I had guessed all along he had been pleading his own cause. Yet there had been something in it.
He said, “And your ship is ready. A lucky omen! Listen, and see why I’ve sailed a week out of my way to fetch you.”
He told me the venture he had in hand: to sail north to the Hellespont, and force the straits, and on into the unknown Euxine, searching for gold. “There is a river comes down in the sand; they tie rams’ fleeces to strain the stream, and haul them up full of gold-dust. I talked with a captain of Iolkos who brought one home with him. He didn’t get it without trouble; but what are we—women? Why flog along old sea-roads, when one can see the world?”
I began to say, “We could sail on after Crete,” but I knew there would not be time. All my life I had wanted to see the country beyond the straits, at the back of the north wind. Reading it in my eyes, he gave me a long tale of marvels, earth-born warriors spawned from dragon-teeth, witches who could make old men young in a magic bath, and such sailors’ yarns. I laughed. And then he said, “Oh, yes, and we shall hug the Pontos coast. That’s where those Amazon girls come from, that you thought so much of in the bull ring. Don’t you want to see how they live at home?”
“Why should I?” I said. “Bull-dancers never talk of home. It’s like bellyache; it takes your mind off the bull.”
So he went back to the Kolchian gold and dragons, while I stared into the lamp-flame in its bowl of streaked green malachite, seeing pictures in the grain.
“Well,” he said at last, “but they are waiting for you in Crete. You don’t want to offend them.”
I answered, “I’ve not sent word yet.” It was all he got that day from me. But he knew that he had won.
Pontos
I
HALF ATHENS SAW US off at Piraeus, when we had sacrificed to the Lady of the Winds. I thought, when I heard the cheers, how times had changed. In the great days of Minos, pirates were no better thought of than brigands on the land. But now there was no fleet strong enough to guard all the sea-roads. Kings fought for their own shores, and sometimes sailed out to take vengeance; and where there is war there’s spoil. From this it was not far to roving on adventure. Young men could set themselves up in life; kings could grow rich without hard taxes, which pleased their people; warriors could show what they were made of, and see the wonders of the earth. Only the graybeards murmured, when I put to sea with Roving Pirithoos and manned the benches of my ships with spearmen. Chiefs’ sons, whose fathers would have had blood from anyone who offered them an oar to pull, were nearly fighting in my presence chamber to get their names in first.
They had time to work their hands in. We got a steady south wind all the way north to the straits; dolphins curvetted in our bow-wave, and blew glittering spray from so blue a sea that one looked to see it dye the oars. Once or twice we saw smoke on shore, and longships beached there; men on our business, very likely; but they let us be. It could be seen from our strength and blazons that we were a royal fleet; and wolves make way for the lion.
I could have dived in and swum with the dolphins for joy to be alive. For a long time the rover in me had been a slave and captive of the king; and now he was on holiday. My eye was as fresh as a boy’s, and my heart as light.
If we had been sailing to plunder Hellene lands, I should have felt less easy. To me all Hellenes are kindred of a sort; which is why, in the Hellene lands I have conquered, I have treated all men as my own people and made no serfs. Some kings know nothing beyond the neighbor they are at feud with; for them, you are foreign if you come from ten miles off. But I have been a prisoner where strange gods were served, and what was dear to us was nothing to our masters. It draws one to one’s own kind.
We coasted north to the mouth of Peneus, where Pirithoos’ people lit a smoke-fire for him, to let him know that his lands were quiet. So we went on, and rounded Mount Athos safely, and sighted Thasos where they mine the gold of Troy. A Trojan fleet was there, loading, and must have had a king’s ransom aboard. But one does not bite the gryphon’s tail, where the head can reach so quickly. So we passed Thasos by.
Ahead was Samothrace, where great dark cliffs and wooded steeps stand straight up from the sea. It has no ship-harbor, which has kept it wild. But it is sacred; Pirithoos and I had ourselves rowed ashore in their boats of hide, taking our stern-pennants to be charmed against shipwreck and defeat by the dwarf gods of the mountain.
We climbed steep winding paths that tacked about the crags, up through mist-swathes that danked the fir woods; past rocky slopes where the hamlets of the Sai, the oldest Shore Folk, are perched like the nests of storks, and on their roofs nest the storks themselves. At the very top, above the cloud-wet woods, are high stony uplands. The dwarf gods’ rough-hewn altar is there, and the holy cave. Having come so far, Pirithoos and I asked to be charmed against defeat and shipwreck ourselves. The rites are secret, so I will only say that they are brutish and nasty, and foul one’s clothes. I left mine on the beach below and, to feel clean again, swam all the way to my ship. However, we were neither wrecked nor defeated, so one must say of the dwarf gods that they kept their word.
While we were in the cave, a hunchback priest with the legs of a bandy child asked us each apart in a vile coarse Greek if we had done any crime beyond the common run. The dwarf gods, he said, had had to be cleansed for murdering their brother; so the man in need of cleansing wins favor there. I told him how I had not changed my sail coming home from Crete, and what had come of it; and he said it would be much to the dwarf gods’ mind. They seemed pleased too with Phithoos; but he never told me why, and, wishing to keep my own counsel, I did not ask. As we clambered down the mossed craggy paths, the wooden bull-roarers, that they dance to in the cave, boomed and roared in our ears; and when we had rowed out of the long shadow of the mountain into sunlit water, it was like being born again. But it is true that I never dreamed again about my father, after that day.
Then the straits of Helle were there before us, like the mouth of a great river. We hove-to, to wait for night. In summer the northeast wind blows down head-on all day there, but drops at sunset. We put ashore for water with all hands armed; for the people there are great ship-robbers and wreckers. Pirithoos showed me a chart the captain from Iolkos had made for him, showing which shores to hug where the eddies would run our way. This man, he said, had been a king’s heir whose father had been put aside by a powerful kinsman. The sailor son had not wealth enough to raise an army and get back his heritage; but in this voyage he got enough fleeces full of gold-dust to hire all the spearmen he needed. He had given his chart to Pirithoos because they had been boys together at Old Handy’s school; and because, as he said, he would not live to make another voyage to the Euxine. He was King in Iolkos; but he suffered a good deal from a curse that a northern witch had put on him. “So give them a wide berth,” said Pirithoos, “even if they offer to do you favors. He told this one he’d marry her if she showed him how to get the gold from Kolchis. Now the curse is eating his bones, and by his looks he won’t last long.”
“Kolchis?” I said. “Did he tell her name?”
“The crafty one, he called her. Aye, and that was her name. Medea.”
I told how she had been my father’s mistress and had tried to poison me. As to his share in it, he had been frightened for the kingdom; and the least I could do was respect his memory.
Five nights we nosed along the straits, catching the inshore eddies; first through the narrows, then by Propontis where you lose the further shore. By day we lay up watch and watch; for the Hellespont is by water what the Isthmus used to be by land. We rigged up bulwarks of shields and hides to keep off arrows, as the Kolchian captain, Jason, had warned Pirithoos to do. Even so one man was pinned by the arm and died of it. And we had only the chiefs to deal with, being too strong to tempt the lesser bands; so this Jason must have been a good man, to have forced the straits with a single ship.