The Sea King’s Daughter

by Barbara Michaels

  “Over thirty years,” Keller interrupted. “Kore was right about you, Frederick; you are incredible. You don’t even ask me what I am doing here. Can it be that you know the answer?”

  “Yes,” Frederick said. “There can only be one answer. As soon as I knew you were here, I knew why.”

  “Then,” Keller said, “you have a question to ask me, I think. Ask it.”

  He put his glass down on the table and straightened, his eyes fixed on Frederick. Arms at his sides, shoulders rigid, he looked like a man facing a firing squad.

  “Yes,” Frederick said calmly. “I do have a question. What have you done about it?”

  “About…it?” Keller’s mouth dropped open in a ludicrous expression of surprise. “You ask me what I have done? And that is all you-”

  Kore sprang to her feet. She put her arms around Keller’s heaving shoulders. I couldn’t tell whether he was laughing or crying.

  “He has done nothing,” she cried, glaring at Frederick. “Oh, you have not changed, you are the same cold, unfeeling-”

  “For God’s sake!” It was my turn to leap up. We stood there like four people in a room without chairs. “I can’t stand this oblique conversation any longer. What the hell are you all talking about?”

  “None of your business,” said Frederick.

  “Then I’ve got a question for you,” I said, snorting with rage. “Were you the one who shot at Mr. Keller a while ago?”

  “No,” Frederick said. “Why should I shoot at him?”

  “I don’t have the faintest idea,” I said wildly. “That’s one of the things I’m trying to find out.”

  Keller gently detached himself from Kore’s clinging arms.

  “Sit down, Liebchen, and calm yourself. I apologize for losing control. She is correct, Frederick. I have done nothing. Nothing at all, except to stay here quietly and watch. You are the one who initiates action. What will you do now?”

  “Take my daughter home,” Frederick said. “ Sandy, go and change.”

  “No,” I said.

  “I had anticipated a refusal,” Frederick said calmly. “I therefore enlisted an ally, reluctant as I was to do so. In this matter, however, we agree. He should be here presently.”

  So we sat and waited. I tried to start a conversation, but nobody gave me any help; my leading remarks fell heavily into an abyss of silence. The situation was so bizarre I couldn’t think coherently. I had been exaggerating when I said I didn’t have the faintest idea what they were talking about. I did have an idea; but it seemed preposterous. Besides, I was preoccupied with the arrival of Frederick ’s ally, whose identity I thought I knew. Sure enough, before long there was another knock at the door, and the maid showed Jim into the living room. With him was Sir Christopher.

  Talk about socially awkward situations. Offhand I can’t imagine anything worse than this one. Kore reacted with less than her usual savoir faire. She huddled in her chair, saying nothing and glaring impartially on the entire group. If looks could kill, all three outsiders would have dropped dead.

  Men are amazing. Jim was the only one who looked embarrassed. The old enemies merely nodded at one another.

  “I hope you don’t mind,” Jim began, glancing at his boss. “When I told him-”

  “I thought I had better come along,” Sir Christopher said. “I confess that it was curiosity, in part. We never met, Herr Keller; but I saw you many times as you went about your duties.”

  “I do not speak of those days,” said Keller softly.

  Sir Christopher smiled. “Very wise. It would be better if we all forgot the past. I came primarily for another purpose: to offer my assistance to Sandy, whatever her plans may be.”

  He wasn’t looking at me, though; he was staring at Keller as if trying to recognize a man he had once known. Keller couldn’t keep his eyes off Jim. Jim was looking at me, and I was trying to watch all of them at the same time. Frederick and Kore were the only ones not involved in the staring contest. Neither of them seemed at all interested in what was going on.

  “ Sandy,” Jim said sharply.

  “What? Oh. Are you all waiting for me to say something? How flattering. I haven’t made up my mind. Maybe I should take a poll. You all seem to have an opinion.”

  “There is nothing to discuss,” Frederick said in a bored voice. “You promised to spend the summer helping me. I want you back at the house tonight, ready to work tomorrow morning.”

  “One vote in favor of me leaving here, but staying on Thera,” I said brightly. “Jim? But I know what you think. You want me to go far, far away. Sir Christopher wants me to go too. Kore?”

  “Stay,” said Kore, in a stifled voice. “You cannot go now. You cannot.”

  “Three to one,” I said. “Mr. Keller?”

  Keller didn’t answer. He was still staring at Jim. His eyes had a vacant glitter.

  “I see now,” he said, as if to himself. “I see the meaning. Yes, it was meant; or why should you come, with his face, as I remember it? You are the one I have waited for, so that I could tell you.”

  He advanced on Jim, who stood his ground. The rest of them moved as one man-or one person, including Kore. She made a dash at Keller and put her arms around him. Sir Christopher stepped in front of Jim. Frederick stood up.

  “Wait,” he said. “Hold on-”

  Somehow, I don’t know how, Kore got Keller turned around, and out of the room. He calmed down as soon as Jim was out of his sight and went with her like a big puzzled child. When the door had closed behind them, Jim let out a long whistle of relief.

  “I’d better get out of here,” he said.

  “You seem to affect the fellow adversely,” Sir Christopher agreed, studying his assistant curiously. “I would not have expected the resemblance to disturb Keller so much.”

  “His conscience is disturbing him,” Jim said.

  “No doubt. Well, my boy, I agree that we had better go. Frederick?”

  “Not without Sandy,” said dear old Daddy, settling himself in his chair.

  “Then I stay too,” said Sir Christopher grimly. “I’ll not have you harassing this girl, Frederick.”

  “Whose girl is she?” demanded Frederick.

  “Not yours,” I said. “ Frederick, whenever you suggest something, it makes me want to do the exact opposite. Leave. I may come tomorrow-if you get off my back. I certainly don’t intend to come now.”

  “Oh, very well,” Frederick grumbled.

  I went with them to the door. The maid seemed to have vanished.

  Jim hung back. “I’ve got to talk to you,” he said out of the corner of his mouth.

  “I would also like to talk to you,” I said.

  “Can you sneak out of here?”

  “Sneak? I’ll meet you tomorrow morning. Outside, if that’s what you want.”

  “Make it one o’clock.”

  Sir Christopher turned. I didn’t think he could overhear, but I was taking no chances. I nodded at Jim.

  I stood in the doorway watching them as they walked away. Frederick was several paces ahead of the other two. It was getting dark; the soft grayish-blue air closed around the three forms, blurring their outlines. They might have been three young men walking in a Cretan evening in a far-gone year. If Kore’s crazy ideas had any foundation, the young man whose life had ended prematurely could find no more suitable place for rebirth than the body of his sister’s son.

  Who are we, anyway? Combinations of common chemicals that perform mechanical actions for a few years before crumbling back into the original components? Fresh new souls, drawn at random from some celestial cupboard where God keeps an unending supply? Spiritual scrap bags-bits and pieces of everyone we have ever been, from the shambling apelike creatures of the Ice Age to the present?

  The tiled floor under my feet swayed just a little. Nothing was stable, not even the solid ground. I closed the door and went back into the darkening room.

  Dinner that night was an experience. I can’t remember
what we ate, I was so interested in watching my host and hostess. To a casual observer they might have seemed normal enough, although Keller’s black tie and Kore’s glitter of jewels were a little overdone. I decided they must dress for dinner the way the Victorian empire builders did in remote outposts, to keep up their morale. They both talked fluently, but every now and then a silence would fall, and one of them would steal a sidelong glance at the other, as if searching for something he was hoping not to see.

  The atmosphere was not lightened by the occasional quiver of the earth. You couldn’t even call them minor quakes, they were just enough to make the chandelier sway. Midway through the meal the movements stopped, and we finished dessert and coffee without further disturbances. Kore insisted on putting me to bed immediately afterward. I went without argument. I was tired. It was not so much physical fatigue as mental strain. I thought Kore felt it too. She looked old that night. She didn’t fuss over me the way she had before, and when I refused a sleeping pill, she merely shrugged.

  “I put it here,” she said, and placed the tray, which also held a glass of water, on the table by the bed. “If you need…”

  “I won’t. I’m tired.”

  She left a light burning, as usual, when she went out.

  I didn’t take the pill, but I drank the water. The sticky sweet wine had produced a thirst that was still with me. Though I was tired, I was not really sleepy, so I read for a while. The book was dull enough to put anybody to sleep; Keller’s English library consisted mostly of books on archaeology and related fields. This was a sober text on Stone Age religion; I remembered having heard Frederick mention it. There was a footnote on practically every word. I read on, my eyelids getting heavier and heavier, till I came across my own name.

  The more I discovered about the origins of that name, the less I liked it. Ariadne was not only the daughter of Minos the sea king, she was also a goddess, a vegetation deity who died in the fall and was reborn in spring… There it was again, that reference to resurrection and reincarnation that was beginning to haunt me. Ariadne was a girl too; she was mentioned by Homer, when he spoke of “the dancing ground which Daedalus wrought in broad Knossos for fair-haired Ariadne.” No one had ever really figured out what the dancing ground was, or why the master craftsman of ancient Crete should have directed the construction of a simple dance floor. The author of the book I was reading suggested that the dancing ground was a maze, like the Cretan Labyrinth, and the dance was a twisting, circling survival of an old fertility ritual. The tributary youths and maidens of Athens performed the dance, under pressure, and met the bull-masked killer who was priest of the goddess. “Only Theseus penetrated to the center, to discover Ariadne…with the help of her own clue.”

  The words blurred. I dropped the book and let my head fall back on the pillow. The night light was a dim golden haze somewhere off in the distance.

  I had never read this book before. It wasn’t exactly my type of literature. How, then, had my subconscious mind come up with the idea that Ariadne herself waited in the center of the maze, the prize of the hero who killed the Minotaur? The dancing place… An innocuous term, suggesting harmless pleasures. How had I known that Ariadne’s dancing place was a labyrinthine web of stone, and that the function of the dance was to deliver a victim to sacrifice?

  I fell asleep and dreamed.

  There was a period of confused and fragmentary impressions-lights flickering, dank, cool air against my face, voices murmuring words I could not understand. Then the mists cleared. I awoke to darkness, but it was not the foul black of the Labyrinth. Stars blazed down out of a high night sky, and the air smelled of wild herbs and of the sea. A hard, gritty substance stung my bare feet as they moved, stumbling at first and then more surely, in a measured rhythm. The music was a thin, high piping. It was the strangest music, without a recognizable tune. Even the scale was unfamiliar. The notes had no ending, no resolution, they repeated endlessly, and my feet moved with them, moving faster as the beat picked up. I was spinning, moving in a narrow circle, with my arms outflung to keep my balance, and the stars were spinning too, so fast that they looked like coiling, luminous snakes. My moving feet made a pattern, a complex network of force like an invisible cat’s-cradle. When the pattern was complete, something would take shape. I could feel it hovering, waiting with a terrible eagerness, like a creature crouching behind a barrier waiting to spring out. The barrier was crumbling, inch by inch…

  Then the night was dissected by a rising bar of fire. The ground shook under my moving feet; they stumbled and missed the beat. I lost my balance and grasped vainly at empty air; but as I fell I saw the thing that waited behind the barrier. It had my face, but the green eyes blazed like emeralds and the mouth was curved in the queer, disquieting smile I had first seen on the archaic statue Frederick had sent me. I toppled, screaming soundlessly, into a bottomless hole of darkness.

  I awoke to clear morning light and a cool breeze from the open window. The sheet was twisted around my legs and the memory of the dream was still heavy on my mind. But as I came back to full consciousness, I was infinitely relieved to realize that for once I had had a nightmare whose origins could be explained. It was the book I had been reading that had set me off.

  Relaxed, I lay on the soft bed and contemplated the day ahead of me. The meeting with Jim was not an unmixed pleasure to anticipate. I wanted to see him, but I knew he was going to lecture me. I was tired of people telling me what to do, as if I were a little child. I wanted to be left alone.

  It was an effort to sit up. I was still tired, and my legs felt stiff; the sheet had been wound so tightly around them that red welts showed. Apparently I had done quite a bit of thrashing around in the throes of the dream. And then, as I bent my knees, preparatory to getting out of bed, I caught a glimpse of my feet.

  The soles were spotlessly clean. There wasn’t even a trace of dust. But from heel to toe they were red and scraped, as if I had run, barefoot, across a rough, hard surface.

  Chapter 13

  AS I SAT THERE STARING AT THE DAMNING, INCONTROVERTIBLE evidence of my scraped soles, I had to fight down a crazy impulse to run, out of the room and out of the house, just as I was-bare feet, gossamer nightgown, and all.

  However, after the first moment of panic I realized that the incident had broken the spell Kore had cast. It was nothing less than that, a combination of drugs, amateur hypnotism, charisma-and a normal human reluctance to accept the incredible. Up to that point I had not been sure what was real and what was my imagination. But the marks on my feet were a fact.

  Kore spent longer than usual that morning fussing over me, rubbing oil on my hands and body, arranging my hair in intricate coils. I had to set my teeth to keep from shouting at her, but I managed to keep quiet. I didn’t know what she would do if I faced her with the truth. She might try to keep me there by force. Kore and Keller, even without the servants, were a match for me. I couldn’t count on Keller to help me; the man’s motives were a mystery.

  So I smiled and chatted and ate my lunch like any polite visitor, and as soon as I was left alone, I got up. The clothes Frederick had brought me were in the wardrobe. The coarse, unpressed denim felt good against my skin; I was sick of clinging softness. Carrying my sneakers, I tiptoed to the door and eased it open.

  The corridor was deserted. I couldn’t hear a sound. Apparently all the members of the household were resting. I made my way cautiously down the stairs, prepared to make a run for it if anyone tried to stop me.

  I met no one. But I didn’t draw a deep breath until I was outside the villa, with the high white walls behind me.

  Within a few minutes I was sweating. It was a hot, hazy day, and the air had the peculiar stillness I had learned to dread. But I was willing to risk an earthquake-a small one-to be free of the atmosphere of that troubled house.

  Jim and I hadn’t settled on a specific meeting place, so I walked along the path that led toward the village. I was a little late. I didn’t see him, thou
gh, so as soon as I was out of sight of the villa I sat down on a big rock to wait for him.

  My thoughts were not good company. By now I was fairly sure I had figured out Kore’s plans. Jim had been right about her. She had resurrected some antique cult and was playing high priestess, with half the women of the village dancing-literally-to her tune.

  In my ignorance I found this knowledge less frightening than one might suppose. Kore had been trying to fit me into the unwanted part of the young goddess, or junior priestess-Ariadne the Most Holy, Persephone to her Demeter-Kore, in fact. I was to be Kore, the maiden, and she was to be… Who? It didn’t matter. I had quitthe cast, and she would have to put on her play without me.

  Keller was the one who worried me, because I didn’t understand him. He had warned me to get away. But his apparent concern for my well-being might be a sham, or a delusion born of his feelings of guilt. Perhaps he meant to warn me about Kore’s uncanny but harmless activities.

  Or did the warning have something to do with the fact that someone had shot at him? I couldn’t get over the way they had reacted to that attack, without even trying to investigate it. They assumed the would-be killer was one of the villagers. That seemed implausible to me, after years of peace, and in a year when there were three newcomers on the island who had good reason to resent Keller.

  I didn’t like the direction my thoughts were taking, but I couldn’t completely reject the possibility that Jim had fired that shot.

  I was so wrapped up in my depressing thoughts that I jumped convulsively when I heard someone approaching. I had almost forgotten that I was a fugitive. The footsteps were coming, not from the direction of the village, but from up the hill.

  When Keller came into view I got to my feet. He was wearing sunglasses; the dark ovals hiding his eyes gave him a sinister look. He might not be young, but he was in excellent physical condition. I wondered how fast he could run.

  As soon as he saw me he stopped. “Don’t be afraid,” he said quickly. “I followed only to be sure you were safe.”