Читать книгу Jason (Mycenaean Greek Trilogy) - Henry Treece - Страница 16

Table of Contents

In times of trouble a man is always alone. Climbing a rock-face with the eagle at his heels; riding an unbroken stallion for a wager; in the strong and pitiless sea, swimming towards a distant island; coming through the gateway of an unfamiliar town to find himself face to face with the guardian, the strong man of the place, the javelin already poised to throw as he bawls out the challenge word; aye, even lying in the feast-straw at a harvest gathering, the chieftain’s daughter under him, a new body, a new trial, testing him, waiting for him to prove himself despite the wine—a man is always alone.

Though his companions may be beside him, behind him, calling their encouragement, their promises of help, it is the man’s own strength, his own wit, that will win him through, and that of no one else. Help from another is a dream—even if the other is a god—it seems to me. Only the illusion of help is possible. True, a man may be hauled away from the eagle on a rope, or caught as he falls from the stallion, or dragged gasping from the clutching waves—but in his inner core he will know that he has failed the test. He will know that he must go back and try it again, unaided, to prove that he is good enough to live on in the world. And then there will be no companions, for he will go in secret, telling no one, perhaps to his death, perhaps to victory. And that victory is but a blowing of air through the lips, a word, a sign that there is yet another higher step to climb—another test, another victory, or another defeat.

When, later in my life, I stood outside the gates of Mycenae and the young boy flung a dart to pierce my eyeball, it was not of my yelling companions in their plumed helmets that I thought. I thought: Here suffers Jason, and there laughs a boy who will always boast how he halted the king-warrior in his tracks and made him howl and let fall his great sword.

At that time I did not even think of the victory I had come near to losing the city, the fame, the loot, the destruction of the Mycenaean League that had pestered me so long. Just the hot and screaming furnace of my ruined eyeball and the laughing boy baring his thin chest and revealing his white teeth in a grin, as though he had stolen a hare, or a bagful of plums, or a golden ring, and got away with it.

When I wanted to kill him, it was not because I hated him. Indeed, I would have been proud to call him my son. But I had to show myself—not my enraged companions—that my loneliness was something braver, stronger, more kingly, than his own. And so with the sweat and blood running like a stream into my beard, I bent and picked up my own javelin from the dust and shook it at him. I would have gone to him if I could, and have smoothed his shaggy hair. But my own agony was so searching and I could not think of anyone but myself, there in that howling black tumult. I fell to my knees and heaved from nausea and they carried me to my tent in a little grove of cypresses. But I was still alone, though they stood about my bed as King Creon’s Egyptian laid what he called healing salves upon my cavern of an eye.

All I thought of then, when I was able to think for the pain, was: This ends me as a javelin-thrower. A man, even a king, needs two eyes to put the spear where he thinks, and now I have only one. Who are these fools who stand about me, wringing their hands? They have two eyes apiece and I have only one. Their wailing will not give me back my eye. Let them go and leave me to suffer in my own way!

How can I tell you, I an old man sitting under a rotting boat, what it was like to be a warrior, a king? If you are not warriors and kings you will not understand my words; you will not understand my loneliness. Yet, again, I think that this loneliness was born in me, grew up with me, before I was a warrior, before I dreamed of becoming a king. Perhaps there are those who are meant by the gods to walk alone for ever.

I spoke those words once to a wise man of Athens; a man so wise that he wore no clothes but a loin-clout, and lived in a hole in the rocks below the Acropolis, eating beans and drinking stream water. He told me: ‘Man’s body is no more than a libation-cup, a container. Man’s knowledge and feeling are the libation within that cup. The two together may please or appease the gods—whatever they may or may not be. Pour out the libation and the clay cup is nothing. Crack the clay cup and the libation spills, useless, to the ground. One way or another, the cup and the blood are hardly worth a man’s time to worry about. Better to consider the beauty of the hyacinth or the changing patterns of the wine-dark sea. All else is a sort of vanity—and even hyacinth and sea are little better than toys in the eyes. I cannot help you one way or the other. Nor can you help yourself. Breathe, and be thankful for breathing—if you like breathing; run on the hills with the goats, or crawl in the dust with the serpents—if you gain delight from running and crawling. There is nothing else. To be is all there is—alive or dead. And it does not matter which—either way you will be alone, always.’

I gave that wise man a necklace of blue Egyptian stones for his advice, a necklace which cost men’s lives in the getting. He bowed and thanked me for the gift; then flung it into the bushes and went back into his hole in the rock. I heard him laughing and belching, crying and breaking wind, as I walked down the dusty track from his place. I do not think he knew I had been there, or remembered what I had said, or what he had replied. It was nothing, like the blue necklace, to him. He, alone in the rock; I, alone on the choking path ...

I tell you this because I wish you to understand that there is nothing to hope for in life. What a man does or gains or loses is worth nothing in the end, or even in the beginning. He is alone, hopeless, helpless, like a pebble in the sun or under the sea. All else is a dream he makes for himself. And even that dream is nothing. You cannot weigh it in scales, can you? You cannot eat it or dress your pretty daughter in it, can you?

I have always known this, from my earliest days—though sometimes I have fought against it, in moments of forgetfulness, moments when I have tried to form life to the pattern of my dreams. All vanity—dried ordure on a hot rock, crumbling to dissolution.

And so I felt that day, below the steps of the palace of Pelias, as the Libyan spearmen closed in on me. True, I smelled the musky sweat of their bodies, felt the hard touch of their hands on my arms and neck. They wrenched my sword and my javelins from me and left me helpless, but I knew that it did not matter. I knew that each of them was as lonely as I. Even Pelias, striking a pose on the steps, his gold necklace jingling and the great black sheepskin on his head and shoulders glistening in the sunshine. A fine upstanding man, a king, but only drying ordure on a hot rock, when all was said and done, something which might not be there tomorrow, and certainly not in a hundred years.

Pelias said, his voice high in his head, a king who wished his people to hear every word he spoke, ‘Come, man, what is your father’s name, and why are you here?’

All my training on the windy hill had been wasted, it seemed now. The Libyans had my weapons and were holding them as though they were snakes and would bite. I felt like weeping, to think that it would have been so easy to put the spears into the man who had wronged my family, but I had not been quick enough, sly enough, to do it. I must confess now that I did not feel tearful that I had in a way broken my promise to my so-called mother, to set up shrines to the Goddess; or that I had failed to carry out the commands of the Oracle at Delphi. What humiliated me, a young killer as I was then, was that before all the folk and dressed warrior-style I had failed in my promise to myself, to slay the tyrant. Nor did I like the way the black men were pulling me about and offending my person with their horny hands.

I think I have already said I was a big fellow by that time and proud of my muscles and my golden hair. I was at the age when young men take foolish risks, make stupid gestures of defiance, just to show those older than themselves that even the young have power and demand notice.

I spoke defiantly then, though Pelias would have had the power and the right, I suppose, to kill me out of hand for coming into his kingly presence armed on the Feast of Poseidon. Yet a strange thing stays in my memory. Suddenly I was not afraid of death, or even of humiliation. For somewhere high on the stone platform of the palace, I heard a harp begin to sound almost as though it were an oracle itself. One of those wind-harps that the Aeolians loved and hung in their corridors and among the boughs of their orchard trees—a half tortoise-shell, across which were stretched strings of gut, so that when the winds blew these strings vibrated to make a gentle rustling sound, as though a lyre-player had run his fingers in a whisper across the cords. There is nothing in such a sound to change a man’s heart or mind, to give him courage. I had heard such harps a hundred times as I had driven horses past the orchards of rich men on my way down to the markets when I was a boy. But this one was different. It seemed to speak words to me, and the words were: ‘All men must die, Diomedes, yes, even the great ones, the strong ones. It is no more than pulling a thorn out of the foot. Most men do it with a smile. Remember the Spartan on the mountain? He laughed till he died. Can you not do better than that?’

I raised my head then and looked into the eye-holes of the ivory mask of Pelias, and I made myself smile, too. I would not be outdone by a Spartan cattle-thief. I said in as clear a voice as I could raise, ‘I am Jason, son of Cheiron, Black One; sometimes called Diomedes, son of Aeson—if miracles can still happen.’

I saw the faces of the crowd turn up towards the old cripple at the top of the wide stairs, and I heard the subdued laughter among the folk that such a dry old stick should produce so full a fruit. And then I felt small and young for having drawn contempt upon the man who tottered helpless and half-blind above me. I even saw a momentary grimace of displeasure on the face of the woman who said she was my mother, the princess, the priestess.

Pelias made a sudden gesture to the Libyans who held me tightly. ‘Loose him,’ he said. ‘He is unarmed, and I have the sword of Poseidon. Perhaps all this is ordained, that he shall lay his head upon the steps as an offering this day. We may not question the ways of the Sea Father.’

They flung me forwards as though I were no more than a goat or a chicken, a trussed offering. That angered me. I heard Hera give another old woman’s dry cough. That angered me, too, for it was as though she despised me as a warrior, a champion of the Mother—not that it was my true will to serve the bloody Mother, far from it; but I wished to be regarded as of worth, like a sharp sword, whoever holds it.

When Pelias spoke again, I answered him out of sheer irritation—in the manner of a young man whose pride is hurt.

He said, ‘Well, Jason, or Diomedes, whatever you choose to call yourself, and suppose you stood where I am, on these steps, with a sword in your hand, on a great feast day ... Suppose all that, if your head can hold such a thought. And suppose that a mad young man came at you with a sword and javelins, prepared to harm you. And suppose that you had been warned of all this by an oracle. Now tell me, what would you do?’

I formed my mouth into what I thought was a careless laugh, and spoke what came first into my head, just, as I say, out of anger and hurt pride.

‘If I were a timid man, like Pelias the Black and Blue, I should send that young warrior well away from my kingdom, where he could not harm me.’

I heard the Libyans give a deep sigh, as though they expected to be called upon to cut me down for those words. I heard the crowd suck in their breath, excited at such a start to the Festival—for it is not every day that these peasants have a chance of seeing a man howling on a javelin point. I saw the hand of Pelias clench about the great hilt of Poseidon’s sword, as though he would step down from the stair and put an end to me. Then, again, I heard the dry cough of Hera, this time as though she were encouraging me, as though she approved of my strange and sudden proud words.

Pelias said, smiling grimly, ‘And where would such a young fool as you go, to be safe?’

I spoke the first thing that came into my head.

‘To Colchis, to the kingdom of Aeëtes, whose gold I would steal. Then I should return here, buy me an army, and take Iolcos from its usurper.’

I was staggered at the words I dared utter. I was even more staggered that Pelias took them in the way he did; for he smiled, nodded his shaggy head, and then said, ‘You are not such a simpleton as I thought, Diomedes-Jason. Or are you? No man has ever sailed to Colchis and then returned to tell the tale. No man has ever bested the Eagle King of Colchis, much less taken his gold. But it might be done—yes, it might be done, by a youth who was prepared to risk all he had to do it.’

He seemed to be thinking deeply about this, when one of my uncles leaned over his shoulder and said, sneering, as it seemed to me, ‘What of this boy’s threat to take your kingdom, Pelias? Is that also a good idea? Have you grown so tired of ruling then?’

Pelias laughed in the sunshine, showing his white teeth under the mask, and the fringe of black hair on his upper lip.

‘Amathaon,’ he said, ‘any man who brought me back a shipload of gold from Colchis might have this midden-heap of a kingdom, and welcome. He would have no need to waste the gold on hiring an army, to sit on the throne at Iolcos.’

My mother gave a gasp at this, high above me, and I heard her. I also heard Hera give a little chuckle as though things were turning out well for the Mother Goddess after all.

I said, ‘Before the people, who are my witnesses, Pelias, I accept that challenge. I’ll buy your kingdom for a cargo of gold from Colchis. Now what do you say?’

He laughed down on me like an indulgent teacher who humours a forward child and said, ‘Aeëtes, the Eagle King, will hang you in a tree and shoot arrows at you. Either that or he will feed you to his bulls or his great snake. But why should I care? I am prepared to gamble a ship on such a venture, and if it does not succeed, then we will raise the taxes here to pay for the lost timber. Your death would affect no one.’