The Sea King’s Daughter

by Barbara Michaels

  On top of the cliff, like a starched crocheted edging, were the sugar-white buildings of the island’s largest town, Phira. I was reminded of a model of the Taj Mahal I’d once made out of sugar cubes for a school project. The town had an Oriental look, with cupolas and domes and arched porticoes.

  Other buildings, docks and warehouses and shops, clustered at the foot of the cliff. Connecting the lower and upper towns was a zigzag path that went up the sheer face of the cliff in a series of acute switchbacks.

  As soon as we had docked I made arrangements to have my stuff carried up to the hotel, and then I considered my own procedure. People usually ride donkeys up the path; it’s too steep for a wheeled vehicle, and the black lava cobblestones are slippery. The donkeys looked as if they were in worse shape than I was, so I decided to walk. I had been sitting for hours and needed to loosen up.

  It wasn’t a walk, it was a climb, and by the time I got to the top I was regretting not having taken a donkey. Blinded with sweat and heaving like a spavined horse, I collapsed in the shade of a fig tree, mopped my wet face, and got my eyes focused. And what do you suppose I saw first? Right. My father. He was sitting at a table at a sidewalk café, staring straight at me with an expression of icy disapproval. I paid no attention, being much more interested in the tall glass on the table in front of him. My throat was as dry as death.

  I started walking toward him. Then it occurred to me that maybe I shouldn’t speak till I was spoken to, so I changed course, heading for one of the other tables. Two of them were taken, but the third had only one occupant. He saw me coming and pulled out a chair. I fell into it. The man grinned and shoved his glass of water toward me. I drained it, pushed the damp hair out of my eyes, and looked at him.

  He was worth looking at. As tanned as the Minoan athletes in the frescoes, with brown hair sun-bleached in streaks, he had a thin face and a friendly smile. Handsome? I don’t know. After I’ve known someone for a while I can’t judge his appearance. All my friends look beautiful to me. All I remember of that first impression was that he was brown. Brown hair, tanned skin, khaki clothes. High, arched eyebrows, which peaked thickly in the center, gave him a permanently surprised look. His frayed work shirt was open down the front to show a chest as tanned as his face. The sleeves were rolled up above the elbows, and his arms were covered with the marks of heavy labor, scratches and scrapes and bruises. So were his hands.

  “Health nut?” he inquired. “Animal lover? Skinflint?”

  His voice was deep; the accent was western United States. I considered the questions.

  “Health nut, I guess,” I said finally. “The climb didn’t look that bad from down below.”

  “Live and learn.” He gestured; when the waiter came, he ordered, without consulting me. I had no objection to the result, however; it was lemonade, fresh and surprisingly cold, considering that it had no ice in it.

  “You speak Greek,” I said intelligently.

  “Not very well. Not the modern version, anyhow.”

  “You mean you speak classical Greek?” A qualm ran through me. “What are you, an archaeologist or something?”

  “Something. If you ask my boss, he’ll tell you I’m a long way from calling myself an archaeologist.”

  I drank lemonade and tried to think. Frederick had mentioned that there was another expedition working on Thera. It was just my luck to run into one of the staff members before I had a chance to talk to Frederick and find out what role I was supposed to be playing.

  My companion was studying me as candidly as I had studied him. He didn’t seem to dislike what he saw.

  “My name’s Jim Sanchez,” he said.

  “Really? My dad’s name is Jim.”

  I was not trying to be sly. I spoke without thinking. Jim was my father, in every sense but the least important. I had momentarily forgotten about the man who was sitting at a nearby table, as I basked in the warmth of Jim Sanchez’s smile.

  “What a coincidence.”

  “Yes, I don’t suppose there are more than half a million men in the world named Jim,” I agreed solemnly; and then we both laughed immoderately, as if the silly comment had been an epigram.

  Why does it happen that way sometimes, with a total stranger? Within five minutes we were talking as if we had shared years of common experiences. We laughed a lot, over things that weren’t really very funny. We caught each other’s meanings before the sentences were completed. There didn’t seem to be any reason why I shouldn’t tell him my name, so I did. Then he told me where he went to school-he was working for a doctorate at the University of California -and I told him where I was from and what I had majored in at school. Casual conversation, nothing profound or clever; but I felt as if I had known him all my life.

  That’s what people usually say when they describe such an experience. It’s a figure of speech.

  Or is it? I wonder.

  The conversation was a little embarrassing because I had to hedge about so many things-why I had come to Thera, for instance, and how long I was planning to stay. I had just about decided it was time for me to make a tactful exit-mentioning that I hoped to be staying at the Hotel Atlantis-when something came between me and the sun. The long shadow fell across the table like a bar of darkness that separated me and Jim. It was very symbolic.

  I looked up at the stony face of my father and waited for him to speak first. It didn’t really matter what he said. He had ended my little tête-àtête. The look on Jim’s face was as revealing as an essay.

  “So you are here at last,” said Frederick. “Where is your luggage?”

  “At the hotel,” I said. “At least I hope it is.”

  “Come along, then.” He moved his head in a brusque commanding gesture and started to turn away. He hadn’t even looked at Jim.

  “So,” said the latter. “That’s who you are.”

  “Who?” I asked warily.

  “One of his protégées. No wonder you didn’t-”

  Frederick turned back.

  “Miss Bishop is the daughter of an old friend, who has offered to give me a hand for a few weeks-typing and recording, that sort of thing. I am extremely shorthanded. But you should know that better than anyone. Sir Christopher hired all the able-bodied men in the village before I arrived. No doubt he had been told I would be here.”

  Even considering the paranoidal tone of the last sentences, this was an extraordinary speech for Frederick. As a rule he didn’t condescend to explain himself. Jim’s quirked eyebrows rose.

  “Really, Dr. Frederick, he didn’t know. I’m sorry if you feel that way-”

  “Your regret or lack of it is irrelevant,” Frederick interrupted. “Even if your sentiments are genuine, which I am inclined to doubt, they would be of no practical use, since it is your employer who determines your actions. Come, Sandy, I want to get back to the site this afternoon.”

  Naturally enough, this piece of rudeness wiped the conciliatory expression off Jim’s face and restored his original look of suspicion and hostility. I didn’t blame him. I could have slapped my father. However, it wasn’t fair of Jim to blame me for somebody else’s bad manners. He didn’t give me a chance to apologize or explain or smile, or anything. He threw down a handful of change, pushed his chair back and walked off, fairly radiating anger with every muscle in his body. It was a nice body, too, lean-hipped and broad-shouldered, like those of the bull dancers.

  Frederick was several yards away, walking fast. I trotted till I caught up with him. He didn’t slow down.

  “Why the hell did you have to be so rude?” I demanded.

  “I cautioned you, I believe, against speaking to anyone you met here on Thera.”

  “No, you did not!”

  “Then you ought to have had the elementary good sense to know it without being cautioned. It is imperative that your identity remain a secret-”

  “Then why did you speak to me? I figured-”

  “You did not figure, if by that you mean ‘think sensibly.’ I
t will be evident, as soon as you appear on the dig, that you are working with me. The important thing is to keep people from suspecting that you are planning to dive professionally. There can be no objection to your swimming or diving for pleasure, and if you are thought to be a casual acquaintance, with no training in archaeology, suspicion will not arise. That is why I explained your presence as I did.”

  “Well, you might have told me that before,” I grumbled. “And I still don’t see why you had to be so nasty to-to him.”

  “His name is Sanchez,” said my father obtusely. “He is the assistant to Sir Christopher Penrose, who is conducting a dig on the other side of the village. There is a Minoan town there; house remains were found almost fifty years ago. Sir Christopher is probably preening himself because he believes he has taken the area I wanted. He hopes to find a palace. He is mistaken. The palace is not east of the village, it is west, part of it is submerged, that is why it is necessary for you to dive. Must I explain in laborious detail why I don’t want that inquisitive young man hanging around you? His superior is one of my chief antagonists. He would like nothing better than to find me violating some idiotic regulation, so he can have me expelled from the island.”

  I was tempted to write this speech off as incipient paranoia, but I couldn’t. The article I had read in the dentist’s office all those months ago had told me what the rest of the world thought of my father and his work. Some of the reading I had done since proved to me that scholars can be as petty-minded and vindictive as mean little kids. Sir Christopher might be like that. And if this incident was a sample of how my father behaved with his colleagues, I didn’t blame them for hating his guts.

  He had been arrogant enough when I first met him. Here, on his native turf, he was overpowering. He had my stuff collected and put into his rented Land Rover before I had time to draw a deep breath, and my feeble suggestions about lunch didn’t even win a glance of acknowledgment. His Greek sounded as fluent as his English. I wondered if the content was as rude. I couldn’t judge from the faces of the islanders he was dealing with, they were studiedly blank or studiously polite. Certainly he got results, and we were out of town before I realized that not only had I missed lunch, but I hadn’t even gotten a good look at Phira.

  To complain would have been to waste my breath, so I settled back and tried to enjoy the scenery-not an easy job, since the roads were bad and the Land Rover had long ago lost any springs it possessed. Frederick drove the way I would have expected, with competence and with complete disregard for the comfort of himself or his passenger. However, the scenery wasn’t awfully scenic. The country was rough, cut by ravines and rising to mountains of considerable height. The soil was a dismal dusty gray, with big lumps of lava and pumice. Volcanic soil is richer than it looks, though; Thera produces good wine and vegetable crops such as tomatoes. The fields, outlined by low stone walls, were terraced to make the most of the uneven terrain. Rows of young vines curved around the flanks of the hills like green contour lines.

  We passed a quarry that looked like a lunar ruin, ragged and silvery. I remembered reading that the hardened ash is used in making cement. And I remembered that Thera had once been called Kalliste, “the Beautiful.” The name wasn’t very appropriate now, and yet there was a kind of stark grandeur about the place.

  The village was only about six miles from Phira, but it took a long time to get there because of the roads. They wound all over, skirting ravines and mountain slopes. A mile or so out of town the road I had considered rotten petered out to a goat track, deeply rutted and barely wide enough for the car to scrape between the stone walls. Finally we climbed a steep slope, bumped precariously along the top of a ridge-and down below was the village, Zoa. The white houses, with their distinctive arched roofs, were huddled together as if they needed mutual support to keep from falling down the hillside into the sea.

  As we plunged downward, on no road that I could see, I asked, “Where are we staying? Is there a hotel?”

  I should have known better. A hotel, even a primitive hotel, would have had some labor-saving devices, such as maids. A hotel would have had people. Frederick didn’t like people and he wasn’t particularly interested in saving me any labor. No, we had a house, a ramshackle four-room structure some distance from the village. One look at it brought out housewifely instincts I never knew I had. I even forgot about my empty stomach. I couldn’t have eaten in that house, and the courtyard was worse.

  I spent the rest of the day shoveling out the debris and burying the smellier parts of it. Frederick disappeared while I was working, presumably back to his dig. It was obvious that he wasn’t going to help with the housework. I assumed that the cooking was supposed to be my province too. The kitchen was distinguished from the other rooms by the fact that it contained cases of canned goods and a camp-type Coleman stove.

  There was plenty of food and enough bottled water to last for weeks. I wasn’t so sure that was good news. It implied that Frederick wasn’t planning on many outside contacts. Surely, I thought, we could get fresh provisions from the villagers-tomatoes and wine, at least. It was too late to go shopping by the time I had made the house semi-habitable, so I got into my bathing suit. There was a tiny beach below the house, separated from the village harbor by a spur of rock. The path going down to it must have been made by goats, but I managed it without too much trouble.

  The water felt like a benediction. It washed away the grime of the house and most of my tiredness. When I came up, a spectacular sunset was streaking the sky, and rosy reflections shimmered across the darkening water. I could have stayed there for hours. The place was utterly silent, except for the swish of the waves. But I decided I had better get back up the cliff before it got dark. I was hungry.

  When I reached the top of the cliff, I saw a light in the house. I followed it to the kitchen. Frederick was sitting there eating soup and reading, by the light of a single lamp. He glanced up at me and went back to his book.

  I looked from his hunched back to the shadowy, grimy little room, and I thought pessimistically: This is going to be a long, lonesome summer.

  Frederick didn’t give me time to be lonely. I was too busy. The routine began early next morning, with Frederick dragging me out of my sleeping bag. (There had been a mattress in my room, but I buried it.) We spent the morning-and it was a long one-at the dig. The area was about a block from the house, at the bottom of a ravine. There were a dozen or so bored-looking men scratching away at the ground. When we appeared they scratched a little faster. I couldn’t see that they were finding anything much.

  “You’ll direct this group,” Frederick said, leading me to where three men were poking around in a cleared space about three feet square. He spoke to the men in Greek. One of them grinned at me. I grinned back. It was the first smile I had seen that day, and it looked good. Still grinning, I said out of the corner of my mouth,

  “You’re crazy, Frederick. I can’t direct anything. I don’t know what they’re doing, and even if I did, I can’t talk to them.”

  “You’ll learn,” said Frederick.

  I learned. I had to revise my impression that he would make a rotten teacher. He wasn’t entertaining, but he was effective. For the next few days my head felt swollen with all the information he was jamming into it. But there’s nothing like experience on the job; he could explain things as they came up, and in a surprisingly short time the things made sense. Oh, I couldn’t have handled it without him right there, ready to jump in when I hit something I didn’t know about. But I got by. It’s amazing what you can communicate with gestures and goodwill. The men went home for lunch and a siesta break, but I didn’t; I stayed on the job, munching crackers while Frederick lectured and demonstrated. In the evening he lectured some more and showed me how to record and classify pottery fragments.

  We found more pottery than anything else. Pottery is practically indestructible. I mean, it breaks, but the pieces don’t decay the way wood or cloth do, and it’s so cheap it isn
’t worth stealing. Another reason why archaeologists find so much pottery is that it was the universal storage container in ancient times. People then didn’t have tin cans or bottles or brown paper bags. Pots were used not only to store food but all kinds of things, from clay tablets to dead bodies. The area we were working in had been a storeroom back in Minoan times. We found one jar with a few desiccated grains of cereal still in it.

  The side of the ravine was a colored diagram of the geological history of the island. At the bottom was a level of brownish-black soil-ground level in 1500 B.C., before the big eruptions began. It was at this level, or just above it, that the Minoan remains were found. Above that was a pinky-red layer of pumice ten to fifteen feet thick-debris thrown out by the first stage of the eruption. The volcano had been quiescent for some years after that; a narrow sandy layer above the pumice showed signs of normal weathering. Then came a layer of white ash, thirty feet of it; thick enough to bury houses, kill crops, choke springs and fountains. It had been hot, too; earlier diggers had found burned human teeth. The ash fall was enough in itself to make the island uninhabitable, but it had only been the prelude to the final explosion. Having emptied itself, the volcanic chamber collapsed, and the sea rushed into the chasm.

  Seeing the actual remains of the catastrophe made it seem very real. The work was fascinating, actually, but I was too inexperienced to see that it was also rather peculiar. There was an amateurishness about the whole business that was out of keeping with Frederick ’s reputation and temperament. The very fact that he would allow a novice like me to handle his precious antiquities, even broken pieces of pottery, should have alerted me to the truth: that the digging wasn’t his main concern. It was a blind, hiding his real interest.