John Gardner - Jason and Medeia

by gale and salt

to the thickness of a twice-baked galley biscuit. At their

necks hung daggers

with thong-wrapped handles and serried blades. On

their wrists, brass sheaths

ornate with dragons and monsters of the deep. Then

someone seized

my shoulder — so fierce that my arm went numb and

I shouted — and without

a glance, he shoved me away and down. In horror I

felt myself

falling to the mud, my spectacles dangling,

precariously hooked

by one ear. I squealed like a rat incinerated, my mind all terror, my left hand clutching at my

spectacles, right hand

stretching to snatch some hold on the sweatwashed back

of the giant

in front of me. I fell, sank deep in the mud; the

maniacal

crowd came on, stepping on my legs, battering my ribs. On the back of my left hand, blurry as a cloud, fell

a scarlet drop

of blood. “Dear goddess!” I whimpered. I’d surely gone

mad. It was

no dream, surely, this jangling pain! A foot sank, blind, on the four fingers of my thin right hand and

buried them;

thick yellow water swirled where they’d been, then

reddened with blood.

My mind grew befuddled. My vision was awash. Then hands seized me, painfully jerked me upward, at

the same time

heaving back at the crowd. I gave myself up to the

stranger,

clinging still to my spectacles. My rescuer shouted, struck at the crowd with his one free arm like a

wounded gorilla.

We came to a wall, a doorway; he dragged me inside,

put me down

on a pile of skins, and scraped the bloodstained mud

from my face.

Gradually, my vision cleared. I remembered my

spectacles

and, finding a part of my vest still dry, I wiped them, as well as I could. One lens was cracked

like a sunburst,

a small piece missing. The other was whole. My rescuer,

seeing

what I struggled to do, though he had no faintest idea

what it meant,

brought me water in a jug, poured it on the lenses,

then offered

a cloth. When at last I could see again, we looked at

each other.

He was young; not intelligent, or so I suspected, his face

defeatured

in its lionish, square-jawed frame. His small gray eyes

were round

with amazement. I might have been an elf, a merman,

a unicorn’s child.

Behind him, three women and a man, in the robes of

shop-people,

bent at the waist to stare at me. And still, outside, in the blinding brightness, the rioting sailors pressed

and shouted.

The young man turned, following my gaze. Then all

at once

some change came over the crowd. There were cries

of alarm, loud questions.

The crowd rolled back, retreating from the pressure in

front. The women

and the bearded man — his beard came nearly to his

knees — came bustling

to the door, peeked timidly out, their silhouettes

blocking the light.

They gave sharp yells, all four of them at once, and

rushed to us, reaching,

chattering gibberish — some argot Greek or Semitic

tongue

I couldn’t identify — and pushed us farther from the

door into darkness.

I caught a glimpse — as I plunged with them in past

bolts of cloth,

calfskins, wickerwork, leather — of Kreon’s police force,

armed

with naked swords and whips, great helmets like mitres

that shone

brass-red. Each time a whip flashed out, some man fell

screaming

to the yellow mud, his torn arms clenching his head.

Then darkness;

we’d come to a deeper stall, the air full of spices — aloes, cloves and saffron and cinnamon … They whispered in the language foreign to me. We waited for a long

time.

My eyes adjusted to the dimness a little, and I saw the

old man

was as thin and ashen as an old wood spoon. His

marmoset face

was covered like a cheap plaster wall with bumps and

nodes like droppings

of mason’s grout; his tiny eyes were like silver coins. He pulled at his beard with his fingers, watching in

secret alarm

(as I watched him) for signs that I might prove

dangerous.

His wife was brown and swollen, sullen, the others buxom and dimpled, country odalisques with dull, seductive eyes. All four of them watched

me in fear,

exactly as they’d watched the crowd, the Corinthian

police. I grinned.

The four grinned back, and the man who’d saved me;

a glow of teeth

in the cavern-dark of wares. The merchant brought

wine. We drank.

When the streets were quiet, we crept back out, down

wynds and alleys

to a silent square — fother by the walls, abandoned

winejugs,

wases of straw and faggots, wrecked carts … It was

dusk. Here and there

men lay still, as if asleep, sprawled out in the mud,

on cobblestones,

drawn up onto the stoops of shops that stared at the

empty

twilit square like lepers waiting for blessing. We went— the man who had saved my life and I — to a man who sat some twenty feet from the door of the shop that

protected us.

He sat with his face in his drawn-up knees, as if

weeping, or sick.

I touched his shoulder. He fell over slowly, indifferently,

dead.

My friend looked at me and nodded. He held out his

hand, palm up.

I understood, put my palm on his. He nodded again, unsmiling; and so we parted.

I had no desire now

to climb that hill to Kreon’s palace. My body ached from the soles of my feet to the crown of my head.

My clothes were ragged,

damp and bespattered, mud-stained. My right-hand

fingers were numb

and misshapen; broken, I believed. However, I climbed

as far

as the first of the palace pools, where I meant to wash

the blood off,

caked on my hands and face. I studied my reflection,

amazed:

hat battered like a tramp’s, the pockets of my suitcoat

ripped,

my nose grotesquely swollen, the spectacles tilted, bent. I straightened my glasses as well as I could, then tucked

them in my pocket.

In the stone gray sky above, bats circled. The city was

still.

Then someone spoke to me. “See it to the end.” I wiped

the water

from my eyes and looked. He stared gravely at nothing

— the ancient

seer of Apollo whom I’d seen, long since, with Jason.

I hooked

my spectacles over my ears and looked more closely:

a man

so calm he seemed to encompass Time like a vase.

He said:

“See it to the end. The gods require it.” He turned

away,

and I saw only now the boy with him, his guide. I

struggled

to speak, but couldn’t. I glanced up the hill at the

palace, aglow

like the galaxy with torches. When I turned to the seer

again

he was moving slowly downhill, leaning hard on the

boy. I found

my voice and called, “Teiresias!” He turned, waiting. I realized in alarm we had nothing to say.

Enveloped

in a mist that hid me from the watch, I climbed to the

palace. The crowd

was thinner by half than when last I’d listened to

Jason speak.

It filled me with dread. I knew well enough what the

reason was.

The best had abandoned the contest, and not because

Jason appeared

to be winning. The brutal quelling of the riot, tyrannic

use

of the law’s whole force on their own long-suffering,

disgruntled crews—

and perhaps something more, the murder I’d heard of,

the crew arrested—

had turned them to scorn of Corinth and Corinth’s

prize. Without

a word, I suspected, they’d turned their steps to the