John Gardner - Jason and Medeia

of arrows,

such deadly poison that maggots perished in the

festering wounds.

And close to the corpse, it seemed to us, we saw fiery

shapes

wailing, their mist-pale arms flung past their golden

heads.

At our first glimpse of the beautiful strangers, majestic

beings

in the white-hot light, they vanished in a swirl of dust.

Then up

leaped Orpheus, praying, wild-eyed: ‘O beautiful

creatures, mysteries,

whether of Olympos or the Underworld, reveal

yourselves!

Blessed spirits, shapes out of Ocean or the violent sun, be visible to us, and lead us to a place where water

runs,

fresh water purling from a rock or gushing from the

ground! Do this

and if ever we bring our ship to some dear Akhaian port, we’ll honor you even as we honor the greatest of the

goddesses,

with wine and with hecatombs and an endless ritual of

praise!’

No sooner did he speak, sobbing and conjuring strangely

with his lyre

than grass sprang up all around us from the ground,

and long green shoots,

and in a moment saplings, tall and straight and in full

leaf—

a poplar, a willow, a sacred oak. And strange to say, they were clearly trees, but also, clearly, beings of fire, and all we saw in the world was clearly itself but also fire.

“Then the beams of the oak tree spoke. ‘You’ve been

fortunate.

A man came by here yesterday — an evil man—

who killed our guardian snake and stole

the golden apples of the sun. To us he brought anger

and sorrow, to you release

from misery. As soon as he glimpsed those apples, his

face

went savage, hideous to look at, cruel,

with eyes that gleamed like an eagle’s. He carried a

monstrous club

and the bow and arrows with which he slew our

guardian of the tree.

Our green world shrank to brambles and thistles, to

sand and sun,

and in terror, like a man gone blind, he turned to left

and right

bellowing and howling like a lost child.

And now he was parched with thirst, half mad. He

hammered the sand

with his club until, by chance, or pitied by a god, he

struck

that great rock there by the lagoon. It split at the base,

and out

gushed water in a gurgling stream, and the huge man

drank, on his knees,

moaning with pleasure like a child and rolling his eyes

up.’

“As soon as we heard these words we rushed to the place, all our

company,

and drank. Medeia — still unconscious, more cruelly

punished

than those we’d buried in the sand — I placed in the

shadow of ferns

at the water’s edge. I bathed her arms and legs, her

throat

and forehead, and dripped cool water in her staring

eyes. With the help

of her maidens, I made her drink. She groped toward

consciousness,

rising slowly, slowly, like Poseidon from the depths of

the sea,

until, wide-eyed with terror at some fierce vision in the

sun,

invisible to us, she clenched her eyes tight shut, clinging with her weak right hand to my cousin Akastos, with

her left to me.

Mad Idas wept. Doom on doom he must witness, and sad premonitions of doom, to the end of his dragged-out

days. No more

the raised middle finger, the obscene joke through

bared fangs;

no more the laughter of the trapped, that denies, defies

the trap.

He’d recognized it at last: more death than death, and

he rolled

his eyes like a sheep in flight from the wolf, and

nothing at his back

but Zeus. Such was the sorrow of Idas, the bravest of

men,

now broken.

“As soon as our minds were cooled, we came to see that the giant savage of whom the tree had spoken

could be none

but Herakles, much changed by his many trials. We

resolved

to hunt for him, and carry him back to Akhaia, if the

gods

permitted. The wind had removed all sign of his tracks.

The sons

of Boreas set off in one direction, on light-swift wings; Euphemos ran in another, and Lynkeus ran, more

slowly,

in a third, with his long sight. And Kaanthos set out

too,

impelled by destiny. Kaanthos was one who’d ploughed

for his living

and his heart was steady and gentle. He had had a

brother once,

a man of whom nothing is known. He found a grazing

flock

of goats kept alive by desert thistles, and he sought the

goatherd

to ask for news of Herakles, the sky-god’s son. Before he could speak, the herd leaped up with a look

of alarm

and threw a stone at him. It struck the poor man

squarely on the forehead,

and Kaanthos, astounded, fell, and his life ran out.

Nor was that

the least of my men to be lost on sandswept Libya. As for Herakles, we found no trace. They all returned; we prepared to set sail for home.

“And then came Mopsos’ time, foreseen by him from the beginning, thanks to his

birdlore. He was

the noblest of seers, for all his peculiarity— his whimsy, the grime on his fingers, the bits of dried

food in his beard—

but little good his wisdom did him when his hour

arrived.

“An asp lay sleeping in the sand, in shelter from the

midday sun,

a snake too sluggish to attack a man who showed no

sign

of hostility, or fly at a man who jumped back. It meant no harm to anything alive, though even a drop of its

venom

was instant passage to the Underworld. Old Mopsos,

chatting

and strolling with Medeia and her maidens, while the

rest of us worked on the ship,

by chance stepped lightly, with his left foot, on the

tip of the creature’s

tail. In pain and alarm, the asp coiled swiftly around the old man’s shin and calf and struck, sinking its fangs to the gums. Medeia and her maidens shrank in horror.

Old Mopsos

clenched his fists in sorrow. The pain was slight enough, but he knew he was past all hope. He lifted his foot to

free

the asp. Already he was paralyzed, numb. A dark mist clouded his sight, and his heavy limbs fell. In an instant,

he was cold,

his flesh corrupting in the heat of the sun, his hair

falling out

in patches. We dug him a grave at once and buried him. Then went down to the ship, full of woe.

“With Ankaios dead, no sure helmsman among us, our chances of reaching

Akhaia

were slim. But Peleus took the oar, the father of

Akhilles,

and we drew the hawsers in. There must surely be

some escape

from the wide Tritonian lagoon, we thought. Having no

aim,

we drifted, helpless, the whole day long. The Argo’s

course,

as we nosed now here, now there, for an outlet, was

as tortuous

as the track of a serpent as it wriggles along in search

for shelter

from the baking sun, peeping about him with an angry

hiss

and dust-flecked eyes, till he slips at last through a dark

rock cleft

to freedom. And so we too found freedom. Once in the

open,

we kept the land on our right, hugging the coast. The

sun

was kinder now, though fierce enough. We slept in the

shadow

of rocks by day, and drove the Argo by the power of our

backs

from twilight till dawn’s first glance. And so wore out

by stages

the curse of Helios.”

Here Jason paused, looked down, his dark eyebrows knit. The hall was silent, waiting, Kreon leaning on his arms, his gaze intent. I could feel their dread of the man’s conclusions.

He said: “Except, of course, that no man — no house — wears out a curse by his own