your feet!
Entrust your homes, your cattle, your lovely city on
the hill
to these visitors! Whatever their beauty or ugliness, they’re lovely beside old age, starvation, the silence
at the end.’
“They listened, shocked. A few rose up and clapped;
and then
on every side, the hall applauded Polyxo’s speech. Hypsipyle stood up again, ghost-white. ‘Since you’re
all agreed,
I’ll send a messenger to the ship at once.’ She said
to Iphinoe:
‘Go, Iphinoe, and ask the captain of this expedition, whoever, whatever the man may be, to come to
my house;
and tell his men they may land their ship and come
into town
as friends.’ With that, the beautiful golden-haired
daughter of Thoas
dismissed the meeting and set out in haste for home.
“More swiftly
Euphemos came, racing over the water, to the Argo, and so we were ready for the news Iphinoe brought.
“Blue eyes
cast down, half-kneeling like a dancer, a slave,
a suppliant,
she poured out her tale. I hardly listened to the words,
wondering
at the clash of appearance and fact. She seemed more
soft than ferns
at dawn, more sweet than a bower of herbs and
gillyflowers,
clear and holy of mind as sunlit glodes. I stood bemused, and heard her out. In the end, I said I’d come. None spoke against it. We stood observing Iphinoe like
men
in a trance: the night was silent, not a wave stirring.
By the light
of the ship’s torches she seemed a celestial vision of
beauty
and innocence — and yet we knew — and we stared,
numbed,
like a child who’s discovered a spider in the fold
of a rose. When the girl
was gone, receding like music toward that torchlit shore, we gathered around Aithalides, who told what he’d seen and heard, and we turned it over in our minds like a
strange coin,
an arrowhead centuries old. And then I went to them. I hardly knew myself what I meant to do. Avenge the dead, perhaps. Yet how can a man set his mind
to avenge
a crime he can hardly conceive, an act as baffling as
the dreams
of camels?
“Old Argus knew my thought, as usual.
He called me, frowning, and gave me a cloak as I
started for town.
The man knew more than it’s good for a man to know.
The cloak
was crimson, bordered with curious designs that
outshone the rising
sun. I remember the old man’s look as he pointed
them out.
Here the cyclops, hammering out the great thunderbolt for Zeus, one ray still lacking, lying on the ground
and spurting
flame. And here Antiope’s sons, with the town of Thebes, as yet unfortified. Zethos shouldered a mountain peak— he seemed to find it heavy work — and Amphion walked behind, singing to his lyre; a boulder twice his size came trundling after him. Here came Aphrodite,
wielding
Ares’ formidable shield. It mirrored her breasts. And
here
a woodland pasturage, with oxen grazing — in a grove
nearby,
herdsmen fighting off raiders. The trees were wet with
blood.
And here stood Phrixos with the golden ram, the huge
beast speaking,
Phrixos listening, and the whole weird scene so artfully
wrought
that all who looked at it hushed for a moment,
listening too,
straining for the creature’s words. Who knows what
all this means?
Argus wove it. Who knows if he knew himself?
“I wore
the mantle, crossing to the city, and the water glowed
blood-red
beside me. When I passed through the gates the women
came flocking around me,
reddened, demonic in the mantle’s glow. They sighed
and smiled
and held out flowers that gleamed, as eerie as
gardens lit
by burning walls. I kept my eyes on the ground
and walked
till I came to Hypsipyle’s palace. The double doors
with close-fit
panels flew open — panelling of cypress, the beams
of the palace
cedar, and all around me the scent of nard and saffron, calamus and cinnamon, and incense-bearing trees,
Oriental
myrrh and aloes — and Iphinoe led me quickly through the hall and brought me to a polished chair where I sat
and faced
the queen. In blood-red stillness that sweet face looked
at me.
For all the old artificer’s magic, her cheeks were as fair between their pendants — and her neck in the cup of
her necklaces—
as young doves hiding in the clefts of a rock, the
coverts of a cliff.
‘My lord,’ she said, more soft, more gentle than a child,
“why have
you stayed so long outside our city — a city that has lost its men? They have gone to the mainland to plough
the fields of Thrace.
She kept back tears. ‘I’ll tell you the truth. In my
father’s time
they raided there, bringing booty home, and women too. But cruel and childlike Aphrodite for a long time had kept her eye on them, and at last she struck. She
made
their hearts furnaces, howling, raging with lust — burned
out
their wits. They lost all sense of right and wrong,
conceived
a loathing for their wedded wives: turned them out of
doors and took
their captives into their beds. For a long time we
endured it,
hoping their lust would die — but its heat increased.
No father
cared at all for his daughter; a cruel step-mother
could kill
the girl-child in his sight, and the father would laugh.
No brother
cared for his sister as he ought or defended his mother.
At last,
at the dark whisper of a god, we resolved to act. One day when the men sailed home from raiding, we closed our
gates against them,
hoping to drive them elsewhere, whores and all.
They fought us.’
She paused, lowering her eyes, as though the memory were even now a source of pain and shame. ‘Some died,’ she said, ‘some both on their side and on ours. In the
end,
they begged from us our male children and left, and so went back with their women to Thrace. And there they
are now, scratching
a livelihood from its snowy fields. ‘She paused again, eyes turned aside, maidenly.’ Because of that, noble stranger, I invite you to stay and settle with us. All that women can do for men we’ll do for you, beyond your wildest hopes. And you yourself, captain— robed like a king — my father’s sceptre shall be yours
alone,
and all you say shall be heard as law on Lemnos.’ She
raised
her shy eyes, gently pleading, like a girl who’s come to
her beloved
and stands now naked and trembling, awaiting her loved
one’s hands,
fearing he’ll scoff at her gift as shameful. What
could I say?
I could easily think, in the cloak’s unnatural light,
that all
her words were lies. Yet how could I know? Old
Argus wove
the cloth. There was magic in it, the magic of Athena,
queen
of cities, builder of the Argo. And what did Athena care for Hypsipyle, the quiet power a man might gain as king on that lonely island, guarding its old,