on the fleece, spread coil on coil through the groaning
branches of an oak,
the mightiest oak in the world. We stared in wonder,
in the moonlight.
I glanced at Orpheus’ lyre. He smiled, shook his head.
‘Not this one.’
I turned toward Mopsos. Tire in the tree, you think?’
He laughed.
‘And make that creature cross, boy? Not on your life!’
The dusky
eyes stared out at us, dreaming, if old snakes dream.
I poured
libations out, pure wine as sweet as honey from a golden cup — a gift to the river, to earth, to the gods of the hills, to the spirits of the Kolchian dead. Then the boy
Ankaios spoke:
‘We’ve reached the land of Kolchis. The time has come
to choose.
Will we speak to Aietes as friends, or try him some
harsher way?’
Nobody answered him, all of us weighing the power
of the snake.
“Advised by Melas, I ordered my men to row the Argo to the reedy marshes, and to moor her there with
anchor stones
in a sheltered place where she could ride. We found one,
not far off,
and there we passed the night, our eyes wide open,
waiting.
No one asked me now if the thing we were doing
made sense.
War proves itself — all reason slighter than a feather
in the wind
beside that strange aliveness, chilling of the blood,
dark joy.
We’d become what we were, at last: a machine for theft:
a creature
stalking the creature in the tree, our multiple wills
interlocked,
our multiple hungers annealed by the heat of the great
snake’s threat.
I whispered my name to myself and it rang like a
stranger’s name,
the name of a god, an eagle, some famous old Titan’s
sword.
Behind me, stretching to the rim of the world, ghost
armies waited,
silent, nameless, in strange attire, watching for my sign with eyes as calm as dragon’s eyes. The goddess was
in us.”
13
So he spoke, and the visiting kings sat hushed, as if
spellbound, through
those shadowy halls. It seemed to me that his weird
vision
of armies behind him, waiting in the wings, stirred all
who heard him
to uneasiness. As he ended, the room went strange.
The walls
went away like the floor of the sea, yet vast as the great
hall seemed,
the goddess showed me chambers beyond, blue-vaulted
rooms,
expanses of marble floor like a wineglass filled to the
brim
with light, and marmoreal peristyles, each shining pillar twelve feet wide, the architraves made hazy by hovering clouds; and in those spacious rooms where no life
stirred,
I might not have guessed the existence of all those
gold-crowned kings
attending to Jason’s tale.
I found
a room where slaves were whispering the name Amekhenos. The goddess showed me where he crouched in the bowels of the palace peering
out, eyes narrowed,
watching the palace guards pace back and forth on the
wall,
their queer strut mirrored in the lilypad-strewn lake. The
grass
was as green as grass in a painting, the sky unnaturally
blue;
the walls of houses below were the white of English
cream,
with angular shadows, an occasional tree, its leaves autumnally blazing. Far to the east, beyond the sea’s last glint, it occurred to me, there were more
kings gathered,
brought together by the tens of thousands, to die for Helen, or honor, or the spoils of war on
the plains
of Troy. Beside the guests of Kreon, the numberless host of Agamemnon’s army would seem the whole human
race.
Yet beyond rich Troy lay Russia — darkforested Kolchis
— and Indus,
and beyond those two lay China, so many in a host
that the eye,
even the eye of vision, couldn’t gather them in. “Behold I” the goddess said, invisible all around me. With the
word
she darkened the sky, and the grayblue waters became,
all at once,
a horde of people on the move, bearing their possessions
on their backs,
features ragged with hunger, eyes too large, luminous. The children walking at their parents’ sides or
straggling behind
had distended bellies, and I knew by the gray of their
eyes that they carried
plagues. I watched them passing — the crowd went out
from me
from horizon to horizon, and the dust they stirred made a cloud so vast that the mightiest rays of the
sun were hidden.
Suddenly the cloud was a dragon with a fat-thighed
woman on its back,
her chalk-white, hydrocephalic forehead covered all over with elegant writing, swirls and serifs that squirmed
like insects
as I tried to read. The woman had a robe of flowing
crimson
and she carried a torch which belched thick smoke like
factory smoke.
She rode toward me, and then — from north, south, east,
and west—
great louts came lumbering, treading on the people, and
made their way,
teetering and reeling, to the huge woman. With her
hands, she raised
her skirt and spread her buttocks for them, and roaring,
prancing,
they thrust themselves in, and the earth and sky were
sickened with filth,
blackened to a towering mass like a writhing,
bull-horned god.
I choked and gagged. “Goddess!” I cried out. “Goddess,
save me!”
Gulls darted back and forth above the grayblue water, mournfully calling. The slaves in the palace were
whispering.
And then, baffled, still puzzling at the meaning of the
strange revelation,
I was back in the hall of Kreon, where Jason was
standing as I’d left him,
silent, and old King Kreon was waiting, the slave beside
him,
Ipnolebes. I wondered if all I had seen I’d seen in Ipnolebes’ eyes, or perhaps the eyes of the Northern
slave
watching the guards as they strutted, this side of the
battlements,
or the slaves who whispered. I shuddered and shook
myself free of all that,
or tried to. The curious image held on. The gem-lit,
gold-crowned
heads of the visiting kings (there seemed not many of
them now)
strangely recalled the numberless hosts of ánhagas, friendless exiles forever on the move in perpetual night.
I could see by Kreon’s pleasure and the timorous smile
of Pyripta
that Jason’s story was winning them. Indeed, not a soul thought otherwise. It seemed no contest now. He’d seized their hearts and minds by his crafty wit and clung
like a bat
to his advantage. His thoughts were dangerous, and they
knew it. His scheme,
now clear, was impossible to block. When men sit
talking by the fire,
exchanging opinions of interest, discussing betrothals, curious adventures, and one, by the moving
of his sleeve,
reveals a scorpion, all mere trading of civilized insights stops: Death takes priority. So Jason, spinning his web of words, closed off all other business. They
must hear it through, approve