paggled
as the belly of a six-months’ bride. They would bend their
masters’ knees!
How reasonable it sounds! How just! So it seemed to
them,
talking, thinking together when their men were away
on raids.
They put on mannish clothes, cut their hair like men,
took even
the rough, harsh speech they supposed sure proof of
equality.
What could their husbands say? They could curse them,
use male force
to whip their women to heel, but how could they answer
them?
They accepted, in the end. They were, of course, the
flaw in the plan.
They developed a strange, unruly passion for the
captured girls
they’d brought from their raids in Thrace — soft
concubines who’d not yet
seen their reasonable rights. Sly and hard-headed, cool, no more likely than other women to blur their desires (mix up sex and religion, say, as men can do), they kissed — all girlish tenderness — the chests and arms and fists they knew by instinct they had to tame. They
praised
their lords’ absurd ideas; they listened, dazzle-eyed— secretly making lists — to grandly romantic trash: bad poetry, stupid theology — altiloquent designs in the empty air. They got their reward, as
women
do for creeping, stooping, cajoling, flattering. They soon
were
hauled off to bed. They handled it well, of course, those
captives:
slaves eager to do anything — oh, anything! — for the beautiful, glorious lord. When he was satisfied and sleeping, they’d move their girlish hands on his
buttocks and legs,
and play, all girlish tenderness, with his private parts. So the men threw off their wives for the girls of Thrace.
Ah, then
they knew, those women of Lemnos, what it was to be a woman! They became as irrational as men, but
fiercer than men—
unchecked by the foolish poetry, the stupid ideals, of the more romantic part of the two-part beast. They
killed
their husbands, their husbands’ mistresses, and all their
sons;
learned the truth of insane ideas: men’s soft throats
flowering
blood — quick flash of white, the bone, then streaming
horror;
and whatever they thought at first — however they
cringed, all shock
when first they watched the death convulsion no
leopard or wolf
would tolerate, if he understood, but only man— they learned wild joy in the unspeakable: became not
human.
Only one old man escaped, King Thoas, father of Hypsipyle. She spared him — set him adrift across the sea, inside a chest. Young fishermen dragged him
ashore
weeks later, numb and emaciated, at the isle of Oinoe.
“They managed well, those Lemnian women, ploughing, tending to their cattle, occasionally putting
on
a suit of bronze. Nevertheless, they lived in terror of the Thracians; again and again they’d cast a glance
across
the gray intervening sea to be sure they weren’t coming.
“So when
they saw the Argo ploughing in toward shore (for all they knew, the coulter of a ploughing Thracian fleet)
they swiftly
put on the bronze of war and poured down, frantic
and stumbling,
from the wooden gates of Myrine, shouting, ‘Thracians!
Thracians!’
It was a panicky rabble, speechless, impotent with fear,
that streamed
to the beach.
“I sent Aithalides and Euphemos
to meet them, treat for terms. Old Thoas’ daughter
agreed,
in curious alarm — daylight was spent — to grant us
anchor
Just offshore for the night. My heralds bowed, withdrew.
“While the two reported, Lynkeus of the amazing eyes, mad Idas’ brother, looked with his predator’s stare at
the shore,
his sharp ears cocked, sidewhiskers quiet as a jungle
cat’s,
his dark hands steady on the Argo’s rail. His back
was round
with closed-in thought and his eerily beastlike
watchfulness.
He said, when they finished, “Jason, those people on
the shore are women.
And those by the city wall, the same. And those by
the trees.”
I looked at him. We all did. “It’s a whole damn island of women,” he said. Mad Idas, standing at his
shoulder, grinned.
“As soon as the sky was dark enough, I sent
our heralds
back, and Lynkeus with them — the runner Euphemos for quick report, Aithalides, the son of Hermes, for his wide mind and his all-embracing memory, gift of his father, a memory that never failed. They went to a room where Lynkeus said he could see an assembly
gathered.
He was right. It seemed the whole city was there.
“Hypsipyle spoke,
who’d called the assembly together. She said, in the
ravens’ version
(briefer by nearly an hour than that of Aithalides): ‘My friends, we must conciliate these foreigners by our lavishness. Let us supply them at once with food, good wine, young women, all they may dream of
wanting with them
on the ship, and thus we’ll make sure they don’t press
close to us
or know us too well — as they might if need should
drive them to it.
Let these strangers mingle with us, and the dark news of what happened here will fly through the world. It
was a great crime,
and one not likely to endear us much to these men—
or to others—
if they learn of it. You’ve heard what I say. If
anyone here
believes she has a better plan, let her stand and offer it.’
“Hypsipyle finished and took her seat once more in
her father’s
throne. Then her shrivelled nurse, sharp-eyed Polyxo,
rose,
an ancient woman tottering on withered feet and leaning on a staff, but nonetheless determined to be heard.
She made
her way to the center of the meeting place, raised
her head
with a painful effort, and began:
“ ‘Hypsipyle’s right. We must
accommodate these strangers. It is better to give
by choice
than be robbed. — But that will be no guarantee of future happiness. What if the Thracians attack us?
What if
some other enemy appears? Such things occur! ‘She
shook her finger,
bent like a hook.’ And they happen unannounced.
Look how these came
today. One moment an empty sea, and the next—
look out!
But even if heaven should spare us that great calamity, there are many troubles far worse than war that you’ll
have to meet
as time goes on. When the older among us have all
died off,
how are you childless younger women to face the
miseries
of age? Will the oxen yoke themselves? Will they trudge
to the fields
and drag the ploughshare off through the stubborn
fallow? Think!
Will the farm dogs watch the seasons turning, sniffing
the wind,
and know when it’s harvest time?
“ ‘As for myself, though death
still shudders at sight of me, I think the coining year will see me into my grave, dutifully buried before the bad time comes. But I do advise you younger ones to think. Dry wind like a claw scraping at the rocky hills by the burying ground, a long slow file of toothless hags, brittle as beetles, moaning, inching a casket along in the dry, needling wind…. But salvation lies at