A feast, to remember the fallen. Goat meat cooked in blood, gruesome reminder of battle and yet none seem to notice. Pieces of liver and heart and brain bobbing with the meat in each dark bowl, as if organs could have been taken from the dead to rejuvenate the living. Some elixir to eat another man’s heart or devour his brain. Egyptians remove all and pickle each as a separate dish.

Sheep slaughtered also, roasting over fires, and torches everywhere, the night a conflagration. Some refusal from deep within us. Burning all darkness away, denying death.

Wine and drunken shouting, no longer still, no longer reverent. Restarting the world after this abrupt pause. Reclaiming all for the living. And a new king, a cousin of Cyzicus, older, presiding at the steps to his new home.

No people brave enough to live without a king. In every land Medea has heard of, there must be a king, or a queen made into a king, Hatshepsut wearing a beard. Some male figure as defense against the gods of sea and air and darkness and death. Some center. Jason at his side, and Medea, and the most important of his people. It doesn’t seem that a king should be made like this. Her father Aeetes descended from Helios, all history erased. That’s the true making. Descended from a god, containing the beginning and the end. Not some selection made from low necessity.

Medea hates this one more than any other, because he is nothing and has been made a king anyway. An average man, sucking at bones and eyeing young women, not talking with Jason because there’s nothing to say. No vision, no plans except to fuck and try not to be killed.

We need to leave, Medea tells Jason. He’s drinking and looks at her as if from underwater. My father is coming. If you stay here, you die.

Jason holding a leg bone, waving it now to indicate all who are feasting and drinking. It does seem obvious that nothing will happen until night is over and the men have slept through most of the next day. But Medea insists.

You’ll lie here fat and drunken and watch his spear pushed into your chest. All for nothing, for a non-king. Medea points at the new king. It’s unclear whether he understands what’s being said. He shares the language of Ilium, and Medea is using a butchered blend of her language and Jason’s. He looks down at his meat.

Fat smeared around his mouth, same as Jason’s. Shining cave holes in torchlight, devouring. Stupid pointless feasting, boring and unbearable.

Medea stands and takes a torch. I’m going to the Argo, she says. If I have to wait, I’ll burn the ship.