Jason and Medeia Read online

  and nobody there, no matter how old, could recall he’d

  seen

  a handsomer couple.” She closed her eyes and rocked,

  as slow

  as a merchant ship sunk low in the water when the wind first fills her sails. She said, ‘Your

  face was flushed,

  and when Jason moved his hand on your arm, the air

  in the room

  turned rich, overripe as apples fallen from the tree—

  despite

  that glacial stillness of eyes. I was heavy with years,

  life-sickened

  already by then. I saw I must end my days in the service of a lord and lady whose love was a fadge of guilt

  and scorn,

  a prospect evil enough. And little by little, as the tales of the Argonauts came to our ears, we understood.

  Such a passion

  as Queen Aphrodite had put on you two was never seen on earth before; not even in Kadmos and Harmonia was such fire seen. But passion or no, he hated you. How could he not?—a princely Akhaian, and you’d

  saved his life

  by the midnight murder of your own poor trusting

  brother! No matter

  to Jason that that was your one slim chance. He’d

  sooner be dead

  than safe and ashamed. Worse yet … Don’t be

  surprised, lady,

  that I dare to speak these things. I can see how it

  drains your cheeks,

  the mention of your brother’s murder. No better than

  you can I tell

  which way your anger will strike, at yourself or me.

  You suck in

  breath, and I’m shaken with fear—but my fear is more

  by far

  for you than it is for myself. I’ve seen how you wince

  and cry out,

  alone. It fills me with dread. You’ll plunge into

  madness, Medeia,

  hating what couldn’t be helped, wrenching your heart

  out in secret,

  proud—oh, prouder than any queen living—but even

  at the height

  of that fierce Aiaian pride, uncertain, doubting you merit the friendship of any but the

  Queen of Death.

  You’re poisoned, Medeia. Venomed as surely as the ivy

  burning

  from within. I’d cure you if I could, if I knew how to

  force you to hear me.

  Think, child of the sun! Think past the bouldered hour that dams the flow of your mind. Lord Jason hated you. Justly, you think? Unselfishly? Is Jason a god? He’d agreed to your plan—agreed for your life’s sake,

  not his.

  To save your life, the woman who scattered his wits

  like a vision—

  like the sizzling crepitation of a lightning-bolt— he’d do what he’d never consider to save himself. No

  wonder

  if after he’d saved what he worshipped, your Jason

  gnawed his fists

  and hated all sight of what proved his weakness.

  —Jason who once

  loved honor, trusted his courage. You taught him his

  price.”

  The slave

  was silent awhile. Medeia waited—high cheeks

  bloodless.

  The slave said softly, “—But time soon changed all that. Not any intentional act of yours, Medeia, nor any act of his. Mere time. We saw how he tensed when you screamed in the pain

  of your labor, bearing him

  sons. Great tears rushed down his cheeks, and his

  shoulders shook.

  In part of his mind—we saw it shaping—he must have

  seen

  that the fault was his, not yours: you showed him what

  had to be,

  and gave him a plan. He’d acted upon it as gladly, that

  night,

  as he’d have changed places with you now. Or the fault

  was no one’s—love

  a turmoil prior to rules, and rumbling on beyond the last idea’s collapse. His eyes grew warmer then. And yours as well. No house was ever more happy,

  for a time—

  the twins babbling in their sunlit cribs, the master and

  mistress

  warmer than sunbeams arm in arm, sitting at the

  window,

  talking and laughing, or sitting in jewelled crowns,

  on thrones

  level with Pelias and his queen’s. If troublesome

  shadows of the past

  returned, you could drive them back.

  “But soon time changed that too.”

  Her wide mouth closed, trembling, and her faded slate

  eyes stared.

  “Pelias was a fool; perhaps far worse. And now, at times, when Pelias would hinder his will, Lord Jason would

  frown, speak sharply

  to you, or to us, or the twins. Your eyes got the she-wolf

  look.

  His slightest glance of annoyance, and up your poison

  seethed,

  old bile of guilt, self-hate, pride, love—black nightmare

  shapes:

  Aphrodite whispered and teased, cruel Hera, and Athena, gray-eyed fox. Seize the throne for him!—Jason’s

  by right!

  Would old Aietes hesitate even for an instant, dismayed by a sickly usurper of a nephew’s lawful place?

  Strike out!’

  I needn’t remind you of the rest. Screams in the palace,

  blood,

  the cries of the children awakened in haste when you

  fled. And now,

  for that, from time to time, his eyes go cold.”

  The slave

  came forward a little, tortuously moving her thick

  canes inch

  by inch. “I’ve lived some while, Medeia. There are

  things I know.

  Give the man time, and he’ll come to see, now too,

  that the fault

  was as much his own as yours. Let him be. Be patient,

  my lady.

  No woman yet has defeated a stubborn, ambitious man by force.”

  Medeia turned, smiling. But her eyes were wild.

  “I won’t win his heart with labor pains again,” she said, “barren as a rock, wrecked as the cities he burns in his

  wake

  with the same Akhaian lust.”

  “Medeia” the old woman moaned,

  “leave it to the gods! Let time sift it! Tell me, what wife in all the ages of the world has seized by her own

  hand’s power

  more than the staddle of a grave? Not even the

  mightiest king

  wins more in the end. Consider the tumbled columns

  of the bed

  of the giant Og. His fame is now mere sand, a ring of stones that startles the wilderness like a ghostly

  whisper

  of jackals crying in the night. My exiled people have a prophecy for those who trust in themselves. They say:

  Their horses are swifter than leopards,

  fiercer than wolves in the dark;

  their horsemen plunge on, advancing from afar,

  swooping like an eagle to stoop on its prey.

  They come for plunder, mile on mile of them,

  their faces searching like an east wind;

  they scoop up prisoners like sand.

  They scoff at kings,

  they laugh at princes.

  They make light of the mightiest fortresses:

  they heap up ramps of earth and take them.

  Then the wind changes and is gone.

  Woe to the man who worships his arm’s omnipotence!

  I would not wave it away as the noise of a beaten

  people

  shorn of all tools of war but the rattle of poetry. They were mighty themselves when they sang it first,

  though humbled now.

  Learn to accept! What sorrow have yo
u more great

  than the fall

  of a thousand thousand cities since time began?

  You have sons.

  How can you speak of a ruined womb, Akhaian lust, when civilizations—races of men with the hopes

  of gods—

  are tumbled to fine-grained ashes, fallen out of history?”

  “Enough!” Medeia said. She turned, in her eyes a

  flicker

  like cauldron light. “Self-pity, you say. So it is. I’ll end it, tear all trace from my heart and stare, dead on, at night as the tigress slaughters her young, then waits for the

  hunter’s attack.

  We’re all poor fools, poor witless benoms to startle

  a crow

  in the cast-off grandeur of scullery-slaves. I grant the

  wisdom

  of your gloomy people’s prophecy. I howl for justice. Insane! Where’s justice, or beauty, or love? Where

  grounds for the pride

  you charge me with? Childish illusions—not even lies our parents told, but lies we fashioned ourselves in

  the playroom,

  prettily singing to dolls, dead children of sawed-down

  trees.

  How dare I hoot for love, claim honor owed to me? Who in the sky ever promised me love or honor? O,

  the plan

  is plain as day, if anyone cares to read. In the shade of the sweetly laden tree, the fat-sacked snake. Good,

  evil

  lock in the essence of things. The Egyptians know—

  with their great god

  Re, by day the creative sun, by night the serpent, mindless swallower of frogs, palaces. Let me be one with the universe, then: blind creation and blind

  destruction,

  indifferent to birth and death as drifting sand.

  Great gods,

  save me from the childish virgin’s fantasy, purity of

  heart,

  gentleness, courage in a merely created man! We fall in love with the image of a mythic, theandric father,

  domineering

  oakfirm tower of strength, and we find, as our mothers

  found,

  the tower is home to a mouse peeking groundward with

  terrified eyes.

  We teach them to act, or act for them. We teach their

  audaculous hands

  the delicate tricks of love-making, teach their abstract heads the truth about power. They pay us by sliding

  their hands

  up slavegirls’ thighs, or turning the tricks of supremacy on us. And then, when we’re ready to shriek and claw,

  strike back

  with the moon-cold anger of the huntress-goddess,

  absolute

  idea of ice, cold flame of Artemis, they come to us like hurt children, showing the wounds from some

  other woman

  or clever woman’s man, and we’re won again, seduced by the only power on earth more cruel, more viciously

  pure

  of heart than woman, ancient ambiguous garden—

  old monster

  Motherhood.”

  “Medeia, stop!” The dim eyes widened

  and the mouth gaped for air. “Media, child!” she

  whispered.

  Abruptly, shaken by the word, Medeia was silent. She

  raised

  her hands to her face, then suddenly crossed to the

  slave and embraced her.

  I understood, squinting at the two, that the word had

  changed her.

  I gradually made out why. She’d all at once remembered what it was to be a child: the inexplicable safety, the sense of sure salvation adults forget. A fact of

  reality,

  like a house, three sheep in a pasture. In the face of

  what she knew

  she had no choice but acceptance, weeping like a child

  again.

  For all her knowledge of mingled evil and good in the

  world,

  it seemed to her (mysterious, baffling) that she held in

  her arms

  the perishable husk of a truth still pure and

  imperishable,

  eternal as Dionysos drinking and singing in the grave. “Now, now,” the old woman whimpered, weeping.

  “Now, now, my lady,

  no need for sorrow. All will be well. Have faith!”

  “I know,”

  Medeia said, and struggled to believe it for a moment

  longer.

  She drew away, forced a smile, and—seeing that the

  slave

  trembled with weakness—led Agapetlka to a cushioned

  bench

  with a view of the darkened garden, and helped her

  down on it.

  She frowned, studying the old woman, alarmed by her

  gasps,

  the trembling of the dry, gray hands. “All you say is

  true,” she said.

  “I have a kind of proof, in fact—” She paused; then,

  softly:

  “I’ll show it to you.” Swift, majestic, Medeia was gone from the room. In a moment she was back, carrying

  an object wrapped

  in skins. She laid it on the carved bench by the

  window, moved

  the tall lamps close to Agapetika’s chair, and, taking

  the package

  in her hands again, she carefully unwrapped it. A

  gleam of gold,

  and Agapetika gasped anew. And then it was undone, with one quick toss unfurled like a dazzling, sunlit flag. “ ’For you,’ he told me,” Medeia said, “ ‘because it was

  won

  by both of us. No other woman and no other man could have done it—though only Argus, child of

  Athena, could weave

  the fleece we two brought home. Make a gown of the

  cloth, my queen.

  A symbol, fit for a goddess, of Jason’s love.’ —Jason of the golden tongue, they call him.” She brooded.

  “And yet I was moved.”

  We looked—the old woman, Medeia, and I—at the

  cloth woven

  from the golden fleece. It was smooth as silk to the

  touch, and yet

  crowded with figures—peacocks, parrots, turrets and

  towers,

  farmers ploughing their sloping fields under city walls, and, nearby, soldiers, ladies and lords on splendid

  barges,

  all interlocked with loveknots and (curious lace)

  sharp bones.

  The scenes kept changing, like tricks of light, and our

  three heads

  bent close, almost touching. We looked so hard that our

  eyes crimped

  like the eyes of a man who’s stared for a minute at the

  sun. Old roads

  drew us mysteriously inward, plunging into forests so

  thick

  no thread of light broke through where the groaning

  limbs interlocked.

  We came to a clearing, a wide black river tumbling,

  roaring

  at our feet, and across it waterfalls crashed out of

  terrible heights,

  gray cliffs that went up like a falling man’s grasp,

  through brooding clouds;

  and the falls, striking, sent out such shocks that the

  ground where we stood

  shivered like the outstretched wing of a soaring hawk.

  The path

  led on—wound inward to a cave like the nose in an

  ancient skull,

  on the far side of the torrent. But the bridge was

  gone. We were stopped.

  Strain as I might, my eyes could pierce no further

  through

  the deceiving mists of the cloth.

  Then, stranger still, I thought,

  I heard faint whispers stirring, rising from the tapestry: the threads of the cloth, it seemed to me, were singing.
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  They sang:

  Argus wove me, craftily wrought my warp and woof with magic more than Medeia makes, and misery more, and mystery more. And more than he meant I melt in me and wider than Argus’ wisdom wrought I work my

  wyrds,

  my secret words. For wealth and weal he wove in the

  warp

  (ingenious antic engineer by his ancient art!) but bonefire, bane, and burning blood he buried in the

  woof,

  buried in the woof as the bobbin drove; for his dark

  brains burned,

  and little his lore of the lower lusts that lurk in love, lurked in his love for the lady and lord he labored for. (Woe lay within him when Argus wrought my warp

  and woof,

  the warp and woof of my web so wisely, wickedly

  wrought.)

  Argus wove me, weary old Argus, weary old Argus

  who wished them well.

  I stared at Medeia. She’d heard some other song,

  perhaps.

  Or each of us heard what he knew. For the fat old

  woman wept

  and covered her face with her gray hands, shaking in

  sorrow.

  The room went dark. I reached out suddenly to touch

  the two women,

  hold them a moment longer and warn Medeia. I’d

  watched

  too long as the timid outsider, even as I did in my

  own life,

  thirty centuries hence. “Medeia!” I called. No answer. Only the moan of the universe turning on its weary

  wheels.

  My hands closed on nothing. She was a dream.

  “Medeia,”

  I whispered. Useless. The long sigh of the galaxies slowly exhaling, dimming, drifting through darkness.

  Dreams.

  5

  The great hall gleamed. Koprophoros spoke, the

  dark-eyed king

  with the womanish voice, great rolls of abdomens and

  chins.

  The ruby glowed on his forehead like blood on fire,

  and the gold

  of his turban, his robes, his scimitar, was bright as the

  sun.

  The meal had been carried away long since, the

  jugglers returned

  to their rooms to count their coins. The slaves moved

  silently

  from table to table, pouring wine. Old Kreon sat with his chin resting in his hands, observing carefully. His beloved slave, Ipnolebes, standing beside him,

  watched

  with eyes like dagger holes, his arms folded. He seemed carved out of weathered rock. Jason gazed at the

  table—

  forehead resting on his hand, his wide shoulders low-listening thoughtfully, biding his time. Could it be