were still.
No songbird sang, and the clouds above us were as void
of life
as stones. We struggled to awaken, but the ship was
sealed in a charm.
We waited. Then came to a fork in the stream, a great
hushed island,
and the Argonauts, half-starved, rowed in, cast anchor,
and made
the long ship fast. As far as the eye could see on the
windless
rockstrewn beach, there was nothing alive. The tufts of
grass
on the meadow above were still, as if lost in thought.
“On a hill,
rising at the center of the island, there stood a grove so
dense
no thread of light came through, and between the boles
of the trees
lay avenues. We went there, Lynkeus leading the way with his powerful eyes. I walked behind him, my hand
in Jason’s,
and my spirit was filled with uneasiness. I was sure the
air—
chill, unstirring — was crowded with thirsty ghosts. We
found
no game; it seemed that even the crawling insects slept.
“Without warning from Lynkeus, we reached a glade
and, rising
in the center of the glade, a vast stone building in the
shape of a dome.
The gray foundation rocks were carved with curious
oghams:
spirals like eddies in a river, like blustering winds—
the oldest
runes ever made by man. At the low, dark door of the
building
a chair of stone stood waiting. We studied it, none of us
speaking.
And suddenly, even as we watched, there appeared a
figure in the chair,
seated comfortably, casually, combing his beard. He was
old,
his hair as white as hoarfrost. But as for his race, he
was nothing
we knew — a snubnosed creature with puffy eyes. His
face,
like his belly, was round, and he wore an enormous
moustache. He said: ‘
Ah ha! So it’s Jason again!’ The lord of the Argonauts
stared,
then glanced at me, as if thinking the curious image
were somehow
my creation. The old man laughed, impish, a laugh that rang like bells on the great rock mound and the
surrounding hills.
He laughed till he wept and clutched his sides.
“I asked: “Who are you?
Why do you mock us with silent sunlit isles and
laughter,
when Zeus has condemned us to travel as miserable
exiles forever,
suffering griefs past number for a crime so dark I dare not speak of it?’ He laughed again, unimpressed by
grief,
unmoved by our hunger. “Mere pangs of mortality,’ he
said.
‘If you knew my troubles—’ He paused, reflecting, then
laughed again.
‘However, they slip my mind.’ I repeated the question:
‘Who are you?’
He tapped the tips of his fingers together, squinting,
though his lips
still smiled. ‘Don’t rush me. It’ll come to me.’ He
searched his wits.
‘I’m something to do with rivers, I remember.’ He pulled
at his beard,
pursed his lips, looked panic-stricken. ‘Is it very
important?’
Suddenly his face brightened and he snapped his
fingers. At once—
apparently not by his wish — an enormous sow appeared, sprawled in the grass beside him, her eyes alarmed.
He snapped
his fingers again, looking sheepish, and at once the huge
beast vanished.
Again the name he’d been hunting had slipped his
mind. Then:
‘Spirit of sorts,’ he said. ‘Not one of your dark ones, no
god
of the bog people, or the finger-wringing Germans, or—’ His bright eyes widened. ‘Ah yes! I’d forgotten!
— We have dealings, we powers,
from time to time. I received a request from the goddess
of will.
Abnormal. But isn’t everything? — Forgive me if I seem too light in the presence of woe. We’re not very good at
woe,
we Grand Antiques. Treasure your guilt if you like, dear
friends.
Guilt has a marvelous energy about it — havoc of
kingdoms,
slaughter of infants, et cetera. Discipline! That’s what
it gives you!
(Discipline, of course, is a virtue not all of us value.)
However,
Time is wide enough for all. Indeed, in a thousand years (I’ve been there, understand. A thousand thousand
times I’ve heard
the joke, and that lunatic punchline) … But what was
I saying? Ah!
Sail on in peace! — or in whatever mood suits your
temperament.
The passage is opened, this once, after all these
millennia.
Make way for the flagship Argo, ye golden generations!
Make way
for purification by fire, salvation by slaughter!’ His
eyes—
pale blue, mocking, were a-glitter; but at once he
remembered himself.
‘Forgive me, lady. Forgive an old bogyman’s foolishness,
lords
of Akhaia.’ His smile was genuine now. The universe has time for all experiments. Sail in peace!’ He
vanished.
And the same instant the sky went dark and we found
ourselves
on the Argo, on a churning sea. Black waves came
combing in,
and mountains to left and right were yawing apart for
us,
and the opening sucked the sea in, and like a chip on
a torrent
the Argo went spinning, careening, the walls half buried
in foam,
to the south. I clung to the capstan. I would have been
washed away,
but the boy Ankaios abandoned the useless steering oar and caught my arm and held me till Jason could
reach me, crawling
pin by pin along the rail. He held me by the waist,
his arm
like rock. So we stood as we fell, dropped down from
a dizzying height,
a violent booming around us, as if the earth had split, and we looked up behind us in terror and saw the
mountains close,
and the same instant we struck and were hurled to the
belly of the ship.
The Argo shrieked as if all her beams had burst, and
water
boiled in over us. Then, at Ankaios’ shout, we knew we were safe, the ship was afloat, all her brattice-work
firm despite
contusions, a thin, dark ooze. And thus we came, by
the whim
of the river spirit of the North, to the kingdom of Circe,
daughter
of the sun, my father’s sister.
“We did not speak of the dream—
the cynical god who could scoff at all human shame
and pain.
Did only I dream it? There are those who claim we
create, ourselves,
in the dark of our minds, the gods who guide us. Was
I in fact
remorseless as the snake who smiles as he swallows the
bellowing frog?
Did my dreams create, then, even the dizzying fall of the
Argo,
that dark-as-murder sky? I dared not speak of the
dream,
but the image of the god remained, like the nagging
awareness of a wound,—
that and the sunlight in which he sat, with his attention
fixed
on his beard. If I closed my eyes, relaxed, I could drift