Jason and Medeia Read online

  because

  I knew the story—children murdered, Corinth in

  flames—

  that the game seemed to me suddenly ominous, a

  conflict of demons?

  Whatever the reason, I felt cold wind run down my

  spine.

  The fat man, harmless as he seemed, comically

  clowning, filled me

  with superstitious alarm.

  “My noble lords,” Koprophoros

  began, bowing profoundly, “alas, you see before you a fool. How dare I deny it?” He clenched his fists,

  mock tragic,

  and let out a terrible noise, an enormous sigh. He

  winked—

  winked as if someone had pulled some secret string

  in his back.

  “I do my best,” he said, and gave us a sheepish smile, “but you see how it is. The gods have, in their infinite

  wisdom,

  dealt me a belly like a whale’s, fat breasts like a

  woman’s, a face

  androgynous to say the least. I manage as I can!”

  He chuckled.

  He began to pace back and forth, above the seated

  crowd,

  shaking his head and wincing, making morose faces. Mechanically each footstep picked up his tonnage from

  the last.

  He stretched his arms in Pyripta’s direction and

  shivered with woe.

  “I labor for dignity. Alas! Sorrow! I seem, at best, some poor old goof who’s arrived at the wrong man’s

  funeral

  and hasn’t the courage to sneak to the house next door!

  —Ah, well,

  the gods know what they’re doing, I always say.”

  He rolled

  his eyes up almost out of sight, then leered, mischievous,

  goatlike,

  goatlike even to the horns, the folds of his turban.

  He looked

  like the whalish medieval demon-figure Beëlzebub, in brazen armor, sneeping out jokes at God. “It has advantages, my ludicrous condition. Who’d believe a lump like me could argue religion with priests, split

  hairs

  on metaphysics with men who make it their specialty— men of books, I mean, who make scratches on leaves

  or hides

  and read them later with knowing looks, appropriate

  belches,

  foreheads wrinkled like newploughed fields? I do,

  however—

  to everyone’s astonishment. ‘We in fact may have misjudged this creature,’ they say, and look very

  solemn, and listen

  with ears well-cocked henceforth—and they get their

  money’s worth!

  I have theories to baffle the wisest sages!” He leered,

  looked sheepish,

  snatched up a winebowl, drank. “I’ve a theory that

  Time’s reversed,”

  he said then, rolling his coy, dark eyes at Pyripta.

  She blushed.

  “A stunning opinion, you’ll admit, though somewhat

  absurd, of course.”

  He shrugged, slid his glance to the king. When he

  winked, old Kreon smiled.

  “Then again, I know all the ancient tales of the scribes,

  and can tell them

  hour on hour for a year without ever repeating myself, tale unfolding from tale like petals from a rosebud,

  linked

  so slyly that no man alive can seize the floor from me, caught in my web of adventures (ladies, ensorcelled

  princes,

  demons whose doors are the roots of trees) …

  A womanish skill,

  you’ll say—and I grant it: a skill more fit for a harem

  eunuch;

  nevertheless, a skill I happen to possess—such is my foolishness, or the restlessness of my clowning mind.

  “ ‘How,’ you must surely be asking, ‘can this rank

  lunatic

  have power befitting a god’s—the rule of a kingdom

  as wide

  as Indus was, in the old days?’ ” He sighed and shook

  his head,

  deeply apologetic. “I must tell you the bitter truth. All my art, my theology, my metaphysics have earned me nothing! I could weep! I could tear out

  my hair!” He became

  the soul of woe. “I reason, I cajole, I confound the

  wisest

  with holy conundrums like these: ‘If Zeus is absolute

  order,

  or pure intellect, and the Lord of Death is essential

  confusion

  (that is to say, Chaos), what, if anything, connects the

  two,

  and how can each know the other exists? If Zeus can

  muse

  on all that exists, does Zeus exist?’ —But at last my

  enemies

  are convinced (ah, woe!) by mere trivia.” Suddenly he bent, grinning, and with only his teeth, raised up an

  oak chair

  large as a throne—it was carved from end to end

  with figures—

  and, fat neck swelling, he lifted it over his head. With

  fists

  like steel, he cracked and snapped off, one by one, its

  thick

  clawed feet. He laid them on the table like spoons.

  Then, taking the seat

  of stone in his hands, he snapped it like kindling. He

  spat out the rest

  —the back and the cumbersome arms—and then, most

  amazing of all,

  he sucked in breath, belched fire from his mouth like a

  gasoline torch,

  snatching the legs up and lighting them one by one,

  then hurling them

  high in the air, a four-spoked wheel of flame. It turned faster and faster. Mouths gaping, we saw that he no

  longer touched them—

  the fire-wheel spinning on its own, high over the

  trestle-tables.

  Even the three goddesses, I thought, were baffled by

  the trick.

  Quick as the blink of an eye, the fire-wheel vanished.

  There was

  no sound in the darkened hall.

  Then all the sea-kings roared,

  applauding, beating the flagstone floor with their staffs

  and shouting,

  some crying out for another such trick, while some

  demanded

  that he do that same one again, so that people could

  watch it more closely;

  nothing’s more pleasant than discovering the secret

  rules of things.

  How strangely he smiled!—but immediately covered

  his mouth with his hand.

  Then, grinning mournfully, lifting his eyes like a man

  much grieved

  but eternally patient, Koprophoros said, “No more

  tricks yet.

  Dramatic illustration, merely, dear friends. For such is

  the tiresome

  base of my power and wealth. I grant, it’s more

  interesting

  to men like ourselves, that Time is reversed.” He smiled,

  his dark

  and luminous eyes full of scorn for us all. “But the

  world is the world.”

  He sighed profoundly, fat head tipped like a praying

  priest’s,

  his fat little hands with their hairless fingers pressed

  together

  at his chest. “I thank the gods,” he said, “for my

  marvelous gifts—

  my innate sense of justice, my vast learning, my

  qualities of soul.

  But those, alas, are at last mere private benefits. The one firm way a man can be sure of his time for

  thought

  is his talent for breaking skulls—the art of punching

  people,

  or getti
ng one’s army to. Here below, I’m grieved to say, the power for good and the power for evil are identical. The idea of the moral erodes all ethics. Here (though

  of course

  we hope it’s otherwise elsewhere) gentle old Zeus is

  the boss

  of the Hades and Hekate gang.” Now the mournful

  smile was back.

  “I am, let me hasten to add, a profoundly peaceable

  man.

  Inside this enormous hulk blooms the heart of a lilac!—

  However,

  tyrants don’t listen to, so to speak, rime or reason.

  What is it

  to tyrants that hope and soap are mysteriously linked?

  One gets

  one’s throne the other way. Well-a-day! Alack!” He

  smiled,

  suddenly innocent as a girl except for those goathorn

  folds,

  and he bowed. The tables clapped. The king was

  delighted, it was clear,

  and so was Pyripta, smiling down at the tablecloth. I felt a minute, brief twinge of alarm about hope and

  soap.

  He was nobody’s fool, Koprophoros. He left no doubt that he knew how to handle a man as he’d handled the

  chair, though he took

  no special pleasure in violence—unless as art. He bowed and bowed, as neatly balanced as a dancer,

  kissing

  his fingertips, face sweating.

  Then tall Paidoboron

  stood up, the king of a silent land to the north, where

  the gray

  Atlantic half the year lay still as slate, and icebergs pressed imperceptibly, mournfully, groaning like weird

  old beasts

  on the dark roads of whales. It was a country known to Greeks as the Kingdom of Stone. Strange tales were

  told of it:

  a barren waste where no house boasted ornaments of gold or silver, and no one knew till Jason came of stains or dyes or of any color but the dim hues on the skins of animals there, or the grays and browns

  in rocks.

  The towns of that kingdom were few and far between,

  as rare

  as trees on those dim gray hills, and in the largest towns the houses kept, men said, no more than a hundred

  souls—

  bleak men bearded to the waist and dressed in

  wolfskins; women

  tall and stern and beautyless, like stiff, bare pines. The houses and barns, the streets, the walls along

  country roads

  were stone, as gloomy as the sea. They knew no culture

  there

  but raising sheeplike creatures—winged like eagles, but

  shy,

  as quick on their feet and as easily frightened as newts.

  Yet they knew

  the second world to the west, for the Hyperboreans

  owned

  great-bellied, stone-filled ships that could sail forever,

  slow,

  indestructible as the stone rings high in their hills. And

  they knew

  more surely than all other men, of the turning of

  planets and stars:

  geometers, learned astronomers, they spent their lives shifting and rearing enormous megaliths, age after

  age,

  the oldest kingdom in the world. They knew the

  alchochoden

  of every man and tree, knew the earthly after clap of all conjunctions, when to expect the irrumpent flash of crazily wandering comets, could tell the agonals of stars no longer lit, old planets shogged off course by accidents aeons old. They came themselves, they

  claimed,

  from the deeps of space, noctivagant beings shackled to

  earth,

  dark shadow of oaks and stones, for some guilt long

  forgotten.

  They waited and watched the heavens as a prisoner

  stares at fields

  beyond his cell’s square bars. They studied the wobbling

  night,

  and if some faraway star went wrong they sacrificed an eldest son to it, and made it right.

  The king

  spoke softly, as if some god were speaking out of him— a man no more made of flesh and blood than

  Koprophoros, I’d swear:

  stiff as a puppet, a figure in some old electrical game at the penny arcade, mindlessly obstructing—such was

  the impression

  the black king gave with his ponderous, vaguely

  funereal manner;

  and yet there was anger in his manner too, such

  old-man fury

  at all Koprophoros spoke, I could hardly believe it was

  not

  some hellish joke between them. Solemn as death, he

  said:

  “You advertise your talents, my bloated friend, as if you intended to put them on sale. No doubt you’d

  soon find a buyer!”

  He smiled, full of scorn for the listening crowd. “How

  nice to think

  -a man can outfox the fates by his clever wits, outbox the wind, outgrapple the fissures that open when

  earthquakes strike!

  Mere childish dreams. Forgive me for saying so. We’ve

  stood—

  my kingdom—a thousand years. We dreamed like you,

  at first,

  a thousand thousand years ago. But stone cliffs collapsed on us, seas overran us, monsters crawled from the deep and claimed our herds. And winds—

  such violent winds

  as you’ve never seen thus far in these playful hills—

  so dark

  they blanked out sun and moon for seven full years,

  so thick

  they snatched away all our breath like tons of earth

  falling—

  cliffs and seas, monsters from the deep, and those

  terrible winds

  taught us our power was not what we first supposed.

  A man

  can kill a man, if he will, or some beast less than a man, some beast that shares, in its own way, our

  humanness—

  hunger, the rage to rule, our pleasure in thought.

  (I have seen

  elderly wolves sit thinking, smiling to themselves.)

  But a man

  can tyrannize nothing beyond himself, his own frail

  kind.

  If you’ve smiled at bears who pompously, foolishly lord

  it over

  lesser bears but shake like mice at the tucket and boom of heaven, then smile at Koprophoros! How many storms have you tilted up like a chair and deprived of its legs?”

  He laughed,

  the cackle of an old, old man. The black of his hair was

  dye,

  I understood only now. His face was wrinkled like a

  mummy’s.

  Surely, I thought, the man’s long years past fathering

  a child!—

  yet here he stands, contending for a wife! (No one in

  the hall,

  or no one besides myself, it seemed, was amazed.)

  He said:

  “I shiver and shake at your leastmost leer, O dangerous

  friend,

  but the hills are cool to both of us, and the thunder

  laughs.

  You hold your throne by discreet and tasteful violence. As for me, I hold mine—apart. I sit in dreary silence no man envies, no man steals. What little I need to eat I plant myself and harvest alone. For talk, for the stimulation of other men’s minds, I have old

  hymns

  and a thousand years of figures carved in stone. I go on, and my race goes on, the prey of no one but the gods.

  To a man

  new to his glories, blind to the ghostly stelliscript, knowing not whence he comes or whither he goes—

  immortal

  as the asphodel, he thinks—that may seem a trifling

  thing,

  a man
full of hope, unaware of the gods’ deep scorn

  of man,

  a founder like you, Koprophoros.” He moved his gaze from table to table slowly. It came to rest at last on Kreon. The old man sat leaning forward, watching

  intently,

  waiting as if in alarm. Paidoboron smoothed his beard, as black and thick as the fur of a bear in winter. He

  said:

  “If I were, for instance, the last king in a doomed line, I’d run to the rim of the world, taking any child I had, and I’d house myself in stone, and I would propitiate the gods, my surest foe, with prayers and deodands.” His words died away to silence in the rafters of the hall.

  The stillness

  clung like a mist, as though the black-bearded

  Northerner

  had silenced the crowd by a spell.

  Then fat Koprophoros spoke, rising from his seat, bowing, all grace, to the princess

  and king.

  The deep-red jewel on his forehead gleamed like fire

  through wine.

  Symbols of the soul those jewels, I remembered. But

  the blood-red light

  trapped inside fell away and away into nothingness like magnitude endlessly eating its shadow, consuming

  all space.

  “He speaks with feeling,” Koprophoros said, then

  suddenly cackled.

  “A man without interest in the throne of busy Corinth

  and all

  her wealth! Pray god we may all be as wise when we’re

  all as poor

  as Paidoboron!” He beamed, unable to hide his pleasure in his own sly play. The princess laughed too, the

  innocent peal

  of a child, and then all the great hall laughed till it

  seemed that the very

  walls would tumble from weakness. Paidoboron, grave,

  said nothing.

  His eyes were fierce. Yet his fury, it seemed to me

  again, rang false.

  I glanced at the goddesses, reclining at ease near Jason,

  on the dais.

  If the two kings were engaged in some treachery,

  the goddesses too

  were fooled by it.

  The chief of the Argonauts watched the Northerner as though he had scarcely noticed Koprophoros’ trick.

  He said

  when the laughter in the hall died down, “Tell me,

  Paidoboron,

  why have you come? I knew you long ago, and I know your gloomy land. Koprophoros has his joke, but perhaps his nimble wits have betrayed him, this once. What

  wealth can a man

  bring down from a land like yours? And what can

  Corinth offer

  that you’d take even as a gift? I know you better,

  I think,

  than Koprophoros does. There’s no duplicity in you,

  no greed

  for anything Kreon can give. Yet there you stand.”

  Paidoboron

  bowed. “That’s true. Even so, I may have suitable gifts for a king.” He said no more, but smiled.