I laughed.
He snatched my hand, and, sickly as he looked, his grip
was fierce.
He wept. ‘J-Jason, I wish you w-well,’ he said. And
he did—
as Zeus wished Kronos well when he had all his bulk
in chains,
or as Herakles wished for nothing but peace to the
slaughtered snake
or the shredded, mammocked tree when he tore off the
apples of gold.
‘Suppose you had the suh-certain word of an oracle,’
he said,
‘that a suh-certain man was going to k-k-k-kill you.
What would
you do?’ I nodded. ‘I’d send him to fetch the golden
fleece,’
I said. Old Pelias squeezed my hand. ‘Go and f-fetch it.’ And so I agreed. Pelias had known I’d agree, of course. What Pelias couldn’t know was that I’d beat those odds. It meant two things — the perfect ship and the perfect
crew.
I could get them. That very day I checked with the
augurers,
playing it safe. No signs were ever better; and though I had, like any man of sense, my doubts about how much a squinting, cracked old priest — with
reasons of his own,
could be, for seeing what he did — how much such a
man could know
by watching a few stray birds, still, I was excited.
I was
a most devout young man, in those days. Goodness
in the gods
was a rockfirm fact of experience, I thought. And so
I told
the king that as soon as I’d gotten my ship and crew
together
I’d sail.
“It was Argus who built the ship — old Argus, under Athena’s eye. He built it of trees from her sacred groves, beech and ironwood, towering pines and great dark
oaks
that sang in the wind like men, a vast, unearthly
choir—
and Athena showed him herself which trees to cut.
When the beam
of the keel went in, old Argus smiled, his long gray hair tied back with a thong, and the beam said, ‘Good! Nice
work, old man!’
When he notched the planks and lowered them onto the
chucks, the planks
said, ‘Good! Nice fit!’ He carved the masts and shaped
them with figures
facing in all the four directions, and after he’d dropped
them,
slid them with a hollow thump to the central beam,
they said,
That’s fine! We’re snug as rocks!’ Then he built the
booms and wove
the sails. The black ship sang, and Argus had finished it.
“I gathered the crew.
“I can’t deny it: there never was
in all this world or on any world a mightier crew than the Argonauts. Sweet gods, beside the most feeble
of the lot,
I seemed, myself, a mildly intelligent hedgehog!
I gathered
Akhaians from far and near — all men of genius, sons of gods—
“And the first, the finest of them all, was Orpheus.
He was borne by Kalliope herself to her Thracian lover
Oiagros,
high on the slopes of Pimplea. Even as a child, with his
music
he enchanted the towering, frozen rocks and the violent
streams,
and to this day there are quernal forests on the coasts
of Thrace
that Orpheus, playing his lyre, lured down from Pieria, rank on rank of them, coming to his music like soldiers
on the march.
The next I chose was Polyphemon, son of Eilatos,
out of
Larissa. He was, in his younger days, a hero in the
ranks
of the incredible Lapithai who warred with the centaurs
once.
His limbs by now were heavy with age, but he still had
the same
fierce heart.
‘The next was Asterios, son of an endless line
of travellers, explorers, river merchants, a man who
could trade up
wools and linens to priceless gems. And Iphiklos was
next,
my mother’s brother, who came for the sake of our
kinship. Then
Admetos, king of Pherai, rich in sheep. Then the sons of Hermes, out of Alope, land of cornfields; with them Aithalides their kinsman. Then, from wealthy Gyrton, Koronos came, the son of Kaineos — strong as a boulder, though he wasn’t the man his father was. In Gyrton
they say
the old man singlehanded beat the centaurs back, and after the centaurs rallied and overcame him, even then they couldn’t kill him. With massive pines they
drove him
down in the earth like a nail. He was still alive.
“Then Mopsos,
powerful man whom Apollo had trained to excel all
others
in the art of augury from birds. He knew when he
came, he said,
that he’d meet his end in the Libyan desert.
Then Telamon
and Peleus, sons of Aiakos, fathers in turn of sons as awesome as they were themselves — the heroes Aias
and Akhilles,
now chief terrors of Troy.
“And after the two great brothers,
from Attica came Butes, son of Teleon, and Phalerus, famous for their deadly spears. (Theseus, finest of the Attic line, was out of business. He’d gone with Peirithoös into the Underworld, and was kept
there, chained,
a prisoner deep in the earth.)
‘Then out of the Thespian town
of Siphai, Tiphys came. He was a mariner who could sense the coming of a swell across the open
sea
and knew by the sun and stars when storms were
brewing, six
weeks off. Athena herself had sent him to join us — she who’d supervised the building of our ship.
“Then Phlias
came, Dionysos’ son, who lived by the springs of
Asopos—
child of the black-robed god who was my father’s father. Phlias was a dancer, a tiger in battle. He never learned
speech.
“From Argos came Talaos and Areion, and powerful
Leodokos.
“Then came Herakles. He’d heard a rumor of the
expedition
when he’d just arrived from Arcadia. It was the famous
time
when he carried on his back — alive and thrashing—
the monstrous boar
that fed in the thickets of Lampeia. As soon as Herakles
heard it,
he threw down the boar, tied up its feet, and left it
squealing—
loud as a hurricane — blocking the gates of the great
market
at Mykenai. His squire, Hylas, that beautiful boy whom Herakles loved like a son — or like a god — came
with him,
serving as keeper of the bow. He was like a breeze,
like rain.
You see them sometimes, boys like Hylas, and you
pause, as if
snatched out of Time, stunned for an instant. It’s as
if you’ve come
suddenly, turning a familiar corner, to a world more
calm,
more innocent than ours, and there at the door of it, a deity, childlike, all-forgiving; you find yourself thrilled to what’s best in yourself, a spring not yet
corrupt,
and as religion wells in your chest — a strange humility — something else sweeps in, a curious sorrow, deep, mysterious despair. Such gentleness, such trust, such beauty of eyes and limbs … It was as if I knew
even then,
the instant I saw him, that something terrible awaited
him,
patient as a wolf, and knew that after the beautiful boy was gone, strange things would happen to us—
smoke-black darkness,
murderous winds, waves that ground at our ship like
monstrous