Time Trance of the Gods (Book Two) Read online

The Sea People were amiable, although addicted to the alacrity of debate, usually led by the women. Laerces watched me furtively, torn between respect and a desire to regard me as a woman. Zaphaea was wary, close to envy, yet checked by awe.

  Slowly, I began to perceive my past. I recalled another island, linked with Strongyle. What was the connection? The wind. The Meltemi.

  I went to the window. The moon was almost full, spilling white light onto the streets. The people looked to me, and I, in turn, was mesmerised by the motionless shadows of the moon’s surface. The Meltemi bore me to its frozen face. I was steeped in desolation. Then I recalled another lava land and a great eruption. I had a premonition of disaster.

  Early morning. I sought Laerces. Taking him aside, I asked him what year it was. "This is the year of the Ibex," he said.

  So the Sea People had no record of time. How long before the eruption were they living? Quietly I told Laerces what I remembered. He regarded it as a prophecy.

  That night a worse tremor shook Akrotiri. Plaster fell. Pots slipped and shattered. Children cried.

  I ran outside to see if I could help. The town was touched by the white of the moon. The houses were stark, their windows like blind and helpless eyes. Intermittently the wind moaned. The damage was cleared. Apprehensively we tried to sleep.

  The Mycenaeans left for Egypt. Some townspeople watched for raiders. Others climbed to a hilltop shrine to offer protective prayers.

  That night Laerces came quietly to my room. He touched my arm. Then his hand brushed my face. He clasped me hard and I succumbed, steeped still in some enchantment I could not dispel. It seemed I lay in lilies bowed by wind. The rocks pulsated. I was consumed, drawn into an enveloping dark beneath the sun-soaked ground.

  Two nights later, a violent tremor threw me onto the floor. The house shook. Utensils clattered. The roar was deep under ground. Slowly, like a lumbering beast, reluctant to be rushed, it diminished.

  Laerces came each night. During the day I watched Zaphaea. She knew of Laerces's faithlessness but shrank from retaliation, beginning to believe I had the means of deliverance. I watched her conflict. I wanted to stop Laerces coming to me as the night drew in, fraught with danger on the unremitting wind.

  Yet I was powerless; my mind divorced from the dictates of the flesh. My memory and sense of moral decision were lost in the future. But as Laerces grew more reckless, the memory of a man came to me. I strove to regain the essence, then the detail of him. But he and Laerces were one.

  One night Laerces did not come. I heard a scream. It had come from the house of the marine murals. I ran into the wind-swept street and entered the dark lower floor of the house. The silence that had now fallen was eerie; an unsavoury aftermath. Apprehensively I climbed the stairs.

  Laerces stood, frozen in withdrawal from the prone and acutely angled body of Zaphaea. His hands were still raised rigidly above the bare flesh already stiff with rigor mortis.

  I was appalled and finally, in a small voice I did not recognise, uttered, "Why?"

  Laerces turned to face me and also in an alien voice that spoke for him, said, "She accused me of unspeakable things. She was jealous. But that has not offended Poseidon. Our drowning of the raiders is to blame. We should have taken them prisoner and tried them according to our laws. Now nature is retaliating. Zaphaea was newly initiated. Her death will help you avert disaster."

  I was chilled. Zaphaea hampered your lust, I thought, perceiving in Laerces now, the base impulse of a man, goaded, thwarted, over-reacting, then striving to justify his actions. One act of murder was considered wrong, the other, made acceptable as a ritualistic sacrifice.

  I recoiled. He grasped my arm. His eyes no longer focused. I shook myself free and ran from the house. People had appeared but when they entered the house, Laerces had already vanished with Zaphaea.

  I wanted to discuss and reason with the townspeople. While they delighted in nature and had developed an optimistic informality in art and a penetrating appreciation of the aesthetic, their faith foundered when the volcano threatened their stability. They were convinced this was a demonstration of displeasure and must be appeased. How could my meagre knowledge of geology counter such indigenous belief, rooted in awe and respect for man's place in the natural order?

  I experienced an oppressive impotence. I was unable to utter logic or to leave. And as though bewitched, I could neither expose nor condemn Laerces's crime.

  That day I was asked again to officiate at the ceremony, where more young women would be initiated. Instantly, I thought of the unseen altar which had struck such awe into the previous initiates.

  On being asked where Zaphaea had gone, Laerces claimed she had left for a hilltop sanctuary.

  I took my place on the dais. I seemed paralysed by dream. Hazily I saw the girls enter; tentative, bemused. Slowly they filed with their offerings to the altar. Again a scream. But this was succeeded by another. And another.

  Aghast, I ran to where the young women now milled in terror. I looked into the inner sanctum. A foot hung from the loose hide of an animal on the altar. It bore the scar of a recent laceration. Zaphaea.

  Laerces entered the room, drawn by the panic and his guilt.

  "It's Zaphaea!" cried one young woman, voicing what the others already knew. They fled, broadcasting throughout Akrotiri what they had found.

  Zaphaea's body, starkly white, with blue marks of bruising on her throat, was laid in the main square. The priestesses - and I - were summoned. They looked at me, demanding a decision. Despite what had happened, I had inexplicable empathy with Laerces. Denouncement was difficult.

  I was spared. The sky darkened, the earth roared, tilted. We fell as buildings shattered. Two priestesses were crushed. Those who could walk staggered to retrieve what they could.

  The volcano's thin thread of smoke broadened into a sallow column carried sourly by the wind. We fled to the boats and with the Meltemi in our favour, set sail for Crete.

  The great island that lay - a legend - on the Sea People's mind, rose in soft folds of mountains through the mist. Crete enveloped our first fleet of small boats. Others sailed in our wake. The steep slopes, thick with cypresses, pronounced protection. Yet menace rode the Meltemi. Sinister thermals threaded the sunlit air.

  Laerces was in command. The people suspended their suspicions. He had been to Knossos, had talked with King Minos, who was said to be a son of Zeus.

  We beached. The trek from the coast was arduous. But then we saw Knossos. The town was vast, the streets winding, like those of Akrotiri, to defy the wind, the houses here too, seeming to have grown organically.

  We reached the palace; elegantly stepped with columns of red and gilt. Horns of consecration were ranged on its upper storeys and along the wide stairs.

  Dishevelled and disturbed, we followed Laerces, who spoke to the domestic watch. Seeing so many refugees he fled to the king. Minutes later, we saw the watch gesturing for us to proceed.

  We passed along a wide way flanked with frescoes of youths carrying rhytons. Some played musical instruments and in their centre, stood a goddess.

  The giant horns of consecration were a shock, placed to give a clear view of distant Mount Giouktas.

  We continued, expecting to reach the spacious central court we could see below, but climbed instead a broad flight of stairs to the upper storey. We reached the throne room.

  From the throne of gypsum, painted red and white, Minos rose to greet us. The king was square-set and marked by a verve that was astute, yet tempered with sensitivity.

  "Welcome!" he said, "What brings such an exodus from Strongyle?"

  "We cannot placate Poseidon," said Laerces, "We fear for our lives."

  "We too have had alarming indications of his anger," said Minos, indicating that Laerces should sit beside him on a gypsum bench.

  "You may stay here with your people," said Minos. "I shall train your finest youths for bull leaping." It was then that I saw three massive brown and white bulls bel
lowing below. Akrotiri receded before implications of a more elaborate and ruthless ritual.

  I turned to see Minos watching me curiously. I suspected he knew I was not a citizen of Akrotiri. I sensed too the lust beneath the insolent assessment.

  That night, refreshed and allotted quarters in private houses beyond the main palace, we were summoned to the great hall to dine on mixed meats, honey and wine. I accompanied Laerces and was confronted with Pasiphae, the King's wife. She threw swift glances from eyes that glowed with green malachite. Her thick hair hung in curls, dressed with jewels, echoing in miniature, the shape of the axe I had noticed incised on the palace walls. Her face gleamed with white powder. Her open bodice above a flounced skirt exposed her breasts. She looked at me suspiciously.

  I went that night to a room near the queen's quarters, where the painted walls danced with dolphins.

  The next day the palace was hushed. Laerces had vanished. Minos, we were told, was praying. He wanted a bull to rise from the sea to sacrifice to Poseidon.

  I was standing on the upper storey of the palace when I saw the huge white bull approaching as though treading air. The sea spray flew from his flanks to flash like jewels in the sun. Magically, he had surfaced from the sea.

  Minos and his bull catchers left to meet him, throwing over him a wide net. Outraged, he proved impossible to haul back to the palace. He was released and driven towards the king's scattered herd.

  "He is magnificent," I heard Minos declare, "I shall keep him and select another for sacrifice.”

  Later that day, I saw Pasiphae walking through the fields and pausing to watch the white bull that stood - primed and aloof - between earth and sky. She remained motionless. The next day I saw her speak at length to Daedalus, the king's engineer, before she went again to gaze at the bull.

  As I learned Laerces had been escorted to the men's quarters, I sensed some preparation, charged with anticipation and fear, permeating the palace. People moved purposefully across the great court.

  I sat alone in the women's rooms. Minos, walking softly, surprised me. He smiled as I bowed my head, dismissing the gesture with a cursory wave. With the same hand he touched the back of my head. Involuntarily, I shivered.

  "You are not of us, are you?" he said.

  "No. I can recall little of my former life. I don't know why I'm here," I replied.

  "You were sent by the gods. You will be my bride and our high priestess."

  I was about to protest, but he stopped my mouth with his. I fell back on the bench.

  Minos directed the women to transform me from refugee to priestess. My attempts to reason my way out of this auspicious obligation, were futile. I was draped in the elaborate flounced skirt and bodice that bared the breasts. A necklet of double axes was hung round my neck. A bull's head rhyton was placed in my hands and a priestess led me to the throne room and the lustral area.

  From another rhyton, the woman, who watched me incuriously, poured liquid which looked like wine, but had the sickening aroma of water-thinned blood. I flinched, but obediently grasped the vessel and when she indicated, poured its contents into the lustral basin.

  "Repeat these words," said the woman, "Receive this offering Poseidon, Earth Shaker, whose wrath we have incurred."

  I longed to explain again that the quakes were due to a natural process, but to these people, nature was inherent in their gods. So I repeated the words in a tongue I instinctively understood.

  I backed out of the chamber. I could perceive how this action engendered belief in man's interaction with nature. I clung to receding reason.

  As the tremors persisted, two more boats of refugees arrived. I gathered, as I passed through the streets around the palace, that they blamed the murder committed by Laerces for their misfortune. They wanted a reckoning, but Minos, aware of Laerces's relationship with me, had his own plan for his disposal.

  One morning I saw Laerces in the great court, dressed in the tooled and gilded loincloth of the bull leaper. He looked apprehensive, as a great pied bull appeared. A lithe catcher stood behind, while a practised leaper spoke rapidly to Laerces. Suddenly the bull charged in a flurry of sun-streaked dust.

  Laerces, pushed towards him, clutched the huge horns and veered sideways onto the ground. Swiftly the catcher dragged him clear.

  Pasiphae returned from the fields. She was smiling; her malachite eyes lustfully alien. At dinner she watched Minos and me ruefully. She clearly suspected our relationship. Yet she seemed preoccupied, as though recently sated.

  "What is the meaning of the double axe?" I asked Minos before he prepared to leave one night. He took my arm and led me to the window where the three quarter moon shed white light on the palace, laid below us in organic layers.

  "The moon is waxing. But soon it will wane. The waxing tells us of creation, growth. The waning, depletion, even destruction. Our axe represents both, for to live well, we must be balanced."

  "Do you know the moon controls Poseidon?" I asked. He looked at me sharply.

  "How do you know this?" he demanded. "Where do you come from? Who gave you this authority?"

  Suddenly, I remembered. I recalled for the first time, the full impact of the twenty first century. I remembered Thanos. I knew Minos would not believe the truth. So I merely said, "I just sense things. I may be wrong. But I'm sure you can't prevent the earth moving."

  He pulled me roughly to face him. "My high priestess says THIS?" He was aghast.

  "Please relieve me of this duty," I said, "I'm an ordinary woman."

  He looked at me in silence, touched my face with his hand and said, "Each night I have no doubt of that. But you have been sent for our salvation I'm sure. You must perform the rites."

  Pasiphae, drawn from her dream into the present, began to eye me with contempt. Minos did not come every night. I suspected he had many women in the palace. But Pasiphae replaced her resentment with a decision to disregard me. She spent much time in her rooms.

  I soon realised she was pregnant. I speculated. Was it by Minos or someone she had met during those long days in the fields?

  One night, Minos ushered me out of my room.

  "Where are we going?" My words were left unanswered.

  We left the palace bleached by the moon, that now hung full in the star-flung sky. We went by winding ways through the sleeping city, pursued by a querulous wind. We left the streets to pass the huge herd of bulls, bred for sport and sacrifice; some pied, others starkly white and now motionless as though carved from Naxos marble.

  "See how fine they are," whispered Minos. We moved across a meadow towards a widespread oak.

  Suddenly he produced from beneath his robe, a pair of cow's horns which he fastened to my head and the great mask of a bull which he placed over his face. "Now you will be my queen," he said.

  He began to circle me, teasingly, then intently. Involuntarily, I found myself crouching, alert, primed with a beast's blinkered fear and anticipation. I began to turn in conjunction with Minos. Was he man or bull? Instinctive interpreter of nature or superstitious primitive?

  I looked at the moon and remembered that man had walked its surface. How could I tell Minos this? Now I felt a pulsating part of the unstable earth, bound to obey rhythms that the men of my age had relinquished. I felt the weight of Minos inflated as though with bull flesh. Thought fled. I moved in motions of a primal past.

  Pasiphae's euphoria had waned. Now, as I sat at Minos's right hand, her hatred was unconcealed.

  "How can you treat Pasiphae like this?" I asked Minos.

  "She was unfaithful," he replied brusquely.

  Preparations were being made for the bull leaping. I feared for Laerces's life. But my days were filled with religious ritual. Vestiges of reason filtered through my actions but their hypnotic nature began to assume significance. I began by reasoning that while they would be ineffectual against earthquake, they would at least generate resilience in the face of catastrophe. But soon they were a solace in themselves.

/>   I rose at five on the day of the bull leaping. Celebration and savage anticipation possessed the palace. I prepared my rituals. Before I descended to the lustral area, I saw the great bulls led across the court, straining and fearful, able, should they choose, to annihilate the lithe young men who mustered them.

  Early afternoon. The people began to take their seats in tiers in the great court. The women murmured, commenting on the potential of performers; their lips harshly red in white painted faces and their eyes outlined in green malachite. Black hair was elaborately curled to fall softly on pendants and jewels around bare breasts.

  There was music and ritual dance. Two men in leather helmets appeared and began to box. Flowers were thrown at the ebullient victor. They were followed by acrobats who wheeled and sprang lithely through the dust.

  I descended to perform my rituals, pouring water, wine and blood into the lustral basin and offering a plea to appease Poseidon.

  Suddenly, my two attendants appeared with a tall hat that in the semi-dark seemed alive. Then I saw the writhing snake. I flinched, then froze, appalled as they placed it on my head. The two women led me to steps I had not previously descended. At the bottom I recoiled, encountering a large pit of snakes, heaving incessantly in the gloom. Then I recalled the snake as protector and assumed these to have ritual significance.

  I was expected to know how to address them but, being ignorant, muttered some incoherent words from a dry throat. Horrified, I saw the attendants lift two snakes, placing one in each of my shaking hands and indicate I should proceed to the court.

  At the entrance I stood as the hushed crowd gazed at me intently. Waiting. I do not know where I found the words I then uttered. But they were an incantation to the dead. They rang clearly across the court, as the snakes, held at arm's length, twisted and strained to be free.

  The first bull appeared, his horns gilded and striped, followed by a girl. I withdrew. The snakes and the tall hat were removed. I saw Minos on the royal bench with Pasiphae, who stared at me with loathing as a bull leaper emerged from the other side of the court. He wore the traditional tooled loincloth.

  The bull charged in a cloud of hot dust. Simultaneously the bull leaper ran, leapt, grasping the bull's horns and somersaulting over the bull's back. A girl reached to ease him onto the ground. Two more leapers followed.

  Then I saw Laerces. He ran, vaulted, turned awkwardly in the air and barely cleared the animal. The crowd gasped and applauded as the girl dragged him clear.

  The fourth leaper did not run fast enough. He failed to gain momentum to clear the horns. He was impaled. The bull ran, enraged, with him writhing in anguish, to the end of the court, where someone pulled him clear.

  Four men appeared with a net, caught the bull and eased him to the other side of the court where a great double axe stood. Everyone rose, as the successful bull leapers, including Laerces, reappeared.

  They advanced to stand before the terrified beast. I shrank, horrified, as my attendants reappeared, carrying an axe. Ceremoniously, they placed it in my hands.

  "Oh no!" I could not carry out a sacrifice. But my feet moved of their own volition, the women walking slowly beside me. The bull, still netted, looked at me. Uncomprehending terror encountered my abject fear. My reason retarded my hand yet, simultaneously, I was compelled to step forward.

  A bowl of lustral water and a bucket of barley corns were placed by my attendants on the ground. One of them held a dish. A fire was lit beneath the great axe. A lock of the bull's hair was cut and dropped, sizzling onto it.

  "Pray to Poseidon," whispered the woman. I mouthed my usual plea. She sprinkled the barley corn. "Strike the neck!" she urged. My arm no longer seemed part of me. I raised the axe and struck. The bull kicked, groaned, fell to his knees.

  "Hold up his head," said the other attendant, "Now cut the throat."

  The bull's eyes, beginning to glaze, still held mine in disbelief. My eyes streamed from the smoke. But I aligned the axe, closed my eyes and cut. The blood ran into the dish.

  I turned. The people were offering incantations to Poseidon. I lay the dripping axe on the ground and walked shakily back to the inner sanctum. I heard the men dismembering the bull's carcass and, turning, saw them cutting ceremonial portions from the thighs. They wrapped these pieces in folds of fat with some raw meat left exposed. Then they were burnt on the fire and red wine and the bull's blood sprinkled over the flames.

  People left their seats to swarm over the court as the musicians reappeared. With five-pronged forks men tasted the bull's offal. The rest was cut into small pieces, pierced with skewers and roasted in the fire.

  That night I looked at the mellow moon. This race is moonblind, I thought; motivated by the moon's mysteries, but knowing nothing of its essence. I strove to grasp its geology and place in the cosmos, whether accidental or ordained. I recalled the elation, then the disappointment of those who had walked there, hoping to discover more than spent rock.

  The Sea People did not overtly emphasise the moon. It was a manifestation of the gods. Yet it effectively ruled their lives.

  Thetis, the moon goddess, was the consort of Poseidon; moon and tides moved as one. The white bull was sacred to the moon.

  Minos entered. He must just have left Pasiphae. He was freshly perfumed and wine-mellowed. A few revellers lingered in the court below, but slowly the night seeped back; blackly indifferent to man.

  Minos was playful, pulling me roughly down, dallying and reminiscing about the bull leaping. I did not dare mention Laerces.

  As Minos moved over me, I was besieged by pain. There was a frantic scrabbling in my stomach like minute creatures working countless legs and teeth. I cried out. Minos withdrew.

  "I'm sorry, " I uttered, struggling to sit up. I assumed this was a reaction to the momentous day. But the impression of being devoured by hard-backed creatures persisted.

  I fell back groaning.

  "Shall I fetch the physician?" asked Minos.

  "No, I'll be all right." I knew instinctively the doctor was irrelevant. Minos caressed me and left.

  In her room, among the dolphins, the queen smiled.

  Pasiphae was about to give birth. Minos seldom saw her now. She stayed mostly in her room.

  Daedalus, I noted, was tense and when Pasiphae did emerge, he eyed her dubiously. He occupied himself by building an impressive dancing floor, designed like a maze, for Ariadne, the king's daughter. On it she performed a dance imitating the partridge; a curious hobbling love dance. Then she flowed and whirled in a feminine affirmation of spring.

  Pasiphae screamed. The birth. It was after midnight. She screamed again. The birth was long, her suffering inhuman, with protracted and perverted pain. Suddenly it ceased.

  A hush held the palace next day. I saw Minos hurrying from Pasiphae's room and consulting with Daedalus who vanished below ground. I heard the sound of workmen burrowing beneath the palace and learned that Daedalus was extending the subterranean passages.

  Meanwhile, muffled thumps and low groans came from a chamber near the throne room.

  Minos avoided me.

  "How is Pasiphae?" I asked one of my assistants. She blanched and was reluctant to reply, but I insisted.

  "She gave birth to a monster," she said. "There's a rumour that she fell in love with a bull and that Daedalus built her a wooden cow where she hid so the bull would mate with her." I recoiled, incredulous.

  After ten days, Pasiphae intermittently appeared. She was ashen, ungroomed, still in a profound state of shock. The noise of her hidden offspring persisted as Daedalus and his workforce clamoured incessantly below.

  The bull leaping, feasting and sacrifice continued. I braced myself for each occasion. Laerces reappeared and, to Minos's annoyance, was becoming adept. At each success he was jeered by the refugees from Strongyle, still intent on retribution for the murder of his wife. But the incident had not happened on Crete. Laerces, a rival for my favours, was a prisoner for Minos to toy with. Eventually he wou
ld be gored by a bull.

  I strove to discover where he was being held. But I had no access to the men's quarters and none of the women knew.

  And as the smoke of the sacrificial bulls marred the clear sky, the earth tremors worsened.

  At last the building below ground ceased. And the clamour from the room above moved to the passage below. The groans grew to a bellow. I heard a rushing through the labyrinth. Minos could not look me in the eye.

  I urged the assistant priestess to tell me more.

  "They've called him Asterius," she said, "He has a bull's head and the body of a man. Everyone fears him so he has been shut in the labyrinth."

  As the tremors increased, Minos learned the Mycenaeans, who had helped the people of Strongyle defeat the raiders from the sea - it transpired, simply to save themselves - and who had rid the Egyptians of the throne-snatching Hykos, now intended to overrun the island of Crete.

  Minos, a trader and lover of fine things, was unprepared for war. He could only appeal to the gods. Then his son Androgeus was killed by the Athenians.

  As Asterius, who had grown at an abnormal rate and was now said to be as tall as a man, charged in bewilderment and rage through the labyrinth, Minos sought vengeance. He demanded that seven youths and seven young women, be sent to him every nine years. He would feed them to Asterius.

  Meanwhile my life was charged with ritual, absorption in the arts and dread of what lay beneath the palace and the unstable earth. Asterius rampaged, like a savage symbol of earthquake. The moon waxed and waned, seemingly on the periphery of our lives yet, I suspected, mystically manipulating our fate.

  The young men and women arrived from Athens. As they were brought into the great court, I noted one man who walked tall and with defiance, observing the palace closely. Briefly he looked up. Our eyes met in recognition of a mutual alienation from the community.

  Ariadne was transfixed by the stranger, pursuing him shamelessly at dinner with her eyes. I learned his name was Theseus. Even as he planned to feed these young people to his mutant son, Minos could not forego perverse play with the laws of hospitality. First they would be wined, dined and entertained.

  Pasiphae appeared at the feast. She was withdrawn, her white make up accentuating her pallor. Intermittently, she glanced at me with satisfaction. Was it because Minos no longer came to me?

  After dinner, Ariadne rose to dance on the great floor Daedalus had designed. She began slowly, then quickened; sensually improvising for Theseus. He sat enraptured.

  An uproar in the labyrinth woke me. Asterius moaned and ran hard along the ground. A man's voice rang in defiance. The scuffling persisted for a long time, until after a final cry of anguish, Asterius was silent. I knew he was dead. Who had killed him?

  "Asterius is dead and Theseus has taken Ariadne!" cried my servant the next morning. "They say Daedalus gave Ariadne a ball of silk cord to give to Theseus - he's Daedalus's cousin you know - so Theseus could find his way out of the labyrinth. Ariadne told him she loved him and they eloped."

  Minos appeared in the great court. "Daedalus!" he yelled. The engineer sheepishly emerged from a room on the other side.

  "Traitor!" Minos stormed and, summoning the guard, arrested Daedalus. He disappeared in the direction of the labyrinth.

  Minos began to visit me once more after dark. Again I experienced excruciating pain.

  "Pasiphae!" muttered Minos.

  "What of her?" I asked.

  "I daresay she has a hand in it."

  He left and, the following day, still in pain, I sought Pasiphae in her megaron. She smiled callously as I entered. "What have you done to me?" I demanded.

  "Does it feel like serpents and scorpions?" she asked.

  "Yes."

  "Get your gods to deliver you from that!" she hissed.

  "You know I can't. Is it because Minos comes to me? I can do nothing about that. And what of Asterius and your adultery with the bull?"

  Pasiphae's face collapsed. Her malice dissolved in tears. Abruptly I left the room.

  Minos was sympathetic and did not touch me. At night I watched the waxing moon and began to implore it to stabilise the water and the whims of Poseidon as he shook the earth. By now I was thinking in primitive terms.

  For some nights an uncanny calm fell. I could decipher the moon's great "seas". I imagined Poseidon surging to her song; the distant lover under the influence of Thetis who was for ever out of reach.

  One morning I saw two great birds rise from beyond the court. They were unclassifiable, their wing span vast, their action awkward. Slowly they gained height, flapping with unstable effort towards the sun.

  Minos appeared. Again he was incensed.

  "Traitors!" he exclaimed. Once more I sought my servant who could be relied on to know what was happening. She told me.

  "It was Daedalus and his son Icarus. He was seen making the wings which he stuck on with wax. He had to escape. Minos would have killed him."

  Minos demanded I invoked Poseidon to turn Theseus and Ariadne in their boat and return to Crete. I obeyed as Minos prepared to sacrifice a bull. The smoke hung listlessly.

  That night he came to me. "Our world is falling apart," he said. I tried to reassure him. I had grown used to his alternating brusqueness and consideration with lapses of preoccupation. He had achieved much, running a stable economy. The artisans

  were creative and lived well. The court was cultured, the sole social cruelty, sacrifice prompted by fear.

  And now as I recalled every detail of the life from which I had been wrenched to witness this society, I realised how little man had learned. He was skilled. He had evolved a technological trap of an ingenuity the ancients could not have credited. But he had found nothing within himself that had created stability or tolerance. He was more dangerously poised in the present I had left than he had ever been in the past.

  I envisaged his footsteps on the moon, his striving to grasp the significance of his achievement, but his insight still vestigial, cramping comprehension.

  Life remained a labyrinth, as complex as that built by Daedalus. The minotaur was the insurmountable fear of man; unseen, inflated because it could not be confronted, generating folly. Was there a Theseus in the twentieth century, able to overcome this spectre?

  Minos and I must have been sleeping. The shadow at my bed moved urgently, touched my arm. Laerces. "Come, let's go," he whispered. I moved cautiously from the bed. We had almost reached the door.

  "Who's there?" Minos was awake. He leapt from the bed and barred the door. "How did?-", he began and called the guard.

  Laerces, who had overcome a drunken watchman in the room where he had been held, was recaptured and taken by moonlight to the great court. He was bound beneath the double axe.

  Minos left me at first light. I looked from the window into the court. Laerces was hunched, half conscious. The early sun gleamed on the edge of the great axe.

  I did not see who fired the arrow. Was it Minos? I doubted it. He would have completed his play with Laerces - whom he was also beginning to blame for our misfortunes - with some humiliating spectacle.

  Laerces crumpled, the arrow deep in his breast. There was a stirring at the other end of the court. There were many, convinced he was the cause of the earth's unsettling and subsequent events, who would have killed him.

  Sickened, I pursued my rituals; absently, intermittently recalling Laerces's face, on which was superimposed that of Thanos, whom I now remembered clearly. I was beset by a sense of loss and the pathos of mortality. Thanos, Laerces, Minos; mere men manipulated by time and the vagaries of fate. I was fraught with foreboding.

  The Athenian fleet landed the following year as late summer lay calmly in the hills, the high wind dying to a benevolent breeze. Minos's main fleet was absent. He stood defiant, yet undefended on the upper storey of the palace. Pasiphae appeared beside him.

  The people of the palace were petrified in various positions, seeming doll-like from above, as though already re
legated to the past.

  The enemy had disembarked. Minos gestured that I should instantly invoke the help of Zeus. I obeyed. Before descending to the inner sanctum I saw the sky turn sour. The sun had vanished. Rapidly, a pall of black rolled from the north like an accumulation of sacrificial smoke. The earth shifted sharply. I pitched down the steps. I grasped the ritual objects, ruled now by animal fear, fumbling to perform the ineffectual ceremony.

  The ground lurched. I stumbled back up the stairs. I was thrown again. Women screamed and scattered. Men ran, panic sapping purpose. Bulls bellowed.

  The great wall of water reared beneath the black sky. It streamed, glistened; a liquid beast unleashed by a godless hand.

  And as it fell, we were swept, lifted, smashed and plunged into oblivion.