and nobody there, no matter how old, could recall he’d
seen
a handsomer couple.” She closed her eyes and rocked,
as slow
as a merchant ship sunk low in the water when the wind first fills her sails. She said, ‘Your
face was flushed,
and when Jason moved his hand on your arm, the air
in the room
turned rich, overripe as apples fallen from the tree—
despite
that glacial stillness of eyes. I was heavy with years,
life-sickened
already by then. I saw I must end my days in the service of a lord and lady whose love was a fadge of guilt
and scorn,
a prospect evil enough. And little by little, as the tales of the Argonauts came to our ears, we understood.
Such a passion
as Queen Aphrodite had put on you two was never seen on earth before; not even in Kadmos and Harmonia was such fire seen. But passion or no, he hated you. How could he not?—a princely Akhaian, and you’d
saved his life
by the midnight murder of your own poor trusting
brother! No matter
to Jason that that was your one slim chance. He’d
sooner be dead
than safe and ashamed. Worse yet … Don’t be
surprised, lady,
that I dare to speak these things. I can see how it
drains your cheeks,
the mention of your brother’s murder. No better than
you can I tell
which way your anger will strike, at yourself or me.
You suck in
breath, and I’m shaken with fear—but my fear is more
by far
for you than it is for myself. I’ve seen how you wince
and cry out,
alone. It fills me with dread. You’ll plunge into
madness, Medeia,
hating what couldn’t be helped, wrenching your heart
out in secret,
proud—oh, prouder than any queen living—but even
at the height
of that fierce Aiaian pride, uncertain, doubting you merit the friendship of any but the
Queen of Death.
You’re poisoned, Medeia. Venomed as surely as the ivy
burning
from within. I’d cure you if I could, if I knew how to
force you to hear me.
Think, child of the sun! Think past the bouldered hour that dams the flow of your mind. Lord Jason hated you. Justly, you think? Unselfishly? Is Jason a god? He’d agreed to your plan—agreed for your life’s sake,
not his.
To save your life, the woman who scattered his wits
like a vision—
like the sizzling crepitation of a lightning-bolt— he’d do what he’d never consider to save himself. No
wonder
if after he’d saved what he worshipped, your Jason
gnawed his fists
and hated all sight of what proved his weakness.
—Jason who once
loved honor, trusted his courage. You taught him his
price.”
The slave
was silent awhile. Medeia waited—high cheeks
bloodless.
The slave said softly, “—But time soon changed all that. Not any intentional act of yours, Medeia, nor any act of his. Mere time. We saw how he tensed when you screamed in the pain
of your labor, bearing him
sons. Great tears rushed down his cheeks, and his
shoulders shook.
In part of his mind—we saw it shaping—he must have
seen
that the fault was his, not yours: you showed him what
had to be,
and gave him a plan. He’d acted upon it as gladly, that
night,
as he’d have changed places with you now. Or the fault
was no one’s—love
a turmoil prior to rules, and rumbling on beyond the last idea’s collapse. His eyes grew warmer then. And yours as well. No house was ever more happy,
for a time—
the twins babbling in their sunlit cribs, the master and
mistress
warmer than sunbeams arm in arm, sitting at the
window,
talking and laughing, or sitting in jewelled crowns,
on thrones
level with Pelias and his queen’s. If troublesome
shadows of the past
returned, you could drive them back.
“But soon time changed that too.”
Her wide mouth closed, trembling, and her faded slate
eyes stared.
“Pelias was a fool; perhaps far worse. And now, at times, when Pelias would hinder his will, Lord Jason would
frown, speak sharply
to you, or to us, or the twins. Your eyes got the she-wolf
look.
His slightest glance of annoyance, and up your poison
seethed,
old bile of guilt, self-hate, pride, love—black nightmare
shapes:
Aphrodite whispered and teased, cruel Hera, and Athena, gray-eyed fox. Seize the throne for him!—Jason’s
by right!
Would old Aietes hesitate even for an instant, dismayed by a sickly usurper of a nephew’s lawful place?
Strike out!’
I needn’t remind you of the rest. Screams in the palace,
blood,
the cries of the children awakened in haste when you
fled. And now,
for that, from time to time, his eyes go cold.”
The slave
came forward a little, tortuously moving her thick
canes inch
by inch. “I’ve lived some while, Medeia. There are
things I know.
Give the man time, and he’ll come to see, now too,
that the fault
was as much his own as yours. Let him be. Be patient,
my lady.
No woman yet has defeated a stubborn, ambitious man by force.”
Medeia turned, smiling. But her eyes were wild.
“I won’t win his heart with labor pains again,” she said, “barren as a rock, wrecked as the cities he burns in his
wake
with the same Akhaian lust.”
“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 yo
u 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
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