Jason and the Argonauts by Bernard Evslin Read Free Book Online

our base camp, I had also selected the best site for shipbuilding. Oak and pine and cedar grew near the sea and would provide our lumber. The ship could be built on the beach and launched right there.
    Argos came to us. He didn’t look like a master shipwright. He looked like someone a witch had begun to transform into a seal but had left half-done. He was short and smoothly tubby, with very short arms and large hands. He was clad only in a black leather apron, which clung as closely as another skin. Hair and beard were dark brown and very dense. He looked astonishingly like a seal, in fact; but unlike any beast’s, his black eyes smoldered with a furious impatience. He was incapable of understanding why everyone did not share his image of a perfect ship or how anyone could think of anything else. He started to rave as soon as he came.
    “You shall use no ax,” he told me. “Any touch of metal will blight the soul of the dryad that must invest the timbers and keep them alive.”
    “Living timbers?”
    “If an ordinary deadwood vessel is what you want, you don’t employ an Argos. Any ship I build lives upon the water. She sniffs out the best wind and runs before it. She senses the presence of reefs and avoids them. She threads her way among rocks, and beaches where there is no harbor.”
    “With a ship of yours, one scarcely needs a crew.”
    “My ship must be served, sir. Must be kept clean and sweet—unblemished in sail and mast, tackle, gear. She must never be left untended because someone will surely steal her.”
    “First we have to get her built. And it may be difficult to fell trees without using an ax.”
    The others were lounging about the grove. Jason held a kestrel perched on his leather wristband and was whispering to it. Daphnis sat propped against a fallen log, touching his lyre, not playing a tune but imitating the way the wind sighed among the boughs. Autolycus was catching wasps on the wing and letting them go. None of them seemed to be listening to our conversation, but Autolycus growled, “Daphnis can.” I didn’t realize he was speaking to me. He prowled closer and said, “Daphnis can do it.”
    “Do what?”
    “Uproot trees.” He said to Daphnis, “Do it.”
    Daphnis arose slowly, holding his lyre in the crook of his left arm. The sun had just sunk, leaving a clear greenish dusk and a wound of light in the west. Standing, waiting, the fragile boy imposed a hush upon us. The birds fell silent. The wind ceased among the boughs. A piece of moon tangled itself in the branches of a cedar. Daphnis raised his right hand; it floated toward the lyre, bringing a single note. He sang of the Beginning:
    “A startled light arose from the rubble of Chaos and became the Goddess Eurynome … She danced across the edge of nothingness and the paths of her dancing became the margins of sea and sky … The North Wind pursued her as she fled, dancing. The West Wind and the South Wind and the East Wind joined the chase; they surrounded her … And became the Universal Serpent, Ophion.”
    I heard a faint sob. Jason was weeping, trying to make no sound. Autolycus was iron-faced, but the iron was wet. The blackness of Argos’ hair and beard and apron had made him vanish, all but his glimmering hands. Our circle had enlarged. Deer stood among us, and a pair of gray wolves, ears cocked toward the singer, ignoring the deer. A slouching shadow grew into a bear, shoulders bulking. The moon shook itself free of the cedar, and the animals’ eyes became pits of fire.
    Man and beast stood rapt as Daphnis sang:
    “Eurynome was captive to the winds, and they closed about her. She turned herself into a white bird and flew away … She nested in the sky and laid a clutch of silver eggs, which were the sun and the earth and the planets and all the stars that stud the sky. Upon the earth were trees, flowers, birds, beasts, and man …”
    A wrenching, pulling sound began. My brother’s voice floated above it and kept us