by Linda Talbot
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The moon rises; alien and dispirited above the desecrated land. Pasiphae's ghost walks with weightless feet over the wreckage of her former home. The great bull court lies beneath fallen horns of consecration.
The wind whines around the great staircase, leading now to desolation. A muffled sound, like a bellow of deep pain, echoes from the labyrinth.
Pasiphae shivers, remembering Asterius, her son; his frustration as he charged with his baffled bull's head through the airless passages, his man's body, anguished with uncomprehended needs.
Pasiphae feels the weight of guilt on her fleshless body, recalling the coupling with the great bull and the shameful birth. She was not sure how - or even if - her son had died. Were she and Minos, by their infidelities, responsible for the catastrophe?
As she remembers, the air quivers, as though perturbed by ill intent. Slowly, as though etched by moonlight, the white bull rises like a mirage from the ruins; the object, inconceivable now, of her lust. The beast, abrasively curious, looks her in the eye. He bellows, then limb by limb, fades.
Pasiphae backs away, stumbling over loose stones. She had loved yet feared Asterius and if he still lives, she knows she must, by the god-given means she possesses, end his existence.
Now the palace is dead; a shattered phantom wailing with the wind. Pasiphae nears the entrance to the labyrinth. It is blocked by fallen gypsum. She reaches her grey ghost hands to the jagged stone. They pass through its moonlit surface.
She drops to her knees and weeps, then looks in desperation at the moon. It is indifferent; a dead disc hung above annihilation. Pasiphae too is dead, yet her phantom mind lives painfully in the present. As she gazes at the moon, she sees on its cold face, a darkly defined labyrinth. The silver warms as though suddenly sun-struck and an uncharted land enters Pasiphae's imagination. She turns towards the southern sea and, her spirit borne through blue air, she alights on its shore in hot daylight among thronging refugees sailing for Egypt.
Invisible, she is moved by their grief as they leave an island savaged by earthquake and invasion. They are skilled craftsmen, seeking a living in a strange country. But their eyes are dead as they watch the island with its cypress-covered slopes slip away, as though retrieved by the hand of Zeus.
Pasiphae flies with the wild sea birds. She wheels in circles on the wind. She finds a country of flying sand on which a great sphinx squats and where pyramids spear the cloudless sky.
She lies fish-like on the water and glides through the breathless night. On the moon, the labyrinth still glows; a complex interlacing of ancient fissures? Or a sign that in Egypt she will find a labyrinth concealing the ghost of the son who may be dead?
She slides from the Nile and kneels in abeyance to the full moon. This is the time when she can change into a woman, but on this night, she retains her ghostly essence. She watches the palms, believing they are growing, influenced by lunar light.
She weaves along the river in the early sun. She penetrates temples where she finds a great sun disc but few worshippers. She fears the worship of the sun and is anxious for the moon to reappear; a confirmation of the old beliefs; the matriarchal cycle of sacrifice and regeneration.
Each night she gazes at the labyrinth on the moon and by day moves on to where it might be found.
The palace rises like a mirage; quivering on the edge of credulity. Pasiphae turns into an ibis, shivering as the breeze probes her breast feathers. She lifts long legs along the glistening water's edge, looking askance at the undulating gardens, punctuated by silent pools.
She steps through flowers, hears a flurry and sees a young woman in a draped dress and tall blue headdress. Pasiphae relinquishes her bird form, growing from the flowers into a woman. Alarmed, the Egyptian pauses.
Pasiphae touches her shoulder. "Don't be afraid," she says.
"Who are you?" the woman demands.
"Pasiphae."
The woman shivers at the name. Yet does not know why.
"I am Nofreteti," she says.
"I'm looking for the labyrinth and Asterius, my son," says Pasiphae.
Nofreteti has heard disquieting tales of another labyrinth beyond the southern sea; of a hybrid beast and a vanished civilisation. But there is an unearthly quality about this woman. Tentatively, she reaches to touch Pasiphae's bare arm. It has substance. But still she is unnerved.
"Come with me."
Pasiphae follows the Egyptian to the palace. Young women step lightly through the flowers and beneath a rich canopy sits an elegant young man surrounded by children.
"Akhenaten, my husband," Nofreteti says. Pasiphae steps back. The power of the sun emanates from his skin. He has an aura of absolute authority. Pasiphae knows he has assumed the influence of the sun, using its symbolism to subdue his subjects and building the great city of Armana. But she lets him question her, claiming she is a lost refugee. Then she seeks to extract the location of the labyrinth.
He has heard of one that had been built at least one thousand years ago with three thousand apartments for the earth deity. But he fails to understand how Pasiphae's son can inhabit it. She must be affected by grief. He is drawn though to this slight woman who might be a personification of the moon.
Pasiphae delights in the paintings of the palace. They recall the freedom of her island's artists. But, with trepidation, she notes the reproduction of the sun disc, its rays terminating in hands that hold the ankh, the symbol of life, above the heads of Akhenaten, Nofreteti and their children.
By day she inhabits the palace shadows, drifting out as a ghost at night. Kneeling before the moon, she pleads to retain her human form by day as the moon begins to wane. The labyrinth loses clarity.
Akhenaten begins to follow her movements with arrogant eyes. Nofreteti notices and one night sees Akhenaten steal from the palace to where Pasiphae stands with arms raised to the waning moon. She utters inaudible words, then bends low beside the water. Akhenaten throws a small stone into the placid pool. As its ripples widen in the moonlight, Pasiphae turns and gasps as he reaches out his hands. They pass through her phantom form. His fingers clutch at her hair but close about the cold night air as Pasiphae slides into the pool.
Nofreteti runs to Akhenaten and pulls him to confront her. He pushes her away and strides back to the palace.
She grows increasingly agitated and is mystified by Pasiphae as she slips in and out of their lives. Pasiphae stays because she is afraid of embarking on the search for Asterius. She fears to find the labyrinth destroyed, like the maze where he had been imprisoned in her former palace.
Sometimes she reverts to phantom form during the day and, walking invisibly through the city, finds Akhenaten's men crudely obliterating the name of Amon, the people's former god.
Akhenaten identifies entirely with the sun. He is omnipotent. His officials are appalled, the people confused. He neglects the country which has declined into chaos.
Pasiphae understands the machinations of the court, the temptation to assume absolute power, the need for diplomacy and lies. She admires Akhenaten's love of creating with a fresh approach to form. But she cannot respect him as a pharaoh or a man. Many are fickle, yet again, she suspects she and Minos have set excessive infidelities in motion. And she fears Akhenaten's allegiance to the sun.
One evening Pasiphae stays in the palace. The moon, mindful of her status in the past, sustains her ability to resemble a woman. She stands by the window, gazing at its half- shadowed form, drawing on the lunar power, flowing through her like quicksilver.
She shimmers from the room and enters the chamber of the pharaoh and his wife. Their dark heads lie motionless on deep pillows. Pasiphae glides to Akenhaten and gently nudges him awake.
Startled and enthralled, he eases from the bed without waking Nofreteti, taking Pasiphae's proffered hand. His sunskin is blackened now by night but Pasiphae knows the power pulses within; his ego growing daily, delusion routing reason.
She leads him from the palace to the
pool glinting with slanting moon spears.
Pasiphae urges Akhenaten to gaze at the water. His face is trapped by ancient light and interminable time, as Pasiphae wills the moon to emasculate his pride.
In vain, Akenhaten tries to grasp Pasiphae. Like Narcissus he is drawn into his over-weening essence. His face fades. Alarmed, he withdraws, feeling his flesh with agitated hands. In reality his face remains. But Pasiphae has created an illusion of erasure.
Nofreteti speaks to Akhenaten. He does not hear. She touches him. He does not respond. She watches him. He does not notice.
He does not approach Pasiphae again. But he follows her with hungry eyes as she drifts aimlessly through the shade and sits motionless by the pool. Nofreteti can tolerate no more.
"I'll take you to the labyrinth," she announces, approaching Pasiphae by the water. Pasiphae trembles but agrees to go.
Nofreteti prepares her barge; resplendent in purple and gold and manned by ten slaves, who lean as one, ready to get underway as the women embark. Pasiphae sits beneath a canopy, fearing the ferocity of the sun.
The days pass; palm-fringed and sun-soaked. The nights fold the barge in darkness. The moon wanes. Time flows backwards.
Pasiphae, striving to retain human form, barely speaks to Nofreteti who sits throughout the day in isolation, absorbing the cool Nile breeze, beneath another richly worked canopy.
The second palace appears unexpectedly, gleaming in the mid morning sun; its walls green with Egyptian and Asian plants. To the west rise the purple Theban hills.
The barge slows and draws into the bank. As though conjured from the white hot air, slaves appear to help the women disembark.
They walk within the great walls. A man-made lake, a mile long, lies unruffled like a layer of hand-laid glass with intermittent clumps of trees and blooms in cultivated mounds. The sound of women singing, harps, lyres and pipes drifts from beyond the water.
"This must be Elysium," thinks Pasiphae.
A woman in a pleated dress and bright bead collar shimmers towards them. A close-fitting wig frames her face which is prematurely lined by bad temper. She frowns.
"I had a premonition you would come," she announces. "I am Tiye. You are my daughter-in-law."
Nofreteti starts. "But I thought you were dead."
Pasiphae, who had lived long before either of them, inwardly smiles.
"We are looking for the labyrinth," says Nofreteti, recovering her composure.
"It doesn't exist. It's the work of mythmakers," says Tiye.
Pasiphae suspects she is wrong but is not sorry to once more delay her search.
They enter the palace; magnificent in brick and rare woods with stucco-covered walls. The great rooms lie in deep shadow, echoing to their steps, with vivid reproductions of nature and Egyptian life on the ceilings.
"Paradise!" thinks Pasiphae again. Vases of coloured glass stand among pieces in porcelain, silver and gold.
Pasiphae recalls her palace. It had been beautiful but less ornate. They enter a long throne room with great pillars bearing lotus buds and papyri against a sky-blue ceiling where pigeons and golden ravens sweep in flight. Rich carpets cover the floors with impressions of marshes, rivers and the enchanted phoenix.
They walk past carved and inlaid furniture towards two raised golden thrones, spread with the pinions of the royal vulture. On one throne, a man sits - regally erect. He might be a gilded statue; another priceless ornament in the rich room. But, on seeing the three women, he slowly smiles.
"Amenophis, the king," says the ill-disposed woman.
The man scrutinises the women."Your quest?" He speaks abruptly, curious that they can travel alone.
Pasiphae explains she is a refugee and seeks her son in the labyrinth. A shadow briefly envelops Amenophis, like the externalisation of a fearful thought. For years traders have come to Egypt from a great island across the sea. They told strange tales of dangerous games with bulls and of a half-human beast imprisoned in a labyrinth.
Like Akhenaten, Amenophis does not understand how this woman's son can be in Egypt or how he is related to the labyrinth. But he welcomes her, wondering about her true identity. She seems ethereal. He has dreamed of such women, materialising from the night air and emasculating men.
What of the other woman? She glows with an unbecoming confidence, as though she carries within her, the authority of the sun.
His chief wife Tiye, who had brought the women to him, belongs to an earlier epoch. Impetuous and quick to anger, she is however, subservient.
He watches the visitors surreptitiously. If his lust is discovered, he could not endure Tiye's vengeance. Which woman should he take first?
Pasiphae, aware of his intentions, smiles and quietly fades, her flesh growing first transparent, then absorbed into the shadows of the great garden. She watches Nofreteti, who shows no sign of returning to Amarna, seduce Amenophis with her heavily emphasised eyes. As Nofreteti had watched Pasiphae being scrutinised by Akhenaten, she sees Tiye scrupulously observing the sun queen and Amenophis.
In Armana, Akhenaten paces his palace, bereft of the women he desires. His sun glow diminishes. He begins to avoid the temple where the sun disc reflects his authority.
He feels control slipping, like the sloughing of a brazen skin. He weakens and seeks the shadows. He particularly fears his reflection. Once more he senses an erosion of his facial flesh. To his shaking hands it feels fragile, the bones sharpening as though about to pierce the skin.
One day the sun does not shine. Low cloud closes about the palace, turning the pool to a mirror of menace. The flowers close and the palace dims. Akhenaten sits motionless in the garden, staring at the thickening cloud. A stillness envelops the land.
Then, like the roar of an imprisoned bull, the earth shifts and opens before him. Flowers are flung aside, the pool pours sullen water into the cavernous lawns. Akhenaten shudders and clings to his seat. But it slides from under him, and he falls, hits the stricken ground and lies unconscious.
Pasiphae smiles. She has depleted Akhenaten. He no longer emulates the sun. She had induced the earthquake to enter his obsessive mind. He must recognise the influence of the moon.
The sun still shines above Tiye's palace. She and Amenophis have no dangerous liaison with the sun. Nofreteti fills his mind. Her eyes swim through his dreams, her voice monopolises his senses. Her perfume enhances the day and turns night into a limbo of enchantment.
He leaves Tiye sleeping and creeps through shadows to where Nofreteti lies unclothed on her broad bed. For several minutes he stands still, relishing her moon-bathed flesh. Then he steps towards her and reaches to caress her breasts.
Tiye hears a murmuring in the neighbouring room where Nofreteti sleeps. She hears Amenophis breathlessly exulting. Enraged, she is about to rush in, but stops before she reaches the door.
Tiye knows of the silent labyrinth; a dark place of the long dead, shunned by the living. Pasiphae, clearly deranged after the catastrophe in her country, is irrelevant. Even Amenophis has wearied of her evasion. Nofreteti has substance and he is drawn by her independent defiance. This is a challenge; a trait to subdue.
Tiye orders her barge to be prepared. She suggests Nofreteti accompanies her to meet a royal relative. Nofreteti complies. The barge is luxurious, the Nile wind cooling. Amenophis was growing too attentive. She sensed sadism in his demands.
The days are langourous. Then, like a stark reminder of mortality, the labyrinth appears. Nofreteti turns, bewildered, to Tiye. She had been expecting a palace where the royal relatives would offer lavish hospitality. Instead she sees an unyielding edifice, casting long shadows on the drifting sand.
They disembark and Nofreteti, uncannily deprived of speech and compelled as though in dream, follows Tiye along the length of one wall. She barely notices the narrow entrance forced by thieves. They pass through. Heat and light vanish. They are enveloped by damp darkness and a penetrating silence.
Slowly, as though drawn from the past
into the present, the vague shapes of pithoi emerge from the dark. The stifled spirits of the dead weave from within the ancient clay, impregnating the shadowed walls and sliding coldly across the floor.
Nofreteti feels their presence; curious and uncouth. A faint smell, like a resumption of decomposition, hangs in the clammy air. Still Nofreteti is speechless. Some dry desert djinn might have lodged in her.
Tiye pauses, turns and gestures that Nofreteti should follow. She disappears along the passage to the left. Tiye follows. They enter a foul antechamber.
Tiye spins and pushes Nofreteti against the wall. She slides to the ground. Tiye regards her with contempt, then turns and walks away.
At last Nofreteti finds her voice. She cries out as the queen is swallowed by darkness. She crushes one leg as she fall and cannot move. Silence seeps back as her cry dies, as hapless as the fleshless bones of those sealed in the labyrinth.
Nofreteti dares not cry again. She fears the listening spirits.
Clouds obscure the sun. They are alien; sallow, aimless and edged with black. Crops wither. Akhenaten sits, a shell of cold flesh and stultified thought in his darkening garden. The gold, glass and precious stones of his palace dull. He no longer adulates the sun. He is emasculated and motiveless.
At night Nofreteti's face grows from the moonlight that now floods the land with wide rivers of light. Its brightness prevents sleep. People sit, mesmerised, outside their homes, waiting for the sun to rise. But as dawn breaks, a lurid sky blooms briefly in the east, then is swiftly swathed in cloud. No sun rises.
Akhenaten summons his remaining strength and prepares to search for Nofreteti and Pasiphae. His barge sways on the ruffled water of the Nile as he faces the intrusive wind. Vultures wheel above the sullen sand.
Pasiphae sees Tiye return - smug in the late day's gloom. She disembarks with alacrity and walks, without greeting, past Pasiphae. The first rain begins to fall.
"Where's Nofreteti?" Amenophis demands.
"Sick from the river trip. She's being looked after at the palace," says Tiye, referring to the home of the royal relatives that lies beyond the labyrinth. She relishes her husband's agitation.
Pasiphae knows she is lying. She sees a brief, blinding image of the labyrinth; the perturbation of disrupted souls, the fearful immobilisation of someone trapped in the dark.
The rain falls like solid sheets of glass. Crops revive. But the rain does not stop. They rot. The rain obliterates the Nile and the dunes, hammers on the palace roof and flows like newly sprung rivers through the flattened flowers. At night it briefly ceases and the clouds clear to reveal the full moon. It does not wane, but grows more brilliant. Pasiphae, retaining mortal guise during the day, glides as a ghost across the lawns at night.
She sees the labyrinth gain clarity on the moon's surface; a lacework of baffling ways, while within, some indefinable element pulsates in fear.
Nofreteti hears the seeping of water through stone. The temperature drops. She draws closer to the wall. The seeping gains the momentum of a flow and intermittently splashes her frozen flesh. Seconds later, a wall of water rises. She raises her hands as though to beat it back and her whole life seems suspended in her head. Then she drowns.
The lacework blurs on the face of the moon. Pasiphae sees water lapping through the labyrinth. She thinks of Asterius and slides from the garden to move like mist along the river. She does not take her eyes from the moon until dawn breaks and the labyrinth hovers, rendered weightless by the morning light.
Pasiphae, a paradox of ether flowing through substance and irreducible will, concentrates on the water from the flooded Nile washing through the tomb. She reaches the labyrinth and hovers, her spirit unwinding like gossamer. She wills the water to recede. Within the tomb she senses a presence. Asterius? No. It is gentler, the bewildered aftermath of someone newly expired. Nofreteti. She sees the queen's face, pulled into the mask of a grotesque.
Pasiphae hears the draining of the water and watches it flow in a frenzy to the Nile.
Akhenaten sails for four days up the darkened Nile. He is not borne back to the palace of Tiye and Amenophis. Without Pasiphae, moving magically through time, he is confined to the present. Until he comes to the labyrinth. The ancient queen still lingers above the tomb that stands in tact on the drying sand. Still the sun does not shine but the rain stops and the swollen Nile recedes.
Pasiphae sees Akhenaten at the ship's prow, drawn with trepidation to the dead. She weaves with incandescence on the early morning air and watches him disembark and walk, reluctant, yet unable to resist, to the entrance of the labyrinth.
He steps into the narrow passage, rank with receding river water. He feels an intruder, violating the dead. But their spirits have retreated with the river. Damp silence clings to the giant jars and sodden walls.
Each step increases his foreboding. He reaches the narrow way taken by Tiye and Nofreteti. He hesitates, braces and walks into the antechamber.
At first he sees only the great jars like grim guardians in the gloom. Then he sees Nofreteti, twisted, with her head pressed into her chest as though subjected to a great force. Her arms are pinned beneath her body. River mud has matted her hair and remnants of clothes. She already seems part of the earth.
Akhenaten grapples to raise Nofreteti from the ground. He drags her into the passage and pulls her broken body back through the domain of the dead.
The river has loosened rocks outside the labyrinth. As the rain resumed, they shifted to block the thieves' exit. Akhenaten pushes but they are immovable. He drags Nofreteti further into the tomb. She still breathes faintly, yet the spirits of the tomb again seek release and, clinging to Akhenaten, move maliciously through his body and numbed mind.
Pasiphae's ghost glides through the wet tomb walls. She is assailed by the memory of another labyrinth and the panic of her imprisoned son. She shudders in the dark.
The bellow echoes from deep within the labyrinth. Pasiphae freezes. Asterius. So he did not die. She blunders through the passages, pausing to listen for her son. Silence. The bellow reverberates again. She weaves through the pithoi, brushed by the spirits, roused and restless in the gloom.
She wrestles with her love for Asterius, convinced that to restore balance in the cosmos and between people, he must die. But on reaching the furthest chamber of the echoing tomb, she finds only Nile water trapped in the low-lying room; its movement against the wall distorted like the deep-throated bellow of a bull.
Dismayed, she turns and weaves aimlessly to where the thieves' exit is blocked by fallen rock.
Akhenaten feels a strong draught, unlike the fetid atmosphere of the tomb; an agitated stream with a sense of someone recently encountered. Cradling Nofretiti’s muddied head, he strains to see who has passed. The draught intensifies.
Unable to distinguish detail, Pasiphae sees the dark bulk of Akhenaten and Nofreteti, hunched like the body of a beast in pain. The water bellows, the sound bouncing off the wet walls.
Pasiphae musters the last vestiges of power and wills the death of Asterius. The head drops, the bellows cease.
Pasiphae weaves closer. The head is not horned. The body is not that of a bull. She recognises Akhenaten and beside him, Nofreteti. Horrified, she recoils. Her final act has been to murder man. Now she knows his aspirations will still be wrecked by greed, lust and a need for self destruction. She has failed to lay the ghost of gross distortion.
She weaves back up the Nile where now the palace of Tiye and Amenophis has long vanished, to the ruins of Armana.
The future has flowed into the present. She is of no more consequence than a grain of flying sand. And the sun, which had been banished by her fear, bursts from behind cloud to scatter on the water dancing spears of light.
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The Prize of Procyon
There is a Greek myth in which Pelops is said to have won Hippodameia in a chariot race against her father Oenomaus, with the help of Myrtilus,
his charioteer. In this story the time, names and location have changed. But old ghosts die hard.
