Claiming Ariadne (26 page)

Potinia’s silence descended on her like a weight, yet when her mother finally spoke the answer wasn’t what she expected. “I don’t like Taranos. I would have happily sent him to the Underworld to answer for his crime. But once you stood by him and agreed to share his fate, I had no choice. I have no other children, Ariadne. I did once, before you were born, but they’re all gone now.”

At some point, Ariadne remembered someone telling her that her mother had had children before her, but she never learned what became of them. “Were they with Kitanetos, too?”

“No, I had them by other men. I was younger then, still a novice serving the Mistress of the Animals. I miscarried twice, one baby was born dead, another died at six months, and the other—she lived to be seven, and died the year before you were born. But she was afflicted, cursed with deafness, an imbecile. All my children were cursed.” Catching her breath, Potinia wiped a tear from one eye. “I was so old when I conceived you, I wanted to take the medicine, but I got you under Mother Rea. I had no choice. You were born perfect. Kitanetos urged me to be happy. He didn’t understand. I was always afraid. Afraid you would sicken and die. Afraid you would turn out deaf or mute or dumb. I didn’t want to be attached to you, so I never came to the nursery or the schoolroom.”

Ariadne bitterly acknowledged that last part. Although she’d always known who her mother was, Potinia hardly spoke two words to her until she became High Priestess. And then, when she began to swell with her first child at thirteen, her mother brought the snakes and cold admonishments to look after her health, as though Ariadne was some other woman’s daughter. “I’m a grown woman now, Mother, and still you—”

“Why do you think all these years I’ve made you endure the serpents? Do you think I wanted you to suffer what I suffered? Do you think I wanted you to die in childbirth like my mother? Sometimes the serpents are the only friend a woman has.” Potinia’s eyes glittered with tears. Wet tracks streaked her cheeks. “I learned that too late to help myself.”

“What will happen to my children once I leave here?” Ariadne realized now that she would never welcome her daughters into the House of the Great Mother as novice priestesses or see her sons become priests. She wasn’t even certain the child she was carrying now would thrive. “I cannot take them with me.”

“I will make sure they know their mother didn’t abandon them.” Potinia paused, then added, “Your father and I will both make certain.”

* * * *

Kitanetos didn’t need permission to enter the House of the Great Mother, especially now that all Knossos knew his blood relationship to the High Priestess.

Amaja brought in watered wine and little sesame cakes. Ariadne thanked the girl before dismissing her and the other novices. She didn’t know what to say to the High Priest. Maybe the truth shouldn’t have come as such a surprise. Since she was old enough to remember, Kitanetos had always been there, first as a kindly older priest who visited the nursery or came to observe the children in the schoolroom, then as a solicitous advisor to the High Priestess, mediating between her and the various Sacred Kings on the god’s behalf.

She never would have suspected he was her father.

Acknowledging him shouldn’t have been this hard. She needed to. She wanted to. Yet she didn’t know how to begin. “My mother told me—that is—I know what happened yesterday. I just don’t know what to say…”

“Yes, Ariadne, I can see that.” Softly smiling, he took her hand. “I’m proud to have you as a daughter—never doubt that—but your mother never meant for you to know. When you were born, I offered to marry her, but she didn’t want a husband, so I respected her wishes. I only spoke up yesterday because I had no other choice.”

Ariadne chafed at her mother’s continued insistence on having her own way. Had there been no trial, no threat of death, she never would have known the truth. As a grown woman, she had a right to know. “Why didn’t you preside at the trial?”

Kitanetos took a little wine. “Had it been Taranos alone, then I would have. I would have executed him, too, had he been found guilty. But I couldn’t be impartial with you.”

“No one was supposed to die that night.” Ariadne knotted her fingers in her lap. “Elaphos seized me from behind.”

“I warned him to stay away from you.” Kitanetos replaced the wine cup on the table. “When Aktaios and I went down to the storeroom to view the corpse, I knew there had to be some reason Elaphos was down there. I suspected he either followed you or intended to kill Taranos. I know Taranos had no choice but to kill him. As much as I sympathized, it wouldn’t have made any difference. I would have had to condemn Taranos, but when you agreed to share his fate, I couldn’t execute him or even give my consent knowing I would be sacrificing my own daughter.”

Potinia had told her the exact same thing. “Is he all right?”

“Yes, he’s quite well. He’s searching for a fine white bull calf to sacrifice. Once you’re ready, you can join him in the Little Palace.” Kitanetos’s smile curved over the cup rim. “He told me the baby is moving.”

Ariadne laid a hand over her belly. “Only a little. It’s quiet now.”

“I don’t believe I ever touched your belly when you carried your other babies. Perhaps, when the child becomes a bit more restless, you might let me?”

She laughed despite herself. “Kitan—Father, most of Knossos regards it their sacred right to put their hands on my pregnant belly. Why should you feel a need to ask?”

Tenderness brightened his gaze. “I hope you call me that more often.”

Ariadne wished the moment could have been more joyful. “I’m sorry I won’t be here much longer.”

“Potinia told me you might go to your great-grandmother. I will visit you there as often as I can if you do.”

“I don’t even know yet where I will have the baby.”

“You don’t want to deliver in Eleuthia’s sanctuary?”

“It’s not a cheerful place.”

Kitanetos nodded. “Then you’ll leave Knossos before the winter solstice? That doesn’t give you a lot of time to train a successor. Do you already have a girl in mind?”

Not yet. When she did not fret over her own future, the question of naming the next High Priestess consumed her waking thoughts. Only Sopata was exactly the right age, but she would never do. A High Priestess had to be strong-willed and intelligent. Impressionable Sopata would shriek in terror the moment the opium smoke gave her visions. With her absent-minded habits, she would falter during the daily offerings. She would cringe before the Achaeans.

Tukate was bright, but hadn’t started menstruating; she was only nine. So Ariadne studied the older girls, inventorying their strengths and weaknesses, deliberating a long time before summoning her choice up to her sitting room.

“Close the door, Amaja, and come here.”

Ariadne laid aside her shuttle and wools. Sixteen-year-old Amaja was a graceful girl, quiet and deferential, yet with an occasional streak of willfulness. As the eldest daughter of the late High Priestess Kanako, and the granddaughter of an earlier High Priestess, her lineage rivaled Ariadne’s own.

“Do you know why I called you here?”

Amaja shook her head anxiously. So she thought she was about to be reprimanded. “You know I am soon to leave Knossos. I have agreed to become the wife of the Sacred King who just stepped down, and that means I can no longer be High Priestess.”

“So you have to choose a new priestess, Mistress?” Amaja caught on quickly. Perhaps she even expected to be chosen.

“I am about to lay a heavy burden upon you. One day you may curse me for it.”

Amaja subsided once more into her passive role. “Mistress—?”

“From now on, you will call me Ariadne in private.”

“Ariadne, I know you haven’t always been happy as High Priestess. Is it truly so hard serving the Great Mother?”

There was no reason to lie to the girl. She must know the truth. “A High Priestess makes all the offerings to the Goddess, and I don’t just mean the daily offerings in the sanctuary. Her task is to be bountiful and assume the Goddess’s role in all her guises. She must be a mother. She must receive whatever man Rea and Poseidon send to be her Sacred King, and she must receive him with the gifts of Aphrodite.

“You have never known a man, Amaja, and you have never borne a child. Both mean blood and pain. You remember how difficult it was for your mother, pregnant every year, dying from a disease in her womb. Carrying and birthing children is hard work, especially when you don’t love the man who put the seed in you. In seven years, there was only one Sacred King who ever gave me pleasure. Do you understand what I am telling you?”

Amaja’s color drained from her face, but she nodded. “Yes, I understand.”

“No, you don’t,” Ariadne said sharply. “When you do care for a Sacred King, loving him is agony, because you know he may die next spring, or the spring after next. You will have to bear that loss. You will have to accept the physical discomfort and the risk of dying in childbirth. And you will have to deal with the Achaeans. Only a strong woman can command their respect. She may start young and unsure, but inside she has to have the strength to endure. Can you do these things, Amaja?”

A moment’s hesitation, then: “I think so.”

It was much to ask from a young woman who had watched her predecessors suffer. But she had to decide now. “That’s not good enough, Amaja. You must be absolutely certain. I had no choice when your mother died. I was too young to really understand what it all meant. I am giving you a choice. I will ask again: are you certain?”

A pink tongue darted out to lick dry lips. “Yes, I am certain.”

Chapter Fourteen

Harvest brought wheat sheaves and ripe clusters of grapes. Garlanded with flowers, Ariadne stood in the window of appearances above the Western Court as noblemen and farmers laid their offerings before her, but when the priestesses came out to dance with the women, she didn’t join them. Autumn’s warmth brought a curious lassitude and dread, as though she was standing in a bright doorway peering into blackness.

She hovered on the verge of tears, although in truth, she had no real reason to cry. Taranos was alive and waiting for her; he would be there to hold their first child in his arms. Amaja proved an avid pupil and would make an excellent High Priestess. Yet there were times when Ariadne wanted to snatch the ritual vessels from the girl’s hands and take back what was hers, regardless of how many times she had prayed to be free of it.

Thuriatris and her priestesses became a constant presence in this last season before childbirth. Ariadne always had a servant of Eleuthia to soothe and guide her, until she became annoyed with their cloying attention. They only served to remind her of the ordeal ahead: a long, agonizing delivery in a dark chamber with ochre-reddened walls and frescoes of ecstatic, ample-breasted women twirling before the Great Mother, and chanting women scattering sage and saffron to smother the stench of blood. She couldn’t breathe when there. She couldn’t open her eyes for fear of those red-drenched walls. Red for blood, red for pain. Her grandmother Meri had bled to death in that very room.

Lying on her bed with a pillow shoved behind her aching back, Ariadne yearned to escape. Knossos was her home, yet the raw ache of homesickness competed with the more primal need to find a safe haven in which to give birth.

Kitanetos came sometimes to see her in her chamber, a highly unusual occurrence that the priestesses allowed because it seemed to offer solace. “You’ve been rather short with Thuriatris’s women.”

“I don’t want their help.” Ariadne shielded her eyes against his lamp. “I hate the thought of giving birth again in that place.”

Seeing her distress, Kitanetos deposited the lamp in a corner. “I know. I’ve spoken to Taranos about it. You know he would be here if he could.”

“I know.”

“Something tells me you don’t want to go to the Little Palace, either.” Kitanetos sat down beside her. “I’ve been there since Idomeneus took over. It’s a man’s domain now, and you should be around other women. Should you wish to go to your great-grandmother for the birth, you can. Taranos has already been to see her. She’s eager to have you both stay with her.”

Taranos had gone to visit Iphame without notifying her? “When did he do this?”

“He went right after his purification. He was concerned that Idomeneus would seize her house and land for one of his followers. Taranos explained to her that if she turned ownership of the farm over to him, his uncle would hardly take land from a kinsman. Iphame gladly agreed to provide you both with a home, on condition that Idomeneus not evict her.”

Ariadne recalled that he had promised to handle the situation. “And what did the king say?”

“Taranos told me he accepted the offer. So you can go anytime you want. There are skilled midwives and a priestess or two in Archanes, and I’m told that your great-grandmother also knows something about delivering babies.” Kitanetos shook his head, smiling. “This Iphame strikes me as a remarkable woman. I will have to meet her sometime.”

“Tell Taranos...” Ariadne hesitated, for a moment not knowing what she meant to say. “Tell him I want to go to Archanes. I want to have our child in a
home
.”

* * * *

As the first leaves began to curl and fall, as summer’s heat yielded to the coolness that presaged winter, Ariadne climbed into a cart containing her household goods and left for Archanes. An Achaean escort accompanied them as far as Iphame’s house, where the old woman, spying so many able-bodied men, promptly put them to work unloading Ariadne’s belongings.

“I also have grapes that need treading,” she told them.

Ariadne smiled and rolled her eyes. “I don’t think they understand a word you said.”

Taranos came out to greet them. He thanked the escort with wine from his own stores, while Iphame led her great-granddaughter inside. “Oh, my, look at you! Swelling like a pig’s bladder! It won’t be long now before you pop. You’ll have a chamber here on the ground floor. I still remember how many times I had to get up during the night. What woman doesn’t once her belly drops? I have a birthing stool and everything you need, and there’s an excellent midwife nearby. Once the baby is born and you’re well enough, you can sleep upstairs with your husband—oh, it’s all right. I don’t need such a large chamber. There will be plenty of room for you and Taranos and—you
did
bring a cradle, didn’t you?”

Among all the things she brought, Ariadne never once considered a cradle. “There weren’t any in the House of the Great Mother.”

“Then we’ll have to get you one.” Iphame led her into a south-facing room furnished with a narrow bed and chair. Boxes and her disassembled loom cluttered the floor where the Achaeans had deposited them. “I’ll have Sera unpack everything. You don’t have to lift a finger.”

“Great-grandmother, I’m not an invalid.”

Iphame clucked her tongue. “Oh, you’ll have plenty to do. Life here isn’t like Knossos. It’s hard work, and it never stops. Right now, there are grapes to tread, grain to winnow, fruits to boil and preserve, and herbs to dry. The olive harvest is coming. You can help with some things, and once you’ve recovered from childbirth, you’ll learn how to do the rest. Can you cook?”

That afternoon, as her great-grandmother’s serving woman arranged her room, Ariadne grilled her first fish. Bread she knew how to bake, so she also prepared the flat loaves and proudly set the meal in front of her husband. Taranos took one bite of fish, winced, and quickly washed it down with watered wine. “How much salt did you use?”

Ariadne bit her lip. “Is it too much?”

“Woman, it hasn’t even reached my belly and it’s already pickled.”

Iphame’s good-natured laughter only compounded her embarrassment. “At least your priestess-wife was willing to cook. Now tomorrow, you’re to inspect the olive press. I’ll need your strong back once the harvest comes in.”

Taranos stared at her. “I brought fifteen jars of oil, and Ariadne’s brought twenty.”

“Yes, and you’ll be surprised when you find out how quickly a household goes through them all. Olives don’t press themselves, and with those big strong arms of yours, it shouldn’t take long at all. Once you’re done looking over the press, you might inspect the cattle and pigs with the field hands. Ariadne says you know your animals, so you ought to be able to judge which ones we’ll be slaughtering.”

Ariadne slept alone that night in the little downstairs room. Quiet settled over the ground floor, which was untenanted at this hour. Sera, the two field hands, and the houseboy Tarato slept one floor above, while Iphame and Taranos had rooms on the third story. Knowing her husband was in the same house unsettled her. She wanted him near, his arms wrapped protectively around her, his presence reassuring her that all would be well in their new life together. But her constant stirring would have made him irritable. Ariadne shifted in the unfamiliar bed, tried to find a comfortable position, and dozed off only to have to amble drowsily to the chamber pot when she had to urinate yet again.

She slept till after sunrise, rising only when Sera poked her head in to see how she fared. Her sluggishness and the late hour horrified her, particularly in those first few disoriented minutes when she imagined herself back at Knossos. No, no, she realized, gradually calming down. She was in her great-grandmother’s house in Archanes. Amaja was now the High Priestess.

Wrapped in a shawl, she joined Iphame at the household altar in time to present olive oil and pumice to Qe-ra-sija. “I borrowed Eleuthia from a neighbor so you can pray to her.” Iphame indicated a chalk-white figure with pendulous red breasts and a rounded belly. “Kujara says this particular goddess likes freshly ground flour and wine dregs. So tell your husband to leave off playing
kottabos
with the field hands and save you something.”

Following a light breakfast and sponge bath, Ariadne meant to go to the town well, which her great-grandmother adamantly refused to let her do. “For a woman used to the work, it’s all right, but you’re not accustomed to carrying full jugs while pregnant, not with your back aching the way it does now.”

Ariadne decided against arguing that she had drawn water while in Katsambas. Her back hadn’t hurt so much then. “Am I to sit around the house and do nothing?”

“Not at all!” Iphame exclaimed. “Go to the local market with Sera. Get out and walk. Exercise is good for you. Get to know the neighbors and listen to the gossip. Everyone likes a woman who can prepare herbal remedies and is skillful with a needle. But be careful you don’t offend Pakowa. She’s the town priestess.”

A resident priestess meant a potential rival. “Which goddess does she serve?”

“She serves all of them, or so she claims. You needn’t seek her out. Once she discovers there’s a priestess from Knossos here, she’ll come sniffing around on her own.”

While returning from an afternoon outing to buy fish, needles, and a new carding comb, Ariadne learned she and Taranos weren’t the only newcomers to Archanes. Three familiar figures came down the cypress-shaded walkway to meet her. Akuro, draped in a creamy yellow shawl, leaned on Argurios’s arm. Kanako raced ahead of them to hug Ariadne about the waist.

“Argurios just acquired a house and bit of land,” said Akuro. “Oh, no, it’s not what you think. The residents packed up and fled south to Phaistos after Minos Echmedes was killed. Idomeneus gave Argurios the property and distributed parcels to other men nearby.”

Ariadne didn’t need to be told to know the Achaeans had arrived in Archanes. Almost everyone in the marketplace muttered about their dispossessed neighbors. “So you’re married now?”

Akuro flicked the silver hoops dangling from her ears. “One day Argurios showed up with these. Silver, because my name means silver, and so does his. His way of telling me the gods meant us to be together.”

Sera went in with the purchases. A few moments later, Taranos came running out to greet the visitors. Rapid Achaean passed back and forth; the men laughed and nodded. “Argurios wants to know when the wedding feast will be,” said Taranos.

“Oh, tell him to behave!” Akuro swatted her husband’s arm. “He knows enough Cretan now to talk to the neighbors.”

Ariadne rubbed at her back. She certainly didn’t feel like a bride. “I don’t know. Maybe in the spring?”

Argurios carefully enunciated each word. “I bring goats for feast, and cows.”

Akuro became a regular visitor, accompanying Ariadne to the market with Sera. Mistrustful eyes followed them among the stalls. There was little sympathy for native women who took Achaean husbands, even when one of those women happened to be a high-ranking priestess from Knossos. Sometimes the scrutiny made Ariadne long for Katsambas, though Akuro often provided welcome distractions. “Argurios was absolutely horrified when he learned Taranos hadn’t made a cradle. They’re going out to select the right wood today, I think.”

Ariadne relished these visits. Apart from Sera and her great-grandmother, she had no other female friends in Archanes. Most afternoons, she stayed at home to learn what Iphame could teach her about preserving fruit, winnowing grain, and cooking. In the evenings, she spun thread to weave into baby clothes or worked at her loom.

A week later as Taranos and the field hands began slaughtering the pigs in their sty, the local priestess came to visit. Pakowa was a tall, large-boned woman whose earlobes sagged under the heavy gold earrings she wore. A simple white linen diadem held back wispy black curls; it was the plainest thing she wore. A fringed girdle cinched what little waist she possessed, and the embroidery edging her collar and sleeves was almost obscured by the multiple strands of beads looped about her neck and wrists.

“I have been conducting rites at the cave sanctuary,” she said loftily. “So I hear you’re from Knossos.”

“Yes, I am.” Ariadne proffered a plate of sesame cakes. “Would you care for some?”