The Argonauts: the crew that carried the Golden Fleece

The Argonauts were a company of Greek heroes who sailed under Jason, seeker of the Golden Fleece and great grandson of Hermes. They took their name from the Argo, the ship that carried them, and they were the crew that finally prised the Fleece out of Colchis with the help of the sorceress Medea. What they did after that has never been fully explained. The company put in at the Island of Creation, where the Sisters of Fate kept their temple, and there they were destroyed to the last man by the creatures of the Bog of the Forgotten. Kratos, crossing the same swamp on his own march toward the Sisters, walked over their bodies and cut their prize out of the belly of the beast that had eaten it.

Jason and his company#

Jason was reckoned a hero of the first rank, a mortal with divine blood four generations back through Hermes, and the men who followed him were of the same stamp. They were fighting men, and the crew as a body was famous enough that its name outlived every individual in it. No record from the Greek age places Hercules among them, whatever later tellings claim.

The name came from their ship. The Argo carried them out of Greece and back again, and the memory of the vessel clung to the Fleece long after both were lost, since the artefact's own powers were named for the ship rather than for the man who won it.

The taking of the Golden Fleece#

Jason called the Fleece a holy relic made in honour of Zeus, and its history bore that out. It had been taken from a winged ram capable of reason and speech, a creature Hermes had given as a gift to the twins Phrixus and Helle so that they could ride it across the sea and escape their stepmother. Helle fell from its back during the crossing and drowned. Phrixus alone reached Colchis, and there he offered the ram to King Aeetes in thanks for the hospitality he had been shown.

Aeetes killed the animal in tribute to Zeus and kept its hide, which became one of the most valuable objects in the world. He set the Colchian dragon over it as guardian and let it be known that the Fleece was not for sale or for taking.

Jason and the Argonauts came to Colchis to claim it anyway. The king put challenges in front of them, and by his own account Jason would not have prevailed on his own terms. What carried the day was the treachery of Aeetes' own daughter, the enchantress Medea, a priestess of Hecate and a granddaughter of Helios. With her help the Fleece left Colchis in Argonaut hands.

Worn on the arm, it was a piece of layered armour rather than a pelt, and it made its wearer nearly impossible to corner. It turned blows aside, swallowed projectiles and threw them back at whoever had loosed them, and drained the magic out of lesser sorcerers, though it had no such effect on gods, on demigods of the calibre of Perseus, or on a gorgon queen like Euryale.

The last voyage#

Why the Argonauts sailed to the Island of Creation is the part of the story nobody has settled. They had the Fleece in hand, so the voyage came after Colchis, and the likeliest reading is that they either lost their way returning to Iolcos or made the crossing deliberately.

The deliberate version is the one Jason himself gave. He had come for an audience with the Sisters of Fate, hoping to have the thread of his own family respun. The accounts of what had gone wrong disagree. In one, Jason had abandoned Medea and their children for Creusa and wanted them back. In another, he had left Creusa and his children in Medea's keeping, and the sorceress killed them out of jealousy. Either way he arrived on the island as a man trying to undo something, which was the only reason anyone ever went there.

Slaughter in the bog#

The Island of Creation did not receive petitioners gently. Between the shore and the temples lay the Bog of the Forgotten, a dense and dripping swampland of ruined ancient temple stone, choking foliage and poisoned water, and it was thick with things that hunted.

The Argonauts went into it as a company and did not come out. Every one of them was killed in the swamp. Kratos, making the same crossing not long afterward, saw part of the onslaught with his own eyes, and the ground he covered was littered with the dead of a crew that had survived a dragon in Colchis.

One man was still alive. Kratos found him lying outside the den of the Mole Cerberus, spent and barely conscious, and the Argonaut told him what had happened before he passed out: that Jason had been taken by the beast, and that Jason still carried the Golden Fleece. Kratos already knew he needed the Fleece, since nothing else would get him through the temple of Euryale. He dragged the man's body to the mechanism that barred the den, jammed a turning gear with it, and walked in.

The Mole Cerberus and the Fleece#

The thing in the den was a black three headed hound, larger and stronger than a common Cerberus, blind in its outer two heads and red eyed in the middle one. It spat fireballs and breathed sheets of flame.

It had already eaten most of Jason. During the fight it swallowed the arm that still wore the Fleece, which left Kratos only one way to recover the artefact. He drove his blades through the two smaller heads, forced the central mouth open, and reached down its throat to tear the Fleece out, killing the beast in the act.

How Jason ended is told two ways. The plainer account has him mauled to death by the Mole Cerberus before Kratos ever reached him. The fuller one has him alive a little longer, well enough to recognise the Ghost of Sparta as the God of War and to ask for his Fleece back so that the gods might bless him. He had not heard that Kratos had fallen from Olympus, and when he learned that the Spartan wanted nothing from the gods except Zeus dead, he lunged with a dagger at his chest. Kratos turned the blade into Jason's own heart, held him by the throat until he stopped moving, and remarked that there were worse ways to die than in a fight.

Word of it travelled fast. Hermes learned that his descendant was dead and that the Fleece had changed hands, and he carried that information straight to Atropos to use as leverage in their dealings. The Fleece itself served Kratos for the rest of the Greek age, turning the beams of Euryale, the slingshots of Perseus, the magic of Lahkesis, the thunderbolts of Zeus and even a blow from the Blade of Olympus. The Argo was never found.