I only recall a maze of passages. Afterwards, a great bronze gong almost bursting the drums of my ears; and then a small room, full of aromatic smoke. My eyes smarted and my wounds howled. When I was a man again, I looked about me and saw.
The new room was low-ceilinged and its white plaster walls covered with bright paintings—blues, red, greens, gold—of winged lions and serpents, and of princes striding, sword in hand; and of women prancing, holding snakes to their mouths, their long black hair curling down to their wasp-waists.
As I was flung into that room, I almost fell headlong into a small round pit, cleverly tiled with marble slabs, at the bottom of which a heap of little snakes writhed about each other, hissing and striking even at shadows.
I looked around me, on hands and knees; at the far end, under a broad wall-painting of a woman surrendering to a long thick serpent, stood a high chair of carved and gilded wood, its back and arms shaped cleverly to represent sheaves of corn. For a moment I thought that they were real sheaves, they were so delicately sculpted.
But my eye was soon taken by the woman who sat on that chair—a small firmly-built woman, her bare feet just showing from beneath her spangled, flounced dress, her full breasts supported by a stiff bodice which made them thrust outwards like the prongs below the prow of a war-galley. Her oval face, still golden, was flat, and her other features fine but indolent. The eyes and lips were perhaps too full, too rounded, as though she had been made by a dollmaker to represent fullness, fertility. Her black hair, now loosed from its bindings, fell like a thick thunder-cloud over the arms of the golden chair, over her white arms and red-nailed fingers. She played with it, lazily, watching me all the time, her breasts hardly moving as she breathed, her black eyebrows arched like those of a little girl who sees a new toy that interests her.
And about her, everywhere, leaning against the walls, sprawling on the floor, were women—the Amazons. They still wore their blue body-paint, but many of them had relieved themselves of their restricting leather breeches. They lounged or lay, whispering to each other, caressing each other, as though they were sufficient unto themselves, content with their fellows, complete.
The mutton-fat on their bodies mingled its peculiar scent with that of the aromatic smoke from the tripods and the sharp reptilian odour which came up out of the snake-pit. It assaulted me like a slap across the face.
The golden-faced woman in the throne chair said in a low and vibrant voice, ‘I am Medea, the Goddess. Though you have passed the first test and have come free from my father, the Eagle God, you may not find escape from me so easy, Hellene.’
The Amazons made no sign of having heard her words; they seemed too taken up with their own affairs to bother. In some ways, as they writhed on the floor, they reminded me of the snakes in the little pit beside me; even the blue markings on their bodies seemed the same. Perhaps they did not understand the Greek dialect that this Medea spoke, I thought.
I said, ‘Goddess, I have a broken rib and a right hand which would not hold a hair-comb at this moment, much less a sword. How then could I escape anyone?’
She answered, ‘Your name is Diomedes, the Sly One; one of my names is Medea, the Cunning. In a way they are the same name. You are also called Jason, the Healer; and one of my tasks as the Goddess in this place is to heal. We might hold a competition—your slyness against my cunning; your healing against mine. That would be more interesting than battles with swords. My women will give me such battles at any time I ask them, against my father’s hairy Killers. Such things are amusing, to pass the winter; but now the Little Courtyard is stacked high with skulls, and our trees are laden with the hide-wrapped bodies of those who have entertained us. This place stinks of useless death. Let us have a competition of healing, Jason.’
She rose from her seat slowly, even heavily, like a doll moving in her stiff clothes, and came silently towards me as I stared. The set mask of her face never varied. Only her wide dark eyes moved, and her thick black hair swung with her pacing.
I thought she was coming to touch me as I lay on the floor holding my aching side; but she passed me by, a little continuous hiss sounding from her half-opened lips all the while.
I saw also that now the Amazons were turned towards us, watching, and hissing gently in the same way. It was as though they were accustomed to what was to happen, as though it were a daily ritual.
Medea halted at the edge of the snake-pit and inclined her head towards me. ‘Watch well, King of Lemnos,’ she whispered mockingly. ‘I do not think that long-legged Hypsipyle ever showed you such a thing.’
Then she lowered herself to the marble rim of the pit and gently eased down among the little snakes. As their hissing grew in volume, Medea’s set mouth began to smile as though she were relishing some dainty feast. ‘Come closer, Jason,’ she said, ‘there are things you cannot see where you lie.’
It caused me pain to do as she had commanded, but I dragged myself to the lip of the pit as Medea stooped and lifted up her heavily flounced skirt. I saw that her feet were set among the snakes, treading some of them down, and that they were writhing about her ankles and lower legs, striking at her again and again with their blunt snouts.
And when I had seen this, she gave a little laugh and squatted down among them so that they could reach other parts of her—as though to prove to me that there was no deceit in this magic.
I thought, as I watched her at this strange game, that Medea was very comely—though in a different way from Hypsipyle, or the panting daughters of Pelias. And I wondered what sort of showing the lithe Atalanta, who had her own special talents, would make in this pit of vipers.
Medea slowly rose, brushing the snakes from her, and stood waiting for two of her Amazons to lift her from the pit.
‘You see, Jason,’ she said, as she stood above me, ‘I am not frothing at the mouth. I am not howling with the agonies of poison. So—I have healed myself. There is proof for you.’
I was afraid that she would now command me to get down among the snakes and do as she had done. Sick as I was, I would rather have gone unarmed into a pen with three bulls than do this. Snakes have always frightened me. Most of my worst dreams have been concerned with them.
I said, trying to smile easily, ‘Goddess you are not baffling peasants on a market day. You are dealing with one who has seen a little of the world. The fangs of those pretty snakes have been drawn; that is the answer to the secret!’
Medea’s blue-lidded eyes grew wide; her nostrils flared as though she had the power to breathe fire over me, to shrivel me like some flame-spouting dragon. But instead she waved imperiously with her plump and well-formed hand towards a young Amazon girl who sat on a fringed red cushion below the throne.
The Amazon’s face showed no change of expression as she first bowed her cropped head then plunged forward like a young runner in the funeral games in Athens. At the edge of the pit she halted to kiss the hem of Medea’s skirt; then, stripping off her leather buskins, she jumped among the snakes.
I watched in some horror as their vicious hammer-heads beat at her legs and thighs. Her mouth made the shape of screaming for a little while, then her eyes rolled back and the spittle gathered on her lips like sea-foam. She staggered a while and, just when she seemed about to fall among the furious, seething mass of vipers, Medea made another sign and two warrior-women caught their fellow below the armpits and hauled her arching body out on to the stones of the floor.
The Goddess smiled down at me, her mouth twisted in triumph.
‘Do you still say their fangs are drawn, Jason?’ she asked. ‘Look at her wounds. Feel her heartbeats. Touch the wet body and brow of one who truly knows agony.’
The girl’s skin was as cold as ice and it seemed that her heart had given up the struggle of beating any longer. I rose painfully and was about to speak the angry words which already came to my tongue, when Medea pushed me aside, and forcing open the girl’s clenched teeth, thrust something into her mouth, then stood away.
Before my eyes the stiffening body began to soften, to flush with life again. A smile moved across the girl’s face and her eyelids flickered. She slowly sat up, then crawled towards Medea and once more kissed the sequined flounce of her skirt.
‘Take her away, you others,’ the Goddess said. ‘She will need rest after her ordeal.’
Then Medea walked slowly back to her golden chair and was lifted into it by four of the women.
‘What do you say now, Jason of Lemnos?’ she asked proudly. ‘Can your healing match my own?’
I fell down before her and said, ‘Lady, if it could, I should heal my own wounds. You are my conqueror. I can say no more.’
I have seen enough women of that domineering sort to know that if a man gives way before them they will, by some perversity, or by some inner weakness of the female kind, lose their firmness for a while—long enough for a clever man to find a way of redressing the balance. This I counted on in that moment, and to my great joy it worked.
Medea’s features lost something of their stiffness, her dark eyes came suddenly to life, as though she was uncertain what to do. And then she said in a voice less stony than before, ‘So, there is honesty in you, Jason. You are man enough to admit defeat. What are these wounds you speak of, man?’
I played my next trick then and said, ‘Kush-kush, the great one in whose shadow I am not fit to walk, has thought it proper to have my hand crushed and my rib stove in. A small penalty, lady, for my stupidity in threatening his sacred life.’
Even a fool should have seen through my words—but Medea did not, goddess as she claimed to be.
‘Kush-kush!’ she muttered, her face lit with a new anger. ‘When will that thing of the dung-heap cease to play his barbarous games! When shall we be free of him in this city! He belittles us in the eyes of the world!’
She came down the steps once more and paced the small room, the stiff fabric of her many skirts adding their rustle to the hissing of the snakes. Each time, her skirt brushed my face as I kneeled before her empty throne, wondering how well my plan might turn out. A heavy aromatic scent came from this goddess as she walked near me. A strange and thrilling scent—that of death in life, or life in death, I do not know which; a scent which caused me to think of the name Persephone.
And at last Medea bent and touched my back with her warm finger-tips, in the place where the pain was. Many wicked things has she done in her lifetime, and many times has she betrayed and humiliated me; but I swear that something came from her hands that night, some soothing love, some healing. I felt it surge through me like the vibrating strings of the lyre, and set all the nerves of my body tingling.
‘Lady,’ I murmured. ‘Oh, lady! What have you done to me?’
When next I knew anything, I lay in a soft bed with lamps burning about me and tame doves cooing in the rafters. My body had been stripped and washed clean; bandages were bound about my hand and chest. The scent of crushed herbs and aromatic oils came from them. Medea was bending over me, her long black hair lying on the coverlet beside me, holding a cup of spiced wine to my lips.
‘Drink this, Jason,’ she was saying in a low warm voice. ‘Drink this and be strong again.’
I drank, then smiled and said, ‘Why do you wish me strong, Goddess? You thought me your enemy.’
She fed me with the white flesh of a chicken, held in her fingers, as one would feed a pet leopard or a lynx.
Desire and love issued from her body as she stood so close to me. Her voice was warm now, not the cold tone she had used in her throne room.
‘I wish you to be strong because you are the man who shall put an end to Kush-kush,’ she said.
‘Nothing more, Goddess?’ I asked, holding my mouth open again for the wine.
Medea leaned forward with the cup, then suddenly drew it away and pressed her lips on mine. I felt the wine spill over my shoulder, and knew the warmth that body brings to body.
After a while she rose a little way and whispered, ‘I have chosen you, King Jason. You, a Hellene, not a flat-faced Scythian like the princes here. Oh, I have dreamed of your coming for so long. What do you say to me, King Jason?’
I began to say, ‘Goddess . . .’ But she placed her fingers over my mouth and whispered down at me, ‘That is for the public place, not for the bed, beloved. Speak bravely to me, as to a woman and not an image of stone.’
I said, measuring my words, ‘You are the most lovely woman I have seen, Medea. You are the most powerful, the most desirable. But how can you be for me? You have a husband.’
Now, I swear to you, I really did want her then. And she had some magic about her that made her seem more lovely even than my sweet Queen of Lemnos. So I was speaking the truth to her; though, at the same time, I was testing her. A man is capable of doing these two things at once, with honesty. If a woman does it, then she is being dishonest. That is one of the great differences between the two. I tell you this, and I have been a king in many places and know what is true. I am not a common man babbling, I assure you.
Medea shook the black mane of hair away from her face and tied it back with a golden ribbon. Then she blew through her nostrils, as though in disgust, though not at me.
‘A husband!’ she echoed, in mockery. ‘My brother! Apsyrtus, the Streaming One! Do you understand what that means, Jason? A husband, you say! A streaming one!’
Then she began to laugh, rocking backwards and forwards on my bed until I feared she would awake the palace.
I put my arms about her and when she had finished laughing she began to cry. Then she did nothing at all but rolled over beside me and lay like an unhappy girl in my arms.
‘Goddesses,’ I thought. ‘All women beneath the gold and the stiff brocades. All women; all to be conquered at last!’
And thinking so I went to sleep.