“I will go where I like!” Kikeru yelled back, stopping in the middle of the road and angrily dashing the tears from his eyes. “And I will do what I think is right. Don’t treat me like an idiot.”
Right, because it wasn’t enough he had lost his daughter; must he also lose the support of someone who had become far too close, far too fast? No. He shouldn’t think of it like that. Shouldn’t feel sorry for himself. He stopped too and choked back his own tears in the fear that if they spilled, they would put out his rage.
“Don’t,” he managed. “Please don’t. I can’t . . . I can’t be afraid for you too. Please don’t.”
Kikeru sagged, even as swallows wheeled white about his head and a sympathetic onlooker shook her head sadly as she drove a flood of brown goats downhill past them both.
“You’re probably right,” he said, taking the blue woolen cap off his head and wringing it. “I just . . . I just have to do something.”
How do you think I feel? Rusa thought, setting a more sustainable pace for the walk uphill that would take what remained of the day. What they had done to her, they had probably done already. He told himself it didn’t matter. If she lived and she was freed, everything else could be healed. But he didn’t believe himself.
“We’re going to do something,” he said, every sinew in his body tight to bursting with the need to fight. “Neither of us can fight a whole village, but I have a ship.”
Never had the road seemed longer. He wished, for the first time, he had one of the Greeks’ little horse chariots to whip into blazing speed. Feet were slow and oxcarts slower, but he forced himself into a military jog-trot and came to the palace while the blushing sun still clung to the edge of the sky.
The magazines were closing—the priestesses who sat in front of them folding up their tables and packing away their tally sticks, but he found Tarina, with whom he had done business for ten years of voyages, and pressed a shaking fist to his forehead in salute to her as he begged her to stay on for a moment and hear him.
“Rusa,” she said, settling onto her stool and tipping a handful of tally stones back from her pouch into the palm of her hand. She had wispy white hair and shrewd eyes, their black irises circled with milky rings—one who had seen the worst the goddesses could do and had survived it. “This looks urgent. What can I do for you?”
“I need all the naphtha you have in store. I need it sent to my ship right now.”
“Naphtha?” she said, sorting through the stamps in her palm for the right one, picking up the last of the clay sheets that lay beneath damp sacking by her feet to keep malleable in the spring’s strengthening sun. “We don’t have much of it. There’s little call for it and few uses. Nasty, stinking stuff. We have two pithoi in the west wing, no more. How much do you want?”
“All of it.” He unclasped his seal and passed bracelet and stone over. “I will exchange for it whatever you ask—you know my credit’s good. I just want it in my ship before the sun goes down.”
“There will be a decanting charge and a transport charge,” she said, looking at him as though she wished she had the nerve to ask what this was for, but it was not her job to do so. It was not her job to approve or disapprove of the uses to which the goddesses’ bounty was put, but she clearly wished it was.
“Whatever is necessary.”
Another doubtful look, and she stamped the clay tablet with the naphtha stamp, and with the symbol for two, then pressed his seal down after, initialling the record with the flying tern that symbolised his name. A waved arm brought a young runner from where he had been crouching in the portico, and he sped off at her urgent instructions to see it done before the day’s trading ended.
That was when Kikeru reappeared with Maja at his elbow, looking riper than ever beside Tarina’s raisin-like old age. Rusa hadn’t noticed Kikeru slip away, but he noticed him come back, with his face washed and his eyes swollen and a wild, guilty look to his bearing, like a dog who’s eaten the dinner and is afraid he’ll never be forgiven.
It almost made Rusa’s rage falter. Did Kikeru think he was angry with him? He wasn’t. And when he had Jadikira back, he would make that plain. But first things first.
“Tell me what you’re thinking.” Maja put a hand in the centre of his chest, over the pendant of his ship, making the little dolphins that hung there on fine chains tinkle like small bells. The touch made his heart feel like it had burst out of his ribs and was thudding directly into her palm.
“I’m going to burn them out,” he said, startled by the croak of his own voice, which he could scarcely force out of a jaw that had become motionless as stone. “I have three catapults on the Lark. I’m going to sail her down to their miserable little town, and I am going to burn it to the ground.”
Maja and Tarina exchanged glances, both of them with their eyebrows up in their coiled hair. Probably thinking about politics, potential repercussions. Well, let them. He would take repercussions too. He didn’t care.
“Why would you do that?” Tarina asked cautiously, as though she thought he had gone mad.
“It’s the Greeks.” Maja had the decency to look guilty too. Her, he did blame a little. If she had just passed on Kikeru’s news instead of insisting on checking it . . .
That wasn’t fair. She hadn’t put Jadikira in peril. Jadikira herself had done that. And the Greeks.
“They’ve kidnapped his daughter.”
“They’ve what!” Tarina stood so quickly she scattered stamps. “The queen should be told. The household guards can be mobilised, representations made.”
An audience with the queen could take weeks to arrange, and any decision would be debated by the queen’s council and the king’s.
“I want something done now.”
“Of course you do.” Maja let go of his necklace and pressed her fingers to her mouth. “But let’s see if they are afraid of the mothers’ wrath before we do anything that might risk killing children. Even Greek children.”
“A show of spiritual force first,” Tarina agreed, gathering up her lost pieces and straightening her back like a woman ready to go to war. “I can bring a good procession of girls from Diktynna, if you can bring a crowd from Potnia Theron.”
Maja grinned, caught by the idea, and then there was a flurry of runners, as Rusa sent word to his ship, just in case, and the priestesses gathered their armies.
A short time later, and Rusa was walking back down to Amnissos in the centre of a torchlit procession. Ahead went the altars of the goddesses, small clay tabernacles heaped with flowers and born on the shoulders of goatskin-clad priests. Behind, four deep, came priestesses and novices and votaries, and curious farmers and goatherds whom they swept up on the way. Censers dashed the onlookers with oils of myrrh and thyme. Sweet torches burned with scented smoke, as the dancers swayed and stamped in waves like the sea. The sound of conches and lyres and sistrums were a deep, ecstatic heartbeat in time to the thud of their marching feet.
It was hard to be angry in the centre of this. Beneath the strangely tinted light of the torches, in the braziers’ drugged and perfumed smoke, Rusa’s panic lifted off him in favour of gratitude. Without thinking whether it was impious or not, he reached out and took Kikeru’s hand. Kikeru’s thankful, forgiving smile seemed a part of the general benediction. No one could remain closed in the face of this generosity, and he wanted to kiss the boy, and hug his mother, as he remembered the holy Ladies were with Jadikira—she was protected.
They gathered a crowd as they went, the women ululating and the men stamping in time, but the crowd drew back when they entered the cleared area before the Achaean walls, where a bowman from inside might pick them off without ever showing his face.
Into that killing field, Maja strode, forcing the procession to follow her. The priests set down their altars, and blew their conches like the bellow that bursts from the deep places when the earth shakes.
Above them, heads poked over the ramparts, tiny as apple seeds.
He could
n’t tell which one of them if any was the monster who had his daughter, but the Ladies would know, their darts would aim true. He hoped they shrivelled every seed in the man’s body, took away every son he might have had.
“In the name of Potnia Theron, Mistress of the Animals, and of Diktynna, Lady of Nets, I charge you to release Jadikira, daughter of Rusa of Amnissos, unharmed, at once.” Maja spread her arms to beseech the goddess, and opposite her, Tarina did the same before the second shrine. In the wavering torchlight, they might have been made of flames themselves, the pearls in Maja’s hair like golden moons, the iron beads in Tarina’s like embers.
“If you do not let her out to us, right now, then I lay this curse on you: the animals will desert you, the powers of your lands and bodies will desert you. Your hunts will be barren, your seas will be barren, your farms will be barren, your women and your men will be barren, until the day she is restored to us.”
He felt a sudden need to weep, and covered his face with both hands, while Kikeru linked arms around his waist and leaned into him. There was too much in Rusa right now to be aroused by that, but he was comforted, and grateful, so very grateful not to be facing this alone.
“Your mother is amazing,” he whispered, and saw Kikeru’s mouth turn up in a brief agreeing smile.
But ten breaths came and went and the door to the Greek compound remained shut. Rusa’s certain hope had already begun to die by the time someone up above was handed a loudspeaker of hammered brass. A distant light on the battlements gleamed on fox-red hair and the shoulder latches of a cuirass. Rusa’s spirit urged him to fly up there and get his hands around the man’s neck, but he couldn’t work out how.
“I see you, little fat woman and your granny next to you,” Stratios yelled back. “Do you think I’m a babe in arms to be frightened by you? Go away. I am not scared of any woman, whether human or divine. But you can tell the coward who brought you here: if he wants me to marry his slut daughter before I bed her, the dowry has just gone up.”
Again, Rusa’s overwhelming thought was, They can’t do this. Surely someone in the Achaean camp must see that forcing unwilling women to marry you was wrong? How could anyone not see that? How could divine justice and this kind of human behaviour possibly coexist?
Maja and Tarina were busy at their respective altars, pouring out libations of wine and honey to set the seal on their curses. Both of them had the serene faces of women who knew for a certainty their power was greater than anything that could oppose them. Which was nice for them, but didn’t help him.
He jostled through the onlooking crowd until he came to a hunter of wild birds, with a net draped over one bare shoulder and a bow on the other.
“May I borrow it?” he said, touching the bow’s horn tip. “And an arrow? I need to send a signal to my ship.”
Kikeru gasped by his side. “You can’t really mean to do that,” he said urgently. “You can’t firebomb a town and start a war no matter what’s happened to your daughter.”
“Watch me,” Rusa said, holding out his hands for the bow, though a part of him admired Kikeru for his political acumen, his broader human compassion. He might even have agreed, if it weren’t Jadikira in there.
“They’re holding a Cretan girl hostage?” The duck-hunter bent his bow against his heel and slipped the string into place. “Is that what this is about?”
“My daughter,” Rusa agreed, looking at the hunter with fraternal approval. He’d seen the man before, in the market, with the bedraggled birds hanging by their necks on sticks around him. He’d never paid him much attention before, but now the man felt like kin. It threw everyone back to the earliest days, when they were all clan, to have an outsider take one of their own.
“You’re not a father, miss, or a mother,” the duck hunter told Kikeru. “You don’t understand.” He handed bow and quiver to Rusa with a dark, conspiratorial look. “You burn it all to the ground, mate. They’ve got it coming.”
He wished he had one of Kikeru’s flares, but a length of material torn from his kilt and lit from one of the oil-soaked torches would do. It had taken the procession long enough to walk all this way from Knossos. By now, his steersman on Lark would have got the oarsmen on board, rowed up the curve of the bay, and be holding position on the sea directly out from the Greek compound. If they’d been efficient about it, then the first bales of wool soaked in naphtha would already be dripping in the cups of the catapults, ready to be launched.
“I’m not going to start a war,” he admitted, watching Kikeru’s worried face. Kikeru seemed tired and distraught, and frankly the Achaeans deserved their roofs burned for that alone. “It’s not like firepots. They’re not going to burst and splatter everything in sight in burning oil. I’ve soaked bales of wool in the naphtha. The wool will keep the oil contained into balls of fire, which will land on their roofs and set them alight. They’ll have no choice but to run into the streets. And when Kira is in the streets, in the confusion, she’ll find a way out. She’s uncontainable. That’s all I mean to do. I swear it.”
Kikeru bent his head into his hands, but his shoulders had slumped. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I should have known you wouldn’t go too far. You’re not like them. I’m sorry.”
He had been thinking Rusa was unreasonable as the Greeks? The thought crawled up his back like a spider, itching and hard to ignore. Was that what he was doing here? Being a man in the same way Stratios was a man? Insisting on his own way, regardless of the needs of those around him?
A warm draft flowed off the lit arrowhead that made a patch of smoky red brilliance by his ear. Darkness had fallen, except for a faint glimmer in the harbour from the lights of moored craft, and a scatter of amber windows in the town. In their circle of torchlight, Maja and Tarina lowered their raised white arms in a gesture of finality. The ritual was over, and for a couple of heartbeats they were neither human nor divine, unoccupied statues of flesh eerie to watch.
Something moved him to act before Maja woke to herself. If she opened her eyes and saw him loose the fire arrow, he would feel inadequate, ashamed, and he had to do something. He had to. He couldn’t just walk away.
He pulled the bowstring back to his chin. The flaming tip of the arrow seared his eyebrow and made his forehead sting, and then he loosed it, and the flare went up, smokier than Kikeru’s, ill-omened in its grey shroud, with its blood-red light. It hung for a moment as a baleful star, reflecting in the sea.
He returned the hunter’s bow. The outer edges of the crowd had begun to fade into the darkness as the ritual had finished and it seemed the theatre of the night was over, but the movement stalled at his signal. Folk turned back, frozen in place, lining the Cretan shore with the sea reflected in their eyes.
“Oh you didn’t?” said Maja, coming up to Kikeru’s side and squeezing him by the shoulders, probably more to reassure herself than to comfort him. “What about trusting the goddesses? Giving them some time?”
I trust them, he would have said, defensively. But time is what I don’t have. Still, he felt rebuked again, faithless and impious.
The first fireball sailed up from the harbour quite silently, light rushing before it, sweeping over the wall and falling in a streaming arc onto the temple roof. Two more followed in quick succession, as the crowd cringed away from them, though they were far off, as though some instinct in them remembered comets falling, or the mountains spitting flame.
These next two burst with a soft floom somewhere inside the compound. Hopefully on the shingled roofs of the uppermost houses. Their glow brought an amber tint to the clouds above, which had barely diminished before another volley of three fireballs swept in, majestic, silent, beautiful in their way.
Scattered cheers among the dark gardens of Amnissos gave Rusa a half-savage feeling of vindication. He was not the only one, then, who wanted these people gone, or if not gone, then humbled.
Come on, he chanted in his head, hoping one of the powers at least would let his daughter hear him. Come on. You c
an use this to get out. I’m tweaking the bull’s tail for you. Grab the horns while he’s angry with me, and get over, get out.
Already, small fires had begun to spring up inside the Greek enclosure. He could see the wavering yellow lights and fountains of sparks as the wooden roof tiles caught. Then someone screamed, and it was as though the sound blew the fire out of Rusa’s heart, leaving it coated in naphtha, black and viscous cold. That had been a child’s voice. A child’s voice, scared. I pray you, Ladies, not injured. I’m sorry. I’m sorry. Protect them all, but please let Jadikira come back.
The cheers had died down. Now he felt at his back the cold uncertainty that was the mirror of his own heart. Had his rage made him as bad, worse even, than the Achaeans were? Goddesses forbid, but maybe it had. Maybe he had that monstrosity in him too.
A final sally of three more fireballs lit the goat-grazed land on which he stood, and thudded into the enclosure, and then the night closed back in like dark waters washing around the walls. Inside, the fountains of sparks had begun to die down, and as he watched, the glow over the temple was quenched.
“They were expecting that,” Maja whispered. Still with one hand on Kikeru’s shoulder, her other crept out and fastened around Rusa’s wrist as if either to hold him back or to reassure herself.
A thud inside the wall was followed by steam and a scent of hot salt and seaweed. True enough. Someone inside was throwing damp sand over the flames.
“Why would they prepare to be attacked from the sea?” Maja wondered aloud, while the procession reformed itself, and the altars were carried to the front of the line, to be walked back home. “Why would they assume we would attack them?”
“It’s like the walls, isn’t it?” Kikeru pointed out. “They know if they’re invulnerable, then they can do whatever they like. Then it doesn’t matter what we think of them, because there’s no way we can touch them.”
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