The reason no man knows; let it suffice
– Christopher Marlowe
What we behold is censured by our eyes.
Where both deliberate, the love is slight:
Who ever loved, that loved not at first sight?
1: Startled Cries
1,800 BCE, KNOSSOS
The sun hadn’t quite set over the horizon as Ariadne Konosotis watched from the balcony as a contingent of guards shuffled the stumbling fourteen adolescents through the main courtyard, packed with curious onlookers.
If she wasn’t concentrating so hard on not wincing from the pull of the pins holding her considerable mass of dark hair up and off her neck, she would have sneered at the way the prudish Athenian sacrifices gaped in horror at the dress of her and her people.
Not that they knew they were sacrifices, but because of events her father wouldn’t quite disclose, the tiny settlement of Athens now sent seven underage boys and seven underage girls to them every seven years.
Ariadne wasn’t sure why it had to be so many sevens in the contract, or why it was her poor brother Asterion who her father had chosen to do the actual killing, but King Minos had claimed it was all in the name of the Great Mother.
And as one priestess of the Great Mother, Ariadne was leading this ceremony.
Or, she would be, if she wasn’t overhearing King Minos muttering to someone just out of her line of sight.
When men came to positions of power, Ariadne had learnt, they often thought themselves wiser than the council of the women they later chained to their sides. She’d inducted many such men into offices of power, and they often went mad from it, thinking they knew better.
Aridane hadn’t become a student of the head priestess by thinking she knew everything already. Unlike those men, unlike her father, Ariadne listened, learnt, and watched.
The words she said now, welcoming the Athenians into Knossos, she’d memorised. Her actions were nothing more than the practiced motions of years building up to this moment.
She listened, instead, to what her father said that was so important he’d say it during the biggest ceremony of the year.
“It’s nothing as dire as that,” Minos said to his companion. “But she’s the heir to the throne. She’ll reach her majority in a few days, and they’ll depose me.”
“Ah,” said his companion with a hint of humour. “So it’s personal, then.”
Minos huffed. “Merely self-preservation. I want to remain king, and I want to do it in my own right. I’m merely a placeholder for a daughter who’d rather run away from her duties.”
“So you’re marrying her off,” said the companion, “to a prince regent as far away as Vasiliki. You know what the rumours are about Prince Kastor.”
Ariadne could feel her eye twitch, but she didn’t let it detract from announcing to the guards to take their new guests to their quarters, so they might refresh themselves after such a long journey across the Aegean.
“After all,” she addressed the crowd below her, feeling both twenty and eighty all at once, “we’re not savages. Regardless of what your king tells you, we will offer you guest rights during your stay here.”
The guards took far more delight than they should have in hauling the Athenians away.
The Athenians just looked shocked a woman could do something more than produce heirs and spares for men. They remained gawping at her while the guards dragged them away by their ridiculous chitons and impractical draping dresses.
At least the men were quiet this year. Seven years ago, one Athenian had shouted at the observing men to cover the women’s breasts up, because their gods thought women were nothing more than trophies and shouldn’t be seen by anyone who wasn’t her husband and master.
He’d been the first the head priestess, Enyo Chiotis, had shoved down the stairs to the labyrinth of tunnels under the Great Temple.
This year, Ariadne was in charge. And this year, she would prove she could lead such important events.
It meant the Council would consider her a true heir to the throne.
Her twin, Anastasios, would have his test later, though his was more about redeeming himself after his drunken revel last week. Whichever one proved themselves before their twenty-first birthday would prove themselves the next ruler.
She just had to stay in the city and avoid this marriage her father wanted her to have. She couldn’t do anything if she was locked away in some farce.
When she turned from the balcony, Minos was there with the particular expression which meant he wanted to talk, and not even the gods themselves would stop him from saying it.
He reached for her arm. “Dear daughter,” he began, like he hadn’t already married off her elder sisters and removed them from the line of succession.
Ariadne adjusted her bodice and strolled right past him.
Not that Dionysos was lurking at the back of the gathered crowd watching the woman on the balcony; it was just that this was the city best known for sacrificing humans every few years after a colossal fuck up between two kings on opposite sides of the sea.
And he just happened to be in the area at the time.
Unlike the city of Mycenae to the northwest, and Dionysos didn’t want to go back there in a hurry, it was a woman who stood at the forefront of the large balcony and welcomed her Athenian guests, and a woman who told the guards where to take her fourteen sacrifices. The men behind her, while looking just as important and rich, and most definitely more than twice her age, didn’t take control once during the flowery speech she gave.
She was magnificent, the woman who might as well have been a queen. Her dark red bodice and darker layered skirt hid her wiry frame well, but there was strength hidden there, and her eyes glittered violet with it in the evening sun. He also had a sneaking suspicion his stepmother would envy her intricate hairstyle, piled high in a precise manner as it was on top of her head with a few chestnut ringlets tumbling down in a fashion which was very
much deliberate.
Her long, spidery fingers twitched with some absent thought, but she directed the crowd with practiced ease.
He’d have to stay and watch as much as he could, before his father did to the Aegean what the gods of Sumer did to the Shuruppak almost a thousand years ago. Zeus was rather fond of imitating others and claiming originality, after all.
Besides, he could tell something interesting was going to happen if he stuck around.
And if he just so happened to piss his father off at the same time? Well, the humans were far more interesting that the mere toys everyone on Olympus dismissed them as.
Humans always were when he got them drunk enough to forget their lives existed beyond the parties he threw and the wine he provided.
The only real downside to staying in one place for so long was that it gave his stepmother more of a chance of finding him.
The fate surrounding this place had better be worth the murder attempts she made, or he’d raze the city to the ground himself.
Someone bumped into him, pushing him into a wall with a raised relief which dug into his back, and he blinked.
The crowd had shifted, and those who remained were indulging in what smelt of strong alcohol.
Excellent, he always did like a party.
And it was no trouble at all to gently increase in the wine’s potency he sensed making the rounds.
Humans always said the funniest things when they were drunk, and once he’d loosened their tongues enough, they revealed the best secrets.
Getting the humans drunk was one of the best forms of entertainment. If they didn’t reveal their own secrets in explicit honesty, they’d let slip someone else’s in excruciating detail. And those secrets were the best ones to witness the fallout of.
The only problem, he realised, was the courtyard was now packed to bursting with people wandering aimlessly. He couldn’t get anything worthwhile out of all these people with wine alone.
How was he supposed to know if the city was worth staying in if most of its inhabitants were sober?
But then he glimpsed the woman who had led the welcoming ceremony slip out of the main palace doors. She’d covered her hair with the hood of her cloak, but her spidery fingers grazed the walls as she edged her way around the courtyard.
It was she who Dionysos could sense provided the most fate in the courtyard.
If he wanted to know anything of the hidden secrets of Knossos, it should be her he followed.
Trailing around humans unnoticed was another aspect of life his father didn’t believe in, but Dionysos found it make his life ever so much more interesting.
He followed the beautiful young woman through the crowds and into the labyrinth of side alleys.
Ariadne hadn’t even stepped into the temple of the Great Mother before Enyo stopped her with a faint smile.
The few other priestesses lurking around, the ones who should be sweeping the oors and keeping their eyes on the lit candles and incense, had nothing but kind words to say to her.
These girls were too young to understand the harsh way the world worked.
But Ariadne thanked them for their kindness while thanking her mother, Pasiphaë, for her lessons in diplomacy and getting men to think the ideas you fed them were their own.
Enyo had barely opened her mouth to add her own contributions to the conversation when Ariadne felt a large and sweaty hand clamp around her bicep and pulled her away.
She crashed into a Mycenaean sailor, his helmet was rather distinctive. His style of chiton was also indicative, as was the way his eyes remained settled on her chest.
Any man from the Knossos empire knew a woman was worth more than her body, but that message hadn’t made it through to the Mycenaeans the way the rest of their exports had.
“What’s a beautiful girl like you,” said the sailor in a voice he probably thought was sultry, “doing in a place like this?”
Ariadne’s eye twitched. She heard Enyo shuffling the girls inside the temple, shushing their protests.
“Unlike the men of your city,” Ariadne said, “I’m ensuring my gods find Knossos worthy of their attention.”
The sailor’s hand, still gripping her arm, clenched tight.
It was unfortunate the bodices in fashion had short sleeves. Anastasios would tear the city apart to relieve the sailor of the hand which dared to harm her.
“If you’re so willing to whore yourself out,” the sailor licked his lips, his eyes still firmly stuck on her breasts, “you should just come back with me. You’d be a good trade deal, a pro table alliance between my king and yours.”
“My king won’t be king by the time you’ve finished drafting your deal.” It was irritating, trading with the people of the peninsula who believed that men were the only ones capable of doing anything. “Once the heirs come of age, there’ll be a new ruler to trade with. If the men of your city have so much intelligence, why don’t they understand something as simple as that?”
The sailor merely scowled at her. His bared teeth made him more of a monster than the monster the Athenians believed Asterion to be.
“Your father,” he said, and Ariadne’s heart sank, “will hear of this.”
Ariadne took a deep breath and glared her most regal glare. “You’re a man of few prospects. My father wouldn’t agree to sell me off even if he were the king himself.”
“You’ll regret this, you little bitch.” He shook her by her arms until her head spun. “When my city overthrows this den of whoremongering, you’ll be the first whore I take.”
“Your cock of a king wouldn’t allow it,” Ariadne said. “Even he knows not to destroy the trade alliance in such a blatant display of stupidity. We own the seas, it’s our produce which keeps your city running.”
“When we take this city for ourselves,” he said, like he wasn’t talking to the future queen, “I’ll take you like the whore you really are. I’ll have the pleasure you give to your gods, the sort you should give to me.”
“This isn’t Mycenae, you pathetic little worm.” Ariadne threw off the sailor’s hands, but he was still too close. “Just because we don’t have the same gods, and just because we treat our women as people rather than cattle, it doesn’t mean you can just invade our borders and take what you please without consequence. Or is your mind too small to understand something as simple as common decency?”
The sailor, for once seeing something beyond her breasts, swore and fled down the street.
Ariadne took a gulp of air and straightened her bodice again.
The sleeves were definitely too short to hide the bruises from her overprotective brother.
But Enyo had left the shelter of the temple, and she didn’t look happy at all.
Nothing good ever happened when Enyo looked like that.
Dionysos watched from the shadows as the woman from the balcony refused the suitor with some sort of vicious pleasure at the man’s humiliation.
He’d seen men like him from all across the lands influenced by the Mycenaean reach.
The woman was masterful in her verbal lashings, and he could only imagine what she would do to a man if she weren’t shackled to one location. The adventures they could have together, with his influence over the preferred alcohol of many getting them into trouble, and her way with words talking them out of it.
But, as she’d hinted to the sailor, she was the future queen of Knossos. What would a queen of one of the most powerful cities of the region want with a winemaker from Mount Nysa?
The other, more pressing issue, Dionysos realised, was the drunken bodies which spilled into the streets. Their grabbing hands were almost reaching for his cloak.
If he were under any other circumstance, he might take a few of them up on their offers of a night of fun.
But many of them were maudlin drunks.
Maudlin drunks always regretted it in the morning, no matter how pleasurable it was. And the partners who sprinted from the room like the Furies themselves were after them were never worth a second approach.
“What the fuck was that?” The head priestess strode from the large temple. The lit candles behind her gave her an avenging air. The woman from the balcony startled, and Dionysos should really think of her as the crown princess.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” said the princess, puffing up like an angry cat. “It was a terrible match. So terrible, in fact, it wasn’t any sort of profitable match at all.
“I’m not talking about that!” screeched the head priestess. “I’m talking about the fact you did it in public! You should never handle private matters in the middle of the street!”
The princess just blinked at the head priestess. “How else am I supposed to handle the brutish men from backward city-states if I don’t humiliate them in front of witnesses?”
“You do it,” said the head priestess through gritted teeth, “in an official court setting, where he’s embarrassed in front of the high ranking officials he wants to impress.”
Dionysos had to bite his lip to stop himself from laughing. He wasn’t the only one. Many of the drunken bodies were giggling into their hands or other people’s shoulders.
“But the common people,” said the princess, “are the one’s who’s lives are affected by the laws created by the rich. And it’s the common people who are the first to greet the idiots. They’re the ones who sail the ships, after all. Why shouldn’t these men be humiliated by the very people they think don’t matter?”
“Because,” the head priestess tossed her veil-covered hair over her shoulder without disrupting a single pin, “you could do it with the window uncovered when the most people are attending the market.”
The princess blinked and huffed like she was irritated she hadn’t thought of it first.
Dionysos wanted to take the princess off on some adventures. The aftermath of the verbal sparring would be worth the fuss of moving every so often. He was sure of it.
The head priestess grabbed the princess by the arm and tugged her inside the temple before they could make much more of a scene.
Dionysos wanted to get as drunk as he could as fast as he could. Perhaps some company would help him forget why leaving Knossos was the most sensible solution when someone had that much fate embroiled in their very being.
Bright and early the next morning, Enyo deigned to hold Ariadne’s hand all the way from her personal chambers in the family rooms of the palace and across the main courtyard. When Enyo finally let go of Ariadne’s hand, it was halfway down the length of the temple, and only because there were too many of the young priestesses lurking around in the hope of gossip they could report back to their cohort.
Most of the girls were tending to the ames in the central fire pit, though Ariadne didn’t understand how they saw anything through the haze of the lit incense and puffs of smoke clouding the centre of the room.
Ariadne followed Enyo to sit on one of the benches lining the painted walls. But Enyo didn’t speak, and Ariadne had nothing to say to her in return.
Instead, they both watched the girls fuss around with preparing the day’s offerings. One girl was far too overzealous in the number of owers she pushed into the vase, while another thought the room needed even more incense.
When the incense combined with the fire’s smoke to turn the air stifling, Ariadne finally spoke.
“I feel I could do more for the Temple. What use is a queen when the trading partners don’t even see her as a legitimate ruler?”
“One who will vanquish her enemies through her iron will when they blind their eyes to what she’s truly capable of.” Enyo was the only survivor from a shipwreck, so perhaps she was knowledgeable in how to get what she wanted from men from under their noses.
“But you can’t forget that you have your own path to follow. You are meant to be the queen. You can’t forsake your people just because you don’t want to marry and secure the dynasty for another generation.”
“No marriage,” Ariadne said, “will ever be of equal worth.” She had thought little of it, but she knew it was true. “Either I owe my loyalty to the Crown before my husband, or my husband sees me as another of his worthless possessions.”
“But,” Enyo firaised a nger, “once you have the city’s heirs, you can renounce this husband for someone who is worth your time and attention.”
Ariadne snorted. “Not in this lifetime, there’s not. Beyond the island, I’m a man’s property. The common view across the peninsula is that women are merely tools for a man’s ambition. What life is that but one of misery and regret?”
There was talk among the advisers that if the continued threat of Mycenaean growth held true, they’d be a genuine threat to the walls of Knossos within a few centuries. But it would take a divine intervention for Knossos to not give back as good as they got.
“Then you do your duty to the Crown and kill off the man in question once you’ve secured your heirs. If women are as pathetic as the Mycenaeans say, they’ll never suspect you of the murder at all.”
“It depends on the poison,” Ariadne said, “and which ones are available in the surrounding area. I’d much rather swear off political marriage altogether.”
“Then the crown will go to Anastasios, and may the gods save Knossos if that happens.”
Ariadne thought it was a harsh judgment on her brother, but she couldn’t respond as the statement deserved. She was leading the morning prayers, and those required her full and undivided attention.
And once she dealt with those responsibilities, it left her to struggling out of her ceremonial robes.
Enyo had vanished at that point, and Ariadne cursed her existence as she fought her way out of the ruffled skirt which didn’t want to untangle itself.
Not that the average, everyday skirt was any different, but she had her attendants to help her in and out of those particular irritants.
The sun was high in the sky by the time she’d changed into something more practical. It shone almost too bright against the paint on the walls. Combined with the hot, dry air of midsummer, it was just as difficult to breathe as it was to see beyond a few arm spans.
She’d stumbled blind out of a temple made even more humid by the choking smoke and incense, and she tumbled onto the street made worse by the stench of animal shit.
It didn’t surprise her when she collided with a man in a bright, undyed chiton.
The man was handsome enough, though he might have needed a new chiton for all he was sweating through it. His dark hair suggested it had once held some curl to it, but sweat pulled it down to stick to his head.
It was an uncommonly hot summer, after all.
His muscles corded as he helped her regain her balance, but his smile wasn’t entirely kind. This was a man who knew how to wield the sword he carried on his hip.
He spoke first, and his accent was entirely Athenian. “Are you okay? You’re not drunk, are you?” His laugh was brash. There wasn’t any warmth in it at all. “It’s too early for the parties I’ve heard this city has!”
Ariadne narrowed her eyes. She didn’t care how good looking this man knew he was, she wasn’t falling for it. “You try walking out of that temple and onto the main street and see how stable you are before your eyes adjust.”
The man laughed again, but he regarded her with something close to inspection.
“You,” he said, “wouldn’t happen to be Princess Ariadne, would you?”
Ariadne’s spine snapped straight upright as she glared at him.
The man’s eyes fell from her face to her chest.
“So what if I am?” she said. “I don’t make a habit of initiating trade deals with silly men who don’t own a single original thought in their minds.”
“I’m a prince,” he said, “of course I have original thoughts.”
Ariadne made a show of looking over his mud-caked sandals. “You look little like the self-centred idiots claiming sovereignty from across the waters. Do you take me for a fool?”
The man’s irritation bled through his mask of calm. “My name is Theseus, son of Aegeus and the god Poseidon. I’m here on behalf of my father, the King of Athens.”
Ariadne blinked. “Should that mean something to me? If you want official business, you should have gone to the throne room. You know, the room on the other side of the courtyard with the big shiny throne in it?”
Theseus, son of Aegeus and the god Poseidon, looked as though she’d slapped him across the face. Ariadne was rather proud of that.
“Oh,” said Ariadne. “You’re not here on official business. Which means you want to do something dangerous and illegal, and you know you’d never get away with it otherwise if you’d approached anyone else of the royal household. Give me one good reason I shouldn’t tell the guards and my Council the Prince of Athens is present in the city without an entourage or an official welcome.”
Theseus, son of Aegeus and the god Poseidon, oundered. It was almost worth the headache he’d no doubt give her later.
“I’ll let you fuck me when I’ve completed my task.”
Ariadne ground her heel into the toe of his open sandal. “I’m not one of your Athenian whores, so don’t presume to treat me as such.” She narrowed her eyes at him. “All I need to do is scream.”
Theseus, son of Aegeus and the god Poseidon, didn’t give her an answer beyond gaping like a fish out of water.
She walked away from him, towards the throne room, and ignored his shouts that she come back.
