Robert Silverberg - The Last Song of Orpheus

Here Jason demonstrated what manner of man he was, and then Medea showed what sort of woman she was, and Apsyrtus revealed his nature as well, and the gods who have made us all surely took pleasure in watching them work out the destinies that had been designed for them. I knew, after a fashion, what was about to happen, but I could not have intervened. The tragedy had to occur. It is always my fate to be a spectator at such events as the one that would now entwine these three people and send them all spinning off to different, but terrible, destinies.

Jason, ever cautious and prudent to a fault, sent word to Apsyrtus that he had an offer to make, and asked for a brief truce while he prepared his message. To this Apsyrtus, young and naive, unwisely agreed. Then Jason called us together and told us of the compromise that he planned to offer the Colchian prince. The Fleece, Jason was going to say, unquestionably belonged to him: King Aietes had promised it to him if he performed certain tasks, the tasks had been performed, and he meant to hold the king to his pledge. But Medea was a different matter. Jason appeared to regard her as a negotiable commodity. He planned to tell Absyrtus that he was willing to put her ashore on a nearby island where there was a shrine of Artemis, and would leave it up to the ruler of that island to decide whether she should be turned over to her brother or allowed to go on to Hellas with him.

Why Jason believed that Apsyrtus, however callow he might be, should have accepted any such offer, is nothing that I will ever understand. Plainly Aietes had charged him with regaining the Fleece, and he could not trade it away. But that Medea would lightly go along with the thing that Jason was suggesting was even less likely. Another woman, I suppose, might have heard Jason’s words without demur, thinking that it was her role as a woman to accept in placid fashion whatever fate might befall her. But Medea, that dark and ruthless woman, surely would not permit herself to be trifled with this way. Nor did she.

Angrily, her eyes ablaze with green fire, she drew Jason aside and reminded him of the oath he had sworn to take her to wife. Did he now mean to break that oath? Was he so meek and fearful that he was ready now to hand her over to her brother with nothing more than a shrug, merely to save his own neck, if some local king should rule that he must do so? She would set fire to the Argo with her own hands before she permitted that, and would call down such vengeful curses on Jason and all his kind for generations to come that he would bemoan the day he had ever been born.

She was a frightening woman when angered, was Medea. And the savage words that she spat at him left the heroic Jason well and truly frightened.

He did what he could to pacify her, vowing that he wanted above all else to live with her as man and wife. But he tried to persuade her that he had no choice but to offer Apsyrtus at least a portion of what he had come here to take. There was no way that Medea could remain with him, he said: either she went peacefully, or Apsyrtus would seize her by force. Jason pointed to the vast armada confronting them, and Apsyrtus’ great horde of warriors. Any battle between the men of Colchis and the Argonauts could end only in the total destruction of Jason and all his shipmates, and in the end Apsyrtus would regain not only the Fleece but Medea herself, whom he would take back to Aea to face the dreadful wrath of her royal father.

“It will not happen that way,” Medea said coolly. And she told Jason of the strategem that she intended to follow. She would send a messenger to her brother, informing him that she had been abducted by Jason against her will and yearned to be rescued and restored to her native city and her beloved father. “If you will go to your sister secretly by night on shore,” the messenger was to tell Apsyrtus, “she will surrender both herself and the Fleece to you, and you will return in triumph to your father with them both, having lost not so much as a single man of your force.”

“And if he does come, what then?” asked Jason.

“You will be waiting in hiding for him, and you will kill him,” said Medea, with not the slightest quaver of emotion in her voice. “When they learn of his death his men will be thrown into confusion, and we will be able to escape and go safely onward together to your country.”

And so it occurred, and all the dark things that were to happen afterward as well, for the gods had designed all this to occur in just such a way. And what the gods design for us must of necessity come to pass.

I know that philosophers will arise in years to come who will claim that we and we alone are masters of our fates, shaping all events of our lives by our own decisions. They are undoubtedly sincere in this belief; but what chagrin they would feel, if only they understood that the very ideas they espouse were put into their minds by Father Zeus, as part of his great plan for the cosmos and all creatures that dwell within it?

So the foolish Apsyrtus went unescorted to the temple of Artemis on shore, where Medea had said she would be waiting for him with the Golden Fleece. She came forth to meet him in the darkness; but as brother and sister stood there quietly talking, Jason emerged from his hiding place behind the temple and struck Apsyrtus dead with his sword. His spurting blood threw a crimson stain over the silvery veil Medea had donned. But grim Medea, unmoved, took the sword from Jason, cut the dead man’s body in pieces, and cast his sundered limbs into the sea, where the Colchians would find them drifting in the morning; and she and Jason returned in silence to the Argo .

As Medea had foreseen, the Colchians lost all heart after the death of their prince. Fearing the fury of Aietes if they returned empty-handed to Aea, they set sail for the farther shores of the Euxine and built new settlements there for themselves and never were heard from again. We, meanwhile, entered the great river unhindered and traveled onward toward the west.

But the gods in their mysterious wisdom often lead us into preordained inevitable sin and then implacably demand atonement. Hera still looked kindly on her beloved Jason, but Zeus, who had never shown any friendship for Jason, was of another mind entirely. And so, the goddess aiding us as best she could but the angry father-god insisting that a proper price be paid for the crime that had made possible our escape, the rest of our journey was one torment after another, by way of punishment for Medea’s crime and Jason’s acquiescence in it, until Medea was deemed cleansed of her brother’s blood.

We sailed up that uncharted westward-flowing river through bitter lands of ice and snow, shivering in northern gales that slowed the very course of our blood. The oarsmen’s hands froze as they gripped the oars. Storms assailed us and came close to shattering our mast. Huge deadly floating masses of ice came drifting all about us, jutting up far above us and making every day seem like a running of the Clashing Rocks. We grew gaunt and weak with hunger, but Ancaeus did wondrous deeds at the helm and I beat time for the weary men with whatever energy remained in me, and we managed to go on.

Deep in the heart of the continent we found at last another mighty river, likewise unknown then to any Hellene mariner, that rose somewhere at the world’s end and flowed southward into our own broad-breasted ocean. When we emerged finally into a place of warmer weather, new storms caught us and spun us around, driving us northward again past the coast of what we surmised was Italy. We fought our way south once more, entering at last into the Tyrrhenian Sea that we knew would take us back to the Hellene lands, only to find ourselves confronted by the isle where the Sirens dwelled, those seductive singers who are put there to lure mariners to their destruction. “There is no other way for us,” said Ancaeus, “but to go past their shore. But who can resist the Sirens’ song?”