But he wouldn’t deny he was disappointed too. He’d thought something was starting, back on the beach. He’d thought, I must take wine and blood and flowers to Yidini and ask her to forgive me because I’m ready to move on.
He sighed as a light well over the left-hand turn restored his sight to him. Well, he would visit her anyway, and he could tell her how cruel it was to hope for a thing and have it snatched away. In the meantime, that did not mean he was excused from helping Kikeru as she was.
The workshop door, too, was open to let the light in. He didn’t trouble to knock, just stooped under the lintel and felt every sinew soften in relief when Kikeru was there.
She made a beautiful woman. Oh very well—honesty was still with him like a weight on his chest—actually, she was no more than middling looking. Even as a young man, he had been more charming than beautiful, but the spirit that shone through his baked brown skin and his midnight dark eyes was so . . . so puckish, so bright and fierce and clever, it gathered up his face and body with it and made them flame-like, beguiling.
Kikeru was restless now, elbow deep in a chest of bent pieces of wire, tossing out metal tangles onto the flagged floor while muttering to himself. Rusa stood and looked and waited while relief and fondness rolled over him like a sunrise. But perhaps he ought not to be saying he. Not even in his own mind.
“Can I help?”
Kikeru started. She’d obviously been a long way away—hadn’t heard him come in. Now she dropped a double handful of strange wooden shapes on the floor, tried to rise, tripped on her skirt and barked her elbow on the wall. Rusa didn’t laugh, but quietly, inside, the clumsiness gave him joy. Had she inherited this disconnection from her body from her mother? What came out as sexlessness in one, coming out as an inability to feel her own boundaries in the other?
“Did Mother send you to check on me?” Kikeru asked, rubbing the elbow and looking resentful. “Did she think I was going to rush off without a thought and get myself into trouble? Does she think I’m stupid? Do you?”
He was amused right up until his gaze fell on the mounds where her flat chest had been squeezed by bodice and corset to make them shallow little nubs of breasts, and then he was fighting off the urge to go and rub a thumb there underneath, to cup his whole palm over them and feel the swell. He could almost imagine the gasp that would come if he did and—
In this place? Really?
“I . . . I’m sorry.” He wrestled his thoughts back into line. “Would I have come looking here if either of us thought you would run off unprepared to be slaughtered? I came to say . . .” His invention failed him. He had not actually thought this far—thought about what it would be to say good-bye, to admit he had no more place in her life.
“I came to say, why don’t you come and meet my daughter, Jadikira? She’s a little younger than you, but she doesn’t have many female friends and I—”
“Don’t call me that!”
This sea was full of crosscurrents, and Rusa could have bristled at getting more anger where he had tried to be very correct. But he had been on enough voyages to know that complaining about the weather never changed it. He listened and tried to adapt. “Don’t call you . . . female?”
“No! I mean, yes. Don’t call me that.”
“But you’re . . .” He waved a cautious hand at her skirts and breasts and red lips, was blindsided by a vivid memory of Yidini as she came out of the potters’ workshop twenty years previously, crackling with fury at some experimental slip-coating that had burst the pots in their kiln, looking so beautiful he never went home again.
Kikeru gave a disgusted sigh and turned away to bring out a large sheet of semitransparent hide. “I told you it was complicated. I’m not a man, true. But I’m not a woman either. I don’t know what I am! And I don’t know what to do about it. So please just go away and let me work.”
It had the recognizable ring of desperation, against which he would not push. “Of course,” he said. “But do come, when you’re done. The Greeks—even if they put this plan into action at once, they will have to send messengers out to the other cities, and their messages will be debated, and then the other chiefs will have to choose who to send. They will have to arm and prepare them and transport them here. There’s time yet for you to come and have dinner with me. You can meet Jadikira as well, but really I want you to come so that you and I don’t have to say farewell.”
Kikeru’s braced shoulders slumped. He (She? They?) rubbed his kohled eye and grimaced at the soot on his knuckles. Managed to smile. “All right. Thank you.”
When Rusa first met his wife, on that fateful day of the broken pots, it was in Knossos. Two years previously, she had fled here from a family who’d made her unhappy and her skills had made her welcome in the temple. He had come on pilgrimage, only intending to stay a month and then to go home to his sprawling clan in Palaikastro. But he’d stayed for her. Bought a share in a ship that he was able with industry to convert to full ownership of a fleet of three.
Being without family in Amnissos, what else was he to do but to adopt the families of his crews? It was the widow of Dolphin’s steersman who cooked the dinner, sharing his kitchen with her own brood. And it was her sister, Itaja, who took charge of cleaning the house until it sparkled and opened his door to Kikeru as though it were her own.
She ushered Kikeru out onto the roof garden to meet Rusa and Jadikira, and disappeared to bring wine, while Rusa tried to look urbane and welcoming and at ease under the sharp and knowledgeable gaze of his grown-up daughter.
This evening Kikeru was wearing the mid-calf-length culottes favoured by women who needed freedom of movement to climb trees or masts. He was wearing them with a man’s uncovered torso, and the combination made Jadikira laugh out loud.
She was seven months pregnant now. Too tired to do very much, with the baby squirming about under her skin. She spent most of her nights up here on the roof, where she could cool down, surrounded by containers of fruit trees and planters of herbs. Rusa thought she must be growing restless, because all this staying at home was not normally to her taste. She had inherited his need to be out and alone in the wild. That would have to change now, obviously.
“Kira, be respectful,” he said now, because he was all but shaking with nerves, and the last thing he needed was for her and her independent spirit to deal this thing a deathblow before it started.
“Don’t fret, Father. I am full of respect. It’s strange, that’s all.”
Kikeru paused in the act of bending to a seat and gave Kira a long look, while Rusa wiped his hands on his kilt—a different one this time, less formal, a little worn, to show they were all friends—and silently supplicated the Lady of the Animals to keep Jadikira in line.
“Did you just call me ‘it’?” Kikeru asked, settling to the woven leather bands of the stool top. He didn’t sound as upset as Rusa might have thought he’d be.
“I called your outfit ‘it,’” Jadikira corrected cheerfully, scooping up a dollop of fig paste and olives, the mere smell of which turned Rusa’s nervous stomach. “But as you’re wearing it, I don’t know what I should call you.”
“I don’t know either.” Kikeru seemed to reflect back her cheer, perking up. “Call me whatever you like.”
“She gets ‘call me anything’ and I get ‘don’t call me that’?” Rusa asked, hiding a little sting of jealousy under an exaggerated protest. The simultaneous eye roll the pair of them gave him made it all worthwhile, made him want to laugh too.
So, this was actually going quite well. He nodded at the bag Kikeru had brought with him. “While dinner cooks, why don’t you show us what you made?”
Kikeru’s eyes lit up. He brought something square out of the bag. A frame of wire held a narrowing sock of hide, and into the narrow end was sewn another frame, slightly smaller, with its own diminishing skirt of hide, and again with a third, and again, each one fitting into the next, until the whole tube opened up into a funnel at least twelve feet long, with
a conch for a terminal like the conch trumpets with which the priestesses greeted the dawn.
It was obviously a work of ingenuity, but it was such a bizarre shape and so outside Rusa’s frame of experience, it struck him as either uncanny or comical. He caught Jadikira’s eye and saw she was desperately trying not to laugh. Laughter would be a relief—he definitely felt there was something otherworldly about the thing, come as it had out of a realm of shadows only Kikeru could reach.
“What is it?” He looked to Kikeru for reassurance that it was safe. Only on seeing Kikeru’s face—the faint trace of fear around the eyes, the parted lips with their uncertain smile—did he realise that Kikeru was also waiting for reassurance. Weird though it might be, this thing was to Kikeru what the work of any artist was to its maker.
“It’s a sound scoop.” Kikeru handed Jadikira the conch. “Listen.”
She put it to her ear and paused a moment with a steadily widening grin. Then she burst out laughing and choked on her wine.
“Is that . . .” Kikeru’s uncertain smile grew more pleading. “Is it a good reaction?”
“It is,” Rusa hurried to reassure him. “That’s a laugh of delight. She was the same when we gave her her first kitten, minus the wine, of course. Poor thing ended up being called Giggles all its life, though it was the meanest tom in the city.”
Rusa took the earpiece away and pressed it to his own ear, still a little worried he might hear gods or the voices of ghosts. For a while the roaring hiss sounded as blustering and chaotic as he expected from the spirit realm, but gradually his mind put it together with the lesser things his other ear was hearing and made sense of it. Once it had, the loudness of everything was astonishing. He could hear his neighbours fighting through the wall. The mouse he could see creeping up the gutter into the pomegranate tree planted on the southeast corner of the roof seemed to be making a scratching worthy of griffins. When the distant seabirds shrieked, it was as though a gong had been smashed just behind him.
“It’s . . . amazing.” Jadikira wiped the tears from her eyes, warmly earnest. “That came out of your head? Or was it breathed into your heart by a daemon?”
Kikeru’s smile leapt up like a flame on fresh kindling. He shook his head bashfully. “I just think, How do I do this thing? I drop the question into the dark. And sooner or later an answer comes back, as though I thought of it without thinking. If you know what I mean?”
Rusa didn’t, and from the way Jadikira pursed her lips, she didn’t either. Kikeru looked at their incomprehension and sighed. “I don’t know where the ideas come from,” he tried again. “Mother says it’s from the goddesses.”
Then you are set apart. Rusa tried not to let disappointment dim his admiration. Both in body and mind, you belong to the goddesses, not to me.
Fortunately Jadikira could be relied on to lighten the atmosphere, slipping back into her fond taunting. “But how are you going to set something like that up in the Achaean compound? They’re going to see an enormous worm attached to their windows, aren’t they?”
“Well, yes. I thought I’d set it up in the sewers, where they wouldn’t see it.” Kikeru gave Rusa an appealing look as if here, too, he wanted someone on his side. But Rusa wasn’t getting into a contest against his own daughter. He shrugged and hoped Kikeru could read the message: You’re on your own here.
“I don’t think the Greeks’ houses even have sewers,” Kira said with a disapproving curl of the lip towards foreigners and their backwardness. “Look. You’re making this far too complicated. I met a Greek lady at their temple of Artemis—that’s what they call Potnia Theron. I’ll just go and visit her. Xenia is her name. While I’m there, I’ll catch up on the gossip, and she’ll tell me if there’s anything going on.”
“Why would she just tell you?” Kikeru scoffed. “She’s a Greek too. She will be in league with her men. Actually she’ll probably be in charge of the whole scheme.”
Jadikira gave him a shows what you know look. “The Greek women hate their men,” she said. “They never spare an opportunity to make them miserable. And I can’t blame them. They’re not even allowed to go outside without a male chaperone. They’ll spill everything, you’ll see.”
Rusa didn’t like this plan. He trusted his daughter and he trusted Potnia Theron to protect her, but he didn’t want her to put herself in danger. However, if he also didn’t want to be like the Greeks and take his daughter’s freedom away for his own peace of mind, he couldn’t actually say so.
“Don’t go in the nighttime,” he said instead, hoping something else would turn up in the meantime to prevent her. “At least wait until tomorrow.”
“Are you sure about this?” Rusa asked Jadikira the next morning. They had passed a pleasant evening, though one he would not willingly live through again, with its combination of yearning, self-consciousness, and the awareness that Jadikira was watching his interaction with Kikeru and adding things up.
Self-consciousness had ebbed this morning, and now they were eating a breakfast of barley porridge and spiced goats’ milk and the last of the raisins in store. Fear had rejoined him on his eating couch, and fear was in each sip of warm new milk, each sweet bite. Rusa had seen conflicts in other lands. On the mainland, Cretan colonies had to fight for their survival against the Achaeans and their like, and he knew enough not to trust they knew how to be human.
Look what they had almost done to Kikeru. No. He swallowed and pushed his plate away, unable to squeeze more food into a stomach clenched tight with fear. He didn’t want to take away her courage but . . . “I wish you would not go. These men are—”
“These men are no worse than the bull, and I’ve survived him.” Jadikira pushed her own plate away—the child had taken up the space in which her stomach used to live, and these days she could only graze on food, little and often. Rusa wondered what it was like to cradle a whole new person under your ribs, and felt briefly, distinctly second class.
“You were not so burdened then,” he said. “You should consider the child.”
“Because she’s more important than I am?” Jadikira bristled. Her mother had been sad much of the time. No matter the gifts and the love, and the funny foreign things he had brought back to amuse her, she would so easily relapse into being sad and quiet, and her rare outbursts of earthquake-like anger had come perhaps once or twice a year, as though they’d had to shift a mountain to emerge. Jadikira was angry more often, but laughed more often too. He thought perhaps that was easier, at least on her.
“All I mean,” he said, “is you run more slowly and leap less high when you are doing it with a passenger, and I worry that you may need to run fast if you go among those men.”
“It will be fine.” She rolled onto her bulge to reach over and pat his hand—their couches lay head to head with the low table in front of them and the second-floor doors thrown open to the balcony beyond. The sky and the sea filled half their vision, blue as the base of a candle flame, scattered with the jewels of painted fishing boats. From here, he could see his flagship, Tern, resting at anchor in the shelter of the headland.
“You forget,” Jadikira reminded him, “I know their wives. The Achaean men are not monsters. They wouldn’t hurt a mother. Not like they might hurt your boy.”
She raised an eyebrow at his blush. “Hmm,” she said. “I thought as much. You like him . . . or her. Whatever she is. You wouldn’t want him to go, would you? So I’ll go instead. It will be fine.”
“I don’t want either of you to go,” he said, feeling defeated. The truth was there was no safe way to find the proof Maja asked for. If he went armed and dangerous into the Greek’s stronghold and asked questions, his intent would be obvious and he could be overwhelmed. Kikeru could not go. They knew Kikeru and would finish what they started. If Jadikira did indeed know the Greek women, her visit would seem innocent, and why should there then be running and fighting? Didn’t he trust her to handle herself cleverly enough?
Jadikira was looking mulish
now, determined, and he didn’t want her to go into peril sore that her father did not believe in her. He rubbed the back of his neck and sighed. “But I trust you to know what you are capable of, and if you say you’re going to do this thing, then I’m proud of you, and I want to help.”
She eased her way off the couch and stood, linking her hands under her belly to hold it up and give it relief. His grandchild was in there, and again he had to fight himself not to plead with her, nor to hold her back by force.
“I should go now before the sun gets too high,” she said, and tilted her head, listening. A moment later he heard it too. Itaja at the door, and Kikeru’s voice asking urgently, “Has she gone yet?”
“Oh, he likes you.” Jadikira nudged Rusa’s shoulder with a sharp elbow and grinned.
Even worry couldn’t stop him smiling about that. “He likes you too, by the sound of things. It’s you he’s here to see.”
“Please!” she rolled her eyes to the roof beams. “I’m not interested in some half-priestess temple boy barely older than me. You keep that all to yourself.”
Which was not at all what he’d meant and she knew it. They were laughing together as Kikeru pelted into the room.
“Good, you’re still here. Take this!”
He handed her what seemed to be an extremely narrow vase made of sheet copper, beaten into a cylinder and then riveted down its join. A second cylinder made of thick leather fitted inside. Inside that, it was stuffed with wool soaked in a stinking black liquid Rusa recognised by the smell. Naphtha, which loved fire and would burn and burn at the slightest provocation.
“Um, thanks.” Jadikira turned the thing in her hands, lips and nose wrinkling at the scent. “What is it?”
“You see here?” Kikeru slid the leather cylinder out of the metal, and showed its base, where a lamp wick threaded into a parchment tube packed with some kind of black powder. “You light the wick. Then you put the fire-stick into its jacket and hold it up. It’s best to wrap your skirt around your fingers when you do that, because it can get hot. After about three breaths, the fire-stick will fly out of the end of the jacket like a rock out of a volcano, and the oil and wool will catch on fire. It will be like a new star in the sky, until it falls.”
Labyrinth Page 4