“What do you think it is?” Nun asked the Chaldean. “The train of a prince?” But the Chaldean did not even shrug. This morning he seemed too wrapped up in himself to be interested in his surroundings.
After they had crawled on at this rate for a mile or so, the road widened, and the charioteer pulled out again to overtake. The sergeant cursed him again, the driver swore back, apparently insisting on his urgent business with the palace, and, in spite of the protests of the soldier and two other officials, he whipped up his horses and began to overtake them on the other side of the road. There was barely room for the chariot to get past the big cart which seemed to be the most important thing in the procession, and as they drew up to it Nun was surprised to see that it was no luxurious conveyance for a prince or for the image of a god, but a great wooden cage on wheels, drawn by six slow oxen. And from the cage there glared at them as they passed a great animal with wide curving horns—a bull.
“It seems that in this country the men walk while the bulls ride,” Nun quipped to the Chaldean. But the sage did not even smile.
They got clear of the procession and bowled along at a fair speed, but it was not long before they had to stop again at a military post where a bored-looking officer interrogated the driver and looked suspiciously at the passengers. A heated argument followed, both of them waving and glaring toward the strange figure of the Chaldean, until he put an end to it by calmly reaching into his wallet for the baked brick with the lion and bull image. This he showed to the officer without speaking a word and immediately the officer’s expression changed; he saluted respectfully and waved the chariot on. There were two more checkpoints, and each time the same thing happened and the magical brick had the same effect.
And then, round a bend in the road, they came in sight of Knossos. Set in a hollow in the hills, surrounded by terraces of vines and olive trees, it looked like one vast building of golden stone, rising in square-cut steps of parade grounds and shaded colonnades. Along the edges of the flat roofs on every building were horns, the curved stone symbols of the city of the Bull. No fortification surrounded Knossos, but when Nun remembered the number of times he had been stopped and questioned since making his landfall in Crete, he realized that no enemy was likely to take the place by surprise.
They drove up to the great entrance gate. Sentries stopped them. They drove on to a guard room. The brick seal was produced once again and a respectful chamberlain was summoned to escort them up the ceremonial way to the palace on foot. And it seemed that the whole palace had turned out to greet them!
Down the slope of the ceremonial way streamed a motley crowd; swaggering young noblemen with broad bare shoulders and slim waists, a file of black soldiers advancing at the double, led by a Cretan lieutenant, children of all ages running in circles; but it was the women Nun found himself staring at. He had never seen such elaborate coiffures of curled black hair, such boldly outlined eyes and reddened lips, such frilled and flounced skirts and a lot of unveiled body. He felt his eyes popping, and a feeling of panic as these creatures came toward him—but then he realized that nobody was paying him any attention at all. The whole crowd swept past, with one or two questioning glances perhaps at the bearded Chaldean, the men and women chattering excitedly like birds in high-pitched voices, as they began to congregate in an undisciplined but high-spirited throng round the main gate at the bottom of the slope. Nun and his party turned to see what it was that attracted them. There was a lot of pointing and craning of necks toward the road along which they had arrived. Then a cheer went up and more excited waving, and Nun could see that round the corner of the road had appeared the procession which they had overtaken. It was the bull that the inhabitants of the palace had turned out to greet, not the Chaldean philosopher—and certainly not the obscure Giblite captain. Nun suddenly felt resentful that those girls had not even looked at him.
“Why the excitement over the bull?” Nun asked the chamberlain, without pausing to think that he might not even understand his language. But it seemed that the official had a knowledge of the Giblite tongue.
“Ah, yes, the bull,” said the chamberlain. “They make him welcome. He comes to live in the palace.”
“I see,” said Nun. “I hope I don’t have to share a bed with him!”
“No, no, my friend!” said the chamberlain hastily, but without a smile. He seemed a worried little man, not like the light-hearted crowd of courtiers they had just seen. “We have rooms for everybody. His Reverence from Chaldea will lodge in the quarters of the priests. The bull will be accommodated with the other bulls. And you, my friend,” he dropped his voice to a rather embarrassed murmur, “you are I understand His Reverence’s—er, valet?” He quickly caught Nun’s expression of annoyance at being called the Chaldean’s servant and hurriedly went on, “That is to say—er—secretary? Private secretary?” Nun was amused to see the little man looking at his sunburned features and hardened hands, and trying to make up his mind just what he was doing here.
The Chaldean had overheard and came to his rescue. “This young Giblite gentleman is here as my friend,” he said with some dignity. “He is neither a servant nor a scribe.”
The little man looked even more worried. “Of course, Your Reverence. A thousand apologies! You will understand that the palace is rather crowded at this season. The bulls, you know. And we have strict instructions that everybody must be accommodated according to his category. You will forgive me, but we have no schedule for—er—friends.”
The Chaldean gave him a straight look. “So much the worse for King Minos,” he said, “if he has no place for friends.” The little chamberlain turned pale, looked hurriedly over each shoulder, and his hair seemed to stand on end at this disrespectful reference to the King. The Chaldean continued, “Surely you have somewhere you can lodge a young foreign visitor?”
And suddenly the chamberlain’s face cleared, and he broke into a smile. “But of course!” he beamed. “Pray excuse my obtuseness! How remiss of me not to understand! Your friend is a Young Foreign Visitor. I shall be delighted to give him accommodation with the other Young Foreign Visitors,” and he bowed and led the way fussily along the echoing stone corridors.
“That’s all right, then,” said Nun, and he and the Chaldean exchanged a brief glance of amused incomprehension at the working of the palace official’s mind. They went up steps and along more corridors, lit only by tall shafts to a roof far above, and they passed on either hand more gloomy passages leading to cellars and storerooms. Nun began to long already for the open air of his own poopdeck and the wide sea horizon. How he would hate to spend his days in the depths of this vast mass of masonry!
They came out again into the daylight of a little sunken courtyard, and the chamberlain peeped into a little office where some pages were lying around playing dice and said something sharply to one of them. “The page will conduct you to your quarters, Honorable Young Foreign Visitor from Gebal, while I escort His Reverence to the house of priests. Farewell, and good luck!” But Nun was at a loss to understand the mixture of respect and gloating mockery which seemed to make up his smile.
The Chaldean took him aside by the arm. “Good-bye, my young friend and benefactor. I trust I may once again call on your help to carry me back to your country. But stay, before we part! I am not happy to leave you alone in this great palace. I have my talisman, as you have seen, the message from my King and the imprint of the lion and the bull. You have no pass, but take this! It may help you if things become difficult.” He pressed into Nun’s hand a small, hard object, then they went their separate ways. As he followed the strutting page down yet more gloomy corridors, Nun stole a look at the Chaldean’s gift. It was a stone cylinder about the size of his middle finger joint, but it was too dark to make out the design.
After more flights of steps up and down, and many right-angled turns, they reached another open courtyard which Nun saw at once must be the quarters of the Youn
g Foreign Visitors. Nun was very young for a sea captain, but the others seemed younger still. Some of them had fair hair and pale skins, some were dark and swarthy, and all of them seemed to hang together in groups according to their various colorings and the languages in which they chatted. Those who were not lying in the sun were engaged in some sort of physical exercise. Some were wrestling, some swinging heavy weights, and some groups were forming human pyramids. But the most common exercise seemed to be some form of handstand or handspring, and the biggest group of all were taking it in turns to do forward springs over a sort of vaulting-horse. But no, it was not a horse—whoever saw a horse with horns? The block over which these young men were springing was fitted with broad curving horns, just like those of the bull he had seen in the cage.
It was a scene of great activity, yet it seemed to be much less light-hearted than the tumbling Nun used to do as a boy. Nun could swing himself around the rigging of his ship with the best of his seamen, but he did not feel much inclined to join this club of grim-faced gymnasts, merely because the court of King Minos seemed to think it was the right thing for Young Foreign Visitors.
The page showed him to a small room, like a cell, with two hard beds. It was nothing like as comfortable as the guest house at Amnisos had been, but he supposed he could not be too demanding in a palace. He smiled his thanks to the page and the page grinned back and left him. Nun sat down on the bed and wondered what he was doing there, why he had come, and what to do next. Just then a young man came in, breathing heavily, and sat down on the other bed.
Nun looked curiously at his roommate. His hair was pale yellow and very straight, his eyes pale blue, and his skin seemed to vary from white to brick-red, according to how much the sun had got at it. Nun had never been so close to a man of this coloring before; he realized he was sitting and gaping at the stranger stupidly, yet no words came to him. What sort of language would such a strange creature speak, anyway? The stranger looked at Nun with rather blank blue eyes, then spoke in the Cretan tongue with an appalling accent.
“Too much bull in Crete!”
Nun’s knowledge of Cretan was not extensive either, but he felt he should try to make conversation.
“Too much bull?” he repeated rather foolishly. The words did not seem to have much meaning.
“Bull talk,” said the fair young man. “Bull pictures, bull games, bull dancing. Lot of bull.” He flopped heavily on the bed.
“And the bull monster?” queried Nun, trying to keep up the conversation.
“No bull monster,” said the other. “Bull stories.”
“What about the women?” suggested Nun.
The other shut his eyes, was briefly silent, and then said:
“Cows.”
Conversation was clearly going to be difficult with this laconic stranger. There was a long silence. Nun was surprised when the other broke it.
“Where you come from?” He still had his eyes shut as he spoke.
“Gebal,” said Nun. The other made no remark at all—presumably the name meant nothing to him. Nun felt he ought to ask, “And you? Where are you from?”
The young man opened an ice-blue eye at the last rays of the westering sun shining on the courtyard outside, then pointed a long stringy arm toward the North, “Far,” he said. “Very far. You don’t know.” There was another silence, and then he said, in a distant voice, as if not interested in the answer, “You have snow in Gebal?”
This was actually a difficult question to put and to understand, because in the language they were speaking “snow” was an uncommon word.
“Snow,” Nun repeated. “Why, yes. We have snow in Gebal. We have the sea, we have the mountains, and we have snow on top of the mountains.”
The young man sat up and his eyes seemed to come to life. “We, too, have sea, mountains, and snow,” he said. “But do you have this?” He pulled from round his neck a string of translucent golden stones. “Elektron,” he said, holding the amber out to Nun.
Nun took the strange gems. They seemed to hold the light and warmth of the sun, and they clicked with the gentle sound of wood or bone.
“In my land,” said the stranger, “much snow, much cold, much dark. But this sunstone we find by the sea, bring to King Minos. Look!” He rubbed the biggest stone on his woolen sleeve, pulled a twist of wool from the blanket, and held the stone over it. The wool jumped and clung to the stone.
What strange northern magic is this, Nun wondered, but the other made nothing of it, and hearing a movement of feet in the courtyard, stood up.
“Come!” he said. “We eat!”
Groups of young men seemed to be making for a big hall on the other side of the courtyard. Nun and the Northerner followed. They were all taking seats on long benches at big tables. There was a babble of different tongues. “Meet my friends!” said the Northerner, and Nun was glad to be introduced to a group.
Not that he felt he had much in common with them. Their very names seemed impossible to catch. His roommate introduced himself as something like Ag, and the others Nun decided to think of as Eg, Ig, Og, Ug, and so on. They were all much taller than Nun, each one had fair or reddish hair, one had a flaming red beard, all of them had great beefy limbs and massive hands. And Nun wondered that they seemed older than all the other Foreign Visitors, as well as much bigger.
They also seemed unconcerned, while the behavior of the other groups showed tension or bravado. The red-beard waved a meat bone at him. “Come, eat!” he called in bad Cretan. “We sailors, we like to eat.”
“I, too, am a sailor,” said Nun.
“And he comes from a land of mountains and snow,” said Ag.
“Good! Good!” came a chorus through mouthfuls of food, and Nun shook hands all round with large greasy fists, then sat down and joined them.
The food was good: fancy dishes of fish and meat and vegetables, spiced and sauced, wine, fruits in abundance, all served on the finest painted pottery. “Bull pottery too,” Nun remarked to himself, noticing that pictures of bulls being hunted, captured, netted, or wrestled with, seemed the favorite decoration.
He had not nearly satisfied his appetite when he heard above the chatter the voice of a page who had just come in, calling something which he at last distinguished as “Nun the Giblite! Nun the Giblite!”
“Who wants Nun the Giblite?” he called back, raising his voice in nautical fashion. There was a hush, and eyes were turned on him as the page approached. It was the same page who had rather contemptuously delivered him to his cell, but now his bearing seemed very much more respectful.
The page bowed. “Nun the Giblite is requested to accompany me to the Chief Chamberlain’s office.” The other diners exchanged glances and murmurs, clicking their tongues and sniggering.
The young man with the fair hair opened his eyes wide. “My friend, what have you done?” he asked.
Nun, who had been sitting unnoticed and ignored by most of the gathering, now got up with the eyes of the whole room on him. He bowed, smiled briefly, and walked out with the page.
The page took him along corridors to the chamberlain’s office, where another chamberlain, wearing the usual worried expression of the palace officials, took charge of him and led him at an even faster pace through more corridors and up more steps murmuring apologetically as they went. “An error of the administration—regret the temporary, inconvenience—see to your proper accommodation myself—immediate audience with His Majesty …”
“Audience with his Majesty!” exclaimed Nun, almost as out of breath as the flustered official. “But I don’t want to see the King.”
“Understand your feelings—” babbled the chamberlain. “Such short notice—our fault entirely! But you will find His Majesty so condescending, so gracious—especially to his friends—no need for anxiety.”
So His Majesty does have friends, thought Nun. But puzzled as he was to kn
ow how he had reached this dizzy promotion, he kept the remark to himself.
The halls and passages through which they were passing were becoming richer and more luxurious. There were paintings on every wall—sea creatures, birds and beasts and flowers, processions of libation-bearers and throngs of gay ladies. And in the ante-rooms they encountered the courtiers themselves, supercilious young noblemen and bright-eyed, fashionably dressed women who stared at Nun as he was hurried through, and whispered and giggled behind his back as soon as he had passed. At last they came to a living barrier of palace guards with figure-of-eight shields. There was a group of courtiers laughing and chatting to the aristocratic young officer in charge, apparently trying to cajole him into letting them through. The officer was chaffing them in return, but still apparently being quite firm and admitting no more. The Chamberlain led Nun up to him and said in an agitated voice, “Get your soldiers out of the way, please. We’re late as it is.”
“Throne room’s full, old man,” said the officer haughtily. Orders to let no more in.”
The chamberlain actually began to wring his hands in frustration as if he was trying to twist his fingers off.
“But I have special instruction to bring Nun the Giblite in time for the audience,” he moaned.
“What, this?” sneered the officer, looking Nun up and down. “He’s not even dressed!”
Nun felt he could say a number of things. That he had not asked to come to the palace; that, having come, he had no desire for an audience with the King; and that, anyhow, he was wearing more clothes than the young officer, whose summer uniform seemed to consist of an inflated chest and a narrow kilt. But he was not going to be made a fool of after coming all this way. Without a word he felt in his wallet for the seal the Chaldean had given him. In the light he could see the device of the lion attacking the bull. He held it out between finger and thumb before the nose of the officer. At first he thought that it had not had any effect—he had no idea why it should—then he realized that the barrier of guards had melted away in front of him, and with the chamberlain clucking in the rear he walked into the throne room.
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