disgrace me when I
am far from home and in no dear kinsmen’s protection.’
She spoke
in anguish, fallen at his feet. But the words she spoke
made Jason’s
heart leap high, whether for joy at her beauty — now
granted
as a gift to him — or joy at her promise of the fleece, she
could not
tell, study his eyes as she might. He raised her to her
feet,
embracing her. Then, to comfort her: ‘Beautiful
princess,
I swear — may Olympian Zeus and his consort Hera,
Goddess
of Wedlock, witness my words — that when we’re safe in
Hellas,
I’ll make you my wedded wife.’ And he took her hand
in his.
She believed him, and said, ‘I have nothing to promise
in return but this:
‘I’ll be faithful to you. Wherever you go, I will go.’
“So to the ship, and at once, with all speed, to the
sacred wood
in hopes that while night still clung they might capture
and carry away
the treasure, in defiance of the king. The oars with their
pinewood blades
skirled water, awakening the dark. As the boat slid out
from shore
like a nearly forgotten dream, Medeia gasped, wide-eyed, and stretched out her arms to the land, full of wild
regret. But Jason,
never at a loss, spoke softly, and her mind was calmed.
She turned
like a charmed spirit, and gazed toward the isle of the
serpent.
“The Argo
glided landwards, the mast tip blazing with dawn’s first
glance,
and, guided by Medeia, the Argonauts leaped to the
rockstrewn, windless
beach — a muffled jangle of war-dress, and then vast
stillness.
A path led straight to the sacred wood. They advanced,
silent;
and so they came within sight of the mammoth oak,
and high
in its beams, like a cloud incarnadined by the fiery
glance
of morning, they saw the fleece. They stood stock-still,
amazed.
It hung, magnificent, above them, like a thing
indifferent
to the petty spleen of Aietes, courage of Jason, or the
beating
of Medeia’s confounded heart. It seemed a thing
indifferent
to Time itself: Virtue, Beauty, Holiness, Change— all were revealed for an instant as paltry children’s
dreams,
carpentered illusions to wall off the truth, man’s
otherness—
eternal, inexpiable — from this. The Argonauts
remembered again
Prometheus’ screams — first thief of celestial fire;
remembered
the whispering ram on the mantle that Argus had made,
off Lemnos,
Phrixos listening, all attention, and all who looked on it listening, tensed for the secret; but the smouldering
ram’s eyes laughed,
and the secret refused their minds. Stay on! It’s not
far now!
A moral meaningless, outrageous. For a long time they
stared,
like mystics gazing at an inner sun, some nether
darkness,
pyralises. But now the sharp unsleeping eyes of the
snake had seen them,
and the head swung near like a barque on invisible
waters. Their minds
came awake again, and even the bravest of the
Argonauts shook
till their armor rang, and their legs no longer held
them. The serpent
hissed, and the banks of the river, the deep recesses
of the wood
threw back the sound, and far away from Titanian Aia it reached the ears of Kolchians living by the outfall of
Lykos.
Babies sleeping in their mothers’ arms were startled
awake,
and their mothers, awakening in terror, hugged them
close. Apophis,
in his sheath of blue-green scales, rolled forward his
interminable coils
like the eddies of thick black smoke that spring from
smouldering logs
and pursue each other from below in endless
convolutions. Then
he saw the witch Medeia rise from the ground and
stand,
her hair and eyes like flame, her strangely gentle voice invoking sleep, a sing-song soothing to his ancient mind; he heard her calling to the queen of the Underworld—
softly, softly—
and as Jason looked up, stretched out flatlings in the
shadow of her skirt,
the snake, for all its age and rage, was lulled a little. The whole vast sinuate spine relaxed, and its
undulations
smoothed a little, moving like a dark and silent swell rolling on a sluggish sea. Even now his head still
hovered,
and his jaws, with their glittering, needlesharp tusks,
were agape, as if
to snap the intruders to their death like fear-numbed
mice. But Medeia,
chanting a spell, sprinkled his eyes with a powerful
drug,
and as the magic assaulted his heavy mind, the scent
spreading out
around him, his will collapsed. His wedge-shape head
sank slowly,
his innumerable coils behind him spanning the wood.
Then, rising
on feeble legs, Jason dragged down the fleece from the
oak,
Medeia moving her hand on Apophis’ head, soothing his wildness with a magic oil. As if in a trance herself, she gave no sign when Jason called. He returned for her, touching her elbow, drawing her back to the ship. And
so
they left the grove of Ares.
“Magnificent triumph, you may think.
Was Aietes not a devil, and his downfall just? Ah, yes. But the legend of human triumph coils inward forever,
burns
at the heart with old contradictions. The goddess was
in us, the anguine
goddess with sleepy eyes.
“Victorious Jason, on the Argo,
lifted the fleece in his arms. The shimmering wool
threw a glow,
fiery, majestic, on his beautiful cheeks and forehead.
And Jason
rejoiced in the light, as glad as a girl when she catches
in her gown
the glow of the moon when it climbs the welken and
gazes in
at her window. The fleece was as large as the hide
of an ox, a stag.
When he slung it on his shoulder, it draped to below
his feet. But soon
his mood changed. With a look at the sky, he bundled
the fleece
to a tight roll and hid it in a place only Argus knew in the Argo’s planking, for fear some envious man or
god
might steal it from him. He led Medeia aft and found a seat for her, then turned to his men, who watched
him thoughtfully,
puzzled by the hint of strangeness he’d taken on. He
said:
‘My friends, let us now start home without further
delay. The prize
for which we’ve suffered, and for which you’ve labored
unselfishly,
unstintingly, is at last ours. And indeed, the task proved easy, in the end, thanks to this princess whom
I now propose,
with her consent, to carry home with me and marry.
I charge you,
cherish her even as I do, as saviour of Akhaia and
ourselves.
And have no doubt of our need for haste. Aietes and
his devils
are certainly even now assembled and rushing to bar our passage from the river to the sea. So man the