I held him by the horns-the intimate, loving gesture shown him in the past only by his mother, Kora, and little Icarus-and kissed his cheek.
“Be cautious. I don’t need to tell you to be courageous.”
And then I left the country, marching out into the meadow where Aeacus, three years ago, had fought his battle. The grass was soft beneath my sandals; butterflies, like winged buttercups, fluttered away from me and meadowed the air. It is a good omen, I thought. The air has partaken of earth, and earth is my friend.
Omens can be deceptive.
I approached the farmhouse feeling-trepidation, did you expect me to say? Caution, perhaps? I refuse to be falsely modest. I approached with the complete assurance that I would get what I wanted, by wiles or sheer animal appeal, from the farmer: the stone-wheeled oxcart in which he carried his produce to Knossos and in which I would hide the undisguisable immensity of Eunostos. Of course I knew my limitations. Place me beside Kora and I was clay beside alabaster. But Cretan farmers were not acquainted with women like Kora. I glittered, I glistened, I rippled like a snake goddess in a breast-revealing gown which my Cretan lover had bought for me in Knossos. Compared to the average, woolen-garbed farmwife, I was a finely glazed cup beside a crude earthenware jug. I was, to be frank, sufficient to fill a farmer’s eye and make him drop his hoe.
This particular farmer was chopping wood with the rhythmic, leisurely motion of a man who had never known a bad harvest-not on rich Crete-or confronted Achaean marauders. His cart leaned against the blue, almost windowless thatched mud box which passed rather prettily for a house. His ox grazed in a neighboring pasture bosomed with hay ricks and besprinkled with daisies. Immediate theft was out of the question. Nor could I wait until night and make off with ox and cart without arousing either the farmer or the inevitable watchdog found in peasant homes. Cretan farmers are as wary as Bee queens, though for different reasons. They eat well on the fat of the land, but they own few possessions and guard them with a zeal enforced by pitchforks, hoes, and knives, to say nothing of dogs whose immediate ancestors roamed the forests and held their own with wolves. I must bide my time; I must wait till night, when Eunostos could creep out of the forest, some three miles away, and join me outside this very house. Meanwhile, however, I must beguile and ingratiate-and incapacitate the farmer and whatever family and animals he might possess.
He looked at me and dropped his ax. Evidently I had filled his eye, and his nostrils too, for he sniffed greedily at the myrrh in which I had bathed my face and breasts. He also looked at me with suspicion: what was this ample, not young but decidedly not superannuated woman doing in a bell-shaped skirt embroidered with conch shells and starfish and, boldness of boldness, in an open bodice which revealed, nay, accentuated and framed her two glories, her glowing pomegranates, her full moons, their nipples painted a titillating crimson to match her lips? Furthermore, I had ripped the gown in order to suggest an escape from bandits who had attempted my honor, and I had ripped in provocative places-a lure of thigh, a tantalization of leg. My hair, though brown with umber, scintillated with mica dust; my ears were concealed-at least their pointed tips-but the lobes were graced by big silver earrings, a loan from Amber, shaped like beehives and tinkling when I walked as if their inhabitants were about to take flight. I had touched enough kohl to my eyes and carmine to my cheeks to make me look not quite a courtesan, but at least a woman of experience, not a great lady but definitely not a peasant-perhaps a merchant’s wife whose husband was often at sea; in short, a woman with a roving eye and the wherewithal to rove.
The farmer grinned and gaped. He was sleek and just short of being plump, since the Cretan countryside was luxuriant enough to support its farmers without wearing them to the bone. He wore an unembroidered loincloth which reached almost to his knees and over which his bare stomach had started to bulge. Give him a year, perhaps two, and he would become fat. As I approached his house I affected a limp and slyly observed him slyly observing the undulation of my bosom. He sucked in his stomach. Thus diminished, he was not unattractive and I vowed that if necessary I would sacrifice my rarest possession to secure the oxcart.
“Achaean raiders,” I said in a throaty whisper. “I was going to visit my cousin in Gournia. Carriage stolen. Slaves killed. Wandering since dawn.” I swayed toward him and he extended a steadying hand which lit on my shoulder but gradually crept toward my twin glories.
“Where?” The tone was peremptory; the speaker, his wife. She had not so much emerged from the house as flurried; a little, swallowlike woman with a blackbird’s voice. The steadying hand was arrested in its descent.
“Where did they attack you?” I paused to fathom her curious accent. The “you” resembled an “e.” (Cretan peasants take enormous liberties with pronouns, but I will regularize them for the sake of my scroll.)
“Three or four miles from here. Over that hill-” I swept expansively with my hand to include the whole horizon and at least a dozen hills. I could not be specific since all I knew of the terrain was the general direction of Knossos. “But they’ve gone back toward the coast to their ships. No danger to you.”
Apparently he was having similar troubles understanding me. Beasts and Cretans share the same tongue but not the same inflections. There is a certain huskiness in the voice of a Beast, whether Dryad or Minotaur, a lilt in the voice of a Cretan.
“Needs some beer, Chloe,” said the husband at last, frowning at his wife and guiding me through the door. She returned his frown-for even peasant women stand up to their men on Crete-and followed us into the house.
The house was a single room, a hearth in the middle of the floor with an unlit fire whose smoke would have to escape from the one window, a pallet of straw, a low table without chairs, and an outsized and surprisingly clean pig. No, not surprising, since pigs like cleanliness; if they dwell in filth it is the fault of their masters. There was also a wooden cupboard from which the wife reluctantly drew a sheepskin of beer. I will have to say that in spite of the sparseness of furnishing, there was not a mote of dust, not a smudge of smoke. What is more, the cupboard was painted like a rainbow shell and graced with a single plain but exquisitely wrought cup of Kamares ware. But this was Crete, where even the peasants have a passion for cleanliness and an eye for color.
“I can’t pay you,” I said. “They took everything.” Chloe’s frown intensified to a scowl. If she had the delicate frame of a bird, she also had the beady, incriminating eyes and, one guessed, the claws. She stared at my large leather pouch, which looked heavy enough to contain gold and jewels.
“Except my earrings,” I added. “It nearly cost me my honor protecting them.” I cast a quick, knowing look at the farmer, as if to say: Not that my honor is unassailable. That was my problem: to allure him and lull her. “They’re real silver. Very old. Egyptian. I was born in Egypt, you see.” Since I did not speak like a Knossian, I had to account for what must seem to them a foreign accent. I unfastened the earrings and presented them to the woman.
“Fetch her some cheese, Tychon,” she piped in a much kindlier voice, a blackbird turned swallow. “Who’re we not to show hospitality to the poor dear?” She was already inserting the bars of the earrings into her own pierced ears. They were so large in proportion to so small a woman that they brushed her shoulders, but she peered at her reflection in the side of a bronze kettle and seemed to find them becoming, for she gave her hair a quick sweep and looked at her husband with the expectation of a compliment.
“Charming,” I said, trying to direct his attention from me to her. “Aren’t they?”
“Yus.” He was still looking at me, as if he wished to return the earrings to their original ears.