The channel bends to the right, easier, straightening out, the downwind shore no longer a threat, and the men haul the yard again, sail billowing out over the right side of the boat. The Argo tipped and sliding along, its bow held to the left in order to go straight, moving like a crab.

Small encampments all along the Thracian shore but nothing like Lygos, no boats pursuing. The other shore strangely vacant. Such an important passage, and no one here. The Hittites not ranging this far. How each people came to a certain place and not another. Histories forgotten, all in every land believing in their own inevitability, that they somehow were born of a place and always meant only for that place. Yet someone will live on this shore someday and they aren’t here now.

The world is too big. Who can say how far the empty lands and seas extend? In almost any direction you might walk the rest of your life and find no one. Desolate places home only to gods, or the desire for gods, great behemoths churning through land and sea and air to keep all from dissolving into nothing. Oceans risen into vapor and swept away, entire mountain ranges collapsed into dust and forgotten, if not for the gods. This is what they do, holding together the unseen world, preserving. This is why they exist and why we can never find them. Once we arrive in a place, they leave, their work done.

The Argonauts resting now. Oars shipped and sailing. Pursuers unseen waiting anywhere ahead, so they’ll need their strength then. Drifting an impossible current draining nowhere, and Medea thinks they must have lied about passing this way before. She can’t imagine they could have rowed against this current.

Perhaps if they had anchored along the way. Fighting for a few hours then anchoring again. It might have been possible, some tremendous and unstoppable will, clawing their way along, dreaming of gold, fearing those mythical rocks that could appear at any moment to grind them to dust, great boulders rising from the sea. A story she’ll no longer be able to imagine after gazing at this calm water, almost no waves, sheltered river without rocks at all.

Ship of sleep swept along quietly in a breeze, roll of the hull and creaking, tug of the sail. Small birds landing on the yards. Impossible to believe what happened before. The past always like that, shrunken and undone and unlikely.

Sea road made by unknown hands, the Argo ushered on its course, effortless. Small coves and headlands passing until the mouth opens into another sea and there is no sinkhole, no fall into an abyss but only the water slowed and current disappearing without pull, unclear what had ever tugged at it, some rift unseen. The Argo slowed, having to make its own way again, blunt bowed and lazy.