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, perh
aps 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
my part
to speculate.
“We were close inshore, so close that through the haze on the land we could hear the mooing of cattle
and bleating
of sheep. We were drenched, half-starved, stone-numb
with weariness,
but according to the boy at the helm, Ankaios, the land
was the isle
of Helios. We needed, God knew, no further bavardage with him. And so we continued on and arrived,
half-dead,
at the isle of the pale Phaiakians.
“There we married, Medeia and I, our hands forced by necessity. A fleet of Kolchians,
arriving by way of the Black Sea, drove Alkinoös to a choice. Medeia, by secret dealing with Alkinoös’ queen, outwitted the old man’s justice— for which I was glad enough, no warbling songbird
for I knew then nothing of the wandering rocks we had
yet to face,
that child of the sun and I, back home in Iolkos. She
was,
not only in my eyes but even to men who despised the
race
of Aia, a woman more fair than the pantarb rising sun, the moon on the sea, the sky-wide armies of Aietes
with all
their trumpets, crimson banners, bronze-clad horsemen.
She seemed
as fair beside all others as a dew-lit rose of Sharon in a trinsicate hedge of thorn, more fine than a silver
dish
the curve of her thighs like a necklace wrought by a
master hand.
My heart sang like Orpheus’ lyre on that wedding night, played like lights in a fountain—and whose would not?
“We sailed joyful, Phaiakian maidens attending Medeia, Phaiakian sailors heaving on the rowing seats left vacant by the
dead.
And so came even in sight of Argos’ peaks. Mad Idas danced in a fit of wild joy. The prophecy of Idmon had
failed:
the hounds of Zeus had forgotten him, or if not, at least, had spared him for now, had spared him the doom he’d
dreaded most,
a death that dragged down friends. But even as
he danced for joy,
his brother, Lynkeus of the amazing eyes, put his black
hand gently
on Idas’ shoulders, gazing into the sea and beyond the curve of the gray horizon. Nor was it long before we too saw it—a stourmass terrible and swift,
blackening the western sky,
rushing toward
us like a fist. We heaved at the Argo’s oars. Too late! We lurched under
murderous winds,
black skies like screaming apes. We struck we knew
not where,
hurled by the flood-tide high and dry. Then, swift as an
eagle,
the storm was gone. We leaped down full of dismay.
Gray mist,
a landscape sprawling like a dried-up corpse, unwaled,
immense.
We could see no watering place, no path, no farmstead.
A world
calcined, silent and abandoned. Again the boy Ankaios wept, and all who had learned navigation shared his
woe.
No ship, not even the Argo, could suffer the shoals and
breakers
the tidal wave had hurtled us unharmed past. There
was no
return, the way we’d come, and ahead of us, desert, gray, as quiet as a drugged man’s dreams. Poor Idas sifted our gold and gems, the Phaiakians’ gift, and
howled
and bit at his lips until blood wet his kinky beard.
Though the sand
and sea-smoothed rocks were scorching, our hearts
were chilled. The crew
strayed vaguely, seeking some route of escape. Bereft
of schemes
I watched them and had no spirit to call them back,
maintain
mock-order. When the cool of nightfall came, they
returned. No news.
And so we parted again, each seeking a resting place
sheltered from the deepening chill. Medeia lay shivering,
moaning,
in the midst of her Phaiakian maidens, her head and
chest on fire
with the strange plaguing illness, Helios’ curse. All night the maids, their golden tresses in the sand, cried out
and wept,
as shrill as the twittering of unfledged birds when they
lie, broken,
on the rocks at the foot of the larch. At dawn the crew
rose up
once more and staggered to the sunlight, starved, throats
parched with thirst,
no water in sight but the salt-thick sea—the piled-up
gifts
of the Phaiakians mocking our poverty—and again set
out
fierce-willed as desert lions, in search of escape. And
again
returned with nothing to report.
“We gave up hope that night. All that will could achieve, we’d done. We sought out
shelters,
prepared to accept our death, the sun’s revenge, triumph of Helios. We listened to the whimpers of the maidens
and wept for them,
and secretly cursed the indifferent, mechanical stars.
“But on that Libyan shore dwelled highborn nymphs. They