For days on end, contrary winds kept the heroes detained on Euboia’s northern coast,
near the famous city of Chalkis, founded by Krios the Titan
when he was cast from the heights by the Gods who attend Zeus the Thunderer;
under his golden rule the island flourished, and grew rich in cattle
and its people colonized many glorious cities,
including Naxos in Trinakria, Demeter’s breadbasket.
To wait out the punishing rains the Argonauts all disembarked
and went to trade with the people of Chalkis, lovers of exotic eastern wares.
Nauplios, the steersman, got separated from the rest
and when swift-sailed Argo left port he found himself in bed with a couple of Cretan girls,
Aerope and Klymene, daughters of Katreus;
but he was tired of endless wandering and warfare and the waves’ fish-stink;
instead he decided to set up home here with the sisters,
and teach the local youths how to train with the ball and hoop.
Orpheus and Medeia, too, nearly missed the boat
for they had gone off to visit the temple of a native God
whom the locals credited, like an autochthonous Kadmos, Minos or Hermes
with the invention of letters. Hanging in the temple
were sheets of birch wood, miraculously preserved down through the centuries,
on which the Old Man had scribed mantic poetry and gnomic aphorisms.
The language in which he wrote was strange, half Greek and half barbaric,
like Pelasgic but different enough that neither Lydians nor Tyrsenoi could easily decipher it.
As daring as they were curious, the pair had to visit the temple and try,
and Jason just grunted, “Don’t be late,” and went back to haggling with Phoenicians.
The temple was humble, a hut of branches rather than the ostentatious marble favored by Olympians,
and as the neokoros showed them around they saw it was sparse to the point of being Lakedaímōnian
– a pit with an ever-burning fire into which the God’s libations were poured,
a throne in which the image of the God sat, a great ashwood spear that gleamed even in the dark,
and a broad-brimmed petasos to indicate when the God was present and when he wasn’t.
Upon the throne was carved a many-branched tree,
a snake coiled around its base, a wolf, a well,
and on either side a raven with wings spread wide.
Medeia gasped when she saw the picture, for it reminded her of Ladon and the Hesperidean Maidens,
a thing they certainly knew nothing about in this far distant land.
Hanging above and around the throne,
as if they were stars falling from heaven,
were the birch sheets, bearers of savage mysteries.
From the neokoros they learned the God’s names
– men of Euboia call him Máchos and Hermēneus and Katapôgon,
but to the fair Hyperboreans he is known as Oudanos Mainomenos.
As the hunters of wisdom tried to read the unfamiliar script
they found themselves slipping into an hypnagogic trance
and together they saw
the spinners spinning,
thunder striking the serpent,
the wolf devouring the moon,
and hosts of dead riding out to their final battle.
Then a wave of fire washed everything clean
and the two were back to the beginning again
– a Giant father’s skull split in two, Heaven and Earth
and between them an ocean of bodily fluids.
And out of the darkness rose grammatical beings,
a scream of creation into the gap and void,
a divine breath reshaping the primordial elements
into persons, places and things
– a whole world full of them, and other worlds too.
Then they were back in the temple-hut.
“Holy fuck – did you just see that?” Orpheus inquired of his dear companion.
“Yeah -” was all Medeia was able to say
before they were startled by the sound of Echion blowing the salpinx,
summoning the Argonaut band back to their ship.
