Ovid s Other Metamorphoses part 1
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Glory Climbs the Heights
"Soft, and never safe from Cupid's arrows,
Was my heart, that the slightest thing could move." --Tristia 4.10
We needed fig wine, and immediately. There was no time for consultation
or discussion. If the wine merchant's directions proved accurate, it
would take us a week to reach the winery. Many conditions hung upon
that eight-day forecast: we would need good weather, a swift coach, a
modicum of fortune, an alert eye, and a respite from bandits. Even
then, it would be another eight days for the return journey.
Cornelius Quadratus was a powerful young man, but he could not fight a
company of bandits alone. Julius Caesari was newly male, strong and
deft, but he had no training in the gladius. Alexios the slave was of
an impressive barbaric physique but bore no weapons. I could contribute
nothing, being both womanly and weak, and I was keenly aware of my
helpless deficiencies. The soft, womanly endowments I wore attracted
the lecherous eye, but could not save me from malicious intent. Indeed,
I was ever more a target than before.
"We must commission one of my mother's carriages," Julius decided, his
mouth set in determination. We had adjourned to a quieter location near
the eastern forum to make our limited, hasty plans. "She knows of the
power of the Fiasco of Bacchus. Still, I cannot show my face on
Palatine Hill, or my father might see me in this condition. Alexios can
go in my place and request one of her."
"Will this carriage be capacious enough to hold a legion of soldiers?"
Cornelius asked. "If we depart Rome in a coach emblazoned with your
mother's insignia, we are sure to be accosted by every bandit between
here and the Anio Valley winery."
I could not help but feel annoyed at my friend's objection. Julius had
spoken; that decision was enough for me. Even so, the instant Julius
changed his mind, I changed mine to match.
"That's a reasonable objection," Julius admitted, and I nodded
wholeheartedly. "But we will have to chance the bandits. We cannot
take soldiers." When Cornelius opened his mouth to protest, Julius held
up a hand. "Would you have the Praetorian Guard reveal to Augustus that
we are in possession of a Bacchic relic? That we are experimenting with
the magic of Dionysus?"
"Bandits," Cornelius said with forced patience, "will kill us all, and
steal the Bacchic Fiasco in addition. Is that worse than anything
Augustus could do?"
"I don't know," said Julius, his voice heavy with sarcasm. "Perhaps you
should ask that question of Marcus Antonius or Cleopatra."
"Ah. Yes, but it is possible he would never find out the purpose of our
expedition," Cornelius suggested.
To my surprise, Alexios the Greek slave shook his head. "The
Praetorians report to Caesar. If Julia Caesari requests a guard to
accompany her, Caesar is sure to discover where we have asked them to
take us."
"And that is supposing the guard could be convinced to heed my orders,"
Julius concluded. "At the moment, I do not appear much like myself."
"We are between Scylla and Charybdis," Cornelius moaned. "If we
convince the Praetorian Guard that you are Julia, we have given away the
secret; if we don't convince them, we have no escort. Hiring
mercenaries that we can trust takes time. If we traveled with a large
caravan of merchants--"
"That also takes time," Julius said flatly. "Face facts, my friend:
our journey will be complete in two weeks if we leave immediately. I
can scarcely prevent my father from taking the impression that I have
gone somewhere, whether I go or stay. You are the only one among us who
has no urgent need to depart, no secrets to withhold, and you are the
one cautioning that we should delay until the journey is perfectly safe.
If you wish to stay, Cornelius, then stay. I have no objection, but
decide quickly: I must find us a coach."
While Julius searched for our transportation, I had only hours to advise
my brother and my wife that I would be absent for a time. What Flavia
might say in response to my altered condition I dared not guess; she had
only been my wife for less than a year and our marital status was not
solid. Gaius, too, defied prediction; he was also one of the
centumviri, but he possessed the same family name as I. Would he honor
and protect my secret shame to shield our shared reputation, or would he
denounce me?
After visiting and relating my tale to him, I perceived that Gaius
Ovidius was unable to decide himself which course of action was most
honorable.
Convincing him that the Bacchic Fiasco existed was not easy, for I had
no means to prove it other than my testimony that I was indeed his own
brother. Fortunately, my brother's wife Sophia had some intimate
knowledge of the Bacchic rites, as I had believed -- she knew far too
much of their behavior to be innocently curious. She confirmed my
story, leaving out any involvement by Cornelius, Julia, or anyone other
than myself.
Gaius chewed at his lip in disgust and indecision. His ire would later
be directed at his duplicitous wife, who had concealed from him her
participation in the Bacchic rites, but for the moment he faced only me.
"You endanger everything our father has worked for, Publius," he
harangued me. "This atrocity of yours, this barbaric experiment, is
unworthy of the name Ovidius. The rites of the Wine God should be left
to distant people in rustic lands, not to Roman judges."
"It was never my intention, Gaius," I protested as vehemently as I
could. Objecting to a man was difficult for me now; it ran against my
every feminine instinct. "My only concern now is to restore myself to
normal, as quickly as I can."
"By using that magical abomination again?" my elder brother sneered.
"There is no other way," I promised him.
He was silent for a time, and relented with a furious exhalation. "You
leave me no alternative. Go, find your antidote. I hope that this is a
valuable lesson for you, Big-Nose."
I agreed that it was, and then begged a final favor of him. "I have no
time to return home to my wife Flavia, to inform her that I will be
away. Can you advise her that I have gone for a time?"
Gaius's face was rigid. "I will reveal everything to her, Publius. I
will not corrupt myself with lies to conceal yours."
"Tell her anything," I told him, "but tell her that I shall return."
We departed Rome that afternoon in a carriage arranged by Julius. The
coach itself was worn, and bore no ornament, but it was sound; the
horses were fresh, but had been made dirty to conceal their quality. At
first I wondered if Livia had assisted us secretly, and I asked about
the provenance of the mysterious coach.
"Don't worry about it, Ovidia," Julius assured me.
Naturally, I agreed with him implicitly. I could no longer be curious
about the coach, because I had been instructed not to. The subject
never crossed my mind again.
Our directions were to follow the Via Tiburtina to the east until we
reached the valley of Anio, from which sprang the famously clear and
cold waters that fed the Aqua Marcia. On many occasions during our
expedition we saw that aqueduct, rising in elegant arches, soaring above
the sun-soaked agricultural lands of the peninsula. The aqueduct led
directly from the mountains to the City, in perfect geometrical
precision, while our road twisted and circled across the contours of the
land.
Whether our journey was blessed by the gods, or merely fortunate, we
encountered no bandits. We did encounter several small cohorts of
Praetorian Guards that had been stationed in the towns near Rome, and we
passed many sweating laborers who toiled at the roads, restoring them to
proper function by order of Caesar Augustus. We stayed several nights
in hostels along our route, when they were available; accommodations
were few and badly maintained. Even when we could get rooms, they were
hardly worth the cost, but such as they were we still had to contend for
them. One merchant caravan passed in the opposite direction; every
available bed had been devoted to their clan, leaving none for us.
Everywhere we stayed, Julius and I slept together, though we rarely
slept. He possessed his own sexual appetite as well as mine, and his
lust was unquenchable. Every time he desired to fornicate with me, I
was aware of every twitch of his desire, as it spilled across into my
own brain. Whenever his eyes were upon me, I became aroused myself, and
this occurrence was almost constant on our journey. Even as we guided
our horses along the Via Tiburtina in the bouncing, rattling coach, I
sat close to him, pressing my thigh against his, warming his bicep with
my bosom and clutching hands. During those times he was not driving, he
struggled to control his passion and to withhold his caresses from me,
but he often failed, and when he succumbed, so did I. I could no more
ignore his affection, or resist his attention, than could Icarus resist
the heat of the sun.
We came at last to the Anio valley on the sixth day. There we saw the
Aqua Marcia collect the waters of the Anio and siphon them westward. We
beheld the valley, adorned in vestal forests of pine and juniper. We
heard the call of osprey and ptarmigan, and saw the tracks of deer, but
we found no winery.
"It must be here in this valley," Julius declared in exasperation.
"Those were our directions: east to the Anio, then turn north along the
road toward the headwaters. I see no road, Cornelius, do you?"
"Nothing," Cornelius said, looking left and right. The valley lay to
either side, sloping upward to the left. Our ears rang with the crash
of the river and the sluice of water through the aqueduct.
"Have we missed a turn?" Julius asked Alexios.
The Greek slave had been driving the horses while Cornelius nodded in
his seat and Julius explored my willing thighs with his hands. Alexios
shook his head. "There have been no intersections," he reported. "I
have been watching closely."
"Did you see anything, Cornelius?" Julius asked, without much hope.
"No," my friend retorted, his voice tinged with asperity. "I was
dozing. If you and Ovidia hadn't been entertaining each other in the
back seats, you might have noticed it yourselves. Did you see anything,
I wonder?"
"Of course not," Julius grumbled. "It is difficult to concentrate with
Ovidia sitting beside me."
None of them bothered to ask me whether I had seen anything. In the
past six days they had learned to accept that I would simply repeat
whatever Julius believed, whether it was true or not. I realized that I
had somehow become impaired by the Bacchic Fiasco, and that some
essential part of myself had been commandeered, but I could not regain
control of it. I interrogated my memory, asking myself whether I could
recall seeing the winery, or seeing any marker or road leading toward
it, but every inquiry terminated with Julius's own response: no, of
course not. I hadn't seen anything. I had become a mere extension of
Julius. I was his Maenad.
"But we are in the vicinity," Cornelius said assertively. "The turn may
be further on."
"We were told to bear left at the crest of the hill," said Alexios
quietly. "We are here, looking into the valley as we were instructed,
and there is no turn."
Even I could see that. The road which had been built by centurions of
decades past was square, straight, and led directly over the spine of
the hill, through a narrow cut which had been carved by the engineers
between two adjoining ridges. Even the aqueduct was as the young wine
merchant had described it.
"There must be some local villager we could question," Julius said.
"The residents here must be aware of it. Look for signs of
civilization, and we'll go inquire."
From our vantage on the crest of the hill we could see the entire
valley, and we each surveyed the land before us in hopes of seeing a
rooftop, a barricade, a well, or any other sign of life. I examined the
aqueduct from where I sat, followed the road with my eyes into the vale,
and looked up the length of the ridge that climbed up toward the blue
sky on our left side. Something there caught my attention, and I nudged
Julius.
He peered in that direction and saw it too, on a ridge overlooking the
headwaters of the Anio: a tree with golden leaves, shining like Selene
amid a sea of green. Despite our distance and the luminous daylight the
golden leaves seemed to have a distinct shine.
"The secret is in the tree, he said," Julius mused. "I wonder if that
tree might be a fig. I can't discern at this distance."
"It may just be a diseased tree," Cornelius judged, but he sounded far
from certain. "They lose their green color when worms infest the
trunk."
"Worms do not make the leaves glow golden," Alexios pointed out, even as
he was clambering down out of the coach.
"He's right. We should investigate," Julius said, and instantly I
concurred with his opinion. I had begun to forget what it felt like to
have my own. "If it isn't a fig, then we leave it alone. If it is--"
"If you wish to pluck fruit from a diseased tree," Cornelius said, and
shrugged, leaving his implication incomplete.
Julius gave my skeptical friend a look of exasperation. "We haven't
traveled for nearly a week to make notes from the side of the road, have
we?"
We walked in the direction of the golden tree, now observing it between
the branches, now losing it in the vastness of the valley. The terrain
was steep and uneven, and thickly populated with wild birds and insects.
Frequently, we heard the rustle of watchful animals, but we pressed on.
I followed Julius confidently, incapable of anxiety, heedless of any
potential hazard. Julius led; I followed.
It was indeed a fig tree, golden in color from its roots to its crown,
and unmistakable for its funnel shape and sky-reaching branches. The
Golden Fig lay north of the road on the upper reaches of the valley
slopes, perched at the edge of a rocky ridge. The ascent to its base
was difficult, but we managed it.
For a few moments we lounged in its shade, examining the fruits and
leaves, enjoying the aura of cool refreshing air which seemed to emanate
from it. The fruits were all perfectly ripe, despite the early season,
and gave off a heavenly sweet fragrance.
"This must be the tree," Julius guessed.
Cornelius was unwillingly convinced. "I admit it looks promising. You
should taste one of the fruits, Julius."
"Why me?"
"You're the woman, remember?" Cornelius said with a smirk.
"Ah, right," Julius said, and plucked a fig from the tree. "It smells
good."
We watched carefully as he sniffed the fig in his hand, and took an
experimental bite, tasting the flesh of the fruit on his tongue, his
eyes darting to and fro in cautious self-investigation. "I can feel it
working," Julius said at last. "This time it's a pulling sensation,
drawing part of me out."
Cornelius had carried the Bacchic Fiasco through the trees, and now he
inspected the inside. "It is beginning to fill," he reported. "It
looks as if we won't need the winery after all. How many figs are in a
bottle of wine, do you suppose? Should we pick twenty? Thirty?"
Julius looked up at the tree, counting silently. "Let's pick a hundred
of them. Any we don't use, we can bring back to Rome with us. We might
find a use for them there."
"Or a buyer," the Greek slave smiled.
When we had set out from Rome we hadn't taken much apart from the
clothing on our backs, the Bacchic Fiasco itself, and any supplies we
had remembered to collect at our homes. To supplement these, we had
purchased a few necessities from various towns along the Via Tiburtina,
including wool blankets, fresh spring fruits, bread, and travel
clothing. We hadn't had the foresight to bring anything like a basket
suitable for picking figs, but Cornelius had a satchel, which we emptied
and proceeded to fill with the golden fruits from the tree.
I could not climb into the upper branches, because my slender arms were
too weak, but I helped collect the figs handed down from the concealment
of the leafy canopy above and place them into the satchel. The figs
were firm and plump, each quite inviting, and I carried them gently to
their container as Cornelius, Julius, and Alexios scrambled in the tree
branches over my head. None of us considered it necessary to watch the
Amphora of Dionysus itself; it was safe in a patch of dry grass.
It took an hour to gather up a supply of figs from the upper branches,
for we had no ladder, and many of the fruits were out of reach on the
slender outer limbs. By that time, we had begun to notice something
peculiar and alarming.
"Julius," grunted Cornelius from his vantage point, dangling over the
edge of the rocky ridge, "did you say that you felt something like a
pulling sensation?"
"When I ate the fig? Yes," Julius responded shortly. He clung to a
thick branch with one hand, and cupped a handful of figs in his other.
I could see the strain and sweat on his face from the ground.
"Are you still feeling it?" Cornelius asked in a worried tone.
Julius admitted that he was. "I haven't eaten any more figs, but I do
still sense some of the magic. I believe I'm slowly turning into a
woman again."
"And it feels as if you're being wrung out like a sponge?"
"Yes. Why do you ask?"
"I believe we have a problem."
The three men handed down their supplies of figs, and I stored them into
the satchel as they gingerly navigated the branches back toward the
trunk. As I glanced up to watch their descent, I saw that each was
changing very slowly.
Julius was beginning to look like his old female self, with long curly
black tresses brushing his slimming shoulders, and the suggestion of a
bosom appearing. However, the same effect could be seen on Cornelius
and Alexios: each of them, too, was becoming a woman, exactly as I had.
Alexios was transforming into a slender, exotic slave girl, with wide
innocent eyes and a shapely posterior; Cornelius had lost much of his
square-bodied athletic power and was diminishing into a curvaceous
beauty.
"Ovidia, why didn't you say something?" Cornelius demanded as she
regained her footing. "How long have we been turning into women?"
"I don't know," I answered. "I have been running back and forth beneath
all of you, grabbing handfuls of figs and putting them away. I haven't
had time to admire the view, Quadratus."
Cornelius now examined her hands, her chest, her thighs. Her tunic hung
more loosely on her frame, draped like a sheet over a scaffold, failing
entirely to conceal a rounded female architecture beneath. "Oh, gods,"
Cornelius said with a shiver. "It's happening to me, too!"
Julia Caesari grabbed Cornelia's hand and turned it up to show the palm.
"You have some fig juice on your hand. That is only natural; they are
very ripe. We have all been handling them, also. It must work even
before it gets fermented into wine."
"Why didn't they affect Ovidia, then?" Cornelia insisted, pointing at
me, while Alexia held her face in her hands with dismay.
Julia began her reply, but I interrupted. Now that she no longer
carried my masculinity, she was no longer my master, and I could speak
out. "I've already had every drop of manhood taken from me, Quadratus,"
I told the woman. "There is nothing more that it can do to me."
"What do we do?" Alexia asked, in a panic. She was beginning to tremble
fearfully. "If I go back to the palace looking like this, Caesar
Augustus will have me executed. He'll know what we have been doing!"
"Calm yourself," Julia begged the slave girl. She was discovering that
she could not be as forceful or commanding as she once had been; before
she had directed, now she pleaded. Her male traits, those that she
borrowed from me, had now been taken. "Don't be overly anxious. We
have the Fiasco with us; we brought it from Rome. All of our
masculinity has simply been put into the flask. Drink it, and you will
return to your normal shape. Alexios, stop weeping!"
Cornelia's quavering voice became steady. "Yes, Julius. Julia, I
should say. Yes, that is excellent advice. All we must do is--"
We turned to the Amphora of Dionysus, which still nestled securely in
the grass where we had left it. But the grass was no longer dry; it was
wet. The Amphora had collected the masculinity of three men, but it had
the capacity only for one. The vessel had overflowed.
All four of us were women now; their transformations were rapidly
approaching a state of completion near to my own. Soon, no masculine
traits would remain among any of us. A thin rivulet of nectar dribbled
from the lip of the amphora as we debated which one of us should get to
drink it.
"There is only enough for one," Cornelia promised Alexia. "Ovidia has
used it before. We're certain of this. Dividing it between us would be
of no use."
"Even if we had cups," I interjected. "We cannot divide it evenly. If
we drink from this alabaster flask, how will any of us know when we have
had our share?"
"How do we know," Cornelia said darkly, "that the first person might not
take it all?"
Alexia dismissed the tears forming in her liquid eyes. "I understand.
It must be only one of us."
"Not I," said Julia Caesari. "I was always meant to be a woman. Half
of our purpose in coming here was to restore me to this shape."
"We have already established Ovidia as portraying my wife, so there is
some justification there," Cornelia reasoned aloud. "And even as a man,
Ovidia, you must admit you have never held a sword. As well, we have
informed Ovidia's . . . wife, I suppose, that she -- that Ovid would be
away from home. That grants us time to seek a solution. Therefore, the
man must be one of us, Alexios."
The slave girl sighed, for she knew what the answer must be. We had
miles to cover before we reached safety, and between the two of them,
Quadratus was competent with a blade.
Cornelia had known the answer too, for her voice had sounded almost
apologetic. "There must be an answer to this dilemma, somehow. Perhaps
we might find someone in Rome who would willingly sacrifice his
manhood," she mused. "One of the revelers, perhaps. And if a willing
participant might not be found, an unwilling one might do as well."
"I wish there were another way," Julia said sorrowfully.
"As do I," I said. "But I can think of none. In the entire world, we
know of only one relic with power such as this, and only one Golden Fig
Tree with enchanted fruit."
Julia reached out to take my hand, sadly. We were women again,
together, just as we had begun the journey.
Cornelia's face was filled with concern as she paused with the Amphora
of Dionysus hoisted to her lips. "This is a mixture of everyone's
manhood: that which Ovidia lent to Julia, and that of Alexios, and
mine. I suppose we have no way to know what effect this will have on
all of us," she said. "But we have a long way to go before we see the
City again. We'll need a sword arm."
We all nodded. Alexios began to weep softly for her lost manhood.
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