The Sea King’s Daughter

by Barbara Michaels

  Then another point hit me and I interrupted the tirade.

  “What do you mean, you don’t have permission to dive?”

  “The words seem plain enough to me.”

  “Yeah,” I said. “They seem plain to me, too. In other words-correct me if I’m wrong-you have permission to dig, but not to dive. You can’t hire divers-no pro would be fool enough to risk his career and his reputation by breaking the law-so you are suggesting that I do so. Thanks a lot.”

  “You have no career and no reputation to lose,” said Frederick.

  “How tactfully you put it,” I said. “What makes you so determined to risk your reputation? Why can’t you just dig, like a good little archaeologist is supposed to do? It just so happens that I know about Thera, about the Minoan houses that were dug up-out of the dirt that is, not out of the ocean floor. And if you’re thinking about my diving down into the caldera, where the middle of the island was, forget it. A diver couldn’t work down there with ordinary scuba gear, it’s hundreds of feet deep.”

  “Three to four hundred meters, to be exact,” Frederick said. “Obviously I wouldn’t propose any such absurd idea. Water pressure would have destroyed any remains in that area. If you knew as much as you claim to know, you would realize that the outer portions of the island were also subjected to seismic action. Parts of the coastline have subsided since ancient times. Local divers have reported seeing ruins underwater. I want you to investigate a-a particular area. The situation is ideal. Even our names are different. No one will suspect you of being motivated to-”

  “Break the law,” I said. “Won’t they get just a teeny bit suspicious when they see me diving?”

  “The village is remote. We will take all possible precautions.”

  “But it’s impossible! I’ll need gear. Tanks. Air. How do I get my tanks filled without some smart character suspecting that I just possibly might be diving? It’s crazy!”

  The madman-my father, for God’s sake-looked vaguely around the room.

  “I’d like some coffee,” he said. “We’ll discuss the details. They can be worked out.”

  I made him some instant on my hot plate. I didn’t want to go out to the coffee shop with him. I didn’t want to be seen with him. But I knew what was going to happen. I even knew why it was going to happen.

  Breaking the law didn’t bother me, although I had made a big point of it to Frederick. As he said, I had no reputation to lose, and I didn’t consider that I was planning to commit a crime, merely bend a minor regulation. I doubted that they would put me in a Greek jail even if they caught me. I could always claim my revered parent had ordered me to do wrong.

  That danger I could dismiss, but the other dangers were more serious. Diving is the greatest fun on earth, but it is not a game. You have to know what you’re doing, and you have to know the terrain. Thanks to Jim’s super coaching, I felt competent to take care of myself in home waters, but I didn’t know anything about the Mediterranean. For all I knew, they had man-eating plants down there. And my father didn’t strike me as the greatest person to have around if you got into trouble. I had a feeling I could drown ten feet away from Frederick if he happened to be thinking about something else.

  Money was no problem, apparently. Somehow or other Frederick had conned some nutty foundation into sponsoring the dig. There are more of them-nutty foundations-than you might suppose, supported by millionaires with more money than sense, or by groups of earnest fanatics. They want to find the Fountain of Youth, or the secret of the Great Pyramid, or-in this case-Atlantis. The Atlantis bit suited Frederick ’s plans; that’s what he was really looking for, although he put the problem in more pompous terms. So I could get my fare and expenses out of Frederick. I might not be earning any money, but at least I wouldn’t be a drag on Mother and Dad.

  Which brought me to the main problem.

  I had no intention of telling my parents-my real parents-about Frederick. Mother would flip, and I wouldn’t blame her. It had taken me only half an hour to realize that my begetter was ruthless, unreliable, and incapable of feeling responsibility toward another human being. Mother had better reasons than anyone in the world to know these things. For the first time in my life I allowed myself to contemplate that marriage. It had lasted for three years… I shivered. Cold. Cold-it must have been like embracing a block of ice.

  So what I had to do was think up a convincing story. I considered lying about my whereabouts, writing a dozen letters and arranging to have incoming letters forwarded by a confederate in some safe neutral town, or one of the state parks, where I might reasonably be expected to find a summer job. The idea didn’t appeal to me. If I got caught, it would destroy a relationship that had taken me twenty years to build up. I hated to risk it. And yet it was because of that relationship of trust that I could get away with what I planned to do that summer. Mother and Jim would believe me when I told them…anything. They trusted me that much.

  I was already starting to talk away the difficulties. The decision wasn’t hard to make. It was a choice between Joe’s Pizza Parlor, with a lot of beer-drinking high-school big shots making grabs at me, and…Thera. Brilliant sunlight and cobalt-blue waters, olive groves and white beaches and bronzed Greek sponge divers with dazzling smiles… My ideas of Greece were pretty vague. But underlying the hazy tourists’ picture, motivating the decision that altered my life was the prospect of what might be waiting for me in the blue waters off Thera. Sunken treasure, cities under the sea. The columned halls of the sea kings. Gold ingots, piled in stacks. Crowns and diadems, jewels spilling out of rotted chests bound with silver. Pretty Sandy Bishop, the discoverer of the treasure…

  I’m not ashamed to admit I was a fool. Even now, after all that happened, I’d rather be foolish than too dull to respond to a lure like that.

  After Frederick had left I tried to get back to my term paper, but it was a lost cause. His aggressive presence still pervaded the room. After a while I put on my raincoat and went to the library. Instead of looking up references for my paper, I took out three books about ancient Greece.

  Things worked out about the way I had expected. Lying to Mother and Jim left me with a nasty feeling. I hated to do it. But there was no other way.

  So I set up a deal with Betsy, a friend of mine who was planning to spend the summer backpacking around Europe with a couple of other guys. She agreed to forward mail, read telegrams or anything that looked urgent, and telephone me right away if something came up. (That was before I found out about telephone service in remote parts of eastern Europe.) She was also supposed to scribble an unintelligible postcard from time to time.

  Mother and Dad accepted my plans with a readiness that made me squirm inside. I had about two hundred dollars in the bank. I told them it was more. They believed me. And I felt like the A-I heel of the universe on graduation day when Jim handed me a check. He had to borrow the money, I was sure of it. I almost told them the truth then, they were so teary-eyed and proud and gullible. But I didn’t. I promised myself I would pay Jim back at the end of the summer, with interest. I could get the money from Frederick, and believe me, I had no qualms about doing just that.

  I had seen him a couple of times since his first visit. Finally I told him not to come to the campus. He made me nervous. It was okay with him. We communicated by letter after that, and I must admit he was relaxing to deal with. He wasn’t like a parent at all. I mean, with parents-parents you love-you have to go through all kinds of contortions to keep from worrying them or hurting their feelings. I didn’t have to pretend with Frederick. He treated me like an equal-no, not like an equal, he didn’t think he had any; he treated me like a functioning adult, no more incompetent than the other adults he knew. Like, in making the arrangements for the trip. He just sent me a check. No reservations, no “I’ll meet you at three thirty-four at the customs desk, and for heaven’s sake, don’t miss the plane.” Love is fine. But it is also confining, it ties you down. My parents were the greatest, but even w
ith them there were times when I felt like Gulliver, pinioned by a million tiny strings, and I wanted to leap up and yell and throw my arms wide and break loose.

  I wanted to be free. And if that sounds corny, adolescent, immature-it’s the truth, and I’ve made up my mind to be as honest as I can. I know. Freedom’s just another name for nothing left to lose. I had plenty to lose and no intention of losing it. I didn’t want to be free of Mother and Dad, not permanently. But for a while… WithFrederick I was free. I didn’t give a damn about him and he didn’t give a damn about me. If I ever came into conflict with his precious work, then heaven help me. He would sacrifice me as quickly-and with less regret-than Agamemnon had sacrificed his daughter to get favorable winds. (You see, I had been doing my homework on ancient Greece.)

  I knew from the start I couldn’t live long in that arctic cold that was Frederick ’s emotional environment. But after twenty years of cozy warmth, it felt bracing. He was an interesting man. I was curious to find out more about him. And there were the sunken halls of the sea kings, waiting…

  They weren’t such bad reasons. There was no way I could have anticipated what was going to happen.

  III

  I took my time about getting to Thera. Frederick was probably pacing up and down the volcano, looking at his watch and cursing me in several languages; but after all, it was my first trip abroad. Besides, I felt I had to establish my relationship with Frederick right from the start. If I wasn’t firm with him, he would walk all over me.

  So I spent a couple of days in London and a couple of days in Paris, seeing the sights and sending lots of postcards home. I was always with a crowd; there were a lot of people my age traveling, and it’s easy to spot a fellow student, whatever his or her nationality. I said good-bye to Mike and Sally and Joe in Paris, and met another group in Athens. We visited the Plaka together, and I learned how to do that Greek dance, the kind where the dancers have their arms around each other’s shoulders.

  Oh, yes, we went up to the Acropolis one afternoon. If they would only fix the place up, it would be rather impressive. There’s no reason why they can’t patch the holes and put up some new columns.

  I mention this not to show what a boor I am, but because my lack of response to the great antiquities of Greece proves that I am not susceptible to that sort of thing. I had no emotional reaction to the place, and it’s a place that brings out the hidden romanticism in many people. “The birthplace of democracy… The stones trodden by the sandals of Socrates…” That sort ofthing.

  Which makes my experience in Crete all the more peculiar.

  I hated to leave Athens. I had met this guy named Aristotle-really-who was a student at the university, and he was showing me parts of Athens most tourists don’t see. He wanted to show me some other things, too; and although I was having fun, I decided maybe it was time to move on. I wanted to spend a couple of days in Crete, to keep up my tourist pose, before I went to Thera. I suppose I was overdoing the camouflage, but I rather enjoyed it; it made me feel like Mata Hari.

  I took a boat. There were quite a few other students on board, and we stayed up most of the night singing and talking. The cabins were stuffy little cubicles with four or five people in each of them. I guess every safety regulation was violated on that boat, especially the one that limited the number of passengers. I figured if we hit a rock or something, I’d have a better chance on deck, so instead of going to bed with my four roommates, I just lay down on the deck when I got sleepy.

  When I woke up, with the sun shining down on my face, I felt awful-sick and stiff and depressed, the way I’d felt when I had Asian flu. It wasn’t the hard deck or the fact that I’d had only three hours sleep. I had done that plenty of times. I wondered if I was catching some kind of bug, and I lay there for a while with the smell of bilge and sour wine strong around me, regretting my boasts about never getting seasick. Then I remembered the dream.

  When I was young I used to have nightmares-not often, but when I did, they were bad. It would take me a long time to fight free of the dream, even after I woke up; I can remember lying in bed in a cold sweat of terror, shaking and sick, before I came fully awake. It hadn’t happened for a long time. Until now.

  I felt a little better when I realized that the main thing wrong with me was a bad dream. I tried to recall the details of this one; but the harder I concentrated, the more the memories slipped away, like small wet fish between my fingers. At first all I could remember was that it had something to do with Crete and the old legend-with which I was now very familiar-of Theseus and the Minotaur.

  The Minotaur was a good theme for nightmares. Half man, half bull, he was the result of a temporary liaison between the queen of Crete and-right. The queen couldn’t help herself, actually. Poseidon, the god of the sea, had made her fall in love with the bull because her husband had kept the animal for himself, instead of sacrificing it. The Greek gods were always doing things like that. They were a mean, vindictive group of divinities, not nearly so well behaved as the poor humans they harassed.

  Anyway, King Minos couldn’t destroy the Minotaur because it was sacred. So he had his brilliant architect, Daedalus, design the Labyrinth as a sort of kennel for the monster, and every nine years he fed it with hostages from the conquered city of Athens-seven young men and seven maidens. One year, when the sacrifice was due, the prince of Athens, Theseus, volunteered for the draft, hoping to kill the monster and save his fellow Athenians.

  He wouldn’t have succeeded if the Princess Ariadne, Minos’ daughter, hadn’t fallen in love with him. She gave him a clew, a ball of string, to unwind as he went into the Labyrinth. Without it, he couldn’t have found his way out again, even if he succeeded in killing the monster, which of course he did, being a hero. He took Ariadne with him when he escaped from Crete, but he deserted her before he got home-sailed away, leaving her on an island where they had stopped for provisions. At least that’s what one version of the legend says, and it’s the one I’m inclined to believe. Another version claims Theseus’ ship was blown away by a storm while Ariadne was on shore.

  The part I had dreamed about was the part where Theseus meets the Minotaur.

  I had seen a picture of that scene in some mythology book. It was a line drawing in black and white-nothing like my dream picture, which had been in living color, complete with all the sensory impressions. As I lay there, the dream came back to me, my memory nudged by the Greek sun beating down on my upturned face, the boat rocking gently under me, the smell of fish and seawater and close-packed bodies…

  The walls were rough, rock cut; they dripped with moisture and shone with a rotten greenish luminescence. There was a horrible smell-not the smell of manure and hay, which is wholesome and clean by contrast, but the stench of organic things decaying. The air was thick with it. No wind from outside had entered that place, to sweep it clean, since it was built. This was the heart of the Labyrinth, the lair of the monster. Maybe the outer walls and corridors were man-built and straight; I hadn’t seen that part in my dream-but here, at the very core, the rocky maze seemed to be cut out of the body of the earth itself. The earth mother was the oldest of all the gods, and the slimy, curving corridors were horribly suggestive of the entrails of some gigantic animal. The light pulsated feebly, as if something breathed.

  In the center there was darkness, utter and absolute. But I knew something was there. I could sense it, waiting. The man knew it, too. He was afraid. The sweat ran down his face in streams, and yet his half-naked body shook convulsively, as if he were cold. He was wearing a queer short skirt, with a wide belt that shone like metal. It pulled his waist in and made his chest and shoulders look even broader than they were. There was a chain around his neck, with an amulet or locket hanging from it. He had dropped the clew. There was something on the ground at his feet. How could I tell it was a box, the box that held the ball of twine? I don’t know. But I was sure.

  Yes, I was there. That was the worst part of the dream. I was there, invisib
le, impalpable; watching in an agony of fear and hope.

  Something stirred in the central darkness. There was a rustling sound, not the rustle of dried grass or hay, but a clicking rattle, like dead bones rubbing together. Then It came out into the light.

  Half man, half bull. It’s all right when you see something like that in a drawing. You can accept the grotesque because it is unreal. But this was real-alive and breathing. The mingling of animal and human wasn’t as neat as it is in the illustrations-a well-shaped man’s body with a bovine head, like a mask. This creature was indescribably blended. But the face was human, and that was horrible, because it was aware. It knew what it was, and it felt the same loathing its victims felt-for its own body. Imagine being trapped, not just for a single lifetime, but for eternity, inside something you loathe and despise with a sick hatred… Hate was its only emotion. Hatred for itself and for humanity and for the immortal gods. I caught one glimpse of that ghastly face and blacked out.

  When I could see again, the two, man and monster, were wrapped in a struggle to the death. They rolled over and over, in and out of the light, arms and legs entwined as if they were being molded together into a single, even more monstrous, being. And I knew that one of the two must die; and I knew that whichever one it was, I would suffer a loss in that dying, for the monstrous thing was part of me, bone of my bone. As the two rolled and tore at each other, among the brittle, breaking bones of earlier victims, I woke up.

  I remembered the whole thing now, and it was almost as bad as dreaming it. Then somebody’s arm went around me and rolled me across the deck. Two sleepy brown eyes stared into mine and a fur-fringed mouth opened in a wide grin.