The dead are too far, and how we cross over none can say. Is the dancer or the crawler any closer?

Hekate. She presides over all of this, over death and dying and darkness and the mind entering that darkness, and Medea is her priestess and knows nothing. All we would want to know opaque. All we can retreat to is an older god, to Nute, and because we are unable to reach darkness, we use a woman’s form, let night live inside her so that it will be contained, and let her give birth to the sun each day. We would swallow night and death and refuse both. And before Nute? Only terror, if there was any mind at all.

These men yank at their own hair in order to control. They would have a say in death. They would accompany the fallen and keep watch during the journey.

When the spear has been removed, Cyzicus is lifted by six of his men, with Jason cradling the head. They walk into the trees guided by torchbearers who have taken from the fire, followed by mourners who beat their own faces and tear their own hair. A few men help the wounded and dying now, lift them to their feet, but almost all who are wounded want to stay curled and close to the earth, scream out in agony as they’re lifted and stretched. Death pulling from underground, some current irresistible, some comfort to darkness, to a return.

The dead are carried away too, or dragged on their backs with arms outflung, as if they would hold all the sky at once. Bodies moving numbly in shadow until the grove has been emptied and there is only the fire and Medea and small waves breaking on the shore, the Argo spinning idly at anchor.

She must follow, but she would rather stay. She doesn’t wish to mourn a king stupid enough to attack his friends, stupid enough to rush a spear. She doesn’t wish to mourn any king. Let them all die right now, fall to the ground and never rise again. And the mourning will be endless, with feasts and games and unbearably long speeches, every woman looking at her wanting to slit her throat. The men untouchable, blameless, but not a woman.

These nonpeople, whose name has extended nowhere, led by a king too young. Let them all vanish from the earth and never have been. Her father is coming. His ship could be passing into this smaller sea right now, sailing through night toward this shore, following the wind the same as the Argo. Thieves forgetting to run. The wind is holding, and they should be using it.

16

16