John Gardner - Jason and Medeia

house. “Jason!”

she screamed, clinging to the jamb. He didn’t look back.

He walked

to the gate and through it. I hurried after him, amazed,

stumbling,

trying to watch Medeia over my shoulder, where she

stood

on the steps.

“Jason, you’re insane!” I hissed. I snatched at his arm. My hand passed through his wrist. Ghosts, I

remembered. Shadows.

I kept close to him, whispering. If Medeia had seen me,

so could he,

if he’d use the right part of his mind. “I know the whole

story!” I hissed,

“the fiercest, most horrible tragedy ever recorded! God’s

truth!”

I might as well have complained to the passing wind.

We came

to the palace steps. There was a crowd gathering. He

started up,

three steps at a bound, his cape flaring out behind. At

the door

I caught a glimpse of the blond young slave Amekhenos. Gone before Jason saw him.

Then, from behind us in the street,

came a thin, blood-curdling wail. “Jason!” We stopped

in our tracks.

The crowd shrank back. She stood with blood running

down her cheeks,

the skin torn by her own nails. “Jason, I warn you,” she called, and sank to her knees, stretched out hex

arms to him.

“By the sign of this blood, I warn you — Medeia,

daughter of Aietes,

as mighty a king as has ever ruled on earth — come

away!”

He stared, shrinking. I was sick, so weak that my

knees could barely

hold me. Her hair was beautiful — red-gold, shimmering

with light,

too lovely for earth — but her face was torn and swollen,

bleeding…

We looked away, all of us but Jason. At last he went

down to her

and, gently, he took her hands. After a moment, he said, firmly, but as if he were speaking to a child, “No,

Medeia.”

She searched his face, trembling, clinging to his hands.

“Go home,”

he said. “I know you too well, Medeia. Not that your rage and grief are lies. You feel what you feel. Nevertheless, this once you can’t have your way. If you could show

what I do

in any way unjust or unlawful — if you could raise the shadow of a logical objection, I’d change my course

for you.

You cannot. Long as we’ve lived together, you were

never my wife,

only the lady I’ve loved. There’s a difference, in noble

houses

with large responsibilities. For love of you I fled my homeland, abandoned my throne, sharing

the exile

your crimes earned. I was innocent myself — all Argos

knew it;

no one more shocked than I when I learned of that

monstrous feast.

Ask anyone here.” He turned to the crowd, then to her

again.

“Now, and partly for your sake, I mean to rebuild my

power,

gain back part of what I’ve lost. Go home and wait for

me.”

She drew back her hands from his and, touching her

lips, said nothing.

Jason too was silent now. He merely looked at her, then went back up the steps and into the hall. At the

doorway

Kreon nodded, wordless. Jason bowed. They went to their places. The slaves brought dinner in, and soon

the hall

was filled to the chine of the wide-ribbed roof with the

whisper of eating,

the snarling of dogs over scraps, the hum of the

sea-kings’ talk.

Jason sat very still. Pyripta watched him. There were no gods in sight, today. The servants watched like

lepers,

moving without a sound between the trestle-tables. I whispered, “Change your mind, Jason! It’s not too

late!”

When the time came, he told the story of Lemnos.

Said:

“We couldn’t know, as we rowed through dusk to that

rocky coast,

the terrible things that had happened on Lemnos the

year before—

the wrath of the goddess of love. (We might have

guessed from the way

the surf crashed in on those shaded rocks, and the way

it pulled back

with a groan and a long, dry gasp.)

“There were now no men on the island;

murdered, every last one of them, by their wives—

and all

their sons killed too, so that none might rise to avenge

the crime.

For a long time the women of Lemnos had scorned

Aphrodite

and thought her wiles and tricks beneath their dignity. (So Medeia would tell me, long after, whose raven spies, children of Hekate, keep all the past of the world in

mind.)

They were not less wise than their men, the women of

Lemnos said—

quicker, if anything, with their minds as with their

hands. They would

not creep, stoop, cajole, flatter, run up and down like slaves — sew half the night while their burly

masters slept,

legs aspraddle, snoring, farting from wine, in big soft beds. If women were weaker, was that some fault

of their own?

They were human, as human as men, and they meant

to be judged as human.

They declared war, held angry council. From this day

forth

they’d crackle and cavil at each least hint of tyranny, traduce each day all pillars, pylons, fenceposts, stocks of trees, all shapes ophidian, all tripod forms; inveigh against all dangling things, hurl malisons on winds not shrill, all shapes not bulbous, torous,

paggled

as the belly of a six-months’ bride. They would bend their

masters’ knees!

How reasonable it sounds! How just! So it seemed to

them,

talking, thinking together when their men were away

on raids.

They put on mannish clothes, cut their hair like men,

took even

the rough, harsh speech they supposed sure proof of

equality.

What could their husbands say? They could curse them,

use male force

to whip their women to heel, but how could they answer

them?

They accepted, in the end. They were, of course, the

flaw in the plan.

They developed a strange, unruly passion for the

captured girls

they’d brought from their raids in Thrace — soft

concubines who’d not yet

seen their reasonable rights. Sly and hard-headed, cool, no more likely than other women to blur their desires (mix up sex and religion, say, as men can do), they kissed — all girlish tenderness — the chests and arms and fists they knew by instinct they had to tame. They

praised

their lords’ absurd ideas; they listened, dazzle-eyed— secretly making lists — to grandly romantic trash: bad poetry, stupid theology — altiloquent designs in the empty air. They got their reward, as

women

do for creeping, stooping, cajoling, flattering. They soon

were

hauled off to bed. They handled it well, of course, those

captives:

slaves eager to do anything — oh, anything! — for the beautiful, glorious lord. When he was satisfied and sleeping, they’d move their girlish hands on his

buttocks and legs,

and play, all girlish tenderness, with his private parts. So the men threw off their wives for the girls of Thrace.

Ah, then

they knew, those women of Lemnos, what it was to be a woman! They became as irrational as men, but

fiercer than men—

unchecked by the foolish poetry, the stupid ideals, of the more romantic part of the two-part beast. They

killed

their husbands, their husbands’ mistresses, and all their

sons;

learned the truth of insane ideas: men’s soft throats

flowering

blood — quick flash of white, the bone, then streaming

horror;

and whatever they thought at first — however they

cringed, all shock

when first they watched the death convulsion no

leopard or wolf

would tolerate, if he understood, but only man— they learned wild joy in the unspeakable: became not