Thersander stood upon a pile of charcoal, in Laurium.
'This must be the dirtiest job of all!' he yelled, from the end of a basket chain which stretched in a long line from the boat to the rows of charred turf that had covered the fuel as it cooked. 'Clean dirt,' yelled a voice back. 'Make the most of it!'
The ship was eventually filled to capacity and they moved on to another one. In its bottom sat fifteen ingots of lead, each the weight of a sack of wheat. They had spent three days 'hiding the lead' as the task had come to be known.
·
Theseus made a painful decision. He would spend another six days with Clitia, making beautiful love to this perfect being, then he would do what he had come to do. What he had risked his life to do. Six days and five nights to come, to remember for the rest of his life.
Then he would do what he had come to do and leave. He would light the fires.
In a cave by the sea, several miles away, were two sails, a black and a white, hidden and secure. On a cliff near his father's house, or on a beach, or in the home of one of his friends, his father would be standing, looking out to sea. Theseus imagined the elders warning him, 'Aegeus,' they would be saying, 'we cannot see a white sail. It has been six months!'
Six months!
Delay! Delay! Delay! Theseus repeated this word quietly to himself, as Clitia lay asleep beside him.
On the shore he would find a boat. Now that the weather was good, it would not be difficult to find a boat. The cave was secure. But the moon was still a little too bright. In six days' time it would be new. Then he must go. Then he would sail for Athens. It was an easy journey and the ships for the expedition would need fitting out before they began the long voyage eastwards in search of the Golden Fleece.
Clitia stirred a little and her cheek came to rest gently against his.
·
The next evening came and Clitia did not appear. Theseus stayed in her room all night, waiting, but she did not come. The next day passed and the morning of the next, and still she was nowhere to be found. The first pang of regret began to tie a knot inside him. He had not told her of his plans, of course; how could he! She would alert the keepers at once, Theseus knew that and understood. This Temple was her new life, stretching before her. She had no reason to come every day to the Temple. Perhaps she was washing her clothes, or visiting friends, or one of a hundred and one other things she might be doing - WHY? - the thought intruded like a blow.
Entering the shrine of Potnia, a cool breeze gusted in from the central court of the Temple Mansion. Nobody was about. Theseus stayed only long enough to look at the large double axe of solid gold that stood with its long handle planted vertically in the stepped plinth between two pillars on the higher platform. The Axe of Potnia, symbol of the covenant with the Great Goddess. Theseus shivered and struggled to lift the axe from its setting, in order to feel its weight. It felt no lighter than it had before. As he left, a dove flew down, settled upon the axe and stared intently at him.
·
In a grand hall, in the land of the Achaeans, a great fire burned in a hearth, stoked and blown to a great heat. Beneath its blue flames, resting amongst the bright orange coals, lay a copper figurine. As the metal began to melt, signifying that the fire was hot enough to melt gold as well as copper, a trumpet sounded to announce the fact; huge bulls were led into the hall and through a heavy barrier onto a wooden platform, which bent downwards and quivered threateningly as their weight increased upon it. Three priests stood by the platform as the copper vanished into the fire. Each wore an ornamental bronze dagger on a cord around his neck
An axe was brought up to the hearth; a large double axe of gold, set in an ivory shaft. Another priest took this heavy object in his hands and waited for the bulls to quieten.
When they had done so, great drums began to beat and when they had filled the hall with a terrible reverberation, the priest raised the axe in his hands, and plunged it heavily into the fire. With a great explosion of flame and sparks the coals thrust sideways to accommodate this violent intrusion and at the same instant, the priests at the platform began to cut at the bulls mercilessly with whips. The bellowing and the stamping rose to a crescendo that shook the floor so much that it began to fall apart. Timbers crashed, the floor of the platform tilted dangerously, and in this climax of sympathetic and contagious magic, the gold of the axe began to melt in the flames.
·
The late afternoon wore on, and Theseus went again to see if Clitia was in her room, but she was not, so he returned to the lower halls. A stillness pervaded the hall in which Theseus stood. When he stopped moving, the world stopped moving, and in its place was a painful silence that hurt his ears. He made his way out into the central court. There had been an earth tremor a short while before and the Ladies of the Goddess had obviously thought it wise to retire to the safety of the open air beyond the Temple.
The anticipation of another tremor hung in the silent evening like a rumble from a distant explosion. Somewhere, in the alternatives that rang through the universe, Theseus had already taken the Axe.
The court was deserted and in shadow. The entrances to halls and stairways led upwards and downwards into the rooms, halls, courts and passages of the lower levels of the building. All was quiet. Theseus entered a hall.
Back in the central court, the ornamental trees rustled in a gusty breeze which swirled down from the horn-adorned roofs, high above. A wooden couch invited him to sit, but he declined the offer.
Theseus walked across the courtyard to the side that caught the sun's rays for most of the day. Far above, on his right, the waning sunlight played upon the high stonework. Before him was a great passage which led down a slope, surrounded by great walls and high columns. He leapt onto a ledge of the stonework, walked along its edge and came by a narrow and precipitous route to the columns supporting the roof of a portico. On the back wall was a brightly-coloured fresco, in bas-relief, depicting great bulls cavorting in an orgy of capture. Theseus stood on the lip of the parapet and looked down at the ground beneath him. Because of the gradient of the passageway from the central court, it was now quite a long way below.
On the other side of the passage, at the same height, was a similar portico. Theseus measured the distance across to it with his eyes, and with his judgement. He jumped.
A short flight of stairs led from the portico down into a hall of colonnades. He skipped down, looked around and ran back up the steps, climbed over a balustrade that hung high above the sloping passageway and found another small ledge to follow, to a lintel that formed a small bridge to the top of a high wall. From here, the rows of great horns decorating the roof lines of the Temple Mansion were visible in all their glory; rounded battlements of great curving crescents, pointing skywards. He turned and followed the wall to the top of a stone jamb against a tall wooden door, scrambled down the face of the door, using the fittings as footholds, crossed the passage and stood at the foot of the slope on flat, paved ground. 'There is probably no need even for a rope!' he thought to himself, as he mused upon his impending escape.
In front of him lay the open side of another hall of colonnades, beneath the other. The columns were all of wood, inverted cypress trunks tapering downwards to the floor and painted a deep red. On the far side stood double axes, mounted vertically on wooden shafts.
Against a white gypsum wall were thick woollen carpets. One was decorated in a bold pattern with many interconnected white spirals and yellow dots against a deep purple background. Another was older, slightly faded and had a single flower surrounded by bolder, more open spirals, stylised frogs and nets against purple and brown. Painted plasterwork decorated the wall above. In the shadow of the evening, everything felt suddenly very alien.
Theseus began to prepare his mind for a journey through a moonless night and unpredictable seas.
Between the hanging carpets was a door. Theseus opened it and entered a gloomy passage and a corridor which led off to his right. A little more than halfway down the corridor was an entrance, again to his right. Theseus entered a small, dark hall. It was furnished in browns and reds. Two lamps burned on a stone balustrade. A dozen paces further down the long corridor he came to a flight of stairs leading upwards. Opposite, an ornamental table stood with silver feet upon a white and blue-veined stone floor. A wooden gaming board lay on top with some ivory pieces. Four creatures with the heads of eagles and the legs of lions. Two Ladies of the Goddess. Four buildings with upwards-crescentic horns. Sixteen fluted cones, each about the size of a walnut. Two strange pieces with the head of a bull and the body of a man.
A noise in the small hall sent him back along the corridor.
Holding one of the pieces, Theseus raced back to the gaming table and up the stairs, and found himself in an enclosed courtyard surrounded by high walls; it was partly roofed, and surrounded on all sides by tiers of wooden balconies. Beneath these at floor level was a veranda running along all four sides of the space. All was of wooden construction, with strong posts rising high in support, and hand rails and banisters. The veranda he found himself on was lavishly furnished, as was the one on the opposite wall, and the balconies above seemed identical to the ground level. There were banisters on one side of him and furnishings against a long decorated wall on the other, carpeted with rugs on polished wood, lined with dressers and trunks, vases and ornaments, wicker chairs and couches in loose, colourful drapery. A court of verandas! Theseus's sense of direction told him that he was near to the top of the sloping outside passageway of bull capture. The high wall against which the veranda and balconies rested on one side might be the back of this, but he could not be sure.
The only doorway he could see was on the opposite side of the court and led into a warren of storerooms, where a clutter of junk and old furniture lay. In one of the cells was a jug of fresh milk. Theseus abandoned the gaming piece on the floor, drank the milk and was disappointed, but not surprised, to find that the only way through the storerooms led back down into the small hall he had already peered into from the corridor. He retraced his steps back through the storerooms and into the Court of the Verandas again.
It puzzled him that fresh milk had been placed in the storerooms.
·
Hermione descended the steps that led down into the crypt. Passing through the doorway she knelt at the foot of a square pillar. At its base was a small area of polished stone with a grove of sand beside it. Upon the surface of the polished stone lay three inverted cups, very small cups and very plain; conical cups with a very narrow base. Hermione carefully removed the cloth that concealed a bronze dagger, grasped the handle of the jug she was holding, upturned one of the cups and made her offering. Then she arranged a woollen blanket around her shoulders and settled with her back against the wall to experience the slowly growing world that her ancestors would reveal to her; and to wait for the presence she had summoned.
·
The Testimony of Asterion
I have gathered myself for the journey back to the underworld. My ankle is healed and strong again. The room where I rest is dark and hidden from the eyes of the Ladies; but sometimes, when I venture out at night, I hear them close to me, separated by only a wall or a column or the thickness of a floor above my head. On a low table at my feet, in the space in which I tell you this, is the figure of a goddess. I can feel its gentle contours and the smooth finish to the ivory. Contours that I felt many times when I was master of these halls, when I had a mind to rehearse the agility I had shown on the backs of bulls and to sire many children. When I had a mind to repeat the leaps of the bull arena, alone among the applauding columns of this house.
Who will thrust the sharp mistletoe spike into my childrens' hearts? It will be I, the Bull of Minos, who masquerades this year as Theseus in the halls around me, loving my women and acting as I once acted! Theseus has lain with Clitia in a high room of this Temple. I have watched from behind a column. But she is not by any means the only one.
I will depart for the underworld very shortly.
·
Theseus entered the broad and breezy space of the central court of the Temple Mansion and saw that dusk was beginning to descend. Another shudder swept through the fabric of the building; an earth tremor. Whether aftershock or fore-shock he had no idea. He filled his lungs with air and gazed at the clear sky. From the central court he could run in almost any direction and be near a doorway or an entrance that led up or down a flight of steps and back into one level or another of his sumptuously furnished home. Stairs might lead yet further downwards to yet still lower levels, and here may be dark passages and doors, unexplored. In the silence he could almost sense a voice calling. Was the madness of Asterion gripping him? A shudder ran over his shoulders.
In the Court of the Verandas Theseus heard a noise above him, on one of the balconies. As he walked onto another veranda, a movement caught his eye; a woman appeared opposite him, partly hidden by the columns that rose to a higher balcony. She moved and seemed to reappear, almost at once, a little further along its length. Her steps sounded on a stairway and she emerged onto the floor of the court. Her skirt was long, heavy and beautifully embroidered, and hung from her ultra-slim waist beneath a golden apron. Her black hair was not elaborately arranged and hung without the attraction of ringlets, over narrow shoulders where it played beautifully with the deep blue material of her bodice, which was open at the front to expose her breasts fully. She wore no hat, and her face was very strikingly formed. Even at a distance, Theseus found himself oddly enthralled and transfixed by her extraordinary looks. She was certainly no beauty by any commonplace stardards but if she could be called plain, it was a plainness that Theseus found captivating. And strangest of all, she stared with a look of intense concentration at a papyrus manuscript held closely in front of her as she walked. Theseus gazed with mute compulsion as she moved across the court in front of him, continuing her close study of the manuscript.
Theseus turned and watched her pass through the entrance into the storerooms. He jumped down the steps onto the court, crossed quickly and entered into the dark space, but there was suddenly no sign of her. Theseus followed the entire circuit through the storerooms into the small hall, the corridor of the gaming table and the stairs back to the Court of the Verandas, but he could not find her.
A new exploration of the maze of storerooms brought Theseus to the foot of a stairway and all of a sudden into close proximity with a pleasant smell; it was all the more curious since the storerooms themselves had only a moment ago smelt of nothing but mustiness and dry clay. It was a lovely perfume like no other that Theseus had ever smelt before. After pausing for a few moments, he heard a noise above him. Bounding up the stairs, he arrived at the head of a corridor that on his right hand side looked down between downwards-tapering columns painted in red and yellow onto a hall paved with white gypsum. Across this hall below him he could see the woman walking now; she was still holding the manuscript up to her face as she made her way across the woven mats and gypsum flags. A few moments later she disappeared through a doorway on the opposite side. Theseus leaped over the balustrade of the corridor, or perhaps it was a balcony, he had no time to consider or even to care as he landed heavily onto the stone floor of the hall and ran swiftly across its diagonal to the doorway through which she had just vanished. Theseus found himself in another corridor, a very long corridor and this time poorly lit and with only small and intermittent windows looking out at a moderately elevated level, across to the river that lay beyond the lawns on the eastern side of the Temple Mansion over which he had once run the hardest race he had ever run in his life. Infuriatingly, and more than a little puzzlingly, there was no sign of the woman at all.
Theseus ran the length of the corridor and could find no doorway on the right hand side through which the woman might have gone. He was by now close to the south-eastern corner of the building and below him descended a long wooden spiral staircase into a small but brightly-lit hall that fronted on the opposite side into a lightcourt filled with a number of pillars standing to head height and rounded smoothly at the top as though with a wax coating. As he brushed past these he caught almost instantaneously the smell of honey and the sight of the woman he was seeking; she was reading her papyrus manuscript beyond some brightly-painted columns that defined one side of a covered walkway a dozen running strides away. Curiously, she seemed to Theseus to vanish behind one column and to reappear on the other side of the next column along as she quickly receded from him and he tried to understand how the light could play such tricks as this as he bounded onto the gypsum slabs of the walkway and continued his swift pursuit.
Almost at once Theseus came into a small dark hall with a spiral freize and a low balustrade upon which rested a number of small jars and some oil lamps that cast a flickering light, as though the air beside them had just been disturbed. The only other exit from the hall was a stairway that led not upwards but downwards, as though in collusion with a strangeness that seemed to be growing with every moment. Theseus bounded down the steps and found that they emerged into a small room from the floor of which descended a flight of stairs that led further downwards still. The air above this wooden stairway soon grew too black and he returned presently with a lamp. After walking along a sloping passage the light revealed a huge cavernous excavation down the wall of which he descended on a stairway that followed the curve of the wall, and moved in a slightly worrying manner with every step he took. The walls were of red earth. The bottom was of red earth. The tunnel that disappeared into blackness at the foot of the stairway was of red earth.
·
The cave was very dark, now that the sun had moved away to the west. Clitia edged her way inwards, towards the huge stalactites which hung down from the jagged and irregular roof. She clasped an image in her hand as she climbed her way across the floor of the cavern. When she reached the votive area and had laid down the image she had made, of the child that she desired Theseus to give her, a curiosity seized her and she clambered further into the darkness, towards the back of the cave. It was a rule of this entrance to the underworld that no light should be used within it.
Her fear increased as the sound of water began to echo from the deep. Still she went further, until a very strange thing happened. The floor of the cave became smooth and her footsteps in the puddles of water began to echo oddly. She splashed with her foot and listened. It was beautiful. She went further in.
Although the dim orb of light behind her had vanished and she walked in total blackness, still she went forward.
'Theseus,' she voiced into the air, and heard his name repeated softly back to her.
A few steps further and she walked into something on the ground. Clitia bent slowly down and reached out a hand towards it. Soft fur - a sudden terror gripped her; petrified, her ears strained for any clue to its nature and her mind shouted the obvious; but there was no sound, except the thumping of her own heart! Something was asleep on the ground! Her heart told her to run and her brain told her to run very, very slowly. With the greatest control she had ever summoned, she listened to neither. It was not in her nature to turn her back on anything. There was no sound, except her own heart. She reached down, again, very slowly, and let her fingertips brush the thing at her feet. It was cold. She closed her eyes in relief and kept them closed, preferring to imagine that she was not in total blackness, but blindfolded in daylight. Only in this way could she suppress the panic which threatened to engulf her.
It was not a dead animal but a skin which had been thrown over a large piece of oiled fabric, as large as a sail.
·
Near the central court of the Temple Mansion was a large staircase which connected all the floors on the eastern side of the building. Theseus ascended the white gypsum steps of this broad staircase, past thick downwards-pointing columns, painted deep red and pale blue and looked down into the lightcourt of a hall of colonnades, far below. He had not yet decided where it would be best to start a fire. Theseus crossed a landing and a large hall beyond it to a wide balcony, planted with columns that supported the levels above and which overlooked another deep lightcourt, filled with tubs and hanging baskets. There were no Ladies of the Goddess to be seen among the plants and flowers. He went back to the stairs, stood very still and listened. He could hear a sound. Further up the staircase, he ran around corners, along corridors, through concatenations of rooms, but the noise was elusive and always elsewhere.
Theseus walked briefly into the central court again, then descended the darkened main staircase on the eastern side, down four flights and crossed the hall of colonnades and a larger hall, subdivided by rectangular columns with open doors between them, into the floral lightcourt which he had looked down upon a short while earlier. The gloom in the lightcourt was very deep. On a table sat a cat, looking slightly worried and vaguely perplexed.
He walked back through the halls, up the staircase and out into the central court again, across and descended into the western side of the building. In one of the ceremonial rooms was a lamp and he took this through a long dark passage into a longer and even darker one. The passage was broad and on the left hand side were a large number of rooms, much longer than they were wide. Many were filled with jars and pithoi, and some had open, stone-lined cysts in the floor. Some of the storage containers, particularly the very large pithoi, held the remains of wheat and barley that had not been used during the winter. Some stood higher than he did. There was a smell of dried fish, then oil, olives, figs, beans. Some of the jars were sealed. Others appeared to have been broken into.
In one of the magazines he heard a noise, and approached a large, round clay vessel that stood upon the paved floor. Theseus shone his lamp closer to it, and the light cast shadows across the body of the pot, from the clay brackets used to support the carrying poles. A snake shot out, wriggled closely around the edge of the wall and disappeared into the darkness of the corridor.
Theseus put down the lamp and put his hand inside the jar, finding a spiky surface of unthreshed wheat. The ear he produced rolled dryly in his hand and when he blew...
...the lamp went out.
Theseus waited a little for his eyes to become accustomed to the gloom, but the gloom proved to be very deep. Fumbling along the wall, he found the corridor and followed it further along, feeling with his hands, and came to a doorway on his left and chose this path. The way before him led into a winding corridor which soon gave the impression of encircling a large space, but there seemed to be no way into it.
Gripped by an inexplicable compulsion to know what the space contained, Theseus at last found some steps which led up to a room with a staircase leading downwards. He descended into the blackness. The space was dry and airless. A paved floor supported no furniture and no pithoi, or at least none that Theseus could feel or bump into. Then he tripped over something. In an instant, anger subsided into curiosity - it was a low table and lying upon it appeared to be an ivory figurine, a Lady of the Goddess. Theseus felt his way along the wall.
But there seemed to be nothing else in the room except for a curious smell. Theseus felt his way back up the steps, through the upper room and down again into the winding corridor. Around a corner was a step which he stumbled upon. Above it was another. A few steps more and he turned around a corner and into a dim light. Soon he came to a doorway through a massive wall. His eyes had become, by now, very sensitive, which was fortunate because the dimness revealed a deep, unguarded dungeon at his feet. He stepped forward to peer down into the gloom. It was large and very deep.
Skirting around the remains of timberwork that made an effort to conceal one end of the huge pit, he found another one, just as deep. On the walls around him were solid figures of eight, shields, doming outwards.
The passage outside led to a stairway and back up into the darkening gloom of the central court. There was still nobody to be seen. A little further along the western side of the court, a descending flight of stairs led through a passage into a windowless room with an opening to an inner chamber beyond. He ventured through and found a crypt with a single pillar at its centre. Beneath the pillar was an area of polished stone with sand beside it, and around these a floor paved in fine gypsum. On the surface of the sand was an offering to the Goddess, and two inverted cups lay on the polished stone beside it. On the gypsum lay a jug. Theseus lowered his head and moved into a room beyond the crypt. The light from a lamp revealed a woman crouching in one corner, holding a pebble. To Theseus it seemed oddly like the pebble that he had thrown out into the sea on the morning of the Games. He was sure, suddenly, that it must be the very one.
Theseus went back into the outer chamber and poured an offering. The air was heavy and aromatic. When he returned, he leaned against the wall and slid down next to her. The lamp revealed the flickering image of a scene of butterflies hovering over a clump of crocus and ivy, yellow butterflies, fluttering all around the empty space of the room. The woman turned, appearing surprised to see him, and asked if he was going to stay long. And then night came very quickly, and in the darkness, a ship carried Theseus and Hermione away to search for gold to feed to the butterflies. And as they sailed, Hermione listened for the sound of ceramic against stone, for a hand pouring an offering into the third cup, listened, for the presence she had summoned.