Medea (52 page)

'What is the news?' asked Nauplios, taking the mooring line out of the sailor's loosening grasp and leaning back to hold the
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against the tide.

'Why, the hero Herakles is dead!' cried the messenger. 'His wife was jealous and thought his affections were waning. He was lying with a slave girl in his house, so she soaked his shirt in the blood of Nessus the centaur. That wicked one had told the gullible maiden to do this, and then Herakles would love her again. He put on the shirt and it burned him, burned him to the bone, and he could not tear it off and he could not die.'

I knew the method. One soaked linen in phosphorus and kept it under oil. Then, when it was expedient, put it on the victim and it burned on contact with the air, with a very hot flame that could not be put out by water. My heart ached for Herakles. This was a dreadful death.

'He ordered his pyre built,' continued the messenger. 'He lay on it and begged the men of Athens to light it. But no one would, afraid of killing the greatest hero in the world; until a passing stranger accepted the hero's bow in payment and thrust a brand into the wood. Then he burned like a torch, so that all within the land of Achaea saw it. But when they came to search the ashes, they found no bones. Nothing of the hero but his empty armour. He is lifted up to heaven to be with the gods,' said the man.

Phosphorus generates kiln-temperature heat. I doubted whether any bones would have been found, without the need for divine intervention.

So a stupid girl had murdered the beloved of Hera, the strongest man in the world, the most delightful of heroes, because she was jealous of a slave. It was revolting. I felt sick, and looked at Nauplios, seeing my disgust reflected in his eyes.

'We leave,' he said, jumping into the boat. I lifted Scylla and Kore and was boosted in myself. Then the sisters of Hekate put their shoulders to the keel and we slid down into the sea.

'Farewell, Achaea,' said Nauplios, spitting over the side. 'I never want to see you again.'

I spat also, and agreed.

 

The journey to Colchis, as I had expected, occupied months. We took
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, slowly and carefully, along the galley route which Jason had followed on the way to Colchis. We sailed when we could, rowed when we had to, and rested each night in a suitable harbour.

We stopped in one temple of Hera to commend Herakles to her attention. Medea mourned the hero, though not excessively, for he had told us that he was about to die and bid us remember that he was happy. I never told my lady of that jealous face I had sighted in Herakles' garden, watching him kiss her on the forehead as he plaited gentians into her straight black hair. It was a thing which she did not need to know.

At first she slept uneasily, waking often, crying that the children were gone, were dead, and I lay beside her to comfort her. But as the time went on, she woke more seldom. We who mourn do not forget, but the pain eases as it wears our hearts into a groove as a turning wheel wears a channel in a mill-stone, or a worm gnaws a worm-chamber in soft fruit. Memory returns, I have found, after a month, when the mind can contemplate it again, and so it was with my lady.

We talked about the children, endlessly rehearsing every moment of their short lives; and about Clytie, her wit and her devotion. We went from Euboea to Andros where no women can land, then to Skiathos, from Skiathos to where we saw Mount Olympus rising into cloud, and finally across to Lesbos, where no men can land. From there, rowing against an adverse current, we sailed into the bay of Troy. Women are seen in public without veils in Troy. An Achaean who tried to imprison one of them would have his work cut out, for they are well-skilled women and make their own terms with their husbands. Achaeans are not favoured amongst the maidens of that city.

It is a prosperous and pleasant place, and their waterfront taverns are better and cleaner than anywhere else. We heard the free-striding female traders speaking Trojan, a form of Phrygian, and we were accosted by a stout woman in a bright red gown and a startling headdress made of feathers and shells. She had a new house, she said, not lived in yet, and she would offer it to us for a small sum. We agreed on a price for a fire and lodging for us and the hounds. She recognised my lady's robes and her pendant of the three-legged cross, requested and got Hekate's blessing on her house, fed us well, and left us alone in a room as clean and pale as the inside of a sea-shell.

There we spoke, finally, of Jason.

'I don't know what came over me,' she said softly, cupping her chin in her hand and staring into the driftwood fire, which burned blue. 'I was mad, I think.'

'You gave him everything you valued,' I said cautiously.

'Which would have been better given to you, Nauplios,' she said unexpectedly.

'I would have valued it more,' I replied, truthfully.

'Yes,' she sighed. 'You would have. Would you value it now?'

'More than ever,' I replied through numb lips. She laid her hand on mine and I clasped it, unable to believe what I was hearing. Hoping, if this was a dream, that I would not wake. Her hand was warm, calloused and hard with hauling lines.

'I will not ask you to swear me an oath,' she said.

'Yet I will swear it,' I insisted.

'No, all swearing is vain, it is against the gods. I would not hear another man promise never to leave me, and then break his word,' she protested.

'I could not swear that in any case,' I told her. 'No one can swear that. Death will take me, Lady, and I do not know when Thanatos will come for either of us. But I, Nauplios, son of Dictys, fisherman of Iolkos, make oath and say, before all the gods, before Themis and Dike, before Aphrodite, Demeter and Artemis, that I love the lady Medea, and have always loved her. That I will stay with her as long as we live or fate allows.'

These were the words of the marriage oath taken in my own village, simple words not used in sophisticated cities like Corinth. And in the country her word is required of the lady, too, though in rich men's houses no one cares if the bride is pleased or displeased, and no one asks for permission. Poor men cannot afford to give their daughters to unacceptable suitors, for they must live in the same village as the new-married pair, and they can make the unwise father's life a misery if they are mismatched.

I did not know if she understood the significance of the ritual, though my lady understood most things much better than I.

The lady Medea knelt beside me and stared into the fire as she said, very clearly, 'I, Medea, daughter of Aerope, make oath and say before all the gods of both Colchis and Achaea, that I love Nauplios, the fisherman's son, and that I will stay with him as long as we live or fate allows.'

Then she kissed me. Quite deliberately, she unfastened my tunic at the shoulder, and it slid down my body to the floor. I saw her reach behind her neck to free her pendant and her blue tunic followed mine. She was naked and utterly beautiful and I feared to touch her. I had wanted her for so long that I was afraid I would hurt her, disgust her, or somehow turn her away from me.

'I don't know if this will work, Nauplios,' she whispered, leaning her head on my shoulder. 'I waited until I felt desire again, not wishing to give myself to you until I was sure. I have felt the warmth of your body the last moon, lying beside me.'

She sang a little of Philammon's creation hymn: '
Not the hasty fleeting incomplete mating of men and beasts
.'

'Are you afraid, Lady?' I asked.

'Oh, yes, Nauplios, I am afraid.'

'Come and lie down with me,' I said, taking her hand. 'At least we can be afraid together.'

And she chuckled a small chuckle, which gave me hope.

And it was nothing to be afraid of. I had lain with the Lemnian woman and felt as if I was being eaten alive. I had been seduced by the strange, illusory maidens of Circe's isle and felt deeply threatened. After that there had been the priestesses of Aphrodite, the lovely easy women of the temple in Corinth, and the sad Khirra widow who took me into her bed because she was cold. Medea was not like any of them. Her body yielded under my touch, smooth and warm, and I caressed her, using all the skills which I had learned from women all over Aegeas' ocean. Under soft kisses she released her frozen clutch on my shoulders and explored me, seeking to give pleasure and thus receiving it. My skin tingled with the delicate touch of her fingers. She was altogether lovely, strong, female. I would not hurry this mating, this culmination of all my desire. I found the pearl and stroked it, a circular touch which made her body jolt. I felt her begin to glow, I felt the clutch and spasm of her sheath around and under my fingers, then she opened to me by her own desire, guiding my phallus inside her, hungry for my love as I starved for hers.

We tried to be gentle, but we were not. I had wanted her for so long, and she had been without a man for years, As soon as she felt me inside her, she cried aloud and forced my hips against her, grabbing handfuls of flesh and muscle, driving her pelvis against mine until bones should have cracked. Our mouths met and bit and sucked. And I groaned in the rush of fire as her sheath bloomed around my phallus and sucked in my seed.

Then we lay in each other's arms, side by side, still joined, and fell asleep as though we had been drugged.

I woke not altogether sure of who I was or where I was, just that something unimaginably lovely had happened. A woman stirred beside me. My arm was numb, I ascertained, because she had slept in my embrace all night. Her long black hair drifted across my face and made me sneeze, and she laughed sleepily.

It was Medea, my lady, my wife, my sworn love, and she was lying in my bed, in my arms.

It was not the Lemnian woman who had required my semen, nor the generous priestesses who would take any man if he was kind. It was Medea, whom I had loved from the first moment I saw her, and she was content and replete, her head now on my chest.

Few lovers have had such a blissful awakening. I brushed the hair out of my mouth and said, 'Lady, it is morning.'

'So it is,' she replied, interested. 'But it is early, see, just dawn, and we do not need to get up yet. Even the hounds are still asleep.'

I looked. It was true. Kore and Scylla were lying as they always did if someone had banished them from the princess' bed; Kore's chin resting on Scylla's black back. I looked away hurriedly before my gaze brought a black ear up to alert, and lay down again.

And then we made love gently, softly, slowly, as I had never made love before. Time expanded, flesh became infinitely flexible. Touch seemed to sink into skin, as though there would be fingermarks, yet we were as soft as clay. She was responsive, inventive, finding new ways to please me, and I pleased her.

When we climaxed at last and lay back in the disordered bed, she said to me, 'I love you, Nauplios'; and I said, for the first time in my life, 'I love you.' For other women had wanted things from me, but it had never been my love.

When the woman in the red kirtle came with our morning meal, she looked at us and grinned all over her face, commenting, 'Now, that's a good omen for my new building! A house needs lovers in it, so that even when they are gone the walls will repeat their whispers, and those who come will be peaceable and quiet, not quarrelsome. Loving is the best way to complete a new bedchamber, though old friends getting drunk and swapping stories is good as well.'

'Lady,' said Medea, slipping easily into the Trojan tongue. Her Trojan was better than mine, fluent and idiomatic. The princess was naked to the waist and the light gilded her dark skin. I was still not sure that this was real, so I cupped a palm over her shoulder, and she was palpable bone and flesh. 'Did you choose us because you thought we were lovers?' she asked.

'Not lovers yet,' replied the woman in the red kirtle. Her headdress this morning was a relatively undecorated scarlet cloth tied into several interesting knots. 'But I knew you were going to be, this night or soon. And it was the night when you lodged with me, and I am very grateful. I have brought you bread and wine and broth, and the new fruits. The big dish is for the dogs,' she said, and went away, her crimson scarves fluttering.

We looked at each other, and laughed until we got hiccups.

We resumed our slow voyage to Colchis and I was happier than I have ever been. I admired her as she stood to the steering oar, quick and competent, now nearly as strong as she had been before Jason had plundered her love and murdered her children and her faith. We had travelled together for so long that we were friends and shipmates as well as lovers, and this was a union unknown in Achaea, where relations between men and women are always based on a difference in power. Men are strong, women are weak. Men own women and can treat them as they like, although most husbands are kind and most women can stand up for themselves. My lady was stronger than me, and had more courage. And she loved me, lay down with me in delight and rose in joy.

And because we both knew how fragile life was, how a snapped oar-blade or a hidden rock could wipe one or both of us out of existence, we were the more precious to each other.

We did not attempt to sail the Clashing Rocks, but landed on the Phrygian side and had the
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carried along the ancient portage way, by grumbling men with shoulders like Atlas and an insatiable thirst for the sour, flat beer they make in that country. We supplied a sufficiency of it to encourage their efforts, and they brought us into the Euxine Sea near the end of summer. When we got to Colchis, we would have to stay there, at least until the next spring. But I did not mind where we were, as long as she was with me.

 

The Delphic oracle had said that I was absolved. It had said, 'Another place, another life.' Then it mentioned a hero wrapped in flame, then a fisherman with the heart of a hero. I had not understood it until we heard of the death of Herakles in the shirt of Nessus.

I was afraid to believe it. Nauplios, my dear comrade, was a fisherman, and he certainly had the heart of a hero. He had been kind and constant, but I feared that my regard would be a poor return for his constancy and kindness.