The Sea King’s Daughter

by Barbara Michaels

  I was up to my eyeballs in pots and new experiences, and I didn’t draw the obvious conclusion. Oh, I knew Frederick wanted me to dive, but I assumed the underwater work would be an extension of what we were doing on land. I was soon to learn that I had been way off base on that assumption.

  One thing happened during that period of time. It was an insignificant thing in itself, but it made an odd impression on me.

  I was sitting in the courtyard one evening washing potsherds. This occupation is not quite so boring as it sounds. The Minoans made some pretty painted pottery, and every now and then a scrap with a flower or shell or spiral pattern would turn up. It was like magic, seeing the vivid colors and vigorous shapes appear as the masking crust of dirt washed away.

  Even painted pots can pall, however; that particular evening I was squatting there with my hands trailing in the water, staring absently at the view and thinking about how bored I was. The wall of the courtyard was in bad shape; parts of it had collapsed completely, and there was a wide gap where a wooden gate had once stood. The sun had just gone down behind the crest of the mountain, and the sky looked like one of Mother’s modern embroidery pieces, silky, shiny crimsons and oranges, with sparkles of reflected light like patches of gold thread. There were a few stunted trees on the ridge nearest the house; they made grotesque silhouettes against the garish sky.

  Then I realized that there was another shape silhouetted against the sunset, that of a man on horseback. In contrast to the dwarf-sized trees, he and the animal looked larger than life. They were utterly still, so still that they resembled a monumental equestrian statue instead of creatures of flesh and blood. As I watched, they disappeared, almost as if they had melted into the darkening stones below and beyond them.

  I had the impression that the man had been staring straight down into the courtyard. Straight at me.

  There was no reason why this should have disturbed me even if it had been true. Nor was there any reason why the sight of him should bring back memories of those unnerving hours in Crete. I hadn’t exactly forgotten that experience, but I had rationalized it as the result of sunstroke or illness. I had not felt a single twinge of discomfort since I arrived on Thera, and if my problem in Crete had been an upsurge of ancestral memory, I ought to have experienced it again here, when my fingers actually touched the baked clay those long-dead hands had fashioned.

  But the man on horseback was an archaic figure, out of the old legends with which I was now familiar. I couldn’t remember whether the Homeric heroes had ridden horseback or not; but they had used horses to pull their chariots. Poseidon was also Hippios, the horse god. The old gods seemed to linger on, here in the regions where they had once been supreme. It was fitting that Poseidon should haunt Thera, for he was both a sea god and a maker of earthquakes.

  Frederick came out just then, grousing because I wasn’t washing pots fast enough, and I forgot my fantasies. I forgot about the horseman, too-for a while.

  Toward the end of the week I had learned more about ancient Crete than I wanted to know. My brain was reeling and my body was cramped with squatting among broken pots. I might have rebelled anyway, but something happened that gave me a good excuse for changing my routine.

  We went up to the dig as usual that morning. As a rule the men were there waiting for us, but that morning the place was deserted. I expressed surprise, and Frederick explained that they weren’t coming. It was a holy day, a saint’s day or something. He added a few comprehensive curses on the Greek Christian pantheon.

  It was cool down there in the ravine, and deeply shadowed; but when I looked up I could see a slash of blue sky and a bird soaring high and free. I stood up, brushing dirt off my knees.

  “I’m taking the day off, too,” I said, breaking into his anathemas. “God knows I deserve it, the hours I’ve been working. See you later.”

  I left without waiting for an answer. We’d just have gotten into an argument, and arguing with Frederick was the most useless activity known to man. He never listened to a word anybody said. I went straight back to the house and changed into my bathing suit.

  I know I shouldn’t have gone swimming alone. But I was young and confident, and I really had very little choice; either I swam alone, or I didn’t swim. I could imagine what Frederick would say if I suggested he join me, especially after I’d walked out on a day’s work. He had already turned down several invitations to come for a swim, saying he wanted me to gain some experience with archaeological techniques before I started working underwater. When I pointed out that people did occasionally swim for pleasure, he gave me a blank look.

  As I climbed down the cliff, carrying my fins and mask, I promised myself I would be careful. I wouldn’t go out far or stay in long, and I would keep an eye out for monsters. But I couldn’t wait any longer. It was warm and bright and the blue water drew me like a magnet. It slid over my body like a silken robe as I went in.

  In a way, it was like coming home after a long absence. Water is not our natural element. We die if we stay in it too long. But we came from the water, if the theory of evolution is right. Millions and millions of years ago, our remote ancestors were spawned in the seas, and they lived there for more millions of years before some foolish fish wriggled up onto dry land and turned into an amphibian. Maybe that’s why some of us keep trying to go back. I don’t know. All I know is, I love it. There’s a whole world down there, and if some of its denizens are killers, they are less vicious than their two-legged descendants.

  Actually, I wasn’t too sure what kinds of killers I might run into in these waters. Sharks were a possibility; they inhabit most of the seas. Some jellyfish are unpleasant customers, and they too are common all over the world. I had read about a fish called a weever, which is “capable of inflicting a painful sting.” But I figured the chance of encountering anything like that was pretty slim. I was dying to meet a dolphin. I had read about them, how intelligent they are, and how friendly. I also wanted to see an octopus, not a little squid, but a big Kraken-type monster eight feet across. Not that I intended to get familiar with an enraged octopus, but I know most predators are unlikely to attack if you don’t bother them.

  I didn’t see anything particularly interesting that day. I’d never been in water so clear, though; I suppose anything around the United States is bound to be contaminated. The water shimmered with refracted sunlight, and magnified details. I could see the separate, delicate strands of seaweed on the bottom twenty feet below. There wasn’t a lot of weed, but it was a rough bottom, covered with rocks and lava fragments. The terrain lacked the spectacular colors of coral and vegetation that I was used to, but it looked fine to me.

  When I finally came out of the water I saw that I was not alone. The straight, lean body of the man on the beach gave me a momentary thrill, but almost immediately I realized it couldn’t be Jim. His back was turned to me, and it was bleached white in color, not tanned, as Jim’s back surely must be. The man turned. I recognized my father.

  Half amused and half annoyed I walked toward him. Like his face, his body was younger looking than it ought to have been. I suppose an ascetic, physically active life accounted for that. So far as I could tell, he didn’t suffer from any of the temptations of the flesh.

  I expected him to be annoyed at my defection, but he greeted me without anger-without emotion of any kind.

  “Thanks for coming down to keep an eye on me,” I said.

  He looked surprised.

  “Why should I do that? You are supposed to be an excellent swimmer.”

  “Even an excellent swimmer can get a cramp,” I said, angered at his indifference-and pleased that I could tell him something he didn’t know. “I do swim alone sometimes, but I know it’s stupid. When I start diving for real, you’ll have to stick around.”

  “I will certainly be on hand, to direct your actions.”

  “I didn’t see anything interesting out there. No pots, no walls-”

  “I doubt that you would recognize
them if you found them,” he said dryly. “In any case, this is not the area in which I am interested. We’ll swim around the headland and I’ll show you the spot. It’s not far.”

  I followed him into the water, and then north along the coast. He swam with the same economical power all his other actions displayed, but he was a little awkward; I could tell that his technique was the result of concentration, not of training. I turned over onto my side and took a look around. We had rounded the headland and were a long way from shore.

  Ahead and to the left, another miniature bay had opened up. Perched on the cliff top was a house. It wasn’t a small cottage, like the houses in the village, but an honest-to-God villa, almost a mansion. The walls gleamed white in the sunlight, and the red-tiled roof stood out against the blue sky.

  Frederick was slowing down. I moved in closer, blaming myself for not checking him out before we started. He might be well preserved, but he was certainly no chicken, he had to be in his fifties, and for all I knew he might have a heart condition or something. By this time I could see bottom down below, although we were still some distance from the inner wall of the bay. Though the water wasn’t deep, there was no beach, only rough rock all around.

  Frederick caught hold of a rock, one of several that poked its head up out of the water. He clung there, breathing hard, and I joined him, hanging on with one hand.

  “You’re out of condition,” I said.

  “I have one bad lung,” Frederick replied, as calmly as I would have announced, I have a pimple on my nose. “I punctured it some years ago.”

  “You fool, why didn’t you tell me? I wouldn’t have let you-”

  “Let me? I can’t imagine how you would have prevented me.”

  We were both bobbing gently up and down with the motion of the waves, and in spite of myself I started to laugh.

  “Look,” I said, after a moment. “I take all the orders you hand out, don’t I, when it comes to digging? On this subject I’m the expert. I’m familiar with all the life-saving techniques, but I’d prefer not to use any of them on you. Let me do the swimming from now on, okay?”

  Frederick ’s reaction was meek, for him.

  “Why do you suppose I’m not doing the underwater work myself? The techniques do not seem difficult; I could have mastered them in a few months if I had been physically able to do so. I shall certainly leave the diving to you as soon as I have instructed you as to what you are looking for.

  “As we know, the Minoans were the greatest navigators and sailors of their age. Cretan experts were responsible for the massive harbor installations near Alexandria, in the Egyptian Delta, discovered by divers in 1910, and a few Minoan harbors have been explored. Five years ago, following certain clues which I need not enumerate to you, I did some diving near here. I found…”

  He stopped. The rest had restored his color and slowed his breathing, but I didn’t like the way he was looking at me.

  “If you can’t trust me, whom can you trust?” I asked. “You found traces of the harbor installations, I suppose. What’s so unbelievable about that? I don’t see why you couldn’t tell the antiquities people; they might have given you permission to dive, or even supplied money and equipment. You shouldn’t be so damn suspicious of-”

  I stopped speaking, because he was shaking his head violently.

  “You little fool, what do you know about life? Especially my life! This is a cutthroat world, and I have been persecuted more cruelly than most men. Five years ago my career was over. My enemies controlled Greece; not only was I unable to dig, but my very life was in danger. It was a miracle, nothing less, that Mistropolous should have become head of the antiquities department; he is probably the only man in my field who still has some regard for me and my ideas. But he is only one man, and his own position is precarious. If it were known that I had made this discovery, a discovery so astounding, so unprecedented-”

  “Okay, okay,” I said, in some alarm. “I get your point. But I don’t see why a breakwater or a couple of warehouses should be such a-”

  He laughed. I think it was the first time I had ever heard him laugh, and if this was a representative sample I knew I wasn’t looking forward to hearing it again.

  “Don’t be so stupid,” he said. “Think. You know what happened here in the fifteenth century B.C. on a spring day, when the wind was blowing from the northwest.”

  It was an unexpectedly poetic phrase for him to use. His voice softened and his face became calm, brooding. There was a far-off look in his eyes. I felt as if I were hearing an eyewitness account of the event.

  “There had been signs of the displeasure of the gods. The cloud of fiery gas by night, the pillar of smoke by day, and the rumbling roar of the bull god, Poseidon, the Earthshaker. But these things had happened before. Some fled; most remained, making their ineffectual sacrifices, and hoping… When the cataclysm occurred, it caughtthem all-women tending their children, the men in the fields, priests in the shrines…”

  His voice rose. “And what else? What else, in a harbor town, a mercantile shipping center?”

  His eyes bored into me. They were perfectly sane. He was excited, but he wasn’t crazy. I knew what he was driving at. But-

  “It’s impossible,” I said.

  “Ships!” He slammed his fist against the rock. “Minoan ships, the trading fleet of the sea king himself. They are there, in the water, where they sank over three thousand years ago.”

  Chapter 4

  UP AND DOWN, UP AND DOWN, THE WAVES ROCKED ME. I was hypnotized by the motion, the warm caress of the water, and the mesmerizing gaze of this maniac who happened to be my father.

  “Now just one minute,” I said, getting a grip on myself; for a moment the picture had dazzled me. “Your reasoning is excellent. Sure, there were ships. Some of them must have sunk. But no ship could survive underwater all that time. Oh, I know about the wrecks of Greek and Roman ships; quite a few of them have been located. But they date from a hundred A.D. or a hundred B.C. You’re talking about fifteen hundred B.C. Almost thirty-five hundred years ago.”

  “A ship could survive that long. It has. At Cape Gelidonya, in Turkey. That wreck was investigated in 1960. It has been dated to approximately the fifteenth century before Christ. Not only was the cargo found, but even the planks of the ship’s hull.”

  “You’re kidding,” I said. But I knew he wasn’t. He wouldn’t joke about anything as important as this. In fact, I had never heard him joke about anything.

  “No.”

  “Okay, it could happen. But how do you know it happened here? I mean, what exactly did you find?” And then, as he hesitated, I said impatiently, “Look, I know what a couple of hundred years can do to the wreckage of a ship. Nothing survives unchanged-except gold. Timber rots and is eaten by worms, metal corrodes. Even pottery would be changed by marine accretions, or by electrolysis from the elements in the clay. And it’s easy to be deceived. Rocks look like ballast, and natural formations can imitate straight-line, man-made shapes.”

  For the first time since I had known him he looked at me with something like respect.

  “Essentially you are correct,” he said. “Although pottery is not altered as much as you suggest. There are pots here. They are amphorae, vessels containing material meant for export. A heap of such jars almost always indicates an ancient wreck. But that is not all. The ships themselves are there.”

  I was silent. If anyone but Frederick had told me such a yarn I wouldn’t have believed him. I don’t know why I believed Frederick. Maybe it was because I just didn’t expect his insanity to take this particular form. Paranoia was his problem, not fantasy. If I ever lost my mind, this was the kind of beautiful madness I would create.

  “An entire fleet must have been in the harbor,” he went on. “Ash had been falling for hours, perhaps for days; the sky was black as night, poisonous fumes made breathing difficult. The rulers of Thera reached a decision-to flee, while flight was still possible. Save the royal treasures
, the ritual vessels of the shrines. Seek the safety of the sea, retreat to the motherland. They could not have dreamed of the magnitude of the disaster; they could not know that Crete was also in peril.

  “They crowded on board the ships, men, women, and children, with their private treasures and the most precious possessions of the state. But before they could cast off, the volcano caught them. Earthquakes, great tidal waves, showers of molten rock turned the harbor into a scene out of Dante. Some ships caught fire. The flames were quickly quenched when the vessels sank, but I tell you, there are charred ships’ timbers down below, in this very bay.

  “The sunken ships were covered almost immediately by sand and ash. That is what preserved them. Throughout the succeeding millennia they remained sealed in their natural tombs. And then, by pure accident, a storm, accompanied by earth tremors, shifted those strata. The hardened ash cracked and the sands were washed away. The skeletons of the ships lay exposed as they had fallen. Only for a short time; another storm followed and again the wrecks were buried. It may be that they are gone forever. But I doubt it. I think they are still there. Of all that wreckage something must remain. It will be a long project to search the area thoroughly. I am no longer fit for such exertion. So-”

  “So,” I said. “Me. It’s funny, isn’t it, that your long-lost daughter should turn out to be a diver?”

  “Funny?” The cold gray eyes grew cloudy, as if they were focusing on some inner vision. “In the cosmic sense, yes; the kind of jest one might expect from a deity who excels in irony. The Olympians would enjoy such a joke. It would have suited their primitive, revengeful sense of humor. I felt at times as if they were taking a hand in my affairs. And why not? I have been so long concerned with theirs. The accident that put an end to my diving was such a jest, and its author is not hard to identify-who else but the Earthshaker, the lord of the sea, who was also the god of ancient Crete? Resenting the interloper, punishing him for intruding. And then…you. How is that to be taken, I wonder? Has the god relented, or is this the first part of another of those elaborate, childish practical jokes?”