Oil lamps on the altar flickered and poured out scent. Here, thicker, it was like caramelised flesh, sweet but disconcerting. Shadows swept from the wicks and went wheeling up the dripping rock, calling out fingers and locks of hair and staring faces, until he was surrounded by gods and daemons and the dead, and he shook for fear.
The offering priestess took their gifts without a word—one of Kikeru’s anklets, Jadikira’s chain—and threw them over the edge of the platform to splash in the sunless lake, the waters of the womb, that lay at the deepest place of the cave. Rusa stripped himself of the image of Tern, his necklace with the dolphins that had come to mean his whole past life to him, and placed it, too, into her soot-stained palm, holding nothing back.
In blessing, she brought one of the censers to him, new-filled and thick with white smoke, passing his face three times through the smoke. Then she brought him a cup and made him sip of bitter wine.
Around the altar, the priestesses danced, stamp and step and shrug in a snakelike spiral, and the reeling light swung counter to their tempo, so his eyes were dazzled with the flicker of gold and the swing of fringed skirts of all colours and the sway of bare white breasts standing out against the darkness like moons. The cavern caught the pipes’ sweet, shrill whistle and echoed it through the lyre’s strings and the endless brassy rustle of the sistrums.
Already he could feel his skull breaking apart. It didn’t worry him, because something divine was filling the empty space. He felt Kikeru catch his wrist again and pull him further in, and he went smiling, because this dark place was suddenly a summer meadow. He could feel the goddess’s radiance on his skin like a young sun.
Further down, further in, and he just glimpsed the ripples of the dark water of the sunless lake when Kikeru took a sharp turn and pulled him into a small rock chamber aside from the main path. Here the music sounded sweet and far away, and if they stood to one side of the entrance, they could hear the worshippers’ feet tap-tap as they passed on their way to the waters of birth.
Kikeru turned his lantern to the wall, then took Rusa’s from his hand and did the same. Now, but for the two yellow spots like the eyes of a lion, it was utterly dark. “What?” Rusa asked, still golden inside his head, not following.
“Tell me you want me,” Kikeru whispered, coming close enough so he felt it more as a breath against his throat than as a sound.
Rusa couldn’t see her, him, so he put out both arms, and she slipped into them, and all the sensations were like nothing he had ever felt before. The very press of Kikeru’s skirt against Rusa’s knees was the most fascinating thing that had ever been in all time, except the skin under his palm was better. Smooth as butter, softer than a warm wave.
He pushed one hand into Kikeru’s hair, dislodging what might have been a stylus and two beads. Kikeru was already leaning up. Their mouths meeting in the darkness was like a red pulse of light that seared down his throat and kindled a more consuming fire in his belly. The lust was bigger than him. But Kikeru was bigger than him too, more significant.
Though it was dark, his exploring hands dragged down the back he had admired earlier, and it seemed like it glowed, like he could see it in his mind’s eye. He tried to worm his hands beneath Kikeru’s belt, caught up in the strange blind warmth of the kiss, of the slippery sweet cave of Kikeru’s mouth, opening to him.
Kikeru’s hands had untied his skirts. They dropped to the floor like a multicoloured rain he could almost see glowing in the dark. Kikeru’s hands, wonderfully competent, still obeying a mind that wasn’t half floating in the infinite sunny abysses of the divine, had freed Rusa from his loin cloth, shoved up his kilt and Kikeru’s shift and pressed them together at the core, and Rusa was lost in a world of bliss he didn’t have words for, couldn’t find the borders of, couldn’t find himself within it.
Goddesses, but he could almost see Kikeru as she really was—beautiful as the sun on the meadow, strong as the mountain, potent as the scorpion’s sting. She, he, they were everything. They were everything.
He toppled over the peak of pleasure, gasping, and the darkness was waiting for him on the other side. A tiny human part of him was aware he was clinging to Kikeru and the boy was gasping against his chest, eyelashes like butterfly wings against his skin. A moment later and Kikeru had pulled away, was wiping him down with her shift, the scent of semen like olive oil between them as she tucked him gently away.
“I’m sorry,” said Kikeru, burrowing back into his arms. The heaviness of Rusa’s sacrilege pressed on him suddenly, pushing him to his knees. Kikeru collapsed down with him, and he curled himself around the boy, trying to keep the darkness away from him. It was not Kikeru’s fault. Not his fault that Rusa couldn’t control himself. It was not the place of the young to restrain the follies of the old. The other way. The other way, and he had failed.
He had come to the most holy place, and he had defiled it. It only seemed right that already the walls were bulging out into awful worm corridors around him, and he could hear the approaching feet of his every last nightmare given flesh. Time itself had drawn away from him. He deserved to be punished. Let it come.
Rusa wandered in the dark for ten thousand years, and after he had grown old and died and had his body rot into the ground, he woke up with a terrible headache and a consuming desire to vomit.
Dizzy, his legs like water under him, he ran for the leeward side of the boat and threw up until the coating of toffee-flavoured smoke was completely scoured from throat and nose. Then he lurched back to the awning and collapsed there.
Tern was under sail again, tacking up into the wind. From the coast and the sun he worked out they were sailing from Malia back to Knossos, and a faint shade of the profound shame in which he had spent the last millennium chilled his breast where his pendant had once lain.
“Finally!” Jadikira gave him a twisted smile, more sympathetic than her words. Maja passed him watered wine that he thought he wouldn’t be able to touch, but which actually lifted some of the constricting lead bands from his chest and head. “She certainly gave you a workout, the goddess. Now you’ve got to tell us what you saw.”
Beneath the awning, the crew had piled up cushions for their guests, and Rusa seemed to have been lying on all of them, had scattered them by his flight to the rail. Kikeru had caught a striped one, red and yellow and green, before it landed in the bilge water, and slid it back towards him, looking uncertain and shamefaced and ravishing.
Rusa remembered that part with a sudden rush of warm gold to the head. Had it really happened? He couldn’t be sure. But he could see for himself Kikeru needed reassurance, and he had plenty to give. He reached out and caught the boy’s hand, the fingertips that had burned into his skin now slightly chill and trembling.
“I remember I saw you: beautiful and whole, neither man nor woman, but both. I saw you how you really are. I can’t explain it, but I loved it.”
Kikeru looked at him, stunned, and then he gave a little sob and threw himself down into the angle of Rusa’s arm, cuddling into his side and weeping into his collarbone. Simultaneously, almost amusingly so, Maja and Jadikira let out exasperated sighs and walked away, rolling their eyes.
In the moment of privacy, Rusa lifted Kikeru’s chin with one hand and kissed him gently, and then a little more insistently on the mouth. It felt perfect to do so.
“I’m sorry,” said Kikeru again, as he had said in the dark before the daemons came. “I shouldn’t have . . . You weren’t yourself. You didn’t know what you were doing.”
“Shh,” Rusa whispered, wiping away yet more smudges of kohl. One day, he promised himself, he would see to it Kikeru stayed dry-eyed and happy so his eyeliner survived. “I wanted it too. Only now we must pay for it. That’s what he said.”
“That’s what who said?” Maja was the first to return. She gave him a knowing smile as she pulled a plump blue cushion beneath her rump and knelt, smoothing her skirts around her feet. Rusa had respected her before, but it overwhelmed him n
ow, the realization of the places she went, the entities she dealt with, day after day.
“Asterios.” At the name, he could feel it again, the palace of infinite complexity and the procession of terrible shapes, crowned with awe and dread. “There were five of them, men and women with the heads of animals.”
Even now when he tried to put this one together in his mind, it didn’t cohere. He could no longer sense how the parts fit, but he had seen it nevertheless. “A princess who was also a bee.” He hadn’t liked her eyes or her sting. “A priestess with the head of a cat. I thought she was Bast, the Egyptian goddess? But she didn’t answer when I called that name.”
None of the first four had answered him. Hadn’t even seemed able to see him. They had just stalked past him in silence, shaking his bones with their tread as they went. “A man with a goat’s head, and one with a crocodile’s. And then the fifth. The fifth had the head of a bull from the bull court, with his horns gilded and a rosette on his forehead. He looked at me, and his name was Asterios.”
When he was old enough to become a man, Rusa had dared the bull in the arena, and he would never forget the jolt that drove through his chest like a goring horn at the animal’s eyes—at the cleverness in them, at the sight of his own death. Asterios had had the same gaze, magnified by eternity.
Jadikira edged back into their circle, drawn by the story. She settled on the stool and picked a couple of grapes from one of the bowls. Kikeru was still huddling in the circle of Rusa’s arm. No longer weeping, but downcast and small.
Jadikira threw a grape at him, and then another. The first bounced off his temple, and Rusa felt him squirm like an affronted cat. The second hit him on the cheekbone, made him raise his head and glare at her. “Oi!”
The third, he caught and ate, with a snotty, superior look that made her laugh and made him grin in return.
“It’s not uncommon to see daemons in such a ceremony.” Maja sounded unimpressed, even a little dejected, though she too was smiling at the young ones. “And they aren’t always terribly reliable. I had hoped to receive clear guidance from the goddess, but I heard nothing. So try hard to remember his exact words. If the goddess sent us a solution to the problem of the Greeks, it must be in what he said.”
Some of the dread of the hollow places roiled in Rusa’s stomach at that. He had been so busy apologizing for defiling a temple maiden behind the very altar of the goddess. He had grovelled, and Asterios had set his ebony foot firm on Rusa’s chest and squeezed out every breath.
I only want to love her—him—as I did my wife. If she’s a woman, if she’s even partly a woman, why should I not? That’s what he’d said, and Asterios had bent down and pressed the tip of his right horn into Rusa’s mouth until his tongue bled.
He hadn’t been thinking about the Greeks at all. Now he bent his head into his hand and groaned. He hadn’t asked.
He hadn’t asked, and he certainly didn’t dare go back and try again.
Why should you not, indeed? Asterios had answered, breathing hot straw scent into Rusa’s open mouth. Why should you not marry them, once you have saved us all?
“He said I could have what I most desire.” Rusa rubbed the ache from his forehead, feeling sick again. “If I could save us from the Greeks.” He shook his head gently, to avoid jostling what useless brains he had. “He didn’t tell me how.”
Despair hung over them all for a moment. Jadikira broke it by flicking grapes at Kikeru again. This time he flung them back, and after squealing in protest over the first two, she began to try to catch them in her mouth. Soon they were both laughing, and though Maja and Rusa tried, the mood of squashed heaviness could not be sustained. They found themselves smiling too.
“You two get on very well.” Maja snatched the latest missile out of the air and waggled her finger between them. “And you’re both of an age. Maybe you should marry each other?”
Yet again, the bottom went out of Rusa’s world like a stone had smashed through the keel. But Kikeru whined, “Mother!” and Jadikira exclaimed, “Ew!” at the same moment.
“I thought you were thrilled about my becoming a temple maiden?” Kikeru protested.
“I thought you weren’t,” Maja retorted, jerking her chin at the way he was plastered up to Rusa, back to chest, arse to groin.
Kikeru shuffled a little apart from Rusa and glared at Jadikira. “Anyway, ‘Ew’ is not polite. What’s wrong with me? You’d be lucky to have me, if I asked.”
Jadikira shrugged, then oddly she seemed to turn to Maja for reassurance. “I don’t know what the appeal is, to be honest. All these stories about young women throwing away their lives to marry some young man? What’s that about?”
Maja shifted on her cushion, smoothed down her skirts, and looked troubled. “To tell the truth, I don’t know either. Like you, I never felt the urge.”
“Don’t get me wrong.” His daughter beamed at the older woman, as if she’d found a soul mate. Probably the first person she had met ever to agree with her nonsense. “Lust, I can understand. That’s how I got the bump. But her father could be any one of three men, and I don’t want to be hitched permanently to any of them.”
“There you’re ahead of me, then.” Maja tweaked her apron, and smiled at the deck planking. “Lust is not something I understand either—not for anyone. My child, I conceived at a ceremony like the one we just attended. I don’t remember much about it. Her father was a luminous creature. A god. That’s how I knew she was destined to be extraordinary. But not even that made me wish for a lover or a husband. For a long time, none of it troubled me at all. I had more interesting things to do.”
She cocked her head, light running over the creases of wisdom in her face, looking humbled. “But now I’m growing old, and my child will leave me, and I will face the rest of my life alone. Now I begin to think perhaps the love and marriage stuff had its purposes after all. It would be nice to be surrounded by grandchildren, and to have at least one person in your life whom you could always turn to. Someone for whom you would be special.”
“I’ve got my dad.” Jadikira grinned at him in a way that twisted up every vein in his body.
“I can’t always be there, sweetheart. Half the time I’m on the sea and you’re rattling around in that big house alone. And even when I am there . . .”
He still felt the bull horn piercing his tongue, the flow of blood down his throat that had made him want to vomit. “Even when I am there, I keep not asking the right things. This talk of marriage is all very well, but what are we going to do about the Greeks?”
“You’re still trembling.” Kikeru edged back more firmly into Rusa’s embrace now his mother was not watching. Rusa hadn’t realised the boy was checking up on him, comforting him. He’d thought it was the other way around. “Was he really that terrifying? Asterios, I mean?”
Involuntarily, Rusa shuddered all over, remembering. “If he had tossed his head, the whole world would have been sent flying.”
“Then I think . . .” Kikeru had that quicksilver look on him now, as though spirit and light could barely keep pace with his thoughts. “I think I might have an idea.”
Three weeks later, Rusa had put the final layer of paint on the last of their preparations. They had built panels of wattle with a carry strap and a handle like that of a shield. These they had coated with plaster and painted to look like parts of the temple walls. Kikeru had made a bellows into which the sacred smoke could be fed, and from which it could be directed via a nozzle and a long tube to wherever it was needed most.
Maja had brewed the most potent of her herbs, her poppies and dittany, her sage and her hemp, and dried them with prayer into tight, damp balls that would burn with the thickest smoke. Jadikira had hollowed out a great, black snake stone and worked it into the shape of a bull’s head, and between them, she and Kikeru had hinged the stone mask to fit a man. All four of them had worked on his horns, sacred horns, taken from the skeleton of a bull-court veteran, covered with sheet gold by Ru
sa, and set in their sockets by Jadikira’s stone craft and Kikeru’s skill.
They had spent most days together, at work, bickering and laughing. They had eaten dinner together, witnessed and taken part in the dawn and sunset and noon observations together, and Rusa knew he would miss their constant presence once this was done and their two households separated again.
He had not thought he lacked for anything, before these two came into his life, but if they were to go, then how empty it would seem.
Well . . . they had prepared for three weeks for this, and now the time was come. Struggling to breathe around his terror, his mouth hot, copper-filled, he went to one knee beneath the light well.
“Are you ready?” Maja asked.
No, he wasn’t. He never would be. But this was the plan Kikeru had come up with and like everyone in their little band, he believed that Kikeru had been inspired—he believed this was the will of the goddess, the second half of the message he had so singularly failed to hear. This was his penance, so he had better complete it. “As I ever will be.”
Maja lifted up the stone mask in both hands, Jadikira stepping up behind him to catch the hinged back of it and carefully place it around Rusa’s head. It went on like suffocation, closing him away from the light, closing him once more into the darkness he had shared with the daemon.
Asterios, he called inside his head, casting his thoughts out like a fisherman into the darkness. I’m here. Come and shake the Greeks for yourself. I’m here. Come and ride me.
Jadikira had shaped the inside of the mask to the contours of Rusa’s brow and eyes. Where his nose and mouth were it was hollow, so he could breathe through the long bull’s muzzle, but his chest ached as if he were fighting for breath, and he made a huh noise, a huffing, magnified by the mask into a nervous animal snort, low and rough.
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