Perhaps it was.
Perhaps it was homage to a power that should be placated by people in a situation of tenuous survival.
Kesair believed this, and her belief carried its own power. Standing face to face with her in the silvery loneliness, he could feel the power.
What had she said? Water sustains life?
It does, Fintan thought. I cannot deny it.
She was looking at him intently.
“The water remains,” he echoed.
The tension in her face eased. “That is the beginning of understanding. We are starting over, Fintan.” She reached into the neck of her gown.
To his disappointment, she withdrew a simple seashell. She held it up. “Look, Fintan.”
He looked, puzzled as to what she wanted.
The shell was white with the faintest rosy tinge that darkened to a deeper color within its fluted lip. Round at one end, it spiraled to a pointed tip at the other. When he looked more closely he realized how beautiful it was.
We share a love of beauty, he thought. I could make something of that …
“Listen, Fintan.”
Kesair held the shell to his ear, pressing the fluted edge against the curled ear flap that was so like the curve of a shell.
Obediently, Fintan listened, keeping his eyes on hers.
She waited.
At first he heard nothing but a sound that might be the muffled beating of his own heart.
Then, faintly, he became aware of something else. He began to listen with his whole being.
The sound grew in intensity. Became a roar. A roar of ancient power, the roar of a billion voices held within the shell, muted to softness, but immortal.
Fintan’s eyes widened with delight.
“I hear the sea,” he said.
Fire. Fire! Firefirefirefirefirefire.
Let there be fire.
Hot hotter hottest singeing singing soaring burning blazing conflagration inferno holocaust.
Let there be light.
Sparking flashing flaring flaming illuminating glowing gleaming glaring dazzling radiant.
Let there be life.
Vigor ardor intensity vehemence fervor passion fury magic inspiration genius brilliance.
Thoughtless explosion of power giving birth to all thought, all awareness. Vast outgoing surge of creative passion studding the universe with stars, smoldering in the souls of planets.
Simmering scorching scalding sizzling bubbling boiling molten inflaming energizing consuming.
Firefirefirefirefirefire.
Fire is. Fire was. Fire will be.
Mindless.
Allmind.
Fire.
Fire.
Fire!
7
Meriones awoke with a sense of guarded expectation. It felt like a day when something good just might happen. He opened his eyes to the light of the Mediterranean reflecting from the plastered walls of the second-story sleeping chamber. Beyond the window, the dawn glowed rose and gold. The music of the waking city was a harmony of voices and bustle, carts creaking, neighbors calling out to one another, shutters being thrown back.
Meriones stretched lazily beneath the linen sheet. The other half of the bed was empty. Tulipa had been up since before dawn, pouring a bowl of milk for the house snake that guarded their spirits when they slept, building a fire in the bake oven in the courtyard, setting up the small folding table beneath their one olive tree for their morning meal. As usual, she talked to herself as she worked, pitching her voice so it was certain to carry through the open window to Meriones.
Tulipa had lost interest in spending the early morning in bed with her husband. When he tried to lure her back she was quick to point out it was his fault she must leave him. “Who will milk the goat if I do not?” she would ask. “Who will cook our food or sweep our share of the street? There are no slaves here such as are to be found in the houses of more famous musicians. The wife of The Minos’ favorite says she doesn’t even know how to use a broom, can you imagine? But I do. I’m just Meriones’ wife. I know how to do all manner of tiresome tasks. I have to get up right now and empty our night jar, so the whole house doesn’t stink of it. I have no time to loll in bed with you.”
As soon as she began, Meriones would shrug and smile his shy smile, offering little tokens of peace between the flying arrows of her words. “I am sorry … of course, you’re quite right … you do work very hard, I know … yes, yes …”
But she had to run on to the end, always. And loudly, so others heard. In the city the houses huddled close together.
“She will be different when the children start to come,” Meriones had once said apologetically to Phrixus, who lived next door.
“I doubt it,” commented Phrixus, who was older. “Sometimes the marriage rites bring forward the worst in a woman. Your Tulipa told my Dendria that she had married beneath herself and regretted it.”
Meriones had hung his head at these words. “Tulipa’s uncle was Keeper of the Bulls. I’m just one of the countless musicians at the palace, with no royal blood to give me status.”
“How did you come to play the lyre?”
Meriones had hesitated before answering. When he spoke his voice was low with embarrassment. “My grandmother was brought here as a slave from the Islands of the Mist. Are you surprised? Not many know; Tulipa would rather die than tell anyone. My grandmother taught me to play a small stringed instrument that had belonged to her father. It was the only possession she had been allowed to bring with her.”
“You don’t have to be ashamed, Meriones,” Phrixus had said. “Almost everyone on Crete has ancestors who came from somewhere else, and a lot of them were slaves. After all, the commerce of the world goes through our harbor. Slaves are treated well here and their descendants can prosper, you are proof of that yourself. So be proud—and start siring some descendants of your own. They will keep Tulipa too busy to scold you.”
But although Meriones and his wife prayed daily to the Good Goddess and observed her rituals, and Tulipa made several pilgrimages to the cave of the deity of childbirth, her belly remained flat while her tongue grew sharper.
Now as Meriones emerged, blinking and yawning, from the windowless ground floor of his house into the brilliant sunlight of the courtyard, she began on him at once. “That thief at the oil merchant’s shop sold me a whole pithos of rancid oil, husband. It was delivered yesterday. I just unstoppered it and the vile smell turned my stomach over. What will I boil tonight’s meat in? Why does everyone think they can take advantage of us? It’s your fault, Meriones. Because you are unimportant we are sold rancid oil and we live on a crowded back street with no view of the harbor.”
“We have a nice house,” Meriones replied. “You seemed to like it well enough when we married, and you said nothing about the view then.” Trying to hold on to the good mood he had awakened with, he looked admiringly at his little house of stone and plaster. Its exterior walls were painted the cheerful yellow of field flowers. As was the custom in Knsos, the ground floor was windowless to insure privacy, but the upper story was windowed front and back to catch the light and draw the salty breezes from the harbor.
A man’s status in the community could be judged from the view he commanded, and in the ninety cities of Crete there was intense competition for a panorama of the mountains or the dark glittering sea. The day room and sleeping chambers were at the top of the house, so their occupants could enjoy the scenery and be removed from domestic activities taking place at ground level in the megaron, or hearth room.
Meriones’ house boasted no view more lofty than that of the paved street in front and its own tiny courtyard behind, but the building itself was bright and comfortable. Privately, Meriones thought it a fine achievement for the grandson of a slave. Yet many of his class lived as well or better, for the wealth of the sea kings lapped like a tidal wave over the inhabitants of the island of Crete.
Tulipa was not really dissatisfied with the house. It
was her life and her husband that displeased her. She sat tapping her foot while Meriones ate, then sent him on his way with a negligible pat on the cheek, her mind already casting about for some way to avoid the chores waiting for her. She felt they were making her old before her time. Perhaps she could put off airing the bed until tomorrow—“Meriones will never notice anyway” she muttered to herself—and spend the morning with her friends Lydda and Dendria, gossiping over bowls of spiced fruit juice and comparing the faults of their husbands.
“Men are all alike,” one of them would say with a sigh, and the other two would readily agree.
Meriones swung around the corner and set off up the main street of Knsos, heading south, inland. He blended immediately into the crowd, one more slender, almond-eyed young man in a throng of chattering townspeople. He walked with his chest thrust out and his back arched, swinging his arms freely and flexing the arches of his feet to produce the exaggerated, jaunty gait that identified a Minoan of Crete anywhere in the known world. It was a walk that had taken him years to perfect. A strain of rogue blood in his veins resisted the effort, but had at last been overcome.
Now anyone seeing him would have thought him pure Minoan. The dazzling sunshine of Crete had tanned his skin to copper. His black hair was folded and knotted at the nape, with oiled curls hanging over his ears in the latest fashion. Around his waist he wore a linen apron embroidered in gold thread, emblem of one who had access to the palace of The Minos, the greatest sea king of all, Lord of Knsos, god-king of the Minoan empire.
Meriones’ waist was tightly girdled to accent its abnormal smallness, the result of wearing the heavy copper girdle that was fastened on children of both sexes almost from birth. “The tinier the waist, the more elegant the person,” was a Minoan axiom.
Meriones was considered elegant indeed.
A stray hound trotted out of a narrow alleyway and came to a halt at Meriones’ feet, looking up at him hopefully. He stopped and returned the dog’s gaze. “I’d be glad of a companion as far as the Sun Gate,” he told the white hound, “but they won’t let you come into the palace.” When he began walking again the dog trotted at his heels, its feathery white tail waving like a plume.
They threaded their way through a polyglot of lean dark Egyptians and ebony-skinned Nubians, Syrian traders and Cycladic purchasing agents, Libyans and Amorites and Hittites, porters and sailors and laborers who jostled one another and laughed or swore as the occasion dictated. Nobles in sedan chairs claimed right of way. Small donkeys, overburdened and uncomplaining, picked their way over the paving stones and ignored the impatient hands jerking their headcollars.
As Meriones moved inland toward the great sprawling palace known as the House of the Double Axes, the shops and small businesses that lined the main street began to give way to public areas furnished with fountains and flowers. Curving walkways led to luxurious villas set well back from the road. The tang of the sea was replaced by the heady aroma of flowering trees. Behind walls painted in blue and yellow and coral, caged birds could be heard singing, their music mingling with the laughter of children.
The land lifted, the houses climbing with it in a series of steps, bright blocks of color forming a random mosaic across the hills. Had he looked back, Meriones would have seen the cobalt sea and the mass of lateen-rigged ships crowding the harbor. Instead he gazed steadfastly ahead, contemplating immortality. Beyond Knsos great Zeus himself lay sleeping, pretending to be a mountain.
Meriones and the dog passed a small stone shrine by the side of the road, heaped with floral offerings and containing a glazed jar of seawater with a realistically painted octopus curling its tentacles around the vessel.
Meriones paused. The hound flopped down in the dusty road beside him and scratched behind one ear with an audible sigh of relief.
A vendor carrying a wickerwork tray stepped out from behind the shrine. “An offering for the god of the shaking earth?” he suggested.
Meriones considered. The sun was warm. The ground felt stable beneath his feet. The flower-bedecked shrine to Poseidon gave no hint of the unstable temper of the god. Still …
“It never hurts to be cautious,” the vendor urged. “Only last year, at Phaistos …”
“Yes, yes, I remember.” Meriones quickly selected a sprig of mint from the man’s tray and added his offering to the heap, though he was embarrassed to see how small one sprig looked amid the piles of gaudy, more expensive flowers. The vendor was looking at him with contempt, like Tulipa. He pressed a coin into the man’s hand, whistled to the dog, and hurried away.
The sunbaked road broadened into the Royal Avenue as it led into the valley that sheltered the palace of The Minos from the greedy gaze of sea pirates. Not that there was any real danger of invasion, not anymore. For several centuries Crete had ruled secure and unchallenged at the heart of the world’s seaways.
And sometimes the god who ruled those seas reminded man of his ultimate power by shaking the earth.
With the white hound at his heels, Meriones crossed the stone bridge that spanned the stream east of the palace. The House of the Double Axes, called Labrys in the court language, spread out before him as if a bag of jewels had been spilled from a giant’s hand, tumbling down the valley in gay profusion.
No huge perimeter wall protected Labrys. Its guardian was the power of the sea’s mightiest fleet, defending not only Knsos but the other cities of the Cretan sea kings. Instead of a fortress, the palace of The Minos consisted of a number of elegant villas surrounding a central core of chambers and halls. Some of these villas, which served as homes for the vast array of officials and functionaries required by The Minos, rivaled the king’s own quarters in splendor. But none could compete with the royal residence in terms of sheer size.
“There it is,” Meriones said to the dog. “I spend every day of my life there—except feast days, of course. The palace is a city in itself, you know. There’s a maze of passages and storerooms and private chambers inside. It took me years to learn my way, but I did,” he added with shy pride.
The dog wagged its tail and grinned up at Meriones.
Labrys had been built from the heart outward, as a tree grows, until it sprawled in giant tiers like a child’s blocks. The heart itself was the Great Central Court through and around which all life flowed. Four main gates led into the complex. The westernmost, called the Bull Gate, was the ceremonial entryway, with a pillared portico fronting on a broad paved courtyard. The south gate was the Zeus Gate, facing the mountains. To the north was the Sea Gate. Meriones approached by the eastern Sun Gate, following a walkway through flowered gardens. He wove his way among increasing crowds of gaily dressed men and women in animated conversation, hands fluttering, voices trilling. In addition to the customary courtiers there was the usual scattering of long-haired folk from Boeotia and Attica and Euboea, travelers from Pylos and Lerna, even a few flint-eyed warriors from Mycenae and Tiryns.
Everyone came to the House of the Double Axes.
Meriones, like most citizens of Knsos, was fluent in several languages. He smiled from time to time at some overheard witticism, and translated for the dog’s benefit.
As he climbed the broad stone steps that led to the Sun Gate itself, the giant Nubian warrior at the top of the stairs looked down at him. His usually impassive face cracked into a smile.
“Not another dog, musician?”
Meriones glanced ruefully at his companion. “I’m afraid so. They follow me and I can’t help encouraging them. I would like to have a dog of my own but my wife says they make her sneeze.” He gave the white hound a last fond pat, then handed it over to the Nubian, who held it by the scruff of the neck until Meriones disappeared inside the palace, and then gave it a shove, not unkindly, and sent it on its way.
Meriones made his way through the corridors and service rooms that lay between the Sun Gate and the residential quarter. Like all public areas of Labrys, the royal apartments featured spacious open rooms, often divided by the same da
rk red columns that were used to support the exterior porticoes. The columns tapered downward in the distinctive Cretan style, and were as integral a part of palace design as the painted frescoes glowing on every wall. The famous Grand Staircase was renowned throughout the Mediterranean world for its scenes of cavorting sea creatures, blooming lilies, and elegant court life. Numerous light wells provided adequate illumination for the appreciation of such beauty, even in the inner recesses of Labrys.
But Meriones did not reach the Grand Staircase. His progress was interrupted by Santhos, Master of Musicians. “You have a new assignment,” the round-faced Santhos announced. “You won’t be playing in the royal apartments for a while. The queen is very dissatisfied with the quality of work being done by the goldsmiths these days, and wants a musician sent to play in their workrooms and inspire them.”
Meriones’ erect posture slumped. The workrooms of the royal craftsmen were in the northeast quarter of the palace, a comparatively dreary place where a musician himself might despair of inspiration. But there was no point in arguing.
Meriones forced a smile, straightened his spine and saluted Santhos. He strode off jauntily, springing upward from the balls of his feet, looking as if the prospect of days spent in gloomy workrooms was the thing he most desired.
Watching him go, Santhos said to himself, “Thank Zeus for men like Meriones. Musicians are so temperamental. Most would have refused.”
The craftsmens’ workrooms were on the ground floor beneath the Great Eastern Hall. In separate cubicles, men fashioned furniture, fabrics, tableware, jewelry, the myriad items required by the huge community above them. The chamber of the goldsmiths was in a favored position, with a light well and freshly painted walls, but Meriones’ heart sank when he entered. It was hot and cramped and utilitarian rather than elegant. Tulipa would be angry if she learned of this.
Half a dozen men were working at benches and tables. They all looked up as he entered.
“I am a musician of The Minos,” he began formally. His words dropped like stones into a sudden silence. “I have been sent to make music for you while you work. Is there, ah, a bench, a stool … ?”
The Elementals Page 8