“We have heard of a ship attacked by Harpies. Are you perhaps its survivors?”
Hora sighed and gave him a soulful gaze. Dusk had yielded to dark. Newly lit torches of pine illuminated her face, the rubicund skin, the full cheeks, the lips which were red without the deceit of carmine. She made me think of a mulberry tree whose branches were laden with fruit. Though frequently plucked, she always flaunted a crop. Her eyes did not need kohl to emphasize their enormity. By daylight they were the shifting blue of the sea in the Misty Isles; by night, gray but reflecting the torches around us and also seeming to smoulder with interior fires. (There were fires in Hora, banked since the death of our parents, which even I, her cousin, could not divine . . . yearnings, laughters, sorrows.) I knew that she used her eyes to feign whatever feeling suited the situation, except alone with me, and then they were often merry, sometimes sad, sometimes indecipherable. Do not misunderstand. We were never lovers, Hora and I. From the time of the loss about which we never spoke—you see, our family had owned a villa and slaves in the Delta of Lower Egypt—Hora had been like a sister to me. (A sister for whom one procures a lover instead of a husband. But Hora and I agreed that marriage was a curse from the gods. “Look at Zeus and Here.”)
“It’s sole survivors,” she said. Her eyes were ova1s of desperation.
“They can’t attack you here, my sweet.”
Gratitude.
“And you will want to stay until you can catch another ship. And of course you will need a gown. Your disarray is charming, but our nights are sometimes chill.” He snapped his fingers; a young Libyan, black as an onyx blade, appeared at his side. “Horus, you will fetch the lady a gown. A flounced skirt. Blue, I should think. A bodice transparent but not open.” To Hora. “Because of the chill. Except for that, I would not diminish your splendors.” Horus departed to look for a gown to fit a lady out of the sea.
“It was our intention, my cousin and I, to stay on Pseira. We intended to buy a home. You see, we lived in Memphis, but our parents, our clan, were murdered by cutthroats and thieves, and we wished to forget on these pleasant shores.” (In truth there was much to forget, but worse than thieves. . . .)
“Did they rob you as well as kill?”
“Oh, no, Talos. We were spared our fortune at least, though it proved small consolation. Enough however to purchase a house on Pseira and devote ourselves to the pursuits of peace. I am an expert lyrist—I believe you have need for such at festivals?—and my brother is very skillful with the bow. He will enjoy hunting in your forests.”
“Not our forests. There you are hunted. Now to things of the moment. Our fee for a night’s lodging and food is quite reasonable.” His face remained smooth; he was not avaricious; he was simply ungenerous, like his trader-countrymen. “More for less” was their ultimate rule, though they rarely stole or lied; they merely out-traded, and the methods they used were as variable as their island: indirectness, evasion, misrepresentation. . . .
“But you don’t understand. We lost our belongings aboard the ship. We must wait until our fortune overtakes us. Happily, our gold is following in another ship.”
“Oh?” Suspicion narrowed his eyes. “Ships do flounder, as you have seen. A snake in the house is worth two in the garden.”
Obviously puzzled, Hora awaited a clarification. In Egypt, snakes had been feared since pre-dynastic times, when arrow heads had been dipped in viper venom.
“The Cretans like a snake in the house,” I reminded her. “Bringers of luck, I believe. And fertility, of course. It has to do with their shape, don’t you think?”
“A little time, Talos, and we shall have a houseful of snakes.”
“I can give you one night.” The words, blandly spoken, were unanswerable. “And the gown is free.”
“You are too generous.” He did not seem to detect her irony; she did not intend detection.
“There are two rooms over the kitchen.”
Clashing copper pots, swearing cooks, reek of conch and cuttlefish. Insupportable.
“If you will be so kind as to show us the way.” Light as a moth, she brushed his thigh with her hand.
“With pleasure,” he smiled, peering at her intently and seeming to like the view. “Your brother shall have this room—”
My room was a cubicle, built I suspect for the least of the cooks. The furnishings were sparse: a raised stone platform without any cushions. “A couch,” Talos beamed. A ewer of stale water. “For washing and such.” A wooden bench. “For entertaining.” A snake-roost shaped like a cylinder. “We are never bothered with flies.”
“What about fleas?” At such a time it is best to hold one’s tongue. But I lack my cousin’s tact. “And where is your vaunted Cretan plumbing?”
“Oh, we reserve that for guests who have not been shipwrecked. You have a chamber pot.”
“Bronze, I trust.”
“Terra cotta.”
The wall which divided our rooms was thin, yellowing parchment of the kind which filled Cretan windows and withstood the sandy blasts from Libya to the south in summer, even across the ridge of Ida, or the Boreal, wintry onslaughts from the north. I could hear Hora’s body unfolding onto a cushioned couch; Talos pouring a doubtless delectable wine, or a beer from barley stalks.
“But you must sit beside me. I long for the conversation of a civilized man. The voyage was tedious; the sailors illiterate, to say nothing of disrespectful; the attack a horror beyond description.” A touching catch in her voice. “They came at us like a thunderstorm—”
“Poor dear Hora. How you must have suffered. Here, let me bathe your brow. Such golden hair! Is it—?”
“Yes, it is natural. I have no need of dye from the saffron crocus.” She did not show offense. She always welcomed a chance to explain that her hair was naturally blonde. “My parents were Achaean, you see. Talos, you presume! We have hardly met, and your hands have begun to explore.”
“It is the nature of my race. You must learn our Cretan ways. Desire, explore, possess. You fill my eye, sweet Hora. If I am pleasing to you, well then—”
A sigh which carefully ranged from helplessness to plea. “You would take advantage of a castaway?”
He laughed. “Take advantage? You have much to offer, and your hair is a dazzlement. But then I am hardly a novice in love, and I can promise delights to equal gold.” (Always a trader, those Cretans. This for that, skill for gold.) “The choice is yours.”
“You must know my answer, you mischievous man.”
“How should I know? I lack Egyptian subtlety and you will have to tell me in unmistakable terms. A word or a gesture will do. I only know that there is a dark-eyed Babylonian in an adjacent room. With plumbing. And I never sleep alone.”
“If you were to let me linger here for a time. And my cousin too of course.”
“Free? Two rooms occupied?”
“How else?”
“Hora, dear, you are named for an Achaean goddess, I believe.”
“Yes, a goddess of time and seasons.”
“But there are connotations to the name.”
“How clever of you to spy me out!” Such was Hora’s gift. Caught, she would change her approach without so much as a pause. “Yes, I am a courtesan, and I had thought to establish myself at Pseiros. My skills are from Aphrodite. But I need a sponsor.”
“We have no courtesans here.”
“No courtesans? Such morality! You sound like those guilt-ridden desert folk, the Israelites.”
“We have no courtesans because we don’t need them. Why pay for a griffin when you can find one in the woods? A night of lodging out of my generous heart. No more.”
“Well then, let me enjoy my night alone.”
Hardly had he departed than Hora entered my door, bearing a cabyx of beer.
“Lordon, did you hear?” She spoke without rancor. She was used to many vicissitudes in her trade. (“Good and bad are mingled in every life,” she often said. “Accept the bad. Exult in the good. And y
ou are ahead of the gods!” I would have said we had not overtaken them.)
“Everything. Shall I knife him?”
“No.”
“Rob him?”
“In his own caravanserai?”
“Perhaps the Libyan lady then. With the plumbing.” Other thoughts than robbery pranced in my brain. I have always fancied an older woman. I quaffed the beer in a single gulp.
“No. I expect our host will spend his evening there. I suggest the streets. But the next man you hit, hit him hard. I don’t want another exile. I like this town. And the men will pay, I promise you that. Just think. I shall introduce prostitution into Pseira. This business of giving free is not to my taste and certainly bad for the trade. After all, I work long hours, and my expenses are great. We have only to find a house, and you shall make friends in the wine-shop and bring me the choicest males. That is to say, the rich and the young. The rich will do. But first to the streets with you.”
“Well, I don’t mind a little procuring along with my thievery. But I’m overdressed in this Egyptian kilt.” With a few vigorous tears I reduced my ancient garment to an abbreviation. “Now I shall look like a fisherman, I expect, and no one shall notice me, and I can skulk and lurk and do my worst.”
“Your best.” She took my face between her hands and kissed me for luck and smiled. “Did ever a woman have so resourceful a cousin? I wish I could join you. Sometimes I have wished to be a man. But then, being a woman has its own rewards.”
I was badly mistaken to steal after such a day, particularly in an alien land, particularly since the young men carry their money in their phallus-pouches, and the old men with money bags—bronze or copper ingots instead of coins—are attended by Lydian slaves. There were also ubiquitous griffins with which to contend. Egyptians like cats. Libyans like monkeys. Cretans like griffins. I can only describe them as huge, four-legged, rainbow-colored birds with long, sloping crests, black beaks as sharp as a fisherman’s hook, and a look of eminent satisfaction doubtless learned from their masters. It has often been said that a Cretan will lend you his wife but not his griffin.
Finally I found an old lady asleep in her litter. The bearers must have gone in search of a beer, since crime was hardly known in prosperous Crete. She carried no pouch but she wore a rare pectoral of silver and marguerites about her withered neck, and boldly I started to loosen the leather thongs.
A griffin began to urinate on my foot. I had not seen his approach, but I assured his departure with a forceful kick and resumed my theft.
The motion, however, had waked my victim.
“Young man, are you attempting a rape?” inquired the lady, not without expectation. She resembled a mummy encased in a silver sheath.
“Oh, no, I was only going to rob you.”
“Cutpurse!”
The magistrate spoke in a mild, silvery voice. But his meaning was bronze. “You are to leave the city before the sun has set. Thieves are unwelcome to the Griffin Judge.” (The Cretans believe that a griffin judges the dead and dispenses punishment or reward.) I was proud of Hora, who neither flinched nor stammered, but asked a question and stated a truth. “But where can we go? We have no ingots or goods.”
“To Phaistos in the south. It faces Egypt, you see, and there are women of your profession to service the sailors.” He seemed to belong in the room. Still as stone, he sat on a gypsum chair, and the light from clerestory windows lit the silver bracelets on his arms and kindled the agates set in his belt. Instead of a loin cloth, he wore an ankle-length robe. On the plastered walls, the Griffin Judge, robed like the magistrate, was weighing the deeds of the dead on a monumental scale. Judged, the women were metamorphosing into butterflies, the men into snakes; the evil would keep such shapes; the good would outgrow them whenever they chose—some would choose to linger with those they loved—and join the Goddess in the Isles of the Blest.
“And how shall we find our way to this distant port?” I snapped, looking piratical (or so I hoped) and booming like the surf.
“Distant? The width of the island is thirty-five miles or so at its widest point. Use the sun as your guide. And you can live on the land, which is very rich.”
“I am not a rustic,” said Hora with unaccustomed pique.
“Then learn. Of course you will have to pass through the Country of the Beasts.”
“Minotaurs, do you mean? Panisci? Then I would like a sedan chair and a suitable escort of
guards.”
“Charm them with your golden hair.” The quiet young man allowed himself a smile.
“At least we were only exiled,” I remarked as we were led from the room by mournful Libyans, slaves from a carefree homeland to the South. “The way they feel about thieves, we might have been sentenced to die.”
“But Lordon, we were. No one has ever returned from the Country of the Beasts.”
Chapter Two
Lordon
“I think I could be a farmer,” I said.
“City boy,” Hora chided. “You know how you hate the soil!”
“Not this soil. It’s sort of hello before goodbye.”
The girdling sea an embrace instead of a grasp . . . pine trees to break the occasional storm-wind from the north. Cultivated fields divided by rows of conch shells or multi-colored stones . . . grapevines, laden with clusters of fruit like upturned hives . . . olive trees, silver of leaf, green of fruit, awaiting late summer and beaters with sticks and baskets, the presses, the pressers, the vats and their dragonhead spouts. A summer house, blue as a halcyon, perched as airily in a cluster of vines. . . .
Then, a rise in the land, the cultivation yielding to forestation, with neither a road nor a path to join the work of man to that of the Mother or her irresponsible son.
The Country of the Beasts.
“It’s like a cyclopean wall,” said Hora, pausing to nurse a blistered foot. Her feet were unaccustomed to Cretan sandals, but I secretly guessed that she wished to delay our ascent. Walls, unless you know the builders, have to be scaled or breached, and what they conceal is often not what you want.
“It’s only pine and cypress, and foliage between. Wild grapevines, bracken, and such.”
“Only? They have a look of—judging and passing sentence. Arboreal griffins, a Cretan might say. I don’t think we have an invitation.”
“Well, we must just invite ourselves.”
A row of farmers, grim with scythes and hoes, stood in a human wall (low to be sure, but impossible to scale); behind them, the Libyan guards who had brought us from Pseira watched with the open sympathy which is a mark of their race. Hirelings or slaves, black of skin, exiles from the warm and hospitable south, they understood our plight.
“Well, we can’t go back. Even the coastal villagers are alerted to a thief and a whore—”
“Courtesan. Whores take what they can get. Courtesans choose.”
“Whatever they called you began with an ‘h.’”
“They were speaking my name, I expect.”
“I didn’t hear any ‘a.’ Anyway, they might as well have called us Gorgons. One old farmer hit me with his hoe,”
“Lordon, Lordon,” she smiled. The smile did not deceive me; she meant to allay my fears. “Why are we loitering here when we might be on our way? We’ve seen worse times. After our parents died—” She did not complete her remark; speak the unspeakable. “I expect we shall see this through.” Hora could always summon a smile. She had a thousand likes and a single fear (aside from a Sphinx), and the fear was love, which she shunned like the Ivory Sleep, and I was her devotee.
Thus we entered the Country of the Beasts, lifting a vine, squeezing between two trunks, and the ground rose gradually toward the limestone ridge (snow-clad in winter, snow-clad now in mid-summer where Ida challenged Olympus in majesty) which composed the spine of Crete and halved the island into a temperate north and a semi-tropical south. The sun diminished because of the thickening boughs; brambles prickled our legs; red-capped woodpeckers flutt
ered from trunk to trunk. At least our captors had allowed me a dagger, its bronze hilt emblazoned with cuttlefish—“you’ll need it”—and outfitted Hora in a makeshift tunic, a garment disdained by the women of Crete, which allowed her freedom of movement but enclosed her breasts. “No need to tempt the Beasts.”
A griffin flew at us, shrilling, from a clump of shrubs like a Libyan porcupine. Undomesticated, the females have the inclination of Harpies, and they would rather claw you than urinate on your foot. (The males are small and docile, much in the way of a spider male, who is often devoured by his larger mate.) Big as a dog with feathers, she tried to scratch at my eyes, but I brandished my dagger and beat her into retreat. Griffins are cowards, whether pets or loose in the wilds. Other and smaller birds observed us from the branches or from a hill which rose like a turtle from the thickest trees. Owl, oddly awake by day . . . phoenix, preening his daffodil feathers . . . partridge . . . pheasant . . . wood grouse. No fear of hunters in any bird. They seemed to be watching us. None of them sang.
“The whole forest is watching,” said Hora.
“Ridiculous,” I snorted, thinking, however, yes, our arrival is known and observed by every beast (and Beast?).
“Listen!”
At first it was like the drip of a water clock, rapid but scarcely audible even where birds had no song. A friendly sound, unless you must rise with the geese.
But the clocks became manifold; then, the drips were a thump like the hail on a flat stone roof.
“Beasts,” said Hora.
“Oh, probably oryxes running from hunters.” The oryx was a mountain antelope with black marks and long straight horns; proud, swift, and elusive. I had heard that a few of them lived in the mountains of Crete.
“Lordon, we never lie to each other. It’s Beasts, and they’re up to no good. Let’s make for that hill wiith the pheasants. It seems to be sunny on top, and at least we can spy out the land and see just what it is that’s stalking us.”
Cry Silver Bells Page 2