The Sea King’s Daughter

by Barbara Michaels

  “Guten Morgen,” said-I had forgotten his name. He was Austrian.

  “Hi,” I said, and freed myself. I stood up, holding the rail for support.

  The view almost made me forget my queasy stomach. The air is so clear in that part of the world that everything seems to sparkle. The water was aquamarine, sprinkled with lines of foamy white bubbles. The sky was a big inverted bowl of blue, with fat white clouds in it. We were gliding along the coast of Crete, and I could see the harbor of Herakleion, with a rash of houses and buildings enclosing it. The island was a bright, cheerful green, but behind the coast rose brown, bare mountains, and in that marvelous brilliant light it seemed as if I could make out the separate boulders on the slopes.

  “We come into harbor,” said Hans, or Fritz, or whatever his name was. Joining me at the rail, he threw an enormous arm around me and squeezed my shoulders till the joints cracked. He was a great believer in touching. That arm had been around somebody, usually me, the whole evening. He was a big, blond, sleepy-looking guy who looked like a linebacker. There were 220 or 230 pounds of him, and most of it showed; he was traveling in a pair of shorts, sandals, a knapsack, and a beard. I put my arm around him and squeezed him back. The solid warm feel of him was wiping away the memory of my nightmare. But what a dream that had been!

  “So,” said Fritz, or Hans. “Where we go? First we drink a beer, eh? Then to museum, then to Knossos, then to Haggia Triada, then-”

  “First some coffee,” I said.

  There was no dining room on the boat, but the crew cook ran a little concession on the side. I got coffee for me and Hans, at an exorbitant price. I figured Frederick was paying for it, so why should I be cheap?

  Fritz continued to hang around. I didn’t know whether it was the coffee or my girlish charm that kept him, but I didn’t care. He knew a few words of Greek and found a guy, one of the ones who were lounging around the dock, who had a sister who rented rooms. He-the brother-agreed to take my luggage to the house. He told Hans where it was-the house-and I gave him my luggage check and some money, and we went looking for a café. I might add that when I describe such transactions to adults they almost die; but I never lost a piece of gear or a drachma.

  After I had stocked Hans up with food-he ate an incredible amount-we headed for the museum.

  The minute I walked in the front door I began to feel funny. I’ve tried to think of how to express it; the only thing I can say is that I recognized the objects in those cases. Not all of them. But some things… It was like the time I found a beat-up, half-disintegrated object under a bush in the backyard and recognized it as the remains of a doll I had lost a few years earlier.

  I remember what brought on the first stab of recognition-it felt like that, like a sharp, physical pain. The object was described as a gaming board. I could see that it had been absolutely gorgeous, all inlaid with lapis and crystal and gold and ivory. There was a border of daisies around the edge, and reliefs of shells and things, in miniature. The board was cracked and battered, but it didn’t take much imagination to see it the way it had looked when some proud artisan presented it to the king. It had to have been a king’s plaything, that glitter of crystal and gleam of gold could not have been designed for any but a royal household.

  Okay. So an imaginative person could picture that without much strain. Only I knew that board. I knew how to play the game. The pieces started on the right side, in the central one of the four circular spaces, and followed a path I knew, ending in the ladderlike section at the left-“home.” The men moved according to the throw of dice-ivory dice, larger than the ones we use today. I could almost feel them between my palms; one was a little jagged because I had flung it against the wall one time, when I made a losing throw…

  The room came back into focus, and I realized that Hans-Fritz was holding my arm in a grip that hurt.

  “Do not fall on the case,” he said calmly. “It is always so in museums, do not fall on the case.”

  I realized that he had not seen anything peculiar in my behavior. That was a relief. He was a relief, with his big, lazy, good-natured grin. Not a nerve in him.

  “You mean, don’t lean on the cases,” I said. “Uh-Hans, I think we ought to go. Let’s go to Knossos or someplace.”

  “No, no, we must see museum. All in order.”

  I don’t think I could have gotten through the museum except for Hans. Although he looked like a football player, he had a brain like a Rhodes scholar-the two are not necessarily incompatible, in fact. He knew a lot about the Minoan culture, and he communicated it to me in his cheerfully ungrammatical English. I just nodded and made noises. I was feeling queerer and queerer, Hans’s hand, to which I clung like a kid afraid of losing his mother, was a lifeline anchoring me in the present.

  Some of the other objects hit me almost as hard as the gaming board-a gold necklace, a mirror-but the one that shook me most was the clew box.

  It’s a small, squarish box made of clay, with holes in it. It could be used to hold a ball of string; I’ve seen similar gadgets in modern kitchens, containers with a hole for the string to come through so you can pull out the length you need without having the ball unwind all around the room. Such a device would have been equally practical for Ariadne and Theseus; the clew, or ball of twine she gave him, so he could find his way back out of the Labyrinth, might well have been enclosed in such a box. But there’s no way of proving that theory. The name of the mysterious object in the Herakleion museum is pure fancy, the suggestion of some imaginative scholar. Ariadne is a mythological character, and nobody knows what the function of the clay box was. Nobody but me.

  I don’t remember what else we saw in the museum. I must have walked and talked and looked normal, like a well-constructed mechanical doll, because when I got my wits back, Hans didn’t appear to have noticed anything unusual about me. We were in a grocery store at the time. It was almost noon. I gathered that we had decided it would be romantic to eat lunch among the ruins of Knossos. So we bought goat’s cheese and a loaf of bread and a bottle of local wine and went to the plaza to catch the bus.

  The bus ride was so normal and crowded and human, I forgot what had happened in the museum. We were jammed in like sardines. Hans took up a lot of room, and he kept apologizing to people, who nodded and grinned back at him. Everybody seemed to be in a good mood. I couldn’t help thinking of the buses in Miami at rush hour during the tourist season-the scowling, worried faces and hard voices.

  Knossos was the end of the line, so we all piled out. It seemed funny to ride a bumpy little local bus to an ancient Minoan palace; twenty kilometers and three thousand years out, so to speak. There was a grape arbor outside the entrance to the city. The grapes were little green balls, but the leaves were thick and shady, so we sat on the ground in the shade and ate lunch, with Hans quoting inaccurately from Omar Khayyám. Then we paid our entrance fees and went in.

  Most archaeological sites are pretty boring, just low foundation walls, drab brown brick and gray stone, with dusty weeds growing up over the thresholds. Knossos has been restored by the excavator, Sir Arthur Evans; and although the purists criticize his restorations, claiming that he used more imagination than research, the result is so handsome you can’t condemn him. The palace is truly labyrinthine in size and complexity. The rooms, roofed and columned, are complete; the grand staircase really is grand, the queen’s bathtub is in place in her bathroom. And the colors! The queer Cretan columns, larger at the top than at the base, painted black and red; the faded terra-cotta of the giant storage jars; the soft blues and yellows of the painted walls. The frescoes are clean modern copies of the originals, which are now in the museum. Like most of Knossos, they have been restored-over-restored, according to some critics. But they give some idea of how gay and bright the place looked in its heyday. There are flying blue dolphins and golden griffins; processions of young men with long black curls falling over their shoulders and their waists pulled in by broad, tight belts; frivolous Cretan ladies in
costumes that look like the latest Paris fashions, the skirts long and full and flounced, the bodices baring their breasts.

  Perhaps the most famous fresco is the one of the bull leapers.

  Hans liked that one.

  “Achtung,” he exclaimed, or some vigorous German exclamation. “How could they do such dangerous thing? I would not jump over bull!”

  “You might if the alternative was being killed,” I said. “Maybe the bull dancers were prisoners who were trained for the job.”

  “Yes, yes, I have read the books that say so. But I doubt that it happened. Even, I doubt the picture when I see it! It is a fantasy.”

  “No,” I said. “No, it could be done. It doesn’t require any more skill or coordination than modern-day gymnastics. The only difference is that it’s more dangerous. The mortality rate must have been high. But that didn’t seem to bother the Greeks. I wouldn’t choose you, though, Fritz. You’re too heavy. A bull dancer had to be light and lean-pure muscle.”

  Like the man in my dream.

  “Like you.” Fritz looked me over approvingly. “You would dance well with the bull, nicht?”

  The big brown bull was in full charge, his head lowered. The three athletes were naked except for queer little calf-length boots and close-fitting loincloths, fastened at the waist by the broad, stiff belts that seemed to have been fashionable in Crete. One of them was standing behind the bull with her arms raised, as if she were about to catch the man who was doing a handstand on the bull’s back. His legs were flung back, and it was clear that he was about to somersault over the tail and land on his feet, behind the bull. The third of the three vaulters was just starting her leap. She had hold of the bull’s horns, and she was right in between them, you could see the points on both sides of her body. The technique couldn’t have been more clearly expressed in a games manual. The athlete grabbed the bull’s horns when he charged, and when he tossed his head back she vaulted up over his head, landed on his back, and jumped to the ground. That is, she did it unless she got caught on the horns.

  Yes, I said “she.” Two of the athletes were girls. No mistake; not only were they shaped like girls, but they were painted a pale yellowish white, in contrast to the third athlete, who was reddish brown. Hans explained that coloring the men darker than the women was a convention in Minoan art. The Egyptians did the same thing, perhaps because the women usually stayed inside and protected their complexions from the hot Mediterranean sun.

  I wondered if I could get a postcard of the scene. If so, I would send it to Mr. Barnes, the gym teacher who had refused to let me play baseball because girls were too fragile for such a violent sport.

  This was one sport I wouldn’t have tried out for. Oh, it could be done; as I had said to Hans, it didn’t require any more coordination than a lot of the tricks gymnasts learn. Only here, if you slipped, you didn’t get up, rubbing a sore fanny, and try again. But the danger wouldn’t deter the bull vaulters, any more than it stops bullfighters and mountain climbers and Evel Knievel. Maybe the vaulters weren’t prisoners. Maybe they were kids who saw themselves as superstars, strutting down the stone-paved streets with everybody pointing and whispering and asking them for their autographs. And, as Hans said, there might have been a religious meaning to the game. That would strengthen an athlete’s nerve too. The bull was the sacred animal of Poseidon, the sea god, and the games might have been rituals in his honor. Remember the Minotaur, half man, half bull…

  You see, I was thinking quite reasonably and coherently. All the while, however, another process was going on inside me. What had happened in the museum was only the overture before the main event, which began as soon as I set my sandaled foot on the soil of the city. The feeling was so strong that it overpowered my sense of congruity. It no longer seemed strange that I should find so many things familiar. It was as if I were two people in the same body. The real me- Sandy -was in control. She walked around and talked to Hans and admired the sights. But down underneath, in the dark places of my mind, someone else was waking up from a long, long sleep. That someone didn’t have a name. I didn’t dare give her one. But she knew this place, as she had known the gaming board and the clewbox.

  “We” stood in the big central courtyard, and one of us remembered the games.

  It was midafternoon by then, and hot. The sun beat down on the dusty gray surface, where a few hardy weeds survived the trampling of tourists’ feet. Along the four sides of the court were the walls and columns of the enclosing palace. There were quite a few sightseers. The ones who had come on the big gaudy tour buses were mostly over sixty and overweight. They had gray hair or white hair or no hair, except for a few of the women, whose bright-gold heads had come off a shelf in some shop. They huddled together like sheep, listening to the guide’s lecture. The younger tourists seemed to be students, for the most part. Some of them, with their long hair and short shorts, their legs and torsos bared, might have stepped out of the old frescoes-slim-waisted, brown young men.

  “I” saw the tourists and the sunbaked earthen flooring. The other person in my mind saw great stone paving blocks, ominously stained; rows of spectators watching in breathless silence; the great brown bulk of the bull, and the man who stood waiting for its charge, hands raised and ready for the horns. His body was lean and brown, and his face was the face of the man in my dream.

  Chapter 3

  WHEN I WOKE UP THE NEXT MORNING I DIDN’T KNOW where I was. The events of the previous day were hazy and dreamlike, as if they had happened to some character in a book I had been reading. The hallucination in the great court, when I had seemed to see a color replay of the bull games, was my last coherent memory. The rest of the day was a series of isolated fragments.

  Hans and I had explored the palace, met a couple of students from Denmark, and had supper with them. I remembered their faces; the names were gone. Afterward I must have found the house where I had rented a room… Yes, one ofthe memory fragments concerned the house, and the smiling, motherly Greek lady who owned it. She had shown me the room and brought me water so I could wash. After that-blank.

  Calling the experience a hallucination reduced it to terms I could accept. Mentally I added another acceptable word. Sunstroke. Too much sun, unfamiliar food, illness-hallucinations. Reassured, I looked around the room.

  The window was wide open. Sunlight made the whitewashed walls so bright they hurt my eyes, and there were so many flies they sounded like a vacuum cleaner. I had a couple of little red bites I hadn’t had when I arrived in Crete, but otherwise I felt fine.

  I went downtown and had breakfast. The coffee was the kind you have to strain through your teeth. We call it Turkish coffee at home, but I had been cautioned against using that term. The long Turkish occupation of Greece still rankles; the beverage is Greek coffee, if you please. Anyhow, the bread was good and the jam was a little bit like glue, and after I got my tongue unstuck, thanks to the water that is served with the smallest order in Greece, I went down to the dock and found that I could hitch a ride on a local boat that was going to Santorini that afternoon. On the way back to my boardinghouse I met Hans. He suggested I stick around for a few days and go on to Rhodes with him. I said “No, thanks.” He kissed me good-bye; and then he decided he would go with me, wherever I was going; and I had some trouble getting rid of him.

  My hostess and I parted on excellent terms. I practiced my Greek on her. I already knew how to say “Thank you” and “Please” and “Where is the toilet/café/hotel/boat/dog of the innkeeper?” Then I shouldered my stuff and started out for the dock. I only had one suitcase, in addition to my backpack, but it was a big suitcase. It held my diving gear. Frederick had assured me I could rent gear on Thera, but I don’t like using secondhand stuff. I only hoped Frederick was right about getting tanks and air for them.

  I had to hang around the dock for a couple of hours before the captain of the boat got back from his afternoon nap. Jim would have had fits at the sight of the boat. It was a filthy tub that lo
oked as if it would founder in a slight breeze. The deck still showed the traces of its last dozen cargoes-animal droppings, oil, fish scales, and so on. I scraped out a spot and sat down. It’s about a hundred and twenty kilometers from Crete to Thera, and from the looks of the scow I figured she’d be lucky to make twenty kilometers an hour. I overestimated the speed. It was late the next morning before we got in.

  Santorini is in the guidebooks. I had read about it, but a verbal description can’t possibly prepare a visitor for the real thing. It’s fantastic.

  In an aerial view the group of islands looks like a half-eaten sugar cookie from which a giant child has taken a big bite and let the fragments fall onto his shining sea-blue plate. The main island, Thera, is the largest, crescent-shaped piece. Smaller islands lie like fallen crumbs, outlining the perimeter of the former crater of the volcano. In the center of the bay are two other islands, black intrusions on the surface of the clean sea. They are not parts of the cookie, but new volcanic cores, risen phoenix-like out of the chasm. One of them, Nea Kaimeni, is still active.

  Chugging through the channel between Thera and the next-largest island, Therasia, we entered the caldera. The water was a rich teal blue, thirteen hundred feet deep. It seemed funny to think we were sailing over what had been the populated central peak of a circular island. We passed by the ominous black cone of Nea Kaimeni, a desolate heap of cinders and slag, with a trail of pale-green vapor rising from its fumarole. Ahead was a stunning view-the red, white, and black cliffs of Thera, rising sheer a thousand feet out of the blue water, as sharply perpendicular as if they had been cut by the snap of gigantic teeth. The geological strata were defined like the layers of a cake-the black of congealed lava, the pinky-red of pumice, and the awesomely thick layer of white ash that fell during the eruption of 1450 B.C., before the final paroxysm blew the guts out of the island. The cliff glistened in the sunlight, and I remembered Plato’s description of the Royal City of Atlantis, built of red and black and white stone.