Weighing Shadows

by Lisa Goldstein

  “How on earth did they find us?” Walker asked in English. “How did they know?”

  “Silence!” one of the guards said. “You’ve lost your right to speak, lost any rights you might have had.”

  “Where are we going?” Franny asked.

  “Silence, I said. But you’ll see soon enough.”

  They continued on into the city. The houses around them started to look familiar; they were headed toward the palace. They’re taking us to the queen, Ann thought. And what we’ve done is treason. She saw a vivid picture then, her neck on a chopping block, the shadow of a double ax raised above her.

  A loud shout came from somewhere ahead of them, and then a wild cheer that seemed to go on and on. They turned a corner and came to a gate, with rearing bulls atop the walls on either side. They had arrived at the palace, at the bull court.

  The guards took them inside and pushed through the crowds of people at the back. They skirted another wall and came finally to a raised dais, with an embroidered canopy shielding it from the sun. Several women sat under the canopy, fanning themselves.

  The guards forced them up a small staircase and onto the platform. “Here they are, Queen Ariadne,” one of them said. All the guards put their fists to their forehead, saluting her.

  A woman turned toward them. The queen, like Da Silva, seemed to embody an archetype, or several archetypes at once. She looked like a mother, though one who was not gentle but terrible, stern—yet at the same time she had the energy and grace of a young woman. And her eyes seemed different still, old and dark and filled with wisdom. She was white as milk, and as thin as any of the women on the frescos.

  Someone shoved Ann into a chair near the queen and she landed heavily, unable to use her hands to brace herself. “Come and watch the games with me,” Queen Ariadne said. Her voice was soft and pleasant. “And I’ll consider what to do with you.”

  To Ann, already filled with terror, it sounded like a threat, as if the queen was about to throw them to the bulls. Walker must have thought the same thing, because she said, “Please, don’t—”

  “Hush,” the queen said. “Watch.”

  Ann looked at the vast space in front of her. A bull came running into the arena. In front of it, almost unbelievably, stood a slight figure, and as the bull hurtled toward him he jumped, grasped the horns, somersaulted over, and landed on the bull’s back. The crowd cheered and he turned to the queen, spread his arms, and grinned, accepting the people’s love and excitement. Then he leapt off the bull and was caught on the shoulders of another acrobat.

  The bull turned and lumbered off in another direction. A different acrobat, this one a woman, cartwheeled toward it until she stood in its path. She wore only a breechcloth, like the men, and she looked even smaller than the last dancer, a straight line against the solid mass of the bull. The bull saw her, charged—and she, too, jumped for the horns, somersaulted, came down on the bull’s back, and dropped down onto another person’s shoulders.

  Ann had been holding her breath. She tried to applaud and was surprised to feel the bindings on her wrists holding her back. She had nearly forgotten them, forgotten the queen’s threat poised above them like a sword.

  Another woman stood facing the bull. It charged, she leapt—and missed catching one of the horns. She hung from the other horn for a moment, then dropped off and scurried across the court. The bull thundered after her. She reached a stone platform in the corner of the arena and climbed it quickly, then, as the bull came past her, dropped down on its back. She spread her arms, the way the others had done, but the cheers from the crowd were slight and scattered.

  Go for that stone, if she throws you into the arena, Ann thought. Stay there, and maybe the bull will forget about you. But she knew she could never outrun the bull, and that it was tall enough to scrape her off the stone.

  Her mouth was dry, and she tried to swallow. She wouldn’t survive more than a few seconds against the bull. If the company wants to rescue us, now would be a good time, she thought, but she had the idea that the company had lost track of them.

  The crowd gasped, and she realized something was happening on the court. A man lay on the ground, had somehow missed the bull’s back when he’d somersaulted. The bull swung its massive head from side to side, then gored him through with its horns.

  Ann looked away, and when she looked back a dancer was leading the bull toward a gate in the wall. When it had gone a woman climbed down from the queen’s platform and walked slowly over to the man.

  The crowd was silent. Two more women came out, one of them carrying a double ax, the other something that looked like a low table. The first woman lifted the man’s head onto the table—a chopping block, Ann realized. The man was still alive.

  She turned away again. There was a thud, and then the crowd cheered; a few of them were singing. She looked back for the smallest instant she could manage and saw the woman holding up the man’s head.

  Everyone was singing now. “What are they doing?” she asked. “Why on earth do they sound so happy?”

  “Kore will feast him tonight,” the queen said. “He was sacrificed in her name.”

  Incredibly, the games were continuing. The bull was led back out, and another woman faced it. Instead of a breech-cloth she wore trousers made of bright colored patches, and she had a cap sewn with bells on her head.

  The bull charged. She jumped, and like the earlier acrobat she missed one of the horns. She dangled from the other horn; the bull was close enough to the queen’s platform that Ann could see her fear. But it was an exaggerated fear, a fear that made fun of itself, and the crowd was laughing.

  The woman swung back and forth on the horn, her bells jingling. She looked puzzled now, as if trying to think of a way off. Then she grinned and twisted up and over, and suddenly she was sitting on the bull’s head, her legs dangling over its eyes.

  The bull roared and flung its head around in frustration. She scrambled up, slipped, recovered, slipped again, and dropped back down to the bull’s horn. She swung back and forth between the horns, moving in a quick intricate pattern that Ann could barely follow. The bull roared again, and tossed its head, and she used the motion to somersault over the horns and land on its back. It trotted off and she sat down abruptly, then bounced along its back until she dropped to the ground.

  The crowd cheered. The cheers went on for a long time, while the woman spread her arms and turned in a circle to take in the entire arena. The bull spotted her and charged, and she skipped away toward the gate in the wall.

  Even after she was gone the cheering continued. Ann wondered at the Kaphtorans, who could go from contemplating the mysteries of the underworld to laughing at a comedian in a quick heartbeat. Were they children, unable to understand the concept of death? Or were they something else, something so sophisticated she would never figure them out?

  The queen stood and spread her arms as if to embrace the crowd. As one, the people put their fists to their foreheads, saluting her. Then they stood and began to make their way down the stone steps.

  “Get up,” one of the guards said, prodding Da Silva with the blunt end of her spear.

  The games were over. They wouldn’t be sent into the arena after all. Ann’s feeling of relief was so overwhelming that for a moment she couldn’t move. Her legs seemed disconnected from her body, unfamiliar; she couldn’t seem to remember how they worked.

  “Take them to the River Room,” Queen Ariadne said.

  She left before they could ask what would happen to them next. The guards chivvied them up with the butts of the spears. Ann made an effort to stand. They were forced down the stairs, through an open door, and into the palace.

  THEY WENT ON FOR a long way, through corridors and colonnades, past pillars and frescos and carvings. In one wing of the palace they saw a row of open doors and beyond them craftspeople at work, women and men spinning thread, beating metal, painting unfired pottery.

  Finally they came to a wide staircase. They he
aded down and down, four or five floors, through a part of the palace that must have been carved into the hill. Then they were shown into a nearly empty room, with silk cushions scattered across the benches and over the floor. Frescos showed a flowing green river with fish and turtles, lilies and reeds.

  The guards sliced through their bindings and left them. They heard the sound of a bar being dragged across the door and they ran to slam against it, but it held firm.

  They dropped down to the cushions in the center of the room and started to take off their disguises: pulling out padding, taking off toupees, rearranging their clothing. “I want to know how they found us,” Walker said. “No one knew where we’d be, except the Minos.”

  “Well, that’s it then,” Elias said. “He must have talked.”

  “Why would he do that?”

  “He takes drugs, doesn’t he? And he drinks a lot, too. He must have let something slip.”

  “You think so?” Da Silva asked. “This was his moment, his rebellion against the queen. Do you really think he’d jeopardize that, even drugged?”

  “I don’t think he’s a very strong character, if that’s what you mean.”

  “I’m with Amabel,” Walker said. Amabel? Ann wondered. Right, Da Silva. “I don’t think he would have said anything. So who did?” She looked at Ann and Franny. “Are you two sure you didn’t say anything to Meret?”

  Ann felt anger rise within her and take her over, so strongly that for a moment she couldn’t speak. She’d told them about seeing Meret—she had squealed, as they said in the foster homes—and yet Walker still suspected her.

  “Of course we’re sure,” Franny said. “And we couldn’t have told her anything anyway—we didn’t even know the Minos’s plan when we met her. All we knew was that he wanted us to disable the lookouts, not when or how to do it.”

  “You could have seen her later, after we talked to the Minos again.”

  “When?” Ann asked scornfully. “We were cooped up in that room the whole time. Anyway, we wouldn’t have mentioned seeing her if we were plotting in secret all this time.”

  “I’m sorry, but it’s the only explanation. If the Minos didn’t say anything—”

  “Of course the Minos said something—” Franny said.

  “Oh, who cares?” Ann said. “How are we going to get out of here, that’s the important thing. You do realize that what we did was treason? That they’re going to kill us? How many other agents were killed on their assignments?”

  “I don’t know if we can get out of here,” Elias said. “You escaped from them once—they’re going to watch us carefully from now on.”

  “And we don’t have our bags, or we could have—” Walker said.

  “God, that’s right,” Da Silva said, interrupting. “If they track us back to the inn they’ll find our bags. The drugs and stun guns and computers—”

  “Well, but everything is pretty well hidden,” Elias said.

  “But what if they find them?” Da Silva turned to Ann and Franny. “You know the company’s policy on this, don’t you?”

  Ann remembered a lecture on it, but the other woman didn’t wait for her answer. “Tell them nothing about anything,” she said. “Not the drugs or the technology, not the company, not our meetings with the Minos and what we talked about.”

  “What if—what if they torture us?” Franny asked.

  “Don’t worry, they won’t. This isn’t the kind of culture that tortures.”

  Was that true? How could Da Silva know something like that? She didn’t remember anything about torture in Strickland’s lectures.

  “Wait, what did you mean about the bags?” she asked. “What could you do if you had them?”

  “Any number of things,” Da Silva said. “Send a message to the company, use the drugs somehow—”

  “You can—you can contact them? From here?”

  “Well, of course. We can send them messages, if we need to be extracted without a key. We don’t do it very often, and we can only send small bursts of text data—it uses a huge amount of energy. But this is an emergency.”

  Why didn’t they mention that before? Why did the company have to be so secretive? Suddenly Ann couldn’t bear to listen to them any longer; she felt trapped, suffocated. She stood and walked over to a partition and looked behind it. There was a toilet on the other side, and a large basin—it was the most luxurious prison she had ever heard of.

  “Well, but they have to know where we are, don’t they?” Franny said. “I mean, they’ll come and get us sooner or later.”

  “I don’t think—” Elias said slowly. He didn’t want to tell them, Ann saw, and she felt ill with disappointment. “They know which inns we were staying at—that much was worked out ahead of time. But there’s no way they’ll guess that we’re at the palace. I found you that first time because I knew that prisoners stayed in private houses—all I had to do was ask around and find the right one. But as far as I know, no one was ever jailed in the palace itself. They’ll have no idea.”

  “Well, but they have all the time they need to work it out, right?” Ann asked. “They could figure it out in 2050 or something, and still come back for us.”

  “That’s the problem,” Elias said. “If they were going to extract us they would have done it already. They would have stopped us on the way to the lookouts, someplace where we were alone.”

  “So that’s it. We’re going to die here.” No one said anything. “I wonder how long they’ll go until they give up.” She pulled her legs up and laid her head on her knees, feeling hopeless.

  “They might send someone to look for us, I suppose,” Elias said. He sounded dubious. “Time travel uses a tremendous amount of energy, though.”

  “So, what—they’d rather save a few bucks than rescue us?”

  Elias looked at her with impatience, and she realized how stupid she’d been. It wasn’t a question of money, she saw. The world the travelers came from had depleted most of their energy; they could not help but hate the way her tace had wasted all of its resources.

  “They’ll be doing everything they can,” Da Silva said.

  “But you don’t think it’ll be enough.”

  “There’s no point in being pessimistic. We can’t know what will happen.”

  A part of Ann wanted to believe her. She looked so much like a mother, the sort of kind, concerned parent who put you to bed when you were sick, and cheered when you got the lead in the school play, and commiserated when the boy you were interested in turned out not to be interested in you. But at the same time she knew that that wasn’t true, that she had conjured up a mother out of a comforting smile and warm, compassionate eyes.

  It was still afternoon, but she felt suddenly tired. She went to one of the benches and lay down, and in a short while she was asleep.

  SHE WOKE TO A loud scraping noise, and then the door opened and what seemed like a crowd of people walked into the room. For a moment she could make no sense of any of it— the sounds, the people, even where she was. Then she realized that someone had drawn back the bar on the door, that they had visitors, and she got up quickly.

  The queen stood in the center of the room. She wore a purple frilled skirt and a white open blouse, and her hair was twined with gold and beads and jewels. A circle of her women orbited around her, and surrounding them, like distant, outer planets, were servants with trays of food and guards holding spears.

  “I thought we’d have breakfast together,” Queen Ariadne said. If she noticed that they all looked slightly different, that they had removed their disguises, she gave no indication of it. “And I want to apologize for that trick I played on you yesterday, making you believe I’d send you into the bull games. I was angry with you, and it affected my judgment.”

  She motioned to the servants, and they set down plates of hot bread and dried fruit, and mugs filled with some kind of juice. She sat on one of the pillows, spread her frilled skirts around her legs, and gestured to the others to join h
er. The servants and guards moved back to the walls and waited.

  “This was my daughter’s room, when she was a child,” she said, as Ann and the others gathered around her. “I want to show you the Goddess’s hospitality, even though I don’t truly understand what you hoped to accomplish here. We defeated your army, you know. The Achaeans had landed from the mainland, ready to invade the palace and take command while everyone was at the games. And what I want to know is why. Why would someone from Egypt send the Achaeans against us?”

  No one said anything. The queen looked puzzled, as though one of her children had lied about something unimportant. Ann couldn’t help feeling sorry for her: they had come into her country, taken advantage of her hospitality, plotted with her enemies, and she would never know the reason for it.

  Ariadne took a sip of her drink. Ann brought her mug to her mouth. Her drink was dark red, like blood. She tasted it cautiously. Was it pomegranate? Would she be forced to stay here, like Persephone in the myth? She shuddered.

  “We know much of it already, of course,” Ariadne went on. “We know the Minos has been talking to the Achaeans, that he wants to rule here.” She shook her head. “He’s not a very strong person, you know—he didn’t take much convincing to tell us everything. He would have made a terrible ruler. So help me understand, please. Why did you want to set him up here as queen?”

  No one answered her. “He’s a strange one,” the queen said. “I’ve had two Minoses before him, and both of them lived their lives here without complaint. They know, when they begin their term, that they’ll be sacrificed at the end of seven years, and they accept it. The fruits and flowers die each winter, and are reborn in spring. And the Minos is reborn too, though not in his own person. If he is not sacrificed to Our Lady of the Waning Moon at the proper time, what would happen to the fertility of the land? What would happen to us if the crops die within the earth?”