The rudders loose, bound by thick rope now stretched. Resting on forked posts, lashed together but flexing with every wave. The men on the tiller handles braced and struggling. The lower lashing at deck level slick, worn black, pulled outward then upward and yanked in tight, shaft knocking against the hull. Blades in the water below trembling and diving into wave after wave, submerged then almost clear, great dark wooden faces, only a thin lower edge trailing.

The sea erupting beneath them in great boils and upwellings rimmed by foam and hissing. Every pattern and shape shrinking from every edge into unknown centers. Glimpse of the deep in each clear welling, fibrous with light, muscled. What might live down there none can say. Something large as mountains.

The Argonauts fight the sea, and it’s clear they left too early. Only as the sun goes down do the waves diminish at all, the headland still visible in the distance, their progress far slower than if they had walked along the shore.

One of the men comes to the stern near Medea to fish in last light. A rough net weighted with stones. He ties a line to a rudder post, his fingers swollen and scraped, innumerable small scars and cuts. A young man with old man’s hands. He ties a second line to an oar loop and flings the net overboard, beautiful pattern in flight, a practiced throw, the stones swirling out into a perfect circle just as they hit water.

Dragged behind them, and easy to see how slowly they’re going. Net bowed and sinking, rising again as the stern is pushed up by a wave. The surface become silver, opaque, molten, as if the sea could be reforged every day, great ingot of tin melted down each night, this fisherman casting his net to capture impurities. Pulling at some guide line now, and when the net rises again, it’s taken the form of a shallow basket, wide rounded mouth, black spider work amid silver, then submerged.

Only metal can look cold as it burns, and no other liquid can be so heavy. This sea could break the world, some platform below snapping and folding and all rushing down, seas draining and the shore slipping. Who can say what’s below or what this world rests on.

The fisherman the only Argonaut to work in the invisible, the only one to pull at a line and feel the unseen. Long-bearded but young, worn and new, burnt darker than the rest, hidden. He should have led this voyage. Medea would have found him more interesting than Jason. She’s realized by now she left Colchis for more than love. She would make her own kingdom. What she felt as love, a kind of madness, was also the thrill of her freedom.