Jason and the Argonauts (15 page)

“It is unkingly to grieve,” he said to himself. “I owe my people a brave face, a cheerful face, no matter what my loss. And perhaps, perhaps I shall see her again. No matter how forgetful she is, she may remember me. At least, I must try to believe so.”

B
OREAS CAME AGAIN TO
Medea. He would not answer her questions, but she knew he had killed Lethe, and she rejoiced. She stepped off a hill onto his back and was whisked across the Middle Sea. They landed on the northeast shore of Iolcus, near where the
Argo
had been launched three years before.

“Before we part,” said Boreas, “may I offer you some advice?”

“There is no one, dear Boreas, whom I venerate as I do you, not on earth, or in heaven, or in hell. I love and admire everything about you. Your opinion is sacred to me.”

“Then hearken: if you wish to avenge yourself on Jason, drop the idea of murder. Death is too easy. His shade, released, will bound happily down to Tartarus and embrace the shade of Lethe.”

“How, then, shall I punish him?”

“Let him live and live with him. You shall be a wife rejoining her husband, ready to forgive all—but forgetting nothing. And you will know how to torment him in a thousand ways.”

“Will he take me back? He left me once.”

“He was a pirate then. He is a king now and bound by sacred law. You are his rightful wife—a king’s daughter, who will inherit a rich realm. Moreover, you are about to bear his child. He will not cast you off.”

“I shall enjoy tormenting him, of course. But I hoped to marry you, you know.”

“I know. And perhaps you will, but not yet. He won’t last too long under your tender care.”

“Will you marry me when I’m a widow?”

“We’ll discuss it then.”

So Medea joined Jason in Iolcus and prepared to bear her child. But then she had an idea that made her smile for the first time since leaving Boreas.

“I know how to do it,” she whispered to herself. “A man like Jason, fearless, hardened by battle, made proud by victory, can only be hurt by something he loves. Witness his grief at the loss of Lethe. So I’ll give him the same grief twice over and grind his soul between two millstones. By witchcraft shall I give this child, who is to be born tonight, the face and form of Lethe—her voice, her laughter, and her accursed joyousness. I can do it. That face is printed on my mind in lines of fire; they burn down to my womb and will brand that likeness on the child within. This girl who is to come tonight shall be another Lethe for him, a child he shall adore. Yes, the hooks of love will anchor themselves in that stony heart, and when the child is taken from him, the heart will be torn from his bosom. That will be my vengeance. Yes … yes.”

That night she bore a child. A girl. Sleek and fair, with huge velvety black eyes and a nimbus of daffodil hair. When Jason bent to her in wonder, she did not cry but made a sound like the chuckling of water as it purls over rocks, and he felt an airy spear of joy piercing his chest.

For the next five years, Medea forced herself to wait patiently, but her eyes smoldered as she watched her husband and her daughter. For the girl became his shadow; she followed him everywhere, and her laughter filled the castle. She went sailing with him, riding, rock-climbing. And she went with him on sadder errands. For, as king, he cultivated his healing powers and visited the sick and the dying. He let her come with him, for he knew that the sight of her joyous face and the sound of her voice were health itself. In time to come, he thought, she would grow up to be a healer, magically endowed; already the snowdrop touch of her fingers seemed to banish pain.

But she was not to grow up. One night of wind, she vanished from her bed, and Jason led a frantic search for her. She was found by fishermen as they spread their nets the next morning. Her crushed body lay among the rocks at the foot of a cliff.

Medea vanished also. Some said that grief over her lost child had driven her to drown herself. But Jason thought otherwise. He climbed the cliff so that he could jump off and land among the same rocks that had killed his daughter. A voice spoke out of the sky. “No!”

“Why not?”

“You are king.”

“Shall I be denied that which the lowliest of my subjects may have for the asking?”

“You are king—with every privilege except making yourself less.”

“I don’t want to live.”

“You have done many things you didn’t want to do and shall do more. You are a leader, god-gifted. You must serve your people, accept your loss, endure your suffering, and serve them still. You must rule them, lead them against their enemies, make laws, make rain.”

Jason climbed down the cliff and went to the castle.

T
HE MYSTERY OF MEDEA
made rumor sprout like weeds and grow to legend. In one story that spread throughout the lands of the Middle Sea, she prayed to Hecate to give her wings to match her claws and work to match her talents. And the arch-hag, who had long been pleased with Medea, made her an honorary harpy, conferring wings and immortality upon her. And she proved so good at her work that she became a favorite of Hades and perches on his great wrist, wings folded, waiting for him to cast her like a falcon at runaway shades. She soars high, then plunges, shrieking, freezing the shade in place, and seizes him in her talons. But she does not rend him, for he is bloodless; but bears her victim back to Hades, who decrees new torments.

What happened to Jason’s crew? During their quest for the Fleece, the Argonauts had become addicted to peril and could not bear to leave each other. So they voyaged together, searching the world for promising wars, thrusting themselves always into the hottest part of the battle. Idas and the Twins managed to get themselves killed on the same afternoon. They took on an entire regiment and killed half of them before being destroyed themselves. The three shades slipped out of their ruined carcasses and swaggered down to Tartarus, vowing to fight harpies, turnspit demons, and all the legions of hell.

Rufus followed them shortly, but did not stay in Tartarus. The fires there were not for making things; they were the unproductive ovens of torment, and he refused to fuel them. He prayed to Hephaestus, asking for a transfer. Now he works in the smith-god’s own smithy, which is a crater in an old Sicilian volcano named Aetna.

As for Autolycus, he did not seek death. He sought vengeance and tracks the North Wind ceaselessly. You can see him sometimes in his gray cloak, riding high, following the storm.

What happened to Daphnis? He lasted longer than most. He had formed a quenchless taste for naiads and, after writing a song, would search the waterways of the world for someone to sing it to. Finally, sun-dazed on a strange river, he tried to serenade a crocodile.

As for Ekion—he disappeared into the mists of legend. Some say he still tinkers with dreams, visiting the sleep of storytellers, planting lies that flower into truth.

When Lethe came to Tartarus she lit up the dark vaults. A fountain burst out of the ground near her garden gate. And this fountain became a blessing to the newly dead. Lethe bathed in its waters and lent them forgetfulness, so that when the newly arrived shades, exhausted by their journey, bewildered by the loss of their bodies, came to this fountain and drank its waters, they drank oblivion. They forgot who they had been when alive, forgot those they had left behind, forgot everything that would cause them pain in this place, and so were able to accept death without rancor or rebellion.

Jason’s beloved child, who looked enough like Lethe to be her daughter, helps the nymph tend the fountain. And they both wait for Jason, who, they know, will join them after death and abide with them at the fountain of healing waters.

S
TORYTELLERS WERE TELLING THEIR
stories long before they knew how to write them down. Those antique wonder-tales we call myths were spoken or chanted by warrior minstrels who wandered the dangerous roads from castle to castle and campfire to campfire, singing for their supper. Full of murder and marvels and mystery was the crude verse chanted by these bards—songs of heroes, gods, and monsters; of cattle raids, piracy, elopements; of battles fought for the love of a woman and won or lost by the whim of a god.

Some stories grew to be favorites and were told over and over again, and each bard telling the same tale told it differently. But all this time a written language was slowly growing, permitting some learned minstrels to commit their story-songs to those marks which could magically transform themselves into living words. And each time the same story was written down by someone else, something changed.

A blind bard named Homer, for example, gathered hundreds of tales about a war that had been fought five hundred years before and about the voyage home of a war-chief called Ulysses and wove them into two mighty epics, the
Iliad
and the
Odyssey.
And his stories differed from all that had gone before. The old, old tales had passed through the fire of his genius and had been changed forever.

A word now about this book, which differs so from other accounts of Jason, Medea, and the Argonauts.

The cycle of tales that make up the Argosy are among the earliest in Greek mythology. As has been seen, there is no “authorized text” of any myth, and particularly none of this cycle, which varies wildly in all its versions. Fragments lodge in the work of Pindar, Hesiod, Appolodorus, Apollonius Rhodius, Homer, and Herodotus, and of a later Roman author named Valerius Flaccus—much of it untranslated and accessible only to those who read Greek and Latin. Having undergone the privileged ordeal of a classical education, I have been able to pick and choose among those bits and pieces and half-told tales, and use those people and events which best suit my own way of telling a story.

But why is the source material of the Argosy more confused and formless than other myth-cycles? Well, there is considerable evidence that the reports of this voyage were engendered by not one but
several
quests for a Golden Fleece, or other sacred relic, stolen by Black Sea raiders from some coastal temple on the Peloponnese. Seven generations of pirate kings from the lands of Hellas recruited warrior crews and sailed across the Middle Sea to recapture the magic loot. Seven voyages—at least—spanned some two hundred years, all happening about four thousand years ago. The stories intermingle, the routes intertwine; islands pop up and sink away, place names and people names jostle and obscure one another. And each mythographer must find his own way through the fabulous rubble and recast the tale according to his own vision.

About Medea: like many names this was a word first, then a title, finally a given name. Originally, “Medea” simply meant “clever,” but as time passed it gathered darkness and came to mean “weirdly clever,” being especially used to described women who did magic—very much like our word “witch,” whose first meaning was “sharp-witted,” or wise. So by the time the
Argo
sailed, “Medea” meant “witch” in that language, and was considered too unlucky a word to use unless you had to. For magic bubbled closer to the surface then, and witches were much feared. Among other charming habits they were known to eat babies.

Actually, the legend of a woman named Medea began long before the first Argosy began and lingered long after the last one ended, and sprouted into many forms. In later tales she is also depicted as being the wife of Aegeus, making her the stepmother of Theseus. In another account she comes to Attica simply to kill Aegeus, seeks to kill Theseus, and vanishes. She appears in still another group of linked stories as a cruel sorceress queen of Corinth, slain finally by her subjects when her crimes became too much to stomach.

The Athenian playwright Euripides, writing some fifteen hundred years after Medea did or did not do the things she was accused of, adapted one tale to his own purpose, and it became the play
Medea.
This drama shows her being driven mad by jealousy because Jason has decided to cast her aside and marry a richer younger princess. Her madness culminates in murder when she butchers their two children.

This is what she became best known for, but is not what I would choose to emphasize.

A tale well told is a kind of Argosy, launching you on uncharted seas and taking you among perils and pleasures that are very strange but half-familiar as if fledged out of your own dreams. Is it a coincidence that the oldest words for ship and book are the same—the word “bark”?

Among my happiest memories are those when I felt myself embarking on such a voyage of joyous piracy, knowing the vaults of my imagination were filling with a treasure that would out-glitter gold.

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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

copyright © 1986 by Bernard Evslin

Illustrations copyright © 1986 by Bert Dodson

cover design by Omar F. Olivera

978-1-4532-6446-1

This edition published in 2012 by Open Road Integrated Media

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New York, NY 10014

www.openroadmedia.com