Something to read first
A ship that talked back
There is a king in this story who has made himself comfortable. He took a throne that was not his, kept it for years, and now spends his nights listening for one particular footstep. An old prophecy had told him to be careful of a man who would come down from the hills, and the prophecy was so oddly specific about how to recognise the stranger that the king had trained himself to look at people's feet. When a tall young man finally walked into the marketplace with a bare heel and a lost shoe, the king did what comfortable people do. He smiled, he asked about the boy's family, and he set him a task that he was sure would end badly.
The task was to fetch a fleece. Not any fleece. This one hung in a distant kingdom at the far end of the Black Sea, in a grove where the trees stood absolutely still, guarded by something that never slept. It had once belonged to a ram that flew, which had carried two frightened children away from a sacrifice, and one of those children had slipped off over the water and given her name to the narrow sea beneath. The king thought the errand was impossible, and he was probably right. What he had not counted on was that the boy had been raised on a mountain by a teacher who was half horse, and had been told since childhood that impossible was a word for other people.
Getting the boy to the other end of the world required a ship, and the ship required builders, and the builders required help. Greece had never seen anything like it. A goddess who loved clever work leaned over the keel and, as a gift, set a plank into the prow that had been cut from a forest where trees were said to answer questions. The result was a vessel that could, if it chose, offer opinions. Fifty men sat at fifty oars, and they were not ordinary men. There were twins who shared a crest of stars, a pair of brothers who could outrun the wind because their father was the wind, and a man who sang so well that the waves leaned in to listen. Somewhere among them sat the biggest man in Greece, rowing so hard that the wood began to complain.
The voyage was a string of detours. There was an island where the women had made some drastic decisions about their husbands and were not sure what to do with a boat full of strangers. There was a young man who went to fetch water and was never seen again, and a very large friend who refused to leave until he had searched every inch of the shoreline. There was an old blind king by the sea whose dinners kept disappearing in a rush of wings and a terrible smell, and who paid for his rescue with directions, the most valuable thing a sailor can be given.
His directions were to a place where two cliffs slammed together like hands clapping. Nobody who had tried to pass had come out the other side. The old man's advice was to let a small creature go first and watch what happened to it, then rush the gap in the instant after the cliffs fell back. It is the kind of plan that looks like cowardice until you notice that it works.
Beyond the clapping cliffs lay the country of the king with the fleece, a man who, as it happened, was the child of the sun. He was not delighted to see Greeks. He agreed to hand over his treasure on one condition, that the visitor complete three jobs he privately believed no man could survive. There were bulls whose hooves were bronze, built in a forge by a god who had made a career out of unlikely animals. There was a field to be planted with the teeth of a dragon that another hero, long before, had killed beside a faraway spring. And there was, finally, the creature in the grove.
What the king overlooked was his own household. His daughter, who knew something about herbs and a great deal about the dark, found herself struck by a small, painless arrow that nobody had seen fired. Whatever she felt for the stranger, she acted on it. She gave him an ointment, she gave him advice about what to do when armed men came out of the ground, and when the time came to enter the grove, she went with him. It is easy to read the rest of the story as a love affair. It is harder, and more honest, to read it as a young woman choosing a ship over a father.
The journey home was longer than the journey out, and it was cruelest at the end. Some singers on a rock tried to call the crew onto the stones. A giant of bronze paced the shoreline of an island, and the only thing that stopped him was a clever woman who knew where a god keeps his weakness. When the ship finally came to rest, Jason hung up his oar and offered the vessel to the god of the sea. Years later, according to one telling, the old ship had the last word over the man who had commanded it. The Greeks found that fitting. They believed that adventures always come home to the person who launched them, and sometimes they arrive in pieces.