Naturally he had to express this by choking and blushing furiously while he tried to smother the coughing fit that followed. “I’m, ah . . .” He offered his hands in evidence, once he had mastered his breathing enough to laugh again. “I’m hideous. Water would be good.”
He could see where the man had got his crescent lines—he was grinning now, but it was a friendly grin, a grin that laughed with Kikeru rather than at him. “Let’s offer your dirt to the sea.”
He rose like a mountain rising. Kikeru tried not to stare, but no, he had not been imagining the size of the man. If anything, in his panic, he had been underestimating it.
“Something wrong?”
Oh, he’d missed the hand being held out to help him up. One of the many daemons in the debating committee of his mind told him he’d been inappropriate again—he’d been off in the spirit world and lost track. He should do something to make it right. “Kikeru,” he said, and grasped the hand.
“No, my name’s Rusa,” the stranger said, droll and amused. Kikeru rolled his eyes and tested his knees beneath him. They held firm, but he leaned into Rusa’s continuing support anyway as they paced through the shifting sands and down into the ocean.
Cold at his toes, it was yielding and moving and fresh on his legs. Waist-deep, he became aware of its strength, pushing and rocking him. He spread out his arms, shut his eyes, and toppled backwards into the life-giving splash of its clean water. It closed over his face like the caul of birth, and he let it lift the dirt from him, from his face and his hands and his heart.
When he came up, the sea was piercingly pure, turquoise blue, clear down to the fish swimming by his feet. The long braids of his hair tugged pleasantly against his scalp, his unclogged nose scented woodsmoke and roasting fish. The sky was bright all around him. He was not, to his mother’s despair, a religious person, but sometimes Poteidon’s hand was easy to discern even for him.
“Better?” Rusa asked, standing close by with the spear, points up, poised in his hand. If Poteidon had chosen a human form he could not have done better. Floating, rocking on the waves, Kikeru smiled back.
“Much. Thank you for intervening. I think you saved my life.”
Rusa twitched a large shoulder like an ox shaking off a hornet. “Why would they kill you? I know the Achaeans are . . .”
The pause was eloquent. Ever since the foreigners had come to Crete, they had brought their notions with them. Profoundly wrong notions that created cruel people. They even twisted the goddesses, and they resisted the untwisting, as though they preferred them that way. “The Greeks are strange, but they usually have some reason for their actions. I mean, you’re beautiful, and they don’t need any more reason than that to . . . But killing? Why?”
Kikeru walked out from the sea, squeezing the water from his plaits, with his smile turned away. Beautiful? He wished he was. He wished his long, lean frame would put on some curves. If he could gain just a little flesh in the chest, he could pinch it in and mould it and look more finished, more complete, instead of the bony boyish thing he was now. But beautiful still brought the petals of his soul out of the unfurling bud.
In squeezing his hair dry, he forgot the ivory stylus he had threaded through one lock, and pushed its blunt point painfully into his palm.
“Ow!” he said, and then his wrist was caught and Rusa was looking at the red indentation and the fish’s bite with a quizzical smile.
“You don’t need Achaeans, do you? Look,” he pointed to a flat stone further up the beach on which a nest of sticks smouldered, the source of the smell. “Come and share my catch. I’ll cook—your hands have suffered enough. And you can tell me everything.”
The flat stone was within sight of the harbour and the tallest of the gleaming houses of the town. Rusa swept away the remaining pebbles around it and offered him the bare space. In the distance, a sleek white ship with a flower-garlanded canopy at its stern had just finished rowing out into the offshore winds and was dropping its sail. Kikeru watched it while he tried to martial his thoughts, distracted by Rusa’s movements. The man had a bag here and a cloak and he was rummaging about in them while the light shone in tantalizing shadows on the muscles of his back and thighs. Kiltless, his loincloth at the back was little more than a white line between his buttocks and—
And Kikeru ought not to be looking. He focused hard on the ship just as Rusa turned around.
“I—” he stammered. “Huh.” Where to start? “I am the child of Maja, priestess of Potnia Theron. We live in the palace, and I . . . I make things. I look at how things work, and I improve them. I study the world around me, and I use what I find to create new things—things that no one has ever thought of before.”
Rusa set a wineskin in front of him, then he raked the smoking ashes of his fire from the top of a leaf-wrapped parcel of fish. He gave Kikeru a darting glimpse of approval from his honey-gold eyes. “I thought so—you have a look about you as though you’re seeing more worlds than the rest of us.”
Kikeru sighed. Was it that obvious? He didn’t really want to be set apart for the goddess. She might have consulted with him before she made him this supple, middling thing with fizz for brains. It was nice to be holy, perhaps, but what he really wanted was to be normal.
He took a pull at the wineskin and accepted a handful of cool seaweed with a chunk of baked fish on top. The scent of olive oil and thyme rose from the food and made his cheeks ache with watering.
“I came down from Knossos this morning to walk and think. I am of an age to be married.”
Rusa took his own piece and sat next to him, so close that when Kikeru turned his knee a little, it fell to rest against Rusa’s leg. He liked that. He liked the feeling of being protected, which he’d had every time Rusa touched him since the first.
Perhaps Rusa had sat so close to make it easier to share the wine. Or perhaps it was so that he could, as at first, curve one arm around Kikeru’s back and stroke his shoulder with a petting thumb. Kikeru squirmed because he didn’t really need any more complications to an already impenetrable knot, but oh!
“And you can’t choose the girl?” Rusa asked, sympathetic, though his hand stilled as he waited to be told that he was unwelcome.
“That’s not it at all!” Kikeru scoffed. “My mother would choose for me if that was what I wanted. Or I could go into the temple and dedicate myself as a woman created by the goddess, belonging to the goddess alone. Sexless, unable to marry. I’d be alone forever as my mother is. I don’t think even she is happy with that anymore.”
“She could have married though?” The hand had dropped, perhaps to be reassuring, but Kikeru felt the withdrawal of its intent as a sadness. He would have enjoyed feeling it slide up into his hair, or down to cup his arse. “I’m sorry. I should know this, but theology is not my strong point.”
“She could have married,” Kikeru agreed. His mother, after all, was a mundane woman, fertile and therefore able to bless a marriage. The lesser priestesses were thought better of if they showed they could produce children as well as prayer. He would not be offered that option. If he revealed himself to be a woman, he would be considered an exceptionally holy one, and set apart for the goddesses use alone. “She said she could never see the point. But now I think she regrets not having a household of her own, full of grandchildren who’ll keep her tied into life even when her bones are in the ground.”
“And—” Rusa’s voice grew gentler still, either with awe or with pity “—you have no father?”
“No. I’m the child of a god. Which is fine, but it doesn’t make for good company. I mean, I like the idea of marriage, of children, of running a household together, of growing old together, but . . .”
“But?”
“But I’ve never met a girl I wanted to marry. Never met one that stirred me.” Well, he’d come here to try to work this out. Perhaps it was meant to be that Rusa was here to listen to it. He dared a darting sidelong look. “Plenty of men. Never a woman.”
&nb
sp; “You like me,” said Rusa happily. “I thought so.” He leaned in for a kiss.
Kikeru ducked his head and received it as a butterfly brush of warmth on the edge of his eyebrow. “Don’t!” He chuckled softly because it felt safe to do so. “It’s complicated enough without you making it worse!”
“I’m sorry.” Rusa looked nothing of the kind, gently aglow with amusement and daring. “But none of this is telling me why the Achaeans would want rid of you.”
Kikeru contained himself. “I came down here to think,” he repeated, “but I found a moray eel skeleton with a fully articulated head, and I was looking at it, kneeling concealed behind a dune, when I overheard the Greeks plotting to get all their soldiers together and do something to the temple.”
“Do what?” Rusa’s playfulness fled like the good mood of a kitten dropped into a bath. Under other circumstances, Kikeru might have been frightened, but this was the same power that had come to his rescue, and he felt it as reassuring by his side as if he had been given a weapon.
“I don’t know!” He tried to imagine it, but his thoughts couldn’t reach. “Steal the goddesses’ treasures? Kill people?”
“Kill the king?” Rusa’s voice had regained its growl.
“Why would they want to?”
“In other places, if you kill the king and occupy his palace, you can make yourself the queen. Then all the people have to answer to you.” Rusa was putting out the fire and quenching the hot rocks beneath a layer of damp sand. He stood up and hefted Kikeru to his feet with an effortless strength that felt like flying. “We must tell the queen and the priestesses. We need to be ready.”
Kikeru had been angry at the foreigners’ ideas, but he’d never supposed they would truly act on them. The goddesses would stop it. But now he felt again the careless, certain brutality of the foreigners, and it scared him into shivering. To let those people ever have control over him again could not be endured, true. But perhaps the powers were not idle. Perhaps they had put one of their holy ones in exactly the right place to hear this. Perhaps they expected him to deal with it.
He quailed at the thought. “Will you come with me?”
Rusa pointed to a two-storey mansion with yellow balconies, visible over the pomegranate trees of the overhanging town of Amnissos. “That’s my house. I can’t possibly appear before the queen looking like this. I’m going to run up there and change. You go ahead. Take the news to your mother. Maja, wasn’t it? I’ll meet you there.”
It was noon by the time Kikeru arrived at the temple complex. There was a heaviness in the sunlight that beat on his back as he hurried across the western courtyard, ducking between merchants under their cloth shades and food sellers in bright skirts with covered cauldrons in their arms and bowls stacked on their poised heads.
At midday, small crowds had formed around the food sellers. Folk were packing into the slices of deep shade cast by the masonry to eat and doze a little before the sun slid down the distant mountains and the afternoon appearance of the goddess-queen at her windows heralded the bull game and the sacred dances in the theatre. After which would come all the ceremonies of putting the day properly to bed.
Kikeru barely saw any of it. He blinked twice as he passed from the glare into the shadow of the wall, spiky with horns raised red against the sky. Blinked again as he came out of the shade and mounted the shallow steps of the goddesses’ path. And again as he came dazzled and half-blind from the many alternations of bright and dark into the twisting maze of the palace corridors.
He barely saw those either. This was his hive, as familiar to him as the honeycomb to the bee, and his body turned corners without being asked as he avoided all the sacred and the public rooms, jogged up to his mother’s quarters with the simple assurance of coming home.
They had replaced the rush matting on the floor only a few weeks ago. This new mat was green and yielding underfoot, and the scent of it filled his nostrils as he stepped through the door—straw-like, fresh and clean. The walls were a sandy yellow, painted with blue and green lilies. A cheerful room, large enough for his mother’s couch in the corner, a pallet for him that they folded away under it in the daytime, a bench along one wall with two folding stools leaning against it. His chest and hers along the other.
He saw the room now with a critical eye, though he had scarcely registered it for the last five years. The background of his life, it had been invisible to him until the prospect of Rusa seeing and judging it had made it come alive to him again.
No, this was fine. The matting was clean, the bed well draped in a saffron and indigo coverlet. Rusa could sit on the nice stool with the gilded griffins, and he would see the portable shrine on its bench, and the tripod in the corner where a lamp of rock crystal like frosted ice had been capped with a circlet of wildflowers so the burnt wick did not look ugly during the day. He would have no need to look down on either Kikeru or his mother.
Kikeru would not deal well with anyone who thought ill of his mother.
Maja smiled at him as he came in. She was kneeling in front of her mirror, the polished bronze of its surface upheld by an ivory stand. She had brushed her hair after the morning’s exertions and was repinning it in swags wound about with strings of pearls. In the privacy of her own room, she kept her breasts covered, saying that the support of her shift stopped them aching, but she had taken off her tight bodice and belt, and slung her heavy flounced skirt over the couch.
“You need to get dressed,” Kikeru blurted, mortified at the thought that at any moment Rusa might arrive and find her looking like a washerwoman caught in her underclothes.
“I am getting dressed,” Maja laughed. “Can’t you tell? Specifically, I’m robing to play the part of third cupbearer to the Mistress of Animals. I would have thought by my age I would be first cupbearer at least, if not permitted for once to embody the goddess. But no, that little chit from Gournia gets the honour again, because she has a husband and five children already and one more on the way.”
He loved her, and he would not associate with anyone who did not respect her, but not this again. Kikeru sighed gustily and plopped down on the mat close to his chest, managing to ram his knee into its nearest foot. His finger throbbed, and all of a sudden he was back, bruising grips around his wrists and ankles, helpless.
Not helpless. Not helpless, he reminded himself. Rusa had been there. Flinging the chest open, he rummaged with unusually clumsy fingers for his own comb, his mirror, his palette of cosmetics. And clothes, goddess! Why had he gone out this morning wearing a kilt he’d grown out of when he hit his last growth spurt at eighteen?
“Is there something wrong?” his mother asked, watching him in that patient way of hers, as if she could see right through him to the bones. And yet she so rarely saw what he believed was there to be found.
“Nothing’s wrong. Well, yes, there is, but I really need to get dressed. And so do you.”
Her painted mouth quirked, giving her apple-round face a look of mischief and delight. “Did you meet someone?” she said, and grinned broader at his reaction. “Oh, goddess be praised, you did! Look at you, you’re as pale and as pink as almond blossom. So spill it all. What’s her name? And her profession? She must live in Amnissos, yes? Oh, I’ve been waiting so long for you to show some sort of interest. Finally I might get to hold a grandchild in my arms. I know I’ve been patient—I know what it’s like not to want to be bothered with all the courting and sex and lovey-dovey stuff—but oh, I’ve missed having a little baby to fuss over. Tiny fingers. Little baby snores . . .”
A pause. Kikeru was familiar enough with the endless lapping murmur of his mother’s words to know better than to try to interrupt. He just unplaited his damp hair and wrestled a comb through it, dislodging several stones and feathers as he did.
“You were so cute.” Maja had taken a breath and now she was relaunched. “I never expected to be blessed myself, and I wouldn’t have said anything if you had chosen to dedicate yourself to the temple, but I
am glad you’ve chosen a wife. You won’t go away, will you? You’ll find a few rooms near the workshop, and I will visit you every day and play with your children, and—”
“I didn’t meet a girl.” A different kind of anger stirred in his belly, the kind that was more comfortable to feel than the guilt that underlay it. But he couldn’t stand to hear any more about her ideal future and how he was going to make it happen. “It all sounds lovely, and I’d give it to you if I could, but—”
“I can find you a girl.” At least as she spoke, she was wrapping the skirt around herself, and struggling into the tight sleeves of a madder-red woollen bodice. A boned corset over the top was almost successful at pulling her motherly figure into a more fashionable shape. Perhaps in response to his rebuking look, she parted the open edges of her shift and tucked them around her breasts, leaving them properly displayed. There. She was still talking, but at least she was fit to be seen.
“I know a lot of young women of an age to be married. I could find you the perfect one in no time. It’s good that you’re thinking of it. Young men should marry and be fertile; it’s the goddess’s way.”
The attack this morning seemed to have changed something in him. He had anger to spare for everything, was finished with being helpless and cowed and pliable. So he hadn’t worked it all out yet—still there were some things he did know. “I don’t want a girl, Mother. I did meet someone, yes. He is a man. He is a man, and I’m . . . I don’t know what I am, but it’s not a man, it’s something else—”
He should not have spoken. Now time had turned to amber around them. It was the end of a world—the end of his childhood. Instantly he wished he could take it back and stay, stay in the hinterland of not being known, not knowing, forever.
And then a new world was born. Maja clapped her hands together and raised them to press against her slowly spreading smile. “Oh!” she exclaimed, eyes welling up with pride. “You’re holy! Oh. I should have known you would be. I sometimes saw it, but then I told myself it must be your choice because it’s hard. It’s hard to be alone because you’re set apart, I know, but She is great, they are great—the powers. They give you so much in return for your service. See, they gave me you, and it only seems right now that I should give you back.”
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