armed.
Crowds of women meanwhile poured from the city to
view
the wide-famed Argonauts; and when they learned our
joyful news
they spread it far and wide, and all Phaiakia came to celebrate. One man led in the finest ram of his flock; another brought a heifer that had never
toiled; still others
brought bright, two-headed jars of wine. And far and
wide
the smoke of offerings coiled up blinding the sun.
There were golden
trinkets, embroidered robes, small animals in cages—
and still
the Phaiakians kept coming. There were casques of
chalcedony
and mottled jade, and figures of ebony, and ikons of gold with emerald eyes. There were baskets, carpets, bowls,
weapons,
there were songs not heard since the First Age—mute
Phlias danced—
and for seven days more they came, those gentle
Phaiakians.
“And as for Alkinoös, from the moment he gave his
judgment
and learned soon after of the marriage, he stood
intransigent.
He couldn’t be shaken by threats or oaths, and he
refused to dread,
beyond the displeasure of Zeus, Aietes’ enmity. When the Kolchians saw that their case was hopeless,
they remembered the vow
of Aietes, and feared to return to him. More humble
now,
they craved the king’s asylum. Alkinoös granted it. I wept for joy, all danger past. I was sure I would soon be home. I looked at Jason—that beautiful, gentle
face—
and could nearly believe, in spite of myself, that the
world was born
anew, all curses cancelled.
“But at times in dreams I saw
the merry old god of rivers, who laughed in the North,
untouched
by the sorrows that unhinge man. And at other times I
dreamed
I stood in the sacred grove of Artemis and searched for
something.
It would soon be dawn, the rim of the mountains
already on fire.
I must hurry. I must struggle to remember. Whatever
it was I sought,
it was near, as near as my heartbeat. I heard a footstep.
Or was it?
A swish like the blade of a scythe … that I
remembered … And I
would scream, and Jason would hold me, his eyes
impenetrable.
“So the days passed, and on the seventh day we left the isle of the Phaiakians, the Argo loaded to the beams with Phaiakian treasure. King Alkinoös
gave
strong men to replace all those we’d lost from the
rowing benches
in our dark wanderings, and Arete sent six maidens with
me
to comfort and serve me as once I was served at home.
On the shore
King Alkinoös and his queen stretched up their hands
and prayed
to the gods for our easy passage and final forgiveness
for crimes
committed of harsh necessity; and the people kneeled, the whole population, weeping. And so we left the
place,
sailing for home. I rolled the sound on my tongue.
For home.
I started, cried out. For out of the corner of my eye,
I thought,
I’d caught a glimpse of the river-god combing his beard,
watching us,
terrible god from the beginning of things, who laughed
at guilt.
‘Jason!’ I whispered.
“ ‘Easy, my love,’ said Jason, smiling.
They were all smiling, their eyes like the gods’ dark
mirror, the sea.”
17
I awakened and looked in alarm for Medeia. The voice
had ceased
and the winds that tumble and roar in space—so I
thought in my dream—
were swallowed to nothing. I clung to the bole of the
oak like a bat.
Then came a shimmering light, sea-green on every side, blurred cloudshapes, moving, like crowds of sea-beasts
hemming me in.
The silence changed; it swelled—more swift than a
falling tower—
to a boom, sharp voices of angry men. And now,
suddenly,
my eyes focussed, or the universe focussed, life crashed
in on me:
sweat-dank, bearded sailors milling like bees in a hive, howling against some outrage, I knew not what.
I’d grown
more solid, it seemed. When they bumped me, hurriedly
elbowing past,
I staggered. They tromped my feet, jostled me,
caved in my hat
with no apology, hardly a glance. Wold-I, nold-I, I moved with the crowd. Men all around and ahead of
me jumped,
clambered for a view, shook fists, shouted. I caught a
few snatches.
Someone was dead, murdered by the king, the crew
of some ship
arrested by Kreon’s police. Some voice of authority
bellowed
from a raised platform somewhere ahead of us, but his
cries were drowned
by the roar of the mob. I struggled for breath, shouted for the goddess, but no help came. Some man at my
back growled bitterly,
“Corinth is cursed. We were fools to come.” Another
voice answered,
“Everywhere’s cursed.” I craned my neck to see who’d
spoken,
but they all looked alike, their tanned hides toughened
by gale and salt
to the thickness of a twice-baked galley biscuit. At their
necks hung daggers
with thong-wrapped handles and serried blades. On
their wrists, brass sheaths
ornate with dragons and monsters of the deep. Then
someone seized
my shoulder—so fierce that my arm went numb and
I shouted—and without
a glance, he shoved me away and down. In horror I
felt myself
falling to the mud, my spectacles dangling,
precariously hooked
by one ear. I squealed like a rat incinerated, my mind all terror, my left hand clutching at my
spectacles, right hand
stretching to snatch some hold on the sweatwashed back
of the giant
in front of me. I fell, sank deep in the mud; the
maniacal
crowd came on, stepping on my legs, battering my ribs. On the back of my left hand, blurry as a cloud, fell
a scarlet drop
of blood. “Dear goddess!” I whimpered. I’d surely gone
mad. It was
no dream, surely, this jangling pain! A foot sank, blind, on the four fingers of my thin right hand and
buried them;
thick yellow water swirled where they’d been, then
reddened with blood.
My mind grew befuddled. My vision was awash. Then hands seized me, painfully jerked me upward, at
the same time
heaving back at the crowd. I gave myself up to the
stranger,
clinging still to my spectacles. My rescuer shouted, struck at the crowd with his one free arm like a
wounded gorilla.
We came to a wall, a doorway; he dragged me inside,
put me down
on a pile of skins, and scraped the bloodstained mud
from my face.
Gradually, my vision cleared. I remembered my
; spectacles
and, finding a part of my vest still dry, I wiped them, as well as I could. One lens was cracked
like a sunburst,
a small piece missing. The other was whole. My rescuer,
seeing
what I struggled to do, though he had no faintest idea
what it meant,
brought me water in a jug, poured it on the lenses,
then offered
a cloth. When at last I could see again, we looked at
each other.
He was young; not intelligent, or so I suspected, his face
defeatured
in its lionish, square-jawed frame. His small gray eyes
were round
with amazement. I might have been an elf, a merman,
a unicorn’s child.
Behind him, three women and a man, in the robes of
shop-people,
bent at the waist to stare at me. And still, outside, in the blinding brightness, the rioting sailors pressed
and shouted.
The young man turned, following my gaze. Then all
at once
some change came over the crowd. There were cries
of alarm, loud questions.
The crowd rolled back, retreating from the pressure in
front. The women
and the bearded man—his beard came nearly to his
knees—came bustling
to the door, peeked timidly out, their silhouettes
blocking the light.
They gave sharp yells, all four of them at once, and
rushed to us, reaching,
chattering gibberish—some argot Greek or Semitic
tongue
I couldn’t identify—and pushed us farther from the
door into darkness.
I caught a glimpse—as I plunged with them in past
bolts of cloth,
calfskins, wickerwork, leather—of Kreon’s police force,
armed
with naked swords and whips, great helmets like mitres
that shone
brass-red. Each time a whip flashed out, some man fell
screaming
to the yellow mud, his torn arms clenching his head.
Then darkness;
we’d come to a deeper stall, the air full of spices—aloes, cloves and saffron and cinnamon … They whispered in the language foreign to me. We waited for a long
time.
My eyes adjusted to the dimness a little, and I saw the
old man
was as thin and ashen as an old wood spoon. His
marmoset face
was covered like a cheap plaster wall with bumps and
nodes like droppings
of mason’s grout; his tiny eyes were like silver coins. He pulled at his beard with his fingers, watching in
secret alarm
(as I watched him) for signs that I might prove
dangerous.
His wife was brown and swollen, sullen, the others buxom and dimpled, country odalisques with dull, seductive eyes. All four of them watched
me in fear,
exactly as they’d watched the crowd, the Corinthian
police. I grinned.
The four grinned back, and the man who’d saved me;
a glow of teeth
in the cavern-dark of wares. The merchant brought
wine. We drank.
When the streets were quiet, we crept back out, down
wynds and alleys
to a silent square—fother by the walls, abandoned
winejugs,
wases of straw and faggots, wrecked carts … It was
dusk. Here and there
men lay still, as if asleep, sprawled out in the mud,
on cobblestones,
drawn up onto the stoops of shops that stared at the
empty
twilit square like lepers waiting for blessing. We went— the man who had saved my life and I—to a man who sat some twenty feet from the door of the shop that
protected us.
He sat with his face in his drawn-up knees, as if
weeping, or sick.
I touched his shoulder. He fell over slowly, indifferently,
dead.
My friend looked at me and nodded. He held out his
hand, palm up.
I understood, put my palm on his. He nodded again, unsmiling; and so we parted.
I had no desire now
to climb that hill to Kreon’s palace. My body ached from the soles of my feet to the crown of my head.
My clothes were ragged,
damp and bespattered, mud-stained. My right-hand
fingers were numb
and misshapen; broken, I believed. However, I climbed
as far
as the first of the palace pools, where I meant to wash
the blood off,
caked on my hands and face. I studied my reflection,
amazed:
hat battered like a tramp’s, the pockets of my suitcoat
ripped,
my nose grotesquely swollen, the spectacles tilted, bent. I straightened my glasses as well as I could, then tucked
them in my pocket.
In the stone gray sky above, bats circled. The city was
still.
Then someone spoke to me. “See it to the end.” I wiped
the water
from my eyes and looked. He stared gravely at nothing
—the ancient
seer of Apollo whom I’d seen, long since, with Jason.
I hooked
my spectacles over my ears and looked more closely:
a man
so calm he seemed to encompass Time like a vase.
He said:
“See it to the end. The gods require it.” He turned
away,
and I saw only now the boy with him, his guide. I
struggled
to speak, but couldn’t. I glanced up the hill at the
palace, aglow
like the galaxy with torches. When I turned to the seer
again
he was moving slowly downhill, leaning hard on the
boy. I found
my voice and called, “Teiresias!” He turned, waiting. I realized in alarm we had nothing to say.
Enveloped
in a mist that hid me from the watch, I climbed to the
palace. The crowd
was thinner by half than when last I’d listened to
Jason speak.
It filled me with dread. I knew well enough what the
reason was.
The best had abandoned the contest, and not because
Jason appeared
to be winning. The brutal quelling of the riot, tyrannic
use
of the law’s whole force on their own long-suffering,
disgruntled crews—
and perhaps something more, the murder I’d heard of,
the crew arrested—
had turned them to scorn of Corinth and Corinth’s
prize. Without
a word, I suspected, they’d turned their steps to the
harbor and sailed
for home. I was partly wrong, I learned later. There
were shouts in the palace,
young kings outraged, old kings quietly astounded at
Kreon’s
ways. But my guess was right in this: the best who’d
come
had abandoned Corinth, prepared to become, on further
provocation,
her enemies.
I moved, among those who remained, to a stairway, a raised place where I could see. Except for the kings
who’d departed
all was the same, I thought—the princess Pyripta in
her chair
of gold, with her hand on her eyes (her light-filled hair
fell softly,
swirling, enclosing her
shoulders as if as protection);
Kreon
stern in his place, lips pursed, eyes squeezed half shut;
the goddesses
listening, watching like kestrels, except Aphrodite,
who sat
half-dreaming, studying Jason and Pyripta. I noticed
at last
that Kreon’s slave Ipnolebes was missing, as was the blond Northerner, Amekhenos. But I had no time
to brood much on it. Jason was speaking. His voice
was gentle,
troubled, I thought. How much had he seen, in his
lordly isolation,
of the day’s events? I saw him with the eyes of the
young Medeia,
stunned in her father’s courtyard. He would have been
thinner then,
as big in the chest, less thick in the waist, his gestures
tentative,
boyish despite all those daring deeds already. His eyes seemed hardly the eyes of a power-grabber. What was
he, then?
Yet perhaps I knew. His guarded glance at the princess,
for instance.
Age-old hunger of vanity, hunger to be loved just one more time, and just one more, one more—give the
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