Free Medea by Kerry Greenwood

to conceive and bear monsters.
    I lay and dreamed, and Jason dreamed the same dream. It was the last night on the mountain with the centaurs. The next day my lord and I would venture into Iolkos and claim his kingdom.
    A woman of fascination, a woman with dark hair, not red, a striga with dusky skin and warm breath, dressed in black, came and kissed us and stroked us, her clever hands caressing and sliding, her breasts in our face, her mouth on ours, until we woke clasped together, wet with seed, still shuddering.
    We said nothing about it. It was dawn, and we washed and dressed in our finest tunics. We were, at last, returning to the sea. We were going down from the mountain to claim Jason's kingdom.

--- V ---
MEDEA
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    The grove was as black as pitch and I stood still, as I had been taught, with my eyes closed. Beside me, Trioda began to sing. I listened carefully.
    It was a high, simple, strongly accented tune, punctuated with palm-strokes on the small drum, and I caught the melody quickly and joined in. We sang, on a rising pitch:
    O phis Megale, Ophis Megale, Ophis Megale kale
    Then the same triple invocation on a dipping pitch, then the three words on a level. We repeated it.
    The treasure of Colchis, the Golden Fleece, hung from the biggest tree. It is the skin of a curly fleeced ram, of considerable size, and it gleams, because it is filled with gold dust. Each tress has been soaked in water-borne gold, and it shines even in the darkness of the grove. In sunlight - though it must never leave the grove - it would be blinding. Achaeans believe that it is the skin of a magical beast on which Phrixos rode to Colchis.
    It is actually the skin of the king of the Massagaetae's ram, laid in the stream to soak up gold; and Colchians still lived who had seen Phrixos the Foreigner arrive in a perfectly ordinary ship.
    The ilex is not a friendly tree and few things like growing under it. The floor of the grove was, therefore, smooth, and deep in last year's prickly leaves. I could not hear my own footfall, but I could hear something else.
    Something very heavy was coming through the leaf mould. I was not sure that I could cope with sight, so I listened and kept my eyes closed, singing along automatically to the tune and the drum. The grove was resounding with the shrill alarm calls of birds when Trioda nudged me and I looked to see a serpent of amazing size. She was as long as a boat and wide as a doorway; wide as a pithos, the big-bellied grain amphora, and taller than me. Her head was the size of a cow's, her eyes the size of my doubled fists, and she must have been very old - only a huge length of years allows the serpent kind to grow so gigantic.
    I could not move. She slid closer, her belly rippling over the prickly ilex leaves, and then rose to more than Trioda's height, towering over us. Her mouth opened pink and she flicked a forked tongue as long as my forearm at Trioda and me.
    She was patterned like a tortoise-shell, mottled and magnificent. I would have fallen to my knees except Trioda had cautioned me to make no sudden move, lest the guardian be startled. I was awed and terrified at the power of the great goddess, who kept such a creature in subjection to guard her grove.
    Trioda opened her basket and produced a bowl, into which she poured milk as prosaically as any housewife. The great head dipped, the tongue flicked, and the guardian drank.
    'You may touch her,' said Trioda. Trembling, I laid one hand on the smooth scales, and felt them not wet as I had expected from their sheen, but dry as a pine-cone, slippery as enamel, and warm.
    The custom of serpents is to sleep through the winter. They are creatures of two gods, belonging to both Ammon and the Mother. During the summer when Ammon is exalted, they worship him. During the winter they seek the warmth of the Mother's breast, in darkness under the ground. To see this creature awake and alive in the cold winds of autumn, when the leaves fall ragged into the