Knossos

by Laura Gill

  “Where is Keos?” Of all those who had sent their condolences, she had had no word from her consort.

  Myrna huffed, “What does it matter where that commoner boy is, child? You cannot languish there forever. Miscarriage is a grief that befalls every woman at least once in her childbearing years. You are no different. Even your mother lost babies, more than ever survived. Only the most potent seed, that most favored by the goddess, thrives. That is a mystery you must learn.”

  A dried-up old nobody telling her not to grieve! “Leave me alone.” Shutting her eyes, Ariadne shifted onto her side, and burrowed further under the blanket.

  *~*~*~*

  A demon wind howled outside the shelter, blowing pale yellowish dust everywhere. Keos’s skin prickled. His nerves were on edge, the impulse toward violence never very far away.

  From its birthplace in the deserts of Libya, where it arose every spring, the hot, dry sirokos wind blew across Crete.

  The first day had been bad enough. When they sensed the wind turn and saw the ominous yellow haze cresting the southern hills, Keos, his cousins, and his uncle had driven the flock toward the nearest shelter, a rough stone shepherd’s lodging. Inside, they had stuffed straw and rags into the chinks to keep out the dust. Food and bedding had been laid by for just such an emergency. The animals were unsettled by the battering of the wind against the structure, so the herdsmen stayed with them to wait out the crisis. They prayed to the Mistress of the Winds, while growing increasingly agitated themselves.

  Six hours passed, then twelve, then twenty-four. The smothering, static-laden air became demonic. Sirokos made brawlers of peaceable neighbors, strangers of kinsmen, screeching harpies of obedient wives. Hunkered down, listening to the hot wind moan incoherently, Keos reflected that he could have as easily remained an unpleasant drunkard at home as spend his time crammed into a hut with four kinsmen and thirty-two bad-smelling, bleating sheep.

  Boukolion, he noticed, resisted the evil spirits with aplomb, occupying himself with small tasks, and occasionally making the rounds to calm both the animals and the younger men. “The Mistress of the Winds is throwing a tantrum like any woman,” he said. “Offer her your best and let her have her say, as a wise man does with a peevish woman. In a few days she will relent. Think of the sweet winds that always come after.”

  Keos did not have the patience to dwell upon cranky women or halcyon winds. The dust was everywhere—in his nostrils, his hair, even his loincloth. He wanted to punch something.

  The demon wind certainly had not kept the priests of the Labyrinth from finding him, and insisting that he return with them. What did Ariadne want with him now? He had heard that she miscarried her child, though how that concerned him he neither comprehended nor cared. Consorts had no legal rights over their offspring. Ariadne was not his wife, only a curse to be prayed away.

  “I do not have to come,” he told them. “In fact, I would be insane to agree at this late hour, and on such a day.”

  Stunned, the priests stood there blinking like dumb cattle. “The Lady commands your presence,” the elder one stammered. “You must obey.” Just a moment ago he had been supercilious, though somewhat perturbed at having to venture out into the wind. “The Lady Ariadne is the goddess’s vessel on-earth, and you are her divine consort. Velchanos always comes.”

  His cousins stood amazed. No one had told them what all his neighbors in Knossos knew, that he had stood stud for the Lady of the Labyrinth. Only his paternal uncle had been told, and Boukolion had breathed not a word of it to anyone.

  “But I am not Velchanos,” he asserted. “I am free-born, a citizen of Knossos, not a servant of the Labyrinth. She is not my wife. There is no contract between us, not even an infant, and there is no law that says I have to come.” Was there? Perhaps if he bluffed convincingly enough, they would leave him alone. “Furthermore, I simply do not wish to come.”

  The elder priest had recovered from his shock. “Blasphemy!” he hissed. “The Lady commands, her subjects obey. You must—”

  “Ariadne is not even high priestess.” The words fell from Keos’s mouth against his better judgment, however true it was. How many nights had he lain awake listening to her babble on and on about how Lady Wordeia had usurped her authority and honors in the sanctuary? Those around her only obeyed her because they feared her tantrums, as he had realized early on; her sacred madness was a labrys swinging above everyone’s heads. “She cannot command me to do anything.”

  Even as he uttered those last words, a blow landed on his right ear, then, as he instinctively reached up to shield his ear, another blow struck the crown of his head. “Stupid, sacrilegious boy!” Boukolion, his face flush with outrage, stood over him. “No kinsman of mine disrespects the Lady of the Labyrinth under my roof. Do you want the everlasting immortals to throw down these walls because of your foolish tongue? Do as you’re told and apologize.”

  Keos had no intention of doing any such thing. Did his uncle think him a child to be cuffed and corrected? His blood seethed. “Then I will leave and spare you the immortals’ wrath.”

  Shoving past the priests, he got no farther than the threshold of the hut. Armed men waited in the glare of sputtering lanterns. He could not see their faces, covered as they were against the blowing dust, but their stance told him that they would brook no nonsense on this night.

  While he stood there trying to decide what to do, arms seized him on either side. Someone stifled his nose and mouth with a broad strip of cloth. Another swathed his head likewise. Keos struggled even as he realized that his captors were taking measures to protect him from the wind, because he had not consented to their seizing him, either to stand at stud again or to be sacrificed.

  The strength of the wind, which bent hundred-year-old cypress trees at a precarious northward angle and scattered debris across the road, forced Keos and his captors to travel hunched over. When he was a child, Keos’s mother used to tell him that the snake-haired Erinyes rode the sirokos in search of oath-breakers and bad children. The way the lanterns guttered, threatening to blow out and plunge them all into darkness, he could well believe that the three demon-sisters were abroad.

  The priests had no consideration, and his escort was surly, shoving him along when he failed to move fast enough. Was he the Lady’s consort, deserving of respect and careful treatment, or a condemned prisoner? He himself had said he was not Velchanos, and the Labyrinth’s rare human victims were as well looked-after as the animal offerings; the elderly priest who used to instruct the neighborhood children in the correct religious observances had said so.

  When at last they reached the Labyrinth, their route took them through corridors and courtyards he did not recognize from other visits. Nor were the charming Helike and her priestesses on hand to bathe him. Instead, a severe woman dressed in blue met him in an antechamber.

  “I am Head Priestess Kleito of Eleuthia.” Her hair was as gray as her welcome. “You are not here to perform your conjugal duties as the Lady’s consort. She remains unclean and cannot partake of the goddess’s blessings of love until she has been purified. Yet she has requested your company tonight and throughout the following days. Therefore, you will remain here in the Labyrinth to—”

  “I am a free man of Knossos, not the Lady’s husband or her slave.” Keos could not believe what he was hearing. Did they take him for her lapdog, that she could pet and keep beside her?

  Kleito remained unmoved. “You accepted your service to the Lady the moment you parted her legs.” And that was the end of the argument. “You will bathe and don clean garments.” She wrinkled her aquiline nose in distaste. “You smell of animals.”

  The bath was a hurried affair, with none of the anointing and painting of previous occasions, and the clothes Kleito’s women gave him were well-made but plain. More importantly, there was no offer of resinated wine beforehand to do away with his inhibitions, only water sprinkled with barley and mint to moisten his throat.

  Then came the descent
, the familiar route down the staircase into the gloom of the sanctuary; he knew enough now to know that Rhaya had her precinct on the uppermost level where men never went, and that the level of Ariadne’s apartments had once belonged to Poseidon. Even there, the sirokos wind penetrated, the air eddying through the passages with atypical warmth. Static raised hairs along his arms and the back of his neck, and along with it the sense that something sinister was about to charge out at him from the shadows.

  Ariadne was wide awake despite the hour. She looked as fragile as a child in her white dressing gown. Throwing herself into his arms with a little cry, she clung to him like a cobweb, weeping, “Oh, Keos, Keos!” Her snot dampened his chest through the thin tunic. She smelled unclean, of sweat and blood, and women’s dark mysteries. “The babe is dead!”

  Gods, but she was a nuisance! What did he care about an unborn baby? Was he the acknowledged father? Was he her husband? Grasping her arms, and with great effort, Keos pried her loose, held her at arm’s length. “Stop this, you foolish girl!” Her attendants, also awake, and also in their sleeping clothes, observed from a distance. Would they intervene? “What do you expect me to do about it?”

  Her hands clutched at his arms, her clammy fingers digging into his skin. “Oh, Keos, but it was not yours.” Her breath was fetid, as though she had been drinking. “It was a little seahorse, a fish-child, the seed of Poseidon.” Her eyes glowed with a feverish light. “The seahorse entered me when... Oh, it was so long ago! But we can make another after my purification, when the time comes, when the blessed goddess—”

  “What is this nonsense?” He shook her again, harder. “Seahorses and fish children? You had me brought here to tell me this?” The attendants were muttering and shaking their heads. He heard the distant howling of the wind from the light-well, the rustle of debris, the clink of a stone striking the bottom. The lamps were sputtering, throwing eerie shadows everywhere.

  “Why are you being so cruel?” Ariadne’s voice turned shrill. Her face had become demonic. “I did not mean to lose the babe, but there will be another, there will!” Her words tumbled out in a single, frenzied breath. “And this time there will be a blood sacrifice to consecrate the new life. You will be my Velchanos in the flesh, my love. You will sanctify everything, and when—”

  “You fucking madwoman!” When he tried to shake her loose, she held onto him, babbling on about his blood and bones being plowed into the furrows. His blood mixed with wine and barley and honey, the sacred kykeon, drunk down so he could live on inside her—whatever madness the ancient rites entailed, whatever fantasy she had conjured for him. He knew he should have taken the chance and escaped earlier, because Ariadne truly meant to do it. Her lunatic mind instructed her to consume him and tear him to pieces and there her hands were, all over him now, plucking, pulling, never mind that she was polluted.

  He struck her. He forgot she was a daughter of the Labyrinth, that she was even a woman, and slammed his fist into her face. She screamed, her women cried out and surged forward, presumably to rescue her from him, but he was not about to stay around to allow that. Turning and flinging the doors open, he plunged into the passageway.

  “Keos, oh Keos, come back!” Her bare feet slapped the stuccoed paving as she dashed into the corridor after him. Without sufficient light, he could not run in order to escape her. Ariadne pounced, latched onto his middle, entrapping him. “Do not leave me!” she cried.

  Prying her loose, he shoved her so hard that she lost her balance and stumbled to the floor. Did he have to kill her to get away from her? The thought crossed his mind, was dismissed just as quickly, and again he turned from her. “Find another fool to stand stud for you.”

  Whimpering, she did not rise. He started to leave, to fumble his way through the passageway to the staircase, when the darkness attacked him. An angry bellow assaulted his ears, and he had the briefest glimpse of a bull’s head charging out of the shadows before his assailant’s momentum carried him straight into the wall. Something hard crashed into his stomach.

  Retching, instinctively clutching his belly, he expected to find himself impaled on the bull’s horns, with his life’s blood running onto the stones, yet when he felt his stomach he found no bleeding or mortal wound, nothing but bruised muscles. Groaning, sucking in desperate breaths, he tried to process the fact that a bull was loose in the Labyrinth’s lowermost level where women dwelled, when a stunning blow landed on his jaw. Stars exploded behind his eyelids.

  He heard a muffled male voice yell, “Blasphemer!”

  Bulls did not speak. Men did. Realizing that changed everything. A man against an enraged bull stood no chance, but against another man? Keos raised his arm to ward off a second blow, and then, dodging to the right, kneed his attacker’s thigh. The man stumbled. Keos moved down the corridor to get his breath. As his vision stopped spinning and he regained his equilibrium, he saw that the man was wearing a bull mask. A spotted, shaggy bull’s hide covered broad shoulders.

  Then the bull-man lumbered in for another attack. Keos darted aside, pressing himself against the wall at the last second to keep from being bowled over. His blood raced. He heard labored breathing. A fist cracked the painted plaster beside his head, and an audible groan seconded the man’s heaving breath. So the bull-man, though tall and strongly built, was not young.

  It did not take him long to realize that the bull mask impeded the man’s vision. Keos seized the advantage, leaping onto the bull-man’s back and wrapping both arms around his opponent’s throat to effect a chokehold. The bull-man flailed and stumbled backward, and suddenly Keos felt himself slam into the wall. Again and again the man tried to dislodge him, and it was all Keos could do to maintain his grasp.

  “No, no! Leave him alone!” Keos had forgotten all about Ariadne. Now she hurled herself into the conflict, grabbing his tunic and beating at his legs. “You leave Minotauros alone!”

  Keos kicked at her. His foot connected with her shoulder, but she kept coming, raining blows and curses upon him.

  In the struggle, the plaster and hide of the bull mask tore, revealing graying hair underneath. His movements became increasingly desperate. Strangling a man was not easy. It seemed to take forever.

  The moment the bull-man collapsed to his knees, Keos had to contend with Ariadne pummeling his back with her small fists. “Oh, Minotauros, Minotauros! Release him, you blasphemous wretch. You leave Minotauros alone!” The Bull of Minos, was that the man’s name?

  Keos dared not release him to push Ariadne away, not now. Minotauros started convulsing under him. Then he pitched forward onto his stomach, jerked once, and was ominously still. Keos maintained the chokehold a few moments longer to make sure, then slowly, tentatively released his victim. His right arm cramped, and his heartbeat was thundering in his ears. He had just killed a man.

  Fingers pulling at his hair and nails raking his cheek drove away his burgeoning confusion. Keos forgot the soreness in his arms as he grasped Ariadne by the throat. “You fucking harpy.” She was bruised from his earlier blow, sporting a split lip. Droplets of blood stained her white robe. Keos thought she would have looked better as a corpse, but he swallowed the raging impulse to smash her head against the wall.

  Her women, who had crowded panicking on the threshold of her apartment during the struggle, now swarmed forward to rescue her from a similar death. So Keos thrust her away from him and into them with a grunt of disgust and turned instead to the dead man under him.

  The mask came away easily, revealing a middle-aged man with a crooked nose and curling gray hair. Who was he? Had he been a servant of the Labyrinth or of the Minos? Keos bit down on his right knuckle. Gods forbid, the dead man could have been a priest.

  Ariadne shuffled forward, knelt beside the corpse, and stretched a trembling hand to touch his face. Then she snatched her hand away. A low, animal groan escaped her throat. Throwing back her head, she shrieked and started to tear her hair. “What have you done? Minotauros! Minotauros!”

&n
bsp; Ariadne’s screams jolted Keos out of his daze. Her hue-and-cry would bring others downstairs, men who would discover his deed and arrest him. What penalty might the priesthood impose on him for killing the bull-man? Would it matter that he had acted in self defense? A quick glance at Ariadne and her women provided an answer. She, vengeful and insane, would condemn him, even though he had been the one wronged, and as always the priests would accommodate her.

  Keos knew then that he was not going to stay around and become a victim of her madness. No longer! Better to run away, far away. He got to his feet and wobbled down the passageway toward the stairs, leaving Ariadne behind.

  *~*~*~*

  Ariadne gasped for breath. “Minotauros?” Where she had expected a younger man, Poseidon himself, the face before her was one that she thought she recognized. A priest? She must have seen him countless times during public ceremonies such as the Bull Dance and yet never known who he was.

  Grief overcame her with physical pain, and she doubled over beside his body. Her attendants gathered around.

  She heard Myrna say, “Goddess above, what has that boy done?”

  Keos. Her consort, the one she had chosen, that ungrateful nothing commoner, that murderer—he had taken Minotauros from her. Where was he? The tears stinging her eyes rendered her half-blind. She fumbled, trying to lay hands on him, yet her hands found only motionless limbs and the familiar touch of a musty bull hide. Keos. He had strangled her protector, her friend, and the gods had not prevented him. “Keos! Keos!” she screamed. “KEOS!”

  Someone said, “That blasphemer will not get far. The sentries will find him, and the priests will punish him.”

  “Poor Kinata! That is what happens when you let an uncouth commoner into the Labyrinth.”

  Their words spun like dust motes around her. Beyond her own labored breathing, Ariadne heard the howl of the demon wind, and in it the muted shrieks of the Erinyes, the avenging goddesses. Did they know she had been wronged, that her friend and protector lay murdered beside her? Kinata—was that his name? She was the high priestess, the goddess incarnate. They must heed her outraged grief.