During the days that followed, the riders never left us. Hunched on their small horses, legs dangling, sometimes sitting on high piles of sheepskin with bundles or cooking-pots rattling behind them on the horses’ rumps, they moved along the shore, never seeming to pay any heed to us, but always there. They wore thick skin jackets and high hats of sheepskin, made in the shape of rough cones; all carried long lances and short bent bows across their backs.
There must have been two hundred of them, all told, strung for a mile or more along the southern land. At night their camp-fires glowed through the blackness and we envied them the warmth as we crouched on shipboard under the awnings, afraid to put ashore ourselves now, but dropping Athene’s anchor-stone each night just out of reach of their bows, we thought. Luckily we had loaded enough food and water on the island of Ay-mari not to need to land. All the same, Argo came to seem a very small ship, and our lives circumscribed like those of prisoners. Quarrels began to break out among us over the silliest trifles because we were penned up together.
For example, Ancaeus and Tiphys almost brained each other before I could stop them, arguing about which star one should steer by to reach the Pillars of Heracles—as though anyone cared! And even old Butes got Phanus by the throat and tried to strangle him when the Cretan said his taste was for rough wine and not for honey-mead made by the bees. In that case no intervention of mine was needed, because, though small, Phanus was as strong as a wolf and soon had the old man over his knee, pretending to smack his backside for being such a fool. But it was there, this unrest, all the same.
Then at dawn one day Polydeuces came to me as I lay under my tent in the after part of the ship and woke me roughly. ‘Look, master,’ he whispered, ‘I found this sticking in our mast.’
It was an arrow, short and thick, very strong. Its point was of hard iron, filed like a razor-edge.
‘It was on the side which faces the shore,’ he said, his broad face grave. ‘One of them must have shot it, as a warning.’
I said, ‘A warning of what? They cannot touch us, they have no boats. They cannot swim their little horses out to sea to where we are.’
But secretly in my heart I also was troubled like the Spartan boxer. If their bows could reach us, then they were very strong weapons—and the archers who aimed with them were no fools. . . . Suppose they let fall a shower of such arrows while we all lay asleep? It crossed my mind that I would hate to wake into a screaming dawn, to find myself pinned to my couch! The barbs of those arrows were very broad and cruel; no man could disengage himself once he had been struck. I began to think of a shipload of men, all pinned to deck or rowing-bench, all dying slowly, powerless to help each other. . . . It was not a pleasant thought.
But I swept it aside, as a leader should, and forced a smile which I did not feel—though good enough to trick simple Polydeuces, who was better in the boxing-ring than out of it when it came to using his brains.
‘Thank you for bringing this, friend,’ I said. ‘But we shall find a way. I have a plan already.’
To tell the truth, I knew of no way to scare off these haunting riders; nor had I a plan. I was as frightened and bewildered as anyone else in my company. But Polydeuces went away grinning and left the arrow with me, having promised to tell no one about it for the time being; not even his brother Castor, from whom he usually kept no secrets.
As for me, from then on I anchored Argo another fifty paces offshore each night. Though I got into the habit, thenceforward, of making a dawn-patrol the length of the ship, in case there were other arrows. I found one, stuck in the deck exactly between Atalanta and Admetus, with whom she had been lying for the past few nights. As I drew the barb from the oak planks, she stirred in her tumbled sleep and murmured, ‘Yes, my love, if you wish. Yes, a hundred times.’ Then she sank back into a deep slumber once more. Sleeping or waking, there was but one thing in her life, poor devil. No wonder women seldom make good soldiers! They haven’t the singleness of mind for the trade. Oh yes, I know, many of them can become expert with the javelin and even the dirk, and they love dressing up in armour, if it is pretty and the helmet does not disarrange their hair. But very few—yes, very very few—have ever gained fame as warriors, in spite of their patroness Pallas Athene’s military feats. Hippolyte the cavalry-leader was perhaps the only one fit to rank beside a man—and look what happened to her—she gave herself up to that young idiot from Troezen, Theseus, they called him, nothing but a common bull-dancer, and spent the rest of her days suckling his brats. A woman like that deserved something better—a shipmaster or a leader of the hosts. No, women are not reliable, not even the best of them. And in war it is the first essential that a warrior should be reliable, whatever else he is not.
I’ll say that for my crew on the Argo, they were reliable; whatever land they came from, whatever the gods they prayed to, the colour of their eyes and hair, and so on. I could now trust them all—even Meleager, who at one time had looked troublesome.
In fact, it was Meleager and his boon-companion Acastus, son of Pelias and Prince of Iolcos, who took the next move in our adventure and brought about some good by taking it. I will tell you how it happened.
One night just before dusk when we were considering where to anchor, there was a high shouting from the shore. The voice of a single man, raised on the wind and yelling out in a language I did not know.
Lynceus, the look-out man in the crow’s nest, called down that one of the riders had got stuck in the oozy salt-marshes that lined the shore now, and was waving to us. It seemed that his horse was sinking gradually and the man, though putting on a jocular voice and pretending not to be concerned, was deadly afraid.
Meleager heard this and came to me, his thin face twisted in a smile. I think he was secretly at war with all men because Atalanta had taken up so frequently with Admetus.
‘Jason,’ he said—for by now most men had got into the habit of using my nickname and ignoring my first and princely one—‘Jason, I have a taste for taking a swim. Acastus would like to go with me. Have we your permission?’
As he spoke, he nodded his head towards the shore like a Spartan. I liked that in him—and, of course, I knew that he was a fish in the water; after all, I had once competed with him, off Icos!
I turned away and said, ‘A swim would be refreshing. But who can breast the waters dressed in a bear’s hide?’
He smiled and clapped me on the shoulder. ‘That is soon remedied,’ he said quietly.
He and Acastus stripped to the skin and slipped overboard almost before anyone noticed it. The water must have been freezing cold, but the swimmers did not show it. They swam under the surface for a good period before coming up to breathe. I admired that, for I would not have dared to do it, not knowing what cold sea-beasts lurked about these shores, waiting to take a man by the neck or the leg.
And at last in the dusk I lost sight of them. I went back to my awning and occupied myself by building up charcoal on the brazier, for it looked like a cold night again.
When the two climbed back over the ship’s side, instead of bringing a hostage as I had expected, they carried only small things—a bow, a hat, a head.
Acastus said airily as he rubbed himself dry, ‘In the water a man can bring only portable things. It would need Heracles to bear a man on his shoulder through the brine—and Heracles has left us now.’ I think he was trying to taunt me, knowing that I missed my twin.
I came near to striking him across the face, although he was a king’s son and my cousin. ‘You do not need to tell me,’ I answered angrily.
Then I calmed down and looked at what they brought. The head was still smiling, or weeping, I do not know which, because it was a foreign head, not the head of a Hellene, whose expressions I know. This was flat-faced and yellow, though the blood had drained from it by now. The eyelids were slanting, and the eyes, when I opened their cold shutters and looked within, were dark brown, almost black. The lips were thick and the big teeth yellow. The coarse black hair was heavily braided with silver thread and wound round into a bun on the top of the skull. From the gold ear-rings, this must have been a king or a prince. I had thought it might be a Scythian prince, for it somehow resembled the face of that Yaga-Mash, who miscalled herself Idaea—but the nose was too hooked and prominent. Perhaps this man had been the son of a Scythian and a Hellene; I do not know. Such mixtures were common in the eastern lands.
What I did know, however, was that his high sheepskin hat was worth a fortune, for it was everywhere decorated with beads of gold and silver, and the edge of it was trimmed with alternating pieces of amber and of jet. To get such a hat, a man must have sent from Colchis, or Egypt even, to the farthest north, where amber and jet are as common as the blue clay which we moulded for our bead-necklaces. This hat was like a king’s crown, and much more valuable than most of the bronze or iron crowns which I had seen on the brows of village tyrants in Hellas, among the rough Dorians.
But it was the bow which appealed most to me. I had never beheld another like it—though later I was to see many, in Colchis and on the plains about that city. It was very short, and always bent, as curved as Diana’s moon-sickle. At first I thought it was of some wood which did not grow in Thessaly—but, as I examined it, I found that it was made of layer upon thin layer of horn, the horn of bulls, it seemed; but each layer bound to the next with thin silver wire, and the whole thing so highly and smoothly polished that the joints were nearly invisible.
I pulled on the string, which was of twisted gut and hair—human hair, I think—and, although it was soggy with the water, it needed all my force to bend that bow. And when I let the string go, it made a twang that put the harp of Orpheus to shame!
Castor heard this and said, ‘A bow like that would drive a shaft through a fat man and come out at the far side, Jason.’
I nodded. ‘It makes me wish I were a bowman and not a javelin-thrower,’ I said, smiling.
But I did not mean this, for a javelin-man is considered of the highest rank in an army. He is usually a fine swordsman, too, which sets him above mere archers, who shoot their arrows and then run away.
All the same, I put the three trophies in my sea-box, under my bench below the striped awning, and promised Meleager and Acastus that they should be rewarded in due course. They laughed back at me and said, ‘We ask no reward, Jason. We are not common sailors. Getting these things was a pleasure to us, an evening’s entertainment.’
It was as though they had rehearsed their reply, for they spoke together. Then they left me and took it in turns to be warmed and comforted by the priestess, who had been waiting at the edge of the crowd anxiously all the while I was examining and displaying the trophies. Atalanta always admired a brave man, she was never tired of telling us; and here were two truly brave men.
This incident had a strange result, one which I had not expected. The following dawn, I was awakened by great yellings from the shore and looked overboard to see a whole host of riders gathered at the water’s edge, hatless, weaponless, and holding out their hands as in an act of pleading.
The foremost one of them, seeing me awake, a bent old fellow in a black gown, stumbled his way through a sentence or two of Greek—the sort of Greek that black Libyan villagers speak, having learned a smattering from the traders.
‘Great one,’ he called, ‘my son’s head is lost from its body. The body begs for its head so that it can lie at peace in the ground, complete. Ask not I for bow or anything else—but only head, I plead with you. That head shall buy you peace also, a weeping father says so.’
I smiled back at him in contempt; but I have never been one to neglect an opportunity. So, when I had unbraided the precious metal from the coarse black hair, and cut off a lock of that hair as a charm, I flung it into the water and saw it bob along slowly on the shoreward tide. I was surprised it did not sink, it was so heavy.
Half the horsemen ran neck-deep into the icy sea to gain the head and the old man fell on his knees in the swamp and seemed to call down blessings upon me.
When the men brought it to him, he clutched it to his chest as a little girl holds a precious doll, stroking it and fondling it. I felt quite disgusted. But savages do not behave like the men of Hellas.
I watched them go further up the shore and shoot a flight of arrows high into the air above them, as though in a final token of farewell. The shafts went up as thick and black as a swarm of bees: I could hear their buzzing, too.
Then they mounted their shaggy ponies and we did not see them again. It was a good bargain.
After that we camped on shore whenever we wished and the final stage of the voyage to Colchis would have been a pleasure, had it not been for the great cold and the snow-laden winds that blew down on us from the far north.