“It’s a hard thing, I know myself, for a man to give up his natural pride. The outrage strikes and stings, and
before
you know it, you’ve turned, struck back. It makes me
envy women.
They’ve got no option of learning ‘the art of punching
people,’
and as for making fools out of people by abstract talk— Time and Space, the ultimate causes of things, and so
forth—
their quick minds run in the wrong direction, inclined
by nature
to thoughts of their children, comforting the weak,
by gentleness soothing
their huffing, puffing males. The fiercest of women
reveal
their best in arts like those.”
The table talk died down.
A few of those nearest had caught his allusions to
Koprophoros’ speech.
Jason went on, half-smiling, conversational (but Hera was in him, and Athena; his eyes were sly).
He said,
forming his words with care, yet hiding his trouble with
his tongue:
“When Pelias scorned me, refused me all honors
because, as he put it,
I was “wild,” not fit to be anything more than a river
tramp,
I wanted to strangle the fool. I’d have gotten off cheap,
no doubt.
The people are always more fond of their wild young
river tramps
than of grand old tyrants who stutter.” He laughed,
looked down at his hands.
Like lightning the goddess Hera returned to the
red-bearded man.
“You were scared, Jason. Admit it! Or did it seem
uncivil?”
Jason laughed again, to himself. Athena poked him. “No, not scared,” he said, and let it pass.
Old Kreon
cleared his throat and squeezed one eye shut, tapping
his fingers.
“As a matter of fact,” he said, “I’d be pleased to hear
about it.
We all would, I’m sure.”
A few of the sea-kings clapped, then more.
Pyripta glanced at him, blushing, unaware of the gentle
touch
of dark Aphrodite’s fingertips on her wrist — for the
goddess,
fickle, perpetually changing, could never resist a chance to prove herself. (Yet even now, no doubt, her concern was mainly for Medeia.) Still Jason frowned and
thought.
In the end
they prevailed upon him — and though he insisted he
felt like a fool
to be launching a tale so cumbersome (it was late,
besides:
by the stars it was almost midnight now) he began it.
The slaves
passed wine, and those who had nothing to do collected
in doorways
or stood by the treasured walls, listening. More than
a few
in Kreon’s hall had heard those fabulous tales of the
Argo,
strange adventures from the days of the princes’
exodus,
some in one version, some in another, no two agreeing; and more than a few had heard about Jason’s
storytelling,
celebrated to the rim of the world.
Reluctant as he was
to speak, his eyes took on a glint. He knew pretty well— Hera watching, invisible, over his shoulder, crafty— that whether or not he was playing for the throne, the
sighing princess,
he meant to make fools, for his sport, of fat
Koprophoros
and the Northerner, shrewd as they seemed. As he
spoke, he smiled. Near the roof
an owl was perched, stone-silent, with glittering eyes.
A lizard,
light as a stick, peeked from the wall, then darted back. Nearby, the slave Amekhenos, with the boy beside him, leaned on the door to listen, head bowed. He too, I
thought,
had things he could tell, one day, when the time was
right for it.
The house lower on the hill was dark save one dim
lamp
that bloomed dully in its shade like a dragon’s lidded
eye.
The female slave Agapetika kneeled at the rough-carved
shrine
of Apollo the Healer, in the corner of her room. Not
like Helios—
rising and setting in anger, rampaging in the
Underworld,
sire of dragons, zacotic old war-monger — not like Helios was the god of poesy, lord of the sun.
In her larger room,
high-windowed, dim, Medeia lay troubled by gloomy
dreams.
The cloth lay in the moonlight singing softly, faint as the song of mosquitoes’ wings, the sleeping children’s
breath.
Argus wove me, weary old Argus, weary old Argus who
wished them well.
6
“It was Pelias shipped us out. I might have murdered
him
and seized my father’s kingdom back, and might have
been thanked for it.
Nobody cared for his rule. But he was my uncle, and
I had
my cousins to think of, also my father’s memory,
he who’d
given my throne to Pelias, or so old Pelias claimed, backed by his toadies, I being only a child, unfit, a ruffian to be watched, required to prove my
kingliness.
I seethed, not deaf to the whispers in Iolkos. More than
age,
men hinted on every side, had hustled my father to
his grave.
It was possible. They wrestled, those two half-brothers,
from birth,
contending in anger for the place of greater dignity, whether the line of Poseidon or of Lord Dionysos should
rule.
If Pelias seemed a timid man, consider the weaseclass="underline" he does not suck in air and roar like the honest,
irascible tiger, or stamp
his hoof in annoyance, like the straightforward horse; nevertheless, he has his way — soft-furred as the coney, more calculating, more subtle and swift than a jungle
snake,
richer in mystery, conceiving his young through his
ear, like a poet.
My father, old women claim, gave my uncle Pelias
his limp—
a man more direct than I, my father; rough, red-robed, beard a-tremble in the fury of long-forgotten winds … “Shifted to a smoky old house with my mother, I kept
my quiet;
watched him when he came to call with his curkling
retinue,
watched the cowering, sequacious mob as the old
cloud-monger
stammered the state of the kingdom, stuttered his
counsellors’ thoughts,
balbutiating the world to balls of spit. I watched with the eye of a cockatrice, but when he smiled,
smiled back,
pretended to scoff at the rumors. I would not tangle
with him,
at least not yet. Like those who crowded the streets,
I beamed,
shouted evoes at his rhetoric. Things might be worse. He hadn’t seen fit to imprison us yet ‘for our own
protection’—
a gambit common enough. Yet I was in prison, all right. To an eagle the widest of volaries is not yet sky. Men came to me in the night with suggestions. I refused
to hear them.
Sibyls brought me the riddlings of gods, how they
signalled in the dust,
mumbled through thunder. I’d give no ear to their
stratagems.
‘For all he said of my wickedness — I was fifteen
then—
I preferred to wheel and deal. So, having nothing, only the dry crumbs Pelias dropped, I made my bargain with
him.
I’d sail the seas, bring back whatever my crew and I could steal, and leave it for him to decide what worth