John Gardner - Jason and Medeia

the murderer’s sword plunged in beyond the life-lock,

down

to life renewed, midnight black, imperishable.

Such was the song, cold-blooded lure, of those

cunning sly-

eyed bitches. Orpheus’ fingers jangled the lyre,

but couldn’t

blot from our minds their music’s deadly mysticism.

One of our number, Butes the spearman, went

overboard,—

snapped steel chains and plunged. We’d have followed.

him down, if we could.

We couldn’t. We strained at our shackles and raged; we

frothed at the mouth;

the Argo sailed on, and Orpheus played, immune to

our wrath

as he was to their song. He took no stock in absolute

evil,

or good either. (The god of poets, the Keltai say, is a sow, rooting, rutting with boars, able to converse with wind.)

Orpheus sighed, endured by his harp-playing.

Which was well enough for him, but what of the rest

of us?

“We sailed on, sorrowing, Medeia blaked with a fury

that had

no possible vent: fury at the father she loved; at herself; at me for the murder of the brother whose murder she’d

engineered …

And so we came to the terror of Skylla and Kharybdis.

On one side,

sheer rock cliff, on the other the seething, roaring

maelstrom.

We looked, Ankaios sweating. I scarcely cared. My soul was thick with the torpor of those who have listened to

the sirens and failed

to act. Was I half asleep? On the left, rock scarp as steep as the walls of a graveyard trench, and as certain to

grind our dust:

call it death by rectitude. On the right side, turning like an old constrictor, a woman enraged, — death by

violence,

bottomless shame; between — barely possible — death by

indifference,

soul-suffocation in the corpse that stinks, plods on.

Ankaios

wept, abandoned the steering oar. I called on Asterios, son of an endless line of merchants. He seized the oar, tongue between his teeth, his brown eyes luminous. I laughed — God knows, without joy. And clumsy as he

was with the oar,

he knew the line and kept it, who cared for nothing in

life

but the clinquant possible of profit tomorrow. The heavy

ship

was as easy for him as a lighter by the quay.

Short-sighted fool,

valueless, podging, unfit for the company of thinking

men,

I give you this: You kept possibilities open, so that, plodding, stinking, we may yet have time to reconsider—

perhaps

oppose you, perhaps turn tradesman and find

amusement in it.

“We came to the wandering rocks. The sky was

choked. Hot lava

shot up on every side through spicious, roiling steams. Great islands loomed around us, rowelled like brustling

whales,

sank once more into darkness. The sails were like ruby,

like blood.

By the light of explosions from the hills surrounding

we chose our channels

— there, and there — the options shot up like partridges, wide roads, keyholes of daylight, all of them fair, all fine in the instant’s vision of the possible. But the black

sky closed

like a curtain, and the steam came swirling again, and

the channel was gone,

another one gaping to the right of us, sucking us in—

in the distance,

sky. Yes, this then! Good! — But a belch of flame,

cascade

of boulders, and the sea was revised once more. Old

Argus watched it,

fascinated, too preoccupied for fear. Again and again

he glanced

from the tumbling seas to the sky. He shouted, swinging his eyes to me, shaggy beard splashed red by

the sea,

‘It’s all Time-Space in a duckpond, Jason! See how it

moves

by law, yet unpredictably. So the galaxies turn

in their aeviternal spans, some bodies wheeling to the

left,

some wheeling right, some rolling head over heels like

bears,

a few — like the overintellectual moon — staring, as if with a mad idée fixe, at a single point. It’s food for thought, this sea. It teaches of terrible collisions,

the spin

of planets battered to chaos by a dark star drifting free, the plosion of a sun in the northwest corner of the

universe,

flash of a comet, collapse of a cloud of dust. Like

colliding

balls, the planets scatter in dismay, then quickly settle on a new course, new synchysis, and feel secure.

Then CRASH!

an instant later (as the ends of the universe read their

clock)

a new, more terrible collision — new cries of alarm in the

heights …

We here, who assess durabilities by clicks too brief for the mind of space to vision except by number theory, we watch the sun sail west, and we nod, approve the

stupendous

rightness of things, “Choose so-and-so,” say we, “and

we bring on

such-and-such.” We frigate the hills with purpose: “This

oak,

meaningless before, I delimit as wood for my cart.”

We move,

secure, never glancing down, on precarious stepping

stones,

Mondays and Tuesdays a-shiver in the torrent of Time.’

He laughed,

indifferent to grim implications. He meant no harm

in life,

Argus, observer of mechanics, creator of machines.

A man

who hated war so long as he thought as a citizen, but fashioned the mightiest engine of war yet built,

with the help

of the goddess. A man who lived by order, fashioned

by his grasp

of predictables, but observed, cold-blooded, and laughed,

that order

was illusion, a trick of timing. Incredible being!

Knowledge

was all, in the end; the pawks in the book he’d leave to

the future,

if luck allowed its survival. Not so with Orpheus, whose machine was art, a bit for piercing the surface

of things,

advancing nothing, returning again and again to the

cryptarch

heart, where there is no progress and each new physical

engine

threatens the soul’s equilibrium. At the words of Argus

he paled, though I’d heard him express, himself,

thoughts twice as grim.

‘Not true,’ he shouted. He clutched my shoulder, pointed

at a glode

where blue burst through with a serenity like violence.

The gods see more than we mortals dream. I tell you,

Jason,

and swear to it too, these seas that fill us with terror

are alive

with nymphs, pale nereids sent here by Hera. They

leap like dolphins,

running on the reefs and breaking waves, fanning our

sails

with the swing of invisible skirts; and the hand of the

tiller is the hand

of Thetis herself, sweet nereid wife of Lord Peleus. Whatever the bluster of the wandering rocks, we need

not fear them.

The world is more than mechanics. If that weren’t so,

we’d be wrecked

long since!’ In a sea of choices, none of them certain,

I chose

to believe him. We kept her upright, scudding with the

wind, accepting

any opening offered. Whatever the reason, we came to quiet seas and sunlight, for which we thanked the

gods,

on the chance they’d had some hand in it. It was not

my part

to speculate.

“We were close inshore, so close that through the haze on the land we could hear the mooing of cattle

and bleating

of sheep. We were drenched, half-starved, stone-numb

with weariness,

but according to the boy at the helm, Ankaios, the land

was the isle

of Helios. We needed, God knew, no further bavardage with him. And so we continued on and arrived,

half-dead,

at the isle of the pale Phaiakians.

“There we married, Medeia and I, our hands forced by necessity. A fleet of Kolchians,