Every fleeing ship has this one advantage, though, that its oarsmen face the stern, are looking back and can see exactly how close they are to being overtaken. Argonauts grim, pulling hard, and the gap no longer closes. Each man looking at his death from brutes wearing animal hides and shouting in a foreign tongue, death without funeral rites, far from home, ripped to pieces and thrown into the sea like Medea’s brother. The golden fleece gone, voyage for nothing, names forgotten and story never told. Demigod kings hacked into meat.

Medea rises and screams, arms in the air. Enemy oarsmen pause and turn to hear what witch. She invokes the name of her father, Aeetes, son of Helios, a name they will have heard before. She promises the fleet of Colchis, a great army landing at Lygos to slaughter. She works her arms in the air as if she could bring that army now and bring also the night into the day, calls on Hekate and curses them. Your women will give birth to goats, and no Thracian will speak a human tongue.

Some among them will understand. Fishermen who have been to Colchis. She screams again the name of her father, her own name, Hekate’s name, and sees them confused, paused at their oars, some of the pure pleasure of the chase and killing gone. Men in the nearest boat are calling to the other boats coming up behind. They pause, too. All are slowed and the Argo escaping.

Medea continues to scream her curses, though they won’t hear her now. Her father has saved her. Thracians turned away, the difficult row upstream back to their harbor. Long boats like centipedes, so many oars, crawling into the distance.

The channel opens to the left, no dead-end canyon but a sharp bend, and this faces the Argo too close to the wind, so the Minyans have to drop the upper yard, collapse the sail. Six men to do this. Here is where they would have been overtaken if not for Medea. They owe her their lives, and she intends to make them pay.

14

14

Glare on the water ahead in this bend, all color gone. Swept by current, wind blowing against them, boat sagging toward land. No way of knowing how deep the water. Stranded on some bar in this river-sea, they’d be helpless. Small encampments along the bank, more Thracians.

Medea silent again, her hands shaking and some shaking also in her chest. More rage now than fear. What fear converts to, the desire to kill. She paces her small area of deck behind the rudder posts, a kind of cage.

Jason’s men exhausted, moving numbly at the oars, but he shouts at them to row harder. The helmsmen need speed for steering. The bow swings one way and then another, and the shore comes closer.

Clouds advancing in long lines, bunched and gray, heavy. No part of this world still.