in the street. I got up, dusting my trousers, and hurried
to the door.
No one saw me or stopped me. I found, in Medeia’s
chamber,
Artemis—enormous in the moonlit bedroom, her bowed
head
and shoulders brushing the ceiling beams—stooped at
the side
of Medeia’s bed like an eagle to its prey. “Wake up!”
she whispered.
“Wake up, victim of the mischief god! Seek out thy
light,
sweet Jason, life-long heartache! You are betrayed!”
Medeia’s
eyes opened. The goddess vanished. The moonlight
dimmed,
faded till nothing was left but the glow of the golden
fleece.
The slave Agapetika wakened and reached for Medeia’s
hand.
Medeia sat up, startled by the memory of a dream. She
met
my eyes; her hand reached vaguely out to cover herself with the fleece. I remembered my solidity and backed
away.
“Devil!” she whispered. In panic I answered, “No,
Medeia.
A friend!” She shook her head. “I have no friends but
devils.”
And only now understanding that all she’d dreamt was
true—
as if her own words had power more terrible than
Jason’s deeds—
she suddenly burst into tears of rage and helplessness. She tried to rise, but her knees wouldn’t hold her, and
she fell to the flagstones.
I said: “I come from the future to warn you—”
My throat went dry. The room was suddenly filled, crowded like a jungle
with creatures,
ravens and owls and slow-coiled snakes, all manner of
beings
hated by men. In terror of Medeia’s eyes, I fled.
20
On the palace wall, in his blood-red cape, the son of
Aison,
arms folded, gazed down over the city of Corinth. He knew pretty well—Hera watching at his shoulder,
sly—
that he’d won, for better or worse—that nothing
Paidoboron
or Koprophoros could say would undo the work he’d
done
or open the gates of Kreon’s heart or the heart of the
princess
to any new contender. He smiled. On the palace roof behind him, a raven watched, head cocked, with
unblinking eyes.
For reasons he scarcely knew himself, Jason had
avoided
his home today. It was now twilight; the light, sharp
breeze
rising from stubbled fields, dark streams, fat granaries, brought up the scent of approaching winter. There
would come a time
when Medeia would rise and insist upon having her
say. Not yet.
Though light was failing, the house, lower on the hill,
was dark
save one dim lamp, dully blooming—so yellow in the
gloom
of the oaks surrounding that it brought to his mind
again the fleece
old Argus wove, and the obscure warning of the seer.
The vision blurred; I hung unreal. Then, crushed to flesh once
more,
my swollen hand brought alive again to its drumbeat
of pain,
I stood—dishevelled as I was, my poor steel spectacles
cracked
and crooked—in the low-beamed room of the slave
Agapetika,
hearing her moans to the figure of Apollo on the wall.
Her canes
of gnarled olive-wood waited on the tiles, her stiff, fat
knees
painfully bent on the hassock before the shrine.
She wailed, whether in prayer or lament, I could hardly tell: “O
Lord,
would that an old slave’s wish could wind back time
for Medeia
and she never beguile those dim, too-trusting daughters
of Pelias,
who slaughtered their father; or would that Corinth
had never received them,
allowing a measure of joy and peace, pleasure in the
children,
lord,
her will and his will one, as even Jason knew, for all his anger, bitterness of heart. The loss of love makes all surviving it blacker than smoke at sunrise.
What once
was sweet is now corrupt and cankered: our Jason plans heartless betrayal of his wife and sons for marriage
with a princess.
And now in impotent rage and anguish, Medeia invokes their oaths, their joined right hands, and summons
the dangerous gods
to witness the way he’s rewarded her life-long
faithfulness.
Worse yet, she curses old Kreon himself, and Kreon’s
daughter,
howling her wild imprecations for all to hear. In
her rage
she refuses to eat, sacrificing her body to grief as she sacrificed her home, her kinsmen, her happiness for Jason’s love. She wastes in tears; she cries and cries in such black despair that her sobs come welling too
fast for Medeia
to sound them. She lies stretched wailing on the stones
and refuses to lift
her eyes or to raise her face from the floor. To all we say she’s deaf as a boulder, an ocean wave. She refuses
to speak—
she can only curse her betrayal of her father, murder
of her brother,
death of her sister Khalkiope, through Aietes’ rage— for all of which she blames herself alone, as if no one before her had ever betrayed on earth. She takes no joy anymore in her sons: her eyes seem filled
with hate
when she looks at them. It shocks me with fear to see it.
Her mood
is dangerous. She’ll never submit to this monstrous
wrong.
I know her. It makes me sick with fear. Let any man
rouse
Medeia’s hate and hard indeed he’ll find it to escape unmarked by her.”
Agapetika opened her eyes in alarm, straining—grotesquely fat, feeble—to turn her head for a view of the door at her back. In the hallway,
the old male slave
and the children approached, the two boys squealing
and laughing, the old man
shushing them. She slued clumsily, inching around on the hassock to watch them pass. The old man
paused, looked in,
his lean face drawn and crabbed. The eyebags drooping
to his cheeks
were as gray and wrinkled as bark. He whispered,
“What’s this moaning
that fills all the house with noise? How could you
leave your lady?
Did Medeia consent?”
She shook her head, lips trembling, tears now brimming afresh. “Old man—old guardian
of Jason’s sons—
how can the troubles of masters not soon bring sorrow
to their slaves?
I’ve left her alone for a little to grant my own grief
vent.”
He turned his head, as if looking through walls to
Medeia’s room.
“No change?” he asked. She covered her face.
“No change,” she said.
“My poor Medeia’s troubles have scarcely begun.”
The old man narrowed his eyes. Then, hoarsely: Poor blind fool—
if slaves
may say such things of masters. There’s reason more
than she knows
for all this woe and rage.”
Agapetika inched around more to stare at the man in fear. “What now?” she exclaimed.
“Sir, do not
keep from me what you’ve heard.”
He shook his head. “No, nothing. Vague speculation. Mere idle talk.” The twins had
run on—
romping to their room, indifferent and blind to misery— and his eyes went after them, grudging. The whole
afternoon they’d kept him
plodding with hardly a rest. At the crest of every hill his old heart thudded in his throat, and his brains went
light, so that
to keep his knees from buckling he would stretch out
his hands to a tree
or ivied gatepost, coughing and gulping for air.
In the park
high above seacliffs, he’d met with a fellow slave,
a servant
in Kreon’s palace, and there, where leafless ramdikes
arched
past hedges still bright green—where the sky,
the distant buildings,
highways and bridges were as drab as in winter
despite the glow
of lawns grown rich and lush, deceived by late
summer rain—
he’d heard this newest catastrophe. He revealed it now, compelled by the old woman’s eyes. He said: “The
palace slaves,
who know the old king’s purposes sooner than
Kreon himself,
are certain the contest’s settled already, as though
no man
had spoken in all this time but Jason alone.”
There’s more,” he said, and avoided her look. “In the
palace they say
the king is resolved to expel our mistress and her
two sons
from Corinth. He thinks it a generous act, considering
her powers
and her sons’ inevitable position as royal pretenders.
I cannot
say all this is true. But I fear it may be.”
“And will our Jason allow such things?” the old woman asked.
But already
she saw that he might. She whimpered, Though he and
Medeia are at odds,
surely he hasn’t forgotten so soon what pain she
suffered,
torn long ago from her homeland and dearest friends!
Though he needs
no friends himself, quick to win facile admirers, thanks to that dancing tongue, and at any rate more pleased,
by nature,
with work than with love—like Argus, like the
god Hephaiastos,
a creature sufficient to himself, his heart all schemes—
surely
he knows our lady’s needs! She might have been queen,
herself,
of all dark-forested Kolchis, had her fate run otherwise; she might have had no more need than he of enfolding
arms,
shield against darkness and senselessness. He robbed
her of that—
became himself her homeland, father, brother and sister, her soul’s one labor and religion. Can he dare make all
that void?—
by a fingersnap make all she’s lived an illusion?
Can he turn
on his own two children, change them to shadows,
to nothing, as though
they’d no more solid flesh than a glimmering
wizard’s trick?”
As if to himself, the old man said, “The familiar ties are weaker now. He’s no more a friend to this gloomy,
crumbling
house. —Say nothing to Medeia.”
Just then, beside him at the door, the twins appeared and looked in, curious, no longer
laughing,
coming to see what was wrong. The woman cried,
“Children, behold
what love your father bears for you! I will not
curse him—
my master yet—but no man alive is more treasonous?
The male slave scowled. “Let the children be, mere
eight-year-olds,
what have they to do with treasons? As for Jason,
what man
is better, old woman? Now that you’re old, look squarely
at the world.
All men care for themselves and for nobody else.
All men
would joyfully swap away sons for the pleasures of a
new bride’s bed.”
She was still, looking at the children. At last, with
a heavy sigh:
“Go, boys, play in your room. All will be well.” And then to the attendant: “You, sir, keep them off to themselves,
I beg you.
Take them nowhere in range of their mother in
her present mood.
Already I’ve seen her glaring at the children savagely,
threatening mischief. She’ll not leave off this rage,
I know,
till she’s struck some victim dead. I pray to the gods
her wrath
may light among foes, not friends.”
From deeper in the house then came a wail deep-throated and wild as the cry of a
jungle beast.
My veins ran ice and I jerked up my arm to my face.
A shock
of pain flashed through me, innumerable bruises, and
I nearly revealed
my hiding place in the shadow of the black oak bed.
The slaves
listened to Medeia’s wail as if numbed. When the
old woman
could speak, she said: “Go to your room now quickly!
Be wary!
Do not provoke that violent heart! Hurry! Go swiftly!
The soul of her father is alive in her. This gathering
cloud
of tears and wailing will enkindle soon far stormier
flashes.
A spirit like hers, headstrong and bitterly stung by
affliction—
what wild and reckless deeds may it not dare thunder
on us?”
I glanced at the garden, my eyes in flight from the
anguish of the house,
and my heart leaped. There stood the goddess Artemis,
tall
as a stone tower, watching with burning eyes.
And then the sea-kings were gathered around me, Jason on
the dais, with Kreon,
and the princess rigid in her silver chair. The whole
wide hall,
so it seemed to me, was a-gleam with the light
of Artemis.
Paidoboron spoke, dark-bearded king
of barren moraine, debris of glaciers, in his gloomy eyes the stillness of tideless seas. The assembled kings
sat hushed.
At a dark door far from the dais, the slave Ipnolebes
watched,
his hand on the shoulder of a boy.
“Think back,” Paidoboron said, “on the days of old.” His voice had nothing alive in it— the voice of a clockwork doll, some old, artificial
monster—
and his slow, mechanical gestures enforced the same
effect,
mockery of life. ‘Think over the years and down
the ages.”
He pointed as if to the darkness of endless corridors. “
Nation on nation the gods have raised up, then
crushed again.
Again and again the bow of the mighty the gods have
broken,
and the feeble and oppressed they have girded with
strength. No law of the stars
is surer than this: Empires shall rise and fall forever till the day of the earth’s destruction. The cities of the
strong will burn
and the bone
s of the master be hurled on the
smouldering garbage mounds
beyond the city’s gates. Then he who was weak shall
be robed
in zibelline, and in place of his shackles
the greaves of a warrior king, and his slaves
shall be splendid nobles of the age just past—
till he too falls to the jackals.” He paused, looked hard
at Kreon.
“Has it not yet struck you, Corinthian king? Though
you watched Thebes burn
with your own two eyes—great Thebes whose outer
walls were oceans,
whose kingdom’s heart was all Ethiopia and Egypt,
city of Kadmos the Wanderer, noblest of dragon
slayers—
have you never been struck by the deadly regularity with which, like suns, great kingdoms rise and fall?
Is all this
accident? To the ends of the world the rubble stretches, the scattered orts of banquets, the fumets of
chariot-horses,
fortresses ruined, thrones, the occamy spangles of once-proud concubines. All human tongues record the same in their legendry: the dark agonals of kings. And still man’s heart inclines to power, to the wealth and ease,
rich art,
fine food, of the demon city. But I tell you the truth:
the earth
at our feet cries out its curse on that tumorous growth.
In the shade
of walls, earth dies; it stiffens, trampled by sandals,
and cracks.
The city’s wealth cries softly to marauders in the night,
like a whore
at the jalousie. Her mounds bring plagues, her discharge
insects,
dry rot, rats. Still the city grows, dark lure of ambition, hunger of the exiled spirit, abandoned forever by
the stars,
for the wombsoft slosh of fat. The corpus of law grows
bloated
like a corpse recovered from the sea; and those who
enforce the law
grow cynical and rich, foxy, wolfish, beyond inculpation by any man, till all but frampold devils are shackled in chains. Then like a thigh-wound festering, the city
overflows
her battlements and coigns—robs all the land
surrounding for victuals,
chops green-forested mountains for timber, quogs out
quarries,
to heave up monuments worthy of the devastating
power of her kings,
tombs for the slyest of her paracletes, the most
celebrated
of her enemy-smashers, deified dragon-men—
sky-high houses
staddled on broken-backed slaves. Consumes the land,
the clouds;
builds ships for trade, extends her scope; finds conquest
cheaper,
more durable. And so that hour arrives at last