A longer journey might have been better as it now seemed to come upon them in a rush. A year of waiting and anticipation and discussion and planning; and there it was, right there before them.
“I feel sick.” Such an admission from Danae was rare and gave some indication as to how overcome she really was.
“Me too,” Ilia agreed.
“Daddy…” Leda did not need to finish her sentence, as the fear she wished to convey gripped her vocal chords, cracking and escalating her tone.
“It’s alright sweetie, you’ll be safe. You’ll all be safe! I promise!” Dad glanced over his shoulder as he said this to try and give them a reassuring look, but it was too brief and he was too apprehensive himself to succeed in this intent.
The hilltop behemoth loomed ever more ominously above them as they drew near and all their eyes were fixed upon it: Knossos, the palace of King Minos and reputedly the location of the legendary Labyrinth of Daedalus. Dad turned into the car park and, after a few seconds of the sound of tyres crunching on gravel, they came to a halt and he turned the engine off. There was no time for any more build up.
The girls noticed Dad’s hesitation, as well as the long, single, very deep breath that inflated then deflated his chest. He paused for a moment, then seemed suddenly aware that the girls were watching him. There was a moment of awkward silence from which Ilia was the first to recover:
“Shall we go and find the Wings of Daedalus?”
The spell was broken.
“Absolutely!” Danae responded with her usual enthusiasm restored.
“Fine by me!” agreed Leda, although she sounded less convinced than her siblings. Dad gave them all an appreciative smile and then opened his door. Although it was still early, already it must have been at least 30 degrees, as a wave of heat flooded their previously air-conditioned space and swept over them.
“Phew!” Dad exclaimed. “It’s a bit of a scorcher girls!”
They clambered out and grabbed their daypacks, while Dad checked again that they had all put sunscreen on and had everything required to endure a hot day in the open. There was no more preparation to be done.
As the car park is right under it and separated from it by a steep rise, the palace of Knossos was now out of site, but its presence could be felt by all the girls. The feeling is difficult to describe, but it was like the effect achieved by the strict head teacher, when he or she personally decides to supervise you when taking your most difficult school exam – as if you were not stressed enough already. There was a tension, an awareness, an oppression. And it was something which they were about to enter voluntarily.
The car park contained the usual variety of tourist buses and hire cars and, at the end of it, was a disorderly queue of people in summer clothes, wearing hats and wielding daypacks and cameras – as if they had all been issued to them. Beside the mob was a small gift shop and, at the apex of their queue, was a wide and functional steel porch that sheltered the entrance – the bottleneck where tickets were collected and through which the swarming plague of visitors were discharged upon the ancient ruins. In the presence of such a mundane collection of 21st century tourists, with their sunglasses and smart phones and water bottles, some of the girls’ apprehension subsided. A mythological quest from the Ancient world seemed highly unlikely in such company.
Their skin tingling and stomachs churning, the girls joined the end of the queue and Dad told them to wait for him there.
“Right girlies, I’ll go get the tickets. Won’t be long.”
Dad was soon back with them and for a few agonisingly long minutes they shuffled forwards, the apprehension growing with every step. It was as if they were queuing to enter the gaping mouth of a whale. It seemed much longer but, after less than ten minutes, they were finally through the entrance and joined the cavalcade of tourists on the Royal Road to Knossos. The road itself was quite unique – a straight path paved with large regular slabs that descended and then rose through a narrow defile, the stone retaining walls on either side rimmed with a light wood of scented fir trees. Despite the number of tourists on it, it still presented a suitably grand and somewhat ominous approach to the palace. After just a few minutes they emerged and stood blinking in the blazing sunlight on the edge of the ruins of the 4000-year-old palace of the Minoan monarchy.
The ruins of Knossos were different to anything any of them had visited before. Unlike Pompeii or Ostia Antica or Paestum, this was definitely a residence, rather than a city or a town, and so it was a great series of interlinking rooms and corridors and courtyards, rather than houses and buildings built around a street network. Many of the rooms, of course, must have been vast, as would be expected in an ancient palace of the monarch of a great civilisation, but to the girls as they passed through it that day, the layout felt far more intimate, each room or space having had a very human purpose within the great household.
Most of the palace was open to the sky, as if broken and deroofed by giants greedy for what was contained within so, from where they were standing when they first entered, they had the impression that they could see the entire residence. It was not, however, entirely destroyed; here and there rooves and dark doorways implied that at least some of the great House of King Minos was protected and intact. Something else which struck them – and that they had never seen elsewhere – was the colour; sections of the palace had been restored and painted in their original hues of chalky sky blues and rusty reds and ochre yellows, bringing the sandy-coloured stone to life, and conveying some sense of the magnificence this palace must once have possessed.
“It’s not that big,” said Ilia.
“Well,” Dad disagreed, “it would have been a massive house in its day. Probably a couple of thousand people could have lived here.”
“Yeah I know – I don’t mean it like that. What I mean is that I can’t imagine that the entrance to the Labyrinth could be here somewhere and no one has found it. I mean, it’s not like Pompeii. Anything could be hidden there. But here…” she trailed off, clearly dubious.
“Well, this isn’t a normal situation is it? Maybe it’s here, but is not meant to have been found.”
“Yeah,” Leda agreed, “it could be like, behind a secret door or something, Ilia.”
“Thank you Leda!” Ilia had a very low tolerance for her youngest sister trying to tell her anything.
“There are several levels to this, as well; I understand it goes quite deep into the hillside and was several stories higher than it is now. There are probably lots of places where you can crawl through into hidden rooms. We’ll just have to search every nook and cranny.”
“We might be able to get some hints,” Danae suggested, “if we touch some of the stones and use The Sight. We might even see Daedalus and Minos talking about it, or something like that.”
“Or Theseus and the Minotaur!” erupted Leda excitedly. “Wouldn’t that be cool!”
“Yeah, as long as the Minotaur isn’t still here!” responded Ilia.
“What?” said Danae; her tone was flat and overflowing with the most mocking sarcasm, “living in the rocks here, three or four thousand years later?”
Looking around at this ruinous place, so clearly a relic of such a distant and near forgotten past, the idea of anything in the ruins apart from scurrying lizards seemed very unlikely.
“And durr Ilia – Theseus killed him!” Leda really did not need to roll her eyes as well; her tone was condescending enough. “I just meant we might get to see some of the story if we touch the right stones. And it might show us where the Labyrinth is.”
“Whatever, Leda.” Normally Ilia would have bitten back a little more ferociously at being dismissed like she was idiotic, but this was a special day and her tolerance was higher. Instead, she changed the subject. “When was the palace ruined, Dad?”
“No one is quite sure, I don’t think, Ilia. I don’t know a huge amount about the Minoans, in fact” – and here he seemed to give himself an excuse for this admission �
� “I don’t think anyone knows a lot about them. I did read one book about them that talked about their periods being defined by the various dates of the construction phases of this palace, and their pottery, but there is so little known of them that it makes pretty dull reading. They were incredibly early – like 2500 BC. To put that in context, in Britain they were still constructing stone circles like Stonehenge when the Minoans were building things like this. Well, not quite like this, but this palace wasn’t that much later. And the Callanish stone circle in Lewis was probably erected about the same time as the Minoan civilisation flourished. In fact, in Scotland, it is unlikely that they ever built anything on this sort of scale until Victorian times, 4000 years later.”
“Yep, pretty advanced the ol’ Scots,” Danae added drily.
“What I find most interesting about the Minoans, though, is that it was probably a volcano that caused the end of their civilisation.”
“Like Pompeii?” Leda’s eyes lit up.
“A bit similar, I suppose. There was an underwater volcano called Mount Thera, which actually made a ring of islands in the sea. Santorini was one of those islands. Well, you remember when we talked about Vesuvius and how big the explosion was, apparently when Thera erupted it was incomparably bigger than Vesuvius.”
“Bigger? How is that even possible?” Ilia was incredulous.
“I know, it’s amazing. There have been a few bigger eruptions around the world than the Vesuvius eruption of 79 AD. I was reading on it last night after you all went to sleep. There was an eruption in the 1800s of Mount Krakatoa in Indonesia. It was several times bigger than Vesuvius and put so much ash into the atmosphere that it blocked out some of the sunlight and world temperatures dropped for a couple of years. Well, Mount Thera, which erupted maybe 1500 BC, was meant to be about four times bigger even than Krakatoa. One of the biggest eruptions the planet has ever seen. They think it caused tidal waves as big as 120 metres high, which hit the north coast of Crete and destroyed all the towns and villages along it, virtually wiping out an entire civilization in one hit. That’s a wave nearly as big as the London Eye! Like something straight out of a disaster movie. There were earthquakes and fires as well. It must have seemed like the whole world was tearing apart. It’s thought that it was even felt as far away as China, because something referring to earthquakes and ash appears in one of their written records from the time. Famine in Egypt is also blamed on it. Some have argued it caused the plagues of Egypt that allowed the Israelites to leave. And it is probably the best explanation for the legend of the lost city of Atlantis. Historians think it devastated and weakened the Minoan civilisation so much that it allowed the Mycenaeans to conquer them. You know, Agamemnon’s lot?”
“All because of a volcano erupting? Wow.” Ilia was genuinely impressed.
“And this palace was there then, Dad?” asked Leda.
“Yep. Earthquakes probably pulled part of the palace down. And because the Minoans were sea traders, most of their settlements were on the sea, and all those along the north coast of Crete would have been wiped out…”
“I just had a thought…” Danae interrupted, looking very pleased with herself.
“Well done!” came Ilia’s response, injecting some sarcasm of her own.
Danae just glared at her for a second.
“Yeah good one,” she said dismissively. This was clearly too good an idea to be put off by sororal banter. “Anyway, if we can find the right stones, we might be able to see the eruption! Cool hey?” Her eyes were glowing at the thought, but Ilia was not about to admit that it was a good one.
“Oh hello, Danae! We can’t even see the volcano from here, not even the sea! We wouldn’t be able to see the eruption.”
“Would we Daddy?” Leda asked, less confident than her sisters.
“Well,” answered Dad, hesitant to contradict Ilia in a moment of sisterly rivalry, “you might be able to. Remember the plume of Vesuvius’ big eruption was about 30km high?” They nodded. “I read that the ash plume from Mt Thera’s eruption is estimated to have reached 80km straight up! That’s nearly in space! So you probably could see that from here. In fact, it might have dominated the entire sky, like you were right under it. Something that big is impossible to imagine.”
“Well,” concluded Danae triumphantly, “we just need to find the right stone!”
“And we aren’t going to find any stones standing here all day,” agreed Dad. “So are you ready...”
The girls nodded eagerly.
“Let’s do it,” said Leda, conveying a determination that was incongruent with both the scale of their task and the apprehension she was feeling. But for all of them, excitement was starting to outweigh fear and they were eager to get on.
They were in a large open courtyard on the edge of the palace and, by the position of the morning sun which was directly ahead and rising towards them, Dad pointed out it must be the western edge of the complex. Leda and Ilia seemed quite impressed by this until Danae pointed towards a nearby sign that read West Court.
“Did you work that out from the sun, Dad, or did you maybe …read that sign?”
Dad laughed his slightly guilty admission.
“Well done Danae, it always pays to be observant! That and I have a map as well.” He pulled it out of one of the large side pockets on his shorts and, identifying a ruined wall of suitable height, approached it and spread the map out so they could all see. The girls crowded around.
“So that’s us here,” he indicated with his finger on the left-hand side of the map, “and that big open space in the middle is the Central Court; the whole palace seems built around that. See there are four sections or wings, really, one on each side, and we should probably work through them one at a time. So shall we start there, in the middle?” Dad looked up, only to realise that the girls were already on their way. “Wait for me in the Court!” he called out, then swept up the map and made an abysmal attempt at multi-tasking as he tried to both fold the map up and walk at the same time. Dad was very good when he focused on a single task, but his ability to take on more than one did not even extend to maintaining a conversation whilst making a cup of coffee.
In order to reach the Central Court they had to work their way through the west wing and it was difficult to resist the temptation to go exploring immediately. But Dad promised they would come back to it soon so they carried on, albeit wide-eyed and so interested in the ruins immediately about them that they kept bumping into both each other and every obstacle in their way.
After a short time they passed through and found themselves in the Central Court, a space so large it felt more like a small Roman forum or Greek Agora, surrounded on all four sides by ruined walls and rooms of varying heights. Many of the walls were only waist height to Leda, so they were low enough to permit the stunning backdrop of the surrounding hills and distant mountains. Leda immediately picked out a large block of stone near the centre of the Court and headed straight for it, her sub-conscious feeling the need for a central point of reference for their search. Her sisters followed and Dad, still struggling with the challenge of both trying to fold the map in its original pattern whilst putting one foot in front of the other, was bringing up the rear.
Unknown to Dad, all three girls could feel something building, a rising tension that made their stomachs knot and their skin tingle. But it was more than this, there was an awareness as well, something difficult to describe, a cross between the discomfort of knowing you are being watched, and the sense of entering a special place or presence. Perhaps the impossible scenario of entering a completely deserted St Peters on Easter Monday, whilst knowing you are being stalked by an unseen lion, would convey some sense as to what they were feeling. Their fingers were buzzing and their hearing almost painfully acute, both with the immediacy of the palace about them but also something about the entire landscape they were in. There was a familiarity and a fear and an excitement; none of them doubted that they had been here in a previous life. And whatever
had happened had left a stain on their souls that had not been washed clear despite countless draughts from the river Lethe.
A couple of steps from the great block of stone and Leda faltered. She had felt something over her shoulder and the fine hair on the back of her neck was on end. She turned around and squinted into the blue sky – she really needed to get her sunglasses from her daypack. But not yet; there was a range of rugged hills and distant mountains that had risen to view above the outline made by the fir trees that bordered the western margin of the palace. Amidst them and far off, partially obscured, was a small peak that drew her eye. It was clearly incredibly high, but so distant that it appeared lower than it really was. The sight of it sent a shiver down Leda’s spine and, despite the temperature already being in the mid 30’s, she felt a momentary chill as if she had just opened the door to a freezer room.
Danae was only a few steps behind and, seeing Leda turn and the expression on her face, she pivoted automatically; the same distant peak abducted her vision and for a moment she saw nothing else.
Ilia, slightly further behind, turned on cue also, but was not yet clear of the treeline. Knowing something was there, however, she took five long steps backwards, then stood frozen next to Danae, eyes fixed on the same peak.
Dad, of course, felt nothing. Well, that is not quite true; he was suffering from a disproportionate degree of frustration at what he saw as a malicious lack of cooperation from the map; it simply refused to fold up the same it had been before being unfolded. Finally, thinking he would teach it a lesson, he just forced it into a small rectangle, reversing many of the creases, gratified by the notion that it would cause the obstinate cartographical construct some discomfort at the least. He simply did not believe that the lack of cooperation of inanimate objects was innocent.
The Progeny of Daedalus Page 5
