with them,
living so close, if Poseidon weren’t a shield between us, father of our line. They’re a strange people, lawless,
blood-thirsty—
true barbarians; nothing at all like us, believe me! They no more understand our civilized laws of
hospitality
than cows know how to fly. Great earthborn monsters, amazing to look at. Each of the beasts is
equipped
with six great arms, two springing from his shoulders,
four below—
limbs coming out of their hairy, prodigious flanks.
They look
like spiders, in a way, but their bug-eyed heads are the
heads of men,
and their hands, except for the hair, are constructed
like human hands.
Their penises are long and double, and the cullions hang like barnacles on a ship just beached, dark tumorous
growths.
Ravenous feeding and raping are all those monsters
know.
Stay clear of them, that’s my advice. No god ever talks to that fierce crowd: no priest advises their violent hearts to gentleness, respect for what the gods love.’
“I pressed him,
asking what lay still further north. He told me all he knew. At last, thanking Kyzikos a thousand times for his kindness, we went to our beds. I saw him
speaking with his seer,
smiling happily. We were, the seer was telling him, the ones. Or so I found later.
“In the morning. I sent six men
to climb to the higher ground, in the hope of learning
more
of the waters we’d soon be crossing. I brought the
Argo round,
edging the shore of the island, heading north, to meet
them.
“We’d badly underestimated the earthborn savages. Watchful as they were, my men didn’t see them sneaking
around
from the far side of the mountain, slipping through
the trees like insects,
and then suddenly hurtling away down the slope like
pinwheels,
arm under arm crashing like boulders through the
brush.
They reached the wide harbor and, working like lightning, began to
wall up
its mouth with stones, penning my men up like cows.
Luckily,
Herakles was there with the six. He snatched out arrows, bent back his recurved bow and, fast as a man could
count,
brought down seven monsters. At once, the others
turned,
hurling their lagged rocks, a hundred at a time. He fell, and their huge rocks piled around him like a Keltic
tomb. Ankaios,
giant boy, gave a wail, a bawl like a baby’s, and ran to help. Then almost as fast as they fell, he snatched
up the rocks
that buried Herakles, and hurled them back, heaving
them wildly.
We fled in terror for the open sea as the great stones
came,
rumbling slowly like elephants driven off a cliff, making a rumbling sound as they passed us, inches from our
sails. Then Koronos,
son of Kaineos whom the centaurs could not kill, ran
down
and helped Ankaios, weaker than the boy but cooler,
saner.
And now the rest got their spirits back — the mighty
brothers
Telamon and Peleus got arrows in their bows, and Butes’ spear that never missed struck down the
monsters’
chief. The monsters charged them with all their fury,
and more
than once; but the brutes were done for, squealing like
apes gone mad,
pissing and shitting as they died. On our side, we
hadn’t lost
a man — by no means Herakles! When they rolled
the stones
from his face they found him grumbling, angry that his
tooth was chipped.
We on the Argo rowed in.
“When the long timbers for a ship
have been hewed by the woodsman’s axe and laid out
in rows on the beach
and lie there soaking till they’re ready to receive the
bolts, and the carpenters
move among them, checking them, nodding with cool
satisfaction,
dropping a comment from time to time on the beauty
of the thing,
the beauty that only a craftsman can understand—
no art,
no way of life seems finer; and so it was with us that day as we walked the beach, studying the fallen
monsters,
stretched out, roughly in rows, on the gray stone beach.
Some sprawled
in a mass, with their limbs on shore and their heads
and chests in the sea;
some lay the other way round. We observed how the
arrows had struck,
how heads had been crushed, how this one had made
the mistake of running,
how that one had stood at the wrong time, and this one,
stupidly,
had pulled the spearshaft out and had needlessly bled
to death.
Then, arm in arm, like men charged with some lofty
purpose,
proud of our art, and rightly, we boarded the ship.
Behind us
vultures settled on the corpses — came down softly,
neatly,
dropping like a hushed black snowfall out of the
ironwood trees.
“We loosed the hawsers of the ship, caught the
breeze, and forged ahead
through choppy waves. We sailed all day. At dusk,
the wind
died down, then veered against us, freshened to a gale,
and sent us
scudding back where we came from, toward our
hospitable friends
the Doliones. We came to an island in the dark and
landed,
hastily casting our hawsers around high stones. Not a
man
on all the Argo guessed that this was the very land we’d left, the isle of Kyzikos. As for the
bridegroom-king,
he leaped from his bed at the alarum and rushed to
the shore with his men,
bronze-suited, armed; and, thinking his troubles were
past — the threat
the seer had warned him of — he struck at once,
believing us
raiders — Macrians, maybe — but in any event,
unwelcome,
flotsam jacked from the sea. We met, and the clash
of our implements
boomed in the dark, leaped like the roar when a
forest fire
pounces on brushwood, blowing its bits sky-high. We
pushed them
back, back, back, to the walls of the city — Herakles and Ankaios moving like great black towers, blocking
out stars
ahead of us, the rest of us following like the widening
belly
of a ship, our swords and spears flashing out in the
dark like oars.
They fled through the gates and heaved against them,
straining to close them.
We lashed torches to our spears and hurled. The city
went up
like oil. Ye gods but we were good at it! Mad Idas
shrieked,
dancing with a female corpse. Leodokos, strong as a bull, pushed in the palace doors and we saw white fire inside. And then one struck at my left, and I whirled, and even
as the spear
plunged in, I saw his face, his helmet fallen away: Kyzikos! He sank without a word, and when his
muscles jerked
and his head tipped up, there was sand in his open
eyes. Too late
for shamed explanations now; too late to consider again the warning of the seer! He’d had his span: one more
bird caught
in the wide, indifferent net. Nor was he the only one. Herakles killed, among lesser men, brave Telekles and Megabrontes; Akastos killed Sphodris; and Peleus’ spear brought down Gephyros and Zelos; Telamon brought