Da Silva had also brought along something the size of an iPhone, and she glanced at it as they went, making sure that Meret was still at the graveside. Ann wondered how they powered the computers and cameras hern, but she knew if she asked they wouldn’t answer her. It was yet another question to store away, to see if she could figure it out later.
Finally Elias raised his hand and went on ahead of them. “She’s there,” he said quietly as he came back.
“You two stay here,” Da Silva whispered to Ann and Franny. Then Elias said, “Now.”
Elias and Da Silva rushed forward. Ann followed them, and saw Meret running off in the opposite direction.
All of them hurried after her, going as fast as they dared, their torches flaring like flags. Meret’s flashlight shone out ahead of them, its glare unnatural in the weaker light of the torches.
The road began to slope downward. Meret was still running quickly, as confident as if she knew the way. Ann found herself near the front, between Elias and Da Silva. Ahead of her Meret’s light vanished behind trees or outcroppings of rock and then shone out again.
Then the flashlight disappeared for good, and they ran to where they had seen Meret last. The road forked into three smaller paths, each heading down the hill. Beyond that was darkness, too dark to see the way she had taken.
Elias cursed softly. He chose the largest path and hurried ahead with his torch. Da Silva stayed where she was. She shone her torch around her; the rough stone face of the hillside loomed up in the light. “She’s gone, I guess,” she said.
Something sounded from inside the hill. “What—” Da Silva said. She ran her hand over the wall.
The sound came again, stone falling on stone. Ann felt along the tall rocks next to her. The hillside ended abruptly, and air came from an opening within it.
“Here,” she said, whispering. “There’s an entrance over here.”
“Stay there,” Da Silva said—unnecessarily, since Ann had no intention of going inside without a light. Da Silva moved toward her and went through the entrance, and Ann and the others followed.
It led to a straight corridor within the hill. They walked along it as silently as they could, but still their footsteps seemed to echo all around them, a crowd marching in darkness.
The passageway ended suddenly. Two others led away from it, to the left and right. “It’s the labyrinth,” Ann whispered. Her voice echoed back to her, sounding full of portent.
“Yes,” Da Silva said. She brought her torch close to the walls. They were nearly straight, an amazing feat of engineering. “There’s a carving of a double ax on the left—look. Was that put there to show the way?”
No one said anything. “Let’s go on a bit, see what we can find,” she said. “Maybe Meret didn’t go very far. Be as quiet as you can.”
They turned left. It was chilly within the labyrinth, much colder than the night outside. At the next juncture Da Silva found another double ax to the right, then right, then left again, until Ann lost any sense of how many times they had turned, and where the entrance lay behind them. Her uneasiness grew.
They went right. A musty, animal smell wafted out toward them. Suddenly they heard an eerie sound echoing through the corridors, a deep groan, breaking occasionally into a high whine. It sounded mad, desperate, the cry of someone who had been imprisoned inside the labyrinth for centuries.
“What the hell is that?” Franny asked.
“I think—I think it’s a bull,” Da Silva said. “This must be where they keep them, until the games.”
“So that’s where the carvings lead,” Franny said.
Ann looked at her in surprise. Franny hadn’t said much since Gregory died, and when they’d met Meret she’d seemed to check out entirely. Maybe she’d finally accepted that Gregory’s death was an accident, that they had to concentrate on their assignment. Ann hoped so, anyway.
“Well, she can’t have gone down that way,” Da Silva said. She sighed. “We should head back.”
“I guess you’re right—the company doesn’t care about her,” Ann said. “This would have been the perfect place for them to capture her, before she ran into the labyrinth.”
They turned around and followed the carvings to the entrance. A short while later Elias returned, and they told him what they’d found.
“The labyrinth!” he said. “Man, I wish they’d let us do some research while we’re hern.”
“We’re doing something much more important,” Da Silva said. It sounded like an argument they’d had before.
“I didn’t find her either, obviously,” Elias said. “Let’s get back—we can’t do anything more tonight.”
THE NEXT FEW DAYS were as dull as Ann had feared. She and Franny played hundreds of games on the computer, they checked the feed from the camera, they talked about movies they’d seen, or places they’d visited—but never anything important, nothing about Ann’s foster homes or Franny’s marriage. And they never saw anything more on the camera feed, just a rocky field and an empty hole.
Finally Da Silva and Elias came to visit them. “We made contact with the Minos this morning,” Da Silva said. “We told him where we were staying and he came to see us, told us where the lookouts are and when we’re supposed to take care of the guards. Here—” She took out a piece of papyrus with a crudely drawn map.
“Weren’t the queen’s spies following him?” Ann said.
“Of course they were. We snuck out the back door and took him to a tavern we knew, a place where we could sit in the back and not be disturbed.”
Ann looked at Walker. This was how you did it, she wanted to say, how you kept the queen from following your every move. But she felt too hot, and too dispirited, for the argument that would certainly follow.
And of course Da Silva’s instructions were much more important. The Minos wanted them to do their work during the bull games, when everyone but the guards would be at the palace. They would not overpower the guards, as the Minos had suggested, but use the drugs that Walker had brought with her. The five of them would split into two groups, one for each lookout; they would try to get to know the guards, drink with them, and then, when the bull games started, they would give them the drugged wine.
“Would drugging them really change things that much?” Ann asked. “I mean, the Minos told us he has allies, which I guess means foreigners, people off the island—but doesn’t Kaphtor have a huge navy? How far would they get if they actually invaded?”
“We don’t ask those questions until we get back,” Walker said repressively.
Da Silva seemed to take pity on her, though. “Well, we do know that the navy was more or less destroyed thirty years ago, when the volcano on Thera erupted. They’ve started to rebuild, of course, but their whole infrastructure was wiped out, shipyards and lumber stores and so on, so it’s going very slowly. That whole northern coastline suffered—even the chain of lookouts there are gone. So there’s only this one slim tace to carry out our assignment and let the Achaeans in.”
“Is that who’s going to invade?” Ann asked.
Walker glared at Da Silva, but Da Silva laughed. “Well, who else could it be? Who else lives to the north, and is trying to expand their territory? Anyone could have guessed it.”
“But why are we on the Achaeans’ side in this?” Ann said. “How do we know their rule would be any better than the queen’s?”
Franny caught the echo of Meret’s earlier question and glanced at her quickly, a warning in her eyes. Ann ignored her.
“Those decisions aren’t up to us,” Walker said. “You know that.”
“A lot of effort goes into these calculations,” Da Silva said. “You can’t imagine how complex they are. I’ve seen the computers on the fifth floor, the modeling they do for every situation, every possible outcome—and you will too, once the company decides it’s time. All I know is that we can’t possibly second-guess them—we don’t know nearly enough. If they want us to help the Minos then we’re helping t
he Minos.”
“So when are the games?” Franny asked.
“Tomorrow.”
“Tomorrow? Can we be ready by then?”
“Of course.”
“What if the queen told the guards to look out for us?”
Da Silva shrugged. “We’ll make you look different. I wouldn’t worry about it, though. Even if they did have your description it wouldn’t be terribly accurate—it’s not like they have photographs. And the queen doesn’t know what I look like, and probably not Yaniel either.”
“And we can always stop them if our assignment goes wrong,” Elias said.
“Stop them—how?” Franny asked.
“Stun guns.”
Had Walker had stun guns all this time? Probably not, probably they were only issued to higher-level agents like Elias and Da Silva. And Walker would certainly have said something if she’d had one.
Elias was disappointed that he wouldn’t get to see the bull games. “It’s like going to Rome and not seeing the Colosseum,” he said.
“Maybe you can watch it being built, your next assignment,” Da Silva said, and Elias laughed.
THEY SPENT THE REST of the day disguising themselves. Da Silva took off Ann’s wig and dyed her hair a pure black, and she added some padding under her robe. For Franny she had some reddish skin dye, making her look more like the men. “They’ll think you’re both a bit ugly,” she said. “Ann’ll be too fat, and Franny too dark. But that’s good—it’ll keep them from looking at you too closely.”
Da Silva gave Walker some padding as well, and a hood to cover her hair. Elias got a toupee, and Da Silva suggested that he shave his mustache. He grumbled, but he took her advice.
They woke early the next day and left the inn. They had come to Knossos from the south, in keeping with their story of having sailed from Egypt, but now they were leaving by the northern road. All of them looked carefully at the unfamiliar streets around them, seeming to realize that their time hern was coming to an end, that they would have this one last chance to try to remember everything.
They came to a fork and separated, Elias and Franny and Walker going to one lookout and Ann and Da Silva to the other. They would hear the roars from the crowd when the bull games started, Da Silva said.
All of Ann’s boredom of the last few days had vanished. She was finally carrying out her assignment, doing what she had been sent hern to do. She would—well, if not save the world, at least help in some small way to fix things.
They came to the lookout. The hut was painted like the one she’d seen when she’d come to Knossos, with a mural of ships; probably they wanted to remind people of their great naval and trading fleets, even, or especially, after those fleets had been more or less destroyed by the volcano. And this place, like the earlier lookout, had a tall pile of wood across the roadway, a beacon.
The door was open; Da Silva knocked on the wall next to it. After a moment a woman and a man came outside.
“What do you want?” the woman asked.
“We don’t require you to see us when you leave, if that’s what you’re thinking,” the man said, and then laughed as if he’d said something funny.
“We’re interested in your lookouts here,” Da Silva said. “We’d like to do something similar where we come from. How do you know who to keep out and who to let in?”
“How do we know you’re not spies, come to learn our secrets?” the woman countered.
Da Silva raised her hands. “You don’t have to tell us anything if you don’t want to. We’re curious, that’s all. And we have some wine, if you’re interested.” She bent and took out two pottery jars from a leather bag she’d brought with her.
The man laughed again. “Why not?” he asked. He looked at the woman, who made the shrugging gesture Ann had seen before.
They went inside. The hut seemed a cozy place, with benches against the walls and a table in the middle. The table held the remains of a meal, some chicken bones and crusts of bread. A cat lay curled up by a back door, studying the table lazily as if trying to work out the best way to get at the food. There was one window, looking out toward the road, and a stone shelf held an oil lamp and some pottery mugs.
The woman and man took down the mugs, set them on the table, and poured the wine. They sat at the table, and the woman spoke some words and let a few drops of wine fall to the floor.
“Where are you from?” the woman asked, taking a sip from her mug.
“Egypt,” Da Silva said. “Beyond the Great Green.”
“You don’t look like folks from Egypt. We get a few of those from time to time, don’t we?” She looked at the man.
“And they would have bowed to our cat,” the man said. “All the Egyptians love our cat.”
“We’re from far to the south,” Da Silva said. “I think we’re the first people from our land ever to visit Kaphtor.”
“Say something in Egyptian then,” the woman said.
Da Silva was drinking from her wine glass; it was up to Ann to answer her. She opened her mouth, wondering what she would come up with.
“Here we are now, entertain us,” she said in English, remembering the song she had listened to over and over again in high school.
The guards nodded, seeming satisfied. They were sharper than she had given them credit for, though. She and Da Silva would have to be careful.
“So,” the woman said. “That’s how we do it. We ask questions, and we see if everything matches up, if it makes sense.”
“And if you’re a foreigner we take your weapons,” the man said.
“But anyone can buy weapons in Knossos,” Ann said. “I saw dozens of shops selling axes.”
The woman and man looked at each other, as if amazed that anyone could be so ignorant. “They’d never sell you one,” the man said. “Only a woman may touch the double ax, and only a woman of Kaphtor.”
“And the Minos,” the woman said. She giggled, as if there was something inherently ridiculous about the Minos. “Karu here wanted to be a Minos once, didn’t you?”
A distant cheer went up, somewhere beyond the walls of the hut. The bull games. Their mugs were empty, and Da Silva reached into her bag and took out another jar, then poured the woman and the man another round.
“Sure,” Karu said, taking a sip of the wine. “All the sex and drugs and food and drink you could ever want. Anything you desire, you just have to say the word.”
“Except freedom.”
“Well, it seemed worth it at the time, when I was a boy. Fortunately she didn’t choose me.”
“Who didn’t choose you?” Ann asked.
“The queen, who do you think? All the candidates line up, and the judges send home the ones who are too ugly or too old or too young, and then the queen chooses from whoever’s left. She sleeps with him until she’s tired of him, and after that he can have anyone he wants, if they’re willing. And there’s never any shortage of women wanting to sleep with the Minos.”
“Your time would be nearly up now, if she’d chosen you.”
He nodded. “’S why I’m glad she didn’t. Seven years seems like a lifetime when you’re young, but it comes soon enough.”
Ann was starting to feel warm, though the stone hut had been cool when they’d first entered. Was it the wine? Had Da Silva made a mistake and drugged them instead? She glanced at the other woman and saw beads of sweat at her hairline, under her wig.
“How do you choose your Minos, in Egypt?” Karu asked.
“We don’t have a queen where we’re from,” Ann said. “We have a—a king.”
The language of Kaphtor didn’t even have a word for king; she had to use the word for queen and make it masculine. It must have sounded funny, because the woman and man laughed loudly.
“A king!” Karu said, trying out the word. “Everyone knows men can’t rule. They don’t have the—the mind for it, the what-do-you-call-it? Focus, that’s it. Give them a problem to solve and they’re off hunting, or to the bull games. And
it’s the women who understand gove—how to bring a family into balance, or a country.”
He was starting to slur his words now. But despite what he’d said Ann was beginning to lose her focus too, becoming unable to concentrate. “Why is it so hot in here?” she asked.
“Hot?” the woman said. “Are you hot, Karu?”
“No. Are you?”
“No, I’m not hot. Why do you think it’s hot in here?”
“Because—look, you’re both sweating,” Ann said. “Of course it’s hot.”
“The beacon!” Da Silva said. She ran to the front door, but both the guards had gotten there before her.
Despite her confusion Ann understood what she meant immediately. She made a dash for the back, thinking, The back door, someone went out the back door and lit the beacon. The police are coming for us.
The door didn’t budge. She hurried to the front. The woman swayed like a tree in the wind and fell to her knees.
“What—what have you done with us?” Karu asked. He took a step forward and stumbled, then righted himself.
Da Silva tried to get past him, but he was still strong enough to resist her. “We drugged you,” she said. “Your friend fell asleep, and you will too.”
He dropped back against the doorjamb, blocking the way out. His eyes closed.
“Help me get him away from here!” Da Silva said. They both pushed against him, but he seemed as immovable as a wall. Noises came from somewhere, the cheer of a crowd or the crackling of a bonfire. Finally, with a sound like a wall coming down, the guard fell to the ground outside the hut.
Ann and Da Silva hurried outside, then stopped. Several women and men stood before them on the path, all of them carrying spears and wearing three feathers in their hair. More were circling around the hut. They were surrounded.
THE GUARDS TOOK DA Silva’s bag and tied their wrists together with rope, then marched them back to the city. At the fork they met Walker and Franny and Elias, also bound and closely guarded. The two groups shuffled together like a deck of cards.
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