Collected fiction, p.645
Collected Fiction, page 645
“Before the paint was dry on me I could hear through the wall the commotion when they found the altar empty. The priest slipped out. I think—” She hesitated. “No, I know he went to bring another girl for the sacrifice. A slave. They put my insigne on her and the word went out that I had died. But rumors move fast in a place like this.
“Since then I’ve had a room in the slave quarters. Eight of us tend these apartments, where the highest ranks among the priesthood live. The rumor went out that they were bringing a man from Aeaea and I came. I thought it might be someone smuggled in to help me. But when I listened—” She writhed in my arms so that she faced me fully, and her eyes were grave.
“Tell me the truth,” she said. “When you made that promise, you meant to keep it.”
I COULD have lied to her. I didn’t. “Yes,” I said quietly. “I meant to keep it.” I shifted her on my knee, taking a firmer grip on her wrist. “Tell me one thing more.”
I said. “Who am I?”
She shook her head, her gaze unswerving on my face. “I don’t know.”
“How long did you listen to what Phrontis and I were saying?”
“Only from your bargaining. I—I lost my head then. I’d counted so much on your coming here to help me. Perhaps if I’d pleaded with you instead of striking you—” She waited, but I didn’t answer. Sighing, she went on: “Well there are those in the city who would help, me if I could reach them, but how much they could do—I don’t know. Hecate’s domain is smaller than Apollo’s. That, perhaps, is what their war is about, though I’m not sure. And I must get free—I must! The mother-goddess needs me, and the Circe who rules now is too old to fight.”
“And you? What could you do, if you were there again?”
“On Aeaea, you mean?” she said, with dignity. “Myself, I could do little. But with the Mask of Circe, and the power of Hecate, I think I could face Apollo himself!”
A little breeze of chill seemed to me to move briefly through the room as she spoke. There were powers in leash here at which I could only guess, even through Jason’s memories. This girl knew more than I about too many things.
I considered what she had said. An idea was beginning to take vague shape in my mind. “The city’s well-guarded, is it?” I asked her.
She gave me a grim little smile. “So well guarded that I was surprised when I thought even Hecate herself had managed to smuggle in an envoy to help me. There’s war between the gods. You can guess from that how closely Helios’ walls are watched.”
“If I should decide to help you,” I said, “what chance have we of escaping?”
I felt her slender body droop in my arms. “So little chance,” she told me, “that I might as well have died on Apollo’s altar. I was a fool to strike you. Even if you would, you couldn’t help me now. And you won’t. You promised Phrontis.”
Yes, I had given my word to the priest, which might have been a mistake. I wasn’t sure now. It had been easy enough at the time, when I remembered how I was being pushed, pawn-like, about the board of a war-game here. But at this moment, holding the young Circe in my arms, watching her thick lashes shadow the eyes like sunny brook-water, it was a different matter entirely to think of giving her up to Phrontis and the altar.
But I had to do one thing or the other. I had to make up my mind. I thought, is there any hope of helping her? But there was none. I knew too little. Jason, whose memories moved so bewilderingly through my mind when I did not want them, had nothing to offer out of his age-old store of knowledge now in the hour when I needed his help most.
I thought with sudden desperation, Give me the answer, Jason! Help me if you can! And deliberately I made my mind blank.
There was—no Jason. There was, in reality, no subtle, untrustworthy ghost of the old hero hovering in my brain. Only his buried memories lay there, deep under incredibly many layers of superimposed lives. But between that age-old mind and mine so close an affinity existed that I could tap his memories, and he—strangely, magically, out of that past which was his future—had completed the time-cycle by tapping mine. Whether or not that was the true answer I did not know. I could only accept it and search with all my mind’s strength for the aid I needed.
Dimly it began to come. The room faded around me. I locked my grip around Cyane’s wrist and waited . . .
A WORD, a picture, swam uncertainly to light and submerged again. Fiercely I dredged after it. A glow, something brilliantly golden, infinitely precious. Something Jason had fought for and won long ago. Something with a secret in it Jason could tell me, if I searched his memories deeply enough.
Golden—gleaming—hanging on a strange tree in a strange, dangerous place—
“The Fleece!” I heard my own voice saying in surprise. “The Golden Fleece!”
A violent wrench at my hand startled me out of my daze. I heard a gasp and the thud of bare feet on the floor. I blinked in bewilderment at Cyane, my captive a moment before, now standing a dozen feet away and looking at me with wide, angry eyes.
“Jason!” she whispered. Her teeth showed white against the darkness of her painted face in a grimace of amazement and revulsion. “You must be Jason! I might have guessed it! Who but Jason would choose so wrong a time to answer the summons of thousands of years!”
I scrambled to my feet, the sweat of my remembering still cold upon me, my mind not yet steady as Jason’s memories ebbed away. Ebbed? Not wholly. There was anger in my brain to answer Cyane’s anger, and I think it was Jason who voiced a soundless cry to me.
“Catch her, you fool! Don’t let her get away!”
She must have seen something of the thought in my face, for she danced away from me backward as I stumbled toward her, my hands out.
“Wait,” I said. “There’s something! I think I know away.”
She laughed scornfully. “Trust Jason? Medea trusted him—Creusa trusted him, and Queen Hypsipyle and how many others? But not Cyane!”
I felt smooth words bubbling up in my mind like water in a fountain, soothing arguments, phrases bland as oil. But as I caught my breath to speak, the air shivered around us to the music of an unseen harp, and behind Cyane I saw the darkness between two pillars open like a rift in thunder clouds.
“Cyane?” Phrontis’ voice said. “Who speaks of Cyane?”
Tall and golden, he came through the darkness into the room. There were priests behind him, peering curiously across his shoulder. Cyane spun to look, then wheeled again, her eyes imploring me in the smooth dark face.
“It seemed to me that my mind turned over upon itself, spilling every crowding thought into utter confusion. Lightning-flashes of plot and counterplot darted through it. Phrontis’ eyes rested inquiringly upon mine.
“This is Cyane,” I heard myself saying calmly. “The slave-girl here. Catch her—quick!”
CHAPTER VIII
Hecate Speaks
I FOLLOWED Phrontis down a golden corridor in silence. My mind was still in turmoil, but the foremost among the thoughts that seethed in it now was the prospect of surcease—soon—in another hour at most. Phrontis had promised me. For I followed him to the room where the ceremonies of freeing my mind from Jason’s would begin.
I was still Jason in part. I could still feel the bubbling up of smooth, easy phrases that offered solace to the conscience of Jay Seward. I hated that subtle, plausible brain intruding itself upon mine. And yet—were these arguments he offered me wholly wrong? Was it Jay Seward or Jason the Betrayer, who voiced them?
“What else could I do?” I asked myself futilely as I followed Phrontis. “We were in a hopeless spot as we stood. No escape possible, and Hecate’s fate depending on our escape. Whether I mean to fight on her side or not doesn’t matter now. I’m not sure about that. Hecate was a dark goddess, one of the underworld deities, queen of sorceries and black magic. Apollo, at least, is the sun-god—bright daylight against enchantments and night time. You can’t judge them on those merits—it’s pure legend and. may mean nothing. But what else have I to judge them by?
“Well, it doesn’t matter. As things stood, there was only one thing I could do and it was a blow struck equally in favor of both sides. I won Phrontis’ trust. That’s worth a lot, because he seems to be very nearly in full charge here. Now he’ll work with me. But I did more than that, because somebody powerful in Helios released Cyane.
“Somebody had a plot in motion when he did it. By this act, I’ve thrown that plot off balance. And any shift in balance just now is good for it may mean help to us; it can’t mean any more danger than we were in already—if I’m working for Hecate. If this unknown priest’s plans are disarranged, something will come of it and since I’m in Phrontis’ confidence now, maybe I can watch for the moment and turn it to my own ends.”
But was it Jason who reasoned thus smoothly? I couldn’t forget Cyane’s eyes on my face as they dragged her from the room. Many women, I knew, must have looked at Jason of Iolcus in such a way, after he had betrayed them. But for Jay Seward it had not been so easy to stand by. Still, if I’d jumped to her defense all that Jay—or was it Jason—had gambled on this desperate throw would be lost and wasted. No, better to let her go with the priesthood—go as far as the altar if need be, while I let chance mature Jason’s plans.
We paused before a sun-blazoned door. Phrontis pushed it open and nodded me in, following silently. The room within was star-shaped. Golden curtains cut off the five corners, and a tall man was just lowering the last curtain as I entered. He turned and I looked into the ravaged face of Ophion, the high priest. He limped forward to confront me.
“Son of Jason,” he said in a quiet voice, “you go to stand before Apollo. The room beyond this is a part of his holiest sanctum. You will look into the Eye of Apollo, and the memories you hate will drop from you as you look.” He hesitated, his fine brow wrinkling a little. But before he could speak further, Phrontis had moved past him and touched a latch in the far wall.
The peak of the star-shaped room opened outward like a comet’s tail and I was looking into an infinity of interreflecting silver walls. Phrontis’ hand on my shoulder urged me forward. Half in a daze, I walked forward.
“Ophion will guide you from outside,” Phrontis’ voice said from behind me. “He must serve as high priest, since technically I am still an acolyte. But I’ll stand with him to learn. Are you ready, Son of Jason?”
I was not ready. Oddly, now that the moment was upon me, I felt strangely reluctant to give up those memories that had been torture whenever they came, yet which had promised me knowledge and power I might badly need before I left Helion—if I ever left it alive.
But Phrontis did not wait for my answer. There was a soft rush of displaced air in the room, and when I turned with belated swiftness I was alone. The shining walls had slipped back into place and I saw no way out. Mistrustfully I looked about the room.
It was small. But I could feel the—the power—that quivered and vibrated here from wall to silvery wall, latent unknown forces that might move into life at any moment. There was more power in focus here, I thought, than in the whole city of Helios outside.
FROM the faceted ceiling dim light shot down in a webwork of interlacing rays, ghostly and radiant. The floor sloped down to a shallow depression at the center where a milky hemisphere four feet across, lay like a pool of opalescent water. The walls were mirror-silver.
I waited, my heart thumping. There was utter silence here. The shafts of dim radiance streamed down in columnar patterns. And after a moment or two it seemed to me they were growing brighter.
The milky hemisphere in the floor was beginning to shine with a cold, ice-bright radiance, and a hint of gold was creeping into that crepuscular glow. Still the silence held. The Eye of Apollo dimmed. The columns of light dimmed with it.
They waned and waxed again, brighter. This time the golden shining was unmistakable. Like the slow pulse of a heart of cosmic light the Eye faded—brightened—dimmed once more.
Faster and faster the changes came. The walls reflected a throbbing series of golden flashes. I saw my own image leaping into clarity and vanishing again, rhythmically, as the sun-shafts blazed down from above.
They flickered like lightning, and suddenly the whole room was an intolerable glare of gold, so blinding I could not face it.
I flung up an arm to shield my closed eyes. Behind the lids colors swam confusingly, like boiling clouds. And then, incredibly, the clouds seemed to part and a face looked through them into the depths of my brain.
It seemed to me that every cell of my body retracted instinctively away from that sight. I was aware of a hideous cold crawling through every nerve and muscle as if my flesh itself recoiled by an instantaneous motion deeper than reflex before the beauty of that Face—
Apollo’s face.
I was looking upon a god.
Many legends surviving to my own time and world had hymned Apollo’s beauty. But it was not human beauty. The face had all the lineaments of human likeness, but the beauty in it transcended any human beauty as the sun transcends candlelight. There are no words in any language to tell you how he looked—or how that godlike splendor repelled the eye that gazed upon it.
He regarded me with remote interest, aloof as all gods must be from human endeavors. I was no more than a ripple upon the surface of divine thoughts incomprehensible to any mind but his. And behind him I was very dimly aware, in no more than a flash of consciousness, of vast golden things looming impossibly high into a golden sky. A god’s world!
A god?
I remembered Phrontis’ skeptical cynicism. Ophion believed in the supernal beings, but did Phrontis? Could this terrible beauty he only human, after all? Or more than human, but less than divine?
All that went through my mind in the space of one heartbeat, while the Face gazed with cold indifferent interest into mine, through the barrier of my closed lids.
I opened my eyes again. The room was incandescent with light. It seared the eyes. And it was more than light. The galactic energies of the sun itself seemed to pour through body and brain. The power of—of—
The word eluded me. Veils were slipping one by one from my mind in that burning bath. And behind those veils was something that shone brighter than the Eye of the Sun God.
The last veil burned and was gone . . .
We three stood on a hilltop—Circe and Jason and a great, strange, shadowy figure at our backs. We faced a distant brightening in the air, and fear brimmed in me like wine in a cup. I knew who it was that stood behind me—and she was no goddess. Men called her Hecate.
But in the weeks he had spent on Aeaea, Jason came to learn what truth lies behind the clouded altars.
Circe—priestess of Hecate.
The dark goddess herself—mightily armed.
And I, Jason, son of Aeson, armored in that unimaginably strange thing named the Golden Fleece.
We three stood waiting for coming battle—waiting for Apollo . . .
IT WAS long ago—three thousand years ago. Part of my mind knew that. But the living part of my mind just now dwelt in that forgotten past which was sweeping back upon me in wave after wave of memory. Jason’s memory. Each veil of it, I thought, relived in a flash and torn aside forever.
Argo cleaving the purple Aegean water—the dark groves of Aeaea—the faces of many women.
Argo, my own, my swift and beautiful.”
What was any woman to me? What was Circe, or Hecate herself, or this monstrous battle between those, people called gods—who were not gods? True, I had sworn an oath—
But Jason had broken oaths before.
We came to Aeaea three weeks ago, to the white temple and the lovely Enchantress who dwelt there among her half-human beasts.
Medea and I, traveling overland to be cleansed of blood-guilt and to wait the coming of the Argo. But there were storms that year, and Argo did not come. And while we waited on that strange isle in the Adriatic where Circe wrought her spells, dim, unreal days and nights went by. There was something strange in the very air of the island, as though Aeaea hovered on the edge of the veil that hides another world.
Slowly, during the long summer evening, Jason’s thoughts turned from Medea, who was a well-known story now, and lingered upon Circe, the Enchantress. I knew from the first that she had been watching me, not for my own sake, though I did not guess it then, but for another reason—for the sake of another man.
I have a double mind. Always I have had that. Perhaps I was born to it, perhaps it developed in the days when I was a student under the wisdom of Charon, the Centaur. But sometimes another man, a ghost from some unknown Hades, looks through Jason’s eyes and speaks with his tongue. Not often. But on Aeaea it happened more often than I liked, and Circe lingered near me while the madness had reign in my mind, her strange ember-green eyes hot upon mine.
Mine? No, that other man’s. He was that nameless ghost who shared Jason’s brain.
And—a new look began to come into the green gaze. I had seen that look on a woman’s face often enough to know what it implied. Well, it was nothing new to Jason that a woman should love him. But uneasiness nagged at me beneath the complacence. There was something here I did not understand.
The weeks were long before the Argo came. And before that happened, Circe spoke to me of Hecate, and Hecate herself stepped down from her altar . . .
We had been drinking wine together in the cool summer evening, Circe and I. After awhile she said to me,
“I have a message for you, Jason—a message from the goddess.”
I considered that. The wine was in my head. I wondered if the goddess herself had looked upon me and found me good. Perhaps that was what lay behind the strangeness I had sensed. And legend told of many times before now when a goddess stooped to bestow her favor on a mortal.
Circe said abruptly, “Come with me,” and I rose and followed her with a sense of pleasant anticipation . . .
