by David Vann
The forest thinned, drier, smaller trunks. Then the white curve of a beach, rare along this shore. A small hut at the edge of the sand, and then another, but no people, hiding perhaps.
The men alert, all awake now, ready to drop the sail, ready to take up oars, their spears and shields lying on deck beside them. Thracians at Lygos, on the far side of the passage, not to be trusted. They somehow must have allowed passage before, but apparently that doesn’t mean they’ll allow passage again.
Jason standing near her, between the helmsmen. The great bear-man at the bow holding his war hammer and shield, a warning to Thracians and anyone else.
Sail pulled to the side as they turn, the ship rolling in small waves. Enough breeze still. Every man hoping it will remain, wanting a fast passage.
Headlands and another small point, low and forested. The passage must be just beyond. She can see now the point on the other side and the settlement of Lygos, low walls and rounded dwellings on a hill, the land stripped and brown. Mud dwellers. Larger but less grand than Colchis. Her father’s city the greatest on this sea.
The passage not as narrow as she had heard. Lygos farther away than she had imagined, shrunken in the distance, boats in a harbor just barely visible, tucked in along the shore. They’ve been seen by now, no doubt, but men at this distance too small, an impression only of the hillside itself shifting, some movement in the dirt.
Thracians have come to Colchis before, fishermen, dirty beggars wearing hides. Even their sails made of hides, not of linen. Using stones for knives. And more numerous than any other people on this sea.
Headlands blocking the wind now, sail gone slack. The Argonauts strike water with their oars, rowing hard, bending in unison. Helmsmen staying close to this shore, entering what looks like a long narrow bay.
Thieves always running, this is who the Argonauts are. Slipping along this far shore. The water calmer now, protected, and changed in color, turquoise, bright even under clouds.
The land curving, taking them closer to the harbor of Lygos, passage narrowing. The Argo moving faster now, helped along somehow by the gods. Going twice as fast as it has before, and Medea thinks the water itself must be moving, carrying them, because only the shore is passing quickly, not the water around them. Strange world. This water sucked toward the other sea, the sea god breathing in.
Fear. That at the end of this passage, the world collapses, all water drawn downward and the land, too, folding inward. Great waterfalls into a dark abyss, entire hillsides and forests falling through air, the Argo and its crew and Medea twisting endlessly, waiting for an impact that never comes. Medea knows this is not true, because the Argonauts sailed from Iolcus, the other side, and so there can’t be any collapse. But she fears anyway, because of what she sees, all this water rushing somewhere, impossible if there isn’t a fall at the other end. What she sees can’t make any sense otherwise. Water in a level place doesn’t rush.
And then she realizes something terrifying, that perhaps they’ve simply lied. Perhaps they’ve never been through this passage before. At the far end of her father’s sea, beyond Lygos, is a great river that leads eventually to another sea. A long passage, difficult, but they could have come from there.
Medea can hardly breathe. Panicking, and she considers jumping overboard, swimming for shore. Close enough still she might make it. Strange turquoise color, hiding all, and she doesn’t know what might be waiting. Heavy-looking water. It could be too thick to swim in. She could be pulled under.
The men at the rudders having trouble steering, the Argo sagging sideways one direction then another, wallowing. Current moving too quickly, sweeping them along. Jason shouts at the oarsmen, has them quicken their pace.
Other rowers coming over the water, Thracian boats. Masts without sails, rowing into the wind, angling ahead to where the shores come closest to meeting. Lower boats, slim and light and fast and filled with men, tiny still in the distance but growing.
Jason takes one of the lines of the sail himself, thick line tied to the lower yard, and tries to find some wind, pulling in carefully, letting out, tugging again, trying to catch a pocket of air, something to help them along.
Medea eyes the shore again, near enough she might make it. If men swarm the deck and kill the Argonauts, she knows what waits for her, passed along from man to man, a slave the rest of her life if she lives through the first days. Water that would hold down and devour, men who would do worse. Small cliffs here, but she could climb, disappear into the forest, live alone hidden in ravines, work slowly back to her mountains.
There are no gods, only men. Hekate would not save her. There is no Hekate. Medea can feel the thinness of the air, the emptiness of the world, no one to call on. Empty invocations. And none descended from gods but only claiming origin in oblivion. All who came before have been erased, and Medea would guess not a few generations but a hundred generations or a thousand generations, ancestors mute and forgotten, born into the same brutal world of men rushing to the kill. Women always having to trick their way out of slavery, but she doesn’t see what she can do now.
All the hours of their lives come down to these few minutes. Jason holds the thick line in both hands, gazes into the sail as if it were alive, beast that could be reawakened. Some shape, a bit of pull, then flattened again by their own headwind, moving so quickly under oar and current.
Medea does not call to Hekate. She won’t spend her last moments speaking blank words into air. She waits at the remains of her brother and watches those tiny boats gain shape and size and sees how many oarsmen, hundreds. Faceless, nameless. What is it in men that makes it impossible for them to simply watch a ship go by? Why the constant desire to kill and dominate? Even in herself, relentless, a need to conquer. She would make all cower on the ground before her, every man in every land.
Those boats very fast, narrow and low, and the wind weak. The Argo a large pig of a boat, heavy, turning numbly this way and that, never sailing in a straight line, swept along more by current than by oars. The Argonauts tiring, slowing, looking at the Thracians. Clouds low. What Medea feels is only sadness, no excitement, no panic now but only a dull recognition of the end, unspeakably sad, the last thing any living being must feel for itself.
If she could go back, she would. She would make her brother whole again, breathe life into him, and obey her father. But she knows if they escape, this regret will be erased. No thought reliable, only a sign of the moment. And somewhere beneath, some churning thing that is Medea, something as unseen as what lies below these waves, and without limit or any floor that can be found.
Small bay opening to their left, and the breeze can reach their sail. Feel of that power, the hull leaning, digging in and accelerating. Jason with feet braced, lying back on deck holding that line, keeping the lower yard in place as the upper yard twists and curls.
The Argonauts on the upwind side are standing to dig their oars lower to find water. Each oar held only by a small loop of rope shielded in hide, loose and sliding, and one man after another has to stop rowing to bend and pull more oar through the loop.
The boats of the Thracians closer now. The water unnatural, this bright blue, as if lit from below, and entirely opaque. Another headland to the left, the wind more shielded again, so the Argo wallows level. The men sit and pull for their lives.
Spearmen at the bows of the Thracian boats, braced and ready to throw. Holding round shields of hide, gray brown, in pairs like the dull eyes of oxen, without their own light. The sky a wilderness of cloud in ridges and folds heavy and shifting, coming closer, bearing down. Men as mimics only, controlled by cloud, enacting the same pressure, no different from waves on water, as relentless and inevitable and unthinking.
Gibbering among them, shouts and calls over the water, whoops, excitement of killing. Medea stays low to the deck, not wanting to offer rape as well. Shore flying by but water passing too slowly, the Argo mired again, and the Thracians gaining. Medea’s life decided by something as simple
as a few puffs of wind. More breeze and she lives. Less and she dies, and the Argonauts with her.
Ahead the water seems to flow to nowhere, no outlet. A long bay with walls in front and along both sides, an impossibility. River rushing into a closed canyon.
The horde coming closer, low bows slapping at the water. Oars fashioned from small trees and no more than bark removed, almost no shaping. No wide blades at the end, yet there are so many they surge forward. Undisciplined rowers looking over their shoulders at their prey.
Every fleeing ship has this one advantage, though, that its oarsmen face the stern, are looking back and can see exactly how close they are to being overtaken. Argonauts grim, pulling hard, and the gap no longer closes. Each man looking at his death from brutes wearing animal hides and shouting in a foreign tongue, death without funeral rites, far from home, ripped to pieces and thrown into the sea like Medea’s brother. The golden fleece gone, voyage for nothing, names forgotten and story never told. Demigod kings hacked into meat.
Medea rises and screams, arms in the air. Enemy oarsmen pause and turn to hear what witch. She invokes the name of her father, Aeetes, son of Helios, a name they will have heard before. She promises the fleet of Colchis, a great army landing at Lygos to slaughter. She works her arms in the air as if she could bring that army now and bring also the night into the day, calls on Hekate and curses them. Your women will give birth to goats, and no Thracian will speak a human tongue.
Some among them will understand. Fishermen who have been to Colchis. She screams again the name of her father, her own name, Hekate’s name, and sees them confused, paused at their oars, some of the pure pleasure of the chase and killing gone. Men in the nearest boat are calling to the other boats coming up behind. They pause, too. All are slowed and the Argo escaping.
Medea continues to scream her curses, though they won’t hear her now. Her father has saved her. Thracians turned away, the difficult row upstream back to their harbor. Long boats like centipedes, so many oars, crawling into the distance.
The channel opens to the left, no dead-end canyon but a sharp bend, and this faces the Argo too close to the wind, so the Minyans have to drop the upper yard, collapse the sail. Six men to do this. Here is where they would have been overtaken if not for Medea. They owe her their lives, and she intends to make them pay.
14
Glare on the water ahead in this bend, all color gone. Swept by current, wind blowing against them, boat sagging toward land. No way of knowing how deep the water. Stranded on some bar in this river-sea, they’d be helpless. Small encampments along the bank, more Thracians.
Medea silent again, her hands shaking and some shaking also in her chest. More rage now than fear. What fear converts to, the desire to kill. She paces her small area of deck behind the rudder posts, a kind of cage.
Jason’s men exhausted, moving numbly at the oars, but he shouts at them to row harder. The helmsmen need speed for steering. The bow swings one way and then another, and the shore comes closer.
Clouds advancing in long lines, bunched and gray, heavy. No part of this world still.
The channel bends to the right, easier, straightening out, the downwind shore no longer a threat, and the men haul the yard again, sail billowing out over the right side of the boat. The Argo tipped and sliding along, its bow held to the left in order to go straight, moving like a crab.
Small encampments all along the Thracian shore but nothing like Lygos, no boats pursuing. The other shore strangely vacant. Such an important passage, and no one here. The Hittites not ranging this far. How each people came to a certain place and not another. Histories forgotten, all in every land believing in their own inevitability, that they somehow were born of a place and always meant only for that place. Yet someone will live on this shore someday and they aren’t here now.
The world is too big. Who can say how far the empty lands and seas extend? In almost any direction you might walk the rest of your life and find no one. Desolate places home only to gods, or the desire for gods, great behemoths churning through land and sea and air to keep all from dissolving into nothing. Oceans risen into vapor and swept away, entire mountain ranges collapsed into dust and forgotten, if not for the gods. This is what they do, holding together the unseen world, preserving. This is why they exist and why we can never find them. Once we arrive in a place, they leave, their work done.
The Argonauts resting now. Oars shipped and sailing. Pursuers unseen waiting anywhere ahead, so they’ll need their strength then. Drifting an impossible current draining nowhere, and Medea thinks they must have lied about passing this way before. She can’t imagine they could have rowed against this current.
Perhaps if they had anchored along the way. Fighting for a few hours then anchoring again. It might have been possible, some tremendous and unstoppable will, clawing their way along, dreaming of gold, fearing those mythical rocks that could appear at any moment to grind them to dust, great boulders rising from the sea. A story she’ll no longer be able to imagine after gazing at this calm water, almost no waves, sheltered river without rocks at all.
Ship of sleep swept along quietly in a breeze, roll of the hull and creaking, tug of the sail. Small birds landing on the yards. Impossible to believe what happened before. The past always like that, shrunken and undone and unlikely.
Sea road made by unknown hands, the Argo ushered on its course, effortless. Small coves and headlands passing until the mouth opens into another sea and there is no sinkhole, no fall into an abyss but only the water slowed and current disappearing without pull, unclear what had ever tugged at it, some rift unseen. The Argo slowed, having to make its own way again, blunt bowed and lazy.
The men not returning to the oars. Jason allowing the slow progress of the sail, the sun breaking through overhead, clouds dissipating. Day long and air hot and thick. Heading toward some distant shore unnamed.
Time. Never steady. Always quickening or slowing. A day can be of any length, and a ship drifting through an open sea makes the longest day.
One of the men sings. A voice that seems to come from farther over the water, not originating here. Mournful song. She thinks he must be missing someone. Argonauts only a band of men, without name, as inanimate as wood, until one reveals himself like this. The fisherman and now the singer, missing some woman, perhaps, wanting to be somewhere else, opening of a life. His eyes closed and head fallen back, face tilted toward the sky. Alone and every other man made alone, and Medea, too. The men will not look at each other, each traveling singly into another time. Hollow voice, low and lost, rising in desire and falling again. The world collapsing all around them, far places brought close.
Every life short and also endless, and song a way back, wandering. His face almost flat, darkened mask, but that mouth, caving. Medea closes her own eyes, sees willows along the river, summer heat and shade but then winter and the making of bread, her nurse, a man whipped, the forest when she was older and then, falling back, her young brother, lying on the bank talking about a future Colchis with himself as king, fanciful visions in which he and Medea invented how all in Colchis should walk on one hand and one foot or sleep in bundles or hang upside down to eat and drink. Their sister Chalciope saying their father would be king forever, no future king. Every time in memory living inside every other, with no separation, no distance between, and Medea doesn’t understand how this can be, how all can collapse. A voyage at sea nothing by comparison, no distance traveled at all.
Day in which all are lost, even after the song’s end. A far shore appearing, and after sunfall they drop the sail, anchor and go ashore for the night.
Small fire, no bodies covered in oil, no shouting or loud songs. A simple meal of fish and water and the men exhausted still, disappearing into the forest to sleep, souls around a fire vanishing one by one. The wind no more than a murmur in the pines, the air warm.
Medea follows Jason into the trees, where he lays hides on pine straw and they move slowly and she feels a tender
ness for him, wanting to hold his face in her hands. The night seems perfect to her, and she does not feel alone. As he falls into sleep, she lies on his chest and feels her love for him. Some softness inside her, as foreign as this place.
15
She wakes in fright. A man screaming, one of the Argonauts close to the fire, a spear driven through him. Bare chested and this wooden shaft coming out of his belly, unnatural grafting. Disbelief, his hands pulling as if the roots might be dislodged. Struggling on his knees in the dirt, oblivious to foreign men standing above. A club swung high and brought down on his shoulder, sickening thud, crushing of bone. Face rolling to the side, and he seems without air, and the club comes down again on his head and he falls.
Other screams now, all through the forest, shouts and grunts and knocking of shields.
Jason rising with his spear, attackers everywhere. Medea expects to see her father, golden mask and feathers in firelight, but these are other men. Not Colchians, not Thracians, not Hittites, but a people she’s never seen before, hidden along these shores, nameless. Wearing animal hides on their heads, as if they could invoke beasts.
Jason without his shield. She grabs it quickly, heavier than she had imagined, rough wood and hide, and runs after him, but the trees are filled with bodies, glint everywhere of fire on skin and spear point, and she’s lost him. She has no weapon other than this shield, so she slams an edge into the back of a man’s neck, where hide drapes onto his shoulders, and he staggers, turning toward her, and an Argonaut drives a spear into his side.
It’s not the man impaled who screams this time. It’s the Argonaut, his face twisted and terrified, howling for blood, ramming the shaft deeper. Every man gone mad. Medea so terrified she screams also, as high and frightening as she can, calling on Hekate. She swings her shield into the back of a man’s knee and he folds but swings a club as he falls. She catches it on the shield and is thrown by the impact.