Welcomes you.

Guards pull her away and her sons follow, instinct in them. They will always follow their mother.

She’s not taken far. No mud hut at the edge of Korinth. Royal room, walls painted with hunts and battles and women. Chariots, though what chariot has ever been here in Korinth, driven on what road? Echoes of Egypt. These people unable to imagine themselves, seeing only the pharaohs.

A royal couch, lined in lamb’s wool. She sits her sons here, kneels before them. Listen, she says, and she touches their faces, traces the shape of them. Skin softer than lamb’s wool, eyes large pools unending, deep brown without surface, color of caves, Jason’s eyes, not the gray of her own or her father’s. They will try to take you away from me.

Aeson looking into her eyes bravely, remnant of a lost king, heir to another. How many kings in him? Blood of how many tyrants?

I am the only one who loves you, she tells her sons. I am the only one.

She rises and takes their hands, leads them to the large bed. Lies down on her back and they come to her, rest their cheeks on her breasts, and she wraps her arms around. Their legs intertwined with hers, roots grown together. Let Kreon try to separate them.

8

8

A feast that night for the hero-slave. Triumphant return for a son who never left and is not a son. Medea seated far away, corner of the courtyard with Aeson and Promachus. Vines along stone walls, and she’s been buried here, separated from Jason. Guards with torches standing to either side, as if they are only providing light.

Jason held close between Kreon and his daughter, Glauce, who stretches her neck and tilts and coos and studies his arms and eyes and mouth. Young, very young, hardly more than a girl, and never made a slave or mother. Her only concern is ornament. Glancing at her own wrists, at gold bracelets, how they fall, folds of thin Egyptian cloth over her breasts. If her breasts were cauldrons, she would fall in, drawn by her limitless desire for herself, and Jason would fall with her. He speaks with Kreon and never sees him, sees only young flesh.

Aeson and Promachus devouring meat. Sounds of their mashing. Eyes for nothing more than their food, unaware of all that is changing. Ramming their faces into hot flesh, their mouths not big enough.

Medea is starving, but she cannot eat. Forced to watch this show without sound, without words, too far, only gestures and glances, and Jason doesn’t look her way, not even once. Barbarian wife, too much trouble, left behind now. Somehow she didn’t believe this would happen. They were tied together with wet rope, bound and crushed in the sun.