Bright Air Black Read online

  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

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

  The largest wears the hide of a bear and walks toward Medea, loosening the cloth around his hips. Jason giving her up so soon. But this bear-man stops at the rudder posts, holds onto one and leans back over the water, shits into the sea, fouling the air. The breeze not strong enough, and now the other men feel free to do the same.

  This is the sea burial of a prince, she says in their language, waving with her arm for them to stay away. A future king of Colchis. She sees one grinning, teeth in starlight. A game to them. Jason unconcerned. He takes his turn at the oars, as vacant and stone eyed as the rest.

  They drink water from clay vessels foreign to her, eat food taken from her home. Sounds of chewing on lamb that was grilled over her father’s fires. Sweet smell of honey to mix with the smells of shit and viscera.

  Hekate’s hold loosening, the first deep blue appearing over the mountains that rim her home. Jagged outlines of black, and the stars fading. She looks down again into the water and is losing this world, too, the surface thickening, becoming opaque even in this first shadow of light.

  Her grandfather climbing the other side of the world. Holding the reins, hooves pounding air. She used to wait for him at this hour when she was a girl, waking before the rest, hoping to see him. The beginning, perhaps, of her interest in night, unintended. Descended from the sun and worshipping darkness. Who she is makes no sense to her. How she became. What she will become still.

  The other side of the world steep and nearly endless. Long climb in that chariot, light appearing long before he clears the peaks. A place where mountains wear away, long slides of loose stone, without trees, directionless. Any other god would become lost. She feels this place inside her now, barren heart, no living or growing thing. She waits for Jason to notice her, his face only one of nearly fifty pale dark-blue shields in this light, rolling away with each heave at the oars then returning.

  All these men belong, all act as one, the rowers, the men who stand before her working the rudders, the men holding thick lines that guide the sail, even those who have stopped to eat or drink and sit low on the deck. They’ve fallen into a wordless routine, their minds blank.

  Jason, she calls. She can’t wait for him to notice.

  He pauses, the other faces rolling away from him and returning and heaving away again. He lowers the handle of his oar to the deck and comes aft to kneel beneath the rudder posts. His hair in curls. Nose fine and straight, lips full, but his beauty in the soft curve of his cheeks, the smooth fall away from that nose, an open plain beneath each eye. She pulls him close with both hands and presses her lips to this soft place, feels the blink of his lashes, his thick hair in her hands.

  He doesn’t move, his breath caught, and she smiles, presses her lips to the other cheek. You are mine, she says in a tongue he won’t understand. By the old stars above and the new stars below, I will rule your heart. You are the land I conquer.

  This ship riding a thin plain between two heavens, and she would turn it over, make the underworld the air they breathe, wet stars bumping against Jason’s broad back and flung away in the wake. She’ll find shelter here. She curls in closer to his chest and he wraps his arms around. Damp with sweat, on fire from the oars, smell of him and heavy beating of blood. His sides flared out in ridges, thick and rounded. She holds these in her hands, bulwarks to keep her from falling overboard. The night heavy and warm, another sea, and she closes her eyes, longs to sleep, exhausted, but he pries her away, leaves her kneeling, returns to his oar.

  As if the rowing were saving them. These pieces of her brother are saving them. Her father would be on their decks now, hacking through flesh in his rage until no part matched any other, until no Minyan hero could be assembled by his kin for funeral rites, until they’d have to be burned together in a great pile. Only Medea is saving them, only her sacrifice.

  She turns away, sees the mountains of her home shadow teeth now against a paler blue, the light she would live in always, the sun held on the far slope, offering enough only for outline and texture, all softened and cooled. The sea a color she’s never seen, not the same as a river or pond, not the same as viewed from land. Deeper, darker, a melted hue and shadows everywhere, interrupted light, broken, each hollow something you could reach into and never find bottom. Her first sunrise from the sea, and why did she have to wait this long? It was here, not far away, every morning of her life.

  She realizes only too late that she’ll never see the light rise behind these mountains again, that she’s missed seeing them transform in the light, that she’s looked too long at the water and lost her home. Already the ridges and peaks are edged in white, losing substance and depth. All is being flattened and won’t return again.

  Her grandfather would erase all. White glare each morning an oblivion. Distance gone. Shape and shadow and being. Eyes without use, and this water an open desert with no refuge.

  Forest at the edge of her home, original forest, wet with mist, rising steeply, mountain after mountain without end. No flattening of distance but each fold expanding, each ravine become larger. Moss and fern. Gnarled old roots black and intertwined. Needles dense above, branches twisted and the tops gone from sight. Places even her grandfather can’t reach. Deadfall and dark rock, caves in those mountains and the forest itself a cave. Her home. In that stillness, walking beneath those trees. Cold breath, all sound muted, always watched and alone, a place on the edge of panic, as if the forest might swallow or she could be hunted. Wolf and bear. And the overwhelming sense of being alive, the thud of a heart beating. A strange freedom not given to girls, but one she took anyway, walking out alone at night even when she was very young. A home she always knew was hers, antidote to the sun, escape from her father, a place instead of a mother. A refuge she can’t imagine herself without, lost and gone now, and she knows she’ll never return, that she’s made herself an outcast and will be a stranger even to herself. Why she did this, she doesn’t know. Love the erasure of everything else, a blinding worse even than the sun.

  Madness without thought. One act and then another, inevitable, unstoppable, never questioned. He appeared from nowhere, came out of the fog at the edge of the city. Strange fog for this season, late burning, and so he and his men were able to anchor in the river and w
alk through groves where the dead hung in their ox hides and come right to her home unchallenged. Jason stood before her, unlikely, something she could not have imagined. A half-god, favored, a gift. Given to her, gazing at her. And from that first moment, all was set in motion. All subversion of her father’s plans, the many ways she would help Jason and his men, all as if it were already accomplished. Not fate, but something waiting inside her. Fate no more than a brute plow dragged along, but this was something wanted, sprung from desire unknown and released, a recognition. The closest Medea has ever known to truth. The most certain moment of her life.

  Some spell, anything too certain not to be trusted, but once it happens, it’s already too late and has always been too late, erasing all that came before.

  Medea. She says her name aloud. Medea. Tries to remember. She reaches for a piece of her brother, a foot severed at the ankle, and presses it now to her breast, closes her eyes, tries to feel something for him, for her family, for her home, and feels nothing. Another life, someone else’s life. Cold flesh, no different from the meat of an animal. This is strange power, too much power. Hekate no more than whisperings and rumor and blind earth compared with this, spells of a mole tunneling through nothing.

  5

  The day heating already. Her grandfather most powerful of the gods, giver of light and life and destroyer, also. But were there really none who lived before? How did the world become so populated? How can there be Minyae and Egyptians and Hittites and Colchians if the sun is her grandfather? How could Hatshepsut have ruled two hundred years back, and all the pharaohs before her, longest of lines? And how could every one of these Minyae be descended from the immortals? She understands almost everything they say because they share their language with the Mycenaeans, so she knows their story of themselves, each of them descended from a god, half god and half human. Yet they look like men. They sweat at the oars as the sun heats the air, they require food and water, they piss and shit. If they do descend from gods, they’ve inherited the weakest parts of that blood. As they pull, they stare at her breasts and legs and all think the same thing, same as any man in Colchis.

  What Medea believes is this: that there are no gods. There is only power, and to hold power, you have to be descended from a god. In the end, this is the same thing. When you have that power, you do become a kind of god. Hatshepsut and every pharaoh before her.

  Slaying her brother, destroying her father. These are acts of a god, acts that inspire fear and form myth. Gods do what cannot be done. And a woman can become a god easily because she is not allowed anything. She can become a thing of fear. Hatshepsut wearing a beard, both woman and man. And who would cross the priestess of Hekate? Who would stop a girl from wandering in the woods at night? Just the bare fact that she wants to be in those woods is terrifying to everyone.

  But here among the Minyae she must start again. Chopping her own brother into pieces and licking his blood may be enough, or she may need to do more. Every one of them must fear her or she will become a slave.

  Her brother’s head, severed. Medea lifts it from beside her on the deck. She stares into his eyes, oddly intact, and chants to Hekate. She knows no Minyan will forget. Tales of how she invoked the soul of her dead brother or sent him to an underworld or might even be death herself. Let them tell it however they will.

  What she remembers, though, is her real brother. His face still a face she loves. And she’s broken by this, has to put his head down, sees him through all the years of their lives. She can play at power, but she is ruled by stronger things.

  When they were children, they took one long journey with their father and their sister, Chalciope, in this direction, to Suppiluliumas the Hittite king in Hattusa, and saw carvings in stone of lions, sphinxes, warriors, and gods of the underworld. These carvings homes of the gods. This is what her brother deserves. She would carve a tomb for him with her bare hands, and this still would not be enough to atone.

  She takes one last look at his face, her own face, and flings his head into the sea. Quick glance at the rowers to see them appalled, paused at their oars, horrified. Then she watches her brother’s head fall away, bobbing in the waves a dark and strange creature. Hair contracting and flaring and contracting again like tentacles, propulsion in the new element. Looking down into these submerged heavens beyond where Helios can reach. Finding some account of his own short life written there in pattern and pressure and a different light made below. Heavy enough he should sink, but he doesn’t. The surface of the water on fire from the sun, so she can’t see her brother for long. Her father’s ship not visible, lost somewhere far behind, and he should not be able to find this floating head, but she knows he will. She knows he will find every last piece.

  6

  They do not see her father’s ship again all that long burning day and through the night and another day and another night. The wind dies in darkness, and they drop the sail, lowering the upper yard. Bumping and scraping as it falls, ponderous invention of brutes against the finer braid of stars above. These Minyae barbarians despite their belief in their own greatness.

  Jason visiting afterward as half his men sleep and the other half pull at the oars. Visiting several times each night, and the smell of her brother increasing. The blood dried but flesh softening, rotting. They lie in this, most foul of wedding beds, and Jason himself smells as strongly musked as any beast in the field, but they must be with each other, a pull that comes from their spines and curls them. She would pull him beneath her ribs and keep him there.

  He leaves for the oars again, and her grandfather climbs into the sky again, and the sea is flat, without any wind at all.

  Many of the crew still sleep, and those who pull at the oars have slowed. They’ve become lazy. They think they’re safe, but Medea knows her father. They won’t be safe until they reach Iolcus and Jason’s people and their fleet and army. He won’t stop until then.

  Do not stop, she says in their language. Hurry.

  They do not hurry. The Hieros mountains are in view now, pale and washed out, without substance in this light. She knows these mountains. Thermodon river just beyond. If she still knows names, they are not far enough away to lose her father.

  The sun rises higher and the decks burn, planks so hot it seems they could erupt in flame. No shade, no sail, no breeze.

  The men wet and shining, skin burnt dark. Medea’s skin far whiter, turning red now, painful.

  The water all around them on fire, too bright to look at, so she closes her eyes and kneels on deck bowed down, hiding from the sun, and waits for this to end. Each day on this boat is longer than any day she has known before. Her grandfather’s path across the sky without measurable progress from hour to hour, some punishment from him, to hold back the reins and let her feel his wrath for how she has destroyed his line, the future king cut into pieces. No forest to shield her, no fog or mist or cloud or darkness or man-made shelter. A merciless god.

  Jason brings her water every few hours, which is not enough. Ship’s rations, held below deck in a narrow space above the ballast stones. She has seen them move aside the deck planks and reach below, and she wants to lie there in the shade. She believes she’ll die soon if she remains in the sun. So she crawls forward and pulls up the short planks. The men watch her. Jason is rowing and says nothing.

  She crawls into shadow below, and there is nothing soft. Stones and clay jars and tools: the sharp wide green blades of adzes, chisels, axes, whetstones, tongs, awls, drill bits, every hard and sharp and dangerous thing, raw ingots of copper and tin to make bronze. Smell of bilgewater and rot, mold. But in a narrow space between the rudder posts, she finds coils of rope, and here she can lie down. Rough fiber but not sharp or hard. A place to rest away from the sun.

  Gentle rocking of a ship, even in a sea without waves, from the motion of the oars. Feel of that pull, sound of the waterline, a stream unceasing, and the ship could be going ten times as fast. It feels and sounds that way, escaping quickly, one of many illus
ions. They are moving too slowly. Her father is out there somewhere not sparing his men.

  The hull feels as if it is burrowing, as if they are going deeper into the sea. A bird with its head straining downward, trying to dive, but only sliding along the surface.

  She wakes, a hand at her ankle. She yanks her leg in panic, then sees it is Jason leaning in at the hatch. Your father, he yells.

  She crawls over tools and stones, avoiding blades. The hull bucking beneath her, no longer calm. Her breath coming faster, expecting to see her father at the stern, about to leap aboard, but when she emerges, she sees no ship. The sun late in the day, falling, and a wind now against them, waves formed. Land close along their left side, the Hieros mountains rising above. They’ve come too close to land. A headland is directly ahead, and they’ll need to go around it.

  Where? she asks.

  Jason points. Her father’s ship is much farther from land, veered away from their path but correcting course now, angling closer, a dark shape on the water and a flash with every dip of the oars. Rowing quickly.

  The Argonauts all at the oars now, no sleeping.