by David Vann
Bodies too soft for this. Mashing sounds and spray of flesh, the air wet, raining blood.
She tries to hide, tries to find Argonauts. They seem to be gathering at the fire, backs to the flame. The bear-man swinging his war hammer, huge hunk of bronze at the end, crushing bodies. She runs in beside him, holds her shield as defense for his side, and sees Jason. He’s chopping with a short ax, chopping off a man’s arm at the shoulder, something white showing, not bone but something else. The man looking down at his shoulder and oddly calm, no longer fighting, just standing there. He’s covered in blood and seems fine. Then Jason chops at his neck and the blade catches, snags, and Jason is yanking to free it, the man shaken into a kind of dance. Eyes looking upward and mouth open, finding some new god, given over, priest and sacrificial victim, presiding at his own death.
Medea near the flames, this man and all others flickering presences with no single shape but shifting, leering closer and vanishing and appearing again, enormous and shrunken. The man won’t fall, remains on his feet as he’s shaken. There could be no end to this odd dance, so Jason lets go and the man turns and totters off toward his own people.
Smell of blood and viscera. A man smashed in his midsection by the war hammer, burst and flattened unnaturally, crawling away.
Some gathering, a surge. A dozen men charge, led by their king in a golden helmet. For a moment Medea thinks it is her father after all, but the mask is different, the body younger, as if her father could go back in time. This other sun king leaps toward the bear-man and is caught on a spear, lifted, dangling in the air for a moment, impossible shape, Jason knelt on the ground at the shaft. A king in flight, rising in a small arc like a minor sun, then collapsing to the ground, mask fallen away.
Jason yells. Cyzicus. A name. He yells it again, and all men stop. I am Jason of Iolcus, he shouts.
All men come closer, gathering around the fallen king. Jason become his nursemaid, kneeling at his side, and it’s clear they were friends. A mistaken attack.
Lament. Groans and rising into more, into howls, Jason more distraught than any other. Weeping and sounds up high as if there were women here, all spears and shields dropped to the ground, every man on his knees. So strange, that slaughter is fine as long as the men haven’t met before.
Medea not mourning with the others. Still crouched by the fire behind her shield, wondering at the stupidity of men, outraged. But she holds herself back, says nothing, does nothing. Even she knows not to interfere at the death of a king.
They need to remove the spear, but they don’t want to hurt the body. Weeping and arguing at the same time, turning his body on its side and working the shaft through, twisting and trying not to harm, but some of the men seem to think he might still be alive. Impossible, with a spear through his chest and all his blood gone, bone crushed, but they hate that there should be any discomfort. Other men groaning in the dust and pine needles, bleeding and dying, and no one helps them, because they aren’t kings. The one with his midsection smashed and leaking still crawls toward some unnamed destination farther out in the trees, some fountain or spring perhaps, some rumored well. Who can say what the mind becomes when the body is crushed and maimed and lost? The dancer with the ax in his neck has wandered off to his own promised place.
The dead are too far, and how we cross over none can say. Is the dancer or the crawler any closer?
Hekate. She presides over all of this, over death and dying and darkness and the mind entering that darkness, and Medea is her priestess and knows nothing. All we would want to know opaque. All we can retreat to is an older god, to Nute, and because we are unable to reach darkness, we use a woman’s form, let night live inside her so that it will be contained, and let her give birth to the sun each day. We would swallow night and death and refuse both. And before Nute? Only terror, if there was any mind at all.
These men yank at their own hair in order to control. They would have a say in death. They would accompany the fallen and keep watch during the journey.
When the spear has been removed, Cyzicus is lifted by six of his men, with Jason cradling the head. They walk into the trees guided by torchbearers who have taken from the fire, followed by mourners who beat their own faces and tear their own hair. A few men help the wounded and dying now, lift them to their feet, but almost all who are wounded want to stay curled and close to the earth, scream out in agony as they’re lifted and stretched. Death pulling from underground, some current irresistible, some comfort to darkness, to a return.
The dead are carried away too, or dragged on their backs with arms outflung, as if they would hold all the sky at once. Bodies moving numbly in shadow until the grove has been emptied and there is only the fire and Medea and small waves breaking on the shore, the Argo spinning idly at anchor.
She must follow, but she would rather stay. She doesn’t wish to mourn a king stupid enough to attack his friends, stupid enough to rush a spear. She doesn’t wish to mourn any king. Let them all die right now, fall to the ground and never rise again. And the mourning will be endless, with feasts and games and unbearably long speeches, every woman looking at her wanting to slit her throat. The men untouchable, blameless, but not a woman.
These nonpeople, whose name has extended nowhere, led by a king too young. Let them all vanish from the earth and never have been. Her father is coming. His ship could be passing into this smaller sea right now, sailing through night toward this shore, following the wind the same as the Argo. Thieves forgetting to run. The wind is holding, and they should be using it.
16
City of fire. An entire hillside of torches, every woman awake and waiting for the return of her husband or son. Patches of flame unconnected, so each house seems to float in blackness, as if this hill were a wave risen up and all this light revealed within.
Unnatural, all that is human. Living with fire, turning a hill into a city, sailing over the sea, killing for no reason. This place carved from the night and separated from earth and sky.
Medea stops in darkness, alone, and wants never to enter a city again. She closes her eyes, listens to the thrum of cicadas, the air warm.
Then she hears the wailing of women, a great din from across that hillside, their king dead, their men slaughtered. Predictable, wailing exactly as they would, yet they go to war over and over, endlessly.
Medea walks on, sees the procession up the hill and torches come close together, as if all the stars in a wave could gather, the same as when she swam at night, exactly the same. Very strange the world can repeat itself in this way, in the sky and in the sea and on a hill at night, all essentially liquid and changing. Even the unnatural works of humans are repetitions and mirrors, made natural again, no different from stars submerged.
What she wants is to find herself at the center of what makes all liquid and changeable. She would add her will to what controls these shifts. She would see that lights on this hillside might swarm as the lights in the water did below, and she would be the one to make them swarm, and she would do it only because the repetition is beautiful, because form mirrored is form recognized. Instead of mourning the death of a king, she would see pattern in kings and people and bring the death of a king whenever needed and only if he offered some symmetry. The death of this king beautiful because he was slain by his friend, because the attack was a mistake, made at night, and echoes all that humans do in darkness, all the turns they take in their lives, always blind. His story will be useful to a hundred generations to follow.
What Medea doesn’t know, of course, is how to come any closer. Where the symmetries are held none can say. A priestess should know, but Medea is sure that no priestess knows. She is sure no priestess is greater, no seer or oracle clearer sighted. If any of this will be found, it will be found by her. Another reason she left Colchis, to move more freely, to no longer be constrained.
At the top of the hill, a small citadel of stone, a fifth as large as her father’s but larger than she would have thought for a nameless
people. The king’s wife will come down and weep and wail, and his children if he has any. Medea would like to see this, to judge how well the queen grieves, so she hurries toward the gates, which are only a gap in a low wall, abandoned, a torch to either side. Any army could walk through right now. Everyone in the city gone to the citadel.
A street of mud and shit, dug by the hooves of animals wandering freely, Medea’s feet sinking into the mire. As if there were no stone available. A lazy, disgusting people. Mud hovels woven with sticks, the smell of human shit also. Yards of shadow, only a few torches remaining along the road, all light gathered above, and the only souls left the old and infirm, sat and gazing dumbly into nothing.
Higher on the hill, the road turns to stone. Medea wipes her sandals on the edge, but the filth is all the way past her ankles. She’ll have to wade into the sea.
New shrieks above, more urgent and terrified, but not the shrieks of a single woman, the queen. Instead, this is many voices and spreading. Some new thing has happened. Medea fears for Jason, alone at the head of that procession. She runs, and hears her own blood.
A crowd all moving into the citadel, bodies packed. Too small here, loose walls of stone with narrow entrances and passageways, a maze, no towering citadel above but lost as she gets close. Directionless and maddening. Smoke of torches, the walls moved by flame, seeming to shift as shadows within them hunch and resettle.
Pushing through bodies filthy and bare, reek of urine and sweat and smoke. Disgorged into a courtyard just as crowded, and she sees Argonauts. Every person here looking toward a narrow flight of stone stairs just above, leading to the upper room of this low citadel. Something has happened in there.
Medea finds her way to Jason. Cyzicus lies on the ground forgotten.
His queen, Jason says. Cleite has hanged herself.
Medea laughs. It’s perfect that the queen of the nothing people would hang herself. Maybe the rest will set themselves on fire now. Jason’s hand over her mouth, and he forces her down to her knees. Tears on his face. He’s ruined by this night. Crying over the non-king and idiot queen. But Medea will not mourn any woman stupid enough to kill herself for a husband.
She struggles to free herself, but Jason is too strong. He shakes her hard and pushes her flat to the ground, stone covered in dirt and mire.
The daughter of great Aeetes being stepped on by rabble, by people who live in shit. Held pinned to the earth like any insect. She crawls toward Cyzicus, toward where she might stand, and vows revenge. She could use her knife now, but she will wait. She will consider. Killing Jason now, she’d be killed herself, killed for a man, same as this queen. She won’t die here in a nameless place and for nothing.
Just as she had felt a stronger love for Jason. And now on her hands and knees, fate of any woman who lets herself love a man.
A sea of lament, the crowd surging above, moaning and shrieking for two pieces of meat. The heat of them, all moving as one, pressed that tightly together, but she finds Cyzicus, presses against his empty chest, hardly more than a boy without his mask, frees her legs to straddle. Hands on his chest, groin against his, and she could be riding him. Medea laughs. They would be horrified. They would kill her. But they are all looking upward to see the queen brought out dead. They want to see her neck stretched, so Medea rides their dead king surrounded by all his people, some atavistic ritual in torchlight, as if all must be fucked into the other world and no other entrance, a god of lust, barbaric god from before thought, before name.
Medea yells and hoots and laughs in that night, and none can tell. Sorrow and joy the same sounds, and everyone blind in their obedience, never imagining Medea possible. No one will ever predict her.
She stands, finally, places her foot on this borehole chest and is able to see better that way, taller, stepping on their king. Her other foot on his face, sandal covered in shit. She holds onto shoulders in the crowd, sees the queen brought out, not what you’d imagine in a queen, smaller, a lump in brown linen, not wearing animal hides at least.
She steps off into the crowd as they turn to raise their king to meet his queen, not knowing he’s just been with another, a final love to last into death. Cleite will have to be alone.
Wander forever, Medea says in her own tongue. Both of you, wander alone forever in the other world and never meet, and Cyzicus dream only of me. And let this city be burned and erased and forgotten.
17
They raise the king and bring him his queen, puppet show from the afterlife. Refusing death, demanding ritual even if they have to carry the bodies themselves and move the limbs. Cyzicus as Cleite is brought into his arms. Lovers raised higher than the crowd, become giants, her arms around his waist, neck long enough now to hook over his shoulder. Her face dangling, openmouthed, lost in some other ecstasy. A hole in his back, her love so powerful it has eaten right through him. Jason straining on tiptoe to keep Cyzicus’ head from lolling.
Medea understands now this was their wedding day. A bridal dress Cleite wears, of linen brought from some better land, and a bridal wreath in her hair, and the bands at her wrists. She waited in her wedding bed as Cyzicus went to war, was left a virgin and chose to remain a virgin forever.
The death of Cyzicus not only at the hand of his friend but also on his wedding night, his bride waiting, and when she hears of his death, she tries to cross over to join him. Too beautiful not to have been planned, some irruption of gods into this common world to form a story to last not a hundred but a thousand generations.
Cleite, Medea says. Beautiful Cleite. Not some sad, small thing. Much larger than I thought. But you will still be alone. You will wander and never find him. The one he lay with first after death was me.
Medea wants all to know this last part of the story, the most beautiful and sad part that makes the rest, but of course no one will ever know. They carry the lovers now to their wedding bed, would give back what Cyzicus and Cleite have lost. Carried up the stairs holding each other close, let down gently to pass over the threshold, disappeared within to lie together. The sound could be of revelers at a wedding, not so different, a crowd weeping in joy rather than grief, the beginning rather than the end. Each part mirroring every other part, all repetition and pattern.
Small citadel and a people living the most important moment of their history. All who came before and all who will come after will be forgotten. Only this night matters.
Unremarkable sky above, stars appearing briefly then gone again, low cloud moving but no storm, nothing to mark the occasion. No howling of beasts in the wilderness around them. Gods working invisibly, mute shaping to go unnoticed, and perhaps it has to be this way. The story has to be about Cyzicus and Cleite and Jason and not about the gods. Cyzicus has to be the one who chose, not sent against his will, and Cleite has to have chosen also, when her time comes.
Small citadel, and all the rest of the world blind to what has happened. They won’t hear until later, and by then, they will imagine something else. Cleite will have urged Cyzicus to attack, making a fatal error, or she will have been the one to first see smoke that evening along the coast, or Cyzicus will have turned back but then changed his mind again and continued on. Some moment that would have changed everything.
And what will they imagine when they hear of Medea’s story? It won’t be the same as with Cyzicus and Cleite. Every woman will want to imagine herself Cleite, making that sacrifice, honored and lamented by her people. But who will want to stand on the stern of the Argo with her own brother chopped to pieces at her feet? Who will want to be an outcast or betrayer? It will be a different kind of story, tale of a monster, a story of what is not human. Every king has bathed in blood, but that is told differently. Cyzicus won’t be remembered for those he slaughtered. He’ll be remembered for the wedding night he didn’t have, for the love of Cleite, for his friendship with Jason, for his youth and bravery. Every story born in pattern and wrought by the telling into another pattern again.
Medea seemingly invisible i
n this crowd, but then she is summoned, and the crowd parts to let her through. Daughter of a greater king. She will be used to mark this occasion.
Up the stone stairs to the home of Cyzicus and Cleite, and Jason takes her arm at the threshold, as if his touch could be only kindness. Not convenient at the moment to grind her into the dirt.
The room larger than she had imagined, higher ceilinged, but no rope dangling. Then she sees it, at a rafter by a window. Cleite jumped out the window for a greater fall.
She lies now in his arms, arranged on the bed. On their sides, turned and holding each other, snake-necked Cleite staring into that empty borehole of the spear shaft.
Trick of the dead, always, to seem alive still. Cleite’s head ducked low and brought against his chest seems to be moving, tucking in closer, the most basic and beautiful affection. His hand on her back pulling her near. Hint of a smile on his dead lips, some contentment. Medea would not be surprised to see him kiss her forehead.
All in this room are silent and have knelt, pulled downward and falling endlessly within themselves, the dead some enormous weight that tumbles without resistance into nowhere, anchored to the living. An entire city might sink yet there would be no sound and all would seem not to have moved. Worlds within worlds. Anyone still for long enough can lose hold.
Long night, and there are no words. Only observance as Cyzicus and Cleite complete their vows. This room tilts on its side, swings back again and caves and fills. Pain in Medea’s knees then lost again until the air becomes a dark dark blue, cold and paling.
Outside a moaning, low keening broken, no longer holding to disbelief. King and queen dead, wedding night gone, and each day will be lengthened, passing of the sun slowed.