New sparks on the walls were torches. Five of them, and the central one gleaming on a head of red hair and a loudspeaker of bronze.
“Was that the wrath of your goddesses?” Stratios shouted. “You scared a couple of babies and scorched a few walls. You think I can’t tell wool soaked in oil from a divine thunderbolt? Maybe your people are that credulous, but we Greeks are a more rational breed. Or was it the might of your vaunted navy? If so, we see how undefended you really are.”
Where rage had been blazing, powerful and exultant in its own strength, this failure felt like having his head held under a vat of naphtha and breathing in the dark slime of it. Rusa took off his bracelet and pressed the stone to his mouth, as if it could seal inside the uselessness of him, but how could it? How could it, while his daughter was still captive?
“I could walk into your palaces tomorrow and sack them,” Stratios boasted, a tiny little distant point of contempt like the first sight of an arrowhead aimed at one’s eye. “How ripe for the taking you are, defended by women and ball-less freaks in women’s clothes.”
He felt Kikeru stiffen beside him, rigid with shame, and wanted to tear this world in two and remake it, better, as it had been before. Before the Greeks, when the people of Minos had been safe in their homes and honoured in the rest of the world.
Maja took the conch from her apron and gave the nod to the priests to begin the long walk back to the temple. “This land is defended by the goddesses, and by the god Poteidon, whom you defy at your peril, and by his children,” she returned. “Do not, in your hubris, think you are better than that. But I will give you some time for the curse to bite, and then we’ll talk again.”
Rusa couldn’t take a step away. He couldn’t go and leave Jadikira in there. He couldn’t give them some time. No.
The procession began to move, heavier on this return journey, without the joy and expectation with which it had arrived. The faces of those who swerved around him were troubled, downcast. Kikeru tugged at his arm, but he couldn’t move. He couldn’t.
Maja tugged too, and between mother and child they managed to off-balance him and push him a few steps up the track. “You heard what that man said earlier? He hopes to get a dowry from you with the promise of marriage. He’s not going to touch her until then. He thinks you wouldn’t value her as highly if he did.”
That unlocked the chains from his limbs. “Are you sure?”
“I’m sure. I don’t know what we’re going to do now, but there’s still time. I’m sure.”
She was a priestess, and she knew better than him. So he let them lead him away, feeling like a goat trying to flee from the altar, its throat cut, bleeding out with every step. Unsure about his own heart, his own worth, all the way. I can’t leave her behind. I can’t.
But he did.
Kikeru began the journey home angry with Rusa. The man had thought his own efforts would succeed when the prayers of Kikeru’s mother would fail. He had thought he was justified in potentially burning down the houses of sleeping children to protect his own grown daughter. In its way, that too was monstrous.
And yet, when he waved good-bye to the procession and tugged the man up to Rusa’s house, his heart couldn’t keep up the condemnation. Surely the real monsters were the ones who had started this? He could still feel their hands around his wrists and ankles like burning bracelets. It was hard to condemn Rusa for doing anything, anything at all, to prevent the same thing happening to someone else he loved.
They shouldn’t have done harm if they didn’t wish to be harmed back.
Rusa walked behind him like a stunned ox, and Kikeru thought perhaps this had been for Rusa a little like the experience by the dunes had been for Kikeru. That he was filled with the knowledge even he could be defeated and shamed. By the time Itaja had opened the door for them both and let out a wail of sorrow at the looks on their faces that was echoed through the kitchen and into the servants’ quarters, Kikeru’s anger had been doused in sand and extinguished.
“Tell me you’re going to be fine,” he said, watching Rusa wander around dining room and storerooms and bedroom, opening chests and turning out his jewellery boxes and spices, making little heaps of his wealth.
“If it’s the dowry he wants, maybe he’ll take the valuables and let her go.” Rusa took off his seal and put it in the pile, clasped it back on again afterwards, as if his hands had to move, but they didn’t know what to do. “I can spare the ships. I can start again somewhere, as long as I have her back.”
Kikeru half turned toward the door. This was heartbreaking to watch, and suddenly he understood. He would burn a fucking town down too, if it would only stop Rusa looking so helpless and so lost.
“Drink this, Skipper.” Itaja pushed a wine krater into Rusa’s hands. The creamy liquid inside steamed with warmth. A smell of honey and cows’ milk and something almost floral, sweetly enticing, lifted off it. “You’re distraught. What you need is to go to bed. Things’ll look better in the morning.”
She exchanged a worried look with Kikeru, making a brushing gesture as if to say he wasn’t needed, that he had better be gone. Indignant, he stayed, and so was on hand to catch the krater when it slipped from Rusa’s suddenly nerveless hands, and to catch Rusa a moment later when he staggered to his knees.
“What was in that?” he asked, partly offended on Rusa’s behalf and partly intensely curious. As he struggled against his legs’ desire to buckle under the weight, Itaja got her shoulder under Rusa’s other arm, and together they hauled him onto a couch to sleep it off.
“Just some herbs. I don’t want him doing anything all our families will regret because he’s not thinking clearly.” She folded her arms and gazed down at her sleeping master with a look of mingled fondness and ruthlessness.
Then she turned it on Kikeru, and he was pierced. “So if you’ve got any ideas to help, you’d better get on them before he wakes up.”
Did he have any ideas? The moment he turned his mind that way, they were queueing up. The first was probably wishful thinking—but what if it wasn’t? What if Rusa knew his daughter well enough to be right that she would have been able to take advantage of the chaos and sneak out of Stratios’s house? That would have only been her first step. Afterwards, she would have had to somehow get out of the walled compound.
What if she had succeeded in one and failed in the other? What if she was outside the house, trying to find some way of getting through the walls that did not involve passing the guards in the single gateway? Maybe . . . If he could only get back to his own workshop—but no. That would take hours, and if she was outside now, she’d be recaptured by then.
He picked a purple cloak from a pile of ready wealth and draped it over Rusa’s sleeping form, excited at the thought that maybe he could come to the rescue this time. “Do you have any chisels?”
Itaja raised her eyebrows. “Probably. Somewhere in one of the ship warehouses out back. What d’you need chisels for?”
“Getting over the wall.” He mimed hammering in a pair of chisels, stepping up to the top one, pulling out the lower and hammering it in further up. On second thoughts, that might be a little loud.
“Jadikira’s not going to be able to do that. She’s seven-months pregnant. Her belly will get in the way.” Itaja picked up the drugged krater and hugged it. “But what they use a lot of on board ship are ropes and grapples. I can give you those.”
“And pulleys?” he said, trying to picture himself hauling up a pregnant woman by his own strength—or asking her to haul herself up.
“And pulleys.” She nodded. “We’ve got them too.”
That was how he came to be walking up the coast road in a sea hat and boat cloak, with a basket full of rope on his back. Lamps on the ships in the harbour bobbed like fireflies over the waves, and a fitful crescent moon gave just enough light to make the sky bruise-purple and drown out a few halfhearted stars.
Between the sea cliffs and the Achaean wall lay only a couple of hands’ bread
th of crumbling rock; that was where they would have placed fewest guards. It stood to reason they would have been looking down everywhere else an enemy might stand. He knew he was clumsy, but he was clumsy only when his mind was on other things. True, that was almost always, but now he felt he could focus, at least for a time.
He looked at the narrow path on which only a goat would feel confident, and swallowed. Well, he would rather fall off than risk the Greeks, so . . .
Breathing out gently, he left the coastal track as if he were going down to the beach to lure out razor clams, and then he felt upwards for the rocks that connected to the citadel, and carefully not thinking about anything else, he edged his way around to the unguarded outermost point on the wall.
There he strung his bow and fitted the grapple arrow with its great eye and its thread. The angle was awkward, but he got his shoulder wedged into the support of an overhang and leaned on that and loosed.
Like most young people, he had trained with bow and arrow to hunt marsh birds as they shot into the air and skirled in a whirling flock. It wasn’t a challenge to aim at the high point of a rubble and plaster wall. The grapple hit. He tugged, and it slipped a finger-width, two, and then caught. Reeling in the fine line attached to it, he pulled a stronger rope up, through the eye, and back down into his hand where he hitched it tight to itself.
He closed his eyes, back flush to the cliff, and breathed for a moment, trying to tell if anyone had heard him. They were being quiet if they had. Only a distant murmur of voices as lulling as the gentle sea beneath him met his ears. Very well, then. Now for the harder part.
Climbing the rope in the dark with the cliff edge and the drop onto rocks behind him was plenty to focus his mind. He wasn’t sure he’d ever been so conscious of the tussle of the wind flapping in his skirts, or where his own body ended and began. The burn of effort in muscles and lungs—he didn’t like it.
At last, he pulled himself up the last yard, and hung like laundry over the rounded lip of the wall.
Oil lamps burned outside the spindly white temple—the closest building—but the streets seemed bare. He lay there in despair, watching and thinking, Well, now what? before a flicker of movement in a trash pile behind the temple caught his eye. He flattened himself, heart a-thunder, hoping it was just a rat, just a cat. Not a guard. Please not a soldier.
The thing bulged, looking pale in the shadow. Looking yellow? Yellow as a veil pricked all over with garnets?
It stood up, a shrouded thing like a dead woman. “Is someone up there?”
He had to bite his lip not to laugh aloud, leaned further over, and whispered, “Jadikira?”
Rusa had been right all along! Goddesses, now he felt terrible he had thought so ill of the man. Hadn’t he said Kira would escape any confinement, given a chance? Who would have thought he could have been right?
“Kikeru?”
Already, he was swinging the loop of rope over to her side of the wall. “Wind it around your arms,” he whispered. “I’ll walk down the outside. That’ll help pull you up. Then when you get to the top, I’ll hang on and help you come down slowly.”
Could they really not be looking for her? Admittedly she seemed to have found the temple’s rubbish dump. She was covered in the ash of sacrificial fires and the bones of their carcasses, and perhaps she could have hidden there all night, but still, nobody seemed to be combing the streets for her; the compound slumbered.
When he reached the base of the wall as her counterweight and she reached the top, he thought, Yes! Yes, we’re getting away with this! Like many theological principles, it was hard to believe, but it was still true: she was down, leaning precariously back against the cliff with only one foot having purchase on the stones.
“Come on!” she said, grinning at him like a madwoman, amazingly uncowed. “I knew someone would come. I thought it would be Dad, but you’ll do. Thank you, by the way.”
When they stepped back onto the path and he swung his cloak over her, to conceal her gore- and ash-streaked hair from anyone who might be looking, he found himself wondering if implausibility was a necessary factor in the definition of truth. Focus ruined once more, he tripped over his own right foot and started laughing with astonishment and relief.
“What happened?” he asked, as they passed from the shadow of the Greek walls, out of bowshot range, and began to mount the first of the series of steps that would take them into Amnissos. Oil lamps in the doorways of the houses made her look like a walking corpse, but her eyes were bright and impudent, and he thought with some envy she must never have been terrified at all.
“I told you their women despise them, didn’t I?” Jadikira laughed. “When the fireballs came down, Xenia and her handmaids shoved a brazier up against the wall and burnt through the plaster and the laths under the window until there was enough of a hole for me to get out. They’re going to claim it was a direct hit from the ship that did it, when the men wake up.”
“When they wake up?” Sometimes Kikeru felt more male than female. At other times, like now, he was seized with the joy of being a girl. He could not have felt more proud.
“The Achaeans use hemp seeds for easing pain—they soak them in wine and drink the wine. The men know about that. But the women know if you burn the seeds instead, you get a smoke that makes people happy, then insensible, then sleepy. They filled the house with it, so I would have time to get away. I thought I would be able to climb onto the roof of the temple and get over the wall from there, but sadly Dad was right about that. I’m not as agile as I used to be. So I found somewhere to hide while I thought about what to do next. I’m very glad you came.”
She made him feel less terrified just by striding along next to him, resilient and unbowed.
“I am too,” he agreed. “Maybe the goddesses were with us after all.”
“Of course they were.” She nudged him in the ribs with a grimy elbow, leaving a smear of soot and grey calf fat. “Or at least, let’s hope that’s what the Greeks think, eh?”
For all her ferocity, Itaja squeezed them both tight when they came through the door of Rusa’s house, and bowed her head to Kikeru as if to say he had earned her respect.
“I don’t think you’ll wake the skipper if you tried,” she said, examining Jadikira and cracking a smile. “Which is just as well. You look like a corpse.”
“He’s asleep?” Jadikira gasped, astonished and obviously some little part hurt.
“She drugged him,” Kikeru explained. “He was out of his mind with worry. And she’s right about the corpse thing. You should have a bath.” In the light indoors, the patches of old congealed sacrificial blood were even more ghastly, and the tiny bones of doves scattered her ashy hair. “That way when he wakes up, you can be there, radiant and untouched, and he’ll think all his dreams have come true.”
Itaja hurried off to build up the fire under a cauldron of water, and Jadikira regarded Kikeru with a warm, wry twist to her mouth he wasn’t quite sure what to make of.
“After all these years, I didn’t think he would ever marry again,” she said. “But I’m glad you love him. He deserves to be loved.”
Kikeru shrugged, discomforted, and helped her to peel off the filthy yellow veil. Seeing its coating of damp ash, he took it to the toilet, shook it off there. “That’s moving a little fast,” he called out to her, as he flushed down the inclined marble floor with the entire contents of the sluice jar. The stream of water gathered dirt with it and flowed away to clear the drain beneath the toilet’s wooden seat. “I only met him yesterday. I don’t know if I’m even a woman. If I am a woman, I don’t think I’m allowed to be married, and nobody’s asked him if he wants to marry me.”
But the thought glittered like a jewel. His mind yearned to pick it up and examine all its facets, and his body warmed all over in response. He could see himself as mistress of this pleasant house, occupying his time at the workshop while he waited for Rusa to return from the sea.
“Well,” Jadikira put he
r head around the toilet door, “he must have had other lovers since mother died, but he’s never brought any of them home before. Never introduced them to me.”
“I’m not even his lover,” Kikeru groused. She was too bold and went too far, but what had he expected of her after kidnap and wall-climbing?
“But you want to be.”
Yes, answered his body, his face burning hot. Yes, tingled in his mouth, his fingertips, and his loins, but the body wanting did not mean the mind should assent, and he still wasn’t sure. “I don’t even know that.”
“Well.” She stripped off her jacket and overskirt and headed for the bathroom. “Make up your mind before we all die on the point of a Greek spear.”
While she bathed, Kikeru sent one of Itaja’s children up to the temple to tell Maja what had occurred, and then he scrubbed the moss and dust off himself and borrowed a shift and skirt from Jadikira, so he too could be clean when Rusa woke up.
It was a delightful conspiracy to sit at the end of Rusa’s bed with her and wait for the shock and joy that were to come. They both perched side by side, and Kikeru’s confused heart welled with honey to see Rusa asleep. He looked younger with the lines of his smile smoothed away, and defenceless. Cherishable. That big chest looked firm to lean on, and in the quiet of the dim room, Kikeru could imagine what it would be like to drowse here, their own flesh-warmth a cocoon around them, Kira and Itaja clattering in the other rooms without disturbing his peace, his sense of being placed right where he should be.
If he thought of not having that—of doing almost anything else—it gave him a pang like a fishhook in the heart.
“Hey.” Jadikira lost her patience, put a hand down to shake her father’s bare right foot where it poked out of the blanket. “I’m going to start pinching you if you don’t wake up.”
“Nn?” Rusa turned his face into his pillow, trying to retreat back into his drugged haze, but she pinched his big toe just as she’d said. “What?”
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