There were scarlet burns on his hands, and sooty sears on his culottes—the same ones he’d worn last night. Though he wore a blue knitted cap tight to his skull, at least two of the braids poking out from under it looked shorter than usual and frazzled at the ends, and Rusa realised with a rib-aching welling up of gratitude he’d been up all night creating this thing.
“But what’s it for?” Jadikira asked, looking almost as charmed as Rusa felt himself.
“If you . . .” Kikeru’s slightly manic certainty wore off to reveal concern. “If you need help, you set this off. We’ll see it in the sky and we’ll come.”
Rusa laughed because he otherwise might cry, and strode forward without thinking to lift Kikeru off his feet into the engulfing hug that would, he hoped, say everything his words could not. Kikeru laughed too, and for a long moment he clung on, putting his face down against Rusa’s neck. It was comfort for a while, until it became inappropriately arousing, and Rusa had to peel him off and set him back on his own feet.
The moment he was down, Jadikira swept him up into her own hug, though cautious of her belly, which she’d told Rusa recently had begun to ache at contact, stretched as it was.
“Thank you,” she said. “This is ingenious! I thought about a fire arrow, but I couldn’t have smuggled a bow in. This I can put in the bottom of a basket and cover with cloth. I’m embroidering baby blankets. It won’t look strange.”
A moment later and she had gathered up her basket and wound herself in a long shawl, pulling the material around her skirts, up over her head, pressing flat the spiral reddish hair she had inherited from her mother. She had her mother’s blue eyes too, ill-omened and yet so beautiful, and the all-encircling yellow veil made them stand out as bright as the sea.
Don’t go, Rusa wanted to say, walking her to the door. But he didn’t. Kikeru slipped a hand into his as they watched her walk down the narrow white path with her basket on her head. Then she turned into the coastal road between old Kubaba’s house and the chandlery and they lost sight of her.
He turned and hugged Kikeru again, because how else could he say how grateful he was that she was there?
This time the hug lasted a little longer—too much conflicting emotion in it to sweep it into flames. He found he was taking comfort from Kikeru’s slender strength against him, from the way they had tucked their long hands into the top of his belt, and the press of fingertips against his tailbone, even from the smell of scorched hair and naphtha, and the scratchy goats’ wool of the knitted cap.
After a moment longer, Kikeru sagged against him. When Rusa looked down, he saw the youth’s head was balanced on his collarbone, eyes closed. They had seen a chance to help and they had taken it, though it had taken them all night and all their strength. He smiled down at the crescent of dark eyelashes as Kikeru’s mouth parted, and he was just fighting off the urge to lean down and touch it with his own, when their legs slid out from under them.
Kikeru had fallen asleep here in Rusa’s arms, as unguarded and profoundly as a child. Tenderly, Rusa swung him up and carried him up to the dining room, where an eating couch was a more decent place to recline together than a bed. Rusa sat propped by the back of a couch, arranging Kikeru to sleep over him, pillowed by his thigh. That allowed him to put a hand in the youth’s hair to soothe him, while looking out over the town, waiting for a flare he was all but certain would come.
Hours gnawed at Rusa’s belly like wolves. It was afternoon by the time Kikeru awoke, completing the ruin of his makeup by rubbing the sleep from his eyes. “What happened to her husband?” Kikeru asked softly, putting his head back down in Rusa’s lap, though it could not be comfortable there at present.
Rusa sighed. “Nothing. She . . .” He shrugged, though careful to avoid rocking Kikeru’s cheek across the ridge of his erection and making things harder in every way. “She doesn’t have one. Doesn’t want one. Says it is enough to have friends and a father. I don’t believe she even knows whose child it is. She says she enjoys sex but she’s never had any desire to love or live with a man.”
“That doesn’t worry you?” Kikeru asked, looking at Rusa’s strained expression and shifting his cheek to Rusa’s hip instead, leaving Rusa both relieved and frustrated.
“Of course it does. I’m missing a third of my profit this season because I couldn’t go on voyage and let her deliver the child alone. And if she expects me to look after it once it’s here, so she can run about unfettered as of old, she’s got another think coming. She should be involved with her own daughter, but it saddens me that it has to be alone.”
“It’s all so complicated,” Kikeru lamented. “Like a knot when you can’t find the end.”
“For me, it’s simple,” he said, looking back out the window at the sky. “Right now all I pray is she’ll be safe.”
It seemed a pointed irony that, at that very moment, the flare blazed up.
The Achaeans had been given a parcel of land to the west of the city and had built themselves houses in their own style: white, with thin white pillars of stone that looked as though they would fall down at the first tremor of the earth.
They had surrounded their enclave with a high wall, filled with earth, so when Rusa jogged up to it, Kikeru loping easily at his side, all he could see was the monumental equivalent of a clenched fist.
Cretan towns arose from the land like hills—here a pavement and then a little flight of steps, a garden and a garden wall over which berry vines hung, or bean flowers buzzed with bees. A house and then a taller house behind it, and an archway between them, or a courtyard where children could play. Wind from the sea flowed up through the streets sparkling, and the land blew it back, warmer, heavy with scent, so the people of the island were at all times involved with their homeland, open to take in its sweetnesses and give it back their love.
This compound could not have been more different. Crete ended at the knife-sharp cut of its walls into the grass. For all they were meant to be defensive, the walls said, We’re ready for your nonsense. We believe the whole world outside is poised to attack us and inside we’re bristling up and waiting. The sheer thought that they might need such a defence was an offence in itself.
So Rusa thought, as he hurried along the dusty path with the fortifications at his right, looking for a way inside. Sometimes what folk thought of as a defence turned out to be a prison, and he had never been more aware of how impossible it must be to get out of this place, let alone in.
Only one gate opened landwards, barely wide enough to fit an oxcart through. Its great stone archway and the carving above it of a male god seated on the sacred mountain between the queen’s griffins—they felt like insults, as though the Achaeans had seen what was most sacred and decided to mock it, even in the very face of their hosts.
But he must not let himself take everything amiss. They were strange, he knew that. But if there was still some way he could do this in peace, with no harm to anyone, he must make himself find it.
The black shadow of the gate was startlingly cool as he hurried through it. Then the compound closed around him like a communal burial chamber, giving no sight of the world beyond its walls, cutting him off. He stopped while he was yet in the passageway through the depth of the wall, and an Achaean gave him an impatient jerk of the head from under a boar-tusk helmet.
“Go in or go out,” he said, with his hand resting on the pommel of his short stabbing sword. “Don’t stand here blocking the way for everyone else.”
Kikeru curled a hand into Rusa’s belt, and he felt it shaking, trapped like the heartbeat of a small bird under his ribs. He put his own hand over the top of it as he came fully through the passage and stepped to one side to rake the enclave with his gaze, hoping he would catch sight of Jadikira’s rose-coloured skirts or the golden veil she had demurely drawn over herself that morning.
“Why don’t you go back?” he said. “After yesterday, you shouldn’t force yourself to come this close to these people again. I should have m
ade you stay at the house. Go back.”
Kikeru pressed a little closer, drawing an appreciative glance from the guard that made Rusa put a protective arm around her shoulders. “I’m not going back without Jadikira,” she said with stubborn fear. “No one should be alone with these people.”
Rusa didn’t want to entertain that thought, but agreed. Where was she?
He saw a central amphitheatre, like that of the temple, where sacred dances and games could be held, but where, now, a dozen naked men were running a foot race around a score more who were boxing or lifting stones. Farthest away from the gate, a temple stood on raised ground with only one door, and no windows of appearance—presumably the god was as trapped in there as the people were trapped behind their walls.
Under the temple’s shade, a group of older men were sitting and—judging from the loud voices and wide gestures—arguing about something. From what he knew of the Greeks, it was probably a wrangle over the nature of true justice, as though they would know. They should ask their wives and their priestesses, but . . .
It took a moment to register and then clicked into place with a dull horror. There were young men and old men in the streets, and boys. There were no women. His flesh crawled when he imagined Jadikira walking in here, she who knew that everywhere was allowed to her, walking in here and feeling all of them turning to look.
“I can’t see any women at all!” Kikeru whispered at his elbow with disbelief. “Don’t they have any? But then how do they . . .?”
Rusa had thought he could walk in and ask for Xenia, but it occurred to him belatedly he should have asked the name of her father or her husband. How well would the Greeks take it if he came in trying to speak to one of their women by name?
Rusa strode out for the temple and the old men under it, in the hope the years had taught them compassion.
“I’m searching for my daughter,” he said as they broke off their bickering to look up at him with expressions he was used to from the mainland. Effete asiatic, their blue, dismissive eyes said loudly, but gods, look at the size of him!
“Well, I would have thought the beards would clue you in to the fact you will not find her here,” said a wag with a waist-long bush of beard red as a barbary ape. He eyed Rusa’s shaved chin, and Kikeru’s feminine trousers with visible contempt. “Though I understand you people find it difficult to tell your men from women and your women from men.”
“I wonder how they do tell?” said a voice he recognised—the white-haired man from whom he’d freed Kikeru. He sounded far more confident on his own ground, piercing Rusa with a gaze that asked him how he liked it when the boot was on the other foot. “We should make an examination for the sake of philosophy. See if they keep any balls at all under those kilts, or if they all cut them off when they’re born.”
Shit. Rusa backed away, even as the bite of Kikeru’s fingernails into his flank told him the youth was scared and trapped and vulnerable. This was not the place to be angry, but he could feel it shoulder up under his breastbone like a bubble of molten stone. “We are not enemies,” he said, gritting the words out from a jaw that wanted to clench. “Your gods and mine abhor this lack of hospitality and this mocking of a father’s concern, but—”
Kikeru pulled his hand away suddenly, squirmed out of the protection of Rusa’s arm and ran two steps away, to where a small bare boy, about three or four years old, had run out of a nearby house. Kikeru was kneeling by him, raising the twig of the boy’s arm into sunshine, making the bangle around his wrist flame up with light like the flare.
Rusa turned his back to the men, expecting to be knifed in the kidneys, and came closer to pick up what Kikeru had seen. And yes, that was his daughter’s bangle, the one he had brought her home from Egypt, gold with lotus flower terminals filled with blue enamel and faience beads.
“That’s very pretty,” Kikeru was saying, as the boy preened to be admired. “Do you know where the lady is, whose bracelet this was?”
“It’s my bracelet now.”
Part of Rusa didn’t even want to let that go. Two tonnes of dried fish, this thing had cost, and a sweetener of fragrant cyprus wood, and Jadikira had loved it so much she had never taken it off again. “Just tell me where the lady is,” he growled, and saw the child flinch, as if he associated that tone of voice with a slap.
“She’s in my house. Mummy said I should show you.”
The house was a miniature of the compound—closed in on itself, its red-tiled roofs visible above a defensive wall of its own. Buildings on three sides of the square, a courtyard in the middle, and to the right a two-storey building with tiny barred windows. The single gate into the courtyard was closed and a soldier with a sword stood in front of it.
“She’s up there.” The boy pointed at the second-storey room. “With Mummy and the concubines. Mummy says the lady wants to go home but she isn’t going to be allowed.”
That was ridiculous, and the boy must be lying. The Greeks could not possibly imagine they would get away with that?
Rusa hadn’t even finished the thought before he had shoved the guard aside and was pounding on the gate’s locked door. “Jadikira! Jadikira!”
Silence inside, and then something smashed and the quiet was suddenly a flurry of running feet and shouting. The guard tried to come at Rusa with his spear, but Rusa grabbed the shaft of it behind the head and twisted it out of the man’s grip almost absentmindedly, as he resumed yelling.
Women’s voices like seagulls shrieked from overhead in the innermost of inner rooms. He didn’t know whether he could actually hear his daughter or if her voice was in his imagination, but he flung himself at the locked door in such a state of transport, he could not feel the impact of the wood against his shoulder. Only the splintering of planks around the lock registered, with a hot, red, panicky exultation.
Unexpectedly, the door was flung open just as he was about to ram it again. He could not stop himself and reeled into the centre of a scrum of soldiers on the other side. Like a bull running into the hunter’s nets, he tried to toss them off, but there were too many, all the hands dragging at him, pulling him away.
He looked up. He knew the man who stood at the other side of the courtyard’s stubby, mocking altar pillar. Stratios of Megara, the Greeks’ spokesman and leader. Whatever was going on here, if this outrage was connected to the plan to despoil Knossos or not, it went to the top. He would find no help in the Greeks’ own ranks. Well, good. Let them all burn.
“Where’s my daughter, you villain!” he shouted, still pushing, pushing to get closer to the house, to get to the stairs up. If he could only drive his way to the women’s quarters and fling wide the door . . .
“Oh, you’re her father?” Stratios eyed Rusa’s battle against the five soldiers still clinging to his arms and legs. “You’re a disgrace. Letting your pregnant, unmarried daughter run around like a bitch in heat? You should be thankful to me. I’ve decided to take the girl into my house and make an honest woman of her. Give her bastard a man’s name and lineage. You can pay me her dowry when you’ve calmed down a little.”
By now Rusa’s chest was burning, his heart fit to burst. His legs trembled, and the soldiers drove him back a pace, and then as he struggled to breathe, another.
“Rusa!”
A glance over his shoulder, and Kikeru stood tear-streaked by the courtyard door with the guard’s bronze sword scoring a red line at his throat.
All his splendid defiance crumpled together like a sheet of gold leaf until there was nothing but a little heavy stone left. “Wait,” he said, stumbling back as they shoved him, reeling, through the wall and out into the jeering crowd. “Don’t hurt him.”
“Milksops,” said Stratios, following him out of the door and addressing the watchers, as though this were a piece of theatre designed especially for them. A public performance to make a point. “You see what pushovers they are? This is the best they can offer to oppose us?” He shook his head, miming a contempt so deep it was all but
despair. “Throw them out.”
Rusa wasn’t sure what entity possessed him, whether it was a god or a daemon. It wasn’t his own mind. That was screaming somewhere far above his head. No, it was something else, something howling. It was all he could do not to shove Kikeru aside as he bounded onto the road that lead back to Knossos, and the fire in him pushed him to a sprint.
“Wait,” Kikeru gasped, catching up. Yet again he was bloody and streaked with running eyeliner, a theme of their encounters with the Greeks. “Where are you going? What are we going to do?”
“I’m going to the temple.” That part of Rusa’s plan was all instinct—if there was critical thought left in him at all, he would have to admit the whole of the plan was instinct—but he was not second-guessing himself at present. He was going to hit something and hit it hard until these people realised they could not—
How could they think they would get away with this?
How could he be running in the opposite direction when his daughter needed him? But . . . but she did not need him to die. That would not help her. And if he could not hit strongly enough with his body, he had other resources. He would make them give her back. He would make them pay for hurting Kikeru twice and for—
Oh goddesses, Potnia Theron, whom my daughter serves. They call you Artemis in there, protector of wild young women. Don’t let them hurt her. Please.
“Listen.” Kikeru’s face was scrunched like wet linen, as he struggled to run and breathe and talk and weep all at the same time. “I’ll put on a dress and go in to look for her. They know that means a priest. They wouldn’t—”
“You’re not going anywhere near them!”
Later, Rusa might have been ashamed to think of how easily his regard for the freedom of others fled him in that moment, but right now, no. He was not going to let another woman . . . another beloved person . . . run into the same noose, however brave it was to offer.
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