Free Celtika by Robert Holdstock

chasing only her guards and her chariot, the charioteer a man in woman’s clothing. Medea had slipped away, with Cretantes and the boys, and run to a cove on the shore, where a small ship had taken her to the eastern ocean and into a territory that was at war with Iolkos.
    Oddly, I must have glimpsed this event from the hills above the sea, though I had not realised what I was seeing. But the skogen picked it out of my confusion and amplified the scene in its singing grove.
    The galley had eight oars, worked vigorously. The furled sail was black and gold, Medea’s colours, arrogantly displayed as if she knew, now, she was safe. Narrow-hulled, sitting low in the water, it slipped quickly towards the open sea, to the east, towards Rhodes, perhaps, or the ruined city of Troy. Medea sat, crying bitterly, her arms around her sons, who were now awake. They were squabbling, rubbing at the sore cuts on their necks, unaware that their mother was watching the headland and saying goodbye to a life she had come to love—until Jason’s betrayal of that love. She was a widow in heart, leaving behind a man dying of despair because of her fateful conjuration. Jason had paid the price of his treachery; Medea had condemned herself and her sons to a life in exile.
    The grove was filled with the sound of a man crying with rage.
    ‘Is this true?’ Jason demanded of me. ‘Is this true? Or just a trick?’
    ‘Everything you saw is true,’ I whispered and the man threw back his head and howled at the fading stars.
    ‘All those wasted years! All that time in mourning! And I should have been hunting her down. I gave up the chase too quickly—I should have been hunting her down!’
    His tears were of anger and frustration. His glance at me was bitter, as if somehow I was to blame.
    ‘All those wasted years, Antiokus! I could have had my sons by my side! May the goddess be damned for not telling me!’ he shouted.
    And with that last furious curse, Jason left the forest sanctuary.
    I stayed in the grove until the song-chant ritual of leaving was complete, then rode back to the lake with Jouhkan and an uncharacteristically silent Niiv.
    ‘Where is he?’ I asked Urtha when we came to the camp. He pointed out across the lake and I saw Jason standing on the broken ice at the prow of dead Argo, his arms raised to the ship as if trying to call her back. The ice was melting fast. It gleamed in the dawn. The frozen silence was giving way to the sound of running water. The ice itself creaked and cracked as it ‘gave up the ghost’.
    Later, Jason came to Urtha’s tent. I was eating, Niiv sitting silently and thoughtfully beside me, watching the fire. He asked permission to enter and Urtha waved him in. Jason had cut his ragged beard down to a stubble and had tied his long hair into a single plait that reached down his back almost to the waist. He had found a pair of red, Roman trousers, tight around the thigh and cut above the knees, and a pair of grey fur boots. He still wore the black sheepskin cloak in which he had spent the last years of his life in Iolkos.
    His eyes were sad as he stared at me. He dropped to a crouch and warmed his hands at the wood fire.
    ‘The ship is dead. Argo is dead. The goddess has left her.’
    ‘I know. The effort of resurrection was too much.’
    ‘I take back what I said in the grove, Antiokus. Everything! Perhaps Medea had blinded the goddess as much as she had blinded us.’
    ‘Most likely.’
    ‘But the ship is still useful. When the ice melts, we’ll tow Argo to the shore and rebuild her. And if we can find a decent trunk of oak in this wretched land, and lay a new keel, perhaps we can call the goddess back.’
    ‘That’s a good thought,’ I offered.
    ‘Yes. But if not, we’ll have to sail without her.’
    It had already occurred to me that Argo could be rebuilt under the protection of one of the local goddesses, unrefined and unpredictable though they were. I kept the thought to myself for the