Sjon - The Whispering Muse

On one such occasion I spotted something unexpected: one of the deceased workman’s hands was trapped in the outer layer of the paper pulp. The little finger and half the ring finger were missing but a wedding band still encircled the stub, and the bones were visible through a gaping wound in the palm.

Before I could alert the workers, the block was lowered into the hold and I thought to myself that it would be a hopeless task to find the hand in the gloom below. So I decided to keep the knowledge to myself; the crew were superstitious enough as it was. And even I had my doubts that fortune would favour any ship that carried a dead man’s hand.

Indeed, I had grave doubts on this score.

Mate Caeneus listened for an unusually long time to his woodchip that Saturday evening in Mold Bay. For, as it transpired, it had some peculiar things to impart. Certainly Caeneus was frowning when he lowered the chip from his ear and replaced it in the inside pocket of his officer’s jacket. He drained his coffee cup in one go, wiped his mouth with the back of his hand and said in a low voice:

‘When I began my account of the Argonauts’ sojourn in the realm of doe-eyed Hypsipyle, I told you that we sailors got into some tight spots at times, and once I only narrowly avoided killing myself through sheer recklessness — during our shore leave on Lemnos, as it happens.

‘After more than three months on the island a few of us younger deckhands had the bright idea of organising a race in the chariots left behind by our mistresses’ former husbands. These were solidly built, showy vehicles, inlaid with gold leaf and engraved with images of the swiftest-flying gods and fabulous creatures of antiquity: wing-footed Hermes, rosy-fingered Eos, Pegasus of the shining mane and shimmering Iris — all sprinting hell-for-leather across the wide fields of heaven.

‘My mistress at the time was called Iphenoa. She was in her thirties and had been married to a lieutenant, for by this point in time the crew of the Argo had finished with the smartest district of the town and we were now servicing the needs of the women in the soldiers’ and artists’ quarter. Iphenoa had two nubile daughters. On the day of the race she accompanied me to the starting line and knotted a blue brocade scarf around my neck for luck. Her daughters harnessed the racehorses to the chariot, referring to one as Cat and the other as Death. These were giant beasts that the poets would have described as snorting fireworks, for Cat was of the same stock as Bucephalos, Alexander the Great’s steed, with toes instead of hooves, while Death was grey, with eyes of blue.

‘During the weeks I had spent in the women’s home, both sisters had tried in turn to entice me into bed, but unlike many of my shipmates I refused to serve more than one woman from each family, and never young girls. The maid servants were another matter — and here the daughters felt I was rubbing salt in the wound — for I was quite willing to roger the servants when the mistress was away from home. So I should have been on my guard. When Iphenoa had kissed me on the mouth and was leading the lieutenant’s daughters to the stands, the girls glanced back over their shoulders, smiling at me most oddly.

‘We raced five at a time, and in the second heat my fellow charioteers consisted of: Peleus, father of Achilles; Acastus, son of Pelias; Staphylus “bunch of grapes”, son of Dionysus; and the huntress Atalanta.

‘The latter competed on behalf of those celibates who took no part in the womanising but remained on board the Argo and guarded the ship under the command of Heracles.

‘The judge raised his arm. He let it fall.

‘The horses leapt into action. The charioteers yelled.

‘Then the sky was blue over Lemnos. Then the waves lapped the shore, then the limestone threw back the sunlight and the men’s skin shone until they seemed as insubstantial as immortals. Everything sang to the same tune; no ear could distinguish between the hoof-beats, the creaking of the wheels and the shouts of the charioteers.

‘Half an eternity passed in this manner.

‘I had driven no more than ninety feet when the spokes in the left wheel of my chariot gave way. As if by a miracle, Cat and Death broke free from the yoke and suffered no harm, but the chariot and ground collided with such colossal force that all I can remember is being hurled into the air in a forward trajectory and landing on the undercarriage, where I danced a brief tarantella before everything went black.

‘When I came to my senses Jason was standing over me, looking very grave. He said I had broken both my legs. I’m told that I smiled back at him as if it was nothing to make a fuss about. Then I swooned again and had no idea that my life was hanging by a thread. Next I woke to discover that my clothes were being cut off, and I was vaguely aware of a girl drawing splinters of wood from my chest, for which I was grateful. But when the wounds were stitched up without an anaesthetic, the pain was so great that I blacked out. I must have surfaced from my deathly coma like this several times during the first days after I was brought to the hospital.

‘I was in such a bad way that it’s a wonder Captain Jason bothered to have me patched up at all. For broken legs were not all that ailed me after the accident: on closer examination it turned out that I had been grazed on the hands and across the breast, a great wound gaped from my right eyelid to the nape of my neck. My diaphragm had burst when my lower intestines were thrust upwards, putting so much pressure on my lungs that I had difficulty breathing, on top of which I had bruised five of my ribs. My right ankle had shattered, my foot was twisted back and my thighbone had snapped at the ball joint on the left-hand side. This in turn had been stirred together in such a tangle that broken shards of bone had sliced through the muscle. The bones of my left hand had snapped, as had the fingers of my right. Both calves were also broken and split up to the knee joints; altogether, eleven bones were broken in twenty places. My left wrist and shoulder joints were sprained, and so were several other joints. And a large patch of my scalp had been flayed from my skull.

‘Now I owed my life to the fact that Jason son of Aeson had been fostered and tutored by the centaur Cheiron, the greatest physician of his age. As there was a risk of my healing in a deformed posture, being so soft and mangled, he resorted to “crucifying”me: nails were driven through both my legs and straps were tied to them, then belayed around two blocks on a pole at the end of the bed, and Jason tied a heavy sandbag to the end of each strap. Next, slings were placed under my knees which were then hoisted up, each weighed down by a sandbag. It took me two weeks to get used to the “cross” from which I was to hang for four months altogether. All that time I suffered from a nagging ache in the nail holes, though this was alleviated when I drank the wine that Iphenoa brought me every morning.

‘Before Jason could crucify me he had to bore holes through my legs below the knees, using a fairly hefty drill for the job. Apparently I told Jason that it would prove hard to drill through the bones of a man who had been granted the gift by blue-haired Poseidon of being impervious to sharp weapons. This proved correct, for the drill got stuck for an age in the bone, and one handle after another snapped off, but Jason broke through in the end and immediately started on the other leg.

‘But it was not only the toughness of my legs that betrayed my past. During the struggle to heal myself my body reverted to the shape it used to have before my metamorphosis sixteen years earlier. I myself wasn’t aware of this until one of the girls who helped me to breathe held up a mirror below my belly. I saw that my penis had shrunk until it exactly resembled the penis of a five-year-old boy, both in size and behaviour, and its proportion to a man’s body was like what you would see on a Renaissance sculpture (at last I understood why the nurses had been giggling at me). Moreover I had moulted like a wolf in spring. My chest was white and soft again — with the swell of maidenly breasts.