Claiming Ariadne (20 page)

“An Achaean wearing lilies and peacock feathers, pah!” snorted Erawa, the bruised young woman sitting next to Ariadne.

Taranos glared at her. “Yes, I admit I look ridiculous in them. Kanako, my sweet girl, go fetch me a drink, would you? Akuro, you’re either going to stick that knife in me or sit down. Which will it be?”

Akuro gathered her skirts and glumly took her seat. Kanako, too afraid to move, did nothing until Ariadne nudged her. “It’s all right. Taranos might be big and stupid, but he won’t hurt you. Go get him something.”

“Is it true what I’ve been hearing about the men and boys? Are they all dead?”

“Even the babies,” Erawa added bitterly. “Dashed against walls or thrown from the rooftops. And our daughters and sisters seized to serve as concubines.”

Kanako returned with a half-cup of wine. Taranos took pains to thank and reassure her before adding water from the pitcher. “I can’t do anything to prevent that.” He took a long draught, wiped his mouth on his arm. “Not even Idomeneus can.”

As he reached for a piece of bread, Akuro snatched it back. “If you can’t do anything to help, you can sleep tonight with the other men.”

Taranos appealed to Ariadne. “What about you?”

A day spent among these women, seeing their bruises, listening to their outrages, and watching them weep, was enough to harden any woman’s heart. “Go to your uncle, Taranos.”

“I’ve been to see him. Where do you think I got this?” Taranos indicated the bruise on his cheek. “Idomeneus is furious with me over the way I left you. I never meant to do it. In fact, I spent the night riding halfway to Amnissos and back just to keep my pursuers away from you.”

So that was his excuse. “Did it ever occur to you that your friends might have seized and raped me?” Ariadne itched with the urge to slap him. “What I went through last night was nothing compared with what these women have suffered. I suggest you stay away.”

Taranos looked dumbstruck. “I thought Idomeneus had better sense than to do what he did, that’s why! All he had to do was subdue the town, maybe kill a few men who resisted. No one here was a threat to him. This wasn’t a raid. Idomeneus is staying in Crete. He
needs
the port to remain open.”

 
“You didn’t ask him?”

“I’m going to interrogate a man who almost broke my jaw?” Taranos shook his head vigorously. “Idomeneus doesn’t answer to anyone.”

Ariadne would have asked. No, as a High Priestess, she would have
demanded
an answer. Perhaps Poseidon and the Achaean god of war blessed this venture. Mother Rea would have something to say about it, though. “Just go.”

“I never thought he would go this far.” Taranos started to say more, then, seeing how pointless it was, he slammed his empty cup down on the hearth and stalked out.

* * * *

Wearing a wide-brimmed hat borrowed from Erawa, Ariadne climbed up to the third-story roof with Kanako. There, she had her first true glimpse of the Achaean camp and fleet. When Ekhinos led her through the camp, dawn hadn’t yet begun to brighten the horizon. Now she saw what she hadn’t been able to see before.

At the town’s edge, she glimpsed scattered fires, hide tents, and the prone lumps of sleeping men. Sentries patrolling the town and surrounding area made escape impossible. Katsambas’s docks, where the merchant and fishing vessels moored, lay directly north. Eastward, men, animals, and tents covered a broad swath of beach like so many beetles. And behind them, she counted sixteen beached ships.

Once Kanako understood the strange woman the Achaeans brought to her mother’s house was the High Priestess of Knossos herself, the little girl clung to her like a shadow. Not even the newest, most impressionable novices in the House of the Great Mother tried so hard to be helpful or begged so hard not to be sent away. Ariadne did what she could to comfort the girl.

“You see those buildings down by the sand?” Kanako pointed out two burnt-out shells where the port town met the beach. “Those were houses. The Achaeans broke in and tipped the olive jugs and set fire to them. Mama says if they did that to the warehouses, then the whole town would’ve burned up.”

Olive oil was wealth. Even Achaeans bent on conquest wouldn’t destroy commodities they could use. “Do trading ships still go in and out?”

“Yes, Priestess, but the foreigners are too afraid to come into the town, and we don’t get any of the goods now. Those horrible men already came into our houses and took our gold and pretty things and killed all the boys. They killed my papa, too, but I didn’t see that. When the ships came, he ran out to the waterfront, and we never saw him again.”

A burgeoning maternal instinct led Ariadne to stroke the child’s dark curls and relax etiquette where she’d never done it with her own daughters. “You don’t have to call me ‘priestess’ here, Kanako. We’re not at Knossos. You can call me Ariadne.”

Kanako looked up at her. “Is Knossos a very big place?”

“Yes, there are many rooms and shrines and a large court where the Bull Dance takes place.”

“Are there any children that live there?”

Ariadne felt the subtle pressure of the girl’s fingers squeezing hers. “Yes, there are children. They live in a dormitory above the Western Court where they play in the morning, and they go to school in rooms near the sanctuary of Eleuthia. I have a daughter a little younger than you. Her name is Sasara.”

“I wished I lived there. Bad things don’t happen there.”

Ariadne thought of the women who sometimes died in childbirth at Knossos, of her first unhappy days as High Priestess when she cried in Erika’s arms, and of Elaphos stalking her like a nightmare through the shadows, pressing a knife to her throat. And she thought, too, of old evils that only her great-grandmother now remembered. “You and your mother have been very fortunate.” The Achaeans hadn’t molested Akuro because she was too old or unattractive, but because they never found her. Having had just enough warning, Akuro crawled with her daughter into a dusty, cobwebbed space under her house until the madness passed.

“Mama cries at night. She doesn’t think I hear her, but I do.”

Ariadne hugged the girl to her side. “The Great Mother once lost her daughter Koré. She cried and cried, and the earth withered and winter came. But then the other gods heard her and took pity. Koré came back, and it was spring again.”

“Papa isn’t coming back, and my brothers aren’t coming back either.”

What to say to a child too old to be comforted by stories? “No, but maybe one day the gods will send you and your mother a new papa, and she won’t cry anymore.”

* * * *

Bleeding and cramping, two women writhed on pallets in the back room. Other women sat with them to hold their hands and bathe them with cool water infused with herbs. Still reliving their trauma, they huddled into themselves and sobbed brokenly. Ariadne came in at intervals to examine their progress.

Once she had the ingredients and spoke with each woman, she prepared the medicine in secret. Knowing the recipe wasn’t enough. A trained priestess must know how to measure out the correct dosage and what prayers to say to give the killing draught potency. It was so dangerous that she’d been seventeen, already a High Priestess for five years, before Erika entrusted her with the lore. Ordinary women couldn’t work this powerful magic without abusing it.

Ariadne managed to persuade five other women to wait until they showed signs of pregnancy. As for the two bleeding now, they’d been so frantic, so unhinged by their ordeal that the seed polluting their wombs brought unending torment. Later, when their moon-blood stopped flowing, she would purify them. Maybe it would help bring them peace.

Akuro set aside a corner with an image of the Great Mother that Ariadne could use as a shrine. As it was the woman’s allotted day to do laundry in the Achaean camp, the house didn’t suffer from her gloomy presence. Other women came to cook and spin, and several donated honey or oil as offerings for the shrine. Erawa supervised Kanako as she sewed her first skirt.

Cries of derision greeted Taranos as he entered, yet when the women saw the disheveled, delicate-looking fifteen-year-old girl he brought with him, the protests turned to exclamations of surprise and confusion.

“Meri!” Erawa embraced her tightly.

Ariadne didn’t speak until Taranos joined her at the corner table where she sat shelling peas. “What did you do?”

Every ear attuned to his reply, Taranos struggled to keep his composure. “She’s Erawa’s sister.” Half a moment later, he addressed the entire room. “Meri can’t stay. I have to take her back to the camp in a little while, but I think her situation might improve now. Erawa, while you’re cooing and fussing over her, make sure she has clean clothes and a bath. She doesn’t have anything at Philaretos’s house, and she’s been too afraid to bathe there.”

Erawa tightened her hold on her younger sister. “She isn’t going anywhere.”

“I’m not going to sit here and argue with you, but if Philaretos has to come and fetch her personally, you won’t be helping her. Just do as I tell you and you’ll see how it works out.”

Start from the beginning, said the women. Taranos regarded their demands impatiently but relented. “Meri was given to a very high-ranking man called Philaretos. I visited him this morning in the little house he’s taken. Right away, I recognized Meri—running errands, keeping the house, being pinched and harassed by the followers Philaretos entertains in his dooryard. So I asked him if the girl belonged to him. Naturally he said yes, that pretty maid was his prize.”

Several women cast murderous looks at Taranos. Undaunted, he continued, “I asked him why he was letting his men pinch and prod his property. I also told him Meri came from a good Cretan family.

 
“Wipe that look off your face, Erawa. You, too, Ariadne. My story isn’t done yet. You should have seen the way Philaretos hung his head. A younger man in his position would’ve just shrugged it off, called for more wine, and put his hand up the girl’s skirt to show everybody whose property she was. But Philaretos is older, he comes from a noble family, and he knows how to behave. Right away, he sent his men off on some errand and called Meri over. Not to molest her. He wanted to talk to her, ask her how she was, but his Cretan is so bad he asked me to translate. I suspect that’s why he hasn’t talked to her before.”

 
Erawa scowled at him. “Let him ask properly for her and offer bride-gifts if he wants her as his wife.”

“He just might. Idomeneus will need a governor here in Katsambas. Philaretos seems to be the man he favors. Once that happens, Philaretos is going to need a wife. I suppose he’s been too busy right now to notice much, but once I brought Meri to his attention, he was downright embarrassed that she didn’t have any clean clothes or pretty adornments, and that she was as skittish as a young foal in his house.

“And as for the rest of you ladies, since I apparently didn’t warn you before, let me do so now: there are a good many Achaean men who want wives. That’s right—wives, not concubines. Expect them to come around trying to woo you with trinkets and their broken Cretan.”

Chaos broke out. Not in ten lifetimes, they vowed. Not after what the invaders had done to them. In the midst of their mutual outrage, the women fussed over Meri. They led her into a back room, where they bathed her and combed her hair, and dressed her in clean clothes. Ariadne, still shelling peas, heard the girl assuring the women in a small voice that Philaretos was the only man who had touched her. He wasn’t cruel, she insisted. His men were uncouth, but he didn’t hit or shout at her.

From the corner of her eye, Ariadne spied Taranos creeping toward the front door. Oh, no, not so fast! Setting aside the peas, she went after him and managed to catch him just as he exited.

“What was all that about? If you did it to impress me...”

Taranos snorted in genuine surprise and disgust. “Must everything be about you, High Priestess? Don’t forget that I lived here in Katsambas for a year. I know these people. I broke bread with Akuro’s husband and two sons. I knew the old priestess who was killed. I went fishing with Meri’s father. I can’t take away Philaretos’s prize, and I won’t. That’s what happens in war, Ariadne. When a town is taken, the men are killed, and the women seized and made—”