Jason and Medeia (44 page)

my part

to speculate.

   “We were close inshore, so close that through the haze on the land we could hear the mooing of cattle

and bleating

of sheep. We were drenched, half-starved, stone-numb

with weariness,

but according to the boy at the helm, Ankaios, the land

was the isle

of Helios. We needed, God knew, no further bavardage with
him.
And so we continued on and arrived,

half-dead,

at the isle of the pale Phaiakians.

   “There we married, Medeia and I, our hands forced by necessity. A fleet of Kolchians,

arriving by way of the Black Sea, drove Alkinoös to a choice. Medeia, by secret dealing with Alkinoös' queen, outwitted the old man's justice— for which I was glad enough, no warbling songbird

gladder,

for I knew then nothing of the wandering rocks we had

yet to face,

that child of the sun and I, back home in Iolkos. She

was,

not only in my eyes but even to men who despised the

race

of Aia, a woman more fair than the pantarb rising sun, the moon on the sea, the sky-wide armies of Aietes

with all

their trumpets, crimson banners, bronze-clad horsemen.

She seemed

as fair beside all others as a dew-lit rose of Sharon in a trinsicate hedge of thorn, more fine than a silver

dish

the curve of her thighs like a necklace wrought by a

master hand.

My heart sang like Orpheus' lyre on that wedding night, played like lights in a fountain—and whose would not?

   “We sailed joyful, Phaiakian maidens attending Medeia, Phaiakian sailors heaving on the rowing seats left vacant by the

dead.

And so came even in sight of Argos' peaks. Mad Idas danced in a fit of wild joy. The prophecy of Idmon had

failed:

the hounds of Zeus had forgotten him, or if not, at least, had spared him for now, had spared him the doom he'd

dreaded most,

a death that dragged down friends. But even as

he danced for joy,

his brother, Lynkeus of the amazing eyes, put his black

hand gently

on Idas' shoulders, gazing into the sea and beyond the curve of the gray horizon. Nor was it long before we too saw it—a stourmass terrible and swift,

blackening the western sky,

rushing toward us like a fist. We heaved at the
Argo
's oars. Too late! We lurched under

murderous winds,

black skies like screaming apes. We struck we knew

not where,

hurled by the flood-tide high and dry. Then, swift as an

eagle,

the storm was gone. We leaped down full of dismay.

Gray mist,

a landscape sprawling like a dried-up corpse, unwaled,

immense.

We could see no watering place, no path, no farmstead.

A world

calcined, silent and abandoned. Again the boy Ankaios wept, and all who had learned navigation shared his

woe.

No ship, not even the
Argo,
could suffer the shoals and

breakers

the tidal wave had hurtled us unharmed past. There

was no

return, the way we'd come, and ahead of us, desert, gray, as quiet as a drugged man's dreams. Poor Idas sifted our gold and gems, the Phaiakians' gift, and

howled

and bit at his lips until blood wet his kinky beard.

Though the sand

and sea-smoothed rocks were scorching, our hearts

were chilled. The crew

strayed vaguely, seeking some route of escape. Bereft

of schemes

I watched them and had no spirit to call them back,

maintain

mock-order. When the cool of nightfall came, they

returned. No news.

And so we parted again, each seeking a resting place

sheltered from the deepening chill. Medeia lay shivering,

moaning,

in the midst of her Phaiakian maidens, her head and

chest on fire

with the strange plaguing illness, Helios' curse. All night the maids, their golden tresses in the sand, cried out

and wept,

as shrill as the twittering of unfledged birds when they

lie, broken,

on the rocks at the foot of the larch. At dawn the crew

rose up

once more and staggered to the sunlight, starved, throats

parched with thirst,

no water in sight but the salt-thick sea—the piled-up

gifts

of the Phaiakians mocking our poverty—and again set

out

fierce-willed as desert lions, in search of escape. And

again

returned with nothing to report.

   “We gave up hope that night. All that will could achieve, we'd done. We sought out

shelters,

prepared to accept our death, the sun's revenge, triumph of Helios. We listened to the whimpers of the maidens

and wept for them,

and secretly cursed the indifferent, mechanical stars.

   “But on that Libyan shore dwelled highborn nymphs. They

heard the laments

of the maids and the groans of Medeia. And when it

was noon, and the sun

so fierce that the very air crackled, they came, for pity of the maidens, doomed unfulfilled, having neither

men nor sons,

and stood above me, and brushed my cloak's protection

from my eyes

and called to me in a strange voice, a voice I

remembered

yet could not place—some shrew with the flat Argonian

accent

I'd known as a child.— ‘Jason!' I looked, saw nothing

but the blinding

sun. They cried, ‘Pay back the womb that has borne so

much.

Call strength from murdered men. Redeem these

thousand shames.

Embrace your ruin, you who have preached so much

on mindless

struggle, unreasoning hope. Have you still no love?' So

they spoke,

voices in the white-hot light. I had no idea what they

meant,

whispers of madness, guilt. I slept again, awaiting death. And then sat up with a start, a crazy idea tormenting me: the womb was the
Argo
who'd borne us

here,

the murdered men not those I'd lost before but those around me, grounded by the sun; and my ruin was

the sun himself:

I must go to the center of the furnace, my only prayer

for the men,

the Phaiakian maidens, and Medeia. Oh, do not think

I believed

it reasonable! The desert was hotter where I meant to

go,

and the
Argo
no weight for men half-starved, no water

to drink

on a trip that might take us days, if not all eternity. Nevertheless, I roused them, fierce, a lion gone mad, and stumbling, incredulous, they obeyed. I sent no

scouts ahead,

and no man there suggested it. Blind luck was our

hope,

perhaps blind love, the Argonauts bearing that

monstrous ship,

spreading her weight between shoulders meaningless

except for this,

their union in a madman's task. In their shadow the

maidens walked,

singing a hymn of heatwaves, the pitiless sun, a dirge for all of us. And so those noblest of all kings' sons, by their own might and hardihood, lips cracked and

bleeding,

carried the
Argo
and all her treasures, shoulder high, nine days and nights through the death-calm dunes

of Libya.

   “I shared the weight till the seventh day. Then

Medeia fell,

unconscious, and could not be wakened. So I carried

my wife in my arms,

shouting encouragement to the men, reassuring the

maidens. The sun

filled all the sky, it seemed to us. But the maidens sang, struggled to help with the load till they fell, befuddled,

giggling

like madwomen. We dragged them on. Told lunatic

jokes,

talked with the sun, the sand, a thousand sabuline

visions—

and so we came to water. But left the desert strewn with graves, unmarked by stick or stone. One half my

crew

and two of the maidens we buried in the white-hot sand;

and not

the least of those who fell there, slaughtered by the heat,

was Ankaios,

nobleman robed in a bearskin and armed with an axe.

We buried

the twelve-foot child and wept. Our tears were dust.

Then set

the
Argo
down in the calm Tritonian lagoon, and

searched

for drinking water.

   “The sky was blinding white, all sun. It seemed to us that we came to the body of a huge

gray snake,

head smashed, by the trunk of an appletree. From the

venom sacks down

the corpse was asleep, undreaming, the coils a thicket

of arrows,

such deadly poison that maggots perished in the

festering wounds.

And close to the corpse, it seemed to us, we saw fiery

shapes

wailing, their mist-pale arms flung past their golden

heads.

At our first glimpse of the beautiful strangers, majestic

beings

in the white-hot light, they vanished in a swirl of dust.

Then up

leaped Orpheus, praying, wild-eyed: ‘O beautiful

creatures, mysteries,

whether of Olympos or the Underworld, reveal

yourselves!

Blessed spirits, shapes out of Ocean or the violent sun, be visible to us, and lead us to a place where water

runs,

fresh water purling from a rock or gushing from the

ground! Do this

and if ever we bring our ship to some dear Akhaian port, we'll honor you even as we honor the greatest of the

goddesses,

with wine and with hecatombs and an endless ritual of

praise!'

No sooner did he speak, sobbing and conjuring strangely

with his lyre

than grass sprang up all around us from the ground,

and long green shoots,

and in a moment saplings, tall and straight and in full

leaf—

a poplar, a willow, a sacred oak. And strange to say, they were clearly trees, but also, clearly, beings of fire, and all we saw in the world was clearly itself but also fire.

   “Then the beams of the oak tree spoke. ‘You've been

fortunate.

A man came by here yesterday—an evil man—

who killed our guardian snake and stole

the golden apples of the sun. To us he brought anger

and sorrow, to you release

from misery. As soon as he glimpsed those apples, his

face

went savage, hideous to look at, cruel,

with eyes that gleamed like an eagle's. He carried a

monstrous club

and the bow and arrows with which he slew our

guardian of the tree.

Our green world shrank to brambles and thistles, to

sand and sun,

and in terror, like a man gone blind, he turned to left

and right

bellowing and howling like a lost child.

And now he was parched with thirst, half mad. He

hammered the sand

with his club until, by chance, or pitied by a god, he

struck

that great rock there by the lagoon. It split at the base,

and out

gushed water in a gurgling stream, and the huge man

drank, on his knees,

moaning with pleasure like a child and rolling his eyes

up.'

   “As soon as we heard these words we rushed to the place, all our

company,

and drank. Medeia—still unconscious, more cruelly

punished

than those we'd buried in the sand—I placed in the

shadow of ferns

at the water's edge. I bathed her arms and legs, her

throat

and forehead, and dripped cool water in her staring

eyes. With the help

of her maidens, I made her drink. She groped toward

consciousness,

rising slowly, slowly, like Poseidon from the depths of

the sea,

until, wide-eyed with terror at some fierce vision in the

sun,

invisible to us, she clenched her eyes tight shut, clinging with her weak right hand to my cousin Akastos, with

her left to me.

Mad Idas wept. Doom on doom he must witness, and sad premonitions of doom, to the end of his dragged-out

days. No more

the raised middle finger, the obscene joke through

bared fangs;

no more the laughter of the trapped, that denies, defies

the trap.

He'd recognized it at last: more death than death, and

he rolled

his eyes like a sheep in flight from the wolf, and

nothing at his back

but Zeus. Such was the sorrow of Idas, the bravest of

men,

now broken.

   “As soon as our minds were cooled, we came to see that the giant savage of whom the tree had spoken

could be none

but Herakles, much changed by his many trials. We

resolved

to hunt for him, and carry him back to Akhaia, if the

gods

permitted. The wind had removed all sign of his tracks.

The sons

of Boreas set off in one direction, on light-swift wings; Euphemos ran in another, and Lynkeus ran, more

slowly,

in a third, with his long sight. And Kaanthos set out

too,

impelled by destiny. Kaanthos was one who'd ploughed

for his living

and his heart was steady and gentle. He had had a

brother once,

a man of whom nothing is known. He found a grazing

flock

of goats kept alive by desert thistles, and he sought the

goatherd

to ask for news of Herakles, the sky-god's son. Before he could speak, the herd leaped up with a look

of alarm

and threw a stone at him. It struck the poor man