Jason doesn’t argue. He only turns away, something in him resigned. Enough light still to watch his back as he goes. Appearing from the mist in Colchis, her new life, and disappearing now. She doesn’t know how to bring him back. She feels as if she herself is the one disappearing, losing weight and substance, being erased, hung in the air to feel loss and nothing more, some vague emptiness that is no longer painful but only true.

She lies on this ground as it cools, pulls her sons close. They will keep her from vanishing. Anchors to this world.

7

7

Narrow land, isthmus between seas come so close to meeting. The familiar one pale and whipped white by wind, the new one dark, much deeper, and sheltered.

A great mountain, rocky head thrust up to watch over Korinth. Some elder, outcrops of rock like a fringe of hair. Man, not woman. We should not go here, she tells Jason.

Kreon is a friend, Jason says. Friend of my father.

The air whited beneath blue, wind cooler, and from this hilltop they might turn any direction, set a new path. They could go along the shore of this new sea. But Jason steps down the bare slope and her sons follow, starving, wanting food.

Medea follows because what else can she do? Her feet not touching ground, dizzy. Settlement at the base of that rocky head, small city of stone. The same mud huts spread over flatland, and one of these hovels will be their new home. Arriving in slave’s clothing, filthy and desperate.

All stare as they pass. With every traveler, some new story begins. The only thing their arrival cannot mean is nothing.

Fertile here, groves of olive, shade of fig, grapes low along the ground. Springs from this mountain. A fortunate place, potters with water for their work, large urns painted, a wealthy place. Fishermen, also, close enough to the sea, and farmers and shepherds. Bronze workers tending their fires in bright day. Weavers and spinners and masons, and as they near the citadel and the group of houses built in stone, signs everywhere of visitors from other lands, from Egypt and Minoa and Thracia, cloth and glass and metal foreign and rich. From that new sea, also, there must come peoples Medea cannot name, and from elsewhere on this rumored peninsula, Mycenae and Argos and many more. The poverty of Iolcus even more apparent now.

Streets no longer of dirt but of stone, and their arrival noticed, spearmen appearing, king’s guards. Narrow alleys, a maze easily defended. Medea keeps her sons close, a hand on each one’s neck as they walk before her. Jason the slave, broad backed, sacks left behind, walking past the soldiers as if they aren’t worth notice.