“Gold and bronze,” she said. “My mother was fair, but I am all Cretan. She was ashamed of me.”
I said, “Bronze is more precious. From bronze come honor and life. Make my enemy a golden spear, and a sword blade too.” I did not like to speak of her mother, after all I had heard; so I kissed her instead. She hung all her weight upon my neck, and pulled me down to her. She was like a young salamander meeting flame; afraid at first, and only when flung in knowing its own element. There is an old saying that the house of Minos has sun-fire in the blood.
We slept, and woke, and slept. She would say, “Am I awake? Once I dreamed you were here, and could not bear to waken.” I proved to her she was awake, and she slept again. We should have been there till morning; but in the hour before dawn the old woman came into the temple, and prayed aloud in her high cracked voice, and struck the cymbals, before she pattered away.
It was about this time that I learned to sleep by daylight. Even the shouts of the echoing Bull Court could not wake me.
The second night, the thread was stretched a new way for me. There was a trap in an old disused lamp room, very much nearer. It was the old woman who had led me so roundabout, to keep me from learning the way. She was a kinsman, on the distaff side, to Pasiphae the dead Queen. The new way got me there much quicker; and it still passed the ancient armory.
This night there was wine set by the bed, and two gold cups to drink it from. “They look,” I said, “like libation cups.” She answered, “So they are,” making nothing of it. My mother had taught me respect for sacred things. But my mother was only a priestess.
The lamp burned on unquenched tonight. As for me, my eyes had been blind to all women else, and that day’s dusk had seemed unending.
Deep in the night, she said to me, “I do not live, unless you are here. A doll walks and talks and wears my clothes, while I lie here waiting.”
“Little Goddess, tomorrow night I cannot come.” It came hard to me, but I was still a Crane, bound by our oath. “Next day is the bull-dance. Love and the bulls don’t go together. But we shall see each other, when I come into the ring.”
She clung to me, crying, “I cannot bear it. It is a sword stuck in my heart, every time you leap. Now it will be worse a thousand times. I will have you taken from the Bull Court. They can think what they choose. I am Goddess-on-Earth.”
She was all girl, saying this. It made me smile. I saw, now, that it had never crossed her mind to make herself like the gods. It was an old title, showing her rank and office. All the sacred rites here had become like play, or mere court trappings. She did not know why I smiled, and her eyes reproached me.
“Bird of my heart,” I said, “you cannot take me from the Bull Court. I offered myself to the god, to answer for my people. While they dance, I dance with them.”
“But that is a …” She checked herself and said, “only a mainland custom. Here in Crete no king has been sacrificed for two hundred years. We hang our dolls on the trees instead, and the Mother has not been angry.”
I made over her the sign against evil. Her dark eyes, with little lamp-flames in them, followed the movement of my hand as a child’s eyes do.
“You offered yourself,” she said, “and the Mother gave you to me.
“We are all her children. But Poseidon gave me to my people. Himself he spoke to me; and I cannot leave them.”
She reached out for the Corinthian’s bull-charm, which I wore even when I wore nothing else, and tossed it back over my shoulder. “Your people! Six boys and seven girls! You who are worthy to rule a kingdom.”
“Not unless I am worthy to rule them. Few or many, it’s all one, once one has put oneself in the god’s hand.”
She drew back to look in my face; but she kept a hank of my hair clutched in her fist, as if I might run away. “I am in a god’s hand too,” she said. “Peleia of the Doves has caught me. This is her madness, this love like a barbed arrow that cannot be pulled out. When you try, you drive it deeper. My mother called me a little Cretan; I hated Hellenes and their blue eyes; but Peleia is stronger than I. I know what she is doing well enough. She sent you here to be Minos.”
I stared at her, feeling my mouth part with horror. Yet her eyes were innocent, it seemed, of everything but wonder at mine. At last I said, “But, Lady, it is your father who is King.”
She looked quenched, like a child who does not know what it did wrong. “He is very sick,” she said, “and he has no heir.”
Now I understood her. But it was a great matter; my mind moved to it slowly.
“What is it?” she said. “Why did you look at me as if I were evil?”
She lay on her side; her waist had little folds full of soft shadow. I stroked them with my hand. “I am sorry, little Goddess. I am a stranger here. At Eleusis, when I went to the wrestling, it was the Queen who led me.”
She looked at my hair still in her hand, then up at me, and said not angrily but as if in wonder, “You are a barbarian. My nurse said that they ate bad children. I love you more than I can bear.”
We talked then without speech. But a man is not a woman, and cannot long be kept from thinking. Presently I said, “Your father may have no son; he should know best. But he has an heir.”
Her face sharpened in the lamplight. “I hate him,” she said.
I remembered her in the temple, looking at him over the broken tablet.
She said, “I have always hated him. When I was little, my mother would leave me when he came. They had their secrets. She laughed at me, and called me her little Cretan; but never at him, though he was twice as dark. When she died, and they buried her, I scratched my face and breast until they bled; but I had to throw my hair all over my eyes, to hide that I could not weep.”
“Did you know then?”
“I knew without knowing, as children do. My father is a silent man; he rarely spoke to me. But I knew they mocked him when they whispered in corners. It made me love him.” She dug her fingers into the bed. “I know who has killed him. I know; I know.”
“But,” I said, “you told me he was sick.”
“He is dead,” she said. “Dead alive. For a year and more his face has not been seen; now he never leaves his room. When he goes, it will be on the death-car.” She paused and said, “Swear to keep this secret. You must bind yourself; I could never, never curse you.”
I bound myself with the oath. Then she said, “He is a leper.”
I felt, as one always does, the word like a cold finger on my flesh. “That is a heavy thing. But it comes from the gods.”
“No. It comes from another leper, or from something of his. All the doctors say so. When they found it on my father, they stripped and searched everyone about him; but all were clean. I thought myself it was magic, or a curse. But then he remembered how more than a year before, he had lost an arm-ring, one he wore every day. It was gone nearly a month; then it was found, in a place that had been searched before. So he put it on again. It was under the ring that the marks began.”
This seemed to me too fanciful. “If there were a traitor among his household,” I said, “why not poison, which is quick? Lepers live long, if they have a roof and people feed them.” To myself I was wondering why Minos had not gone back to the god, on the first day. “Asterion might have years to wait; he would find something surer.”
She said, “He has found the surest thing. If my father had died outright, and he had been proclaimed Minos, there would have been war. The Kindred would not have suffered it. Now little by little he has been getting power in his hands; buying some men, putting others in fear. At first, when my father sent out orders, they were obeyed. Now they do not reach the men he sends them to, and the Captain of the Guard has bought a new estate. No one knows now who belongs to Asterion. No one dares ask.” And then she said, “He rules like a king already.”