by John Gardner
love
of the stuttering, wrinkled old man that Argus devised
the palace
that made us the envy of Akhaia, or built the waterlocks that transformed barrenness to seas of wheat, or built,
above,
the shining temple to Hera that soared up tower on
tower,
mirrored by lakes, surrounded by majestic parks. It was
not
for love of Pelias that Orpheus brought in the mysteries of Elektra to Argos, and made our city of Iolkos chief of the sacred cities of the South. Nor was it for him
that Phlias
created the great dance of Heros Dionysos, which
brought us glory
and wealth and favor of the god of life and death. I
shared
all honors with Pelias, though I’d changed his kingdom
of pigs and sheep
to a mighty state; and I did not mind the absurdity
of it.
And yet he was thorn, a hedge of thorn, and I might
have been glad to be rid of him.
I could move the assembly by a few words to
magnificent notions—
things never tried in the world before. I could have
them eating
from my hand, and then old Pelias would rise, wrapped
head to foot
in mufflers and febrile opinions. His numerous chins
a-tremble,
blanched eyes rolling, the tip of his nose bright red, like
a berry
in a patch of snow, he’d stutter and stammer,
slaughterer of time,
and in the end, as often as not, undo my work with a
peevish
No. Nor was he pleased, God knows, to share the rule with me. He hadn’t forgotten the oracle that warned,
long since,
that he’d meet his death by my hand. He couldn’t decide,
precisely,
whether to hate and fear me outright—whatever my
pains
to put him at ease—or feign undying devotion,
avuncular
pride in my glorious works. At times he would snap like
a mongrel,
splenetic, critical of trifles—insult me in the presence
of the lords.
I was patient. He was old, would eventually die. His
barbs were harmless,
as offensive to all who heard them as they were to me.
My cousin
Akastos would roll his eyes up, grinding his teeth in fury at his father’s ridiculous spite. I would smile, put my
hand on Akastos’
arm, say, ‘Never mind, old friend.’ It drew us closer, his shame and rage at his bumbling father’s stupidity. He had, himself, more honor with the people than his
father had,
having sailed to the end of the world with us—a
familiar now
of Orpheus, Leodokos, and the mighty brothers Peleus and Telamon. He’d become, through us, a friend of the hoary centaur Kheiron, and come to
know
the child Akhilles, waxing like a tower and handsome as
a god.
What had Akastos to do with a snivelling, whining old
man,
Akastos who’d stood at the door of Hades, listened to
the Sirens,
braved the power of Aietes and the dangerous Kelts?
The old man
hinted that after his death Akastos should follow him as my fellow king. It was not in the deal; I refused.
Akastos
was furious—not at me. And now he seldom came to the palace, bitterly ashamed. He remained with
Iphinoe, at home,
or travelled with friends, supporting their courtships
or wars.
“At times Pelias would drop his peevishness, put on, instead, a pretense of cowering love. He’d sit with his head to
one side,
lambishly timid, and he’d ogle like a girl, admiring me. ‘Noble Jason,’ he’d call me, with lips obscenely wet, and he’d stroke my fingers like an elderly homosexual, his head drawn back, as if fearing an angry slap. His
desire
to please, in such moods, was boundless. He couldn’t
find honors enough
to heap on me. He gave me gifts—his ebony bed (my father’s, in fact), jewels, the sword of Atlantis—
but with each
gift given, his need—his terror of fate—was greater
than before.
In the end he gave me the golden fleece itself as proof that all he owned was mine, I need not murder him. He was mad, of course. I had no intention of murdering
him.
And still he cringed and crawled, all bootlicking love.
That too
I tolerated, biding my time.
“Not all on Argos shared or understood my patience. On the main street, on the day of the festival of Oreithyia—our chariot
blocked
by the milling, costumed crowd—a humpbacked
beggarwoman
in fetid rags, a shawl hiding all but her hawkbill nose and piercing eyes—a coarse mad creature who sang
old songs
in a voice like the carrion crow’s and stretched out
hands like sticks
for alms—leaped up at sight of me, raging, ‘Alas for
Argos,
kingless these many years! Thank God I’m sick with
age
and need not watch much longer this shameful travesty! We had here a king to be proud of once, a man as
noble beside these pretenders
as Zeus beside two billygoats!
That king and his queen had a son, you think? He
produced what seemed one—
an arrogant, cowardly merchantry-swapper with no
more devotion
than a viper. The father’s throne was stolen—boldly,
blatantly—
his blood cried out of the earth, cried out of the beams
and stones
of the palace for revenge. The son raised never a finger.
And the mother,
poor Alkimede, my mistress once, was driven from her
home
to lodgings fit for a swineherd. There she lived with
her boy,
as long as he’d stay. It was none too long. For all her
pleas,
for all the great sobs welling from her heart, he must
leave her helpless,
friendless in a world where once she’d stood as high as any in Akhaia. ? shameless! Shame on shame he heaped on her: not on his own but in foul collusion with the very usurper who seized that throne, he must
sail to the shores
of barbarians, and must bear off with him on his mad
expedition
the finest of Akhaia’s lords! Few enough would return,
he knew.
O that he too had been drowned in the river with
innocent Hylas,
or fallen like Idmon to a maddened boar, or withered
in Libya!
She might have had then some comfort in death,
though little before,
wrapped in a winding-sheet wound by strangers,
tumbled to her tomb
like a penniless old farm woman. And Jason returned, joyful with his barbarous bride, and shamelessly joined
the usurper,
smiling on half of his father’s blood-soaked throne. See
how
he preaches justice and reason, preaches fidelity, trades on his great past deeds to avoid all present risks. “Do not rave,” he raves; “no shame can trouble our city. Prophesy wealth and wine! The past is obliterated! Tell us no more about crimes in the tents of our
ancestors!
Justice and reason, like tamed lions, have settled in
Io
lkos.”
Where is his justice and reason? Where is his loudly
bugled
fidelity? The throne was stolen; stolen it remains. What of fidelity to fathers and mothers? What of
fidelity
to the dead in their winecupped graves?’
“So the old shrew raged, shaking. Medeia, standing beside me, glared with eyes like ice. Softly, she said, ‘Who is this creature
you allow to berate you in the streets?’ I touched her
hand to calm her.
“A woman who loved my mother,’ I said. Medeia was
silent.
It was not till another day she asked, ‘Is this accusation just, that Pelias stole your father’s throne?’ I thought, Everything is true in its time and place. But answered
only:
‘I was young; my father was unsure of me. There were
vague rumors …
It was all a long, long time ago.’ But after that when I spoke in the assembly or debated plans with my
fellow king,
and Pelias had qualms, found reasons for doubt,
objected, found cause
for delay, she would watch him with tigress eyes.
“Pelias, as his mind dimmed with the passing years, grew
increasingly a burden.
It’s a difficult thing to explain. He interfered with me
less.
He grew deaf as a post and nearly blind, his mind so
enfeebled
that in the end he relinquished all but a shadow of his
former power.
The trouble was, he seemed to imagine that both of us had abandoned the nuisance of government.
Old-womanish, dim,
he’d call me to his bedroom and beg from me stories of
the Argonauts,
or he’d tell me, as if we were shepherds with all
afternoon to pass,
tedious tales of his childhood. It proved no use to send his daughters instead, willing as they were—
good-hearted, sheltered
princesses with the brains of nits. It had to be me— myself or Akastos, and Akastos rarely came. I would
stoop,
absurd in my royal robes, by the old man’s bed, and
listen,
or pretend to listen, brooding in secret on Argos’ affairs. The drapes would be drawn, a whim of his daughters,
as though he were
some apple they hoped to preserve through the winter
in a cool dark bin.
He would stutter like a fond old grandmother, on and
on. At times
he’d recall with a start the prophecy, and he’d hastily
offer
his cringing act, lading on flattery, protesting his
life-long
love. His fingers, clinging to mine, gripped me like a
monkey’s.
His daughters would listen, drooping like flowers from
slender stalks,
and whenever they spoke it was tearfully, with a kind of
idiot
gratitude for the affection I showed their belovèd father. At last he’d sleep; I’d be free to leave the place.
“I’d go to the wing of the palace I kept with Medeia and the
children; I’d pass
in silence among our slaves, and my heart was sullen
with suspicion.
Surely, I thought, they must mock me. Jason in his
kingly robes,
shouldered like a bull, gray eyes rolling as he sits, polite
as a cranky old shepherd’s serving boy, by the bed of
Pelias,
hanging on stammered-out words. O shameless coward
indeed!
I would stand alone at the balustrade of marble, glare
out
at the sea, Orion hanging low, contemptuous.
I was not a coward, I knew well enough,
and it ought not to matter what others supposed.
I governed well—no man denied it. If I wasted time on a fusty, repulsive old man, I had excellent reasons
for it.
I was no Herakles pummelling the seasons with passionate, mindless fists. Oh, I could admire the
crone
who cackled in the streets, full of rage and scorn, her loves and hates as forthright as boulders in the
grass. No doubt
she would, in my place, have struck down Pelias at the
first suspicion,
as would Herakles; or failing that, she’d have schemed
and plotted—
would never have seemed to accept, as I did, his right
to the throne,
or half of it. She’d have schemed and slaughtered,
maintained the honor
of Iolkos’ noble dead, whatever the cost to the living— bloodshed of factions, houses in furor, families divided, chaos for ages to come. I had no doubt that the course I’d chosen was best, my seemingly shameful
compromise.
Absolute passion, absolute glory, was for gods, not men. I could claim the status of a demigod, but the future
was not
with them.
“Yet glaring out toward sea, resolved on a course no man of sense could conceivably mock,
I was filled with a dangerous weariness.
More real than the seven-story fall
that gaped below me, more sharp to my sense than the
quartz-domed tomb
of Alkimede on its high hill north of the temple of Hera, or the figure of Medeia at my back, as heavy as bronze
with anger—
visions of flight would snatch my mind—the Argo’s
prow
bobbing like the head of a galloping horse, half
smothered in foam,
dark shapes looming out of fire-green water, then
vanishing—
the wandering rocks.
“I was protected once by an old Kelt, sired by a bear on a moon-priestess, or so he claimed.
We talked, in his shadowy hall, of freedom. His boy
sat hunched
by the hearthstone, listening, watching with eyes like a
cat’s. From the beams
of the old king’s walls hung the heads of his vanquished
enemies,
and above the fire, nailed firmly to the slats, hung the
leathern arm
of a giant. He said: ‘I see no freedom in peace and
justice.
I see no meaning in freedom that leaves some part of
my soul
in chains. I grant, it’s a noble ideal, this thing you
purpose—
a state well governed, where no man tromps on another
man’s heel,
the oppressed are aided, the orphan and the widow win
justice in the courts,
and each man holds to his place fox the benefit of all.
But I’d lose
my wind in a state so noble. I’d develop maladies— mysterious, elusive, beyond any doctor’s skill. Like a bat in a cage, I’d wither, for no clear reason, and die.’ The
boy
at the hearthstone smiled, sharp-eyed, heart teeming
with thought. The king
with mild blue eyes—cheeks painted, startling on that
dignified face—
shook his head slowly, amused. ‘You speak to me of
gentle apes
in Africa and claim their kinship. Let Argus advise us, who’d studied the world’s mechanics for most of a
century.
Is that indeed our line?—In this colder land we say mankind is a child of the cat, old source of our
crankiness,
our peculiar solitude—for though we may sometimes
hunt in packs,
and share the kill, if necessary, we have never hunted like brotherly wolves or bears.’ He smiled.
‘By an
other legend, the gods made man from the skull
of a rat,
that grim and deeply philosophical scavenger who picks,
light-footed,
perilously cunning, through houses of the dead, spreads
corpses’ sickness
to all he meets, yet survives himself and laughs at
carnage
and takes bright trinkets from the slaughtered.
“ ‘Be that as it may—‘ The king glanced over at his boy.’—If my
blood’s essence
is not the gentleness and wisdom of Zeus but, whatever
the reason,
has murder in it, as well as devotion and trust like
a boy’s,
then freedom is not for me what it is for Zeus. The
freedom
of the eyes is to see and the ear to hear; the freedom
of the soul
is to love and defend one’s friends, assert one’s power,
behead
one’s enemies, poison their streams.’ He smiled. ‘My
words appall you.
But come! It was not I who proclaimed the supreme
value
of liberty. I might well admire the state you dream of, where nature’s law is replaced by peace and justice—
though I would not
visit the place. But do not mistake these noble goods for freedom.’ He reached his hand to my knee and
smiled again.
Your course will no doubt prosper, Jason. Your
philosophy has
a ring to it, a nobility of glitter that can hardly fail to appeal to the collector rat. Ten thousand years from
now
men will look back to the Akhaians with pious
admiration, and to us,
the treacherous Kelts, as bestial and superstitious,
to whom
good riddance. And they may have a point, I grant. And
yet you’ll not
outlast us, lover of mind. From age to age, while your spires shake in the battery of the sun, we, living
underground,
will gnaw the animal heart, doing business as usual.’ I turned to the boy, a child with the gentleness of
Hylas. I’d heard
him sing, and his voice was sweeter than dawn in a
wheat-filled valley.
The severed heads of enemies hanging on the hall’s dark
beams
shed tears at his song, and the greatest of harpers,
Orpheus himself,
was silenced by the music’s spell. “You, too, believe all
this?’
I asked and smiled. For the Kelts were friends; I was
not such a fool
as to hope to convert their mysterious hearts and brains
by Akhaian
reasoning. The boy said shyly, How can I doubt what I’ve heard from the cradle up? This much at least
seems true
for both of you: You’d gladly fight to the death for