The Testimony of the Minotaur
I had to silence him. He would have turned and seen me, and his scream would have alerted the Temple to my presence.
But so will his body thrust into the jar.
My journey through the tunnels is long and tiring, and the weight of this axe grows with every step I take, every wonderful step towards an unknown future. And every now and again I can detect the smell and the sound of a woman in front of me; she is always in front, but however hard I try I cannot catch up with her. The axe impedes my efforts to struggle and crawl through the low spaces of damp clay and sharp stones. But its gold will buy my passage across the water.
·
Clitia sat on a small folding stool on a roof terrace and watched the sun slowly sink towards the horizon above a bank of wispy cloud to the west. Earlier that day, before dawn, she had returned from the cave of Eileithyia with a weight of guilt that the subsequent events of the day had done nothing to lessen. She had returned from the cave, walked for an hour to her room in the Temple Mansion and watched the early morning from this small space high on the west side of the Temple. Soon she had found her attention welcomely distracted by a caravan that had halted nearby. And in a fit of passion, in a longing for release from the unbearable tension she had felt, and from the strong and unfulfilled desire that had led her to the cave of Eileithyia in the first place that morning, she had succeeded only in adding to the weight of her guilt.
She was frightened. Taking a fire-pot into the depths of the cave of Eileithyia before dawn had been dangerous enough. But as the embers had grown into flames and as she had scrambled hurriedly back to the votive area to make her escape, the light from the conflagration had clearly revealed a cavern that led nowhere. She had revealed a lie. And as she stood on the roof terrace now, looking northwards towards the coast, she could see a bright orange glow on the horizon, and what appeared to be a huge, menacing cloud above it, standing vertically like no cloud she had ever seen before; and as she stared, another loud shudder ran through the fabric of the building.
His sails lay in ashes at the back of the cave. But she would not betray him to the keepers.
The youth she had enticed into the Temple had not been where she had left him, when she had returned just now. She had been checking all afternoon and hoped with all her heart that he had managed to escape. Clitia went down again to the central court and crossed over to the other side of that large quadrangle, up the higher flights of the grand staircase overlooking the hall of colonnades and back onto the roof terraces on the other side of the building. There was no untoward activity near the river or the alder grove. Clitia made her way down again to the central court and walked back across. In front of her, the Axe of the Covenant was missing from the shrine where it usually rested on its plinth, she noticed, as she made for a large entrance to the right of the shrine, a broad flight of stairs guarded in their ascent by a single tall column reaching massively upwards to support the third storey of the Temple, high above her, and the floor on which her room lay.
Through the ceremonial halls she went, down a wide and gently descending staircase to a small passage leading to some more stairs and into another hall. At a table laid with cheese and vegetables, salads, fish and cold meats, Clitia poured a jug of milk, collected a bowl of tongue and followed a winding path through dark passages that led into a hall on the southern side of the central court. Then she decided that there was no need to avoid crossing the court itself with her burden, so she walked across to the grand staircase on the eastern side and descended to the floor of the hall of colonnades with the central lightcourt and the double axe with ivy twisting up it, and into the passage which led into the cells where she had left the youth. If he had not yet made it to safety he might by now have returned to this secluded corner of the Temple Mansion.
Holding the milk in one hand and the wooden bowl in the other, Clitia arrived again at the cell where she had lain with the youth. There was no sound. Letting her eyes become used to the darkness, she felt for the door and found that it was open. She went a little deeper into the warren of passages, and there was still no sound.
'Glaucus,' she spoke softly into the darkness.
Putting down the bowl and the milk, Clitia made a search of the maze of cells beneath the hall that lay north of the hall of colonnades, but they revealed nothing to her and she soon became satisfied that they contained nobody.
'He must have found his own way out,' she thought to herself, with relief, and picking up the cold meal in the darkness, she made her way back into the central court.
·
As the young lady disappeared up the staircase and into the western halls, the silence in the central court became suddenly very sinister and foreboding, and Hermione noticed with a start that the Axe was not standing between the columns of the shrine. The thought crossed her mind that Theseus might have taken the Axe. But she had been speaking with him only a few moments before and the idea seemed ludicrous, preposterous, impossible. He could not have overtaken her, she would have seen him, or heard him. Perhaps he had moved it somewhere earlier. Or perhaps the keepers were doing something with it. But to what purpose? A sudden chill passed over her. Hermione found herself overcome by a sudden emptiness that held a sickening familiarity. Gripped suddenly by a strong sense of urgency, she turned and hurried back towards the Court of the Verandas.
Theseus walked along a balcony overlooking the Court of the Verandas when a noise stopped him in his tracks. It was the sound of footsteps on one of the floors above and he knew instantly who it was. Bounding to the nearest flight of stairs, he launched himself up them and stopped again to listen. The footsteps came from the next balcony above and this time the woman turned towards him as he called to her from the top of the next flight of steps. Her black hair was not elaborately arranged and hung without the attraction of ringlets. Theseus once more found himself enthralled and transfixed by her extraordinary looks; she was not beautiful by any common standard but possessed a plainness that Theseus found captivating. And for the first time, Theseus was able to speak to her. For the first time in his life, he found himself at a loss.
'I have been waiting for you,' he said. She appeared not to be impressed by this and said nothing. Her face was as he remembered it; she had the most limpid and liquid eyes he had ever seen. They looked at Theseus with an intensity that turned his flesh to jelly.
'What is your name?' Theseus stood within an arm's length of her and reached a hand towards her wrist. Her face was alive with intelligence and concern. 'Ariadne,' she said, softly.
'Ariadne,' repeated Theseus. But before he could restrain her, she turned and beckoned him along the balcony, up another flight of steps to the highest level and into a dark corridor that ran parallel with the balcony. Theseus became concerned that he would loose her in the darkness. He caught and held her arm. She turned.
'The Axe of the Covenant has been taken from the shrine and you must not leave without it,' she said. Theseus's heart missed a beat, as much at her knowledge of his secret as at the news itself. He could not absorb the information, with such a quickening of his heart as Ariadne's voice instilled.
'It has been taken by the creature you have come to destroy. You can delay no longer.' Theseus listened, and his confusion made him less inclined to speak than to listen. 'Perhaps you have been unaware of its presence? But there are some in this Temple who have not been so unaware. It is within your power to seek out this monster and to slay it. But you will be unable to slay this creature without my help,' she continued. 'And you will be unable to escape from the labyrinth without my help.' She moved closer to him. 'And I am unable to help, without your love.' She reached out a hand and touched Theseus on the chest.
·
The Testimony of the Minotaur
I have emerged from the tunnels into this startling world, this underworld. And as I emerged, I saw no sign of the woman ahead of me. As I walked out into this expanse of bare soil, this barren, treeless, plantless emptiness that extends from horizon to horizon, I was alone. There can be no explanation. I had been following her, unmistakably following her, down into the high, white chalk tunnel as the light grew around me and I looked with passion, straining my eyes excitedly, wishing to see who had guided me so resolutely; but there was nobody there. And beyond the mouth of the tunnel, beneath a white, overcast sky, in a land where there is nowhere at all to hide, not even on the steep hillside above me, there is no sign of anybody or anything, except; high in the sky, a bird flies away, it is gone now, perhaps it was a dove.
The air is freezing and the clouds are pale and lifeless. There is no green at all. I must cross the water. I must carry this golden axe to the water, and wait.
·
The central court of the Temple Mansion was deserted and the shrine was empty. Theseus turned and looked at the evening sunlight playing upon the very top of the roofscape behind him. Before him stood two columns upon a rostrum, flanked on either side by a lower space and a single column, looking out into the shadow of the central court. Between the columns, only a stepped plinth looked back, lonely and displaced, supporting nothing. It was clear to Theseus that he had to trust Ariadne.
Theseus stole through a ceremonial hall, taking the lamp from a table, and paused at a door that led into a vestry. The door was not locked and he entered. This had been a favourite hiding place of a young woman whose name he tried to recall but for some reason could not do so. The room should have held a suite of memories, but it is strange how a place can sometimes fail to capture any sense of its history, and it was now simply a small room with a waxed wooden floor, a number of chests lying against the walls, piles of cloth and gold. But no axe.
On the floor was a figurine, the size of a vase. Theseus picked it up and felt the smoothness of the bronze. It was a Lady of the Goddess, wearing a long skirt rising in tiers to an apron. Her face held an air of melancholy and he was sure that it had not before.
Another figurine stood on the floor with the same, long skirt, the same full, exposed breasts, but waving two snakes in her hands and wearing a flatter hat on her head, with a cat sitting upon it. Theseus decided that he must do as Ariadne wished, and extinguished the lamp, both to emphasise his decision and to prepare.
He put the figurine down in the darkness and as he did so, heard the sound of footsteps in the large hall outside. There was a shuffle of feet and a whisper, then the sound of running, more distant but approaching. Through the doorway into the hall he could just make out the form of Alcimede, entering from a stairway.
Then another woman appeared, whom Theseus recognised only vaguely and then, it was difficult to see in the darkness, Hesione, and perhaps Phyllis and, he could not be absolutely sure but a woman wearing a tall hat looked very much like Tethys, and the woman in a long pale skirt was unmistakably Pandora. A coven of karpathia.
'Can you feel it? The presence has gone.'
'Yes, I feel it. Our evening's work is done.'
An involuntary chill passed through Theseus and he decided not to disturb them. They spoke in hushed tones that he could not hear properly and then, as though they had conjured all the winds together at once, they vanished.
Theseus followed a winding path through the Temple Mansion and arrived at the lightcourt where steps descended down into the earth cavern and the tunnels. There was no sign of Ariadne. Theseus took an oil lamp, climbed down the steps and followed the passage to the curving stairway along the wall of the cavern. At the bottom of this vast and musty silo, Ariadne stood at the entrance to the tunnel of red earth. She touched his chest as he came and stood beside her
'I can help you, but you must do as I say,' she cautioned. 'Take this spindle of thread, play it out, and let it guide you through the labyrinth. It is a thread that Daedalus made and will lead you to the Minotaur. When you have slain this creature, you must follow the thread back to me, and I will be waiting. But do not loose your way, and do not let yourself stray from its path. If you do not follow this thread back, you will be lost.'
Theseus took the spindle from her and turned for the tunnels. Glancing back into the darkness as he crouched low into the passage, he could feel Ariadne's presence but could no longer see her.
He followed the tunnel until it opened out at the place where, earlier that day, he had painted Hermione. But it is strange how places sometimes hold a greater anticipation of things to come than they do memories of the past. This tunnel, with its damp walls of saliva and paint, was now a first staging post on a potentially long and hazardous journey and had a wholly different aura now than it had had only a short while before. Theseus found himself having to crawl through the tunnels, playing out the thread and letting it guide him onwards, through the labyrinth of tunnels, deeper and deeper. Soon the oil in the lamp became exhausted and he found himself in total blackness.
·
Thersander hammered an impression into the ingot with an ivory stamp and a bone mallet. He had cupelled so much lead in the past month that his workshop resembled a treasure store on a rubbish tip. Propped up against the wall were three ingots of pure silver, brightly formed and each the weight of a large flagon of wine. Surrounding them was a litter of dirty white powder, heavy yellow litharge, red lead, black charcoal and a brittle scum; as though the jetsam of an unwholesome tide had sludged over broken rock rubble on his floor. His workshop was foul almost beyond description. From it, the ground floor of his home, no door led out into the lane beyond and it was not easy to remove the residue that he and his apprentices had manufactured. They had oxidised more lead during the past few weeks than it was possible for five men to lift in one effort. Cleaning the floor had not been a priority when each hour away from the burners was a further hour into the night that had to be worked. His charcoal store was now almost depleted; a scale model of its former self, only small pieces and dust. Only a single burner now passed noxious fumes out into the lane, via a flu. At the peak of activity Thersander had had six going. The mother of his baby daughter was not preparing to pass another meal down into the workshop from the upper levels of the building; she had gone over to her mother's house for the evening.
On the workshop hearth was a bowl of lead that had just melted. The apprentice took it off and stood it on the floor. As it cooled, he pulled a bronze ladle from the fire and dipped it into the liquid, straining the hot fluid through the wire mesh, fishing for lead weights.
Out they came; once, twice, three times. He knocked them onto the floor. This pure lead would be used later to make measuring weights; much later. For the time being, he would remelt them and cast an ingot onto a wooden sand-table, in the shape of an ox-hide, tied by the legs to the four corners of the table. He was not a bad apprentice. Many times had he frozen a ladle into a cooling block of lead, but only once had he poured molten bronze into too square a shape for an ingot and set fire to the wooden sides of the sand-table.
The metal that began to solidify in the pot, as he knocked the last of the lead from the strainer onto the floor, contained a higher enrichment of silver. He put the pot back onto the fire to remelt the enriched lead and repeat the process once again.
After a few repetitions the very enriched lead would be heated yet again and air fanned over it. This was where the horrible mess came from. As the very enriched lead was fanned with air, a heavy yellow scum would develop and be skimmed off. And the end of this magic was a large amount of yellow litharge and a heavy button of pure silver, which would be heated over a very hot fire to give it its final purification. During this stage, apprentices had been known to faint, from the heavy blowing required.
Thersander gave his apprentice leave to go home and the boy gratefully disappeared, leaving the pot of enriched lead on the cooling embers. As he hammered the insignia of the town and of his workshop into the only silver ingot not to have one, Thersander heard a number of shouts from outside. Daylight still penetrated into his workshop and the smell of cooking fires mixed with the industrial smell of charcoal and lead. The sun, unseen from his windows, cast long shadows in the lane outside.
He climbed the wooden ladder up to the spacious living floor of his house and descended by the front stairway into a wide lane. The flues from his workshop discharged into a back lane and the air in the front was quite breathable, laced with coriander and mint from the evening cooking. Another medley of shouts drifted past the houses, from the direction of the harbour.
Down at the beach, a boat had arrived carrying olive oil, grain and a quantity of other provisions. It had rowed for its life as the sun had begun to sink in the west, and thirteen very exhausted mariners were disembarking. Amongst them was a friend of Thersander's.
Thersander spotted him.
'Where have you been? We had almost given you up for dead!'
Inachus dismissed his crew and strode up the beach. The crew passed waterproof fabric and tent poles to each other over the side of the boat.
'Where is your livestock?' inquired Inachus.
'Take me to your livestock!'
A fading light dwindled slowly to nothing as the sun had done a while before, and cast a meagre illumination over the last moments in the life of a heifer, as her blood washed the horns of the goddess Potnia beside the butchers' alter, bathing the curved section between them in sympathetic imitation of the blood of childbirth. Taking life is a serious business and respect must be shown. Her thigh bones were carefully wrapped in the fat from her underbelly and offered with heartfelt prayers of thanks to the Goddess. 'Thank you, benefactor of all,' spoke Inachus with sincerity, 'for dropping us safely upon this shore, and for the food and drink which will follow.' He shot a questioning and expectant eye at Thersander.
The sail was stowed away and the cargo made safe and secure, and the rest of the meat was butchered by the light of a fire. The men gathered around the flames, but the joints were dispatched to kitchens nearby. The candles of bone and fat burned brightly upon the butchers' alter (all death must be accompanied by an offering) and Thersander retired with Inachus to the comfort of Neileus's hearth.
'That was the most ill-fated journey I have ever made,' said Inachus. 'You should have heard the oracle I was given on Calliste. There is no way we ought to be setting out on this expedition. And the steam! You should have seen the steam! A snake! - she said. beware a snake!' (The Island of Calliste lies a little less than two days' sailing to the south, and is itself an island in the 'Midst of the Sea'. In later times it will be known as the island of Santorini, or Thera. Thera is shaped like a crescent moon; an island with a big bite taken out of it. Cliffs of volcanic rock rise to six hundred feet above an anchorage that is twelve hundred feet deep. Calliste is a round island with many distinctive shallow-water inlets and a fine city. Inachus had anchored in shallow water to clean the barnacles from the bottom of his boat. Gasses which issue from the rocks beneath Calliste are cleansing to the bottoms of boats. But they carry their own prophecy.)
'You are safe now, anyway' said Neileus.
'Yes,' replied Inachus, 'although the wind dropped halfway across today and left us floundering in a horrible sea. I have never experienced the wind to drop quite so suddenly. There is something very ominous going on. Thersander,' he turned to his friend, 'how was your journey to Albion?'
'I didn't get lost amongst the long stones of Brittany, my friend.'
'Not in Albion?' Inachus cast a glance at Neileus.
'He has been like this ever since he got back,' joked Neileus.
Thersander grinned. 'I wouldn't worry about the oracle,' he said. 'I don't think anyone can see into the future.' Inachus took a pace forward and embraced him. 'Lets go and visit the kitchens,' he said. 'I'm hungry.'
They walked out into the night, past a number of houses built of stone below and brick above, of three storeys here, four storeys there and with windows that glowed with the incandescent red of oil lamplight through oiled papyrus paper. The warmth in the sight of the red windows against the night sky, and the smell of the fires and cooking, transmitted itself to Inachus as an involuntary shudder. How much more comforting than the cold blackness of water at night.
They came to a hall where meals were being prepared. Beef was on the menu; celery and fennel braised in oil, asparagus, sea perch, mackerel and squid from the fishing boats, bread and olive oil.
'We will be setting off on the expedition early tomorrow morning,' said Neileus. 'The boats are all ready and packed with everything we will need. Everything we can think of. Our first port of call will be the island of Kos, and then we will make our way along the coast. Are you ready to join us on the quest for the Golden Fleece?'
'Of course we are coming,' replied Inachus. At that moment a shudder ran through the house, followed by another, more powerful one. In the distance, far to the south, an orange glow had appeared on the horizon and through the windows of Neileus's house sounded a faint and muffled crack, as though from distant thunder.
·
Hermione ascended a wooden staircase then up, up, to the highest above the court, and along its floor, over bare boards and rugs, past chests and couches laid against the wall, past banisters that overlooked the court and a horned roofscape; she gazed down into the evening shadows, but could see nothing.
The sun had set a while before and she imagined Theseus leaning nonchalantly against the banister, and imagined herself throwing him violently over the balustrade into the courtyard far below, where he lay motionless, face down in the grey powder that was beginning to cover the flags. The image pleased her.
At the end of the balcony was a large cabinet. It stood upon a red rug with a spiral design. Beside it was a stone vase with large, sweeping handles, filled with dried grasses and papyrus rushes. Hermione opened the door of the cabinet to reveal seashells of various shapes and sizes and other objects which she removed. Behind all these was a sheet of papyrus paper that she had torn from one of the scrolls. It was covered with brown marks. 'The calf of Iphiclus,' read Hermione, focusing her mind anxiously away from her other concerns. 'The soul of the crab,' she read, 'lay in the calf, but the crab lay torn into pieces. The calf sat happily and chewed, not knowing that it was dead.'
Hermione took the sheet and placed it on the floor. She reached inside the cabinet and pulled out another couple of sheets, torn from the same scroll. 'The fisherman spread a net over the sea,' she read, 'suspended on four poles, one at each corner. When it was tight, he asked the magician to render it opaque and, behold, a flat green surface spread before them both. But whenever a wave...' Hermione turned to the other sheet, '...broke through the net, the magic made it appear as a growing hill, which travelled along the net until it shrank and died. The fisherman was dissatisfied with hills that appeared and disappeared, moved and rose and fell, and urged the magician to shape them differently; so the magician shaped them like men and women, cattle and...
'pphhheewwww!' she sighed.
To the northeast of the Temple Mansion, in the Harbour Town and on the shores around about, people were already beginning to sense that something odd was happening to the sea. The tide was receding far beyond any point it had ever fallen to before. In the growing dusk, fishermen with lines were finding themselves looking at a landscape they had never dreamed of ever seeing. Fish were lying stranded on distant rocks. There was a sound coming from the same direction that they had never heard before.
Hermione took out her bronze knife and tied a piece of Theseus's hair to its blade. Then she gave the scroll dresser a heave and sent it crashing through the wooden balustrade down onto the floor of the court below. It landed with a splintering impact. Hermione allowed herself to imagine that Theseus had been standing, leaning over the banisters in front of it and knew that it would have done the job that she had intended for it. She suspended the knife by the piece of hair and sent it spinning around.
'I will follow you,' she said. 'I WILL FOLLOW YOU' she shouted, as volcanic ash began to fall gently down into the court, like snow.