Jason and Medeia (39 page)

of giants! And the fleece! Flattered like a goose-eyed

country wench

I granted what should have been sacred, what may be

no more, for you,

than a trophy, a tale for carousing boys—but for me

the demise

of honor, the death of childhood, disgrace of my

womanhood!

I tell you I am your wife, Jason—your daughter, your

sister,

and no man's whore. And I'm coming with you to

Hellas. You swore

you'd fight for me—fight come what may—not leave

me alone

as you diddle with kings. Jason, we're pledged to one

another,

betrothed in the sight of gods. Abide by that or draw your dagger and slit my throat, give my love its due.

Think, Jason!

What if this king who judges me should send me to

Kolchis—

supposing—incredibly—that my brother keeps his

word, refrains

from sheathing you all in fire before he drags me home to protect his own poor head from my father's rage.

Can your mind

conceive the cruelty of my father's revenge? —As for

yourself,

If the goddess of will, as you say, is your protector—

beware!

When was she kind toward cowardice?' Raising my

arms and eyes

to heaven, I cried, ‘May the glorious Argonauts reach

not Hellas

but Hell! May the fleece disappear like an idle dream,

sink down

to Erebus! And even in Hades' realm, may howling

furies

drive false Jason from stone to stone for eternity!' And then, to Jason: ‘You have broken an oath to the

gods. By your own

sweet standard, Reason, my curses cannot miscarry.

For now,

you're sure of yourself. But wait. I'm nothing in your

eyes, but soon

you'll know my power, my favor with the gods. Beware

of me!'

“I boiled with rage. I longed to fill all the ship with

fire,

kindle the planking and hurl my flesh to the flames.

But Jason

touched me, soothing. I had terrified him. ‘Medeia,

princess,

beware of
yourself!'
And again that voice, still new to

me,

had uncanny power. ‘You begin with complaints,

appeals, but soon

your own blood's heat makes a holocaust. Call back

your curses.

It's not finished yet. Perhaps I may prove less vicious

than you think.

Look. Look around you at the Kolchians' ships. We're

encircled by a thousand

enemies. Even the natives are ready to attack us to be rid of Apsyrtus as he leads you home to Aietes.

If we dare

strike out at these hordes, well die to a man. Will it

please you more,

sailing back to your father, if all of us are slaughtered,

and you

are all we leave them as a prize? This truce has given

us time.

We must wait—and plan. Bring down Apsyrtus, and his

force—for all

its banners, its chatter of bugles—will clatter to the

ground like a shed.'

“My eyes widened, believing for an instant. The

next, I doubted.

Was he lying? I was sick with anguish. His look was

impenetrable.

I who moved at ease with the primal, lumbering minds of snakes, who knew every gesture of the carrion crow,

the still-eyed

cat, who knew even thoughts of the moon, stared

humbly, baffled,

at the alien eyes of Jason. It seemed impossible that the golden tongue, those gentle hands, could lie.

Searching

vainly for some sure sign—his hands on my arms—

I felt

a violent surge of love, desire not physical merely, but absolute: desire for his god-dark soul. I whispered: ‘Jason, plan
now.
Evil deeds commit their victims to responses evil as the deeds themselves. If what you

say

is true—if my brother's forces will collapse when my

brother falls,

and if that, as you claim, was your hope when you

sealed that heartless truce—

then once again, I can help you. Call Apsyrtus to you. Keep him friendly. Offer him splendid gifts, and when his heralds are taking them away, I'll speak and

persuade them to arrange

a meeting between us—my brother and myself. They'll

do it, I think.

They no more wish me sorrow than does my brother.

When we meet,

slay him. I will not blame you for it. The murder's our

one

last hope.'

“And still Lord Jason's eyes were impenetrable, studying me. His swordsman's hands closed tighter on

my arms,

as if horrified. But at last he nodded, the barest flick, revealing no sign of his reasons. My anguish was

greater than before:

on one side, terror that he scorned me for the plan,

seized it merely

as the skillful, methodical killer I knew he was; on

the other,

sorrow for Apsyrtus. He'd thrown me up on his

shoulders as a child,

had shaken snow-apples down for me from hillside

trees.

Despite all that, he would drag me to my father's

torture rooms.

Was I more cruel? But my mind flinched back. It was

not a question

for reason. There was no possibility of reason, no

possibility

of justice, virtue, innocence, on any side.

“So that,

mind blank, heart pounding in terror and

self-condemnation, I watched

as Jason in his scarlet mantle, all stitched with

bewildering figures,

laid out gifts for Apsyrtus, with the Argonauts' help.

Black Idas

watched me, smiling to himself, and soon the trap was

set.

I watched Lord Jason debating in his mind the final

gift—

the mantle of scarlet that Argus wove, majestic but

gloomy—

it sent out a dull, infernal light—or the sky blue mantle King Thoas gave to Hypsipyle when she wept and

spared him,

sending him out on the sea. The son of Aison chose the blue, hurled it on the pile as if in anger; then, suddenly smiling, transformed, he came where I stood.

The heralds

approached. My mind went strangely calm, as calm as it

was

when I charmed the guardian snake. They left with the

message. When I

had come to the temple of Artemis—so the message

ran—

Apsyrtus must meet me, under cover of night. I would

steal the fleece

and return with the treasure to Aietes, to bargain for

my life. Such was

the lure. I know pretty well how Apsyrtus received it,

sweet brother!

His heart leaped up and he laughed aloud. ‘Ah, Medeia! Brilliant, magnificent Medeia of the many wiles!' He

could scarcely

wait for nightfall, pacing restless on his ship and

smiling,

beaming at his sister's guile.

“The sun hung low in the heavens,

reluctant to set, but at last, blood red with rage, it sank. As soon as darkness was complete he came to me,

speeding in his ship,

and landed on the sacred island in the dead of night.

Unescorted,

he rushed to the torchlit room where I waited and paced.

He seized me

with a cry of joy, proud of my Kolchian cunning. And

for all

my grief and revulsion, my murderer's certainty of his

imminent death—

tricked for an instant by his smile of love—may the

gods forgive me!—

I returned the smile. With his bright sword lifted,

Jason leaped

from his hiding place. I turned my face away, shielding

my eyes.

Apsyrtus went down like a bull, but even as he sank

to the flagstones

he caught the blood in his hands, and as I shrank from

him,

reached out and painted my silvery veil and dress.

I wept,

soundless, rigid as a column. We bid the corpse in the

earth.

Orpheus was there, standing in the moonlight. There

was no other way,'

I said, rage flashing. He nodded. I said: ‘I loved my

brother!'

Perhaps even Jason understood, dark eyes more veiled

than a snake's.

He took my hand, head bowed. We returned to the

Argonauts.

Apsyrtus' fleet was heartsick, divided and confused,

when they learned,

by local seers, that the prince was gone forever. And

so

the
Argo
escaped.

“Such was our crime, our helplessness.

16

“In Artemis' temple we killed him. The blood-wet corpse

we hid

in the goddess' sacred grove. Then Zeus the Father of

the Gods

was seized with wrath, and ordained that by counsel of

Aiaian Circe

we must cleanse ourselves from the stain of blood, and

suffer sorrows

bitter and past all number before we should come to

the land

of Hellas. We sailed unaware of that, though with heavy

hearts,

praying, the sons of Phrixos and I, for their mother's

escape

when news of the murder came to Aietes' dragon-dark

mind.

Our fears, we learned much later, were not ill-founded.

He lay

on the palace floor for days, shuddering in lunes of rage, calling on the gods to witness the foul and unnatural

deed

committed in Artemis' temple. He'd neither lift his eyes nor raise his cheek from the flagstones, but wept and

howled imprecations,

hammering his fists till they bled. And at last it reached

his thought

that she who had seemed most innocent, bronze

Khalkiope,

was most at fault. Then soon chaogenous dreams of

revenge

were fuming in his serpent brain, the last of his sanity

burned out,

and he called her to him.

“She knew when the message came what it meant.

She touched her bedposts, the walls of her room, with

the air of one

distracted, and since they could grant her no time for

parting words,

she left with the guards themselves her sad farewell to

our mother.

She looked a last time at the figures of her sons, the

work of a sculptor

famous in the East, and tears ran down her cheeks in

streams.

Then, walking in the halls with her silent guards, her

sandals a whisper

on fire-bright tessellated floors, she prayed for the safety

of her sons;

and for all her trembling—most timid of all Aietes'

children,

her hair like honey as it rolls from the bowl—she kept

her courage,

and came where Aietes lay. He rose up a little on his

arms

and hissed at the guards. They backed away as

commanded. And then,

though he'd planned slow torture, unspeakable pain

for the sly eldest daughter

(so she seemed to him), he was suddenly wracked by

such fiery rage

that he hurled his axe, and Khalkiope, with a startled

cry,

was dead. A death to be proud of, the sweet gift of life

to her sons!

“We left behind the Liburnian isles, and Korkyra with its black and somber woods, and passed Melite,

riding

in a softly blowing breeze; passed steep Kerossus, where

the daughter

of Atlas dwelt, and we thought we saw in the mists the

hills

of thunder.

“Then Hera remembered the counsels and anger of

Zeus.

She stirred up stormwinds before us, and black waves

caught us and hurled us

back to the isle of Elektra with its jagged rocks where

once

King Kadmos struck down the serpent and found his

wife. And suddenly

the beam of Dodonian oak that Athena had set in the

center,

as keel to the hollow ship, cried out and told us of the

wrath

of Zeus. The beam proclaimed that we'd never escape

the paths

of the endless sea, nor know any roofing but thunderous

winds

till Circe purged us of guilt for the murder of Apsyrtus.

And if

in cleansing us by ritual, the heart of Circe remained aloof, forgiving by law but not by love, then even in Hellas our lives should be cursed. The

beam cried out:

‘Pray for your souls now, Argonauts! Pray for some

track

to the kingdom of Helios' daughter!' Thus wailed the

Argo
in the night.

The Argonauts hurled up prayers to the gods as the

ship leaped on

through dark welms streaming like a wound. O, dark as

my soul was the place!

Sick those seas as my body in riotous rebellion—

fevers,

chills, mysterious flashes of pain. His ghost was in me, a steady nightmare, a madness. I vomited, fouling my

beauty

in Jason's sight. Not even Orpheus' lyre could check that sickness throbbing in my head, or the fire in my

bowels. They looked

away, one and all, as from Hell itself. I hissed

imprecations,

and they listened with white teeth clenched.

“And as for the sea, it was

the water of Helios' wrath. No bird, for all its rush, for all the lightness of its arching wings, could cross

that deep,

but mid-course, down it would plunge, fluttering,

consumed in flames;

and all around it, the daughters of Helios, locked in

poplars,

wailed their piteous complaint, and their weeping eyes

dripped amber.

“There sailed the joyless Argonauts, weary of heart,