Robert Silverberg - The Last Song of Orpheus

And then I knew that it was time for me to leave Egypt; for I always know when it is time to close one phase of my journey and begin the next. So I moved along from that sun-gripped land and set forth to return to my native Thrace.

There I found my father Oeagros dying. He had just enough strength left to speak of making a final journey into the wild mountains of the north, as he had always said he would do when he felt his end approaching, a journey from which there would be no coming back. I offered him the consolations I had learned in Egypt, but he would have none of them. In our land Dionysus was the reigning god, the old fierce Dionysus whom they worshipped with wild torch-bearing processions and the drinking of wine and the rending of beasts and the guzzling of their blood, and so my father ended his days with what he saw as the proper homage to his god, making a last offering to Dionysus, eating of the flesh and drinking of the blood, and went on his solitary journey into the dark mountainous wilderness dense with mighty trees that surrounded our city, and that was the last of him. So for a time I ruled as king in his place. Knowing that this was what I was meant to do at this point in my days I dwelled placidly among the roughhewn Ciconians and was for a time their ruler, their lawgiver, their teacher. I gave them the art of letters and showed them better ways of sowing their crops and made songs for them that tempered to some degree their cruel and savage spirits, and attempted to inculcate in them some of the true Mysteries, though that was hard, because I wanted to guide them toward the cool and disciplined way of Apollo and it was plain that they preferred the riotous and bloody way of Dionysus. I did my best. The years went by, and still I tarried in the land of the Ciconians. I lived there as king and lawgiver until Cheiron the king of the centaurs came to me and and stood looming above me with his great beard flowing down over the vast barrel of his horse-chest, and said I must sail with Jason, whose foster-father he was, on his quest for the Golden Fleece.

“Must I?” I said. “What good will be served by that? I am of great use doing what I do here.”

Of course I knew in my heart that it is a waste of breath to question what has been determined for us by the gods. The voyage I would make with Jason would be an arduous and painful one, and plainly it was meant to be the next stage in my tempering; therefore it was mere folly to protest. But I had ruled long enough in Thrace to have come to cherish my role as teacher and counsellor, and it was my first response to balk at giving all that up merely to go off on some wild venture with a great fool like Jason.

But Cheiron, that noble creature with the head and shoulders and brawny chest of a god rising from the body of a magnificent horse, was the wisest of all his race, himself a master of the arts of medicine and music and gifted with the skill of prophecy, and he was patient with me. “You must go because you must go,” he said simply, knowing that I would understand what he meant by that; but also he said, “Without you and your music, Orpheus, the voyage will not succeed, and the voyage must succeed, and therefore you must go.”

That I had no choice in the matter was already clear to me, for one never has any choice in any matter; that there might be any merit in this quest of Jason’s was something that could well be doubted, but it is madness to attempt to understand the reasons the gods have for what they decree; and that Zeus had sent the command to me by no less a messenger than Cheiron, the wise centaur king, told me that there must be some necessity underlying what one might easily regard as an idle and even wicked enterprise.

So I gave a great feast in honor of the noble centaur, and he and I sat up far into the night discussing high and serious matters, the subjects I had already devoted much of my life to contemplating: the nature of the gods, most particularly Apollo, who was as close to his heart as he was to mine, and the relationship of music to number, and the role of music in sustaining the movements of the stars, and the methods by which the dead can sometimes be restored to life, and many another subject; and in the morning I bade him farewell and began my preparations for joining Jason and his Argonauts. Which is how it happened that I went off with them to distant Colchis in quest of the Golden Fleece, and achieved much but suffered greatly in the course of those high deeds.

About this Jason—a brave man, but, as I have said, a great fool—and this voyage to steal the Golden Fleece, I will tell you many things, but first you must know this:

In Thessaly in ancient times lived King Athamas, the son of Aeolus, with his queen, Nephele. They had two children, the boy Phrixus and the girl Helle. King Athamas in time put aside his wife and took another, and Nephele feared that her children might be in danger, for their stepmother did not love them. She prayed to Hermes, who sent her a ram with golden fleece; Nephele placed the children on that ram’s back and it vaulted into the sky, heading eastward across the strait that divides Europe and Asia. In mid-flight Helle lost her grip and tumbled into the sea, which is why that strait is called the Hellespont, but Phrixus held tight and was safely delivered to the land of Colchis far away on the eastern shore of the great body of water we call the Euxine Sea, which later men will know by the unkinder name of the Black Sea.

Aietes, king of Colchis, welcomed Phrixus, for he was under the command of Hermes to be hospitable to him, and gave him sanctuary. The ram who had borne him there was sacrificed as a thanksgiving-offering to Zeus; Phrixus gave its golden fleece to Aietes as the bride-price for the king’s daughter Chalciope, and the fleece was placed in a consecrated grove, where it was guarded by a great serpent that slept neither by night nor day. But Aietes felt resentful that the gods had thrust Phrixus upon him, and when after a time Phrixus died, the king denied him a proper burial of the sort practiced in all the Hellene lands. In Colchis it is the strange custom that only women are given burial; the bodies of men are wrapped in ox-hides and they hang them up exposed in trees for the birds to eat, and that was what was done with the body of Phrixus. Because of that the ghost of Phrixus was compelled to wander disconsolately about in Colchis with no way to attain proper rest. This is the story as it was told to me; whether it is true or not, I cannot say. You already know of me that I neither confirm nor deny.

Now to sing of Jason: like Phrixus a man of Thessaly and indeed his kinsman, Jason was the son of Aeson, who ruled the kingdom of Iolcus, close beside the land where Athamas, the father of Phrixus, was king; and Aeson was a son of Cretheus, brother of Athamas, so Aeson and Phrixus were cousins. Jason’s name at birth was Diomedes. King Aeson was a mild and gentle man, but his warlike half-brother Pelias, coveting the throne, forced him to yield his crown to him when Aeson’s son Diomedes was only a babe, though Pelias promised that when Diomedes reached manhood he would surrender the royal power to him. Aeson was kept a prisoner thereafter in Pelias’ palace; as for Diomedes, a kindly servant saw to it that he was smuggled out of Iolcus to Mount Pelion, where he was placed in the care of the centaur Cheiron. The centaur gave him the new name of Jason, meaning “healer,” and raised him there until he was grown. This much I know to be true, for Cheiron told me so himself.

The usurper Pelias, ruling unchallenged in Iolcus, was haunted by the ghost of his cousin Phrixus, who told him in dreams that neither Pelias nor any of his kin would flourish until both Phrixus and the fleece of the golden ram that had carried him to Colchis were brought back to Thessaly. Pelias also was troubled by an oracle’s tale that a man with one sandal would come to his city and overthrow him. And indeed one day a man with one foot bare did arrive in Iolcus: none other than Jason, now full-grown and intending to restore his father to the throne. He had lost the sandal while helping the goddess Hera, in the guise of an old woman, to cross a river, and by so doing had won the gratitude and the protection of the queen of the gods.