Twelve Nights

by Andrew Zurcher

  ‘The horn is useless here,’ Will said, flatly but quietly. Flip didn’t argue, though Phantastes raised his eyebrows and watched the others intently.

  ‘Then what do you recommend?’

  ‘Flip, I think we need to do things the old-fashioned way, and trust to our strengths. Maybe we can make a miracle happen.’

  Flip was impatient. ‘We’ve been through this so many times. There is no way that she –’

  ‘Will.’ Phantastes had his bag off his shoulder in a heartbeat, and was rummaging in it as he spoke. Kay knew what he was looking for, and her eyes pooled with tears at the thought of it. ‘Will, I have something of yours that you must take back into your keeping now. I have been carrying it around long enough.’

  He withdrew from his sack a little satchel, which Kay had almost forgotten about. Now he carefully loosened its buckles, one by one, then took from it a little wooden box she had first seen in a boat on an underground lake in the caverns beneath Alexandria. In the bright midday January sun it seemed so common and trivial a thing that Kay wondered for a second whether her memory was playing tricks on her. Perhaps this wasn’t the same wooden box. Perhaps that incredible thing which she had held to her lips, which she had sounded through the ancient caverns beside the tree of Byblos, was all just a false memory, a dream.

  ‘Old friend, now is not the time for –’

  ‘Take it. Now is exactly the time.’

  Will took the box. Kay’s heart beat huge strokes in her throat. He undid the metal hasp, and with one last quizzical look at the old wraith cracked the two wooden covers apart. Ell’s eyes looked ready to pop with absorption, and even Razzio was staring. But no one could have been so surprised, so focused, so overwrought as immediately, the shuttle in his hand, Will had become.

  ‘But … but …’ he stammered. ‘Ghast had it thrown into the sea. It should be lying half cased in silt at the bottom of the ocean. I don’t understand.’

  ‘Oh, I heard all his boasts: I will break the loom, I will throw this and that into the sea. But before I let you surrender it up, I plugged all the stops with wax,’ Phantastes replied. His brow was furrowed with mischief. ‘And I hoped desperately. The night after Ghast’s barbarisms I took two boats and we rowed the coast off Bithynia with a net. It’s a heavy thing, but the hollow chamber within it must have given it just enough buoyancy; we recovered it after only seven hours.’

  Kay could see that Will’s hand was a natural but also a practised fit for the shuttle. He spun it absently between his thumb and palm as he gawked, sucking air, and then looked at Edward More. A colossal sadness was clearing like a cloud from his features, and he appeared suddenly boyish – blood under his temples, a tip to his ears, hair slightly sparky and a pucker swelling in one of his cheeks. For the first time in days Kay felt an exhilarating surge of unchecked hope.

  ‘Use it, Will. If ever anyone deserved a miracle, that one is you.’

  Will looked to Flip for his approval.

  ‘Do it. It’s our best chance now.’

  Will held the shuttle to his lips as he skirted along the wall towards Kay’s father. At first Kay thought he was about to blow it, but after a few steps it became clear that he was whispering to it as he walked. Perhaps, she thought, he was saying a prayer. Flip gently dropped Ell to the ground, and the two girls, with the wraiths in their wake, cautiously followed Will until they were close enough to eavesdrop on what was said. Kay could hear her father talking now, the angry and percussive notes of his monologue punching through the light drone of traffic passing nearby. She couldn’t make out individual words, and perhaps there were none to speak of; but the tone and voice, though altered, were his. He gave no sign, as Will sat down a couple of metres away against the wall, that he was aware he had been joined. The girls paced a little way off before themselves cowering into the safety of the wall, almost out of sight. The others settled beside them. And then they all remained completely still for several minutes.

  When at last the shuttle sounded, Kay was looking at the obelisk across the road. The note was so thoroughly embedded in the air itself that at first she assumed her mind was playing a trick on her, and she was simply hearing what she had been admiring, seconds before, as the awesome majesty of the obelisk. But this sound, it soon became clear, was of another character: though a single high note, it throbbed with intense overtones that came and went, came and went like a petulant tide. Will’s face behind the shuttle and his fists lay still and impassive, but the note ached with expression. Kay found herself paralysed by it, as did her father, whose restive rant came to an abrupt end. He stared about him, as if furtively.

  Phantastes leaned over to Kay’s ear. ‘Good choice!’ he whispered. ‘I thought he might go for that on a day like today. The note you sounded. Love.’ They all settled back and drew their coats over their noses as Will began to speak.

  The Clue

  ‘When Theseus came to the city of Knossos, he was only a boy of eighteen, but he had been charged with a peril on which the weight of his father’s kingdom depended. Athens with all its country had for years been a vassal state to the Cretan king, Minos. Now Minos was a great master of wave and wind. From his island seat he had grown to be judge over many peoples and nations. These he bound to his power through a hard regime of heavy exactions – that is, fines which his subjugate princes paid not only in money, but in human lives. To his palace at Knossos annually the richer cities of Greece sent tribute in oil, fish, pottery and gold. They also sent their children: the foremost among the boys and girls of every city, who entered the gates of Minos’ palace in chains, and never departed after. It was said that he loosed them in his legendary labyrinth, a maze of winding tunnels built all of stone, at the centre of which was situated the lair of the Minotaur, a gigantic and fabulous beast with the body of a man and the head of a bull. Perhaps this monster existed. Perhaps this monster devoured the children. At any rate, they never again returned to their homes, to their parents.

  ‘King Aegeus ruled over the richest and most powerful city of the Greek Peloponnese, and the bloody conquest of his Athens was the brightest jewel in Minos’ awful crown. The proudest horses are broken only with the cruellest whipping, and so it was with Aegeus: to him and to his city Minos reserved the most terrible of tributes, demanding the yearly surrender of so many goods, so much lustrous metal, so many fired pots and painted vases, that in a short time he beggared the kingdom. All this Athens might have borne. What it could not bear was the annual harvest of its youth: fourteen of the fairest and most promising children of the city, picked out by Minos’ lieutenants, shackled in sober rows on his galleys and shipped into the swallowing sea. In five years the city had grown sombre and quiet; after ten years it was little more than a wasteland. The citizens went about their daily business like stick figures in an empty dream. Fishermen lost their catches. Musicians forgot their notes. Buildings began to crumble.

  ‘Aegeus had no hope, but he had a son, and in the twelfth year of the Cretan tyranny this son, Theseus, was selected by Minos’ agents to be sent across the sea, sacrificed and fed to the Minotaur. Theseus, too, had no hope, but he had beauty, and when the galleys arrived in Knossos and he was delivered into the hands of Minos’ palace officers, it happened that the eye of the young princess, Minos’ only daughter, Ariadne, fell upon him. Her eye fell upon him as the pale sky falls upon the morning, when frost lies on the land and no birds sing. The touch of her glance alighted here and there, on this eye and the chiselled turn of that high cheek, upon his dark hair and the new brawn of his arm, on the fullness of his lip and the dusty furze of his thigh. But like the dawn her particular glance sheeted and enveloped him, too; and who can find himself revealed by such a light, and not search for the lamp that made it? She drew him like a thread; suffice that he who was illuminated at last found out the source of that radiance. Their eyes met. Each looked. Each was looked upon. For that moment each was nothing but that look.

  ‘In those days no woman in the
Greek world was reputed so fair, so royal as the Cretan princess Ariadne. Poets adorned her with their epithets: she of the white arms, she of the flashing eyes, she of the burnished hair, she with fingers fast as flights of arrows, she with skin clear as the cream of goats. Her circling arms were a king’s cradle, her voice his well-tuned lyre, her broad and unclouded brow the fair field of his fortunes. This was cheap poet stuff. In truth her beauty dazzled; but for all her outward speaking ornament, the real ground and substance of her glories was inward, and snaked within in close-seamed veins of rich ore unmined. She knew her worth, but dimly; others grasped clutchingly only at an outward shadow.

  ‘Chief among those who misprized Ariadne was her father. From the first she was to him a jewel, which he was content to wear among the other jewels of his crown, the better to show off his majesty. But as she grew and matured, he doted upon her ever more obsequiously until – when she had become a woman – the services and honour he offered her amounted to nothing less than idolatry. Ariadne was the most precious thing in his life. She was the sum of his cares and achievements, the circle and ambit of his happiness. Without her he could not stir, not even to dine or to pastimes. At affairs of state he was naked unless she stood by his side. When decisions were taken, either she graced the proceedings or they did not proceed. She was his life, his all in all.

  ‘To be cherished so absolutely may seem a blessing. It can be a curse. Ariadne found herself imprisoned in the love of her father, the admiration of his court, the devotion of many nations. Not one man saw her for who she was or – what was worse – for who she might become. In days to come not even Helen of Troy would be so shamefully bound and bent to every man’s need, made into the sign and emblem of their honour. Ariadne passed the nights in the darkness of sleep, but she woke into a greater darkness, and more complete. Her life was a maze, a tunnelling, in which she wandered blindly with no hope of escape. It was said that Minos’ queen, Pasiphaë, had borne at Ariadne’s birth another child, the Minotaur, a monster sired not by her husband but by the bull of Poseidon. To Ariadne, this beast that laired at the centre of the labyrinth, this brother, this terrifying half-god that ate up the beauty of her father’s imperial sway, was her double. She felt herself to be imprisoned in the dark tunnels of its mazy monstrousness.

  ‘When Ariadne’s look fell upon the beauty of Theseus, she saw in him as in a crushing fall of rock the whole depth of a hopeless ambition. He had an insatiable appetite to prove himself, to survive the Minotaur and to deliver his people from their bondage. But she also saw her own deliverance, a choice that she might make, the chance to be more than an ornament or an icon, the chance to plot. She saw the chance to create her own story.

  ‘On the night before he was to be led into the labyrinth and sacrificed to the Minotaur, Ariadne put into his hands what is known as a clue – a spool of twisted thread, wound tight – and a knife. Theseus knew what to do. Minos’ officers came in the morning, before dawn, and roused the young prince not with a kick or a blow to the head, but with a whispered call. The priest poured oil and milk upon his face and loins, and summoned the gods by strange names as he consecrated the victim’s flesh and life to their glory. Theseus stood motionless in the paling gloom, saying nothing; for in his mouth he concealed the tightly bound clue, and against the inside of his thigh, beneath his tunic, hung Ariadne’s knife. The officers lifted him by the elbows and marched him slowly down the long, straight flight of steps that bowelled below the palace. Before the great bronze door, embossed with the astonishing head of Poseidon’s sea-charging bull, they released him, then stepped back to the safety of the flight ascending. The priest chanted from the third step. Theseus knelt only a moment on his knee. The door swung with surprising ease when he pushed it. Within, all was darkness; that darkness closed on him like a tomb as he drove the door shut then dropped the long bolt home. But he walked boldly into the labyrinth, bearing ever towards the centre, unspooling the thread behind him. When he reached the monster, there was no struggle. It awaited him like a lover, panting. After they had embraced, he killed it with a soft upward thrust of his blade; and then he followed the thread – back to Ariadne, back to the light and freedom, back to his father’s ship, back to Athens. But Ariadne – hers was not a human thread. The gods claimed her.’

  The Bride

  Kay discovered herself standing before her father. The cold wind that ran along the wall bit at her fingertips, and she felt dizzy, as if she had been turning cartwheels. She couldn’t think how she had come to be standing there – here – when all the time, she thought, she had been sitting with Ell by the wall, listening to Will’s story. And she remembered it, down to the last syllable – which in itself was strange because, though it seemed impossible to her even as she thought it, she somehow knew that story herself, and had always known it; it was not as if she knew the words to say, but that she knew the threads that would draw forth from her the same words that had come from Will. Every word he had spoken, she thought as she stood blinking into the stinging cold before her father, she had willed him to speak.

  So preoccupied was Kay with her thoughts that she startled to hear her father speak as he turned sharply to Will. ‘Did you see what I saw?’ he demanded, and in his usual voice. Direct, authoritative.

  ‘I don’t know what I saw. I don’t believe what I saw,’ Will immediately replied. His face he had thrust into his palms, and the long tips of his fingers uncurled from his pendent hair, and then, suddenly tensing, dug into his scalp. He sobbed quietly, as Kay had heard her mother sob the week before.

  ‘Please,’ Kay said, ‘Dad, please, let’s go home.’ She wanted above all things to throw her arms around him, to bury her face in the warm woollen must of his jacket. Take us home.

  Edward More was a tall, thickset man, but beneath the brawn his muscles, supple and responsive, were sure. And his body, sitting on an old crate, resisted her approach, gave nothing to her. Instead, his gaze locked into hers across the scant distance that separated them. He eyed her not suspiciously but curiously, as if he were newly appraising her – as if, Kay thought, alarmed, she were no longer his daughter.

  ‘Dad, please –’ she began.

  ‘No, Katharine. Don’t you understand what has just happened? Can’t you feel, can’t you remember, what you just did?’

  Dad. Won’t you just take us home?

  Kay looked around. ‘I must have stood up while the story … I must have walked over, that’s all,’ she said hesitantly. She was about to point to Ell and Phantastes and Flip and Razzio, but when she turned to them, even as she began to raise her arm, she saw that something was not right. Ell was cowering in the crook of Flip’s arm, and Razzio and Phantastes held her gaze with a kind of stupefaction, but only for a moment; then they turned away. Without looking directly at her, and almost as if feeling self-conscious, Phantastes pushed himself to his feet and crossed silently to where Will and her father sat. He placed his hand very gingerly on Kay’s shoulder, as if assuring himself that it was still there, that it was still a shoulder.

  Why?

  ‘And Ontos let her on to the dais,’ said Phantastes, almost in a whisper. ‘We ought to have known then, Will. We ought. We ought to have thought.’

  Kay looked down at herself, her sense of time and place still in disarray. Her battered brown shoes carried the scars of frost and ice, and in a few places nicks and gouges from the hard stone of the mountain. On her instep the alluvial mud of the Nile had caked, leaving streaks, now in the cold turned almost white. There was salt here, too, from the spray of the sea off Patras and, on the lower cuff of her trousers, grass stains she had picked up – where? – in the House of the Two Modes. Tucked in around her waist she could feel the light cotton wad of the robe Will had given her in Alexandria – no, in the air, above Alexandria. She had flown. On top of that, this heavy anorak Oidos had dug from an old chest of drawers, a garment perhaps as old as memory, stained with the old wraith’s tears. She couldn’t take it all in. She
felt lean, somehow, and under the tough, stained fabric of her trousers her legs looked more sinewy than she had remembered them. She held out her hands; they seemed as ever, though a little cracked and a little scabbed, and red across the knuckles from the cold.

  Phantastes, standing just to her left, held out his awkward hands, cupped, as if he would take hers. But he didn’t. ‘Child, do you recall any of what you just said?’

  Kay looked up at him, squinting into the wind, for the first time.

  ‘Katharine,’ said her father, ‘a moment ago you stood up, walked directly over to me and put your hands on my face. Are you sure you don’t remember that?’

  ‘No. I mean, no, I don’t remember that.’

  Why won’t anyone touch me?

  Her father turned to look at Will, who lifted his head from his hands to reveal a gaze so drawn, eyes so inky, cheeks so lined that Kay’s head rushed with an exhilaration that almost made her giggle. ‘Tell her, Will.’

  Will held out his hands, palms cupped and facing upwards. ‘Kay, there is something I never told you about the Bride, and the old stories about how she appeared to Orpheus. I think I didn’t tell you because I hoped it was true, but I feared that it wasn’t.’ He stopped and closed his hands, looking at them for a long few moments. ‘It is said that Orpheus spoke of her whispering, spoke of her mouth moving inscrutably as she darted between trees or slid round corners just out of sight. It is said that the whispering touched him in his dreams, and that, where others saw and felt the visions and movements of their dream-thoughts, he heard them, and saw not things but words weaving into and from him. And it is also said that, when he became practised at inviting the presence of the Bride, and could call her to him almost like a familiar – it is said that he found the words she was whispering to be none other than his own.’