Medea (55 page)

'Perses, why did you come to Colchis?' I asked.

'For gold,' he answered. He was frightened, but not terrified.

'We are protected by a powerful goddess, Hekate the Black Bitch,' I informed him. He did not reply, but jerked his thumb at Trioda.

'You think that she can protect you?' I laughed softly, and that seemed to alarm him, for he shrank back. 'She has left the goddess to follow you, Perses. She has no power now.'

Something was gathering at the back of my head. It was a pain, as if someone was pinching my brain, or squeezing it in a vice. This had always been Trioda's punishment for inattentive princesses and she would never tell me how she did it. I looked at her. She was smiling in triumph, lips parted over her teeth.

But I knew about pain. I could bear it.

'You will be cursed unless you leave now,' I told Perses. 'Your followers who were in the palace are dead.'

He shouted suddenly, three words which might have been names.

I gave him time to feel the silence, and then said, 'She is a powerful goddess and she gives us certain authorities. One is to command ghosts. Hekate is the queen of phantoms. Ghosts are all about you, Perses. Bloodstained ghosts. You have killed many. One here has a knife in his back - is he yours? And the child with blond hair, how about him?'

The interesting thing was that I could see them, too. They were not vengeful but shadows, quite mindless, and somehow attached to their murderer. The act which had taken their lives had bound them to Perses. I did not have to make them up. I just described them, while the pain in my head grew.

'The woman in the green tunic, her throat is cut - and the other one in red, she was smothered, a rape perhaps? Would you like me to tell her that you didn't mean to kill her, just to silence her screams?'

'Tell her,' he shouted. I spoke to the phantom but she could not hear me, of course. She was what Colchians call the
ba
soul, a mere shape and form, quite harmless, though Perses didn't know that.

'She does not believe you,' I told him. 'What about this man in armour, much like that black armour you wear. Is he your father, Perses, or your brother?'

'Tell him to leave me alone,' he cried.

'They will stay here if you leave Colchis,' I insinuated. He was wavering, almost convinced and very frightened now, when Trioda took a hand.

'Do not believe the witch, Lord,' she said quickly. 'There is nothing she can do to banish your ghosts. And there is much profit to be made of Colchis yet, before we leave for Asia and your destiny.'

'She is powerful,' said Perses, pointing at me.

'She has no power but that of brazen insolence.' Trioda grabbed for my arm, and then laughed.

One of Hekate's people was wrapped around my wrist, and it raised its head and hissed.

'Do you think to frighten me with that?' she demanded. The pain in my head increased.

Trioda smiled a pitying smile at me and seized the viper. Then she watched in great amazement as it turned in her hand and sank its fangs into her arm.

'But I am a priestess of the Dark Mother,' she protested, sinking down into her chair. I was almost sorry for her, this bitter and spiteful woman who had done her best to destroy my life.

'You were her priestess, but when you betrayed her and me, she cast you out,' I explained. Even if I had wanted to save her, there is no cure for the venom of the red viper. 'And she took away from her faithless priestess the ability to handle serpents.'

The pain in my head vanished. Trioda collapsed and died in a few minutes. She tried to speak to me again before her heart ceased to beat, but she could not form words. I do not know whether she meant to ask for my forgiveness or to curse me afresh.

After the removal of his pet priestess, we had little further trouble with the usurper of Colchis. He required no persuasion at all to get out of bed and precede us through the palace, out of the door and down to the river, where we launched a boat in which we also laid the three bodies of his fellow pirates. On the journey he became distressed and shouted at us several times, but all I needed to do was to lean a little closer and let him see the red viper, and he was as clay in our hands.

And when we reached Poti, the town was awake, picking over a huge pile of stolen property on the quay. Three Scyths lolled on the deck of a ship, looking exquisitely self-satisfied and idle, which is a habit of Scyths and an affront to all respectable persons.

I saw into the vessel as we pulled up. The crew were all trussed into neat bundles and laid out in rows. They had been gagged, which explained the silence. We allowed Perses to climb on board and I spoke to him for the last time.

'We will drag your ship into the middle current, Perses, and it will carry you to Asia, and maybe your destiny. I will keep your ghosts here with me. But if you return, pirate, you will meet all your nightmares here again, and they will haunt you beyond flesh and bone, beyond mind and spirit.'

He nodded. I sprinkled him with certain herbs and made the prayers to my lady Hekate, and saw his phantoms separate, fade and vanish into the Colchian mist. The
ba
soul, once released, sinks back into mist and thence into rain or dew, and re-enters the earth. Perses, who must have had some rudimentary insight, noticed at once that they were gone. Even in his bare skin, about to be thrust into the world with a whole crew to untie and placate because there had been no profit from his capture of a city, he gave me a small bow and thanked me for taking the ghosts away.

I would have liked to know him better. Perhaps. He had a certain brazen, gambler's courage. The sailors towed Perses' ship out into the current and released the lines, and the pirates vanished into the fog.

I returned to the palace to have Trioda's body prepared for burial in the earth. And to my great surprise, I wept.

 

The restoration of the king was the excuse for a very large feast. Medea and I sat with the Scyths, who ate most delicately and carefully for the most part. The Colchians were loud with complaints about the actions of the tyrant Perses, though any people with a scrap of initiative would not have allowed themselves to be plundered by one ship-load of strangers.

Unless, of course, they had inside help. Such as we had received from my lady, or Perses had been given by Trioda. I had accompanied Medea to the funeral of this woman whom she had hated for years. All she said about Trioda was spoken while we were looking down into the wrappings at the corpse.

'All this time I've been thinking of her as a Titaness, a huge, overbearing monster. But she's just a small woman, and old.'

'And now dead and entirely done by her own hand,' I pointed out.

'Just so,' said my lady.

 

I walked around Poti and thought it a very nice little town. It was not enclosed, as Colchis was, stranded in the cold marshes halfway up a river. It had a good harbour and a beach for careening ships. Fresh water was always available from Phasis, and there were other springs besides. Plenty of trade went through Poti, in valuable commodities like gold and amber and parchment, so there was a babble of different voices along the dockside; no Achaeans, but Phrygians, Trojans, and a language which I had never heard, spoken on the other shore of the Euxine.

I joined some Colchian fisherman as they went out after the schooling sea bass; and after they had seen for themselves that I could obey an order, secure a line, trim a hip against a wave and haul a net, they accepted me. There were old men amongst them who reminded me of my father, Dictys, and some of their sayings were identical.

'Never assume that a mooring line is secure or an anchor cannot shift,' they warned me solemnly. 'For Oceanos is a god and gods are whimsical.' I felt at home.

I accompanied my lady when she rode with the Sauromatae women the next day. They were returning to Washing Place, and I wanted my boat.

'Lord,' said Medea to me, as we rode knee to knee along the grassy edge of the sea.

'Lady?' I asked.

'Will we stay here?'

'I will take the
Good Catch
down to Poti, and there I will buy or build a house,' I said, smiling into her anxious face. 'I am a fisherman, after all, and the fishing here is good. Will you come with me, Medea?'

'You don't want to live in the palace?' she asked. I could not read her expression, but I owed her the truth. 'Aetes wishes to make you king,' Medea told me.

'I am a simple fisherman, Lady, and I will not be a king.'

'You mean this, Nauplios?'

'Certainly,' I said, fear gripping my heart. I had come from Iolkos by the longest road to Colchis, and I had brought a princess home. She would naturally want to regain her rank and her marble rooms and her slaves. I was about to lose her, who had journeyed so long with me, and whom I loved with all my heart.

Then she grabbed my rein and forced my horse to a halt.

'We must go with the Scyths and collect the hounds and the boat,' she said rapidly. 'Then we will find a house and never, never think of kingship again.' And she flung herself off her horse and into my arms and held me tight, her face pressed against mine.

 

I had been so afraid that Nauplios would fall in with the king's wishes and accept the title of prince. I had returned to Colchis, and it was chill and dangerous, full of bloodsucking insects and fog which stank of dead men. I had acquired a taste for waterfronts, and I liked Poti. I thought longingly of a house for a fisherman and a priestess, with a wide bed to lie warm in with room for the dogs, and maybe a small garden and a vine. I would ride with the Scyths, of course, and I had to go and visit Tyche of the shrine of Hekate Oldest. I might bear or I might be barren; I did not care. I wanted a sanctuary, I wanted rest and love and sleep.

But if Nauplios accepted the burden and honour of the title of heir to the throne, I would go with him because I could not bear to leave him. And in that closed stone city our love would be blighted, would sicken and die in the mist, until I would one day wake alone again and forever.

It took me all my courage to ask him, but I should have known; I should have trusted to his integrity and his honest good sense. He knew that he did not want to be king. He had seen enough of kings to last him as many lifetimes as an Orphean. When he told me that he wanted what I wanted, I threw myself into his arms and laughed for joy.

Autumn came. I was sitting on a cask of Achaean wine, watching the unloading of a ship, when I heard a voice singing. It was a clear, beautiful voice, pitched to ring over the sailors swearing and the traders crying prices for their stock, and it was singing my name.

Medea, priestess,

Colchis' princess,

Finds her happiness

With a mariner.

Sailors all

Take note of this:

Be kind to your woman,

She might be a princess.

 

'Philammon!' exclaimed Nauplios, abandoning his discussion on the respective merits of hemp or hair ropes for nets, a topic on which all sailors had an opinion.

'Greetings and well met! I was looking for you. Ah, you are happy, as the song says,' he said, holding us at arm's length and smiling.

'We are happy, and you? Have you something to tell us?' Nauplios asked.

'Some things, let us sit down,' said the bard. 'I can't stay. That boat over there is taking me back to the portage way. You are settled, that is good. I have bad news for you,' he said.

Nauplios stood behind me, his hands on my shoulders.

The bard said, 'It is about Jason.'

'I care nothing for Jason,' I said, with perfect truth.

'Care then as you would for any human in Phanes' net. He declined, as you might have heard. He drank, and disgraced himself. Then he went down to
Argo
, where she lies rotting on the beach, with a rope, intending to hang himself from the keel. But before he could…'

'The keel fell,' I said, remembering my bright little vision. 'The statue of the goddess Hera fell, and crushed him.'

'Just so. And even I have not been able to make an epic out of the Argosy. It does not end well, not as a story should. The audience would be dissatisfied with Jason's decline and Medea's despair and this small conclusion, a fisherman as a husband and a small house on the shore at Poti.'

'It is not a small thing,' said Nauplios gravely. 'Happiness is not a small thing.'

Philammon shook his coppery hair and laughed. 'You are right. Oh, and here is the other news out of Achaea. Guess who has come from Mysia to defend Herakles' children? Deianeira hanged herself, you know, once she realised what she had done.'

'Who?' I asked.

'Hylas. Nauplios knew him. A very pretty boy, who was, he says, beguiled by the nymphs. Someone clearly beguiled him, and kept him for years, but now he has turned up, a strong young warrior. He fought off one attack on the sons of Herakles, and says he will defend them with his life.

'I'm coming now,' the bard called to the captain of the little boat, who was waving. He leaned down and kissed us both, and the last we saw of Philammon he was running down the quay, red hair flying, green tunic open, then leaping into a boat which would bear him out of the Euxine Sea.

 

It was the middle of winter. The gales had lashed the sea. Fishing was out of the question and I came into the house shaking off water from my sodden cloak. Nauplios laid down the carving he was making and told Scylla that she could relax. She had been acting as model and took this seriously, but it was a trial for an ageing dog and she collapsed next to Kore with a relieved sigh and went to sleep. The hounds were old, stiff in their joints and disinclined to move, not even to chase birds, though they always accompanied Nauplios on his morning walk down to the quay and back. The house was white and warm. Firelight glittered off Herakles' sword, hung on our wall next to a painting of Hekate on parchment. I was freezing.

Nauplios kissed me and took off my cloak, spreading it over a chair to dry.