A small group gathered by the wrestling area on the flat ground at the foot of the slope between the Temple Mansion and the river. Five suitors; and of these, only one had prevented his mind from lapsing into nervous preparation. He wore an ornate headdress of silver from which rose a plume of long flowing feathers. Around his neck was a string of silver flowers, hidden over his shoulders by his long black hair. He stood and began to walk away from the group.
'You are all wasting your time!' he called back to them, imperiously. 'The Goddess protects those she favours most.'
'And She emboldens those who are soon to join her,' shouted another, as Iasius made his way past the ladies in the enclosures, equally immaculate in their skirts of fine embroidery.
Theseus sat alone and thoughtful on the far side of the flat fighting ground. He could see the six Athenian youths looking on expectantly, anxiously, believing that their own turn was going to come soon, perhaps next year, perhaps a little later, before the next seven Athenian youths and maidens were summoned in nine years' time. And looking beyond the circles of dancing women and a little way up the slope in front of the Temple Mansion, Theseus could see the enclosures of the Ladies of the Goddess beginning to fill. In front of this, a strip of level ground followed the river northwards and was laid out with timber railings and course markers. The remainder of the slope in front of the Temple Mansion was crowded with spectators. Theseus sat on a marker stone and watched, and listened.
Immediately behind him were the trees of an alder grove. Before him, the naked dancers swirled around in concentric circles, surrounding the musicians so entirely that it sounded as though a rhythmic counterpoint of strings and flutes came from the dancers themselves. A contortion of action and rhythm, then a change of mood and a change of pace and a break in the circles and a new dance.
A ribbon detached itself from a new and wildly balletic performance and blew in the breeze towards Theseus. He watched it as it came towards him, and then stood to pick it up. The dancers took no notice. It was a strip of linen, dyed blue and yellow. Theseus walked with it into the grove of trees, past a large wooden column pointing skywards, and tied it to a bough of a small alder tree.
Moving deeper into the grove, past trees of alder and willow, Theseus came to a place where water trickled noisily over the stones at the mouth of a small culvert. The slowly flowing river was penetrated by the inflow at this point, and drifting twigs, leaves, weed and green slime made swirls in the water. Twenty paces back, in the heart of the grove, Theseus left the damp smell of water plants and entered a roofed enclosure, made of dry stone and timber; a building open on all sides, with wooden columns holding a broad, flat roof and large curved horns of polished timber pointing skywards. Near the centre of this platform was a room, almost a separate little building in itself, sitting upon the open floor. The doorway into it revealed a hollow of hot ashes in a hearth. Outside, the temple was paved in white limestone and contained nothing else at all, no furniture and no carvings or icons of any kind. It had obviously been freshly swept. Theseus walked across the broad platform of bare limestone towards the open doorway and trod on something. It was a small piece of bone. Nearby, basking in a leaf-dappled patch of sunlight, was a small brown snake. It started to uncurl as Theseus emerged again from the room, and began to move towards him. It was a snake that was more commonly seen in the upland parts of the island than here, by the river, and had obviously been brought inside one of the skulls from the sanctuary at the hillpeak. It slithered with a dry ease across the limestone floor and passed Theseus without any apparent awareness of him at all; unconcerned, as though its mind, too, was totally absorbed with something more important.
Theseus walked back to the edge of the alder grove and out onto the grass. The music and the dancing continued unabated. A short distance away, the skulls were seated in tiers and looked on - in perplexity? In vacant affirmation? Who could tell. They stared silently, with Theseus, across the fighting ground, towards the dancers.
·
As some Ladies of the Goddess descended the steps which led from the Temple Mansion out into the sunlight, Hermione and five other ladies knew that eyes were turning in their direction.
'I am worried that I haven't seen my daughter yet,' said Alcimede. 'She asked to go back to my house a long time ago and she should have returned by now.'
'I don't know how Clitia managed to forget it!' she added, turning to Hermione. 'She was very excited last night, though, and left most of her dinner at the table.
'And afterwards, she was obviously cooking something up with her friends,' she added.
'She has taken my palanquin and my bearers. And she will get into trouble,' she turned to the lady behind her. 'You know what she is like!'
Hermione well knew the excitement that this young lady would be experiencing, if she was exploring the hidden parts of the Temple Mansion for the first time. And she knew also that the priestesses and the eunuch keepers would be tolerant. They would do nothing to discourage the freshly-chosen from watching at the safe but visible distance of the upper rooms and terraces of the southern and eastern sides of the Temple, despite the general call to the enclosures. It had been exactly the same at Troezen.
Clitia, in fact, after smiling at Theseus from her mother's palanquin, had made speed to her house and returned with a spindle of yarn. She was in the Temple Mansion, but not watching the dancing from the terraces. She was threading the yarn through passages, up gypsum steps, along corridors, past lightcourts, orchids and double axes, down dark stairways, through halls and between downwards-tapering columns of red and blue. Connecting the rooms of her friends and herself with a spider's thread. But like true spiders, they could not yet be certain what their thread might bring to them.
By now, the raised enclosure, towards which Hermione and the others were walking, was nearly full. On the sloping banks to either side of the steps upon which they gracefully descended, the audience had gathered. The dancing and the music coursed on, the sky was clear, the breeze gusty, the trees bright. And the brains of eight men fermented and worried and looked forward and hoped (and feared).
A plume of smoke wisped erratically from a beacon at the top of the distant hillpeak, signalling the arrival of a runner with the sacred flame. At a great pyre on the far side of the fenced arena, a flame from the same source was thrust into the heart of a great heap of white poplar, on which lay the headless remains - of a surrogate.
As flame grew into fire and fire into conflagration, a bronze trumpet blew loudly and clearly into the morning air and was answered by a deeper, more mellow call from a conch shell beside the staircase leading to the only door into the eastern side of the Temple Mansion. A great tournament would soon begin, a pre-Olympic tournament, a funeral games of wrestling, fighting and the risk of death, for the hand of the ladies. The suitors were ready to be presented to the Ladies of the Goddess. The flames of the pyre burned fiercely and an acrid stench began to fill the air.
Theseus sat on the ground, waiting his turn.
One by one, the suitors answered the formal beckoning gesture of the robed priestess and stepped forward to stand in front of each of the two enclosures which flanked the portable shrine of Potnia. Each suitor was clothed in a short loincloth and a codpiece, a bronze waistband and a headdress, and stood facing the object of his life, the pinnacle of his ambition; Ladies of the Goddess, women of great beauty and fine breeding. Each felt his manhood rise through the anxiety and each stood and held his fist proudly to his forehead in salutation as his matriarchal lineage was announced. The crowds cheered loudly and the flags waved, their great symbol of the labyrinth, like four crooked arms inside a square, dancing with the fires and the curling smoke. Herbs were heaped upon the pyre to sweeten the air.
·
The dancers left the area in front of the crowd and the enclosures, and their ribbons blew gently across the grass towards the river. The sounds of music were replaced by the murmur of expectation and then by the sounds of effort, as the first of the wrestling contests began.
The audience burst into a frenzy of shouting as Theseus forced his first adversary into a flurry of quick backwards steps, but the man recovered quickly by the use of his massive weight, and prevented Theseus from gaining any further advantage. As Theseus fought this bull-shouldered giant, another contest began a little way off.
(As each contest ends, the officials, the eunuch keepers and the priestesses will attempt to make clear to the crowd who is the victor, who the defeated, and by how great a length of advantage the victor will benefit as a result of his efforts. Because the purpose of the wrestling is to gain advantage in the final race. The final race at the end of the day which will decide everything.
But the outcome of a contest may not be obvious. Sometimes so but not always, and it is not easy to convey results when there is no public address system. It is a wonder, in fact, that they have not thought of a device like a cricket scoreboard, posting the accumulated length of advantage to each competitor as it is achieved. But they have not. They have only the device of the cricket umpire, or perhaps, more accurately, the racecourse bookie; a raised arm, a tap on the head, a wave, a nod; a system to signal to those in the crowd who understood the semaphore. But the overriding concern of those in charge is not the entertainment of the crowd, it is the accurate judgement and relay of the details of advantage to the recorders. This is only a Games on the surface of things; in reality, it is an Experimental Programme, and the audience are allowed to watch in much the same way as the circles of young men around a Victorian operating table will, in years to come, be allowed to witness the pain of surgery; the show is not put on for their pleasure. Except for the karpathia, the key-bearers of the Temple Mansion, the Ladies of the Goddess; their attendance is required.)
Iasius wrestled another contestant, who quickly became an early casualty, his left forearm injured by an awkward fall, or rather, in fact, by a clever throw on the part of Iasius; he was forced to sit by a pile of rugs on the grass a short distance away from the ensuing action, painfully rubbing his hands in soft white chalk and waiting to hear the extent of his misfortune.
Theseus sat also, and considered his strategy. He had given away ten feet of advantage to his first adversary. But this did not worry him unduly. The man was a huge Bull of Minos, bovine-shouldered and so stockily built that Theseus felt he could start the race thirty paces behind him and still have every chance of winning. The greatest threat came from Iasius; he was as powerfully built as the other man but with a more balanced physique and no weaknesses that Theseus could yet identify.
But Theseus let his thoughts drift away from the proceedings in front of him. Such tainted blood repelled him. Into his mind came an image of his father, standing on a beach and waiting for his return. All through his life Theseus had renounced him and claimed the semi-divine status that accompanied conception within the walls of a temple complex whose oldest parts had been home to the god of the regions beneath the sea since time immemorial. Was his mother not a bearer of a key to this temple in Athens - the Temple of Poseidon? "Theseus,' they used to say, knowingly, "whose son are you Theseus?" I answered them with the olive club of Heracles and send their brains splashing against the walls of the Temple. But I was wrong. My father Aegeus wept for me then. My true father. And now he waits.'
A roar from the crowd followed the conclusion of a contest. Theseus turned and looked over the heads of the onlookers towards the roof terraces of the Temple Mansion. Here and there, young ladies stood and watched, giggling and jumping excitedly. 'Sickening. Like a cancer masquerading as a beauty spot,' he thought.
Two suitors strode out onto the fighting ground. They were veterans of many voyages and had been lifelong friends. But now they were gripped by passion and ambition, and by the other's strong hands, no longer friendly. They twisted and turned, a leg thrust out, withdrawn, a heave, an oath, a readjustment of balance, an arm locked and every ounce of strength pulled from their shoulders and their straining backs. Each wore a bronze waistband which clung tightly to a slim midriff.
As they exchanged a quick succession of holds, one gained an unstoppable momentum and seemed on the point of forcing his adversary to capitulate or to be thrown heavily onto his back when the other broke the man's grip and lunged at his throat, then struck his opponent full in the face with a punch followed in a flash by another flurry of blows. Ducking low beneath this onslaught, the first man found a grip around the other's waist and launched him head first into the ground, crushing his opponent's shoulder and forcing him onto his back. The other suitors stared from their positions on the sidelines and the crowd roared with excitement. The victorious wrestler stood up and waited, wiping some blood from his face with his forearm. The officials looked on, impassively. A keeper approached the defeated wrestler with a vessel as he rolled onto his front and pulled himself to his knees.
Theseus was not sure what was going on. The blows had been outside the established custom of wrestling and would be punished.
The man took the vessel, drank a deep draught from it, and the keeper withdrew.
The crowd of onlookers stood motionless and expectant, and the wind fell to augment a nervous silence, rose again and gusted gently across the trees of the alder grove.
A seagull cried plaintively overhead.
The scene looked to Theseus like a piece of theatre when an entrance has been missed. Everyone was waiting for something to happen. Was the drink a reward, or was it an 'ad lib' to keep the interest of the audience? What was happening?
When the mind of the kneeling suitor had sunk painlessly into an anaesthetised awareness, a keeper approached him from behind and with a blow from a bronze sword, cut him to the ground. The damaged shoulder that so soon before had been rippling with strength and pride, hung now from a hook as the body was butchered. The crowd chatted cheerfully and waited for the next contest.
Hermione misheard a question from her neighbour and tried not to show her anguish.
This had been an unusual occurrence and it was possible to detect a greater degree of orthodoxy in the wrestling contests which followed. More care in the technique, more self-control but no diminution of strength or effort.
As the last of the wrestling contests approached, Theseus's mind turned to the feats he hoped to perform, the damage he hoped soon to inflict upon this grotesque Temple, and to a voyage eastwards for the Golden Fleece. But Iasius had a big lead over him.
Hermione sat and watched. And listened politely to the conversation on her left. She was not looking forward to the next phase of the competition.