Jason and Medeia by John Gardner Page B

old priest—with
    reasons of his own,
    could be, for seeing what he did—how much such a
    man could know
    by watching a few stray birds, still, I was excited.
    I was
    a most devout young man, in those days. Goodness
    in the gods
    was a rockfirm fact of experience, I thought. And so
    I told
    the king that as soon as I’d gotten my ship and crew
    together
    I’d sail.
    â€œIt was Argus who built the ship—old Argus, under Athena’s eye. He built it of trees from her sacred groves, beech and ironwood, towering pines and great dark
    oaks
    that sang in the wind like men, a vast, unearthly
    choir—
    and Athena showed him herself which trees to cut.
    When the beam
    of the keel went in, old Argus smiled, his long gray hair tied back with a thong, and the beam said, ‘Good! Nice
    work, old man!’
    When he notched the planks and lowered them onto the
    chucks, the planks
    said, ‘Good! Nice fit!’ He carved the masts and shaped
    them with figures
    facing in all the four directions, and after he’d dropped
    them,
    slid them with a hollow thump to the central beam,
    they said,
    That’s fine! We’re snug as rocks!’ Then he built the
    booms and wove
    the sails. The black ship sang, and Argus had finished it.
    â€œI gathered the crew.
    â€œI can’t deny it: there never was
    in all this world or on any world a mightier crew than the Argonauts. Sweet gods, beside the most feeble
    of the lot,
    I seemed, myself, a mildly intelligent hedgehog!
    I gathered
    Akhaians from far and near—all men of genius, sons of gods—
    â€œAnd the first, the finest of them all, was Orpheus.
    He was borne by Kalliope herself to her Thracian lover
    Oiagros,
    high on the slopes of Pimplea. Even as a child, with his
    music
    he enchanted the towering, frozen rocks and the violent
    streams,
    and to this day there are quernal forests on the coasts
    of Thrace
    that Orpheus, playing his lyre, lured down from Pieria, rank on rank of them, coming to his music like soldiers
    on the march.
    The next I chose was Polyphemon, son of Eilatos,
    out of
    Larissa. He was, in his younger days, a hero in the
    ranks
    of the incredible Lapithai who warred with the centaurs
    once.
    His limbs by now were heavy with age, but he still had
    the same
    fierce heart.
    â€˜The next was Asterios, son of an endless line
    of travellers, explorers, river merchants, a man who
    could trade up
    wools and linens to priceless gems. And Iphiklos was
    next,
    my mother’s brother, who came for the sake of our
    kinship. Then
    Admetos, king of Pherai, rich in sheep. Then the sons of Hermes, out of Alope, land of cornfields; with them Aithalides their kinsman. Then, from wealthy Gyrton, Koronos came, the son of Kaineos—strong as a boulder, though he wasn’t the man his father was. In Gyrton
    they say
    the old man singlehanded beat the centaurs back, and after the centaurs rallied and overcame him, even then they couldn’t kill him. With massive pines they
    drove him
    down in the earth like a nail. He was still alive.
    â€œThen Mopsos,
    powerful man whom Apollo had trained to excel all
    others
    in the art of augury from birds. He knew when he
    came, he said,
    that he’d meet his end in the Libyan desert.
    Then Telamon
    and Peleus, sons of Aiakos, fathers in turn of sons as awesome as they were themselves—the heroes Aias
    and Akhilles,
    now chief terrors of Troy.
    â€œAnd after the two great brothers,
    from Attica came Butes, son of Teleon, and Phalerus, famous for their deadly spears. (Theseus, finest of the Attic line, was out of business. He’d gone with Peirithoös into the Underworld, and was kept
    there, chained,
    a prisoner deep in the earth.)
    â€˜Then out of the Thespian town
    of Siphai, Tiphys came. He was a mariner who could sense the coming of a swell across the open
    sea
    and knew by the sun and stars when storms were
    brewing, six
    weeks off. Athena herself had sent him to join