by Laura Gill
As she shook her head, Yishharu abruptly rose and seized her upper arms. “You had better do it.” He thrust his face in hers. “For all the wickedness you have committed, for everything you have made me do on your behalf, I will not idly sit by while you destroy us both.” All she saw was the intensity of his glare, all she imagined were his hands around her throat. “What is to keep Minos Rasuros from bringing charges of impiety and murder against you? He still has his supporters. You would be convicted, because there are too many witnesses. You would have to stretch your neck for Mother Labrys, and the priests would take your head.”
“You would never let that happen!” she gasped. “You are the high priest. You would stop—”
“What choice would I have? They would take mine, too.” Yishharu’s grasp tightened; his fingers impressed bruises into the soft flesh of her arms. This made it twice in one night that a man had rendered her powerless. “The very least you can expect now is to be jeered in the streets.”
“No.” When he released her, she collapsed back onto the couch. Shaking her head repeatedly, weeping uncontrollably, Pasiphae tried to free herself of the nightmarish vision Yishharu painted. No high priestess had ever been executed. Even her foremother, High Priestess Europa, widely reviled, had been exiled. Yet she knew it could happen. The ancient axe might lop off her head. Her corporeal body would be desecrated, her shade trapped in the freezing limbo between earth and the underworld. Her name, that holy goddess-name passed down through the generations, would be obliterated, or worse, it would be transformed into a curse, a byword for female oath-breakers. “No.”
“Yes,” Yishharu said in a voice like a hammer blow, “and you would deserve it. You could have returned Ikaros to his father once you saw that he was committed to the project. There was no reason for continuing to hold him hostage. I warned you about Asterios, but you would not listen, so now...” His pause gave her space to dwell on the outcome of her stubbornness. “From this night forward, you will do as I tell you.”
*~*~*~*
Daidalos awakened spent, having no more tears to shed. He stared instead at the pale yellow plaster covering the ceiling, feeling neither hunger nor pain, and he thought about nothing.
Someone nearby cleared his throat. Then a face appeared above his, of such startling likeness to his dead son that he gasped aloud. Had his son’s fatal accident simply been a nightmare, or was what he saw some cruel jest of the gods?
“Master Daidalos, are you thirsty?”
As the fog of sleep cleared from his eyes, Daidalos recognized that the youth staring down at him was not his son’s double, after all. He was older, better-looking, with a long, aquiline nose and square face, and did not speak with Ikaros’s holdover Akkadian accent.
“Who are you?” Daidalos was sure he had seen the youth before, but could not place him.
“Iapyx,” the youth answered. “Pu-abi is downstairs making supper, so I offered to sit with you. Are you hungry?”
Shutting his eyes, Daidalos turned his face to the wall. He did not want the boy there. Iapyx was too tangible a link to Ikaros.
Not only did Iapyx linger at his bedside, but he kept talking where he had been so unobtrusive and deferential before Ikaros’s death. “You haven’t eaten in two days, sir. You need to take something.”
“Leave me alone.” Daidalos’s mouth was sand-dry. He could not even swallow. “Get out.”
Iapyx ignored him a second time. Worse, he slid an arm under Daidalos’s shoulders, raising him to a sitting position. Daidalos grunted his protest. He would have resisted harder, except that a sudden ache in his lower back prevented him. He knew that twinge; he had been sedentary too long.
“Why are you even here?” he grumbled through cracked lips.
“High Priest Yishharu sent me.” Iapyx tucked down-filled cushions behind his back as support, then hastened to bring a pair of leather slippers for his feet. “He’s made me your servant.”
Though he did not necessarily want to rise, Daidalos carefully eased one leg to the ground then the other, and let the boy push the slippers onto his feet. “I don’t want you.” Nevertheless, he used Iapyx as a crutch to help him manage the stairs, then the short distance from the light-well to the main hearth.
Pu-abi greeted him with an effusive smile. She and Iapyx made him comfortable on a footstool beside the fire. Daidalos resented having to rely on them as much as he despised his arthritic old bones.
When Pu-abi tried to get him to drink some water flavored with barley and honey, he pushed the cup away. “Bring me wine,” he barked. Gods, he was so thirsty! The juice of the grape, Dionysos’s gift to mortal man. Anything that would blunt the pain of being awake and aware.
Hesitant, she started to comply, when Iapyx interrupted. “Master Daidalos, forgive me, but the healer-priest says wine is forbidden except with food.” He managed to look apologetic—small recompense for his gall.
“I told you to get out, didn’t I?”
Iapyx did not move; the insolent youth probably knew that Daidalos in his present condition could not physically evict him. Daidalos scowled. “Woman, wine!”
Pu-abi instead brought him pieces of warm flatbread dipped in heavily watered wine, which was not at all to his liking, but which he nevertheless accepted in order to suck what inebriating juice he could from them. He found eating a tedious, revolting waste. He was not interested in his health, judging it better to be free from the shackles of his corporeal body than a perpetual slave to it.
When he had eaten all he could stomach, Iapyx took away the crumbs. Pu-abi went out, and hastened back carrying a basket filled with objects she must have assumed would please him: glittering ornaments of gold, silver, and precious stones; a rock crystal bowl shaped like a turtle; a scarlet tunic edged with lavish embroidery; a pair of red leather shoes with golden buckles.
“They’re gifts from the temple,” Iapyx explained. “High Priest Yishharu’s servants brought them yesterday. There are some other things, too, I heard. Scribe Isiratos has the tablets for you.”
Daidalos knew what the gifts were for without having to ask. Yishharu might as well have sent him a pile of venomous snakes. A chastened and confused Pu-abi took the basket away, returning a short time later with water to heat over the fire. Observing her, Iapyx said, “She has been bathing you. I think she wants to use the tub in the other room so she can wash and trim your hair.” Half a heartbeat passed, then he continued, “Master Balashu was here yesterday with Master of the Waterworks Arikusa. Their men repaired the drainage in the light—”
“Quiet,” Daidalos snarled. He did not care that the rain had ceased or that the mansion was no longer threatened with flooding. All he wanted was for the rest of the world to vanish and leave him in peace.
He heard water sloshing in the tub next door. Pu-abi returned from the bathroom and gestured for Iapyx to help her get Daidalos into the steaming water. Daidalos’s lower back resisted, but he did not. What did it matter what they did with him? A bath was not going to lessen his grief.
Once in the bathtub, he stared blankly at the peeling, yellow-washed walls as he had stared at the ceiling upstairs. Iapyx went out. Pu-abi scrubbed him with a sea sponge and washed his hair. Daidalos wished he could sink under the water and simply stop breathing, except that the heat of the bath, coupled with the intimacy of Pu-abi’s movements, began loosening his numbness. He began to feel again, to flounder about and wonder, until the memories of that awful night came flooding back.
Daidalos broke down and wept. He covered his face with palsied hands and howled against them. Pu-abi, meanwhile, set down the shears with which she had been trimming his hair, and caressed him. She massaged his shoulders, pressed her lips against his cheek, and when he leaned toward her to touch her she settled his head on her breast and held him until he was spent.
She helped him from the bath, dried him with a linen towel and guided him upstairs. This time, without beseeching his permission, she undressed and climbed und
er the fleeces to twine her naked limbs around his. Daidalos did not evict her because he knew she was not offering sex. What she was giving him was something infinitely more precious: the sharing of her human warmth and the feel of a heartbeat beside his to remind him that he was not alone in the darkness. Her arms cocooned him in a motherly embrace. Daidalos buried his head against her breast and let her rock him to sleep.
In the following days, visitors came sporadically to the house. Balashu and Diwinaso paid their respects on behalf of their work crews. Many laborers came around with votive offerings. Master Carpenter Aridmos sent bread and wine for the household gods. Enusat brought food and drink, Isiratos’s family inquired about the funeral and offered to pay for professional mourners. Kurra came bearing tablets inventorying gifts from the temple that Daidalos did not want.
“Where is my son now?” he kept asking. No one would tell him. Everyone feigned ignorance in their efforts to upset him further. “Where is Ikaros’s body? His shade must be appeased. I must bury him.”
At least Kurra granted him the semblance of an answer. “That is being seen to,” he replied hesitantly.
“By whom?” Daidalos did not want anyone else touching his son; it was his responsibility alone to wash and prepare his only son for the next world. “It’s my duty, mine alone.”
Kurra could not hide his discomfort. “Forgive me, Master Daidalos, but the temple is seeing to it.”
“I don’t want the temple seeing to it.” “The temple” meant Yishharu and Pasiphae. Pasiphae, who had wronged Ikaros in life had no business tending him in death. “Go and you tell them it’s my duty, my right!” He pounded the wood of the table between them. A knot tightened in his throat. How many days had it been already? Ikaros might already be in the ground.
No one promised him anything. Rather, everyone’s efforts seemed focused on his forgetting, when that was not necessarily what he desired. Certainly the accident and the nightmarish vision of his son’s corpse, but not Ikaros as he had been when he was alive. Daidalos wanted to hold onto that.
That evening, another visitor came to the house. Yishharu cut a much different figure than he had that awful night; he wore his priestly vestments. On the threshold, he took Daidalos’s hands in his. “Master Daidalos, you have my sincerest condolences. May I come in?”
Yishharu handed Pu-abi the gift of jar of wine and some pickled olives, and let Iapyx bring him a footstool. “I understand,” he said to Daidalos, “that you are concerned about your son’s funeral rites.”
“When may I bury him?”
Pu-abi brought water for Yishharu to wash his hands with. On the other side of the hearth, Iapyx was mixing water and the high priest’s gift of wine in a ceramic krater for the libation.
“It has already been done.” Yishharu dried his hands on a linen cloth. “Ikaros was buried four days ago in a tomb not far from here. I personally saw to all the arrangements and officiated at the rites.”
Daidalos choked back his anger and disappointment. “And no one bothered to send for me?”
“I apologize,” Yishharu replied, “but Healer-Priest Kinnashu advised me that you were not well enough to attend. You are still unsteady, I hear. When you are better, send me a message and I will show you the tomb.”
“You deprive me of my son in death as you withheld him in life,” Daidalos growled under his breath, “and now you expect me to be grateful?” He clenched his hands into fists. “Never.”
“I intended no such thing.” Yishharu took the libation cup Iapyx placed in his hands. The household gathered around, heads bowed. “Lord Pawayon,” the high priest intoned, “continue to watch over this man Daidalos.” He sprinkled the hearthstones with wine. “Lady Hekate, watch over the shade of this man’s son, the boy called Ikaros.” Another sprinkling of wine.
When Yishharu offered him the cup, Daidalos stared dumbly at it, unable to decide whether or not to take it. The libation was such a simple and universal gesture, as he had discovered during his travels, but such bitterness dwelt beneath his heart that he had to force himself to perform the rite.
Pu-abi brought hot flatbread, olive oil, and grilled fish fresh from the agora. “Take heart,” Yishharu said. “You will have a chance to bury Ikaros a second time, wherever and however you choose, after the period of his first interment ends.” He selected a round of flatbread to tear into pieces. “You may hire what professional mourners you wish, choose the funerary vessel and the linens, and select the wine in which to wash his bones. You may keep the tomb I have provided, or find one elsewhere. You may even take him back to Naxos. No one will stop you.”
Five years in the tomb; that was how long it took a body to decay. Daidalos’s heart sank. The sacred laws governing disposal of the dead prohibited him from disinterring Ikaros any earlier. “So I must wait.” Had he the choice, he would have quit Kaphtor the moment the sea lanes opened.
“Unfortunately so,” Yishharu admitted. “I tried to wait, but you were unwell and the priestesses of Hekate insisted on going ahead with the rites. You may wait here as a guest—a true guest—of the temple, or retire to a house in the country that I will deed to you from my personal estates.” He dipped a piece of bread into the olive oil. “You may even return to Naxos and make arrangements there.” A thoughtful pause. “However—and it is entirely your decision—you are more than welcome to stay here and continue as chief architect of the new temple. In fact, I still believe that the gods appointed this task to you.” Yishharu popped the bread into his mouth and started chewing.
Daidalos snorted. “And this is how the gods make their will known, by snatching away my son? And why should I want freedom, when it no longer means anything?” Yishharu responded with an apologetic look as he continued chewing. “As for the temple, you were so clever before, manipulating me with talk of gods and personal glory. My eyes are open now, Priest. I will not build anything for that murdering bitch.”
Yishharu shook his head as he swallowed. “If you are referring to my sister, she no longer has any authority over the project.” He broke off a piece of his bread and offered it to Daidalos, who had taken nothing for himself. “Eat something, I beg you. The flesh is falling from your bones.” Daidalos stared at the morsel as if at a stone. Yishharu tried again. “If not for yourself, then for your servant woman. I know Pu-abi would be inconsolable if you wasted away.”
Daidalos avoided meeting Pu-abi’s gaze, but took the bread and tried to chew. It tasted of sawdust and defeat.
“As to the temple,” Yishharu continued, “I have full authority over the project. There will be no more nonsense. I urge you to reconsider, Daidalos, because if I have to send to Tylissos for Samushanas I know I will have to pay double for inferior workmanship.” He chuckled, even though his attempt at a jest fell flat.
Daidalos bristled. Mention of the charlatan from Tylissos irked him for some reason. Shrugging, he mumbled, “Do as you like.”
Two days later, he returned to work.
Over time, he had grown to relish the challenge of the temple project and his rapport with the work crews. Never having walked away from a project once started, he could not bring himself to abandon his labors now, for he grasped in his bones that the temple of Knossos was the last and greatest building project he would ever undertake. His name would be written in those stones; it would live forever. And why not? The temple was the only thing of value he owned now that Ikaros was dead.
Samushanas would replace him over his dead body. He could not stand the thought of that amateur from Tylissos touching his sketches, dismantling his work, and desecrating everything that Ikaros had died for. Daidalos would make the temple a monument to his son’s sacrifice.
Returning to the site presented difficulties. At first, the work crews tiptoed around him—at least for the first quarter-hour, after which time, his patience growing short, he loudly reprimanded them. “How do you expect to raise a temple mincing about like squeamish little girls? Balashu, I want that wall a foot highe
r. Enusat, those saws need sharpening. The edges on those ashlars are turning out ragged.”
Daidalos drove them hard from morning until dusk, but no one complained because he was out there with them in the spring damp digging ditches, shaping mudbricks and smoothing blocks with a borrowed bronze hand saw. It had been a long time since he had pitched in with the common laborers, and his joints sometimes protested, but he welcomed the exertion. His aches and sprains and calluses were a soothing balm for his internal wounds.
He decided then that it was time to temporarily cease building storehouses and workshops and break ground on the first of the temple’s proposed sanctuaries. He brought in Arikusa, Knossos’s official Master of the Waterworks; the man had cleared the pipes in his house and though he was actually a potter by trade, he was regarded as Kaphtor’s foremost expert on Akkadian-style drainage systems. Daidalos placed an initial order for eighty-five sections of straight pipe and thirty-two curved. In the meantime, Aridmos had his carpenters preparing an order for fifty columns of cypress trunks. Enusat’s men prepared limestone flooring slabs and gypsum tiles.
By day, Daidalos escaped his tumultuous emotions through his work, while by night he had to struggle to maintain his equilibrium. He learned to hate silence, idle hands and the darkness. Pu-abi remained constant; he welcomed her into his bed with the understanding that she was not there for sex. She was not his wife or concubine despite, as he ruefully observed, her obvious eagerness to serve him in that capacity. Through signs and gestures, Pu-abi indicated that she, too, was sometimes lonely, and with both hands described the shape of a rounded belly. It would give her the greatest happiness, she signaled, to be able to give him another child.