Free The Last Song of Orpheus by Robert Silverberg

rest. Pointing ahead along the coast of Thrace, he said calmly, “Before us lies Salmydessus, whose king is Phineus, the son of Agenor. He knows the secret of the rocks and will tell us how to get ourselves safely through their jaws.” 
    That unhappy king’s land lay on the western shore of the Bosphorus close by the water, not very far beyond the mouth of the Hellespont. It once had been a prosperous realm, and Phineus, aspiring to the wisdom of the gods, had accordingly been endowed by Zeus with the gift of prophecy. But he had grievously misused it, widely and carelessly sharing the confidences that the Great Father offered him without tact or forethought, and in the end he was visited with an awful punishment. He had been allowed to live on into old age, but his sight and strength had been taken from him, and food had become devoid of all savor for him, so that he could eat next to nothing. One splendid dish after another would be placed before him, but after a nibble or two Phineus turned aside, shuddering and waving the food away, and therefore in the prime of his manhood he had become a feeble, shrunken, trembling yellowed thing, more dead than alive, tottering about with the aid of a gnarled crooked staff. 
    Phineus still was able to see into the future, though, and so he knew that the gods had ordained that relief from his torment would come when a sturdy black-sailed ship with blue and gold and crimson timbers, with fifty renowned heroes aboard, pulled into his harbor. He greeted us, therefore, with such joy and gladness as his withered body could muster, and we performed the rites necessary to purify him and cleanse him of his sin, and for the first time in many years he was able to taste his victuals without revulsion. In return he shared with us those secrets of the Bosphorus and the great sea behind it that we needed to know if we were to complete our voyage to Colchis. He was shrewd enough to know that he dared not tell us all that Zeus had in store for us on our voyage, having learned his lesson in that regard, but he could at least recompense us in some measure for the service we had performed for him. 
    “The Bosphorus,” he told us, “is nearly twenty miles long from end to end, but in places is less than half a mile wide between its banks; and thus it is more like a swift river than like an ordinary strait. Above it lies the mighty Euxine Sea, five hundred miles broad and nearly a thousand miles long. Before you enter it, though, you must pass between the Clashing Rocks, and that is no easy matter. Indeed, no ship has ever succeeded.” 
    “They are not a legend, then,” said Jason soberly. 
    “Not a legend at all,” Phineus replied. And he confirmed all that we had heard of those deadly rocks, telling us how they guarded the narrows at the upper end of the Bosphorus, indeed moving one against the other whenever the spirit moved them, grinding to splinters any vessel unfortunate enough to be between them when they came together. 
    But, he said, there was a way to outwit even such malign rocks as those. If we found them quiescent and apart as we approached them, that meant that they were lying in wait for some victim to present itself, holding themselves poised on the verge of their next movement toward each other. It was possible then to deceive them and keep them from the goal that they sought, the destruction of ships. As we lay before them we should send out a dove to go ahead of us. The bird would fly between the rocks and very likely the rocks would close upon it, out of their sheer noxious eagerness to do harm. If the gods favored it, the bird would safely negotiate the dire passage; or perhaps the poor creature would be caught and crushed. Either way, though, the rocks would withdraw for a time to restore their baneful energies before making their next inward approach, and in that span we must use all our energy to thrust ourselves between them and move on into the sea beyond. 
    And