Knossos

by Laura Gill

  Pasibe felt a shiver of revulsion pass through her body. “What is it that makes you so sure?”

  “It’s the exhaustion. I remember.” Molana tapped her temple with one finger. “You never get morning sickness when you’re carrying. You’re always tired, always yawning.”

  That was true. Pasibe had almost forgotten what it felt like to be with child; nearly ten years had passed since her last, brief pregnancy. “I think I would have preferred the change.”

  Spring ended, summer came, but her moon-blood did not. She made a concentrated effort not to dwell on whatever was growing inside her womb and sapping her vigor. She was too old to conceive. It must be some malignant growth, some black curse of the goddess. She had seen other women so afflicted. They never lived very long.

  Those pilgrims, male and female, who still came from the country and neighboring villages to revere the blasted tree asked to touch her womb as proof of Rhaya’s boundless fertility. Lady Melia and the junior priestesses kept them away, asserting, “Lady Pasibe must have rest in order to nourish this miracle.”

  The priestesses took turns staying at her house so she should not be alone. Every day, they fetched her well water and milked her goat in order that she not strain herself unduly, and cooked her meals. Pasibe found their smothering an unwelcome burden. Their presence was a constant reminder of her condition.

  Asterion admonished her to go forth and let the people celebrate her fertility. “It’s selfish of you to keep this blessing to yourself.”

  Not that he cared a whit about the thing in her womb, she reflected morosely. Rather, he wanted her to flaunt the blessing—if blessing it was—before the people to enhance his standing and diminish that of Minos. Their forefathers had been the chieftains of Knossos before Menes came, just as their foremothers had been the priestesses of the sanctuary.

  Pasibe did not care who the earthly ruler of Knossos was. Nor had her mother, who, while her father had brooded over the loss of the family’s status under Menes’s successors, had taken her aside and explained that while chieftains came and went, the gods were immortal. “Your bloodline is stronger than all the followers of Minos put together. Whether your father wields the scepter in Knossos or ekes out a living in a foreign land, you will always be bound to holy Europa and the Great Bull.”

  Yet Asterion never understood the distinction. Pasibe pitied his small-mindedness, but that did not mean she intended to humor his demanding nature. After all, she was the elder sibling, and outranked him, besides. “When the child is born—providing it is a child and not some evil humor—and if it survives and is healthy, then I will carry it among the people,” she answered. “Until then, I will not be disturbed.”

  He glowered at the untouched bowl of broth Pinaruti had sent with him, then at her. “They say Sama has performed his first miracle and confirmed his godhood by planting this seed in your womb.”

  Pasibe laughed harshly. “Since when have you ever believed that Sama has become a god?”

  Asterion glanced at the junior priestess chaperoning them. “Eat your broth, Sister.” He nudged the bowl toward her.

  “I’m not hungry.” Nor would she eat anything her sister-in-law had prepared. Who knew what strange herbs Pinaruti might have employed? “Stop mothering me, Asterion. Why are you really here?”

  The firelight with its play of shadows deepened the grooves creasing his mouth and his brows. “You don’t believe my concern is genuine?”

  “I believe you’re concerned, though not necessarily about me. If I died in childbirth tomorrow, you’d rejoice and take the child to raise as your own.” Pasibe ignored her chaperone’s admonishing hiss. Foolish words, perhaps, but the sentiment applied.

  Asterion’s eyes widened. “That’s a harsh thing to say before the gods.” He nodded toward the collection of idols occupying the hearth. “Especially when it isn’t true. You’re the high priestess. We would be diminished if you died.”

  “Diminished in spirit, or in your status?” Pasibe challenged. His crestfallen expression told her more than his words ever could. “I’m sure Pinaruti would be delighted to assume my place in the sanctuary.” Again, she felt the priestess’s disapproval. Seshe was the most straitlaced of her attendants, and the most critical.

  “Are you mad? Pinaruti’s no priestess. She doesn’t have our bloodline,” Asterion asserted. “She has neither the patience nor discipline for the rites of the sanctuary. She wants to be a chieftain’s wife.”

  Was he lying to her because he thought that was what she wanted to hear, or expressing his own views? Pasibe wanted to believe him, but in the end words were words. “You know my history with childbearing,” she answered. “I would rather wait until after the birth.”

  To her surprise, Asterion agreed to let her be. “Only, I want to see you eat something.”

  Pasibe gave the broth a passing glance. What she saw turned her stomach. Overcooked celery and onions swimming in oily, dark liquid. Pinaruti’s cooking disagreed with her even on the best of occasions. Nevertheless, Pasibe managed a courteous smile. “Later.”

  *~*~*~*

  On a hot summer’s day when the village women raked and dried straw to make hay, Pasibe felt the thing quicken inside her. There was no pain, only an unsettling sensation of shifting and stirring that renewed her doubts. The goddess had always denied her before, when she was married, when her husband had been a kind and respectable man, but now, to let her conceive by a lover? The child’s father had been selfish and vain, and blasted to cinders by the goddess’s consort. Pasibe loathed dealing in such ironies, for they convinced her that nothing good could result from this pregnancy.

  Her attendants helped her prepare swaddling clothes and diapers. Asterion persuaded her to let the pilgrim women receive her blessings of fertility now that the child had quickened. “If this isn’t a sign that Alautha favors you,” he argued, “then I don’t know what other proof you need.”

  So Pasibe donned her sacral robes, painted her face white, and went out among the pilgrims. Though she maintained a smile and gave the correct ritual responses, privately she found the exercise troubling. Not because the pilgrims jostled her or burdened her with requests—even though they did the latter—but rather because it seemed like an act of colossal hubris to parade around like the manifestation of the goddess when she had not imbibed the smoke of the poppy to induce the appearance of Rhaya. Who was she to claim that her child was sacred?

  More troubling still, the women who visited her hearth assumed that she needed a husband. All had brothers and sons and cousins who, they claimed, were seeking a pious, industrious wife.

  “My brother En is good with children, and he’s an excellent carpenter,” one woman said. “You should see some of the toys he’s carved for my sons.”

  “But what else does he do?” a second woman challenged. “You remember Yishharu, don’t you, Priestess? He’s a hard worker, not like that dimwitted layabout En—”

  “Dimwitted?” exclaimed the first woman.

  “Yes, dimwitted and lazy. I’ve never seen him working the fields or driving cattle, and if you ask him to do a simple thing like help fetch something, he suddenly doesn’t feel well and has to lie down.”

  Only to Lady Melia and her friend Tana, both of whom could keep a confidence, did Pasibe express her reluctance to take a second husband. “I like being my own mistress,” she asserted. “Besides, I don’t think this child will want for attention.”

  Yet she did not confide in them her deepest fear: that she herself might not survive. Following her last miscarriage, she had been deathly ill to the point where the midwife had informed her and her husband that they should not try again for children. That had been almost ten years ago. Middle-aged women did not fare so well in childbirth.

  Too many ruminations of death and disaster depressed her. She tried to push them from her thoughts and concentrate on everyday business. In one way, the pilgrim women gladdened her heart. It was good to meet and share wisdom
with those who might otherwise have not visited Knossos. The women brought with them recipes and herb lore, and ancient stories she had not heard before.

  A white-haired great-grandmother had a tale to tell about Pasibe’s foremothers. “Now I heard this from my grandmother, back in the days before black-headed Menes came up from Egypt to rule here.

  “In the beginning, there were three sisters. Three—one for the heavens above where the gods make their abode, one for the earth where mortals dwell, and one for the realm below where our shades fly when we die.” Pasibe studied the grandmother’s face in the clear sunlight streaming through the open door, and it seemed to her that the woman was like an ancient oak, gnarled and brown, and impossibly old—perhaps even old enough to remember the beginning of which she spoke.

  The grandmother’s voice was clear and strong as she continued her tale. “The Great Bull saw the sisters as they walked along the beach on the shores of Rhodes. Desiring them, he enticed them with his snow-white hide and curving horns, and persuaded them to mount him. When the last maiden climbed onto his back, Lord Potidas plunged into the foaming sea and carried the women wailing and shrieking in terror across the water to Kaphtor.” Pasibe had never heard of the Great Bull abducting three women, only the one, Europa. “And when they came here, to this very spot at the meeting place of the waters, he took the form of a man, pleasing to the eye, and with tender words persuaded all three to become his brides, and then his priestesses in the sanctuary the people built for him.

  “Their names were Europa, Phaedra, and Ariadne. You, Lady Pasibe, are a daughter of Europa. Me—” The old woman tapped her chest with a withered hand. “I’m named after Phaedra of the sacred caves. My mother was named after Ariadne of the high places.”

  People often gave their daughters the sacred names of nature spirits and goddesses. Pasibe herself had been named for Pasibi, the horned moon, an aspect of Rhaya as consort of the Lord of the Heavens.

  A younger woman told her, “Mother Phaedra is a priestess. In her youth, she dwelt in the wilderness with the maidens of Britomartis.”

  Pasibe noticed the clay goddess-amulet hanging between Phaedra’s sagging breasts; its paint, once vivid, was now much faded. “Then you’ve encountered Velchanos?”

  Phaedra proved self-effacing. “Not as you have, Lady Pasibe. Yes, I saw Velchanos die and rise many times, but always through the gift of the grape and the smoke of the sacred poppy. Sometimes he danced with the young men or the animals. Other times, he came down to enjoy the company of us women.” She smacked her thin lips at the obvious pleasure of those memories.

  Although Pasibe invited Phaedra to stay with her until the harvest, the elderly priestess refused to tarry. “I must carry word of this blessing back to my people,” Phaedra explained, but then added a hopeful comment. “Perhaps I will return for the birth.”

  *~*~*~*

  When the harvest came, it was bountiful and good. Minos and the other priestesses dissuaded Pasibe from laboring long hours in the fields, but she joined the village mothers in plaiting and decorating the sacred sheaf for the sanctuary. This was an effigy of wheat and barley, elaborately braided with blossoms and colored ribbons, representing a child. As the primal earth mother bore fruit, so her mortal daughters in thanksgiving chanted ancient songs and joined hands to dance the circle dance. It had been more than a generation since the last bad harvest, since the women had had to sacrifice a young man to appease the goddess.

  Of all the harvest rituals, Pasibe liked the goddess-cakes best, because she made them so well. Her mother had handed down the family recipe. After threshing and winnowing the first grains, Pasibe ground flour and kneaded it into dough into which she mixed almonds and raisins. This year, the priestesses and Melia helped her with the most grueling tasks, but from her larder she provided the wooden molds that gave the cakes their curvaceous goddess shape. She brushed them with honey, baked them upon the hearth, and shared them with whoever came to her door. Only women and girls were allowed to eat goddess-cakes, and they made a great occasion of it, going from door to door sampling the cakes of their neighbors, then going home and serving their own.

  Pasibe must have baked over a hundred cakes that day, for everybody wanted to visit her. They brought milk for the house snake, honey for the altar, and foods to satisfy her cravings. Strangely, she hungered for nothing except pistachios.

  When harvest celebrations drew to a close, and the villagers had gleaned the stubble from the fields, then came the festival of the vines. Women hung effigies of young men in the grove and danced all night around bonfires. They stomped the grapes in wooden vats. Pasibe could not join them on account of her swelling ankles. She occupied a place in the shade instead, and thought about the maidens of Britomartis worshipping in the high pastures. Weeks ago, she had asked old Lady Phaedra to send word if the wild women encountered Sama in Velchanos’s retinue, but as the days passed and began shortening, she heard nothing.

  And then the first cold winds of autumn arrived, and the leaves reddened and dropped, and Pasibe grew fretful. At last, she confided her fears to Tana, her oldest friend. “I think this is how the gods punish women, through the children in their wombs.” She stared at her hands, at the blue veins standing out against her skin, and her swollen fingers, and pictured them as curled and crabbed as an old woman’s. On particularly cold days, her joints hurt.

  Tana moved closer and stroked Pasibe’s hair in its mussed plait; some days, her exhaustion was such that all she could do was to tend the fire and groom herself. “That’s because Alautha mixes the greatest of blessings with the greatest amount of discomfort. It’s to remind us that nothing precious comes into the world without great sacrifice.”

  Pasibe brushed away tears with the back of her hand. “I see shadows of death lurking everywhere, and sometimes think I hear the rustle of wings in the eaves, as if some demon of the underworld is coming to collect my soul.”

  Tana draped an arm around her, drawing her close so that Pasibe’s head rested upon her shoulder. “That’s the wind soughing through the dead leaves, and the shortening of the light. Wait until the child is born. There’s nothing more wonderful than lying snug in a warm bed on a cold winter’s day with an infant at your breast. Far better than a lover, because a child is completely yours. That’s the way the goddess binds mothers and children together.” As Pasibe listened, trying to draw comfort from the woman’s words, she realized that Tana was rocking her. “You’ll see, and then you’ll laugh to think that you were ever afraid.”

  Tana’s words could not, however, soothe the persistent ache in her back or the pressure on her bladder, though the old woman offered home remedies to try to ease her burden. Pasibe tried everything at least once, and crammed images of Alautha and protective amulets all over the house. She no longer dreamt of Sama as she once had—her entire being was focused on the life growing and shifting uncomfortably in her womb—but her fears did not abate. All she could do was pray and wait out the days.

  Her labor started on a night blanketed with stars and lit by a full white moon, three weeks after the winter solstice. Tana acted as the chief midwife, with the junior priestesses chanting and waving amulets in the background. Pasibe took little comfort from their ministrations. The goddess seemed very distant. Old Lady Phaedra had not come.

  Pasibe strained and sweated as she crouched on the birthing stool. The women took turns supporting her weight. Her entire lower body trembled with effort; from the waist down was nothing but pain, cramping worse than any menstrual period, any miscarriage. She screamed herself raw. It was so warm in the house. Everything reeked of sour herbs and rank sweat and blood.

  It was a hard birth. Evening became morning, and morning became midday. It was taking forever for the child to emerge. Pasibe could not breathe. She could not bear the contractions any longer. Tana peered between her legs and told her that everything was proceeding normally. “Praise Alautha’s workings,” the old woman said, beaming. “The child is on its
way.”

  “You’ve been saying that for hours and nothing’s happened,” Pasibe groaned.

  Molana examined her next. “The contractions are coming closer together. You’re wide open. Believe it or not, the babe’s coming.”

  How in the world, Pasibe wondered, was an aging woman like her supposed to push a newborn infant through her opening? She already felt ravaged and half-dead.

  “Is the water boiling?” Tana called. The area around the hearth was a flurry of activity and women’s voices. “We need cloths. It’s time.”

  “Praise the goddess!” Lady Melia exclaimed.

  “Praise her!” her daughters echoed.

  “Shake your bells.” Melia and her daughters had brought sistra outfitted with copper bells, and were now rattling them, much to Pasibe’s annoyance. Her head throbbed. “Call upon mighty Rhaya and Alautha to drive away the demons of the darkness, the demons that lurk around mothers and their newborns!”

  Pasibe groaned. “Tana...”

  The woman gave her a wizened hand, reassuring and solid. “Push, Priestess. When the next contraction comes, push for Alautha. Push for the goddess.”

  Pasibe screamed at the pain, for although gravity and the contractions of her womb did some of the work, bearing down felt like tearing herself in two. Someone behind her held her in the squatting position; someone else had her hand as Tana knelt before her nakedness. “Ah, ah, here comes the head!” the old woman exclaimed. “Yes, here it is.”

  Now the priestesses were excited and full of advice, assuring Pasibe that the hardest part was over. They urged her to continue pushing, to get the child fully out when it seemed that she had already given everything she had to give—then another contraction gripped her, and with one last effort she bore down and felt the child slip from her body amid a rush of warm blood.