by Jodi Taylor
Dr Stone and Dr Dowson slowly emerged from Number Seven. I’m not sure what they were expecting – the eruption already in full swing, perhaps.
I stepped apart slightly from everyone and looked around, inhaling deeply. I could smell hot dust, a faint farmyard smell and a sweet-smelling night plant. I was back in the Bronze Age. I was in Minoan Crete at the height of its powers. What wonders would I see when the sun came up?
We didn’t go far from the pods, waiting quietly until Security reappeared about twenty minutes later.
‘Nothing close,’ said Markham. ‘There are some structures below us. About a quarter of a mile in that direction. Smells like some sort of farm, I think, and there’s a cluster of huts about a mile in the other direction. But otherwise we’re on our own up here.’
I nodded. ‘OK, everyone. Let’s get set up. Quick and quiet. I want everything in place by the time the sun comes up.’
There wasn’t actually much to do. We’ve done this sort of thing before and everyone knew the drill. The pods, Six, Seven and Eight, were parked in the usual three-sided square, their doors all facing inwards for easy defence. Not that I thought we’d have any problems. My only concern was that we might have landed in someone’s olive grove or inadvertently flattened someone’s crocus crop, but we were well out of the way up here.
We rigged up the canvas awnings that would shade both the pods and us because we’d mostly be living outside. We spread out coarse mats in the space between the pods because from now on life would be a constant battle to keep the dust out. That done, we put the kettle on, and as the sun rose, we were sitting comfortably, waiting to see what we would see.
‘This is a pretty spot,’ said Markham, looking around. We were on a small plateau. Above and to our right, olive trees drooped under their burden of unripe fruit. Far over to my left, out of view, stood Mount Ida, the tallest mountain on Crete and birthplace of Zeus, king of the gods.
The ground was rocky but not massively so. I could hear the faint tonkle of a goat bell in the distance as someone led their goats out to forage for the day. They must pass this way occasionally judging by the droppings. Or if not goats then really giant rabbits. Other than an occasional far-off bleat and the continuous, incessant noise of the cicadas, our world was completely silent. Utterly peaceful. And we were high enough to enjoy the light breeze shushing among the trees. It would be sweltering down in the town.
Peterson yawned and stretched. ‘I’m glad we’re not down there, Max. We’re definitely better off here. This is very pleasant. Bronze Age rural life. Pretty and peaceful.’
Frighteningly close, the monstrous bellow came out of nowhere and I nearly dropped my tea. For a very nasty moment, I thought the Minotaur himself had come for us.
‘Bloody hell,’ said Peterson, as we all scrambled to our feet, staring around. ‘What was that?’
We sent Evans off to investigate and he returned with bad news. The optimistically described ‘farm’ about a quarter of a mile below us was, in fact, nothing of the kind. Yes, there were a few huts and a couple of larger structures that looked like barns, and there was the traditional, nostril-searing, steaming midden, but mostly what we could see were cattle.
‘Not cattle,’ reported Markham, squinting through binocs. ‘Bulls. Bloody hell. Big bulls. Look at the size of the one on the end.’
‘Oh, wow,’ I said, grabbing the binocs off him. ‘Jackpot. Well done, me.’
Thirty seconds later I’d completely changed my mind and everyone hated me.
There must have been about twelve or fifteen of them altogether. Each one in his own sturdily built pen, all carefully and firmly erected a safe distance away from each other. As the sun rose, so did they. And they weren’t happy. Whether it was a competition, or they were greeting the sun, or they wanted their breakfast, or there weren’t enough girl cows around, or they were just discontented with their life in general, I don’t know. I do know they really weren’t happy. Not happy at all. They flung their heads around and stamped up massive clouds of Cretan dust. One or two of them slammed their heads into their timber-built pens. The structures shuddered but held. The noise was – noisy.
Speech was impossible. Which was probably just as well. Peterson was shouting about something. I could tell he was complaining because his mouth was moving.
I simply shrugged my shoulders, indicated I couldn’t hear him for the noise of the bulls over there and finished my tea.
Eventually, they quietened down. The bulls, I mean – not my less-than-happy band of campers. They had quite a lot to say.
‘Why here?’ demanded Peterson, gesturing around.
‘Well, I didn’t know, did I?’ I said indignantly. ‘This really isn’t my fault.’
‘Did you just look at a map and stick in a pin?’
‘Of course not,’ I said, even more indignantly, because that was, more or less, exactly what I had done. ‘I surveyed the area with regard to safety, fresh water, level land, proximity to Knossos . . .’
‘And this was the best you could come up with?’
‘Bulls are a major part of Cretan life. It’s a wonderful opportunity to study them up close. You should be thanking me.’
No one showed any signs of thanking me. I moved into unappreciated historian mode and sulked.
‘Are they all bulls?’ said Van Owen, who’d grabbed Markham’s binocs herself.
‘I’m pretty sure they are,’ said Dr Stone, grinning. I could see he was going to be a troublemaker. ‘Allow me to explain the difference between boy cows and girl cows. Can you see that great big dangling thing . . . ?’
‘I meant . . .’ she said, with dignity, ‘there’s some speculation the Minoans might have bred aurochs. For the bull-leaping.’ She paused, confused because aurochs is the singular. ‘I think I mean “aurochses”.’
‘Makes you sound like Gollum,’ said Markham, grabbing the binocs back again. ‘Bloody hell. They’re even bigger than I thought.’
Well, this was interesting. They’ve all gone now, sadly, hunted out of existence, but aurochses – or aurochsen – were huge, undomesticated cattle famed for being horribly vicious and aggressive and doubly so during the mating season. Which was around about now. If the Minoans used aurochses, then bull-leaping wasn’t just some pretty ritual. There would be blood and injuries all over the place and people would die.
‘No,’ said Peterson, squinting. ‘Just bulls. Bloody big ones, though. Perhaps with aurochs ancestors.’
They shut up eventually. The bulls, I mean. I tried to explain how interesting all this was and what a wonderful opportunity we had here and all I got from my colleagues were hard looks. I sighed. There’s a saying somewhere about how a prophet is never appreciated in his own country, and exactly the same applies to an historian in her own department. Similar management principles apply to both bulls and historians though: control and discipline are maintained through a judicious blend of food and sex. I thought about mentioning this but decided to wait until they’d cheered up a little. Although, as I brightly pointed out, there would be no oversleeping on this assignment.
Our neighbours aside, this spot was perfect. Knossos lay before us, slowly revealing itself as the sun swept across the town, turning white walls golden and the shadows a lovely deep purple.
The palace dominated the town. It just went on and on. We were looking down on it so it was just flat roof after flat roof spreading down the hillside. Terrace dropped down on to terrace. Building crowded building. From up here it looked exactly like a giant maze. Or a labyrinth. I could see the vast open Central Courtyard around which everything seemed to be built. I could see stairways and fat, terracotta-painted columns supporting the upper floors. And over everything, on the highest point, a huge pair of stylised bull horns dominated the palace, the town, everything. Wherever you stood, you looked up at them. Or they looked down on you.
‘Interesting,�
�� I said. The bull clamour had subsided somewhat as they got stuck into their breakfast.
‘What is?’ said Dr Stone, who, unlike the rest of my colleagues, didn’t appear to be holding any sort of grudge.
‘Well, society here is matriarchal. The Mother rules. And yet, when you think about it, you can’t get much more macho than a pair of giant bull horns.’
‘Oh, I don’t know,’ said Evans. ‘If you really want macho, how about a pair of giant bull’s . . . ?’
‘Yes, thank you,’ I said. I turned to Markham. ‘Why did you bring him?’
‘For his valuable insights into the social significance of one part of a bull’s anatomy over another. You know you always bring the Security Section along to handle the difficult stuff.’
Time to change the subject. ‘Right,’ I said, before we started brawling. A bad example to set the bulls. ‘We’ll spend the morning exploring and getting our bearings. Sun protection and hats, everyone. Especially the men. Everyone back here for noon. We’ll have lunch and sit quietly for a couple of hours – in this heat we won’t want to do much else – and then down into town to meet the others and sort out our plan of action. Let’s go.’
Everything went well. I allowed myself to hope this might – just might – be a problem-free assignment. We had lunch and then left Evans behind, guarding Dr Dowson and Dr Stone, he said. They both wanted to set up their equipment and he was there to do the heavy lifting. He prepared himself for this onerous task by finding a nice patch of shade and making himself comfortable.
‘I’m like a coiled spring,’ he said, closing his eyes.
We left them to it.
The best bit about being here was that Van Owen and I could stride out with the boys. We didn’t have to shuffle along at the back or cover ourselves up or unsuccessfully attempt to look modest and chaste. We strode downhill, arms swinging, perfectly comfortable in our fitted blouses and bell-shaped skirts. We were covered enough to be protected from the sun but our clothing was light and cool. I was in blue and terracotta with an embroidered apron that fell front and back and Van Owen wore a terracotta skirt and a striped ochre blouse.
It was the lads who suffered. They’d seen sense over the loincloths so they were all in tunics. Very short tunics. Another reason Van Owen and I were at the front. There was a great deal of skin on show.
We’d sprayed ourselves with the strongest sun protection around and before anyone asks – not, repeat not, the stuff knocked up by Professor Rapson and his team – which, I had to admit, did provide a more than adequate protection from the harmful effects of the sun’s rays, because ten to fifteen seconds after application, the wearer was encased in a rigid shell of unpleasant-smelling something-or-other that burst into flames if the wearer incautiously ventured too close to an open fire. Thank you, professor, but we’ll stick to the proprietary brands.
The ground was rocky but there was a goat path and we followed that. We were talking and gesturing and full of high spirits because this was the first day of our spectacular new assignment. We’d been here nearly nine hours and no one was dead or bleeding yet. I had high hopes for this one.
We didn’t rush and it took us just over half an hour to get to the outskirts of town. The houses surrounding the palace that had looked so small from our campsite were actually nothing of the sort. Nothing was under two storeys tall, many had three and some had four. They were sturdy and well built – because of earthquakes, I supposed. They’d used crushed stone for the ground floors while the upper floors were made of traditional fired mud bricks. Most were whitewashed, rendering them dazzling in the bright sunshine, with their architectural details – the surprisingly large windows, the eaves and so forth – picked out in red, black and ochre. Almost all of them were adorned with the symbol of the Labrys, the double-headed axe. An ancient symbol, older even than the legend of the Minotaur.
And they had public art. I was entranced. Blank walls were adorned with beautiful frescos of bulls, dolphins, flowers, birds, ships and horses. The colours were vibrant and intense.
‘The streets are paved,’ said Peterson, looking down.
‘They’ve got aqueducts,’ I said, dragging my eyes away from a lively depiction of a school of dolphins barrelling through bright blue waves.
‘And water butts,’ said Van Owen, looking around. ‘To collect the water off the roofs. This is really sophisticated. Look – is that some sort of pipe system over there?’
Colleagues forgotten, she tried to set off down another street and was pulled back by Markham.
‘We’re here for a couple of months, at least,’ he said soothingly. ‘We mustn’t have all our fun on the first day. Let’s leave something for tomorrow, shall we?’
Site A was about two hundred yards north of the town and laid out in the same configuration as Site B. They not only had their awnings and mats out but they’d identified a nearby well from which to top up their water tanks.
We all had an evening meal together, I checked everyone was clear on their work schedule, we wished them good luck and, at the end of our first day, slowly strolled home in the evening sunshine.
31
Our daily routine was soon established. We rose early – not that we had a lot of choice; the Dawn Bellow saw to that. We’d have breakfast – usually porridge; Markham’s speciality. He’d dollop a great, grey lump into my bowl, I’d force my way through it somehow, and it would sit like a lump of lead in my stomach as we worked our way through our allotted tasks for the morning.
Then there was picking up the mats and shaking the dust off them and sweeping out the pods, because no matter how careful we were, there always seemed to be more of Crete inside the pods than outside.
We had two seemingly never-ending tasks. Gathering firewood and fetching water. We seemed to get through both at an extraordinary rate but it had to be done. And sitting around a small fire in the evening talking over our day and planning the next was a pleasant, relaxing experience. All the firewood was cut to approximately the same size and stacked neatly behind Number Eight.
I’m not actually sure what happened but one evening we chucked on what we thought was an ordinary log and ten seconds later the smell could knock out a bull.
People turned to glare accusingly at Markham, usually the prime suspect for unpleasant odours.
‘What?’ he said, looking up. ‘Bloody hell – who did that one?’
The smell got worse. People began to get up and retch.
‘What the hell . . . ?’
Two minutes of increasingly desperate investigation later – pulling up the mats, inspecting the latrine, sniffing armpits and so on – we discovered some idiot had mistaken a corpse for a piece of wood and that the apparently small log smouldering nicely on top of the fire was, in fact, a very-long-dead Cretan badger. The air was full of abuse, recrimination and thick black smoke until Dr Stone pulled himself together, found a stick, lifted it out of the fire and then paused because he didn’t want to set fire to this pretty Cretan hillside.
Sadly, it smelled even worse out of the fire than in it.
‘Get rid of it,’ shrieked Van Owen, her apron over her nose, from a distance of about twenty feet.
‘How? Where?’
The problem was solved by Markham, who shoved the smoking carcass into a bucket of water. There was a great deal of hissing steam and the smell became unbearable. Half of us were sick. The other half watched the first half and then threw up in sympathy.
Not one of our more convivial evenings. It took ages to clear up the mess. Every log was very carefully inspected after that and we all took a blood oath never to mention this to Site A. Ever.
And, sadly, we’d left the doors open, so the smell permeated the pods, too. Ignoring the feeble bleats of the Security Section, we all slept a hundred yards away in the olive grove that night. And the next.
Fetching water was t
he other continual chore. First thing in the morning it was off to the cistern with buckets to top up the tanks for the day, and Dr Stone would calculate the water-purification dose. We usually had to top up at noon and in the evening as well. Especially in the evening if we wanted to shower off the Cretan dust after a long, hard day sitting under a tree observing something or other.
Over breakfast and the one cup of tea we allowed ourselves, we’d organise ourselves more or less peacefully into teams and set out, filled with enthusiasm, eager to accomplish the day’s tasks.
Returning at noon – when the day stopped being merely hot and became incandescent – we’d have lunch – bread and something, usually – sit in the shade, compare notes and write up our findings.
We’d be back out again in the marginally cooler early evening air. I’d use this time to visit the other site and have a look at what they’d been up to and then we’d all be back to our pods before dark. The site leaders would do a headcount and we’d have our evening meal. No alcohol – unless it was Saturday night, when we allowed ourselves a mug of wine each. Roberts had brought his guitar. Everyone was allowed two personal items – I’d brought a sketch pad and pencils – and we’d sit around and have a bit of a sing-song. Dr Dowson and Dr Stone were having a chess tournament. They were both very good players and it was a bit of a tussle, apparently. Several people had brought a pack of cards and we’d all brought at least one book so we had a library as well.
Not that we lingered long after our evening meal. Staying up after dark used valuable power so we generally went to bed shortly after the sun went down.
Occasionally a few of us would venture down to a headland – somewhere with a view out over the Med – where we would watch the sea turn into a still cauldron of molten copper, reflecting golden highlights from the setting sun. Trust me, the sunsets on Crete could make your soul sing.
Then it was back to the pods, slipping and stumbling over the rocks, for a hard-earned, good night’s sleep.
I’d made it clear there was a choice. Yes, we could sleep outside on the pods’ roofs, but there must be at least one person on watch at all times. Otherwise it was everyone inside, stifling or not. And no, no air con because it used too much power. We chose to sleep outside and everyone took a turn on watch. An hour each, which was no hardship. I myself would use the time to watch a million stars wheeling across the night sky. And we were much more comfortable outside.