Knossos

by Laura Gill

  “My apprentice?” Now it was Daidalos’s turn to be surprised. “I was thinking that you might work under Balashu or Aridmos, if you want to become a craftsman. Why would you want to work under me?”

  Iapyx answered, “Ikaros said you could look at a place, even bare dirt, and know what should go where. You see the temple in your head before the first stone is ever laid.” He shrugged at his perceived inability to adequately articulate his impressions about the architect’s craft. “It’s magical, what you do.”

  “Is it because of Ikaros that you’re asking, or is it because you truly want to build? You have to have a talent for building. You have to want it.” Would Ikaros have shown that aptitude? Daidalos wished he knew the answer to that question. “I might make a hard teacher, and not a very good one.”

  “I’ve been working with the men for a year,” Iapyx reminded him, “with the carpenters and masons and regular laborers. I like all of it. I see where it all comes together—clearing ground, digging channels for the foundations, mixing plaster to protect the mudbricks.” His enthusiasm seemed genuine. “I want to learn how to saw and finish limestone blocks, how to choose the right wood for a framework, how to use a plumb-line. I understand how it works, only I’ve never had a chance to try it. I want to learn Master Arikusa’s secret recipe for waterproof plaster, even though there’s no chance that he’ll ever give it up.” He confessed that last part with a lopsided smile.

  Daidalos studied the youth’s face, registering how intensely the youth was paying attention. Iapyx reminded him of himself at fourteen. “Then report tomorrow to Balashu. You’re not strong enough yet to saw blocks, but you are old enough to learn the principles of stoneworking.” He watched Iapyx’s expression fall. “An architect has many teachers, young man. I learned carpentry from my father, then masonry from another master. I have learned about waterworks from Arikusa. You want to learn? Then accept that there will never come a day when you stop learning.”

  *~*~*~*

  Three years later, as the vines were harvested and the leaves started falling, Ikaros’s remains were exhumed, washed in wine, shrouded in fine new linen and reinterred. Daidalos purchased a larnax decorated with scenes of flying birds, large enough to accommodate a second burial, because he had decided that he wanted to share eternity with his son. Whoever attended him at his deathbed, he would have to tell them.

  All his workers turned out for the reburial. Iapyx was there, and Pu-abi. Minos Dadarusa, who had earlier that year been invested after processing along the new ceremonial walkway, sent a vessel of wine and lengths of Egyptian linen. Yishharu sent a bull for the sacrifice.

  During the pouring of the libations, Daidalos noticed a heavily veiled woman standing beside the road; she was not part of the funeral cortege, but had chosen to observe at a respectful distance. With her dark mantle and hidden face, she could have been the Mistress of the Crossings. Had his time come, then? No. Other mourners remarked on her appearance; the vision had not been for him alone.

  When the tomb was shut, the veiled figure slowly turned and walked away. By then, Daidalos suspected that behind those layers of fabric was a flesh-and-blood woman bearing her own burden of grief. He might have gone so far as to give her a name, and been right, but he elected not to pursue the matter.

  He was finished with her.

  *~*~*~*

  Each day, Pasiphae watched the temple rising from the north portico of her mansion, where she cloistered herself during her final illness. For a year, she had managed to conceal the painful growth in her breast, until a time came when she acknowledged that she was not going to recover, and that her presence polluted the sanctuary of Rhaya. At least her daughter was old enough to assume her duties and to be invested as the high priestess of Knossos when the time came.

  She would never see the temple completed, but, oh, what a vision it would be when it was finished! The sanctuary of Rhaya was a bright, airy confection of blue porticoes and horns of consecration, visible from miles away, a far cry from the cramped, gloomy anterooms of the past. Pasiphae smiled to know that the goddess was pleased by her new home; the last four harvests had been exceptionally bountiful.

  There was a sanctuary called Labyrinthos, for the housing of Mother Labrys. Workers were laying the foundations for what would be a trio of ceremonial granaries on the west where Daidalos had dismantled the old Minos’s mansion. Pasiphae had heard about designs for courtyards where potted herbs and hanging flower pots and the gurgling of water in the catchment basins would provide a cool respite. There would eventually be a large pillar crypt and a sanctuary for Ashera and her sacred serpents. Yet she would not be there to see any of it.

  Just as well, she reflected, that she remained absent, silent, remote, for she had heard rumors of what the people were saying in the town and elsewhere. While the fabric of the temple exceeded her deepest desires, people did not receive it as she had imagined they would. They did not refer to it as the temple that Lady Pasiphae had built for the glory of the gods. Ambassadors from Egypt, Babylon and Cyprus called it the palace of Minos. Locals spoke about the temple of Daidalos. Architects from all over Kaphtor visited Knossos to study the temple’s architecture and question Daidalos. Priests were scrambling to build similar temples at Phaistos and Kydonia to honor the gods there.

  Pasiphae grimaced at the stab of pain in her right breast as she shifted on her couch; the lump was now the size of a chickpea. The vision had been hers. yet her name would be forgotten; it was Daidalos who would become immortal. She acknowledged the goddess’s hand in her punishment. Anonymity and an early death were the price of her impieties.

  She died in the ninth year after the ground was first broken on the great temple of Knossos, on a cold afternoon a month after the tripartite shrine was dedicated to the powers of the heavens, earth, and underworld. Her daughter Akalla and Yishharu attended her deathbed. Senehat held her hand as she passed into the keeping of Lady Hekate, the Mistress of the Crossings.

  After the morticians washed and anointed her body and cut the tumor from her flesh, Pasiphae was carried in state from Knossos to the tomb she had prepared overlooking her Archanes estate. Mourners flocked from as far abroad as Tylissos, Mallia and Juktas to pay their respects.

  Daidalos did not attend.

  *~*~*~*

  High Priestess Akalla was a cheapskate. The temple complex, which covered most of the hill, was, in her opinion, of sufficient size and capacity to serve the sanctuaries. She had no compunctions about reducing annual expenditures. What subsequent construction was undertaken at Knossos happened very gradually. And all work ground to a halt when the laborers heard that Master Daidalos was on his deathbed.

  He was sixty-three then, hunched with arthritis and nearsighted, reduced to hobbling about on the cane that Iapyx had made for him during his carpentry apprenticeship. Most days, he scarcely left the cubicle in the temple’s north quarter that had been his home since he had dismantled the Minos’s mansion. Iapyx, now a prosperous architect living in the town with his family, handled whatever actual construction or maintenance was necessary, and he refused to wrest any project from or assume any authority over the great Daidalos. He was not about to touch the hostel.

  Daidalos died on a spring day, with Iapyx and the faithful Pu-abi beside him. Masons, carpenters, plasterers and a hundred laborers crammed the corridor and courtyard near his chamber. Iapyx claimed his body to hand over to the priests for washing and anointing and arranged for the funeral, with the requisite professional mourners and two bull calves for the sacrifice. Daidalos had requested a simple burial, and final interment with his son in the tomb the priesthood had provided for Ikaros years earlier.

  Iapyx soon found his efforts thwarted by the temple. High Priest Yishharu usurped the funeral arrangements through his official seal, increased the number of professional mourners and sacrificial offerings, and, in order to accommodate guests from Phaistos, Mallia and other regions of Kaphtor who wished to attend, he delayed the buri
al by a week. The priests were obliged to embalm Daidalos’s body in honey to preserve it for the funeral.

  Astute observers remarked later that more people attended Daidalos’s funeral than Pasiphae’s.

  In time, he was disinterred according to custom, his remains purified, and reburied with Ikaros. His kinsmen on Naxos, having at last received word of him, petitioned to have him brought home and buried near his parents and siblings in the cemetery near his home village. The priesthood of Knossos refused. Daidalos would remain. The gods demanded it, for the modest tomb he shared with Ikaros had since become a place for veneration and cult.

  Kaphtor had claimed the architect for its own.

  Five

  The Sacred and the Profane

  1701 B.C.

  Narkitsa took mental inventory of the treasures she had rescued from under her bed after the worst of the shaking ceased.

  She preserved her necklace of jasper beads—one chipped—that her cousin had cast off. There was a black eggshell cup decorated with delicate swirls and flowers in red, white, and purple pigment, which had once been very valuable before the style went out of fashion. She also owned a bronze hairpin and plain wooden comb. Thank the gods she had had the presence of mind to grab her things, leave her terrified companions, and dash outside.

  Others were not so fortunate as she. Fire started by overturned oil lamps had claimed the dormitory and much of the house before the women managed to smother it. A few were badly injured, some from the earthquake, others from putting out the fires. One had died.

  A shame the dead woman was not Arishat. Narkitsa thoroughly loathed that bitch.

  As aftershocks continued to jolt Knossos, the priestesses of Ashera joined the scores of people gathering in the central courtyard. Narkitsa was stunned by what she saw. Almost every building surrounding the court had sustained damage. The floors above the Labyrinth shrine had pancaked. Fallen bricks and horns of consecration littered the court just below the Rhaya sanctuary, whose porticoes were tilting at a precarious angle. Narkitsa heard a man’s voice yelling for everyone to stay clear lest they be struck by falling debris; it sounded like High Priest Urtanos. Smoke billowed from the direction of the storerooms and kitchen on the north side of the complex. Did that mean there would be no breakfast? The air was choked with the acrid reek of blazing timbers, oil, and—gods forbid, but was that the stench of burning flesh? Narkitsa gagged.

  Around her, people were throwing themselves on their faces and praying to Poteidan Earth-Shaker. Others stood or huddled together staring into space. Having never experienced more than the small tremors that occasionally shook the region, Narkitsa did not know what to do. It was Urtanos and his priests who bore the responsibility for appeasing the god’s anger.

  Meanwhile, the rumor mill churned. The house just west of the high priestess’s house had been crushed by the destruction of the terrace above. Down in the Vlychia valley, the pilgrim house was completely demolished and ablaze. Gods only knew how many people there might be dead or trapped inside.

  Narkitsa was not concerned with pilgrims or wayfarers. She did not care who was missing, dead, or reunited with family and friends. What mattered most to her was that, having fled in nothing more than a thin night dress and bare feet, she was cold and her belly growled with hunger.

  “Lazy cow, what are you doing lolling about?” The dark, hawkish woman hovering at her elbow set her teeth on edge. Arishat, head priestess of Ashera. “The serpents must be liberated.”

  Hugging her bundle of belongings to her chest, Narkitsa sought an avenue of escape. Her strategy for dealing with her superior consisted mostly of disappearing on errands both real and invented. “But the high priest said...” Was Arishat actually expecting her to go into the wreckage of the Ashera sanctuary to find some stupid snakes?

  Arishat seized her ear and twisted. “Do you want to offend the goddess?” Narkitsa winced. She had never been able to stand up to the woman, either in rank or sheer physicality, only in daydreams where she envisioned delivering a thousand different forms of retribution, one for each time Arishat had hurt or humiliated her. If only she could find the strength to twist away from the vise of Arishat’s grip and retort that she hated snakes, and hoped that the goddess’s messengers were all crushed and burned up in their jars and gone forever.

  All the other priestesses watched, some with scorn, others with malicious amusement. A few looked frightened. No one, not even the most devout, wanted to venture back inside, but for the goddess’s sake they would do their duty. Narkitsa’s humiliation offered distraction from the real, ominous possibility that the Ashera sanctuary would fall in on them.

  Narkitsa’s ear throbbed when Arishat released her. She knew well enough, though, not to touch her hand to the bruised flesh or give any other indication that she hurt, lest the head priestess do worse.

  Reluctantly, still cradling her bundle, she fell in line with the other women shuffling toward the sanctuary. One day, she vowed, she was going to get them all.

  *~*~*~*

  Aranaru nursed an impressive black bruise on his left shin. He could not recall having injured himself, though it must have been during the frantic dash to escape his cubicle as the earth heaved and the building shook. After a cursory inspection, he concluded that nothing was broken. Many people had suffered far worse. In the makeshift infirmary where he sought news of his colleagues and betrothed, he encountered victims of deep lacerations, broken bones, severe burns, and concussions. He had not surveyed the dead—those were being taken elsewhere—but he remembered rushing past the sprawled corpses of those who had been caught by falling bricks. That was a sight he would never forget.

  As soon as he ascertained he was all right, Aranaru quickly found work helping some kitchen boys struggling to free a trapped woman from a collapsed section of the south complex where the facade had sheared away to expose ruined cubicles, corridors, and shrines.

  The middle-aged woman kept wailing about her husband, even when the three boys callously told her that he was probably dead, and that she should shut up or they would leave her.

  “That’s enough,” Aranaru barked at them. Fortunately, the woman was so disoriented that she did not seem to have noticed.

  The nearest youth, who could not have been more than eleven or twelve, flashed him an obscene gesture. “Who the fuck put you in charge, you ugly swine-faced bastard?”

  Aranaru grabbed him by the collar of his bedraggled tunic. “That’s Priest-Architect to you.” Had they spent more time outside the kitchen, they might have recognized him as the newest priest of Daidalos. “Insult me again and the next words you hear will be a curse.”

  Only when the boy’s face registered comprehension did Aranaru release him. “Now stop throwing bricks farther along the pile. I see you doing it. You don’t know who else might be trapped, and the weight of the bricks could crush them. You—” He pointed to an older youth with his meaty hands wrapped around the end of a beam. “Leave that. Dig this woman out first.”

  He set the example, digging with his hands, discarding bricks onto the growing pile behind him, pulling away pulverized mud bricks while wishing to all the gods that someone would bring shovels. He could smell the fires, see the smoke rising not fifteen yards away, and hear people screaming, although with so many crammed into the courtyard he could not say for certain whether the cries were coming from under the debris.

  “Master Priest, here.” One of the boys was trying to shift what Aranaru recognized as an orthostat.

  Aranaru coughed from the smoke. “No, it’s too heavy for you.” Through a coating of plaster dust, he saw that the orthostat was sheared across with a diagonal crack; there would be no salvaging it for the rebuilding. “Wait. I’ll come—”

  Another large tremor suddenly shook the hill. Intact buildings swayed. The trapped woman moaned. People who had gathered in the courtyard screamed, and many of those not knocked down by the jolt threw themselves onto the ground to join those already praying
to Poteidan.

  Some of those able-bodied men and women, Aranaru realized with rising annoyance, could be doing something much more constructive than simply standing around, and since it did not look as though they were going to join the supplicants on their hands and knees...

  As the temblor subsided, Aranaru cupped his hands around his mouth and shouted. “You—you—you—come and help over here!” Some stared at him and the debris pile with obvious disdain, while others were frozen in mingled terror and uncertainty. “Hear me! I am Priest-Architect Aranaru, servant of Daidalos. We need assistance!” He grasped bystanders to shake some sense into them, jostled them, and shoved them toward the collapsed south quarter. “Do your duty! We need hands, blankets, shovels, anything!”

  Finding three fit-looking men, he directed them to carefully shift the orthostat. He discovered that the slab was leaning on the ashlar foundation blocks to which it had been bolted; its fall created a void that had shielded the woman from the brunt of the collapse.

  With the slab removed, the rescuers were finally able to free the woman’s arms and reach her legs to dig them out. A disheveled girl wearing only a night dress inched her way across the debris and knelt beside the woman to calm her. Two other girls and their mother began sorting through the rubble five feet away; their bare feet and night clothes prevented them from attacking the pile more aggressively. While Aranaru appreciated the effort, he shouted at them to get some shoes or rags to bind their feet with.

  Someone brought a blanket, from which the four men just joining the recovery effort fashioned a makeshift stretcher to carry the woman away. The boys celebrated with cheers over having gotten someone out alive. Aranaru gave them a moment, and waited until the woman was safely away to indicate the human hand, almost indistinguishable from the shattered bricks pinioning it, protruding from the rubble. He suspected it might be the woman’s missing husband.