pulling back into the shadows as they caught my gaze. I saw the glitter of gold, the gleam of bronze and the sheen of iron, a wasteland of trophies, offerings and secrets cast into the lake over the ages. And the masts and prows of ships that had sunk here and lay at all angles, weed-covered and broken, ransacked for their timbers.
A sudden swirling around me and lean, translucent faces peered hard at me, elemental water guardians rising from where they prowled over the sunken dead. They seemed distressed by my presence so deep, but didn’t try to fight me. I had prepared for this descent for three days, offering more than just a meal of entrails to the entities below. I had sung and chanted in the groves, and I followed carefully the instructions of the young shaman who had taken pity on me, and made a personal drum, whittled birch bark, and scratched my name on stones, which I had dropped through the ice into the deeps.
Now I felt a certain confidence, and at last I put a name to my quest.
Air bubbling from my lungs, I called to the old ship, the grave ship, the ship that screamed …
‘Argo!’ I called, and the sound spread down into the lake, booming through the swirls and eddies of the deeps.
‘Argo! Answer me!’
I looked hard for the signs of her below. I called again, swimming deeper, then called twice more. I began to lose track of time. The voytazi kept track of me, I noticed, a vortex of eyes, mouths and bony fingers, keeping at a distance.
Too cold to feel panic, I began to entertain the grim thought that perhaps I had been wrong. Perhaps she had not come here after all but lay elsewhere in the deeps, in another lake or a hidden sea, guarding her captain’s remains.
But then: that whispering voice with which I had become so familiar in my time with Jason, during the long journey through the heart of the world, before we had returned to Iolkos, the voice of sentience that was the ship herself:
‘Leave us in peace. Go up. Leave us to sleep.’
‘Argo?’
The water below me pulsed. The lake seemed angry. I could see a shattered vessel, dark and indistinct, its hull fringed by twisted branches that reached out like tendrils. The branches of the sacred oak that formed her keel, I realised—she had kept on growing!
‘Argo! Is Jason alive?’
Before I could speak further, invisible hands caught me. I was dragged up towards the ice, flung vigorously against the roof, a dizzying blow. I heard laughter. My tormentors sank down, swimming quickly like eels. For a while I stayed where I was, bobbing gently among the bloated dead, then my lungs began to burst. My control had gone and I was on the verge of drowning. I tried to summon warmth, but failed. I scrabbled along the underside of the ice, increasingly desperate, then saw a hook probing down, fishing close to a corpse. I pushed the dead man aside and clung on to that welcome curve of bone. The upwards passage was almost too narrow for my shoulders, but someone above knew I was a living being, and hauled and hauled until at last my head gasped above the surface. Niiv came running to me with a heavy cloak. In the glimmering dawn, and by the light of torches, I saw tears in her eyes.
‘I thought I’d lost you,’ she said angrily. ‘I told you to prepare better!’
I had no response to that. My talents had failed me in the realm of Enaaki—or perhaps because of the power of Argo herself—and the lesson was a sobering one.
* * *
A while later, warmed and revived from my lazy, arrogantly ill-prepared excursion downwards, I lay on the ice, close to a hook hole, and again called to Argo, begging her to respond.
‘It’s Antiokus. You must remember me. I was with you when you sailed on the quest for the fleece of gold. Jason, please hear me. Your sons are not dead! Listen to me. Your sons are alive! Argo, tell him what I’ve said.’
I kept trying. I have no idea how long I lay there, staring down through the hole, which was already