He sat up, and Kikeru had a glorious view of the way his mouth fell open when he saw Jadikira, and his eyes went from bleary despair to disbelief and exultation. Then Kikeru was being swept up into a bone-bending hug, as Rusa launched himself between them, pulling Kira in with his right hand and Kikeru with his left, and clung on tight, shuddering.
“Kira, Kira! Oh goddesses! It’s you. It’s you! I thought I’d never see you again. Are you all right?”
“Let go!” She shoved him off, playfully. “Remember the bump. I’m fine. All the Greek ladies looked after me very well, and then Kikeru helped me over the wall.”
“You did?” Rusa held him at arm’s length for a moment, only to desperately look in his face, searching for something. Maybe confirmation? Reassurance that Kikeru was fine too?
“Yes,” Kikeru said. “The fireballs gave her a chance to get out of the house, and then—”
The world jerked under him as he was yanked forward, and then Rusa was kissing him, urgent, a little overaggressive at first, but they softened together as all of Kikeru’s bones turned to honey and with a deep, melting throb of joy he let himself be drawn further in, mouth open and working as mind, body, and soul flowed together into the kiss.
“‘I don’t know,’” Jadikira repeated, mockingly, a continent away, scratchy as a needle left in a cloth. “Looks like you found out.”
“Thea Diktynna!” Rusa swore, pulling away, though Kikeru allowed it reluctantly, chasing the warmth of his mouth. “I’m sorry. I keep doing that. This time I even knew I shouldn’t. But oh, blessed maiden, rescuer, thank you. And Kira, come here and hug me properly. You’re sure you’re well? Oh mothers, you are never going out of my sight again. I shouldn’t have doubted you. I shouldn’t have doubted them. Oh goddesses!”
Jadikira laughed, and Kikeru joined her. There were times when Rusa was like a big hunting dog, not fit to be brought inside for fear of the way he’d bound around the room, shouldering vases off their stands and whacking his flailing tail across the household gods. Just as it would have been in a dog, Kikeru found it desperately endearing, but he also wondered what Rusa’s exuberant strength would be like, if all of it was trained on giving him joy.
“Hello?” Itaja stuck her head around the doorway and smiled. A naked boy of about ten with a shaved head and a blue rope belt and a small gold lily necklace stood behind her, vibrating with poise and purpose. “Good to see you up, Skipper. This is Sima. He says he has a message for you from the palace.”
Kikeru’s triumphant awareness of Rusa’s delight and his own arousal grudgingly allowed themselves to be shouldered aside by duty. Even Jadikira drew herself up straighter and put her hands on her knees, leaning forwards to listen. Rusa made a halfhearted attempt to unsquash his lain-on hair, and said, “What can we do for you, Sima?”
The boy reached into the small pocket that dangled from the rope belt and held out a seal stamped on one side with the labrys—the double-headed axe of the goddess-queen—and on the other the horns of her consort, the eight-year king, the young bull. “The queen wishes to see you. As soon as you can.”
They passed through the public corridors of the temple, shadowed by figures of giants on the painted walls. With a graceful, terrible solemnity, the plaster figures strode in procession towards the presence of the numinous, and the labyrinth’s chancy slices of light gilded the curve of their faces, the tassels of their kilts, as though they were emerging from the walls, slipping on reality as they neared the holy places.
They were echoes of dreams, Kikeru knew. Echoes of ceremonies that had taken place here day after day after day while the years piled up. In a way, their still and endless presence was more true than his brief footsteps. But the thought led him into tangles of philosophy where he might lose himself, so he drew his mind back and dwelt, instead, with pleasure on how grand they were.
Maja had joined them when they reached the central courtyard at dawn. She was arrayed in ancient regalia of goatskin, surviving from before womankind learned to weave cloth. Rusa was in his best, no less overwhelming now than he had been that first time Kikeru saw him. Jadikira, next to him, was all asparkle with gold beads and chains in her piled-up hair, and he himself still rejoiced in the heavy skirts and corset he had been allowed.
The goddesses had not punished him yet. But what would the queen say?
They passed into the great reception room, going down crooked stairs into the gypsum-lined basin, damp as a cave underfoot. The four doors of the outer chamber that opened onto the central court were shut, and it was dark as a cave also. Kikeru’s impious mind noted the ledge in the corner of the basin, where the queen could sit in the death days, with her face at the level of the rising sun. He noted the geometry of the room, and approved its cleverness, but knowledge of the tricks took away some of his awe.
Rusa, by contrast, had reacted to the dim clammy chill with all the trembling appropriate to a journey through the underworld.
Shadowy figures stepped from the corners of the basin and washed their hands and feet with rosewater and oil of crocuses that coursed down his fingers and tinked into a spreading puddle on the floor. The falling water drew away all their heat, and at last even Kikeru shivered.
Then in the antechamber, another unseen functionary flung open the second door of the four, and the beam of the sun’s light sliced through the air like a spear, and settled in glory on the goddess-queen on her throne.
Light ran from her lap, where her golden apron caught the dawn, and spiralled up her arms on snakes of gold. It brought an ivory glimmer out of the globes of her breasts and made her painted mouth seem to bleed. Above her dark, shrewd eyes, her crown bore a smiling cat with crystal eyes that glinted as she moved, and on each shoulder of her bodice perched a dove with outstretched wings of silver and clear crystal, blue-backed like the sea.
She had no name. How could she, who was a mouthpiece for the goddesses? When she spoke, it was they who gave utterance, they who ruled, not her, and there was a lightness, a clarity to her expression suggesting she had found some freedom in that.
The eight-year consort sat close to her on the nearest bench, barely visible in the reflection of her radiance. A beautiful youth destined to rule a short time beside her and then die. They called him Minos, and he brought change into this place of eternity. Change and death. Death acknowledged and accepted in its right place, like the falling of autumn leaves that fertilise the soil for spring.
On Minos’s left and right, the queen’s councillors lined the inner walls: great traders, representatives of Crete’s other cities, the foremost of the king’s followers—those young men trained to arms—the priestess keeper of the keys, treasurer of the nation. As the sunlight slid up the wall, away from the queen, the other doors to the courtyard were opened, and a more mundane light flowed in to show forth everyone else.
Nervous now, Kikeru stepped up out of the spreading puddle of water and scented oil, following his mother, with Rusa and Jadikira following him. Already the sun’s heat was creeping into the room, and the puddle on the basin’s floor had begun slowly steaming back into the air, cooling it, filling it with the scent of roses and attar of lilies.
After a curious glance at Kikeru’s skirts, the queen addressed Maja, as the person with the most authority among them. “Tell me the whole story of your dealings with the Achaeans.”
Maja introduced Rusa, who unclasped his seal bracelet and turned the stone in his fingers over and over, while he gave a short account of everything that had happened, from Kikeru’s words about Beard and his friend to the kidnapping and rescue of his daughter. Then Kikeru confirmed these things in his own words, and Maja finished by recounting Stratios’s boast about sacking the palace tomorrow if he wished.
“And do you think that is what he wishes?” the queen said, cutting through the murmuring of her councillors on their benches. “I would want to be sure before we took any action that might provoke the very thing we sought to avoid.”
“I don’t know,” Kikeru said again, hollow and angry with himself for finding no surety about anything. “They were ready to kill me to prevent me telling you. And it seems to me abducting Jadikira must have been meant as an excuse to start a war they knew they would win—”
“They would not win,” the queen rebuked him. “But nor would we. No matter who kills or who dies, war is a loss for everyone, and I will not countenance it if there is another choice.”
“What other choice do we have, if they go around stealing our children?” Rusa protested, now with his bracelet twisted between his hands like a snare.
The queen smiled. “By your own account, your inflammatory bombing of their compound achieved nothing, when the action of our handmaiden here—” she nodded to Kikeru, and he beamed back, his heart leaping at the word “—was softer and far more effective. I am not going to fine you, Rusa, for an act that might have provoked war, but I am going to require you to be the one to avert it. That will be your penance.”
“I’ve just had it rubbed in my face how powerless I am against them,” Rusa complained, wheedling like a five-year-old in his mother’s kitchen. “What can I do?”
“It is apparent to me . . .” The queen nodded slightly. At the gesture the cat on her crown moved its paw, and the doves on her shoulders stirred their mother-of-pearl wings, whispering secrets in her ear. “It is apparent to me you four have been picked for this. Go to the sacred Dikteon cave, therefore, and ask the goddess what to do. She will baptise you for the next stage. She will make your further steps clear to you there.”
They took Rusa’s ship, the Tern, to Malia. A happy ship, Kikeru thought. All the oarsmen looked well-fed and confident, with shoulders and chests like Rusa’s from all the rowing, but without his height. The sail crew were half willowy young men and half women with their breasts bound like athletes and marlinspikes in their belts.
As the oarsmen pulled out of harbour, Rusa stood at the great steering oar at the stern—staring out at the blazing blue sky and the glister of the sea, guiding them through sandbanks and shallow places where octopuses crept cunningly across the shipwrecks. Kikeru, Jadikira, and Maja sat beneath a white linen awning that kept the sun from scorching them, with nothing to do but watch and be lulled by the rocking of the waves and the regular surge forward as oars bit sea.
Then they came into the offshore wind, the sail’s crew hoisted the yard, the girls running across it to let down the sail, and suddenly all the oars were lifted out of the sea and the Tern took flight. Her laced-together planks flexed with the movement of the waves and she seemed to ripple like a dragon on the wave. Up by the bows, where her sharp, white beak sliced the sea into two curves of silver, dolphins chased her, clicking with glee.
One of the oarsmen’s mothers had come on board and cooked them new caught squid with garlic and pomegranate, and as he ate, Kikeru leaned back against the warm timbers and contemplated Rusa. The man looked good here, relaxed and planted on the deck as if he had grown from it, turning the whole boat by gently leaning on the tiller beneath his elbow. His long brown-black hair blew forward like a lion’s mane, and he had had to tie a strap of red leather around his forehead to keep it out of his eyes, his distant, luminous eyes, focussed on the next landmark, and then the next.
Here in this sunny spot, with his mother and Jadikira sitting close, exchanging some embarrassing story about babies, it didn’t seem possible anyone could willingly seek out war. But if war came . . . He pushed his plate away, half-finished, dread filling his stomach, making it impossible to fit anything else in. If war came, Rusa would be the one who died first.
The Achaeans would see Kikeru as a priestess. Maja too, they would probably not dare to touch. Jadikira they would take as a wife—not a good fate, but not the end of the world. Rusa, though, they would kill, spilling his blood on the land as though he were a sacrificial bull.
The thought made Kikeru’s spine grow sharp within him. But it did at least draw one certainty out of the tangled knot of doubt that was his mind. If there was to be war, if Rusa was going to die, then Kikeru was going to have him first.
In the dark of the goddess’s cave, Kikeru was going to claim him, and all three of them would have to make of it what they would.
At Malia, they left the crew to swim and fish in the bay, to visit with friends and kinsfolk in the town. Rusa hired an oxcart for the journey to the cave, since it was enough of a labour for a pregnant woman just to walk down into the dark, without having to toil for hours on dusty stone to get there.
A kindly place, this plateau land, with many blocks of white houses whose upper stories were bedecked with flowers. As Rusa flicked the end of a rope over the ox’s sullen red ears, they rolled into vineyards, emerald between dark-viridian olive groves, the mountains only a blue and sunlit yellow crumpling of the land in the distance, like a dropped napkin.
The ox, red and white and somnolent, put its head down and seemed to almost fall forwards, lazily dragging the cart after it. Rusa glanced over his shoulder from where he sat in the driver’s spot and smiled at the three passengers curled up together in the cramped wooden box behind. Jadikira—he had not yet fully got over the terror of losing her, and the sight of her sprawled there, looking fat and sleek and happy, still brought a lump to his throat.
Maja, sitting very prim and neat in her corner—he liked her. There was something very full and calm about her. Something he clung to now, because while he had gone to the tamer environments of Knossos willingly, a fear of the otherworld still watered his blood when he thought of this place.
And Kikeru, wedged between them, drowsing with his head on Maja’s knee, his long lashes shadowing the apples of his boyish-tanned cheeks. He had the shoulders and the chest of a man, that lovely long sweep of the spine between padded back muscles and the V of the hips, but there was something girlish about him too, even if it was just the silver ribbons his mother was plaiting into his hair. Rusa had found it strange at first—the way Kikeru couldn’t decide what she was, but now he was beginning to catch glimpses of it himself, to think if she ever did choose, one or the other, it would be less than the whole.
Truly, Kikeru was rare and holy, but the thought didn’t stop Rusa from wanting to slide his hands down into the bell of Kikeru’s skirt and worship whatever he found there with lips and tongue and prick. At that thought he had to stir on the seat and rearrange himself, hoping the goddess would see his stiffness as praise to her works and not as presumption.
Up, then, onto the stone path that ascended the side of Mount Dicte, the afternoon air hot despite the shade of the oaks on either side of the path. In crannies of the grey rock-side, thyme grew in great fragrant purple bushes, and dark myrtle bore sweet-scented flowers like exploding white stars.
Before the cave’s entrance was a little shrine with a single back room in which a priestess lived. She tied up the cart and watered the uncomplaining ox, and after a short professional conversation with Maja, handed them lanterns and nodded them on.
“There’s a ceremony taking place at this moment,” Maja whispered, as they crowded round her, even Jadikira seemingly beginning to feel the awe of the place. “I can’t tell you what will happen, or what you’ll see.” She smiled at them all, with a spiritual bravery, a certainty, that Rusa admired. He was already terrified and they hadn’t started yet.
“Just take her a gift,” Maja continued, “and bring out again what she chooses to give you in return. Don’t be afraid. This may be a place of death, but above all it’s a place of being born.”
She turned and, her candle-lantern held high, walked into the gaping hole.
“Heh. No.” Jadikira rearranged the cushions in the oxcart and climbed back in, patting her bump. “This little one isn’t ready for either death or birth, so I’m going to stay out here. I’ll say a few prayers in the shrine instead.”
Rusa wished he had that excuse. He didn’t like the black emptiness of that hole in the world either, but he was glad she had some
caution in her somewhere. “Good idea,” he said, certain whatever man was born or died in there would still love her when he came out.
“Here.” She unwound one of the long strings of beaten gold butterflies that quivered in her hair, and dropped it into his hand. “Give her this from me.”
“Thank you.” He kissed her on the cheek before returning to Kikeru’s side. The boy had waited for him, looking poised for once, his feet bare, his ankle bracelets gleaming beneath his skirts.
“Ready?” Kikeru asked, and took his hand. There was a wild and knowing look in his night-dark eyes, and his recurve bow of a mouth tilted up at both ends, in a way that made Rusa’s flagging serpent rear again and his chilling skin blush.
They walked out of the world together. Silence fell like a blow almost as soon as they took the first step into the cave, and darkness swooped over them. The cold was sudden and intense, raising goose bumps on Rusa’s arms. The passageway turned, burrowing down and spiralling like a ram’s horn until all light was gone but what they carried.
Clammy air stroked over his skin, scented with bitter smoke and a reeking tannery stench. On the third or perhaps the fourth flight of stairs down—he had lost count—the roof of the cave above him susurrated, sighing and moving, and he couldn’t raise the lantern high enough to see what kind of beast clung there.
“Bats,” Kikeru whispered in a reassuring tone, rubbing his thumb over Rusa’s knuckles, fanning out his fingers beneath Rusa’s wrist to touch his palm and the place where his heartbeat hammered. Little strokes of fire in the cold.
Music was pulsing up from the depths. Snatches at first, smoothing in and then fading away. The beast-like piss smell faded, but the smoke strengthened, musky with a syrupy sweetness behind it, smooth on the back of the throat.
By the time they came into the first sacred chamber, the smoke had filled Rusa’s head and begun to push outwards—he felt its pressure against all his bones, as if it were trying to make room in there for something extraordinary. Here, a great stone pillar, worked by no human hand, linked the floor and the ceiling of the cave. It glinted and glittered all over with votive offerings, tiny bees and flowers of gold, axes, horns, slivers of wood and ivory into which folk had scratched their wishes and concerns.
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