CHAPTER 1
"Cablegram, Sir," cooed Nicole, the busty department secretary, hired only
four months earlier, but already in the throes of a hopeless crush on the
addressee, Professor Peter Draper. Nicole had quietly entered Draper's
office while he was deeply engrossed in a translation; he was unaware of
her presence until she spoke. She had approached his desk in mincing steps,
the tightness of her miniskirt restricting her stride. Though the girl was
wearing heels, she had come into the office on the tips of her toes, but
now that she had at last attracted the professor's attention, she lowered
herself and closed the remaining distance between them with that rapid and
slightly nervous clicking of high heels so typical of predaceous females.
She stood expectantly, breasts thrust slightly forward, and batted her
heavy-lidded eyes.
As Draper looked up from his work and removed his glasses, Nicole leant
over his desk to hand him the yellow envelope -leant a little more than was
really necessary, far enough to grant the Professor an unimpeded view down
the front of her blouse, where her generous cleavage was nestled in a froth
of white lace.
Cablegrams were a regular monthly event, and the department secretaries
fought one another for the privilege of delivering them to Professor
Draper, a strikingly handsome man in his mid-forties - slim, tall, always
impeccably dressed, independently wealthy (heir to a Maine pulp-and-paper
fortune) - and unmarried. To get Draper to marry one of them was the
unspoken agenda of all - the reason most had taken the job in the first
place. It was the year 1965, when the Prospect of Marrying the Boss
governed the career decisions of many young women.
Draper suspected these secretarial rivalries, and was flattered by them. As
he accepted both the envelope and the display of Nicole's magnificent
bosom, he reflected that, as the new girl on the block, she must have
fought tooth and nail to deliver the cablegram. That took spunk, a trait he
admired in women as long as it carried over into their lovemaking. With the
celerity of thought, he undressed Nicole in his mind, approved of what he
saw, and felt the familiar twinge in his crotch in response. He resolved to
bed this delectable creature at the first opportunity.
"Thank you, er..." said the professor, taking the yellow envelope.
"It's Nicole, Sir," offered the girl, seeing that Draper did not know (or
had forgotten) her name. She blushed professionally.
"O, yes, of course. Nicole. Thank you Nicole." The charm of her blush had
the desired effect of a rapid tenting of the front of his trousers.
"Will there be anything else, Professor?"
Draper was on the verge of asking her whether she was free for dinner, but
he couldn't afford the distraction, not now, when he was so close to
deciphering the codex. Today - a rare exception to his usual protocol - sex
would have to wait.
"No, Nicole. Thank you. That'll be all."
The girl's face fell, but she nonetheless managed a winning smile, turned
on her heel and smartly clicked her way out of the office. Draper's gaze
was riveted to her shapely rear and undulating hips; he instantly regretted
his decision and was on the verge of calling her back, but she had already
closed the door behind her.
The opportunity lost, Draper turned his attention to the yellow envelope
containing the progress report from the dig. Colin Richards, his senior
research assistant, made a monthly trip by motor launch to Saros for basic
supplies. His last stop before returning to the dig was the Empoulis
telegraph office. He'd cable Draper with a progress report and also put in
an order for lightweight tools that could easily be mailed, like trowels,
brushes and dental picks, items that the crew was constantly running out
of. Because of budgetary constraints, they could never pack enough of them
at the start of a project. But since replacements came out of a different
fiscal category, it was standard practice simply to order them up as needed
over the course of a project.
Draper opened the envelope with a fine Toledo dirk he kept honed to a
razor's edge. He hated dull letter-openers, hated how they tore the paper
rather than cut it, whereas he relished the gratifying whiz of a sharp
blade slitting the fold of an envelope. He was as precise in his letter-
opening as in everything he did. He removed the cablegram, unfolded it and
smoothed it out on the desk.
As was Draper's habit, he rapidly scanned the message without really
reading it through, to get a quick idea of its contents. His first
impression was that there must have been a mix-up at the telegraph office -
the clerk must have pasted the teletype tapes from someone else's message
over Colin's name. But as he began to read it through in earnest, he saw
that there had been no mistake, which made the content even more alarming.
It read:
"17 MARCH 1965 EMPOULIS ISLE OF SAROS GREECE TO PROF PETER DRAPER
HARVARD ART MUSEUMS 485 BWAY CAMBRIDGE MASSACHUSETTS USA MIRROR
FRAGMENT UNEARTHED 1 MARCH IN CELLA. STOP UNEXPECTED DEVELOPMENT MARCH
14 HAS HALTED ALL WORK STOP YOUR PRESENCE URGENTLY REQUIRED STOP MEET
AT EMPOULIS QUAY 21 MARCH 3 PM STOP CRUCIAL YOU BRING ITEMS ON
FOLLOWING LIST STOP FULL EXPLANATION ON ARRIVAL STOP"
It was this list that had made Draper believe the telegraph office had
pasted on the wrong teletype tapes: the remainder of the cable was a
detailed itemization of women's apparel and feminine frills and necessities
- dresses, blouses, skirts, slips, khaki workshorts and shirts, blue jeans,
cotton bras and panties, one- and two-piece bathing suits, socks,
stockings, garter belts, tennis shoes, plain flats and heels, sun hats,
nighties.... all in various specified sizes; shampoos and conditioners; a
variety of sanitary napkins and tampons, soap flakes, needles and thread,
costume jewelry, various notions and rickrack.... The list went on for
almost two pages - enough to clothe, pamper and meet the intimate needs of
perhaps a dozen women for at least six months - and ended thusly:
"ABOVE ITEMS ABSOLUTELY REQUIRED STOP SPACE PERMITTING BRING 6 SETS
FANCY BRA AND PANTY SETS IN EACH OF SIZES AS LISTED ABOVE STOP SILK
NYLON SATIN ACCEPTABLE STOP ALSO 1 DOZ EACH EYEBROW TWEEZERS NAIL
FILES NAIL POLISH HAIR COMBS BRUSHES MIRROR COMPACTS 60 BARETTES 48 PR
PEDS ASSORTED LIPSTICKS EYE SHADOW MASCARA EYEBROW PENCIL STOP COLORS
AND BRANDS YOUR DISCRETION STOP GIRLS WILL BE GRATEFUL NO MATTER WHAT
BUT NO JUNK PLS STOP (signed) C RICHARDS PS ALSO FORTY JARS DEPILATORY
CREAM ANY BRAND STOP IF POSSIBLE LAST 12 ISSUES LADIES HOME JOURNAL
COSMOPOLITAN REDBOOK AND ANY HARLEQUIN ROMANCES YOU CAN FIND STOP"
"Girls will be grateful?" the Professor muttered out loud. "GIRLS? There
are girls on the island? Has Colin gone completely off his rocker? And all
this.... all this disgusting girl-stuff? Am I running an archeological dig,
or a bordello? What does Colin think I am, some whorehouse wardrobe master,
buying frillies and baubles for his prostitutes? Tampons and sanitary
napkins? The boy has obviously spent a bit too much time in the sun!"
Over the years, Draper had developed strict rules for all his digs: male
graduate students only, willing to toil twelve hours a day in the merciless
Aegean sun for nothing but tent and board - and the glory of working on a
Draper dig. The sites were remote, the local crews (even the cook) were all
male, and women were not permitted within five miles because of the
distraction they'd surely cause. Despite this, the graduate students
occasionally managed to smuggle in some local girls for a few nights, whom
they passed around, share and share alike. Draper had got wind of this
practice, but looked the other way as long as work was progressing
satisfactorily.
But on this dig, the issue of girls simply could not arise: the site was on
Yaros, the only uninhabited island in the Cyclades, a monolith of
dazzlingly white rock two miles long by a mile wide, used by various Greek
regimes to exile enemies of the state. Yaros was popularly known as the
Greek Alcatraz. In late 1964, the conservative junta in Athens, brought to
power in a bloodless coup, ordered the ancient prison razed - the island's
only building - to make way for a new one, which everyone thought would
accommodate a large contingent of leftists who were already cramming the
mainland prisons to overflowing.
Yaros prison, one hundred and five years old, was solidly built. Hence
blasting - the archeologist's best friend - was required. After the third
detonation, the sub-basement dungeon cells collapsed into what even the
workmen could tell was an early Hellenic temple. Word of the find quickly
leaked out to the antiquities community. Not even the Philistine generals
could resist international pressures to excavate the site. The generals
granted a one year's stay of execution. Harvard's Fogg Museum won the
contract, mainly because of Professor Peter Draper, the Fogg's curator of
Hellenic antiquities and a recognized world authority on the archeology of
the Cyclades.
In the mid-1950's, as a graduate student in Hellenic archeology, Draper had
written a brilliant doctoral dissertation on the Circe legend. His
groundbreaking translation of the inscrutable Mikonos Codex led him to
assert that the powerful sorceress, who had, according to legend, turned
Odysseus's men into swine, dwelt, in fact, not on Aiaia , as had been
erroneously repeated for several millennia, but on Yaros, then heavily
forested and so densely populated with wild animals of all sorts that the
ancients believed they were marooned mariners transformed by Circe's
spells.
Now, some fifteen years later and near the apex of his career, Draper was
deciphering yet another codex, the so-called Kythnian Codex, found on
Kythnos in 1881. It had languished, forgotten, for more than seventy years
in the Fogg's moldering basement annex until a workman fixing a drain
retrieved it from where it had fallen between a bookshelf and the wall. The
newly rediscovered codex had subtle and tantalizing parallels to the
Mikonos Codex, so many, in fact, that Draper at first thought that one was
a copy of the other, set down from memory by some fourth century B.C.
scribe - a hack - which would account for their textual differences.
Both codices referred to Yaros as Circe's island, but only the Kythnian
mentioned a "temple of Circe," which held an east-facing sanctuary on whose
inner wall was affixed a circular mirror - Circe's Mirror - the source of
the sorceress's powers, but only when it reflected the rays of the rising
sun for seven days on either side of the vernal and autumnal equinoxes.
Circe was a votary of Apollo and made rich sacrifices to him. In recompense
for her devotion, Apollo would, twice a year, grant Circe's Mirror its
transformational powers. Or so said the new codex, at any rate.
The codex related that whenever mariners landed on the island - whether for
water, or because they were stranded by wind, weather or shipwreck - Circe
commanded her spear-toting Amazon guards to drag them to the temple at
sunrise and restrain them before her mirror, whereupon the reflected rays
of the rising sun would transform them. The new codex made a distinction,
however, between the mirror's vernal and autumnal powers: the autumnal
mirror transformed men into beasts, but the vernal mirror transformed them
into..... women.
Here the new codex had a lacuna, however, where the inscription was faint
and inconclusive. And it was on this very lacuna that Draper had been
working when Nicole had entered his office bearing Colin's cablegram. The
lacuna referred to the sexual transformations specifically: Circe enslaved
the newly-transmuted females as her handmaidens. If they served her in all,
doing her bidding without question or hesitation, she turned them back into
men, using her ordinary powers (apparently, it was a relatively simple
matter to make a man, whereas making a woman required the direct
intervention of a god). She gave them their liberty: the island's forests
provided the trees to build boats. But if they were surly or disobedient,
they were brought before the mirror again in the fall, and were made beasts
forever.
As far as the professor was concerned, the mirror's differing powers were
purely academic. The entire Circe myth was exactly that: a myth, one
calculated to appeal to the Hellenes' ancient and abiding fixation on
transformations, a perverse thread running through most of their culture
since time immemorial. Charming stories, true, which played upon
humankind's endless fascination with sexual ambiguity. But whether Draper
believed the codex or not, what it contained soon became known as the New
Circe Legend.
