

### Time Trance of the Gods

BOOK TWO

By Linda Talbot

Smashwords Edition

Copyright Linda Talbot ~ February 2013

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Smashwords Edition, License Notes.

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This book is a work of fiction and any resemblance to persons, living or dead, or places, events or locales is purely coincidental. The characters are from the author's imagination.

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Contact blog: http://lindajtalbot.wordpress.com

~~~~~~~~Table of Contents~~~~~~~~

**Time Trance of the Gods - Introduction**

Moonblind

The Song Of Logoth

The White Shell

Niobe

Labyrinth

The Prize Of Procyon

The Catalyst

The Second Season

The Ghost Gift

The Tyranny

Thodorou

Monogamy

Author's Note, next publication and contact

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Time Trance Of The Gods

BOOK 2

~~~~~~Introduction~~~~~~

### In Book Two of Time Trance Of The Gods we meet more mortals mingling with gods and wandering inexplicably through time. The old gods had decidedly ungodly habits as do many of the humans with whom they tangle in these tales.

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Gods of good and malicious mischief

still haunt our little lives. L.T.

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Moonblind

Defiantly, the Spartan town thrust ruins at the wind; carved with shameless clues and laced with sanctuaries still charged with awe.

I paused by the theatre built on the mountain's edge, as though, with words, the actors would defy the gods. I absorbed the past with senses primed but barely saw the obdurate stones. I wept with the wind and humiliation.

I had found Thanos with the Swedish woman in the cluttered back room of the agency. He had not heard me come in to stand, sealed silently in shock. Then I had hurried into the fury of the night, where the wind lashed the tamarisks beside the black beach. I reeled, unable to reason and next day climbed, as though to purge the pain, the steep path to ancient Thera.

From there I would strive to regain perspective, watch Kamari recede until its ant-like activity was unreal.

But on the great slope, gazing as the Dorians had, into the huge horizon, I was doubly reduced, rocked by wind and unable to regain equilibrium.

I had met Thanos on my first visit to Santorini and had lived with him for six years. I had succumbed to the island; wooed by the fractured frailty, belying the destructive potential of Earth's Aegean and African plates as they moved on a collision course beneath the sea.

Watching the lambently symmetrical shape of Nea Kameni, that had risen from the water, I strove to envisage an ancient eruption - a hundred times more powerful than the hydrogen bomb - that shattered the round island of Strongyle, plunging its centre into the caldera that now washed with a depth of four hundred metres, corroborating the legend of Atlantis, deep below the town of Fira.

I had grown familiar with Therasia, the island that was another splintered aspect of Strongyle, as was tiny Aspronisi, its white back like a ridge of snow, and I knew too the timelessness of Paleo Kameni, the Holy Isle of the ancients, with its hot springs, that had risen from the water in 197 BC.

Thanos had lived on Santorini for ten years, initially returning each winter to his home in Athens. But he too had succumbed to the island and settled in a simple house in fields near Mesa Gonia, the village devastated by the earthquake of 1956.

I had relinquished my London job and joined him to help set up the tourist agency. His elemental energy, tempered by gentleness sustained me through the tempestuous winter winds.

But this year in early spring I had sensed him almost imperceptibly withdrawing. His courtesy and warmth were undiminished yet he had lapses of preoccupation. It was mid June, as visitors laid claim to the island, when I discovered him with the woman who had helped in the agency.

Now I shared the ancient city with those, who, like me, would be beguiled but who would not stay long enough to hear the howling of her hollow ghosts. I prepared to descend.

I moved to Fira, renting a small white room overlooking the caldera. I decided to take the boat trip that plied between its islands. It was five years since I had viewed Santorini from the sea. I was seeking another means of perspective.

I relished again the precipitous descent to the port of Athinios. At sea I scrutinised the multi-toned layers of volcanic rock around the headland and the haughty profile, poised above the water.

Beyond the solitary rock of white lava ash soaring starkly from the sea, I saw the glinting roofs protecting the Bronze Age city of Akrotiri that had been buried, virtually undamaged, beneath the ash of the early eruption.

I recalled how on my last visit, I had glimpsed a woman in a flounced skirt, her head shaved, save for a long lock gathered tightly on top, disappearing down a deep staircase. I had been surprised. It was out of bounds to visitors. I had peered down the steps but had seen only a shadowed storage space filled with pithoi. There was insufficient room for even a small person to pass.

The boat turned and sailed back to the caldera, past Aspronisi and around Paleo Kameni. People leapt from the boat, to swim like blind fish drawn by an irresistible force to the sulphurous hot springs. As they returned and we started towards Therasia, I watched the slow passing of Fira, spread on the severed rock like crystalline snow.

After eating in Manolas, high on Therasia, we sailed to Nea Kameni.

The sinister sprawl of black lava was invariably a shock; the violent inner earth spewed indiscriminately to flow in fire. It had solidified; a misshapen imposter in the sun; a smooth surface fantasically carved by a crazed hand.

Stepping from the boat I walked through the random rocks, black against the distant snow of Fira. I climbed, pervaded by the silence that had settled after extremis. Even here grasses thrust; tenacious beard on a black face. But the interjections of scythed and bulbous lava intimated turmoil.

The Indonesians believe a volcanic eruption is an indication of human disharmony, which at least leads to reassessment, but also the illusion that man can influence the elements. The fact that he, a microbe on his planet, can do nothing to halt the movements of the earth, is less palatable.

The volcano sprawled with several craters, some rocks retaining evidence of fire, reddened as well as charred, as though newly stacked in frenzy. From the largest crater wall, sulphurous steam rose.

I left the crowd. Isolation enclosed me; the essence of exacerbation frozen in poignant pinnacles and ungainly blocks. I passed a rock jaggedly spliced as though by the machinery of man. I sank by a flat-backed block of lava, drowsy with heat and emotional dismay.

The boat did not signal its departure. I was roused by an inexplicable sensation of unease. I rose and slithered down the precipitous path. I saw the boat moving placidly away. Frantically, I waved, but it sailed blithely on to Athinios. For some minutes I did not grasp my predicament. Then as I retraced my steps to the rock where time had been suspended, I sank in bleak realisation of how I would have to await the arrival of another boat the following day.

I had neither food nor water. I tried to hail passing ships. I might have been invisible. As the snow of Fira softened and began to glow, I was aware of faint rustlings with hints of the human voice as though distilled by time and intent on communication.

I tried to dispel the oppression that was rising as though from within Nea Kameni. I watched the civilising sun redden and lay a final path of faint gold on the water. I had the irrational notion of walking along it into infinity. I crouched as the sun darkened and lowered. For some seconds it fell on the lava field as though reigniting the sullen ground. Then the first deluding hues of night crept like curious fingers to where I sat. They reached for me coldly, as the first lights appeared in Fira. People there would be sentimentally watching the darkening volcano.

Tortured by thirst, I felt blackness push possessively about me. Low wind moaned through the wiry grass and as I moved, it seemed the earth stirred too. The voices grew distinct while their words were indistinguishable. Compelled to rise, I walked down the slope and stood above the caldera; a black abyss charged with catastrophe.

Now the moon rose and walked coldly on the water. I envisaged man's first weightless steps in that airless, apparently fossilised world. Contrary to poetic conviction, it was coal black, although bathed in reflected sunlight which now fell on the eastern rim, creating a tentative crescent.

As it drew away from the setting sun, it would wax, and later in the month, I would see the great plains, once thought to be seas and named by the Jesuit, Giovanni Riccioli as the Seas of Tranquillity and Serenity and the Ocean of Storms. They were hollowed by meteorites, so there, as on Strongyle, molten lava rose and hardened.

As I neared the suck and swell of the caldera, I thought I saw Thanos, borne as effortlessly as man on the moon, away from me, across the silvered sea. I stepped into the water.

I was standing, lashed by the Meltemi on a lush hill where white lilies rocked on a cloth of crocus gold. Swallows wheeled. Below, the wind wilfully plucked the sea.

I looked onto an imposing city. From the main street, men, some wearing helmets, made apparently from tusks and carrying spears and shields of animal skins, swarmed towards the sea. Women milled helplessly behind.

I saw ships heading for the shore. The city men ran to elegant long craft beached nearby and set out to meet the oncoming boats. They clashed. Daggers drawn, the aggressors leapt aboard the long ships.

The combat persisted, but the city men were superior. The invaders drowned and their boats were towed ashore. The women, with long flounced skirts lilting in the wind, ran to meet their men.

I descended and walked between the houses to the shore. Initially, in the confusion, no one noticed me. Then a woman, her face darkly agitated, stopped tending her man and stared. Suddenly everyone was watching me. I still wore a simple white dress. My hair was gathered high in a scarf. I towered above these small, olive-skinned people, who approached me now with inherent grace. Some men wore long robes, others tunics or kilts. The women were bare-breasted in tiered skirts, also tied over tunics.

A bearded man, whom I had seen lead the defence, stepped towards me. I did not recognise the words he spoke, yet I understood, as though they had been simultaneously translated.

"Who are you?"

I mustered a smile. His face was composed, despite the recent engagement.

"I don't know." Uncannily he understood my words, but was confused.

"Laerces. Captain of Akrotiri's fleet." He introduced himself.

Akrotiri. A name from some future, I felt, yet could not grasp.

"Where are you from?" he asked. Others, listening, came close. I was dumb. I could not remember. He probably thought I was a spy.

"Come."

He took my arm and steered me through the wind and sun towards the town. Speculation murmured in my wake.

We passed by stone built houses of two and three storeys. Inside one that was exceptionally large, I saw two artists painting the freshly plastered walls with a woman walking with a necklace in her left hand towards a girl who appeared to have wounded her foot. I was impressed by the paintings' spontaneity.

"What year is this?" I asked Laerces. He viewed me quizzically. Tentatively, he touched the tip of my blue head scarf. He registered respect, then awe.

"You have been sent to us?" he asked. I was baffled. How and why had I come?

"What land is this?" I persisted.

"Strongyle, as you must know."

He paused, stood back. We had reached a square and the townspeople encircled me. Suddenly Laerces kneeled and everyone followed suit. I heard the murmur, "Goddess," move like a wave among them.

"No!" I recoiled, appalled. Laerces smiled and gestured that I should follow. We entered a large house, climbing stairs to an upper storey. He indicated I should sit in one corner and from the shadows a young woman, whose hair was beginning to grow after apparently having been shaved, brought me figs, pears and meat that tasted like venison. A dry white wine followed. All was served from clay utensils.

After the meal, I was led to a bed; a wooden frame stretched with an animal skin. Before lying down, I asked Laerces, "Who were you fighting today?"

"Men who came to plunder. Fortunately, the Mycenaean mercenaries on their way to Egypt, were breaking their voyage here and helped us."

"Why are they going to Egypt?"

"To help the Thebans oust the Hykos. But you must know this."

"I must be suffering from amnesia," I said, "I remember nothing."

"Sleep now," he said.

But I lay awake, listening to the night sounds of Akrotiri. The wind worried the empty streets. From the hills I heard unfamiliar cries. Then the ground beneath my bed shuddered. An earth tremor. I heard voices outside. Then silence. I tried to sleep. Footsteps. A man's breathing. I recognised Laerces's hands as he bent to touch me.

"I know I should not," he said, but leaned nonetheless to brush my face with his. "The earth is angry because of the men we killed today," he said.

"No. It was an earth tremor. Volcanic, "I assured him. While I could not recall who I was or why I was here, I spontaneously offered this knowledge of the earth. Laerces gently withdrew, in awe again.

"But WHY should it move?"

"Molten earth pushes through the earth's crust," I explained. "It's a warning. It may come again, more violently. You should be prepared."

"It has happened before. We left before the worst disruption. We've only been back a short time."

I recalled now the signs of hasty repair I had noticed in the town. Again, I experienced a half-grasped knowledge of some catastrophe related to the earth....

Laerces left. Fitfully, I slept.

Soon after dawn, I rose and went downstairs. Already artists had started work on a wall. They were depicting yesterday's sea battle, eliminating the bloodshed with a few of the defeated thrust overboard, while life in Akrotiri proceeded unperturbed. Outside people knelt as I passed.

"Please!" I indicated they should rise.

Laerces was conversing with the Mycenaeans. These men were war-like. They did not kneel as I approached. Laerces appeared embarrassed. The Mycenaeans stared candidly at me.

"Come." Laerces indicated I should leave with him.

"What is your race called?" I asked.

"We are the Sea People. Our king is Minos of Crete. And you were sent to save us."

"No - please, you are mistaken. Heed the earth and if it moves again, leave. Is there a safe place you can go?"

Laerces looked dismayed. "We could go to Crete, but our destiny is in your hands." There seemed no way of dissuading him.

"I would like to leave if the earth moves," I told him. At last he seemed disconcerted.

We parted at the end of the main way. "I shall walk for a while," I said and started for the hills. I met four young men coaxing a netted bull along a track towards the town. I climbed among crocuses and herbs. The land was laced with steep terraces bearing olives, figs and vines. Briefly, I glimpsed what might have been an ibex. Long grasses cowered beneath the Meltemi. The sun sowed diamonds on the sea.

Then, from a hill near the island's centre, I saw a wisp of smoke. A volcano. It seemed otherwise somnolent. Yet I shivered in the sun.

On my return, Laerces was waiting on the outskirts of Akrotiri. He indicated I should follow and led me to a house where he carefully unfolded a loose robe. He approached me like a supplicant, holding wide the robe. Apprehensively I let him drape it on my shoulders.

Throughout the day, an air of expectation pervaded the town. I ate, slept and was introduced to those who were clearly high in the hierarchy. Women appeared to be in charge.

Outside, spring was elevating and brought with it, I sensed, more than a simple renewal of nature. The people were in preparation, moving with alacrity among numerous tasks, some of which were mysterious and performed out of sight.

My memory stirred. I thought of annual fertility rites performed by the ancients and wondered if some similar ceremony was underway.

The next day I was taken to the great house where the artists were painting the wounded girl. Now they were depicting others gathering crocuses. The painting ceased as we entered. Laerces took me to an upper storey and seated me on a dais. He left. There was little light, but below I glimpsed young women, their heads shaved and dyed blue except for a piece of hair drawn high from the top of their heads. They seemed apprehensive, bunched in a corner, each reverently holding two small objects.

They moved into a line, hushed now, their slim bodies barely beyond puberty, their eyes warily wandering to stairs that descended at the end of the room. I could see only part of what lay beyond. I suspected it was an altar.

As though instructed, the six young women proceeded slowly towards the steps. The tension was almost tangible. One by one they moved down. The first to reach the inner sanctum gave a strangled cry. Forcibly I felt her fear. The next, perhaps prepared, was silent but emerged shaken. The third, carrying crocuses and a vase, paused, a long thorn, held high in one hand. Crouching, she ripped her right foot until it bled. I remembered the girl in the wall painting. As she set her face against the pain, the other women turned away, then walked, in turn, down the steps. After several minutes the girl emerged without the flowers and limped to join those who had already been below.

Now they climbed the stairs to where I sat. Solemnly, still overcome by their awesome experience, they approached me, holding out their second gifts. These they lay at my feet. None raised her eyes to look at me.

I wanted to speak, to reassure them and learn about the ritual. I felt absurd, a charlatan. Had I been younger, I would rather have been in their place. They passed on. I waited. Could I now leave? Laerces appeared and gestured that I might descend.

He explained later that the earth must be annually appeased and that, as I suspected, the girls were obliged to undergo initiation into womanhood. I wanted to ask about sacrifice. Was there an altar in the inner sanctum where it was carried out? But some instinct checked me.

Laerces took Zaphaea, the young woman who had cut open her foot, to live with him.

In the evening, after eating, they joined me and Laerces told me of King Minos, who had sent citizens from Crete to settle Strongyle.

That night the earth moved again. The tremor was more pronounced and prolonged.

The Sea People were amiable, although addicted to the alacrity of debate, usually led by the women. Laerces watched me furtively, torn between respect and a desire to regard me as a woman. Zaphaea was wary, close to envy, yet checked by awe.

Slowly, I began to perceive my past. I recalled another island, linked with Strongyle. What was the connection? The wind. The Meltemi.

I went to the window. The moon was almost full, spilling white light onto the streets. The people looked to me, and I, in turn, was mesmerised by the motionless shadows of the moon's surface. The Meltemi bore me to its frozen face. I was steeped in desolation. Then I recalled another lava land and a great eruption. I had a premonition of disaster.

Early morning. I sought Laerces. Taking him aside, I asked him what year it was. "This is the year of the Ibex," he said.

So the Sea People had no record of time. How long before the eruption were they living? Quietly I told Laerces what I remembered. He regarded it as a prophecy.

That night a worse tremor shook Akrotiri. Plaster fell. Pots slipped and shattered. Children cried.

I ran outside to see if I could help. The town was touched by the white of the moon. The houses were stark, their windows like blind and helpless eyes. Intermittently the wind moaned. The damage was cleared. Apprehensively we tried to sleep.

The Mycenaeans left for Egypt. Some townspeople watched for raiders. Others climbed to a hilltop shrine to offer protective prayers.

That night Laerces came quietly to my room. He touched my arm. Then his hand brushed my face. He clasped me hard and I succumbed, steeped still in some enchantment I could not dispel. It seemed I lay in lilies bowed by wind. The rocks pulsated. I was consumed, drawn into an enveloping dark beneath the sun-soaked ground.

Two nights later, a violent tremor threw me onto the floor. The house shook. Utensils clattered. The roar was deep under ground. Slowly, like a lumbering beast, reluctant to be rushed, it diminished.

Laerces came each night. During the day I watched Zaphaea. She knew of Laerces's faithlessness but shrank from retaliation, beginning to believe I had the means of deliverance. I watched her conflict. I wanted to stop Laerces coming to me as the night drew in, fraught with danger on the unremitting wind.

Yet I was powerless; my mind divorced from the dictates of the flesh. My memory and sense of moral decision were lost in the future. But as Laerces grew more reckless, the memory of a man came to me. I strove to regain the essence, then the detail of him. But he and Laerces were one.

One night Laerces did not come. I heard a scream. It had come from the house of the marine murals. I ran into the wind-swept street and entered the dark lower floor of the house. The silence that had now fallen was eerie; an unsavoury aftermath. Apprehensively I climbed the stairs.

Laerces stood, frozen in withdrawal from the prone and acutely angled body of Zaphaea. His hands were still raised rigidly above the bare flesh already stiff with rigor mortis.

I was appalled and finally, in a small voice I did not recognise, uttered, "Why?"

Laerces turned to face me and also in an alien voice that spoke for him, said, "She accused me of unspeakable things. She was jealous. But that has not offended Poseidon. Our drowning of the raiders is to blame. We should have taken them prisoner and tried them according to our laws. Now nature is retaliating. Zaphaea was newly initiated. Her death will help you avert disaster."

I was chilled. Zaphaea hampered your lust, I thought, perceiving in Laerces now, the base impulse of a man, goaded, thwarted, over-reacting, then striving to justify his actions. One act of murder was considered wrong, the other, made acceptable as a ritualistic sacrifice.

I recoiled. He grasped my arm. His eyes no longer focused. I shook myself free and ran from the house. People had appeared but when they entered the house, Laerces had already vanished with Zaphaea.

I wanted to discuss and reason with the townspeople. While they delighted in nature and had developed an optimistic informality in art and a penetrating appreciation of the aesthetic, their faith foundered when the volcano threatened their stability. They were convinced this was a demonstration of displeasure and must be appeased. How could my meagre knowledge of geology counter such indigenous belief, rooted in awe and respect for man's place in the natural order?

I experienced an oppressive impotence. I was unable to utter logic or to leave. And as though bewitched, I could neither expose nor condemn Laerces's crime.

That day I was asked again to officiate at the ceremony, where more young women would be initiated. Instantly, I thought of the unseen altar which had struck such awe into the previous initiates.

On being asked where Zaphaea had gone, Laerces claimed she had left for a hilltop sanctuary.

I took my place on the dais. I seemed paralysed by dream. Hazily I saw the girls enter; tentative, bemused. Slowly they filed with their offerings to the altar. Again a scream. But this was succeeded by another. And another.

Aghast, I ran to where the young women now milled in terror. I looked into the inner sanctum. A foot hung from the loose hide of an animal on the altar. It bore the scar of a recent laceration. Zaphaea.

Laerces entered the room, drawn by the panic and his guilt.

"It's Zaphaea!" cried one young woman, voicing what the others already knew. They fled, broadcasting throughout Akrotiri what they had found.

Zaphaea's body, starkly white, with blue marks of bruising on her throat, was laid in the main square. The priestesses - and I - were summoned. They looked at me, demanding a decision. Despite what had happened, I had inexplicable empathy with Laerces. Denouncement was difficult.

I was spared. The sky darkened, the earth roared, tilted. We fell as buildings shattered. Two priestesses were crushed. Those who could walk staggered to retrieve what they could.

The volcano's thin thread of smoke broadened into a sallow column carried sourly by the wind. We fled to the boats and with the Meltemi in our favour, set sail for Crete.

The great island that lay - a legend - on the Sea People's mind, rose in soft folds of mountains through the mist. Crete enveloped our first fleet of small boats. Others sailed in our wake. The steep slopes, thick with cypresses, pronounced protection. Yet menace rode the Meltemi. Sinister thermals threaded the sunlit air.

Laerces was in command. The people suspended their suspicions. He had been to Knossos, had talked with King Minos, who was said to be a son of Zeus.

We beached. The trek from the coast was arduous. But then we saw Knossos. The town was vast, the streets winding, like those of Akrotiri, to defy the wind, the houses here too, seeming to have grown organically.

We reached the palace; elegantly stepped with columns of red and gilt. Horns of consecration were ranged on its upper storeys and along the wide stairs.

Dishevelled and disturbed, we followed Laerces, who spoke to the domestic watch. Seeing so many refugees he fled to the king. Minutes later, we saw the watch gesturing for us to proceed.

We passed along a wide way flanked with frescoes of youths carrying rhytons. Some played musical instruments and in their centre, stood a goddess.

The giant horns of consecration were a shock, placed to give a clear view of distant Mount Giouktas.

We continued, expecting to reach the spacious central court we could see below, but climbed instead a broad flight of stairs to the upper storey. We reached the throne room.

From the throne of gypsum, painted red and white, Minos rose to greet us. The king was square-set and marked by a verve that was astute, yet tempered with sensitivity.

"Welcome!" he said, "What brings such an exodus from Strongyle?"

"We cannot placate Poseidon," said Laerces, "We fear for our lives."

"We too have had alarming indications of his anger," said Minos, indicating that Laerces should sit beside him on a gypsum bench.

"You may stay here with your people," said Minos. "I shall train your finest youths for bull leaping." It was then that I saw three massive brown and white bulls bellowing below. Akrotiri receded before implications of a more elaborate and ruthless ritual.

I turned to see Minos watching me curiously. I suspected he knew I was not a citizen of Akrotiri. I sensed too the lust beneath the insolent assessment.

That night, refreshed and allotted quarters in private houses beyond the main palace, we were summoned to the great hall to dine on mixed meats, honey and wine. I accompanied Laerces and was confronted with Pasiphae, the King's wife. She threw swift glances from eyes that glowed with green malachite. Her thick hair hung in curls, dressed with jewels, echoing in miniature, the shape of the axe I had noticed incised on the palace walls. Her face gleamed with white powder. Her open bodice above a flounced skirt exposed her breasts. She looked at me suspiciously.

I went that night to a room near the queen's quarters, where the painted walls danced with dolphins.

The next day the palace was hushed. Laerces had vanished. Minos, we were told, was praying. He wanted a bull to rise from the sea to sacrifice to Poseidon.

I was standing on the upper storey of the palace when I saw the huge white bull approaching as though treading air. The sea spray flew from his flanks to flash like jewels in the sun. Magically, he had surfaced from the sea.

Minos and his bull catchers left to meet him, throwing over him a wide net. Outraged, he proved impossible to haul back to the palace. He was released and driven towards the king's scattered herd.

"He is magnificent," I heard Minos declare, "I shall keep him and select another for sacrifice."

Later that day, I saw Pasiphae walking through the fields and pausing to watch the white bull that stood - primed and aloof - between earth and sky. She remained motionless. The next day I saw her speak at length to Daedalus, the king's engineer, before she went again to gaze at the bull.

As I learned Laerces had been escorted to the men's quarters, I sensed some preparation, charged with anticipation and fear, permeating the palace. People moved purposefully across the great court.

I sat alone in the women's rooms. Minos, walking softly, surprised me. He smiled as I bowed my head, dismissing the gesture with a cursory wave. With the same hand he touched the back of my head. Involuntarily, I shivered.

"You are not of us, are you?" he said.

"No. I can recall little of my former life. I don't know why I'm here," I replied.

"You were sent by the gods. You will be my bride and our high priestess."

I was about to protest, but he stopped my mouth with his. I fell back on the bench.

Minos directed the women to transform me from refugee to priestess. My attempts to reason my way out of this auspicious obligation, were futile. I was draped in the elaborate flounced skirt and bodice that bared the breasts. A necklet of double axes was hung round my neck. A bull's head rhyton was placed in my hands and a priestess led me to the throne room and the lustral area.

From another rhyton, the woman, who watched me incuriously, poured liquid which looked like wine, but had the sickening aroma of water-thinned blood. I flinched, but obediently grasped the vessel and when she indicated, poured its contents into the lustral basin.

"Repeat these words," said the woman, "Receive this offering Poseidon, Earth Shaker, whose wrath we have incurred."

I longed to explain again that the quakes were due to a natural process, but to these people, nature was inherent in their gods. So I repeated the words in a tongue I instinctively understood.

I backed out of the chamber. I could perceive how this action engendered belief in man's interaction with nature. I clung to receding reason.

As the tremors persisted, two more boats of refugees arrived. I gathered, as I passed through the streets around the palace, that they blamed the murder committed by Laerces for their misfortune. They wanted a reckoning, but Minos, aware of Laerces's relationship with me, had his own plan for his disposal.

One morning I saw Laerces in the great court, dressed in the tooled and gilded loincloth of the bull leaper. He looked apprehensive, as a great pied bull appeared. A lithe catcher stood behind, while a practised leaper spoke rapidly to Laerces. Suddenly the bull charged in a flurry of sun-streaked dust.

Laerces, pushed towards him, clutched the huge horns and veered sideways onto the ground. Swiftly the catcher dragged him clear.

Pasiphae returned from the fields. She was smiling; her malachite eyes lustfully alien. At dinner she watched Minos and me ruefully. She clearly suspected our relationship. Yet she seemed preoccupied, as though recently sated.

"What is the meaning of the double axe?" I asked Minos before he prepared to leave one night. He took my arm and led me to the window where the three quarter moon shed white light on the palace, laid below us in organic layers.

"The moon is waxing. But soon it will wane. The waxing tells us of creation, growth. The waning, depletion, even destruction. Our axe represents both, for to live well, we must be balanced."

"Do you know the moon controls Poseidon?" I asked. He looked at me sharply.

"How do you know this?" he demanded. "Where do you come from? Who gave you this authority?"

Suddenly, I remembered. I recalled for the first time, the full impact of the twenty first century. I remembered Thanos. I knew Minos would not believe the truth. So I merely said, "I just sense things. I may be wrong. But I'm sure you can't prevent the earth moving."

He pulled me roughly to face him. "My high priestess says THIS?" He was aghast.

"Please relieve me of this duty," I said, "I'm an ordinary woman."

He looked at me in silence, touched my face with his hand and said, "Each night I have no doubt of that. But you have been sent for our salvation I'm sure. You must perform the rites."

Pasiphae, drawn from her dream into the present, began to eye me with contempt. Minos did not come every night. I suspected he had many women in the palace. But Pasiphae replaced her resentment with a decision to disregard me. She spent much time in her rooms.

I soon realised she was pregnant. I speculated. Was it by Minos or someone she had met during those long days in the fields?

One night, Minos ushered me out of my room.

"Where are we going?" My words were left unanswered.

We left the palace bleached by the moon, that now hung full in the star-flung sky. We went by winding ways through the sleeping city, pursued by a querulous wind. We left the streets to pass the huge herd of bulls, bred for sport and sacrifice; some pied, others starkly white and now motionless as though carved from Naxos marble.

"See how fine they are," whispered Minos. We moved across a meadow towards a widespread oak.

Suddenly he produced from beneath his robe, a pair of cow's horns which he fastened to my head and the great mask of a bull which he placed over his face. "Now you will be my queen," he said.

He began to circle me, teasingly, then intently. Involuntarily, I found myself crouching, alert, primed with a beast's blinkered fear and anticipation. I began to turn in conjunction with Minos. Was he man or bull? Instinctive interpreter of nature or superstitious primitive?

I looked at the moon and remembered that man had walked its surface. How could I tell Minos this? Now I felt a pulsating part of the unstable earth, bound to obey rhythms that the men of my age had relinquished. I felt the weight of Minos inflated as though with bull flesh. Thought fled. I moved in motions of a primal past.

Pasiphae's euphoria had waned. Now, as I sat at Minos's right hand, her hatred was unconcealed.

"How can you treat Pasiphae like this?" I asked Minos.

"She was unfaithful," he replied brusquely.

Preparations were being made for the bull leaping. I feared for Laerces's life. But my days were filled with religious ritual. Vestiges of reason filtered through my actions but their hypnotic nature began to assume significance. I began by reasoning that while they would be ineffectual against earthquake, they would at least generate resilience in the face of catastrophe. But soon they were a solace in themselves.

I rose at five on the day of the bull leaping. Celebration and savage anticipation possessed the palace. I prepared my rituals. Before I descended to the lustral area, I saw the great bulls led across the court, straining and fearful, able, should they choose, to annihilate the lithe young men who mustered them.

Early afternoon. The people began to take their seats in tiers in the great court. The women murmured, commenting on the potential of performers; their lips harshly red in white painted faces and their eyes outlined in green malachite. Black hair was elaborately curled to fall softly on pendants and jewels around bare breasts.

There was music and ritual dance. Two men in leather helmets appeared and began to box. Flowers were thrown at the ebullient victor. They were followed by acrobats who wheeled and sprang lithely through the dust.

I descended to perform my rituals, pouring water, wine and blood into the lustral basin and offering a plea to appease Poseidon.

Suddenly, my two attendants appeared with a tall hat that in the semi-dark seemed alive. Then I saw the writhing snake. I flinched, then froze, appalled as they placed it on my head. The two women led me to steps I had not previously descended. At the bottom I recoiled, encountering a large pit of snakes, heaving incessantly in the gloom. Then I recalled the snake as protector and assumed these to have ritual significance.

I was expected to know how to address them but, being ignorant, muttered some incoherent words from a dry throat. Horrified, I saw the attendants lift two snakes, placing one in each of my shaking hands and indicate I should proceed to the court.

At the entrance I stood as the hushed crowd gazed at me intently. Waiting. I do not know where I found the words I then uttered. But they were an incantation to the dead. They rang clearly across the court, as the snakes, held at arm's length, twisted and strained to be free.

The first bull appeared, his horns gilded and striped, followed by a girl. I withdrew. The snakes and the tall hat were removed. I saw Minos on the royal bench with Pasiphae, who stared at me with loathing as a bull leaper emerged from the other side of the court. He wore the traditional tooled loincloth.

The bull charged in a cloud of hot dust. Simultaneously the bull leaper ran, leapt, grasping the bull's horns and somersaulting over the bull's back. A girl reached to ease him onto the ground. Two more leapers followed.

Then I saw Laerces. He ran, vaulted, turned awkwardly in the air and barely cleared the animal. The crowd gasped and applauded as the girl dragged him clear.

The fourth leaper did not run fast enough. He failed to gain momentum to clear the horns. He was impaled. The bull ran, enraged, with him writhing in anguish, to the end of the court, where someone pulled him clear.

Four men appeared with a net, caught the bull and eased him to the other side of the court where a great double axe stood. Everyone rose, as the successful bull leapers, including Laerces, reappeared.

They advanced to stand before the terrified beast. I shrank, horrified, as my attendants reappeared, carrying an axe. Ceremoniously, they placed it in my hands.

"Oh no!" I could not carry out a sacrifice. But my feet moved of their own volition, the women walking slowly beside me. The bull, still netted, looked at me. Uncomprehending terror encountered my abject fear. My reason retarded my hand yet, simultaneously, I was compelled to step forward.

A bowl of lustral water and a bucket of barley corns were placed by my attendants on the ground. One of them held a dish. A fire was lit beneath the great axe. A lock of the bull's hair was cut and dropped, sizzling onto it.

"Pray to Poseidon," whispered the woman. I mouthed my usual plea. She sprinkled the barley corn. "Strike the neck!" she urged. My arm no longer seemed part of me. I raised the axe and struck. The bull kicked, groaned, fell to his knees.

"Hold up his head," said the other attendant, "Now cut the throat."

The bull's eyes, beginning to glaze, still held mine in disbelief. My eyes streamed from the smoke. But I aligned the axe, closed my eyes and cut. The blood ran into the dish.

I turned. The people were offering incantations to Poseidon. I lay the dripping axe on the ground and walked shakily back to the inner sanctum. I heard the men dismembering the bull's carcass and, turning, saw them cutting ceremonial portions from the thighs. They wrapped these pieces in folds of fat with some raw meat left exposed. Then they were burnt on the fire and red wine and the bull's blood sprinkled over the flames.

People left their seats to swarm over the court as the musicians reappeared. With five-pronged forks men tasted the bull's offal. The rest was cut into small pieces, pierced with skewers and roasted in the fire.

That night I looked at the mellow moon. This race is moonblind, I thought; motivated by the moon's mysteries, but knowing nothing of its essence. I strove to grasp its geology and place in the cosmos, whether accidental or ordained. I recalled the elation, then the disappointment of those who had walked there, hoping to discover more than spent rock.

The Sea People did not overtly emphasise the moon. It was a manifestation of the gods. Yet it effectively ruled their lives.

Thetis, the moon goddess, was the consort of Poseidon; moon and tides moved as one. The white bull was sacred to the moon.

Minos entered. He must just have left Pasiphae. He was freshly perfumed and wine-mellowed. A few revellers lingered in the court below, but slowly the night seeped back; blackly indifferent to man.

Minos was playful, pulling me roughly down, dallying and reminiscing about the bull leaping. I did not dare mention Laerces.

As Minos moved over me, I was besieged by pain. There was a frantic scrabbling in my stomach like minute creatures working countless legs and teeth. I cried out. Minos withdrew.

"I'm sorry, " I uttered, struggling to sit up. I assumed this was a reaction to the momentous day. But the impression of being devoured by hard-backed creatures persisted.

I fell back groaning.

"Shall I fetch the physician?" asked Minos.

"No, I'll be all right." I knew instinctively the doctor was irrelevant. Minos caressed me and left.

In her room, among the dolphins, the queen smiled.

Pasiphae was about to give birth. Minos seldom saw her now. She stayed mostly in her room.

Daedalus, I noted, was tense and when Pasiphae did emerge, he eyed her dubiously. He occupied himself by building an impressive dancing floor, designed like a maze, for Ariadne, the king's daughter. On it she performed a dance imitating the partridge; a curious hobbling love dance. Then she flowed and whirled in a feminine affirmation of spring.

Pasiphae screamed. The birth. It was after midnight. She screamed again. The birth was long, her suffering inhuman, with protracted and perverted pain. Suddenly it ceased.

A hush held the palace next day. I saw Minos hurrying from Pasiphae's room and consulting with Daedalus who vanished below ground. I heard the sound of workmen burrowing beneath the palace and learned that Daedalus was extending the subterranean passages.

Meanwhile, muffled thumps and low groans came from a chamber near the throne room.

Minos avoided me.

"How is Pasiphae?" I asked one of my assistants. She blanched and was reluctant to reply, but I insisted.

"She gave birth to a monster," she said. "There's a rumour that she fell in love with a bull and that Daedalus built her a wooden cow where she hid so the bull would mate with her." I recoiled, incredulous.

After ten days, Pasiphae intermittently appeared. She was ashen, ungroomed, still in a profound state of shock. The noise of her hidden offspring persisted as Daedalus and his workforce clamoured incessantly below.

The bull leaping, feasting and sacrifice continued. I braced myself for each occasion. Laerces reappeared and, to Minos's annoyance, was becoming adept. At each success he was jeered by the refugees from Strongyle, still intent on retribution for the murder of his wife. But the incident had not happened on Crete. Laerces, a rival for my favours, was a prisoner for Minos to toy with. Eventually he would be gored by a bull.

I strove to discover where he was being held. But I had no access to the men's quarters and none of the women knew.

And as the smoke of the sacrificial bulls marred the clear sky, the earth tremors worsened.

At last the building below ground ceased. And the clamour from the room above moved to the passage below. The groans grew to a bellow. I heard a rushing through the labyrinth. Minos could not look me in the eye.

I urged the assistant priestess to tell me more.

"They've called him Asterius," she said, "He has a bull's head and the body of a man. Everyone fears him so he has been shut in the labyrinth."

As the tremors increased, Minos learned the Mycenaeans, who had helped the people of Strongyle defeat the raiders from the sea - it transpired, simply to save themselves - and who had rid the Egyptians of the throne-snatching Hykos, now intended to overrun the island of Crete.

Minos, a trader and lover of fine things, was unprepared for war. He could only appeal to the gods. Then his son Androgeus was killed by the Athenians.

As Asterius, who had grown at an abnormal rate and was now said to be as tall as a man, charged in bewilderment and rage through the labyrinth, Minos sought vengeance. He demanded that seven youths and seven young women, be sent to him every nine years. He would feed them to Asterius.

Meanwhile my life was charged with ritual, absorption in the arts and dread of what lay beneath the palace and the unstable earth. Asterius rampaged, like a savage symbol of earthquake. The moon waxed and waned, seemingly on the periphery of our lives yet, I suspected, mystically manipulating our fate.

The young men and women arrived from Athens. As they were brought into the great court, I noted one man who walked tall and with defiance, observing the palace closely. Briefly he looked up. Our eyes met in recognition of a mutual alienation from the community.

Ariadne was transfixed by the stranger, pursuing him shamelessly at dinner with her eyes. I learned his name was Theseus. Even as he planned to feed these young people to his mutant son, Minos could not forego perverse play with the laws of hospitality. First they would be wined, dined and entertained.

Pasiphae appeared at the feast. She was withdrawn, her white make up accentuating her pallor. Intermittently, she glanced at me with satisfaction. Was it because Minos no longer came to me?

After dinner, Ariadne rose to dance on the great floor Daedalus had designed. She began slowly, then quickened; sensually improvising for Theseus. He sat enraptured.

An uproar in the labyrinth woke me. Asterius moaned and ran hard along the ground. A man's voice rang in defiance. The scuffling persisted for a long time, until after a final cry of anguish, Asterius was silent. I knew he was dead. Who had killed him?

"Asterius is dead and Theseus has taken Ariadne!" cried my servant the next morning. "They say Daedalus gave Ariadne a ball of silk cord to give to Theseus - he's Daedalus's cousin you know - so Theseus could find his way out of the labyrinth. Ariadne told him she loved him and they eloped."

Minos appeared in the great court. "Daedalus!" he yelled. The engineer sheepishly emerged from a room on the other side.

"Traitor!" Minos stormed and, summoning the guard, arrested Daedalus. He disappeared in the direction of the labyrinth.

Minos began to visit me once more after dark. Again I experienced excruciating pain.

"Pasiphae!" muttered Minos.

"What of her?" I asked.

"I daresay she has a hand in it."

He left and, the following day, still in pain, I sought Pasiphae in her megaron. She smiled callously as I entered. "What have you done to me?" I demanded.

"Does it feel like serpents and scorpions?" she asked.

"Yes."

"Get your gods to deliver you from that!" she hissed.

"You know I can't. Is it because Minos comes to me? I can do nothing about that. And what of Asterius and your adultery with the bull?"

Pasiphae's face collapsed. Her malice dissolved in tears. Abruptly I left the room.

Minos was sympathetic and did not touch me. At night I watched the waxing moon and began to implore it to stabilise the water and the whims of Poseidon as he shook the earth. By now I was thinking in primitive terms.

For some nights an uncanny calm fell. I could decipher the moon's great "seas". I imagined Poseidon surging to her song; the distant lover under the influence of Thetis who was for ever out of reach.

One morning I saw two great birds rise from beyond the court. They were unclassifiable, their wing span vast, their action awkward. Slowly they gained height, flapping with unstable effort towards the sun.

Minos appeared. Again he was incensed.

"Traitors!" he exclaimed. Once more I sought my servant who could be relied on to know what was happening. She told me.

"It was Daedalus and his son Icarus. He was seen making the wings which he stuck on with wax. He had to escape. Minos would have killed him."

Minos demanded I invoked Poseidon to turn Theseus and Ariadne in their boat and return to Crete. I obeyed as Minos prepared to sacrifice a bull. The smoke hung listlessly.

That night he came to me. "Our world is falling apart," he said. I tried to reassure him. I had grown used to his alternating brusqueness and consideration with lapses of preoccupation. He had achieved much, running a stable economy. The artisans

were creative and lived well. The court was cultured, the sole social cruelty, sacrifice prompted by fear.

And now as I recalled every detail of the life from which I had been wrenched to witness this society, I realised how little man had learned. He was skilled. He had evolved a technological trap of an ingenuity the ancients could not have credited. But he had found nothing within himself that had created stability or tolerance. He was more dangerously poised in the present I had left than he had ever been in the past.

I envisaged his footsteps on the moon, his striving to grasp the significance of his achievement, but his insight still vestigial, cramping comprehension.

Life remained a labyrinth, as complex as that built by Daedalus. The minotaur was the insurmountable fear of man; unseen, inflated because it could not be confronted, generating folly. Was there a Theseus in the twentieth century, able to overcome this spectre?

Minos and I must have been sleeping. The shadow at my bed moved urgently, touched my arm. Laerces. "Come, let's go," he whispered. I moved cautiously from the bed. We had almost reached the door.

"Who's there?" Minos was awake. He leapt from the bed and barred the door. "How did?-", he began and called the guard.

Laerces, who had overcome a drunken watchman in the room where he had been held, was recaptured and taken by moonlight to the great court. He was bound beneath the double axe.

Minos left me at first light. I looked from the window into the court. Laerces was hunched, half conscious. The early sun gleamed on the edge of the great axe.

I did not see who fired the arrow. Was it Minos? I doubted it. He would have completed his play with Laerces - whom he was also beginning to blame for our misfortunes - with some humiliating spectacle.

Laerces crumpled, the arrow deep in his breast. There was a stirring at the other end of the court. There were many, convinced he was the cause of the earth's unsettling and subsequent events, who would have killed him.

Sickened, I pursued my rituals; absently, intermittently recalling Laerces's face, on which was superimposed that of Thanos, whom I now remembered clearly. I was beset by a sense of loss and the pathos of mortality. Thanos, Laerces, Minos; mere men manipulated by time and the vagaries of fate. I was fraught with foreboding.

The Athenian fleet landed the following year as late summer lay calmly in the hills, the high wind dying to a benevolent breeze. Minos's main fleet was absent. He stood defiant, yet undefended on the upper storey of the palace. Pasiphae appeared beside him.

The people of the palace were petrified in various positions, seeming doll-like from above, as though already relegated to the past.

The enemy had disembarked. Minos gestured that I should instantly invoke the help of Zeus. I obeyed. Before descending to the inner sanctum I saw the sky turn sour. The sun had vanished. Rapidly, a pall of black rolled from the north like an accumulation of sacrificial smoke. The earth shifted sharply. I pitched down the steps. I grasped the ritual objects, ruled now by animal fear, fumbling to perform the ineffectual ceremony.

The ground lurched. I stumbled back up the stairs. I was thrown again. Women screamed and scattered. Men ran, panic sapping purpose. Bulls bellowed.

The great wall of water reared beneath the black sky. It streamed, glistened; a liquid beast unleashed by a godless hand.

And as it fell, we were swept, lifted, smashed and plunged into oblivion.

I was standing, lashed by the Meltemi on a lush hill where white lilies rocked on a cloth of crocus gold. Swallows wheeled. Below, the wind wilfully plucked the sea.

I looked onto an imposing city. From the main street, men, some wearing helmets, made apparently from tusks and carrying spears and shields of animal skins, swarmed towards the sea. Women milled helplessly behind.

I saw ships heading for the shore. The city men ran to elegant long craft beached nearby and set out to meet the oncoming boats. They clashed. Daggers drawn, the aggressors leapt aboard the long ships.

The combat persisted, but the city men were superior. The invaders drowned and their boats were towed ashore. The women, with long flounced skirts lilting in the wind, ran to meet their men.

I descended and walked between the houses to the shore. Initially, in the confusion, no one noticed me. Then a woman, her face darkly agitated, stopped tending her man and stared. Suddenly everyone was watching me. I still wore a simple white dress. My hair was gathered high in a scarf. I towered above these small, olive-skinned people, who approached me now with inherent grace. Some men wore long robes, others tunics or kilts. The women were bare-breasted in tiered skirts, also tied over tunics.

A bearded man, whom I had seen lead the defence, stepped towards me. I did not recognise the words he spoke, yet I understood, as though they had been simultaneously translated.

"Who are you?"

I mustered a smile. His face was composed, despite the recent engagement.

"I don't know." Uncannily he understood my words, but was confused.

"Laerces. Captain of Akrotiri's fleet." He introduced himself.

Akrotiri. A name from some future, I felt, yet could not grasp.

"Where are you from?" he asked. Others, listening, came close. I was dumb. I could not remember. He probably thought I was a spy.

"Come."

He took my arm and steered me through the wind and sun towards the town. Speculation murmured in my wake.

We passed by stone built houses of two and three storeys. Inside one that was exceptionally large, I saw two artists painting the freshly plastered walls with a woman walking with a necklace in her left hand towards a girl who appeared to have wounded her foot. I was impressed by the paintings' spontaneity.

"What year is this?" I asked Laerces. He viewed me quizzically. Tentatively, he touched the tip of my blue head scarf. He registered respect, then awe.

"You have been sent to us?" he asked. I was baffled. How and why had I come?

"What land is this?" I persisted.

"Strongyle, as you must know."

He paused, stood back. We had reached a square and the townspeople encircled me. Suddenly Laerces kneeled and everyone followed suit. I heard the murmur, "Goddess," move like a wave among them.

"No!" I recoiled, appalled. Laerces smiled and gestured that I should follow. We entered a large house, climbing stairs to an upper storey. He indicated I should sit in one corner and from the shadows a young woman, whose hair was beginning to grow after apparently having been shaved, brought me figs, pears and meat that tasted like venison. A dry white wine followed. All was served from clay utensils.

After the meal, I was led to a bed; a wooden frame stretched with an animal skin. Before lying down, I asked Laerces, "Who were you fighting today?"

"Men who came to plunder. Fortunately, the Mycenaean mercenaries on their way to Egypt, were breaking their voyage here and helped us."

"Why are they going to Egypt?"

"To help the Thebans oust the Hykos. But you must know this."

"I must be suffering from amnesia," I said, "I remember nothing."

"Sleep now," he said.

But I lay awake, listening to the night sounds of Akrotiri. The wind worried the empty streets. From the hills I heard unfamiliar cries. Then the ground beneath my bed shuddered. An earth tremor. I heard voices outside. Then silence. I tried to sleep. Footsteps. A man's breathing. I recognised Laerces's hands as he bent to touch me.

"I know I should not," he said, but leaned nonetheless to brush my face with his. "The earth is angry because of the men we killed today," he said.

"No. It was an earth tremor. Volcanic, "I assured him. While I could not recall who I was or why I was here, I spontaneously offered this knowledge of the earth. Laerces gently withdrew, in awe again.

"But WHY should it move?"

"Molten earth pushes through the earth's crust," I explained. "It's a warning. It may come again, more violently. You should be prepared."

"It has happened before. We left before the worst disruption. We've only been back a short time."

I recalled now the signs of hasty repair I had noticed in the town. Again, I experienced a half-grasped knowledge of some catastrophe related to the earth....

Laerces left. Fitfully, I slept.

Soon after dawn, I rose and went downstairs. Already artists had started work on a wall. They were depicting yesterday's sea battle, eliminating the bloodshed with a few of the defeated thrust overboard, while life in Akrotiri proceeded unperturbed. Outside people knelt as I passed.

"Please!" I indicated they should rise.

Laerces was conversing with the Mycenaeans. These men were war-like. They did not kneel as I approached. Laerces appeared embarrassed. The Mycenaeans stared candidly at me.

"Come." Laerces indicated I should leave with him.

"What is your race called?" I asked.

"We are the Sea People. Our king is Minos of Crete. And you were sent to save us."

"No - please, you are mistaken. Heed the earth and if it moves again, leave. Is there a safe place you can go?"

Laerces looked dismayed. "We could go to Crete, but our destiny is in your hands." There seemed no way of dissuading him.

"I would like to leave if the earth moves," I told him. At last he seemed disconcerted.

We parted at the end of the main way. "I shall walk for a while," I said and started for the hills. I met four young men coaxing a netted bull along a track towards the town. I climbed among crocuses and herbs. The land was laced with steep terraces bearing olives, figs and vines. Briefly, I glimpsed what might have been an ibex. Long grasses cowered beneath the Meltemi. The sun sowed diamonds on the sea.

Then, from a hill near the island's centre, I saw a wisp of smoke. A volcano. It seemed otherwise somnolent. Yet I shivered in the sun.

On my return, Laerces was waiting on the outskirts of Akrotiri. He indicated I should follow and led me to a house where he carefully unfolded a loose robe. He approached me like a supplicant, holding wide the robe. Apprehensively I let him drape it on my shoulders.

Throughout the day, an air of expectation pervaded the town. I ate, slept and was introduced to those who were clearly high in the hierarchy. Women appeared to be in charge.

Outside, spring was elevating and brought with it, I sensed, more than a simple renewal of nature. The people were in preparation, moving with alacrity among numerous tasks, some of which were mysterious and performed out of sight.

My memory stirred. I thought of annual fertility rites performed by the ancients and wondered if some similar ceremony was underway.

The next day I was taken to the great house where the artists were painting the wounded girl. Now they were depicting others gathering crocuses. The painting ceased as we entered. Laerces took me to an upper storey and seated me on a dais. He left. There was little light, but below I glimpsed young women, their heads shaved and dyed blue except for a piece of hair drawn high from the top of their heads. They seemed apprehensive, bunched in a corner, each reverently holding two small objects.

They moved into a line, hushed now, their slim bodies barely beyond puberty, their eyes warily wandering to stairs that descended at the end of the room. I could see only part of what lay beyond. I suspected it was an altar.

As though instructed, the six young women proceeded slowly towards the steps. The tension was almost tangible. One by one they moved down. The first to reach the inner sanctum gave a strangled cry. Forcibly I felt her fear. The next, perhaps prepared, was silent but emerged shaken. The third, carrying crocuses and a vase, paused, a long thorn, held high in one hand. Crouching, she ripped her right foot until it bled. I remembered the girl in the wall painting. As she set her face against the pain, the other women turned away, then walked, in turn, down the steps. After several minutes the girl emerged without the flowers and limped to join those who had already been below.

Now they climbed the stairs to where I sat. Solemnly, still overcome by their awesome experience, they approached me, holding out their second gifts. These they lay at my feet. None raised her eyes to look at me.

I wanted to speak, to reassure them and learn about the ritual. I felt absurd, a charlatan. Had I been younger, I would rather have been in their place. They passed on. I waited. Could I now leave? Laerces appeared and gestured that I might descend.

He explained later that the earth must be annually appeased and that, as I suspected, the girls were obliged to undergo initiation into womanhood. I wanted to ask about sacrifice. Was there an altar in the inner sanctum where it was carried out? But some instinct checked me.

Laerces took Zaphaea, the young woman who had cut open her foot, to live with him.

In the evening, after eating, they joined me and Laerces told me of King Minos, who had sent citizens from Crete to settle Strongyle.

That night the earth moved again. The tremor was more pronounced and prolonged.

The Sea People were amiable, although addicted to the alacrity of debate, usually led by the women. Laerces watched me furtively, torn between respect and a desire to regard me as a woman. Zaphaea was wary, close to envy, yet checked by awe.

Slowly, I began to perceive my past. I recalled another island, linked with Strongyle. What was the connection? The wind. The Meltemi.

I went to the window. The moon was almost full, spilling white light onto the streets. The people looked to me, and I, in turn, was mesmerised by the motionless shadows of the moon's surface. The Meltemi bore me to its frozen face. I was steeped in desolation. Then I recalled another lava land and a great eruption. I had a premonition of disaster.

Early morning. I sought Laerces. Taking him aside, I asked him what year it was. "This is the year of the Ibex," he said.

So the Sea People had no record of time. How long before the eruption were they living? Quietly I told Laerces what I remembered. He regarded it as a prophecy.

That night a worse tremor shook Akrotiri. Plaster fell. Pots slipped and shattered. Children cried.

I ran outside to see if I could help. The town was touched by the white of the moon. The houses were stark, their windows like blind and helpless eyes. Intermittently the wind moaned. The damage was cleared. Apprehensively we tried to sleep.

The Mycenaeans left for Egypt. Some townspeople watched for raiders. Others climbed to a hilltop shrine to offer protective prayers.

That night Laerces came quietly to my room. He touched my arm. Then his hand brushed my face. He clasped me hard and I succumbed, steeped still in some enchantment I could not dispel. It seemed I lay in lilies bowed by wind. The rocks pulsated. I was consumed, drawn into an enveloping dark beneath the sun-soaked ground.

Two nights later, a violent tremor threw me onto the floor. The house shook. Utensils clattered. The roar was deep under ground. Slowly, like a lumbering beast, reluctant to be rushed, it diminished.

Laerces came each night. During the day I watched Zaphaea. She knew of Laerces's faithlessness but shrank from retaliation, beginning to believe I had the means of deliverance. I watched her conflict. I wanted to stop Laerces coming to me as the night drew in, fraught with danger on the unremitting wind.

Yet I was powerless; my mind divorced from the dictates of the flesh. My memory and sense of moral decision were lost in the future. But as Laerces grew more reckless, the memory of a man came to me. I strove to regain the essence, then the detail of him. But he and Laerces were one.

One night Laerces did not come. I heard a scream. It had come from the house of the marine murals. I ran into the wind-swept street and entered the dark lower floor of the house. The silence that had now fallen was eerie; an unsavoury aftermath. Apprehensively I climbed the stairs.

Laerces stood, frozen in withdrawal from the prone and acutely angled body of Zaphaea. His hands were still raised rigidly above the bare flesh already stiff with rigor mortis.

I was appalled and finally, in a small voice I did not recognise, uttered, "Why?"

Laerces turned to face me and also in an alien voice that spoke for him, said, "She accused me of unspeakable things. She was jealous. But that has not offended Poseidon. Our drowning of the raiders is to blame. We should have taken them prisoner and tried them according to our laws. Now nature is retaliating. Zaphaea was newly initiated. Her death will help you avert disaster."

I was chilled. Zaphaea hampered your lust, I thought, perceiving in Laerces now, the base impulse of a man, goaded, thwarted, over-reacting, then striving to justify his actions. One act of murder was considered wrong, the other, made acceptable as a ritualistic sacrifice.

I recoiled. He grasped my arm. His eyes no longer focused. I shook myself free and ran from the house. People had appeared but when they entered the house, Laerces had already vanished with Zaphaea.

I wanted to discuss and reason with the townspeople. While they delighted in nature and had developed an optimistic informality in art and a penetrating appreciation of the aesthetic, their faith foundered when the volcano threatened their stability. They were convinced this was a demonstration of displeasure and must be appeased. How could my meagre knowledge of geology counter such indigenous belief, rooted in awe and respect for man's place in the natural order?

I experienced an oppressive impotence. I was unable to utter logic or to leave. And as though bewitched, I could neither expose nor condemn Laerces's crime.

That day I was asked again to officiate at the ceremony, where more young women would be initiated. Instantly, I thought of the unseen altar which had struck such awe into the previous initiates.

On being asked where Zaphaea had gone, Laerces claimed she had left for a hilltop sanctuary.

I took my place on the dais. I seemed paralysed by dream. Hazily I saw the girls enter; tentative, bemused. Slowly they filed with their offerings to the altar. Again a scream. But this was succeeded by another. And another.

Aghast, I ran to where the young women now milled in terror. I looked into the inner sanctum. A foot hung from the loose hide of an animal on the altar. It bore the scar of a recent laceration. Zaphaea.

Laerces entered the room, drawn by the panic and his guilt.

"It's Zaphaea!" cried one young woman, voicing what the others already knew. They fled, broadcasting throughout Akrotiri what they had found.

Zaphaea's body, starkly white, with blue marks of bruising on her throat, was laid in the main square. The priestesses - and I - were summoned. They looked at me, demanding a decision. Despite what had happened, I had inexplicable empathy with Laerces. Denouncement was difficult.

I was spared. The sky darkened, the earth roared, tilted. We fell as buildings shattered. Two priestesses were crushed. Those who could walk staggered to retrieve what they could.

The volcano's thin thread of smoke broadened into a sallow column carried sourly by the wind. We fled to the boats and with the Meltemi in our favour, set sail for Crete.

The great island that lay - a legend - on the Sea People's mind, rose in soft folds of mountains through the mist. Crete enveloped our first fleet of small boats. Others sailed in our wake. The steep slopes, thick with cypresses, pronounced protection. Yet menace rode the Meltemi. Sinister thermals threaded the sunlit air.

Laerces was in command. The people suspended their suspicions. He had been to Knossos, had talked with King Minos, who was said to be a son of Zeus.

We beached. The trek from the coast was arduous. But then we saw Knossos. The town was vast, the streets winding, like those of Akrotiri, to defy the wind, the houses here too, seeming to have grown organically.

We reached the palace; elegantly stepped with columns of red and gilt. Horns of consecration were ranged on its upper storeys and along the wide stairs.

Dishevelled and disturbed, we followed Laerces, who spoke to the domestic watch. Seeing so many refugees he fled to the king. Minutes later, we saw the watch gesturing for us to proceed.

We passed along a wide way flanked with frescoes of youths carrying rhytons. Some played musical instruments and in their centre, stood a goddess.

The giant horns of consecration were a shock, placed to give a clear view of distant Mount Giouktas.

We continued, expecting to reach the spacious central court we could see below, but climbed instead a broad flight of stairs to the upper storey. We reached the throne room.

From the throne of gypsum, painted red and white, Minos rose to greet us. The king was square-set and marked by a verve that was astute, yet tempered with sensitivity.

"Welcome!" he said, "What brings such an exodus from Strongyle?"

"We cannot placate Poseidon," said Laerces, "We fear for our lives."

"We too have had alarming indications of his anger," said Minos, indicating that Laerces should sit beside him on a gypsum bench.

"You may stay here with your people," said Minos. "I shall train your finest youths for bull leaping." It was then that I saw three massive brown and white bulls bellowing below. Akrotiri receded before implications of a more elaborate and ruthless ritual.

I turned to see Minos watching me curiously. I suspected he knew I was not a citizen of Akrotiri. I sensed too the lust beneath the insolent assessment.

That night, refreshed and allotted quarters in private houses beyond the main palace, we were summoned to the great hall to dine on mixed meats, honey and wine. I accompanied Laerces and was confronted with Pasiphae, the King's wife. She threw swift glances from eyes that glowed with green malachite. Her thick hair hung in curls, dressed with jewels, echoing in miniature, the shape of the axe I had noticed incised on the palace walls. Her face gleamed with white powder. Her open bodice above a flounced skirt exposed her breasts. She looked at me suspiciously.

I went that night to a room near the queen's quarters, where the painted walls danced with dolphins.

The next day the palace was hushed. Laerces had vanished. Minos, we were told, was praying. He wanted a bull to rise from the sea to sacrifice to Poseidon.

I was standing on the upper storey of the palace when I saw the huge white bull approaching as though treading air. The sea spray flew from his flanks to flash like jewels in the sun. Magically, he had surfaced from the sea.

Minos and his bull catchers left to meet him, throwing over him a wide net. Outraged, he proved impossible to haul back to the palace. He was released and driven towards the king's scattered herd.

"He is magnificent," I heard Minos declare, "I shall keep him and select another for sacrifice."

Later that day, I saw Pasiphae walking through the fields and pausing to watch the white bull that stood - primed and aloof - between earth and sky. She remained motionless. The next day I saw her speak at length to Daedalus, the king's engineer, before she went again to gaze at the bull.

As I learned Laerces had been escorted to the men's quarters, I sensed some preparation, charged with anticipation and fear, permeating the palace. People moved purposefully across the great court.

I sat alone in the women's rooms. Minos, walking softly, surprised me. He smiled as I bowed my head, dismissing the gesture with a cursory wave. With the same hand he touched the back of my head. Involuntarily, I shivered.

"You are not of us, are you?" he said.

"No. I can recall little of my former life. I don't know why I'm here," I replied.

"You were sent by the gods. You will be my bride and our high priestess."

I was about to protest, but he stopped my mouth with his. I fell back on the bench.

Minos directed the women to transform me from refugee to priestess. My attempts to reason my way out of this auspicious obligation, were futile. I was draped in the elaborate flounced skirt and bodice that bared the breasts. A necklet of double axes was hung round my neck. A bull's head rhyton was placed in my hands and a priestess led me to the throne room and the lustral area.

From another rhyton, the woman, who watched me incuriously, poured liquid which looked like wine, but had the sickening aroma of water-thinned blood. I flinched, but obediently grasped the vessel and when she indicated, poured its contents into the lustral basin.

"Repeat these words," said the woman, "Receive this offering Poseidon, Earth Shaker, whose wrath we have incurred."

I longed to explain again that the quakes were due to a natural process, but to these people, nature was inherent in their gods. So I repeated the words in a tongue I instinctively understood.

I backed out of the chamber. I could perceive how this action engendered belief in man's interaction with nature. I clung to receding reason.

As the tremors persisted, two more boats of refugees arrived. I gathered, as I passed through the streets around the palace, that they blamed the murder committed by Laerces for their misfortune. They wanted a reckoning, but Minos, aware of Laerces's relationship with me, had his own plan for his disposal.

One morning I saw Laerces in the great court, dressed in the tooled and gilded loincloth of the bull leaper. He looked apprehensive, as a great pied bull appeared. A lithe catcher stood behind, while a practised leaper spoke rapidly to Laerces. Suddenly the bull charged in a flurry of sun-streaked dust.

Laerces, pushed towards him, clutched the huge horns and veered sideways onto the ground. Swiftly the catcher dragged him clear.

Pasiphae returned from the fields. She was smiling; her malachite eyes lustfully alien. At dinner she watched Minos and me ruefully. She clearly suspected our relationship. Yet she seemed preoccupied, as though recently sated.

"What is the meaning of the double axe?" I asked Minos before he prepared to leave one night. He took my arm and led me to the window where the three quarter moon shed white light on the palace, laid below us in organic layers.

"The moon is waxing. But soon it will wane. The waxing tells us of creation, growth. The waning, depletion, even destruction. Our axe represents both, for to live well, we must be balanced."

"Do you know the moon controls Poseidon?" I asked. He looked at me sharply.

"How do you know this?" he demanded. "Where do you come from? Who gave you this authority?"

Suddenly, I remembered. I recalled for the first time, the full impact of the twenty first century. I remembered Thanos. I knew Minos would not believe the truth. So I merely said, "I just sense things. I may be wrong. But I'm sure you can't prevent the earth moving."

He pulled me roughly to face him. "My high priestess says THIS?" He was aghast.

"Please relieve me of this duty," I said, "I'm an ordinary woman."

He looked at me in silence, touched my face with his hand and said, "Each night I have no doubt of that. But you have been sent for our salvation I'm sure. You must perform the rites."

Pasiphae, drawn from her dream into the present, began to eye me with contempt. Minos did not come every night. I suspected he had many women in the palace. But Pasiphae replaced her resentment with a decision to disregard me. She spent much time in her rooms.

I soon realised she was pregnant. I speculated. Was it by Minos or someone she had met during those long days in the fields?

One night, Minos ushered me out of my room.

"Where are we going?" My words were left unanswered.

We left the palace bleached by the moon, that now hung full in the star-flung sky. We went by winding ways through the sleeping city, pursued by a querulous wind. We left the streets to pass the huge herd of bulls, bred for sport and sacrifice; some pied, others starkly white and now motionless as though carved from Naxos marble.

"See how fine they are," whispered Minos. We moved across a meadow towards a widespread oak.

Suddenly he produced from beneath his robe, a pair of cow's horns which he fastened to my head and the great mask of a bull which he placed over his face. "Now you will be my queen," he said.

He began to circle me, teasingly, then intently. Involuntarily, I found myself crouching, alert, primed with a beast's blinkered fear and anticipation. I began to turn in conjunction with Minos. Was he man or bull? Instinctive interpreter of nature or superstitious primitive?

I looked at the moon and remembered that man had walked its surface. How could I tell Minos this? Now I felt a pulsating part of the unstable earth, bound to obey rhythms that the men of my age had relinquished. I felt the weight of Minos inflated as though with bull flesh. Thought fled. I moved in motions of a primal past.

Pasiphae's euphoria had waned. Now, as I sat at Minos's right hand, her hatred was unconcealed.

"How can you treat Pasiphae like this?" I asked Minos.

"She was unfaithful," he replied brusquely.

Preparations were being made for the bull leaping. I feared for Laerces's life. But my days were filled with religious ritual. Vestiges of reason filtered through my actions but their hypnotic nature began to assume significance. I began by reasoning that while they would be ineffectual against earthquake, they would at least generate resilience in the face of catastrophe. But soon they were a solace in themselves.

I rose at five on the day of the bull leaping. Celebration and savage anticipation possessed the palace. I prepared my rituals. Before I descended to the lustral area, I saw the great bulls led across the court, straining and fearful, able, should they choose, to annihilate the lithe young men who mustered them.

Early afternoon. The people began to take their seats in tiers in the great court. The women murmured, commenting on the potential of performers; their lips harshly red in white painted faces and their eyes outlined in green malachite. Black hair was elaborately curled to fall softly on pendants and jewels around bare breasts.

There was music and ritual dance. Two men in leather helmets appeared and began to box. Flowers were thrown at the ebullient victor. They were followed by acrobats who wheeled and sprang lithely through the dust.

I descended to perform my rituals, pouring water, wine and blood into the lustral basin and offering a plea to appease Poseidon.

Suddenly, my two attendants appeared with a tall hat that in the semi-dark seemed alive. Then I saw the writhing snake. I flinched, then froze, appalled as they placed it on my head. The two women led me to steps I had not previously descended. At the bottom I recoiled, encountering a large pit of snakes, heaving incessantly in the gloom. Then I recalled the snake as protector and assumed these to have ritual significance.

I was expected to know how to address them but, being ignorant, muttered some incoherent words from a dry throat. Horrified, I saw the attendants lift two snakes, placing one in each of my shaking hands and indicate I should proceed to the court.

At the entrance I stood as the hushed crowd gazed at me intently. Waiting. I do not know where I found the words I then uttered. But they were an incantation to the dead. They rang clearly across the court, as the snakes, held at arm's length, twisted and strained to be free.

The first bull appeared, his horns gilded and striped, followed by a girl. I withdrew. The snakes and the tall hat were removed. I saw Minos on the royal bench with Pasiphae, who stared at me with loathing as a bull leaper emerged from the other side of the court. He wore the traditional tooled loincloth.

The bull charged in a cloud of hot dust. Simultaneously the bull leaper ran, leapt, grasping the bull's horns and somersaulting over the bull's back. A girl reached to ease him onto the ground. Two more leapers followed.

Then I saw Laerces. He ran, vaulted, turned awkwardly in the air and barely cleared the animal. The crowd gasped and applauded as the girl dragged him clear.

The fourth leaper did not run fast enough. He failed to gain momentum to clear the horns. He was impaled. The bull ran, enraged, with him writhing in anguish, to the end of the court, where someone pulled him clear.

Four men appeared with a net, caught the bull and eased him to the other side of the court where a great double axe stood. Everyone rose, as the successful bull leapers, including Laerces, reappeared.

They advanced to stand before the terrified beast. I shrank, horrified, as my attendants reappeared, carrying an axe. Ceremoniously, they placed it in my hands.

"Oh no!" I could not carry out a sacrifice. But my feet moved of their own volition, the women walking slowly beside me. The bull, still netted, looked at me. Uncomprehending terror encountered my abject fear. My reason retarded my hand yet, simultaneously, I was compelled to step forward.

A bowl of lustral water and a bucket of barley corns were placed by my attendants on the ground. One of them held a dish. A fire was lit beneath the great axe. A lock of the bull's hair was cut and dropped, sizzling onto it.

"Pray to Poseidon," whispered the woman. I mouthed my usual plea. She sprinkled the barley corn. "Strike the neck!" she urged. My arm no longer seemed part of me. I raised the axe and struck. The bull kicked, groaned, fell to his knees.

"Hold up his head," said the other attendant, "Now cut the throat."

The bull's eyes, beginning to glaze, still held mine in disbelief. My eyes streamed from the smoke. But I aligned the axe, closed my eyes and cut. The blood ran into the dish.

I turned. The people were offering incantations to Poseidon. I lay the dripping axe on the ground and walked shakily back to the inner sanctum. I heard the men dismembering the bull's carcass and, turning, saw them cutting ceremonial portions from the thighs. They wrapped these pieces in folds of fat with some raw meat left exposed. Then they were burnt on the fire and red wine and the bull's blood sprinkled over the flames.

People left their seats to swarm over the court as the musicians reappeared. With five-pronged forks men tasted the bull's offal. The rest was cut into small pieces, pierced with skewers and roasted in the fire.

That night I looked at the mellow moon. This race is moonblind, I thought; motivated by the moon's mysteries, but knowing nothing of its essence. I strove to grasp its geology and place in the cosmos, whether accidental or ordained. I recalled the elation, then the disappointment of those who had walked there, hoping to discover more than spent rock.

The Sea People did not overtly emphasise the moon. It was a manifestation of the gods. Yet it effectively ruled their lives.

Thetis, the moon goddess, was the consort of Poseidon; moon and tides moved as one. The white bull was sacred to the moon.

Minos entered. He must just have left Pasiphae. He was freshly perfumed and wine-mellowed. A few revellers lingered in the court below, but slowly the night seeped back; blackly indifferent to man.

Minos was playful, pulling me roughly down, dallying and reminiscing about the bull leaping. I did not dare mention Laerces.

As Minos moved over me, I was besieged by pain. There was a frantic scrabbling in my stomach like minute creatures working countless legs and teeth. I cried out. Minos withdrew.

"I'm sorry, " I uttered, struggling to sit up. I assumed this was a reaction to the momentous day. But the impression of being devoured by hard-backed creatures persisted.

I fell back groaning.

"Shall I fetch the physician?" asked Minos.

"No, I'll be all right." I knew instinctively the doctor was irrelevant. Minos caressed me and left.

In her room, among the dolphins, the queen smiled.

Pasiphae was about to give birth. Minos seldom saw her now. She stayed mostly in her room.

Daedalus, I noted, was tense and when Pasiphae did emerge, he eyed her dubiously. He occupied himself by building an impressive dancing floor, designed like a maze, for Ariadne, the king's daughter. On it she performed a dance imitating the partridge; a curious hobbling love dance. Then she flowed and whirled in a feminine affirmation of spring.

Pasiphae screamed. The birth. It was after midnight. She screamed again. The birth was long, her suffering inhuman, with protracted and perverted pain. Suddenly it ceased.

A hush held the palace next day. I saw Minos hurrying from Pasiphae's room and consulting with Daedalus who vanished below ground. I heard the sound of workmen burrowing beneath the palace and learned that Daedalus was extending the subterranean passages.

Meanwhile, muffled thumps and low groans came from a chamber near the throne room.

Minos avoided me.

"How is Pasiphae?" I asked one of my assistants. She blanched and was reluctant to reply, but I insisted.

"She gave birth to a monster," she said. "There's a rumour that she fell in love with a bull and that Daedalus built her a wooden cow where she hid so the bull would mate with her." I recoiled, incredulous.

After ten days, Pasiphae intermittently appeared. She was ashen, ungroomed, still in a profound state of shock. The noise of her hidden offspring persisted as Daedalus and his workforce clamoured incessantly below.

The bull leaping, feasting and sacrifice continued. I braced myself for each occasion. Laerces reappeared and, to Minos's annoyance, was becoming adept. At each success he was jeered by the refugees from Strongyle, still intent on retribution for the murder of his wife. But the incident had not happened on Crete. Laerces, a rival for my favours, was a prisoner for Minos to toy with. Eventually he would be gored by a bull.

I strove to discover where he was being held. But I had no access to the men's quarters and none of the women knew.

And as the smoke of the sacrificial bulls marred the clear sky, the earth tremors worsened.

At last the building below ground ceased. And the clamour from the room above moved to the passage below. The groans grew to a bellow. I heard a rushing through the labyrinth. Minos could not look me in the eye.

I urged the assistant priestess to tell me more.

"They've called him Asterius," she said, "He has a bull's head and the body of a man. Everyone fears him so he has been shut in the labyrinth."

As the tremors increased, Minos learned the Mycenaeans, who had helped the people of Strongyle defeat the raiders from the sea - it transpired, simply to save themselves - and who had rid the Egyptians of the throne-snatching Hykos, now intended to overrun the island of Crete.

Minos, a trader and lover of fine things, was unprepared for war. He could only appeal to the gods. Then his son Androgeus was killed by the Athenians.

As Asterius, who had grown at an abnormal rate and was now said to be as tall as a man, charged in bewilderment and rage through the labyrinth, Minos sought vengeance. He demanded that seven youths and seven young women, be sent to him every nine years. He would feed them to Asterius.

Meanwhile my life was charged with ritual, absorption in the arts and dread of what lay beneath the palace and the unstable earth. Asterius rampaged, like a savage symbol of earthquake. The moon waxed and waned, seemingly on the periphery of our lives yet, I suspected, mystically manipulating our fate.

The young men and women arrived from Athens. As they were brought into the great court, I noted one man who walked tall and with defiance, observing the palace closely. Briefly he looked up. Our eyes met in recognition of a mutual alienation from the community.

Ariadne was transfixed by the stranger, pursuing him shamelessly at dinner with her eyes. I learned his name was Theseus. Even as he planned to feed these young people to his mutant son, Minos could not forego perverse play with the laws of hospitality. First they would be wined, dined and entertained.

Pasiphae appeared at the feast. She was withdrawn, her white make up accentuating her pallor. Intermittently, she glanced at me with satisfaction. Was it because Minos no longer came to me?

After dinner, Ariadne rose to dance on the great floor Daedalus had designed. She began slowly, then quickened; sensually improvising for Theseus. He sat enraptured.

An uproar in the labyrinth woke me. Asterius moaned and ran hard along the ground. A man's voice rang in defiance. The scuffling persisted for a long time, until after a final cry of anguish, Asterius was silent. I knew he was dead. Who had killed him?

"Asterius is dead and Theseus has taken Ariadne!" cried my servant the next morning. "They say Daedalus gave Ariadne a ball of silk cord to give to Theseus - he's Daedalus's cousin you know - so Theseus could find his way out of the labyrinth. Ariadne told him she loved him and they eloped."

Minos appeared in the great court. "Daedalus!" he yelled. The engineer sheepishly emerged from a room on the other side.

"Traitor!" Minos stormed and, summoning the guard, arrested Daedalus. He disappeared in the direction of the labyrinth.

Minos began to visit me once more after dark. Again I experienced excruciating pain.

"Pasiphae!" muttered Minos.

"What of her?" I asked.

"I daresay she has a hand in it."

He left and, the following day, still in pain, I sought Pasiphae in her megaron. She smiled callously as I entered. "What have you done to me?" I demanded.

"Does it feel like serpents and scorpions?" she asked.

"Yes."

"Get your gods to deliver you from that!" she hissed.

"You know I can't. Is it because Minos comes to me? I can do nothing about that. And what of Asterius and your adultery with the bull?"

Pasiphae's face collapsed. Her malice dissolved in tears. Abruptly I left the room.

Minos was sympathetic and did not touch me. At night I watched the waxing moon and began to implore it to stabilise the water and the whims of Poseidon as he shook the earth. By now I was thinking in primitive terms.

For some nights an uncanny calm fell. I could decipher the moon's great "seas". I imagined Poseidon surging to her song; the distant lover under the influence of Thetis who was for ever out of reach.

One morning I saw two great birds rise from beyond the court. They were unclassifiable, their wing span vast, their action awkward. Slowly they gained height, flapping with unstable effort towards the sun.

Minos appeared. Again he was incensed.

"Traitors!" he exclaimed. Once more I sought my servant who could be relied on to know what was happening. She told me.

"It was Daedalus and his son Icarus. He was seen making the wings which he stuck on with wax. He had to escape. Minos would have killed him."

Minos demanded I invoked Poseidon to turn Theseus and Ariadne in their boat and return to Crete. I obeyed as Minos prepared to sacrifice a bull. The smoke hung listlessly.

That night he came to me. "Our world is falling apart," he said. I tried to reassure him. I had grown used to his alternating brusqueness and consideration with lapses of preoccupation. He had achieved much, running a stable economy. The artisans

were creative and lived well. The court was cultured, the sole social cruelty, sacrifice prompted by fear.

And now as I recalled every detail of the life from which I had been wrenched to witness this society, I realised how little man had learned. He was skilled. He had evolved a technological trap of an ingenuity the ancients could not have credited. But he had found nothing within himself that had created stability or tolerance. He was more dangerously poised in the present I had left than he had ever been in the past.

I envisaged his footsteps on the moon, his striving to grasp the significance of his achievement, but his insight still vestigial, cramping comprehension.

Life remained a labyrinth, as complex as that built by Daedalus. The minotaur was the insurmountable fear of man; unseen, inflated because it could not be confronted, generating folly. Was there a Theseus in the twentieth century, able to overcome this spectre?

Minos and I must have been sleeping. The shadow at my bed moved urgently, touched my arm. Laerces. "Come, let's go," he whispered. I moved cautiously from the bed. We had almost reached the door.

"Who's there?" Minos was awake. He leapt from the bed and barred the door. "How did?-", he began and called the guard.

Laerces, who had overcome a drunken watchman in the room where he had been held, was recaptured and taken by moonlight to the great court. He was bound beneath the double axe.

Minos left me at first light. I looked from the window into the court. Laerces was hunched, half conscious. The early sun gleamed on the edge of the great axe.

I did not see who fired the arrow. Was it Minos? I doubted it. He would have completed his play with Laerces - whom he was also beginning to blame for our misfortunes - with some humiliating spectacle.

Laerces crumpled, the arrow deep in his breast. There was a stirring at the other end of the court. There were many, convinced he was the cause of the earth's unsettling and subsequent events, who would have killed him.

Sickened, I pursued my rituals; absently, intermittently recalling Laerces's face, on which was superimposed that of Thanos, whom I now remembered clearly. I was beset by a sense of loss and the pathos of mortality. Thanos, Laerces, Minos; mere men manipulated by time and the vagaries of fate. I was fraught with foreboding.

The Athenian fleet landed the following year as late summer lay calmly in the hills, the high wind dying to a benevolent breeze. Minos's main fleet was absent. He stood defiant, yet undefended on the upper storey of the palace. Pasiphae appeared beside him.

The people of the palace were petrified in various positions, seeming doll-like from above, as though already relegated to the past.

The enemy had disembarked. Minos gestured that I should instantly invoke the help of Zeus. I obeyed. Before descending to the inner sanctum I saw the sky turn sour. The sun had vanished. Rapidly, a pall of black rolled from the north like an accumulation of sacrificial smoke. The earth shifted sharply. I pitched down the steps. I grasped the ritual objects, ruled now by animal fear, fumbling to perform the ineffectual ceremony.

The ground lurched. I stumbled back up the stairs. I was thrown again. Women screamed and scattered. Men ran, panic sapping purpose. Bulls bellowed.

The great wall of water reared beneath the black sky. It streamed, glistened; a liquid beast unleashed by a godless hand.

And as it fell, we were swept, lifted, smashed and plunged into oblivion.

I was standing on the summit of a hill almost submerged by water. Beside me people waited, gazing upwards into a clear sky hung with a searing sun.

I recalled a wall of water rearing and collapsing to bear me beyond consciousness. Now I was here, unhurt, surrounded by people in white suits with apparatus for breathing.

"Where are we?" I asked, and before anyone replied, recognised the great limestone backbone of Santorini and a few feet away, the windswept ruins of Old Thera.

"What year is this?" A man raised his protective mask and looked at me quizzically. "2,120," he said abruptly and moved away suspiciously.

I had been spirited from the island in 2,020. My existence in the Minoan past had seemed brief, yet I had been absent for a century.

"Why is the sea so high?" I asked another man seated on a stone carved with an enigmatic sign.

He replied, "Don't you know the world is flooded? The seas have risen. The climate has changed. Where have you been?" The man spoke modern Greek.

I looked closer as he raised his mask. It might have been Thanos. Grown old. But now he would be dead. And the sharp profile was not his. I realised, as I looked at my still youthful hands, that I had not changed. I had been inexplicably protected from time.

"Why is everyone dressed like this?" I asked, realising I too was wearing a white suit.

"Today we are being airlifted to the space base in northern Greece and from there we'll be transported to the subterranean city on the moon. Where have you been that you don't know this?"

The moon. I looked up to see it faintly defined in the hot sky. So man had destroyed Earth; not by an annihilating war but through negligence.

I recalled the prophecies of death from unbridled pollution; the rising of the seas as the planet warmed through misuse of gases and the reluctance to invest so it might be saved.

"Where has everyone else gone?" I asked.

"Some to Mars, others to satellites launched near Venus. There are high sanctuaries for those who cannot go yet. But Earth will soon be uninhabitable. Where HAVE you been?"

I smiled and looked down at the surging Aegean, still whipped into curving crests by Poseidon.

"You win," I said under my breath.

The shuttle approached like a hovering insect with retractable legs. It set down where the Spartan theatre once presented drama and debate about a world still young and primed with hope.

The people moved clumsily against the wind like inflated clones bereft of reason and identity. I was the last to climb the steps. I turned at the top to see for the last time the rugged remains of an ill-treated earth. The volcano was lost beneath the waves. Somewhere, claimed by Poseidon, lay Minos, Pasiphae, Laerces and Zaphaea, the hope, then the aggression, that was Theseus. And Thanos.

Would a new race of gods, nymphs or mutants be fathered by Poseidon? He crashed in triumph, manipulated still by the moon, as we rose to claim her at last.

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The Song of Logoth

This story is based on the ambitions of King Minos and his siege of Nisa in the Isthmus of Corinth. There was a tower in the city built by Apollo with a musical stone at its base. Scylla, daughter of King Nisos who ruled the city, fell for Minos and tried to follow him back to Crete.

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The wind sings through the open mouth of Logoth, the alabaster god by the whispering sea. His eyes of multi-coloured mineral gaze blindly at the stars.

Griesha listens from the undulating city wall. The song is a prophesy.

She sees the white-clothed interpreter approach; a slow-climbing ghost in the moonlight; arms outstretched in supplication. He kneels at the god's great feet and listens.

The song follows a disturbing scale that moves from major to minor; a warning and lament the interpreter reads as imminent danger. He sees the face of a stranger, moving with the motion of a ship.

The city is a self sufficient entity. No one knows its origins. It does not decay. Its elegant structures of a pale, unidentified mineral, curve and enfold, with bridges over salty inlets from the sea.

Griesha was told her race of people awoke one day to find the city shimmering in the sun. Their needs were mysteriously fulfilled. Yet they are a race without a soul, treading a land of indestructible beauty. There are days when the deathless flowers glow too unerringly in the softly filtered light and the languid lapping of the turquoise sea nullifies their senses.

The people might have been plucked from the void on the whim of an ancient god whose voice rises and falls in the song of Logoth.

As the interpreter kneels, he is borne to a land of cypresses and soaring peaks. The wind blowing through sun-steeped time is the wind that enters the god's open mouth.From a bustling harbour, a fleet of ancient ships sets sail. He knows they carry the stranger.

Lystos sails at the head of his fleet. He recalls how his son Shoun died during an exploratory expedition of the island. Lystos knows nothing of the people's passivity and, not knowing either that a stranger cannot survive in that land, suspects he had been killed.

Now he will devastate the city and take the island. He has heard it is an inexplicable paradise. Some say it rose from the sea; a pulsating mass of foliage and flowers; its unassailable city poised on the highest hill.

The inhabitants are thought to be immortal and their god melodious and monumental.

The interpreter runs to Arias, Griesha's father.

"Prepare. Strangers!" he declares. He describes the lush land he had envisaged. It was lovely yet flawed; a land where fear fuelled rituals of regeneration. And he related the departure of the fleet.

Arias listens. He knows nothing of other lands. He does not even understand his own. He has no arms, having had no need of them. He merely waits on the pure white wall, watching the placid sea.

At dawn Lystos slides over the ocean's rim. Birds with pearl grey wings waft majestically over the water, assessing the invaders with curious eyes.

Arias still stands on the wall. His anxious mind draws demons from the salt; floating figments of unreason that only the pearl grey birds disperse.

The ships with their elegant prows draw near. Griesha joins her father and is dazzled by the craft, shining in the sun. She is mesmerised by the splitting of the sea into heads of tossing foam as the craft glide towards the shore.

Yet as they scrape onto the sand, the sun withdraws. The pearl grey birds darken until their plumage glowers with menace. They settle in a line before the ships.

Lystos is paralysed, his hand half raised, his face frozen in anticipation. His navy stands to attention, motionless.

Arias gazes in disbelief. Griesha looks only at Lystos's dark austerity.

Night falls. The navy dims. Still the great birds wait in line. And from the hill Logoth begins to sing; a quiet confirmation of rebuttal.

The people of the city sleep. But Griesha leaves her bed to gaze again at Lystos; god-like now in the moonlight. When she eventually sleeps she hears Logoth's song and is borne from her room to his feet. She feels along his frozen legs, her fingers probing each indentation in the stone. She thinks the body quivers, compelling her to climb and touch the god's great chest. Her head is parallel with the carved sinews of his neck.

The song envelops her, washing through her blood and bones, until her eyes meet those of Logoth; depthless pools of sky blue and sea green flecked with the ochre of earth. They are unblinking.

Griesha fingers his massive lips. She opens her mouth and feels the song entering her soul. Logoth's great mouth closes. Griesha can utter every rise, fall and implication of the song. Carefully, she descends.

She is not dreaming. She shivers in the night. The rough ground is real beneath her feet. She looks at Logoth; impotent without the power to prophesy.

Griesha is compelled to walk towards the shore. She confronts the petrified ships. Lystos stands motionless; his eyes fixed on the inviolable city.

Griesha feels the song swell in her. She looks at the frozen face of Lystos and opens her mouth, releasing the unearthly chords.

Inexplicably, she is suddenly beside him. Slowly he bends and the cold skin of his face grazes hers. She shivers and lifts her lips to his, passing the song to Lystos, feeling its chords wrung from her.

He takes her arm and eases her below deck. Gently he lays Griesha down and runs his hands lasciviously through her blue-black hair. As he enters her, she feels the song alive within him. Afterwards she is dazed and delighted.

He goes on deck and begins to sing. Griesha is unnerved by the solemn song. It seems wrong in a mortal mouth. Dawn breaks and the men begin to move. Lystos leaves Griesha and descends onto the sand. The dark birds rise in a whirring cloud of fallen feathers. His men follow. Still he sings. People appear on the city wall. Bewildered they look up to Logoth and realise he is silent. They see Lystos and hear the song of their god.

The invaders reach the city gates. Silently they glide open. Whoever possesses the song has influence over the city. The early morning is sunless. The city's white walls grow dull and are suddenly vulnerable. The invaders swarm like insects along the streets and over the bridges.

Helplessly, the people, who have not previously encountered aggression, fall back. Lystos is lustfully transformed. He and his men accost the terrified women. Their men are immobilised.

Griesha struggles from the shore, her recent pleasure plunged in pain. She sees her father, arms spread, flattened against a wall. She cannot reach him for the marauding men and is carried on the raw rape of the city.

By nightfall the city is depleted. Audibly, it sighs. Lystos stands on the pure white wall. He sees Arias crouching, head in hands, by his ruined residence. Drawing his sword, Lystos leaps from the wall and runs it through Arias, who falls heavily and, clawing at the dust, dies.

Griesha screams, runs to Arias and rocks his head in her hands.

Lystos looks on; bewildered. He had come to sack the city, not to murder. With his men he returns to the ships. Griesha follows. Her infatuation turns to rage. She had given Lystos Logoth's song. She would retrieve it and return it to the god.

She grasps Lystos's arm as he prepares to embark.

"Take me with you!" she pleads. Impatiently Lystos pushes her away. Now his destruction disgusts him. A demon had driven him to murder. The song has turned sour.

He prepares to sail. Griesha watches the marauders depart. Lystos no longer sings but she knows he carries the song within him.

She walks slowly back to the fallen city. For the first time clouds move across the sky, sliding black shadows along the shattered walls where people are hunched in trauma.

Then, as she looks, the people begin to disintegrate. Flesh flakes and gently falls like snow. Bones soften and begin to crumble into the dust.

Horrified, Griesha searches for her father. She finds the ransacked house but Arias has vanished. She kneels where he had sat and weeps.

When she looks up seven young men and six young women are walking purposefully towards her. How have they survived? They are silent and apparently unseeing, although they pause before her, waiting. They want her to join them.

Numbly she gets up and walks with them to the hill where Logoth towers in silence. They kneel at his massive feet, fingering the stone. Now it lacks an unearthly element. It is merely a mineral; lifeless and, like the city, subject to decay.

Five years pass. The young people live a rudimentary life in the ruins. They are no longer provided for. They have to fish and venture inland to trap small mammals. The indefinable food that had previously sustained them has vanished.

Swiftly, they age. Their hair turns grey, their faces furrow. They have no urge to procreate. Then, one morning, as they wander near Logoth, whose stone is eroding in the wind and rain now lashing the land, they see two ships nearing the shore.

As they approach, Logoth's song drifts like a rifled recollection. Griesha, haggard and withdrawn, recoils. Now she can see Lystos at the prow of the first ship. He is singing.

The ships beach. The men begin to climb towards Logoth. The young men and women want to run but, as in dream, their feet are rooted to the ground.

Lystos seems no older. But he is darker and more menacing as he climbs, singing, up the hill. Griesha thinks Logoth quivers as the song is borne on the wind. But it is she who trembles. Lystos pauses and, disappointed, surveys the men and women. He does not recognise Griesha, she is so radically changed.

Without a word, Lystos gestures to his colleagues to take the unresisting men and women to the ships. As she embarks, Griesha looks back at Logoth, lost and songless above the derelict city.

Night falls. Lystos goes below. Softly Griesha also descends. He looks up. A flicker of recognition. But it passes. He cannot know this woman with a haggard and haunted face. Griesha smiles.

"What do you want?" Lystos is annoyed. He should have bound the captives.

"Where are we going?" Griesha asks.

Lystos glowers and does not reply. He looks more closely at her. She must have been beautiful. Her bones are fine, her eyes clear, her body firm. He has not held a woman for weeks.

He grasps her and, repeating the action of five years earlier, lays her down. Griesha reaches deep into his mouth, prolonging their liaison with her quivering tongue. In her head she hears Logoth's song and, extending her tongue, plucks it from Lystos' s throat. He shivers and withdraws, sensing some part of himself has been relinquished.

The ships reach the mountainous land the interpreter had envisaged. Cypresses - dark interjections reaching for the sun, climb the steep slopes.

The men and women are led from the ships onto an orderly quay. Lystos binds them and they move in a line to a building of brashly painted columns and stepped porches.

They enter a central court and move towards steep steps that vanish in the dark. Lystos stands in the centre of the court and tries to sing. Silence. He strains, his deep voice tuneless and gruff.

The men and women are taken to a small room in the depths of the palace. Intermittently there is a distant reverberation, then a roar, muffled as though by walls. The dim and airless room lulls the captives into semi-consciousness through which uneasy shadows slide. The image of a beast with distorted hints of desperate humanity, cowers against one wall.

Griesha gazes as the black bulk gains identity; its blood-shot eye swimming in the gloom. The dull red liquid runs into the blackness of its body which loses definition and merges with the wall. The men and women drift into dark dream.

That night the sexes are segregated, the men left in the haunted room, the women led to another chamber of shadows and distant disturbance. They cannot sleep. In their troubled subconscious they sense drama deep in the palace. Then the disturbances abruptly cease.

Suddenly three figures steal into their room. They are dressed as women yet their physiognomy is partly male. They help the women to their feet, easing them from the room and up the steps.

The moon floods the great court, turning the palace walls to milk. The women see their rescuers are two homosexuals from the seven male captives, who had posed as females in the women's quarters.

They reach the quay where a ship of blond timber and silk sails gently rides the dark night water.

A young man with blood-stained hands and a woman whose clothes denote royalty, breathlessly arrive.

"The beast is dead!" says the man. Griesha thinks of the bull-like image on the wall.

As the ship gets underway, she sees Lystos mustering his men in pursuit. But the enchanted vessel, carrying the young women, skims the high water and Lystos is soon a small figure on the rapidly receding quay.

Griesha feels the song inside her and senses she has been borne back in time to a land of significance and grace and some horror, demanding appeasement.

At dawn they sail into a glowering sky and disconsolate wind. Griesha sees her hazy homeland, abandoned in the rain. And, as they near, Logoth, defaced by storm, materialises from the mist.

The ship glides effortlessly over the surging sea and beaches on the shingle. Driftwood, deposited by the storm, lies like a misshapen menagerie, glistening in the rain, impeding the women as they disembark with the homosexuals and struggle up the beach.

Quizzically, Griesha looks back at the strange young man and his dark-haired consort, but already, as though time has mysteriously moved forward, the silent ship is far out to sea.

Griesha leaves her companions and walks up the steep slope to where Logoth stands in windy isolation.

She kneels and feels his frozen feet. She grasps his great eroded legs and, clinging to the stone, begins to climb. As she reaches his rugged neck she sees his great mouth slowly open. The wind whines tunelessly through.

Griesha feels the song, potent with power, still within her. She reaches for Logoth's great mouth, summoning the song from her soul. It swells and bursts from her body into Logoth's waiting mouth. It swirls and eddies and as Griesha begins to descend, issues with a rush on the rising wind. It sings across the wretched land, prophesying re-birth. Griesha stumbles to the city. The sky clears, the rain stops and the wind drops. Sunshine lies in blinding pools.

Griesha sees the shattered city shining as its broken body heals into a whole; white-walled buildings breathe in the rain-clean air, bridges curve once more over salty inlets, bright with diamonds of dancing light.

She passes through the great gate and sees the dead, who had blown with the dust, walking through the winding ways. But she searches for her father in vain. He had been brutally murdered and his ghost looks on, unable to materialise but relishing the land's rejuvenation.

Once more, the inhabitants, who only now and then have a haunted hint of their inexplicable past, are mysteriously supplied with every need.

The white-clothed interpreter resumes his audiences with Logoth, submitting himself to the solemn song. Instinctively Griesha knows the men who had been taken to the palace were sacrificed before the beast was killed.

Lystos regrets his aggression against Logoth's land, yet was compelled by the beast, that was perhaps an aspect of himself, to demand the sacrifice, fearing an outraged god would retrieve the song of Logoth. He had not known Griesha, who had inadvertently transferred the song, was among the victims.

The interpreter kneels by Logoth and as the song flows through him, sees the wavering land of Lystos. The palaces shake, their coloured columns precariously lean and crumble. Horns of consecration, erected high on the wall like a tribute to the nameless beast, topple into the dust.

Is this because the beast has been slain or because Logoth's song, that had promised immortality, has gone, leaving the land to the whim of wild gods? On the sun-steeped island, the song weaves without end through the wind.

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~~~~~~~~~~

The White Shell

This tale is inspired by that of Tereus, who acted as mediator for a king, married one of his sisters, then fell for one who was younger, confining his wife to slaves' quarters. Eventually both women turned into birds and left him.

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Zalazin reached the hilltop where the wind whirled the stinging sand. He could scarcely see the settlement below. How could he keep the community together? It had grown and could not be sustained.

The seas had risen, flooding the land. Now Earth was water; the high peaks still perceptible as islands, lying like colourless gems on translucent skin.

The survivors lived in the echoing caves of the new, nameless sea and in the ruins of the twenty second century - as space dwindled, even the highest land had been built on.

On Zalazin's island the people had voted for equality; no leaders, councils or means of old world contention. There was a fresh water stream that sprang from deep within the earth and in spite of the drought, never dried. There were ample food stocks. Strange new fish bred, and their flexible skins were turned, with no treatment, into the identical tunics worn by women and men. There had been sufficient shelter.

But now there were too many people. Crude boats were being built from driftwood and survivors were leaving to seek other islands. But not enough.

The sky darkened; a lowering more intense than usual before one of the pernicious daily storms. Eccentric clouds converged and dispersed, forming the features of an ethereal face.

Zalazin went to the natural ring of rocks on the other side of the island. Here, people came to meditate. Only he had turned the rocks into an oracle.

The years when civilisation had lain like a veneer on primitive instinct, were now a myth. Past luxury and refinement were elevated out of proportion. The poverty in which most had subsisted, was forgotten.

Zalazin had assumed control against the people's wishes. They would have muddled on into civil conflict.

At the oracle he watched the great face; bright clouds uncannily riding through black. Beleagured nature had provided a portent.

He suddenly saw the solution to over population; euthanasia for those over sixty. It was a small price to pay for the good of the community. Survivors could not expect the long lives of their forbears. Sixty now was old age. Mysterious diseases took their toll and the excessive sunlight caused cancers. He left the oracle.

Fearfully, the people gathered on the beach. There was a flash, and an explosion rocked the island, throwing them off their feet. The storm might have been a vessel of accumulated outrage against man's environmental negligence.

No rain fell. There was no more thunder. But the darkness hung like a heavy accusation. The sea barely broke. Some great force might have been waiting for the people's next move.

Zalazin returned; arms raised as a sign of imminent announcement. The people were silent and listened.

He said, "At the oracle I saw the face of wisdom; neither woman nor man, yet it reached from the sea to the sun and I heard its thoughts in my heart. In order to survive we must consider euthanasia for those over sixty, or we shall all die."

The people, struggling to their feet were aghast. Shock swiftly turned to anger. They surged towards Zalazin.

"And what of your mother? She must be nearing eighty!" yelled one man.

Incredibly, Zalazin had overlooked her. He would have to set an example by sacrificing her.

From the back of the crowd, Aniel watched. He was bored. Now in his thirties, a need for substance, even procreation, had replaced fecklessness. He did not share the communal instinct. He lived alone. His parents had died prematurely.

He watched Zalazin's calculated exertion of control and sensed an opportunity to further his own ends.

That night the people streamed to Zalazin's house - the unsightly ruins of a mountain apartment block. The wind howled through the hollow rooms strewn with the rubble of decay.

Zalazin had rigged a billowing screen of water weed across the ground floor which was cleared and studded with exotic shells. They were unprecedented mutants; no two were alike and they appeared on the beach at dawn each day.

Near him sat Maya, his mother, her long grey hair coiled high on her head, her bare breasts draped with shells that washed up with small holes, through which weed was passed and tied.

Her sun-soaked skin was deeply etched, her hazel eyes, a mirror of her strange, long life. And they reflected the image of Zalazin; self centred and a bully, even as a boy. His father had died of disease when he was three. Maya had spoiled Zalazin and now he was an inextricable part of her. He pondered the implications of his decree.

Aniel entered the house as people surged from the sea. Zalazin's sister Yiasa came into the room. She was unsmiling and aloof. Her black hair was strung with shells and others draped her breast above the blue-green tunic. She had Zalazin's dark eyes, swimming with shadows and mistrust. She did not like men.

Aniel confronted Zalazin and said, "You can't impose this death sentence. Your own mother would be the first victim. Compromise. Let the people build boats. Let them go."

"I see no alternative," sighed Zalazin, "But listen to them. They'll have me first."

"Let me speak to them," said Aniel. He walked onto the precarious balcony. "Listen to me!" he announced. Surprised, the people, who had seldom heard Aniel speak, paused before reaching the door.

"Zalazin retracts his idea of euthanasia. He suggests that those who are able, build boats and look for other islands." But the people were still outraged and moved forward. They shouted for Zalazin, seizing their chance to depose and even murder him.

"Stop!" Aniel stood firm, raising his hands. "You will gain nothing by this. Think of your survival. Use your strength for that."

The people calmed and began to mill in disorder. Most were superstitious but few had been fooled by Zalazin's reference to the face in the clouds. Eventually, after gathering in agitated groups, the people began to disperse. Some looked back in hostility, regretting they had not assaulted Zalazin. Others wandered off to seek driftwood for boat building.

Aniel turned and entered the room. Zalazin stood ready to shield his family.

"It's all right, they've gone," said Aniel.

"How can I repay you?" Zalazin asked.

Aniel looked at Yiasa. In spite of her dislike of men, his authority moved her.

"I'll take Yiasa," said Aniel.

Zalazin smiled. "Agreed," he said.

Aniel discovered a woman with quiet depths, who seldom spoke but whose gestures had insight and warmth. They went to Aniel's home; the remaining ground floor of an apartment block, whose cellar backed onto an echoing cave. Aniel had broken through the wall so the dry cave became an eerie extension of the house.

Yiasa was wary. Walking into the chaos of multi-coloured rock, she sensed a primitive presence. Inhuman eyes might be assessing her human frailty. The sea reverberated relentlessly through the cave. Suddenly she knew she was pregnant.

People left the island in unseaworthy boats. Many drowned. But conditions eased on land. Yiasa bore Aniel a son. He named him Zepheris. He was a quiet child and seemed already uncannily self possessed. Yiasa was obsessively attentive. She carried him in a fish skin sling on her back, walking miles along the unsullied beach. She dipped his tiny fingers into the frothing sea and gathered pearl-lined shells to hang around his neck.

Aniel, impatient to oust Zalazin, but finding no valid reason and growing increasingly jealous of Yiasa's doting on Zepheris, vented his frustration at the least provocation. He walked through the echoing cave, needing to manipulate and make an authoritative mark. He had no creative impulse and no ability to exist in the undemanding present.

Yiasa grew increasingly withdrawn and disappeared more often, sometimes not returning until sunset. She ignored Aniel's bad temper. Her eyes looked through and beyond him. Eventually Aniel ceased shouting and finding fault. He too withdrew and was silent.

One night he walked to Zalazin's house, anxious to see whether, without being able to organise the lives of others, he showed a decline.

But Zalazin was lusty, composing music in his head to which he set ambiguous words. Aniel sat beside him and tried to take part. But his mind was confined and now so inwardly directed, consumed solely by ambition.

Then Loel, Zalazin's younger sister, appeared. She was fair, her eyes not yet able to candidly meet those of a man. She sat by Zalazin and began to sing.

Aniel was speechless. The sound was more melodious than the few birds that still inhabited Earth. He was simultaneously roused and placated.

As the song rose and fell, he neither knew nor cared what it was about. He could not move nor lift his eyes from Loel's face. She had closed her eyes, feeling her way through music and words. When she finished Aniel was still motionless.

Zalazin smiled. Aniel slowly regained reality. "That was beautiful," he said.

Loel blushed and rising, walked lightly from the room.

Returning that night to Yiasa's indifference, he dreamed of Loel; her song running like soft silver through his being.

In the following days he thought of little else. Even his ambition to dominate cooled. Loel's face hung before him and her voice filled his mind.

One night he saw her walking by the stark white rocks above the settlement. Her fish skin tunic glimmered in the moonlight. Her head was thrown back to receive the night wind. Her fair hair flowed.

Cautiously, Aniel approached. She did not hear him and started when he lightly touched her shoulder. As she turned, her hair fell like silk on his hand. For the first time her pale eyes looked directly into his.

"Don't be afraid. I only want to talk," he said. He guided her to a flat-topped rock and commented on the beauty of the moon. He was not sure she heard. She sat rigidly in the gentle wind, not knowing how to respond. Carefully, Aniel slid an arm round her but exerted no pressure.

Loel remained motionless. Aniel continued to talk about the moon, which laid a shimmering path across the sea.

"I would like to take you along that path to paradise," he said, astonished at his words. But, faintly, Loel smiled.

One day Aniel grasped Yiasa by the hand. "Walk with me. Let's talk!" he said. Loathe to leave Zepheris she nonetheless acquiesced and they entered the echoing cave. Aniel however, said nothing and did not release his hold. The sea boomed, as though seeking admission to the cavern. The mottled rock moved with restless crustations.

"Where are we going?" Yiasa was uneasy. Still Aniel was silent.

They reached a gaunt chamber with a roof of shifting shadows. The far wall was not visible. Yiasa hung back.

"Now here's a place for a heartless woman who thinks more of her son than of me!" Aniel said at last. He dragged Yiasa, who was now crying out in protest, down a winding passage that struck into the cave's appalling depths. He turned to right and left, doubled back and then took fresh directions. The cave was a labyrinth, as formidable as Knossos. Aniel released Yiasa's hand, swiftly turned and vanished.

Yiasa started after him but was confronted only by rock. Aniel might not have existed. She cried his name. It was flung coldly back at her. She reached for the walls of the passage to steady herself. They were clammy and smooth, like the skin of some creature bred on neither land nor sea and, very faintly, they pulsed.

She slid frenziedly up and down, trying not to touch the walls which left a strange sensation on her skin. At last, she sank to the ground, head in hands.

The sea was distant now, like the memory of a former life. But there were other sounds; a crustaceous rustling and an intermittent whine like traces of wind trapped underground.

As Yiasa's eyes grew used to the dark, she saw that the walls were almost imperceptibly moving; the crustaceans were breeding. Yiasa was hunched in the middle of the passage but could still see the conical striped shells shifting on the slug-like bodies of the cave creatures. They had long antennae to feel across the rough rock face and to communicate with each other. Yiasa hung her head and wept.

Aniel told Zalazin that, tragically, Yiasa had died. Death from unidentified disease was rife, although not enough to radically reduce the community.

Zalazin was grief stricken but not surprised. Aniel now went regularly to Zalazin's house. He listened to Loel sing and slowly gained her confidence. Soon he was walking with her in the moonlight, his frustration growing at not being able to physically love her.

One night, Zalazin took Aniel aside. "You can have her if you wish," he said, "But give her a ceremony. She's a virgin and needs to be eased into these things." Aniel agreed.

Zalazin came to Aniel. "I'll take Yiasa's body," he said. Aniel rapidly replied, "She told me that if she died she wanted to be buried at sea. She spent all her time walking by it. I should have let you see her first but I was so distressed, I gave her to the waves that same night."

Zalazin was shaken, but hung his head and left.

Yiasa shuddered as the whining increased, like the ghost of someone who had succumbed to the cave before her. The creatures' rustling persisted above the wind. The incessant agitation of their shells besieged her brain. She could not sleep or think. There was neither water nor food. The gloom seeped into her soul and she began to forget the outside world.

Then Loel's frightened face rose, half-formed, before her. At first it was marred by the graininess of the rock from which it materialised, but as her features formed, the grains dropped away and her pale face contorted. Yiasa knew she was being violated. She reached for the disembodied face but clutched only air. The features faded.

"Loel!" Yiasa cried and cast about the cave, scraping the crustaceans from the walls as anguish overrode fear. She knew Aniel had raped her.

Loel lay in a darkened room in Aniel's house. She had come to visit him before the ceremony. Aniel, frustrated without the physicality of a woman and seeing no sign of Zalazin's decline, had watched Loel poised, as though expectantly, at the end of the room and had pulled her in a frenzy to the floor.

Afterwards he opened his eyes as though from an untenable dream and gazed numbly at Loel, sobbing where she lay.

Aniel entered the cave and wound through the labyrinth until he found Yiasa, rocking in the dark.

When he touched her, she started and swung to face him.

"Rapist!" she shouted.

"How did you know?" Aniel uttered hoarsely.

Yiasa did not reply. Aniel feared she had unearthly powers. He took out a knife, salvaged from a former world, and pulling back Yiasa's head, forced her to thrust out her tongue. With one stroke, he cut it out.

He dragged her, unconscious, through the cave, unable to understand why he did not kill her. Did he fear her apparent power?

He took her to the group of women on the other side of the island, who were working on Loel's ceremonial dress. When she regained consciousness, he made her hide her face. He could not risk Zalazin discovering her.

But, as she wove the magical lengths of fish skin, she depicted her plight in a code that she and Loel had used as children and which only Loel would see as she stepped into the tunic.

Aniel found Loel where he had left her. She shrank from him and he tried to reassure her, fearing she would go to Zalazin and he would lose her.

Eventually she calmed. Was Aniel's behaviour part of becoming a consort? Aniel persuaded her to stay until the ceremony and persisted in taking her roughly each night in the darkened room.

Then Aniel began walking to the oracle. He had dismissed its prophetic power as a device of Zalazin's manipulation, but now some inner force drew him to the stones and as he looked at the half spent moon, he felt a strangeness in the air, as though pervaded by some presence on the point of disclosure.

And, instinctively, Aniel knew Zepheris would be harmed by someone close. Since Yiasa's imprisonment, Aniel had come to love the undemanding child. He saw himself in retrospect, discovering the enormity of the sea, the frightening faces etched by erosion in the rocks and, from a height, the movement of the cloud-banked sky.

He had the joy of hearing his son's first words and suffered the sorrow of his tears when he missed his mother. He hurried back. The child too would have to be kept in custody.

Loel lived in dream. Her days seemed endless as she aimlessly drifted round the house. Her nights were brutal. The imminent ceremony seemed irrelevant.

Loel's tunic was brought; glimmering with skilfully interlinked scales and hung with iridescent shells. She held it at arm's length, admiring the intricate stitching with a fine fish bone. She opened it out. She was about to step in, when she saw the carefully wrought code inside.

Momentarily, she relived her happy childhood. She recalled the day she and Yiasa pretended to be birds, running along the beach with arms outspread, wishing their feet would leave the sand and they could rise at will above the waves. They invented the code, writing messages in the sand, to bewilder passers-by. This message told her where Yiasa was.

She ran from the house. Aniel was walking with Zepheris on the beach. Loel knew vaguely where the women workers lived. The rough road left the shanty settlement, winding through the sun-depleted scrub that thrust defensive thorns against the implacable blue. Loel shivered despite the heat. Why had Aniel claimed Yiasa was dead?

The track narrowed. Stunted trees with blue-green leaves were bent almost double by the wind. From the top of a bare hill, Loel saw the women working in a compound with a bamboo roof. She could not see Yiasa.

Then at the end of one row, a woman broke away. It was Yiasa. Other women tried to restrain her. She struggled, screamed and they let her go. She ran up the rock-strewn track, clawing the air.

Loel skirted the workers and reached Yiasa as she gasped and stumbled towards the sea.

"Yiasa!" She paused, turned and stood stock still. She was haggard, her eyes unfocused, her long hair loose and bedraggled.

"What happened? We thought you were dead," said Loel. She took the distraught woman's arm. Yiasa drew roughly away, staring without recognition at her sister. Then her face registered recollection and she let Loel touch her.

"What happened?" Loel repeated, unaware she could not speak. Yiasa looked blank. She could recall nothing.

"Come here!" Loel urged. A dark hint of the past filtered through Yiasa's fevered mind. Distressed, she ran over the rocks and disappeared. Loel pursued. But there was no sign of her on the other side of the hill.

Yiasa stumbled into a cave, running blindly through its clammy ways, winding like the foul veins of a stranded sea beast. She paused and listened. Only water seeped steadily through rock.

She crouched on the wet ground, her hands pressed hard against her ears. Eventually she rose and walked unsteadily towards a distant chink of light. Outside, the sea washed and eddied on the white beach. A small figure played at the edge of a rock pool. Yiasa, demented, winced in the sun. The figure wavered, its small back strangely hunched. She approached, crunching through the narrow strand of shingle near the water.

The figure turned. The sun shone directly into Yiasa's eyes. The creature's face was distorted; a mocking mass of light. Its hands twitched with long claws.

Yiasa screamed as the being rose and started towards her. She sprang upon it, pressing her hands hard around its throat.

The limp body fell into the water and the pierced white shell that Aniel had given her before the birth of Zepheris, fell from her neck beside it. Zepheris lay lifeless in the pool, while the crabs he had caught, scuttled away.

Aniel reached Zepheris first. The boy had run ahead, anxious to explore the pools. Incredulous, Aniel lifted the child and saw the strangulation marks on his neck. Then he saw the pierced white shell.

Yiasa had rounded a bend in the beach and waded into the water, splashing its salt wildly into her face. She perched like a mad mermaid on a rock, pushing agitated fingers through her matted hair. Her muddled mind wove beings from the hovering heat haze and, defensively, she thrust out her hands.

Aniel turned up a track that was a short cut back to his house, so did not see Loel running along the beach, desperately looking for Yiasa. Loel passed the rock pool, where Zepheris had died and slowed to draw breath.

Yiasa saw her materialising from the haze; a half being, whose feet did not touch the sand. Yiasa shaded her eyes, peering into the heat and recognised Loel. They embraced. Silently, Yiasa wept.

"Come to our father's house," said Loel. And still unaware Yiasa could not speak; "Tell me what happened." They walked unsteadily up the track recently taken by Aniel.

"Listen!" Loel stopped. Aniel was slumped on a rock, the dead child in his arms. Yiasa recognised Zepheris but could not recall what she had done. She halted, horrified. Aniel, sensing a presence, looked up. His face darkened. He fumbled and found the white sea shell and swung it before her. Slowly, she recalled what she had done. Shaking, Aniel rose. The women turned and fled back to the sea. Aniel cried out like a wounded beast that sees hunters moving mistily through his pain and stumbled in their wake.

Over the water the women saw the wide-winged sea birds and remembered their childhood game. The birds swooped to settle on the foam, then dived for the multi-coloured fish. Loel and Yiasa spread their arms as they ran, feeling the light wind fly through their fingers.

Suddenly they were airborne, their hands fluttering with feathers, their legs pulled hard beneath their bodies. Their bones were hollow, their heads thrust into the wind as they glided out to sea.

Aniel stopped and strained to look along the beach. He saw no one. Only two birds flying over the high white waves.

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Niobe

Iakovos watches Niobe brush her hair; black as the depths of the Dicte Cave. It splays on her shoulders, as though nurtured by the night. He moves to run fingers through its slippery sheen and lifts a heavy lock to his lips. "You are the muse of Minos." He meets her eyes in the mirror. "You were painted two thousand years ago. How have those genes of inspiration and savage sacrifice dropped directly through the generations?"

Niobe smiles. "What are you? An artist or a geneticist?"

As he paints the women of Hania, Iakovos is haunted by their pervasive predecessors; the women with bare breasts and bead-hung hair, who watched youths leaping bulls.

The women's essence might lie in Crete's spent hills; tender still, although deprived of tree-lined dignity, like women de-flowered on a day too distant to recall.

How great those trees grew when Minos moved through the land to renew his laws. How they blazed when Talos, his brazen, bull-headed defender hurled rocks at invaders. The island had flowed with sacrificial fire. Great horns of consecration curved insatiably against the sky. The smell of incense, smoke and blood merged with the myths of the moon. Superstition and inviolate ritual vied with a meticulous creativity.

Niobe leans over Iakovos, urging him to the bed on which small pools of waning sun spill like liquid gold. She is a little afraid of his perceptions. As darkly sensuous as Minos himself might have been, he works as though directly in touch with the Minoans who painted their palaces with every nuance of the natural world.

On hot nights, when the city's sensuality is palpable, Iakovos sees in Niobe the nonchalant women who smiled at Knossos. Lulled by the late light and voices in the street below, past and present merge. Niobe assumes the dark flesh of the palace women with its Anatolian fragrance. She might embody their subservience to ritual and sour hints of the bewildered bull which have clung to them as they left the bull court.

Vassilis scrutinises the painting of Niobe Iakovos is about to sign with his flourishing signature. The face is Niobe's, yet her puckish smile seems alien.

"What does Niobe think of it?" he asks.

"She hasn't seen it yet. She's tiring of me. She suspects I have another woman. How can I tell her I'm haunted by women painted almost three thousand years ago?"

Vassilis says, "I've been trying to convince you for years there are sources of great power that need only a receptive mind to manifest. Think of what has happened on our island. Is it any wonder the past has persisted in the present?"

Vassilis is a practising alchemist; a rare and suspect occupation that draws a response from the older people who have seen such perversions of human nature, Vassilis's propositions seem viable.

As Niobe's interest in Iakovos wanes, he sees his chance to seduce her. His senses, too often channelled from sensuality to esoteric formulae, are roused by her dark defences.

One dust-filled afternoon he threads through the narrow streets of the old Venetian town to the small house of peeling blue plaster where Niobe lives, taking in sewing and making alterations on the sewing machine inherited from her mother.

In her mind she makes undulating dresses in shades of sunset and dawn, laced by layers of night, to flow through moonlight on some ethereal woman. Flowers of the Cretan spring shimmer to her from their fields beneath the limestone peaks. In her mind she paints them onto fine cotton, so as the clothes move on willowy women, the flowers flutter as though stirred by a light wind, expanding with the intangibility of dream.

But as Vassilis enters, he sees only coarse suiting and plain working skirts with a white buttoned blouse draped on Niobe's simple chair.

She raises her dark head, turning to him eyes that are red-rimmed from sewing in poor light. Her skin is sallow, her shoulders still hunched from her posture at the machine.

But he agrees with Iakovos. In certain light - a shaft of late sun falling as she stands by the window, under the moon or in low lamp light, Niobe is transformed into a mildly mocking and sophisticated woman of Minos. As she turns to gather her work, he sees her profile; uncannily like that of a Minoan.

She serves him strong coffee. They speak of the forthcoming election and Turkish war-mongering, carefully avoiding the personal. Both feel unaccountably shy.

Iakovos stands like a watchful spirit between them. Then, as though Aphrodite has intervened, they acknowledge and dismiss him simultaneously and draw together in the fading light.

Their union is instant and complete. Vassilis feels Niobe alchemically form. She has the liquidity of water as she slips between his hands, the ferocity of fire in her rapid responses, the sweetness of unpolluted air as she turns and briefly stretches and in the movement of her flesh, the undulations of the earth. She becomes his personal creation.

Niobe sees less of Iakovos. His pain is alleviated by an increasing retreat into dream. As day slides softly into moon-white night, his grasp of reality falters. Women's faces darken, their bodies assume lithe dimensions. Their voices fade as though absorbed by the past. Their lips move with strange and soundless words.

Iakovos passes among them; his eyes distant while injesting their essence. He sits absently at cafes in the outer harbour, taking an hour over a single brandy, unnoticed by the throng; other aliens, briefly touching, then leaving the town.

He returns to his studio near the Archaeological Museum on Halidhon and looks long at the portrait of Niobe. Her head appears to shift slightly and she confronts his distraction with inscrutable eyes. Peering into them, Iakovos sees the island, thick with cypresses beneath a hard blue sky. Fires flicker before tall lilies.

He withdraws and Niobe reverts to a likeness in oils. Iakovos sets out for her house.

The buildings of the old town bombed by Nazis, were once elegant Venetian palaces and vast warehouses for goods brought in by sea. They rear like ragged ghosts, softened by lamplight, with the aroma of fresh fish and chicken turning over charcoal. The people within these fragile shells also inhabit a fantasy.

Iakovos reaches Niobe's house. The windows are unlit, the house uncannily still. He knocks. Silence. He pushes the door and it opens. He passes through the dark kitchen into the cramped room where Niobe sews and fantasises. A plain dress lies on the couch. It might drape a sleeping figure. Iakovos lifts it and it hangs limply in his hands.

He moves to the bedroom. Is Niobe unwell? The door is closed. He turns the handle and enters.

Two heads lie on the pillow. Niobe's face almost touches that of Vassilis. They are sleeping, as innocent as the first couple on Earth, devoid of guilt and blindly fulfilled in each other's existence.

Iakovos cannot move. To find Niobe with a stranger would be painful. But Vassilis is his closest friend. Stunned, he watches them almost imperceptibly breathing.

Then Iakovos rips the sheet off Vassilis and pulls him onto the floor. He pummels and drags him across the room. Niobe's screams eventually slow his blows. Sickened, he backs from the room and leaves the house.

Vassilis is hospitalised, slowly recovers and three weeks later marries Niobe.

The couple avoids the cafes where Iakovos sits; sullen and unseeing. Initially he is wracked by the need for vengeance but as the winter rains begin, his impetus falters.

He lies for hours in his dark studio with no urge to paint. He is transfixed by the portrait of Niobe, still propped on the easel. Her eyes mock him, changing with the light; the derisive eyes of the Bronze Age woman whose influence was enhanced by the power of the Great Goddess.

Iakovos goes to Knossos, intent, although he does not know how, on exorcising the woman's image. The palace remains are bleak; Arthur Evans's self-conscious restoration abandoned and misplaced; the great horns of consecration a latter-day fancy, seeming now devoid of religious significance.

Iakovos peers into the lower rooms, redolent with dread and now out of bounds. Dolphins, suspended in a displaced world of water, swim in what is thought to have been the queen's quarters and, nearby, the brooding room where Minos is assumed to have sat, is fraught with the fantasy of griffins.

Iakovos ponders the perversity of Pasiphae, mating with the great white bull and giving birth to the Minotaur. Breathing the legacy of two thousand years, he feels the pressure of the labyrinth, built by Daedalus, as though he is penetrating its dark depths.

He thinks of Minos's fury at his wife's bizarre adultery. He envisages Niobe with Vassilis and sinks onto cold stone; motionless as their bodies move relentlessly through his mind.

Niobe gives birth as the snow begins to melt on the White Mountains. Briefly, she sees the struggling child, then, gasping from loss of blood, dies.

Vassilis is numb. His cold hand closes on her white brow. He had felt her thoughts extinguished one by one.

He looks in anguish at the screaming child. Unable to tolerate her, he instructs the midwife to arrange a rapid adoption.

The child grows with fluid limbs and hair, that like Niobe's, flows around her face, suggesting the undulations of a secret river. She has inherited strange insights from her father. Oddly compelled, her foster parents call her Ariadne.

She has hung her mother's clothes, made on the machine that is now hers, on the walls of the small room in Mochon. The dresses - some bearing the flowers that had moved through her mind - retain their inner life; flowers that shimmer as the first spring sunshine slants through the window, then dim, as though about to die, when autumn rain spatters the glass.

This is when Ariadne wonders what her mother was like. She has seen Vassilis, sitting darkly at a cafe. Everyone knows of his alchemical claims. Some believe them. Others are sceptical. Many also know how he had his child instantly adopted.

Ariadne wants to speak to him. She watches him from a distance; noting the intelligent face as he discusses some controversial magic; confident in the ancient art to which he is addicted.

One night he moves with relish round his workshop. In his head swim the enigmatic elements of nature; the impetus of life, the black hole of death, the euphoria of unity, the yearning to grasp infinity.

Piece by piece, he will approach the Great Work; the attainment of perfection symbolised by the creation of gold. In dreams he perceives the secrets of hermetic alchemy.

Enveloped by the soft southern night, he enters the labyrinth of the gods; an interlocked logic of growth, death and renewal, carried in the essence of a single seed.

He enters the seed and feels it pulsate, expanding with the aspirations of those trapped by Earth's revolutions. He feels the lifting of exultant life, its diminishing and inevitable demise. Then the thrust of regeneration, even a glimpse of infinity.

He always wakes at this point; the enormity too great to grasp.

On other nights he is transformed into a body of light, filled with "quintessence"; the elusive fifth element sought by philosophers.

By first light he returns to his workroom. Fleetingly, he senses Niobe and hears splintered intimations of her voice. He must create the Philosopher's Stone. It is spring. The time is right. He will go to the sea and find the stone of the philosophers; a real stone which must be prepared and purified before the final Philosopher's Stone can even be contemplated.

He drives through Hania's suburbs - subdued after the brief winter. The sun is warm behind him; the first fire of a new season which will be washed with flowers.

The White Mountains shine. The shepherds who brought their herds to the lower reaches, test the air and look towards the high slopes, still white with snow.

Vassilis reaches the wild expanse of Mylos Beach. The waves rear; fury contained, to crash and, still enraged, withdraw.

Thodorou island - in myth a beast that would have eaten Crete - has a dream-like haze, its great cave, a watchful eye, as though the beast still waits to encroach. Poseidon had turned it into stone and now the island abounds with kri-kri, the wild Cretan goat.

Vassilis walks past driftwood contorted like alien creatures flung ashore by a force Poseidon would consider playful. He stoops and picks up a large grey stone banded with white lines of erosion. It is typical of the crude distress created by the Cretan Sea.

He holds the cold stone to the new sun's warmth, then places it in his pocket. The sun strengthens; symbol of the gold of earth and inner light.

Iakovos begins to paint again. His hand moves spontaneously with swift deliberation, creating a wild abstraction of the labyrinth and its rituals. He smells the burning oil, the sacrificial flesh of the bull, sees smokily, the dark women dancing with jewels flickering through flames that die, yet still emanate the essence of fire. He paints dark symbols; people looking at the new moon; transfixed by its clean curve as though relating their existence to the constellations.

He pauses, steps back. The canvas seethes; a swirling incoherence, which, as he looks, flows in waves of fear and blind abeyance.

The next morning Vassilis leaves the house at dawn and drives to the lower slopes of the mountains behind the town. There he gathers the fresh spring dew; pulling up grasses, and, turning to acknowledge the sun, shaking the dew into a small container.

Ariadne has located Vassilis's house. She finds it shuttered. But, nearing a lower window, she peers through a crack. Vassilis moves purposefully round the sparse room. Ariadne sees him take a white powder and from the other container, shake in the dew.

She strains to see, as he turns his back to her, raising his hands in a silent ritual. She smells smoke; an acrid burning from the bench, but sees no flames. Vassilis has created the secret fire.

Ariadne has an impulse to knock on the door, but her courage fails and, thoughtfully, she leaves.

Vassilis takes up the striped stone he had found on Mylos Beach and places it in a mortar. As though succumbing to his will, it responds to the pestle, crumbling into countless pieces. He takes the vessel of smokeless fire and adds it to the "materia prima." He has created the Philosophic Egg. He pours this back into the vessel, seals it and places it in an anthanor where it will be kept at a constant temperature.

He watches as sulphur - the hot male symbol of the sun - interacts with mercury; coldly feminine and reflecting the moon.

Ariadne grows. Each day she feels more ambivalent towards her foster parents. From neighbours she has learned how Iakovos loved Niobe and how Vassilis took her from him. And she knows where Iakovos lives.

She has heard he has become a recluse. She reaches the small house, knocks and waits, until eventually the door opens. Iakovos, unkempt, confronts her. He knows who she is and for a moment, sees her as the child he might have had. Then his face hardens. He waits.

"May I come in?" Ariadne almost whispers. He gestures for her to pass. "Why have you come?"

Ariadne wants to say she is seeking her roots, true relationships, the meaning of her existence. But she is speechless. The studio is oppressive and steeped in the smell of oil paint.

She feels Iakovos breathing fast by her shoulder. Ariadne is wearing one of Niobe's dresses with blood-red flowers that bleed as she moves. She looks at the canvas suffused with fear.

As though influenced by her predecessor, she is drawn into the horror of the labyrinth and is aware of fire without smoke, of imminent suffocation.

And she is aware of Iakovos running his hand through her hair, while Niobe moves through his mind. Ariadne pulls away and rushes from the room.

Vassilis, who had fallen asleep while watching the disturbing interaction of mercury and sulphur, suddenly wakes. Niobe stands before him in her white dress bruised with poppies. Is she Niobe? Or her double? She is younger, her wide eyes accusing.

Vassilis reaches for her, but, with an acrid smell of smoke, she fades. There are red petals on the floor, but these too vanish when he stoops to gather them.

Trembling, he approaches his work bench and from clay, begins to shape a small figure resembling Niobe. Uncannily she grows; his longing shaping her lithe limbs, the undulating hair. Her features are minutely formed and she looks at him; saddened, her body loosely mourning. Yet she is lifeless.

Gently he lifts her and carries her to the piece of waste ground by his house. It is still moist from the spring rains. He scoops a hollow and places her within. Then, as the moon sheds white light at his feet, he walks round it clockwise, chanting an ancient formula, which intensifies as he begins to sweat. The dead Niobe of flesh and blood dances in his mind, then the clay replica trembles and with the impetus of sudden life, stands and looks up at Vassilis with real eyes. Her black hair is silvered by the moon and lifts in the night breeze. She raises her arms as though yearning to be held.

Vassilis bends and gathers her in one hand. Her white flesh is soft and cold. She whimpers. He raises her to his lips, kisses her tiny head and flowing hair. He takes her inside and places her carefully on the bed. She sways, falls and rolls over. Vassilis sits beside her and strokes her body with one finger. She sighs and looks at him in recognition.

"Niobe," he whispers. He places her on the pillow and stretches beside her. He closes his eyes and Niobe fills his mind. He feels her arms draw him, her breath warm on his face. He embraces her and is borne to the limits of lilting existence.

The Philosopher's Egg changes, grows dark. Vassilis unstops the vessel and the smell of corruption floods out. He replaces the seal.
When he wakes, Niobe has vanished. Distraught, he leaves the house, eyes downcast to seek her tiny form. Fearfully, he hurries through the harbour, blindly boards a bus and is borne along the wild coast to Kolimbari.

Fishermen pore over broken nets, the presence of freshly caught fish is potent in the streets. Mysteriously impelled, Vassilis climbs the hill to Moni Gonia and walks on, to where the road winds high above the sea. Black rock is heaped against bright blue water, thrusting and retrieving ferocious heads of foam. Early spring flowers glimmer in the rocks.

Vassilis sees the distant figure of a man. He walks faster, as though the stranger has some personal and imperative significance. Vassilis gains on him. It is Iakovos, carrying easel and paints and heading for a piece of ground with a view of the great Gulf of Hania.

Vassilis stops short. Iakovos looks up. Uncannily, their animosity evaporates and the two men stand in silence as though reconciled. Iakovos unpacks his paints and sets up his easel. The canvas is stark in the sun. Before Iakovos applies his brush, a dwarfed and wavering woman appears; a nebulous suggestion, that, as Iakovos paints, grows into the image of Niobe. A few inches high, she is perfect in every detail, from fragile fingernails to splayed black hair.

As Iakovos continues to paint, she slowly expands; her minute limbs filling and possessing the canvas. Instinctively Iakovos paints one of the dresses that flow with flowers and sinuously sway as though lifted by the west wind.

Suddenly a strong air current issues from the canvas, drawing the men into a vortex of colour and warmth. They are enveloped by female flesh; the homunculus of Niobe striving for tangible life.

Then Vassilis smells sour putrefaction; an inevitable aspect of alchemical advance. Niobe walks away. The men follow. The flowers on her dress fade, droop, their petals falling with the foul smell of decomposition. Her skin blackens, her dark hair drifts like a funeral veil.

They pass through a mass of rocks scythed as though by knives. They form a distorted processional way, leaning like the wounded guardians of some demonically denuded land. Then the men stand on the great staircase leading to the Knossos labyrinth.

Niobe descends into darkness. Her putrefaction drifts into the crumbled crevices. The men pass through the passages, pulsating with the transition of life into premature death. A bellow echoes through the darkness.

The possessiveness and guilt that had overwhelmed the men, are drawn into the darkly breathing walls. Niobe - dying and obscene - turns to face them. It was she who had bellowed in her anguish.

Vassilis knows that from death, his alchemy will draw life. But first he and Iakovos, must pass beyond Niobe, hunched silently now on the tainted ground.

Shapelessly, with a stench of dead lilies, she is disintegrating. The texture of her rotten flesh wraps around the men. They moan, lifting feet that might be forged from iron.

Then there is daylight and spring whispers in the trees outside the labyrinth. And there, beneath a flurry of fresh leaves, stands Ariadne; vibrant in the restless air. She could be the daughter of Minos, wooed and abandoned by Theseus. She might have danced with the early passion of puberty on the maze-like floor built by Daedalus. But now she stands softly; flesh, blood and a soul perceiving its roots.

Both men had loved Niobe and Ariadne bore her genes. Through her they sense the unity sought by artist and alchemist. The Philosopher's Stone has many guises and is as intangible as air.

Its presence lies now in the face of Ariadne; a response like a long-lit fire of unconditional feeling for the two frightened men motionless before her.

Iakovos clutches the canvas, through which all have passed. On its surface Ariadne has replaced Niobe. Red flowers dance on her dress and a faint fragrance floats on the unsullied air.

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~~~~~~~~~~

Labyrinth

This is a tale investing Pasiphae and Egyptian royalty with fantasy. Pasiphae, after the fall of Crete, obsessively seeks the Minotaur. She is guilt-ridden by her adultery with the bull and convinced that only the death of Asterius, the Minotaur, will redeem humanity.

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The moon rises; alien and dispirited above the desecrated land. Pasiphae's ghost walks with weightless feet over the wreckage of her former home. The great bull court lies beneath fallen horns of consecration.

The wind whines around the great staircase, leading now to desolation. A muffled sound, like a bellow of deep pain, echoes from the labyrinth.

Pasiphae shivers, remembering Asterius, her son; his frustration as he charged with his baffled bull's head through the airless passages, his man's body, anguished with uncomprehended needs.

Pasiphae feels the weight of guilt on her fleshless body, recalling the coupling with the great bull and the shameful birth. She was not sure how - or even if - her son had died. Were she and Minos, by their infidelities, responsible for the catastrophe?

As she remembers, the air quivers, as though perturbed by ill intent. Slowly, as though etched by moonlight, the white bull rises like a mirage from the ruins; the object, inconceivable now, of her lust. The beast, abrasively curious, looks her in the eye. He bellows, then limb by limb, fades.

Pasiphae backs away, stumbling over loose stones. She had loved yet feared Asterius and if he still lives, she knows she must, by the god-given means she possesses, end his existence.

Now the palace is dead; a shattered phantom wailing with the wind. Pasiphae nears the entrance to the labyrinth. It is blocked by fallen gypsum. She reaches her grey ghost hands to the jagged stone. They pass through its moonlit surface.

She drops to her knees and weeps, then looks in desperation at the moon. It is indifferent; a dead disc hung above annihilation. Pasiphae too is dead, yet her phantom mind lives painfully in the present. As she gazes at the moon, she sees on its cold face, a darkly defined labyrinth. The silver warms as though suddenly sun-struck and an uncharted land enters Pasiphae's imagination. She turns towards the southern sea and, her spirit borne through blue air, she alights on its shore in hot daylight among thronging refugees sailing for Egypt.

Invisible, she is moved by their grief as they leave an island savaged by earthquake and invasion. They are skilled craftsmen, seeking a living in a strange country. But their eyes are dead as they watch the island with its cypress-covered slopes slip away, as though retrieved by the hand of Zeus.

Pasiphae flies with the wild sea birds. She wheels in circles on the wind. She finds a country of flying sand on which a great sphinx squats and where pyramids spear the cloudless sky.

She lies fish-like on the water and glides through the breathless night. On the moon, the labyrinth still glows; a complex interlacing of ancient fissures? Or a sign that in Egypt she will find a labyrinth concealing the ghost of the son who may be dead?

She slides from the Nile and kneels in abeyance to the full moon. This is the time when she can change into a woman, but on this night, she retains her ghostly essence. She watches the palms, believing they are growing, influenced by lunar light.

She weaves along the river in the early sun. She penetrates temples where she finds a great sun disc but few worshippers. She fears the worship of the sun and is anxious for the moon to reappear; a confirmation of the old beliefs; the matriarchal cycle of sacrifice and regeneration.

Each night she gazes at the labyrinth on the moon and by day moves on to where it might be found.

The palace rises like a mirage; quivering on the edge of credulity. Pasiphae turns into an ibis, shivering as the breeze probes her breast feathers. She lifts long legs along the glistening water's edge, looking askance at the undulating gardens, punctuated by silent pools.

She steps through flowers, hears a flurry and sees a young woman in a draped dress and tall blue headdress. Pasiphae relinquishes her bird form, growing from the flowers into a woman. Alarmed, the Egyptian pauses.

Pasiphae touches her shoulder. "Don't be afraid," she says.

"Who are you?" the woman demands.

"Pasiphae."

The woman shivers at the name. Yet does not know why.

"I am Nofreteti," she says.

"I'm looking for the labyrinth and Asterius, my son," says Pasiphae.

Nofreteti has heard disquieting tales of another labyrinth beyond the southern sea; of a hybrid beast and a vanished civilisation. But there is an unearthly quality about this woman. Tentatively, she reaches to touch Pasiphae's bare arm. It has substance. But still she is unnerved.

"Come with me."

Pasiphae follows the Egyptian to the palace. Young women step lightly through the flowers and beneath a rich canopy sits an elegant young man surrounded by children.

"Akhenaten, my husband," Nofreteti says. Pasiphae steps back. The power of the sun emanates from his skin. He has an aura of absolute authority. Pasiphae knows he has assumed the influence of the sun, using its symbolism to subdue his subjects and building the great city of Armana. But she lets him question her, claiming she is a lost refugee. Then she seeks to extract the location of the labyrinth.

He has heard of one that had been built at least one thousand years ago with three thousand apartments for the earth deity. But he fails to understand how Pasiphae's son can inhabit it. She must be affected by grief. He is drawn though to this slight woman who might be a personification of the moon.

Pasiphae delights in the paintings of the palace. They recall the freedom of her island's artists. But, with trepidation, she notes the reproduction of the sun disc, its rays terminating in hands that hold the ankh, the symbol of life, above the heads of Akhenaten, Nofreteti and their children.

By day she inhabits the palace shadows, drifting out as a ghost at night. Kneeling before the moon, she pleads to retain her human form by day as the moon begins to wane. The labyrinth loses clarity.

Akhenaten begins to follow her movements with arrogant eyes. Nofreteti notices and one night sees Akhenaten steal from the palace to where Pasiphae stands with arms raised to the waning moon. She utters inaudible words, then bends low beside the water. Akhenaten throws a small stone into the placid pool. As its ripples widen in the moonlight, Pasiphae turns and gasps as he reaches out his hands. They pass through her phantom form. His fingers clutch at her hair but close about the cold night air as Pasiphae slides into the pool.

Nofreteti runs to Akhenaten and pulls him to confront her. He pushes her away and strides back to the palace.

She grows increasingly agitated and is mystified by Pasiphae as she slips in and out of their lives. Pasiphae stays because she is afraid of embarking on the search for Asterius. She fears to find the labyrinth destroyed, like the maze where he had been imprisoned in her former palace.

Sometimes she reverts to phantom form during the day and, walking invisibly through the city, finds Akhenaten's men crudely obliterating the name of Amon, the people's former god.

Akhenaten identifies entirely with the sun. He is omnipotent. His officials are appalled, the people confused. He neglects the country which has declined into chaos.

Pasiphae understands the machinations of the court, the temptation to assume absolute power, the need for diplomacy and lies. She admires Akhenaten's love of creating with a fresh approach to form. But she cannot respect him as a pharaoh or a man. Many are fickle, yet again, she suspects she and Minos have set excessive infidelities in motion. And she fears Akhenaten's allegiance to the sun.

One evening Pasiphae stays in the palace. The moon, mindful of her status in the past, sustains her ability to resemble a woman. She stands by the window, gazing at its half- shadowed form, drawing on the lunar power, flowing through her like quicksilver.

She shimmers from the room and enters the chamber of the pharaoh and his wife. Their dark heads lie motionless on deep pillows. Pasiphae glides to Akenhaten and gently nudges him awake.

Startled and enthralled, he eases from the bed without waking Nofreteti, taking Pasiphae's proffered hand. His sunskin is blackened now by night but Pasiphae knows the power pulses within; his ego growing daily, delusion routing reason.

She leads him from the palace to the pool glinting with slanting moon spears.

Pasiphae urges Akhenaten to gaze at the water. His face is trapped by ancient light and interminable time, as Pasiphae wills the moon to emasculate his pride.

In vain, Akenhaten tries to grasp Pasiphae. Like Narcissus he is drawn into his over-weening essence. His face fades. Alarmed, he withdraws, feeling his flesh with agitated hands. In reality his face remains. But Pasiphae has created an illusion of erasure.

Nofreteti speaks to Akhenaten. He does not hear. She touches him. He does not respond. She watches him. He does not notice.

He does not approach Pasiphae again. But he follows her with hungry eyes as she drifts aimlessly through the shade and sits motionless by the pool. Nofreteti can tolerate no more.

"I'll take you to the labyrinth," she announces, approaching Pasiphae by the water. Pasiphae trembles but agrees to go.

Nofreteti prepares her barge; resplendent in purple and gold and manned by ten slaves, who lean as one, ready to get underway as the women embark. Pasiphae sits beneath a canopy, fearing the ferocity of the sun.

The days pass; palm-fringed and sun-soaked. The nights fold the barge in darkness. The moon wanes. Time flows backwards.

Pasiphae, striving to retain human form, barely speaks to Nofreteti who sits throughout the day in isolation, absorbing the cool Nile breeze, beneath another richly worked canopy.

The second palace appears unexpectedly, gleaming in the mid morning sun; its walls green with Egyptian and Asian plants. To the west rise the purple Theban hills.

The barge slows and draws into the bank. As though conjured from the white hot air, slaves appear to help the women disembark.

They walk within the great walls. A man-made lake, a mile long, lies unruffled like a layer of hand-laid glass with intermittent clumps of trees and blooms in cultivated mounds. The sound of women singing, harps, lyres and pipes drifts from beyond the water.

"This must be Elysium," thinks Pasiphae.

A woman in a pleated dress and bright bead collar shimmers towards them. A close-fitting wig frames her face which is prematurely lined by bad temper. She frowns.

"I had a premonition you would come," she announces. "I am Tiye. You are my daughter-in-law."

Nofreteti starts. "But I thought you were dead."

Pasiphae, who had lived long before either of them, inwardly smiles.

"We are looking for the labyrinth," says Nofreteti, recovering her composure.

"It doesn't exist. It's the work of mythmakers," says Tiye.

Pasiphae suspects she is wrong but is not sorry to once more delay her search.

They enter the palace; magnificent in brick and rare woods with stucco-covered walls. The great rooms lie in deep shadow, echoing to their steps, with vivid reproductions of nature and Egyptian life on the ceilings.

"Paradise!" thinks Pasiphae again. Vases of coloured glass stand among pieces in porcelain, silver and gold.

Pasiphae recalls her palace. It had been beautiful but less ornate. They enter a long throne room with great pillars bearing lotus buds and papyri against a sky-blue ceiling where pigeons and golden ravens sweep in flight. Rich carpets cover the floors with impressions of marshes, rivers and the enchanted phoenix.

They walk past carved and inlaid furniture towards two raised golden thrones, spread with the pinions of the royal vulture. On one throne, a man sits - regally erect. He might be a gilded statue; another priceless ornament in the rich room. But, on seeing the three women, he slowly smiles.

"Amenophis, the king," says the ill-disposed woman.

The man scrutinises the women."Your quest?" He speaks abruptly, curious that they can travel alone.

Pasiphae explains she is a refugee and seeks her son in the labyrinth. A shadow briefly envelops Amenophis, like the externalisation of a fearful thought. For years traders have come to Egypt from a great island across the sea. They told strange tales of dangerous games with bulls and of a half-human beast imprisoned in a labyrinth.

Like Akhenaten, Amenophis does not understand how this woman's son can be in Egypt or how he is related to the labyrinth. But he welcomes her, wondering about her true identity. She seems ethereal. He has dreamed of such women, materialising from the night air and emasculating men.

What of the other woman? She glows with an unbecoming confidence, as though she carries within her, the authority of the sun.

His chief wife Tiye, who had brought the women to him, belongs to an earlier epoch. Impetuous and quick to anger, she is however, subservient.

He watches the visitors surreptitiously. If his lust is discovered, he could not endure Tiye's vengeance. Which woman should he take first?

Pasiphae, aware of his intentions, smiles and quietly fades, her flesh growing first transparent, then absorbed into the shadows of the great garden. She watches Nofreteti, who shows no sign of returning to Amarna, seduce Amenophis with her heavily emphasised eyes. As Nofreteti had watched Pasiphae being scrutinised by Akhenaten, she sees Tiye scrupulously observing the sun queen and Amenophis.

In Armana, Akhenaten paces his palace, bereft of the women he desires. His sun glow diminishes. He begins to avoid the temple where the sun disc reflects his authority.

He feels control slipping, like the sloughing of a brazen skin. He weakens and seeks the shadows. He particularly fears his reflection. Once more he senses an erosion of his facial flesh. To his shaking hands it feels fragile, the bones sharpening as though about to pierce the skin.

One day the sun does not shine. Low cloud closes about the palace, turning the pool to a mirror of menace. The flowers close and the palace dims. Akhenaten sits motionless in the garden, staring at the thickening cloud. A stillness envelops the land.

Then, like the roar of an imprisoned bull, the earth shifts and opens before him. Flowers are flung aside, the pool pours sullen water into the cavernous lawns. Akhenaten shudders and clings to his seat. But it slides from under him, and he falls, hits the stricken ground and lies unconscious.

Pasiphae smiles. She has depleted Akhenaten. He no longer emulates the sun. She had induced the earthquake to enter his obsessive mind. He must recognise the influence of the moon.

The sun still shines above Tiye's palace. She and Amenophis have no dangerous liaison with the sun. Nofreteti fills his mind. Her eyes swim through his dreams, her voice monopolises his senses. Her perfume enhances the day and turns night into a limbo of enchantment.

He leaves Tiye sleeping and creeps through shadows to where Nofreteti lies unclothed on her broad bed. For several minutes he stands still, relishing her moon-bathed flesh. Then he steps towards her and reaches to caress her breasts.

Tiye hears a murmuring in the neighbouring room where Nofreteti sleeps. She hears Amenophis breathlessly exulting. Enraged, she is about to rush in, but stops before she reaches the door.

Tiye knows of the silent labyrinth; a dark place of the long dead, shunned by the living. Pasiphae, clearly deranged after the catastrophe in her country, is irrelevant. Even Amenophis has wearied of her evasion. Nofreteti has substance and he is drawn by her independent defiance. This is a challenge; a trait to subdue.

Tiye orders her barge to be prepared. She suggests Nofreteti accompanies her to meet a royal relative. Nofreteti complies. The barge is luxurious, the Nile wind cooling. Amenophis was growing too attentive. She sensed sadism in his demands.

The days are langourous. Then, like a stark reminder of mortality, the labyrinth appears. Nofreteti turns, bewildered, to Tiye. She had been expecting a palace where the royal relatives would offer lavish hospitality. Instead she sees an unyielding edifice, casting long shadows on the drifting sand.

They disembark and Nofreteti, uncannily deprived of speech and compelled as though in dream, follows Tiye along the length of one wall. She barely notices the narrow entrance forced by thieves. They pass through. Heat and light vanish. They are enveloped by damp darkness and a penetrating silence.

Slowly, as though drawn from the past into the present, the vague shapes of pithoi emerge from the dark. The stifled spirits of the dead weave from within the ancient clay, impregnating the shadowed walls and sliding coldly across the floor.

Nofreteti feels their presence; curious and uncouth. A faint smell, like a resumption of decomposition, hangs in the clammy air. Still Nofreteti is speechless. Some dry desert djinn might have lodged in her.

Tiye pauses, turns and gestures that Nofreteti should follow. She disappears along the passage to the left. Tiye follows. They enter a foul antechamber.

Tiye spins and pushes Nofreteti against the wall. She slides to the ground. Tiye regards her with contempt, then turns and walks away.

At last Nofreteti finds her voice. She cries out as the queen is swallowed by darkness. She crushes one leg as she fall and cannot move. Silence seeps back as her cry dies, as hapless as the fleshless bones of those sealed in the labyrinth.

Nofreteti dares not cry again. She fears the listening spirits.

Clouds obscure the sun. They are alien; sallow, aimless and edged with black. Crops wither. Akhenaten sits, a shell of cold flesh and stultified thought in his darkening garden. The gold, glass and precious stones of his palace dull. He no longer adulates the sun. He is emasculated and motiveless.

At night Nofreteti's face grows from the moonlight that now floods the land with wide rivers of light. Its brightness prevents sleep. People sit, mesmerised, outside their homes, waiting for the sun to rise. But as dawn breaks, a lurid sky blooms briefly in the east, then is swiftly swathed in cloud. No sun rises.

Akhenaten summons his remaining strength and prepares to search for Nofreteti and Pasiphae. His barge sways on the ruffled water of the Nile as he faces the intrusive wind. Vultures wheel above the sullen sand.

Pasiphae sees Tiye return - smug in the late day's gloom. She disembarks with alacrity and walks, without greeting, past Pasiphae. The first rain begins to fall.

"Where's Nofreteti?" Amenophis demands.

"Sick from the river trip. She's being looked after at the palace," says Tiye, referring to the home of the royal relatives that lies beyond the labyrinth. She relishes her husband's agitation.

Pasiphae knows she is lying. She sees a brief, blinding image of the labyrinth; the perturbation of disrupted souls, the fearful immobilisation of someone trapped in the dark.

The rain falls like solid sheets of glass. Crops revive. But the rain does not stop. They rot. The rain obliterates the Nile and the dunes, hammers on the palace roof and flows like newly sprung rivers through the flattened flowers. At night it briefly ceases and the clouds clear to reveal the full moon. It does not wane, but grows more brilliant. Pasiphae, retaining mortal guise during the day, glides as a ghost across the lawns at night.

She sees the labyrinth gain clarity on the moon's surface; a lacework of baffling ways, while within, some indefinable element pulsates in fear.

Nofreteti hears the seeping of water through stone. The temperature drops. She draws closer to the wall. The seeping gains the momentum of a flow and intermittently splashes her frozen flesh. Seconds later, a wall of water rises. She raises her hands as though to beat it back and her whole life seems suspended in her head. Then she drowns.

The lacework blurs on the face of the moon. Pasiphae sees water lapping through the labyrinth. She thinks of Asterius and slides from the garden to move like mist along the river. She does not take her eyes from the moon until dawn breaks and the labyrinth hovers, rendered weightless by the morning light.

Pasiphae, a paradox of ether flowing through substance and irreducible will, concentrates on the water from the flooded Nile washing through the tomb. She reaches the labyrinth and hovers, her spirit unwinding like gossamer. She wills the water to recede. Within the tomb she senses a presence. Asterius? No. It is gentler, the bewildered aftermath of someone newly expired. Nofreteti. She sees the queen's face, pulled into the mask of a grotesque.

Pasiphae hears the draining of the water and watches it flow in a frenzy to the Nile.

Akhenaten sails for four days up the darkened Nile. He is not borne back to the palace of Tiye and Amenophis. Without Pasiphae, moving magically through time, he is confined to the present. Until he comes to the labyrinth. The ancient queen still lingers above the tomb that stands in tact on the drying sand. Still the sun does not shine but the rain stops and the swollen Nile recedes.

Pasiphae sees Akhenaten at the ship's prow, drawn with trepidation to the dead. She weaves with incandescence on the early morning air and watches him disembark and walk, reluctant, yet unable to resist, to the entrance of the labyrinth.

He steps into the narrow passage, rank with receding river water. He feels an intruder, violating the dead. But their spirits have retreated with the river. Damp silence clings to the giant jars and sodden walls.

Each step increases his foreboding. He reaches the narrow way taken by Tiye and Nofreteti. He hesitates, braces and walks into the antechamber.

At first he sees only the great jars like grim guardians in the gloom. Then he sees Nofreteti, twisted, with her head pressed into her chest as though subjected to a great force. Her arms are pinned beneath her body. River mud has matted her hair and remnants of clothes. She already seems part of the earth.

Akhenaten grapples to raise Nofreteti from the ground. He drags her into the passage and pulls her broken body back through the domain of the dead.

The river has loosened rocks outside the labyrinth. As the rain resumed, they shifted to block the thieves' exit. Akhenaten pushes but they are immovable. He drags Nofreteti further into the tomb. She still breathes faintly, yet the spirits of the tomb again seek release and, clinging to Akhenaten, move maliciously through his body and numbed mind.

Pasiphae's ghost glides through the wet tomb walls. She is assailed by the memory of another labyrinth and the panic of her imprisoned son. She shudders in the dark.

The bellow echoes from deep within the labyrinth. Pasiphae freezes. Asterius. So he did not die. She blunders through the passages, pausing to listen for her son. Silence. The bellow reverberates again. She weaves through the pithoi, brushed by the spirits, roused and restless in the gloom.

She wrestles with her love for Asterius, convinced that to restore balance in the cosmos and between people, he must die. But on reaching the furthest chamber of the echoing tomb, she finds only Nile water trapped in the low-lying room; its movement against the wall distorted like the deep-throated bellow of a bull.

Dismayed, she turns and weaves aimlessly to where the thieves' exit is blocked by fallen rock.

Akhenaten feels a strong draught, unlike the fetid atmosphere of the tomb; an agitated stream with a sense of someone recently encountered. Cradling Nofretiti's muddied head, he strains to see who has passed. The draught intensifies.

Unable to distinguish detail, Pasiphae sees the dark bulk of Akhenaten and Nofreteti, hunched like the body of a beast in pain. The water bellows, the sound bouncing off the wet walls.

Pasiphae musters the last vestiges of power and wills the death of Asterius. The head drops, the bellows cease.

Pasiphae weaves closer. The head is not horned. The body is not that of a bull. She recognises Akhenaten and beside him, Nofreteti. Horrified, she recoils. Her final act has been to murder man. Now she knows his aspirations will still be wrecked by greed, lust and a need for self destruction. She has failed to lay the ghost of gross distortion.

She weaves back up the Nile where now the palace of Tiye and Amenophis has long vanished, to the ruins of Armana.

The future has flowed into the present. She is of no more consequence than a grain of flying sand. And the sun, which had been banished by her fear, bursts from behind cloud to scatter on the water dancing spears of light.

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~~~~~~~~~~

The Prize of Procyon

There is a Greek myth in which Pelops is said to have won Hippodameia in a chariot race against her father Oenomaus, with the help of Myrtilus, his charioteer. In this story the time, names and location have changed. But old ghosts die hard.

~~~~~~~~~~

Ioannis crouched by the glimmering rock. It curved with the contours of a woman. He clasped her. She was unyielding and cold.

"Where am I?" His fear was callously caught and accentuated by the air. A bright patchwork of growth spread from his feet, interspersed with rocks of clear minerals, suggesting the wistful stance of women with heads inclined as though interpreting airborne vibrations.

Painfully he rose, recalling now the star stream that had borne him as a fugitive from Arcturus. He had killed a colleague in an attempt to seize political power and been obliged to flee.

His feet were hindered by the ground cover of dull red lichen and crushed the tight-packed petals of the patchwork flowers. He walked, unsteadily, still dazed from the velocity of the star stream.

The curving sky turned from indigo to gold, the colour spreading like liquid over the flowers and lapping at the base of rocks. A ridge of white gleamed against the gold. As Ioannis walked, he deciphered buildings; elegant angles and curves cut sharply against the sky.

A white horse, its burnished tail streaming like an aspect of the air, moved on buoyant limbs, its eye in a fine head, uncannily comprehending. He murmured and struck the blue earth with a golden hoof. His huge haunches swung in Ioannis's face and he sped weightlessly towards the city, Ioannis now saw was built of white marble.

Ioannis reached a gateway curving with intricate masonry and minerals. Inside houses swam with fish, flowers and abstractions on windows and doors.

Where were the people? Silent white ways struck straight between buildings. In layers of gold, time was bewitched. Ioannis passed through the streets as in dream. Then he heard a roar on the edge of the city.

The main white way abruptly stopped. From it a broad blue avenue swept to a vast stadium packed with gesticulating people. Inside, white horses raced; identical to that which had passed him outside the city. They drew elaborately carved vehicles driven by dark men primed with the will to win.

The horses' hooves barely touched the earth. They gleamed - a slipstream that might be bearing the animals silently aloft.

The racers flashed before Ioannis; unreal particles of light. The winner was hailed with a protracted roar from the crowd. Like his fellows, he was swarthily intent, but while they were dressed in indigo and saffron, he wore white. Triumphantly he drew in his four horses.

Behind him, a young woman, her black hair hectic around a face etched exultantly with relief, accompanied a young man close to tears.

As a refugee, Ioannis felt he should approach the man in white. Ioannis was conspicuous in the loose green suit worn by the officials of Arcturus, and as the turmoil of the race calmed, was assessed by countless eyes.

"I am Ioannis from Arcturus." He addressed the man directly. "I left after a political quarrel."

The man proffered a hand. "I'm Ballias. I welcome you to Procyon. I shall consult with my ministers. If they agree, you may stay. This is my daughter Alyca." He indicated the young woman who had come second in the race. The distraught contestant who had accompanied her, had vanished.

Ioannis inclined his head.

Alyca accompanied him to the city. The horses flowed, untended from the stadium, melting into lofty quarters where they murmured in communication.

Ioannis followed Alyca into a four storeyed building with furnishings carved from Procyon's minerals and woven from strands of plants that still bore living flowers.

"Rest," Alyca directed, indicating a small room with a large carved window. She joined Ioannis, weaving across the room; a metamorphic aspect of light. Yet she was too, earth, fire, air and the swirl of water.

"Who was the man racing with you?" asked Ioannis.

"A contender for me," she replied. "They come often. My father challenges them. They always lose. If one won, he would have me and my father would die."

Ioannis recalled the horses; the speed that appeared illusory, the leader's horse drawing away from the others as though enchanted.

"Tell me about your horses," he ventured.

Alyca said, "No one knows where they came from. They were here when we arrived from Capella, our old home beyond the Pleiades. There are many legends. Some say the horses evolved from a species found on a planet called Earth that was mostly water and which was destroyed by fire. Some claim we came originally from there too but had left before the catastrophe, living in colonies under the surface of the Moon before going to Capella a century ago.

"There are legends of a hot land where islands rose from blue water with fish like those shapes inherited by our artists. And there was purple fruit on creepers and silver green trees. It is said we came from there and that, long ago there were gods, who, if they chose, could resemble us."

Ioannis, whose predecessors had also left that part of the planet and had colonised Arcturus, momentarily entered the legendary land. He smelt a sweet, wild growth, was touched by wind and struck by sudden sun.

He looked at Alyca and had an impulse to hold her. He was charged with an anticipation of excitement, solace, emotional heights, hollows and sustenance.

Alyca left. Ioannis wandered from the room, passing to an outer court. He recoiled. On the great gate opposite, the heads and limbs of six young men were nailed. They were gilded by the golden light, accentuating the anguish of their eyes, the gape of mouths sealed in obliterating pain.

Procyon's night was an almost imperceptible deepening of gold. The ground cover glimmered but did not close. There were small sounds of unseen beings that crawled, probed and scuttled.

Ioannis, having eaten, and learned a little more of Procyon from Ballias, looked from the window to a horizon that bore a rose rim. Then the sky absorbed the colour, until infused with warmth, it spread long fingers through the lichen and ground cover, like a tentative lover touching the surface of flesh.

The horse appeared to materialise from air. His whiteness was audacious against the rose. He danced as though for joy; elements of white and gold.

Alyca was suddenly beside him. She grasped the arched neck and sprang onto his back. Exultantly they raced. Ioannis stepped into the rose-steeped night.

The horse had turned and was flying back; his coat a pale kaleidoscope of reflected light. Alyca hung happily around his neck and slithered to the ground, alarmed at seeing Ioannis outwardly motionless and inwardly moved.

He stepped forward. He took her by the arms and as the horse lunged lightly, laid her gently on the ground.

Ballias kept a stable of fourteen horses. They raced, and a number of mares were separated for breeding, mating with a preliminary side-stepping dance and a sound that resembled singing. The mares roamed freely, raising foals that were left for seven years to grow in the fluctuating light of Procyon. Then they were called in and needed no breaking, responding to the men with whom they were ready to co-operate.

Ioannis walked among the people; mineral carvers, flower growers, musicians playing stringed instruments fine as gossamer. They lived on the russet lichen whose properties engendered creativity as well as vigour and a keen competitive sense. This in turn, entailed aggression. But they were not overtly fearful. They were unthreatened from without and settled internal disputes through a democratic council.

Alyca told Ioannis of the men who had approached her and been defeated in the race. None had moved her. In Ioannis she found a free spirit that opened her like a flower. They met in the shelving fields outside the city, sometimes accompanied by the murmuring approval of a white horse.

Ballias lay trapped in dream; impenetrably deep, moving through a pall of malevolence. He fought loss, the indignity of deposition. His city swayed, the marble surfaces shifting to slide like floes of ice into shocked fields of flowers.

Ballias saw the contained communication between Ioannis and his daughter and he saw Ioannis leave to meet her in the rose-rimmed night.

"We will race in three days," he told Ioannis.

The fugitive walked from the house into a reach of rainbow light. He walked further than before over ground that sloped and sighed beneath his feet. In a hollow where the blue earth was bare, human skulls were heaped to form walls with gaps that might be windows and slopes resembling roofs.

Ioannis walked beneath the sinister lacework that seemed balanced solely by whim. A low wind, imperceptible outside the structure, moaned, as though lamenting the loss of young life. For Ioannis instinctively knew these were the skulls of those who had raced for Alyca.

"My father's horses are unlike the others. Their feet have the essence of quicksilver," said Alyca as she walked with Ioannis through flowers. He absorbed her finesse that turned, as he held her, to passion, initially playful, then intense, bearing him through colour and light that merged with her movements.

"I shall have you and we'll leave. I'll not displace your father," he told her. She saddened, then slowly inclined her head.

"Who is your father's driver?" asked Ioannis.

"Amphion," said Alyca.

That evening, as the city lay lulled in ochre light, Ioannis walked by inconspicuous ways to the horses' quarters.

"Where is Amphion?" he asked a young man. Suspiciously, a small man emerged and stood squarely before Ioannis, who said, "I am Ioannis. I race for Alyca tomorrow. I will give you half Procyon and Alyca for one night, if you will ensure I win the race." This was a proposition he had no intention of honouring.

The driver looked Ioannis in the eye. He smirked. He wondered. Finally, he said, "Yes".

Race day dawned. People, who had pursued their lives with a quiet sense of purpose, became animated. As Ioannis walked to the central square, they whispered behind high held hands.

From a careful distance Ioannis watched the four horses with quicksilver in their feet. They shimmered and danced, heads high in anticipation.

He was led to the horses that would draw his vehicle. They murmured and moved restlessly.

Alyca appeared. "Good luck." She held him and looked dubiously at his horses.

"Don't worry. I shall win," he assured her.

The people in the stadium rose like waves of agitated water. Ioannis stood beside his non-committal driver. He looked straight ahead, eyes on Ballias, who had reached the starting line.

The race began. Blue earth flew into Ioannis's face. A swell of sound, as though the water was now wind-whipped, rose and fell.

The racers beside Ioannis dropped back. His horses appeared to hum as they flew. Three circuits were completed. Ioannis still saw Ballias ahead, poised confidently beside his driver.

Then his vehicle began to veer. On two wheels it sped to one side, then lurched to the other. His horses collided in confusion and as Ioannis sped past, the vehicle collapsed. Ioannis had won.

The crowd, jubilant that a contender had succeeded at last, rose as one to applaud.

Ballias did not stir where he had fallen. Alyca ran to him.

"I curse Amphion. He will die at Ioannis's hands," he declared, knowing the vehicle had been weakened and suspecting foul play by Amphion.

He rasped as he held Alyca's hand. The crowd was silent now. Ballias died.

Public opinion swung suddenly against Ioannis. People had been happy to see Ballias defeated but were not prepared for his death. Now they were leaderless.

Alyca accompanied Ioannis back to the city. She was numb. Her feelings for Ioannis were superseded by grief.

"How did you do it?" she asked.

"I bribed your father's driver to destabilise the wheels," said Ioannis.

Alyca recoiled. She had detested her father's treatment of the contenders but he had protected and cared for her since her mother's early death.

Distraught, she ran into the flowers among the woman-shaped rocks and wove wildly; a distracted figment of the unstable light, until Ioannis could no longer distinguish her from the air.

A hostile crowd advanced from the city. Amphion ran before them, urging Ioannis to leave with him. They hurried to where Alyca was again visible, kneeling, her head clutched in her hands. Summoning a grazing horse, the fugitives mounted. Amphion uttered an inaudible command and the horse sped to the east.

The city diminished; a crystalline illusion swallowed by light. The flowers grew sparse. The blue earth appeared to expand, speeding beneath the silent hooves of the horse. The sky turned from rose to pale green flecked with burnt umber. The ground rose to meet it with strangely symmetrical hills.

They passed a herd of white horses that wheeled and scattered to the west. Alyca clung to Ioannis, leaning low on the horse's neck. Amphion held onto her, gloating on Ioannis's promise that he could lie with her. And when they returned to the city and the people's wrath had cooled, he would also be allotted half the planet. In his blinkered greed, he believed Ioannis would honour his word.

Having glided down a steep hill, the horse, without bidding, halted. They dismounted. The creature had chosen well. The ground here was soft and flat, and sinking to his knees, the horse instantly slept.

Alyca too stretched and dozed. Amphion took Ioannis aside. "Am I to have her tonight?" he asked.

Ioannis hesitated. "I must look for lichen," he said and walked away.

The land felt alien, uninhabited. He saw a glint of russet and moved towards it through the glittering blue earth.

Alyca woke. She fought to clarify her conflicting feelings. How could she remain with Ioannis? She could not forgive, yet she could not leave.

Amphion seemed restless, pacing a few yards, then returning and looking askance at Alyca. She began to feel uneasy. He sat at last and reached a dark arm to her hair. She flinched. He persisted. His breathing quickened. He took her roughly, pushing her hard against the ground as the horse murmured and stirred.

Ioannis appeared with an armful of tired vegetation. Alyca stumbled towards him, indicating in distress Amphion, who stood at a distance with his back to them.

Understanding her, Ioannis plunged towards him. The two men locked in combat.

The horse woke and, assessing the situation, sped to the two men, extracting Amphion skilfully with one sharp hoof and then in a deft movement, rolling on him. Ioannis knelt, felt his pulse. He was dead.

Ioannis was entitled to Alyca and to govern Procyon. But no longer politically motivated, he chose only Alyca. With the miraculous white horse they departed, skimming the low blue hills and rose, although wingless, until - buoyant on the limpid air - they were borne into infinity.

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~~~~~~~~~~

The Catalyst

Cephalos resisted the temptation of Eos - the dawn - so in retaliation, she cast doubt on the fidelity of Procris, his wife. She appeared to be right, so Cephalos succumbed to Eos. Later, when hunting, he accidentally shot his wife, believing her to be a wild animal.

~~~~~~~~~~

The people on the boats silently succumb to the hollow slap of oars in deep water. The island that had fallen from above into the underground lake of Melissani, persists with incongruous growth. A ragged piece of sky hangs in the hole left by its collapse.

For the first time that day Lise is silent; uneasily beset by the echoes of the lake, subdued by the impassive boatman and alarmed at the water's depth.

Jules watches her face, and with sullen satisfaction, sees the fear that has frozen her unmitigated malcontent. He looks up to the area of blue where the sun-soaked life of Cephalonia persists; easy with the influx of tourism in towns rebuilt since the earthquake of 1953 with money brought back from abroad.

Briefly, Jules sees a young woman, watching them from the sunlit gap above the lake. Wryly she smiles, then is absorbed by air.

Lise is silent as they drive back to Skala; her eyes unseeing as they slip through unruly rock speared with cypress.

She declares, "You have never tried to better yourself. You have deliberately destroyed your chances. I'm surprised you managed to bring me this far."

Her complaints about his low salary as a salesman with few clients, flow freely now. And from his lack of ambition, according to her, stems their inability to communicate, to entertain people of consequence, to plan for an early retirement in the sun.

She has red hair today, which frames her fury like leaping flame. She changes its colour according to impulse, as she darts through diversions, believing that the unlocking of wealth will ease the tedium to which by nature she is condemned.

Jules, darkly immaculate, yet careless of career and social standing, stoically bears the brunt of the clipped complaints, but looks with longing at the calm of the crystalline Ionian, lapping the curve of Myrtos beach below.

The purity and peace shimmers; eternal, while witnessing the passing of people who glimpse the gently eroded grandeur and depart.

Then, in the aquamarine, the Assos peninsula stands unsullied; symbol of the unattainable.

The courier is telling them of Cephalos, after whom the island is named. "In one myth, he rejected the love of the goddess Hera and in another, the seduction of Eos - the dawn - who to be avenged, cast doubt on the fidelity of Procris, his wife. Eos said she would betray him if sufficiently tempted by the wealth of another man.

"Cephalos, in disguise, found this to be so and when he revealed his true identity, she went into exile. Cephalos, meanwhile, had succumbed to Eos. Procris returned and followed him at the hunt. Cephalos, seeing a bush disturbed, presumably by an animal, shot at it and killed his wife. Haunted by her and grief stricken, Cephalos went into exile and was given the island of Cephalonia in recognition of his help in wars against the Teleboans and Taphians. But he was haunted by Procis's ghost and leapt from Cape Leucas to his death."

Lise listens; on her face, a fleeting fear, as though prompted by premonition.

Next day at dawn, Jules wakes to the slap of a wind-worried sea. He leaves Lise, her face fraught with fine lines, even in sleep, to walk into the unseasonable wildness of the bruised beach.

Initially, the woman who approaches from the strengthening sun, seems a figment of its light, tentatively touching the sand, suffused with the pale potential of the day.

She gains ground, as though moved by mystic means and is laughing, her fair hair flowing around wryly dancing eyes. She wears a rose pareo that the wind unwinds. She extends a supple hand. She is the woman he saw looking down onto the Melissani lake. Impulsively he grasps the proffered hand. He holds the essence of the early morning sun.

Like light, she enters him; expunging his cold core of rejection, seeking his retreating soul, severing the filaments of fear.

He feels the lick of wind-flecked foam, the harshness of shingle and sand. He bathes in the woman's rose light. And as dawn turns to day, he feels her slipping and contracting, until she is a small sensation in his hungry hand. And then no more.

All day, as Lise berates him in the sun and shade, Jules seeks the rose-limbed woman. He lies sleepless in the night which is windless now and waiting; its long breath in suspense. Towards dawn it is released and a light wind ferrets inland.

Involuntarily, Jules leaves the bed and walks towards the sea. Lazily it laps in the pearly light. And again, from where the sun will rise, moves the rose-limbed woman of the dawn.

Now she stops before the man and, smiling, tells him in a low voice, "Enjoy me. Lise will betray you with a man of means."

Jules looks into her unreadable eyes. " I don't believe that," he says. Despite Lise's discontent, Jules retains an illogical faith in his wife.

"Come!" the rose woman reaches. This time Jules declines, fearing now submergence in a force that would sever him irrevocably from Lise.

The woman, suffused once more with the strengthening rays of the sun, laughs; a sound caught and carried to the sea's soft edge. She shimmers, sighs and spirals into air.

Jules returns to find Lise has already left. He walks back down the main village street, and halts, disbelieving, as he sees her seated with a dark-jowled man at the back of a breakfast bar. She is laughing - a transformation; eagerly amiable. From her fingers drifts a fine gold chain hung with a fire-flecked stone.

The man, a Greek, whose casual clothes are meticulously cut, raises a hand to Lise's face, tracing the contours of her gratitude.

Later, Lise joins Jules in their usual place by the sea. All day she does not utter one word of criticism or complaint.

Jules withdraws, needing to challenge her, needing to know. Where is the chain? What are the implications of this gift? Who is the man? Yet he is mute.

Sunset. Soon sunrise. Anticipation. The realisation that now he is justified in seeking the rose-limbed woman. Is she a prophet? Where is she staying? Slowly, Jules grasps she is a composite of present and past; man and mythology. Perhaps she exists solely in his mind.

The night is interminable. At dawn Jules rises and softly leaves the room. The pearl grey air is cold yet shot with intimations of ensuing warmth. The sea is plucked, breaking restlessly at random.

Jules hurries to the beach. But the woman does not walk today from the first rays of sun.

He panics. He scours the shingle. Then, as he turns to seek her in the fields beyond, she is suddenly before him, as though created from cold air.

She is laughing, her pareo loose, then crumpled on the ground. She places soft yet fleshless hands on his shoulders; the gentle pressure easing him into the sand.

He is suffused with rose red warmth, then the intensity of a fire whose origin is boundless, enveloping; a consummation.

He opens his eyes to find beside him a roseate spread of warming sand. It glimmers and slowly fades as the sun gains strength.

"Bastard!" The words are hurled at him by Lise beneath the broad-leaved tree at lunch. Jules, believing her berating to have begun again, flinches but does not retaliate.

"Who is she?" Lise is shrill. Jules starts. How could she know?

"That couple from next door saw you on the beach with her this morning. I was asking if they'd seen you around - they always take an early morning walk."

Jules wants to demand, "And who is the man you see at breakfast? Where is the gold chain; the fire stone?"

The words burn but some force freezes them within. He sits in silence. Lise rises and walks, enraged, towards the village. Jules lingers, then, numb and motivated by a strange and increasingly ominous impulse, he too gets up and returns to pack.

He goes home alone, reaching the suburbs of Paris as though borne through dream; his actions forged by fate. Still he looks for the rose-limbed woman. On wasteland littered with sad heaps of sand, he expects to see the fluttering pareo. In narrow streets between the faceless flats, he waits for her hands to draw him beyond time.

Lise is lost to him. Her face, tautly contentious, forms in the autumn air but is rapidly replaced by that of the rose-limbed woman; now smilingly iridescent; the essence of dawn - potential spirit merged with man.

In his isolation Jules wanders in the early hours, waiting for first light to reveal the blatant blocks of the outer city. Slowly his expectation falters, leaving in its wake, the creeping cold.

He starts talking to himself between bleak walls. The words are incoherent, already comprising a language of loss. Neighbours look askance, then decide he is harmless. He rejects their offers of help.

On Cephalonia Lise meets Yiorgos at dusk. He says, "After the earthquake many of us went abroad - to America, Australia. We made good money which we sent back to rebuild the island. I have two houses - one in Argostoli, the other in Lixouri."

He produces a turquoise bracelet and, with a slow smile, fastens it on Lise's wrist. She allows him to take her to a friend's flat where his surplus flesh encloses her like a confirmation of comforts to come.

One morning, as they breakfast, a small woman, darkly neat and rigidly resolved, comes crisply up to them and brings down a heavily jewelled hand on the table. The ensuing exchange is in rapid Greek. Yiorgos stands, shrugs and says wryly to Lise, "Meet my wife."

Drawn and uncommunicative, Lise returns to Paris. The limits of her life, that had been briefly stretched, contract once more.

She lives with her sister in St.Cloud, wanting to see Jules, regretting her castigations, needing forgiveness. But she is unable to go home. She envisages the rose-limbed woman; sensual, compassionate, accessibly addictive.

One night Lise returns at last to the street where she had lived. Four times she passes the impersonal apartment block but recoils from entering and offering Jules her humility.

She turns into a deserted side street. An autumn mist drifts. The lights are rudimentary, the shadows deceptive. One materialises ahead; the black bulk of a man with head bowed. He talks incessantly, the words incomprehensible. Jules. Lise slows. She senses another shadow beside him. Surely he is with the woman. The former fury, fired now with jealous pain, impels her to lunge at Jules. He staggers, then deals a self defensive blow. Lise falls with a moan. Jules bends and recognises the woman whose head wound has rendered her unconscious.

Lise dies the next day. Jules, numbed and motionless now in the apartment, sees the rose-limbed woman recede into a dim dimension; a cruel catalyst born of his despair.

He climbs at last into the lonely bed. As he restlessly turns, he feels Lise's brittle fingers working on his arm and is aware of her acrid breath. Horrified, he recoils. But the fingering persists, growing stronger, the nails penetrating his flesh until he protests in pain. Petulantly, her presence withdraws.

The next night she presses frozen lips to his. He tries to pull away. She grasps him with arms like ice and draws him against her stiffened flesh. He is assailed by decomposition.

With difficulty he fights free. He runs from the room into the fog-filled night. He heads for the river as the sour earth falls about his body. Fragments of Lise's flesh float before his eyes.

He reaches the bridge. He does not see the water but brushes at the flesh fragments which multiply, accompanied now by a disembodied moan. Is it his, or that of Lise's traumatised soul?

Jules jumps. The water washes and drags. Insistent, oily, yet cleansing the dead flesh, the martyred moan. But as he sinks for the third time, the fog clears, the water is shot with rose and dawn delivers the pale warmth of a winter sun.

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~~~~~~~~~~

The Second Season

When Persephone was snatched by Hades and taken to the Underworld, Demeter, her mother, responsible for the world's fertility, demanded to see her daughter. Would she then prevent the world withering or was that up to man?

~~~~~~~~~~

The head of Persephone shone in the Macedonian sun. Soon another, identical head, lay beside it. Then, to the incredulity of the archaeologists, eighteen more were unearthed. She lay multiple; evidence of a lost cult; an invocation to Spring?

Through the night, her many faces rested, implacable, silvered by the moon. Secrets were sealed behind her eyes. The years had passed in dream, man enacting his fulminating follies until finally the land had retaliated and Poseidon, a sprawling opportunist, had risen.

It may have been the white play of moonlight, but Persephone appeared to smile with increasing conviction, even pleasure at being released from the Underworld into the twenty second century of man.

The next day when the archaeologists returned, only nineteen heads could be accounted for.

Persephone, apparently flesh, yet her veins filled with ichor, the life blood of the gods, was borne back to her native Greece; shocked by the shorn hills, the lack of trees, the exhaustion of the undulating land.

A heavy pall of pollution obliterated Athens. The Acropolis stood bravely, yet unbreathing. Then Persephone perceived, on Boreas, the north wind, intimations of her mother Demeter, distantly striving to sustain fertility.

Persephone willed a passage across Poseidon. She was a memory, a figment of man's conjecture, breathed onto the air he had destroyed. She passed above the Alps; their perpetual snows thrusting through cloud vapour, while distant paths wound like bright ribbons through precipitous valleys. And then the patchwork fields of France.

She crossed the Channel and a sallow sun penetrated cloud to fall on a land grown pale and denuded of its ancient trees. Seeds had been unable to germinate or had died in fire or drought. The ash tree had been carried north by river and wind, the small-leaved lime also flourished. Deciduous oaks and beeches, that had already declined from forest to copse, had vanished. Willows and alders were sickly and scarce.

Instead, Persephone saw scrub high on the Sussex Downs. Planes trees were ranged with sycamores, poplars, pines and rowans. Then, as though she had not left her native land, she glimpsed in ordered plantations, the silver-leaved olive and the cork oak.

The sun rose strongly. She was elated yet apprehensive. The time and place were disorientating. Man's warming of the atmosphere had brought wetter weather to the north and west. The south east languished, adapting to the demands of the Mediterranean, yet dying each day. The changes now were rapid. And along the east coast, Poseidon plunged, pillaged, devouring the shingle and low cliffs, relishing the loss of life, claiming at last, the land denied him in the lost era of the gods.

Demeter, responding to an inexplicable instinct, had already reached the Anglo-Saxon and Celtic lands. She would have relished the long fields, that, not long ago, had moved in whispering seas across East Anglia, interspersed with the lushness of trees, nurtured by countless waterways above and below ground.

But now she perceived the dryness of the seedlings and saw sadly rank river beds. Bleached reeds rasped dryly and the wild life, once rife, had succumbed to insecticides. Dawn had broken without the sound of birds with their melodious defence of territory.

Man had no such means at his disposal. She considered the philosophy of the Gnostics; that some perverted spirit had interceded to demolish good will. And when Prometheus gave fire to man, he handed him his destiny. For by fire, man threatened self-destruction and if he should survive, it would ironically be the death of the Sun's far fire that would end existence.

She thought of Persephone. As climate changed, Persephone had ceased to surface from the Underworld. The sense of regeneration was replaced by a perverse impetus of growth at unprecedented times.

The eerie air, permeated by debilitating chemicals, oppressed her. She walked among the blue-grey flints that littered the dry soil. Once, farmers believed they grew as they lay in the fields. Some were huge, like ancient bones, or shaped, as though for tools, by an unseen hand. They lay around the olives and under the planes; obdurate elements that would exist beyond the fall of man.

Demeter shrank from the Underworld. She felt its pulse beneath her feet; the workings of the subsoil and its creatures. And, more deeply, sinister stirrings. Even violent vibrations were intermittently perceptible.

Demeter envisaged Hades; the slothful River Styx, three-headed Cerberus. She recalled Persephone's account of the Asphodel Fields, the limbo where many would eternally remain. She visualised the Judging and those condemned to the horrors of Hades. And on pondering the Elysian Fields, she was moved by memories of old Greece; green with vegetation inhabited by gods. The lushness had gone. Now the Earth was marred by harshness. The old harmonies had died.

The stirring beneath Demeter's feet increased; a restlessness difficult to define and which filled her with foreboding.

There was no sign of man in the countryside, although the small plantations seemed cared for. Modest copses remained, but little wild life was perceptible. The trees stirred petulantly in the wind.

Demeter had little indication of encroaching Spring. Although in sluggish growth, the land seemed in shock. She sank wearily beneath a spreading plane and, drifting into desultory sleep, was beset by despair. She relived the day when Persephone was raped and abducted by Hades.

Demeter wanders for nine days. Her hair is lank, her skin hardens, ages. She grows crooked and creased. She is gnawed by physical pain. She is obsessed by the image of Perspehone enslaved in darkness. Her bitterness stultifies the land. People starve.

Zeus sees, and pitying man, sends the goddess Iris to Demeter. She folds golden wings and pleads,"Demeter, please relent. Save man from starvation."

"Not until I see Persephone," replies Demeter. A succession of gods follow Iris, begging her to reconsider.

"No." Demeter is adamant.

She woke. Shivered. The earth trembled. The enslaved souls of man might be moving beneath her. She walked wearily into another copse of withered trees. She perceived fresh sounds. Moving towards them, she found in a clearing, ten people seated silently in a circle. In the centre was a woman, her black hair elaborately arranged and intricately strung with leaves. She wore vivid layers of cloth, sewn with shining objects and a striped scarf wound and trailed around her. She sat cross-legged, motionless, as the people about her, similarly clad, except for the strange structure of leaves in the hair, began to sway slowly, inclining their heads to her. Demeter knew instantly she was, in their eyes, a goddess.

The woman focused, saw her. Her subjects sensed her response, ceased swaying and followed her gaze.

"Who are you?" the woman asked. Demeter sensed her mortal fear. She told them and, as she expected, their fear fled and they laughed.

"You've escaped from the hidden city, haven't you?" said the woman. Demeter knew then what she had felt beneath her feet. She smiled, shook her head. "I come from Greece. One day I may nourish the land again."

The woman clearly considered her deranged. "I'm Gaia. I am the land. It will be saved without your help," she retorted. Now Demeter regarded a demented woman. Gaia, the Earth Goddess, had been Demeter's grandmother. "Tell me about the hidden city. Who lives there?" she asked.

"How do you not know?" asked Gaia.

"I told you, I've come from Greece," said Demeter.

The company, ranged in their coloured cloths like woodland gipsies, stared at her suspiciously, but were willing to enlighten her about the hidden city.

"It's where the technocrats and the lemmings went when the going got hard up here," said Gaia.

"Technocrats?" Demeter queried.

"The people who relied on technology and ruined the planet," said a young man whose fair hair fell about his face like the tendrils of a tender plant.

"We stayed to restore the Earth," said Gaia.

"Are there others like you who tend the trees?" asked Demeter.

"Yes, we live in the woods. There's enough food for us if we work hard. We grow herbs and berry-bearing trees as well as olives."

"How do those in the hidden city live?" asked Demeter.

"They have their chemistry. Their diet is entirely man-made. They no longer need nature," said the young man.

Demeter knew she had come in search of Persephone, but why, after so long? Their annual encounter belonged to ancient myth.

"Why are you really here?" Gaia asked.

"I'm looking for my daughter."

Gaia laughed. She had been a classics scholar. "Now I know you are mad," she said.

"How can you call yourself Gaia?" said Demeter calmly. How this had happened clearly escaped the young woman. Shadows, like faint recollections of a former life, moved across her face and, momentarily, she seemed baffled. But she regained composure and slipped again into the role she had created. It rendered the dying Earth bearable. "You may stay with us if you like," she said to Demeter, sensing in spite of herself, a like spirit, compelled to make sense of calamity.

Persephone moved lightly across the harrowed land. Beneath her feet fresh grass sprang. The crocus, once venerated in the Cyclades, unfurled in her path. And like a balm, a light spring rain began to fall. Parched olive, plane, lentisk and myrtle lifted leaves to receive rejuvenation.

In the wood Demeter, dressed in the cloth of the gipsies, raised her face to the freshness. Memory moved her. The lyrical renewal of life had come with Persephone's appearance in Spring. She did not dare believe her daughter would come again. Yet she felt her presence.

"What is it?" Gaia noted Demeter's attitude of listening, as though straining to detect some significant sound. Demeter did not increase her lack of credibility by explanation. She merely smiled, her face transfigured.

Persephone perceived the unnatural summer possessing the land. It was a season beyond the renewal she had engendered; a protracted dehydration denying life.

Sadly she passed through the dry groves, stirring like brittle bones. She heard the hollow wind; the sound of Harpies drained of predatory desire. She felt the earth stir beneath her feet.

As dusk deepened, she dimly perceived an opening in the ground. It lay beneath a broad span of planes, sloping steeply into a well of blackness. A memory perturbed her. Some dark event had marred her past; an oppressive obligation, bearing with it brief hope.

She was startled by the man who appeared at the mouth of the passage. He was dressed in a loose suit of a smooth grey substance. His skin was white, drained by lack of daylight. He paused on seeing Persephone. She froze, possessed by the sensation of someone long ago, seizing and abducting her.

She was unable to run, to prevent a repetition of the past. The man said, "Do you come from the woods?" He believed her to be one of the gipsies.

"Yes," said Persephone, feeling again the fragile deprivation of the copses. The man wondered why she should venture so close to the city. The gipsies despised the life of the technocrats. Looking into her unworldly eyes, he thought then she was somewhat retarded. He seized her. Persephone cried out, overwhelmed by the dark repetition of the deed.

The man carried her down an airless passage. His clothing was cold, untouched by the renegade sun. They reached a city of translucent domes, shot with colour shed by artificial lights in the reinforced roof of the excavated space. Inside some domes, hybrid plants, alien to Persephone, reached for the man-made light. Other domes contained people, clad coldly like her captor and intermittently talking; suspended in lethargic limbo. Where before had she encountered such a pause between past and future?

"Why are they waiting?" she asked the man.

"To be housed. The committee will decide who will go where," he replied. Dim ghosts plucked the perimeters of her mind. Then she saw the people waiting in the Asphodel Fields, destined for Elysium or Hades, according to how they had lived. And, reconstituted from drifting shadow that spread with dark dominance, she saw the King of the Underworld.

The man restrained her as she turned to flee. He confronted her, tracing with white fingers whose touch had a fungal feel, the sun-warmed contours of her face.

"You're not a gipsy are you?" he said. "Who are you?" As he loosened his hold, she stood apart and gained stature. She expanded, her flesh golden in the gloom, her face composed.

"Persephone."

Somewhere, in an unreal past, the name had significance. But too much had intervened. The ancients had succumbed to the technocrats. Myth had moved aside; disregarded or feeding fantasies.

The man grasped her arm once more. They passed the people in the domes, sealed like sad automatons with blind eyes.

"How long will they wait?" asked Persephone.

"Sometimes years," said the man.

Persephone saw again the mist-filled meadow of Purgatory, where people lost their past and felt the wind of the gods whistle through a void.

Later they would be judged by Minos, Rhadamanthus and Aeacus and taken down one of three paths. Many returned to the Plain of Asphodel, a few would enter the Elysian Fields, the rest would endure the torture of Tartarus.

"Why did you abandon the Earth?" asked Persephone.

"It had nothing left to give," replied the man uneasily.

The sterility of the man-made cave closed about Persephone like a harbinger of death. Now she clearly recalled the seizure from the Sicilian field by Hades and the violation in dank semi-darkness.

The Styx crawls, a sullen ribbon of river and from its dimmest reach looms Charon the ferryman. He ducks deeply to Hades, who, exempt from the toll, steps with Persephone into the rotting boat.

Images of Spring, abandoned with the world above, interact with the dry rustle of demise and the milling of those who wait and on the far bank, to prevent them leaving, stands the three-headed dog, Cerberus.

"What's your name?" Persephone apprehensively asked the man.

"Hal."

The man's eyes lacked humanity. They were not the imperious eyes of Hades, but they had relinquished life. Warmth was replaced by the cold need to manufacture the means of survival.

Yet he took her arm without pressure. A flicker of feeling lit his face. "Come."

They walked on. The domes flattened into long units. Bizarre plants sprawled and reached for the artificial light. Some bore unwholesome blooms.

"Oil." said Hal brusquely.

"You have all the sustenance you need?" asked Persephone.

"Yes, we're entirely self sufficient." But some element was lacking. Dimly Persephone recalled the reverence for beauty and an aptitude for art. She looked at the plastic panelling of the roof, studded with perpetual lights. As they moved on, the air grew cold. The lights dimmed. In two long rows people sat at squat computers, their screens flickering with concepts and colours; a kaleidoscope of ingenuity and change.

"Paradise," said Hal.

"Are they alive?" Perspehone recalled the languid Elysian Fields.

"Of course. We have eradicated death. Citizens are frozen when they draw their last breath and re-awakened later. How else can man learn from his mistakes?"

Perspehone knew man would never learn from the history he had made. Yet she thought it ironic that he should have achieved, after so long, the immortality he had always desired and which she took for granted. She pitied the men and women absorbed at their screens and who would never die. For humanity lacked the other gifts of the gods that rendered eternal life tolerable.

The regimented rows ended, the room narrowed. Hal led Persephone into a dim ante-chamber, with pale cushions of some plastic substance, piled high. Abruptly he pushed her down among them and she felt the lowering of his hot weight. Summoning her powers, she withdrew her true identity, so the woman he savaged was a godlessly sensuous archetype; adapting, initiating, capable of boundless response.

Hal wearied, withdrew, was incredulous at her capacity, then apprehensive, suspecting some inhuman trickery. Persephone smiled, untouched, freshly feminine, engendering that timeless suspicion of women that had rendered men brutish.

Beneath the olives Demeter stirred in her sleep. Some brash act had been perpetrated on someone close to her. Persephone. Demeter sat up, starkly aware now of the movements under the earth.

Gaia stirred too, rolled over and woke. She reached a strong hand to touch Demeter's arm. Demeter recoiled. Gaia moved closer, placed her arm around Demeter's shoulder and impulsively kissed the immortal skin of her face. Then she sought her lips. The substance she found within Demeter's mouth, had the unearthly smoothness of ambrosia. It ran into her, warmly penetrating, promising; an inducement she could not, however, pursue.

Demeter had reduced herself to a shadow. Her woman's form slipped along the ground; enticing and evading, a foil to the seeping moon silver.

"Demeter, I love you!" Gaia pleaded and cast helplessly about. Demeter's shadow slithered silently away from the copse. She heard the subterranean stirrings more clearly now she was close to the ground. Instinctively, she reached the entrance to the city and with intimations of her daughter growing stronger, she resumed her human shape. She looked with dismay at the domes and their hopeless occupants. She reached the room of leisure. No one noticed her. She entered the dim ante-chamber. It was empty.

Hal led Persephone along a passage to another open area cut from rock and sub soil and filled, once more, with pallid people. They peered at torn books, drew thread through coarse cloth and strove to coax music from unfamiliar instruments.

"This is Hell," said Hal. Persephone was baffled. These people were pursuing activities that once ranked high in the life of man. The gods had given him such gifts. And while he had fought and forgotten he was not immortal, squandering his brief span in pettiness and greed, he had simultaneously nurtured the arts.

"But this is good," said Persephone.

Hal's suspicion that she was some kind of changeling from beyond the sun-blighted present, grew. How could the old tedium that once touched every aspect of man's life, compare with the alacrity of technology?

Persephone helped a woman close a simple seam, the slim fingers of the goddess moving with dexterity. But the people here were too dulled by fruitless endeavour to take much heed. Those striving to read and relate pages of their books to Hal, had been treated with memory lapsers, so letters had no significance. Others instructed to paint a canvas were given paint that faded when in contact with the surface, so their task was unending.

Persephone and Hal passed on to reach a series of rooms with more pale cushions and transparent units on which stood machines that silently winked as though conveying some significant secret.

"Sit." Hal indicated a white cushion in one corner. Consumed with a mortal exhaustion, Persephone complied. She considered Hal closely, her unearthly perception penetrating his bravado. Beneath the brusque mastery, she saw the fear with which man perverted each coherent course he proposed. She saw fear above all in the eyes that had relinquished green growth for technology. The means man had devised to serve him, had rendered him a slave.

Demeter heard the woman shouting. The sound reverberated eerily through the city. Gaia dispensed with taboo. She ran, distracted, through the domes, rousing their lethargic occupants. The people at the processors stirred uneasily. Some turned. Most pursued, unheeding, their imposed leisure.

When Gaia reached the ante-chamber, Demeter had vanished. Yet her presence remained in the clinging damp of the walls, the impacted rock of the floor. She moved too in the subsequent passage shining ahead to where Persephone and Hal had begun to establish an understanding.

Hal was apprehensive, yet relieved to confide at last the pressures of his position. He talked of how pollution had seeped into the lifeblood of humanity until discomfort - and death - had driven him below ground.

"There are other cities. We communicate through our technology," he said.

"And what will become of Earth?" asked Persephone. "The gipsies still have faith. They haven't abandoned her. You should have stayed to rectify the negligence."

"It's too late. We cared more for a money-based economy at the expense of survival," he said.

Persephone perceived a trace of her mother, rapidly absorbed in the dankness. She slept.

She woke to find Hal leaning over her. He was curious, beginning at last to accept her allegiance to some other world. His consciousness expanded into the past, absorbing folly and endeavour. He experienced the future; contracting, fearful. He had intimations of how to convey his insight to the people. He fell on Persephone, as though to draw from her flesh, the strength to act.

She withdrew her essence, while her body countered his. He believed she was magically motivating him and as he moved more deeply, he encompassed the pathetic and profound, the terror and the benevolence of time.

He withdrew. She had been silent. But her eyes were eloquent.

Demeter turned to the left, hurrying along a wide passage, ablaze with light. Gaia saw her turn and followed, fevered and resolved. Demeter could no longer sense Persephone. She contemplated turning back but was compelled to continue.

The passage reached an impasse. There were signs that it would be extended but for some reason building had stopped. Materials lay heaped and abandoned on the damp earth. There was an insidious odour of decay. She heard Gaia closing. She turned her back to the wall and saw the gipsy running; arms wide and high. She reached Demeter. Her face, roughened by the sun, tautened hysterically. She grasped Demeter's shoulders. Her mouth closed on the light lips of the goddess.

"You must return. I can never be yours," said Demeter. Gaia, consumed by a lust that had been suppressed by the need to lead and survive despoilment, tightened her calloused hands around Demeter's neck, intending only to intimidate her. But the earthly shell of the goddess broke. She exhaled the fragile breath, sustaining her while in the world, and fell like a broken doll. Beyond this shell she would survive, although she would not walk again on Earth.

But Gaia did not know this. She recoiled from the flesh that now darkly disintegrated. She stumbled back, anxious to regain the dying Earth. But she was drawn to the ante-chamber. There, Persephone and Hal were seated in silent communication. They looked up as she entered. No one spoke.

Then, "She's dead," Gaia said. Persephone rose, knowing instinctively Demeter's outer self had been destroyed by an earthly lack of constraint. She knew too that the land she and her mother had watched over, was also about to die. The earthly death of Demeter was symbolic of the planet's demise. She would not walk the land again as a woman. How could the Earth survive?

Persephone witnesses briefly, with horror and hope, the ancient act of sacrifice; a king killed to restore fertility, as Spring approaches.

She gazed at Hal until he was immobilised, sitting upright still but unable to move. He resembled one of the technological components he had helped devise; now vacant and invalid.

Gaia knew what was required. Now she released her loathing of Hal's denial of life, advancing on him with hands primed for mutilation.

"We must take him above," said Persephone. Beneath her silent influence Hal rose and walked stiffly before them along the passage, past the paradise of automated leisure, the baffled creators, the pallid people trapped in limbo.

They climbed the way towards stars, unnaturally bright in the blackness. The night held a heavy breath. The shapes of trees expanded as though grotesquely turned by the weight of darkness, into parodies.

They walked to the top of a hill. They glimpsed the flat fretwork of fields, once large, now reduced to the modest proportions of the Mediterranean.

Persephone panicked. Without Demeter, how could she cope? Persephone was a visitor to the land. Although Demeter had imposed the symbolic death of Winter, when Persephone was released for part of the year from the Underworld, she became custodian of the land's fertility. But now the Earth was dying. Demeter, influencing the tentative Spring growth, harvesting invisibly among the men and spreading her fructifying shadow over the newly-tilled land, would come no more.

"Here!" Persephone turned to Gaia and at her words Hal paused. He turned to face them; an automaton with blind eyes.

"Die. Now!" Persephone softly commanded. Gaia watched, aghast, as Hal was reduced, cell by cell, his face falling, streaked by the moon's cold light, the disintegration rapid and uncanny. His unseeing eyes flickered as they closed. His flesh, white from life below ground, puckered and peeled to reveal the pulsing of internal organs; the raw red essence of life that persisted despite his denial of humanity.

They merged, as his cry of anguish echoed over the conspiratorial groves. Then every vestige of him vanished as though plucked clean by scavengers.

Gaia watched the death of technology without the relish she had anticipated. She felt sickened and infinitely sad - as dismayed by her ungovernable lust for Demeter as by the cold alternative of the city.

Would the land be saved? Could a primitive sacrifice performed through panic have relevance in the twenty second century?

"We must bring up the others," said Persephone. She returned with Gaia to the city. The people in limbo readily rallied, relieved their wait was over. Those striving to create in ways alien and locked in time, also came without query. But the people in the soulless "paradise" of diversion, recoiled; distressed and unable to comprehend. Finally, as one relented, drawn by the entreating of Persephone, the others slowly followed. The screens flickered and died.

The people glimpsed the uncertainty of the dark exit in the over-heated night. As day dawned, the fearful were beset by bleak memories of want, waste and annihilating war. They looked anxiously to Gaia, who seemed now a green and russet aspect of the earth and Persephone, serenely pale and soon destined to return to Hades. No one dared ask what became of Hal. But the instinctive knowledge of some sacrifice; inevitable and performed by immortal means, possessed them.

Gaia led them to the gipsies, who initially rose, alarmed and ready for confrontation. Gaia motioned them to calm. They saw contrition in the people's eyes.

As summer passed and the people felt their way back to a respect for the land, Persephone prepared to return to the Underworld. She mourned Demeter. Now man must take responsibility for the land. This would be his second season; an opportunity to rectify his negligence. And Persephone would return each Spring; a confirmation of renewal. Would she find a land steeped again in life, or a man-made waste, hurtling prematurely to extinction?

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The Ghost Gift

The wail wandered like the soul of a sailor stolen by a siren.

"How appropriate," thought Bjorn, considering Symi, the island near Rhodes where he walked in painful reassessment of the recent past.

Here seafarers knew the implications of the mermaid's song, as they broached the waves in the skaphes, once the fastest ship in the world. This was the island where, at the Panormitis Monastery, with its miraculous connotations, model ships and gifts from afar, Taxiarchis Michael, the island's patron saint and protector of sailors, held a soul in his hand.

In the mirror Bjorn looked impartially at his shifting soul. He saw a tall, blond yet small-spirited man, ill equipped for emotional crisis, mentally marooned in the high room of the house in Chorio; its neo-Classical elegance fully restored, like a consciously constructed defiance of the waterless land.

Ingrid had asked him to leave. To allow them both a breather. She had insisted on the abortion, suspecting a genetic disorder. The conception had been accidental.

The hollow within him deepened. Part of him had died. The wail wandered once more on the breathless night; rising, subsiding, then as chilling as a roused cat or abandoned child.

Sleepless, Bjorn climbed from his soupha - the raised wooden sleeping platform - and crossed to the window. He saw the moonlit town, climbing the steep-sided harbour; the houses, in principle, too urban and considered for this land, yet even in restoration, homogenous.

He went downstairs and stepped into the white of the moon. He climbed from the town into the arid hills. He looked at the full moon and, fleetingly, believed he saw Aigle; a luminous figment of mythology, in his path.

Symi was named after her. She had been a lover of Apollo and given birth to the Three Graces. She flickered, turned her implacable white face to the sea and was gone.

The wail wandered again; behind Bjorn, but moving to where Aigle had stood and where now glimmered a pool of cool light.

Aigle had exposed Asklepios, her son but he had survived, suckled by a goat, guarded by a sheep dog and found by a herdsman. Later Asklepios was renowned for raising the dead.

Bjorn took a side track, hoping to evade the wail that wavered now and died. Suddenly he heard heavy footsteps. He swung round to confront only white-lit vegetation. Then small hands clasped his chest, squeezing and digging, until, fighting for breath, he fell. A great weight oppressed him. He thrust at it, pummelling the air and rose unsteadily.

He ran, silvered, through the night dust, and, like Glaukos, an early inhabitant of Symi, who had eaten an immortal flower, reached a promontory and leapt into the sea. Glaukos became a sea god but Bjorn lay, worried by the waves with no will to swim. He moved enough not to drown, riding the tide, exhausted, until he washed up on a gleaming stretch of sand.

Ingrid sailed the woven waters of the lake. Her face; the rigid features of a stranger, moved with her. She held herself with regal restraint; a pale haired inheritor of the Nordic mist. She would continue to teach; haunted in class, by the essence of the growing child.

Now the mist moved, weaving with abstract impetus across the grey face of water, infant forms with bowed heads, small hands feeling for a way, the wispy limbs furling, then wayward and pulled irrevocably apart.

Gaining weight on the wet air, a sense of accusation oppressed her, until she steered the boat impulsively in evasive circles.

The feel of fragile fingers worked like spiders, exploring her wind-worn skin. Wildly she brushed at them, while longing to grasp their implication. They persisted, their urgency increasing as though weaving a web of intractable gossamer over her face. She no longer saw the water; the fine web lines wavered before her eyes. The boat slammed into the damp bank.

She made fast and stumbled out. The web broke with the sound of a child deprived which was lifted by the querulous wind and borne over the darkening lake.

Ingrid made her way through dull vegetation to the shack of the old woman who lived by the lake. She had never married and in the dark hut, with few amenities, distilled herbs and, some claimed, hot air, to appease and alarm. Still the old, fearful and incurable, consulted her.

Ingrid saw faint smoke, lifting to be lost in the grey air and knocked on the door. She heard a low acknowledgment. And as the woman cautiously lifted the latch and peered out, a potent mix of wood smoke, herbs and ingrained dirt, wafted from within.

She gestured Ingrid inside. The room closed around the young woman as she bent broad shoulders and a head of blond hair dishevelled by the fairy fingers.

As she sat on a low chair by a dim table strewn with herbs, the old woman said, "So you have killed your child."

Ingrid started. How did she know? "It was barely a child," she objected, unable to meet the woman's eyes that gazed greyly beyond life.

"But you are suffering," she insisted.

"Yes."

The old woman peered unpleasantly into Ingrid's face. "I see the utbard; lost, resentful, moving from mother to father, from this land to one where old ghosts who have suffered and survived, have returned. They are wise and will resolve this."

Ingrid knew of the utbard - the ghost of an unwanted child - that returned, invisible, yet whose spirit swelled or shrank to a curl of smoke in its sad search and claimed victims, even on its mother's death. It could only be rendered harmless if confronted by water or iron.

Aware of this, Ingrid pointed out, "I was on the water when it came."

"Ah yes. But to be subdued it must be completely submerged. The father will help." The old woman said no more.

"Thank you." Ingrid rose to go.

"All will be well," said the old woman finally, as Ingrid bent again to pass through the door.

Bjorn opened his eyes to a sheer wall of rock reaching to unbroken blue. He struggled to stand in the searing sun.

A hand grasped his elbow. He turned to see a dark young man with recognition in his eyes. "You are Bjorn?"

"Yes."

"I'm Asklepios. I understand."

"Understand what?"

"I was abandoned at birth. Now I can restore life."

Bjorn looked askance. He considered Symi's monkish implications and assumed the man to have succumbed to a belief in miracles. He pulled away. But could not leave. An aura beyond the brilliance of the sun surrounded the stranger.

Bjorn froze. The aborted child. The plaintive wails had gone. But the oppression remained. Bjorn was compelled to look into the man's eyes, where shadows stirred that might be water or the slow movement of memory. He wore the casual clothes of contemporary man, yet seemed unrelated to the present. He was composed; his flesh unearthly as he shimmered in the sun.

He released Bjorn, who, alarmed, passed his hand through the man's arm. It was visible, limp now at his side, yet it did not exist. Doubting his own existence and fearing he had drowned and entered some dimension of sunlit death, Bjorn walked quickly through the sand. But effortlessly the stranger was beside him, smiling with a presence that smelled now, of decay. His youth was suddenly incongruous, like a confidence trick; a cruel manifestation in the domain of death.

"Your woman will have a child," he promised, as Bjorn, breathless, began to climb the steep path. He could see the rock's rugged top but it grew no nearer.

The man climbed silently behind. Bjorn could not hear him breathing and his feet did not dislodge a single stone. Suddenly the sun dimmed. The sea surged; a white-backed beast released. A cold wind whirled with a malevolence that brought Bjorn to a halt.

Another presence enveloped them; awesome, unforgiving, assaulting Bjorn and the stranger with a sense of imminent annihilation.

" Zeus." The man dropped to his knees. Now Bjorn knew he was deranged. Yet it grew darker. The sea clawed the cliff. A low wind snatched the vegetation.

Ominous cloud gathered and blackened until it had no limit, no compassion. And from within, resounded thunder with the force of a primordial voice; a being beyond the machinations of man. A blue blaze of lightening lit rock and raging sea. Bjorn and the stranger shuddered, racked by the charge. They were consumed. No trace was left by the subsiding sea and the sky flecked now with blue.

Ingrid felt a fleeting shock. Her hand tightened on the tiller, then fell limply as she perceived some distant and disastrous event.

She drew into shore and shakily disembarked. Horrified, she halted, hearing the whimper of a child. She brushed her face, imagining the tiny hands of the utbard. But the influence this time was warm; drawing her to a dense bush of bracken.

Within, sprawled in a rough shawl, lay a baby. It stopped crying and, as Ingrid approached, opened wide blue eyes as though in recognition.

She took the child, knowing before the fruitless search for the mother, before the exhaustive inquiries to establish her eligibility to adopt, that the boy child, like a gift from the gods, would be hers.

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~~~~~~~~~~

The Tyranny

This is a tale prompted by the adventures of Zagreus, son of Zeus and Persephone. The Titans, Zeus's enemies, lured Zagreus away. He went through several transformations to evade them but was eventually captured and devoured by the Titans. Athene rescued Zagreus's heart and enclosed it in a gypsum figure into which she breathed life, so Zagreus was immortal.

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The woman is pliant. Baezok moves, an unremitting bulk in the black room. Brief moonlight spills onto his shivering flesh. He slows.

He rolls off the woman, who might be bloodless as she lies enveloped by the moon. "You've seen too many ghosts Pila," he says. She is silent, aware that this may be her sole opportunity to procreate. A few weeks later she tells Baezok she is pregnant.

The Somnoi sat in a circle, arms raised round the dead tree hung with the possessions of the murdered. Through the Somnoi's consciousness, suspended by vegetation drugs, filtered knowledge of the genocide. No one could recall why it had happened. But the belief that the ghosts of the millions who had died haunted the living, was sacrosanct.

Everyone saw them; some, more suggestible, encountered them constantly and an unfortunate few relived the last moments of those who had suffered most. These people were thought contagious and liable to pass their horrific insights through the generations. They were forbidden to have intercourse. But enforcing the ban was impossible.

Pila was one who too often entered the anguish of the dead. Her experiences included the agony of a mother who had seen her two children axed to death, and who had then been raped and left to die. And a man who had been swung for a hour and then dropped into a pit of burning bodies.

Three times a month Pila was compelled to undergo ritual cleansing with the Somnoi; a ceremony of trance with a form of exorcism. But still the ghosts came; parts of bodies, mutilated or marred, drifting through the night; hairless heads with mouths sealed open in soundless pain, broken arms and legs borne grotesquely on polluted air.

Pila did not disclose their persistence. She wanted to re-enter the society whose dread of the past prompted ruthless rejection of those consistently haunted. But she was betrayed by the fear in her face.

"Excellent!" Baezok clasped Pila to him as she confirmed her pregnancy. He was in charge of a shattered white city on the edge of the sea. He had no contact with the rest of the mountainous land, although envoys from there and further afield periodically arrived with bleak reports of a world struggling to subsist.

Baezok was less affected than most by the hauntings. He had little conscience. It was not his fault his predecessors had committed genocide. He was victim, not villain.

He had been a cloth merchant in the city, that in prosperous days had manufactured textiles to caress the flesh like a second skin. Now he commanded the women to make him an extravagant wardrobe. The robes fell in folds over his ample flesh onto which he forced the gleaming stones of stolen rings. He let his greying black hair grow to flow onto his shoulders and had complex leather sandals made to pamper his fat feet.

Then he viewed the remaining women of the town. Most were traumatised, even if they saw few ghosts. The men, their numbers decimated, were equally abject or numb with shock. Men and women moved like automatons through the essentials of survival. But none registered pleasure and only those constantly haunted, conveyed pain.

So Baezok took the women whose apathy confirmed infrequent hauntings. But their acquiescence offered no challenge. He was about to seek girls awaiting puberty, when he saw Pila in the covered market where barter had replaced the ravaged economics of the past. She was slight, solitary, her face inscrutable and pale as chalk. She was young, yet during the atrocities her fair hair had turned grey. She barely brushed it but let it straggle to flow over her shoulders and down her back. Yet she had a presence by which Baezok was enthralled.

He took her to the half ruined house he had furnished with other people's goods. There were deep chairs, carved tables, rich rugs.

Baezok was wary of the ghosts haunting Pila. They came in daylight, especially at noon, the time of no shadow. Pila's face darkened and her mouth opened in a cry she could not utter. Even in hot sun, she froze and her temperature dropped.

Baezok could only imagine the blighted beings she witnessed. He was convinced the creed of apparitions was generated by guilt, fostering ghosts within the psyches of the susceptible.

He knew better than to touch Pila when she crouched motionless in the street or in an echoing room of the decaying house.

If she failed to recover within the hour, he fetched a member of the Somnoi who muttered incantations and moved beseeching hands before her face.

She did not resist Baezok. Through her stultifying misery she wanted to give birth, to leave behind some being with the courage to confront and overcome the hauntings.

Baezok was in charge but even he feared the Somnoi. They had uncanny insight, had instigated moral laws, against which his practical domination was futile. Even in their apathy, the people would support them and if they found him with Pila, with whom intercourse was illegal, he would be forced to leave the city. So Pila was released to wander within its confines. No one knew whose child she carried.

The birth is imminent and Pila is surreptitiously ushered into Baezok's house. She lies in a darkened room, aware of indistinct figures gliding in slippered feet about her bed.

Baezok waits in an adjoining room. When Pila cries out he claps his hands to his ears. Pila strains to release the being bursting her flesh. After expulsion she is beset by calm but even as she lies exhausted, feels the spidery hands of babies who have died but crawl still among mortality, seeking maternal protection.

The small hands that subsequently grasp her are warm and wet. She opens her eyes to see a bewildered boy child on her breast.

Baezok enters the stifling room. Awkwardly he approaches the bed and peers at the mewling child. He will teach him to defy the Somnoi and succeed him as ruler of this lethargic land.

Pila lets him take the child. Briefly, he cradles him and as the woman closes her eyes, walks out of the room to descend a dim staircase. At the bottom is a dishevelled cellar stacked with goods snatched by Baezok from abandoned houses. A wet nurse sits on a simple bed. She takes the child and the crying stops.

When Baezok returns to the hot room, Pila has ceased breathing. At last the ghosts have claimed her.

Baezok named the boy Linus and watched him grow with eyes that widened in the dark. The child needed sunlight. Ensuring he was not overlooked, Baezok grew a small garden behind a shattered wall where weeds flourished with straggling flowers. Here he took the child to play.

Linus believed the nurse to be his mother and when not playing with other children's toys, he was taught by Baezok. With reading and writing came clear instruction in dominance and coercion, until Linus was convinced he had the right to covet and control with impunity.

Outside the city the Druesim gathered. They were the dispossessed, who had allowed those who still had strength, to take what was left of their possessions. All knew someone who had been a victim of genocide. All were haunted.

They knew Baezok had taken over the fallen city. From their shanty town they watched him shambling across the broken ramparts. They could see the damaged house on the hill where he lived and the dazed women who followed him through the door. The Druesim waited, as though for a sign, to make their move. One day they decided to send in a spy. Baezok had not appeared for weeks. They wondered why.

Sylus, the spy, slipped through the wretched streets swept by a dry mountain wind. It was dark and people were already indoors. He kept close to the damaged buildings, working his way to the hilltop house.

A child's brief laughter carried on the wind from behind a ruined wall. Reaching it, he heard a man's deep voice relating a parable of blatant immorality. Finding a fallen stone, Sylus climbed onto it and cautiously looked over the wall. He saw Baezok's back, and crouching in a tangled bed of wild flowers, a boy of about six. He was listening closely to the story Baezok told of a raid on an unarmed town. Baezok's approval of the subsequent massacre was clear.

Sylus slid back behind the wall and, recalling the genocide, was brushed by the ghost of his slaughtered wife. He reached emaciated arms to grasp her, but only the wind whistled through his fingers. He had been in the cellar of his home and was unable to conceal his wife before one of the murderers broke in, raped and knifed her. Then the house was looted. No one came into the cellar where Sylus remained, sealed in fear for another hour, before creeping upstairs to find his wife's body.

Now outrage replaced fear. He hurried back through the silent city to the camp. The Druesim met and decided to kidnap the boy. He would be held hostage until Baezok gave them back their rights and distributed the stolen goods. Two of the stronger men were selected and three nights later left for the city.

Linus sleeps near his nurse in the cellar. He dreams of conquests by men in metal masks who plunder cities weakened under siege. He has specific heroes who commit the worst atrocities and imagines himself leading men to storm a town where soon no one is left alive.

He feels a huge hand lift and bear him from the blood-filled streets and opens his eyes to look into those of a tall man with a lean face. His dark hair is unkempt and he smells of ditches.

Before Linus can cry out, the man claps a dirty hand over his mouth and other hands grab his thrashing legs. They carry him up the steps and into the house.

Baezok is sleeping with a young woman from the town in a room near the cellar. Silently the men pass the closed door as Linus continues to struggle for release. They reach the door to the garden where the child had played. Linus lies quietly, then thrusts with all his strength against his captors and, taking them unawares, is suddenly free. He dives into the wild growth and crawls through the dank roots. The men thrash in his wake but he squirms out of reach in the dark. He finds the wall and scrambles up to be lit, like a pallid night creature, by the moon.

The men lunge for his legs, yet again he slithers clear and runs along the moon white path down the hill towards the city. He has not been out of the house before. The night air excites him, the sharp stones beneath his bare feet are enchanted. He enters the way that winds to the sea between the battered buildings. No one stirs. Only the moon and the lonely wind witness his running.

Linus hears the panting men behind. But he is swift and fired by the unforeseeable.

He hears the water; its white-flecked waves like the tossing of headstrong horses. He gasps to catch his breath, pausing at the dividing of two ways. He chooses the path that leads to the hills.

The last buildings slide away. Damp moss grows softly under his feet. The hills loom; black interjections against the star pricked sky.

Linus pauses. How can he know if the men are still following? The moss muffles sound. He turns, but can see nothing as a cloud obscures the moon.

The wind has dropped and a faint mist begins to weave from the ground. It softly consolidates into a haggard human form. Empty sockets lie where eyes once gazed and the ghost's unearthly arms extend unnaturally, its hands, missing several fingers, reaching to touch Linus.

The boy backs away. But other hands pass like spiny whispers over his body and he turns to see men, women and children materialising across the plain. They are more mist than flesh, weaving in weary integration, voiceless yet with a faint scrape of dry bone.

They pass through Linus and move on as though, having examined him, their curiosity is satiated. They drift towards the hills.

The hands that next grasp Linus are heavily human. The Druesim lift and bear him back towards the city. But his encounter with the ghosts has left him as light as a feather. He floats from his captors' grasp, feeling the cold air enter his ethereal frame. He rises as the cloud clears the white face of the moon. The men watch, helpless, as he lifts higher towards the hills.

Nayia sat on the mound of ancient stones before the wind-cleaned bones of her father. He had ruled the province before Baezok claimed the city. She had seen him murdered by the city wall.

Now the bleached bones spoke to her. They were hung to catch the wind and when it shifted them gently, Nayia heard sentiments of reconciliation to the barbarity that had been perpetrated. But when the wind rose they swung wildly, warning her of retribution from those left alive. Then she rose and, consumed with anger, began a deep dance, expressing her intention to avenge her father's death.

Often in the damp dawn, haunted survivors stood in a long line, stretching from the city to Nayia's oracle. They had elevated her to a priestess who could reassure them in the face of fear. When they were with her, the ghosts dissolved.

With her fair hair coiled with perennial plants, she spoke with quiet authority, breathing her intention to avenge the deaths like a pious prayer. The ghosts would go, she affirmed, when tyrants like Baezok had been destroyed. And she would vanquish the oppressors with magic.

Her mind was bereft of reason; fractured by the shock of witnessing death. The voices of the bones spoke only in her head.

She lay her long hands on the people's lice-ridden hair, exerting a pressure and murmuring assurance. They returned to the city with eyes looking inward; their psyches cleansed until the insidious seeping of dusk brought back the ghosts.

With Nayia's unreason had come an eerie insight. Within a wide radius, she sensed the unfamiliar. The air stirred or, resting her ear to the ground, she heard footsteps that did not belong to the semi-conscious community.

A middle aged man with bedraggled white hair and phantom-filled eyes, had wandered past, crying pitifully. He had not even seen Nayia by the swaying bones. On another occasion two women who had found liquor in the city, had staggered, singing and shouting obscenities, over the plain. They had seen Nayia, her arms raised over the bones and had lurched close to the oracle, but Nayia's insanity had penetrated even their impaired perception and they had veered towards the hills.

Now she heard a faint whirr like fairy wings on the air. She peered across the plain but saw nothing in the moonlight. Then a boy was standing before her. He was dressed in night clothes, his dark hair dishevelled and his brown eyes wide with the wonder of how he had got there.

Nayia had long lost her power of speech and Linus was too bewildered to speak. They stared, uncomprehending, at each other. But instinctively, Nayia knew the boy was being followed. She put her ear to the ground and heard the pounding men's feet.

Wildly she pointed to the hills. Linus followed the direction of her trembling finger and shivered. The hills were hunched like sullen beasts. The lightness left his limbs. He was again a simple boy pursued by the unknown. He took a last look at wild-eyed Nayia and began to run.

He might have been dreaming; for every step forward, he seemed to take two back. His pursuers closed in. Linus peered ahead, hoping to encounter ghosts again and perhaps assume their ethereality. But only moss undulated in the darkness.

The men grabbed his legs and dragged him to the ground. Nayia heard his cry and reached in agitation for the bones. In her addled mind the men were synonymous with those who had ransacked the city and killed her father. She could not know that, like her, they were victims.

The men bundled Linus up like an inconvenient parcel, folding his flailing arms and legs and pushing his head into his chest. They hurried to the camp near the city.

The Druesim had gathered in an expectant circle. A fire burned in its centre; a flaming focus into which they gazed as though for enlightenment.

All looked up as the men arrived and dropped Linus, whimpering, by the fire. Thoughts of holding the boy as ransom were abandoned. The Druesim began to taunt him as the son of a tyrant. Linus was confused. He had been taught that tyranny was a noble aspiration. Some men and their ragged women took sticks, and, shuffling close, prodded Linus, until he ran shrieking round the fire.

The Druesim began to chant; a low resentful sound from deep in their throats. Its intensity increased and the men closed in.

Linus fell to the ground deafened by the pounding feet. He lost consciousness at the first knife blow. The weapons fell on him in a frenzy. He was cut into pieces which were handed among the men and eaten raw.

The fire died. The men, encrusted with the blood of Linus, slept.

Baezok heard the nurse wail. He ran to the cellar. Realising that Linus had gone, he hit the nurse hard about the head and scrambled up the steps to mount a search.

Nayia had not slept since Linus left. She asked the bones where he had gone. They were mute. She rose and listened to the murmurs that filled her head; senseless sounds of her own creation. But she interpreted them through intuition and they told her to walk towards the city.

She set out in the sharp-aired dawn, her bare feet starkly white on the slumbering moss. In her head she heard the hapless crying of a child. She hurried as the sun rose and lay liquid gold on the somnolent land.

She found the dishevelled camp outside the city with random sleepers around the embers of the fire. She drew near and saw dried blood on unshaven faces. She knew the men had killed Linus.

No one woke as, tearfully, Nayia cast about, seeking the boy's bones. Picked clean, they were widely scattered among the sated men and women. The people had been starving. Nayia collected them. Then she saw the boy's heart lying near the fire. Incredibly, it had been overlooked. She stooped, dropping some of the bones and gently lifted the heart that quivered in the morning sun. She rose and as the people began to stir, walked softly away.

At the oracle she hung the bones with those of her father. She lifted the heart and held it up to the sun. Within, she saw the boy's face; paralysed with fear and incomprehension; a victim experiencing the savagery Baezok had praised.

Nayia lay the heart near the bones and walked towards the hills. The springy moss grew sparser and the black dust, shot with mica, began to glisten.

A strange geology had worked through the land, intermittently turning common stone to a substance of shining ambiguity. It alleviated the blackness of the hills.

Nayia scrambled to where a sheet lay shining in the strengthening sun. She bent and lifted a large piece with ease. It flowed through her hands and she bound it lightly over her arm. Then she turned and walked back across the plain.

Crouching by the oracle she lifted Linus's heart and placed it on the undulating sheet. Of its own volition the substance rose and softly enfolded the organ. Within hung the heart, shot with sunlight.

The night is cold. Unfamiliar winds wander from four directions. They whisper inaudible words that Nayia strains to hear. One wind, from the north, lifts the bones so they rattle in agitation. Nayia interprets this as an indication of someone's approach. Her fevered mind moves faster. It is someone of personal importance.

Raising her eyes she sees the vague form of her father; head bent as he looks closely at her. He is speechless, his body a half established shadow in the intermittent moonlight.

Linus's heart lies by the bones; an ordinary organ transformed by the lunar light. The man folds into a crouching position and reaches towards it. The strange substance encasing it shivers as though with stars. Then the heart begins to quiver and slowly beat. The man, losing identity, steps back and slowly fades.

When Nayia looks up from the heart, he has vanished. She drops her head into her hands and weeps. Eventually she looks again at the heart. It beats strongly.

Baezok led the search for Linus. He smashed through the ruined homes, pushing aside emaciated people, overthrowing the remains of their belongings. He went to the sea, walked along the shore, stared long into the water. He turned for home, shouting abuse at the Somnoi accompanying him.

The house shifted with shadows. Baezok regretted his treatment of the Somnoi. Within his cynicism lay apprehension. He half believed in their rumoured powers. If Linus was dead he would rather be haunted by his ghost than never see the boy again. Could the Somnoi conjure his spirit?

Baezok shook himself. Linus was probably roaming somewhere beyond the city. He would resume the search in the morning. Then he recalled the Druesim. Had Linus wandered into their camp?

Baezok had watched the starving Druesim from the walls. He despised and feared them. He had heard they were consistently haunted. And, again, in spite of his cynicism he had a sneaking suspicion this might be true. Without support, he dared not approach them in daylight yet he could not dispel the thought that Linus might be among them.

Night consumes the house and Baezok, deep in thought, lights no lamps. The darkness thickens and begins to breathe; a regular yet laboured sound issuing from walls and floor. The nurse lies on the boy's empty bed, bruised and too terrified to stir.

Baezok dismisses the Somnoi and leaves the house. On the city walls he sees the Druesim's flickering fire defining the cowed people who sit or aimlessly wander in its light.He waits, immune to the cold wind and the voices that murmur in the dust.

At last the fire dies and the people sleep. Baezok descends the steep steps from the wall, watching the flapping shanty town that seems alive in the moonlight. The makeshift homes might be great grey birds about to take flight.

Baezok enters the camp. Some people are restless in their sleep, others unmoving, welcoming oblivion. He steps cautiously among them, straining for a sign of Linus. He lifts flaps and looks inside but finds no sign of the boy. He turns for home.

He is about to leave when a great wind gusts from the hills. It slaps him squarely in the face and he hears, in his heart, the recriminations of Linus. The boy does not use words, yet Baezok suffers the brunt of accusation. The spirit of Linus berates him for his elevation of brutality.

Linus is no visible ghost. His heart beats at Nayia's oracle. While there is a physical vestige of him, he will not assume a ghostly presence. But he enters his father's being and Baezok falls in fear to his knees.

He knows Linus is dead. And he knows, beneath his bluster and the suffering he has inflicted on others, he has been wrong. Painfully, he pulls himself up and stumbles from the sleeping camp.

The wind still probes his flesh, as though seeking the bones beneath. He is compelled to turn in the moonlight and sees two shadows at his heels. One is his own, the other a faint replica.

He hurries. The shadows keep pace. Malignant murmurs move through his head. He climbs the steps into the house, shaking his head to release the pressure of conscience. But the sounds increase to a roar; the words inaudible yet the meaning plain, magnifying the accusations of Linus.

Baezok descends to the cellar where the nurse lies. He kneels by the bed where Linus had slept, clutches the sheets, then the nurse's scant clothing in a bid for comfort. She opens her eyes, sees his terrified face and, forgiving his brutality, takes it in her hands.

The roar in Baezok's head subsides yet he cannot rest. He staggers to his feet and back up the steps. Moonlight spills through windows into the house. More shadows spread across the floors and climb the walls; half human shapes with endlessly agitating fingers.

Baezok runs past them, hearing the faint intake of breath. His head is filled again with accusations; a washing sea of sound. He turns into the main room filled with looted furniture. A mirror with a fine wood frame carved into fantastic foliage, hangs on the far wall.

The moonlight floods the room and Baezok sees his unshaven face, distorted with fear, in the mirror. He stares, as at a stranger, then slowly walks towards the mirror. The reflected eyes are his, yet seem alien. They have seen things Baezok has not. They have known truths Baezok has never suspected.

As he reaches the mirror they begin to accuse. They penetrate his soiled, uncaring soul and he flinches. Yet he is compelled to look into them. He hears again the recriminations of Linus.

Baezok is almost touching the mirror. His reflection begins to faintly fluctuate; an unearthly pallor draining life from the flaccid flesh. Baezok confronts his own ghost.

Horrified he backs away. The ghostly eyes remain immutably on his. He turns from the mirror, only to be faced by the full figure of himself after death. He is the colour of earth and indistinct at his extremities. The same eyes relentlessly meet his.

He leaves the haunted room and gropes into the bedroom. Here there are no mirrors, yet as he looks sideways, the wraith undulates by the bed. Baezok feels its cloying dampness as though it has recently risen from the earth. It smells of dead lilies, the most lovely flowers in life, but overwhelmingly foul in death.

Baezok crouches, head in hands, on the floor, but the dampness and death enter every pore of his frightened flesh. By morning he is dead.

Nayia watched the swaying bones. They told her tyranny was ousted. Suddenly the shuddering ghost of Baezok appeared. His eyes had dimmed, washed with remorse and the knowledge that he had relinquished the damaged land of the living.

He looked at Linus' s heart beating within the shining substance and reached towards it. But he could not move from where he stood and the heart remained beyond his grasp.

Tears of the dank underworld welled in his eyes and he slowly faded. Tentatively Nayia touched the wetness of his tears on the blackened ground.

She lifted the heart of Linus and walked towards the Druesim's camp. The people looked up as she entered and, holding the heart high, she told them to return to the city. They could reclaim their possessions from the house on the hill. The owner was dead.

Initially, they did not believe her and had no idea she held up the heart of the boy they had eaten. Then, one by one, they followed her from the camp and up to the city. Some ventured into the house where the bodies of Baezok and the old nurse, who had died from her wounds, had already, by the ghosts, been turned to dust.

The people sought their old homes. Some were barely harmed. Others were uninhabitable. Shelter was shared.

Nayia returned to the oracle, detached the bones and took them with the boy's heart, to the house on the hill. There she assumed spiritual authority, as the people continued to come to her to alleviate the hauntings.

Gradually, they lessened, until ghosts were rare and then to be more pitied than feared. The Somnoi became redundant. Nayia placed the bones and Linus's beating heart in the centre of the open court of the hilltop house. A fragile civilisation resumed.

But while victimised ghosts decreased, as the people forgot their fear and the guilt that they had survived while others had died, Baezok's wraith remained, sometimes whining with the wind through the walls or stretching frail fingers that would never reach the boy's immortal heart.

Nayia was unafraid. She watched him dispassionately. He could not harm them now.

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~~~~~~~~~~

Thodorou

Sophie tries hard to like the Patrakis family. But she is daily diminished by their silent accusation.

Undoubtedly this is because she has married their son Andreas, the most eligible man in the village. They had hoped he would take to their dull daughter, Katina, who still sits sullenly at home.

Sophie had instantly loved the wild slopes of western Crete. And Andreas. Like many from the village he takes seasonal jobs - olive picking in the winter, cooking and waiting on tourist tables in the summer.

Sophie paints; walking the long beach of Platanias, transfixed by the waves assaulting the sand, to be greedily withdrawn as though by the huge hand of Poseidon, the surly personification of the sea.

Local people tell her the sea can be as placid as a pond. She does not believe them. Yet she loves the wild water. She tries to trap it on canvas but cannot convey the wilfulness, elementally contained yet repeatedly straining for release.

And she looks long at Thodorou, the island of St Theodora, said in myth to have been a beast that would have eaten Crete. Poseidon turned it to stone. Now the roughness of the waves might be his prolonged fury and resolve to keep the island captive.

Sophie has confronted the beast, rocking close in a small boat to the great cave that might have been its watchful eye but was probably used for Minoan rituals three thousand years ago.

She has glimpsed the elusive kri-kri, the wild goat unique to Crete, camouflaged in the brown vegetation and she has absorbed the silence of the slopes that might have been the beast's hot flanks.

Katina sits motionless outside her house. She does little to help, being clumsy, with a cast in one eye that is disconcerting when Sophie tries to start a conversation in halting Greek.

Katina lifts her nose with a gesture of barely perceptible disdain and if Andreas comes out of the house, she looks pointedly at him over Sophie's shoulder.

Katina has known Andreas since childhood and in her simple way, had believed he would take her into his home. Eventually Sophie stops trying to communicate with her. She leaves the house early; wistful at abandoning the cool vine and overflowing flowers. She loves the beach and the quiet roads winding through orange trees to sun-struck villages. But there are days when she yearns for her home; to sit silently among the flowers and look down on Thodorou, considering the island in perspective.

Why does it obsess her? According to the light, its position seems to shift. She speaks of this to Andreas. He laughs yet seems briefly ill at ease. He sees the island every day from where he works. And at night he dreams. It is as though the island has infiltrated his consciousness during the day to appear as a living entity at night. It is simply because Sophie has talked of it, he tells himself, or he would not have given Thodorou another thought.

Yet in his dreams it breathes and expands; a symbol of those who have invaded Crete, from the Dorians and Romans to the Venetians, Turks and Nazis. The island has been vandalised, her people systematically persecuted.

Now the Turks are reviving animosities, disputing the ownership of islands, such as arid Gavdos off Crete's south coast. Andreas had served in the army and is aware of the Turks' military means.

By the time he returns from the restaurant Katina is in bed but Sophie comes home each day to her silent accusation as she sits motionless; her eyes fixed on some point out to sea. Sophie realises she is gazing at Thodorou, crouched like a beast in the waves.

At night Andreas and Sophie hear Katina moaning in her shallow sleep. Why don't her parents find her a husband? One day Katina disappears. Her crooked black chair stands empty. The wind gusts suddenly and it topples into the dust.

Simultaneously, as Sophie looks out to sea, a great wave rears, hangs its huge white head in suspension for several seconds, then smashes on shore. Thodorou shimmers in a strange light.

Katina walks into the wind. Her face stings with tears. The shadow of a man lengthens and spreads across the sand; a shape with the girth of a god.

She looks over her shoulder to see who could have cast it. The beach is empty. She walks towards the water and stands motionless as the waves pull tightly into themselves to crash at her feet. Foam flows over her white skin. It is ice cold.

She lifts her skirt and steps forward. The next wave washes up to her shoulders. She gasps and moves to meet its successor. She lets the rapacious water lift and throw her off her feet. She is blinded and gagged by the rushing salt. It swirls in her chest, her guts, filling every part of her unused body. For the first time she is possessed.

She feels the watery hands lifting the sodden clothes from her flesh and close with precision round her waist. They drag her down through a kaleidoscope of fish, through shoals of creatures with a mix of man and shimmering scale, to a clear blue light illuminating beds of undulating growth.

The fronds of fern-like plants reach across the sand, scarlet flower heads glow in the midst of exploratory green feelers. Katina glimpses tritons swimming through the flowers.

She feels, but cannot see the masculine hands that bear her above the sea bed. An elegant hippocampus swims towards her, his green head extended. His eyes are lustful, his lip disdainfully curled. His mane flows with small fish.

Katina shudders; excited and appalled. Then she sees the horses; lofty white creatures with brazen hooves and manes shot with gold. As the huge hands release her the horses quieten and regard her with violet eyes. All are stallions.

They form a circle round her, stepping high like dutiful beasts of the circus ring, moving with one mind. The sea flowers open and close beneath their hooves.

They pause, turned inwards, each white head solemnly confronting her. She smells their lust and sinks into the salt-soaked flowers. She closes her eyes. The lover who lies with her has the texture of a man yet still she is aware of the horses. The flesh that enters hers is neither man nor beast. As the liaison slows, she knows she has sated the appetite of a god.

Poseidon claimed to have created the horse. When Perspehone had turned into a mare to avoid men's lust, he had appeared as a stallion. They had created the nymph Despoena and the wild horse Arion.

Poseidon and his horses withdraw. They are one. Katina lies motionless; wary, overawed. Eventually she stirs and raises her head. Flowers float about her. Iridescent fish dart among their stamens and multi-coloured stems. Warm water washes her body.

But suddenly she sees in her mind, the sullen beast of Thodorou. The weathered flanks heave, displacing sea water which rises in response to lash the lower rocks. The great cave which is its eye, slowly opens, gazes balefully at her and shuts.

Katina's family stand at the water line, edging back as the waves encroach. Katina had been seen by a restaurateur, walking into the water.

More family and friends arrive as the sun slips behind the Rodhopos peninsula. Warmth is replaced by a chill wind. A woman screams; Maria from the village. The others run to where she stands, hands covering her face. On the water's edge Katina's naked body rolls with the rhythm of the waves.

Her parents run to her. Katina is wound with weed and red petals cling to her white skin. On her salt-encrusted abdomen they see the faint hoof print of a horse.

Sophie suffers the unspoken accusation of Katina's parents who deliberately leave the chair lying in the dust. Sophie averts her eyes as she passes the house and spends longer each day by the sea.

While watching the white crested waves she sometimes imagines the straining head of a horse. But as each wave breaks the illusion disperses in cold water at her feet.

July envelops her. She works early and in the evening, stretched from noon to four in the afternoon under a tamarisk tree. Then she walks to the water to bathe. Poseidon's crested progeny have calmed. He turns his face with brief placidity to the sun. Sophie floats with her eyes closed. She loses sense of time and place.

The sinewy arms that drag her beneath the surface are those of a woman. Sophie gasps and fights to rise and break through the water. But the arms pull her down until the blue green shades of the sea spin senselessly.

Sophie opens her eyes to see Katina floating above her against the rugged rock. She has lost the substance of flesh. An eerie blue-grey film clings to her bones and in her face her dark eyes have grown; motionless pools of accusation.

Sophie is immobilised by the dead girl's will. Is she dead too?

The malice grows in Katina's eyes. Sophie has the sensation of being lifted with purposeful relish and borne through streaming water. Briefly, she glimpses half human beings with fins and scales.

She surfaces in blinding sunlight by the burnt flanks of Thodorou. The great cave gapes above. Katina's blue-grey arms seem to lengthen and envelop Sophie. She struggles against their vice-like grip. The ghost's feet do not touch the weathered rock. Her horrible head is flung back.

They reach the cold mouth of the cave. Katina bears Sophie inside. The sea echoes; distant evidence of a lost world. The cave is alive with disconcerting sounds. Bats? Or indefinable beings bred of water, rock and incalculable time?

Katina releases Sophie onto the rough ground. Sophie feels the potency of the past, motivated by the beliefs of a people immersed in the natural world. Their goddess had been a stern demander of sacrifice. Her presence possesses the cave. Sophie sees Katina's unearthly face above her; the blue-grey matter flooding from her bones. She loses consciousness.

The Turks are again disputing the ownership of islands. Greek defences are on high alert.

Andreas is distraught. He watches the war planes and walks the shore, searching for clues to Sophie's disappearance. The police search too but she has vanished without trace. Sand and sea dance only with the diamonds of the sun.

Andreas is transfixed. The great curling crests of the god's defiance are poised, as though for effect, before their futile fall. Then they withdraw, to curve, pause and plunge again.

Suddenly Andreas is in the water. Compelled, he walks steadily into the oncoming waves. The swirling water draws him down through the flowing weed and flowers.

Golden fronds undulate from behind a rock. He reaches and touches one. It has the harsh texture of a horse's mane. Suddenly it swirls and turns into a woman's face. It is faintly familiar with a slight sheen as though polished by the sea. She moves from behind the rock and Andreas sees her body. Her long neck and trunk are those of a white horse. Her two front legs are also equine with brazen hooves. But behind she thrashes the great tail of a fish.

Fearfully she retreats as Andreas fights to master his amazement and murmur reassurance. "Who are you?" His voice is remote.

"Lepinaea", she replies.

Andreas looks closely at the creature's face. She has Katina's accusing eyes. With sudden intuition, he knows she is Katina's daughter. But who is her father?

As though in response the water surges and washes coldly over him. He senses horses. Poseidon.

Andreas assumes he is dreaming. He will wake, go to work and return to find Sophie in her usual place under the vine. Even Katina might perhaps be motionless on her black chair.

But he feels the insistent water and smells the strangely perfumed sea flowers and a trace of salt-soaked horses.

Lepinaea swims, paddling her forelegs and swinging her tail. Her mane flows like liquid gold. They surface. Thodorou soars above them; ragged with coarse vegetation, rustling with kri-kri.

Then Andreas sees the cave. "The eye", he thinks. It gazes at him; bottomless and black. Lepinaea scrambles and squirms up the rock. Andreas follows, scaling the rough face with uncanny ease. They near the cave. A dankness defying the summer air, envelops them.

Lepinaea crawls in. Andreas follows. Disturbed bats swoop in the gloom. They have grown to great size. They fly to the far end of the cave and hang in a cloak-like colony.

Andreas pauses while his eyes grow used to the dark. Then, apprehensively, he looks around. The cave ripples with great shelves of rock that seem sealed in time, retaining a primitive trace of the past.

Then he sees Sophie. She lies, bound thickly with weed, in a corner of the cave. Lepinaea stands over her, bending her equine head in curiosity. Andreas stumbles over the rock-strewn ground.

Sophie has subtly changed. Her face is semi-transparent, as though the blood has been carefully drained. Patches of white skin are perceptible through the weed.

The cave shudders. The bats mass and swoop. A rumble under Andreas's feet rises to a roar. Lepinaea cowers in a corner. A shadow shifts over Sophie's face.

Andreas, losing balance, reaches for a rocky wall. His hand slides over a strange substance, like the aqueous humour of an eye. He stumbles to the cave's mouth. The rocks of Thodorou undulate and pulse. The vegetation is hardening into scales. The island is alive.

Lepinaea crawls from the cave. Now a filmy surface is covering its mouth. Slowly, a distortion with the shape and weight of a massive eyelid, lowers. Andreas knows he is being watched. Then, gathering a strength, long unused, the island heaves.

Poseidon instantly responds, rising with enormous white-crested waves, to smash in Thodorou's path. Andreas clings to the beast's scales but the sea soars and breaks over them. They slip under his hands. He falls and is caught on a protruding ledge.

Lepinaea scrambles up the beast's great flank. She vanishes over the top where vegetation has not yet turned to scales. Andreas dares not move. Now he feels the beast shift slowly towards the shore.

The wind whistles. He looks up and thinks he sees Katina's face; a mournful movement in a wisp of cloud. It flurries in the wind as though restlessly seeking someone. Lepinaea?

Andreas flattens himself against the rock. He thinks of Sophie, trapped in the essence of Thodorou's eye.

The sky darkens. The white waves curve into the heads of huge horses; Poseidon's steeds straining to reach shore. In their frothing manes, fish and strange hybrids teem, swept haplessly in on the tide. The water recedes, leaving them like flotsam on the beach.

People gather on shore; dumbstruck by the island's transformation. They gaze from the horses hurled onto the sand to the heaving body of the beast. Its malevolent eye is charged with the colours of the spectrum.

Thodorou pauses, spent by the effort of metamorphosis. Night creeps cautiously. The island subsides; a vague bulk that might have reverted to rock and ragged vegetation.

Slowly, the people disperse. Andreas feels for a fresh hand hold. The scales remain but they are dry and he is able to sink his fingers into their ridges. Painfully he hauls himself up onto what had once been a goat path.

Where are the kri-kri? The island is ink black. Faint scrapings might be the harassed hooves of the terrified goats. Where is Lepinaea?

The moon appears from behind a cloud, flooding land and sea. The beast's black scales are caked with salt near the water that still heaves the stark white heads of horses against Thodorou. They have multiplied; some hitting the beast and breaking into harmless foam, others, against nature, retreating and tossing dementedly.

Then, stark against the moon, Andreas sees the head of Lepinaea, her mane rising in the night like a river of gold. He scrambles to her among the remnants of vegetation. She tosses her head, turning the woman's face towards him. Katina's pain and apprehension light her eye. She slithers on her golden hooves and thrashes the ground with her tail. Andreas reaches for her, feels the scales of her tail slide through his hand.

A blow falls on the back of his neck. Katina stands over him; a large stone in her hands. She is still outraged that he chose Sophie. Now he is assaulting her daughter. She is about to strike him again but he grasps her arm, deflecting the blow. She drops the stone on Lepinaea. The creature cries out with a woman's voice.

Blood streams from her head, matting her golden mane. Her head lolls, the woman's face exposed and sealed in shock. Her body pulsates. She struggles to raise her great tail. But it falls back motionless.

A roar of water. The sea sweeps over them, dragging them through the scraggy growth. They slither on the beast's scales, soaked now by the sea. Andreas holds Lepinaea. Katina undulates strangely under the moon above the surface of the island.

Andreas feels Lepinaea slipping from his grasp. She slides - blue, white and glinting gold \- down the scales into her father's depths.

Katina has vanished. Andreas crouches, clinging to the beast's back. Dawn slowly lights the eastern sky. Poseidon rages, his horses heaving in congestion.

Intermittently they break over Andreas. His hands are raw with clutching the beast's scales. His head is steeped in shadows.

Thodorou draws in a deep breath. On exhaling, the beast shifts, defying the sea's restraint. But Poseidon persists, dragging down the lower part of the island. Thodorou groans. Andreas cannot move. The horses, unleashed, lash his legs. Still the beast advances.

Andreas hears Katina scream. The sound is half human, yet unearthly and seems to come from several directions simultaneously. Andreas cranes but cannot see her. Then she drops past him.

Poseidon, enraged that Katina has injured his daughter, draws her to the blackness of his lower depths. Then, taking the towering shape of a man, he draws his horse whip and lashes her. She feels the pain through her ghostly frame. She cowers and collapses. Fish and hybrids explore her quivering form, passing to and fro through her bloodless being.

The Turks are arming. Talks have collapsed. History hesitates on the brink of repetition. Old memories are revived at protest meetings. The possibility of re-conquest is unthinkable.

Military exercises sully the skies. People prepare pathetically to defend themselves; hiding goats and valuables as though still in the eighteenth century.

Andreas dives from Thodorou but is beaten back by the turbulent horses. He is thrown onto the brittle scales that move now with increasing articulation. He devises a means of riding their rhythm, stretched full length and shifting periodically to a fresh position.

Finally he reaches the massive eye. It is wide open, watching him with malice; its enormous pupil reflecting the blue, green and crested white of the surging sea.

Andreas crawls apprehensively towards it. It remains implacable. He reaches and touches its surface. His fingers are partly absorbed. He tries unsuccessfully to withdraw them. Slowly the great lid lowers, trapping his hand. He is consumed by pain and cries out, the small sound drowned by the sea.

Eventually the lid lifts to reveal the mouth of the cave through the thinning film. Andreas withdraws his hand and sees the eye dim, until only the craggy cave entrance remains.

Tentatively he steps inside. The bats circle his head. A curious sticky substance lies on the floor and walls. He picks his way to where Sophie lies. He kneels beside her. He hears Katina's voice urging him to revive Sophie with immortal ichor. Suddenly he knows patriarchal violation can be halted by the defiance of a mortal woman emboldened by the gods.

The cowed ghost of Katina who had coveted Andreas, now urges him to revive the woman she had jealously assaulted. How else can Crete be saved?

Andreas knows the ichor of immortality replaces blood in the veins of the gods. Lepinaea is not wholly immortal but Poseidon has endowed her with a measure of the magic.

Where is she? Andreas kisses Sophie's pallid forehead and leaves the cave. As the bats swoop to re-settle, the film grows again across the rocky mouth. The pupil gazes dourly.

Andreas looks at the horses hurled at the sliding scales. He takes a deep breath and dives. The water closes over his head. Blue-green streams are shot with churning sand and swirling hybrids that now outnumber fish.

A tiny creature with a woman's head and a body of grey water weed somersaults past, fixing Andreas with wide eyes. A fish with the genitalia of man moves with dignity through glowing coral. Andreas swims with no need for oxygen. Peace permeates the depths.

Lepinaea lies on a thick bed of water weed and shells. The blow had stunned but not killed her. She stirs and opens her eyes. Andreas reaches a tentative hand to her head. She turns her equine profile to him. He smoothes her salt-encrusted hair. She flinches. He grasps her golden forelock.

She curls her great tail round her forelegs. Andreas runs his hand along her neck and back and feels her lightly shiver. He turns her head to find the woman's face and slowly caresses its outline. Then he repeats the gesture on that of the horse, fingering the strong bones. Lepinaea nuzzles him with her equine nose but he seeks her woman's lips. As he kisses her she whinnies deep in her throat.

Gently he eases her onto her side. Then she rolls onto her back. She lays her tail flat along the ground and tucks her front legs into her chest. Her head is thrown back, her mane spread like a sunburst.

Andreas lowers onto her and she whinnies softly. Her body seems to expand, absorbing him until he is overwhelmed by the unity of woman, horse and fish. His senses swim in a coursing current that renews desire the moment it is satisfied.

He opens her lips, extending his tongue. He feels the saliva and tastes the strange flavoured ichor with which it mingles. He gulps, holding the liquid in his mouth, and withdraws.

He claws through the water until confronting the horses. He clings to a thrashing neck and is borne towards Thodorou. The horse heaves and shakes, trying to dislodge him but Andreas rides the frenzied foam. He must not swallow. Thrown against the creaking scales, he grasps one and pulls himself onto the advancing beast.

Aircraft roar overhead as he struggles up the wet flanks, fighting not to swallow but feeling the precious ichor seeping slowly down his throat. He edges along the scales towards the beast's head. Its eye is closed, as though with the effort of moving to shore.

But as Andreas approaches, the lid lifts and he sees the pupil pulsating in the clear morning light. He thrusts his head through the filmy substance. It is repulsed. The ichor is running down his throat. Again he pushes at the throbbing eye. This time it relents and he falls into the cave.

Sophie lies in the same position. Andreas takes her head in his hands. He presses his lips hard on hers, transferring what is left of the ichor. He withdraws. Sophie does not stir. Then she shivers. She opens her eyes and faintly smiles, her lips still moist with traces of immortality.

Slowly she sits up. Andreas takes her arms and helps her stand. They move to the cave's mouth. The eye lid is closed. They sway with the movement of the beast. They push at the liquid eye. It moves yet remains impenetrable. Now the inner eye of the cave is growing damp. Water wells from its tear duct. Andreas and Sophie claw at the eye and the lid lifts as the water flows with increasing pressure. They are borne on the tear and washed into the sea. Thodorou is gasping, its breath issuing in great clouds.

Like fog they drift across the land. Within them, enemy aircraft drone. Computers fail to find their targets. The pilots circle helplessly and eventually turn for home. The beast is preserving Crete.

The tears welled because Thodorou had been part of the island. The beast is not invading, as myth affirmed, but striving to be reunited with Crete. It had lived through former invasions and weeps now in contemplation of another. Yet its breath continues to thicken and rise. Eventually it clears. Thodorou pauses. The beast cannot quite reach shore. Its strength is spent.

Andreas and Sophie watch the straining scales slow and gradually revert to vegetation and rock. The sound of aircraft returns. Sophie grasps a rock and, transformed by the ichor in her veins, springs like a kri-kri through the scrub.

She gains the island's highest point, spreads her arms and throws back her head. She shines and appears to grow; her bare arms shimmering, her face radiating light. It grows more intense, charged with the heightened colours of the spectrum. The sky absorbs the overwhelming light. Andreas covers his face with his hands. The pilots, blinded, again turn back.

Sophie stands; a simple woman draped in weed, her hair awry, her pallid flesh thick with salt. Andreas climbs to her and helps her descend.

The horses calm, leaving in their wake random flecks of foam. Andreas and Sophie dive into them and swim to shore.

As they stand looking at Thodorou, now so much closer to Crete, Lepinaea rises from the water. Her mane lies like polished gold on the sea. She turns her woman's face towards the shore. On her back she bears Katina's ghost. Now Lepinaea, having relinquished some of her ichor, will one day die too. She pauses, then starts to swim away from Thodorou. Her blue and gold tail thrash the water until blending with the swell.

Thodorou drowses in the sun. The great cave gapes, reverting to a cavernous rock.

Andreas and Sophie move from the village - ill at ease with Katina's parents. They find a house on the Rodhopos peninsula with a room where Sophie can paint and which looks towards Thodorou.

The island, ambiguous still with the contours of an unclassifiable beast, monopolises her canvas. The great eye materialises. It has lost malevolence and is vulnerable, devoid of defensiveness.

The Greek and Turkish governments begin to talk. A compromise is struck and hostilities cease.

The strange fish and teeming hybrids vanish from the Cretan Sea. Poseidon blusters and subsides, responding to the pale moon spilling pools of light on Thodorou.

But sometimes, during the day, as Andreas gazes at the island, he imagines it shifts, almost imperceptibly, moving even closer to the shore and, as he peers into the sun, its cave once more fleetingly resembles a lazy, lidded eye.

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~~~~~~~~~~

Monogamy

In The Odyssey Circe turns Odysseus's sailors into pigs. But with Hermes' help and "moly" - a white flower with a black root, he was protected from Circe's magic and agreed to stay with her on condition she restored his men to their former selves.

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The whitewash appears in large cans one Sunday morning. The workmen arrive the next day. Every house in the ancient town that had been painted yellow, ochre, pink and pale blue, is whitened to dazzle like a virgin in the sun.

The women inside come out and gaze in astonishment as the great brushes sweep and curve, loaded with heavy paint that leaves trails like the leavings of obscene snails on the dusty roads. Horrified, they retreat into their rooms, rich with ornament, their wardrobes hung with elaborate clothes and their jewels in large carved boxes. And they wonder what is happening.

The fact is, the men are reversing a foolish decision. They abolished monogamy, imagining this would be solely to their advantage, little dreaming that the women would want polygamy too and being denied it, become simply promiscuous.

They luxuriated in fine fabrics and jewels from the eastern dependencies. They refined methods of seduction and founded a school for the evolution of harmless flirting which nonetheless led to much misunderstanding and in one case, murder.

So now the men will confine the women indoors, like the Turkish harems that came before them in this old city that has seen constant conflict.

The men will take away the clothes, the jewels and the ornaments made in the far eastern workshops and compel the women to live within stark white walls, echoing those outside and symbolising lost innocence.

The women try to leave their homes again. But now, at each door stands an implacable doorkeeper with ape-like arms, barring their escape. The women retreat and wait.

Having finished the white-washing, the men move indoors and the gathering of the goods begins. Long dresses of fine linen and silk, flamboyant with peacocks, flowers and multi-coloured abstractions, are swept from the cupboards into black plastic bags. So are the numerous ornaments of mythical figures and exotic beasts, the gold-rimmed jugs, the onyx abstractions that caught the sun. Jewellery is more carefully conserved. That will be sold.

The women are speechless. Alexia, an enamelled butterfly gleaming in her short-cropped hair - looks with hostility at the man she called consort but to whom she paid little attention. He reaches to grab the butterfly, but she withdraws with a shriek and he relents.

Maera sits solidified in alarm, her transparent dress reflected in the bands of patterned wallpaper, the carved carnation static for once in her ear as her man carries out the last vestiges of a voluptuous life. Kyllene, still young and susceptible to dream, stares uncomprehendingly, as her partner sweeps ruthlessly through the rooms. And Semele, her long hair tied with a yellow spotted band, gasps and stutters as she watches the evacuation.

The men vanish from their homes. They have their sexual interests elsewhere in town - small harems of women in apartments on the outskirts. These are women who have not felt sufficiently liberated to break the mould of submission. They know about the official "wives" in the houses that were slowly transformed as their consorts strayed with increasing audacity, but they are content to be obedient and be kept without resort to luxury or inventive love play.

The "wives" took any men who were willing to comply. Sometimes they were the men of women they knew. Webs of intrigue were woven.

Now the women who had relished fleeting freedom sit in a silence that slowly ferments. They begin to seethe, to rise and pace about their rooms, trailing the white gowns in which their consorts had confined them. As though of one mind, they besmirch them with food and tear their seams. They hunt fruitlessly for brushes and combs and seek perfume and soap that have been confiscated. They slump on chairs whose fine coverings have vanished. They brood and plot, then rise again to hammer and scratch the virgin walls.

They emit a united scream that echoes through the ageing outer walls to fly across the rooftops into the gathering night sky, to skim the sea and the mist-dim mountains, to sweep and dive onto the island of Aeaea.

Here the enchantress Circe lives, waiting and watching for a situation in which she can mischevously intervene. Her supernatural ears hear the great scream and she flies seaward to observe the tumult of the air and see the white birds wheel in alarm.

She locates the origin of the scream and winding her thick black hair high onto her head, wills herself into the tempestuous town. She is invisible to the men who have now dispersed to visit their mistresses. But as she enters the harsh white houses they have abandoned, she reveals herself; her body undulating and shape-shifting as she promises the women retribution.

They know how she turned the sailors of Odysseus into pigs and how they retained human minds and feelings.

"I'll do you the same favour. It's all your men deserve!" she promises, settling at last into the image of a woman with a faint phosphorescence. "Where are they?"

She is in Kyllene's house. The woman shrugs and scrapes sharp nails in frustration down her grubby gown.

"Relax! I'll find them," says Circe, tossing back her black hair which has loosened to flow saltily on her shoulders.

She lifts as though fleshless from the floor and one by one ejects the men from their mistresses' homes. They have no choice but to follow her as though magnetised.

A high pen of fine gold mesh materialises in the city centre and through a gate, Circe herds the maddened men. They mill and stumble, trying to find the exit but the golden gate has firmly closed.

Limb by limb the men turn into swine, dropping helplessly onto all fours, buffeting each other and snorting in fear and indignation.

Circe laughs and returns to marshal the women. They are taken to the pen and peer incredulously at the plunging pigs. The women laugh, sneer and toss insults through the evening air. Looking closer, they can identify their men by their eyes, imploringly encased in pigflesh. The derision mounts to a cruel crescendo as Circe flits about the pen, tossing her hair in delight - her laughter shot with the sound of the sea.

"Let them stew for a while and do as you please!" she urges the women. She vanishes and they return to their homes, find the doorkeepers in crumpled heaps and with leftover wallpaper and paint begin to restore their rooms to their former richness. Their cupboards and shelves are still bare, but Alexia discovers the painting - Girl leading man with sheep's body - a work by the popular Kalighat painters of India in a book that was overlooked by her consort.

The picture is widely reproduced and hung on every wall and the occasional knife flung at it. The sparse white robes are washed and hand-painted. Shells and stones from the beach are fashioned into primitive jewels to enhance the women's sallow skin.

Then Circe reappears and marshals the women once more. "I am not saying that you women are blameless, but you were provoked. You and your men need bringing to your senses. Meanwhile, if you can't have men and there is not a single one who didn't deserve to be turned into a pig - take your pick of these companions." She indicates a strange menagerie striding, fluttering and floundering in her wake. They are in fact some of the worst male offenders, unrecognisably transformed.

There is a grimacing fish with gleaming scales struggling waterless along the road, a pert peacock whose tail glimmers with enchantment, a miniature elephant with a malevolent eye and the unnerving feet of a man and a disgruntled harpy with limp black curls.

Each of the women chooses a "familiar. Semele takes the harpy, Kyllene the elephant, Maera the peacock and Alexia the fish.

"Enjoy!" cries Circe and once more vanishes.

Semele places her harpy on the mantelpiece where the bird-like being nervously twitters.

"Don't be afraid," soothes Semele and strokes the ruffled feathers. The harpy smells of sea salt and her black curls are damp.

Semele sinks into her deep chair, watching the harpy hopping up and down the mantelpiece until she is lulled to sleep.

The harpy has gained in size and suddenly Semele is flying out of the window in the harpy's wake, her long hair streaming in the early morning air. The harpy, flapping broad blue wings, is heading for the harbour.

There are no crews on the ships - all having been turned into pigs and Semele and the harpy scatter terrified seagulls as they move out to sea, flapping low above the lace-crested waves. The land disappears, the motion of the water is mesmerising; a unified wash like a seething symbol of infinity.

Semele flies as though hypnotised, then sees ahead, a tossing ship with a loudly complaining crew who appear to be lost. They are heading for an island; stark with rose red crags, caught now by the strengthening sun. There is the faint sound of singing.

The harpy lowers sharp black claws like an undercarriage and lands lightly on the rock. Semele follows but falls with a thud, grazing her legs. She sees that the rock is covered with creatures; half woman half bird, similar to her "familiar", yet with more flesh than feathers. Simultaneously opening and closing lustful mouths, they are singing. The notes drift and are half lost on the sea wind, the words are non-existent, yet the sound is softly seductive.

Semele feels she should join in but does not know the tune. Her voice is feeble and is snatched by the wind but she strives to lie gracefully on the hard rock.

The ship with the lost crew looms suddenly. The laughter of the harpies stirs the water, so the sailors are pitched unceremoniously into their wet laps. They lie, gazing enraptured into the bird-like faces with their soothing song and do not notice the ship drifting away on the waves.

One sailor - swarthy and still drunk from the last of the rum - has landed in Semele's lap and fumbles to feel her salt-encrusted face. She recoils and tries to push him off but he clings like an intoxicated limpet. She wrestles and he writhes and has his clumsy way.

The other harpies are frolicking now on the rocks, the besotted sailors clinging to their feathers and flesh, bereft of will and doomed to die of starvation.

Semele's sailor passes out and rolls from the rock into the sea where he bobs away like a black-haired cork. Semele sighs, closes her eyes, then opens them to find she is still in her chair and the harpy fast asleep on the mantelpiece.

Kyllene is not sure she trusts the elephant that scrutinises her with an eye that is knowing and seemingly alien to its species. Its man-like feet rest on the shelf near a curvaceous Japanese vase retrieved from a cupboard overlooked by Kyllene's consort. She is transfixed by the elephant's eyes. Her own slowly close.....

She wakes in a valley shining with orange trees under a cloudless sky. Birds sing and she can hear the sound of the sea. Snow-capped mountains soar to the south. The air is warm and she walks into the orange grove which glows and rustles; the dark green leaves lifting gently in the wind.

She dreams beneath a tree, absorbing the birdsong and the fragrance of fresh fruit. Suddenly there is the sound of crashing timber and a full-sized elephant - otherwise identical to the miniature she had been given by Circe - appears, breathing heavily with the effort of uprooting trees in its path. Oranges roll around her as she scrambles up and runs away.

But the elephant, with lustful eyes and huge human feet, pursues her, his smelly trunk at full stretch and intermittently prodding her in the back. Kyllene darts at a sharp angle and races up a narrow track. She crosses a stream and stumbles, falling hard on slippery stones fringed by a pale green weed. It lifts and whips round her legs, binding them tightly. Then it writhes around her body, immobilising her flailing arms.

The elephant crashes through the trees and, with his alien eye, lustily surveys her helplessness. He lifts his obnoxious trunk and draws it across her frightened face. Kyllene shrieks and struggles and the pale weed tightens. She can barely breathe.

Then three female elephants burst through the shattered trees. They trumpet and shake their heads, hung thickly with the blinding blue of morning glory. They stop and stare at Kyllene's elephant with eyes whose lashes still shimmer with dew. He quivers and reaches with his trunk to tease each of theirs.

They retreat, their eyes lit now with sexual promise. Kyllene's elephant lumbers after them into the trees. With a sigh, the pale weed around Kyllene's body loosens and falls to lie limply on the streambed. She struggles to her feet and clambers up the slimy bank.

Slowly she emerges from her dream - sprawled at an odd angle in the chair and sees the elephant is still on the shelf, watching her. Indignantly, she gets up and prods his leathery back, so he turns, as though in disgrace, with his face to the wall.

Maera is delighted with her peacock that might have stepped from a Turkish tapestry. His hooked feet touch the carpet lightly and his black-edged tail gleams with jewel-like "eyes". Intermittently though, he turns to look surreptitiously at her. And she has the uneasy feeling he is endowed with more than a bird's brain. She slips a fine black chain round his neck to which he does not object, yet she does not feel in control of her companion and watches him with growing apprehension.

Exhausted by her vigil, Maera falls asleep. She is in a bare white room - like that painted by her consort - with walls that seem to be silently contracting and about to dislodge the ancient basin of red hot poker flowers she had placed near the door. She walks towards the wall where a window once opened onto the street. Now its opaque surface has a feathery feel - like the body of a bird. She shudders and withdraws.

Turning, she sees the peacock - grown to the size of a man, but his head, above the sharp black beak, is eyeless. His "eyes" glare at her from his tail. They no longer have a jewel-like lustre. They are those of her consort. They are grey and coldly accusing; the eyes that had so often silently probed her, trying to extract her amorous plans.

She tries to push past the peacock but he fluffs up his feathers and fixes her with the multiple eyes so she is frozen and inundated with fear and speechless loathing. The grey eyes bore and begin to swim, as though they would work loose, expand and draw her into oblivion. She crouches and covers her head with her hands. She reaches for one of the red hot poker flowers and holding it at arm's length, thrusts it at the pulsating eyes ......

Suddenly she is within the eye - trapped in a viscous veil through which she can barely see. She slips and slides, seeking a way out, but encounters only grim grey walls that yield, then mockingly resist.

She spins in panic and feels the persistent pressure of her consort slipping in and around her; demanding and deriding. She pushes a wall which hardens, then, as the great eye blinks, relents, forcibly ejecting her.

Rapidly, she regains consciousness, but when she opens her eyes, can see nothing. Her anguished cry rouses Circe who, under various guises - from a shadow without sun to a ship's rat - is still in the city.

In seconds, the enchantress is at Maera's side and laying spiny hands on her quivering eyelids, restores her sight. The peacock, his tail resplendent once more, trails his chain across the floor, pauses, and turns to look at her in disdain.

Alexia is watching her exotic fish. It swims in circles, constantly coming into contact with the edge of its tank and eyeing her with disgust. But she is conscious only of its flashing scales and the strong propulsion of its tail. The iridescent colours merge, undulating like a dress she once wore for twilit seductions. Alexia too succumbs to sleep.

She is drawn down through rushing water shot with sinuous flowers and darting fish, the salt encrusting her mouth, nose and eyes. She gasps and tries to rise to the surface, but is bound in a flowing water weed that whispers and derides as she drifts deeper onto the sharp stones littering the ocean bed.

A triton with a curvaceous scaly tail, small wings and a large conch shell clutched in one hand, hovers nearby, reaching tiny, malicious hands towards her, a mean glint in his bright blue eye. Painfully Alexia pulls away, then is eerily brushed by the blackness of a flailing squid. She wrenches one arm free of weed and flaps at a tenacious tentacle. Uncannily it dissolves and desperately she squirms among the floating fragments. She moves through a multitude of curious creatures with flapping fins, translucent scales, vestigial horns and horrendous teeth.

Suddenly her exotic fish appears from behind a rock. Grimacing, it shoots towards her, its tail furiously fanning the dark water, its gimlet eye fixed on her frightened face.

Appalled, Alexia waits and is horrified when another fish with a great gaping mouth swims up and swallows her whole. She flounders inside with moaning minnows and half digested plankton, thrown against slimy stomach walls and whirled in steamy darkness. Then she feels the fish rise rapidly to the sea's surface. It heaves her out of its mouth onto the convenient crest of a wave and she is borne regally ashore.

Alexia wakes suddenly, the taste of salt water still on her lips. She is relieved to see the exotic fish has wedged itself under a rock in the tank. But, with a baleful eye, it follows her every move.

Circe reappears, riding a high sea wind into the city. She gathers the women by the shore and says, "Well, did you enjoy your dreams?" The women, still dazed, blink heavy eyes. They are speechless.

"Let's see if the men have come to their senses."

They follow the enchantress through the white-washed streets to the golden pen. The pigs squeal, expecting their bowls of swill. The harpy, elephant, peacock and fish have been spirited from their owners into the midst of the quarrelling pigs, where they collide and complain about overcrowding.

The pigs gaze at the women with the eyes of the men they once were. Some are in tears. Others seem distant and disorientated.

"Now, you men, we need a new arrangement here!" says Circe in her saltwater voice. "Equality. Either you and your wives agree to be polygamous or you both settle for monogamy. But I won't have tinpot dictators - men or women. I am not suggesting your qualities are identical but I do insist you have equal opportunities - perhaps a vote is in order."

She sweeps a phosphorescent arm over the pigs pushing towards the gate. One by one they regain their humanity, staggering to ten-toed feet and gazing in bewilderment from Circe to the women, whose post dream daze has been replaced by defiance.

Then as though magically manipulated, the men chorus, "We'll take our women. We're worn out."

"I hope that's not the only reason!" chides Circe, swinging her formidable hair which balloons about her like a storm cloud.

"No - we took them for granted!" admits the man who had briefly been a fish.

Cautiously, Circe opens the gate. The bedraggled men file out and one by one find their consorts.

"No more whitewash?" asks Alexia of hers. He concurs.

"I can wear jewels now and then?" asks Kyllene of hers. He concurs.

"I can embroider my dresses?" asks Semele of hers. He concurs.

"I can have that Persian pot I fancied?" asks Maera of hers. He concurs.

The women smile behind their demurely lifted hands. Even Circe does not see the faint but unmistakable hint of mischief in their eyes.

~~~~~~END~~~~~~

Thank you for reading this book - which I hope you have enjoyed. If you would like to read my other writings, please visit this link to Smashwords.com.

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Author's Note

Linda Talbot writes fantasy for adults and children. She now lives in Crete and as a journalist in London she specialised in reviewing art, books and theatre, contributing a chapter to a book about Conroy Maddox, the British Surrealist and writing about art for Topos, the German landscape magazine. She has published "Fantasy Book of Food", rhymes, recipes and stories for children; "Five Rides by a River", about life, past and present around the River Waveney in Suffolk; short stories for the British Fantasy Society, and stories and poetry for magazines.

My next book will be Words On The Wind - a selection of my poetry in sections from "Breakages" and "Demeter's Dance" to "Moonbirds and Wild Water" - poems from Greece.

Contact blog: http://lindajtalbot.wordpress.com

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