Robert Silverberg - The Last Song of Orpheus

Unaware, though, of all that had passed betwen Jason and Medea, Aietes was injudicious enough to let slip something to her concerning his intentions. Hastily Medea carried word of that to Jason, telling him that he must seize the Fleece that very night—she would aid him in that, she told him, using one of her potions to lull the serpent that kept watch over it—and then he must set out to sea immediately thereafter. She would, she said, leave Colchis with us, for she was confident that Jason would make good on his pledge to take her as his wife once the expedition had returned to the Hellene lands.

“So be it,” said Jason, buckling on his sword.

Then Medea turned to me and said, “You must come along with us today, Orpheus. My drug alone will not be sufficient to close the serpent’s eyes.”

I understood. Indeed, I had been expecting the request.

So we set out together in the darkness, Jason and Medea and I, toward the sacred forest called the Precinct of Ares, some six miles away from our mooring-place. There the fabled Golden Fleece hung all agleam from a bough of a gigantic oak tree. It was near to dawn when we got there; and when the first pink glow fell upon us out of the east, we beheld not only the tree and the wondrous dazzling Fleece, so bright even in that early light that the eye could barely stand to look upon it for long, but also saw the terrible guardian of the Fleece, lying coiled in casual heaps about the base of the tree, a monstrous mottled green-and-gray thing so thick around that I doubt that even Heracles could have encompassed its girth with his arms.

The snake was sleeping when we approached. But it sensed us quickly, opening first one chilly red-rimmed eye and then the other, and lifted its enormous head and hissed a warning to us to be gone. “By Hera,” said Jason in a hoarse whisper, “it would be greater in length than the Argo itself, if it uncoiled,” and I looked at him and saw him pale and bloodless, with unmistakable terror showing on his face, a thing which I had never seen before. I realized that he must believe now that everything he had struggled for all these many months was slipping from his grasp in this one moment, for surely it would be impossible to gain the mastery over this stupendous monster.

But Medea showed us then, as she would on many occasions thereafter, that she was a woman born without any sense of fear. She went forward until she stood face to face with the beast, so close that she could almost have reached out and tapped it on its scaly snout. It hissed once more and, slowly, almost lazily, drew its huge jaws apart as though it meant to devour her at a gulp. Medea, weaving from side to side very much as if she were a serpent herself, murmured an incantation of some sort, a low rhythmic chant in a language I had never heard before. From the bosom of her gown she drew a small green phial sealed with a waxen stopper and broke the seal, and with a quick gesture splashed the potion that the phial contained across the serpent’s slitted nostrils.

A different kind of hiss came from the serpent then, a muzzy soft-edged sound that seemed almost like one of bafflement. A mist came over those hard ophidian eyes and the great eyelids began to grow slack and the beast’s head swayed sleepily from one side to the other. But its fanged jaws were still gaping, and even as the creature struggled against the power of Medea’s drug it thrust its head malevolently in Jason’s direction as though it meant to snap him in two if it could manage to reach him.

“Now,” she cried. “Play, Orpheus! Play!”

Yes. I played.

There is music to stir the soul and make a man leap forward eagerly to his death on the battlefield, and there is music to spur the oarsmen of a great ship to pull against the angriest of seas, and there is music that can soothe any creature into the trance of utmost peace. I knew my task and I had the skill. I took my lyre in my hands and from it came such tones as even a monster like this could not withstand. The shallow drowsiness that Medea’s potion had induced became deep slumber. The ponderous jaws slowly closed and the huge head sagged and sagged again, until it fell nestling into the creature’s tangled coils. I swear by bright-eyed Athena and her father the lord of thunder that the thing had begun to snore.

Quickly Jason broke free of his terrors, sprang forward past the helpless serpent, reached up and pulled the Fleece from the tree. In that same moment the dawning sun came fully into the sky and its brilliant radiance, striking against the Fleece like a bolt of lightning, lit Jason from head to foot so that he seemed to shine with a golden flame. For an instant it seemed that I was looking not upon the mortal son of Aeson but on Apollo himself.

“Come,” he cried hoarsely, and we fled from that grove and hurried back to the Argo where it lay in harbor. There Jason displayed his glittering prize to our astonished comrades, who gathered round, murmuring in awe. Medea came aboard with us, as she had said she would. We said the words that we hoped would bring the restless spirit of dead Phrixus on board too, for that was part of our task. That having been done, we cut our hawsers then and there, and with a furious splashing of oars we pulled out into the open water.

It was not so much in our seizing of the Fleece but in our homeward journey to Hellas that we felt the full weight of the test that the gods had devised for us. Nothing we had suffered on the outward trip, however grueling it had seemed at the time, appeared in hindsight to have offered any real difficulty at all when placed against what we had to contend with on the voyage home.

You may think that all we had to do was reverse our track and sail back through now-familiar waters, down the Euxine to the Bosphorus, down the Bosphorus to the Hellespont, and quickly onward by way of the ports we had visited on the way out to our starting-point at Pasagae. But that was not to be. The seer Phineus had advised us to take another route, going counterclockwise around the upper end of the Euxine and down a large unknown westward-flowing river that we would eventually come to, and thence onward by a roundabout course into our native seas. For the current and the winds would be against us if we attempted to sail southward through the Euxine, he warned us, and, what was even worse, all the nations that dwelled along that route were subject in one way or another to King Aietes of Colchis. The enraged Aietes was sure to send out messengers to them, ordering them to intercept us and take us, along with his traitorous daughter and our stolen booty, back to Aea.

In fact Aietes, driven not merely to rage but almost to madness when the news of the theft of the Fleece was brought to him, lost no time sending a fleet out in pursuit of us, an armada of many swift warships headed by his son the prince Apsyrtus, Medea’s half-brother. While we were groping our way slowly and uncertainly westward through the upper waters of the Euxine, with our helmsman Ancaeus hard pressed to navigate in a sea where neither he nor any of the rest of us had had any experience, the fleet of Apsyrtus, traveling in its home territory, was making haste to overtake us. Hardly had we reached the entrance to that great river of which Phineus had told us but we saw his ships coming up to surround us. There were Colchian vessels all about us, fifteen or perhaps twenty of them, blocking our access to the river and cutting off our access to the sea as well. We stood on the verge of a one-sided battle, the slaughter of many men, unburied ghosts left to wander in these strange seas. Surely that was not what the gods had had in mind when they sent us on this journey; but wherever we looked we could see the spears of Apsyrtus’ multitude of warriors bristling in the sun.