But Aeacus sighed, and a lady of the court, Metope, looked at him in astonishment. She was abloom in a flaring skirt and brandished her bare breasts like melons ripe to be plucked.
“Aeacus,” she said. “Tonight the ladies of the court will dance the Dance of the Cranes beside the River Kairatos. And afterwards they will choose their lovers from the men who have come to watch them. Do you want to come?”
“No.”
“No!” she repeated, incredulous. “You no longer find me pleasurable?”
“At the moment nothing pleases me.”
“Cruel Aeacus! You speak like a Hittite instead of a Cretan. Have I developed a wrinkle since I last looked in my mirror?”
He peered into her face and detected a faint little network of lines beneath her eyes. But this time he remembered to speak like a Cretan instead of a Hittite.
“No, dear Metope, there are no new wrinkles. Nor old ones. The fault lies with me, not you. Your face is as smooth and pink as the inside of a conch shell, and much more soft. Lately I’ve been-somewhere else.”
“Where, Aeacus? Where would you rather be than Knossos? Thebes, Memphis, Babylon…?”
“I don’t know.”
“Come to the dance then. It will bring you back to us. It will make you laugh again.”
“Very well, I will come.”
He was not affronted by her invitation. In Knossos, the women were as bold and amorous as the men. Besides, he had already lain with her in a meadow of asphodels and on a stone couch mountained with pillows and called her, in flattering light and under the influence of wine, a mortal incarnation of the Great Mother.
He shook himself free of his sighs and laughed. “Yes, I will come.
She looked at him with a frank, level gaze of a race whose women hold equal footing with men. “Laughter becomes you. It shows your teeth, which are white like the shells on the beach. You make me think of abundance, of pomegranates in a luxuriant field. We’re small, we Cretans. Yet there’s still a richness about you. It’s more than your bronze chest and roseate cheeks. More than your lyre-sweet laughter. More than your supple hands, so full of gifts for the children of the court. You yourself are a gift, the rarest of all. Did you know that you are loved above your brother?”
“That is very wrong,” he said. “My brother is king.” He felt the affront to his brother’s dignity. Still, he had to admit that it was good to be loved. He, who loved purple of murex, blue-gray of dolphin, laughter of harvesters returning from the barley field. He who was only angry at ugliness or when the Achaeans raided the Cretan coast. Yes, he loved to be loved. He basked in love like a cat in a palace lightwell.
“Your brother is king, but there is something almost Egyptian about him. He thinks too much.”
“And I?”
“You feel. That is what it means to be Cretan.”
He lifted one of the curls from her forehead and kissed her lightly on her white skin, which curls and cosmetics and parasols protected from the hot Cretan sun.
“I will watch the Dance of the Cranes,” he said, and he followed her with his eyes as she moved, prettily but absurdly like a great crimson flower, through a doorway flanked by stone bulls and into the palace. Then he forgot her.
He sighed and fled from the court, down gypsum stairs, across a second courtyard paved with cobblestones and worn by dancing feet, along the triumphal approach to the palace, and between trellises of grapes and on…and yet on… Behind him, the track of a goat through silver-leafed olive trees. He could not have told where he ran or why, till he stood in a tamarisk grove and leaned on a tree to stifle a sob-and to listen.
The tree was speaking to him. It was not that she spoke in words, she spoke to his heart. She welcomed him. But then, it was widely known that the Mother loved trees and bushes and flowers as animals and endowed the lowliest plant with indwelling spirit, perhaps invisible, perhaps as tangible as Metope in her poppy-shaped skirt. Aeacus knew, of course, about those very tangible spirits known as Dryads, but he also knew that they dwelt in the Country of the Beasts, and no Cretan invaded those forbidden fastnesses of Minotaurs and Centaurs and other horrendous beings sometimes spied by those who ventured to the edge of the forest (for that is the view which the Cretans hold of us).
Dryads lived in oak trees. And yet this tamarisk tree made a strange whispering, like a tongue guessed at but not quite understood, like a soft-voiced maiden from the Misty Isles, whispering at her loom; and somehow he felt companioned by her.
“Tree,” he whispered. “Have you something to say to me?”
The tree did not answer him, but he saw in the eyes of his mind an image of other trees, in other places, immemorial cedars on the slopes of great limestone mountains, fir trees, prickly but not wounding, and one tall oak which spread its limbs like enfolding wings.
“My brother.” It was Minos himself, the king. “I saw you start from the palace like a wounded gazelle and followed you here.” The king was a man of thirty with a youthful, unlined face but hair as white as the snow atop Mt. Ida; diminutive like all of his race but august from his plumed headdress to his feet shod in high boots of Egyptian antelope leather. Born as blithe as his people, he had tried to retain their lightness and their laughter. But even the king of a happy people has cares. He was ready to wrestle the bull or go to the theater where maidens danced with a python in their arms, but he must also wrestle at times with the problems of ruling a populous empire whose ships sailed as far as the Misty Isles to bring back tin and dye.
“What troubles my little brother?” he repeated, with the tenderness of an older brother who would always see the younger as little, though they were identical in height. There was also perplexity in his voice and a gentle reproach. “You come to the grove-alone. You speak to the trees, when you might better speak to your brother and king. Is it for love you pine? Never before has a maiden disdained the handsomest of men.”
“No, my brother. It is none of these things.”
“What then?”
What then? It was a question without an answer. “I don’t know,” he said sadly. “I felt a kind of want.”
“For every want there is an answer. The thirsty man drinks wine from the nearest cellar. The hungry man eats lobster from the Great Green Sea. The lovelorn man makes love to a woman old in experience but young in beauty.”
Aeacus forced a smile. “How could I thirst or hunger or yearn after love in many-pleasured Crete? I’m acting like a foolish schoolboy who has broken his tablets and forgotten his lessons. If I could only understand…”
The king appeared to muse. “Not so foolish, perhaps. Our ancestors were a restless people before they settled in Crete. Perhaps one is speaking through you. And I have the answer. Last night an Achaean warship raided the coast. Three farmhouses were burned. Our patrol craft rammed and sank her, but there’s still a raiding party afoot. They’ve gone inland. There’s no end to the mischief they can do.”
“I’ll go after them. I’ll pick some men from the palace guard and-”
“Only if you so will it. There is no need for a prince to endanger himself in pursuit of pirates unless he chooses. I have already chosen a party, and the head of the palace guard can lead them.”
“I will lead them.”
The king smiled. Through the intertwined limbs of the feathery tamarisk trees, a sunbeam smote his hair and kindled its white to silver. He was crowned more truly than with his royal headdress. “Very well, you shall lead them. Your skill with the bulls is legend. Your dagger flashes like a dragonfly. But take care. Remember that Cretan agility and daggers are more than a match for Achaean brawn and swords-but only if you take care. You must leave your sighs in the palace, or an ill-smelling braggart will put a sword through your heart before you remember to draw your dagger.”