The Mask of Circe Read online

  I was still Jason in part. I could still feel the bubbling up of smooth, easy phrases that offered solace to the conscience of Jay Seward. I hated that subtle, plausible brain intruding itself upon mine. And yet—were these arguments he offered me wholly wrong? Was it Jay Seward or Jason the Betrayer, who voiced them?

  “What else could I do?” I asked myself futilely as I followed Phrontis. “We were in a hopeless spot as we stood. No escape possible, and Hecate’s fate depending on our escape. Whether I mean to fight on her side or not doesn’t matter now. I’m not sure about that. Hecate was a dark goddess, one of the underworld deities, queen of sorceries and black magic. Apollo, at least, is the sun-god—bright daylight against enchantments and night time. You can’t judge them on those merits—it’s pure legend and may mean nothing. But what else have I to judge them by?

  “Well, it doesn’t matter. As things stood, there was only one thing I could do and it was a blow struck equally in favor of both sides. I won Phrontis’ trust. That’s worth a lot, because he seems to be very nearly in full charge here. Now he’ll work with me. But I did more than that, because somebody powerful in Helios released Cyane.

  “Somebody had a plot in motion when he did it. By this act, I’ve thrown that plot off balance. And any shift in balance just now is good for it may mean help to us; it can’t mean any more danger than we were in already—if I’m working for Hecate. If this unknown priest’s plans are disarranged, something will come of it and since I’m in Phrontis’ confidence now, maybe I can watch for the moment and turn it to my own ends.”

  But was it Jason who reasoned thus smoothly? I couldn’t forget Cyane’s eyes on my face as they dragged her from the room. Many women, I knew, must have looked at Jason of Iolcus in such a way, after he had betrayed them. But for Jay Seward it had not been so easy to stand by. Still, if I’d jumped to her defense all that Jay—or was it Jason—had gambled on this desperate throw would be lost and wasted. No, better to let her go with the priesthood—go as far as the altar if need be, while I let chance mature Jason’s plans.

  We paused before a sun-blazoned door. Phrontis pushed it open and nodded me in, following silently. The room within was star-shaped. Golden curtains cut off the five corners, and a tall man was just lowering the last curtain as I entered. He turned and I looked into the ravaged face of Ophion, the high priest. He limped forward to confront me.

  “Son of Jason,” he said in a quiet voice, “you go to stand before Apollo. The room beyond this is a part of his holiest sanctum. You will look into the Eye of Apollo, and the memories you hate will drop from you as you look.” He hesitated, his fine brow wrinkling a little. But before he could speak further, Phrontis had moved past him and touched a latch in the far wall.

  The peak of the star-shaped room opened outward like a comet’s tail and I was looking into an infinity of interreflecting silver walls. Phrontis’ hand on my shoulder urged me forward. Half in a daze, I walked forward.

  “Ophion will guide you from outside,” Phrontis’ voice said from behind me. “He must serve as high priest, since technically I am still an acolyte. But I’ll stand with him to learn. Are you ready, Son of Jason?”

  I was not ready. Oddly, now that the moment was upon me, I felt strangely reluctant to give up those memories that had been torture whenever they came, yet which had promised me knowledge and power I might badly need before I left Helion—if I ever left it alive.

  But Phrontis did not wait for my answer. There was a soft rush of displaced air in the room, and when I turned with belated swiftness I was alone. The shining walls had slipped back into place and I saw no way out. Mistrustfully I looked about the room.

  It was small. But I could feel the—the power—that quivered and vibrated here from wall to silvery wall, latent unknown forces that might move into life at any moment. There was more power in focus here, I thought, than in the whole city of Helios outside.

  From the faceted ceiling dim light shot down in a webwork of interlacing rays, ghostly and radiant. The floor sloped down to a shallow depression at the center where a milky hemisphere, four feet across, lay like a pool of opalescent water. The walls were mirror-silver.

  I waited, my heart thumping. There was utter silence here. The shafts of dim radiance streamed down in columnar patterns. And after a moment or two it seemed to me they were growing bright.

  The milky hemisphere in the floor was beginning to shine with a cold, Ice-bright radiance, and a hint of gold was creeping into that crepuscular glow. Still the silence held. The Eye of Apollo dimmed. The columns of light dimmed with it.

  They waned and waxed again, brighter. This time the golden shining was unmistakable. Like the slow pulse of a heart of cosmic light the Eye faded—brightened—dimmed once more.

  Faster and faster the changes came. The walls reflected a throbbing series of golden flashes. I saw my own image leaping into clarity and vanishing again, rhythmically, as the sun-shafts blazed down from above.

  They flickered like lightning, and suddenly the whole room was an intolerable glare of gold, so blinding I could not face it.

  I flung up an arm to shield my closed eyes. Behind the lids colors swam confusingly, like boiling clouds. And then, incredibly, the clouds seemed to part and a face looked through them into the depths of my brain.

  It seemed to me that every cell of my body retracted instinctively away from that sight. I was aware of a hideous cold crawling through every nerve and muscle as if my flesh itself recoiled by an instantaneous motion deeper than reflex before the beauty of that Face—

  Apollo’s face.

  I was looking upon a god.

  Many legends surviving to my own time and world had hymned Apollo’s beauty. But it was not human beauty. The face had all the lineaments of human likeness, but the beauty in it transcended any human beauty as the sun transcends candlelight. There are no words in any language to tell you how he looked—or how that godlike splendor repelled the eye that gazed upon it.

  He regarded me with remote interest, aloof as all gods must be from human endeavors. I was no more than a ripple upon the surface of divine thoughts incomprehensible to any mind but his. And behind him I was very dimly aware, in no more than a flash of consciousness, of vast golden things loom-int impossibly high into a golden sky. A god’s world!

  A god?

  I remembered Phrontis’ skeptical cynicism. Ophion believed in the supernal beings, but did Phrontis? Could this terrible beauty be only human, after all? Or more than human, but less than divine?

  All that went through my mind in the space of one heartbeat, while the Face gazed with cold indifferent interest into mine, through the barrier of my closed lids.

  I opened my eyes again. The room was incandescent with light. It seared the eyes. And it was morethan light. The galactic energies of the sun itself seemed to pour through body and brain. The power of—of—

  The word eluded me. Veils were slipping one by one from my mind in that burning bath. And behind those veils was something that shone brighter than the Eye of the Sun God.

  The last veil burned and was gone…

  We three stood on a hilltop—Circe and Jason and a great, strange, shadowy figure at our backs. We faced a distant brightening in the air, and fear brimmed in me like wine in a cup. I knew who it was that stood behind me—and she was no goddess. Men called her Hecate.

  But in the weeks he had spent on Aeaea, Jason came to learn what truth lies behind the clouded altars.

  Circe—priestess of Hecate.

  The dark goddess herself—mightily armed.

  And I, Jason, son of Aeson, armored in that unimaginably strange thing named the Golden Fleece.

  We three stood waiting for coming battle—waiting for Apollo…

  It was long ago—three thousand years ago. Part of my mind knew that. But the living part of my mind just now dwelt in that forgotten past which was sweeping back upon me in wave after wave of memory. Jasons memory. Eac
h veil of it, I thought, relived in a flash and torn aside forever.

  Argo cleaving the purple Aegean water—the dark groves of Aeaea—the faces of many women.

  “Argo, my own, my swift and beautiful.”

  What was any woman to me? What was Circe, or Hecate herself, or this monstrous battle between these people called gods—who were not gods? True, I had sworn an oath—

  But Jason had broken oaths before.

  We came to Aeaea three weeks ago, to the white temple and the lovely Enchantress who dwelt there among her half-human beasts.

  Medea and I, traveling overland to be cleansed of blood-guilt and to wait the coming of the Argo. But there were storms that year, and Argo did not come. And while we waited on that strange isle in the Adriatic where Circe wrought her spells, dim, unreal days and nights went by. There was something strange in the very air of the island, as though Aeaea hovered on the edge of the veil that hides another world.

  Slowly, during the long summer evening, Jason’s thoughts turned from Medea, who was a well-known story now, and lingered upon Circe, the Enchantress. I knew from the first that she had been watching me, not for my own sake, though I did not guess it then, but for another reason—for the sake of another man.

  I have a double mind. Always I have had that. Perhaps I was born to it, perhaps it developed in the days when I was a student under the wisdom of Chiron, the Centaur. But sometimes another man, a ghost from some unknown Hades, looks through Jason’s eyes and speaks with his tongue. Not often. But on Aeaea it happened more often than I liked, and Circe lingered near me while the madness had reign in my mind, her strange ember-green eyes hot upon mine.

  Mine? No, that other man’s. He was that nameless ghost who shared Jason’s brain.

  And—a new look began to come into the green gaze. I had seen that look on a woman’s face often enough to know what it implied. Well, it was nothing new to Jason that a woman should love him. But uneasiness nagged at me beneath the complacence. There was something here I did not understand.

  The weeks were long before the Argo came. And before that happened, Circe spoke to me of Hecate, and Hecate herself stepped down from her altar…

  We had been drinking wine together in the cool summer evening, Circe and I. After awhile she said to me,

  “I have a message for you, Jason—a message from the goddess.”

  I considered that. The wine was in my head. I wondered if the goddess herself had looked upon me and found me good. Perhaps that was what lay behind the strangeness I had sensed. And legend told of many times before now when a goddess stooped to bestow her favor on a mortal.

  Circe said abruptly, “Come with me,” and I rose and followed her with a sense of pleasant anticipation…

  The goddess spoke to me with Circe’s tongue. I did not like what she said. It had a dreamlike quality and I was not sure I believed all of it. There are things too strange even for a goddess to convey.

  “Two souls dwell in your body, Jason. One will not know life for three thousand years. He would know the truth of my words better than you, who are still half-savage. Hellas will be only a memory to him, and new nations will rule his world. That man Jason—not yourself—is the man Circe has so foolishly allowed herself to love.

  “Well, I cannot control love. But I wish she might have been born three thousand years from now.”

  I was afraid. But there was a dizziness in my brain and I thought that—other—that dweller—listened with passionate intensity. I thought he understood.

  “Two worlds intersect in this time, Jason. One you know. The other world is my own. In it are those you know as gods and goddesses, but we are not divine. Natural forces made us as we are—the mutation of natural laws.”

  She was not speaking to me as much as to the other Jason—the man yet unborn—who listened with my mind—the man Circe loved.

  Well, perhaps I could use him, I thought, and devious ideas began to shape themselves in my brain.

  “Those two worlds intersect at this time and place. It is possible to move from one to the other, where the veil is thinnest. At such places, on Aeaea, temples are raised with gateways, doors that open both ways.

  “Apollo’s temple on Helios is a gateway too. Apollo and I are sworn enemies. He has powers that to you seem godlike, but he is no god. The powers are normal powers, for Apollo has mastered principles of science you have not yet learned. To you they seem magical, as my powers seem necromantic. Yet I am no goddess either, though my powers transcend, in a way, time and space.

  ”We were born long ago, Apollo and I and the others. You have your legends of our lives. Now the twin worlds touch and we can pass from one to another, until the time-streams swing apart again. Then we will pass on beyond your knowledge, and perhaps other gods, or beings like gods, will take our place among mankind. But we ourselves work out our destinies in this farther world no man can enter—without armor.”

  The voice hesitated. Then it went on more strongly. “I need a man of your world to aid me, Jason. Armed as I could arm him, such a man could win a rich reward of me. I could change your life from its predestined patterns, which are not happy ones. And I think destiny meant you to come to me at this hour, because you know that armor I have in mind for you.

  “The Golden Fleece, Jason. The Fleece is armor against Apollo. It was made by another—call him god—whom Apollo slew. Hephaestus, you name him. A man who wears the Fleece can stand against even great Apollo.

  “Because we have transcendent powers, Apollo and I cannot meet in battle as ordinary warriors dp. Only under certain rare conditions can we meet. The time is ripe now, and I need you, armed with the Fleece, to act as my sword against my ancient enemy. Will you aid me, Jason?”

  I did not answer. I was thinking, double-minded, of all she had said. As for the Fleece—I was no fool. I knew it was more than the skin of an ordinary ram. I had held it in my hands and felt the power that trembled among those shining folds. I had taken it from the temple tree in Colchis where it hung guarded by what legend called never-sleeping Python. I knew how much of truth there was in that story, and how much of falsehood.

  Boldly I said, “And what of Circe, goddess?” Through Circe’s lips the goddess said wearily, “She fancies she loves the man she sees beyond you. I have promised my aid to you both. If you swear to help me in my battle, then Circe and Jason, of the double mind, shall share love together—”

  Strangely, eerily, Circe’s own voice broke in upon the words of the goddess as she spoke through Circe’s lips.

  “But I am no immortal, Mother! I shall grow old and die long before the new Jason—the one I love—is born again upon earth!”

  The goddess said in her own voice, “Peace, child, peace! There shall be a Mask made for you, a dwelling place for the soul of Circe. Each priestess who serves me through the generations shall wear it at my altar and you will live again in each of them until Jason comes again.”

  And so, in the end, we swore an unbreakable vow together before Hecate’s altar. Jason’s mind was troubled, unsure of his own rewards and unsure of their values. But he had no choice. When a goddess commands, mortals dare not refuse if they value their futures. We swore.

  And afterward, Hecate trained me in the uses of the armor made by a god, for gods alone to wear. Often enough my spirit quailed within me as I had glimpses of the world beyond Hecate’s altar, where the gods are so much mightier than men know.

  Harnessed demons from Hades I saw—chained Titans shouting in their iron prisons—flames from Olympus lancing through monstrous forests.

  Machines, Jason, only machines! The product of another world, another science, another race—not

  I did not enter that world. I looked upon it through strange windows Circe opened for me. My other self saw things there that I did not understand.

  I had not forgotten the Argo. But she did not come, and I waited and worked, learning the ways of the Fleece, shuddering whenever I
thought of the hour when I must use it.

  Chapter IX

  Radiance of Death

  Clothed in the Fleece, I the first Jason went to meet Apollo.

  High upon Aeaea rises a treeless hill overlooking the blue bay. There, where the veil was thinnest between this world and the world of the gods, Hecate came to us in a web of shadow. I saw her, dimly. She was strange beyond telling, she was far more than human, but she did not rouse in my flesh that instant revulsion which Apollo evoked. They were very different, these two beings.

  Circe stood beside me. I wore the Fleece. And before us the air brightened in a dazzling ring, and within it I saw the Face begin to form.

  Feebly I began the ritual that would activate the Fleece. I knew I must, and yet I was not sure I could. For fear was a blindness and a sickness in me, and that terrible Face swept nearer and all my body seemed to shrivel with the revulsion of its presence.

  Automatically I did as I had been trained to do. But a cloud hung before my eyes and my brain was not my own. And then, through a rift in that cloud, I saw below me in the harbor the one thing I had loved with a true, unselfish passion—Argo, my lovely ship.

  Argo! When I saw her, I knew suddenly that I cared nothing for Hecate or Circe or all the gods in Olympus. What was I doing here, sick with terror, fighting another’s battles, while Argo lay there in the edge of the water waiting for me?

  I ripped off the Fleece. I turned and ran. Flickering lightning and thunders raged behind me on the hill, but I paid no heed to them. Only when a mighty voice rang out behind me from the height did I pause for a moment.

  “Run, coward—run for your life!” the goddess cried after me. “There will be no escape for you, however far you run. Living or dying, your oath still binds you. One day you will come back. One day in the far future you will walk the earth again and answer my summons. There is one oath you can never break. Circe will wait until you return, and I will wait.