“ I confess,
Koprophoros is right.” He smiled, not harmed in the
least by that;
glad to be instructed. “I’ve admitted already that my
judgment was faulty,
though by no means consistently so, I hope. (That
you must decide.)
And Koprophoros would be right, too, if I claimed,
indeed,
what he seems to believe I claimed. I’ve spoken
of marriages just and unjust: the king and state,
the gods
and nature, mind and body. I meant no attempt
to split off
mind, as if body and mind were not one — as surely
as Orpheus
and Eurydike were one, while they lived, and are one
even now
in the cool and dark of the Underworld — or as Theseus and Hippolyta are one. The world is rife with
inadequacies—
imperfect creatures starving for completion. To survive
at all,
weakling must fadge with weakling, and out of that
marriage win strength.
Not all unions are therefore holy. The blazing
trumpet-vine
clinging to the elm may drive the branches of the tree
toward light,
leaning on the strength of the tree for its own
expansions; but at last
both fall together. We therefore prudently hack down
the vine
in its earliest stages, and tear up its underground tubers
and burn them.
I intended no more than that when I spoke.
“As for the business of Troy—” He paused, looked straight at the Asian, then
down, much troubled,
for all the world like a man betrayed by an old,
old friend,
and confounded by it. He said at last, too softly
for many
in the hall to hear, “I cannot fathom his attacking me
with that.
I’m an exile, a man with no army to lead and no
leader willing
to take me with his troops, though I’ve formally pleaded
and sworn with oaths
that no past glory of mine would impede his leadership.
Koprophoros knows all that. I told him myself. Why
he now
forgets it, and twists my misfortune to shame …”
His voice trailed off.
When, little by little, they grasped the force of what
he was saying,
the kings were astounded. Those in the back who’d
missed what he said
whispered to be told. Shock at Koprophoros’ treachery
rolled
to the outer walls like a wave. Only three in the room—
Koprophoros,
Jason, and I (for all that Artemis knew, I knew)— were aware that — for all his wounded but forgiving
innocence
(army or no army, lord or no lord) — Jason had spoken a cold-blooded lie. He’d told Koprophoros nothing
of the kind.
The effect of the lie was immediate and deadly, as he
knew it would be.
Not a man there had one single word of good he
could say
for Koprophoros.
(So once King Arthur, playing the demonic Other King, understood that to lose the game
meant death,
and with powerful fists he ground the chessmen of gold
to dust
and smashed the board. In horror the Other King
reached out wildly,
and, the same instant, vanished. So Jason too refused to play the game — he who had played so many far
so long.
What was I to think?)
Kreon rose, politician to the last. As if he’d seen nothing, as if merely finishing one more
evening
of banqueting, he thanked all who’d spoken and,
pleading the lateness
of the hour, dismissed the assembled kings to their beds.
As they left
the kings talked earnestly, bending to one another’s ears.
With Koprophoros,
no one exchanged a word. He gazed at the floor, furious and smiling, torn between anger and rueful admiration.
In his room, Ipnolebes watching like a man turned stone, old Kreon
talked,
pacing, wildly gesticulating as his slaves undressed him.
“There it is, you see. Right from the start!” His bald
head gleamed
in the candlelight. His shadow leaped up, stretched
on pillars,
the shadows of the slaves reaching out to him like
ghostly enemies
clutching at his life. He paused, hiked up one foot
to relinquish
a sandal, then paced again, short-legged. “We two
know better,
you and I,” he said, “than to lay our bets on wealth
alone,
honor like Jokasta’s, genius like that of—” Ipnolebes
watched
like a wolf; said nothing. The king prattled on.
Ipnolebes’ eyes
fell shut, his spirit more fierce than a god’s. “There
is no anger,”
the voice of the moon-goddess whispered in my ear,
invisible beside me,
“more deadly than a slave’s.” She laughed, aloof.
‘There lies the evil
in tyrannous oppression. It ends in the gem-pure fury
of the man
who has tolerated the intolerable, no longer loves himself or anything living.” I observed that the rest
of the slaves
were the same, as if Ipnolebes’ emotion, ravaged and
inhuman,
inwardly burning like a coal that appears (at first
glance) ash,
had crept into all their veins through the shadowed,
impotionate air.
He broke in abruptly: “Suppose your magnificent Jason
was lying.”
Kreon, in his nightcap, fat arms stretching to receive
his nightgown,
seemed not to hear him at all.
In the wide-beamed banquet hall, dark and abandoned except for one figure, moonlight
fell—
cold shadow of Artemis — mottled on the tables and
floor. A slavegirl,
servant of Pyripta, watched in the shadow of the
doorway as the man
who remained, though the others had left, paced
musingly back and forth.
She watched for some while, then hurried to her
mistress to report what she’d seen.
Quickly, silently, the princess arose, her heart pounding like a drawn kestrel’s, and, moving more softly than
a huntress in the night,
she went to discover for herself if the message were
true. Alone,
her quick mind rushing more swiftly than her small
and silent feet,
she entered the hall where Jason paced. He saw her
coming
and paused, his eyes averted from the shimmer of hex
gown. She spoke
in a whisper, a-tremble with the thought that she
might be discovered with him,
a-tremble with the thought that she might say more
than she ought to say.
Speaking, she half by accident reached out shyly for
his hand.
“My lord, what can this mean, that you stay when all
others have gone,
pacing the floor like a man tormented by doubts?
Though we’ve asked you
on many occasions to stay with us here, you have always
refused us,
insisting on duties elsewhere. So now you make me fear that my father and I have offended you, stirred up
some cause
for grief you can neither suppress nor, because of your
well-known kindness,
reproach us with. Or perhaps your heart is still troubled
by the cruel
and shameful behavior of Koprophoros. If it’s so, let me
soothe you