Chapter 42
Atalanta
“Calais and Zetes drove away the Harpies,” Jason explained to Medea as he escorted her out of the library. He did not touch
her, I noticed, but instead hovered around her anxiously. He ignored me completely, so that I was forced to drift after the
two of them like a ghost.
“The twin sons of the north wind,” Jason continued, “chased the Harpies through the air like sparrows. They were gone so long
that I began to fear for them, but they came back breathless, telling a fantastical story about Iris, goddess of the rainbow.
It seems Iris persuaded the wind brothers to stop chasing the Harpies, and in return the Harpies will trouble King Phineus
no more. Isn’t that wonderful?”
There were many things in the world more wonderful than this, but at the moment my mind was a torrent of confusion and I could
not articulate any of it. Words and letters wiggled like ants behind my eyelids, spelling out my thoughts, making my imaginings
tangible and impossible to ignore. All of them circling around the woman in front of me, walking next to the man she was going
to marry.
I took refuge from these thoughts in hard labor, loading the water, wine, and food that Phineus gifted us onto the Argo, not to mention the gems, gold, and jewelry he bestowed as a reward.
The Argonauts elbowed each other and whispered at the king’s generosity, knowing they would all be very, very rich.
I did not share in their joy, preoccupied instead with the feelings arising in my heart.
Before our planned departure, Jason leaped up on the deck, a hand shielding his eyes as he surveyed the crew. His face fell
at what he saw.
“Where is Heracles?” he asked. “And where is Hylas?”
The footprints ended at a pool.
Tucked up in the hills of Phineus’s island was a small lake, the water as still as the surface of a mirror and surrounded
by reeds. Despite its serene beauty, there was something disquieting about the place. Predators, as I well knew, often lay
in wait at such watering holes.
The footprints marked a man’s unhurried walk to the pool. There was no corresponding set of footprints leading back.
A sound caught my attention as the Argonauts crested the hill. A great bulk of a man, clad in his usual stinking lion skin,
was sitting in the middle of the path.
He was weeping. There was something terrible about seeing a mature adult break down like a child, wailing with his whole body.
But that was what Heracles did.
“Hylas,” Heracles moaned, “where have you gone?”
Phineus raised his head and sniffed the air. “The reflecting pool,” he said, making the ancient sign against evil. “No one
dares come here, except to make offerings. Nymphs are said to haunt this place, water nymphs with teeth like freshwater eels.”
My eyes traced the footprints. I could picture the scene: Hylas bending over the pool to fetch water for our journey, unaware of the faces looking up at him from below.
Hands reaching for him even as he drew back the filled pitcher.
How quickly Hylas fell when the nymphs grabbed him, the serene surface of the lake closing over him as though he had never been.
I felt suddenly cold. Hylas’s death reminded me painfully of Procris’s—swift, and meaningless, and violent.
“We have to leave this place, Heracles,” Jason said. He did not dare place a hand on Heracles’s shoulder; greater men had
died for less. The strength of Heracles was legend, as was his temper.
A low groan cut the air, gradually increasing in volume until it was nearly a scream. A long, drawn-out sound, like a bull’s
roar. In a flash Heracles was on his feet, causing Jason to stumble backward. But that hurricane of a man did not seek to
harm any human being; instead, there came a loud cracking sound as he pulled up a tree, roots and all. Heracles threw the
tree in the direction of the lake, and it sunk into the indifferent surface of the pool.
“Hylas!” he screamed. The word seemed torn from his viscera, dripping with blood. Then Heracles was staggering away, crashing
through the brush like an injured animal. His formidable shouts of “Hylas! Hylas!” eventually became muted by the distance.
Jason started after him, then halted, knowing as well as the rest of us that there was no way of making Heracles do anything
he did not wish to do.
This scene broke my heart open all over again. I knew what it was like to lose one’s dearest companion and to lose them in
such a way that there was not even a corpse to bury. I thought of Meleager, vanishing into the wind. And Procris, murdered
in the woods far away.
Not for the first time, I considered that I carried a curse, some hateful remnant of the birth parents who had left me for
dead. How else could it be that everything and everyone I loved seemed poisoned by my mere touch?
My gaze drifted to Medea, taking in her black curls, her round cheeks and proud nose, the ring she anxiously twisted on her finger. The idea that any harm should befall her was utterly intolerable.
The other Argonauts were arguing about what to do. “Are you mad?” Peleus shouted. “Heracles is the best among us. We must
retrieve him, or else we will never return home.”
Other angry voices echoed that of Peleus, but they fell quiet as a new sound drowned them out. Strands of music.
Orpheus, the musician.
In the sudden silence, he began to sing. The song described a son of Zeus, fathered on a mortal woman. The child was named
“glory of Hera,” to appease Zeus’s jilted wife. This did not work, and when the mortal son was grown, Hera sent down a terrible
curse upon him.
The man came home one day to see two imps rush out at him from the house, followed by a dragon. With his supernatural strength,
he dispatched them all quickly. But then the fog lifted, and the man saw that they were not monsters but his own wife and
children. To dispel the evil of this act, the mortal son of Zeus had to perform many impossible Labors. But nothing could
ever bring back his children and his wife.
This, Orpheus concluded, was the tale of Heracles.
“Heracles did penance at the command of King Eurystheus and the court of Queen Omphale,” Orpheus declared following the conclusion
of his song. “But his debt is not yet repaid and his story is no longer one with ours. We should be on our way.”
“I wondered where the miasma on Heracles came from,” Medea whispered to herself beside me. “Now I know.”
We’d all heard of the great Labors of Heracles. But none of us, it seemed, knew why he had been tasked with them in the first
place. The songs usually left that part out.
But where in all this was there room for Hylas, the young man who had looked after Heracles so devotedly and ran his life like a tidy ship? Where was there space in the songs for the love they’d shared, crammed into the margins of a story about a man who spent his life making amends?
That evening, I realized with terrible clarity that I was beginning to fall in love with Medea.
We spent the night on the shores of Phineus’s island, Jason having split the difference between the two courses of action
laid before him. If Heracles did not return by the morning, Jason announced, then we would leave without him, but it was unseemly
not to give a member of the crew the chance to reconsider and return. There was no question of demanding the king’s hospitality
once more, so we camped on the beach as we usually did. Medea worked alongside me to prepare the camp.
I was ecstatic to be near her again, which I recognized as a worrying symptom. The allure of her presence as sweet as honeycomb,
lending fascination to the most mundane things as long as she was interested in them. I’d felt it with Procris, and now I
felt it with Medea. Only the faintest beginnings of love, but unmistakable.
Medea. At some point over the Argo’s long journey she had become a friend, and now she became something more. We had not known each other long, but we did know
each other well.
I flinched back from these feelings as I might from a knife’s edge. How faithless the human heart, to set its sights on someone
new so quickly. Only a few days had passed since I’d learned of Procris’s death. The goddess’s prophecy held true—I had loved,
and lost myself. But then again, perhaps this meant that the inverse was also true. If I did not love, I would not lose.
Yes, it was simple when looked at like that. I’d prune these feelings like an invasive growth of mistletoe and brick up the yawning gap of my vulnerability. Having come to the revelation that I was falling in love with Medea, I decided to bury this truth like a dog hastily hiding a bone.
On the beach, Orpheus was singing again. A little ditty about a god called Eros, who seemed to spend all his time making people
fall in love with each other. Then the melody slowed and deepened, the notes becoming darker as it changed to a tale about
a girl who had been struck by Eros to love a wandering singer. The girl’s name was Eurydice, and her ankles flashed as she
danced at their wedding. Then a serpent sank its fangs into that tender flesh, and Eurydice fell down into the abyss of the
Underworld.
Her husband, the singer, went after her. He walked the cypress-lined road into the land of the dead while yet living, winning
passage with his music. And when he stood before the throne of the dread queen of hell, he charmed her with his song. Persephone
let the soul of Eurydice follow her husband through the shadows of the Underworld up into the light, under the condition that
he did not turn around. But just as they were about to step into the living world, the singer turned to look at his beloved.
And the form of his Eurydice dissolved into mist.
The sorrow of the tale drove the breath from my lungs. But more than that, something about it made me angry. Leaving Medea
to eat her supper alone, I stalked toward Orpheus and confronted him at the fringes of the camp.
“You were the singer, weren’t you?” I demanded. “The one in the song, who went after Eurydice.”
Orpheus did not seem ruffled by my sudden appearance and regarded me with eyes as calm as the lake of the nymphs where Hylas
had drowned. Around him, the others continued to carouse. “I was,” he replied. “All that way I traveled, only to lose her
again. One might say it was a waste, but love is never wasted.”
The words echoed in my mind. Love is never wasted.
“How can you love Calais if you loved Eurydice?” I demanded.
This was why I’d come here—to ask Orpheus how he could sing about his past love with his current one sitting nearby.
Orpheus could not really love her if he loved him, and vice versa, or so I told myself.
Anything to poke holes in the vastness of his love and, by extension, my own.
Orpheus simply laughed. “The heart is not a throne, with only one king to sit upon it. Or a lyre, played by a single hand.
The heart breaks, but it also rises. Love is pain, but so is life and it is no less dear to us. You would do well to remember
that. Or, at least, never look back once you’ve made your choice.”
With that, Orpheus left to sit with his lover, Calais, and Calais’s brother, Zetes, who were currently being feted by the
rest of the Argonauts for their defeat of the Harpies.
Their revels irked me. Here they were partying, as if Heracles did not roam the woods beyond, utterly bereft. As if Hylas
were not dead, and Eurydice too, and Procris and Meleager. As if there were not a thousand reasons to mourn.
I returned to Medea, waiting in our nest of blankets, as though I’d been drawn along by an invisible string. Foolish as it
was, I could not bring myself to leave her.
I slid under the covers and pretended to fall asleep immediately. I didn’t want to expend effort concealing my feelings now
that I understood that one love did not inoculate against another.
If I did not love, I would not lose. But it had never been that simple.