The Argo slips toward the strait at Ilium, where her father could be waiting. No other boats or sign of people along the shore, no wind, and so it seems the world might be new, not yet populated, the winds not yet begun. The one god of peace not yet given birth to lesser gods who would stir the air and lash the seas and tear up the earth, not yet released havoc.

Argonauts hunched at the oars half sleeping, throwing off animal hides as the air heats. The sky cleared, clouds gone, and a faint breeze begins. Water etched in dark patterns, the mirror gone.

A small fishing boat, and another, and all is slowly built. Huts along the shore, ripples on the water, more men at the oars, Jason looking at the sail, considering. Medea looks everywhere for her father, feels always that he must be near.

A large island ahead on the right, narrow passage between it and shore, and several small protected bays, coves perfect for hiding a ship. Jason alert, and his men, also, looking over their shoulders now.

The wind rising, small waves, and they would use the sail if the passage ahead weren’t so narrow. Trapped and funneled toward whatever awaits.

Jason climbs the yards, stands just above the golden fleece, holding onto the mast. The ship swaying. He’s searching for the mast of her father’s ship, a slim dark line that might be waiting in any cove. Young and muscled and false, not to be trusted, but he is beautiful and he is all she has.

No one looks at her. Not Jason or any of his men. Since they’ve come on board, not even a glance. She inhabits some vacant place in the air. Each man at the oars somehow managing to never look straight ahead as he rows. A strange art to this, drawn to deck and water and sky and nowhere.

So she opens the deck, crawls below and decides she doesn’t care whether her father is waiting along this coast. The hold filled with wine and water and meat and several new fishing nets. She has to push her way through in narrow bands of light from the seams above to reach the rudder posts and the rope coiled there, her bed. The only safe place. She falls easily into sleep, wakes at the sound of the anchor line running over the side, falls asleep again and wakes in the night.

Gentle rocking of the hull, and she waits and listens but hears nothing except the soft creaking of wood and rope. She crawls in darkness through spaces too narrow, panicking a bit, pushing at deck overhead that won’t open, buried. She thinks for a moment the crew could have placed a weight on the hatch to keep her trapped, but then she finds the piece of deck that lifts free.