Jason and Medeia (43 page)

lie to death

for an instant. But it wasn't enough for him, the total

adoration

of a girl. He must have whole cities' adoration—and

he'd had that, once,

rightful prince of Iolkos, the throne his uncle had

usurped

and he might have won back, without shame, by

bloody deeds; yet chose

the reasonable way, for all his might in arms, for all his people's love. “Evil deeds commit their victims,” Medeia had said, “to responses evil as the deeds

themselves.”

That was the law he'd sought to change.

No wonder if the child of Aietes hadn't understood,

had struck—

sky-fire's child—with the pitiless force of her father's

father.

And so Lord Jason had lost it all. I remembered again the crowd of outraged sailors, turning and turning,

grinding …

My memory seethed with the image, all space astir like

grain

in the narrowing flume of a gristmill. Against that

ceaseless motion,

Jason stood in the great hall still as a rock, a tree, as gentle of mind, as reasonable, as firm of will as the cool, intellectual moon. Ah, Jason knew, all right, of the riots. Calm, his voice an instrument, he spoke:

“Six weeks the god's wrath banged us shore to shore

among foemen,

men who fought naked, cut off their enemies' heads.

All that

for Circe's failure to forgive. Old Argus' wonderful

engine,

driven as if by its own will, struck rocks and laughed at the steering oar of Ankaios. I lost there fourteen men to wrecks and those savage raids. I gave what attention

I could

to Medeia—whatever was left, to the needs of my men.

She was sick,

hour on hour and day on day, some strange collusion of body and mind, or a poison shot down from Helios. I loved her, yes, though her bowels ran black, and at

times, in pain,

she raged. I loved her, if anything, more than before

that time,

as you love a child you've nursed through the night,

alarmed by his trembling,

cooling his forehead in terror of convulsions. Loved her

for the shame

that closed her hands to fists, made her jawline clench.

A love

that trenched past body to the beauty deeper, the

humanness

astounded by love not earned by its outer form. She was, in her own crazed, blood-shot eyes, a thing despicable,

vile;

to me the wealth of kingdoms, dearer than my flesh,

her acrid

lips, distilled wild honey, her tangled hair more joy

than goat flocks frisking in the hills. —Yet rage she did;

demanded

more than my hands could give, my reeling mind hold

firm.

Raged and wept, while claws of rock reached up at us and savage strangers struck us from every tree and rock on shore. I clung to my scrap of sanity like Theseus

clutching

Ariadne's thread in the Labyrinth. At times I sobbed, clenched my teeth at the loss of friends. At times, with

the help

of Butes, king of the spear, and Phlias and Akastos,

kept calm

by fear for me, I heartened my men with words. Mad

Idas

mocked, shouted at the winds, demanded that Zeus

destroy him.

He beat his chest with his great black fists and

slobbered, convinced

that for him, for his slight against Zeus, we endured

this punishment.

Once, in the night, he went overboard. Medeia

awakened

with a scream, aware of catastrophe.

We saw him at once, and Leodokos, mighty as a bull,

went over.

Swimming like a dolphin, he dragged him back to the

Argo,
poor Idas

spluttering, cursing the gods and the skewbald sea.

   “So, hurled by unknown winds and waters, we came to the Sirens'

isle.

I shackled my men and Medeia like slaves; myself as

well.

Orpheus played, struggling to drown out their song,

or untune it.

The sea was calm, full of sunlight.

   “I heard it well enough: music peeling away like a

gull

from Orpheus' jazz. Dark cavern music, the music of

silent

pools where no moon shines: the music of death as

secret

hunger. What can I say? They were not innocents, those sirens: it was not peace they sang, fulfillment

in joy.

Who'd have been sucked to his death by that?—by

holy dreams

of isles forever green, where shepherds play their pipes softly, softly, for girls forever white? It wasn't gentleness, goodness, the sweetness of age those sirens

sang:

the warmth of a family well provided for, a wife grown old without a slip from perfect faithfulness. I have heard it said by wise old men that ‘history' is all you have left in the end, the fond memories shared by a man and a woman who've seen it all, survived it all, together. There is no nobler reward, they say. Perhaps. But that was not the unthinkable hope they lured

us with.

They sang of known and possible evils driven beyond all bounds, slammed home like crowbars driven to the

neck in great, thick

abdomens of rock. Oh, not like sailors' whores,

who whisper with girlish lust, the nebulous verge of love, what wickedness they mean. (She arches her back

to you,

her breasts grow firm, packed tight with passion, as if

they're filled

to the bursting point with milk. She seizes your mouth

with hers;

plunged in, you can't break free, clamped in by a fist,

her legs

closed on your hips like jaws.) All that, for the moment

at least,

is love. They did not sing to us of love. They sang … terrible things. No generous seaport prostitute, whispering, screaming—whatever her tricks—could

satisfy

our murderous, suicidal lust from that day on. Nothing (by no means islands forever green) could quench,

burn out

our need beyond that day. It was pain and death they

sang:

terrible rages of sex beyond the orgasm,

blindness, drunkenness bursting the walls of

unconsciousness,

the murderer's sword plunged in beyond the life-lock,

down

to life renewed, midnight black, imperishable.

Such was the song, cold-blooded lure, of those

cunning sly-

eyed bitches. Orpheus' fingers jangled the lyre,

but couldn't

blot from our minds their music's deadly mysticism.

One of our number, Butes the spearman, went

overboard,—

snapped steel chains and plunged. We'd have followed.

him down, if we could.

We couldn't. We strained at our shackles and raged; we

frothed at the mouth;

the
Argo
sailed on, and Orpheus played, immune to

our wrath

as he was to their song. He took no stock in absolute

evil,

or good either. (The god of poets, the Keltai say, is a sow, rooting, rutting with boars, able to converse with wind.)

Orpheus sighed, endured by his harp-playing.

Which was well enough for him, but what of the rest

of us?

   “We sailed on, sorrowing, Medeia blaked with a fury

that had

no possible vent: fury at the father she loved; at herself; at me for the murder of the brother whose murder she'd

engineered …

And so we came to the terror of Skylla and Kharybdis.

On one side,

sheer rock cliff, on the other the seething, roaring

maelstrom.

We looked, Ankaios sweating. I scarcely cared. My soul was thick with the torpor of those who have listened to

the sirens and failed

to act. Was I half asleep? On the left, rock scarp as steep as the walls of a graveyard trench, and as certain to

grind our dust:

call it death by rectitude. On the right side, turning like an old constrictor, a woman enraged,—death by

violence,

bottomless shame; between—barely possible—death by

indifference,

soul-suffocation in the corpse that stinks, plods on.

Ankaios

wept, abandoned the steering oar. I called on Asterios, son of an endless line of merchants. He seized the oar, tongue between his teeth, his brown eyes luminous. I laughed—God knows, without joy. And clumsy as he

was with the oar,

he knew the line and kept it, who cared for nothing in

life

but the clinquant possible of profit tomorrow. The heavy

ship

was as easy for him as a lighter by the quay.

Short-sighted fool,

valueless, podging, unfit for the company of thinking

men,

I give you this: You kept possibilities open, so that, plodding, stinking, we may yet have time to reconsider—

perhaps

oppose you, perhaps turn tradesman and find

amusement in it.

   “We came to the wandering rocks. The sky was

choked. Hot lava

shot up on every side through spicious, roiling steams. Great islands loomed around us, rowelled like brustling

whales,

sank once more into darkness. The sails were like ruby,

like blood.

By the light of explosions from the hills surrounding

we chose our channels

—there, and there—the options shot up like partridges, wide roads, keyholes of daylight, all of them fair, all fine in the instant's vision of the possible. But the black

sky closed

like a curtain, and the steam came swirling again, and

the channel was gone,

another one gaping to the right of us, sucking us in—

in the distance,

sky. Yes, this then! Good! —But a belch of flame,

cascade

of boulders, and the sea was revised once more. Old

Argus watched it,

fascinated, too preoccupied for fear. Again and again

he glanced

from the tumbling seas to the sky. He shouted, swinging his eyes to me, shaggy beard splashed red by

the sea,

‘It's all Time-Space in a duckpond, Jason! See how it

moves

by law, yet unpredictably. So the galaxies turn

in their aeviternal spans, some bodies wheeling to the

left,

some wheeling right, some rolling head over heels like

bears,

a few—like the overintellectual moon—staring, as if with a mad
idée fixe,
at a single point. It's food for thought, this sea. It teaches of terrible collisions,

the spin

of planets battered to chaos by a dark star drifting free, the plosion of a sun in the northwest corner of the

universe,

flash of a comet, collapse of a cloud of dust. Like

colliding

balls, the planets scatter in dismay, then quickly settle on a new course, new synchysis, and feel secure.

Then
CRASH!

an instant later (as the ends of the universe read their

clock)

a new, more terrible collision—new cries of alarm in the

heights …

We here, who assess durabilities by clicks too brief for the mind of space to vision except by number theory, we watch the sun sail west, and we nod, approve the

stupendous

rightness of things, “Choose so-and-so,” say we, “and

we bring on

such-and-such.” We frigate the hills with purpose: “This

oak,

meaningless before, I delimit as wood for my cart.”

We move,

secure, never glancing down, on precarious stepping

stones,

Mondays and Tuesdays a-shiver in the torrent of Time.'

He laughed,

indifferent to grim implications. He meant no harm

in life,

Argus, observer of mechanics, creator of machines.

A man

who hated war so long as he thought as a citizen, but fashioned the mightiest engine of war yet built,

with the help

of the goddess. A man who lived by order, fashioned

by his grasp

of predictables, but observed, cold-blooded, and laughed,

that order

was illusion, a trick of timing. Incredible being!

Knowledge

was all, in the end; the pawks in the book he'd leave to

the future,

if luck allowed its survival. Not so with Orpheus, whose machine was art, a bit for piercing the surface

of things,

advancing nothing, returning again and again to the

cryptarch

heart, where there is no progress and each new physical

engine

threatens the soul's equilibrium. At the words of Argus

he paled, though I'd heard him express, himself,

thoughts twice as grim.

‘Not true,' he shouted. He clutched my shoulder, pointed

at a glode

where blue burst through with a serenity like violence.

The gods see more than we mortals dream. I tell you,

Jason,

and swear to it too, these seas that fill us with terror

are alive

with nymphs, pale nereids sent here by Hera. They

leap like dolphins,

running on the reefs and breaking waves, fanning our

sails

with the swing of invisible skirts; and the hand of the

tiller is the hand

of Thetis herself, sweet nereid wife of Lord Peleus. Whatever the bluster of the wandering rocks, we need

not fear them.

The world is more than mechanics. If that weren't so,

we'd be wrecked

long since!' In a sea of choices, none of them certain,

I chose

to believe him. We kept her upright, scudding with the

wind, accepting

any opening offered. Whatever the reason, we came to quiet seas and sunlight, for which we thanked the

gods,

on the chance they'd had some hand in it. It was not