I bit on it awhile in silence. Then I thought, “Good. If I submit to this, no man alive could say I am his guest.”
I asked for a lyre, and tuned it to the Hellene mode. Asterion sat back smiling. But I saw sly Lukos looking under his eyelids. He had travelled. He knew what the skills of a gentleman are among our people.
It does not become a captive to sing the triumphs of his forebears. Nor did I want to warn anyone my thoughts were upon war. Yet I wanted to make these Cretans remember me, and not as quite the fool Asterion hoped. So I sang one of those old laments I had learned at home in Troizen. It is the one they sing all over the Isle of Pelops; often when the bards tell of a sacked city they will work it in, but sometimes they sing it alone. It is about the King’s heir, the Shepherd of the People, kissing his wife farewell at the gatehouse, as he leaves for battle foreknowing his death.
“Let me go,” he says, “and do not try to keep me. If I hung back, I should be ashamed before the warriors, and the gold-belted ladies with their flowing skirts. Nor would my heart consent, for I was reared to valor, to fight in the vanguard for my father’s honor and mine. In my deep heart I know the sacred citadel must fall, the King and his people perish; yet that is not what I grieve for most of all; no, not for my father, nor my mother, nor for my bold brothers tumbled in the dust. I grieve for you, when they carry you off in tears to the hollow ships, and end your days of freedom. Far away, in the house of some foreign woman, I see you working the loom, or driven with heavy water jars up the steep path from the spring. And someone who sees you weeping will tell another whose wife you were, bringing your sorrow freshly home, that your man is gone who would have kept you free. May I lie dead, and the earth heaped over me, before I see you led away, and hear you cry.”
In the Labyrinth, they have servants to make their music for them. He had not expected a king’s son to have been properly taught. When I saw the Cretans wipe their noses, I knew that now they would not mock me. At the end, they came crowding all about; by which I knew those who were not his lackeys yet, a good many it seemed. It was all I could do to keep a straight face. But there was nothing he could say; I had only done as he asked me.
That night I said to Ariadne, “I have been at the Little Palace. You were right. If he is to be stopped, it must be quickly.”
“I know,” she said. “I have thought of killing him myself, if I knew how.”
She felt as soft in my hands as a nestling dove. Though he was her brother of the same belly, her words were too wild to shock me. She had been alone, with no one to turn to. I said, “Hush, and listen. If I could get word to my people at home, and they sent me ships, what then? You understand it would mean war. Whom would the Cretans fight for?”
She turned over in the darkness, and lay thinking, her chin propped in her hands.
“They would fight for themselves. They would rise against the Hellene houses, when the chiefs went to the war. There would be terrible things done, blood everywhere. But that is what Asterion will do himself; that’s what he wants with the Cretans. When he has used them, he will take care that uprising is their last. Yes, they will have died to buy themselves a heavier chain.” She folded her arms and laid her head upon them. Presently she said, “But if …”
“Yes?” I said, stroking her hair. But she shook her head, and said, “I must think. Look where Orion is; how quick night passes.” So we began our good-bys, which took a long while, and no more was said about it.
I had now moved arms enough for every dancer in the Bull Court, men and girls, and had told Amyntor where they were, so that someone should have the knowledge if I died. The girls had about thirty daggers hidden in their sleeping place. Winter was come, and sometimes the bull-dance was not held because of the rain or snow; it was a long while since the people of the Labyrinth had put themselves out to honor a god. But if we missed a dance, we practiced on Daidalos’ Bull, or sometimes held our own Games, boys against girls, or drawing for sides; or we danced, if we were feeling stale; anything to keep us limber. I had seen other teams get slack, and what always came of it.
This was our third season in the Bull Court. We had learned by now every chance that can happen to bull-dancers, whom the Cretans call Poseidon’s little calves. We knew what they live by, and how they die; what kills a dancer in the first week, and what kills him after half a year. And one day Amyntor touched my arm, while the girls were wrestling (the priestess would not let them wrestle with boys), and said to me softly, “Chryse is growing.”
Our eyes met. There was no need to say more. She had been fourteen when she sailed from Athens; and she was all Hellene, head to heel. If she lived, she would be like the Maiden Goddess, upright and tall. But tall girls did not live long in the bull ring.
I said to Amyntor, “After the winter, and before the great spring winds, that is when the ships will come.” I measured him against me, when he was not looking. He had grown three fingers himself.
Amyntor had grown dear to me. We had worked together till we thought like one; he knew how I would leap before I knew myself. It was rumored in the Palace that we were lovers. We no longer put ourselves out to deny this. It saved us from the nonsense of the Knossos courtiers, with their flowers and seals and mincing verses and lurkings in the night, and gave us something to laugh at. Lately it had served me well; we could talk secrets unregarded, and, now my wanderings among the women were over, it saved me from too much guessing.
But the night before the bull-dance, I always lay alone; two nights even, if I felt my eye out at practice. It came hard, for I was young, and had not so much as kissed another woman since I came to her. But my people and I were far from home. To keep me a king I had neither laws nor warriors, only what I could find within me. It was a little kingdom; the finest crack could shiver it.
If I told her I could not come, she never reproached me, or not in words. But from her hands I knew her mind. She wanted to hear me say, “Let tomorrow go, let the bull have me and my people die; it is all well lost for one night in your arms.” Then she would have answered, “No! Do not come; I swear you will not find me.” She only wanted to hear me say it. But I was young, and took my calling gravely, as a holy trust, which it would be impious to play with, or toss to a girl like a string of beads. In those years, I had always one ear listening for the god.
Nowadays it would cost me nothing to please a woman so. He speaks no more to me, since my son died on the rocks beside the sea. I had felt the warning in the ground; “Beware the wrath of Poseidon,” I said to him, and he could take it as he chose; I too was angry. He chose to take it for a curse, and I would not speak again. I watched him off, the tall lad and his big Troizenian horses, riding to the narrow way. I kept my silence. Now the god keeps his.
But I remember, though it is long ago, how the night after the bull-dance our meeting was like unmixed wine, all fire and spiced honey, making it worth while to have stayed away. I remember how she wept over some silly graze, my first since we were lovers. After a while I said, “Have you thought of any plan?”
“Yes,” she said. “Tomorrow night I will tell you.” I asked, “Why not now?” But she said it would take too long, there was no time tonight, and bit me softly, like a kitten. Often I had the marks of her teeth next day. But a bruise is nothing, in the Bull Court.