Jason, p.16
Jason, page 16
Then Orpheus, who had come in, his hair awry, his tunic torn, staggering with wine and love, a young girl clasping his waist, called out tipsily, ‘You Cretans never were poets—and now you never can be! I’ll sing you the proper song for this gathering.’
The giggling girl fetched his lyre for him and put it in his hands. He sat on a pile of sheepskins before Hypsipyle and me, and sang this to us:
‘I sought my love among the pines
But their needles turned me away:
In the pool’s dark depths I looked for her—
And the great fish looked for me. . . .
I stood upon the high hill-top
But clouds cloaked my questing eyes.
Yet I found her by chance one summer night
In a bed of strawberries!
In a bed of strawberries she lay
As I rolled drunk from the hall,
Singing to pass her time away
And tossing a golden ball.
The strawberries we ate that night,
The golden ball we shared,
While the long-legged queen held Jason tight.
What bird can fly, ensnared?’
There was a great deal of laughter in the feast-hall at this song and all men called out for Orpheus to make up one about them; but he was too weary and flung his lyre down and reached for his girl again.
Hypsipyle smiled and took me by the hand.
‘Come, my king,’ she whispered. ‘There are more seemly places for great ones to declare their love for each other than this feast-hall.’
I went with her into a small chamber heavily draped with Assyrian silk to keep the draughts from coming in through the window-holes. And there on a broad gold bed we competed with each other in declaring our affection. The sounds of singing from the hall died away as though we were the only creatures left on earth.
Hypsipyle the long-legged queen was perhaps no more than seventeen, but in all ways she was knowledgeable. I whispered this to her in my admiration as the night rolled on like a broad and powerful river that bore us relentlessly with it. She laughed, blue-lidded, and said hoarsely, ‘A queen must know all things from the cradle.’
Yet a strange difference came over her when the dawn with its rosy fingers parted our silken curtains. She knelt beside the bed as though she were praying to a god—to me—and her face was drawn and haggard.
‘Dearest lord,’ she said, ‘I have more to confess than my love for you. Will you promise that when I have told you, you will not hurt me?’
I was too sleepy and content to harbour thoughts of hurting anyone then. That night had been too sweet for any bitterness to break its spell, and so I smiled and nodded and stroked the queen’s honey-coloured breasts.
‘If I hurt you, may my right hand rot,’ I said, ‘and may my javelin never reach its target.’
She smiled up at me sadly and said, ‘Your javelin has already reached its target, with a vengeance, which is why I want to tell you this. Know, Jason, that I am a goddess myself. That I am also called Myrina and have power over the corn in the earth and the fishes in the water. I can make them grow and multiply.’
I think, having enjoyed her as a woman, I was a little stupid, a little drunk by our closeness to each other—for remember that I was of the men, a Hellene, and in my deepest heart believed that women were the lesser creatures, although in certain places they still held on to their sly little dark ways which frightened simple herdsmen and warriors.
But now, in her gold bed, I felt masterly again and I said in a teasing voice, ‘If you are what you say, my dear one, then show me a trick of your magic—something more unusual than what you have already shown me, which is the magic of all beautiful women, goddesses or not!’
The queen’s face stiffened and seemed to become a mask of ivory in the dawn light. Then in a low, hard voice she answered, ‘Very well, Jason, I may not refuse such a request, though it was not my wish to make any proofs to one like you. Hold my breasts, one in each hand, as though they were apples.’
This command I complied with readily, and laughing. Yet when I saw her heavy eyes close and heard her breath moan through her half-open mouth, as though she were in a trance, the laughter left me and I looked down at her in alarm.
Suddenly what had been warm and soft became as cold as ice and as hard as stone. I seemed to be holding two rocks, or the breasts of a marble image—just as barren women hold the stone breasts of the Mother-statues in the shrines, begging for a child.
The chill ran through my fingers and up my arms, until it seemed to reach my heart itself. And then I noticed that Hypsipyle’s golden hair, caught wafting in a little breeze that blew in through the window-hole, stayed still, outstretched in the air, as though it had become frozen, too. An image knelt beside that bed, not a living woman. And then the image spoke, its voice as stiff and harsh as its breasts.
‘Now take your hands away, sailor,’ it said.
I tugged and tugged but I could no more have moved my hands than I could have overcome Castor at boxing, or Orpheus at verse-making. I was a prisoner, chained invisibly to the stone breasts of the kneeling goddess.
‘Let me go, for God’s sake,’ I said. ‘I do not deny your magic now, I swear!’
The queen gave a shudder and a deep sigh, and her breasts became warm and soft again. I took my hands away and moved from her, to the other side of the bed, rubbing my tingling fingers to get life into them once more.
The queen rose and lay beside me, comforting me like a little child who has had a bad dream and has cried out in the night.
‘Poor husband,’ she said, ‘so now you are afraid of me for doing what you asked me to do. That is the way of men, and who is to change it? Yet I declare to you that never again shall I use the power that is in me. I swear it, Jason, and I command you to believe my words.’
I thought: How simple and silly are the proud daughters of Pelias, one with her dolls, one with her slashed cheek, one with her broken collar-bone. . . . How simple and stupid have all the women I have known been, compared with this slim woman whose power is buried so deep beneath her great loveliness. . . . Yes, even the dark-haired girls of the Village of Women, where we used to go when I was a stripling under Cheiron’s care. They were dancers, sly blood-letters, maniacs imprisoned in their ancient Cretan dreams. But here was a woman of the Hellenes by her appearance, straight-backed, open-eyed, tall and proud . . . Yet a goddess, one gifted with a power that did not need the silver sickle to make itself known, a power that lived in every lock of her hair, every drop of blood in her slim body.
Hypsipyle made me feel very young, a lad again, and very stupid —not a warrior, a javelin-man, a king; just a man-fool.
I said haltingly, ‘How dare I love you, Goddess, from this time onwards. How may I do anything but fear you?’
She gave a sorry little laugh and took me in her arms warmly. ‘The fit has passed, lover,’ she said. ‘Have courage to master me again as you have done. Break my magic with your strength, dearest one. I am only yours now. The goddess has gone from me and will not come back again.’
At first hesitantly, then gradually with boldness, I did as she commanded; and at last my pride flowed back into me as though I had never felt those two cold balls of stone within my hands. I was a man again, a king, by the time the cocks were crowing out beyond the houses.
18
‘What bird can fly, ensnared?’
A year passed like a day. Such a year as I had never known before or since; a year of god-like pleasures as the varied seasons rolled by. Argo lay half on her side, beached and forgotten by all except her creator, Argus, who alone went down to the waterside each day to inspect the rigging, her planks, the caulking of her seams. Sometimes he could persuade a few men to go with him, those whose new wives drove them out of doors for a day or two for certain reasons—and sometimes he took young girls, the Nymphs of the island, those who were at the verge of marriage, but had not yet been allowed that happy state.
I do not think he was unhappy, one way or the other, in spite of the fact that I would never give him an audience when he came, glum-faced, to pester me with complaints. Frankly, it was firm in my mind that I would never again set foot in that ship—I was too contented as I was.
My queen, Hypsipyle, saw to that. Proud towards all others, she was a slave to me, tending me in all ways, gladly obeying my every wish or desire. And always moving about like a goddess, tall and golden; but a goddess with her sting drawn now. Which sometimes made me think I was a god . . . More than a mere king.
In fact, once when we had a late-summer thunderstorm, I went on to the pine-covered hill in the centre of the island to test this notion, for the first time in my life disregarding the heavy, sulphurous air, the black clouds that reached down their fingers to grasp at me, the sword-like streaks of lightning.
And I stood unprotected upon the hill, in an open place, and pointed my finger at the sky where the turmoil seemed at its thickest. Putting on my most severe voice, I cried out, ‘Have done with this roaring and rumbling. Leave this island in peace, I command you!’
I don’t know whether my words were heard or not. All I can report is that there was a sudden crack of thunder directly above my head, a sound as though two gigantic planks had been smacked together. As I ducked with the spasm of fearful surprise, my head almost touching my feet, a tall pine tree immediately behind me shuddered and groaned, then split down the middle, its branches falling to either side, the new damp wood of its trunk laid bare, like a woman cruelly stripped of her clothing by raping marauders. I was sorry for that tree and turned towards it in wonder. But without warning the rain came down in a solid sheet, like myriads of javelins with all the earth as their target, missing nothing. The weight of water bore me down, flung me among the prickly purple flowers of an acanthus clump. Then from the rock above me a stream, dried up by the constant heat of the long summer, broke forth and poured on its old way, rolling with it the rotting carcass of a sheep. This thing came to rest at my very feet, its sneering skull picked clean of wool and flesh, its black eye-sockets staring, its swollen belly slashed open and empty, the rib-bones white as snow and poking like accusing fingers out from the tattered hide.
The ravens had been at it, and perhaps the foxes, I thought. But why should it be flung down at me in this unceremonious way? Had the gods answered me so? And did that mean I was not a god? Or was it a warning of my own doom? A doom like that of a sheep, my Ananke?
I confess, I ran down the hill without stopping and then lay shivering in Hypsipyle’s bed, drawing comfort from her warmth. She rolled over and said sleepily, without opening her blue-lidded eyes, ‘There, husband, you are wet through! It is unwise to go out on the hill when they are disputing among themselves about the future of man. A toppled tree might fall upon you, or a sudden stream drown you. I could not bear to lose you now that I have found you at last. Lie close and cease your shuddering.’
A little later she gave me warm goat’s milk and soft barley cakes spread thick with wild honey. The milk I drank from a glazed libation cup, with great proud handles on it. But when I had drunk a mouthful of it, I seemed to see reddish streaks of blood floating in the liquid and I could not stomach it any further. I emptied it down the terra-cotta drain-runnel that ran along one side of the room and went on eating my honeyed bread, while the queen, her back towards me, bent at her task of blowing on the charcoal embers of last night’s fire, in the hearth-stone which was dedicated to Hestia.
That, I think, was the first and last time I tried to find out if I was indeed a god. After this, I contented myself by being a mere king. King Jason, of Lemnos!
My companions from Argo had no such torments of mind, though. They took their good fortune as it came and drank it to the lees. Which is what stout-hearted sailors should do; for who, indeed, can see into the future? No mortal man. It takes us all our time to realize what we are doing in the present—or to remember rightly what we did in the past.
No, my men took each day as it came and then forgot it, like good honest creatures, and their women seemed content to do the same; so we were a happy isle, in the year we stayed there.
As we swam in the sea or the streams, men and women together, naked as dolphins, Orpheus made up merry songs which set us all laughing. Once he sang a little verse about the wedding of Heracles and Hylas, which almost earned him a broken neck—but which the women of Lemnos, and especially the young and mischievous Nymphs, found very diverting. Though Heracles went round with a face as black as thunder for days afterwards.
At other times, in the season, we hunted, running in parties, javelin in hand, the women with their skirts tucked up into their girdles, to chase deer or fox, and then to sit together under sheltering rocks and to drink from the calfskin wine-bags that we always carried with us.
And sometimes we would walk into the sea with bone-headed tridents, waist-deep, to spear the fat fish which swarmed in lazy shoals along the eastern shore of our island.
Always we left a deer, or a basketful of fish, when we returned home, as an offering to the gods who had given us success that day.
We were always most happy, like children, on that island, with the blue sky above us and the blue sea all about us. Our world was blue and golden and green—save for the colours of the many flowers and herbs which covered the hill-side, and which we men joined the women in picking—making garlands for each other to wear. These were things we would never have done back on the mainland, where men did not go with the women to gather herbs, and would never think of wearing flowers in their hair. But here all things were different.
Then there was grape-gathering, treading the full and succulent fruit, storing the wine in great red earthen jars. That was a truly merry time, when hardly one of us stayed sober save perhaps Atalanta, who was in all things save one remarkably abstemious.
Those who had no skill were set to chop wood and to stack it beside each house, in readiness for the winter. But such men as Butes the bee-keeper, were always occupied. His mead, made from fermented honey, was the most highly-prized drink on that island, for it was by some secret always more potent than the Lemnian wine. And we held many feasts—not religious ones, you understand. There were no sacrifices, no blood, just merriment. It was as though we had all had enough of gods and goddesses, and, though secretly fearful of them, had agreed to keep them out of our revels. We were just men and women, enjoying each other and the fruits of the earth, unthinking, unrepentant.
Yes, we kept ourselves busy enough. Acastus and Admetus, who had seen the bronze-workers of Tiryns at their trade, set up a forge and a cowskin bellows and made what they called swords and spearheads—rough and ready things, but better than the flint we should have had to fall back on when our own weapons were worn out. Castor and Polydeuces, to everyone’s surprise, began to call themselves potters and gathered clay from a little valley in the island, with which they moulded cups and small figures of men and women and bulls, much like the images that are to be found at Pylus. Every house on the island had one of these figures before they had done.
Perhaps the most useful work that we did in our year on Lemnos was to uncover a quarry, from which the strongest of us dragged out blocks of stone, which we hewed and shaped to form the two pillars of a new gate, headed by twin lions, and based on what we could recall of the Lion Gate of Mycenae, the lions only slightly raised from the surface of the stone—for we had no chisels strong enough to let us round out the figures—and leaning towards each other as though in great affection. These pillars were solemnly dedicated to Hypsipyle and myself, when they were at last raised, and, as an act of acceptance, the queen and I were compelled to embrace each other below the stone lintel in the presence of all the men and the Nymphs, while Atalanta intoned certain ancient Minoan charms and spells, dealing with the duties and uses of man towards woman, and of woman towards man. This was the only marriage ceremony we had, Hypsipyle and I; but it was carried out in public, we clasping each other’s hands, and so it was a true marriage; one which I hold as being the only binding marriage of my life, despite the ceremonies I assisted at in the future.
I am an old man now, when I tell you this; women pass me by and young girls speak of their affairs in my hearing as though I were a block of stone. Yet there was a time when I, too, had hot blood in my body, when I knew what love was, and when no woman of whatever age passed me by without reluctance. I have been with many women, I admit; but it was only Hypsipyle that I truly loved and that I was truly married to, under the new Lion Gate of Lemnos, the gods help me! All others were a dream, a nightmare, a penance, a torment of the flesh, matter for repentance in my after-years. Only she was clean; all others left a scum of filth upon my body and my mind. I tell you this because I want you to understand why I did certain things afterwards, and how I suffered at having done them.
Oh, Hypsipyle, my darling, my dear, my long-limbed and clean golden one! My Hellene, my wife-mother, my only lover! I weep as I recall your name. Wherever you are, forgive me! Forgive a boy who did not know what he was doing; forgive an old man who, knowing, has tortured himself all his years ever since and will die with the sword of regret passing through his body from side to side, as my javelin passed through the belly of the laughing Spartan on Pelion that distant summer day. But he went quickly; I have lingered on and have known the sword a thousand times, a thousand swords, God help me!
You must forgive me; I must speak, or I should weep, and a king must not weep where fishermen and washerwomen can see his tears. Not now that the Dorians have set the new fashion of men being known as cowards if they weep . . . We must all laugh now, whatever the occasion.
