Jason and Medeia (37 page)

himself

was astonished to see that great ball thrown. But the

earthborn men

fell on one another in a froth, and beneath each other's

spearpoints

toppled like pines uprooted in a violent gale. And now, like a thunderstone out of heaven, pursued by its fiery

tail,

the son of Aison came, spear flashing, and the dark

field streamed

with blood. Some fell while running, some still

half-emerged,

their flanks and bellies showing, or only their heads.

So Jason

reaped with his murderous sickle that unripe grain.

Blood flowed

in new-ploughed furrows like water in a ditch.

“Such was the scene

the Lord of the Bulls surveyed, and such was his rage

and grief.

For he knew well enough whence came this miraculous

power in the man.

He went back numbed with fury to the city of the

Kolchians.

So the day ended, and so Lord Jason's contest ended.

15

The witch slept, and in dreams the goddess Hera filled her heart with agonizing fears. She trembled like a fawn

half hidden

in a copse at the baying of hounds. Her eyeballs burned;

her ears

filled with a roar like the crashing of a tide. She played

again

(it was no mere game) with the thought of some

deathwort painless and swift.

Far better that than the vengeance her father would

devise. (She'd seen him,

a shadowy form in her sorcelled mirror, seated with

his nobles,

preparing his treacherous stroke.) She groaned,

awakened in terror,

the shadow of a crow on the moon. She slipped her feet

down, groping,

moving in silence to the box where her potions were

locked, then paused,

remembering the stranger's words. It was not possible,

perhaps—

and yet, perhaps in that kinder world … In haste, half

swooning,

Medeia kneeled down and kissed her bed, her eyes

streaming,

and kissed the posts at each side of the folding doors,

and the walls.

She snipped a lock of her hair for her mother to

remember her by,

and then, to no one in the darkness, whispered,

Farewell, Mother.

Farewell Khalkiope; farewell my home, my beloved

brother,

farewell sweet rooms, old fields…' She could say no

more, sobbed only,

‘Jason, I wish you had drowned!' Then weeping like a

newly captive

slave torn roughly from her home by the luck of war,

she fled

in silence swiftly through the palace. The doors,

awakening

to her hasty spells, swung open of their own accord.

So onward

barefoot she ran down narrow alleys, her right hand

raising

the hem of her skirt, her left hand holding her mantle

to her forehead,

hiding her face. Thus swiftly, fearfully, she crossed

the city

by lightless streets, and passed the towers on the wall

unseen

by the watch. The moon sang down, cool

huntress-goddess, grim:

‘How many times have you blocked my rays by your

incantations,

to practice your witchery undisturbed—your search for

corpses,

noxious roots? How many times have you terrified

innocents,

raising up devils, the shadow of wolves, along country

lanes?

Go then, victim of the mischief god! Seek out thy light, sweet Jason, life-long heartache! Clever as you are,

you'll find

there's deadlier craft than witchcraft stalking the night

Go! Run!'

“Thus sang the moon. But Medeia rushed on, and

arrived at last

at the high earth sconce by the river and, looking

across it, caught

the bloom of the Argonauts' bonfire, kept all night,

celebration

of victory. She sent a clear call ringing through the dark to Melas, Phrixos' son, on the further bank. He heard and recognized her, as Jason did. They spoke to the

others.

The Argonauts were speechless with amazement and

dread. Three times

she called; three times they shouted back, rowing toward

her.

“Before they'd shored or cast off the hawsers, Jason

leaped

light-footed from the
Argo's
deck, and after him

Phrixos' sons.

At once she wrapped her arms around Jason's knees,

imploring:

‘Save me, I beg you, from Aietes' wrath—and save

yourselves.

Our tricks are discovered; there's nothing we can do.

Let us sail away

before he can reach his chariot I'll give you, myself, the golden fleece. I have spells that can bring down

sleep on the serpent.

—But first, before all your men, you must call on the

gods to witness

your promises to me. You must vow you will not

disgrace me when I

am far from home and in no dear kinsmen's protection.'

She spoke

in anguish, fallen at his feet. But the words she spoke

made Jason's

heart leap high, whether for joy at her beauty—now

granted

as a gift to him—or joy at her promise of the fleece, she

could not

tell, study his eyes as she might. He raised her to her

feet,

embracing her. Then, to comfort her: ‘Beautiful

princess,

I swear—may Olympian Zeus and his consort Hera,

Goddess

of Wedlock, witness my words—that when we're safe in

Hellas,

I'll make you my wedded wife.' And he took her hand

in his.

She believed him, and said, ‘I have nothing to promise

in return but this:

‘I'll be faithful to you. Wherever you go, I will go.'

“So to the ship, and at once, with all speed, to the

sacred wood

in hopes that while night still clung they might capture

and carry away

the treasure, in defiance of the king. The oars with their

pinewood blades

skirled water, awakening the dark. As the boat slid out

from shore

like a nearly forgotten dream, Medeia gasped, wide-eyed, and stretched out her arms to the land, full of wild

regret. But Jason,

never at a loss, spoke softly, and her mind was calmed.

She turned

like a charmed spirit, and gazed toward the isle of the

serpent.

“The
Argo

glided landwards, the mast tip blazing with dawn's first

glance,

and, guided by Medeia, the Argonauts leaped to the

rockstrewn, windless

beach—a muffled jangle of war-dress, and then vast

stillness.

A path led straight to the sacred wood. They advanced,

silent;

and so they came within sight of the mammoth oak,

and high

in its beams, like a cloud incarnadined by the fiery

glance

of morning, they saw the fleece. They stood stock-still,

amazed.

It hung, magnificent, above them, like a thing

indifferent

to the petty spleen of Aietes, courage of Jason, or the

beating

of Medeia's confounded heart. It seemed a thing

indifferent

to Time itself: Virtue, Beauty, Holiness, Change— all were revealed for an instant as paltry children's

dreams,

carpentered illusions to wall off the truth, man's

otherness—

eternal, inexpiable—from this. The Argonauts

remembered again

Prometheus' screams—first thief of celestial fire;

remembered

the whispering ram on the mantle that Argus had made,

off Lemnos,

Phrixos listening, all attention, and all who looked on it listening, tensed for the secret; but the smouldering

ram's eyes laughed,

and the secret refused their minds.
Stay on! It's not

far now!

A moral meaningless, outrageous. For a long time they

stared,

like mystics gazing at an inner sun, some nether

darkness,

pyralises. But now the sharp unsleeping eyes of the

snake had seen them,

and the head swung near like a barque on invisible

waters. Their minds

came awake again, and even the bravest of the

Argonauts shook

till their armor rang, and their legs no longer held

them. The serpent

hissed, and the banks of the river, the deep recesses

of the wood

threw back the sound, and far away from Titanian Aia it reached the ears of Kolchians living by the outfall of

Lykos.

Babies sleeping in their mothers' arms were startled

awake,

and their mothers, awakening in terror, hugged them

close. Apophis,

in his sheath of blue-green scales, rolled forward his

interminable coils

like the eddies of thick black smoke that spring from

smouldering logs

and pursue each other from below in endless

convolutions. Then

he saw the witch Medeia rise from the ground and

stand,

her hair and eyes like flame, her strangely gentle voice invoking sleep, a sing-song soothing to his ancient mind; he heard her calling to the queen of the Underworld—

softly, softly—

and as Jason looked up, stretched out flatlings in the

shadow of her skirt,

the snake, for all its age and rage, was lulled a little. The whole vast sinuate spine relaxed, and its

undulations

smoothed a little, moving like a dark and silent swell rolling on a sluggish sea. Even now his head still

hovered,

and his jaws, with their glittering, needlesharp tusks,

were agape, as if

to snap the intruders to their death like fear-numbed

mice. But Medeia,

chanting a spell, sprinkled his eyes with a powerful

drug,

and as the magic assaulted his heavy mind, the scent

spreading out

around him, his will collapsed. His wedge-shape head

sank slowly,

his innumerable coils behind him spanning the wood.

Then, rising

on feeble legs, Jason dragged down the fleece from the

oak,

Medeia moving her hand on Apophis' head, soothing his wildness with a magic oil. As if in a trance herself, she gave no sign when Jason called. He returned for her, touching her elbow, drawing her back to the ship. And

so

they left the grove of Ares.

“Magnificent triumph, you may think.

Was Aietes not a devil, and his downfall just? Ah, yes. But the legend of human triumph coils inward forever,

burns

at the heart with old contradictions. The goddess was

in us, the anguine

goddess with sleepy eyes.

“Victorious Jason, on the
Argo,

lifted the fleece in his arms. The shimmering wool

threw a glow,

fiery, majestic, on his beautiful cheeks and forehead.

And Jason

rejoiced in the light, as glad as a girl when she catches

in her gown

the glow of the moon when it climbs the welken and

gazes in

at her window. The fleece was as large as the hide

of an ox, a stag.

When he slung it on his shoulder, it draped to below

his feet. But soon

his mood changed. With a look at the sky, he bundled

the fleece

to a tight roll and hid it in a place only Argus knew in the
Argo
's planking, for fear some envious man or

god

might steal it from him. He led Medeia aft and found a seat for her, then turned to his men, who watched

him thoughtfully,

puzzled by the hint of strangeness he'd taken on. He

said:

‘My friends, let us now start home without further

delay. The prize

for which we've suffered, and for which you've labored

unselfishly,

unstintingly, is at last ours. And indeed, the task proved easy, in the end, thanks to this princess whom

I now propose,

with her consent, to carry home with me and marry.

I charge you,

cherish her even as I do, as saviour of Akhaia and

ourselves.

And have no doubt of our need for haste. Aietes and

his devils

are certainly even now assembled and rushing to bar our passage from the river to the sea. So man the

ship—two men

on every bench, taking it in turns to row. Those men not rowing, raise up your ox-hide shields to protect us

from arrows.

We hold the future of Hellas in our hands! We can

plunge her into sorrow,

we can bring her unheard-of glory.' So saying, he

donned his arms.

They obeyed at once, without a word. Dramatically,

Jason

drew his sword—the same he'd used for goading the

bulls—

and severed the hawsers at the stern, abandoning the

anchor stones.

Then, in his brilliant battle gear, he took his stand at Medeia's side, near the steersman Ankaios. And the

Argo
leaped

at the mighty crew's first heave. And still none spoke.

They watched him.

And she—I—knew it, and was sick at heart,

remembering the song

of the moon. We had done a splendid thing—and I

above all,

—was that not true?—forsaking my dragon-eyed father,

rejecting

his treachery, turning half-blindly, innocently to the strange new doctrine, Love. Oh, it was not glory

I asked,

throwing myself on the mercy of Jason's Akhaians.

I asked

to live, only that, to live and be treated unshamefully. Yet Jason glanced at the sky, the shore, still thinking of