dignified face—
shook his head slowly, amused. ‘You speak to me of
gentle apes
in Africa and claim their kinship. Let Argus advise us, who’d studied the world’s mechanics for most of a
century.
Is that indeed our line? — In this colder land we say mankind is a child of the cat, old source of our
crankiness,
our peculiar solitude — for though we may sometimes
hunt in packs,
and share the kill, if necessary, we have never hunted like brotherly wolves or bears.’ He smiled.
‘By another legend, the gods made man from the skull
of a rat,
that grim and deeply philosophical scavenger who picks,
light-footed,
perilously cunning, through houses of the dead, spreads
corpses’ sickness
to all he meets, yet survives himself and laughs at
carnage
and takes bright trinkets from the slaughtered.
“ ‘Be that as it may—‘ The king glanced over at his boy.’—If my
blood’s essence
is not the gentleness and wisdom of Zeus but, whatever
the reason,
has murder in it, as well as devotion and trust like
a boy’s,
then freedom is not for me what it is for Zeus. The
freedom
of the eyes is to see and the ear to hear; the freedom
of the soul
is to love and defend one’s friends, assert one’s power,
behead
one’s enemies, poison their streams.’ He smiled. ‘My
words appall you.
But come! It was not I who proclaimed the supreme
value
of liberty. I might well admire the state you dream of, where nature’s law is replaced by peace and justice—
though I would not
visit the place. But do not mistake these noble goods for freedom.’ He reached his hand to my knee and
smiled again.
Your course will no doubt prosper, Jason. Your
philosophy has
a ring to it, a nobility of glitter that can hardly fail to appeal to the collector rat. Ten thousand years from
now
men will look back to the Akhaians with pious
admiration, and to us,
the treacherous Kelts, as bestial and superstitious,
to whom
good riddance. And they may have a point, I grant. And
yet you’ll not
outlast us, lover of mind. From age to age, while your spires shake in the battery of the sun, we, living
underground,
will gnaw the animal heart, doing business as usual.’ I turned to the boy, a child with the gentleness of
Hylas. I’d heard
him sing, and his voice was sweeter than dawn in a
wheat-filled valley.
The severed heads of enemies hanging on the hall’s dark
beams
shed tears at his song, and the greatest of harpers,
Orpheus himself,
was silenced by the music’s spell. “You, too, believe all
this?’
I asked and smiled. For the Kelts were friends; I was
not such a fool
as to hope to convert their mysterious hearts and brains
by Akhaian
reasoning. The boy said shyly, How can I doubt what I’ve heard from the cradle up? This much at least
seems true
for both of you: You’d gladly fight to the death for
friends,
whatever your theories.’ We laughed. That much was true, no doubt. Medeia smiled and glanced at me.
“But now, standing at the balustrade and gazing
wearily
seaward, I saw all that more darkly. The Keltic king was lighter than I’d guessed. I’d achieved the ideal of
government
I dreamed of then: equal justice for all free citizens, peace in the city. Yet my beast heart yearned, past all
denying,
for violence. I envied Akastos, balanced, alive, on the balls of his feet, riding in that rattling chariot of
war
with the army of Kastor, repelling a wave of invaders
on the plains
of Sparta. In the silence of the star-calm night, I could
hear their shouts,
piercing the hundreds of miles — the snorting and
neighing of horses,
the swish of a javelin hungrily leaping, the tumble of
weighed-down
limbs.
“Medeia said, ‘Jason?’ I turned to her. ‘Tell me your
thought.’
‘No thought,’ I said grimly. She said no more. I saw mad
Idas
dancing with a corpse by the light of the burning gates
of the palace
of Kyzikos. Saw Idmon writhing, his belly ripped open. Saw the great eagle, with pinions like banks of silvery
oars,
sailing to the mountain of Prometheus.
“Hard times those were for Medeia. She tended to the children, kept track of
the household slaves
and hid from me her mysterious illness, or struggled to. I glimpsed it at times: a tightness of mouth, an
abstracted look;
and I remembered her sickness on the Argo. For all her
skill with drugs,
she couldn’t encompass her body’s revolt — now
menstrual cramps,
sharp as the banging of Herakles’ club, and indifferent
to the moon,
now unknown organs rebelling in their dens, now
flashes of fire
in her brains. I would find her standing alone,
white-faced with agony,
her corpse-pale fingers locked and her green eyes
glittering, ferocious.
At times in the dead of night she would rise and leave
our bed
and, passing silent as a ghost beyond the outer walls, hooded, a dark scarf hiding her face, she would search
the lanes
and gulleys of Argos for medicinal herbs — mecop and
marigold,
the coriander of incantation, purifying hyssop, hellebore, nightshade, the fennel that serpents use to
clear
their sight, and the queer plant borametz, that eats the
grass
surrounding it, and gale, and knotgrass … I began to
hear
reports of strange goings-on — a slain black calf in a
barrow
high in the hills; a grave molested; a visitation of frogs in the temple of Persephone. I kept my peace, watching and waiting. At times when I heard her
footfall, quiet
as a feather dropping, and a moment later the closing
of a door,
a whisper of wind, I would rise up quickly and follow
her.
She led me through fields — a dark, hunched spectre
in the moonless night—
led me down banks of creeks that she dared not cross,
through groves
of sacred willows as ancient and quiet as the stones of
abandoned
towns, then up to the hills, old mountains of the turtle
people
who cowered under backs of bone as they watched her
pass. She came
to a wide circle of stone, an ancient table of Hekate.
There she would slaughter a rat, a toad, a stolen goat, singing to the goddess in a strange modality,
older than Kolchis’ endless steppes,
and dropping her robe, her pale face lit by pain, she
would dance,
squeezing the blood of the beast on her breasts and
belly and thighs,
and her feet on the table of stone would slide on the
warm new blood
till the last undulation of the writhing dance. Then
she’d lie still,
like a bloodstained corpse, till the first frail haze of
dawn. Then flee
for home. She’d find me waiting in the bed. She
suspected nothing.