Imagine her as a girl. Free as any little one, spoiled and favored, the dark threads of her talent noted, wondered at, striking like fireflies in the mundane dusk. A raw talent at the first, delicate hands commanding household cats to fly above the rooftops, raising seahorse squadrons to prance upon the surface of the black waves, this way and that beside the astonished royal barge. Children’s games, at the first.
Diligence was the counsel given to her proud and frowning father. Application and solitude, her girlhood spent in ill-lit cells among snakes and insects brought back from death’s ledge, the writhe and pump of resurrected breath, light doled down the list of studies. Application, diligence, and solitary perfection.
Nearing marriageable beauty, the forests and lakes gave up their secrets in her presence, the world whispered behind her closed lids, death knelt and kissed her fingertips. Grown so pale that in a snow-rich field she could pass naked and unseen, hair tight in its milk-white snood, only her black eyes and blood-red lips like ash and flame across the clearing.
The treasure of the kingdom, draped in the midmost branches of the acre-shadowing tree, wound about to a man’s height with the cold and heavy-coiled dragon, whose slumber balanced on an eyelash. She was taken to see the fleece, gazing at it from her father’s chariot atop a windswept hill, frost crunching under the horses’ hooves, crystal music carried across the plain where the wind shook the icy branches to a high-pitched clatter.
In her dreams that night she swam her naked body along the fleece, was swallowed in it till it fused over her its golden skin. She stroked the dragon’s head and saw herself, a gleaming shadow in its ferocious eye, its breath like fog across the field, as black as her hair, her laughing eyes.
Medea held a library within her head, each aisle of memory bristling the weave of a thousand voices, spells, enchantments, the secret languages of every bird and animal, the pleasure or agony contained in every stem and bud and leaf.
Still virgin, and burning with a virgin’s exquisite passion, she fled into the forest to cool her fever in the streams, to lower her body into the snow’s caress, melting an aching silhouette to rise from still ablaze, pressing her breasts and belly against the trunks of stone-cold trees, kissing the bark till it steamed, wrapping her legs round and riding till the clearing sang with her moans, the stars gone double with her dizziness. She slid to her knees and held the tree in her embrace, running her lips over the aftermath of this glad strange love, the reddening ember-points where her sex had mouthed its fire to the wood.
The archives called, the voices whining out her name, and Medea covered her body like a dutiful daughter, still burning, always burning.
And then the messengers, arriving from their watchposts, with news she could not read the meaning of, messengers who spoke and waited in her father’s long and silent stare.
A ship.
A landing party.
Traveling by night.
And then, as if fearless, by day.
Over the mountains.
Along the inland coast.
And here now, before the city’s tall, black-cobbled walls.
–We will make them welcome, her father said at last, but there was nothing welcoming in the king’s low voice.
Medea sat beside her father’s throne, resting her cheek upon his knee, his hand petting her head with its usual distraction. The strangers stood before the throne and their leader, golden-haired as her familiar dreamtime fleece, covered the ground with tribute. She looked among the gifts for something to explain the magic in these strangers but found nothing beyond the standard rarities and priceless vanities. Jason’s speech was rote, held nothing beyond the empty praises she had heard a thousand times before and yet her ear heard something hidden and she looked a second time. And counted, in that brief and hollow speech, ten instances in which his eyes, with the sudden downward arc of a spent arrow, fell from her father’s face onto her own.
Jason’s companions ranged themselves within the great hall and each in turn displayed for the court what special attribute had earned them the privilege of journeying alongside him. An acrobat who propelled himself with cat-speed up the shadow-topped columns and spun, as though boneless, to a perfect landing. A juggler who handled white-hearted coals and unsheathed knives, six, seven, eight at a time, catching them in his teeth and smiling like a cheetah the heart-stopping while. A girl some few years older than Medea, who took her innocent breath away, hair cropped like a Spartan boy’s, right breast carved flat, the circular scar bedded with blue beads, its absence designed to facilitate her bow arm which, for their assembled entertainment, she flexed and loosed, arrow splitting arrow splitting arrow till her quiver was empty of its thirteen. Another twenty men who tossed and caught huge axes in their braid-thick hair, or sang like wolves and nightingales, or bled the shadows with sword or spear, did handstands from the murderous ceiling and coupled like centaurs in mock combat, while her father’s servants kept the fires blazing through the night and none grew sleepy. And often through the passing hours Medea felt Jason’s eyes resting upon her. As though she were a fawn in a sea of grass. And he a hunter tensing his star-tipped weapon for the deciding thrust.
The first faint line of dawn had scarcely skimmed the outer ramparts when the last of Jason’s crew called round the hall his trick of witchery and wisdom, inviting volunteers to have their fortunes read. Like eager children, noble faces turned to the throne to see if etiquette might be slackened in this mood of wide goodwill. The king growled and nodded permission and the magician set his wand and crow’s wing and painted knuckle bones upon the floor (all fakes, the knowing girl smiled and saw). And so another hour passed, and blushes, tears, and laughter rose and fell and everything he said and prophesied was true (the knowing girl laughed a bit herself, to see how he made the simple look hard). But when at length the magician came to her, he lied. And she was silent, and thanked him regally with her eyes, but could not see what he had hidden from her. When the court at last could stand no more amazement, the king commanded all to banquet and to bed and stood alone with Jason for a private word. Medea had watched her father’s face grown young with marvel but now she saw the black frown’s return, and she knew it was not his glory and his fame alone which had brought the strangers inside the walls of Colchis.
She slipped out of the city and ran across the snowy fields towards the forest of her lover-trees. The pale sun cast her shadow into pale blue where she flew and skipped a zig-zag dance towards the woods, rethinking, as she ran, the gasps and cries of the past hours, the strangers’ bodies fabulous as any fox or hawk or dolphin.
She stripped and knelt and crouched and rolled till every inch of skin was stung with snow. She burned as though her blood was naptha, and felt that she might melt an ocean from a mountainside. She leapt and thrashed a flurry from her dripping hair, sweat and snow no less than off a warhorse at full unbroken tilt. She flung herself upon her favorite tree and rubbed and frotted till blood stained her thighs like those of a brand-new bride. The branches closed round her and she shut her eyes in their whipping clasp, and in the darkness she dreamed unblinking Jason, watching with a thin-lipped smile as she frisked herself to froth.