The King Must Die (39 page)

I said, "If I live till spring, my lord, I shall be nineteen."

"And after dark, when the bats fly over, you hear their cry?"

"Why, yes," I said. "Often the night is full of it."

"They cry to the young. And when the old man passes, they are not silent; it is his ear that has hardened. So also with kings' houses; and it is time then to think of our going. When the god calls you, Theseus, what is in your heart?"

I paused, remembering. In spite of what I knew, I thought he would understand. Which is strange, for it had not always been so with my father. Finding what words I could, I opened my heart in this small close room to Star-Born Minos, Lord of the Isles.

When I had said my say, his heavy mask sank forward on his breast; and I paused, ashamed to have tired him. But he raised his crystal eyes again, and slowly nodded. "So," he said, "you made the offering. And yet, it is your father who is King."

His words went sounding through me, deeper even than my grandfather's long ago; deeper than my own thought could follow. "No matter," I said. "A good Shepherd will give his life for the sheep."

He sat in thought awhile; then he sat up and pushed the tablets from him. "Yes, yes; the child was right. I own I doubted her. There is a daimon of perversity that haunts our house. But she chose soundly. Out of death, birth. You are what must come; I question it no longer." He made a sign with his hand in the air between us. Though his forebears had been long from the Achaian lands, I saw he was still priest as well as King.

He shifted in his chair, and made as if he would clear a space on the table; then he shook his head. "This sickness clings to what one touches. Or I would ask you to sit down, and offer you the cup of kinship, as a man should who gives his daughter's hand."

I almost knelt to him. Only I saw it was not reverence he wanted, but an arm to trust in. "Sir," I said, "with my heart I pledge you. I will not rest till I have made her a queen."

He nodded, and I felt he smiled. "Well, Theseus, so much for the courtesies. They are due to your blood and honor. But my daughter will have told you, they are all I have to give."

I said something or other, and he scratched among his papers, shaking his head, and sometimes muttering, as sick men do who are much alone; whether to himself or me I could not tell. "When he was a child, he followed me like a shadow, the black bull-calf branded with our shame; he never let me forget him. He would have dogged me to the hunt, on shipboard, to the Summer Palace; he wept when I sent him back where he belonged. He would call me Father, and stare when he was silenced. I should have known he would destroy me. Yes, yes, a man might laugh; it has been as pat as an old song. I withheld the sacrifice, and it bred my death. If there were really gods, they could not have done better."

He paused, and I heard mice rustling behind the bookshelf.

"Only slaves come here now. The higher stand at the door, and make the lowest enter. The man is dead, and overripe for the death-car. But the King must live a little longer, till the work is done. With the child, Theseus, there must be a new beginning." Then he said softly, "Look if she is out of hearing."

I stepped to the door, and saw her by starlight, sitting on the coping of the sunken shrine. I came back and said, "Yes."

He leaned forward in his chair, grasping the arms. His low voice rustled in the bull-mask; I had to lean near to hear. The close smell choked me, but I hid it from him, remembering what he had said about the slaves.

"I have not told her. She has seen already too much of evil. But I know what this beast of our house will do. He will promise these Cretans a Cretan kingdom; that has begun. But in a Cretan kingdom, he can only reign by right of the Mistress. In the ancient days of the Cretan Minos, they married as they do in Egypt."

My heart paused; there was a stillness within me as I understood. Now indeed I saw why great Minos had received a bull-boy from the mainland, a bastard son of a little kingdom, and offered him the Goddess. And I saw why she had spoken of killing her mother's son. She had guessed, having seen evil already.

It made up my mind. "Sir," I said, "I have sent word to my father I am alive, and asked him to send ships for me."

He straightened in his chair. "What? My daughter said nothing of it."

"It was too heavy," I said, "to lay upon a girl."

He nodded his gold head, and sat in thought. "Have you had an answer? Will they come?"

I drew breath to speak. Then I knew I had been going to speak like a boy. This meeting taught me to know myself.

"I do not know. My father has not ships enough. I told him to try the High King at Mycenae." His head moved, as if to stare. But I was thinking as I spoke. "I daresay the High King might say to him, 'Theseus is your son; but he is not mine. He says that Knossos can be taken; but he is a bull-dancer who wants to see his home again. What if we send ships and Minos sinks them? Then we shall all be slaves.' My father is a prudent man; if the High King says this, he will see sense in it."

He nodded heavily. "And now it is too late to send again, across the winter sea."

"Then," I said, "we must trust in ourselves. If the Hellenes come, so much the better."

He leaned back in his chair, and said, "What can you do?"

"There are still the bull-dancers. They will all fight, even the bull-shy ones, even the girls; they will fight for the hope of life. I am getting them arms as fast as I can. I can take the Labyrinth with them, if we can get help outside the Bull Court."

He reached out for some papers beside him. "There are a few men left who can be trusted." And he read me some names. "Not Dromeus, sir," I said. "He's trimming now; I've seen him at the Little Palace." He sighed, and pushed away the papers, saying, "I brought him up from a boy, when his father died."

"But there is Perimos," I said. "He has stood out, and he has sons. He will know who else is safe. We need two things: arms, and someone to win us the Cretans."

We talked of such things awhile. At the end he said, "However weary I grow of life, I will live till you are ready."

I remembered how I had thought worse of him for not returning to the god, and was ashamed. He said, "Let me know, if you get word from Athens."

I said I would. Then I pictured my father driving in at the Lion Gate, and up the steep road to the Great House of Mycenae. I saw him at table with the High King. But I could not see him in the upper room firing the King for war, making him impatient to launch his hollow ships. My father had had a bellyful of trouble, and it had made him old before his time. I saw the rough dark seas that tossed round Crete; and I saw them empty.

"Ships or no, sir," I said, "we shall know our time when it comes. I am in the hand of Poseidon. He sent me here, and he will not fail me. He will send me a sign."

So I said, to cheer his solitude, because I doubted there would be ships until I went myself to fetch them. But the gods never sleep. Truly and indeed, Dark-Haired Poseidon heard me.

8

A few nights after, Ariadne said to me, "Tomorrow is the day when I give my oracles."

"You should be sleeping," I said. I drew her in and kissed her eyelids. She was too tender, I thought, to bear without bruising the madness of a god.

She said, "Not many Hellenes come. To those I shall say the usual things. But I shall tell the Cretans that a new Summer King is coming, to marry the Goddess and bless the land. Hyakinthos flowering in a field of blood. They will remember that."

I was amazed, and asked her, "But how can you tell what the Holy One will say through you, before you have drunk the cup or smelled the smoke?"

"Oh," she answered, "I don't take much of it. It makes one giddy; one talks nonsense, and one's head aches after as if it would split."

I was shocked in my heart, but I said nothing. If it was true the god spoke to them no longer, it was strange she could tell of it without weeping. But I remembered how Cretans play at such things like children. So I only kissed her again.

"I will make it stick in their minds," she said. "I shall paint my face white, and draw a line of red under my eyelids. I shall have a cloud of smoke (it is all the same to them what one makes it of) and roll my eyes and toss about. When I have spoken, I shall fall down."

I was slow to speak. At last I said, "It is a woman's mystery. But my mother told me once that when she is in the Snake Pit, whatever the question is, something any fool should know without troubling a deity, she always pauses before her answer, and listens, in case the Goddess forbids it."

"I always pause too," she said. "I have been properly taught as well as your mother. A pause makes people attend. But you can see, Theseus, Crete is not like the mainland. We have more people, more cities, more business to fit together. We have ninety clerks working in the Palace alone. It would be chaos every month, if no one knew what the oracles were going to be."

She stroked her fingers back from my temples through my hair; I felt them say, "I love you, my barbarian."

I said to myself it was no matter; that when we were married, I would be there to stand between the god and the people. Yet I was sorry she had not the Hearing; a king, like a craftsman, wants to breed his skill into his sons.

Soon there was less time to think; from then on we were busy.

In the old archive store under the Labyrinth, I met with Perimos and his two sons. The office of his family was to write down the King's judgments; only they and their chief clerks ever used the place, these records were so old. If Minos wanted to know the precedent before a judgment, he sent for the Recorder. It is an ancient mystery, inherited father to son from the founder of it, a prince called Rhadamanthos.

After the King was sick, and Asterion heard the causes, he had sent for Perimos, told him a judgment he meant to give, and asked for a precedent to uphold it. When Perimos brought him instead nine clear judgments the other way, he told him shortly to look again. The Recorder said nothing; he shut himself among the records, searching, till the time was up and Asterion had to do his own injustice. But everyone knew he would only bide his time; and Perimos did not want to wait.

He was about fifty, with stiff brows and beard streaked black and gray like wood-ash, and the fierce round eyes of an owl in a hollow tree. I was sorry for him; he would have got on well with my grandfather. It was against his grain to plot in cellars with painted bull-dancers. I had always to leave the Bull Court bedizened as if for a feast or tryst, else people would have wondered. However, I had not forgotten all I had learned in my grandfather's judgment hall, my father's, and my own; in time he forgot my bull-boy's finery. His sons seemed men of honor; the elder rather clerkish, the younger a lieutenant of the household, very Cretan-looking, lovelocked and willow-waisted, but with the nerve of a soldier. He said we could count on about one in three of the King's Guard, those who respected their oath of service, and those who hated Asterion. It was time, now, I thought, to push things forward in the Bull Court.

I had trusted the Cranes from the beginning. But soon it would have to go beyond them; and I looked for another team leader I could rely on. My choice fell on a girl called Thalestris, a Sauromantian. They have many customs of the Amazons, serving the Moon Maid in arms, and fighting in war beside the men. When first she came she looked very outlandish, dressed in a quilted coat and deerskin trousers, and smelling of goat-milk curd. Her country is at the back of the northeast wind, beyond the Caucasus, and they only undress there once a year. But stripped and cleaned she was a fine girl, a little too mannish for one's bed, but with all the beauties of a bull-leaper. The courage too; for on her very first day she was eying me with envy.

Liking her spirit, I taught her all I could; and when she was made leader of the Gryphons, she came again for counsel. I warned her of one bull-shy boy who would do them no good; when they had given him to the bull and got someone better, she bound them with a vow like ours, and in more than two months not one had died. So people were used to seeing us in talk. I told her everything, except that I was the Mistress's lover. Thalestris was a girl for girls; but it is a thing I have found, that no woman likes to hear you hold forth about another.

When she had heard, she threw a back-somersault, for she was a wild thing still. But she was no fool. After she had run on awhile about her mountain home and friends, whom now she might hope to see again, she asked me to get her a bow, for that was her weapon. I said I would try; now we were in with the loyal Guard, good stuff was coming down into the weapon store from the armory above. She begged to tell her Gryphons, saying they had no secrets apart; and as I thought it spoke well for them, I gave her leave. Before long all the teams knew, who had vows of fellowship. As for the others, they would fight when the time came; but for their tongues one had no surety.

So the leaven worked silently in the dough; there was no folly. The secret was with people whose life-threads were closely bound; to fail the team was to meet your bull next time. You could only see it in their eyes if you knew already.

Now we began to bring up arms into the Bull Court. Amyntor and I showed the other boys of our team, and three or four team leaders, the way down through the lamp room; our friends of the Guard had stacked the arms below it. It was cold, so we had cloaks to hide things in, though we had to saw down the shafts of the spears and javelins. Cretan bows are short, and a good weight for women. The girls hid all these things, and many arrows, in nooks and holes under the floor.

Ariadne had given her oracles to the Cretans. She told me, full of pride, how she had talked in broken phrases, neither too clear nor yet too dark; how she had rolled up her eyes and sunk down among her fangless serpents, and waking dazed had asked what she had been saying. Now, she said, she had sent out an old woman she could trust, to whisper among the gossips and recall the ring in the harbor. Before long, it would be time to warn the chiefs and headmen.