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.”