Jason and Medeia Read online

  compassion.

  “We glided in where the water was dark, reflecting

  trees,

  the steering-oar turning in Tiphys’ hands like a part of

  himself,

  the rowers automatic, the laws of our nautical art in

  their blood.

  And so came in to our mooring place, where vestal

  virgins

  waited in the ancient attire, and palsied, white-robed

  priests

  stood with their arms uplifted, figures like stone. We

  waded

  in, and told them our wish. They bowed, then moved,

  formulaic

  as antique songs, to the temple. And so that night we

  saw

  the mysteries. Impressive, of course. I watched, went

  through

  the motions. Maybe, as the priests pretended, the land

  had mysterious

  powers; and maybe not. All the same to me. Sly magic, communion with gods—it made no difference. Tell me

  the fire

  that bursts, sudden and astounding, in the huge dark

  limbs of an oak,

  lighting the ground for a mile, is some god visiting us, and I answer, “Welcome, visitor! Have some meat!’

  Politely.

  What’s it to me if the gods fly to earth, take nests

  in trees?

  Black Idas scornfully lifted his middle finger to them, daring their rage. Not I. I wished the gods no ill. No more than I wished the grass any ill, or passing

  salamanders.

  Herakles pressed his forehead to the ground and wept,

  vast shoulders

  swelling with power, a gift of the holy visitor, he

  thought.

  I wished him well, though I might have suggested to

  the hero, if I liked,

  that terror can trigger mysterious juices in the fleeing

  deer,

  and the scent of blood makes lions unnaturally strong.

  More tricks

  of chemistry. But live and let live. Idmon and Mopsos, the Argo’s seers, were respectful. Professional courtesy,

  maybe;

  or maybe the real thing. Of no importance. Orpheus watched like a hawk. As for myself, I made the intruder welcome, since he was there, if he was. I might have

  been happy

  to learn the principles of faith between men—husbands

  and wives,

  fellow adventurers—or the rules of faith between one

  man’s mind

  and heart, if any such rules exist. I’d been, all my life, on a mission not of my own choosing (the fleece no

  more

  than an instance), a mission I was powerless to choose

  against. Such rules

  would perhaps have been of interest. But they did not

  teach them there.

  Elsewhere, perhaps. I’ll leave it to you to judge. We

  learned,

  there, that priests can do strange things; that

  worshippers have

  a certain stance, expressions, gestures submissive to

  reason’s

  analysis—as the worshipped is not. We learned what

  we knew:

  politeness to gods is best. Then sailed on. over the gulf of Melas, the land of the Thracians portside, Imbros

  north,

  o starboard.

  “We reached the foreland of the Khersonese,

  where we met strong wind from the south. We set our

  sails to it

  and entered the current of the Hellespont. By dawn

  we’d left

  the northern sea; by nightfall the Argo was coasting

  in the straits,

  with the land of Ida on our right; before the next

  day’s dawn,

  we’d left Hellespont behind. And so we came to the land of Kyzikos, King of the Doliones.

  “Kyzikos had learned,

  by the sortilege of a local seer, that someday a band of adventurers would land, and if not met kindly,

  would leave

  his city on fire, the best of his soldiers dead. He was not a friendly man—his dark eyes snapped like embers

  breaking—

  a man in no mood, when we landed, to waste his

  time on us.

  He was newly married that day to the beautiful and

  gentle Kleite,

  daughter of Percosian Merops, to whom he’d paid a

  dowry

  fit for the child of a goddess. Nevertheless, when word of our landing came, he left his wife in the bridal

  chamber,

  mournfully gazing in her mirror, pouting—baffled,

  no doubt,

  that the man cared more for strangers’ talk than for

  all her art,

  all the labor of her tutors. But the young king bore in

  mind

  the words of his seer, and so came down, all labored

  smiles,

  and after he learned what our business was, he offered

  his house and

  servants and begged us to row in farther, moor near

  town.

  From his personal cellar he brought us magnificent

  wine, and from

  his own vast herds, fat lambs, the tenderest of

  weanlings, plump

  and sweet with their mothers’ milk. We went up to

  dinner with him.

  “I asked, as we ate with him: Tell us, Kyzikos: what

  will we meet

  that we ought to be ready for, north of here? What

  strange peoples

  live between here and Kolchis, tilling the fields, or

  hunting?

  ‘The handsome young king thought, then said: ‘I can

  tell you of all

  my neighbors’ cities, and tell you of the whole

  Propontic Gulf;

  beyond that, nothing.’ He glanced at his seer. Tour

  crew should be warned

  of one rough gang especially—the people who keep Bear Mountain, as we call it here, the wooded, rocky rise at the tip of our own island. We’d’ve had hard going

  with them,

  living so close, if Poseidon weren’t a shield between us, father of our line. They’re a strange people, lawless,

  blood-thirsty—

  true barbarians; nothing at all like us, believe me! They no more understand our civilized laws of

  hospitality

  than cows know how to fly. Great earthborn monsters, amazing to look at. Each of the beasts is

  equipped

  with six great arms, two springing from his shoulders,

  four below—

  limbs coming out of their hairy, prodigious flanks.

  They look

  like spiders, in a way, but their bug-eyed heads are the

  heads of men,

  and their hands, except for the hair, are constructed

  like human hands.

  Their penises are long and double, and the cullions hang like barnacles on a ship just beached, dark tumorous

  growths.

  Ravenous feeding and raping are all those monsters

  know.

  Stay clear of them, that’s my advice. No god ever talks to that fierce crowd: no priest advises their violent hearts to gentleness, respect for what the gods love.’

  “I pressed him,

  asking what lay still further north. He told me all he knew. At last, thanking Kyzikos a thousand times for his kindness, we went to our beds. I saw him

  speaking with his seer,

  smiling happily. We were, the seer was telling him, the ones. Or so I found later.

  “In the morning. I sent six men

  to climb to the higher ground, in the hope of learning

  more

  of the waters we’d soon be crossing. I brought the

  Argo round,

  edging the sho
re of the island, heading north, to meet

  them.

  “We’d badly underestimated the earthborn savages. Watchful as they were, my men didn’t see them sneaking

  around

  from the far side of the mountain, slipping through

  the trees like insects,

  and then suddenly hurtling away down the slope like

  pinwheels,

  arm under arm crashing like boulders through the

  brush.

  They reached the wide harbor and, working like lightning, began to

  wall up

  its mouth with stones, penning my men up like cows.

  Luckily,

  Herakles was there with the six. He snatched out arrows, bent back his recurved bow and, fast as a man could

  count,

  brought down seven monsters. At once, the others

  turned,

  hurling their lagged rocks, a hundred at a time. He fell, and their huge rocks piled around him like a Keltic

  tomb. Ankaios,

  giant boy, gave a wail, a bawl like a baby’s, and ran to help. Then almost as fast as they fell, he snatched

  up the rocks

  that buried Herakles, and hurled them back, heaving

  them wildly.

  We fled in terror for the open sea as the great stones

  came,

  rumbling slowly like elephants driven off a cliff, making a rumbling sound as they passed us, inches from our

  sails. Then Koronos,

  son of Kaineos whom the centaurs could not kill, ran

  down

  and helped Ankaios, weaker than the boy but cooler,

  saner.

  And now the rest got their spirits back—the mighty

  brothers

  Telamon and Peleus got arrows in their bows, and Butes’ spear that never missed struck down the

  monsters’

  chief. The monsters charged them with all their fury,

  and more

  than once; but the brutes were done for, squealing like

  apes gone mad,

  pissing and shitting as they died. On our side, we

  hadn’t lost

  a man—by no means Herakles! When they rolled

  the stones

  from his face they found him grumbling, angry that his

  tooth was chipped.

  We on the Argo rowed in.

  “When the long timbers for a ship

  have been hewed by the woodsman’s axe and laid out

  in rows on the beach

  and lie there soaking till they’re ready to receive the

  bolts, and the carpenters

  move among them, checking them, nodding with cool

  satisfaction,

  dropping a comment from time to time on the beauty

  of the thing,

  the beauty that only a craftsman can understand—

  no art,

  no way of life seems finer; and so it was with us that day as we walked the beach, studying the fallen

  monsters,

  stretched out, roughly in rows, on the gray stone beach.

  Some sprawled

  in a mass, with their limbs on shore and their heads

  and chests in the sea;

  some lay the other way round. We observed how the

  arrows had struck,

  how heads had been crushed, how this one had made

  the mistake of running,

  how that one had stood at the wrong time, and this one,

  stupidly,

  had pulled the spearshaft out and had needlessly bled

  to death.

  Then, arm in arm, like men charged with some lofty

  purpose,

  proud of our art, and rightly, we boarded the ship.

  Behind us

  vultures settled on the corpses—came down softly,

  neatly,

  dropping like a hushed black snowfall out of the

  ironwood trees.

  “We loosed the hawsers of the ship, caught the

  breeze, and forged ahead

  through choppy waves. We sailed all day. At dusk,

  the wind

  died down, then veered against us, freshened to a gale,

  and sent us

  scudding back where we came from, toward our

  hospitable friends

  the Doliones. We came to an island in the dark and

  landed,

  hastily casting our hawsers around high stones. Not a

  man

  on all the Argo guessed that this was the very land we’d left, the isle of Kyzikos. As for the

  bridegroom-king,

  he leaped from his bed at the alarum and rushed to

  the shore with his men,

  bronze-suited, armed; and, thinking his troubles were

  past—the threat

  the seer had warned him of—he struck at once,

  believing us

  raiders—Macrians, maybe—but in any event,

  unwelcome,

  flotsam jacked from the sea. We met, and the clash

  of our implements

  boomed in the dark, leaped like the roar when a

  forest fire

  pounces on brushwood, blowing its bits sky-high. We

  pushed them

  back, back, back, to the walls of the city—Herakles and Ankaios moving like great black towers, blocking

  out stars

  ahead of us, the rest of us following like the widening

  belly

  of a ship, our swords and spears flashing out in the

  dark like oars.

  They fled through the gates and heaved against them,

  straining to close them.

  We lashed torches to our spears and hurled. The city

  went up

  like oil. Ye gods but we were good at it! Mad Idas

  shrieked,

  dancing with a female corpse. Leodokos, strong as a bull, pushed in the palace doors and we saw white fire inside. And then one struck at my left, and I whirled, and even

  as the spear

  plunged in, I saw his face, his helmet fallen away: Kyzikos! He sank without a word, and when his

  muscles jerked

  and his head tipped up, there was sand in his open

  eyes. Too late

  for shamed explanations now; too late to consider again the warning of the seer! He’d had his span: one more

  bird caught

  in the wide, indifferent net. Nor was he the only one. Herakles killed, among lesser men, brave Telekles and Megabrontes; Akastos killed Sphodris; and Peleus’ spear brought down Gephyros and Zelos; Telamon brought

  down Basileus;

  Idas killed Promeus, and Klytius, Hyakinthos, called the Good. And there were more—the men Polydeukes

  killed,

  fighting with his fists when his spear had snapped, and

  the men who were killed

  by Kastor, and those that the boy Ankaios killed. There

  are stones

  on the island, marked with their names—brave men

  known far and wide

  for skill, unfailing courage.

  “So the battle ended, unholy

  error. We hurried through fire and smoke, helping the

  people,

  moving them up to the hills, above where the city

  burned.

  For three days after that we wept with the Doliones, wailing for the king, his young queen, and their

  beautiful palace—

  crumbling walls, charred beams. Then built him a

  splendid cairn

  that moaned in the wind like a widow sick with sorrow,

  made

  by Argus’ subtle craft. And we gave him funeral games and all the noble old ceremonies that men hand down from age to age—solemn marches as angular as the priests’ hats; dances darker and older than the

  hills;

  poems to his virtue, the beauty of his
queen.

  “For twelve days then

  there was murderous weather—high winds,

  thunderstorms, soot-black rain,

  the angry churning of the sea. We couldn’t put out. At

  last

  one night as I slept—my cousin Akastos standing watch, reasoning out, full of anguish, the whole idea of war, its pros and cons (wringing his fingers, hammering

  the rail),

  the old seer Mopsos watching and smiling—a halcyon came down and, hovering above my head, announced,

  in its piping

  voice, the end of the gales. Old Mopsos heard it all and came to me. He woke me and said: ‘My lord,

  you must climb

  this holy peak and propitiate Hera, Mother of the Gods, and then these gales will cease. So I’ve learned from

  a halcyon:

  the seabird hovered above you as you slept and, lo! so

  it spoke!

  The queen of gods rules all this earth, the sea, and

  snow-capped

  Olympos, home of the gods. Rise up and obey her!

  Be quick!’

  “With one eye part way open, I studied the graybeard

  loon.

  His eyewhites glistened, as sickly pale as the albumen of an egg, and his heavy lips, half hidden in beard and

  moustache,

  shook. He was serious, I saw. I rubbed my eyes with

  my fists,

  laboring up out of dreams. Then, seeing he gave me

  no choice,

  I leaped up, feigning belief, and I hurried from cot to

  cot,

  waking the others, rolling my eyes as seemed proper,

  telling

  the news, how Mopsos had saved us, he and a halcyon. None of them doubted. Mopsos nodded as I told them

  the story,

  backing up all I said. And so, within that hour, we started work. The younger of the men led oxen out from the stalls and began to drive them up the steep

  rock path

  to the top of Bear Mountain (the spider people asleep

  at its foot.

  sending skyward the unpleasant scent of sixteen-day-old death). The others loosed the Argo’s hawsers from the

  rock

  and rowed to the corpse-strewn harbor. Leaving four

  on watch,

  they too climbed through the stench. It was dawn. From

  the summit you could see

  the Macrian heights and the whole length of the

  Thracian coast:

  it seemed you could reach out and touch it. You could

  see the entrance to the Bosporos

  and the Mysian hills, and in the opposite direction the

  flowing waters

  of Aisepos, and the city on the plain, Adrasteia.

  “In the woods