‘That is true,’ said Atalanta. ‘It is the gift of the Goddess Artemis.’
‘Medea attributes it to Brimo,’ said Argeus, ‘but perhaps these are different names for the same aspect of the Ineffable One. Medea is the most skilful physician and witch in the whole kingdom.’
Jason stroked his short, downy beard meditatively. ‘She appears to be the very woman for our purpose,’ he said. ‘Myself, I am not afraid of witches. Cheiron the Centaur taught me an infallible charm against them. She is beautiful, you say, and not very old, though she is your aunt? But “beautiful” to a Colchian may not be “beautiful” to a Greek. I hope that she has not black, kinky hair, flat feet, and inverted shins like your brother Melanion? I could never bring myself to kiss a woman of that sort.’
‘Oh, no!’ Melanion answered, grinning. ‘Her mother was a white Taurian, not a Colchian. Medea has a round chin, yellow ringlets of hair (like those for which her aunt Circe was famous in her girlhood – they are as yellow as mountain cassidony), voluptuous lips, amber-coloured eyes, a slightly hooked nose, and the neatest ankles in Colchis. Her age is about four-and-twenty.’
‘That is very well,’ said Jason. ‘I have always preferred mature women to girls. Now, comrades, to sleep. I wish you all propitious dreams. Our comrade Atalanta has pointed the path for our feet to tread.’
But before he slept he asked Melanion privately: ‘Of what does Medea’s Colchian inheritance consist? Is she joint-heir with her brother to the throne?’
‘No,’ he answered. ‘She is heir only to a third part of her father’s treasure. The kingdom, having been granted to Aeëtes as a reward for his services to the Colchians, is hereditary in the male line, except for the eastern territory, which adjoins the kingdom of Albania. Those wild lands are his only in virtue of his marriage with our Colchian grandmother Ipsia, and at his death will descend in the female line to our sister Neaera.’
Jason said: ‘Indeed. Apsyrtus then should be pleased with the bargain that he has struck with her. For Ephyra is nothing to him, and a third part of the treasure that Aeëtes has amassed must amount to a sum sufficient to buy half of Greece.’
Chapter Thirty-One
King Aeëtes Receives the Argonauts
That night King Aeëtes could not sleep, try how he might. Not only had the Sacred Horses of the Sun been off their feed for some days and unresponsive to the purges duly administered by the Stable Priests, but he was deeply concerned about an evil omen that he had witnessed in the temple of the Moon Goddess that evening. Twelve months before this, one of the temple slaves, whose office it was to provide fish for the sacred black cats of the Goddess, had suddenly gone mad – though no sign of failing wits had previously been noted in him – and had rushed out into the forest caterwauling and shouting ecstatically in a language that nobody understood. The High Priestess had gone out in search of him, fettered him in sacred fetters, and maintained him for the rest of the year in royal state. At the annual sacrifice to the Goddess this slave had been sacrificed with the other victims, being pierced through the heart with an obsidian-tipped lance; the manner of his fall was expected to provide a heartening omen of coming events. But, instead of falling forward, a fall which denotes victory, or backward, which denotes defeat; or sinking in a heap, which denotes peace – instead of any such fall, the victim chose to whirl around left-handed three times and die crouching with his hands clasping his belly, a sight never seen before and one of great horror to all those present.
Aeëtes was reminded by his four wise Councillors of State that the omen might be significant not of disaster to Colchis, but merely of some alteration in the Goddess’s affairs, a return perhaps to a more primitive ritual; however, they could not easily reassure him. He prowled about his palace, which was built of massive well-polished stones, going from room to room in search of he knew not what: so a house-dog behaves when it is sickening for rabies, before the madness at last flecks its jaws with foam and drives it snapping and howling along the streets. Shortly before dawn he sank down wearily on a couch in the inner hall, not far from the long basalt pediment on which stood the brazen bulls, and there he dreamed a most unpropitious dream. First he watched a shining star fall slowly into the lap of his daughter Medea, who took it in haste down to the Phasis river and cast it in; the waters whirled it away towards the Black Sea. That part of the dream did not disquiet him, but next he watched the brazen bulls being roughly yoked with a red-painted wooden yoke and forced to plough a field. They were indignantly puffing flames from their nostrils and mouths, but the young ploughman cried tauntingly: ‘Your flames cannot scorch me. I have been anointed by Medea with Caspian salve.’ He spoke in Greek. Aeëtes could not distinguish his face or even his hair, because he was shrouded in a dark cloak; and now he was goading the bulls forward across the field with a javelin. A divine hand scattered serpents’ teeth in the crooked furrow behind him, and where they fell armed men sprouted and sprang up. Aeëtes recognized these by their helmets as the priests of the Taurian war god in whose honour he had set up the brazen bulls. The ploughman presently cast a stone at one of them and struck him on the brow; whereupon they began hacking at one another, until all lay dead. At this the ghost of the hero Prometheus wailed aloud with the desolate cry of a night bird, and the hollow valley of Aea rang again with the noise.
Aeëtes awoke in a cold sweat. He stumbled to Medea’s bed-chamber and roused her from sleep to tell her his dream, which he forbade her to reveal to a soul, and begged her to tell him what she thought that it portended. She answered: ‘Father, I cannot speak with any certainty. I think it probable that you have in some way or other offended the Bird-headed Mother. Propitiate her with rich gifts and perhaps she will inform you in a dream or vision how you have erred and how you may escape the consequences of your error.’
Aeëtes frowned. As King of Colchis he was always in a difficult position because of the religious jealousies and dissensions of his people. His nobles worshipped the gods of Egypt, being descended from the soldiers of Pharaoh Sesostris who had been defeated in futile war with the Goths; but there had been no priests among the broken troops who took refuge in the Phasis valley and established themselves at Aea, and their worship was therefore irregular and debased. When Aeëtes first came to Colchis as a merchant-adventurer he had found a religious war in progress between these Egyptians and their aboriginal neighbours, who worshipped the Caucasian Goddess and Mithras, her fair-haired Sun-Child. He proposed an armistice and offered to reconcile their religious differences. He displayed his own fair hair and amber-coloured eyes in proof to the aboriginals that he was a Sun priest; and satisfied the Egyptians, by an explanation of certain of their own religious observances, that he had a more profound knowledge of the theology of Memphis than they had themselves. They listened to him the more attentively because the oracular jawbone of Prometheus which he brought with him had already made several veracious and helpful utterances. Upon their agreeing to abide by the decisions of Prometheus, Aeëtes reformed the national religion of Colchis in a way that enlightened and, for the most part, contented both peoples; for the jaw-bone proclaimed the identity of the Caucasian Goddess with the Bird-headed Goddess, Egyptian Isis. In gratitude, the nobles offered him the throne and swore perpetual loyalty to him and his house. Each people was obliged to yield to the other in some particulars: the aboriginals, who lived in the mountains, submitted to the Egyptian rite of circumcision and the veneration of the ibis; the Colchians, who cultivated the river-valley, submitted to the custom of tree-burial and to the veneration of the white horses of Mithras, his yearly gift from the Mother.
Yet Aeëtes felt that he was treading on the tussocks of a quaking bog that might at any moment engulf him. He now told Medea: ‘When, to preserve this country from a Scythian invasion, I allied myself with your grandfather the King of the Taurians, of whom the Scythians stand in awe, I was, as you know, obliged in token of good faith to offer his war god a foot-hold in Aea. I did this reluctantly, well aware that the Mother has
no love for this god, who is uncivilized and brutal in the extreme. Likewise my alliance with the Moschians, whose land (as you must agree) is a necessary outpost against the insane Amazons, has involved me in other religious transactions which may have displeased her. But what else could I have done? Let no ignorant person envy me my throne, which is no more comfortable a seat than a thorn-bush spread over with a coverlet of gold tissue.’
‘I cannot blame you in the least degree, Father,’ replied Medea, who as Priestess of Prometheus, and of Brimo, could sympathize with him in his religious perplexities. ‘Yet try to placate the Goddess, and keep your eyes and ears open for a sign from her, which cannot be long in coming. I do not think that the Goddess is offended by your Moschian alliance, but you will know by the sign whether you have insulted her son Mithras, who slew the Bull of Darkness, by introducing the Taurian bulls into your palace, or whether the Goddess herself resents your admission of the Taurian priests to the fore-part of the enclosure of Prometheus. I grant that these acts, which necessity forced upon you, were performed many years ago; and that you propitiated the Goddess most dutifully at the same time; yet this is the first year in which, yielding to the persuasions of my uncle Perses the Taurian, you have dared either to attend the revels of the war god or to garland the bulls with Colchian flowers. You would be wise to consult the Goddess at once. It may be that she is promising that if you are obliged to offend my mother’s people by the expulsion of the priests, or the bulls, or both, help will come to you from the land of Greece.’
Aeëtes said: ‘This is a possible interpretation, I grant. But what of the serpents’ teeth?’
Medea answered: ‘The Taurians claim to be sprung from the teeth that fell from the jaws of the snake Ophion, when Eurynome strangled him, and thus to be of an earlier creation than Pyrrha and her lover Deucalion, the clay-formed ancestors of the Greeks. The dream suggests that the Sown men will ruin themselves by their opposition to these Greeks.’
Aeëtes asked again: ‘But what of the star that fell into your lap?’
Medea answered: ‘Is it perhaps some divine gift conferred on me, which will spread the fame of our house into foreign parts?’ She concealed from him the dream which she had been dreaming when he had awakened her, and which, she was convinced, supplemented his own. It was of Circe, his sister who lived in the island of Aeaea at the head of the Adriatic Sea, a proud, falcon-eyed, falcon-nosed crone, beckoning to her and crying: ‘Leave all and come to me!’
He asked again: ‘But why did the ghost of Prometheus wail?’
She answered: ‘How can I tell you that? It may well have been derisive wailing for his Taurian neighbours. He will be pleased enough to see their backs when they are driven from his enclosure.’
Aeëtes pondered on Medea’s answers, and approved them in the main. Yet he still felt a grave misgiving, and dared not return to the couch to complete his sleep, for fear of further dreams. Instead, he invited her to come out walking with him in the palace grounds while breakfast was prepared; after breakfast he would avert the evil consequences of his dream by a double precaution – he would wash in the clear water of the Phasis, and he would tell his dream to the Sun so soon as ever it surmounted the eastern peaks.
Medea consented. She dressed herself in one of her finest robes, and adorned her head with care; then she went out with her father along the level walks between the flower-pots and fruit-bushes towards the place where the fifty-jetted fountain played. Wishing to rid his mind of a secret that weighed heavily upon it, he most unseasonably disclosed to Medea a recent decision of his Council of State. They had invited old Styrus, King of the Albanians, to come to Aea with an offer of marriage for her. ‘It may be,’ he said, ‘that my dream of the star is concerned with the fruit of this marriage, which I have planned, as you will understand, solely for the public good. You have always been a prudent girl, avoiding the snares of love which make life so unnecessarily painful for young people; and therefore I trust that you will raise no objections to this marriage (which Styrus himself has proposed through a Moschian intermediary), as you have to others of less political consequence; but, on the contrary, will welcome it. With old Styrus as my son-in-law all our foreign anxieties will end.’ For Styrus ruled over a powerful tribe in the mountains to the north of the river Cyrus, and thus not only commanded the trade route upon which much of the prosperity of Colchis depended, but threatened the kingdom’s eastern frontiers. And Aeëtes reminded her too: ‘Your position in Albania will be one of far greater power than you can ever hope to attain in Colchis when your brother Apsyrtus succeeds me.’
Medea said nothing at all in reply, but inwardly she seethed with rage; for the Albanians are lice-eaters and have disgusting sexual habits, and the Council of State had insulted her by treating with Styrus behind her back.
Aeëtes ironically praised her dutiful silence; but still she said nothing. Together they watched the distant snowy hills of Moschia take on the reflected radiance of sunrise.
‘It is the colour of fresh blood,’ said Aeëtes involuntarily; and could not recall these unfortunate words.
As they turned to walk back towards the palace a messenger came running up from the southern watchtower. ‘Majesty,’ he cried breathlessly, ‘a thirty-oared Greek ship has just sailed up the river through the mist and is casting anchor at the Royal Quay. The figurehead is a Ram, and the crew appear, every one of them, to be persons of great distinction. Among them I have discerned your four grandchildren, the sons of Phrixus; of whom one, Prince Argeus, has been wounded in the head.’
Aeëtes strode out at once through the Southern Gate of the city and down towards the quay in an excess of anger, intending to forbid the Argonauts to land; but met Echion the herald already advancing to meet him, olive wand in hand.
Echion was the first to speak:
‘Thrice-noble King Aeëtes of Colchis, formerly of glorious Ephyra, we come in the name of The Mother on an errand of piety which our captain will presently disclose to you in better words than I can muster. He is Jason the Minyan, heir to the throne of Phthiotis, and the rest of our ship’s company are, similarly, of the best blood to be found in Greece, some of them kings, others of divine parentage. Among them is Augeas, King of Elis, who, like you, is a hereditary priest of the Sun. You need not fear that we come with any evil intent, for The Mother herself has sent us. By her gracious intervention, not many days ago, Jason rescued from drowning your four noble grandsons and now restores them to you, safe and sound. And he rescued not only your grandchildren, but his own kinsmen. For Cretheus, Jason’s grandfather, was brother to their grandfather, King Athamas of Orchomenos.’
Aeëtes answered with a lowering look: ‘Is it not known throughout Greece that when news was brought to me of the barbarous murder of my nephew Sisyphus of Asopia, I swore that I would have my revenge on the first crew of Greek seamen who dared to venture up this river and would kill every man of them? What virtue, do you think, lies in the impious name of Athamas that it should persuade me to alter my intention towards you?’
Echion answered blandly: ‘It is fortunate, Majesty, that your words, spoken in anger, were so loosely phrased that you need not consider yourself bound by them in your dealings with us. In the first place, we seamen are not all Greeks, for several of us are of ancient Cretan or Pelasgian stock, and three are Thracians (as their tattooed faces and hemp tunics declare); in the second, we Greeks are not all seamen, for Atalanta of Calydon is a seawoman. As for the name of Athamas, let it ring in your ears as a warning of what befalls those who disregard the orders of the Great One in whose name we come.’
Medea, who had followed her father through the gate from curiosity, caught at his sleeve and drew him aside. ‘Father,’ she whispered, ‘remember your dream and recognize the sign. Do not thoughtlessly drive away the Greek help which the Goddess plainly vouchsafed you last night. Entertain these strangers hospitably, and when you have provided them with hot baths, clean clothes, and the best food and drink at you
r command, listen attentively to what they have to say. They come in the name of The Mother, not of any upstart Zeus or Poseidon.’
Aeëtes answered aloud: ‘If they do not come in the name of Zeus, why does their ship carry a Ram figure-head?’
‘Ask the herald,’ said she. ‘Do not ask me!’
Echion had a ready explanation. The Ram figure-head had been the emblem of Minyan ships for generations, long before the new Olympian dispensation. Why should Aeëtes regard it as having any disturbing significance? He added: ‘Among other prime objects of our voyage is that of offering you, on behalf of the present rulers of Asopia and Ephyra, complete satisfaction for the cruel death of your nephew Sisyphus, which has been the original cause of countless distresses in the double kingdom.’ Never was known so smooth a liar as Echion, when occasion served. His father Hermes had told lies from the very cradle; or so the Arcadian poets relate.
Aeëtes paused and stared fixedly at Echion, who met the angry gaze easily and unflinchingly, as an inspired herald should. Finally Aeëtes yielded. He dropped his eyes and said: ‘Inform Jason your captain that I am grateful to him for the rescue of the four sons of Phrixus, my grandchildren; that he is free to come ashore without fear; and that I expect him to convey to me accurately the message entrusted to him by the Asopian and Ephyran rulers, with whatever other message he pleases so long only as not a word is spoken on the subject of the Golden Fleece of Laphystian Zeus.’
Echion laughed. He said: ‘Do not blow old embers into flame, Majesty, by yourself naming an ancient relic of which (I am glad to inform you) everyone in Greece except heralds and poets, whose profession it is to remember everything, have long ago forgotten the very name.’
By this time Jason and the rest of the Argonauts had disembarked and were trooping, two by two, up the broad stone steps that led from the Royal Quay to the city gate. Aeëtes therefore dismissed Medea, not wishing her to be stared at by Greek strangers, and stood prepared to give Jason a courteous welcome. But Medea did not hurry on her way. Where the crooked path turned by a pear-tree, she also turned. Leaning against a balustrade she looked back at Jason as he stepped with youthful dignity, neither too slowly nor too fast, up the stairway, three paces ahead of his comrades.
The Golden Fleece Page 33