We were naturally curious and Hermes, we were frightened, Marguerite and I. In our short lives, we had suffered fear and loss, flight and loneliness, but never slavery, the ultimate degradation, not even of the heart (that is to say, until I met Zoe, that undegrading enslaver!).
The spokesman for the Tritons, slapping his tail on the deck, confronted the leader of the fishermen, who possessed a wide, squashed head like a hammerhead shark, and bulging eyes. You had the feeling that one of the eyes might fall to the ground, so insecurely did they seem attached to the head. It is said by the Cretans that the Goddess created wonder and beauty in the world, but her son, a child at the time, had made the terror and ugliness, the fearsome monsters and the monstrous men, just as a human child may scribble Cyclopes on tablets of stone or sheets of papyrus, or model clay into marauding wolves.
They conversed in an all but unintelligible combination of perverted Cretan and the series of hisses and snorts which comprise Tritonian. (Have you ever heard a slave being auctioned on the block? The auctioneer’s speech perverts whatever tongue he speaks.) I caught such words as “more,” “Bull-man,” “murex”; there were obvious threats and promises interspersed with scowls and grins (the teeth of a Triton are close-packed and numberless; lost in a fight, they quickly replace themselves; again the shark. There were hisses which served the Triton for expletives and were understood by the fisherman. At any rate, the bargainers reached an agreement and, for the first time, their smiles—leers I should say—were simultaneous. In exchange for the three of us, the fisherman offered a barrel of murex shells, cleansed and polished and ready for wearing in pendants around the neck. The precious dyes, of course, had been extracted for the robes of kings, and the shells were valueless except to Tritons, who liked the look of them and thought them bringers of luck. The fisherman—Hammerhead, I had started to think of him—was careful, however, not to open the door in his railing and not to venture from the support of his friends, who resembled each other and also well fed squids. Perhaps they had grown to suit their occupation. They shared an odor of fish and filth, and their loin cloths could have been the rags discarded by household slaves. Together the four of them lifted a large cedar beam with a hook on the end and thrust it across the railing and balanced it, quivering, over the Tritons—and us.
“Go,” hissed the chief Triton. He bared his teeth in a grin or a snarl. It was the only word he spoke to us.
“Gladly,” I snapped, but Silver Bells hushed me with I shake of his head. I had thought to be going from worse to better, from the inhuman (not the non-human) to our own, however inimical world. Silver Bells seemed to agree—with reservations—and did not want me to anger the Tritons into changing their minds.
Marguerite was unceremoniously hooked by her tunic to the beam, lifted into the air, and dropped among the fishermen. The Tritons handled her like a piece of wood. To them, a Human is ugly, and a beautiful woman the ugliest of her race. A reversal, you see, in point of view. Hideous Hammerhead was probably handsome to his friends, or to the Harpies with which the Tritons mate. I gasped at Marguerite’s flight, but she lit and sprang to her feet and smiled encouragement to me.
I was less secure in my own transferral; I knew that my tenuous loin cloth, old, torn, rotting, could easily burst and drop me onto the spikes. The wind in my face was cool but comfortless; I could see the boats and their ominous occupants but I could not close my eyes! A mess of maggots seemed to crawl in my stomach and slither up my throat. Then, the jolt of arrival, the rough hands hustling me into a cage beside Marguerite. She pressed my shoulder and broadly smiled.
“We made it, Cousin,” she said. “The Mother has smiled on us.”
(Strange, we had broken one of our own steadfast rules: “Excessive hope is the food of fools.”)
Then it was Silver Bells’ turn. Wearing no garments, he had to be trussed to the pole with a piece of line. He somehow survived the trip with dignity and joined us in the cage, erect and proud, a figure of living fire. I marvelled to see that the bells still hung from his horns and felt a premonition from gods or demons: It is time to despair when Silver Bells loses his bells.
The walls of the cage were wooden stakes (bamboo, said Silver Bells, brought to the island by Centaurs from the distant East). We could look between them and breathe the fresh sea breeze. Not that we liked what we saw. Or being seen. We were scrutinized as if we were slaves. And of course we were. Or worse.
Still, we dared to hope.
The four fishermen studied us through the walls. I felt like a fish, about to be brained and eaten.
“Ladies ‘ull like the lad,” said Hammerhead. “Looks right springy too.” A nod of agreement. (Perhaps they would sell me as a stud?)
If they glanced at me, they stared at Marguerite. She refused to sit; she stood with regal presence and glared in turn at each of the staring men, and you would have taken her for a Sumerian queen, receiving court. Her beauty had somehow grown instead of diminished in the Country, and, exiled, captured, pinched, prodded, hoofed, and dumped, she had flourished instead of wilted. Still, she was not misnamed for the Marguerite Daisy, the simplest of flowers. Carmine would seem an affront to her rubicund cheeks. A princess, yes, but robed in simplicity.
“Girl’s got spunk,” said Hammerhead, a trifle cowed. “Ought to sell fast.”
And Silver Bells? Well, I expect they had never seen a Minotaur. They commented on the color of his hair; they observed the hardness of his hooves (“hard as a wench or a chain”); they remarked on his horns and shook their heads at the sight of the silver bells.
Then, the tail. . . .
“That good for anything?”
“Swatting thievish sailors,” said Silver Bells, with a lash through the bars at the fisherman’s foot.
Hammerhead squealed and stooped to nurse his wound.
“Ain’t thieves,” he pouted. “Paid, we did.” They did not retaliate with blows; they did not wish to damage the merchandise.
He and his three friends, looking as if they belonged in the sea, eating each other, perched on the prow of the boat and proceeded to get completely and merrily drunk on cheap malt beer. They seemed to feel that they had happened upon a prodigious piece of luck. The value of Silver Bells was clearly beyond price, and Marguerite had also impressed them with her manner and looks. Even I looked “springy.”
“What am I supposed to do?” I asked. “Spring about piping on a flute like a drunken Satyr?”
“And me,” said Marguerite with obvious disappointment. “They don’t seem to care in the least about my skills. Nobody even asked.”
“To outguess a Cretan is to answer a Sphinx’s riddle. I know I sound like Chiron, but it’s true, and I didn’t steal it. All we can do is wait until our captors sober up enough to pole us ashore.” He forced a tentative smile. “But remember, Cretans are far from the cruelest of men. Look to lower Nubia for the killers.” It must have caused him pain to praise the men who had killed Alyssum. But he wanted to lessen the pain called fear in Marguerite and me.
“And you, my dear,” said Marguerite. She never spoke with such sweetness except to me. “Did they hurt you when they tied you to that pole?”
“I’m tough,” he said. “Under this silky fur is sheer muscle.” But I saw some blood on the fur and I thought how his manly race had dwindled and died because it was their nature to risk their lives in the defense of their friends and neighbors and even strangers.
If Pseira was a wonder of octagons, Phaistos was equally wonderful with squares and rectangles (and never imagine a stark and symmetrical city in the Egyptian style). Pseira was a garden of lotuses. Phaistos was a city of colored blocks, built by the God when he was still a child, and not in a mood to make such hideous beings as Tritons and Harpies and the monster Sphinx. No two rectangles, no two squares, were precisely the same size, even though many stood in pairs or clusters, several sharing a single wall; or perhaps a pygmy square, a single room, perched like a soldier’s helmet atop a titan
ic base.
Like Pseira, Phaistos mingled blues and reds—blue facades, and red, bulging columns in the porticoes of the marketplace and fronting the sometime palace of the king, Minos XIII, who ruled the island from Knossos to the north. Like Pseira, it did not have any temples, those formidable, faultlessly geometrical structures with pylon gates you find near Egyptian tombs; or the halls of megarons of Achaean cities, Mycenae, Sparta, and Athens. The rustic Cretans worship in caves or on mountaintops, the metropolitan Cretans worship in household shrines, where they place an image of ivory or terra cotta—perhaps the Goddess, perhaps her son; perhaps the Divine Bull who holds the island securely atop his shoulders or a pair of horns to symbolize his power. Whether goddess or son, bull or horns, the image will move the worshippers by its smallness and delicacy, not overpower them like an Egyptian pharaoh carved in the side of a cliff.
Phaistos differed from Pseira, however, in its spirit, and the spirit resided in more than the shape of its buildings, or the keelless Egyptian vessels, resting along the beach to the West of the town, sails lowered, oars stacked on the decks (I supposed but could not discern). We had not been welcomed in Pseira; we had been arrested, tried by a judge, and sentenced to probable death, a harsh sentence for a minor theft. Still, we had found a sort of justice for a crime which the people of Pseira—indeed, all of mercantile Crete—take with the utmost seriousness. The island depends on trade, merchants, barter; therefore, theft is a heinous crime.
But the spirit of Phaistos was different. In Egypt every city had its patron deity. The patron of Phaistos must be the God as a small boy: handsome, utterly engaging, and totally ruthless in getting his way, even with his mother, the Goddess. Capricious. That was the word for him. And his caprices could delight—or destroy. He had created a colorful clutter of a town; be had also made the Harpies, Tritons, and Lamias.
I was not surprised that Phaistos was famous for its annual games, held in his honor, or that their nature changed from year to year or that the date of them changed from month to month. When the god was feeling benign and sharing the mood with his subjects, trained dancers from Knossos frolicked over the backs of raging bulls, and few were lamed and no one was killed, unless he should fail in his leap. Or there were singers who sang of the harvest home and dancers who danced to the jangle of sistrums and actors who performed a pantomine to celebrate creation and the gifts of the Goddess whose most unpredictable gift was her son. If the mood of the son was cruel, then men must die in a variety of ways which only the imaginative Cretans (never the stolid, unimaginative Egyptians) could devise.
This year, who could say? We only knew that the Games would honor the God, and include a bull—and us.
The Cretans, like all of their neighbors on the mainland—Achaeans, Egyptians, Babylonians—import slaves from foreign lands, and slaves must be displayed, bought, and sold, usually in the marketplace among the shops and stalls. I knew that Phaistos had its market and its blocks for display where men and women were stripped and examined—the men for youth and strength, the women for beauty and grace.
Silver Bells, Marguerite, and I were not, however, taken into the town. The attention we had received was special—and ominous—and we were hardly surprised that our destination was a villa between the town and the sea. By now it was almost dusk; by now I was tired to the point of exhaustion, and my observations were dim to say the least . . . a hedgerow enclosing a large estate . . . a cluster of coconut palms achatter with blue monkeys from the jungles of Libya . . . a pool of blue lotuses . . . and of course a stone, many-rectangled villa with two levels and a garden on the roof. (It was said that the Goddess had robed the world in green, herself in blue, her son in red. “Let there be colors,” she said, “and let them be bright and fortunate, instead of funereal black and nondescript brown. Brown is for pyramids, those tombs the Egyptians will build for housing dead kings. As if they will need a house when they die, those foolish kings!”)
Our captors waited in the vestibule while a slave went to fetch the master to examine the catch. Hammerhead fretted and swore at the wait; his inarticulate friends affixed their faces to their leader’s mood. Meanwhile, two old women came to remove our sandals and bathe our feet and faces in myrrh; melancholy Libyans, the folk of the South, exiled but not bereft of their kindliness.
“Mistress,” said the elder to Marguerite. Her skin looked like that of a coconut black from the sea. “You’ve nothing to fear. Your youth and your beauty will keep you from menial tasks. But him”—she pointed to Silver Bells—“I never saw such a one. Not even in the nethermost jungles of Yam.”
The slave returned and ushered us into a room with stone couches running along the walls, and murals of bulls and bull dancers and the symbol of male deity, a pair of golden horns. A table held a rhyton or drinking pitcher in the shape of a bull, and the sacredness of the room was apparent to all of us.
The owner of the villa, a gamemaster by the name of Malos, rich, sleek, respected for his profession, wearing a loin cloth for which he was much too fat, entered the room with the walk of a man who is used to being obeyed. I expected a leer for Marguerite, a phantom of loveliness in the dying light, and I saw that she shared my expectations, but he gave her a quick, admiring nod, dismissed me with a glance, and stared raptly at Silver Bells.
He clapped his bands and squealed and his fat brown stomach quivered above his belt, like the foaming of beer about to overflow its cup.
“A Minotaurt It’s true, it’s true!”
“Said it was,” sulked Hammerhead.
Malos examined Silver Bells from his horns to his hooves and listed his attributes:
“Tail’s not molted.
“Hair as glossy as silk from the East.
“Horns like antlers, and made from mother of pearl.”
“Sir,” said Silver Bells in a level voice. “I am not a bull on the hoof. I am a Beast. True, I am your captive, but if you continue to list my qualities, I will gore you with my ‘mother of pearl.’ It’s hard, by the way.”
“Gore me and your friends will feed my griffins.” Malos did not shout. He did not even raise his voice in the way of merchants who wish to protest a price.
Silver Bells paused and a terrible anger ruddied his face. He was not accustomed to bland words and cruel intentions.
“Very well,” he said. “I will do what you wish. So long as you do not harm my friends.”
“Forget about us, Silver Bells,” I cried. “It’s you they seem to want for their—caprices.”
The Gamemaster, not even deigning to recognize my outburst, turned to Hammerhead. “It is not a time to bargain. You have brought me a treasure. Name your price.”
“A hundred ingots of copper,” said Hammerhead, a moderate sum to Malos, a fortune to fishermen.
“As you wish.”
“And the drinkin’ pitcher!”
“That too.”
Hammerhead and his squids departed with the look of men who have outwitted the “city folk.” I feared (hoped?) that he would lose an eye in his enthusiasm.
Malos resumed his scrutiny of Silver Bells. Then to his slaves: “House them, feed them, tend them with care. If they are flawed in any way, especially the Minotaur—”
The Cretans sometimes sacrifice a bull to honor the Great Bull who upholds the island. They think it an honor to both the animal and the God and, not having fought a land war in several centuries, they also relish the sight of blood.
My acorn of hope diminished into a seed, and, in spite of myself and my promise to Marguerite, I remembered the past. Like a ravening brute, it shook me in its maw.
Egypt . . . childhood . . . dwarf chrysanthemums, cornflowers, and sycamore figs around a lotus pool with pads as large as elephant ears. I, a manly eleven, loved by parents and cousin Hora (who had lived with us since her family died of the Plague) father a trader, born in Mycenae, settled in Memphis to trade with lands to the south . . . Hora already ripe for marriage and courted by wealthy fathers for stalwa
rt sons. . . .
We played beside the pool, Hora and I; indulgent girl in a white, ankle-length sheath and younger boy, naked and unashamed, bead shaved except for the “lock of youth.”
“Catch,” I cried, as I threw a ball of stitched leather enclosing barley husks.
I did not hear the thud of the ball in my cousin’s hands.
I heard the scream, as unexpected as lightning in the time of the Drouth. My mother, that frail and luminous lady whom kings had wooed, stood on the high-roofed veranda and leaned on a column topped by a stone lotus bud. There was blood on her face and robe. Otherwise, she was a white as a pillar of salt—white robe, white face, white hands outstretched as if to thrust us into a safer world. It was she who lingered, almost dead on her feet, in a world which had ordered her into the dusk. Her spirit was poised to fly from her lips. She had stayed its flight to warn us; delayed her burial, journey, joining with Osiris in the Celestial Garden.
“Father dead. Hide. H . . . I . . . d . . . e.”
Behind her I saw a bristle of wings, an enormous, feline head, slouching from side to side and dripping blood from its jaws.
“Mother!” I started to run to her help. Or perhaps to seek her help.
“Too late,” cried Hora. “The pool—”
“No!”
She seized my hand in a cruel grasp.
“A Sphinx,” she said. “Their vision is dim. They follow your scent, which they never forget. The water will hide us, if anything. It’s what they hate the most. If they drink it, they die.”
We crouched under lotus pads, sucking the thin trapped air, hoping the bulge of our heads would not be seen on the bank.
But we could hear.
The slow, careful pad of the catlike feet as she searched the garden, sniffing the air; uprooting a sycamore fig and hurling the bush to the ground; shaking a palm until the coconuts fell from the fronds. I saw it in my mind; I saw my mother’s hands and vomited, endlessly, wrenchingly, somehow stifling sound.
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