stood a hundred-year-old vine with a massive, shaggy
trunk,
withered to the roots. We chopped it down; then crafty
Argus
hacked out a sacred image of the queen of gods, long
gray hair
flying as he wheeled his axe. He skilfully shaped it,
gray ears
cocked to the whisper of Athena. When he finished, we
set it up
on a rocky eminence sheltered by dark, tall oaks, and
made
an altar of stones nearby. Then, crowned with oakleaves
(night
had fallen now, the dark storm howling around us), we began the sacrificial rites. I poured libations out, shouting to the goddess to send those flogging winds
away.
Mopsos and Orpheus whispered. Then, at Orpheus’
command,
the Argonauts, in all their armor, circled the fire in a high-stepping dance, beating their shields with their
swordhilts, drowning
the noise of the Doliones, far below us, still mourning their king. More wildly than the storm mute Phlias
danced, their leader.
Louder and louder their armor rang in the night, and
the flam
of drums. I could hardly hear myself, yelling to Hera—
much less
hear the howling of the winds, the howl of the
mourners. Then—
strange business!—the trees began shedding their fruit,
and the earth at our feet
magically put on a cloak of grass. Beasts left their lairs, their burrows and thickets, and came to us wagging
their tails. Nor was
that all. There had never been water—there was neither
spring nor pool—
before that time on Bear Mountain. Now, though no one
touched
a spade, a stream came gushing from the earth, a stream
that flows
even now, called Jason’s Well. And so, it seems, the
goddess
heard us. We finished our rites with a feast—all this
according
to ritual. By dawn, the wind had dropped. We could sail.
“Old Mopsos said—we were standing in the woods
alone, when the rest
had walked back down to the harbor—: ‘My son, you did
that well!
Never have I witnessed a more auspicious flush of signs! Such miracles! Surely the goddess Hera loves you, boy! Surely the crew of the Argo is in divinely favored hands!’ I bowed. He studied me, picking at his lip. He
said,
eyes wicked, grinning in spite of himself: ‘You’re
unimpressed.
Some trick, you imagine? You think the goddess of
will (all praise
to her name) may not have been here with us?’ Then
I too smiled.
“We made a good deal of noise,” I said, and avoided his
eyes.
‘ If I were a mountain, a stormy sky, and were shaken
to the heart
by noise like that, I might do almost anything—goddess or no goddess.’ The old seer chuckled, crazy-eyed. ‘Shrewd observation,’ he whispered, bending close.
‘Bravo!
All very well for a big ignoramus like Herakles to shudder and shake at magic tricks. We know better,
you and I!
Mopsos, king of all augurers, marching to his death—
and for what?
And Jason, robbed of his Lemnian beauty, forced on a
senseless,
pointless mission—abandoning his mother to
ignominious
death, wasting his wonderful oratory (“Jason of the
Golden
Tongue,” as they say) outshouttng cacophonous winds
and drums:
pawn of the fates, murderer of friends that he meant
no harm to,
weary wanderer in a faithless world (alas!
lack-a-day!)—
no wonder if the racket that shakes Bear Mountain to
her deepest stones,
the clatter that whisks away winds—has no faintest
effect on him!
What has the son of Aison to do with the goddess of will? —Jason, who’s gazed into the Pit!’ He cackled,
delighted with himself.
‘Are we brutes? Are we Balls on Inclined Planes? Are
we mindless?—noseless
to the stink, everywhere, of Death? Let Philosophy set
it down
that love is illusion, from which it follows, the gods are
illusion,
which proves in turn that Mother Nature, who gives
such joy,
is an old whore earning her keep!’ Then suddenly:
He stared, intense, his eyes so bright you’d have thought
some demon
had entered him. ‘How do you feel?’ I thought about it. I felt like a man renewed. It was completely senseless. How can the mind know all its mechanics and scoff
at aid,
cold-blooded, and yet be aided? Nevertheless, I was a man reborn. It was stupid. ‘Me too!’ old Mopsos said, cackling, doing a dancestep, lunatic joy. ‘We’ve had us some times!’ he said. We’ve done us some deeds!! Old
Hera’s in us!!!’
He paused. ‘Whatever that may mean.’ He winked,
then aimed
his staff at a tree. It was filled, suddenly, with fire.
He aimed
at a rock: it burst into feathers, screeched, flapped off.
‘So much
for the quacks on the isle of Elektra!’ he said. Then,
sobering,
adjusting his robe and beads—the robe was none too
clean—
he bowed, taking my arm. And so we returned to the
ship,
all dignity, solemnly walking in step. And so sailed on. Idmon, younger of the seers, came over to my rowing
bench.
‘Pick a halcyon, any halcyon,’ he said. He winked.
“Faith wasn’t our business. Herakles’ business, maybe. Sailing the cool treacherous seas of the barbarians …”
9
The wind dropped down to nothing. We rowed— ‘in
a spirit of friendly
rivalry,’ mad Idas said, rolling his eyes, making fun of
God knew
what. Still, that’s what we did, each trying to shame
all others.
The windless air had smoothed out the waves on every
side;
the sea was asleep. We rowed, driving the singing ship, swift as a skate, by our own power. It seemed to us— skimming the sea like a gull, a wingèd shark—not even Poseidon’s team, the horses with the whirlwind feet,
could have overtaken us.
But later, when the sea was roughened by the winds that blow down rivers in the afternoon, we wearied and
relaxed,
and we left it to Herakles alone to haul us in, our
muscles
shaky with exhaustion, throats burned raw by panting.
Each stroke
he pulled sent a shudder through the ship. His sweat
ran rivers down
his face and dripped from his nose and chin to his
wide chest
and belly, tightened like a fist. Young Hylas beamed at
him, watching,
and old Polyphemon, son of Eilatos, grinned, shaking his hoary head, and swore that not even in his prime,
when he fought
with the Lapithai, striking centaurs down with his bare
fists,
had he or any other man pulled oars with the power of Herakles. ‘It looks as if by himself hell bring us to the Mysian coast! the old man said. Herakles
grinned,
or tried to, his face contorted with the effort of his
rowing. But then,
as we passed within sight of the Rhydakos and the great
barrow
of Aigaion, not far from Phrygia, Herakles—ploughing enormous furrows in the choppy sea—snapped his long
oar
and tumbled sideways, clear off the bench. He looked
up, outraged,
the handle of the oar in his two hands, the paddle end
sweeping
sternward, away out of sight. We laughed. He was
angrier yet,
sitting up, speechless and glaring. We took up the
rowing as best
we could, weary as we were. Even now he could hardly
speak,
a man not used to idleness.
“We made our landfall.
It was dusk; the time of day when the ploughman,
thinking of his supper,
reaches his home at last and, pausing at the door, looks
down
at his hands, begrimed and barked, and curses the tyrant
belly
that drives men to such work. We’d struck the
Kianian coast,
close to Mount Arganthon and the famous estuary of Kios. Luckily, tired as we were, the people greeted us kindly, supplying our needs with sheep and wine. I sent a few of the Argonauts to fetch dry wood, others to
gather up
leaves from the fields and bring them to the camp for
bedding; still others
I set to twirling firesticks; the rest of us filled the winebowls, getting them ready for the usual sacrifice to Apollo, god of landings.
“But Herakles, son of Zeus,
left us to work on the feast by ourselves and set out,
alone—
attended by unseen ravens, the night’s historians— for the woods, anxious before all else to make himself
an oar
to replace the one he’d broken. He wandered around till
at last
he discovered a pine not burdened much with branches,
and not
full grown—a pine like a slender young poplar in height
and girth.
When he saw it would do, he laid his bow and quiver
down,
took off his loinskin, and began by loosening the pine’s
hold
with blows of his bronze-studded club. Then he trusted
to his own power.
Legs wide apart, one mighty shoulder pressed against
the tree,
he seized the trunk low down with his hands and,
pulling so hard
his temples bulged, face dark with blood, he tore up
the pine
by the roots. It came up clods and all, like a ship’s mast
torn
from its stays, the wedges and pins coming with it,
when sudden fashes
break without warning as Orion sets in anger. When
he’d rested,
he picked it up, along with his bow and arrows,
loinskin
and club, and started back, balancing the tree on his
shoulder.
“Meanwhile Hylas had gone off by himself with a
bronze ewer,
looking for a hallowed spring where he might get
drinking water
for the evening meal. Herakles himself had trained
the boy
in the business of a squire. He’d had the boy since the
day he struck down
Hylas’ father, Theiodamas, king of the Dryopians. Not one of Herakles’ nobler moments. They were a
lawless tribe,
the Dryopians, fornicating with one another’s wives, maddening themselves by the use of strange distillations
and roots,
scornful of the gods. Unable to find any honest quarrel, Herakles went to the king one day when he was
ploughing, and began
an argument concerning an ox. One moment the king
was laughing,
scornful and clever, enjoying the contest; the next he
lay dead
in the fallow, his skull caved in. He felt no guilt
about it,
Herakles. He took the child from the basket beside the field and brought it up, made the boy his servant—
trained him
as a shepherd trains up a loyal, unquestioning dog.
“Soon Hylas
discovered a spring, tracing the swift stream upward in
the dark
past moonlit waterfalls, majestic trees—it was not the
nearest
of the springs he might take water from; but he was
young, after all.
and the night was beautiful, filled with the sound of
cascades; immense
ramose old trees, motionless, brooding on themselves.
He could stand
on the shelf or rock overlooking the dark, still pool and
feel
he was the only boy on earth. To his left the torrent fell
away,
swifter than you’d guess, swirling and rippling,
murmuring something
that was almost words, and he must have felt that
if he made his mind
quite still—more still than the dark—he might, any
moment, know
what it said. In the forest beside him, bats were
a-flutter; owls
swept silently down the wide avenues of trees; a stately hart stood quiet as a sapling, watching. A fox crept,
sniffing,
in the brush.
“There was in that spring a naiad. As Hylas drew near she was just emerging from the water to sing her
nightly praise
to Artemis. And there, with the full moon shining on
him
from a cloudless sky, she saw him in all his radiant
beauty
and gentleness. Her heart was flooded with desire; she
had to
struggle to gather up her shattered wits. Now the
moonling leaned
to the water to dip his ewer in, and as soon as the
current
was rattling loudly in the ringing bronze, she threw
her left arm
firmly around his neck and eagerly kissed his lips; her right hand snatched his elbow, and down the poor
boy plunged,
sinking with a cry into the current.
“Old Polyphemon, son
of Eilatos, was not far off. He’d left our feast to search
out
Herakles and help him home with his burden. When
he heard
the cry he rushed in the direction of the spring like a
hungry wolf
who hears the bleating of the distant flock and, in his
suffering, races
down to them only to find that the shepherds have
beaten him again,
the sheep are safe, enfolded. He stood on the bank
and roared—
the reboation rang down the gorge from cliff to cliff to the broadening holm below, where the river was
wide and deep—
and he searched the night with his dim eyes; he
prowled the dark woods,
groaning in distress, roaring again from time to time; but there came no answer from the boy. He drew his
heavy sword
and began to search through the place more widely,
on the chance that Hylas
had fallen to some wild beast or been ambushed by
savages.
If any were there, they’d have found that innocent easy
prey.
Then, as he ran along the path brandishing his naked
sword,
he came upon Herakles himself, hurrying homeward
to the ship
through the darkness, the tree on his shoulder.
Polyphemon knew him at once,
and he blurted out, gasping: ‘My lord, I must bring you
terrible news!
Hylas went out after water. He hasn’t come back.
I fear
cruel savages caught him, or beasts are tearing him
apart. I heard him
cry.’
“When Herakles heard those words the sweat
poured down
his forehead and his dark blood boiled. In his fury, he
threw down
the pine and rushed off, hardly aware where his feet were taking
him.
As a bull, maddened by a gadfly’s sting, comes up
stampeding
from the water-meadows, hurls himself crazily, crashing
into trees,
sometimes rushing on, stopped by nothing—the herd
and herdsmen
forgotten now—and sometimes pausing to lift up his
powerful
neck and bellow his pain, so Herakles ran, that night, sometimes pausing to fill the distance with his ringing
cry.
“But now the morning star rose over the topmost
peaks,
and with it there came a sailing breeze. Tiphys
awakened us
and urged us to embark at once, take advantage of the
wind. We scrambled
to the Argo in haste, pulled up the anchoring stones
and hauled
the ropes astern, all swiftly in the shadowy dark. The
wind
struck full; the sail bellied out; and soon we were far
at sea,
beyond Poseidon’s Cape.
“But then, at the hour when clear-eyed
dawn peers out of the east, and the paths stand plain,
we saw
we’d left those three behind. No wonder if tempers
flashed!
We’d abandoned the mightiest and bravest Argonaut of
all! What could
I say? It was my mistake. I’d make plenty more, no
doubt,
before this maniac mission had reached its end.
—All this
for a shag of wool, the right to make dropsical
courtiers bow,
smile with their age-old hypocrisy—or dark-lumped
urchins
stretch for a cure of the king’s evil. I tried to speak but couldn’t. I covered my face with my hands and
wept. Mad Idas
chuckled. Catastrophe suited him, confirmed his ghastly metaphysics.
“But huge Telamon was rabid, uncle
of Akhilles—a man with a temper like that of the boy
who sits
this moment, if what we hear is true, chewing his
knuckles,
stubborn in his tent on the blood-slick plain of Troy.
He said: