Metamorphica

by Zachary Mason

  He dreamed of the hunt. Now and then he woke up, once finding himself firing arrows into a cloud of bronze birds wheeling in the sky, and once to find himself standing before an advancing army, and when he looked back he saw his own soldiers waiting for the signal to charge. The last time, he found himself in his children’s rooms, though the children weren’t there, and there was blood on his hands and on the walls and the ceiling. (Somewhere there was a dull thrum like distant purring.) At first he was alarmed, but then realized he’d been wrong, that what he’d thought was his house was in fact a pier of low rock protruding from the plain, that the blood on his hands was from three young baboons, torn apart by some predator. Relieved, he dismissed Thebes from his mind and set out across the plain, full of joy, keen for the chase, looking for spoor in the sighing grasses.

  27

  MEDEA I

  Medea was a witch and a princess of Colchis. Jason wanted her to help him get the Golden Fleece, which was guarded by Ladon, an immortal serpent.

  In the mountains at the end of the world you finally come to the valley of the fleece. It’s redolent of moss and stone, and water drips contrapuntally into shallow pools from high seeps. Raptors float on thermals, passing from the sunlight into the shadows of the cliffs, but there’s no sign of other animals, not even tracks in the sand. A weathered sign in the hand-writing of another age is nailed to a tree—beyond me, it says, death waits. Your father told you there’s a serpent in the glade, bound there by the gods in ancient days, endlessly wise, always watching, full of hate.

  The serpent must be long gone, you think, but as you pass the sign the bird-song stops and the wind brings dry rot and metal and there’s a sudden sense of breathless intensity. You freeze, sifting the world’s murmur for signs, but hear nothing. Your nerve breaks and you’re turning to go when you see me coiled in the branches.

  You don’t flinch, and that’s why I listen rather than strike. In a strong clear voice you tell me that Jason, your new lover, wants you to get the fleece and then sail away with him leaving Colchis forever. Your father says Jason is an adventurer of obscure family and suspect intent, and would mistreat you as soon as he could get away with it. Who should you believe?

  My malice has been blunted by the torpor of centuries but now I need only speak the plain truth, which is that your father cares for nothing but his kingdom and regards you as his property, and that behind the lovely planes of Jason’s face there’s little but vanity, a need for approval and a restless, inarticulate ambition. He’ll push you aside when another woman comes along and then resent you for being wounded. Knowing this, you’ll go with him anyway.

  28

  MEDEA II

  When he was little more than a boy Jason chanced to meet a demon named Medea, who made him the sole object of her desire and pursued him relentlessly as he fled across the seas. Catching him, she gave him no rest, being out of reach when he wanted her and breathing on him when, exhausted, he only wanted sleep. He cursed her vainly, though in the course of his misadventures she often saved his life, raising her little finger to still storms, stop hearts, sink ships.

  Only when he’d resigned himself to suffering did she admit that she loved him, and long had, and promised to torment him no more. He demanded proof, so she said she would restore his aging father’s youth. Distrusting her, Jason followed secretly when she led the old man into the wood, and saw her cut his throat and let the black blood pour out into a wooden tub. He sprang out of hiding and struck her with his sword but the blade wouldn’t bite so he fled back to their house and sealed it against her. All night she sat outside what had been their door, howling to be let in, her despair shaking the city. When he proved unrelenting she started changing her shape, first into a serpent, then into a fire, and then into a wolf who tore their two children to bloody rags. Finally she became a storm that shattered windows and tore the surface of the sea, but the wind soon blew out and she was never heard from again.

  29

  JASON

  Jason lived quietly after Medea killed his father and their children.

  I found my father sitting on my doorstep. It was evening, and he’d been dead for years, and he was little more than a boy, but I recognized him at once, though it looked like he hadn’t slept in days, and of course I thought I was dreaming. As a gesture toward common sense I told him to get up and go, as I had neither time nor coin for beggars, but his face crumpled and he said, God damn you, god damn you anyway for leaving me out here in the dark, so I let him in.

  I watched him as he ate and couldn’t bring myself to ask questions lest I break whatever tenuous spell had brought him back. It wasn’t long before his eyes glazed, and his chin sank toward his chest; I said, “You have come a long way, and you are welcome here, but now it’s time to rest.”

  I lit candles in my study and tried to read but the words on the page were black marks without meaning so I went and stood in the door to his room, where I thought to find him vanished, or transformed, but there he was, eyes closed, sleeping.

  He slept through the afternoon, and the light was fading when I found him sitting up in his room. He was shaking, as though he had a fever, and he said he was cold, so I propped him up in bed and covered him with blankets and listened as his mind wandered. I was relieved he was confused, and ashamed to be relieved, but I thought he might not ask about the children, and in fact he rambled on about hunts he’d known as a boy, how he’d plunged through thick forests that stretched down to the city walls, and of the sun, which had been brighter back then, when all the animals spoke, and of standing on the strand watching me board the Argo, and watching the Argo sail away.

  When his eyes closed I seized his shoulder, suddenly convinced he’d not wake again, and my voice seemed faint and far away as I said, “But how have you come back? For you made that journey from which there’s no returning.”

  He said, “There was pain, and blood, and bad dreams. I was thirsty, and I was looking for you, wandering in cities whose names I never knew, and no one understood me when I asked for help, and it was always cold, the cold unbelievable, and I thought I’d be lost forever, but then I found you,” and then his eyes closed, and I watched him, as the hours passed, poised to rouse him if it seemed he would slip away, but he was only asleep, and before dawn I was asleep on the floor beside him.

  * * *

  I took him walking in the city. It was winter, and the streets were cased in ice, and the freezing fog made shadows of passersby. I lost him for a moment in the whiteness, and immediately I was certain he was gone forever, but then I heard a girl singing, and following her voice I found him before her, listening on a street-corner. I bought us hot wine; his hands were still clumsy, and spilled red drops stained the snow at our feet. He turned his face toward a momentary sun, and as his exhalations clouded and dispersed I wondered if every breath felt miraculous, and what he’d learned down there in the dark, but he said nothing through the short afternoon.

  * * *

  It was always evening then, and the harbor was frozen, and the city bound in snow, the snow falling endlessly as winter settled deeper. The fire burned low and we seemed always to have been in the shadows and flickering red heat of the low room by the garden. I wanted to ask what he planned to do with the new life before him, but it was easier to watch the snow fall beyond the window and the reflection of the dying fire that was the center of our night.

  * * *

  It wasn’t long before it seemed like he’d been there forever and there was nothing more natural than keeping house with the dead. I kept no servants, first from poverty and then from discretion, and every day I rose early to mend the fire and make the tea. He looked perilously young in the early light. One day, though I knew it was bad luck, I couldn’t stop myself from saying, “Do not go away again.”

  * * *

  When he asked what had become of my mother I put down my wine and said, “She sailed for Rhodes, when you were gone, to be close to her family. She has a garden,
and old friends, and says she’ll die there. There are letters, now and then. I could show them to you…” but he shook his head and looked away.

  * * *

  Ice encased the city walls, and the snow filled the streets to the lintels. The fire in the hearth was all the heat in the house and it seemed that the cold had slowed time. It was like waking when I heard the first sharp crack from the ice in the harbor, its reverberation hanging in the air. I opened the front door onto a curtain of droplets cascading from the eaves, the footprints blurring in the softening snow.

  The rain must have stirred him, as he started rising early and going out into the city, I knew not where. One night he told me he’d been bound by duty, in his life, but now was free, and wanted to see where all the roads led and the other side of the sea. Not yet, I said. I still need you here. You’ve only just come back. He nodded in agreement, or in any case he nodded, and then he embraced me, and we parted for the night, I thought, though in fact we were parting forever, and when I woke in the dark I knew he was gone.

  I looked in his room, then ran into the street. The city was still deserted, and I found what I thought were his tracks in the slush and followed them to a square where all the footprints were overlaid so I guessed and ran on, knowing that if I hesitated or made a mistake he’d be gone for good, and as the sun rose the air warmed and the tracks were melting. By then there were people on the street staring at the panicked old man running through the snow in his dressing gown, and the snow was trampled into illegibility by the time I reached the harbor where green water surged in the channels through the milky, impacted ice, frozen shards and prisms flowing out to sea on the receding tide, and there was a ship, the year’s first, going with them, snow tumbling from its masthead into the water. It might well have been him, up there in the rigging; I called his name, shouting to be heard over the wind, and whoever it was called back something I couldn’t make out while he waved. I sat a long time on the quay watching the ship dwindling, dwindling, and then I looked away for a moment and when I looked back it was gone.

  That was years ago, but even now I see him in every young man standing on a corner. Nights, I sit in my study, and when I hear footsteps on the street I run down and throw open the front door but it’s always just some stranger passing by. Summers wax and wane, and in the hills the wind rattles the tall grasses around the tombs where my sons lie, and beside them are his tomb, and mine, empty, waiting.

  30

  THETIS

  Thetis was an ocean goddess and a notorious shape-changer. She was believed to be the mother of Achilles by the Argonaut Peleus.

  She lay sprawled on the cove’s burning sand like a body washed up, reed-thin and frail and older than oceans. He’d seen her swim in through the high surf, unmoved by the extravagant violence of the water, and now he crept toward her over the rocks with spear and net, grateful for the waves’ echoing crash and roar.

  There was a seal where the girl had been, its whiskers twitching, muzzle working in its sleep. He blinked, wondering if he’d been too long in the sun, but then without transition it was a girl again. A wave broke over her; receding, it left a thin film of water on her skin, and a sand-berm by her side, embedding her, and she seemed then to be of geologic antiquity, unassailable as mountains, but her breasts, hips, sex were a woman’s, so he took the last step and cast his net.

  Her fingers clasped the coarse, weighted mesh. He straddled her, wrapping his hands around her thin, chill wrists. Waves washed over them as he pushed her arms over her head, his face inches from hers, breathing in the sun on her skin as he looked down into eyes like green wells.

  He said, “I’m Peleus, and I want a son.”

  She said, “Mortal, go and find a wife.”

  “But I’ve found you, because at Delphi the Pythia said, Take Thetis by force, and the one who springs from your coupling will exceed all in war.”

  “War,” she said, stretching languidly, and her composure made him want to slap her. “I remember when the hundred-arms went to war against the gods of the mountain; the sea was cloudy for weeks and smoke blotted out the sun. It’s a long time since I’ve seen a battle.”

  “When—” he started, but his hands were clutching at cold water flowing back toward the sea. From the corner of his eye he saw her crouched behind him in the breakers; as he turned he snatched up his spear and found himself facing a golden, sleekly muscled youth whose green eyes burned as he hefted a stone and said, “Was this the son you wanted?”

  They stood motionless. Waves crashing, breakers’ foam, water rushing over his shins, wet sand coating the lower hemisphere of the black stone in the boy’s hands. When the boy moved Peleus thrust at his neck but he slipped aside so fluidly that Peleus’ heart swelled even as the stone clipped his temple.

  He was on his back, blood pouring down his face, a black shadow with stone lifted looming over him. “Let me go,” he said. “I’m nothing to you, a man, no more. Let me live. Send me away. Forget me.”

  The shadow said, “I have been the vortices, the sea-foam, the breaking waves, the vast currents in the deep, the clouds in summer skies. I have been gulls riding the storm, seals swimming in the dark, sharks whose hunger draws them on like gravity. I have been everything, and lost everything, and would’ve gone on idling away the centuries had you not reminded me of strife’s blood and joy. I’ll go inland, and find armies, and the tides of war and hecatombs of soldiers will slow my long slide into nothing.” A wave broke and water rushed over them. The shadow said, “What would you have named your son?”

  “You will be the grief of nations,”3 said Peleus, and then the stone came down.

  31

  ACHILLES

  Achilles was the mainstay of the Greek army in the Trojan War. When Agamemnon offended him, Achilles withdrew from the fight.

  Achilles’ best friend was Patroclus.

  Achilles sits on the beach watching the waves sigh out and rumble in. Before him the sand falls away in a steep slope inscribed with the converging vees of the retreating water. He seems not to see that the tide is coming in. He has no weapon, though Troy’s towers rise through the dawn mist, but they say he needs none.

  * * *

  Patroclus approaches diffidently, turns a weather eye on Troy, and sits down beside him, looking into his friend’s face as his friend looks out to sea.

  “What do you see there?” asks Patroclus. “Your mother?”

  Achilles says, “I see home.”

  Gathering himself, Patroclus says, “The Trojans are upon us. Hector’s rage is like a breaking wave scattering our men before him, and it won’t be long before he and his men reach the ships with their torches and we’re lost.”

  “There was a time, not long ago, when I would’ve cared. I know that, though it’s hard now to believe it was ever possible.”

  They sit listening to the voices of the waves. Patroclus asks, “Does your mother give you counsel?”

  “She wonders why I came here at all, when this war is nothing to me,” Achilles says over the hiss of receding water. “And she’s learned to loathe mortal men—except for one, of course, whom she loves more than all the world.”

  “Any mother would love such a son,” says Patroclus, to which his friend says nothing.

  Silence, and then Patroclus says, “Is it Briseis?4 I’ll give you another girl, twice as pretty, and every chief will give you another girl, for you are the mainstay of the army, and everyone knows it, as everyone knows Agamemnon is a fool.”

  Speaking slowly, Achilles says, “Men value honor, and I valued it with them, and conformed to the rules by which it’s won or withheld. I went to battle joyfully and risked my life to win acclaim, and I killed many men, but then Agamemnon, in his frustration, robbed me, and I let him, because his theft revealed the whole edifice of prestige and obligation as nothing much at all, a mechanism for getting young men to shed their blood willingly on behalf of their elders who pretend to be their betters. I wish I’d never left the se
a.”

  Patroclus asks, “Is it the helplessness?”

  “Helplessness,” snorts Achilles. “I could scatter Agamemnon and all his Argives like sand before a storm.” Patroclus, who loves his friend, continues to look solemn. “But what would it mean? Dead men’s blood soaking into sand, dead men’s bodies drifting out to sea, and still the years’ endless succession.”

  “So much for hatred, but what of love?”

  “A temporary loyalty, born of shared folly,” he says with a hint of a smile.

  “Then lend me your armor, if you love me at all, and if you won’t save us your image will.”

  “Why?” asks Achilles, and smiles at Patroclus with the simplicity that has always won his heart. “Come away with me. Let the war wind on as it will. All the oceans and all the world are before us. I’ll show you wonders.”

  “I must stay,” says Patroclus. “I’m not like you. I’m not remote.”

  * * *

  Patroclus hasn’t been dead an hour when a war-cry like thunder comes from the Greek camp, and Hector, whose hand is raised to finish off a Spartan, looks up; his intended victim takes the chance to scurry away as a metallic shrieking approaches through the dunes.

  Achilles surges into battle, his rage overwhelming as he bats aside nameless men and makes his way toward Hector. A path opens in the throng and Hector, who is fearless, runs to meet him, and the others will always remember that he looked like a man going not to death but to his wedding-night. On the first pass their spears pierce only air, and hope blooms in Hector’s heart as a great cheer rises from the Trojans, but a moment later he lies dazed in the dust, looking up at the sun glinting on a bronze spear-point on a scoured blue sky, and then it’s over.