Jason and Medeia (10 page)

looked sheepish,

snatched up a winebowl, drank. “I've a theory that

Time's reversed,”

he said then, rolling his coy, dark eyes at Pyripta.

She blushed.

“A stunning opinion, you'll admit, though somewhat

absurd, of course.”

He shrugged, slid his glance to the king. When he

winked, old Kreon smiled.

“Then again, I know all the ancient tales of the scribes,

and can tell them

hour on hour for a year without ever repeating myself, tale unfolding from tale like petals from a rosebud,

linked

so slyly that no man alive can seize the floor from me, caught in my web of adventures (ladies, ensorcelled

princes,

demons whose doors are the roots of trees) …

A womanish skill,

you'll say—and I grant it: a skill more fit for a harem

eunuch;

nevertheless, a skill I happen to possess—such is my foolishness, or the restlessness of my clowning mind.

“ ‘How,' you must surely be asking, ‘can this rank

lunatic

have power befitting a god's—the rule of a kingdom

as wide

as Indus was, in the old days?' ” He sighed and shook

his head,

deeply apologetic. “I must tell you the bitter truth. All my art, my theology, my metaphysics have earned me nothing! I could weep! I could tear out

my hair!” He became

the soul of woe. “I reason, I cajole, I confound the

wisest

with holy conundrums like these: ‘If Zeus is absolute

order,

or pure intellect, and the Lord of Death is essential

confusion

(that is to say, Chaos), what, if anything, connects the

two,

and how can each know the other exists? If Zeus can

muse

on all that exists, does Zeus exist?' —But at last my

enemies

are convinced (ah, woe!) by mere trivia.” Suddenly he bent, grinning, and with only his teeth, raised up an

oak chair

large as a throne—it was carved from end to end

with figures—

and, fat neck swelling, he lifted it over his head. With

fists

like steel, he cracked and snapped off, one by one, its

thick

clawed feet. He laid them on the table like spoons.

Then, taking the seat

of stone in his hands, he snapped it like kindling. He

spat out the rest

—the back and the cumbersome arms—and then, most

amazing of all,

he sucked in breath, belched fire from his mouth like a

gasoline torch,

snatching the legs up and lighting them one by one,

then hurling them

high in the air, a four-spoked wheel of flame. It turned faster and faster. Mouths gaping, we saw that he no

longer touched them—

the fire-wheel spinning on its own, high over the

trestle-tables.

Even the three goddesses, I thought, were baffled by

the trick.

Quick as the blink of an eye, the fire-wheel vanished.

There was

no sound in the darkened hall.

Then all the sea-kings roared,

applauding, beating the flagstone floor with their staffs

and shouting,

some crying out for another such trick, while some

demanded

that he do that same one again, so that people could

watch it more closely;

nothing's more pleasant than discovering the secret

rules of things.

How strangely he smiled!—but immediately covered

his mouth with his hand.

Then, grinning mournfully, lifting his eyes like a man

much grieved

but eternally patient, Koprophoros said, “No more

tricks yet.

Dramatic illustration, merely, dear friends. For such is

the tiresome

base of my power and wealth. I grant, it's more

interesting

to men like ourselves, that Time is reversed.” He smiled,

his dark

and luminous eyes full of scorn for us all. “But the

world is the world.”

He sighed profoundly, fat head tipped like a praying

priest's,

his fat little hands with their hairless fingers pressed

together

at his chest. “I thank the gods,” he said, “for my

marvelous gifts—

my innate sense of justice, my vast learning, my

qualities of soul.

But those, alas, are at last mere private benefits. The one firm way a man can be sure of his time for

thought

is his talent for breaking skulls—the art of punching

people,

or getting one's army to. Here below, I'm grieved to say, the power for good and the power for evil are identical. The idea of the moral erodes all ethics. Here (though

of course

we hope it's otherwise elsewhere) gentle old Zeus is

the boss

of the Hades and Hekate gang.” Now the mournful

smile was back.

“I am, let me hasten to add, a profoundly peaceable

man.

Inside this enormous hulk blooms the heart of a lilac!—

However,

tyrants don't listen to, so to speak, rime or reason.

What is it

to tyrants that
hope
and
soap
are mysteriously linked?

One gets

one's throne the other way. Well-a-day! Alack!” He

smiled,

suddenly innocent as a girl except for those goathorn

folds,

and he bowed. The tables clapped. The king was

delighted, it was clear,

and so was Pyripta, smiling down at the tablecloth. I felt a minute, brief twinge of alarm about
hope
and

soap.

He was nobody's fool, Koprophoros. He left no doubt that he knew how to handle a man as he'd handled the

chair, though he took

no special pleasure in violence—unless as art. He bowed and bowed, as neatly balanced as a dancer,

kissing

his fingertips, face sweating.

Then tall Paidoboron

stood up, the king of a silent land to the north, where

the gray

Atlantic half the year lay still as slate, and icebergs pressed imperceptibly, mournfully, groaning like weird

old beasts

on the dark roads of whales. It was a country known to Greeks as the Kingdom of Stone. Strange tales were

told of it:

a barren waste where no house boasted ornaments of gold or silver, and no one knew till Jason came of stains or dyes or of any color but the dim hues on the skins of animals there, or the grays and browns

in rocks.

The towns of that kingdom were few and far between,

as rare

as trees on those dim gray hills, and in the largest towns the houses kept, men said, no more than a hundred

souls—

bleak men bearded to the waist and dressed in

wolfskins; women

tall and stern and beautyless, like stiff, bare pines. The houses and barns, the streets, the walls along

country roads

were stone, as gloomy as the sea. They knew no culture

there

but raising sheeplike creatures—winged like eagles, but

shy,

as quick on their feet and as easily frightened as newts.

Yet they knew

the second world to the west, for the Hyperboreans

owned

great-bellied, stone-filled ships that could sail forever,

slow,

indestructible as the stone rings high in their hills. And

they knew

more surely than all other men, of the turning of

planets and stars:

geometers, learned astronomers, they spent their lives shifting and rearing enormous megaliths, age after

age,

the oldest kingdom in the world. They knew the

alchochoden

of every man and tree, knew the earthly after clap of all conjunctions, when to expect the irrumpent flash of crazily wandering comets, could tell the agonals of stars no longer lit, old planets shogged off course by accidents aeons old. They came themselves, they

claimed,

from the deeps of space, noctivagant beings shackled to

earth,

dark shadow of oaks and stones, for some guilt long

forgotten.

They waited and watched the heavens as a prisoner

stares at fields

beyond his cell's square bars. They studied the wobbling

night,

and if some faraway star went wrong they sacrificed an eldest son to it, and made it right.

The king

spoke softly, as if some god were speaking out of him— a man no more made of flesh and blood than

Koprophoros, I'd swear:

stiff as a puppet, a figure in some old electrical game at the penny arcade, mindlessly obstructing—such was

the impression

the black king gave with his ponderous, vaguely

funereal manner;

and yet there was anger in his manner too, such

old-man fury

at all Koprophoros spoke, I could hardly believe it was

not

some hellish joke between them. Solemn as death, he

said:

“You advertise your talents, my bloated friend, as if you intended to put them on sale. No doubt you'd

soon find a buyer!”

He smiled, full of scorn for the listening crowd. “How

nice to think

-a man can outfox the fates by his clever wits, outbox the wind, outgrapple the fissures that open when

earthquakes strike!

Mere childish dreams. Forgive me for saying so. We've

stood—

my kingdom—a thousand years. We dreamed like you,

at first,

a thousand thousand years ago. But stone cliffs collapsed on us, seas overran us, monsters crawled from the deep and claimed our herds. And winds—

such violent winds

as you've never seen thus far in these playful hills—

so dark

they blanked out sun and moon for seven full years,

so thick

they snatched away all our breath like tons of earth

falling—

cliffs and seas, monsters from the deep, and those

terrible winds

taught us our power was not what we first supposed.

A man

can kill a man, if he will, or some beast less than a man, some beast that shares, in its own way, our

humanness—

hunger, the rage to rule, our pleasure in thought.

(I have seen

elderly wolves sit thinking, smiling to themselves.)

But a man

can tyrannize nothing beyond himself, his own frail

kind.

If you've smiled at bears who pompously, foolishly lord

it over

lesser bears but shake like mice at the tucket and boom of heaven, then smile at Koprophoros! How many storms have you tilted up like a chair and deprived of its legs?”

He laughed,

the cackle of an old, old man. The black of his hair was

dye,

I understood only now. His face was wrinkled like a

mummy's.

Surely, I thought, the man's long years past fathering

a child!—

yet here he stands, contending for a wife! (No one in

the hall,

or no one besides myself, it seemed, was amazed.)

He said:

“
I shiver and shake at your leastmost leer, O dangerous

friend,

but the hills are cool to both of us, and the thunder

laughs.

You hold your throne by discreet and tasteful violence. As for me, I hold mine—apart. I sit in dreary silence no man envies, no man steals. What little I need to eat I plant myself and harvest alone. For talk, for the stimulation of other men's minds, I have old

hymns

and a thousand years of figures carved in stone. I go on, and my race goes on, the prey of no one but the gods.

To a man

new to his glories, blind to the ghostly stelliscript, knowing not whence he comes or whither he goes—

immortal

as the asphodel, he thinks—that may seem a trifling

thing,

a man full of hope, unaware of the gods' deep scorn

of man,

a founder like you, Koprophoros.” He moved his gaze from table to table slowly. It came to rest at last on Kreon. The old man sat leaning forward, watching

intently,

waiting as if in alarm. Paidoboron smoothed his beard, as black and thick as the fur of a bear in winter. He

said:

“If I were, for instance, the last king in a doomed line, I'd run to the rim of the world, taking any child I had, and I'd house myself in stone, and I would propitiate the gods, my surest foe, with prayers and deodands.” His words died away to silence in the rafters of the hall.

The stillness

clung like a mist, as though the black-bearded

Northerner

had silenced the crowd by a spell.

Then fat Koprophoros spoke, rising from his seat, bowing, all grace, to the princess

and king.

The deep-red jewel on his forehead gleamed like fire

through wine.

Symbols of the soul those jewels, I remembered. But

the blood-red light

trapped inside fell away and away into nothingness like magnitude endlessly eating its shadow, consuming

all space.

“He speaks with feeling,” Koprophoros said, then

suddenly cackled.

“A man without interest in the throne of busy Corinth

and all

her wealth! Pray god we may all be as wise when we're

all as poor

as Paidoboron!” He beamed, unable to hide his pleasure in his own sly play. The princess laughed too, the

innocent peal

of a child, and then all the great hall laughed till it

seemed that the very

walls would tumble from weakness. Paidoboron, grave,

said nothing.

His eyes were fierce. Yet his fury, it seemed to me

again, rang false.

I glanced at the goddesses, reclining at ease near Jason,

on the dais.