Theseus found himself in the Court of the Verandas once more. The place held a compulsive fascination for him. He would spend hours resting on the couches and divans here, his ears alert to every sound, his eyes closed, dozing into a state that was somewhere between sleep and meditation, listening and waiting for any footfall that might herald the approach of the woman he wanted desperately to see again. But the place seemed always to be deserted.
Theseus climbed a short flight of steps this time up onto a higher balcony and walked to the far end of it, past some fine wooden furniture and a large alabaster statue. Then he noticed a peculiar smell. If he had known the aroma of the inside of a cigar box, he might have toyed with that description but probably rejected it. Dry grass perhaps. Aromatic plants. Sweat and animal hide? It filled the air between the floor he was on and the next one above, timber floors with bannisters along one side and furnishings of every description against a long plain wall on the other, rugs against wood, chests and trunks and tables and alabaster vases, austere bronze urns, sculptures and ornaments, folding stools and wicker divans draped in loose flowing cloth and embroidered cushions.
Theseus climbed a further flight of stairs to the highest balcony and made a complete circuit of it. It differed from the lower ones only in having a number of doorways that led into an inner, parallel corridor on the side above the storerooms. The passage emerged into a twisting route through rooms and halls and for a short while Theseus found himself passing through a chain of personal living spaces, one after another, each connecting directly although seemingly randomly with its neighbours; a concatenation of personally-furnished spaces with no hallways or landings between them. Two more days, he thought. All the rooms were cluttered with objects. There were lamps to light and there was wool to spin. He was no stranger to these rooms. He picked up a pair of silver tweezers and put them down in exactly the same place. In another of the rooms he found a jug of wine and drank a deep draught from it. Many of these rooms were lit by windows and balconies, some overlooking lightwells to his left and others looking out onto the central court far below to his right. He entered a space that was filled with a brilliant orange light from the setting sun. Outside this room a terrace looked across a roofscape of upwards-cresentic wooden horns across the southern side of the Temple Mansion. Theseus descended a flight of stairs, in search of company. He had left Hermione in her room near the southwest corner of the building. A corridor brought him to another flight of stairs that would lead him through the lower halls on the eastern side of the building. They were deserted. Over the storerooms at a lower level than before, a descending staircase led Theseus into a lightcourt of green, hanging foliage. Another passageway led him through an open gateway and into a courtyard.
In front of him, and enclosed by high walls, was a large house. An ordinary, large house, standing as though the high walls of the courtyard had been inadvertently built around it. Inside was a large quantity of bowls, jugs and other crockery, stacked into two rooms on the ground floor. Theseus ignored these and climbed the staircase. The rooms on the first floor were comfortable personal spaces for sleeping and living; three of these. In one of them was a Lady of the Goddess sitting at her embroidery. Theseus greeted her in the customary way and she leaned forward to receive a second and more prolonged greeting. By now it had become quite dark.
'You will damage your eyesight,' he said.
She agreed and put her work down and Theseus noticed two wine goblets and a jug on the floor by a wall, and found himself engaged in things that he had grown quite accustomed to doing.
Hermione, meanwhile, had just seated herself in a chair on the topmost balcony in the Court of the Verandas and was looking down into the void above the floor of the court that lay far below her. She was acutely aware that she did not have the strength in her arms to do Theseus any serious harm with her bronze knife, even if he should be lying asleep on one of the divans on a lower balcony. And the help she had summoned seemed not to have materialised. Even if he should be sitting with her in her room and she with a knife in her hand, it was too risky. He was too strong. The problem had occupied her for many days now and a solution was beginning to form in her mind. Rising from the chair, she walked around the balcony until she came to the wall high above the opposite side of the court and examined a large piece of furniture, like a heavy dresser, that had been placed hard against the wall and which had large pigeonholes into which scrolls had been thrust. She removed one of the scrolls and felt its weight.
Placing the large roll of papyrus onto a wooden desk nearby, Hermione tried to push her fingers into the gap between the scroll-dresser and the wall. It was hopeless. She could get a little purchase with the tips of her fingers but did not have the strength to move it at all. She tried rocking it forwards but with equal failure.
At the foot of the stairs that led into the Court of the Verandas she came across the gaming table that stood on silver feet. The wooden board that lay on top of it was solidly constructed and sufficiently thin, Hermione judged, to slide behind the scroll-dresser. She shot all the pieces off the board onto the table and made her way back with it.
In exasperation, Hermione found that the board was just a tiny bit too thick to be of any use. She looked around for anything that might have the weight to hammer the edge of it a bit and her eyes lighted upon a bronze inkwell cast in the shape of a boar beside the scroll on the desk. She picked it up and beat a few times at the edge of the wood. The noise echoed down into the space below and caused Hermione to stop. She waited and listened. One corner of the gaming board now looked decidedly squashed and Hermione tried it. She was able to wriggle it in and set up a small rocking motion that let her slide the board in as far as she wanted. When she stopped the rocking, the scroll-dresser fell back and trapped the gaming board flat against the wall.
Hermione returned from her room with her bronze knife, but the sun had set by now and the light was failing as she tried to prize it between the gaming board and the wall. After a few attempts she got a good purchase but as the scroll-dresser moved away from the wall by only a tiny amount, instead of her being able to retrieve the gaming board, it slid down and wedged itself between the wall and the dresser, halfway to the floor. There was no way now that Hermione could get it out! As tears came to her eyes she noticed that because of the new position of the gaming board the top of the scroll-dresser was now further from the wall than it had been, perhaps sufficiently far from the wall now that she might be able to get her fingers behind it. She tried to set the scroll-dresser rocking and the gaming board slid a little further down still. Looking around in the half-light for something larger to wedge behind it, she decided to unwind one of the scrolls. It was longer than she had imagined it would be but she unwound it and folded it until she judged it to be the right thickness and then wedged it down behind the back of the scroll-dresser. Then rocking this heavy piece of furniture with all her strength, the paper wedge slid down a bit further and when she let the dresser fall back the gap between the top of the scroll-dresser and the wall behind it had widened a little more. Setting up a good rocking motion again, Hermione thrust another pad of papyrus into the gap. It was too dark by now to get any clear idea how far she might be able to tilt the whole thing forward without it becoming too conspicuous, but she knew exactly how to get it as far away from the wall as she needed. She would return to her room and come back in the morning to continue her work.
Later that night, Theseus rested for a while on a lower balcony in the Court of the Verandas, then he went to check on Clitia's room, but she was not there, so he went to have another game of hide and seek around the confines of his palace.
·
The next morning arrived and Theseus found Clitia at last! She was on a rooftop feeding a loaf of bread to the gulls! He chased her along the terrace and up some steps, down the steps and fell with her in a laughing heap.
'Where have you been all these days? I have missed you so!'
'I couldn't come!' she said, teasingly, and licked a graze on her hand. He looked into her large brown eyes and she smiled at him with them, then closed them as he kissed her.
·
On a hillside above Amathus, the low white hills of Amathus, on the island of Alashiya, a shepherd played a melody to Aphrodite upon a flute made from the leg bone of a swan. His sheep grazed on the spring grass, lambs pulled at their mother's milk and their high-pitched bleating rolled down the hillside and shimmered upon the sea below. Two ran aggressively at each other, then gamboled about in more gentle play, rolling and falling, bleating, running and charging again; mother called with a low 'maaare'; 'mairrre, 'baaire' others replied to their own children and the sun shone on their scurrying backs.
Aphrodite smiled upon the glittering water below and the shepherd smiled at his flock.
·
On a roof terrace of the Temple Mansion, Clitia and Theseus lay together in an aftermath of ecstasy.
Theseus woke into half sleep and recaptured the memory of his dream. He had been making love to Clitia. It was beautiful love, with a strength of emotion and completeness that is hard to capture in reality. A floating, energetic togetherness, unconstrained by ground or gravity, until she became Clitia, a chair. He loved this chair so much, but in distraction he could not find it. Searching through the endless rooms of his house, rooms of fine furniture, he came across a mirror, set in a finely carved and polished frame. In this mirror was reflected an image of Clitia the chair, but he had turned expectantly only to see other mirrors, all of which held only an image of Clitia. He looked in vain to find the real object of his love; there was only a multiplicity of mirrors with Clitia in all of them, and she was scratched and her polish was old.
He felt a great pain of loss.
And the room was empty.
He roamed through all the corridors and chambers of the uppermost floor searching for her, down into the spacious ceremonial halls, along flights of wide stairs that descended into infinity. He found an earth hill within a room and climbed to its peak, but there was no way forward from its summit to the doorways in the walls surrounding it, so he descended again, down stairs leading further downwards into dark places and still further downwards into tunnels and caves, red with ochre, now cavernous, now narrow, and narrower still until the tunnels were so cramped that he had to turn back. He passed into a hall and through a colonnade of fluted columns to a lightcourt, where pale blue alabaster vases rested upon the ground. Further still, through a narrow doorway, and before him lay a dark space where a lamp burned, and there was Clitia. He fell to his knees in joy and saw that resting heavily upon her as though in subjugation was the Axe of the Covenant.
·
The Testimony of Asterion
The underworld is my future. I have journeyed through the tunnels beneath the Temple Mansion to this underworld and now rest on a post, with a broad forest behind me and a lakeside to gaze upon. And on the lake are lines of white boats with tall masts of metal, clanking and chinking and pulling at pink spheres that float in the water. This is my future. This is my present. There is no returning.
Briefly, I saw a man appear beside me. He stared in terror towards the boats and turned to me with wide eyes that betrayed his antiquity. But the top of this post is comfortable and I did not stretch my wings for the air. And now he is gone.