“We’ve done it!” he called. “The Harpies are gone!”
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 theArgo, 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 fellwhen 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.
