wrong …
it seems to me … though what would I know, mere
foolish old slave?”
Kreon turned his bald head slightly, lips pursed,
eyebrows
low, dark, thick as a log-jam. His neck was flushed — old
rage
not yet burned out. Ipnolebes said: “With Oidipus blind, self-exiled, Queen Jokasta dead, the city of Thebes surrounded, you had no choice but to seal the gates.
That stands—”
He paused, looked baffled for a moment. That
stands … to reason. And of course
Antigone had no choice but to break your law, with
her brothers
unburied, food for vultures. So it seems … It was a terrible time, yes yes, but no one…” His voice
trailed off.
Kreon’s mouth tightened. “I should have relented sooner.
I was wrong.
To think otherwise … Would you have me consider
our lives mere dice?”
Ipnolebes wrung his hands. “I’m a foolish old man,
my lord.
It seems improbable …” “If it’s true, then Koprophoros’
way’s the best:
Seize existence by the scrotum! Cling till it shakes you
loose,
hurls you out with an indifferent horn toward emptiness! I refuse to believe it’s true!” But his eyes snapped shut,
and he whispered,
“Gods, dear-precious-holy-gods!” I looked at Corinth’s
towers,
baffled by the sudden change in him. I looked, in my
vision,
at the parks, academies, sculptured walkways, houses
of the people
(white walls, gardens, children in the streets) — a city
as bright
as Paris, greener than London, as awesome in its power
for good
or evil as rich New York; and suddenly I knew what
shattered him:
Thebes on fire. (Berlin, San Francisco, Moscow,
Florence …
New York on fire. Babylon is fallen, fallen...)
The slave shook his head,
rueful. “My lord, what got you back onto this? We
should think
of the present, be grateful for the gifts the generous
gods give now!”
For a long time Kreon was silent, looking at the sea.
Below him
the city, blazing in the sunlight, teemed with tiny
figures
moving like busy insects through the streets. The tents of the marketplace were shimmering patches of color.
By the walls
stood hobbled donkeys, loaded with goods — bright cloth,
rope, leather,
great misshapen bags of grain, new wineskins,
implements;
above it all, like the tinny hum that rises from a hive, the sound of the people’s voices buying and selling,
begging,
trading — people of every description, thieves, jewellers, shepherds driving their bleating sheep and goats, sailors up from the ships in the harbor, zimmed and
clean-shaved spintries—
shocking as parrots — and prostitutes, old leathery
priests …
The old king pointed down at them, touching
Ipnolebes’ arm.
“See how they live off each other,” he said. “Shoes for
baskets,
honey for wine, filigree for gold, a few pennies for a prayer. Picture of the world — so Jason claims.
Picture
of the Argo, gods and men all ‘arm in arm,’ so to
speak:
no one exactly supreme. If Antigone and I had been like that, more willing to give and take …” Ipnolebes
scowled
but kept his thoughts to himself. When Kreon glanced
at him
he saw at once that something festered in the old slave’s
mind.
“Don’t keep your thoughts from me, old friend,” he said.
His look
had a trace of anger in it. Ipnolebes nodded, avoiding the king’s eyes. His gnarled hands trembled on the
white of his beard
and it came to me that, for all their talk of friendship,
they were
slave and master. Ipnolebes touched his wrinkled lips with two bent fingers and mumbled, as if to himself,
“I was thinking—
trying to think — the old brain’s not what it used to be,
my lord — thinking …
from Aietes’ point of view… how he felt when the Argo—every man at his task, the south wind
breathing
his steady force in the sails — came gliding to the
Kolchian harbor
to steal the fleece, bum ships, seduce his daughter—
destroy
his house.” Suddenly he laughed — the laugh of a
halfwit harmless
slave. King Kreon looked at him, his small eyes wider, glinting. “Aietes was wrong,” he said. The gods were
against him.”
Ipnolebes nodded, looking at the ground. They must
have been.
But what was his error, I wonder?” King Kreon glanced
away.
“Who knows?” he said. Tyranny perhaps. Or he
slighted some god—
who knows? It’s none of our business.” He closed his
mouth. It became
a thin, white line, perspiring at the upper lip. “Who
knows?”
He shot a glance at Ipnolebes, but the old man’s face was vacant. His mind had wandered — a trick of Athena,
at his back—
and Kreon pressed him no more. Ipnolebes excused
himself,
mumbling of work, and the king released him, frowning
slightly.
When the slave was gone, he stood on the balcony alone,
thinking.
All around him, gods stood watching his mind work, slyly disguised as crickets, spiders, a lone eagle ringing slowly sunward, on Kreon’s left
Below,
Ipnolebes paused on the stairway, listening. A frail
old woman,
slave from the south, was singing softly:
“On ivory beds
sprawling on divans,
they dine on the tenderest lambs from the flock
and stall-fattened veal;
they bawl to the sound of the minstrel’s harp
and invent unheard-of instruments of music;
they drink their wine by the bowlful, use
the finest oil for anointing themselves;
death they do not sing of at all.
and death they do not think of at all;
But the sprawlers’ revelry is over,”
Without a word, Ipnolebes descended, thinking.
On a bridge in the palace gardens, Pyripta stood looking
down
at fernlike seaweed, the wake of a swan, the blue-white
pebbles
below. She stood till the water was still and her reflection — pensive, silk-light hair falling over
her bosom—
looked back at her. She seemed to be trying to read the
face
as she would the face of a stranger. The face said
nothing — as sweet
and meaningless as a warm spring day. She pouted,
frowned,
experimented with a smile. She glanced away abruptly, with a frightened look, alarmed by art. I hurried nearer, picking my way through flowers. Aphrodite appeared
beside her,
faintly visible on the bridge, like a golden haze, and