Medea has never seen this world before, never would have guessed its existence. Her first voyage on the sea. Any shape can be found in the sky below. Great aquarian bulls charging, the most fanciful birds with tail feathers reaching, slim, without end. Even her father, a gathering of stars with plumes like his mask, and the weight of darkness attached, rotating slowly and pulling all toward him. More life even than fire. Hekate found in fire, in sparks and sheets of flame, but unlimited here. No distraction of ground or wind, not limited to the fuel of wood but freed and infinite and transparent, able to reveal all. A landscape as unknown and unbound as the felt landscape within, seen by every man who has gone to sea at night for war or fishing but never shared. No man has told Medea of this. And what are these stars? Where did they come from?

New world, or an opening of the old. She can’t find the constellations, familiar forms. Looking into the stars below, she might even find a new god, as the first gods were found by looking into the sky. A god is whatever can’t be reached.

None of these stars fixed. Flung in orbits by the passing of Medea and her crew, a more responsive sky, what she’s always wanted the heavens to be, not cold and distant.

Medea wants to return to the first naming, to when the sky above was as responsive as this one below, before it cooled and hardened and was known. She would have begun with a woman pregnant, Nute covering all, and she would have wandered through every land for years learning the shape of that woman, careful not to draw lines, letting the stars shift for as long as they needed, and only then would she have named the lesser constellations, the head and breasts and feet and hands and womb of this woman, each with its own attributes and promise, shape of all that is needed for worship in life below. And then smaller constellations still for each story, for each myth. She would be there to shape what is wrong and what is right. And then she would push every human head down into the sea, make them forget the sky and every myth and burn their eyes with endlessly shifting pattern in which new gods and their myths are born and die every moment.

What myth can hold when you kneel in your brother’s remains? When you slit his throat yourself? What story can guide us if we can betray all?

Dark one, Medea says to the water. Let everything that binds fall. Let all that is known be confused. Let all that we are die. Let me be most hated of all women, and most true.

4

4

Endless night, but the sailors make no comment, if they even notice. Go about their business. Thieves with pygmy hearts. They’ve lost nothing.