The Testimony of Asterion
Three times the orb of the full moon has come and gone and still Theseus walks the halls and passages above. And still I search for the underworld. Theseus has not found me. Nobody has found me except Clitia, who leaves milk in the darkness.
The keepers searched the Temple Mansion but I am surprised how quickly they gave up looking for me. They came only briefly into the tunnels. Perhaps they dare not even guess at their extent. Perhaps they prefer to think that I am dead.
I work at night, digging this pit into the earth, this pit which will take me into the underworld. Sometimes I wonder what it will be like when I breach the world beneath. I sometimes imagine that I will break through into the top of a sky. But how far will I fall? Against the possibility that it will be sky like the one I know (but have not seen for many days) I have plaited the thread into a rope and work with it tied around my waist.
At other times I imagine that I will break into a new tunnel which will lead me out into the underworld. I dreamed that I broke into a tunnel that was exactly the same as this tunnel, and I ran through the tunnel looking for a new world, and found only a new system of tunnels that led up into a new Temple which was exactly the same as the one above. But no - not quite. Theseus was not there.
At first I used my fingers to scrape the clay and sand from the floor of this pit, but one night, high in the Temple, I watched Theseus make love to one of the Ladies of the Goddess; a woman I had once loved. It was then that I had the idea of using an axe.
Bronze makes progress much quicker, and now I need my rope to haul myself and my sand out of this pit. I have grown used to the darkness. But I long for a light that will not hurt me.
·
The almond tree offered some shelter from the winter rain as Clitia hurried back, carrying a small pot of honey and an oiled skin over her head. She would bake some honey cakes and take them over to her mother's house for Midwinter's Eve.
Making a dash for her veranda, she skipped up the steps and cast her shoes with a clatter against the back wall of the portico.
'I shall probably die an old maid,' she thought as she kneaded the flour and water together and placed a griddle over the hot coals in the hearth. Theseus had not visited her at all. He lay with Themis, his winter bride. It was too cold for games, and she had not been to the Temple Mansion for many days. 'But there is plenty of time,' she thought.
·
Theseus ran five times around the central court of the Temple Mansion in the pouring rain, stood gulping air and rebuked himself, burst off again at a sprint down the slope past scenes of bull capture, turned and raced up the slope again. The pain subsided.
The area where he stood was surrounded on all sides by the towering walls, porticoes and terraces of the Temple. Four storeys of architecture looked down upon him, dripped water and mocked. Life was too comfortable.
In the shrine of Potnia, her twin pillars flanked by single pillars standing at a lower level, was the golden axe. 'There it is!' Theseus mocked himself. 'Take it!'
His thoughts turned to the comfortable body of Themis, and the quieter seas of spring. 'It is foolish to act prematurely,' he told himself. 'How can I succeed in my task if this axe lies at the bottom of the sea? When calmer weather returns, then I shall act. In the spring. There is plenty of time.'
·
Hermione opened a large chest in her main living area in the house she had been allocated about an hour's journey north of the Temple Mansion and listened to the rain, and to the sea. Soon, a pile of objects lay precariously stacked upon the floor, balanced uncertainly upon others, and upon neatly-folded piles of cloth and some spools of freshly-spun yarn. She had found no trace of the thread beyond the break, several months ago now.
With a fresh resolve she pulled out a jar filled with silver figurines and a ring of dancing ladies who nearly quickstepped to their deaths as Hermione produced the figure of an octopus, crawling tightly over the face of a large jar. She peered into the dark void of her newly-inherited wealth, rummaged with a hand beneath the cloth which remained inside and found the object she desired. It was a dagger of polished bronze.
But there is plenty of time, she thought to herself. Plenty of time.
·
From the settlement near the tidal lake, a settlement which had played host to him for nearly five months now, Thersander walked with some friends along the drove-road, past the now brown and tangled brambles and along a leafless avenue of oak trees, southwards towards the chalk ridge. They climbed through a cathedral colonnade of bare forest, shivering with cold, and up onto the open downland. For over a month now, Thersander had been waiting for a favourable wind to depart; and now, at last, it seemed to be veering to the east and to the north. As they reached the top of the ridge, the sea came into view. In a cleft between two low hills, silhouetted against the grey and hostile ocean, stood a distant standing stone. Above this stone, above the water and above a bank of dark grey cloud, shone a low sun.
A village elder stood by the tallest of a number of posts set into the side of the downs facing the sea. Each post was decorated with a shief of barley saved from the summer harvest. In his right hand he held aloft an axe of polished copper, set in a wooden handle. His left hand was outstretched, straining upwards with fingers spread wide. Beside him stood the district shaman, looking, Thersander thought, a little hostile to the whole proceedings. On his head he wore the skull of a deer, its antlers large and branching and its leather hide trailing as a cloak behind him. Hanging from this cloak was a multitude of yellow ribbons.
The village elder had his back to everybody and was gazing at the sun and at the stone, while behind him stood many dozens of other people. He seemed to come to a decision and turned around to face the people who had assembled. The ceremony began.
'Oh world, in whose light we bathe and in whose profound bounty we share,' he cried.
Thersander had difficulty understanding him and guessed that the language may be archaic. The sun's light began to fade as its disc disappeared behind a long bank of cloud near the horizon. Soon, both the top and the bottom of this cloud bank glowed orange and white radial rays of light burst through the greyness into the sea.
Thersander's mind drifted to a recurring dream he had had as a child. A journey had taken him westwards - he had known always that it was to the west - and on his way - he had known always that he was on his way to somewhere very important - he would become lost and wander into an avenue of standing stones. Always he would try to find his way out, but the more he tried to escape from them the more numerous the stones would become. He would try desperately to seek the place where he knew he should be, but would always find himself unable to remember where it was.
'Let this axe, the symbol of your faith in mankind to follow his own will, be given to all people whose trust, by You, is deserved.' 'Indeed, yes,' responded the people around Thersander.
By now, the sun had broken through the cloud and was smouldering as an orange disc just above the horizon. It dazzled Thersander's eyes as he looked at it.
He had learned of great avenues of standing stones in Brittany from a Britannic slave who had been washed ashore, half dead, on the beach near Agia, Thersander's home. And by befriending him and learning something of his language, Thersander had made himself the natural choice for this journey. And Thersander had known in his heart that he had been fated to make it and needed to know that he had the courage to face it. But nothing had happened. He hadn't so much as seen the stones even.
'This sacred axe, given by the Mother of us all, as a covenant to that part of her which speaks the words of men, to alter the green of the world with her blessing, so that it may not become cold and barren, but give good crops of barley and fine quantities of ale...'
Had his dream created the conditions for its own fulfilment? It seemed not. He had reached Albion with far less difficulty than he had expected. It was with a mixture of anticipation and anxiety that he had sailed round the long coastline of the land that faced Albion, but he had set off at last, in the middle of the night, from a beach on a northern extremity of that coastline and after a long day's sailing out of the sight of land, had, by early the next evening, sighted high cliffs of white chalk and rowed past tall white pinnacles reaching like fingers out of the water. These were not the stones that he had seen in his dream. It was an outcome to the journey he had least expected.
Thersander remembered the forest of clanking masts and the words of the district shaman. 'Things do not have to be this way.'
By now the sun's light had faded to an incandescent orange glow over the lowest cloud bank above the sea, directly above the standing stone. The village elder, having shouted an invocation, turned again to face the glow, which expanded, as he did so, into a thin red line above the horizon. With his arms aloft, he declared to the assembly behind him: 'The season of cold will pass, spring will return and the warmth and plenitude of summer harvest will come around to us once again.'
A great cheer arose from the congregation and Thersander raised a cheer himself. The sun's glow faded to nothing and an afternoon dusk began to settle.
Then they all filed towards the standing stone, down a steep path and through some woodland. As they walked towards a large thatched building near the stone, their feet began to crunch upon a frost, and Thersander caught the smell of cooking and roasting. Near the building was a holly tree decked out with hanging orange gourds and yellow streamers, and as they approached it, the smell of roasting goose, thyme and sage filled the air. A hunter had returned with a wren.