Knossos

by Laura Gill

  Zuhatta hustled him away from the courtyard and down a ramp to a neatly paved road along which stood the mansions of various high priests, court officials, and an exiled prince of Babylon. Rusa found the silence nerve-wracking. Was his grandfather going to scold him? Neither Zuhatta nor Kumurru ever struck him, leaving corporal punishment to his parents and Naptu, but Rusa had learned that there were worse penalties to pay for misbehavior than being whipped.

  They paused under an amulet-laden ancient oak whose roots were slowly, inexorably pushing up the pavement. “Sit down here, young man.” Zuhatta patted a flat stone under supporting terrace of the west court. He moved deliberately, in no hurry to answer Rusa’s question or alleviate the tension. He appeared to be thinking, carefully considering his next words.

  “So you think your elders are behaving badly, is that it, Dadarusa?” Rusa twisted his fingers in his lap, until his grandfather caught his wrist. “Stop fidgeting and answer the question.”

  “I’m sorry, sir.” Rusa stared at the oak’s twisted roots as they pushed up through the stones and earth.

  “Then why did you say it?” Zuhatta did not sound angry, despite his firm tone. “Remember, whether he’s a humble mason or an architect, or a scribe like your father, a man must own his words. He must even own his thoughts, and everything that lurks in his heart, because in the hereafter the gods will judge that, too. So why did you say what you said, Dadarusa?”

  Rusa did not care to imagine the gods standing over him in judgment and weighing his soul when he knew he was not always good. Sometimes he let his attention wander during lessons; he had not even been listening to his grandfather’s explanation of the west court. Sometimes he and Balinaru fantasized about playing pranks on Naptu, though, being home schooled and subject to closer scrutiny, they could not devise a way to frustrate him without being discovered at once. And Rusa did not always like what his mother cooked, and thought the way that Kumurru hawked up great green gobs of phlegm and probed his teeth with his fingers was gross. “I don’t know,” he began lamely. “I just...” What he did not know, he decided, was how to articulate himself. “When you say something mean about Grandfather Kumurru, it’s wrong for me to agree, or laugh, or anything because it’s disrespectful to him.” That sounded correct. “And when he says anything about you, then it’s, well, it’s also disrespectful. Two-faced. That’s what the maxims say.” Rusa fell silent then, certain that he had said more than enough, and yet he was dreadfully anxious.

  “Ah.” Zuhatta released the sound with a long breath, so that he sighed the word. “Two-faced. Yes, I can see where that would be a problem for you,” he conceded, “when we are equally your elders.” He butted the end of his walking stick into an ant mound at their feet. “Mine are the ramblings of an old man. It has nothing to do with you or your brothers. You should not take sides.”

  He sighed again. “I dislike Kumurru because he insulted me from the day your father decided to marry your mother. He didn’t—and still doesn’t—think a priest-architect’s family was good enough.”

  “I thought priest-architects had noble blood,” Rusa said.

  “Oh, our blood is some of the noblest of all,” Zuhatta replied, “but that’s not what he means. Had your mother been decked out in gold and dowered with lands and livestock, Kumurru would have liked her much better. A good family doesn’t always mean wealth, Dadarusa. Some architects are very rich, because they cultivate a rich clientele, but we priests of Daidalos have never been wealthy. That’s because we hardly ever take work outside the Labyrinth, so we have very little opportunity to amass a fortune.” He shook his head. “Kumurru is a greedy, grasping man, and he doesn’t like it that I call him out on it. You’re right, though. I shouldn’t do it in front of you or your brothers.”

  “So you’re not angry at me?” Rusa asked in a small voice.

  “Angry?” Zuhatta laughed softly. “You spoke the truth, as you’ve been taught to do. That’s all right.” Rusa felt his grandfather’s sturdy hand pat his back. “Come now, let’s go home.”

  Zuhatta entered the house long enough to pay his respects to Kitane and assure her that Rusa had behaved. “He attended every word I said, and asked pertinent questions about everything.”

  “Of course he did!” Kumurru was awake and sitting beside the hearth like a spider minding its web. “He’s the son and grandson of scribes.” At that, he cast an expectant look toward Rusa, who recalled the sesame ball and the fact that he had not touched it. “A very promising young man.”

  “Indeed.” Zuhatta set his hands on his hips. “He showed great interest in the tomb of Daidalos, and—”

  Kitane interrupted to ask her son directly, “Did you enjoy yourself?” When Rusa nodded, agreeing that he had, and thanked his grandfather for taking him, his mother released him from the present company.

  His grandfathers were still trading barbs downstairs after he washed, stripped off his sandals, and sprawled across the bed he shared with his brother. Balinaru was away, probably exercising with his friends, or playing at dice. All the better. Rusa was not yet ready to deal with his jealousy.

  He had barely closed his eyes, it seemed, before his brother was rudely shoving him awake. “Come on,” Balinaru grumbled. “You’re taking up the whole bed and snoring like a bull.”

  Rusa blinked in the late afternoon light. Balinaru, stripped to the waist, was toweling himself off. His hair was tied back in a queue. “What’s it matter?” Rusa mumbled. “You’ve already had your rest.”

  Balinaru elbowed him, anyway, so that Rusa was obliged to shift. “Where’d you go today?”

  “Tomb of Daidalos.” Rusa suppressed a yawn. “And a quarry. We saw them split a limestone block with fire and water.”

  “Fire and water?” Balinaru flopped onto his back, jostling the mattress with his heavy movements. “I don’t believe you.”

  “It’s true.” Rusa then proceeded to explain the process by which the stonemasons had separated the block from the hillside. “Oh, and then we crossed the stream where the bridge serves the great Labyrinth. Everything was so big. Grandfather Zuhatta said our ancestors built the bridge, and the porch, and the whole west court.” Although he had to stifle another yawn, he was slowly waking up. “He showed me all around the court—the window where the high priestess stands, a corridor where the Minos goes into the temple, and, oh, the entrance has a pillar that our ancestor the Priest-Architect Aranaru put there because his wife was too fat.” Rusa tried to remember the joke as Zuhatta had told it. “He said he would divorce her if she couldn’t squeeze past it.”

  Balinaru did not laugh, just grunted. Rusa wondered whether he was going to nap until supper, when his brother suddenly asked, “Did you like it?” His tone implied that he would have.

  “It was all right.” Had he been sitting up, Rusa would have shrugged. “I’d rather have gone to Katsamba and seen Uncle Lagish’s ship. They’ve probably left for Minoa Kalliste already, but I like it when he tells his stories. And boats are more interesting than tombs or rocks. You can go places in them, and have adventures.”

  “Yeah, that’s true.

  Rusa tucked his arms behind his head. “Do you think we’ll ever get to have adventures like that?”

  Balinaru snorted. “We never get to do anything interesting.”

  *~*~*~*

  The next week, Zuhatta took Rusa to visit some brick makers on the opposite side of town. Balinaru accompanied them this time, because he, not wanting to be left out, had prevailed upon his parents, arguing that it was not fair that Rusa alone went on excursions. Kumurru, to everyone’s surprise, agreed that he should share the privilege. “Maybe then,” the old man said, “you’ll see that being a scribe is preferable to working with your hands like a peasant.”

  The barb passed straight over Balinaru’s head, but Rusa, now that he understood the enmity between his grandfathers, saw the situation in a different light. Whenever his grandfathers argued, Kumurru was almost always the instigato
r. The more Rusa observed, the more he found to his dismay that his respect for his paternal grandfather was diminishing. Balinaru knew nothing of it. Rusa could not confide in him, nor could he, remembering Zuhatta’s admonishment about owning his thoughts as well as his actions, reveal the secret to anyone else.

  This time, he noticed how Zuhatta politely waited outside for him and his brother, as opposed to coming into the house to exchange insults with Kumurru. Balinaru fell upon him with half a hundred queries about brick making. “Do we get to make our own bricks today?” “Can we keep them?” “Will the bricklayers use them in a building, do you think?” Rusa had never seen him so excited to learn something.

  Zuhatta chuckled, “We’ll see, young man. We’ll see.” Rusa noticed him watching Balinaru with a newfound curiosity. “I’d no idea you were so interested in making bricks—or are you simply glad to get away from your lessons?”

  “Eh, he’s not likely to learn anything useful.” Kumurru stood in the doorway, having hobbled to the threshold on his cane, “but his going will spare me a morning of listening to Naptu disciplining him.”

  Balinaru and Rusa both winced, but Zuhatta, calmly regarding his rival, stated, “Perhaps that’s because his ears aren’t on his backside.” He was alluding to the popular saying that schoolboys should be beaten frequently to make them listen, because their ears were on their backs. Rusa had never heard an adult, much less one of his grandfathers, disagree with that adage.

  He relaxed once they were away from the house and the uncertainty of being caught between his quarreling elders.

  The two brothers followed their grandfather’s lead, taking the south road Rusa had traversed with Zuhatta a week earlier, past the Minos’s mansion, toward the bridge at the confluence of the waters. Theirs was a leisurely stroll, with casual conversation. Zuhatta expressed interest in the boys’ lessons, and when he thought it pertinent pointed out various buildings on the temple mount. “You see there, that four-storied structure? That houses the sanctuaries of Rhaya and Poteidan—and it’s actually five stories. The lowermost story, the sanctuary of the Earth-Shaker, is below ground.” Balinaru started to ask a question, probably whether their grandfather had ever been inside, when Zuhatta held up his hand. “Oh, I know what you’re thinking, but it’s forbidden for me to even think about telling you what’s down there. I had to swear an oath.”

  “Not even about the mighty bull they keep down there?” Balinaru persisted. Rusa had heard that it was bull-man that was imprisoned, and never allowed to see the sunlight. He wondered if that was true.

  “Hah!” Zuhatta crowed. “Did your tutor tell you that?”

  “Naptu never tells us anything interesting.” Balinaru kicked a pebble in the road. “So is there a great bull?”

  “Of course there’s a Great Bull, and it lives under the temple mount. And under that hill, and that one...” With his walking stick, Zuhatta gestured toward the southern range of hills where the quarries were location, and to Mount Juktas beyond. “And right under our feet.” He reached over to affectionately cuff Balinaru’s ear. “Foolish boy, do you really think I would tell you about such things? And do you honestly believe a sacred bull tethered underground is that much of a secret if everybody knows about it?”

  Rusa could not resist a laugh at his brother’s expense. He had never thought of it that way before.

  Zuhatta indicated another building, a three-story mansion perched on a terrace on the southeast corner of the mount, separate from the temple yet simultaneously part of it in that sacral horns crowned its rooftop. “That’s the house where the high priestess lives. There’s a legend that says the Minos once lived on the hill, too, and that Daidalos and Ikaros were prisoners in his house.”

  The bridge across the confluence lay forty yards ahead. This time, Zuhatta did not choose the route leading to the tomb of Daidalos, but steered the boys down the west road to a walled compound, and hustled them inside. “Here we are,” he said.

  The compound consisted of a main house and two outbuildings, as well as a dirt yard where several men in loincloths were stacking bricks in the bed of a mule cart. One of the workers stopped what he was doing at Zuhatta’s urging, and went around back to bring his overseer. “Tarina is a master bricklayer,” Zuhatta told the boys.

  When the master bricklayer Tarina emerged from a shed and approached, Rusa saw that his hands were powdery with clay dust, and his nose crooked where it was once broken and poorly set. “So you’re here to learn brickmaking, is that it?” He reached out, first took Balinaru’s hands to scrutinize them, then Rusa’s. He shook his head. “They’re too clean, Zuhatta. Too soft.”

  “Ah, but they’re boys,” Zuhatta argued, “and I’ve yet to meet a boy who refused to get dirty.”

  “Making bricks and laying them takes finesse and muscle. It’s not all slap-and-dash.” Tarina gave Balinaru a skeptical look. “Hmm, this one’s got muscle, but the way he holds himself, I can tell he lumbers like a bull, and I’ll wager he’s clumsy as well. What do I want with a clumsy boy?” Humiliated, Balinaru turned red, despite the fact that Master Tarina’s assessment was true. Rusa frowned, appalled by the master bricklayer’s rudeness for his brother’s sake. “Now this one...” Tarina turned his attention to Rusa. “Scrawny lad. You say he’s—”

  “Don’t talk that way about us.” Rusa could stand no more, even though he knew his outburst would earn him a whipping. “We’re not here to be apprenticed, just to learn about bricklaying.”

  Tarina recoiled as if he had been stung. Zuhatta wasted no time scolding his wayward grandson. “We’re guests here, young man, and that was rude,” he snapped. “Apologize at once.”

  Anxiously chewing on his lower lip, Rusa exchanged a look with his brother. Balinaru looked as aghast as the adults. “Sorry,” he choked.

  Tarina grunted sourly, “Come with me, insolent boy. Your brother, too.” Wearing a dissatisfied look, he escorted the boys into a larger rear yard where neat rows consisting of dozens of mudbricks were drying in the sun. “This is where we make the bricks to order. A hundred and twenty bricks there, another hundred and twenty on the cart you saw, all for a storehouse.”

  He kept walking, talking, gruff with irritation, as he led the boys past the mudbricks toward a shed. “This is where we keep the materials. We use local clay, sometimes dung, depending on what the customers wants or can afford. Also, river mud, and straw from the meadow. Some families that make their own bricks use reeds or dried grass if they haven’t straw.”

  Rusa nodded, trying to appear attentive, but his face burned with humiliation, and he squirmed inside with self-reproach. What had he been thinking? He knew for certain that someone, either his parents or Naptu, would whip him once he got home and his grandfather made his crime known.

  Tarina did not appear to notice his inner turmoil. “Making bricks takes a good deal of water, which is why we’re so near the stream, and a lot of brute strength. Look there.” He indicated a stone vat and wooden paddles for mixing. “Now these are the ratios you use, so listen carefully.” He glared especially at Rusa, doubt inscribed all over his weathered face. “I won’t repeat myself.”

  He and Zuhatta went away to enjoy a cup of wine, leaving the boys to work. Balinaru remembered the first part of the recipe, the amount of clay, but, true to his nature, he had forgotten the rest. Frustrated, he flung up his hands, and started mixing random amounts of sifted earth and water to make a soupy mess that he moved to slop over the clay. “I suppose this’ll do.”

  Rusa, who had memorized the recipe, intervened. “Careful. It’s six parts mud to four parts clay.”

  “Shut up,” Balinaru growled. “I know that.”

  “No, you don’t. You’re just guessing.”

  Without acknowledging that his younger brother was right, Balinaru grudgingly tried Rusa’s way, which seemed to work better. Once the mixture was the right consistency, the brothers knelt on the packed earth floor to squish the clay and mud together with their bare h
ands, just as Tarina had ordered; the paddles were meant to be used later, for pounding the mixture into the molds.

  “Now we have to add the straw.” Rusa’s hands were coated with muddy clay up to his elbows and he was itching in half a dozen places. “We’re supposed to knead it together like bread dough.”

  “I know that part, stupid.” Balinaru added a handful of straw from the bin beside him. “Why’d you have to be so rude before, and make a mess of everything? Now he doesn’t like us.”

  “He didn’t like us before, or didn’t you hear what he said about you being clumsy and stupid, and me being scrawny?” Rusa was not about to admit that he had been defending his brother, because it went against the natural order of things for a younger, smaller boy like himself to stand up for an older, stronger one, and Balinaru’s pride would not have borne the knowledge.

  Balinaru did not reply, but sullenly kept at his work. Rusa rubbed his itching forehead against his shoulder and followed suit.

  Presently, the two men returned. Tarina bent down to test the mixture between two fingers. “Off with your sandals,” he barked at the boys. Once Rusa and Balinaru complied, Tarina pointed to the vat. “Get in there and tread with your feet like you’re stomping grapes. It’s got to be so well mixed that it’s solid, no air pockets trapped inside. Otherwise the bricks won’t be any good.”

  Rusa did not quite understand everything the master bricklayer said, but he obediently climbed into the muck and started stomping. Balinaru made a face and did likewise. Tarina watched them a few moments, then barked another command. “Don’t just stay there. Move around.” He thrust a paddle at Balinaru. “Here. Don’t waste anything. Scrape stuff off the sides so you can get it under your feet.”

  They stomped and scraped and trod under the scrutiny of the two men until their leg muscles burned, and all they wanted was to stop, even for just a moment. As he stumbled around, Rusa felt sure he would collapse before Tarina permitted him any relief, because it served him right for disrespecting an elder. The master bricklayer would probably keep him treading all day.