Jason and Medeia Read Free Page A

high, though what game Kreon meant
    to play
    was not yet clear.
    The Northern slave, Amekhenos, moved
    with the boy from table to table, pouring Cretan wine to the riveted rims of the bowls, his eyes averted, masked in submissiveness. The boy, head bent, returned the
    bowls
    to the trestle-tables, where the strangers seized them
    with jewelled hands
    and drank, never glancing at the slaves—no more aware
    of them
    than they would have been of ghosts or the whispering
    gods.
    The sun
    fell fire-wheeled to the rim of the sea. King Kreon’s
    herds,
    dwindling day by day for the sea-kings’ feasts, lay still in the shade of elms. The storm had passed; in its
    green wake
    songbirds warbled the sweetness of former times, the age when gods and goddesses walked the world on feet so
    light
    they snapped no flower stem. The air was ripe with the
    scent
    of olives, apples heavy on the bough, and autumn honey. Already the broadleafed oaks of every coppice and hurst had turned, pyretic, sealing their poisons away for the
    time
    of cold; soon the leaves would fall like abandoned
    wealth. Below,
    the coriander on the cantles of walls and bandied posts of hayricks flamed its retreat. The very air was medlar, sweet with the juice of decay. The palace of Kreon,
    rising
    tier on tier, as gleaming white as a giant’s skull, hove dreamlike into the clouds, the sea-blue eagles’
    roads,
    like a god musing on the world. As far as the eye could
    see—
    mountains, valleys, slanting shore, bright parapets— the world belonged to Kreon.
    The smells of cooking came,
    meat-scented smoke, to the portico where Kreon stood, his hand on his faithful servant’s arm, his bald head
    tipped,
    listening to sounds from the house. The meal was served.
    The guests
    talked with their neighbors, voices merging as the sea’s
    welmings
    close to a gray unintelligible roar on barren shoals, the clink of their spoons like the click of far-off rocks
    shifting.
    â€œOld friend,” the king said thoughtfully, looking at
    the river with eyes
    sharpened to the piercing edge of an evening songbird’s
    note,
    â€œall will be well, I think.” He patted the slave’s hard arm. “We’ll be all right. The fortunes of our troubled house
    are at last
    on the upswing. Trust me! We’ve nothing more to do
    now but wait,
    observe with an icy, calculating eye as tension mounts—churns up like an oracle’s voice. We’ll see,
    my friend,
    what abditories of weakness, secret guile they keep, what signs of virtue hidden to the casual glance.
    Remember:
    No prejudgments! Cold and objective as gods we’ll
    watch,
    so far as possible. The man we finally choose we’ll choose not from our own admiration, but of simple necessity. Not the best there, necessarily—the mightiest fist, the smoothest tongue. Our line’s unlucky. The man we
    need
    is the man who’ll make it survive. Pray god we recognize
    him!”
    He smiled, though his brow was troubled. It seemed
    more strain than he needed,
    this last effort of his reign, choice of a successor. He
    stood
    the weight of it only by will. He opened his hands like a
    merchant
    robbed of all hope save one gray galleon, far out at sea, listing a little, but ploughing precariously home. “What
    more
    can a man do?” he said, and forced a chuckle. “Some may well be surprised when we’ve come to the end of
    these wedding games.
    We two know better than to lay our bets on wealth alone, honor like poor Jokasta’s, or obstinate holiness, genius like that of King Oidipus—the godly brain he squanders now on gulls and winds and crawling
    things.
    Yet some man here in this house …” The king fell
    silent, brooding.
    â€œAnd yet there’s one man more I wish were here,” he
    said.
    He pulled at his nose and squeezed one eye tight shut.
    â€œA man
    with contacts worth a fortune, a man who’s talked or
    fought
    his way past