“She must have started making her way back to Arcadia,” I said, struggling into a sitting position. “I’ve been telling her to go for months, but she simply wouldn’t listen.”
“Oh, that’s good.” Medea settled down beside me and handed me a bowl of soup. “I thought one of the dragons might have gotten to her.” Then she shook her head in puzzlement, digesting my words. “Wait, what do you mean you’ve been telling her for months? Do you speak to your horse?”
“Well, not the same way I’m speaking to you,” I said between bites of soup. “But Kastana and I have traveled together long enough to know how to make ourselves understood to each other. She’ll head to my son back in Arcadia, and he’ll look after her.”
The thought made me smile. Parthenopaios was grown now, a strapping young man who wore the face of the child I’d nurtured. He had a good life and a place for himself as a member of the Arcadian royal guard. Oh, what a look had come over Schoenus’s face when his grandson abdicated the throne! The shock was probably what finally killed the old man. Good riddance.
Parthenopaios would take Kastana in and ensure she lived the rest of her life in comfort. That was more than enough to satisfy me.
Medea’s face took on a preoccupied look. She lifted her head and gazed out of the hut at the meadow beyond.
“Your son,” she echoed. “I have a living son too, my firstborn, Thessalus. He trains upon Mount Pelion. I’ve thought of him often lately, but I cannot go to him. If the story of what I did in Corinth has not already spread to every corner of Greece, it soon will, and I cannot let the taint fall upon him. Thessalus will never know his youngest brother, but at least he will be free.” Medea’s hand rested on her stomach, where her unborn son lay.
She stared into the distance for a few more moments until I grabbed her hand and pulled her beneath the covers with me. I kissed her, long and slow, and she sighed with delight. Her muscles relaxing, she snuggled into the curve of my body.
A question burned within me, one that I’d long feared to ask, but it seemed the time had come. “If you will not go to Thessalus,” I began, stroking her hair, “where will you go... after?”
After my death,I did not say, though I thought she understood.
“And no more of that Alcestis business,” I added sternly. “You have the dragon chariot and those clanking bracelets on your wrists to pay your way. You can travel anywhere you like and make a life for yourself and your future child. Unless you wish to stay here in the forest?”
She shuddered at the idea. “No. This place is lovely, but it holds no appeal without you.”
“So where will you go?”
Medea burrowed deeper into the blankets, as if to hide from the question. “I don’t know,” she said. “I have to save Chalciope first, but then I’m not sure where I’ll settle. I can’t go back to Corinth after what I did, not that there’s anything left for me there anyway.Same with Iolcus. There’s always Circe, but I don’t want to raise my son on that tiny island where nothing ever changes.”
I was about to urge her to be morespecific, damn it, since I could hardly rest easy not knowing if she’d have a home when I was gone. But then she was kissing along my neck, her hands caressing my skin, gently lifting away my clothing. A dirty trick and a cheap distraction, but an effective one; as my blood heated, I forgot all concept of conversation.
Even as my body weakened from the disease, it seemed I never lost my appetite forthis. For her.
That night, we lay out under the night sky and its canopy of stars. Medea said it reminded her of our time at sea and liked the stories I told about the constellations: Orion the hunter, Callisto the mother bear, and many more.
“Look,” I said, my pointed finger detailing the connections within a grouping of stars, shaping them into a low-slung bark with some sails atop. I’d saved this one for last, delighted to show her. “A new constellation, pointed out to me by a group of hunters near Mycenae a few years back. TheArgo, its image placed among the stars. Our journey will never be forgotten.”
Instead of gasping with delight, Medea curled into herself, suddenly overcome with melancholy. “The journey may never be forgotten,” she said, “butwewill be. No one will remember that you and I sailed with theArgoor what we accomplished along the way. If they do, they’ll relegate us to the sidelines, as always happens with women. I’ll go down in history as nothing but Jason’s wife, and you, as an ordinary huntress. No one will ever know what we had. It’s all a waste.”
No one will ever know.Her words lay heavy on me, and I held her tighter. The happiness we’d carved out for ourselves here inthe forest, the way we called each other wife—all of it would be lost to the darkness of history.
After a time, I spoke. “Many things happen in the silence of the forest that do not make it into the singers’ tales, and they are no less true for that. Perhaps no one else will ever know, butwewill. And that is enough. It must be.
“Besides,” I added, “it’s not a waste, because love is never wasted.”
Medea’s face turned up toward mine, and I kissed her.
“I suppose that I have no right to complain thatIwill not be remembered,” she said, flipping onto her back and looking up at theArgoin the stars, more relaxed now. “After all, Jason’s ship gets its own constellation, but Jason does not.”
We both laughed at that.
80
Medea
That night, I lay in bed and thought about my former husband. There was no anger left in me, I was surprised to discover, only a bone-deep resignation and a faint sadness. This was just as well; I didn’t want to expend the effort of hating him.
Jason. Had I ever really known him, my husband of two decades? Hands folded on my belly, I looked up into the darkness and wondered. The face of the youth I’d first sighted on that Colchian beach so long ago was overlaid by the reddened face of the middle-aged man screaming obscenities at me in the temple of Hera.
Which was the real Jason? Perhaps even he did not know.
