Jason and Medeia (3 page)

“all will be well, I think.” He patted the slave's hard arm. “We'll be all right. The fortunes of our troubled house

are at last

on the upswing. Trust me! We've nothing more to do

now but wait,

observe with an icy, calculating eye as tension mounts—churns up like an oracle's voice. We'll see,

my friend,

what abditories of weakness, secret guile they keep, what signs of virtue hidden to the casual glance.

Remember:

No prejudgments! Cold and objective as gods we'll

watch,

so far as possible. The man we finally choose we'll choose not from our own admiration, but of simple necessity. Not the best there, necessarily—the mightiest fist, the smoothest tongue. Our line's unlucky. The man we

need

is the man who'll make it survive. Pray god we recognize

him!”

He smiled, though his brow was troubled. It seemed

more strain than he needed,

this last effort of his reign, choice of a successor. He

stood

the weight of it only by will. He opened his hands like a

merchant

robbed of all hope save one gray galleon, far out at sea, listing a little, but ploughing precariously home. “What

more

can a man do?” he said, and forced a chuckle. “Some may well be surprised when we've come to the end of

these wedding games.

We two know better than to lay our bets on wealth alone, honor like poor Jokasta's, or obstinate holiness, genius like that of King Oidipus—the godly brain he squanders now on gulls and winds and crawling

things.

Yet some man here in this house …” The king fell

silent, brooding.

“And yet there's one man more I wish were here,” he

said.

He pulled at his nose and squeezed one eye tight shut.

“A man

with contacts worth a fortune, a man who's talked or

fought

his way past sirens, centaurs, ghosts, past angry seas … a slippery devil, honest, not overly scrupulous, flexible, supple, cautious without being cowardly, a proven leader of men … ‘the man who brought

help,' as they call him,

for such is the meaning of his name.” The slave at his

elbow nodded,

smiling. His eyes were caves. King Kreon wrinkled

his forehead

and picked at his silvery beard like a man aware, dimly, of danger crouching at his back.

Just then, from an upper room,

a girlish voice came down—Pyripta, daughter of the

king,

singing, not guessing that anyone heard. Wan, giant

Kreon

raised one finger to his lips, tipped up his head. His

servant

leered, nodding, wringing his fingers as if the voice were sunlight falling on his ears. She sang an ancient

song,

the song Persephone sang before her ravishment.

Artemis, Artemis, hear my prayer, grant my spirit the path of the eagle; in high rocks where only the stars sing, there let me keep my residence.

When the song ended, tears had gathered in the old

king's eyes.

He said, “Ah, yes”—rubbing his cheeks with the back

of his hand.

“Such beauty, the innocent voice of a child! Such

radiance!

—Forgive me. Sentimental old fool.” He tried to laugh,

embarrassed.

The god feigned mournful sympathy, touching an ash-gray cheek with fingers gnarled like

roots.

Kreon patted his servant's arm, still rubbing his

streaming

eyes and struggling for control. He smiled, a soft

grimace.

“Such beauty! You'd think it would last forever, a

thing like that!

She
thinks it will, poor innocent! So do they all, children blind to the ravaging forces so commonplace to us. They live in a world of summer sunlight, showers, squirrels at play on the lawn. They know of nothing

worse,

and innocently they think the gods must cherish them exactly as they do themselves. And so they should!

you'd say.

But they don't. No no.” He rolled up his eyes.

“We're dust, Ipnolebes. Withering leaves. It's not a thing to break too soon to the young, but facts are facts.

Depend

on nothing, ask for nothing; do your best with the time you've got, whatever small gifts you've got, and leave

the world

a better place than you found it. Pass to the next

generation

a city fit for learning, loving, dying in.

It's the world that lasts—a glorious green mosaic built of tiles that one by one must be replaced. It's that— the world, their holy art—that the gods love. Not us. We who are old, beyond the innocent pride of youth, must bend to that, and gradually bend our offspring

to it.”

He sighed, head tipped. “She asks for freedom, lordless, childless, playing out life like a fawn in the

groves.

A dream, I'm sorry to say. This humble world below demands the return of the seed. Such is our duty to it. The oldest oak on the hillside, even the towering plane

tree,

shatters, sooner or later, hammered by thunderbolts or torn-up roots and all by a wind from Zeus. On the

shore,

we see how the very rocks are honed away, in time. Accept the inevitable, then. Accept your place in the

march

of seasons, blood's successions. —In the end she'll find,

I hope,

that marriage too, for all its pangs, has benefits.”

He smiled, turned sadly to his slave. “It's true, you

know. The song

that moved us, there—bubbled up feelings we'd half

forgotten—

I wouldn't trade it for a hundred years of childhood play. The gods are kinder than we think!” The servant nodded,

solemn.

Kreon turned away, still sniffling, clearing his throat.

“Carry a message for me, good Ipnolebes. Seek out Jason—somewhere off by himself, if that proves feasible—and ask him, with all your skill and

tact

—with no unwarranted flattery, you understand (he's nobody's fool, that Jason)—ask, with my

compliments,

that he dine in the palace tomorrow night. Mention our

friends,

some few of whom he may know from the famous days

when he sailed

the
Argo.
Tell him—” He paused, reflecting, his

eyebrows raised.

“No, that's enough. —But this, yes!” His crafty grin came back, a grin like a peddler's, harmless guile. ‘Tell

him,

as if between you and himself—tell him I seem a trifle ‘miffed' at his staying away, after all I've done for him. Expand on that as you like—his house, et cetera.” The king laughed, delighted by his wit, and added, “Remind him of his promise to tell more

tales sometime.

Mention, between the two of you, that poor old Kreon's hopelessly, sottishly caught when it comes to adventure

stories—

usual lot of a fellow who's never been away, worn out his whole long life on record keeping, or sitting in

judgment,

struggling to unsnarl tortuous tangles of law with

further

law.” He chortled, seeing it all in his mind, and beamed, clapping his plump dry hands and laughing in wheezes.

It was

delicious to him that he, great Kreon, could be seen by

men

as a fat old quop, poor drudge, queer childish lunatic. The river shone like a brass mirror. The sky was bright “Go,” said Kreon, and patted his slave's humped back.

“Be persuasive!

Tomorrow night!”

He turned, still laughing, lifting his foot

to move inside, when out of the corner of his eye the

king

saw—sudden, terrible—a silent shadow, some creature

in the grass,

glide down the lawn and vanish. He clutched at his

chest in alarm

and reached for Ipnolebes. The stones were bare.

“Dear gods,

dear precious holy gods!” he whispered. He frowned,

blinked,

touched his chin with his fingertips. The evening was

clear,

as green as a jewel, in the darkening sky above, no life. “I must sacrifice,” he whispered, “—pray and sacrifice.” He rubbed his hands. “All honor to the blessed gods,”

he said.

His red-webbed eyes rolled up. The sky was hollow,

empty,

deep as the whole world's grave.

King Kreon frowned, went in,

and stood for a long time lost in thought, blinking,

watching

the frail shadows of trembling leaves. His fingertips

shook.

2

In Corinth, on a winding hillside street, stood an old

house,

its stone blackened by many rains, great hallways dark with restive shadows of vines, alive though withered,

waiting—

listening for wind, a sound from the bottom of the sea—

climbing

crumbling walls, dropping their ancient, silent weight from huge amphoras suspended by chains from the

ceiling beams.

“The house of the witch,” it was called by children of

the neighborhood.

They came no nearer than the outer protective wall of

darkening

brick. They played there, peeking in from the midnight

shade

of olive trees that by half a century out-aged the oldest crone in Corinth. They spied with rounded

eyes

through the leaves, whispering, watching the windows

for strange lights,

alarming themselves to sharp squeals by the flicker of

a bat,

the moan of an owl, the dusty stare of a humpbacked

toad

on the ground near where the vines began.

He saw it, from his room

above, standing as he'd stood all day—or so I guessed by the way he was leaning on the window frame, the

deep-toned back

of his hand touching his jaw. What he thought, if

anything,

was locked in his mirroring eyes. Great Jason, Aison's

son,

who'd gone to the rim of the world and back on nerve

and luck,

quick wits, a golden tongue—who'd once been crowned

a king,

his mind as ready to rule great towns as once it had been to rule the Argonauts: shrewd hero in a panther-skin, a sleek cape midnight-black. The man who brought

help.” No wonder

some men have had the suspicion he brought it from

the Underworld,

the winecup-crowded grave. His gray eyes stared out now as once they'd stared at the gleaming mirror of the gods,

the frameless

sea. He waited, still as a boulder in the silent house, no riffle of wind in the sky above. He tapped the wall with his fingertips; then stillness again.

Behind the house, in a garden hidden from strangers'

eyes

by hemlocks wedged in thick as the boulders in a wall,

a place

once formal, spare, now overrun—the vines of roses twisting, reaching like lepers' hands or the dying limbs of oaks—white lilies, lilacs tilting up faceless graves like a dry cough from earth—his wife Medeia sat, her two young sons on the flagstones near her feet.

The span

the garden granted was filled like a bowl with sunlight. Seated by the corner gate, an old man watched, the household slave whose work

was care

of the children. Birds flashed near, quick flame: red

coral, amber,

cobalt, emerald green—bright arrows pursuing the

restless

gnat, overweening fly. But no bird's wing, no blossom shone like Medeia's hair. It fell to the glowing green of the grass like a coppery waterfall, as light as air, as charged with delicate hues as swirling fire. Her face was soft, half sleeping, the jawline clean as an Indian's. Her hands were small and white. The children talked.

She smiled.

Jason—gazing from his room as a restless lion stares from his rocky cave to the sand where his big-pawed

cubs, at play,

snarl at the bones of a goat, and his calm-eyed mate

observes,

still as the desert grass—lifted his eyes from the scene, his chest still vaguely hungry, and searched the wide,

dull sky.

It stared back, quiet as a beggar's eyes. “How casually you sit this stillness out, time slowed to stone, Medeia! It's a fine thing to be born a princess, raised up idle, basking in the sunlight, warmed by the smile of

commoners,

or warm without it! A statue, golden ornament indifferent to the climb and fall of the sun and moon,

the endless,

murderous draw of tides. And still the days drag on.” So he spoke, removed by cruel misfortunes from all

who once

listened in a spell to his oratory, or observed with

slightly narrowed eyes

the twists and turns of his ingenious wit. No great wit now, I thought. But I hadn't yet seen how

well

he still worked words when attending some purpose

more worthy of his skill

than private, dreary complaint. I was struck by a curious

thing:

The hero famous for his golden tongue had difficulty

speaking—

some slight stiffness of throat, his tongue unsure. If once his words came flowing like water down a weir, it was

true no longer:

as Jason was imprisoned by fate in Corinth—useless,

searching—

so Jason's words seemed prisoned in his chest,

hammering to be free.

A moment after he spoke, Medeia's voice came up to the window, soft as a fern; and then the children's

voices,

softer than hers, blending in the strains of an ancient

canon

telling of blood-stained ikons, isles grown still. He

listened.

The voices rising from the garden were light as spirit

voices