danced them out of their wits like a prophet of
gyromancy?
Athena smiled and winked at Jason. Dark Aphrodite glanced at Hera for assurance that all was well.
Then Kreon
rose again, gazed round. When no one dared to speak, he turned to his slave Ipnolebes, who nodded in silence. Kreon rubbed his hands together, furious, and at last pronounced the matter closed. He dismissed the whole
assembly
till the hour of the evening meal, when Jason would
resume his tale,
and, taking the princess’ elbow in his hand, bowing to
left
and right, unsmiling, he descended from the dais. As
the two passed
the threshold, the others all rose and followed, and so
the hall
was emptied except for the slaves — near the door the
Northerner
and the boy. The goddess vanished. The vision went
dark. I heard
the nightmare crowd on the move again, in the shadow
of the beast,
smothered in the skirts of the prostitute. Then sound,
too, ceased,
and I hung in darkness, nowhere, clinging to the oak’s
rough bark.
A blore of wind, like the breeze at the entrance to a cave,
tore
at the ragged tails of my overcoat, sheathed my
spectacles in ice.
14
I stood, by the goddess’ will, in Medeia’s room. Pale
light
fell over her, fell swirling, burning on the golden fleece beside her, and then moved on, moved past the two old
slaves
to the door where the children watched. I could not
look at them
for pain and shame. Dreams they might be, as old and
pale
as ghosts in the cairns of Newgrange, but dream or
solid flesh,
they were children, inexplicably doomed. How could
I close my wits
on truths so weird? (Who can believe in the spectre
who walks
leukemia wards, who stands severe above laughing girls whose hearts pump dust? Who can believe those
pictures in the news
of a million children, senselessly cursed, dying in
silence,
caught up in Dionysos’ wars, or the refugee camps of Artemis?) All time inside them … And then I did
look,
searching their eyes for the secret, and found there
nothing. Softly,
my guide, invisible around me, spoke. “Poor dim-eyed
— stranger,
you’ve understood the question, at least. Look! Look
hard!
Study their eyes, windows of the world you seek and
they
have not yet dreamed the price of: the timeless instant.
They have
no plans, only flimmering dreams of plans, intentions
dark
as the lachrymal flutter of corpse-candles. Their time
is reverie.
But already will is uncoiling there. They flex their
fingers,
restless at the long dull watch. The garden is filled with
birds,
bright sunlight. They remember a cart with a broken
wheel, a cave
of vines by the garden wall. They have now begun to be of two minds. Now love and hate grow thinkable, sacrifice and murder, mercy and judgment. And now,
look close:
with a glance at each other — sly grins, infectious, so
that we smile too,
remembering, projecting (for we, we too, were children
once,
slyly becoming ourselves, unaware of the risk) — they
step,
soundless as deer, to the doorway and through it to
their liberty.
Or so they guess, unaware that the house will vanish,
and the garden—
and the palsied slaves they’ve slipped they will find
transmogrified
to skulls, bits of ashen cloth, dark bone. And they’ll
wring their hands,
restless again, and search in children’s eyes for peace, in vain. Yet there is peace. Strange peace: from the
blood of innocents.
You’ll see. The gods have ordained it.” I stared, alarmed
at that,
and snatched off my glasses to hunt with my naked
eyes for the shade—
she-witch, goddess, I knew not what — but no trace
of her.
I turned up the collar of my coat, for the room had
grown chilly. And then
she spoke one brief word more: “Listen.”
On the bed, eyes staring,
Medeia spoke, ensorcelled — death-pale lips unmoving. I glanced, alarmed, at her eyes and my glance was held;
I seemed
to fall toward them, and they weren’t eyes now but
pits, an abyss,
unfathomable, plunging into space. I cried out, clutched
my spectacles.
The wind soughed dark with words and the pitch-dark
wings of ravens
crying in Medeia’s voice:
“I little dreamed, that night,
sleeping in my father’s high-beamed hall, that I’d
sacrifice
all this, my parents’ love, the beautiful home of my
childhood,
even my dear brother’s life, for a man who lay, that
moment,
hidden in the reeds of the marsh. Had I not been happy
there—
dancing with the princes of Aia on my father’s floors of
brass
or walking the emerald hills above where wine-dark
oxen
labored from dawn to dusk, above where pruning-men
crept,
weary, along dark slopes of their poleclipt vineyard
plots?
I’d talked, from childhood up, with spirits, with
all-seeing ravens,
sometimes with swine where they fed by the rocks
under oak trees, eating
acorns, treasure of swine, and drank black water,
making
their flesh grow rich and sweet and their brains grow
mystical.
No princess was ever more free, more proud and sure
in the halls
of her father, more eager to please with her mother.
But the will of the gods
ran otherwise.”
The voice grew lighter all at once, the voice
of a schoolteacher reading to children, some trifling,
unlikely tale
that amuses, fills in a recess, yet troubles the grown-up
voice
toward sorrow. She told, as if gently mocking the
tragedy,
of gods and goddesses at ease in their windy palaces where the hourglass-sand takes a thousand years to
form the hill
an ant could create, here on earth, in half an hour. She
told
of jealousies, foolish displays of celestial skill and
spite;
and in all she said, I discovered as I listened, one thing
stood plain:
she knew them well, those antique gods and mortals,
though she mocked
their foolishness. I peered all around me to locate the
speaker,
but on all sides lay darkness, the infinite womb of
space.
She told, first, how Athena and Hera looked down
and, seeing
the Argonauts hidden in ambush, withdrew from Zeus
and the rest
of the immortal gods. When the two had come to a
rose-filled arbor,
Hera said, “Daughter of Zeus, advise me. Have you
found some trick
to enable the men of the Argo to carry the fleece away? Or have you possibly constructed some flattering
speech that might
persuade Aietes to give it as a gift? God knows, the
man’s