for all
my grief and revulsion, my murderer’s certainty of his
imminent death—
tricked for an instant by his smile of love — may the
gods forgive me!—
I returned the smile. With his bright sword lifted,
Jason leaped
from his hiding place. I turned my face away, shielding
my eyes.
Apsyrtus went down like a bull, but even as he sank
to the flagstones
he caught the blood in his hands, and as I shrank from
him,
reached out and painted my silvery veil and dress.
I wept,
soundless, rigid as a column. We bid the corpse in the
earth.
Orpheus was there, standing in the moonlight. There
was no other way,’
I said, rage flashing. He nodded. I said: ‘I loved my
brother!’
Perhaps even Jason understood, dark eyes more veiled
than a snake’s.
He took my hand, head bowed. We returned to the
Argonauts.
Apsyrtus’ fleet was heartsick, divided and confused,
when they learned,
by local seers, that the prince was gone forever. And
so
the Argo escaped.
“Such was our crime, our helplessness.
16
“In Artemis’ temple we killed him. The blood-wet corpse
we hid
in the goddess’ sacred grove. Then Zeus the Father of
the Gods
was seized with wrath, and ordained that by counsel of
Aiaian Circe
we must cleanse ourselves from the stain of blood, and
suffer sorrows
bitter and past all number before we should come to
the land
of Hellas. We sailed unaware of that, though with heavy
hearts,
praying, the sons of Phrixos and I, for their mother’s
escape
when news of the murder came to Aietes’ dragon-dark
mind.
Our fears, we learned much later, were not ill-founded.
He lay
on the palace floor for days, shuddering in lunes of rage, calling on the gods to witness the foul and unnatural
deed
committed in Artemis’ temple. He’d neither lift his eyes nor raise his cheek from the flagstones, but wept and
howled imprecations,
hammering his fists till they bled. And at last it reached
his thought
that she who had seemed most innocent, bronze
Khalkiope,
was most at fault. Then soon chaogenous dreams of
revenge
were fuming in his serpent brain, the last of his sanity
burned out,
and he called her to him.
“She knew when the message came what it meant.
She touched her bedposts, the walls of her room, with
the air of one
distracted, and since they could grant her no time for
parting words,
she left with the guards themselves her sad farewell to
our mother.
She looked a last time at the figures of her sons, the
work of a sculptor
famous in the East, and tears ran down her cheeks in
streams.
Then, walking in the halls with her silent guards, her
sandals a whisper
on fire-bright tessellated floors, she prayed for the safety
of her sons;
and for all her trembling — most timid of all Aietes’
children,
her hair like honey as it rolls from the bowl — she kept
her courage,
and came where Aietes lay. He rose up a little on his
arms
and hissed at the guards. They backed away as
commanded. And then,
though he’d planned slow torture, unspeakable pain
for the sly eldest daughter
(so she seemed to him), he was suddenly wracked by
such fiery rage
that he hurled his axe, and Khalkiope, with a startled
cry,
was dead. A death to be proud of, the sweet gift of life
to her sons!
“We left behind the Liburnian isles, and Korkyra with its black and somber woods, and passed Melite,
riding
in a softly blowing breeze; passed steep Kerossus, where
the daughter
of Atlas dwelt, and we thought we saw in the mists the
hills
of thunder.
“Then Hera remembered the counsels and anger of
Zeus.
She stirred up stormwinds before us, and black waves
caught us and hurled us
back to the isle of Elektra with its jagged rocks where
once
King Kadmos struck down the serpent and found his
wife. And suddenly
the beam of Dodonian oak that Athena had set in the
center,
as keel to the hollow ship, cried out and told us of the
wrath
of Zeus. The beam proclaimed that we’d never escape
the paths
of the endless sea, nor know any roofing but thunderous
winds
till Circe purged us of guilt for the murder of Apsyrtus.
And if
in cleansing us by ritual, the heart of Circe remained aloof, forgiving by law but not by love, then even in Hellas our lives should be cursed. The
beam cried out:
‘Pray for your souls now, Argonauts! Pray for some
track
to the kingdom of Helios’ daughter!’ Thus wailed the
Argo in the night.
The Argonauts hurled up prayers to the gods as the
ship leaped on
through dark welms streaming like a wound. O, dark as
my soul was the place!
Sick those seas as my body in riotous rebellion—
fevers,
chills, mysterious flashes of pain. His ghost was in me, a steady nightmare, a madness. I vomited, fouling my
beauty
in Jason’s sight. Not even Orpheus’ lyre could check that sickness throbbing in my head, or the fire in my
bowels. They looked
away, one and all, as from Hell itself. I hissed
imprecations,
and they listened with white teeth clenched.
“And as for the sea, it was
the water of Helios’ wrath. No bird, for all its rush, for all the lightness of its arching wings, could cross
that deep,
but mid-course, down it would plunge, fluttering,
consumed in flames;
and all around it, the daughters of Helios, locked in
poplars,
wailed their piteous complaint, and their weeping eyes
dripped amber.
“There sailed the joyless Argonauts, weary of heart,
overwhelmed
by stench where the body of Phaiton still burned. At
night, by the will
of the gods, we entered an unknown stream whose rock
shores sang
with the rumble of mingling waters. So on and on we
rushed,
lost in the endless domain of the murderous Kelts. Now
storms,
now raging men dismayed us, thinning our company. My sickness stayed. My hand on the gunnel was
marble-white;
my face grew gaunt, rimose. We touched at the
kingdom of stone,
the kingdom of iron men, the kingdom of the ants. As
dreams
insinuate their unearthly cast on the light of the sick man’s room, making windows alien eyes, transforming
chairs
to animals biding their time, so now to the heartsick
Argo
the world took on a change. The night was unnaturally
dark,
crowded with baffling machines we could not quite see.
And then
at dawn we looked out, in our strange dream, on
motionless banks
where no beast stirred and even the leaves on the trees