Jason and Medeia (51 page)

shushing them. She slued clumsily, inching around on the hassock to watch them pass. The old man

paused, looked in,

his lean face drawn and crabbed. The eyebags drooping

to his cheeks

were as gray and wrinkled as bark. He whispered,

“What's this moaning

that fills all the house with noise? How could you

leave your lady?

Did Medeia consent?”

   She shook her head, lips trembling, tears now brimming afresh. “Old man—old guardian

of Jason's sons—

how can the troubles of masters not soon bring sorrow

to their slaves?

I've left her alone for a little to grant my own grief

vent.”

   He turned his head, as if looking through walls to

Medeia's room.

“No change?” he asked. She covered her face.

“No change,” she said.

“My poor Medeia's troubles have scarcely begun.”

   The old man narrowed his eyes. Then, hoarsely: Poor blind fool—

if slaves

may say such things of masters. There's reason more

than she knows

for all this woe and rage.”

   Agapetika inched around more to stare at the man in fear. “What now?” she exclaimed.

“Sir, do not

keep from me what you've heard.”

   He shook his head. “No, nothing. Vague speculation. Mere idle talk.” The twins had

run on—

romping to their room, indifferent and blind to misery— and his eyes went after them, grudging. The whole

afternoon they'd kept him

plodding with hardly a rest. At the crest of every hill his old heart thudded in his throat, and his brains went

light, so that

to keep his knees from buckling he would stretch out

his hands to a tree

or ivied gatepost, coughing and gulping for air.

In the park

high above seacliffs, he'd met with a fellow slave,

a servant

in Kreon's palace, and there, where leafless ramdikes

arched

past hedges still bright green—where the sky,

the distant buildings,

highways and bridges were as drab as in winter

despite the glow

of lawns grown rich and lush, deceived by late

summer rain—

he'd heard this newest catastrophe. He revealed it now, compelled by the old woman's eyes. He said: “The

palace slaves,

who know the old king's purposes sooner than

Kreon himself,

are certain the contest's settled already, as though

no man

had spoken in all this time but Jason alone.”

   “Then our fears are realized,” the old woman said; “no hope of escape!”

   There's more,” he said, and avoided her look. “In the

palace they say

the king is resolved to expel our mistress and her

two sons

from Corinth. He thinks it a generous act, considering

her powers

and her sons' inevitable position as royal pretenders.

I cannot

say all this is true. But I fear it may be.”

   “And will our Jason allow such things?” the old woman asked.

But already

she saw that he might. She whimpered, Though he and

Medeia are at odds,

surely he hasn't forgotten so soon what pain she

suffered,

torn long ago from her homeland and dearest friends!

Though he needs

no friends himself, quick to win facile admirers, thanks to that dancing tongue, and at any rate more pleased,

by nature,

with work than with love—like Argus, like the

god Hephaiastos,

a creature sufficient to himself, his heart all schemes—

surely

he knows our lady's needs! She might have been queen,

herself,

of all dark-forested Kolchis, had her fate run otherwise; she might have had no more need than he of enfolding

arms,

shield against darkness and senselessness. He robbed

her of that—

became himself her homeland, father, brother and sister, her soul's one labor and religion. Can he dare make all

that void?—

by a fingersnap make all she's lived an illusion?

Can he turn

on his own two children, change them to shadows,

to nothing, as though

they'd no more solid flesh than a glimmering

wizard's trick?”

   As if to himself, the old man said, “The familiar ties are weaker now. He's no more a friend to this gloomy,

crumbling

house. —Say nothing to Medeia.”

   Just then, beside him at the door, the twins appeared and looked in, curious, no longer

laughing,

coming to see what was wrong. The woman cried,

“Children, behold

what love your father bears for you! I will not

curse him—

my master yet—but no man alive is more treasonous?

The male slave scowled. “Let the children be, mere

eight-year-olds,

what have they to do with treasons? As for Jason,

what man

is better, old woman? Now that you're old, look squarely

at the world.

All men care for themselves and for nobody else.

All men

would joyfully swap away sons for the pleasures of a

new bride's bed.”

She was still, looking at the children. At last, with

a heavy sigh:

“Go, boys, play in your room. All will be well.” And then to the attendant: “You, sir, keep them off to themselves,

I beg you.

Take them nowhere in range of their mother in

her present mood.

Already I've seen her glaring at the children savagely,

threatening mischief. She'll not leave off this rage,

I know,

till she's struck some victim dead. I pray to the gods

her wrath

may light among foes, not friends.”

   From deeper in the house then came a wail deep-throated and wild as the cry of a

jungle beast.

My veins ran ice and I jerked up my arm to my face.

A shock

of pain flashed through me, innumerable bruises, and

I nearly revealed

my hiding place in the shadow of the black oak bed.

The slaves

listened to Medeia's wail as if numbed. When the

old woman

could speak, she said: “Go to your room now quickly!

Be wary!

Do not provoke that violent heart! Hurry! Go swiftly!
The soul of her father is alive in her. This gathering

cloud

of tears and wailing will enkindle soon far stormier

flashes.

A spirit like hers, headstrong and bitterly stung by

affliction—

what wild and reckless deeds may it not dare thunder

on us?”

I glanced at the garden, my eyes in flight from the

anguish of the house,

and my heart leaped. There stood the goddess Artemis,

tall

as a stone tower, watching with burning eyes.

   And then the sea-kings were gathered around me, Jason on

the dais, with Kreon,

and the princess rigid in her silver chair. The whole

wide hall,

so it seemed to me, was a-gleam with the light

of Artemis.

   Paidoboron spoke, dark-bearded king

of barren moraine, debris of glaciers, in his gloomy eyes the stillness of tideless seas. The assembled kings

sat hushed.

At a dark door far from the dais, the slave Ipnolebes

watched,

his hand on the shoulder of a boy.

   “Think back,” Paidoboron said, “on the days of old.” His voice had nothing alive in it— the voice of a clockwork doll, some old, artificial

monster—

and his slow, mechanical gestures enforced the same

effect,

mockery of life. ‘Think over the years and down

the ages.”

He pointed as if to the darkness of endless corridors. “
Nation on nation the gods have raised up, then

crushed again.

Again and again the bow of the mighty the gods have

broken,

and the feeble and oppressed they have girded with

strength. No law of the stars

is surer than this: Empires shall rise and fall forever till the day of the earth's destruction. The cities of the

strong will burn

and the bones of the master be hurled on the

smouldering garbage mounds

beyond the city's gates. Then he who was weak shall

be robed

in zibelline, and in place of his shackles

the greaves of a warrior king, and his slaves

shall be splendid nobles of the age just past—

till he too falls to the jackals.” He paused, looked hard

at Kreon.

“Has it not yet struck you, Corinthian king? Though

you watched Thebes burn

with your own two eyes—great Thebes whose outer

walls were oceans,

whose kingdom's heart was all Ethiopia and Egypt,

city of Kadmos the Wanderer, noblest of dragon

slayers—

have you never been struck by the deadly regularity with which, like suns, great kingdoms rise and fall?

Is all this

accident? To the ends of the world the rubble stretches, the scattered orts of banquets, the fumets of

chariot-horses,

fortresses ruined, thrones, the occamy spangles of once-proud concubines. All human tongues record the same in their legendry: the dark agonals of kings. And still man's heart inclines to power, to the wealth and ease,

rich art,

fine food, of the demon city. But I tell you the truth:

the earth

at our feet cries out its curse on that tumorous growth.

In the shade

of walls, earth dies; it stiffens, trampled by sandals,

and cracks.

The city's wealth cries softly to marauders in the night,

like a whore

at the jalousie. Her mounds bring plagues, her discharge

insects,

dry rot, rats. Still the city grows, dark lure of ambition, hunger of the exiled spirit, abandoned forever by

the stars,

for the wombsoft slosh of fat. The corpus of law grows

bloated

like a corpse recovered from the sea; and those who

enforce the law

grow cynical and rich, foxy, wolfish, beyond inculpation by any man, till all but frampold devils are shackled in chains. Then like a thigh-wound festering, the city

overflows

her battlements and coigns—robs all the land

surrounding for victuals,

chops green-forested mountains for timber, quogs out

quarries,

to heave up monuments worthy of the devastating

power of her kings,

tombs for the slyest of her paracletes, the most

celebrated

of her enemy-smashers, deified dragon-men—

sky-high houses

staddled on broken-backed slaves. Consumes the land,

the clouds;

builds ships for trade, extends her scope; finds conquest

cheaper,

more durable. And so that hour arrives at last

when the city, towering like a mammoth oak—great

shining bartizans,

pennons of crimson and gold like leaves in autumn

on her high-

spired parapets—an oak majestic in its ignorant pride, rotten at the core—shudders suddenly at an odd

new wind,

and trembles, incredulous, shaken by the gale of

exploited men's howls,

and to all the world's astonishment, siles down.

So it's gone

for a thousand, thousand years, and so it will continue.

   “You may say, ‘Nevertheless, there is good in cities: Where else

can men

support great art? The complexity of music, the

intrinsicate craft

of poetry? Who else can pay for architecture,

the gifts of science, ennobling pleasure of philosophy?'

I answer this: To a hungry man, all food is food, sufficient to his need. Trembling with weakness, he

does not ask

for meats denatured by subtle rocamboles. But the

man well-fed,

as short of breath as a boar at the trough, dull-headed

with wine,

bloated on the blood of his workers' children—that

man has tastes

more particular: not taste for food but for taste itself. An art has been born. So the poet whose hunger is

simply to speak—

tell truths, right wrongs—what need has he for the

lipogram,

for colors of rhetoric, antilibrations of phrase on phrase?
Only to the fool who believes all truths debatable, who believes true virtue resides not in men but

in eulogies,

true sorrow not in partings but in apopemptic hymns, and true thought nowhere but in atramentaceous

scrollery—

only to him is elegant style, mere scent, good food.
The city, bedded on the sorrows of the poor, compacts

new sweets

to incense the corpse of the weary rich.

   “—And as for science, cure my disease and I'll thank you for it. Yet I do

not think

you mix your potions and juleps for me. By the ebony

beds

of the old loud-snoring mighty you wring your hands

and spoon out

remedies—dole out health for the coin of convalescent

spiders

in a kingdom of hapless flies. For the spider, health itself becomes not need but taste, where the treatment of

fevers and chills,

chapped lips, a slight but debilitating dryness of the

palate while eating

cake, are men's chief griefs. So it is with all the arts; so even Queen Theology turns a casual amusement for the pornerastic sky- and earth-consumer, a flatulence past the power of all man's remedies. Such is my

judgment.

I may be in error—a man as remote from the bustlings