The Lost Sisterhood

  “Half man, half bull. Used to live here in the olden days.” Rebecca shot him another quizzical glance. “Just ask Dee; she’s the expert on mythology.”

  When we eventually pulled into a parking lot, I looked around in vain for the stately villa Rebecca had described to me so often. All I could see was the bleary outline of a whitewashed motel-like complex encircling us in the shape of a horseshoe.

  “I know it’s not Villa Ariadne,” said Rebecca, reading my thoughts. “But I thought it would be better—” She hesitated, probably realizing it was unwise to go into detail in front of Nick, and continued more cheerfully, “The upside is that most of the rooms are empty, plus we’re a stone’s throw from the actual site. When the fog clears you’ll be able to see the palace ruins from here.”

  DESPITE MY GRIMACES AND whispered hints, Rebecca put Nick in the guest room right next to mine. It was not that she didn’t notice my antics; she simply chose to ignore them. “I’ve just about had it,” she hissed, when we were finally alone. “What on earth is going on?”

  Only too aware that we were separated from Nick by nothing but a few square feet of plaster wall, I filled her in as best I could, confirming that this was indeed the same Nick I had told her about over the phone—the trickster who had never disclosed that he worked for the Aqrab Foundation. “I still don’t know why he is here,” I concluded, “but I’m confident the bracelet is just a pretext. He’s probably trying to figure out why I changed my flight, and whether it has anything to do with what happened in Algeria.”

  Rebecca did not look convinced. “I still don’t understand. Did you really steal that bracelet?”

  “Bex!” I started laughing, but she did not laugh along. In Rebecca’s world, archaeologist that she was, keeping excavated artifacts to oneself was in line with murder.

  “Well, maybe not murder,” she had said once, realizing she had been carried away by a tidbit in a weekly, “but when I read about these things—how some inestimable artifact has been found in the rambling estate of a dead collector—it’s like reading about an abducted child who has been kept in someone’s garden shed for fifteen years.” Naturally, her shock at discovering that her best friend might be one such abductor was considerable.

  “Don’t be absurd,” I said, feeling a twitch of anger that she thought me capable of such a thing. “It was Granny’s bracelet; don’t you remember?” I held out my arm to show it to her.

  “Yes,” said Rebecca after a moment. Then she looked up at me, her eyes full of accusation. “I just never knew you had inherited it.”

  I walked over to the window. Outside, the rain had long since turned the small parking lot into a lake, fed from all sides by rivulets of mud, and a clingy afternoon fog prevented me from seeing more than the silhouette of the units across the yard. Although we were at Knossos, an ancient Minoan palace and the greatest tourist attraction in Crete, the place seemed oddly deserted; notwithstanding the miserable weather this was clearly the time to be here if one wanted to avoid the crowds.

  I had walked the site only once, on that glorious day ten years earlier with Rebecca. Interestingly enough, back then it was I who had been most passionate about the place; thanks to Granny, I had long since decided on a career in ancient history and already fancied myself a bit of an expert on Bronze Age civilization.

  Armed with half a dozen books, plus our shared water bottle, Rebecca and I had spent many hours studying the palace foundation, marveling at the reconstructed royal chambers and the findings from the underground storage rooms. Scoffing at the tourists who hurried to and fro with their guidebook blinkers on, we made our way around the entire perimeter of the site, determined to fully appreciate the enormity of the original building. We had even toyed with the idea of staying behind when the place closed down for the night, in order to get the full moonlit effect of the ruins.

  “I swear to God,” Rebecca had said, walking wistfully backward as the security guards locked the metal gate behind us, “we will be back, and we will spend a night here, even if it kills us.”

  As I stood by the guest room window now, peering out into the mist, those merry, sun-kissed days seemed far away indeed. “Well,” I said at length, realizing Rebecca was still waiting for an explanation, “it came in the mail one day. I suppose Granny always wanted me to have it.”

  Rebecca was so shocked, she stood up abruptly. “I can’t believe you never told me! Why didn’t you … how did she—?”

  “Bex,” I said, suddenly weighed down by fatigue. I had barely slept the night before, and it was all catching up with me—the horror in Algeria, the long drive to Djerba, and the shock of seeing Nick again. “Let’s not waste time on this now. Tell me about the clay disk. You took a photo?”

  Rebecca clutched her head as if it was physically painful for her to change subjects. Then she walked over to fetch her laptop and show me a few images of a round object. “There. I can’t get it any sharper than that.”

  I studied the screen, but couldn’t even verify that the disk was inscribed with Granny’s symbols. “You’re right. This is useless. Where is the disk?”

  Rebecca grimaced. “I’m not sure it’s a good idea anymore—”

  “Bex! I just flew across the Mediterranean—”

  “I know!” She flung out her arms in exasperation. “Okay, so this is what happened: I know you told me not to, but—”

  “You showed Mr. Ludwig’s photo to Mr. Telemakhos?” It wasn’t even a question. For all her professional integrity, Rebecca was incapable of keeping a secret. Even as a child I had been conscious of deliberately keeping her away from my mother when naughtiness was afoot, to prevent her from blurting out our plans at the least convenient moment. And as an adult I sometimes wondered whether perhaps my own slightly worrisome flair for secrecy had evolved as a necessary counter-measure to my friend’s clandestine incontinence.

  As for Mr. Telemakhos, he was one of those quasi-academic wild cards I did my best to avoid. Rebecca—who had originally fallen under his spell at a graduate symposium in Athens—had repeatedly told me this Greek “oracle,” as she called him, was interested in getting to know me and possibly collaborating on a project. But so far I had made no moves to meet this self-taught eccentric, partly because there hadn’t been room for a trip to Greece in my budget, and partly because I feared it might taint my scholarly reputation to have my name linked with his. “Do not associate yourself with such a charlatan,” Katherine Kent had said when I asked her opinion. “He has no credentials and no publications … he’s a schoolteacher, for heaven’s sake!” For all her obsession with academic purity, Rebecca had no such scruples; Mr. Telemakhos was the convivial uncle she had never had and—I was sure—an enthusiastic recipient of her surplus gossip.

  “I emailed it to him.” Rebecca did not look the least bit remorseful; in fact, she looked positively triumphant. “And you ought to thank me for it. Had it not been for him, I would never have known the disk was here. I’m telling you, that man remembers everything. He recognized right away that the script on your photo is identical to the symbols on a disk in our storage room—a disk he only saw once, twenty years ago. Uncanny. The only problem is”—she looked at her wristwatch and made a face—”the team leader mustn’t know about it, and he’ll be back early tomorrow morning.”

  “Why can’t he know?”

  Rebecca’s eyes narrowed. “Because he loathes me. I am positive his entire day is spent concocting reasons to fire me.” She turned to look out the window. “You know how I am. When people get their dates wrong, or inflate the importance of a find … I just can’t keep my mouth shut.”

  I waited for her to go on, but she merely sighed.

  “What a pain,” I said eventually, tuning out the voice in my head reminding me I had heard it all before. From the lowliest freshman to the highest professor, no one was safe from Rebecca’s passionate love of facts. It was still a mystery to me how Mr. Telemakhos had managed to squeeze underneath her high standards. ??
?But you’ve been here for three years,” I continued. “You practically own the place.”

  She smiled ruefully. “Not anymore.” As she stood there in her old dress, her hair still dripping from the rain, Rebecca suddenly looked like the little girl I knew so well but had almost forgotten—the vicar’s daughter who desperately wanted to be blasé about the world, but who really, deep down, was rather afraid of it all.

  “All right.” I stood up. “Then let’s look at it right now.”

  Rebecca shook her head. “It’s not that easy. Maybe we should ask

  Nick—”

  “Absolutely not!” I stared at her, wondering how I could have failed to enlist her in my suspicions about the Aqrab Foundation. “Someone in Dubai has a vested interest in Granny’s writing system. And until that someone comes to me personally and tells me what the hell is going on, and where the Amazons fit into all this, I am not giving them anything. Yes, I deciphered the inscription in the temple, and yes, they paid me for it, but that’s it. I will not be bullied into working for them again, and certainly not for free. The disk is none of Nick’s business. Understood?”

  “If you say so.” Rebecca bit her lip in unspoken disagreement. “But we don’t have time to see it before dinner.”

  “Here’s what we’ll do.” I started pacing up and down the floor to clear my head. “You’ll keep Nick distracted while I look at it alone. That way I know he’s not stalking me. And when your darling team leader flies in tomorrow, I fly out. End of story.” I looked at Rebecca enthusiastically, already quite fond of my plan. “Where did you say the disk is kept?”

  “Well,” Rebecca smiled sheepishly, “that’s the pinch.”

  WE HAD AN EARLY dinner at the Pasiphae Taverna just down the road from the Knossos ruins. The rain had finally stopped, leaving everything damp and rather cool, and as we sat among the dripping olive trees in the patio garden, a tangerine burst of sunset cut through the remaining haze to remind us who was the king of heaven after all.

  “So, tell me more about this Minotaur,” said Nick at one point, looking expectantly at me. “Half man, half bull. Which half is which? I wonder.”

  “Oh, never mind.” I looked away, still upset by his presence. “It’s hardly a dinner topic.”

  “Why not?” He turned to Rebecca. “I just want to know how you become half bull. It intrigues me.”

  “All right.” She smiled at him, impressing me with her ability to behave as if no secret scheme was brewing. “According to myth, the king here at Knossos had a queen, Pasiphaë, after whom this establishment, somewhat worryingly, is named.” Rebecca nodded at the tavern entrance and the sign hanging over the door. “God knows what really happened to this poor woman, but tradition has it she fell in love with a bull, and that the result was a monster with a bull’s head and a human body.”

  “What do you mean, ‘result’?”

  “Well—” Rebecca actually blushed. “The queen, apparently, commissioned a hollow cow made out of wood and had it placed in the field near the bull. I suppose she figured that would … make their courtship easier. Anyway, she eventually gave birth to the gruesome, man-eating Minotaur, who was kept in the dark labyrinth beneath the royal palace. Legend has it the Athenians were committed to sending seven boys and seven girls to Crete every year as food for the monster, and they did so faithfully year after year until the hero Theseus infiltrated the group, killed the Minotaur, and managed to find his way back out of the labyrinth by aid of a ball of yarn.”

  “How do you explain a myth like that?” Nick wanted to know. “Does it have roots in historical fact?”

  Rebecca beamed. This was exactly the kind of question she loved. “Without a doubt,” she said, “there used to be a bull cult here on Crete in ancient times, and it is not entirely unthinkable it involved a practice of human sacrifice performed by priests wearing bull masks. Hence, possibly, the frightening figure of the Minotaur.”

  “And the labyrinth? Is it still there?”

  “In a manner of speaking.” Rebecca cocked her head in the direction of the palace ruins. “Most archaeologists believe the word ‘labyrinth’ simply referred to the palace itself. After all, it was an enormous, sprawling building, and must have been extremely intimidating to visitors—even without the added attraction of the Minotaur.” She paused to glance at me, and I knew we were thinking the same thing. There was a second labyrinth underneath the ruins, a dark, forbidding place known only to a few insiders.

  “It’s a hot potato to many archaeologists,” I chimed in, afraid Rebecca might be losing her nerve. “How do you explain that this apparently happy, peace-loving Minoan culture had stashes of human bones with knife marks on them, hidden in consecrated caves underground?”

  “Those finds could be exceptions,” said Nick.

  Rebecca nodded. “They could. But as my friend Mr. Telemakhos always says, exceptions are the exceptions, and finds are like ants; whenever you see one, you may be sure there were twenty.”

  “What about the queen and the bull?” asked Nick, pouring more wine for everyone. “What’s the scientific take on that?”

  “In all likelihood,” I said, hoping to prevent a return to the subject, “it was just another fanciful story vilifying female passion—”

  “Or,” Rebecca butted in, incapable of putting a lid on her knowledge, particularly on such a juicy subject, “the bull cult also had an element of”—she blushed again—”hieros gamos, to use the Greek.”

  “I don’t know Greek,” Nick reminded her.

  At which Rebecca smiled delightedly, her dimples surfacing for the first time in hours. “I could teach you.”

  “What?” asked Nick, with half a smile of his own. “Hieros gamos or Greek?”

  I sat back on my chair, watching in disbelief as the two of them went on to practice a couple of Greek phrases, much to the amusement of both. It was not the first time I had seen my old friend shed a gloomy cocoon after a few glasses of wine, but I was astounded to find Nick playing along so wholeheartedly; had I not known better, I would have said he was truly enjoying himself.

  And maybe he was. Maybe Rebecca’s clumsy coquettishness had coaxed out some hitherto hidden side of this abstruse man—a side I might never have seen since I did not possess her sweetness. Or was it once again the voice in the sky that had occasioned the change? The voice who had told Nick to hire me back and double my pay that day in Algeria … and who had, almost certainly, instructed him to clean up his act and follow me to Crete? Whose was that voice? Mr. al-Aqrab’s? Or was there someone else in the nebulous ether surrounding me who had instructed Nick to lose the blues?

  “What’s wrong, Diana?” asked Rebecca suddenly. “Is it the food?”

  “I’m so sorry,” I said, pushing back my chair, “but I have such a headache. Please don’t let me break up the party—”

  “I’ll walk you back,” said Nick, getting up, too.

  “No! No, thanks. Really, I mean it.” I motioned for him to sit down again. “You two … stay right here.”

  RETURNING TO MY ROOM I quickly changed into the old windbreaker and sneakers Rebecca had lent me for my nightly mission. The clay disk, as it turned out, was kept in a tablet storage room in that labyrinthine part of the palace basement we had deliberately not mentioned to Nick. When describing the scenario to me before dinner, Rebecca had done everything she could to discourage me from going down there alone, but pride prevented me from changing the plan I had worked so hard to sell to her. Furthermore, my curiosity had always had a way of riding my prudence, and at present it was spurring me on with Amazonian war cries.

  Apparently, the tablet room was considered a bit of a collective unconscious by the archaeologists working at Knossos. Within its walls sat hundreds of clay plates, most of them inscribed with Linear B and found to be old storage lists. The mystery disk with Granny’s writing symbols had been there for years, tucked away in a dark corner; as far as Rebecca knew, no one had ever made a serious attempt at deciphe
ring the message pressed so carefully into the clay more than three millennia ago.

  “I know it’s hard to believe,” she had said, in response to my skepticism, “but Mr. Telemakhos says there used to be a rumor that this particular disk was cursed. Some of the people who touched it had accidents, and … well—” Rebecca rolled her eyes dismissively. “You know how these things work. Maybe this is why it’s been hidden away for so long.”

  As I assembled the things I needed for my expedition—my bag, a flashlight, and the ball of yarn Rebecca had insisted I bring along—I heard a little voice saying I should not be sneaking around like this so soon after my fright in Algeria. But I knew it could not be otherwise; I had promised Rebecca I’d be out of the basement well before daybreak, and I was determined to keep the disk from Nick until I knew what was written on it. Not just because of his affiliation with the Aqrab Foundation, but also because Nick—by his own admission—was being followed around by tomb raiders and terrorists, and my chances of solving the mystery of Granny’s secret language would be compromised by his involvement.

  In fact, after searching in vain for a safe place to hide the ten thousand dollars Nick had given me in Algeria, I decided to zip the money into my bag and bring it with me. I didn’t feel comfortable leaving so much cash behind in my room, mere feet from a man who attracted thieves wherever he went.

  It was almost dark by the time I headed out. Following Rebecca’s instructions, I hurried across the muddy parking lot and stole into the excavation site through a hole in the fence. She had made it sound so easy; as I struggled to squeeze through the tiny opening, the broken metal tore at my hair and clothes, reminding me I was considerably bigger than her.

  Making my way across the squishy ground, I tried to use the scattered boulders and protruding rock as stepping-stones whenever I could. But despite my efforts, cool wetness soon began to seep into Rebecca’s sneakers, and when I arrived at the shed she had described to me, my feet were soaking.

  I fumbled my way along the uneven façade, not yet daring to turn on my flashlight for fear of being seen. When I found the door at last, I slipped inside as quietly as possible, hoping very much no one heard the squeal of the battered old hinges as it closed behind me.