is generous, and she can bear a great love. But you and I both cherish the chance to see others in pleasure, and not pain. "So she served me best this way. "And you, slow-simmering Muse . . ." Ananke leaned back. Clio smiled, and slid over Sappho, tracing a finger up Ananke's leg and under her tunic as she kept her other hand on the poet. Ananke half-turned and held Sappho against her, smiling back at the Muse and opening her legs. Clio kissed her way inward, marveling as she always did at how silken were the inner thighs of her lover, kissing the skin on either side of her cleft, denying herself the first taste. Her left hand brought her the warmth of the mortal woman who would sleep through this, and her face was hot with the need of the goddess who would keep her. She lost herself then, leaving history and its wrack for the endless dark present of another's moist depths. She was in no hurry, she and her lover having learned patience ages since, and her licking was slow and gentle. Clio was no dancer, full of rapid strength, and no lyrist with rhythm and purpose. She was history, and she licked with steady, random motions of hard and soft, fast and feathery, the strangeness of the ordinary. Her tongue explored Ananke's depth and found it new again, then withdrew to tease the clitoris it had so often befriended before. Necessity came, over and over, with quiet stiffening. The hand on Clio's head faltered once, and Clio waited before she slackened off. She slid up and looked into eyes nearly as tired as Sappho's had been. "Love, now you--" She heard the effort in Ananke's whisper and kissed her. "No. I have been well-served, too." Clio moved up again. Ananke took her hand and they lay together with Sappho between. 9. Sappho sang in the bower, softly, as the noonday sun filtered down through the leaves. She'd been quiet as Eurydice played first, smiling and nodding to hear how much her well-loved pupil had learned from Erato. Now Sappho took it in turn to play a new lay, singing of the mother reft of her children, singing *to* her. She sang it as others might most easily hear it, clothing it in the myth of Niobe who wept, and Sappho's fancy was that even the rock the gods made of Niobe could still grieve. Even the gods' mercy was not always equal to the terrible hurts they caused. Erato joined Clio, who had come to listen, but after the first notes the Muse of history no longer saw her sister. Clio let Sappho's voice show her Necessity in Niobe's dress, her work forgotten beside her empty hands as she looked out into the world. Clio saw her own beloved search in vain for her children there, and saw her know, again, that it was being *her* children that doomed them, the brave and the desperate alike. It was the old pain Clio tried always to leach from Ananke's breast but now, as the poet from Lesbos sang it, there was a sweetness she could feel. Sappho's poem told Niobe, told Ananke, that her grief was shared, but as she sang it Sappho knew that sharing went unheard, that in the end consolation came to naught. Love still called it forth, and hope still held it ready, and Sappho said all that too. Eurydice wept to hear it. She and Sappho sat for a while when the older poet was done, their lyres aside, talking softly. Clio knew how earnestly Sappho was pressing her protege to learn that lay, to make it her own, and she knew why. She watched the poet's soft, irresistible tyranny conquer the younger woman who loved her. Eurydice's tears, as she agreed to take the song from Sappho, puzzled Sappho but did not deter her. Erato was silent for a while, sensing how her sister had felt the song itself. "She is . . ." "She will be heard," Clio said, not looking away from her. "She will not always be understood, but they will hear her and know." Erato made a contented sound. "Do you know that song?" There was an edge on Clio's voice, not anger but enough to worry Erato and draw her gaze away from the mortal lovers. "Niobe's tears? It was pretty--no, it was beautiful. At the start I almost would have thought it more what Euterpe would have inspired, but there *is* love in it. Too deep to notice right away, before you know it's taken you." Clio nodded. "I know that love. She is singing of my own. Of Ananke." Her sister looked at her in surprise but said nothing. "Her hope for the goddess Necessity will be to woo mortals to her. Not all, and not even all who are moved by it to love the heroine as she mourns her children alone, will know whom they truly venerate. "But if a woman here and there, now and then, softens her heart to take Necessity's grief away and hold it for her, for a time, then perhaps Necessity will rest easier." Erato looked at her in awe. For a moment Clio was glad it was Erato, not one of the cleverer Muses like Melpomene, who had brought this shining mortal woman among them. Melpomene would have been seeking the depth beneath Sappho's fierce devotion and all it meant. Melpomene would measure it and weigh it, alloying it with other truths to make a tragedy beyond it. Erato, who ruled the verse of hearts sometimes touching and always yearning, had the sense simply to admire it. She touched Clio's arm wordlessly and went to her pupil, to prepare her and Eurydice to return from this sojourn. Clio did not know if they would come here again, or whether Erato would haunt them in their own chambers and lanes and fields. She already knew enough. When Sappho looked up, smiling with a diffidence that seemed strange on her, Clio smiled back and bowed, but she did not go to her. 10. Erato found Clio on the beach, by the shrine to Athene above the highwater mark. Much more than their father Zeus or their patron Apollo, Athene was the Olympian Clio felt closest to. As she watched the offering fire seek the breeze, she made herself face her sister, and tried to find some of Athene's deliberate kindness to give her. Erato's mind and heart still overflowed with the poet. "What will become of her?" Erato wasn't usually a demanding Muse, and the directness of her need struck deeper into Clio. She was as tender of Sappho as Sappho was of Eurydice, and after last night Clio knew something of why. Now Erato seemed less impatient than fearful, knowing what History sometimes had to say. "You would not be like this, even in your melancholy, if her future were happy. "Please. Tell me." "She will mourn obscurity, and no one will hear it." Clio shook her head as Erato stepped back, appalled. "No, sister. Sappho's own name will live, and enough of her work that humanity will regret that all of it did not pass clearly forward. When they do find the volumes at last, they will learn that what they thought they knew of her was only the shadow of what she was capable of, but that will not be for a long time." "That is not obscurity." Erato frowned, but she knew Clio. "Sappho is no preening hack, to complain of what will happen when she's gone." Clio looked her in the eye. "No. Sappho is not that. You know this. This dawn, I learned it too." Erato looked at her. Clio drew a scroll from her chiton and held it, suddenly wanting to protect it, hold it to her like a child. "As the sun rose--before that, as Eos was first stroking at the world and the stars were still clear--Sappho prayed at my altar, up there. She knelt and prayed to me. She prayed that somehow History would find consolation for Ananke, something lasting more than a night's embrace. "Your Sappho loves her now, almost as I do. She sees everyone as she sings them--real, loving, hurting. She offered prayers for a demigoddess as she might for her own dearest of heart." Erato nodded, waiting. Clio took a breath. "She is a woman of the world, to write of it so tellingly. She understands that prayers like that require sacrifice. She offered one. More than her life, or anything she owned. "She prayed to me, because the offering was in my keeping already. "She wished her voice gone, like the smoke from the altar, her every song forgotten when the last note faded, her name no more than a tomb-scratching. Not to lose her fame, but to let her poetry itself vanish, the children of her soul." Clio gazed at Athene's flame, but in the brightness of the day it was easier to see its shadow against the rock. "She would keep writing and singing, her devotion to you. But what she created would die, and live nowhere but her own pledged memory. "That, so Necessity could wake smiling." Clio looked at Erato. The other Muse was too wise to deny it, but her nature was too passionate to endure it. Clio thought about Sappho kneeling in Ananke's firelight. *Lady, how do they worship You?* "Did you grant her this?" Erato whispered. Clio looked down at the scroll she held, and then again at the barely-visible flame on Athene's shrine. 11. "Sappho was not the only visitor to my altar. "Eurydice had come to look for her, and overheard her as she prayed, before Sappho could know she was there. Eurydice nearly leaped out of hiding to stop her, when she heard. "But Sappho's heart was wise when it chose her love for her. Eurydice is more like her than either of them knows. She was strong, and she waited, until Sappho had gone, and I do not know what it cost her to say nothing and watch her lover leave alone, believing she had called that on herself. "Eurydice knelt at my altar where Sappho had. She repeated Sappho's prayer." Erato looked at the scroll, and then at Clio. "With . . . her own voice forfeit, in place of Sappho's? To keep Sappho's vow?" Awe reduced the erotic Muse to a whisper again. "To become nothing, and no one. So that the world will remember--Sappho." It had become something Melpomene might have brought to birth. But Clio refused to belittle either her tragic sister or the two poetic lovers by saying so aloud. Instead she said, "The world *will* remember Sappho after all, and love her, too. Ages after. That may rest more sweetly on Eurydice's brow than any laurels of her own. "But Sappho--being Sappho--will grieve, when she learns what came of her prayer. Eurydice's gift will hurt her badly but she will cherish it, always." "Consolation," Erato murmured, staring at the scroll as though bewitched. Then she looked once at Clio and turned away toward the sea. Clio saw the tears on the other Muse's face. "How could she even hope to do it?" Erato asked softly. "To presume to heal Necessity's pain herself, when it is her nature, her existence . . ." Clio reached out now with her free hand and held her sister's shoulder. "Dear one, it is just what mortals do, the best of them, anyway. Sometimes they conquer futility by ignoring it. Sappho met a goddess, a woman, and loved her and did this for her. She did not calculate beyond that. "She just . . . tried. "Ananke will know. I suspect she will greet it as you do at first, with distress. But when she knows that earth-children do this, and that one of them chose of her own will to do it for Ananke, then--" Clio squeezed Erato's shoulder. "Then it will be the bravest and most generous of her children back alive and home again, kissing her awake from the dream of losing them." Erato stared out to sea. "Necessity will be comforted, and Sappho's voice will live on." She kept her voice steady. "But . . . the only Eurydice the mortals ever know will be Orpheus' lost love." "Yes. But this Eurydice, our Eurydice, stays behind of her own accord, bearing the darkness so her love can reach the light. "Surely Sappho is worthy of someone like that?" She saw Erato tremble. "This poet of yours is a rare jewel, Erato." She said it quietly, letting it seep into her sister to soothe the hurt. "Many women sacrifice to a goddess. "How many will sacrifice *for* one?" Erato stepped to her and rested her head on Clio's shoulder, and Clio held her, looking away to put the scroll into Athene's fire. She watched it burn, so someone might bear witness to its loss, and felt her sister hold her more tightly. Erato's tears grew warmer on Clio's bare shoulder as the wind shifted off the water. It was Eurydice's scroll, in token of the rest, and even Clio had seen the talent in Sappho's diffident, brilliant pupil. She could see the alternate history that would never be, when Eurydice's voice and Sappho's would have sung a glorious duet down through the millennia, and others would have joined it. She knew this was no mean sacrifice, and she knew how freely it had been given. Clio knew also how much of Sappho's own legacy would have to lie hidden, inevitably. In that trove, the song of Niobe's sorrow, meant to express Ananke's, would languish unheard. History did not weep, but History understood why tears fell. And with everything else History saw earth-children do, seeing something like this was what kept despair away. When the scroll was ash, and the sacrifice was done, Clio put her head to Erato's. "Come, sister. It is still morning. Bring your lyre. "We can find Terpsichore and watch her dance." END Afterword: Apologies to all goddesses and poets whom this speculation may have ill-served and misrepresented. My own muse was merely an accomplice, and the blame here is mine. I also need to acknowledge some more contemporary influences--Oosh's magnificent story "The Eve of Victory," and an echo in here of the Ancients created (or remembered?) by EyeofSerpent. Thank you both. And to Sappho, well . . . Happy Birthday. And thank you, as well.