“To someone not as familiar with these matters as I,” she gloated, before adding, graciously, “and you — this passage” — she stabbed at the pages again — “would seem to introduce the flowers, and especially the tulips, only as an element of description. To those more attuned — and to those it wants to address privately — the reference is clearly emphasized, masquerading as refined detailing. Now, I’ve had reason to observe that gypsies are notorious for their lush ejaculations —”
Oh, her superior tone would soon annoy me, but I refused to reveal that.
“— and the Gypsy and the Contessa were lying on tulips. Tulips, dear Lady, are shaped —” She bunched her fingers in imitation of a tube. She leaned back, like a queen on her throne, about to make an unassailable declaration. “It wasn’t to cover her most intimate part that the Contessa reached out to clutch flowers, but to place — into herself— the fluid that the Gypsy had spattered so copiously into the receptive tulips!”
I was chagrined that it had taken me so long to deduce what now became so obvious. Madame was being so impossibly superior that I considered pretending that I had reached the same conclusion — and asking her how she knew about the lush ejaculations of gypsies; of course, she is a very educated woman. My natural graciousness won out: “How utterly brilliant of you, Madame, to deduce it all so exactly.” She looked like a smug detective with a tiara.
“Thank you, Lady.” Sharing her triumph — her smugness! — Ermenegildo spread his tail so that it seemed an extension of the resplendent skirt Madame wore that day.
“Then it’s only Irena who’s the husband’s daughter!” The vast implications assaulted me.
“Yes, but Irena only suspects the truth, truth that would make her the heir to the du Muir fortune after the Contessa. But to sustain such an enormity, she needs a witness, or someone with knowledge gained from someone knowledgeable. She needs proof, information she’s certain the Count possessed. He was his mother’s favorite, remember, dark and loving like his real father. Irena suspects the Count gave you that information, and he did, Lady —”
“— when he proudly called himself ‘the son of a gypsy,’” I recalled with a wrench of sorrow at that precious moment, gone.
“Irena suspects that the Contessa, too, divulged her secret to you,” Madame went on, “and the dear lady was about to, that evening in her coach — and that day by the River, remember, Lady?”
How could I forget the gentle, lovely figure alone by the River? “She had gone there because she had learned that was where her beloved gypsy had been buried,” I was now certain.
“Tossed into the River’s waters by her evil husband’s minions,” Madame had arrived at the exact conclusion. “Oh, that despicable husband of hers was capable of that — and more, torturing his first wife, and” — Madame was thoughtful before she proceeded — “perhaps even himself arousing the mob that assaulted his own son from that earlier marriage —”
“— assaulted in that brutal way that had made my beloved Count wince with horror at the memory.” I had long considered what Madame had concluded. I even more clearly now envisioned the savagery.
Madame paused for a few respectful, solemn seconds — her hands clasped before her lips in a wordless prayer — before she resumed with her earlier investigation: “And how does Irena hope to draw out from you information she wants about the Contessa and the Gypsy? By arousing your indignation with these distortions” — she poked several times at the pages of the installments on the table — “she hopes to unsettle you, to drive you to protest, make you long to separate your beloved husband from the villainies of the du Muirs, especially hers — and then trap you into stumbling, giving her information she needs, and at the same time — this is most important — ambushing interviews by forcing you to blurt your truths before we’re ready . . . Now! Let’s continue. Since it’s clear from the ‘Account’ that Alix still believes himself to be Irena’s ally and the Nobleman’s son, who else other than the Contessa do you suppose knows the truth which still eludes Irena?” she asked, eager to astonish me with her answer.
“The renegade nun, who saw it all.”
Madame had apparently not considered that, because she frowned and for a moment almost ceased her gloating. “She, too, of course,” she mumbled. “But I meant someone much more important in this tapestry of cunning.”
“The Pope,” I again irritated her by answering before she could.
Madame glowered at me for a moment. But she is nothing if not grand, and so she continued: “Yes, the one to whom the Contessa confessed —”
“Confessed? Oh, no, not the Contessa; she told the truth, with justifiable pride.”
“Exactly what I meant,” Madame agreed. “So the Pope has been keeping Irena in check for his own purposes, by withholding from her what he knows.”
“And I’m certain she is keeping him in check,” I acknowledged Irena’s craftiness.
“Ah, I suspect an ultimate confrontation between those two, the creature and the Pope.”
“But before that, Madame, I shall become the primary object of their machinations.” Although I had known from the beginning of their pursuit of me, these new discoveries added graver, even more reckless, urgency. “They’ll have to deal with me.”
Ermenegildo’s twisted feather trembled.
Madame brushed away our apprehension. “Yes, Lady, but they’ll also have to deal with me!” she reminded me. “And we’re not pushovers!” She squared her shoulders and thrust out her bosom; the emerald bobbed.
“We are not, Madame.” All the annoyance I had felt at her gloating evaporated.
I was excited, exultant, ecstatic, overwhelmed, flushed with the prospect of certain triumph during interviews!
Then why was I crying?
No, it was someone else I heard, another’s cry, not mine. A scream? Not mine. A wailing echo . . . I closed my eyes, to listen —
“Lady, were you dozing?”
“Yes, Madame. So deeply that I even dreamt —”
“About the woman whose scream you think you hear on waking?”
“Yes.”
Madame Bernice’s softened words guided me away from the sad dream: “No need to cry then. You’re awake now, Lady, not dreaming. So shall we continue to deal with your memories?”
XIX
“I SHALL TELL YOU ABOUT MEDEA.”
“Lady, it’s late — The sun —”
“— is still bright enough,” I said, although it seemed to me that twilight, beginning at the edge of the horizon, had encouraged my decision.
“Still, I think that if we —
“This cannot be kept in abeyance any longer, Madame.”
“But—”
I did not give her further opportunity to object.
It began, that journey toward violence and blood, with the Golden Fleece —
“— which sent fate to find its deadly course,” Cassandra told me when I narrated to her in Corinth the events I was again recounting to Madame in her garden. Cassandra had befriended me then — and beyond — the only one to do so during that forlorn eternity in the foreign city Jason and I fled to.
“You will, Lady, of course, clarify — again — that this is the same Cassandra whom we saw in Eden and who was with you in Troy?” Madame Bernice interjected brittlely. “That’s clearly a complicated matter that might require more time than this day, and so I suggest leaving it for —”
“No, Madame.”
Ermenegildo rested nearby, his tail gathered as modestly as such luxuriance can be. He had located himself halfway between me and Madame. His usual position is closer to her, but periodically he strolls over to allow me to stroke his head; I assumed this meant he was sharing his allegiance and encouraging the telling of the life Madame seemed intent to exclude.
“Besides —” Madame tried to woo him over to her side by crumbling a cake and holding it toward him. He stretched his neck and took the offering, but he did not alter his position. “Besi
des, do remember that the interlude out of Eden is a matter we would do well to rehearse very, very soon — and, also, the truth about the War in Heaven. Perhaps, do you suppose, we might do that now, at least begin, instead of—?”
I was firm: “It’s time, Madame. It must be told before interviews begin and the last installment of the ‘Account’ appears.”
She was clearly not listening — so determined to dismiss any reason that supported my resolve: “Do remember that there are many other lives — much more important ones — that we still have to explore. Yes, and there’s one — I’ve been meaning to bring this up — that I’m surprised you haven’t even mentioned, the woman whose ghost roams the jungles of —”
She would not dissuade me. Before I resumed with my life as Medea, I would try to assuage the deep frown on her face: “Perhaps we shall find a most unjustly blamed . . . whore.” My eyes locked with hers.
“And perhaps not!” She raised her voice to what veered on anger.
I started again with my odyssey of fury:
It all began with the Golden Fleece. Yes, some — though little — of what has been recorded is correct. Of that little, it is true that the Golden Fleece was ransom paid by a mother to secure the safety of her children.
“Oh? By a mother? To secure the safety of her children? I didn’t know that.” Madame seemed to relax, just somewhat and only for a moment, that day on her lawn under a hazy sky, the air saturated with the scent of the newly born orchid lilies touched with drops of red. I proceeded:
The King of Thessaly had grown tired of his wife, whom he cast out of his palace, although she was the mother of his children, Phrixus and Helle. He replaced his wife with a young, ambitious princess, who quickly gave him another son. Taking advantage of a drought that rendered the land barren and the people hungry, the new wife hired a priest to claim that an oracle demanded the sacrifice of Phrixus. The Prince’s death would allow her own son to assume the throne.
When the King agreed to the sacrifice, the abandoned wife was determined to save her children. She bartered with a man reputed to be a magician, a cunning man, who demanded all her jewels in exchange for assuring her children’s safety.
“I’ll need that much — perhaps more — to buy what is necessary, a dye made of the most precious gold,” he told her.
She surrendered all that would have allowed her to survive in exile, if at all, after the new wife would discover she had been foiled, if the sorcerer’s plan succeeded.
When the boy Phrixus was bound upon a rock to be slaughtered, the magician, true to his word, released a ram with fleece dyed so golden that in the sun it blinded the executioner and everyone else in attendance, except the mother and her children, who had been prepared for what would follow. The executioner’s blade shattered on the rock. The mother strapped her son and daughter to the ram and sent it on its way to safety with her children. Triumphantly, she faced her own dour fate, knowing her children were safe.
“A mother’s true devotion,” Madame commented, still tense but allowing herself another second of ease.
The girl, romping while the ram rested, fell into the sea that would be named after her, the Hellespont; but the boy Phrixus was carried to the Kingdom of Colchis, east of the Black Sea. Dazzled by the beauty of the ram’s fleece, the King of Colchis welcomed the boy. As arranged by the magician, the ram shed its precious skin, which Phrixus gratefully gave to the King. The ransom for the lives of a mother’s children was placed in a consecrated grove, guarded by six ferocious lions, to guarantee that one would always be awake. To assure that Phrixus would never long to return to his kingdom with the treasured fleece, the King of Colchis gave him one of his two beautiful daughters in marriage.
In another neighboring kingdom, King Aeson, the father of a handsome youth named Jason — the ruler was also a distant relative of the man whose child had been saved by the golden ram — tired of the chores of governing and surrendered his crown to his brother, Pelias, on one condition: When Jason became eighteen, the crown would pass to him.
Jason roamed the territories of Greece, becoming stronger, preparing for his time as king. With his virile beauty, he also conquered the hearts of women, surrendering his virginity several times — to young girls eager to lose theirs for his, and to older women lured into believing he would restore the memory of theirs.
When Jason was of age to reclaim his place as king — and under Pelias the country had grown weak, poor, dispirited — Pelias agreed to surrender the throne to the proud young man who stood before him in a leopard skin. Even as he conferred with the King, the young man’s eyes roamed among the gathered, locating the prettiest women and girls he would choose to lose his virginity to, yet again.
“Look at the country you’ll inherit,” King Pelias told the handsome youth. “It’s lost its spirit. Both can be recovered — and greater pride brought to your father and mother.”
“How!” Jason was eager to restore the kingdom of his aging father to its former grandeur.
“Only by the power of a youthful prince — you. There’s a Golden Fleece that belongs in our family. It was stolen by the barbarians of Colchis. Recover it, Jason. Gain your throne in triumph,” Pelias exhorted. He knew how ferociously the Fleece was guarded in a kingdom whose inhabitants, of a darker skin and violent ways, were considered “barbarians.” He was certain Jason would never return from his voyage.
“I’ll recover the Fleece,” Jason vowed, displaying himself to full advantage to a young woman who had begun to fondle and reveal her breasts to him.
Jason had a vessel built, the Argo, larger than any before, to contain fifty daring young men, the most adventurous, who would join his voyage. Among these brawny young men were Hercules, Orpheus, Nestor. The Argonauts set sail to regain the treasure of the Golden Fleece —
“— the ransom a mother had paid for the lives of her children, sacrificing her own life,” Madame interjected with a sigh. Then she frowned. “I believe from here the narrative will become somewhat more . . . controversial?”
I preferred to think that she had spoken to herself; and I resumed:
The journey was not without its sorrows. Hylas, the young armor-bearer and lover of Hercules, wandered into the thick forests of an island where the Argo docked. Yelling out the boy’s name in grief, Hercules hunted for him day and night, with his bare hands ripping the thick limbs of trees, abandoning the journey with Jason to dedicate himself to finding his beloved.
“Really? Hercules loved a boy?” Madame asked. “That muscular symbol of masculinity loved a boy?”
“Yes, Madame. My lives have encountered commitment to love in all its shapes.”
“And with what devotion the strong man hunted for his lover!” Madame asserted. “Imagine! Such sensitivity in so massive a hero.”
Using all the bold cunning of his now twenty years, Jason and the Argonauts braved all the dangers of the seas to reach their destination. Colchis was clouded in fog, which protected the young adventurers from being seen as they made their way to confront the King, Aetes.
He was waiting for them under the arcked entrance to his crude palace of jagged stones. In the years since he had inherited the Golden Fleece, the King had become despotic, hoarding the country’s wealth, so that his people split into roaming tribes, hunters. Becoming obsessed with the possibility that Phrixus would attempt to reclaim the precious fleece, he had exiled him and his own daughter.
“I’ve come to reclaim a treasure that belongs to our family,” Jason said to the King of Colchis, and he planted his sturdy legs, firmly, to assert his determination.
“It’s been waiting for you,” King Aetes agreed easily.
Behind the King had appeared a young woman of fifteen, so beautiful that Jason had not even heard the King’s easy words of acquiescence, only their echo. The girl’s eyes, black as onyx, were outlined by thick, long lashes that required no paint. Her lush hair was so lustrous that even in the moonless night it created a dark-silver aura abo
ut her face. Her lips were as red and liquid as fresh blood. Her skin was the brown color of her people, but of a golden hue. Her breasts had already assumed their voluptuous maturity, challenged in their sensuality by the curves of her slender hips. She wore a dazzle of bracelets the length of her arms, and anklets over her bare feet. Sheathed in an amber tunic so sheer that it revealed the shaded smear between her legs, she appeared naked.
That is how Jason saw me — Medea, Princess of Colchis, daughter of King Aetes.
And this is how I saw him as he stood before my father and affirmed his claim with powerful dignity: fair hair that framed his handsome face and rested on wide shoulders, a slender waist that asserted the muscles of his chest and arms and legs. As I watched him and listened to his voice and heard his words, I felt desire and love, love and desire — I tried to separate them but could not.
“Of course for such a treasure, there must be tests that will make your people proud of your feat before you claim the Fleece at its site,” Aetes said to Jason. He noticed Jason’s eyes fixed on me. “Surely a young man like yourself would like to prove his prowess, wouldn’t he? — especially before our lovely women” — his lustful glance indicated me — “and know, Jason, that our women are renowned for their sensual sorceries, ignited by courage and daring.”
My father — a cold, conniving man whom I had never loved and who had never loved me, though I knew he desired me — was challenging this young man into a plotted struggle that could not be overcome, luring him to certain death, and he was offering me as part of his enticement. I had gone often to the grove where the Golden Fleece was guarded by unsleeping lions, had gone there since I was a child, always at night, the only time when the brilliance of the Fleece did not blind. I had made friends not only with the animals that roamed the hills — sheep, deer with their fawns, wolves — but also with the lions that guarded the Fleece. At first the lions would growl at me. Each time, I came closer so that they would learn to know me. Now when I approached, they would scratch out with their paws toward me, as if in greeting. I would touch them in return. I would stand dazzled by the Fleece. Even under the moon it shone gold.