by Laura Gill
Oh, how she loved wearing the costume, though! The priestesses of the grove wore a skirt of seven tiered flounces and nothing else. They whitened their faces with lime, painted their mouths and cheeks with red ocher, and carefully oiled and coiffed their hair, so that in the end they looked more like a clay image of the goddess than mortal women. Pasibe loved the erotic, otherworldly aspect of the costume, far more than so the uncomfortable woolen garments, rattling copper and shell talismans, and headdress she wore as high priestess. She liked being in the calm, green wilderness, away from the monotonous chanting, sober bloodletting, and public scrutiny of her duties.
Murmured conversation and laughter up ahead forced her to pause. The priestess on duty was entertaining a worshipper; women did not visit the grove except in the morning to hang their amulets from the trees, or late at night when they wished to anonymously serve the goddess and by her grace conceive, as Pasibe herself had attempted to do.
Pasibe turned and crept around to the rear of the grove, wanting to see which priestess was on duty. Sometimes the older ones would sit and visit when not entertaining worshippers. Alas, it was Akaia, a lovely virago with whom Pasibe had nothing in common. Akaia was engaged in conversation with a man and his son—and flirting with the youth, too, who could not have been more than fourteen. She fluttered her eyelashes, stroked his arm, smiled to show a hint of white teeth—all tricks priestesses of the grove were taught in order to entice men. Judging by his fierce blush, it must be the boy’s first time.
Pasibe discreetly withdrew, lest she attract the goddess’s wrathful gaze, and headed in the opposite direction to a place where she could sit undisturbed. Akaia’s flirtatious laughter followed her. That woman had not a care in the world except for waiting on the next pretty trinket her many lovers lavished upon her. Would she have been so blithe had Velchanos incinerated one of her lovers in front of her, Pasibe wondered?
Then she considered why she had gone to the grove. Had she been hoping to confide in one of the older, wiser priestesses, someone who might understand the complexity of her attachment to Sama, or had Rhaya guided her steps, wishing her to serve Pipituna once more? Only Pipituna knew how much she relished being a boy’s first, to strive against and harness that inexhaustible young spirit, to teach him to make love properly. There was nothing obscene about it; she never took any of them home. Her lovers were always older youths of seventeen or eighteen, adult men but young enough to have the energy to satisfy her. She did not really want another husband, because no other man could have compared with Dragas.
She had not met Sama in the grove, but during the bull games held beside the river below Knossos a year ago. The Knossians, who still considered themselves bound to the ancient Bull Clan, honored the god each year by sending their pubescent youths and maidens to dance with the bulls. At fourteen, Pasibe had met the bull, touched his horns to the crowd’s delight, and defied death.
Oh, but Sama had been splendid. His supple limbs gleaming with oil, and his smile nonchalant, he had stood out from the crowd watching the dancers. He had been the very ideal of Kaphti youth, with a broad chest and shoulders tapering to a narrow waist, and the long dark ringlets that young men sported until marriage. His handsome face and the bulge filling his codpiece tempted Pasibe with fantasies of what their lovemaking might be like. It had not taken much for her, a priestess of the grove, to seduce him. A few well-placed caresses, a sultry look, and a gift of a finely tooled leather belt, and she had him writhing and naked in her bed that very same night.
Pasibe flushed, recalling that. There was no doubt that she had satisfied his youthful lust; no girl his age could have known such tricks, or employed them so skillfully. And he certainly enjoyed her gifts of clothing, ornaments, scented oil, and wine. Then why had he chafed at the thought of remaining her lover, and become so quarrelsome? Had he been so eager to cut his lovelocks and settle down to a humdrum existence to some village girl when he could have the high priestess? He never gave her a straight answer when she asked.
Was it a return to the past she wanted? Pasibe did not know. As much as she hated to admit that her brother was right about anything, Asterion had consistently pointed out that her lovers were all callow youths, and that she wasted herself on them. Would she have married Sama had he wanted to stay? She did not know.
Had she and Dragas had children, she would have followed a different, more natural path, and devoted herself to them.
No, she decided, she really could not blame Sama for wanting to move on, to assert himself as a man.
Brushing dirt and stray twigs from her skirt, she rose and returned to the path heading south to Knossos. She arrived in the afternoon to discover Kamash on duty. This time, he showed more respect, raising his hand to his forehead in salute. “No one’s been inside the house, Lady Pasibe,” he reported. “Yamal’s wife milked your goats for you, though, and fed your house snake.”
“Thank you.” Pasibe’s gaze strayed toward the cypress stump; the blackened earth where Sama had died was marked with flowers—white almond blossoms and yellow lilies and sweet-smelling narcissus. “Did you do this?” she asked Kamash. She should have thought of it herself.
He shook his head. “Tana brought them to honor the boy, and to appease Velchanos and Lady Amaya.” A pause. “Your brother was here yesterday, and one of Minos’s stewards.”
Pasibe did not want to see either. “I think you can go home, Kamash. It doesn’t seem that anyone is interested in disturbing me.”
It was a while before he left. In the meantime, she fetched water for washing, meeting no one along the way; afternoon was when people rested after the morning’s work. The hearth fire had died during her absence; she would have to bring fire from the sanctuary. That could wait an hour or two. She inspected the vegetables budding in her garden and pulled a few weeds. The rain had been good for the green shoots. She looked forward to many warm days working in the fertile earth.
Then she saw the house snake basking on a warm rock. It was a common rat snake, but a beautiful creature nonetheless, with red and yellow markings; she felt blessed that it had taken residence in her dwelling. “Hello, there, holy one.” She knelt down, lifted it in both hands, and spent some time stroking its scales. “Tana has been good to you, I hear. I hope you haven’t missed me too much. I’m sorry. I went to seek the goddess at the Alautha Cave.”
The house snake swiped her skin with a forked tongue, a good sign. Pasibe whispered a prayer for it to take below to Ashasara, the snake goddess who relayed messages between mortals and the divine, and released it. “Enjoy the day, holy one. Here’s a patch of sunlight for you.”
Minos’s advisor, when he called on her that evening, was more deferential and circumspect. His name was Duphiro. Clean-shaven, he wore a rock crystal ring and three gleaming copper necklaces, for Minos liked and encouraged ostentation. Pasibe invited him in to perform a libation and partake of her hospitality.
“Minos sincerely regrets the personal loss you have suffered. The death of so young a man is a terrible tragedy.” All tragedies were terrible, Pasibe reflected glumly. She wished Duphiro would get to the point. “And please, accept my own personal condolences.”
“Of course.” Pasibe offered the man more wine, which he bolted down like a man dying of thirst. “But why did you not come sooner?”
Duphiro looked caught. So he did not want to answer that question. “This has all been...” Pasibe saw him eyeing the wine jug. She poured him a third cup. “Most delicate, Priestess. A most delicate matter, really. No one knew how to proceed. The lightning strike, the personal involvement of holy Velchanos, that required much consideration.” He reached for the cup again. “The oracle bones were consulted. There was no sign of disaster, only... The bones were rather vague, to tell you the truth. It may be that Velchanos gazed down from the heavens, glimpsed Sama’s beauty, and desired him for his own. I admit, it is a rare occurrence, but it has been known to happen.”
Pasibe had not considered
that possibility, partly because it was so ridiculous. Any god gazing down at that moment would have caught Sama at his very worst: accusing of her being cold and smothering, calling her a sentimental idiot for wanting him when she was old enough to be his mother, and suggesting that, with her graying hairs, she was wrinkled and undesirable. Maybe Rhaya had witnessed the event, and ordered Velchanos to blast the youth for his insolence toward her high priestess. Pasibe had not thought of that either, focused as she was on her own grief and guilt. She certainly did not deem it wise to mention that aloud.
“I see,” she said.
Duphiro took her answer as an excuse to again sample the wine; her small vineyard, situated on a sunny hillside just east of the river, produced a good vintage. “Hmm, yes. The best thing to do, Priestess, is to return to the sanctuary. Serve the goddess as you’ve always done. It might very well be that what we mortals see as a tragedy will bring manifold blessings to us all.”
“You mean that Sama was a sacrifice.” Pasibe was beginning to wish that she might have been a fly on the wall during the deliberations of the elders.
Duphiro answered with a noncommittal look. “When the gods so spectacularly claim a victim, yes, perhaps.”
If anything, his visit left her with even greater doubts. Maybe Velchanos had chanced to see and desire Sama for his own, but she doubted that. Despite her sentimentality, she had been under no illusions about her lover’s character, and at the time of his death had been growing weary of his tantrums, of giving and giving, and not getting enough in return.
Pasibe summoned the junior priestesses and underwent the rites of purification, bathing in the courtyard of the sanctuary before going inside to reverence the idols. She donned her sacral robes of yellow and blue and painted her face, even though she did not feel ready to play high priestess to her dead lover’s divine ascension, particularly as she did not think Sama had apotheosized into anything other than a knot of charred flesh.
The people decided for her. Her property became a place of pilgrimage. People saw in the cypress stump a rough-hewn altar where they could pour libations of wine and oil, and leave offerings of flowers, amulets, and tiny baked votive limbs. What, did they think vain and haughty Sama would cure their afflictions?
Women once again frequented her hearth, both young and old, bearing presents for her as Sama’s high priestess. But with them also came an unwelcome burden of questions.
“How beautiful was he?” This, from women who had never seen Sama in the flesh, or known what a callous, capricious popinjay he had been.
“As beautiful as you might think,” she replied simply. Let them use their imaginations; the truth would have disappointed them.
“Oh, Lady Pasibe, did you see him taken up into the heavens?”
“Was it glorious, Priestess? Did his soul leave his body like a butterfly?” Some asking the question were her own neighbors. Surely they must have seen his charred corpse.
Pasibe told them a half-truth. “The light and heat were so great that my eyes couldn’t bear it.”
“You must have been very fortunate, Lady Pasibe, to have been able to lie with him.” Pasibe considered the speaker, a plain-faced fifteen-year-old maiden who had pined unsuccessfully after Sama. She wanted to tell the girl outright not to waste her tears or childish longings on fantasies when the world held other men who would appreciate her.
Instead, she demurred. “I cannot speak of that.”
In a curious way, she missed the uncertain solitude of those first days after Sama’s death. Her sole refuge rested inside the sanctuary, with the gods that dwelled there.
The sanctuary of Knossos had been erected millennia ago on a site slightly northwest of the center of the hill. Like the surrounding houses, it had been knocked down and rebuilt multiple times over the centuries. Whitewashed so that it gleamed in the bright Kaphti sun, the Knossos sanctuary was larger than the one the Bull Clan settlers had built in Katsamba, containing three small chambers connected by a narrow corridor. The left-hand chamber, the plainest one, was used for the storage of ritual equipment: stone bowls, copper knives, ceramic vessels and rhyta, and cauldrons. The second chamber contained bloodless offerings donated to and used by the sanctuary for its own maintenance; there were amphorae of wine, pithoi of grain and oil, lentils and nuts, and bundles of fleeces and leather, and bolts of finished cloth.
The third, central chamber, its walls decorated with a wash of yellow ocher and bands of scarlet and brown, was reserved for the veneration of the gods. Opposite a fringed scarlet entrance curtain, a life-sized xoanon of Rhaya claimed the preeminent position. Her face was painted white, her mouth and cheeks red, and her curling hair black as charcoal. Her gaze, her eyes set with shining obsidian, was inscrutable. Each summer before the harvest, Pasibe dressed her in new garments embroidered by the village women, and draped necklaces of rock crystal, copper, and semiprecious beads around her neck.
Velchanos and other divinities occupied the benches along the walls. The great god Potidas was represented by the horns of consecration standing before the plinth. Over the millennia, the worship of actual bull skulls had given way to stylized representations of bull horns in stone, baked clay, and plaster. A pair of such horns surmounted the building. The horns before her were permanently stained pink from the blood of past offerings.
Pasibe swept the square hearth and floor before the horns and plinth, then presented the gods with their daily nourishment on a round, portable ceramic offering table called a kernos. She sprinkled measures of different kinds of grain, fruit, and flowers into the kernos’s many hollows, and added honey and some pretty beads the pilgrim women had given her.
She arranged the kernos upon the hearth curb, then knelt down and made the ritual supplication, with one fist bunched against her breast, and her other arm shielding her eyes. “Rhaya, Great Lady of the Sanctuary, here is barley and emmer wheat and vetch. Here are lentils and olives and flax. Here are the fruits of the earth. Here is golden sweet honey. Here are pretty adornments. Receive this daily bounty from the people of Knossos. Bless their fields and flocks. Bless the fruit of their wombs. Bless your high priestess with greater understanding that she may continue to serve you faithfully.”
Closing her eyes, she lowered her arms and pressed her face to the floor. “If Sama has become a god, then tell your people how to venerate him properly.” She smothered all negative thoughts, knowing that the gods would see right through her; it was not her place as a priestess to venture a personal opinion when putting such a question to them. “Shall an image of him be made and brought into the sanctuary to dwell among you?”
She sensed a sullenness to the silence within the sanctuary. “Shall his mother become his priestess? In life, he accused me of smothering him.” She hesitated, not knowing whether it was prudent to make of her supplication a personal confession. “I dream of him. He reproaches me for giving away his things, and for cutting down his tree, though I had nothing to do with either decision. Surely these dreams have meaning.”
No answer. Pasibe had not really expected the xoanon to blink her eyes and speak; she could only achieve communication of that sort by imbibing the sacred poppy during the mysteries. Yet her heart quailed at venturing that deeply into the spirit realm, lest she meet Sama at the entrance to the underworld.
*~*~*~*
It was Yamal’s wife Tana who first noticed her exhaustion. “You’re not well.” A plump, wrinkled hand touched her cheek and forehead. “No fever, but you’ve black circles under your eyes, and that’s no surprise given all you’ve endured these last several weeks.”
Pasibe did not want to lie down; sleeping meant wasting a beautiful spring morning, especially with the lessening in the pilgrim crowds. She could have done laundry by the riverbank, worked in her vegetable garden, or at her loom, but her limbs were leaden, she kept yawning, and could not resist. These days, she had not been getting enough sleep at night.
Even so, she lay in that curious limbo between sl
eeping and waking, where random images flitted through her head. She imagined dust motes suspended in the yellow sunshine filtering through her open doorway, and visualized the house snake curled in the partial shade by the celery; it had not liked the pilgrim crowds, and had hidden from view.
Pasibe woke still tired, with sore nipples, a sign that her moon-blood was imminent. She fetched from her clothes chest the lamb’s wool pads for the bleeding, recalling then that she had not used them last month because her blood never came. Sometimes it did not, on account of her advancing age.
A handful of days passed. The soreness subsided, but she remained exhausted, and her blood never came. The junior priestesses who attended her when she received pilgrims began watching her suspiciously, until the eldest, Molana, finally took her aside and asked, “Lady Pasibe, when was the last time you lay with a man?”
What a ridiculous question! Everyone knew that she had not conceived since before Dragas’s death. She could not bring a child to term. And she preferred not to discuss her intimate affairs with anybody, especially not the junior priestesses who had behaved like fairweather friends during her travail. “It’s the change,” she answered.
Molana harrumphed. “You’re still fertile.
Pasibe preferred to change the subject. “The xoanon needs new vestments. You and Seshe will dye the wool. Scarlet, I think. The fringe will be blue.” Molana continued staring at her, probing, pressuring until Pasibe remarked sharply, “I’m not with child.”
“I’ve had eight children of my own, and helped deliver seven grandchildren,” Molana pointed out. “I have a sense for these things. And I was always right before. You—” She shook a finger at Pasibe’s womb. “You’re carrying. If you don’t believe me, Alautha will send proof soon enough.”