Jason and Medeia (9 page)

“Medeia” the old woman moaned,

“leave it to the gods! Let time sift it! Tell me, what wife in all the ages of the world has seized by her own

hand's power

more than the staddle of a grave? Not even the

mightiest king

wins more in the end. Consider the tumbled columns

of the bed

of the giant Og. His fame is now mere sand, a ring of stones that startles the wilderness like a ghostly

whisper

of jackals crying in the night. My exiled people have a prophecy for those who trust in themselves. They say:

Their horses are swifter than leopards,

fiercer than wolves in the dark;

their horsemen plunge on, advancing from afar,

swooping like an eagle to stoop on its prey.

They come for plunder, mile on mile of them,

their faces searching like an east wind;

they scoop up prisoners like sand.

They scoff at kings,

they laugh at princes.

They make light of the mightiest fortresses:

they heap up ramps of earth and take them.

Then the wind changes and is gone.

Woe to the man who worships his arm's omnipotence!

I would not wave it away as the noise of a beaten

people

shorn of all tools of war but the rattle of poetry. They were mighty themselves when they sang it first,

though humbled now.

Learn to accept! What sorrow have you more great

than the fall

of a thousand thousand cities since time began?

You have sons.

How can you speak of a ruined womb, Akhaian lust, when civilizations—races of men with the hopes

of gods—

are tumbled to fine-grained ashes, fallen out of history?”

“Enough!” Medeia said. She turned, in her eyes a

flicker

like cauldron light. “Self-pity, you say. So it is. I'll end it, tear all trace from my heart and stare, dead on, at night as the tigress slaughters her young, then waits for the

hunter's attack.

We're all poor fools, poor witless benoms to startle

a crow

in the cast-off grandeur of scullery-slaves. I grant the

wisdom

of your gloomy people's prophecy. I howl for justice. Insane! Where's justice, or beauty, or love? Where

grounds for the pride

you charge me with? Childish illusions—not even lies our parents told, but lies we fashioned ourselves in

the playroom,

prettily singing to dolls, dead children of sawed-down

trees.

How dare I hoot for love, claim honor owed to me? Who in the sky ever promised me love or honor? O,

the plan

is plain as day, if anyone cares to read. In the shade of the sweetly laden tree, the fat-sacked snake. Good,

evil

lock in the essence of things. The Egyptians know—

with their great god

Re,
by day the creative sun, by night the serpent, mindless swallower of frogs, palaces. Let me be one with the universe, then: blind creation and blind

destruction,

indifferent to birth and death as drifting sand.

Great gods,

save me from the childish virgin's fantasy, purity of

heart,

gentleness, courage in a merely created man! We fall in love with the image of a mythic, theandric father,

domineering

oakfirm tower of strength, and we find, as our mothers

found,

the tower is home to a mouse peeking groundward with

terrified eyes.

We teach them to act, or act for them. We teach their

audaculous hands

the delicate tricks of love-making, teach their abstract heads the truth about power. They pay us by sliding

their hands

up slavegirls' thighs, or turning the tricks of supremacy on us. And then, when we're ready to shriek and claw,

strike back

with the moon-cold anger of the huntress-goddess,

absolute

idea of ice, cold flame of Artemis, they come to us like hurt children, showing the wounds from some

other woman

or clever woman's man, and we're won again, seduced by the only power on earth more cruel, more viciously

pure

of heart than woman, ancient ambiguous garden—

old monster

Motherhood.”

“Medeia, stop!” The dim eyes widened

and the mouth gaped for air. “Media,
child!”
she

whispered.

Abruptly, shaken by the word, Medeia was silent. She

raised

her hands to her face, then suddenly crossed to the

slave and embraced her.

I understood, squinting at the two, that the word had

changed her.

I gradually made out why. She'd all at once remembered what it was to be a child: the inexplicable safety, the sense of sure salvation adults forget. A fact of

reality,

like a house, three sheep in a pasture. In the face of

what she knew

she had no choice but acceptance, weeping like a child

again.

For all her knowledge of mingled evil and good in the

world,

it seemed to her (mysterious, baffling) that she held in

her arms

the perishable husk of a truth still pure and

imperishable,

eternal as Dionysos drinking and singing in the grave. “Now, now,” the old woman whimpered, weeping.

“Now, now, my lady,

no need for sorrow. All will be well. Have faith!”

“I know,”

Medeia said, and struggled to believe it for a moment

longer.

She drew away, forced a smile, and—seeing that the

slave

trembled with weakness—led Agapetlka to a cushioned

bench

with a view of the darkened garden, and helped her

down on it.

She frowned, studying the old woman, alarmed by her

gasps,

the trembling of the dry, gray hands. “All you say is

true,” she said.

“I have a kind of proof, in fact—” She paused; then,

softly:

“I'll show it to you.” Swift, majestic, Medeia was gone from the room. In a moment she was back, carrying

an object wrapped

in skins. She laid it on the carved bench by the

window, moved

the tall lamps close to Agapetika's chair, and, taking

the package

in her hands again, she carefully unwrapped it. A

gleam of gold,

and Agapetika gasped anew. And then it was undone, with one quick toss unfurled like a dazzling, sunlit flag. “ 'For you,' he told me,” Medeia said, “ ‘because it was

won

by both of us. No other woman and no other man could have done it—though only Argus, child of

Athena, could weave

the fleece we two brought home. Make a gown of the

cloth, my queen.

A symbol, fit for a goddess, of Jason's love.' —Jason of the golden tongue, they call him.” She brooded.

“And yet I was moved.”

We looked—the old woman, Medeia, and I—at the

cloth woven

from the golden fleece. It was smooth as silk to the

touch, and yet

crowded with figures—peacocks, parrots, turrets and

towers,

farmers ploughing their sloping fields under city walls, and, nearby, soldiers, ladies and lords on splendid

barges,

all interlocked with loveknots and (curious lace)

sharp bones.

The scenes kept changing, like tricks of light, and our

three heads

bent close, almost touching. We looked so hard that our

eyes crimped

like the eyes of a man who's stared for a minute at the

sun. Old roads

drew us mysteriously inward, plunging into forests so

thick

no thread of light broke through where the groaning

limbs interlocked.

We came to a clearing, a wide black river tumbling,

roaring

at our feet, and across it waterfalls crashed out of

terrible heights,

gray cliffs that went up like a falling man's grasp,

through brooding clouds;

and the falls, striking, sent out such shocks that the

ground where we stood

shivered like the outstretched wing of a soaring hawk.

The path

led on—wound inward to a cave like the nose in an

ancient skull,

on the far side of the torrent. But the bridge was

gone. We were stopped.

Strain as I might, my eyes could pierce no further

through

the deceiving mists of the cloth.

Then, stranger still, I thought,

I heard faint whispers stirring, rising from the tapestry: the threads of the cloth, it seemed to me, were singing.

They sang:

Argus wove me, craftily wrought my warp and woof with magic more than Medeia makes, and misery more, and mystery more. And more than he meant I melt in me and wider than Argus' wisdom wrought I work my

wyrds,

my secret words. For wealth and weal he wove in the

warp

(ingenious antic engineer by his ancient art!) but bonefire, bane, and burning blood he buried in the

woof,

buried in the woof as the bobbin drove; for his dark

brains burned,

and little his lore of the lower lusts that lurk in love, lurked in his love for the lady and lord he labored for. (Woe lay within him when Argus wrought my warp

and woof,

the warp and woof of my web so wisely, wickedly

wrought.)

Argus wove me, weary old Argus, weary old Argus

who wished them well.

I stared at Medeia. She'd heard some other song,

perhaps.

Or each of us heard what he knew. For the fat old

woman wept

and covered her face with her gray hands, shaking in

sorrow.

The room went dark. I reached out suddenly to touch

the two women,

hold them a moment longer and warn Medeia. I'd

watched

too long as the timid outsider, even as I did in my

own life,

thirty centuries hence. “Medeia!” I called. No answer. Only the moan of the universe turning on its weary

wheels.

My hands closed on nothing. She was a dream.

“Medeia,”

I whispered. Useless. The long sigh of the galaxies slowly exhaling, dimming, drifting through darkness.

Dreams.

5

The great hall gleamed. Koprophoros spoke, the

dark-eyed king

with the womanish voice, great rolls of abdomens and

chins.

The ruby glowed on his forehead like blood on fire,

and the gold

of his turban, his robes, his scimitar, was bright as the

sun.

The meal had been carried away long since, the

jugglers returned

to their rooms to count their coins. The slaves moved

silently

from table to table, pouring wine. Old Kreon sat with his chin resting in his hands, observing carefully. His beloved slave, Ipnolebes, standing beside him,

watched

with eyes like dagger holes, his arms folded. He seemed carved out of weathered rock. Jason gazed at the

table—

forehead resting on his hand, his wide shoulders low-listening thoughtfully, biding his time. Could it be

because

I knew the story—children murdered, Corinth in

flames—

that the game seemed to me suddenly ominous, a

conflict of demons?

Whatever the reason, I felt cold wind run down my

spine.

The fat man, harmless as he seemed, comically

clowning, filled me

with superstitious alarm.

“My noble lords,” Koprophoros

began, bowing profoundly, “alas, you see before you a fool. How dare I deny it?” He clenched his fists,

mock tragic,

and let out a terrible noise, an enormous sigh. He

winked—

winked as if someone had pulled some secret string

in his back.

“I do my best,” he said, and gave us a sheepish smile, “but you see how it is. The gods have, in their infinite

wisdom,

dealt me a belly like a whale's, fat breasts like a

woman's, a face

androgynous to say the least. I manage as I can!”

He chuckled.

He began to pace back and forth, above the seated

crowd,

shaking his head and wincing, making morose faces. Mechanically each footstep picked up his tonnage from

the last.

He stretched his arms in Pyripta's direction and

shivered with woe.

“I labor for dignity. Alas! Sorrow! I seem, at best, some poor old goof who's arrived at the wrong man's

funeral

and hasn't the courage to sneak to the house next door!

—Ah, well,

the gods know what they're doing, I always say.”

He rolled

his eyes up almost out of sight, then leered, mischievous,

goatlike,

goatlike even to the horns, the folds of his turban.

He looked

like the whalish medieval demon-figure Beëlzebub, in brazen armor, sneeping out jokes at God. “It has advantages, my ludicrous condition. Who'd believe a lump like me could argue religion with priests, split

hairs

on metaphysics with men who make it their specialty— men of books, I mean, who make scratches on leaves

or hides

and read them later with knowing looks, appropriate

belches,

foreheads wrinkled like newploughed fields? I do,

however—

to everyone's astonishment. ‘We in fact may have misjudged this creature,' they say, and look very

solemn, and listen

with ears well-cocked henceforth—and they get their

money's worth!

I have theories to baffle the wisest sages!” He leered,