The King Must Die

  Nonetheless I set myself to move them, night by night, to the vault under the lamp room, where they could be quickly got. There was a pile of old oil jars by the pillar, mostly empty; the cobwebs showed they were never stirred, and there was room behind them. A few nights later I found a box of spearheads, and a whetstone. This was best of all. I began to grind them down for daggers, and to bring them into the Bull Court, a few at a time, for the girls to hide.

  I had sworn the Cranes to silence, even with lovers and mistresses; so I felt bound to it myself. Besides, she was not a girl to give half your mind to. She had that vein of wildness which stirs a man because it lies deep, like Hephaistos’ fire which only the earthquake loosens from the mountain. Afterwards she would look at me with still eyes of wonder; then sink into a milky calm like a full-fed baby’s, and fall asleep.

  Sometimes, when she talked of her father and the kingdom’s troubles, I thought of speaking, and asking her help. Her heart I trusted. For her head, she was young, barely sixteen; she had told her secrets quickly; and most of all I feared her hatred of Asterion. He was no such green lad as I had been in Eleusis. If a woman’s face said to him, “Something is coming to you, though you do not know it,” he was not one to miss the message.

  About this time, he bade me to another of his feasts; and I saw she had told me true.

  I did not see one guest who looked even half Hellene. They were all Cretans, or near-Cretans; the small gentry, whose houses had been great in the days before the Hellenes came. And his manner to me had worsened. Not that he openly insulted me as such a man thinks of insult. That would have won him no praise, for every Cretan loves a bull-leaper. But he made it very clear that I was only there to entertain his honored friends; and I could feel, at the back of it, that he wanted to take a Hellene down before them. Presently he asked me to sing a song of my homeland. He spoke smoothly; but he spoke too as the conquerer does to the captive.

  I bit on it awhile in silence. Then I thought, “Good. If I submit to this, no man alive could say I am his guest.”

  I asked for a lyre, and tuned it to the Hellene mode. Asterion sat back smiling. But I saw sly Lukos looking under his eyelids. He had travelled. He knew what the skills of a gentleman are among our people.

  It does not become a captive to sing the triumphs of his forebears. Nor did I want to warn anyone my thoughts were upon war. Yet I wanted to make these Cretans remember me, and not as quite the fool Asterion hoped. So I sang one of those old laments I had learned at home in Troizen. It is the one they sing all over the Isle of Pelops; often when the bards tell of a sacked city they will work it in, but sometimes they sing it alone. It is about the King’s heir, the Shepherd of the People, kissing his wife farewell at the gatehouse, as he leaves for battle foreknowing his death.

  “Let me go,” he says, “and do not try to keep me. If I hung back, I should be ashamed before the warriors, and the gold-belted ladies with their flowing skirts. Nor would my heart consent, for I was reared to valor, to fight in the vanguard for my father’s honor and mine. In my deep heart I know the sacred citadel must fall, the King and his people perish; yet that is not what I grieve for most of all; no, not for my father, nor my mother, nor for my bold brothers tumbled in the dust. I grieve for you, when they carry you off in tears to the hollow ships, and end your days of freedom. Far away, in the house of some foreign woman, I see you working the loom, or driven with heavy water jars up the steep path from the spring. And someone who sees you weeping will tell another whose wife you were, bringing your sorrow freshly home, that your man is gone who would have kept you free. May I lie dead, and the earth heaped over me, before I see you led away, and hear you cry.”

  In the Labyrinth, they have servants to make their music for them. He had not expected a king’s son to have been properly taught. When I saw the Cretans wipe their noses, I knew that now they would not mock me. At the end, they came crowding all about; by which I knew those who were not his lackeys yet, a good many it seemed. It was all I could do to keep a straight face. But there was nothing he could say; I had only done as he asked me.

  That night I said to Ariadne, “I have been at the Little Palace. You were right. If he is to be stopped, it must be quickly.”

  “I know,” she said. “I have thought of killing him myself, if I knew how.”

  She felt as soft in my hands as a nestling dove. Though he was her brother of the same belly, her words were too wild to shock me. She had been alone, with no one to turn to. I said, “Hush, and listen. If I could get word to my people at home, and they sent me ships, what then? You understand it would mean war. Whom would the Cretans fight for?”

  She turned over in the darkness, and lay thinking, her chin propped in her hands.

  “They would fight for themselves. They would rise against the Hellene houses, when the chiefs went to the war. There would be terrible things done, blood everywhere. But that is what Asterion will do himself; that’s what he wants with the Cretans. When he has used them, he will take care that uprising is their last. Yes, they will have died to buy themselves a heavier chain.” She folded her arms and laid her head upon them. Presently she said, “But if …”

  “Yes?” I said, stroking her hair. But she shook her head, and said, “I must think. Look where Orion is; how quick night passes.” So we began our good-bys, which took a long while, and no more was said about it.

  I had now moved arms enough for every dancer in the Bull Court, men and girls, and had told Amyntor where they were, so that someone should have the knowledge if I died. The girls had about thirty daggers hidden in their sleeping place. Winter was come, and sometimes the bull-dance was not held because of the rain or snow; it was a long while since the people of the Labyrinth had put themselves out to honor a god. But if we missed a dance, we practiced on Daidalos’ Bull, or sometimes held our own Games, boys against girls, or drawing for sides; or we danced, if we were feeling stale; anything to keep us limber. I had seen other teams get slack, and what always came of it.

  This was our third season in the Bull Court. We had learned by now every chance that can happen to bull-dancers, whom the Cretans call Poseidon’s little calves. We knew what they live by, and how they die; what kills a dancer in the first week, and what kills him after half a year. And one day Amyntor touched my arm, while the girls were wrestling (the priestess would not let them wrestle with boys), and said to me softly, “Chryse is growing.”

  Our eyes met. There was no need to say more. She had been fourteen when she sailed from Athens; and she was all Hellene, head to heel. If she lived, she would be like the Maiden Goddess, upright and tall. But tall girls did not live long in the bull ring.

  I said to Amyntor, “After the winter, and before the great spring winds, that is when the ships will come.” I measured him against me, when he was not looking. He had grown three fingers himself.

  Amyntor had grown dear to me. We had worked together till we thought like one; he knew how I would leap before I knew myself. It was rumored in the Palace that we were lovers. We no longer put ourselves out to deny this. It saved us from the nonsense of the Knossos courtiers, with their flowers and seals and mincing verses and lurkings in the night, and gave us something to laugh at. Lately it had served me well; we could talk secrets unregarded, and, now my wanderings among the women were over, it saved me from too much guessing.

  But the night before the bull-dance, I always lay alone; two nights even, if I felt my eye out at practice. It came hard, for I was young, and had not so much as kissed another woman since I came to her. But my people and I were far from home. To keep me a king I had neither laws nor warriors, only what I could find within me. It was a little kingdom; the finest crack could shiver it.

  If I told her I could not come, she never reproached me, or not in words. But from her hands I knew her mind. She wanted to hear me say, “Let tomorrow go, let the bull have me and my people die; it is all well lost for one night in your arms.” Then she would have answered, “No
! Do not come; I swear you will not find me.” She only wanted to hear me say it. But I was young, and took my calling gravely, as a holy trust, which it would be impious to play with, or toss to a girl like a string of beads. In those years, I had always one ear listening for the god.

  Nowadays it would cost me nothing to please a woman so. He speaks no more to me, since my son died on the rocks beside the sea. I had felt the warning in the ground; “Beware the wrath of Poseidon,” I said to him, and he could take it as he chose; I too was angry. He chose to take it for a curse, and I would not speak again. I watched him off, the tall lad and his big Troizenian horses, riding to the narrow way. I kept my silence. Now the god keeps his.

  But I remember, though it is long ago, how the night after the bull-dance our meeting was like unmixed wine, all fire and spiced honey, making it worth while to have stayed away. I remember how she wept over some silly graze, my first since we were lovers. After a while I said, “Have you thought of any plan?”

  “Yes,” she said. “Tomorrow night I will tell you.” I asked, “Why not now?” But she said it would take too long, there was no time tonight, and bit me softly, like a kitten. Often I had the marks of her teeth next day. But a bruise is nothing, in the Bull Court.

  The next night I was going to her through the vaults, when in the shadows of the temple store I saw something move. I reached to my belt for my homemade dagger; then the figure stepped into the light, and it was she. We embraced between the gilded death-car and the stack of dolls. She was wrapped in the dark cloak she had worn before. “Come with me,” she said. “There is someone you must speak with.”

  She gave me from a shelf a round clay lantern, such as one can darken by covering the hole. When I opened my mouth to question her she laid her hand on it, saying, “Don’t make a sound. We must pass right under the Palace.” After she had led me past the archive room, she turned aside. There was another thread tied to a different pillar. She whispered softly, “It is a hard way to find. Once I was almost lost myself.” She took the thread in one hand, and my wrist in the other. The lamp was dim, and the place pitch-dark around.

  The way went winding, through the Labyrinth’s very bowels. We passed old uncouth masonry that looked like the work of Titans or the first earth men. For this was the core of the foundations, belonging to the earliest House of the Ax, the stronghold of Cretan Minos, two palaces ago. These mighty piers, made strong with the blood of a thousand victims, had withstood the rage of Poseidon when every wall had fallen that stood above the ground.

  Sometimes she would squeeze my hand, warning me to shade the lamp; there would be a fine crack in the stone above, with light glinting through, and voices arguing or making love. Little by little our way slanted lower, which made me think we were going westward, with the slope of the hill.

  Here were no stores, but now and then the rubbish of the ancient earthquakes, broken pots shaped without the wheel, or old crude tools. And once, where the earth had settled, there was a man’s white skull sticking out of the ground from the eye-sockets upward, before one of the great pillars. He still wore shreds of an old hide helmet. He was the Watcher of the Threshold, the strong warrior they bury living under a sacred place, for his ghost to fight off demons from it. I started, and then saluted him as became his honor. Ariadne had passed that way before, and only drew her skirt aside.

  At last we came to a few steps and a narrow door. She signed to me to take my sandals off, and not to speak. She took the lantern from me, and quenched it, and set it down.

  The door opened softly. Two plates of my necklace chinked together; she stilled them with her hand and made me hold them. Then she led me through some small dark room, where my feet felt polished tiles. Beyond was another door; then air and space, and what seemed light after the blackness. It was starlight coming from three flights above, through the roof-hole over a great stairway.

  Beyond the stair-foot was a hall, and going down from it a sunken shrine. There was a solemn, old, sacred smell. On the wall that faced the shrine were paintings it was too dark to see, and midway of the wall a tall white throne.

  Through all this she led me, and out beyond. Then there was a door, under which a dim lamplight showed. She whispered, “Wait,” and opened it; within was an embroidered curtain, which fell to behind her. I heard whispers, and a sound of metal. Then a voice spoke, which was not hers. It was the voice of a man, but strangely altered; muffled, and dimly booming. It made me shiver. Yet it was gentle and weary, even sad. It said, “You may come in.”

  I put aside the curtain, and smelled sweet gums burning. The air was blue with the smoke. I peered through it and stopped dead, with my heart knocking my ribs.

  The room was small and plain, with dying embers on the hearthstone. There were shelves for cups and plates and toilet vessels, a shelf of scrolls, and a table with writing things, on which burned a lamp of greenstone. In a chair beside it, hands laid on knees, sat a man with a golden bull-head, and crystal eyes.

  The weary voice, hollow within the mask, said, “Come, son of Aigeus, and stand where I can see.”

  I came forward, and touched my fist to my brow.

  He drew a long sigh, which rustled in the mask like wind in reeds. “Do not be affronted, Shepherd of Athens, that I cover my face from your father’s son. It is a long while now since I sent away my mirror. This face which Daidalos made for the Cretan Minos is better for a guest to see.” He lifted the lamp from the table, and held it up, moving his head because the mask blinkered his eyes. Then he said, “Go out, my child, and watch the stairway.”

  She went softly out, and I waited. It was so still that I could hear the sputter of the incense in its porphyry dish. Behind its precious scent hung the heavy smell of sickness. His right hand, bare on his knee, was long and fine; the left was covered with a glove. Presently he said, “I had heard King Aigeus was childless. Tell me something of your mother.”

  I told him about my birth, and, when he asked, about my rearing. He listened quietly. When I mentioned some sacred rite, he reached for his tablets, and made me tell it all, and wrote quickly, and nodded. Then he said, “But you changed the custom at Eleusis. How was that?”

  “It came by chance,” I said, “from putting my hand to what I found.” And I told him how it was. Once I stopped, hearing him choke within the mask and thinking his breath had failed him. But he motioned me to go on; and I perceived he had been laughing.

  When I had told him how I got to Athens, he said, “They say, Theseus, that you wrote your own name on the lot to come here. Is this true? Or is Lukos trying to excuse himself? I should like to know.”

  “Oh, it is true,” I said. “He is a man who loves order. I was sent by the god. He gave me his sign, to sacrifice for the people.”

  He leaned forward in his chair, and lifted the lamp again. “Yes, so she told me. Then it is true.” He pulled a fresh tablet toward him, and took up a new sharp pen, moving briskly, like a man who is pleased.

  “Come,” he said, “tell me of this. The god spoke to you, you say. You have heard the voice that calls the king. How does it speak? In words? In a sound of music, or the wind? How does it call?”

  I thought, “He is right, seeing my birth is unattested, to prove if I have the Hearing.” But I had scarcely spoken of it even to my father, and the words came hard.

  He said, “I shall be beholden to you. My time hangs heavy here. I am making a book upon the ancient customs, and this is a matter where the archives give no help.”

  I stared at him. Amazement rooted my tongue. I thought I must have heard wrong, yet knew not how to ask. For courtesy’s sake I began to stammer something; but the words died, and we were silent, looking at one another.

  He was the first to speak. He leaned his head on his hand, and said in his sad muffled voice, “Boy, how old are you?”

  I said, “If I live till spring, my lord, I shall be nineteen.”

  “And after dark, when the bats fly over, you hear their cry?”
r />   “Why, yes,” I said. “Often the night is full of it.”

  “They cry to the young. And when the old man passes, they are not silent; it is his ear that has hardened. So also with kings’ houses; and it is time then to think of our going. When the god calls you, Theseus, what is in your heart?”

  I paused, remembering. In spite of what I knew, I thought he would understand. Which is strange, for it had not always been so with my father. Finding what words I could, I opened my heart in this small close room to Star-Born Minos, Lord of the Isles.

  When I had said my say, his heavy mask sank forward on his breast; and I paused, ashamed to have tired him. But he raised his crystal eyes again, and slowly nodded. “So,” he said, “you made the offering. And yet, it is your father who is King.”

  His words went sounding through me, deeper even than my grandfather’s long ago; deeper than my own thought could follow. “No matter,” I said. “A good Shepherd will give his life for the sheep.”

  He sat in thought awhile; then he sat up and pushed the tablets from him. “Yes, yes; the child was right. I own, I doubted her. There is a daimon of perversity that haunts our house. But she chose soundly. Out of death, birth. You are what must come; I question it no longer.” He made a sign with his hand in the air between us. Though his forebears had been long from the Achaian lands, I saw he was still priest as well as King.

  He shifted in his chair, and made as if he would clear a space on the table; then he shook his head. “This sickness clings to what one touches. Or I would ask you to sit down, and offer you the cup of kinship, as a man should who gives his daughter’s hand.”

  I almost knelt to him. Only I saw it was not reverence he wanted, but an arm to trust in. “Sir,” I said, “with my heart I pledge you. I will not rest till I have made her a queen.”