by John Gardner
Jason laughed,
then checked himself, musing. “You’ve seen something
in the stars, I think,”
he said at last. Paidoboron gave him no answer. “I think the stars sent you—or so you imagine—sent you for
something
you’ve no great interest in, yourself.” He tapped his
chin,
thinking it through. Suddenly I saw in his eyes that his
thought
had darkened. He said: “If Zodiac-watchers were always
right,
we’d all be wise to abandon this hall at once.” He
smiled.
Kreon looked flustered. “What do you mean?” When
Jason was silent,
he turned to Ipnolebes. “What does he mean?” The
slave said nothing.
The old king pursed his lips, then puffed his cheeks
out, troubled.
“Fiddlesticks!” he said. Then, brightening: “Wine! Give
everyone here
more wine!” The slaves hurried in the aisles, obeying.
But Jason
pondered on, and the sea-kings watched him as Kreon
did,
Time suspended by Jason’s frown. The game was ended, I thought, incredulous. He’d understood that the fates
themselves
opposed him, through Paidoboron.
Then one of the shadowy
forms beside him vanished—Hera, goddess of will, and the same instant a man with a great red beard
stood up,
and a chill went through my veins. His eyes were like
smoke. The man
with the red beard snapped, “One thing here’s sure.
We’re all engaged,
whatever our reasons, in a test. It’s ungenteel, no doubt, to mention it. But I never was long on gentility. These kings don’t loll here, day after day, some showing
off
their wares by the walls, some flashing their wits at
the dinnertable,
for nothing. I say we get on with it.” He glared from
table
to table, red-faced, his short, thick body charged with
wrath.
Kreon looked startled and glanced in alarm at Ipnolebes. “Jason,” the red-bearded man said fiercely, pointing a
finger
that shook with indignation, “if you mean to play,
then play.
If not, pack off! Make room for men that are serious!” Jason smiled, but his eyes were as bright as nails.
“I assure you,
I had no Idea there were stakes involved, and I’ve no
intention
of playing for them, whatever they are. I am, as you
know,
a beggar here. I leave the game to you, my dissilient friend, whatever it is.”
The man with the red beard scoffed,
tense lips trembling like the wires of a harp, his eyes
like a dog’s.
“We’re to understand that Jason, known far and wide
for his cunning,
has no idea of what every other lout here, drunk or sober, has seen by plain signs: Pyripta’s for sale, and we’re bidding.” He pointed as he spoke, his face
bright red with rage,
whether at Pyripta for her calfy innocence, or at Kreon
for his guile,
or at devious Jason, no one could tell. Like a mad dog, a misanthrope out of the woods, he turned on all of
them, pointing
at the girl, scorning the elegant forms of their civility. Pyripta gasped and hid her face, and the blood
rushed up
till even her forehead burned red. Like one fierce man,
the crowd,
half-rising, roared their anger. He glared at them,
trembling all over,
his head lowered, pulled inward like a bull’s. “Get him
out of here!”
Kreon shouted. “He’s drunk!” But when men moved
toward him
he batted them off like a bear. Men jerked out daggers
and began
to circle him. He drew his own and, hunched tight, guarding with one arm, rolled his small eyes, watching
them all.
Then Jason rose and called out twice in a loud voice, “Wait!” The crowd, the circle of men with their daggers
drawn,
looked up at him. “No need for this,” he said. “A man in a rage is often enough a man who thinks he’s right though the whole world’s against him. I know this
wildman Kompsis.
Dog-eyed, fierce as he is, he tells you the truth as he
sees it—
sparing no feelings. He may be a rough, impatient man, a truculent fool, but he means less evil than you
think. He’s been
a friend to me. Let him be.” The men encircling
Kompsis
hesitated, then put their weapons away. Red Kompsis glowered at Jason, angry but humbled. Then he too
sheathed
his knife. Men talked, at the tables, leaning toward
each other,
and the sound soon filled the hall.
Jason sat down. As if
to himself, he said, “How quickly and easily it always
comes, this
violence! It’s a strange thing. Poor mad mankind!” “God knows!” said Kreon, his voice shaky. The
princess, her face
still hidden behind her hands, was weeping. It was
not cunning—
not Jason’s famous capacity for transforming all evils to advantages—that showed on his face. The son of Aison, whatever else, was a man sensitive to pain. It was that, past
anything else,
that set him apart, made a stranger of Jason wherever
he went.
He suffered too fiercely the troubles of people around
him. It made him
cool, intellectual. Nietzsche would have understood. If
he was
proud, usurped the prerogatives of gods … Never
mind.
I was moved, watching from the shadows. He was a
man much wronged
by history, by classics professors. Jason leaned forward, speaking to Kreon now, but speaking so Pyripta would
hear:
“It’s a hard thing, I know myself, for a man to give up his natural pride. The outrage strikes and stings, and
before
you know it, you’ve turned, struck back. It makes me
envy women.
They’ve got no option of learning ‘the art of punching
people,’
and as for making fools out of people by abstract talk— Time and Space, the ultimate causes of things, and so
forth—
their quick minds run in the wrong direction, inclined
by nature
to thoughts of their children, comforting the weak,
by gentleness soothing
their huffing, puffing males. The fiercest of women
reveal
their best in arts like those.”
The table talk died down.
A few of those nearest had caught his allusions to
Koprophoros’ speech.
Jason went on, half-smiling, conversational (but Hera was in him, and Athena; his eyes were sly).
He said,
forming his words with care, yet hiding his trouble with
his tongue:
“When Pelias scorned me, refused me all honors
because, as he put it,
I was “wild,” not fit to be anything more than a river
tramp,
I wanted to strangle the fool. I’d have gotten off cheap,
no doubt.
The people are always more fond of their wild young
river tramps
than of grand old tyrants who stu
tter.” He laughed,
looked down at his hands.
Like lightning the goddess Hera returned to the
red-bearded man.
“You were scared, Jason. Admit it! Or did it seem
uncivil?”
Jason laughed again, to himself. Athena poked him. “No, not scared,” he said, and let it pass.
Old Kreon
cleared his throat and squeezed one eye shut, tapping
his fingers.
“As a matter of fact,” he said, “I’d be pleased to hear
about it.
We all would, I’m sure.”
A few of the sea-kings clapped, then more.
Pyripta glanced at him, blushing, unaware of the gentle
touch
of dark Aphrodite’s fingertips on her wrist—for the
goddess,
fickle, perpetually changing, could never resist a chance to prove herself. (Yet even now, no doubt, her concern was mainly for Medeia.) Still Jason frowned and
thought.
In the end
they prevailed upon him—and though he insisted he
felt like a fool
to be launching a tale so cumbersome (it was late,
besides:
by the stars it was almost midnight now) he began it.
The slaves
passed wine, and those who had nothing to do collected
in doorways
or stood by the treasured walls, listening. More than
a few
in Kreon’s hall had heard those fabulous tales of the
Argo,
strange adventures from the days of the princes’
exodus,
some in one version, some in another, no two agreeing; and more than a few had heard about Jason’s
storytelling,
celebrated to the rim of the world.
Reluctant as he was
to speak, his eyes took on a glint. He knew pretty well— Hera watching, invisible, over his shoulder, crafty— that whether or not he was playing for the throne, the
sighing princess,
he meant to make fools, for his sport, of fat
Koprophoros
and the Northerner, shrewd as they seemed. As he
spoke, he smiled. Near the roof
an owl was perched, stone-silent, with glittering eyes.
A lizard,
light as a stick, peeked from the wall, then darted back. Nearby, the slave Amekhenos, with the boy beside him, leaned on the door to listen, head bowed. He too, I
thought,
had things he could tell, one day, when the time was
right for it.
The house lower on the hill was dark save one dim
lamp
that bloomed dully in its shade like a dragon’s lidded
eye.
The female slave Agapetika kneeled at the rough-carved
shrine
of Apollo the Healer, in the corner of her room. Not
like Helios—
rising and setting in anger, rampaging in the
Underworld,
sire of dragons, zacotic old war-monger—not like Helios was the god of poesy, lord of the sun.
In her larger room,
high-windowed, dim, Medeia lay troubled by gloomy
dreams.
The cloth lay in the moonlight singing softly, faint as the song of mosquitoes’ wings, the sleeping children’s
breath.
Argus wove me, weary old Argus, weary old Argus who
wished them well.
6
“It was Pelias shipped us out. I might have murdered
him
and seized my father’s kingdom back, and might have
been thanked for it.
Nobody cared for his rule. But he was my uncle, and
I had
my cousins to think of, also my father’s memory,
he who’d
given my throne to Pelias, or so old Pelias claimed, backed by his toadies, I being only a child, unfit, a ruffian to be watched, required to prove my
kingliness.
I seethed, not deaf to the whispers in Iolkos. More than
age,
men hinted on every side, had hustled my father to
his grave.
It was possible. They wrestled, those two half-brothers,
from birth,
contending in anger for the place of greater dignity, whether the line of Poseidon or of Lord Dionysos should
rule.
If Pelias seemed a timid man, consider the weasel: he does not suck in air and roar like the honest,
irascible tiger, or stamp
his hoof in annoyance, like the straightforward horse; nevertheless, he has his way—soft-furred as the coney, more calculating, more subtle and swift than a jungle
snake,
richer in mystery, conceiving his young through his
ear, like a poet.
My father, old women claim, gave my uncle Pelias
his limp—
a man more direct than I, my father; rough, red-robed, beard a-tremble in the fury of long-forgotten winds … “Shifted to a smoky old house with my mother, I kept
my quiet;
watched him when he came to call with his curkling
retinue,
watched the cowering, sequacious mob as the old
cloud-monger
stammered the state of the kingdom, stuttered his
counsellors’ thoughts,
balbutiating the world to balls of spit. I watched with the eye of a cockatrice, but when he smiled,
smiled back,
pretended to scoff at the rumors. I would not tangle
with him,
at least not yet. Like those who crowded the streets,
I beamed,
shouted evoes at his rhetoric. Things might be worse. He hadn’t seen fit to imprison us yet ‘for our own
protection’—
a gambit common enough. Yet I was in prison, all right. To an eagle the widest of volaries is not yet sky. Men came to me in the night with suggestions. I refused
to hear them.
Sibyls brought me the riddlings of gods, how they
signalled in the dust,
mumbled through thunder. I’d give no ear to their
stratagems.
‘For all he said of my wickedness—I was fifteen
then—
I preferred to wheel and deal. So, having nothing, only the dry crumbs Pelias dropped, I made my bargain with
him.
I’d sail the seas, bring back whatever my crew and I could steal, and leave it for him to decide what worth
it was.
I wouldn’t be the first great lord, God knew, who’d
gotten his start
marauding. I gathered my crew together, and with the
first fair wind,
we sailed. We were lucky. Good breezes most of the
way, good hosts …
“We learned quickly. If men came down to us with
open arms,
glad to see strangers, eager to hear of our sea
adventures,
we made ourselves their firm friends—praised them to
the skies,
fought beside them if they happened to have some
war in progress,
drank with them, gave them our shoulders later when
they stumbled, climbing
to bed. And when the time for leaving came, they’d
give us
gifts, the finest they had—they’d load up our boat to
the gunnels,
throw in a barge of their own—and we’d stand on the
shore with them, moaning,
tears running down our cheeks, and we’d hug them,
swearing we’d never
forget. When we sailed away we’d wave till the haze
of land
was far below the horizon.
They were no jokes, those
friendships.
Sooner than anyone thought, I’d prove how firm they
were,
when all at once I had need of the men I’d fought beside, sung with half the night, or tracked down women
with—
princes my own age, some of them, or second sons, nephews of kings, like myself, with no inheritance but nerve—courage and talent to spare—and their old
advisors,
sea-dog uncles, friends of their fathers, powerful fighters who’d outlived the centaur war, seen war with the
Amazons,
and now, like dust-dry banners in a trunk, waited, their
glory
dimmed.
“So it was with friends. But if, on the other hand, we landed and men came down at us with battle-axes, stones and hammers, swords, we’d repay them blow
for blow
till the rock shore streamed with blood—or we’d row
for our lives, and then
creep back when darkness came, invisible shadows
more soft
of foot than preying cats, and we’d split their skulls.
We’d sack
their towns, stampede their cattle in the vineyards till
not one vine
stood straight; and so we’d take by force what they
might have made
more profitable by hurling it into the sea before we came. Yet it wasn’t the best of bargains on either
side.
Both of us paid with lives, and more than once we lost a ship. Besides, the booty we snatched and hauled
aboard
was mediocre at best—far cry from the hand-picked
treasures
given with love by friends. Sometimes when the sea
was rough
the loot we’d loaded on the run would clatter and slide,
and our weight
would shift, and we’d scratch for a handhold, watching
the sea comb in.
“We learned. We were out three years. When we
turned at last for home,
we had seven ships for the one we’d started with. I’d
earned
my keep, I thought: a house like any lord’s, at least, and some small say in my uncle’s court I figured wrong. Sour milk and rancid honey it was, in the eyes of Pelias.
“The king had gotten the solemn word of an oracle
that he’d meet his death through the works of a man
he’d someday see
coming from town with one bare foot. It was soon
confirmed.
Just after we landed, I was fording the Anauros River,
making
for town and the palace beyond, when I lost one sandal
in the mud.
It was stuck fast, gripped as if by the hand of old Hades seizing at a pledge. The river was flooded—it was a
