Jason and Medeia

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Jason and Medeia Page 36

by John Gardner


  heard the laments

  of the maids and the groans of Medeia. And when it

  was noon, and the sun

  so fierce that the very air crackled, they came, for pity of the maidens, doomed unfulfilled, having neither

  men nor sons,

  and stood above me, and brushed my cloak’s protection

  from my eyes

  and called to me in a strange voice, a voice I

  remembered

  yet could not place—some shrew with the flat Argonian

  accent

  I’d known as a child.— ‘Jason!’ I looked, saw nothing

  but the blinding

  sun. They cried, ‘Pay back the womb that has borne so

  much.

  Call strength from murdered men. Redeem these

  thousand shames.

  Embrace your ruin, you who have preached so much

  on mindless

  struggle, unreasoning hope. Have you still no love?’ So

  they spoke,

  voices in the white-hot light. I had no idea what they

  meant,

  whispers of madness, guilt. I slept again, awaiting death. And then sat up with a start, a crazy idea tormenting me: the womb was the Argo who’d borne us

  here,

  the murdered men not those I’d lost before but those around me, grounded by the sun; and my ruin was

  the sun himself:

  I must go to the center of the furnace, my only prayer

  for the men,

  the Phaiakian maidens, and Medeia. Oh, do not think

  I believed

  it reasonable! The desert was hotter where I meant to

  go,

  and the Argo no weight for men half-starved, no water

  to drink

  on a trip that might take us days, if not all eternity. Nevertheless, I roused them, fierce, a lion gone mad, and stumbling, incredulous, they obeyed. I sent no

  scouts ahead,

  and no man there suggested it. Blind luck was our

  hope,

  perhaps blind love, the Argonauts bearing that

  monstrous ship,

  spreading her weight between shoulders meaningless

  except for this,

  their union in a madman’s task. In their shadow the

  maidens walked,

  singing a hymn of heatwaves, the pitiless sun, a dirge for all of us. And so those noblest of all kings’ sons, by their own might and hardihood, lips cracked and

  bleeding,

  carried the Argo and all her treasures, shoulder high, nine days and nights through the death-calm dunes

  of Libya.

  “I shared the weight till the seventh day. Then

  Medeia fell,

  unconscious, and could not be wakened. So I carried

  my wife in my arms,

  shouting encouragement to the men, reassuring the

  maidens. The sun

  filled all the sky, it seemed to us. But the maidens sang, struggled to help with the load till they fell, befuddled,

  giggling

  like madwomen. We dragged them on. Told lunatic

  jokes,

  talked with the sun, the sand, a thousand sabuline

  visions—

  and so we came to water. But left the desert strewn with graves, unmarked by stick or stone. One half my

  crew

  and two of the maidens we buried in the white-hot sand;

  and not

  the least of those who fell there, slaughtered by the heat,

  was Ankaios,

  nobleman robed in a bearskin and armed with an axe.

  We buried

  the twelve-foot child and wept. Our tears were dust.

  Then set

  the Argo down in the calm Tritonian lagoon, and

  searched

  for drinking water.

  “The sky was blinding white, all sun. It seemed to us that we came to the body of a huge

  gray snake,

  head smashed, by the trunk of an appletree. From the

  venom sacks down

  the corpse was asleep, undreaming, the coils a thicket

  of arrows,

  such deadly poison that maggots perished in the

  festering wounds.

  And close to the corpse, it seemed to us, we saw fiery

  shapes

  wailing, their mist-pale arms flung past their golden

  heads.

  At our first glimpse of the beautiful strangers, majestic

  beings

  in the white-hot light, they vanished in a swirl of dust.

  Then up

  leaped Orpheus, praying, wild-eyed: ‘O beautiful

  creatures, mysteries,

  whether of Olympos or the Underworld, reveal

  yourselves!

  Blessed spirits, shapes out of Ocean or the violent sun, be visible to us, and lead us to a place where water

  runs,

  fresh water purling from a rock or gushing from the

  ground! Do this

  and if ever we bring our ship to some dear Akhaian port, we’ll honor you even as we honor the greatest of the

  goddesses,

  with wine and with hecatombs and an endless ritual of

  praise!’

  No sooner did he speak, sobbing and conjuring strangely

  with his lyre

  than grass sprang up all around us from the ground,

  and long green shoots,

  and in a moment saplings, tall and straight and in full

  leaf—

  a poplar, a willow, a sacred oak. And strange to say, they were clearly trees, but also, clearly, beings of fire, and all we saw in the world was clearly itself but also fire.

  “Then the beams of the oak tree spoke. ‘You’ve been

  fortunate.

  A man came by here yesterday—an evil man—

  who killed our guardian snake and stole

  the golden apples of the sun. To us he brought anger

  and sorrow, to you release

  from misery. As soon as he glimpsed those apples, his

  face

  went savage, hideous to look at, cruel,

  with eyes that gleamed like an eagle’s. He carried a

  monstrous club

  and the bow and arrows with which he slew our

  guardian of the tree.

  Our green world shrank to brambles and thistles, to

  sand and sun,

  and in terror, like a man gone blind, he turned to left

  and right

  bellowing and howling like a lost child.

  And now he was parched with thirst, half mad. He

  hammered the sand

  with his club until, by chance, or pitied by a god, he

  struck

  that great rock there by the lagoon. It split at the base,

  and out

  gushed water in a gurgling stream, and the huge man

  drank, on his knees,

  moaning with pleasure like a child and rolling his eyes

  up.’

  “As soon as we heard these words we rushed to the place, all our

  company,

  and drank. Medeia—still unconscious, more cruelly

  punished

  than those we’d buried in the sand—I placed in the

  shadow of ferns

  at the water’s edge. I bathed her arms and legs, her

  throat

  and forehead, and dripped cool water in her staring

  eyes. With the help

  of her maidens, I made her drink. She groped toward

  consciousness,

  rising slowly, slowly, like Poseidon from the depths of

  the sea,

  until, wide-eyed with terror at some fierce vision in the

  sun,

  invisible to us, she clenched her eyes tight shut, clinging with her weak right hand to my cousin Akastos, with

  her left to me.

&nbs
p; Mad Idas wept. Doom on doom he must witness, and sad premonitions of doom, to the end of his dragged-out

  days. No more

  the raised middle finger, the obscene joke through

  bared fangs;

  no more the laughter of the trapped, that denies, defies

  the trap.

  He’d recognized it at last: more death than death, and

  he rolled

  his eyes like a sheep in flight from the wolf, and

  nothing at his back

  but Zeus. Such was the sorrow of Idas, the bravest of

  men,

  now broken.

  “As soon as our minds were cooled, we came to see that the giant savage of whom the tree had spoken

  could be none

  but Herakles, much changed by his many trials. We

  resolved

  to hunt for him, and carry him back to Akhaia, if the

  gods

  permitted. The wind had removed all sign of his tracks.

  The sons

  of Boreas set off in one direction, on light-swift wings; Euphemos ran in another, and Lynkeus ran, more

  slowly,

  in a third, with his long sight. And Kaanthos set out

  too,

  impelled by destiny. Kaanthos was one who’d ploughed

  for his living

  and his heart was steady and gentle. He had had a

  brother once,

  a man of whom nothing is known. He found a grazing

  flock

  of goats kept alive by desert thistles, and he sought the

  goatherd

  to ask for news of Herakles, the sky-god’s son. Before he could speak, the herd leaped up with a look

  of alarm

  and threw a stone at him. It struck the poor man

  squarely on the forehead,

  and Kaanthos, astounded, fell, and his life ran out.

  Nor was that

  the least of my men to be lost on sandswept Libya. As for Herakles, we found no trace. They all returned; we prepared to set sail for home.

  “And then came Mopsos’ time, foreseen by him from the beginning, thanks to his

  birdlore. He was

  the noblest of seers, for all his peculiarity— his whimsy, the grime on his fingers, the bits of dried

  food in his beard—

  but little good his wisdom did him when his hour

  arrived.

  “An asp lay sleeping in the sand, in shelter from the

  midday sun,

  a snake too sluggish to attack a man who showed no

  sign

  of hostility, or fly at a man who jumped back. It meant no harm to anything alive, though even a drop of its

  venom

  was instant passage to the Underworld. Old Mopsos,

  chatting

  and strolling with Medeia and her maidens, while the

  rest of us worked on the ship,

  by chance stepped lightly, with his left foot, on the

  tip of the creature’s

  tail. In pain and alarm, the asp coiled swiftly around the old man’s shin and calf and struck, sinking its fangs to the gums. Medeia and her maidens shrank in horror.

  Old Mopsos

  clenched his fists in sorrow. The pain was slight enough, but he knew he was past all hope. He lifted his foot to

  free

  the asp. Already he was paralyzed, numb. A dark mist clouded his sight, and his heavy limbs fell. In an instant,

  he was cold,

  his flesh corrupting in the heat of the sun, his hair

  falling out

  in patches. We dug him a grave at once and buried him. Then went down to the ship, full of woe.

  “With Ankaios dead, no sure helmsman among us, our chances of reaching

  Akhaia

  were slim. But Peleus took the oar, the father of

  Akhilles,

  and we drew the hawsers in. There must surely be

  some escape

  from the wide Tritonian lagoon, we thought. Having no

  aim,

  we drifted, helpless, the whole day long. The Argo’s

  course,

  as we nosed now here, now there, for an outlet, was

  as tortuous

  as the track of a serpent as it wriggles along in search

  for shelter

  from the baking sun, peeping about him with an angry

  hiss

  and dust-flecked eyes, till he slips at last through a dark

  rock cleft

  to freedom. And so we too found freedom. Once in the

  open,

  we kept the land on our right, hugging the coast. The

  sun

  was kinder now, though fierce enough. We slept in the

  shadow

  of rocks by day, and drove the Argo by the power of our

  backs

  from twilight till dawn’s first glance. And so wore out

  by stages

  the curse of Helios.”

  Here Jason paused, looked down, his dark eyebrows knit. The hall was silent, waiting, Kreon leaning on his arms, his gaze intent. I could feel their dread of the man’s conclusions.

  He said: “Except, of course, that no man—no house—wears out a curse by his own

  power.

  We may with luck propitiate the gods, live through our

  trials;

  but the offense is still in the blood, and our sons

  inherit it,

  and our sons’ sons, and shadow progeny arching to the

  end

  of time. I half understood them now, those ghostships

  riding

  the Argo’s wake. By some inexplicable accident we were, ourselves, the point of no turning back. We

  closed

  an age. The Golden Age,’ men will call it. They’ll honey

  it with lies

  and hone for it, with languishing looks, and bemoan

  their fall

  and curse my name and treason…. Their curses will

  not much stir

  my dust. I was there; I saw the truth. A childish age of easy glory in petty marauding, of lazy flocks on bluegreen hills where every stream had its nymphs,

  each wood

  its men half-goat; where the rightful monarch of a

  sleepy throne

  could be set aside, as was I at Iolkos, and given the

  choice

  of fighting for his right like a long-horned ram

  dispossessed of his gray

  indifferent ewes, or accepting the slight humiliation and moving on. I changed the rules—declined the

  gauntlet,

  made deals, built cunning alliances, ambitious in

  secret,

  with always one thought foremost: keep to the logic

  of nature.

  Be true, within reason, to friends, with enemies ruthless.

  Be just,

  but not beyond reason. Honor the gods and men and

  the stones

  of the earth, but not to excess. Have faith sufficient to

  fight;

  beware all expectations.

  “For there is no power on earth but treaty, no love but mutual consent—whatever the

  relative

  power of those consenting. Not even the gods are firm of character; much less, then, men. The promise I make, I make to a man who may change, become anathema

  to me.

  Therefore, be just, recall no vows still meet, but know we sail among wandering rocks. By these few

  principles—

  some known to me at the start, some not—I organized the Akhaians. It would be, from that day forward, powers pitted against powers, the labor of monstrous

  machines—

  at best, a labor for universal good; at worst, perhaps, exploiters faceless as forests, and the cringing exploited,

  the forests’

  beasts.

  “So riding by night, my hand on
Medeia’s, I watched the shadowy ships like mountains that followed in our

  wake. As before,

  Time washed over us in waves. I dreamed it was stars

  we sailed,

  and our oars stirred dust on the moon, or our shadow

  stretched out, prow

  to stern, in the shadows that tremble and float down

  Jupiter.

  At times stiff birds passed over us, roaring, and

  mountains took fire.

  Medeia, watching at my side, said nothing, and whether

  or not

  she understood these visions, I could not guess. I told

  her

  the words I’d heard in my dream, off the isle of Phineus: You are caught in irrelevant forms. Beware the

  interstices.

  She studied me, child of magic; could tell me nothing.

  Gently,

  I covered her hand. Sooner or later, I knew, I’d grasp

  that mystery.

  I’d pierced a part of it already: it was there at the

  intersections

  of the billion billion powers of the world that the danger

  lay,

  and the hope; the gaps between gods, or men, or gods

  and men;

  the gaps between minds—my own and Aiaian Medeia’s.

  Invisible

  gaps at the heart of connectedness, where love and will leaped out, seek to span dark chambers, and must not

  fail. I seemed

  for an instant to understand her, as when one knows

  for an instant

  a tiger’s mind; the next, saw only her face, her radiant, wholly mysterious eyes. I was not as I was, however, with Hypsipyle on the isle of Lemnos. It was not mere

  fondness,

  shared isolation that I felt. I put my arms around her as a miser closes his arms, half in joy, half in fear,

  around

  his treasure sacks—as a king walls in his city, or a

  mother

  her child. As the raging sun reaches for the pale-eyed, vanishing moon, so Medeia’s burning

  heart

  reached for my still, coiled mind; as the moon reforms

  the light

  of the sun, abstracts, refines it, at times refuses it,

  yet lives by that light as memory lives by harsh deeds

  done,

  or consciousness lives by the mindless fire of sensation,

  so I

  locked needs with Medeia, not partner, as I was with

  Hypsipyle,

  but part. She returned the embrace, ferocious: a wild

  off-chance.

  Thus as Helios’ wrath withdrew we staked our claims, all our curses smouldering still in our blood.

  “And so we came at last by the will of the deathless

  gods to Akhaia.

  18

  “It wasn’t easy, sharing the rule with senile Pelias.

  All real power in the kingdom was mine. It was not for

 

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