by Laura Gill
Once they were past the marketplace on the dusty path toward home, Karsinos commented, “There was a time when the king was brave, and his followers good men. But it’s not been that way since I was a child.”
Knossos was dying a slow, pathetic death. Dikte’s paternal grandfather had been born in a mansion with servants. That was before the king’s great-grandfather Idomeneus had abandoned the administration of the countryside to raid in Anatolia. During his years away, the king had desecrated foreign sanctuaries and offended the Anatolian gods; though he had been driven into exile by a rival kinsman upon his homecoming his impieties had brought drought, famine, and sickness to the people. Zeus sent the relentless heat and dust but no rain to quench the drought. Mother Rhea let the cereal grasses wither in the fields. As Eleuthia, she turned deaf ears to the mothers who implored her to protect their children from starvation.
Apollo hounded the people with his plague-darts. Dikte’s mother had died of a mysterious fever, wasting away with forty-eight others when Dikte was seven years old. Last summer, Dikte herself had barely survived a sickness that had carried off twenty-three of her neighbors, including three friends. She counted the losses not in people, but in the empty doorways of houses left to the elements, in the mounds of mass graves bordering meadows where sheep grazed, and in the forbidding stillness around the well curb, the marketplace, and the threshing house—all those places that had been filled with the sounds of human conversation.
Knossos was no longer a town inhabited by thousands but a village of twelve hundred downtrodden people. The mansion where Dikte’s grandfather was born was no more, and the servants were gone; the family squatted in the two rooms that had survived when the upper stories had collapsed. Houses all around stood empty. People were emigrating from the coastal plains, moving south toward the highlands, even into the mountains where the living was harsher but more secure. Dikte watched neighbors bundle whatever belongings they could carry, collect a few animals, and leave. Her mother used to tell her that those people were going away to visit kinsmen, except that they never came back.
She had the Labyrinth. Had anyone asked, she might have told them that the ruins crowning the temple mount were her birthright and, whether the women of the cult house disparaged her or not, she would have been correct. No one else wanted the dilapidated structure; the mount had become a taboo place, a haunt of ghosts. For Dikte, it was a natural refuge.
Where the abandoned dwellings in the village made her sad, she loved the Labyrinth’s ruins. She liked to imagine herself as the high priestess, dressed and painted like the priestesses depicted in the fading fresco fragments she sometimes found near the shrine. Crowned with dandelions and wild daisies and poppies, she could pretend she was a great, beautiful high priestess who had just commissioned a golden diadem from the lapidaries. She could clamber through the rubble of weed-choked passages to what had once been the storehouses and imagine the burnt pithoi full of produce. If raiders ever invaded Knossos, she knew she could take shelter in the cellars where King Minos had once sent disobedient children to be devoured, and trust in the Minotaur’s ghost to protect her. The Minotaur was not a god. She could not trust the gods.
*~*~*~*
“Ephoros should be returning soon to collect more refugees.” When Ormesilas spoke, which was rarely now since his wife’s death, he neither jested nor minced words. If he commented on anything, it was with a purpose. “Karsinos intends to leave with his family. Dikte, you will go with them.”
Bewildered, Dikte glanced from her father to her aunt. Their craggy faces, illuminated by the hearth, were as grave and resolute as oaks. A cold heaviness settled in her stomach. “We’re leaving?”
“Not we,” Ormesilas answered gravely. “Klymene and I are staying. We have obligations.”
Her breath caught. She had never left the valley. Once or twice, when frightened by rumors of strange ships or roaming bands, when hearing ominous sounds in the night, when waking from nightmares of raiders with bleeding neck stumps and severed heads with hungry eyes, then yes, she had considered running, but had never really imagined leaving Knossos for good. Where could she have gone? Her only havens were the Labyrinth and the family home, and she was no longer certain about the latter. “What do you mean, you’re not going?”
“Must I repeat myself?” Ormesilas picked a bit of onion from his teeth. “We have obligations to the gods of Knossos.”
“If you won’t come, then I don’t want to go, either.”
Except, she discovered then, that despite her declaration to the contrary, a voice inside her told her that she did want to leave, that if she waited, there might not be a shrine to inherit.
When her father frowned, the shadows thrown by the ember-glow gave him a sinister aspect. “Daughter, this isn’t a matter for debate,” he grumbled. “You’re going into the mountains with your kinsmen and the boy you’re going to marry, and that’s that.”
Again, his words gave her pause. “I’m betrothed?” No one had told her that she was betrothed. No one told her anything—though now they were, and it was all at once. “Who is he?”
“Tripodiskos, son of Timaios,” he answered. “You’ll be married and gone from here within the next fortnight.”
Dikte choked. Tripodiskos. Little Threefoot. Eleuthia had turned against the youth while he was still in his mother’s womb, leaving him stricken with a withered right leg. He walked on a cane like an old man. Moreover, he was a peasant, a herdsman’s son, when she should have wed a boy of the priestly class. “That cripple?” Tears sprang to her eyes. Her world was falling down around her. “I won’t marry him!”
Rising, Ormesilas slapped her so hard that sunbursts bloomed behind her eyelids. “Yes, you will. The bride price has already been paid,” he growled. “Tripodiskos is a hard-working, responsible young man. I don’t see what you’ve got to complain about.”
“I won’t marry him!” Dikte’s cheek throbbed painfully; she would have a bruise tomorrow. “He’s cursed by the gods.”
He struck her again. “A priest’s daughter does as she’s told.”
She was sobbing uncontrollably now. “He’s half a man.” Snot dribbled from her nose. “He herds goats.”
“What, because he can’t run footraces or climb a tree to fetch you figs like that useless, pretty youth you pined over last year?” Ormesilas curled his lip in disgust. “Akastos turned out worthless—shirking his duties and abandoning his aged parents to seek his fortune. Fortune, pah!” He raised his voice, but did not shout. “For all the gods know, he’s turned raider himself. I’d be ashamed to call him my son-in-law.”
Her aunt interjected, “Be easy on her, Brother. You don’t understand young maids. Dikte, come here, my dear.” The moment her aunt opened her arms, Dikte flew sobbing into them.
How unfair! She had been a good girl, obeying her elders, paying reverence to and tending the gods, and this was her reward! Of course, her elders would have pointed out that mortals were the playthings of the gods, that life meant hardships, and mostly she would have agreed, but surely her marriage was a thing that could be controlled, fashioned more to her liking. So how was it that her father could sell her to some nobody who was not even a whole man?
Klymene stroked her hair. “Poor thing! You wanted someone handsome like Akastos, didn’t you? I know, but you’re better off this way. Everybody knows comely boys make bad husbands.” Her aunt had cautioned her thus so many times before that Dikte no longer heard her. “Tripodiskos isn’t so terrible. Eleuthia might have punished his mother’s impieties through him, but Zeus has compensated by granting him gifts in abundance.”
Dikte neither knew nor cared what those gifts were. If he touched her, the gods would curse her with sickness. Their children would turn out deformed. “I’m afraid. His affliction might...”
Klymene patted her shoulder with an arthritic hand. “You know better than that, girl. His ailment affects no one but him. His family is clean, as are the animals he works
with. I, too, am clean, and I helped deliver him. You have nothing to fear.”
Dikte wanted to argue that none of those people had to spread their legs and accept a cripple’s seed, but before she could find the right words her aunt withdrew from the embrace, took her hand and led her to the bench where the household gods resided. Crumbs of the evening meal, the choicest bits from the family’s own meager ration, had been placed in the kernos before them.
Klymene reverently lifted Mother Rhea from her place of prominence and kissed the goddess. “These gods are your inheritance.”
Some of the idols cluttering the bench were generations old, imbued with power from the accretion of prayers and offerings. The oldest, the ceramic Great Bull and the young Zeus, had been crafted in one of the Labyrinth’s workshops just before the temple’s destruction generations ago, and had come down through her father’s line.
The other idols were more recent. Dikte’s maternal grandfather, a potter, had turned and painted some of the goddesses as a wedding present for her mother. The Mother Rhea in Klymene’s hands did not resemble the piecemeal goddesses of faience and fragile, yellowing ivory that Dikte sometimes uncovered in the Labyrinth’s ruins. Rhea carried a small head with a severe expression on an elongated neck. Dikte’s grandfather had paid special attention to the goddess’s diadem with its perching doves, and to her upraised hands with their elegant fingers, but Rhea’s lentil-sized breasts were ill-proportioned in contrast with her cylindrical skirt. She was not a goddess to love, but an unforgiving representation of the earth.
Dikte did not feel ready to inherit the gods so soon. “I don’t want to take them away from you,” she murmured. “What would you do for gods then?”
Klymene carefully placed Rhea back on the bench. “There are still the gods of the Labyrinth. If your father and I have warning that raiders are approaching, we will seek shelter on the temple mount.” She turned to Dikte again and smiled reassuringly. “Don’t be afraid. Lady Athena will warn us of the danger, Hermes will guide our steps, and Father Zeus will protect us from harm.”
The whole point of the raids, Dikte figured, was that the intended victims had no warning. Anyway, she had more faith in the spirits of the Labyrinth. “Go below where the Minotaur’s ghost dwells,” she advised. “No one will follow you there.”
Still wearing a smile, Klymene nodded. “You’ve been exploring in the ruins again, haven’t you?”
Dikte gave no answer. Her aunt knew how much she liked the Labyrinth, and besides, the other matter dominated her thoughts. “Must I really marry Tripodiskos?” She spoke softly lest her father overhear and scold her again. Her earlier outburst notwithstanding, as a priest’s daughter she was too well bred to throw a screaming tantrum or dash out into the night. The raiders who had escaped the king’s men might have returned.
Klymene’s answer reinforced her disappointment. “Yes, you must. His kinsmen have already paid the bride price.”
“How much was it?” Had her father sold her cheaply?
“Five goats, a heifer and nursing calf, a jar of oil, and a length of wool.”
Dikte’s spirits sank further. She had assumed that a bull priest’s daughter would have been worth more.
*~*~*~*
Two days later, Dikte’s prospective mother-in-law paid an official call to measure Dikte’s weaving and cooking skills, and to ask pointed questions about her health. Did she menstruate regularly? Had her kinswomen explained the intimacy that passed between a husband and wife? Dikte might have been a virgin, but she was not backward. She had seen animals mating during breeding season. She might have given herself to Akastos last summer had he not chosen to abandon his parents at the same time the Mouse God’s ill-omened dart struck her with fever.
Nonetheless, Lysandra insisted on probing between her legs to find her maidenhead. Was her virginity that important, then? Had Lysandra been a woman of the priestly class, certainly, but they were a family of goatherds where fertility mattered more. Tripodiskos’s mother attended to that, too, weighing Dikte’s breasts in her hands to gauge their firmness and inspecting her curves to ascertain whether she had childbearing hips.
Lysandra’s next comment concerned the bruise discoloring Dikte’s cheek. “Where did you get that?”
Dikte hung her head. “My father,” she whispered.
“So you were disobedient? I won’t have an unruly daughter-in-law.”
“It had nothing to do with the marriage,” Klymene lied. “We told the girl she was to leave Knossos without us. She cried and said she didn’t want to leave, when my brother had planned everything.”
“Dikte’s a good girl,” Thale added. Karsinos stood guard in the doorway, as Dikte’s father had gone to preside over a rite for Archelaos. Her uncle had the good grace to avert his gaze while Lysandra inspected his niece, though, being a garrulous man, he did not refrain from commenting, “Hasn’t your husband told you that one examines the merchandise before purchase, not after?”
He said it with a chuckle, but Lysandra was a severe woman, thin-lipped, with large hands and an air that was all business. “No one asked for your opinion.” She handed back Dikte’s smock to let her dress again. “Don’t expect to become a priestess in the new place. I’ve heard they already have a cult house. You’ll be doing whatever work is needed—cooking and cleaning, weaving and washing fleece.”
Dikte strove to keep her irritation from showing. Would her mother-in-law always scold her thus, or was this a singular occasion, a laying down of the rules? “I know,” she answered softly.
“Oh, do you?”
“Be gentle with the girl,” Karsinos warned in a lighthearted voice. “She’s as hard-working and obedient as her mother was.”
Lysandra ignored his remarks, addressing her questions to Dikte instead. “Klymene claims she’s trained you in the ways of a midwife. Is that true?”
“Of course it is!” Klymene exclaimed.
“Let the girl answer for herself.”
Since before her flowering, Dikte had attended childbirths with Klymene and had witnessed scenes that made her reconsider wanting babies of her own. How much harder would it be with Tripodiskos as the father? “Yes,” she admitted.
“Good. That’s useful.” Lysandra’s approval was as warm as the icy winds that blew from the north in winter, and to Dikte’s dismay the woman was not finished lecturing her. “You’re expected to help tend Agathon’s withered limb. You will perform this duty willingly and cheerfully. “Furthermore—” There was even more? “While others may call him Tripodiskos, you’re to call him by his proper name, the name I gave him.” Lysandra straightened her shoulders and raised her chin as she thumped her breast. “Should I ever hear you use one of the cruel jibes others—”
“Dikte’s a good-natured girl,” Thale insisted. “If you want her to call him Agathon, that’s what she’ll do.”
With a satisfied huff, Lysandra ended the interrogation. She took her leave with an awkward embrace. If the gesture was meant to reassure, Dikte considered it a failure. Her mother-in-law did not like her.
As she hunkered down beside the hearth with her head in her heads, Thale advised, “Don’t take that harpy’s scolding too much to heart. She’s always been that way.”
Leaning in closer, Klymene added in a hushed tone, “No one can strip you of being a priestess, least of all her. It’s in your blood.”
Karsinos came back into the house after having seen Lysandra out. “Don’t worry, Dikte.” He winked at her. “You won’t be alone with that woman in the mountains. Thale and I will be with you. Which reminds me, you’ll sit with us tonight when Ephoros speaks.”
Dikte managed a weak smile. Karsinos was her favorite uncle. His large hands on the potter’s wheel fashioned delicate things for the cult house and the king. He used to pinch clay into doves for her, and when she was old enough he had shown her how it was done. “Thank you, Uncle.”
Toward evening, as sunset colored the ridges of Mount Ida, Karsinos
and Thale returned and together the family walked the short distance to the communal hall to hear Ephoros, a herdsman and guide from the Lasithi highlands, speak about the move to the mountains. Representatives of the king stood along the walls, and the elders of the Knossian damos were present. Dikte wondered if the followers had come to intimidate the people into staying. Archelaos’s brothers-in-law were known to go around threatening farmers and herdsmen overheard voicing a desire to leave Knossos. Certainly they had come to quash the airing of grievances.
Ephoros wasted no time in describing the meanness of the refugee community his audience aspired to join. “You think life here in the lowlands is hard? You’ve not seen Karfi, but you’ll know it when you see it because it sticks up from the ridges of Mount Dikte like a wart. There’s not much room, maybe enough for two hundred now. We’re still building, shifting stones and mixing plaster. It’ll be walled when it’s done, unlike down here where anybody can walk in.” He snorted derisively. “But be warned. Winter comes earlier and stays longer. There’ll be frost on the ground in a few weeks.”
Dikte had rarely seen frost, the winters at Knossos were so dry. Yet if the mountain refuge was remote, so elevated, then the growing season could not be very long. Where would people plant their crops? They could not possibly subsist entirely on goat’s milk, meat and cheese.
Someone braver than she raised his hand to inquire about food. Ephoros whistled through the gap made by his missing front teeth, then answered, “There’s plenty of workable land on the plateau below. You can grow wheat and barley and lentils as the immortal gods allow, which isn’t much. You’ll have to be fit and strong to go back and forth every day, because the way is steep, very winding. But that’s how it has to be. Taking refuge in the mountains doesn’t do much good if we make it too easy for raiders to reach us, eh?” He chuckled, despite the fact that he was dead serious.
If Dikte had disliked the prospect of a future spent with a crippled husband far from Knossos before, she thoroughly loathed it now. Each word that fell from Ephoros’s lips depressed her that much more. She avoided glancing too often at Tripodiskos and his kinsmen, lest she wish herself dead and Thanatos somehow hear her prayer.
