Other rowers coming over the water, Thracian boats. Masts without sails, rowing into the wind, angling ahead to where the shores come closest to meeting. Lower boats, slim and light and fast and filled with men, tiny still in the distance but growing.

Jason takes one of the lines of the sail himself, thick line tied to the lower yard, and tries to find some wind, pulling in carefully, letting out, tugging again, trying to catch a pocket of air, something to help them along.

Medea eyes the shore again, near enough she might make it. If men swarm the deck and kill the Argonauts, she knows what waits for her, passed along from man to man, a slave the rest of her life if she lives through the first days. Water that would hold down and devour, men who would do worse. Small cliffs here, but she could climb, disappear into the forest, live alone hidden in ravines, work slowly back to her mountains.

There are no gods, only men. Hekate would not save her. There is no Hekate. Medea can feel the thinness of the air, the emptiness of the world, no one to call on. Empty invocations. And none descended from gods but only claiming origin in oblivion. All who came before have been erased, and Medea would guess not a few generations but a hundred generations or a thousand generations, ancestors mute and forgotten, born into the same brutal world of men rushing to the kill. Women always having to trick their way out of slavery, but she doesn’t see what she can do now.

All the hours of their lives come down to these few minutes. Jason holds the thick line in both hands, gazes into the sail as if it were alive, beast that could be reawakened. Some shape, a bit of pull, then flattened again by their own headwind, moving so quickly under oar and current.

Medea does not call to Hekate. She won’t spend her last moments speaking blank words into air. She waits at the remains of her brother and watches those tiny boats gain shape and size and sees how many oarsmen, hundreds. Faceless, nameless. What is it in men that makes it impossible for them to simply watch a ship go by? Why the constant desire to kill and dominate? Even in herself, relentless, a need to conquer. She would make all cower on the ground before her, every man in every land.

Those boats very fast, narrow and low, and the wind weak. The Argo a large pig of a boat, heavy, turning numbly this way and that, never sailing in a straight line, swept along more by current than by oars. The Argonauts tiring, slowing, looking at the Thracians. Clouds low. What Medea feels is only sadness, no excitement, no panic now but only a dull recognition of the end, unspeakably sad, the last thing any living being must feel for itself.