Jason and Medeia (30 page)

frowned,

pretended to reflect, like a man who's lost his thread.

And then:

‘However, it seems to me that you may have forgotten

something.

Who but Zeus could have brewed up this terrible

storm? Must we not

atone, disavow the intended sacrifice to Zeus of

Phrixos—

curse, these many years, of all the Akhaian isles, and mockery of all his justice? And was not the golden fleece your father's—a prize he gave up to Aietes' might,

forgetting

that gifts of the gods are loans? I am not a seer, of

course.

I may be wrong. On the other hand, if you served as

our pilots,

running no risk but the sea, who knows what peace

it might mean

for Phrixos' ghost? This much seems sure: When winds

churn waves,

the god of the sky is aware of it. If we help you flee, against his will, it may be not even Athena can save her ship. —But the deathbed vow is yours, of course,

not ours.'

I spoke it gently, like a slow man thinking aloud. They

stared—

the sons of Phrixos—aghast. They knew well enough,

no doubt,

Aietes would not prove affable if we dared to steal that fleece. Young Melas spoke, when he found his voice.

‘Lord Jason,

be sure you can count on our help in any other trouble

but this!

Aietes is nobody's fool, and anything but weak. He

claims

his father was the sun. You'd believe it, if ever you saw

him! His men

are numberless, and the fiercest warriors on earth. His

voice

is terrifying. He's huge as the god of war. It will be no easy trick to snatch that fleece. It's guarded, all

around,

by a serpent, deathless and unsleeping, a child of Hera

herself,

the mightiest beast in the world. Your scheme's

impossible!'

   The Argonauts paled at his words. Then Peleus spoke.

‘My friend,

if all you say is true, and the thing's impossible, at least we might see this snake, as a tale for our

grandchildren.

And yet it may be, at the last minute, we may happen

to spot

some oversight in Aietes' careful precautions. I say we look, then scurry if we must.' At once all the

Argonauts

took heart. Mad Idas rolled up his eyes, all piety. ‘Men who make vows to the dying should try to fulfill

them, if it's

convenient,' he said. We laughed to prevent him from

more. I said:

‘It's late. We'll talk of this further tomorrow.' The crew

agreed.

We slept, Peleus on watch, by my order, lest Phrixos'

sons

evade the promised discussion and leave us marooned.

At dawn

we persuaded them, sailed east. By dark we were passing

the isle

of Philyra. From there to the lands of the Bekheiri, the Sapeires, the Byzeres, travelling with all the speed the light wind gave. The last recess of the Black Sea

opened

and gave us a view of the lofty crags of the Caucasus, where Prometheus stood chained with fetters of bronze,

screaming,

an eagle feeding on his liver. We saw it in late

afternoon,

the eagle high above the ship in the yellow-green light.

It was near

the clouds, yet it made all the canvas quiver in the

wind as its wings

beat by. The long white feathers of its terrible wings

rose, fell,

like banks of highly polished oars. Soon after the

eagle passed,

we heard that scream again. Then again it passed

above us,

flying the same way it came. So Aietes would scream,

I swore,

and all his sycophants.

“Night fell, and after a time,

guided by Melas, we came in the dark to the estuary of Phasis, where the Black Sea ends. Then quickly we

lowered sail

and stowed the sail and yard in the mastcage, and

lowered the mast

beside them; then rowed directly to the river. It rolled in

foam

from bank to bank, pushed back by the
Argo's
prow.

On the left,

the lofty Caucasus Mountains and the city of Aia; on

the right,

the plain of Ares and the sacred grove where the snake

kept watch

on the fleece, spread coil on coil through the groaning

branches of an oak,

the mightiest oak in the world. We stared in wonder,

in the moonlight.

I glanced at Orpheus' lyre. He smiled, shook his head.

‘Not this one.'

I turned toward Mopsos. Tire in the tree, you think?'

He laughed.

‘And make that creature cross, boy? Not on your life!'

The dusky

eyes stared out at us, dreaming, if old snakes dream.

I poured

libations out, pure wine as sweet as honey from a golden cup—a gift to the river, to earth, to the gods of the hills, to the spirits of the Kolchian dead. Then the boy

Ankaios spoke:

‘We've reached the land of Kolchis. The time has come

to choose.

Will we speak to Aietes as friends, or try him some

harsher way?'

Nobody answered him, all of us weighing the power

of the snake.

   “Advised by Melas, I ordered my men to row the
Argo
to the reedy marshes, and to moor her there with

anchor stones

in a sheltered place where she could ride. We found one,

not far off,

and there we passed the night, our eyes wide open,

waiting.

No one asked me now if the thing we were doing

made sense.

War proves itself—all reason slighter than a feather

in the wind

beside that strange aliveness, chilling of the blood,

dark joy.

We'd become what we were, at last: a machine for theft:

a creature

stalking the creature in the tree, our multiple wills

interlocked,

our multiple hungers annealed by the heat of the great

snake's threat.

I whispered my name to myself and it rang like a

stranger's name,

the name of a god, an eagle, some famous old Titan's

sword.

Behind me, stretching to the rim of the world, ghost

armies waited,

silent, nameless, in strange attire, watching for my sign with eyes as calm as dragon's eyes. The goddess was

in us.”

13

So he spoke, and the visiting kings sat hushed, as if

spellbound, through

those shadowy halls. It seemed to me that his weird

vision

of armies behind him, waiting in the wings, stirred all

who heard him

to uneasiness. As he ended, the room went strange.

The walls

went away like the floor of the sea, yet vast as the great

hall seemed,

the goddess showed me chambers beyond, blue-vaulted

rooms,

expanses of marble floor like a wineglass filled to the

brim

with light, and marmoreal peristyles, each shining pillar twelve feet wide, the architraves made hazy by hovering clouds; and in those spacious rooms where no life

stirred,

I might not have guessed the existence of all those

gold-crowned kings

attending to Jason's tale.

I found

a room where slaves were whispering the name Amekhenos. The goddess showed me where he crouched in the bowels of the palace peering

out, eyes narrowed,

watching the palace guards pace back and forth on the

wall,

their queer strut mirrored in the lilypad-strewn lake. The

grass

was as green as grass in a painting, the sky unnaturally

blue;

the walls of houses below were the white of English

cream,

with angular shadows, an occasional tree, its leaves autumnally blazing. Far to the east, beyond the sea's last glint, it occurred to me, there were more

kings gathered,

brought together by the tens of thousands, to die for Helen, or honor, or the spoils of war on

the plains

of Troy. Beside the guests of Kreon, the numberless host of Agamemnon's army would seem the whole human

race.

Yet beyond rich Troy lay Russia—darkforested Kolchis

—and Indus,

and beyond those two lay China, so many in a host

that the eye,

even the eye of vision, couldn't gather them in. “Behold I” the goddess said, invisible all around me. With the

word

she darkened the sky, and the grayblue waters became,

all at once,

a horde of people on the move, bearing their possessions

on their backs,

features ragged with hunger, eyes too large, luminous. The children walking at their parents' sides or

straggling behind

had distended bellies, and I knew by the gray of their

eyes that they carried

plagues. I watched them passing—the crowd went out

from me

from horizon to horizon, and the dust they stirred made a cloud so vast that the mightiest rays of the

sun were hidden.

Suddenly the cloud was a dragon with a fat-thighed

woman on its back,

her chalk-white, hydrocephalic forehead covered all over with elegant writing, swirls and serifs that squirmed

like insects

as I tried to read. The woman had a robe of flowing

crimson

and she carried a torch which belched thick smoke like

factory smoke.

She rode toward me, and then—from north, south, east,

and west—

great louts came lumbering, treading on the people, and

made their way,

teetering and reeling, to the huge woman. With her

hands, she raised

her skirt and spread her buttocks for them, and roaring,

prancing,

they thrust themselves in, and the earth and sky were

sickened with filth,

blackened to a towering mass like a writhing,

bull-horned god.

I choked and gagged. “Goddess!” I cried out. “Goddess,

save me!”

Gulls darted back and forth above the grayblue water, mournfully calling. The slaves in the palace were

whispering.

And then, baffled, still puzzling at the meaning of the

strange revelation,

I was back in the hall of Kreon, where Jason was

standing as I'd left him,

silent, and old King Kreon was waiting, the slave beside

him,

Ipnolebes. I wondered if all I had seen I'd seen in Ipnolebes' eyes, or perhaps the eyes of the Northern

slave

watching the guards as they strutted, this side of the

battlements,

or the slaves who whispered. I shuddered and shook

myself free of all that,

or tried to. The curious image held on. The gem-lit,

gold-crowned

heads of the visiting kings (there seemed not many of

them now)

strangely recalled the numberless hosts of ánhagas, friendless exiles forever on the move in perpetual night.

I could see by Kreon's pleasure and the timorous smile

of Pyripta

that Jason's story was winning them. Indeed, not a soul thought otherwise. It seemed no contest now. He'd seized their hearts and minds by his crafty wit and clung

like a bat

to his advantage. His thoughts were dangerous, and they

knew it. His scheme,

now clear, was impossible to block. When men sit

talking by the fire,

exchanging opinions of interest, discussing betrothals, curious adventures, and one, by the moving

of his sleeve,

reveals a scorpion, all mere trading of civilized insights stops: Death takes priority. So Jason, spinning his web of words, closed off all other business. They

must hear it through, approve

or not. Yet fat Koprophoros wouldn't give up his hopes entirely. As Jason waited, the ghastly creature rose, his eyelids drowsily lowered on his dark and brilliant

eyes,

and spoke.

“My lords, this Jason is rightly renowned for his cunning!

See what he's done to us! Penned us up like chickens in

a coop

by his artistry! First he seduces our girlish emotions with a tale of love—the poor sweet queen of Lemnos!—

and wins

Our grudging respect by disingenuous admissions of

his cruel

betrayal in that grungy affair. But that was mere

feinting, test

of the equipment! For behold, having shown us beyond

all shadow of a doubt—

so he made it seem—that solemn Paidoboron and I

were wrong,

two addlepates, you'd swear—myself no better than a

tyrant,

and my friend from the North a coward (like one of

the gods' pale shuddering

nuns' was, I think, his phrase), he uses our chief ideas to create an elaborate hoax, a dismal drama of anguish in which he—always heroic beyond even Orpheus!— encounters monsters more fierce than any centaur—

monsters

of consciousness. Have I misunderstood? Is not his tale of poor young Kyzikos and the Doliones an allegory attacking all human skills—the skills of sailors, armies, even augurers?—Skills like mine, like Paidoboron's? It's a frightening thought, you'll confess, that the

essence of humanness—

man's conviction that craft, the professional's art, may

save him—

is drunken delusion! We hunch forward in our chairs,

ambsaced,

waiting for Jason, who conjured the bogy, to exorcise it. But ha! That's not his strategy. Pile on more anguish, that's the ticket! The tales of Herakles and Hylas, and

poor Polydeukes.

Human commitment, love of one man for another—

that too