by John Gardner
some harm still undetected?”
“I was thinking of the past,” she said. “I loved you, Jason. I would have thought even a man
might grieve.
But now we’ll go. All I came for is done.” With her slaves
and children
she moved like one in a nightmare toward the door.
With his eyes
he followed them. After they left, he turned slowly, his heart racing, back toward Pyripta’s room. He knew he’d missed something, but for all his cunning, he
couldn’t guess what,
or whether the things were already accomplished or
just now beginning.
His heart was filled with fear, suddenly, for Medeia’s
life,
as her boundless rage turned inward. He could feel now
all around
him a rush, as if Time had grown sensible, and volcanic.
Below,
far ahead of the old, tortuously moving slaves, Medeia hurried with the children, bending her head
against the rain,
rushing downward through lightning, her two sons
crying in alarm
and pain at the speed with which she dragged them
homeward. Medeia
wailed aloud, her tears mingling with the hurrying rain, her voice feeble in the ricochetting boom of thunder: “No! How can I? Farewell then all insane resolves! I’ll take them away with me, far from this fat,
corrupting land.
What use can it be—hurting my sons to give Jason grief, myself reaping ten times over the woe I inflict? I won’t! That too has a kind of victory in it: he wrecks my life, tears it to shreds, and with furious calm I allow him
his triumph,
trusting in the gods’ justice hereafter, the fields where
the meek
are kings and queens, and the powerful on earth are
like whipped dogs.
There’s moral victory!” But she threw back her hair with
a violent head shake
and clenched her teeth. “—So any craven slave will tell
you,
smiling at his coward’s wounds, whimpering to the gods.
Shall I make
my hand so limp, my waste so trivial? —But no, no, no! Repent, mad child of Aietes! Though a thousand curses
rise
like stones turned judges in the wilderness, all justifying in one loud cry your scheme, yet this alone is true: If you strike for pride, for just and absolute revenge,
the stroke
is wasted; for who will call it pride or justice, from you? ‘Her father was mad in the selfsame way and to the
same degree,’
they’ll say, and they’ll wrinkle their broad Akhaian brows
and wipe
cool tears away. Dear gods! Even as an instrument of
death
they’ve made me nothing, meaningless! And yet though
Jason
robs me even of human free will—takes from me even my soul’s conviction of freedom—I still can give pain.
Even now,
crowned by the wreath, swathed in her golden robe, his
bride
is perishing. I see it in my heart. You’ve served me well,
good sons.
One more journey I must send you on, now that we’re
home.
Run in! Go quickly! I’ll follow you soon.” She opened the
gate
and clung to it, weeping. The boys went timidly in
toward light.
But for all her wailing, her mind was not for an instant
deflected
from what she was seeing. For her witch-heart saw it all,
from the beginning:
Before she was aware that his sons were with him,
the princess turned
with an eager welcoming glance toward Jason. But then,
drawing
her veil before her eyes, she turned her white cheek
away,
loath to have them come near. The children paused,
frightened,
but Jason said quickly to the princess, “Do not be hostile
to friends.
Forget your anger and turn your face toward me again. Accept as loved ones all whom your husband holds dear;
and accept
their gifts—worthy of a goddess—look! Then plead with
your father
that he soften toward these children and excuse them—
for my sake, Pyripta.”
The princess, seeing that golden gown, could resist no
longer
but yielded to his will, and gladly. And scarcely had
Jason left
with his children and their old attendant, than the
princess put on the new dress
and circled her hair with the golden wreath. In her
shining mirror
she ranged her locks, smiling back at the lifeless image, then rose from her seat and around the room went
stepping, half-dancing—
her blue-white feet treading delicately—Pyripta exulting, casting her eyes down many a time at her pointed foot.
But now suddenly the princess turned pale, and
reeling back
with limbs a-tremble, she sank down quickly to a
cushioned seat—
an instant more and she’d have tottered to the ground.
An old black handmaid,
thinking it perhaps some frenzy sent by Pan, cried out in prayer. Then, lo, through the bride’s bright lips she saw white foam-flakes issue—saw her eyeballs roll out of sight, no blood in her face. Then the slave sent out a shriek far different
from the first.
At once, one slave went flying upstairs to Kreon’s
chamber,
another to Jason to tell him the news. The whole vast
house
echoed with footsteps, hurrying to and fro. Before a swift walker with long, sure strides could have paced
a furlong
she opened her blue eyes wide from her speechless agony and groaned. From the golden chaplet wreathing
Pyripta’s head
a stream of ravening fire came flying like water down a
cliff,
and below, the gown was eating the poor girl’s fair white
flesh.
She fled crazily this way and that, aflame all over, shrieking and tossing her hair to be rid of the wreath,
but the gold
clung firmly fixed. As she tossed her locks, the fire
burned brighter,
and soon all the palace was heavy with the smell of her
burning hair
and flesh. She sank to the ground, her throat too swollen
for screams,
a dark, foul shape that even her father might scarcely
know.
Her features melted; from her head ran blood in a
stream, all melled
with fire. From her bones flesh dripped like the gum of
a pine—a sight
to silence even the eternally whispering slaves. Lord
Jason
stared, rooted to the ground where he stood—nor would
anyone else
go near that body. But wretched Kreon, with a wild bawl threw himself over the corpse, closing his arms around
it
and kissing it, howling his sorrow to the gods. “Now
life’s stripped bare,”
he sobbed. “O, O that I too might die!—these many
years
ripe for the tomb, and thou barely ripe for womanhood!” So old Kreon wept and wailed; and when he could
mourn
no more and thought he would raise again his ancient
limbs,
he found to his horror that she clung to him as ivy clings to laurel boughs. The slaves and the guards of the
palace stood helpless,
an army of useless friends. The fat king
wrestled with his daughter. When he pulled away with
the whole of his strength,
his agèd flesh tore free of his bones. Too spent at last to struggle further with the corpse or howl in pain, he
sobbed,
dryly, resigned to death. The slave Ipnolebes
stood over him, watching with empty eyes. The old king
whispered,
“Nothing works! All we’ve learned is that!” And he died. Ipnolebes said nothing. Then, all around the room, the slaves began to whisper again. A sound like fire.
Then Jason covered his eyes with his hands and
moaned, for at last
he saw to the end. And then he was running in the wild
hope
that still there was time. He flew down the palace
steps—no guards
in sight there now—and down through that smoky,
endless rain,
the clattering thunder and the sudden bursts of fire out
of heaven,
to his own locked gate. He hurled his shoulder against it
with the force
of Herakles’ club, and the huge bronze hinges snapped
like wood.
The Corinthian women inside all ran to the windows in
fear,
hearing the racket of his coming. But he came no
further. Above
his head, like a hovering lightning shape, Medeia
appeared
in a chariot drawn by dragons—beside her, the bodies
of his sons.
Squinting, throwing up his arm against that blood-red
light,
his throat convulsing till his words were barely
intelligible,
he shouted, “Monster! Female serpent abhorred by
mankind,
by the gods, and by me—you who could find it in your
heart to murder
the children you bore yourself, to leave me childless
and broken—
by all the gods in heaven or on earth or under the earth I curse you! May you live forever in the pain you’ve
brought yourself,
and with every passing day may your sorrow triple, and
your mind
grow more unsure, more tortured by doubt of what’s
happened here,
till nothing is certain but hopeless and endless sorrow.”
Even now— the proof of her victory gray and inert beside her—she
turned
her face from the lash of his words; broken as he was,
he knew
her chief point of vincibility: self-doubt, her fear that all she might do on earth was nothing but the
afterburn
of her father’s mindlessly rumbling, teratical blood. She
shouted,
“Curse all you please. You’ve turned too late to religion,
Jason.
Why should the gods pay heed to the curses of an
oath-breaker?”
She laughed, terrible and false, a crash of ice. He
howled,
“Yield me one thing and go then, free of me forever.”
She waited.
“The bodies of my sons,” he said, “to bewail and bury.”
But again
Medeia laughed, monstrous in her spite. “Never, my
husband!
I’ll bear them myself to the shrine of Hera in the high
mountains
and there bury them where none who hate me will climb
to insult them,
scattering their stones. For the land of Sisyphus I’ll
ordain a feast
with solemn rites to atone for the blood I’ve impiously
spilled,
then afterward away to Erekhtheus I’ll go, and live in
protection
of Aigeus, Pandion’s son. And you, vile wretch—this
curse
I place on you, in the hearing of earth and the burning
sun
and the multitudinous gods: May you now grow old
alone,
childless and silent, and die at last a shameful death, crushed by a beam from your own Argo. Then, then or
never,
shall our marriage end.” He listened in silence, his skin
burning
from the heat of the sun-god’s chariot. He wailed:
“Medeia, give back
my sons.” But again her reply was, “Never!” Then,
turning slowly,
she pointed to the palace. “Burials enough you’ll have,
I think,
without these, husband.” He looked. All the palace was
churning fire—
the tapestried walls, the trusses and cantled beams,
the doors,
the vaulting roofs. His muscles knotted more tightly
than before,
and his mind went wild. “Not my work, husband,”
Medeia said.
“The friends you’d have saved, in your own good time,
from Kreon’s dungeon
have fashioned keys of their own. I’ll bury our children,
Jason.
Deal with the dead mad Idas and Lynkeus scatter in
their wake!”
More darkly than ever he’d have cursed her then, but
his tongue was a stone,
his thick neck swollen as an adder’s. With the strength
of fifteen men
he seized the great bronze gate he’d torn from its hinges,
twisted it,
breaking it free of its latch and lock, swung it around
once,
and fired it upward at his wife. The chariot and dragons
vanished,
cunning illusions, and the door went planing through
the night, arching
upward and away six furlongs, gleaming. All the sky
was alight from the fire in the palace; and now there
were more fires burning,
the brothers taking remorseless Argonaut revenge on a
king
now dead. Jason could do nothing, kneeling in the
cobbled street,
bellowing wordless fury, clinging to his skull with both
hands,
for the heat of burning Corinth was nothing to the fire
in his mind.
Kneeling, his muscular thighs bulging, he swayed and
strained
for speech. He’d forgotten the trick of it. And now he
grew silent,
became like the focus of the whole world’s pressure. The
city all around him
roared, full of fire and shouts, alive with people on the
run.
And now, as steady and endless as the rain, gray ashes
fell.
Kneeling, furious, no longer sane, Lord Jason grew
old.
Before my eyes his skin withered and his hair turned
white.
The street became the Argo. I shouted in terror for the
goddess.
Waves crashed over the gunnels; from the sailyard
icicles hung.
And still, like snow, white ashes drifted through the
universe,
and above the sailyard, circling, circling in the darkness,
the ravens.
24
I stood on an island of flaking shale, where snow lay
gray,
in sickly patches; an island barren except for one tree by a miracle not yet dead, but bare and aging, failing, the surrounding air so choked and smoky that, for all I
knew,
I’d stumbled on the kingdom of Death. From every side
I heard,
ringing across what must have been black and sludgy
/> waters,
cracks and explosions, rumblings, shots; the air was
filled
with the whine of what might have been engines. I could
see, through the snow and smoke,
no smouldering fires, no rocket’s glare, no proof that
the earth
was not, itself, unaided by man, the attacker and
attacked.
Holding my right hand—stiff and useless, violently
throbbing—
in my left, the collar of my old black coat drawn high
to shield me,
I moved with feeble and tottering steps toward the
center of the island.
I began to see now there was more life here than I’d
guessed at first:
insects struggling in the ice, and sluggish serpents,
hissing,
venomous mouths wide open. I kept my distance, and
passed.
In every crevasse of that sickened place, there were
lean, white gannets
crying forlornly in inconstant, snow-filled brume. I found a man with a stick walking slowly in front of the
entrance to a cave,
turning in slow, stiff circles, as if in search of something. His beard came nearly to his knees; his ankles were
knobby and swollen
from some old injury; he had no eyes. He frowned, stern and strangely unbent for a man so old, and a
hermit.
“Who’s there?” he said, and pointed his stick. I struggled
to answer,
but no words came. He reached toward me with his
square, gray hand
to feel out my features and manner of dress, then shook
his head
dully, wearier than ever, and turned his face away, thinking, or listening to something out on the water.
I thought
he’d forgotten my presence; but he said suddenly,
“Whoever sent you,
tell them to take you back. Say to them, ‘Oidipus thanks
you,
but he takes no interest in the future.’ Now go.” He
waved at me gruffly,
not unkindly but impatiently, like a man interrupted. “Are you gone?” he said. I tried to think how to tell him
I was not as
free in my comings and goings as he seemed to think.
He said,
“Good, good!” and nodded, thankful to be rid of me. I said, “I can tell you of Kreon’s death.” He started,
indignant.
But after a moment my words registered,
and he scowled, standing quite still, as if carefully
balancing.
“He’s dead, then,” he said. I said: “A horrible death. I
saw it.”
He wiped his eyebrows. “Don’t tell me about it. Kreon
was dead
from the beginning.” He mulled it over. ‘That was the
difference between us.”
