Knossos

by Laura Gill

  Gula sat frozen beside her chaperone, a middle-aged priestess who started to interject. Aranaru silenced her with an abrupt gesture. Why could the stupid girl not speak for herself, just this once? “Maybe you would prefer a wealthier man, or a handsome young bull dancer?” His heart was in his throat. When had he ever been disagreeable? How could she countenance tossing aside gold for false luster?

  The betrothal had been a colossal mistake. Turning on his heel to leave, he said, “I will speak to your father in the morning.”

  All at once, her lower lip quivered, and her eyes grew moist. “But you...” Whatever she had intended to say, Gula did not bother finishing the sentence. Her remorse was all pretense. Her father, who was counting on the union to ennoble his family, would be angry. Aranaru could not care less.

  He had been an idealistic fool to believe that he could ever enjoy married life. Women simply did not sigh over ugly junior architects. Gula was the first girl he had ever seriously courted, and only because Banabiru had nudged him along. He should have listened to his instincts. His betrothed’s rejection of him felt like a kick to the stomach.

  Gula was not the first woman to reject him, but by blessed Mother Rhaya, she would be the last.

  *~*~*~*

  A scribe had delivered two bolts of red wool, white linen, thread, shears, and needles so that the priestesses of Ashera could sew new vestments and undergarments, and word had spread through the camp that the fountains in the ruined pilgrim house were running, making it possible for people to bathe in groups of ten at a time. To be able to be clean again and do laundry! To have clean clothes again! Narkitsa found herself smiling again for the first time in weeks. Life in the camp was improving.

  She liked sewing because it was one of the few tasks she excelled at, and she enjoyed measuring and cutting her allotted fabric into a new gown. It was a shame that the priestesses of Ashera did not wear the flounced skirts of the priestesses of Rhaya or Pipituna, because she hungered to embroider or attach beads or spangles to something. The agate beads she had recovered from the sanctuary would have looked splendid against the soft wool.

  Her teeth gnashed whenever she thought about the mule-faced priest-architect who had torn the necklace from her throat. How dare he! She had found those beads exactly as she claimed, in the latrine trench when she went to empty the hut’s piss pot. She had braved leaning forward and with her bare hands had rescued that necklace from the effluvium. What right did he have to take it from her? She should have stood her ground, argued harder, fought back when he reached for her neck. What consoled her was the fact that he had not gotten much for his efforts, just some broken string and whatever beads had not gone spinning into the corners. She had retrieved those, and thought she might combine them with the cast-off beads her cousin had given her to make a nicer necklace.

  A morning spent sewing in the hut’s entryway was just the thing to cool her anger, until Arishat had to go and ruin everything with an excursion into the hills. Because the sacred serpents had abandoned the sanctuary—except for the one that had been crushed in its pot by a falling beam—the head priestess was determined to bring Ashera back to the temple.

  Every household had to have a snake or the goddess would withhold her blessings—even Narkitsa with her fear of serpents acknowledged that—but the people were supposed to create a welcoming environment by setting out milk and having a garden with sunshine and rocks and shady places to entice one of the goddess’s messengers. Capturing snakes from the wild went against the teachings, because who could say whether the snake someone caught in a ditch or in the hills did not belong elsewhere?

  “Find a pot with a lid, you lazy slut, and come with me.” Arishat did not give Narkitsa the second she needed to put her sewing aside, but kicked her shin to get her going.

  Six of the other Ashera priestesses had already assembled outside with pots and baskets. How many snakes did they intend to catch, anyway? Narkitsa shuddered. While she could swallow her fear long enough to sweep the sanctuary, or set out a bowl of milk or drop a rodent into a jar, she could not abide handling a serpent. It did not matter how many times Narkitsa told herself that the sacred snakes were harmless creatures, or how often she tried to conquer her natural terror, she could not control it. She had nightmares about being cornered by writhing snakes. She always brought an extra lamp with her when she entered the sanctuary’s inner room, and nudged every corner with the end of her broom to make sure none of the snakes had escaped, even when her rational mind told her that the jars with their ventilated lids were securely fastened.

  At least no one teased or played pranks on her during the journey into the hills. For many, today was a somber day, because the high priest had left at dawn to conduct a special sacrifice on the slopes of Mount Juktas.

  Human sacrifice was an offering that the gods occasionally demanded. Nonetheless, it was a taboo subject. Sometimes the victim was a troublesome temple servant who was drugged, carted away, and immediately forgotten about. Other times, someone volunteered or was chosen by lottery.

  Narkitsa did not know who had been chosen for the sacrifice. As long as it was not her, and the offering calmed the Great Bull’s anger so that the shaking stopped, she did not care.

  Melata posed an innocent question. “Hasn’t the god already taken human victims?”

  Narkitsa stared at the girl. Had she asked such a thing, Arishat would have slapped her across the face and made her do penance on her hands and knees in the sanctuary. The head priestess, however, played favorites, and Melata with her honey-sweet tone, fluttering lashes, and blushing cheeks knew exactly how to curry favor with her.

  “That’s different,” Arishat replied. “The gods demand that we demonstrate our fear and obedience by making the offering.”

  Narkitsa let her attention stray. Spring’s greenness clung to the hills, and there were wildflowers. Pink anemones, white daisies, and fragrant yarrow splashed the hillside. While she enjoyed picking flowers and weaving garlands, she preferred to remain on the path, because her most primal instinct warned her that every inch of hillside was crawling with snakes.

  Arishat plunged ahead without reservation. “Ehat,” she said, “you and Baubil take Melata around to the other side. Gashansi and Sagda, head to the east slope. Narkitsa, you’re with me.”

  Narkitsa tried to steady her breath before venturing into the grass. She watched the ground carefully, placing her feet only where Arishat trod. Arishat had with her a walking stick that she poked under every rock and into every hole with the intent of eliciting a snake. “When one emerges,” she said over her shoulder, “you will grab it immediately and place it in the jar.”

  “Are you sure? I-I might drop it.”

  Arishat stopped and turned around to face her. “I told you a long time ago to outgrow your ridiculous objection to the Lady’s messengers. It’s absurd, your fear of them harming you. Ashera personally sent one of her serpents to choose you in your cradle, while the rest of us had to have our families pay the temple to take us, or be fortunate enough to have mothers who were serpent priestesses.” With each word her tone grew harsher, and her features twisted with scorn. Narkitsa anticipated an angry blow. “You’ve had a free education, room, board, a status that other girls would envy, and what do you—?”

  A low background rumble, which both women had ignored, steadily gained volume. Narkitsa no longer heard the birdsong or the buzzing of insects among the flowers; the air was still but for her pounding heartbeat and the echo of the head priestess’s scathing words in her ears.

  “What is that?” Arishat hissed.

  Their observations lasted only the fraction of a second it took for the rumble to reach them. And when it came, it was not the thunder for which it could have been mistaken, but a violent, lateral wrench of the earth.

  Narkitsa scarcely had time to register the temblor before she felt the hillside giving way beneath her. Dust and pebbles loosened by the shaking skidded down the slope. Arishat put ou
t her arms to try to steady her balance. Narkitsa dropped the earthenware pot she was holding. Every instinct screamed at her to return to the path. She forced her limbs to move, and turned to flee when the place where she had been standing, where Arishat was following half a second behind her, collapsed. She had to move faster, escape the shifting earth, and might have already gained the relative safety of the path were it not for the woman desperately clinging to her arm.

  Arishat tottered on the brink of the void where the slope had been just seconds before. Dirt, bits of torn vegetation, and small rocks continued to shower down from above where a smaller section of the hill had slid away. Arishat, powdered with dust, could not scrabble to safety without help, and she did not have much time. “Narkitsa!” she wailed.

  Narkitsa started to pull her to more stable ground, but then—she did not know what horrible impulse possessed her, for everything happened so lightning-fast—she shoved instead. Arishat’s eyes went wide—Narkitsa was close enough to see the whites around her pupils—and her mouth stretched in a soundless scream. Soundless, because Narkitsa could not afterward recall having heard her cry out, only the angry thundering of the Great Bull’s hooves and the earth showering down.

  Even when the shaking stopped, Narkitsa’s heart kept pounding. What had she just done? She crawled on hands and knees to the lip of the collapsed hillside, where through the airborne dust she could make out Arishat’s form lying several paces away, sprawled amid the debris that had carried her away.

  Was she dead? Narkitsa resisted the notion of climbing down the precarious slope, but she had to make sure.

  Distant shouts prompted her to move; the other priestesses would soon come looking for them. She lowered herself over the crumbling edge, and stumbled over uprooted vegetation, rocks, root tangles, and loose dirt to reach Arishat’s side.

  Crouching down, she touched the head priestess’s dusty hair—and snatched her hand away when she heard a groan. Narkitsa detected movement. Gods, but Arishat was still alive!

  An impulse to help died the moment Narkitsa realized that if Arishat recovered, she would tell everyone what Narkitsa had done. What had possessed her? Narkitsa could not say, but it was too late to undo the deed. All she could do now was make certain Arishat remained silent.

  Scouring the ground, she palmed a rock, raised it, and struck. Yet that first blow did not do the job. Bludgeoning Arishat proved surprisingly difficult; her skull was harder than Narkitsa expected. Arishat groaned again. Narkitsa was sweating. Her hand trembled. Someone—Gashansi?—called out their names. Could she see anything? Narkitsa inventoried the scene with a quick glance, then, realizing that she was committed to the deed, steeled herself, and struck again, harder, and again, until the rock was smeared with gore and Arishat lay silent.

  Narkitsa cast the stone away and rose on shaky legs. She suppressed a sudden urge to urinate, but not to scream. She funneled every ounce of panic into her cry for help, flailed her arms, and waited with a new tightness in her chest for the other priestesses to find her.

  *~*~*~*

  Aranaru had been in the middle of an open-air argument with Banabiru and Abdesh, Gula’s father, when the shaking started. As he dropped to his knees and rode out the temblor, he saw the sturdy cypresses under which his men were resting swaying back and forth, and the houses below the hill shuddering. Panicked screams echoed across the complex.

  The moment the shaking stopped, he excused himself to attend to a more immediate concern: damage to the temple. He enlisted his workers, who were all accounted for, to go around and make sure that no lamps had overturned to start a fire, and that no one inside the west quarter was trapped or injured. “I’ll be in the central court,” he said. “Report back to me.”

  From a scribe fleeing the north quarter, Aranaru learned that there had been at least one fatality. “Some poor man fell from the roof.” His arms overflowing with tablets he had rescued from his cubicle, the old man was frantic to reach the relative safety of the central court. “We’ve sinned horribly!” His wails echoed in the paved alleyway separating the Court of the Scribes from the industrial quarter. “Poteidan will take us all.”

  A man emerged from the north hall clutching a bleeding forehead. Aranaru assisted him to the courtyard, to an area where other injured were congregating. Someone told him that the healer-priests of Payawon were already hard at work. He comforted the man, while assessing the situation. Most of the injuries he saw were minor.

  To the south, a scaffold had collapsed, but no one appeared to have been on it. Timber beams stacked beside a wall had been tossed like twigs onto the pavement. Plaster from an overturned vessel seeped into the ground. Aranaru hastened to the court’s edge to right the jar and mop up the plaster before it could set, when he saw Banabiru heading down toward the Poteidan sanctuary.

  “Stop!” he shouted, and scrambled over the edge onto the ramp to reinforce the warning. He raced toward his brother, the fool. What was he thinking by venturing inside? “It may not be safe.”

  Seeing him, Banabiru halted, but only for a moment. “Poteidan is angry. We must—”

  “Your prayers aren’t working.” As he grabbed his brother’s arm to steer him away from the entrance, Aranaru realized that might have been rather tactless, even blasphemous. “No one goes inside until Eshmal gives the all-clear.”

  Halfway up the ramp, Banabiru wrenched himself loose. “Someone has to prostrate himself before the god and beg forgiveness for the sins of the people. Someone—” Then he froze, and visibly winced. “The high priest...”

  Aranaru found the way the color drained from his brother’s face alarming. He extended an arm to catch Banabiru should he faint. “What about him?” And then he, too, remembered. Today was the day of Urtanos’s special sacrifice. Had Poteidan rejected the offering?

  “Never mind.” He got his brother up to the courtyard. “Stay here. Wait for Eshmal. I’m sure some of the other priests will come. Tell them not to go into the sanctuary until it’s safe.”

  “What do I tell them?” Banabiru motioned helplessly to the people gathered in the court. Aranaru had never seen him so undone, where just a quarter-hour earlier he had been livid with anger over the broken betrothal. “They’ll ask why the god is punishing us again.”

  “Then don’t tell them anything except to wait for the high priest to return.” Aranaru spied Gahal waving. “I have work to do.”

  The mason reported only minor damage. As he described an incident of fallen plaster, Eshmal walked into the central courtyard as though he owned it and started ordering all non-essential workers to return to camp. Half a dozen people, including Banabiru, clamored to speak with him.

  Aranaru did not stay long enough to watch Eshmal fend off all the queries. Collecting his workers, he prioritized the damage, assigned projects, and spent the afternoon going from one area to another to supervise the crews. More than once, he found himself thanking the gods above and below for sparing the Labyrinth the destruction of the first quake.

  Late in the day, just before Aranaru was about to dismiss the crews, Eshmal’s scribe appeared bearing a message. “Priest-Architect Eshmal informs you that High Priestess Ereka has summoned all the priests of Daidalos to a meeting tonight in the Poteidan sanctuary.”

  The scenario the young man described was so incredible that Aranaru was not sure he had heard correctly. “Go back and ask Eshmal again.” Women did not enter Poteidan’s domain. Even the high priestess had to halt on the landing of the stairs leading down into the sanctuary. Whatever business the goddess Rhaya had with Poteidan had to be conducted outdoors or through the high priest.

  “I did,” the scribe insisted. “You and anyone else who needs it will receive special dispensation.”

  “I mean, about the high priestess.”

  The scribe shot him a look that said he understood perfectly. “Yes, sir. She will also be there.”

  Dusk was falling when Aranaru met the other priest-architects outside the entrance to
the east quarter. They were all freshly scrubbed and dressed in the yellow vestments of the priests of Daidalos. Aranaru wished he had had a chance to eat something first. “Do you know what this is about?” he asked Eshmal.

  The older man shook his head. “Something to do with the temple was all her messenger said.”

  Labasha interjected, “If she wants to talk building, there are better places than Poteidan’s sanctuary to do it.” His crinkled nose and curled upper lip indicated his disapproval. “We shouldn’t be doing this.”

  “Has anyone heard from the high priest?” Tabna asked.

  Only Eshmal had information. “One of his servants returned earlier with a message from Juktas. Presumably something about the earthquake.”

  Their conversation ceased with the approach of a quartet of Poteidan priests bearing ritual vessels. Nikanur, the senior-most priest among them, called everyone to attention. “Here at the threshold of the god’s most holy sanctuary, within sight of Poteidan, Lord of the Heavens, the Great Bull, the Earth-Shaker, present yourselves, priest-architects of Daidalos, and be admitted to his mystery.” All four architects arranged themselves in a straight line. “Priest-Architect Eshmal, Master Builder, servant of Daidalos, step forward.” Eshmal was technically exempt from the ceremony, having acquired his dispensation weeks earlier when he started repairing the sanctuary quarter, but after that morning’s temblor he chose to undergo the rites again out of respect for the Earth-Shaker’s wrath.

  As the priests uncovered the vessels, Nikanur sprinkled each supplicant with sacred water, salt, and earth. The dispensations were granted, with one final caveat. “Speak no words in the god’s presence unless summoned. Speak no blasphemy. Entertain no evil thoughts. Repeat nothing that you are about to see and hear.”

  Then it was time to enter the sanctuary. Aranaru’s heart raced with mingled excitement and dread. His only regret was not being able to visit during the day; the single lantern Nikanur carried cast more shadows than light as they descended the multistoried great staircase that formed the building’s spine. The inverted columns supporting the stepped balustrade were red, with the bulky black bases that had been fashionable in Daidalos’s time. The walls awaited a fresh coat of plaster and whatever decorations the high priest had approved.