Knossos

by Laura Gill

  “We will dedicate it together,” he murmured.

  That night, Rusa fell asleep holding Dusani in his arms. There had been moments, inexplicable spells, in Katsamba when his body had responded to the ever-present death, destruction, and hopelessness by longing for a woman. He had been too embarrassed to ask Nindani what it meant, and had thought it a perversion of nature until tonight. Now, tucked against his wife’s warm skin, nestling in the comforting beat of her heart and scent of her glorious hair, with their infant son dozing in his cradle a few feet away, the mystery was answered.

  Dusani’s essence was to him the elixir of life, in that Rusa could not be afraid or downcast too long in her presence. Her words put his situation in perspective. Becoming Registrar of Deaths meant providing for his family, nothing more. He was not the shadow of death, only the mortal official who counted what the gods measured out. And according to Naptu, who had made inquiries that afternoon, there had not been quite as many burials in Knossos during his absence as there had been in those terrible initial days after the catastrophe. Nor would he be returning to Katsamba.

  Rusa found himself becoming drowsier by the moment, as the fragrance of his wife’s skin expunged the miasma of putrescence from his consciousness. Surely the worst of the disaster was behind them now.

  *~*~*~*

  A cautious optimism was at work in the town. Everywhere there were signs of rebuilding. Ruined houses were being scavenged for useable foundation stones, timber, and mudbricks. Rusa supposed that his father’s house was being similarly dismantled. In his reduced circumstances, and not wanting to return to a place where the view included mass graves, he had decided not to pursue the matter. Once he was able, he would provide a more suitable home for his family.

  As he climbed to the temple mount, the subdued industry of the town gave way to a different atmosphere altogether. Despite the destruction, a timeless quality imbued the Labyrinth’s horizontal planes, a sense that the immortals still dwelled on the hill.

  The trade in votives and sacrificial offerings continued unabated. A priestess painted and dressed as Rhaya and grasping sacred snakes occupied a plinth before the ruined north entrance; a trio of priestesses at her feet chimed cymbals, rattled sistra, and sang a hymn of thanksgiving for the goddess’s mercy. Rusa remembered to trade for votive limbs at a stall where the vendor inquired whether there were others among his family whose injuries had been healed by Payawon. “You can’t thank him enough for his blessings,” the woman said. She herself had a puckered scar bisecting her left cheek.

  “Yes, indeed.” Rusa realized then that Dusani had not mentioned whether she had offered votives for the children’s recovery. He bartered the silver bracelet on his wrist, a gift from Minos Hammuras, for the additional body parts corresponding to his children’s injuries, while for his wife he purchased a pair of ceramic hands.

  “Praise be to the merciful Healer!” exclaimed the vendor.

  “Praise be,” Rusa answered.

  Workers had cleared the passage between the north bastions, allowing access to the damaged hall beyond. Rusa did not recognize the scribe on duty when he submitted his documents for registration. He was then given a chit granting him a day’s admittance to the temple, and was told to wait near the south door, where a priestess of Hekate would come to fetch him.

  There were not as many people transacting business as there had been before the catastrophe, and only four junior scribes on hand to assist with fees and offering tablets, and carry messages where once there had been a dozen. Rusa managed to exchange a few words with a temple sentry whom he recognized. “Is this inactivity the normal state of affairs?” he asked.

  “More or less.”

  “Where is Scribe Rasmusa?” Rusa nodded toward the table where he had registered. “Not dead, I hope.”

  The sentry shook his head. “Lost his hearing to the explosion.”

  Rusa’s gaze strayed to the passage leading to the central courtyard. A plump, black-robed priestess approached, her walking stick tap-tapping against the paving stones as she waddled along. He heard her huffing from five feet away. “Master Scribe Dadarusa?” She waited the half-second it took him to affirm his identity before hustling him up the passage. “This way.”

  At the end of the passage, Rusa and his escort emerged into a different world. The central courtyard was a terminus of activity, where men hustled back and forth carrying materials. Scaffolding braced damaged buildings, and carpenters and laborers were busy on rooftops. Rusa had not visited often enough or been told which structures housed which sanctuaries. He searched the court for his younger brother, who was surely in charge of the organized chaos, but his escort would not let him linger.

  “Come on, the dark goddess hasn’t all day for you.” She nudged his calf with her walking stick.

  What did she mean? Rusa had assumed they were headed to one of the administrative offices of the north quarter, but to his confusion she prodded him toward the west quarter. “Where are we going?”

  She grumbled, “The goddess’s holy sanctuary.” Tap-tap went the butt of the walking stick against the pavement. “Where did you think? The Registrar of Deaths is a servant of Hekate.”

  Rusa had never been inside a sanctuary of the temple, nor had he anticipated an invitation. While it constituted an unparalleled honor, even for the Minos, Rusa dreaded whatever ritual the priestesses demanded of him. Consecrating a sacred charge required a sacrifice regardless, but his imagination conjured darkness, corpses, an ordeal of terror. “I assumed it was strictly a civil post,” he said.

  “Then you are a fool,” she muttered, not bothering to hide her scorn. “Anything having to do with death is the Lady’s domain.”

  He swallowed past a sudden dryness in his throat, and suppressed a shiver. Prior knowledge would not have helped him prepare, he realized, only heightened his anxiety. Whatever awaited him, he kept telling himself that it could not be worse than the horrors of Katsamba.

  The sanctuary of Hekate was the great temple’s symbolic underworld, a windowless, colorless chamber dominated by a square, central pillar. Every great house in Knossos, including the house where Rusa had been born, was equipped with a pillar crypt, a domestic sacred cave set aside for the propitiation of chthonic spirits. The women of the household maintained the space, sweeping and making regular offerings. When men descended into the darkness, it was strictly to honor the ancestors.

  A single lamp burned. Silhouetted in its flickering shadows were three priestesses. “Dadarusa.” Their murmuring voices hissed through the chamber, lending his name an unsettling character. Each one crooked a beckoning finger at him. Nindani was not among them. “Come, young man. Come forward.”

  Rusa felt cold and naked in their presence. They reminded him of the professional wailing women the well-to-do hired for funerals. He drew a breath, and allowed the nearest priestess to take his hand and guide him over to a stone cist in the floor where she bade him kneel. A sturdy rope ran through a plug sealing the opening; when the other two priestesses tugged, the stone shifted, and the stench that escaped, a putrescent mix of rancid blood and rotting meat that escaped took him right back to Katsamba. Cold perspiration iced his skin underneath his mantle.

  “Dread Hekate, Mistress of the World Below, Lady of the Crossings,” intoned the priestess at his shoulder. “Welcome this master scribe, Dadarusa, son of Yikashata, to your service. It is he who will now record the passing of the mortals of Knossos into your sacred realm. Receive him, dread dark goddess! Enfold him in your protective embrace.” No, he thought furiously. Hekate’s embrace was the very last thing he sought. “Consecrate him, O Lady.”

  The priestesses who had uncovered the cist now grasped his wrists and urged him to unclench his fingers. The third priestess, the mistress of the ceremonies, produced a painted rhyton. “Consecrate him, dark goddess!”

  A black, viscous liquid flowed over his hands to drip into the cist. Rusa resisted the impulse to jerk back from the libation of
sacrificial blood. Holding his breath, he closed his eyes.

  Then something cool and wet ran over his skin, and when he looked he saw water cleansing away the blood; he heard the splash of liquid falling into the cist. One of the priestesses bent to enfold his hands in white, soft linen to dry them, then it was done. The priestesses bade him stand. His knees were sore from having knelt on the hard floor, and it seemed to him that the chamber had somehow become smaller, and the ceiling lower, as if Hekate had transported him into a cave deep in the earth. Rusa blinked his eyes against the surreal figures of shadow and flickering light moving around him, ghosts of the dead dancing upon the walls.

  The priestess who had fetched him grasped his hand, tugged impatiently to get his attention, and escorted him upstairs through the maze of passages that connected the various sanctuaries until he once again found himself in the central courtyard. The sudden daylight dazzled his eyes, and the sensation of sucking in fresh air left him lightheaded. He stood dumbly, blinking and gasping, for the several moments it took him to regain his equilibrium. When he looked around him, the priestess had vanished.

  “Are you all right, sir?” A young laborer suddenly stood at his elbow.

  Rusa nodded, though he was not altogether certain. “You’re a laborer here in the temple?” When the youth indicated that he was, Rusa asked, “Can you direct me to Priest-Architect Didanam?”

  “I saw him over there.” The young man pointed toward the east quarter, where Rusa immediately recognized the tall, wiry man wearing a dusty leather apron who was hustling a crew of carpenters across a portico.

  Rusa made his way over, and, sidling past the harried carpenters with their burdens of lumber, managed to catch his younger brother’s attention just long enough to get Dida to recognize him.

  “Dadarusa! Gods help me, what are you doing here?” Dida twitched with nervous energy even as the brothers embraced. The carpenters stood around, still shouldering their burdens, and plainly exasperated. Rusa was not surprised. Dida’s absorption in his various projects was such that he often failed to acknowledge other people’s sentiments and shortcomings.

  “Registering for my new post,” Rusa replied. “When I saw him, Balinaru said you weren’t injured at all. I see it’s true.” Not that it was easy to tell. Dida often neglected his personal appearance; he probably would have never trimmed his short beard or changed his clothes at all were it not for the strict code of cleanliness the great temple imposed on its servants.

  Dida smiled self-indulgently. “Daidalos watches over me.” And, still grinning, fidgeting, and casting his glance around, he added, “You should come back when we finish rebuilding the sanctuary of Poteidan.” Never mind that access to the god’s sanctuary was forbidden to outsiders, or that Dida’s statement might be misconstrued as rude, even as a summary dismissal.

  “Dida,” Rusa said tolerantly, “aren’t you going to ask how I’ve been?” He cast a sympathetic look toward the carpenters. Clearing his throat, he tapped his brother’s shoulder, then gestured to the waiting men. “Go ahead and relieve them for a few moments. You can spare the time.”

  Grunting, Dida waved the carpenters away. “Take those beams to the lowermost sanctuary.” He turned back to his brother. “I don’t need to ask how you’re doing. You’re standing right here, and I can see you’re fine.

  Rusa sighed. There was no point in arguing with him. “Yesterday, Balinaru and I divided Father’s property. We set aside some things for you if you want them. We’ve also relinquished our rights to the house.” Slowly, he perceived a lack of interest on Dida’s part. That was nothing new, though. Dida tended to ignore any conversation that did not relate to the temple or the principles of architecture. How anyone managed to work with him, Rusa would have been hard-pressed to understand.

  “I don’t need a house,” Dida said. “Never mind that. There’s work in Poteidan’s sanctuary, and the tie-beams in south dormitory are all wrong.” His mind was already downstairs in the god’s domain, across the court in the south quarter, and probably in half a dozen other places, as well.

  Rusa knew better than to try to detain him. “Go on, Dida,” he said, relenting. Where another man might have been offended, this once Rusa did not mind. It gave him a strange sort of reassurance to know that, amid all chaos and sorrow, some things had not changed.

  *~*~*~*

  “Submit yourselves to Mother Rhaya!” The priestess’s voice was hoarse, and her goddess-garb was soaked through. She should have been indoors warming herself beside a brazier on such an inclement day. Then again, it was the middle of spring and the weather should have been warm and sunny.

  Rusa hunkered deeper into his heavy, gray woolen cloak as he observed from the doorway of his office, a little building at the foot of the temple mount. He considered it a miracle of sorts that the young priestess, who had become quite bedraggled through the last seven months of her vigil in exhorting the goddess, had not contracted pneumonia or some equally virulent sickness when others in Knossos had not enjoyed her good fortune. Payawon had turned his face from the people as surely as those gods who had sent the inundation, scorching wind and earthquake.

  “Kiss the earth and pray!” she croaked to an audience of desperate worshippers. “Beseech her blessing to nourish the fields.”

  Rusa pressed his fingers to his lips, and raised them to his forehead in a gesture of supplication. Rumors were already rampant that High Priestess Kapanni had secretly made human sacrifices and sprinkled the fields with the blood—and popular opinion now held that the Labyrinth ought to dispatch more victims.

  The victims must have been temple slaves, invisible and expendable, because the priestesses of Hekate who served with him never mentioned them or submitted their names to Rusa for inclusion in the tallies.

  Rusa considered further human sacrifices a waste of lives. Common sense rather than terror dictated his opinion. He listened to the local farmers. Winter had lasted too long. What could Rhaya do when Velchanos refused to let the sun shine? Mount Juktas had been crowned with snow a week after the spring equinox, and people still reported icicles hanging in their porticoes where pots of herbs and flowers should have been basking in the sunshine.

  It did not help that someone had leaked to the public the tallies of the dead taken throughout the Knossian territories. 5,809 at Amnissos, where the sea had swallowed everything. 3,488 at Katsamba; subsequent searches had added to Rusa’s initial figures. Archanes, which had escaped the worst effects of the scorching winds, had reported 1,976 deaths, mostly from disease and earthquake injuries. 1,498 had died at Tylissos. 7,526 had perished in the surrounding country, most of those on the morning of the burning wind. Set against the last census taken during Minos Hammuras’s reign, Rusa estimated there were still 11,000 people unaccounted for. He wondered whether they would ever be found, before surmising that the angry gods must have devoured some of the victims.

  As to the numbers, it seemed to him that men had no trouble counting their produce and flocks in the tens of thousands, but they could not process the reality such an excess of corpses. At a certain point, even he shut down, became numb to the message implicit in the arrangement of vertical lines, circles and dots forming the numbers.

  The rain was falling hard now, pelting the roof tiles, and deepening existing puddles. Rusa wished the young priestess would cover herself and seek shelter; the goddess was not listening today.

  Turning, he gathered his assistants, who, muttering about the downpour, crowded the doorway behind him. “It is a somber day for burying the dead,” he acknowledged. “Let us be industrious, do the dead reverence and go home to our families.”

  One asked, “Will there be mulled wine afterward, Master Dadarusa?” Mumbles of assent attended the man’s query.

  “Only if our rations permit.” Rusa had made it his policy to ameliorate the macabre nature of his post by befriending his staff. He asked about their families, remembered name days, and encouraged the men’s wives to come to th
e office and tend the shrine there after several assistants told him that his predecessor had neglected the office’s gods. That was probably why the gods had struck the man down, and why the assistants never uttered Didikasos’s name.

  Rusa’s five assistants and their families were exceptionally devout, and more superstitious than most. On the very first day, the moment he gave them leave to speak, they plied him with advice.

  “You mustn’t let the shadow of a corpse fall on you.”

  “Don’t let your wife inhale the stench of death if she’s with child. The babe will be stillborn.”

  “Never bury a man or inscribe his name in the tallies past sunset, Master. His shade could follow you home.”

  Observing these customs, they explained, was more important than ever now that circumstances necessitated mass burials, and rationing curtailed grave goods. Rusa let his assistants load him with homemade amulets of protection. Who was he to call their admonishments superstition, especially in these dark times? Better to err on the side of caution, he reasoned, and duly asked Dusani and the children, to whom restless shades might be especially attracted, to wear them also.

  Rusa and his assistants met the cart bearing that day’s dead in a meadow south of the temple mount; the place where the young Rusa and his brothers used to play among the sheep had seen its last grave filled in months ago, and would revert to pasture land once the grass started growing again. The cart driver was irascible, despite the relatively light load, and even the mule looked harassed. As for the ditch diggers, Rusa commiserated with them. Muddy water stood ankle-deep at the bottom of the grave, despite the men’s efforts. The corpses bundled in the back of the cart were destined for a wet final repose.

  The priestess of Hekate had come alone, wrapped in sodden weeds more brown than black as the prolonged rain leeched away the dye. Falling droplets smeared her white paint, revealing stripes of the old woman behind the goddess. Rusa saluted her nonetheless, while inviting her to share his canvas awning.