“Of course,” she said, “and have no fear. What I cannot break for your sake, I will bend to the utmost of its span.”
“What? What is it?” Kikeru insisted, when they were sitting on the steps of the theatre together, awnings spread white over their heads, above which the yellow walls and red sacral horns of the palace reared against the unbroken blue of the sky. “Kira, there’s no way out of this for me. I’m just going to have to—”
“You say you’ve chosen to be male,” Jadikira said, grunting as she slowly lowered herself down onto the warm stone seat. “And you marry me.”
What? Rusa’s thoughts stalled. He had supposed the relationship between those two was one of friends. Great friends, yes—Kikeru had taken to calling in on Kira with weird inventions and trophies from his I need to get out and think explorations, stopping her from going entirely distracted and distressed at being cooped up at home. But Rusa hadn’t thought there was anything else between them, and now his whole conception of the last month twisted within him and grew teeth.
“Father can marry Maja,” Jadikira continued, expression still innocent, though with an undertone of smug. Rusa glanced at Maja and at Kikeru, slightly relieved to find them too looking stunned and dismayed. What on earth was his previously perfectly intelligent daughter talking about?
“I don’t . . .” Maja smoothed down her skirts as though she expected to find a ferret in them. “I don’t want to . . . marry my son’s lover?”
“No.” Jadikira laughed. “And I don’t particularly want to marry your son either, but this is the clever bit. Then we all go and live together in the same house. I’ve got a husband, so none of my lovers think they have a right to me, and I’ve got company. Maja has a husband, so the temple hierarchy give her a bit more respect. I’m going to have a child, so she gets to be around babies, and given we are all official in one way, who’s going to be nosing around making sure we’re all in the right beds?”
“I . . . Ah.” Kikeru picked an interesting stone off the ground by his bare big toe, and turned it in his hand for a moment before shoving it for safekeeping into the piled-up masses of his hair. “I would still have to be a man all the time.”
“Only outside the house.” Jadikira closed a hand on Rusa’s shoulder and shook him, as if to say everything would be well. Everything could still be saved. “Inside the house, where we already know who you are, you could be whatever you liked.”
Rusa’s thoughts turned towards it slowly. Better, surely, to have Kikeru in his bed, in his arms, accepted by society as a part of his family, than to have her unattainable, gelded, in the service of a goddess about whom she didn’t seem to care a great deal. Better to have Kikeru however he came than not to have him at all.
“It’s not perfect.” Maja, who sat a step above him, nudged his arm with her bare foot, and he wondered what it would be like to have her constant flow of talk filling up the silences of his house. Knowing, when he sailed away, he would be leaving Jadikira in the hands of one who had already raised one child alone. With a mother and a sibling to take care of her. With her to take care of them. “But it seems like it would be worth a try.”
Three months later, and it had been a sticky afternoon as summer’s heat refused to wane into autumn. Workmen, building a new wing onto Rusa’s house, lay in the shade of the half-high walls and slept with their cloaks shading their faces.
My house now too, Kikeru thought, walking the knee-high maze of passages and feeling joy radiate from the stones like the soaked-up sunshine. The turns and entrances reminded him of the chase through the dark of the palace that had become the chase through the dark of the otherworld, but this was his wing—here was his workshop, and his mother’s sitting room. Their own little shrine with a pillar Maja and Rusa had carved together, and figures of the goddesses Jadikira had made with her clever stone-carver’s hands.
Here, the wing opened out into a courtyard, where he could hang those devices that needed the wind to operate them. He seemed never to run out of ideas anymore. The dread that had squashed him for so long—the dread of having to choose—had gone, and in its place his mind had flowered. There were sculptures and weavings and pipes and machinery of fine-toothed bronze wheels he was working on all at once, as though his happiness had unblocked a dam in him, and he would fill this space and the world with new things, like a woman giving birth.
The sun was a pile of flame out over the sea, and as he stood, knee-high in masonry, a wind swept up from the horizon and stirred his plaited hair, cooling the sweat on his shoulders and flouncing the culottes he still wore without comment from his neighbours. He breathed in deep, in gratitude, and as he gazed out on the whole tawny, wine-dark moving mass of the sea, a white fleck caught his eye.
Was that—?
It grew larger, closer, and yes, as he squinted into the sun’s glare, it grew clearer too. Beneath the diamond pattern of small ropes, the white sail bore a blue skimming bird’s shape. A tern.
“Yes!” His settled joy, like a banked fire, met straw and leapt up in brilliance, consuming him. He gave a little bound in place, stumbled over a displaced mud brick, barking his toe against the wall, caught himself, and ran back into the occupied parts of the house, shouting.
“Tern is back! Rusa’s home!”
In the courtyard garden, where the four sides of the house had kept out the worst of the heat, Maja started from where she had been drowsing by the pool, her hands coming up automatically to cradle the belly and back of the infant who slept in her lap.
“Shh!” she said, and smiled down at Jadikira’s son, Dideru. Kikeru’s son now too, technically.
Kikeru gave another little bound of joy, constrained by the need to keep quiet. He had a son now! He was a man of standing in the community, with an heir already and posterity to work for. Who would ever have thought it?
“I’m sure it’ll take him until sunset to bring the ship in and unload and get home. But I’m telling Jadikira now and Itaja, so she can have dinner ready.”
At his hissed enthusiasm, Dideru woke and fussed. Maja rolled her eyes at him and stood to rock the child on her hip and kiss Kikeru on the cheek, squeezing his shoulder as the baby yanked on his plaits.
“I see you being happy, my child. I’m so glad.”
He hugged her back, and dropped a kiss on his son’s snub nose, making the boy giggle. “I could say the same, Mother. I’m glad too.”
“Ha,” she said. “Well, since Didi and I are up, we will order dinner. I’ll take him to his mother for his. You make yourself pretty and don’t worry about anything else.”
It was both far too long and far too soon afterwards that the door to the street opened and Rusa stepped through, with a sack on his back, looking bronzed and tired from his voyage. This time no thought of quiet constrained Kikeru—he sped out of the courtyard and had leapt up into Rusa’s arms almost before the man could drop his luggage.
Rusa gathered him in close, a hand in his hair, the other sliding down his naked back to settle on the curve of his arse, and this felt like home too, but it also felt like flame, and he wanted. He wanted . . .
“Hey, Dad.” Jadikira appeared in the corridor behind him, having run almost as fast as he, and ruined his moment.
Oh, why had he made sure dinner was ready and all the household were alert? Next time, Rusa could come home in secret and greet everyone else after he had spent a day in bed.
Gently, reluctantly, Rusa put him down on his feet, nuzzling into his neck as he did. “Butterfly,” he murmured, his voice rough, everything hot about him, nothing at all left of the daemon’s cold might. “Later.”
After he had hugged his daughter and his grandchild, and Maja—whom they all tended to forget was officially his wife—there were presents. Late in the season as it was for trade journeys, he had only gone to Thera and back, but the markets of Thera must have been wondrous, because he had brought back iron stone-carving tools for Jadikira, and cool linen cloth from Egypt for the baby. Maja
had a chest of healing ointments from Assyria, and for Kikeru there were some small discs of rock crystal from Phoenicia.
They looked like nothing extraordinary, but when he held the first up to his eye, everything behind it seemed to grow larger, closer, and when he held the second in line with it, arm’s-length away, it intensified his sight the way his collapsible ear-tunnel had done for his hearing.
Part of his mind had already sunk into the things and was away, combining and recombining them to do new things, sanding down the edges, discovering what they were made of and replicating it for himself. But that part ran on in parallel to the part which cherished the fact that Rusa knew what he liked, he had cared, and he had taken the time to choose rightly.
“I heard a rumour, while I was at the markets.” Rusa grinned, settling to his eating couch on the roof as the early stars came out in the east and the lemon sky lingered pleasantly cool over the sea. He pulled Kikeru down—all too willingly—to lie against his chest, and slowly their breathing came into the same rhythm and it seemed the pulse of the blood in both of them was one. “The Greeks spread word, over there, the queen had lain with a bull and got a monster of it, and the monster now roams our palace, protecting it.”
Kikeru laughed, and wormed his way closer into Rusa’s embrace. They had fried snails with olive oil and rosemary, lamb with greens and barley bread, sweet pies of soft cheese with honey and rosewater. But Kikeru didn’t want to eat. Couldn’t think about anything, not the Greeks’ dirty stories or their own cleverness, only the body that supported him and the firm desire against which he lay.
“They call it ‘the minotaur.’” Rusa looked down at his frustrated face and smiled. “They have a name for you too, Butterfly, did you know that?”
He couldn’t imagine it would be good, but he shrugged as if to say he might as well hear it if Rusa wanted to tell.
“They call you the cunning artificer.” Rusa laughed. “Daedalus, in their tongue.”
He craned forward to catch Kikeru’s waiting mouth in a kiss Kikeru could tell was intended to be merely warm, loving, polite. Kikeru squirmed out of that too-strong restraining grasp and poked Rusa in the elbow that was supporting him, causing him to fall forward until he was plastered all over Kikeru like a salve.
Kikeru writhed, scientifically, took the chance to close his mouth on Rusa’s nipple and drag his teeth gently over the hardening bud. The next thing he knew, he was being lifted and thrown across Rusa’s shoulder.
Rusa bowed. “I’m sorry, ladies, but I think dinner will have to wait.” And Kikeru grinned to himself all the way downstairs to the one present he wanted the most. “The cunning artificer”? He liked the sound of that, certainly. But he liked “Butterfly” better.
Though the Minoans seem to have had two different writing systems, one of which has been translated and one of which hasn’t, very few inscriptions survive from the time. We simply don’t (yet) have the kind of insight into their minds we would have if they’d had a Homer to write epic poetry for them. In short, to figure out what Minoan society was like, archaeologists have had to rely primarily on its buildings and other artifacts.
I have made a stab at depicting the culture in accordance with my interpretation of the archaeological evidence as it was presented to me in the research I’ve read. I am very far from claiming I must be right. All I can say is this is how the historical evidence struck me, an agender artist who is well aware that historians tend to bring their own assumptions to the evidence, and who therefore felt free to use my own.
On a similar note, I’m sure there are people who will want to point out to me that according to the myths, Daedalus came from Athens, and therefore could not possibly be a young, genderqueer person from Crete. However, one of the things I wanted to do in this story was tweak the myth of the Minotaur by telling it from the Minoan point of view.
Scholars seem to be floating the idea that “Minos” was not a personal name of a king of Crete at all, but a title. So it seemed within the bounds of possibility to me that “Daedalus” might be similar. It means “the cunning artificer.” Why would a person call their baby that before the child was old enough to have established a reputation for inventing things? Wouldn’t it make more sense as a title bestowed on people who were, in fact, cunning artificers?
In which case, there could have been a Minoan Daedalus and an Athenian Daedalus, and their stories might have been conflated and confused before they came down to us, like the stories of King Minos the perfect judge and King Minos the tyrant.
In short, the story of the Minotaur—including the part Daedalus played in it—is a myth, and I felt free to take certain liberties with it.
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Trowchester series
Trowchester Blues
Blue Eyed Stranger
Blue Steel Chain
Historical
Blessed Isle
The Crimson Outlaw
Captain’s Surrender
False Colors
His Heart’s Obsession
All at Sea
By Honor Betrayed
The Reluctant Berserker
Fantasy
Under the Hill: Bomber’s Moon
Under the Hill: Dogfighters
Too Many Fairy Princes
The Wages of Sin
The Witch’s Boy
Contemporary
Shining in the Sun
Alex Beecroft was born in Northern Ireland during the Troubles and grew up in the wild countryside of the English Peak District. She studied English and philosophy before accepting employment with the Crown Court, where she worked for a number of years. Now a stay-at-home mum and full-time author, Alex lives with her husband and two children in a little village near Cambridge and tries to avoid being mistaken for a tourist.
Alex is only intermittently present in the real world. She has spent many years as an Anglo-Saxon and eighteenth-century reenactor. She has led a Saxon shield wall into battle, and toiled as a Georgian kitchen maid. For the past seven years she has been taken up with the serious business of morris dancing, which has been going on in the UK for at least five hundred years. But she still hasn’t learned to operate a mobile phone.
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