Long night, and there are no words. Only observance as Cyzicus and Cleite complete their vows. This room tilts on its side, swings back again and caves and fills. Pain in Medea’s knees then lost again until the air becomes a dark dark blue, cold and paling.

Outside a moaning, low keening broken, no longer holding to disbelief. King and queen dead, wedding night gone, and each day will be lengthened, passing of the sun slowed.

18

18

Carved into a hill, ancient tombs in rock. Place of ancestors. Dried skulls within, measuring time. Royal tomb, opened now, rocks pulled away from the entrance. Cyzicus and Cleite waiting in shade, lying together under the sky one last time. A better wedding, Medea thinks. Lying there peacefully, a summer morning, yellow and white butterflies lofted and falling, suspended in nothing. No shouts or wine but only a stillness and the reassuring sound of small stones pulled away and tumbling, quiet work in a field.

More tombs opened lower on the hill for his men. Who first decided to bury here? And why bury the dead? We don’t know the origins of anything we do. We might live in a place where the heads of the dead are chopped off and flung into the air again and again, passed among every person in the city, thrown twice by each pair of hands, and this would be the way things must be.

This nameless people removing stone after stone, opening the past, grown quiet, touching the sacred. Hollows never forgotten, a parallel city in which one might open her mouth to speak and all would wait centuries to hear. Imagine sitting long enough that your clothing falls away to dust.

Several Argonauts will take up residence, foreigners in the city of stillness, buried far from home, lying alongside those they’ve slain or who would have slain them. Some desire to reach for a spear preserved, suspended. Abandoned by Jason, who works to free the tomb of Cyzicus. Jason political, every act of his calculated, and this she must remember. No loyalty in him.

What his men think she doesn’t know. They labor now at the rocks as they do at the oars, dumb as cattle, mute. She will never believe they are kings and demigods. Bare backed and burned by the sun, no better than slaves. The shadows around them shortened, the sun high overhead, and they are silvery with sweat as if spun by thread of spiders, long reaching arms only tracings in light, no substance, no flesh. Bright outlines in the air, wavering in every slight breeze.