nothing.
His daughter Pyripta twisted the rings on her fingers
and sighed.
Surely the chief of the Argonauts must be aware, I
thought,
how queer the tale as he told it now must seem to them. The Asian, fat Koprophoros, smiled. He did not mask his pleasure at seeing the Argonaut show his quirky
side.
Athena leaned close to the left shoulder of Aison’s son, warning him, struggling to guide him, her beautiful
gray eyes flashing;
Hera leaned close to his right, her lithe form moving
a little,
weaving like a snake. The story was not what they’d
hoped for at all,
this version turbulent with unresolved doubts, key
changes not
familiar, chords that clashed, a version of well-known
tales
gone crooked, quisquous, trifling matters better off
forgotten
blown up out of proportion, and matters of the keenest
interest
dropped, passed over in silence as if from obsessive
concern
with moments that made no sense. That was no way
to win
a throne. Not even Paidoboron, indifferent to thrones, would wander off like that. Athena and Hera looked
flustered,
losing control. Sweet Aphrodite, fond, dim-witted, hovering over Pyripta, was close to tears — so filled with pity for the hero as he teased the story of his life
for meaning,
she dropped all thought of Medeia, for the moment, and
charged the heart
of the princess with tender affection, innocent
compassion for the man.
He said:
“At dawn we stowed the ship with our booty, loosed the hawsers, hauled up sail, and pushed toward Phineus’
land,
riding the swirling Bosporos, driven by wind. The day was ordinary except for this: around mid-afternoon a wave came in out of nowhere, and even Tiphys,
who knew
the ways of seas and rivers like the back of his hand,
was amazed,
watching it come, a gray wall high as a mountain,
sweeping
clouds along. It hung, full of menace, directly above our sail, and we dived for hand-holds — all but Tiphys—
and waited
for the end, the shriek of the ship breaking up. We
felt — nothing!
no change, the great wave rolling on south, and behind
it the river
calm, as quiet as a pool. ‘What happened?’ I yelled
at Tiphys.
Our hearts were pounding like sledges. He said he had
no idea.
‘Impossible!’ I said. ‘You know the sea like your own
mind.
A prodigy like that, there must be some good reason
for it!’
But Tiphys could tell us nothing. ‘Perhaps some god,’
he said,
pushing his long yellow hair back. ‘Maybe some joke.’
He shrugged.
Mad Idas grinned, showed all his twisted teeth, and
farted.
“The next morning we put in across from Bithynia; anchored offshore from the mansion of Phineus the
seer. He had
the greatest prophetic gift of anyone living, a man who knew not merely by flickers, an insight here and
there,
but knew by steady intuition — or so men said — as much as Apollo knew, who knew all Zeus’s mind. He won great wealth by it, but also unspeakable misery.
“We’d heard, before we landed, nothing of that. We
went up,
eager to visit with the prophet whose reputation
stretched
farther than merchants travelled, to the ends of the
earth. The old man
felt our presence before we came. For days he’d felt us coming. He rose from his bed — none saw it but one
aged raven—
groped for his staff of olive wood, and, feeling his way by the sootblack wall, his old feet twisted and shrunken
beneath him,
he hunted his door. He trembled — age and weakness—
and his head
kept jerking, twisting to the side, then up, his horrible
blind eyes
searching. At the door he fell, siled over and tumbled,
banging
his bald, bruised head on the steps, and down he went
like a corpse
to the bottom, all without a whimper, because he’d
known he’d fall.
He lay awhile unconscious. He had no friend, no servant to care for him; not even a dog would live in the same
house with Phineus.
“After a while the seer came to
and groped around in the dust for his staff, and at last
found it
and painfully climbed back up it and onto his feet,
trembling,
jerking his head, and then, moving slowly, inch by inch, labored toward his gate and the two stone steps that
opened
on the road. There too, as he’d known he would, he fell.
And there
we found him lying with his face in the dirt, his legs
twisted up
like a child’s knot. There were trickles of thin, pink
blood in his beard
where he’d broken his teeth. My cousin Akastos rushed
up to him
and meant to lean over him, listen to his heart, but then
drew back
with a look of disgust. And now we too were near
enough to smell it:
vultures’ vomit, the stink of death on a hot day, blunt as the kick of a mule. We stood well back from
him,
gagging, breathing through our mouths, just keeping our
dinners down.
And then — horrible! — the creature we’d taken to be
dead for days,
rotting on the road, moved his hand a little — a hand
as pale,
as darkly veined as the stomach of a butchered cow. It
was caked,
like all his revolting body, with dirt. Where the hand
went back
to the dark of his filthy robe, which had fallen over it, the wrist was like two gray sticks. Then Phineus
turned his head,
opened his milkwhite eyes as if to stare straight at us, and called out: ‘Argonauts, welcome! You’ve come to
my rescue at last!’
He moved his tongue around his mouth, then wiped his
hand, spitting dust
and blood. ‘From the Harpies, I mean,’ he said. Then
widened his eyes
and let out a croak, like a man who’s suddenly
remembered something,
a source of pain and rage. We stared in amazement.
The old man’s
body shrank up, then jerked out stiff, shrank up,
jerked out,
and we thought he was dying again. But then he lay
limp, and tears
made streaks on his stubbled cheeks. ‘O murderous
gods,’ he said,
and then for perhaps ten minutes Phineus sobbed and
sometimes
pounded the road with his fists. At the end of that
time he clutched
his belly, looked furious, and spoke. ‘I’d forgotten you
wouldn’t know.
I’d forgotten I’d have to go through with you now the
whole insipid
tale. Even though it’s a fact that you people will save
me, because
it’s fated — like everything: endlessly, drearily, stupidly,
cruelly
fated — I’m forced to go through dull motions, politely
pleading,
cajoling, explaining, telling you my tedious history; and I’m forced to listen to your boring responses,
predictable even
to a man not gifted with second sight.’ He pulled
himself together
and labored up onto his knees, groping with his staff,
stifling