Iasius had wrestled another bull and left the arena with thirty strides of advantage. The suitor who had defeated Theseus in the first of the wrestling contests had performed only moderately well with a giant animal, one of whose horns missed his face by a distance which horrified the crowd and, by good fortune alone, had left the arena on level terms with the animal and with the judges.
A lighter man was next. His bull was perhaps the smallest of all and this may have caused him to lower his guard slightly or perhaps to raise his expectations unwisely. For whatever reason, he strutted in front of the animal with the air of an elder brother teasing a sibling. The animal watched and waited, with a look of patient confidence in its eyes. The bronze-belted contestant tried to circle around to its flank, but the bull moved with him. He began to get impatient and moved more quickly. Still the bull waited, and followed the promenade with a turn of its head and a shuffle of its feet.
After a long and patient preamble, the suitor made a sudden move to try to stir the beast into a change of position and succeeded too well; the bull flew at him with the speed of a light charger and gored him deeply, bringing a cry of anguish from the crowd. The man tried to cut his losses and retreat to a safe area beyond the fence, but he was too far within the arena and the pugnacious beast was in no mood for mercy. It flashed forward again with its head low and the point of one horn moving like a lance, dug deeply into accommodating flesh, found a good purchase and ripped violently upwards, tossing the heavily attached weight free again. But a dismal freedom. Freedom in a heap. The injured suitor made another valiant attempt to escape, but the glistening red on his body was no help to the adventure. The bull charged a third time.
The bull was roped at last, and a corpse was removed.
Theseus entered the arena. A rumble of hooves announced the entrance of a huge bull, a bull which appeared to be of greater speed of thought than those which had entered previously; it took no pause but remained galloping at high speed, spotted Theseus and increased its already considerable momentum in his direction. Theseus took evasive action instinctively, an ability born of long years of practice in the hills around his home. The bull turned in front of the fencing and charged again. Again Theseus evaded contact, and the bull turned and charged again; then again; then again. Theseus became certain that he had the measure of the bull's reactions, and the beast must soon get tired. He hoped! as the sweat poured from him.
·
Hermione had had enough. The sight of a badly injured man lying on the floor of the arena with no attempt to rescue him had brought all her worst memories flooding back and she felt sick and exhausted. Making an excuse, she climbed the steps to the eastern door of the Temple Mansion and made her way along the corridors and up the stairs. At first the Temple Mansion seemed to be deserted, but as she descended the stairs again she heard distant laughter from the upper levels. Then she came upon a thread.
It ran in a tortuous path along a couple of passages and through a hall, and Hermione, grateful for any excuse to delay her return, followed it. It wound through another series of rooms and up a short flight of stairs to another split level on an upper floor of the labyrinth. It was ridiculous! Somebody must have caught an end of their clothing on something!
·
Theseus walked a little way across the fighting ground. He had gained advantage in both the wrestling and in the bull-grappling, and each stride of advantage he held was a pace nearer to the finishing line he would stand at the start of the race. But it was the positions of his opponents in relation to himself at the start of the race that really mattered and Iasius had drawn to go first in the second and final round of the bull-grappling contest. Here on Crete he had only this one chance to pull further ahead, only one more entry into the arena, although there was no limit to the number of bulls he could choose to take in succession. Iasius would have to guess how well Theseus and the others might do after him; had to balance the risk to his own safety against the risks that Theseus or Melicertes might choose to take in response. Iasius would have to weigh the risks and the benefits of each further bull that he might decide to take; a risk to himself, a drain on his own energy as each bull would be, so also would be the bull that his opponents might feel themselves forced to take in reply. How much need he do? How far need he go before the drain on his own legs cancelled the advantage gained? This was a matter for judgement. And each bull carried its own risk of serious injury.
·
Hermione was surprised to see the thread suddenly twitch and move as she followed it across a room, and watched it with growing incredulity. After spending a few moments puzzling whether it was really moving forward or simply jiggling about, she put her foot on it. Nothing happened at first, but then one side tightened a great deal, and then suddenly went very slack.
·
The Testimony of Asterion
I came upon a thread in a passageway, as I made myself climb back into the light. When I followed it, it took me into a hall. I pulled across that space, avoiding the lightcourt, between the angular columns of the partition and out into a passage. No end revealed itself on the far side of the hall and the thread moved heavily, despite its lightness. I listened. Were my footsteps the only ones? The thread tightened as I pulled - snap! - I do not know my own strength!
The thread must have been laid especially for me. The only possible reason for it to be here is to guide me to the underworld. I gave joyous thanks to the unknown hand that had taken pity on my suffering and then... No! Cruel hand! Which way should I follow? I held the thread and reasoned. The side which is slackest must lead to the break; and the thread must have snapped on the side that runs deepest. You see! It was even ordained that I should break the thread in order to know which way to follow! I ran across the hall and into the passage, turned and followed it to another hall, ran across that and along a dark corridor to a flight of stairs. Up the stairs.
Up?
I listened. The shouting outside was muffled and unreal. The end of the thread lay on a white gypsum step near the top of the flight. I could not see the other end of the break. Footsteps approached. The thread had tricked me!
·
On a sunlit roof terrace of the eastern side of the Temple Mansion, a group of young women looked on at the bull contests. Clitia was watching the action excitedly with her friends. They were all enjoying the thrill and the honour of their new surroundings and intended to give themselves every chance of a visit when the fun began in the evening. After a while, Clitia went away to check that the thread was still in place.
·
The frayed end of the thread lay on a floor just beyond an open doorway into a room with ships sailing around three sides. The other end of the break was nowhere to be seen. Hermione walked across the room and into a small hall, fronted by a balcony over a lightcourt. An open doorway led from this hall to a white gypsum floor at the top of a flight of stairs. As she approached the steps, Hermione caught a fleeting glimpse of the end of a thread as it vanished into the darkness of the stairwell.
·
Theseus entered the ring. Following Iasius's second performance his hope was to bring down two bulls as safely and effortlessly as he could, but this ambition was confronted almost immediately with difficulty; by a bull which ambled into the arena and stopped. It was a large black beast and as soon as it started to move again, and he approached it, Theseus recognised it to be astute as well. It signalled danger. His problem at first was to persuade it to stop circling safely around the edge of the arena and to come into the centre. This took far longer than he had hoped and when eventually he managed to immobilise it beneath his grip, after much danger and effort, he was unable to complete the manoeuvre. Although he had a firm grip about its neck and horns he was in the wrong position and found himself partly hanging, partly resting upside down on the ground, as the bull knelt with its head twisted above him, the tip of one horn very close to his eye.
He considered his best escape. Alternatives ran through his mind as he strained to keep the beast's head still, trying to decide how to free himself safely. When it came, his action was swift, sudden, and gave the false impression of having been well-rehearsed.
He took, and only partly subdued a second bull and had to ask for a third. There was no time to weigh the consequences of not doing so.
It was a lighter animal, rather like the one that had killed the earlier suitor, and under normal circumstances would not have posed much of a problem for Theseus, except that it turned so quickly after each attack that Theseus had no time at all to recover from his evasion. His efforts at control met with only limited success and both Theseus and the bull found themselves engaged in a wearing down process to which the bull eventually succumbed.
With tired legs and aching arms, Theseus left the arena on level terms with Iasius.
·
Clitia returned to the terrace with dreadful news. The thread that she had wound around the labyrinth, linking the rooms where she and her friends were to lie that night and hopefully providing cause for an intrigued visitor to give them preferential attention, had been tampered with. 'There was no sign of it in the room of the ships, and I looked for it in the lower halls,' she said excitedly, 'and found it,' she stopped to catch her breath, 'going in entirely the wrong direction! I followed it a little way and it seems to be going down into the passages beneath the southeastern courts. I couldn't see very well (she had become very frightened when, in the darkness, a voice had spoken her name) and I couldn't go any further, because I didn't have a lamp.'
A call on a triton shell announced a hiatus in the proceedings, and the ground in front of the portable shrine of Potnia became alive with a frenzy of rearrangement. The suitor whose arm had been injured by Iasius during the wrestling had chosen the lion option.
Clitia was frightened. Fear and disappointment had killed her interest in the final stages of the contest and she left her friends watching dejectedly from the terraces, and roamed through the sunlit rooms of the upper levels. The voice she had heard in the darkness of the passage was a voice that she knew from her childhood, a voice that had once been very kind to her; the voice of a man who had fought last year at these Games, and had won. The voice of Asterion.
But his body had been burned on the pyre.
Finding a loaf of bread and some cooked meat in one of the rooms, she walked out onto an unfamiliar roof level and found a release for her anxiety in the bright sunlight. Breaking the loaf into pieces, she attracted a couple of hungry gulls and began to throw the bread up for them to catch in flight; then discovered that with the meat it was possible to attract other birds besides seagulls.
A number of crows appeared and called reinforcements to fight the gulls.
Never before had such a bad omen been seen. As the suitor stood, weapons in hand, facing a lion in a state of severe fright owing to its recent handling and its present surroundings, but fit and angry and more than ready to defend itself against a man armed only with a long club of wild olive and a short spear; at that precise moment, a flock of crows, away to his left, rose from a tree near the river and flew towards the Temple Mansion, like a plume of black smoke. The noise they emitted, as they did so, was dreadful. It filled the suitor with dread.
Clitia heard a scream, and assumed that it came from one of the birds.
·
The Testimony of Asterion
I have brought this thread down with me so that, if I fail, I can find my way back. These tunnels wind and descend and narrow and open into caverns and twist and wind again. In one direction lies water. In another, there is no water and only the damp smell of clay and stones. The thread pulls with a strain that makes me believe that its length is infinite; that it trails up into a Temple of halls and lightcourts and brightly decorated rooms that continue for ever.
In one of the passages of the Temple a short while ago, I turned to see, in the dimness, the girl who had once come to me with a small embroidered cloth; a gift of thanks for carrying her home when she had fallen and hurt herself. She often spoke to me, before I became the Bull of Minos. The work was a childish design, inexpertly sewn, and I treasured it. She has come to find me. She has come to me once more. Would I have pierced her with a mistletoe spike if she had lost a race at the maidens' Games at midsummer? Would I have killed her also?
Cruel truth.
In the knowledge that the thread was of such length that I could not become lost, I ran, deeper and deeper into the comforting darkness, pulling the thread along with me. Soon the tunnels narrowed, became stony, and I found myself crawling on my hands and knees in the blackness. Exhaustion overcame me. Through the tunnels I could hear the heartbeat of another world. Somewhere, there is a tunnel that will breach this world and lead me into the underworld. But my thirst grows, and still the tunnels do not descend quickly enough.
·
The ceremonial interlude drew to a close, and the contestants stood at the start of a long and irregularly curving racecourse. It stretched for a distance of about six hundred walking paces in all; running in a broad curve to the right, past the alder grove, then to the left along the flat of the river meadows beyond, before turning in a tight hairpin bend to the north of the Temple Mansion and continuing up a crippling slope to the finishing line at the northern entrance of the Temple itself.
Five suitors waited with their eyes fixed ahead of them, knowing that for some of them, this might be the last thing they would ever do. Theseus and Iasius stood together, Melicertes stood sixteen paces behind them and the others much further back still.
The starter called them to attention and let the silence of the early evening scream into their brains.
The lighted torch crashed down onto the stone with the crack of a gun, and a cascade of sparks dissipated quickly into black specks and smoke as the athletes broke with a furious but controlled motion, a final release of energy, and Iasius pulled a little ahead of Theseus and they were both about six running strides ahead of Melicertes and the others as they ran beside the alder grove, and Melicertes began to close quickly and was now within three strides of Theseus who had tucked in behind Iasius who was setting a fast pace for fear of Melicertes, against a wind that began to blow sideways into their faces as they passed the northern edge of the Temple Mansion and Iasius fought to stay in front because he dared not pit his finishing speed against that of Melicertes who was nearly on his shoulder now and Theseus made a break and Iasius responded as they left the Temple Mansion behind them and they followed the broad left-hand sweep of the course with Theseus in front, followed by Iasius and Melicertes, and Theseus began to pull away from Iasius who dug deep into his reserves, only one stride behind Theseus and still with Melicertes at his shoulder as they ran towards the hairpin bend and Theseus made an effort to break away again, and pulled away and led by two running strides as they rounded the bend into the long and crippling uphill straight and Melicertes passed Iasius - Iasius responded and they crossed again and Melicertes fell back and further back, his early effort costing him dearly, and Iasius began to narrow the gap between himself and Theseus, finding a reserve of energy and Theseus responded to his challenge as they ran side by side up the long slope with their legs screaming with pain and growing immobility and as they climbed the slope side by side with only a little way to go now, Theseus began to pull ahead, and a little further ahead still and a little more...
And suddenly it was all over.
Theseus was presented with an apple; it was the most glorious present he had ever received, and he was led quickly up a sloping passage between raised porticoes depicting bull capture into the central court of the Labyrinth.