He hadn’t tasted the bitter wine, yet he knew the creature was here, fastening itself on him as he donned its likeness.
Maja pushed a length of cloth around and into the neck of the mask to cushion the weight of it against his shoulders, and already, even in the good light streaming in from the opening overhead, her hands had begun to tremble. She held herself now as one who was in the room with a snake, one who reverenced and did not wish to startle it.
“How does it look?” Rusa asked, his voice deepened and made hoarse by the muzzle and the teeth through which it came.
“Your eyes are astir,” she said, picking up a rhyton of sacred bull’s blood. “Behind the eyes of the mask. It makes the crystal glitter. He’s not here yet, is he? But I can feel him lurking. Let’s see if this brings him out.”
She poured the blood over his head and shoulders, supplicating the Ladies and their consorts for their help. Brought down fresh from this morning’s sacrifice, it was still warm. Thick, stinking, it flowed stickily over his horns and forelock, his shoulders and his chest. He opened his hands and let it pour down his arms, puddle in his palms and spill through. Distantly there was a curl in the universe as though something bellowed. The blood dripped into his mouth and mingled with the memory of his own.
“Oh!” A distant door opened, and Jadikira stood staring in a rectangle of darkness—all the corridors must be dark now, for this was the palace of his nightmares. She looked at him with wonder and disquiet. “I’ve just seen the flare. Kikeru’s on his way.”
Kikeru had done his eyes with kohl and green malachite, and had lengthened his eyelashes with soot and fat, but he had left off the girdle and the long skirts, dressed now in the phallic apron of the bull court, rolled leather prick gilded and stiff like the challenge it was.
He threw off his cloak in the Achaean theatre, where the men had gathered to discuss their morning’s work, and he grinned with terrified brilliance at the start of shock and sheer bewilderment that went through their faces when they saw what he was.
“I’ve come to give you a message,” he said, borne up on a flight of nerves and two nights without sleep, chewing laurel leaves to stay awake. “We know of your plans, and you’ll fail. You’ll fail. You’ll be torn limb from limb and eaten and be shat out by our goddess’s son, by the starry one. You don’t think we’re protected? Why don’t you come and see?”
During this speech, he had been backing slowly away, watching the thunder come down over their faces and their pale faces turn red.
“It’s that fucking little hermaphrodite freak again.” Beard tossed the cloak from his shoulder and rose. Over on the other side of the assembly, Stratios rose too, reaching for the short, stabbing sword he had laid beside him. Kikeru took another step back and laughed, because he’d been in a place like this before, and now he was here he wasn’t afraid at all.
“You’re just like the bull,” he said, noting the door in the guard wall was still open. No surprise there—some beautiful girls who were friends of his had agreed to lure the man away long enough. “You think bluster and strength is enough. You know what we learn, all of us, when we come of age? We learn the bull is our servant, not our master.”
The sheep-haired man was up now too, and a fourth was picking a javelin out of the hand of a too-well-prepared slave.
Kikeru watched him heft it, didn’t wait for the throw, just turned on his heel and leapt away. With all the times he had traipsed from his house to Rusa’s over this last month, he knew the path to the last turn, and he flew like a startled swan. The javelin smacked into stones just to his left, peppering his legs with dirt, but he had blue boots on to the ankle and his footing was sure. He sped past and grinned as he heard them follow.
About a mile into the journey, they began to flag, and he was able to slow his pace to a jog. Every so often, they would fall back enough that he had to turn and give them the sign of the fig to rile them back up, but he was beautiful and long-legged and young, and something they hated in its very essence, and there was no chance of them giving up while they still believed they could put him back down where they thought he belonged.
He ran with them over the west courtyard of the palace, and into the corridor of the procession. The queen knew what he was about, and the apartments stood empty. As the Greeks came in, a concealed guard shut the door behind them, and all at once the corridor was blood red, lit only from distant shadowed entrances, turns and half turns and exits glimpsed and guessed even by those who knew the palace’s warren-like layout best.
“We don’t see anything to be scared of,” Stratios yelled, as Kikeru counted paces, fingers on the wall. “We know what it’s like. We’ve been here before.”
Twenty-three paces down and his fingers found the tiny roughness where one of their new panels blocked a doorway. He pushed it in, ducked behind it, and shouldered it back into place, listening with a half-disbelieving glee as they ran obliviously past.
When they had gone, he pushed the panel into the corridor behind them, wedged it in place with the plank he had prepared earlier, blocking their way out, and more—making the way out look as though it had always ended in a wall.
The southern exit, they had already closed and plastered over. Kikeru ran up the outer stairs to the upper level and across to where a light well pierced through the floor, to where the Achaeans must now be loping confusedly into the twisting, turning labyrinth of narrow corridors that was the workshops.
The craftspeople had picked up Kikeru’s idea with delight. They had taken their tools away and left bones. Some had even brought their ancestors from their shared clan graveyards to sit their skulls on the workshop benches where they could watch the fun. If he listened hard at the light well, he could hear the men’s voices as they ran into the deserted rooms and found the dead.
By the light well, Kikeru had left a rope and a cloth soaked in watered vinegar. He wound the cloth around his face and climbed down, pulling the panel behind him to close off the light. The men were ahead of him now, lanternless and no longer running, but bunched together and breathing hard.
Kikeru closing off the light had been a sign. Immediately, smoke began to trickle into the corridors—Maja working her system of pipes and bellows. It came with a hiss, like the breath of an enormous serpent.
“What’s that?” The fourth man was lean and nervous. The knife in his hand scarcely had light enough to gleam as he whipped his head from side to side to try to trace the noise.
“It’s nothing,” said Stratios, curtly. “They’re trying to scare us, that’s all. Turn left, then left, then right. There’s a way into the king’s apartment’s there. They want to play, they can do it when we’ve got their lily-king under the knife.”
They ran left, then left, but there was no right turn. The wall smoothly ended there, where Jadikira had come just in time and wedged another panel. Kikeru mentally saluted her, before he folded out a panel of his own from behind one of the pillars and blocked the route down which the Greeks had come, leaving them only one way to go. One way, down a corridor now utterly dark and swirling with divine smoke.
“We . . . we came down here. Didn’t we?” That was Copper again, his voice now thin, the sound of his breath fast and panicky as he sucked in the smoke just on the other side of the fake wall from Kikeru. “I don’t . . . I don’t remember. Did we come down here?”
“It’s . . .” Even Stratios’s voice had begun to sound blurred, uncertain, as the breath of the divine had begun to open out his perceptions, begun to show him what really lay behind the apparent solidity of the natural world. “It’s a wall, isn’t it? We can’t have done. We must have missed a turn. We’ve got to go back.”
Kikeru heard them try to retrace their steps, come upon the other blocked path, and baulk.
“They’re changing! The walls are changing!” That was Beard, sounding betrayed and terrified and small. Kikeru grinned fiercely at the sound of it, because yes, he’d been good, he’d done nothing to dist
urb the peace, nothing to take revenge, so now it was being handed to him freely, and he could savour every drop.
“Don’t be stupid. How could they?” Stratios sounded equally scared. There was a scuffle—he must have pushed Beard, been pushed back. The crack of a blow meant Kikeru had to put his hand over his mouth to stop from laughing.
And then came the bellow of a monstrous bull.
Even though Kikeru knew the sound was Maja blowing into the conch shell in his listening device, now turned into an amplifier, it still dropped his stomach through his spine and made the hair stand on end on his neck. The Greeks did not have that benefit.
“What was that?” Copper again, shrill as a stuck pig. “Oh shit. Oh shit—he meant it. He meant it. They’ve got a god in here. They’ve got something—”
“Shut up!”
The panel Kikeru was supporting shuddered as something was driven against it. He leaned hard against the joist with which he was bracing it and wished he could see. What was going on in there?
A thud, and then something warm was curling about the kid-leather of his boots. He reached down in the dim and felt liquid seeping through beneath the panel. Hot liquid, both thick and thin. The smells of piss and blood. When he pushed the panel inward, a weight leaned against it.
One down, he thought. Stratios or one of the others must have knifed Copper to stop him saying what they were all beginning to suspect. But the bastard had fallen against Kikeru’s panel. He had meant to inch it slowly down the corridor, driving them to the potters’ workshop where Rusa waited, hopefully with Asterios all around him like a shade. If they wandered about lost in the myriad of small storerooms, the smoke might run out. They might lose their ability to see, and that could not be allowed.
With the corridor blocked behind them, Kikeru ran east down the king’s private stair and out to the courtyard. The light pierced his head with millions of needles, made it clear his sight had begun to alter too, even behind the defence of walls and vinegar. Squinting, he sprinted around the outside of the palace and in again to the place where the great storage pithoi stood, looking like the shoulders of giants struggling to be free of the earth.
From here, he could dive back into the warren of workshops from the open side, though it would mean he, too, was deep in the sacred smoke, within grasp of the Greeks, within grasp of the daemon.
He heard its hoofs strike the ground twice as he sprinted through the pottery. This sound was Jadikira, behind the walls, crashing together two bronze cauldrons, but even so it landed on Kikeru’s chest like a rockslide. Distantly, in the small magazines, where the Achaeans were lost, he heard them cry out again, shriller still, but all of his attention was on Rusa as he flew past, trying not to wake the thing that slumbered there.
Rusa knelt in the cleared room, in the centre of a lake of spilled blood. Blood darkened the gilding of his horns, and pooled in the hollow of his shoulders and in his palms. It was hard to be certain of him in the smoke and the darkness, and with the fumes breaking Kikeru’s head apart from the inside, but for a moment he did see it. Not the man he loved, but a titanic thing from without the world, with cold stars burning white in its crystal eyes and a flicker of red fire in its open bloody mouth.
It raised its head and looked at him, and he felt himself implode, folding up into nothingness next to its monumental reality. And then he was past, threading through the humble corridors of his home like a skein of light.
They were scuffling again when he reached them—Stratios hauling Beard off the man with fleecy hair. Fleecy was half-strangled. When Beard yanked his hands away, Fleecy went down on the flagged floor like a tossed carcass, and hit his head on the stone.
Both of those who remained looked unreal to Kikeru after Asterios: poor, little, fragile, bleating things of flesh and blood.
“How are you liking the palace?” He laughed, tugging the cloth down from around his face so they could see who mocked them. “Opens to you like a locked box, doesn’t it? Come and meet my friend.”
“No.” Kikeru couldn’t guess what Beard was seeing when he looked at him, outlined at the end of the passage with the faint, very faint needles of daylight behind him, but it seemed not to be good. “No, no, no!” He raised his hands, his eyes wide and terrified. “You can’t be here. Please. Please, you’re dead. Don’t. Don’t be here.”
A breath of cold passed up Kikeru’s spine, made him step forward, still smiling, and Beard shrieked, turned, and ran himself full tilt into the stone and plaster wall, as if he’d seen a doorway in a different world. He rebounded, tripped himself up, and lay felled on the floor, groaning.
“You . . . unnatural little . . . abominable . . . unmanly freak.” Stratios reeled towards him, squinting hard, as if trying to see what was really there.
Kikeru backed off. “Didn’t your goddess Aphrodite have a child like me?” he said, his back prickling as he returned to the chamber occupied by the daemon. “If I am unnatural, it is because I am partially divine, and I have a right to walk in these places you will never claim.”
“I. Am not.” Stratios staggered after him, gasping in the smoke. “Afraid.”
That was when Rusa stood up. He stood up and up, rising like a mountain out of the sea. The distant daylight made the golden horns burn. He walked forward, one step, two steps, the sound of brazen drums smashing, and the roar of the conch came again, so loud even the walls of the palace trembled with it and the ground shook underfoot.
Rusa caught Stratios by the throat. Knocking the sword from his nerveless hand, he let the man’s watery legs go out from under him, and bent over his swooning form. He snorted, and the smoke seemed to billow. There was a scent of hay and of stars, bright burning, and Stratios went limp in his grip.
He dropped the Greek, unconscious on the floor, and turned his head to Kikeru. Not sure what he was seeing, Kikeru walked forward. It was Rusa and it wasn’t, just as he was Kikeru and he wasn’t. A part of him was that sunny creature Rusa had talked of, that glorious thing Rusa had lain with, neither male nor female, but both, whole and on fire.
Kikeru let the starry one put its arms around him and snuff his hair with fragrant breath, but it was Rusa’s wide chest on which he rested his all-too-human head.
“No,” he said, moving the daemon’s hand from his arse, weariness descending on him as Jadikira and Maja unblocked the distant corridors and let the smoke run out.
Smiling, he reached up and worked the pin free that held the bull mask closed. Touched hair for a moment, hot flesh and muscle as Asterios blew out a last parting breath, and then it was stone beneath his fingers. The mask fell, and he was kissing Rusa’s clammy face, murmuring to him to come home.
“Next time we make love, I want to do it sober. I want to know you really mean it. I want you to do it as you.”
“So we hear there has been much coming and going in the Greek encampment.”
The queen had received them in her private chamber, looking soft and supple and feminine without her crown and her snakes. Rusa thought perhaps he was meant to be beguiled, reassured, but he had carried only a daemon for a short time, and it had taught him to respect the strength of this woman’s mind, she who sometimes walked overshadowed by the goddess herself.
“Stratios has fled to Athens with many of his followers. Those who have returned in his place approach us with more politeness.”
The queen smiled, and her handmaids smiled all around her, like ones who shared a secret. Rusa reached out to Kikeru and closed his right hand on hers—hers he said now, because she was made up like one of the women of the court, fitted in here like a somewhat flat-chested beauty, an acolyte or noblewoman, too high for him to aim.
“The news that we are protected by demigods spreads like a particularly juicy piece of gossip.” The queen quirked her lip as if there were something about the tale she found particularly hilarious, but didn’t elaborate. “So I am of a mind to grant you a boon. Tell me what you most desire.”
He squeeze
d Kikeru’s fingers tight, felt the pulse return, acknowledging, agreeing. They had spoken of this, in the month that had passed. “I want to marry Kikeru,” he said, emboldened by Asterios’s promise, trying not to notice the way the great ladies stilled and sharpened and the atmosphere of the room chilled. “I know she’s—”
“What you ask is impossible.” The queen’s tone was as certain as the falling of a stone. “What she is at the moment is a decision not fully made, a path not fully chosen. That state cannot persist. She must eventually go forward. Either she will accept she is a woman, and she will enter into the temple to devote her life to the goddess. Or he will accept he is a man, and he will marry a woman and have children as other men do. I will give her until the end of the month to choose, and then I will honour her as appropriate. You, however must choose something else.”
He felt the daemon try to shoulder itself up inside him, as it had done ever since he had first encountered it, but the spirit behind the queen’s eyes was stronger. Rusa’s courage fell back, mute, resentful, and even though Kikeru had insisted this would happen, he didn’t believe it. He refused to believe it. They had not gone through all of that just to fail, or what had been the point of any of it?
Kikeru slumped towards him, looking bitter, hard around the mouth. “I told you.”
Jadikira on his other side gasped. He thought at first it was the child coming. His grandchild, due any moment now. But she leaned as far forward as she could and caught the queen’s eye. “Please give my father a little more time, too, in which to decide. Since his first wish is not possible.”
The queen raised a brow, as though she knew something untoward was in hand. The four of them had gained quite a reputation for thinking the unthinkable after their stunt. But she just inclined her head, letting her black hair fall softly over her face like a veil.
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