Knossos

by Laura Gill

  “Captain Glaukos warned me to stay away,” Eteokles replied. “He told me that the people who lived there forgot they were mortal men made in the image of the gods. They behaved like animals, even demons, nourishing themselves with the very meat the gods have forbidden.”

  So the rumors of savage feasts and unaccounted-for dead were true. Rusa asked no further questions, and even tried to forget everything he had heard, but the breaking of that ancient taboo and the images it conjured lingered in his mind where dwelt all such gloomy phantasms.

  He submitted his tallies to Ramush’s aide, collected his chit, and went down to the storeroom to collect his rations—a handful of grain and shrunken lentils, a small amphora of wine, and smaller vessel of oil. It was so little to sustain six people for two days. Rusa’s stomach rumbled. Last night’s fish and mussels had been delicious, only there had not been enough.

  On the way home, he and Eteokles passed the aforementioned house, its doors and windows plugged with clay. Spells against evil were scrawled in red ocher over the whitewashed facade. Rusa did not pause to read them, just averted his eyes and hurried homeward.

  Dusani took charge of the goods. Anath had awakened that morning with a sour stomach, Khasos was colicky, and Beruti too sluggish to get through all her lessons. Rusa refreshed the heated leather pad on which his elder daughter rested, encouraged her with soothing words, and urged his younger daughter to do only as much as she could, and set the remainder aside for later.

  Rusa heeded his own advice. Undressing, and attempting to ignore the gaseous churnings of his belly, he stretched out on the fleeces next door. Everybody was lethargic nowadays. Sleep conserved energy. As a result, chores were left undone. Floors were not scrubbed as often or thoroughly as before, bed fleeces were not aired out, and laundry was neglected for longer periods. Rusa idly wondered how Didanam and Balinaru managed to function. Hunger had not been such a problem when last he saw his brothers, so he had not thought to inquire. The only possible explanation was that temple work crews were receiving extra rations.

  Toward late afternoon, he roused himself, donned a threadbare tunic, and traipsed downstairs for fresh air. No one occupied the kitchen, as the servants had already finished cooking and were now resting in their quarters awaiting orders to heat and serve the evening meal. Nor was there any chance of filching a bit of bread or cheese; the head cook had everything edible securely locked away where not even the master of the house could have reached.

  The kitchen gave on to a corner of the inner court where in better times the servants maintained an herb and vegetable garden. Rusa passed the languishing plots without giving them much notice. A cold breeze tinged the air, where normally the warm days of summer extended into the early part of autumn and the festival days of Dionysus. Grapes grew small and scant on the vine this year, and people were already saying there would be another long winter.

  If the harvest failed next year, they would all starve. Perhaps those who had been drowned by the inundation or taken by the scorching wind were the lucky ones. Rusa remembered his father, drugged, slipping away. If it came to it, he would prefer to have his children perish swiftly rather than—

  Something suddenly barreled into him from behind, sending him sprawling. A weight upon his back had arms and raking nails, it stank like excrement, and was trying to pound his head into the pavement. Instincts honed during childhood wrestling bouts took over. He managed to brace himself and roll over, lashing out with his fist and connecting with a blur of flesh and hair. The moment his attacker’s hold loosened, he tore free and scrambled upright.

  Sammaro remained crouching, feral. He even snarled. There was very little about him that was human now. Rusa’s hand traveled straight to his belt, where he realized to his horror that he was not wearing his dagger. He shivered, thought quickly. “Intruder!” he shouted, raising the hue and cry.

  At that, Sammaro leapt for him. Rather than stand his ground weaponless, Rusa bolted for the house to allow the servants time to respond, and just managed to reach the threshold when Sammaro’s nails raked his shoulder. Grasping hands spun him about, and flung him stumbling into the vegetable patch.

  Rusa barely managed to keep his balance. Seeing how Sammaro blocked his access to the house, he assumed a boxer’s stance. “What do you want, Sammaro?” he shouted. Let the entire neighborhood hear him! Someone would have to hear—the cook, the kitchen assistants, Eteokles...

  “You dare profit from this?” Sammaro hacked out his words. “Demon! Wretched villain!” His curses were further distorted from his loss of teeth, so Rusa could not quite decipher all his jabbering. Nor did he have time to press the madman for an explanation or engage him in any meaningful dialogue, for Sammaro followed up his ravings by lunging forward.

  Anticipating the attack, Rusa ducked under Sammaro’s flailing attempt to seize him, delivered a bruising uppercut that knocked Sammaro hard against the wall. His blood was pounding in his ears, roaring for him to move in and continue pummeling his opponent, when suddenly the head cook appeared in the doorway brandishing a skillet. Two wide-eyed, frightened young assistants hung behind her.

  A blur of motion distracted Rusa from them back to his quarry. Sammaro scrambled from the garden and around a corner, where, with a crash of breaking pottery and frothing curses, he sought escape. No one moved, until Eteokles, already running, shoved his way through the crowd of servants, and with pounding footfalls and spear poised to hurl, dashed around the house after him. Rusa heard a breathless barrage of Hellene, Eteokles’s alarm reverberating in the space between houses, then other Hellenes yelling back, and a commotion outside in the street.

  The cook, meanwhile, hustled Rusa into the kitchen, and bolted the door after. “Get upstairs!” She still wielded the skillet, gesticulating wildly with it.

  Rusa met Kikkeros, Yishana, and others running his way. He caught Isiratos in restraining arms. His son had a dagger drawn. “No! Eteokles has already gone.” Isiratos strained against him, teeth clenched in frustration. “Captain Glaukos and the Hellenes will take him.”

  “Who?” Kikkeros demanded.

  “Sammaro!”

  Dusani was frantic when she heard, and dragged Rusa to the main hearth where she ordered the servants to fetch the children. “Isiratos!” she hollered. “Put down that dagger. You’re not going anywhere.”

  Isiratos wore a look of murder in his eyes. “That madman attacked Father. He must be—”

  “Do as your mother says!” Rusa shoved his son toward the hearth. “Sammaro is a demon, an animal, and he’s bigger than you, and he’s desperate.” His commands spewed forth in a trembling rush. Worse than Sammaro having ambushed him in what should have been the relative safety of his father-in-law’s house was the possibility of the fiend savaging and murdering his son.

  Isiratos nursed his anger. “You never let me do anything.”

  “Shut your mouth,” Dusani shot back.

  “You’re fourteen years old, boy,” Rusa snapped, “and listening too much to Hellene nonsense. You’re the son of a scribe, not a warrior.”

  Eteokles returned just as Zabibe and Naptu hustled the children into the main room. “He’s escaped.” The young Hellene’s face was flushed, taut with aggravation. “The alarm’s been raised. All Knossos is on alert. He’ll be found, taken...” He gasped for breath. “The Minos is sending reinforcements.”

  Rusa assumed the reinforcements were meant to scour the town and surrounding countryside for the escaped Sammaro, but before long the Hellene captain himself was hammering on the door.

  Leading Kleonikos and three other armed men into the house, Glaukos brusquely assigned them stations, then asked to speak with Rusa. “The Minos has requested your statement.”

  Rusa reported the details as accurately as his frazzled nerves allowed. Glaukos’s intimidating appearance and manner did not help his recollection, for the captain was an astonishingly ugly man—nose lopsided from being broken in a long-ago fight, one eyelid seamed o
ver with massive scar tissue. Dusani hustled the girls from the main room to avoid upsetting them.

  “I don’t know how Sammaro got into the inner court. The side entrance was locked,” Rusa said anxiously. “I don’t even know why he’s targeted me. All I’ve ever been able to understand of his ravings is that he somehow thinks I’m profiting by the hardships of my neighbors.”

  Glaukos made no comment, merely barked his next question. “What was your relationship to the priest Sammaro before? You both served Minos Hammuras.” His guttural voice with its heavy accent matched his appearance. “Did you insult him?” The question sounded more like an accusation.

  Rusa tried to get his mixed emotions under control long enough to think. “No. He served as a priest. I was a personal scribe, always silent, in the background. We never interacted...only...” He closed his eyes in order to concentrate better. “On the night of the earthquake, before the burning wind struck, Minos Hammuras asked my opinion on the transgressions of the Kallisteans. I had been there two years earlier, you see, and...” Uncertain, he shook his head. “Perhaps—I don’t know—perhaps Sammaro thought I was contradicting him. I know I was careful not to cross him, but...” Under his present circumstances, his recollections served him no further.

  Glaukos ended the interview as abruptly as he had begun it, leaving behind Kleonikos and the other men. Rusa tried to eat and drink what his wife placed in his shaking hands; he might as well have swallowed cobwebs for all the good it did him. The veil of tension so confounded everything that he could not make conversation or get any rest that night. Having moved his bedding into the children’s room, he felt an obligation to stay awake. Dusani remained alert with him. Isiratos took his dagger, which he had earlier retrieved, to bed with him, and only pretended to sleep.

  Midmorning brought Glaukos back to the house. “Master Scribe,” he ordered gruffly, “come with me.”

  Clinging to Rusa’s arm, Dusani interjected, “He’s not going anywhere while that madman is out there.”

  Glaukos regarded her like an ant crawling across his arm, a nuisance to be swatted. “Your presence is not required, woman.” To Rusa, he added, “We have found the priest Sammaro. He will no longer trouble you.”

  “He’s dead?” Rusa could read nothing from his neutral tone.

  “We found him,” Glaukos reiterated.

  Whether he would or no, Glaukos’s men escorted him from the house, heading east toward the river. He shivered in his mantle, and not merely from the chill in the air. Amid a thicket of spears and tall shields, he still felt vulnerable, unable to settle the queasiness in his stomach. Did Glaukos mean for him to identify and accuse Sammaro as the man who had attacked him? Yet Rusa did not recall that making a public, face-to-face accusation was mandatory under the law. Perhaps temple strictures required such measures when a priest, heretic though he might have become, stood accused. Rusa wished that Glaukos would elaborate.

  They came to the foundations where Minos Hammuras’s mansion had stood and been dismantled. A knot of Hellenes and Libyan mercenaries were milling around a ditch and the body it contained. Rusa glimpsed a pair of callused, dirt-blackened feet protruding from a collection of filthy rags. His nose twitched at the jumbled odors of rancid sweat, filth and voided bladder.

  Sammaro lay supine, his good eye bulging, staring sightlessly toward the heavens. A purple bruise discolored his jaw. Dried blood streaked the right side of his face where it had trickled from his nose. “You killed him?” Rusa asked Glaukos.

  “We found him so.”

  Rusa could account for the bruise, for he had done that, but nothing else. Maybe Sammaro had fallen in the dark, or perhaps the gods had wearied of his troublemaking and madness and had struck him down. Rusa could not say. What manner of death was he to record, then? Obviously Glaukos intended him to perform his official duty as Registrar of Deaths. “I should fetch my writing materials.” He tore his gaze away from the corpse. “The tallies will—”

  “The temple will see to the burial,” Glaukos summarily informed. “You will go home now.”

  Puzzled, Rusa retreated with Eteokles, who delivered him home to a family that immediately bombarded him with questions. He told them only that Sammaro was dead, because that was as much as he knew. All he wanted to do then was embrace his wife and process what had just happened. Sammaro, dead. Just like that? It struck Rusa as unreal, anticlimactic, and though he knew he should have been relieved now that the threat was removed, somehow he felt tainted by the whole episode.

  His sentiments did not change when the Minos, after subjecting him to a thorough inquest, acquitted him of all wrongdoing. Temple authorities never interrogated him, even though he had punched a priest, which in itself was an actionable offense. Conservative elements, it seemed, preferred to dismiss Sammaro as a heretical madman and to forget the curious circumstances surrounding his last hours.

  Rusa could not decide what it was about the incident that disturbed him so. Sammaro had breached the sanctity of the house that should have been a refuge from all troubles, and could have attacked Dusani or the children. But Rusa knew his misgivings were irrational, because he had been more than a match for Sammaro, and had managed to connect some punishing blows before help arrived. Even had the head cook, the kitchen servants and Eteokles not come running, Rusa knew with certainty that he could have gone on beating Sammaro, even pummeling him to death.

  Was it because Sammaro had been a priest? Rusa had never really considered him a genuine example of priesthood. Toward the end, he had even stopped regarding Sammaro as human, but rather more as a kind of pestilential demon that haunted gravesides, clung to the shadows for fear of the light and gnawed on human flesh. Whatever part of Sammaro had been a man, the pain and horror of that terrible night a year ago had leeched it away.

  Upstairs, Rusa lay down with a cloth over his eyes. He felt the mattress give, then Dusani was leaning over him, tenderly brushing his cheek below the compress. “Let the matter alone, love. He’s dead, there’s nothing more to dwell on. And besides, it’s giving you gray hairs.”

  Rusa frowned. “You’re exaggerating.” As far as he knew, he was not going gray, unless... Dismayed, he sat up, and the cold compress fell from his face into his lap. “No, I don’t.”

  Infuriatingly, his wife was smiling. “Just like mine, Rusa.” She leaned forward and kissed the tip of his nose. “It’s a mark of divine favor, you know. It makes you look distinguished.”

  “You’re being incorrigible.” In the light, Rusa saw the crow’s feet radiating from the corners of her eyes, and, as she smiled, from the curve of her mouth. “It’s nothing to smile about.”

  Dusani pretended to pout. “That’s the problem with being married to a scribe,” she teased. “You dwell too much on things when there’s no need. The sun is shining—” She gestured toward the window. “Your wounds have healed, you have gainful employment, and we have food to eat. Granted, it might not be much, but our lot could have been worse.” She took his chin in her hand. “I know you miss your father, but at least he passed peacefully. Many weren’t so lucky. And we could have lost each other, do you realize that? Gods forbid, we could even have lost the children. But we’re all still here.

  Rusa nodded, acknowledging the truth his wife spoke. She was ever the practical, optimistic one. “I do dwell too much on dark things, don’t I?” But winter was quickly approaching, rations were growing ever scarcer, and next year’s harvest might also— No wonder his hair was graying. “Is it the work I do?” he asked. “Or have I lost my faith altogether?”

  “There you go again.” Dusani’s thumb caressed his lower lip. “If you can’t see for yourself how the gods smile on us in their own small way, then you deserve your dreadful thoughts and sleepless nights. You need to keep telling yourself how fortunate you are, remember to thank the gods, and have faith that times will get better. They already are, you know, if you would just open your eyes and look.”

  Her chastising tone roused
his contrition. How he wished he could be as practical and wise as she! “I see that.”

  “Not here.” Releasing his chin, Dusani touched his heart.

  Rusa sighed. “Give me time.”

  Through the ensuing months, he tried his best to find the good in things, though it was hard.

  Their daughters were intermittently sick through the winter, but to much parental joy Khasos took his first wobbling steps, and Isiratos celebrated his fifteenth name day. Rusa regretted not being able to lay out a feast or dedicate a calf to Poteidan as the occasion demanded, but he gave his son a silver fibula that had belonged to Yikashata, and Kikkeros honored the youth by allowing him to pour that evening’s libations and lead the household devotions.

  There were small blessings. Olive groves produced fruit at midwinter, and the local goatherds reported that their animals, who thrived on weeds and shrubs, were kidding. Kikkeros took the opportunity to offer up one of his older nanny goats in sacrifice, thus providing nourishing meat for the children.

  Winter retreated at the proper change of season, and spring was fairer than it had been the previous year. Grass began sprouting where graves had marred the earth before. The Minos traded gold and vessels for Libyan cattle, lentils and barley from Babylon, lettuce and pomegranates from Egypt, and sheep from the highlands of Kydonia. The population in Katsamba swelled. Skilled fisherman and more boats meant greater access to Diktynna’s blessings.

  On the second anniversary of the cataclysm, the townspeople gathered before the west court of the temple to observe the investiture of the new high priest of Poteidan, after fully fifteen months of legal and ecclesiastical wrangling. He was a conservative, a kinsman of the late High Priest Selukkos, which pleased many. High Priestess Kapanni, standing in the Window of Appearances, conveyed the blessings of Mother Rhaya, and priestesses of Ashera brought forth the sacred snakes to witness the devotions of the faithful, to pass along their messages.