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Then we became like horse and rider. There was no beginning of each other and no ending. We were one animal, one demigod, with four legs and two pairs of wings.
    So this was the thunder of Pegasus—poetry’s racehorse! So this was where Aphrodite’s softness and the flinty arrows of her devilish son became one. Soft became hard, hard soft, outside in, inside out.
    Time vanished. Space collapsed. The stars shone in the day sky. If we stayed together, the sun would never be quenched at night. We would make light with the heat of our bodies and spin off another universe between us. Our loving was that powerful.
    At last, under a dawn sky of red and violet, we staggered back to the boat from our idyll in the olive grove. My insides were sore from Alcaeus’ rough love. I wanted to feel sore forever. The sailors stared at me and smirked as if they knew.
    â€œMy darling boy,” Alcaeus joked. “I’d almost think you were a girl !”
    The next night, we slept aboard ship but did not touch. The wind whipped and whistled in the rigging and the oars slammed against the side of the boat. Several of them floated away. Two men were lost off the bowsprit as if mythical monsters were nearby and the whole sea had turned into Scylla and Charybdis. In the shrieking of the wind, in the screeching and tearing of the ropes, the gods were heard:
    â€œ Alcaeus is your first true love ,” Aphrodite sang in the voice of the wind, “ but he doesn’t know it yet. ”
    â€œThen come and guide him,” I whispered.
    â€œ When the time is right ,” she said. “ Love you as I do, I cannot hurry fate. The spinners spin as slowly as they will. ”
    â€œUnfair Aphrodite!”
    â€œ I have been called unfair before ,” she laughed and disappeared.
Aphrodite has everything,
    Can renew her virginity
    With one immersion in the sea.
    What can I give her?
    All night the ropes of the ship cried like skinned cats. All night the stars hid behind clouds. The boat rocked precipitously. We were sorry we had not beached our boat and slept ashore in the shelter of the great sail.
    The next morning, it was improbably clear and bright. Dawn’s fingertips touched our unfurling sails with rose. We sailed around the island to Mytilene with three of Alcaeus’ men as a practice run. Two would go ashore with him to do the bloody deed. Another and I would remain to watch the ship. We were to seek harbor in a hidden inlet near Hiera, waiting for word from them. But before we reached Hiera, when we were hugging the shore between the Temple of Dionysus at Brisa and the beginning of the Gulf of Hiera, a black ship fitted with a great black sail began following us.
    At first Alcaeus dismissed this as coincidence, but soon it became clear that we were its quarry and it was swifter than we.
    A race began along the rocky coast. As the black boat came closer, we saw that the sailors wore satyr masks, shields with the emblem of Pittacus, and brandished bronze-tipped spears.
    â€œPirates!” was Alcaeus’ first thought, but these were no ordinary pirates. Pittacus had sent the boat. Politics played a part in this piracy. I prayed to Aphrodite.
    â€œYou are praying to the wrong goddess,” Alcaeus barked. “She doesn’t give a damn about this sort of thing. Try Athena. She’s a warrior! She’s the one who rescued Odysseus!”
    Of course he would joke grimly at a time like this.
    For a while it seemed that, using only our sail, we could outrun the black ship before the wind. Alcaeus’ sailor boys were good, but not good enough. We had lost too many oars and the black ship had oars aplenty and slaves to man them. The waves were rough and rose on either side. Alcaeus had sung of all this in his songs.
    Look before you sail, he had famously sung, once at sea, you have to ride what comes. This was not the time to remind him of his prophecy.
    I remember the swell of the waves, the