Knossos

by Laura Gill

  Daidalos needed Ikaros as much as his son needed him. As a mother, Pasiphae should have been able to see that.

  Once spring returned with warmer weather, he taught Ikaros the rudiments of making mud bricks. “Oh, I know all about this,” Ikaros laughed. “Mud bricks are just a mixture of water, straw and earth.”

  Daidalos raised an eyebrow. “Do you, then?” He led his son from the place where the laborers were slopping the mixture into wooden molds to an open area. “Here, boy. Mix the materials for me. Then make five bricks. We’ll see what you know.”

  Ikaros awkwardly set to work. Daidalos did not correct the boy’s novice mistakes. Failure was a potent teacher all on its own.

  As to his own brickmakers, by day’s end a field of over two thousand mud bricks was drying in the warm sun; by week’s end there were over ten thousand. During the twenty-five days the bricks took to thoroughly dry out, Enusat’s men resumed their work on the central courtyard. Daidalos employed carpenters to begin building the wooden framework for the storehouse with cypress that had already been treated to withstand the extremes of Kaphti weather.

  The day that the bricks were ready, Yishharu brought Ikaros to the site, then stayed to watch the carpenters raise the framework. “You said before that this area was for storage,” he commented to Daidalos, “but these cubicles do not look large enough to accommodate any pithoi.”

  “They’re bins for the storage of mud bricks.” Daidalos did not mind the high priest’s presence. “The complex will have a constant need for them.”

  He then instructed Ikaros to bring him his five bricks. To no one’s surprise except his son’s, the specimens were crumbling and utterly unsuitable. “So making bricks is easy, is it?” Abashed, Ikaros hung his head. “You didn’t use enough straw to bind the mixture. Now you will learn properly. Go over there and ask for Ninduna.” Daidalos directed Ikaros to the laborers who were mixing materials to mold a fresh batch.

  “He hates having made the mistake,” Yishharu observed amiably, “but he will never forget the lesson.”

  Enusat’s masons had prepared the foundation before the framework was laid. Bricklayers laid the upper course, while leaving the timbers exposed; the tie-beams of the framework were designed to flex during an earthquake and preserve the structure. Horizontal beams roofed in the storehouse. Diwinaso’s men tamped the earthen floor solid, and last, plasterers sealed all the walls with layers of insulating clay and lime. From framework to finish, the work took six days.

  Once the first block of storerooms was finished, Pasiphae came out to assess the work. She did not comment upon or appear to notice the utilitarian storerooms, but liked the central courtyard, even though it was only half-finished. Of course. Its immensity and the gleaming white smoothness of the limestone appealed to her vanity. She shed her sandals to pirouette laughing.

  As her handmaiden fastened her sandals again, the high priestess favored the architect with a brilliant smile. “I want more like this. It must be enormous. Dazzle the senses. Entice the gods.” Pasiphae’s earrings sparkled as she nodded. “I want a wonder that I can show the people.”

  *~*~*~*

  Torrents of rain cascaded down the light-well, flooding the first floor and overwhelming the drainage. A bulwark of sandbags prevented the water from penetrating into the storerooms, but Daidalos took no chances. Whatever could be shifted to the second floor was moved, while he pondered the question of where the drains, which had worked well enough last year, had failed. He did not know how or where to access them with an inch of water complicating the work.

  He would have to consult an expert about the drainage system and about clearing the pipes once the water subsided.

  Meanwhile, the mansion felt humid and smelled like mildew. Pu-abi constantly urged him to let her share his fleeces to warm him at night. Poor Pu-abi. Daidalos would have welcomed the company, but, having no interest in taking a concubine or a second wife, he thought it better not to encourage her hopes.

  At night, he found sleep elusive. A dreadful sense of foreboding chased his dreams. During the day, he shambled about the house trying to recall the phantoms that pursued him during the night. Had he still been in Akkad or Egypt, he could have consulted a dream interpreter. Kaphti had them, too, he was certain, but he did not want word of his personal troubles getting back to Pasiphae or Yishharu. Sleep-demons tended to prey more upon the elderly, that was all.

  He kept himself busy, working around the house, going outside for exercise when the weather permitted and visiting with his son. In the evenings, he expelled the gloom by spending time with Pu-abi. She showed him the dress she was making for herself per his instructions.

  “It looks as drab as the one you’re wearing,” he observed. “Why no color?” Pu-abi worked well with dye stuffs; she had made him a warm cloak in shades of umber and golden sandstone. She had even added a motif of red and yellow running spirals to the collar of his tunic. Yet, for reasons known only to herself, she exercised none of that creativity on her own behalf.

  When she shrugged and turned her handiwork in her hands to find a better patch of firelight, he let her be. The awkwardness between them had subsided. Sometimes he talked about his family, his travels, his work on various projects, and even though the conversation seemed woefully one-sided, whenever he faltered for fear that he was boring her she always urged him to continue.

  During particularly fierce downpours, he and Pu-abi had to bail rainwater from the backed-up drains. They took steps to shift goods from the vulnerable storeroom to the second floor. Nothing could be done about the pithoi, and their contents were safe, but Pu-abi moved portions of the grain, vegetables and lentils upstairs for easier access in case the basement flooded.

  Daidalos made certain he went to bed exhausted; that was the only way to defeat the sleep-demons. Yet despite the double braziers in his chamber and the fleeces that Pu-abi warmed near the hearth, he could not get warm. More than once, he reconsidered sending for her, but always changed his mind at the last second and returned to his solitary bed. The sentimentality with which she interacted with him told him that she would never really understand.

  One night around midwinter, he gave up trying to sleep in his bed and made a pallet beside the hearth. Pu-abi arranged the household gods on the hearth curb for his protection, though he had not asked her, and made herself a pallet across from him. He liked that arrangement.

  A persistent knocking at the door roused him around midnight. Just as he started to dismiss the sound as storm noise, a man’s voice shouted his name from without. Yawning, Daidalos rose, padded barefoot past Pu-abi still wrapped in her blanket and confronted the stranger himself.

  The man who stood bedraggled and dripping wet on his threshold was barely recognizable as Yishharu. “You must come with me.” The high priest grabbed his arm. “There’s no time.”

  Daidalos hesitated while Pu-abi hastened to fetch his shoes and cloak. “What’s this about?”

  “Ikaros.” Yishharu’s eyes appeared dark and sunken against his pallid skin. “There’s been an accident.”

  “What accident?” Daidalos shook him to get a response. Yishharu’s mouth moved, but nothing emerged. “What happened!” He was within an inch of punching the man, when the high priest finally found his voice.

  “A fall.” A sudden lightning flash silhouetted Yishharu. “A fall down the stairs. A physician was called. I know no more!” A tremendous thunderclap rumbled under the hill, rattling the house.

  Daidalos headed out into the storm with Yishharu. The priest’s bodyguard held a sputtering lantern which did little to illuminate the path ahead. That did not matter. Daidalos moved by instinct. He was oblivious to the rain soaking him to the skin through his woolen cloak. He took no heed of the mud through which he sloshed. He did not even blink; the pervasive dampness, darkness and chill were as nothing beside his all-consuming need to reach his son.

  The high priestess’s condescending steward tried to halt him on the thres
hold, making fastidious noises about his wet clothes and the muddy tracks he was leaving on the floor. Daidalos pushed him aside so hard that he nearly fell; when the steward recovered his balance, Daidalos was hastening down the corridor after Yishharu as swiftly as his arthritic joints would allow.

  An air of dread pervaded the mansion, as though the very foundation stones were trying to impart to him the knowledge that something far worse than a mere fall in the dark had occurred. The demons inhabiting Daidalos’s brain screamed a warning that he was too late to counter whatever he was about to discover, and everywhere he turned he received confirmation of it. Servants and sentries milling about refused to meet his gaze. Cloyingly sweet incense choked the air. A woman’s voice from somewhere up ahead chanted dire prayers he remembered from his childhood.

  Ikaros lay on the floor of a small chamber just off the light-well. His sodden clothes soaked the fleece piled underneath him. Wet curls straggled across a forehead that appeared waxen in the lamplight. His eyes were closed.

  Daidalos forced his way past the sentries. He nudged aside the priestess, who ceased chanting the moment he appeared, and sank heavily to his knees on the stuccoed floor beside Ikaros.

  Even as he touched his hand to his son’s cooling flesh, his mind refused to process the reality of the situation. A fall from the stairs. Yishharu had said that a physician had been called, had implied that it was just an accident... No, no, this could not be happening. Ikaros was unresponsive, his neck set at an unnatural angle. Pinkish stains smudged the fleece underneath Ikaros’s head. Daidalos touched shaking fingers to his son’s hair, to confirm what his eyes showed him; they came away sticky with congealing blood.

  This was not real, not happening. But it was, it was. Suddenly, Daidalos could not breathe, could not manage... He heard himself gasping for oxygen, heard and felt his heart beating erratically in his chest. This was all an illusion. The sleep-demons must have snared him in a nightmare. Yes, that was right. Yishharu had never hammered on his door, never brought him to this house of lamentation; this vision of dead Ikaros was the product of his troubled mind.

  “Daidalos...” The hem of a white robe entered his field of vision. A woman with long black hair bent down to him. “It was an accident, a slip on the stairs.”

  As he peered up at her, the woman in white, Daidalos recognized her as Pasiphae, she who had withheld his son from him. It came to him piecemeal, but hard, as savage hammer blows upon his numb exterior. She had violated his guest-right, held Ikaros hostage. She had plied him with promises and reassurances mingled with threats, she was blind and stupid and selfish, and now...

  “MURDERER!” Surging forward, almost tripping over his son’s outflung arm, he grasped her by the throat and shoved her against the wall. Terror clouded those haughty dark eyes of hers, where before she had taken such satisfaction in toying with him. She tried to scream, to twist away and claw at his hands, but as a man he overpowered her, as an outraged, bereaved father he was fueled by rage, and now that he had the treacherous bitch where she deserved to be, he started to squeeze.

  “Let her go!” Yishharu attempted to come between them, but he was no match for Daidalos’s strength. And Daidalos was beyond hearing him, beyond caring that someone had shouted for the guards. All that mattered was the primal pleasure that Pasiphae’s terror gave him, the way she squirmed and struggled, the way her eyes bulged as he throttled the life from her.

  “Let your tongue turn black with disease, you lying bitch-harpy!” Daidalos did not realize that he was speaking Akkadian, only that each imprecation that spewed from his tongue was the foulest and most damning that he could devise. “Let the demons of darkness eat your bowels, you murdering whore! Let worms gnaw on your breasts, let—”

  Arms seized him from behind. Hands physically pried his fingers from Pasiphae’s throat. She collapsed wheezing and retching to the floor. Then the guards were dragging him, still scattering curses, through the corridors along which he had come and out into the driving downpour.

  “Daidalos, stop this madness!” Yishharu’s wet face thrust into his. A hand grasped his chin. “Stop!”

  Suddenly he stopped shouting, halted the relentless stream of curses and, panting and disoriented, looked around.

  Rain pelted his head. Daidalos became aware of the cold night air and colder still, the shards of ice creeping into his gut. What nightmare was this? His son's body laid out, neck broken. Blood staining the fleece underneath him. Pasiphae's bulging eyes. His right hand ached; it was not so easy to choke another human being. An accident, they had said, an accident...

  His head reeled and then he crumpled, hanging between the men holding onto him. Groaning, he wept, heaving great, wrenching sobs that went soul-deep, and while he sagged to his knees in the mud and the rain kept pouring down, he nursed a single thought: Ikaros.

  *~*~*~*

  “He tried to kill me!” Pasiphae's hand wandered yet again to the necklace of bruises blooming around her neck as one of her attendants scurried to find a soothing ointment. Speech came hard, and it hurt to swallow. No one had ever laid a hand on her in violence. She shuddered. Whenever she tried to close her eyes, Daidalos's hate-twisted face filled the space behind her eyelids.

  “That's enough!” Yishharu's hostile tone set her on edge. “What did you expect?” He flung aside the woolen cloth with which he had been toweling his hair. “You deserved it! You did absolutely nothing to protect the boy—a guest under your roof, a supplicant under your protection. You gave that spoiled little monster leeway to—”

  “Asterios is not a monster!” Each accusation hit her like an arrow in the heart because each was true. She had made a mess of motherhood. Rather than disciplining her son as she ought, she had given him everything, hoping that one day he would outgrow his innate jealousy. Whatever good qualities he had possessed had vanished, undone by her spoiling and permissiveness, and now, now when it was probably too late, she did not know what to do. “Ikaros must have slipped by accident. The stairs were wet,” she blubbered. “I myself have sometimes lost my balance. The servant boy is lying.”

  “Oh, yes, everybody is always lying, always out to get your precious baby.” Yishharu was mocking her, twisting the knife in deeper. “It would not be the first time Asterios has tripped someone up on the stairs. That brat’s even done it to me. Iapyx witnessed the whole thing. The story will be all over the servant quarters by now, and by tomorrow all of Knossos will know your rotten son is a murderer. Within a week, who knows?”

  Earlier, Pasiphae had heard Asterios’s panicked cries begging her to come, but now the house was uncomfortably silent. “Where is he?”

  “I had him removed to a secure place, but I will not tell you where.” Yishharu’s tone softened somewhat. “You understand that he will have to be punished. His crime is unpardonable.”

  Covering her face with trembling hands, Pasiphae wept. She understood all too well what it meant. The gods would demand her child’s death, most likely by her own hand, to demonstrate the price of trifling with sacred oaths. In her hunger for the temple, she had not looked to her own house.

  She sensed her brother moving closer, and felt the sponge-filled mattress give under his weight. When she looked up, he was sitting beside her. “Sister,” he said quietly, “you must tread very cautiously before the gods.” Yishharu visibly hesitated. “Daidalos shouted in Akkadian. I understood him.”

  Pasiphae did not want to think about the architect anymore—not his crazed eyes, or whatever gibberish he had spewed at her. What was her brother saying? Her mind sped down manifold paths, each more dreadful than the last. “Has he threatened to murder me? Has he—oh, gods—has he cursed me?” Her guards could protect her from the former, but from the latter... Everyone knew that the gods sometimes lent their weight to the curse of a righteous man.

  Yishharu gazed at her with his large, expressive eyes. Pasiphae did not want his sympathy, for it did her little good, but there was no other comfort. Even the godde
sses occupying their familiar niche opposite her couch seemed remote and unforgiving. Whether she liked it or not, Yishharu was her flesh and blood. He knew her as no one else did, and at such times she felt naked without him.

  “Let me summon Senehat,” he urged, “and have her bring you something to help you sleep.”

  Sleep would bring demons with their nightmares. Pasiphae instead reached out to grasp her brother’s arm. “Please, don’t leave me alone.”

  Yet Yishharu sat unmoved where only a moment ago he had offered to send for a soporific. “You have not even asked about Daidalos,” he stated softly.

  She did not care about the architect, not tonight, not after he had tried to strangle her. Her fingers once again touched the bruises encircling her throat. Blessed goddess, what would people say when they heard what had happened? The Minos would delight in pointing a finger—

  “The man you wronged is inconsolable,” Yishharu finished.

  “I am inconsolable.”

  “I called a priest of Payawon to attend him.” Yishharu talked right over her. “The servant woman Pu-abi is with him, and tomorrow I will send him the boy. Iapyx is no replacement—”

  “Do whatever you think best.” Having wanted him to stay only a short time before, Pasiphae had suddenly changed her mind. Now she wished he would leave and take his criticisms with him.

  “No,” he countered sharply. “We will do what is best. You will not hide like a frightened babe in your chamber. You will put on your best face and publicly demonstrate proper remorse. You will compensate Daidalos with goods, land and livestock commensurate with his loss. You will grant Ikaros a princely burial and at his funeral offer a hecatomb of heifers and bulls for your sins. Then you will—”