Hermione dressed carefully. The promise of the occasion which was to fill the coming day held less excitement for her than even the small amount which the keepers strove to encourage. Excitement was for the girls; for those who had been freshly-chosen for the Temple Mansion.
But as she gently rubbed a light blue powder into the soft skin around her eyes, and tried to rehearse the pretence of a casual, refined interest in the later proceedings, a twist of anxiety rose from her stomach into her chest and opened an unhealed wound. She took a deep breath.
During the coming events, she would sit in the enclosure with her new friends; chat with them and watch the dancing and the Games. She would pass remarks to her neighbours upon the fine physique of one contestant or the good looks of another, but would offer no preferential encouragement to any of the young men as they fought beneath her. Fought for her hand; fought for her love. She would be a passive witness to these events, and would give an equal and impartial encouragement to all of her suitors, by the fairness of her looks and by the temptation of her womanhood. It was a duty that she had performed well in the past, and she would, no doubt, despite everything, give a good performance today.
She drew the edge of her bodice about her breasts, exposing them seductively and properly, in the expected fashion, and began to comb her long black hair. Hermione had attended many Games. Every year for nineteen years, since she had first entered the Temple of Troezen at the age of sixteen; and their memory had taken on an amorphous quality in her mind. Except for a recent and memorable event in the bull arena.
The tightness in her chest increased again.
And as she tried to dispel the image by recalling earlier Games, she could order the events which came into her mind into a loose succession of years. The winner of a javelin-throwing contest she remembered falling, later that day, before a lion's embrace. And the father of her second child - her daughter Iocepe... - but as she slipped a jewelled diadem across her forehead and swept up her hair at the back in order to arrange it properly, the image of her son came back into her mind and would not disperse; an image of bloodstained sand, a hand twisted unnaturally. She arranged a ringlet to fall in front of her ear, arranged it badly and did it again.
And her very first Games, what an effort to remember those now, as she fixed on an earring, delicately clasping the soft yellow metal onto the softer lobe of her ear. She had been only sixteen years old, pretty, she knew, and well-liked by her friends. But she had shunned their company that day and had not watched the contests at all, but had left her sisters and friends in the enclosure and had gone to explore the surroundings of her new privilege; the Temple of Troezen. Columns and rooms, and a refuge from the unpleasantness outside. The rooms, the corridors, the furnished courts and balconies. And her room; her new room.
She looked around at her new room.
Her eyes moistened as she hesitated with a pot of cosmetic in her hand, and Hermione applied her mind to the application of the black eyeliner with a forced concentration, and a confidence born of practice. 'I shall kill Theseus,' she said to herself.
The heavy tread of a eunuch keeper advanced along the corridor outside, and faded again.
Her son had been a son of Poseidon. She had watched him with a strange feeling of inevitability when he returned with the spoils of warfare and announced that he would compete at the Games at the larger Temple at Athens, on the other side of the gulf; declaring his matriarchal blood-lineage, through Hermione his mother and Hermione's own mother Helen, back through the generations. He had been eighteen years old. Too young. The bulls had been unharnessed and Theseus had openly encouraged her son to his death.
Below Hermione, the bellow of bulls drifted in on the breeze. She went to the window, but was unable to see them. The Temple Mansion of Minoan Knossos, on the island of Crete, draped itself in a coherent sprawl over a low hill. It was much larger than the Temple at Troezen, which was now so far away. Four stories of stone and brick fell beneath her to a portico descending the slope to a bridge over a stream. On the lowest roof of this splendid stagger of timber and painted masonry sat an early group of spectators, looking eastwards towards the cliffs beyond the river. Their hands shielded their eyes against the low sun.
In front of them, the preparations for the Games were well advanced. Beyond them, and visible to Hermione through the window, lay a carpet of tree tops, shrouding the slopes of the nearby hills in green and extending southwards in a grey unevenness towards a prominent hillpeak. In the very far distance lay the mountains, basking in the early morning light.
The room in which Hermione sat was large but sparsely furnished. On the floor lay two ample cushions and a neatly folded pile of woollen blankets. On a low sand-table sat a cup and a round, decorated pot for infusing. A small, silver mirror lay on the pile of blankets, beside a range of cosmetics in small jars and an ornate black wooden comb. The only other furniture in the room was a low stool, on which Hermione sat, now wiping a little excess white from her throat with a linen handkerchief. She had not yet had time to furnish the room properly.
On the wall behind her was a fresco; a butterfly fluttering with its companions above a clump of brightly coloured flowers on a rocky hillside. And out in the corridor, a lion chased a blue deer across a yellow mountainside; while through the open window, the late summer sun pursued the early morning.
·
Down by the water's edge, Theseus was introspective; excited, hopeful, tense, fearful, but all these in a mixture rather than in succession. Soon the ritual and formality of the occasion would begin and he would not have time to reflect, so he had come down to the seashore to do so now, as the sun climbed slowly away from the horizon. His donkey brayed in the distance. An ill-beached boat adjusted sharply to a rush of surf that raced up the shore and washed its keel. A following, even more boisterous upsurge of foam dragged at the loose shingle near Theseus's feet. A seagull circled and mewed, rested on the wind with its wings outstretched and looked from side to side for discarded fish. But it looked in vain. The beach was quiet.
King Minos of Crete stretched his long reach every nine years to the shores of Achaea and Attica and plucked seven youths and seven maidens to throw into his cherished Labyrinth. And he, Theseus, would destroy the Minotaur. The Temple Mansion of Knossos needed new blood to try to assuage a madness that had overtaken their bull-chested man, their Bull of Minos; an unpredictable fury, and at other times an irrational pity. It was even rumoured that he was in the Temple still, that he had not subsumed to sacrifice and that the body which would be burnt on the pyre this year was not his. That he had gone to ground in the labyrinth of the Temple Mansion.
Theseus moved a frond of seaweed with his foot and held his breath above the pungent odour as he stooped to pick up a stone. Swinging his arm in a powerful discus-throwing action, the stone flew over the approaching white surf towards the sea where only a short while before he had been sailing captive, hostage to the empire of Crete. Theseus set off to walk to the end of the beach. Finding it impossible to resist the temptation to run, he broke into a sprint and then slowed again to a walk. Should he release the tension in his legs? Should he conserve his energy? 'Think!'
He cast his gaze out to sea, and tried to combat the next wave of anxiety in his stomach.
·
By the time Hermione had finished her hair, Theseus, accompanied by his bronze-belted guards, was riding his donkey quickly away from the sea, along a well-made road southwestwards through the outskirts of the Harbour Town and into the countryside beyond, leaving the Cave of Eileithyia behind him. The houses thinned into a valley, with olive trees and fields of barley stubble. On the steeper slopes to his left were ridges of pale buff rock, cypress trees, and vines heavily laden with red grapes. A little further on, rows of wooden beehives appeared and he slowed his donkey to let a palanquin pass on the raised central paving of the road. Inside, the young occupant smiled at him as her bearers hurried her onwards. Theseus resumed his pace towards the Temple Mansion, and the houses of the city soon began to appear, ahead of him.
·
Hermione attended to a final inspection of the many overlapping layers of her skirt. Then, after a last look into the silver hand-mirror before placing it on top of the blankets, she parted the folds which hung in front of her doorway and walked, barefoot, out into the dimly-lit corridor, carrying her shoes. High roof-beams stretched away into the middle distance and the lack of sunlight caught her eyes unawares, but as she walked, and they quickly adjusted, bright colours and forms took their shape on the walls; painted images of crocus and ivy brushing the feet of a startled gazelle; an underwater scene of crabs and octopus; and as she descended a few steps and turned a corner, the light from an open doorway revealed a blue dolphin, leaping from the scale-like foam of a choppy sea. Above the frescoes, and dividing them, timber beams and uprights showed themselves proudly at this high level of the building.
She walked gracefully down corridors, through concatenations of rooms, and descended the white gypsum steps of a broad staircase. Timber columns tapered downwards and punctuated the outer drop of the stairway with vertical lines of deep red and pale blue. Far below lay the floor of a lightcourt. Leaving the stairway, whilst still high above this court, she entered a columned hall decorated in blue and ochre, and met a Lady of the Goddess, entering the same room through another doorway.
'Hello,' said Hermione, smiling.
The woman smiled in reply but said nothing, and they turned together towards a short passageway which led into a smaller room. In the corner of the room stood a large storage jar, decorated with white spirals on a dark brown and deep red fabric. On the walls were scenes of blue monkeys gathering saffron. Three lamps burned on a stone bench and cast an eerie light over the room.
Hermione had seen the woman before, but had not spoken to her. She felt comfortable in her presence and let the silence continue as they walked on, through another room and along a passage, but after a while she judged that a friendly comment may break the ice that was beginning to develop.
'Have they seated the skulls yet, do you know?'
'I am afraid I haven't looked,' answered the woman. 'It is still a little early,' she hesitated. 'We usually gather in the courts before the skulls are seated,' and she cast a smile over her shoulder, 'for some 'tea'.' Hermione followed her down a long flight of stairs and they walked together through a hall of colonnades, past a larger hall, down another flight of steps, and through a doorway.
Outside, near the river, the skulls lay stacked upon the floor of a temple in an alder grove, presided over by keepers beside the flame of the previous Games.
'Did you stay overnight?'
'No, my new house is not far away,' replied Hermione. 'And my room here is not yet furnished.'
The woman looked in surprise. 'Are you freshly chosen?' She looked doubtfully at Hermione.
'Yes,' Hermione answered, and felt foolish at giving an answer which was obviously untrue. She was clearly not a girl. But she was not going to announce herself as a captive. The woman smiled in a way that told Hermione that she understood.
A sharp turn gave a brief view through a large room and beyond to a colonnade, through which could be seen trees silhouetted against an eastern sky on the facing hillside.
'You were fortunate not to be here last night,' said the woman as they neared the end of the corridor. 'The ships bringing the tribute in from Calliste were late arriving, and they were humping jars around and storing them away until well into the night. The noise from the west wing was dreadful!'
'Are the rumours true?' asked Hermione. The woman paused.
'Yes,' she said. 'He must still be in the building somewhere, but all the searching has revealed only a few signs of his presence, and no clues to where he is hiding. It is all rather frightening, really.'
At the end of the corridor, the woman led Hermione into a beautifully furnished hall, paved in the old-fashioned style with irregular gypsum slabs set into a red clay. Oak cabinets lined the walls, and near the centre of the hall were low tables surrounded by mats and folding stools of wood and colourful fabric. Near a wall was a great bronze double axe, its long blades pointing towards opposite sides of the hall. On another wall was a fresco of a creature with the head of a bull and the body of a man. Nearby, on a squared gypsum flagstone, was a large wooden pillar, supporting nothing. They crossed to the real columns, tapering downwards along one side of the hall, and entered a small court, open to the sky and filled with plants and blooms. In this airy space, a group of six Ladies of the Goddess turned around at the sound of Hermione's exclamation of delight at the plants, and one of them offered her outstretched arms in greeting.
The lightcourt lay deep within the building (or so Hermione supposed) and balconies rose in tiers above them to four higher levels, like the interior of a tiny theatre, overlooked by the sky. On the side she had entered, the space between the columns fronting the interior hall gave the hint of a stage, but the lightcourt itself was illuminated by sunlight, direct sheets of which shone onto the walls and columns high above them. Within the shade of the court itself, many dozens of decorated vases, tubs and baskets, hanging and standing, contained a well-arranged jungle of foliage and flowers.
·
The skulls had, indeed, not yet been seated, but this was quite normal and the occasion was well in hand.
An army of persons of lesser caste knew their duties and were carrying them out efficiently and conscientiously. The keepers and priestesses were observing custom and the lesser mortals around them with an equally vigilant eye. Courses and arenas had been marked and secured, seating arrangements made, kneeling arrangements made, standing arrangements confirmed, refreshments prepared, bulls tethered and chained, lions subdued, oil made ready, fire made ready, fire for light, fire for cooking, herbs for cooking, fire for herbs, sacks of herbs and spices, smaller vessels and substances of a more secretly guarded and sinister nature, cloths, clothes and codeine, all ready and in place. And waiting.