Pelias lets go, and Medea is faint from the pain and lack of breath. Jason reaches for her, helps her to sit.

Jason will be a slave too, forgotten along with his father and brother and mother. I already can’t remember them clearly. Did his father drink bull’s blood or some other poison? Did Promachus drink also, or did I simply bash his head against the stone floor over and over? I can’t remember. Did his mother flee to Chiron, or did she hang herself? These people are so small it’s just impossible to remember what happened to them.

Pelias’ daughters smiling. Several Medea’s age, several much younger, still children. Shy in their viciousness but Medea is sure they will be like their father. Jason, if he were stronger, might rise now and claim his throne, rightful heir. He might demand vengeance for the murder of his father and brother, for the murder or banishment of his mother. He might make all Iolcans rise up against a tyrant with no legitimate claim to power. But the people of Iolcus do seem beaten and pliant, and what Pelias has said about the fleece is true for all to see, and the Argonauts are gone, scattered in fear. Medea does see that if Jason tried now he would only be killed.

She feels a need to protect him, strange feeling. As if she were his mother. He looks young and lost and without hope.

Take that ridiculous mantle off him, Pelias says, and dress them both as slaves. Take them now.

Guards unbuckle the purple-edged mantle and let it fall to the ground with all its unintelligible tales, pull Jason and Medea away along the edge of the terrace toward those stone stairs, Iolcans watching. Some of them smiling. Medea may have to destroy them all, not only their tyrant king.

28

28

Hovel of mud and sticks, rounded, just large enough to lie down, some human imitation of a hole or den, shelter from sun and night and nothing more. Pine straw for a bed. Rough clothing woven of goat hair, smelling of smoke and sweat and urine.

They spend the night stunned, without speaking, lying side by side, Jason’s feet and head reaching the walls. Medea staring into a future transformed entirely. Her mind won’t extend. It keeps stopping, can’t imagine beyond these walls, can’t imagine beyond this night. Tomorrow something that can’t be reached or prefigured or believed. Medea destroyer of kings. Where is Medea now? Jason closer than ever before and still unknown.

No sky, no stars except through one small hole for smoke, for some fire imagined that can never happen. No room to sit beside it, and the entire hut would ignite. This land burning anyway, exposed, the sun close and no shade, all trees stripped away. A hundred similar huts on all sides of them, connected by dirt and shit.