Her brother’s head, severed. Medea lifts it from beside her on the deck. She stares into his eyes, oddly intact, and chants to Hekate. She knows no Minyan will forget. Tales of how she invoked the soul of her dead brother or sent him to an underworld or might even be death herself. Let them tell it however they will.

What she remembers, though, is her real brother. His face still a face she loves. And she’s broken by this, has to put his head down, sees him through all the years of their lives. She can play at power, but she is ruled by stronger things.

When they were children, they took one long journey with their father and their sister, Chalciope, in this direction, to Suppiluliumas the Hittite king in Hattusa, and saw carvings in stone of lions, sphinxes, warriors, and gods of the underworld. These carvings homes of the gods. This is what her brother deserves. She would carve a tomb for him with her bare hands, and this still would not be enough to atone.

She takes one last look at his face, her own face, and flings his head into the sea. Quick glance at the rowers to see them appalled, paused at their oars, horrified. Then she watches her brother’s head fall away, bobbing in the waves a dark and strange creature. Hair contracting and flaring and contracting again like tentacles, propulsion in the new element. Looking down into these submerged heavens beyond where Helios can reach. Finding some account of his own short life written there in pattern and pressure and a different light made below. Heavy enough he should sink, but he doesn’t. The surface of the water on fire from the sun, so she can’t see her brother for long. Her father’s ship not visible, lost somewhere far behind, and he should not be able to find this floating head, but she knows he will. She knows he will find every last piece.

6

6

They do not see her father’s ship again all that long burning day and through the night and another day and another night. The wind dies in darkness, and they drop the sail, lowering the upper yard. Bumping and scraping as it falls, ponderous invention of brutes against the finer braid of stars above. These Minyae barbarians despite their belief in their own greatness.

Jason visiting afterward as half his men sleep and the other half pull at the oars. Visiting several times each night, and the smell of her brother increasing. The blood dried but flesh softening, rotting. They lie in this, most foul of wedding beds, and Jason himself smells as strongly musked as any beast in the field, but they must be with each other, a pull that comes from their spines and curls them. She would pull him beneath her ribs and keep him there.