Knossos Read online

  Knossos

  Laura Gill

  Copyright © 2014 Laura Gill

  All rights reserved worldwide

  Smashwords Edition

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  Other Titles by Laura Gill

  HELEN’S DAUGHTER

  THE ORESTES TRILOGY

  The Young Lion

  The Outcast

  The Warrior

  One

  The Founder

  6300 B.C.

  Knos the mariner had three talents: navigating, haggling, and seducing other men’s wives. Those first two talents, which were his livelihood, kept him from being stoned for the third.

  He worked his mischief in foreign ports, where he had been able to wheedle his way out of most of his troubles. When his tongue did not smooth the way, his fists and his loyal crew won him the argument. But this particular dilemma? Knos gritted his teeth. By Potidnu’s balls, it figured the gods would find some way to reverse his fortunes.

  How was he to guess that the garishly painted woman who had toyed with him behind the waterfront and then taken him home for an hour of vigorous lovemaking was in fact a daughter of one powerful chieftain and the recent bride of another? “You must be mistaken,” he told the men of the Dolphin Clan who came around at sunset the following day to question him about what he had done with their kinswoman. “That girl was a whore if I ever saw one. Why, she seduced me!” The moment the words left his lips, Knos realized that was the wrong thing to say. “Easy, friends, easy!” He put up his hands to forestall any violence. “A chieftain’s daughter? No, there must be a mistake. I don’t believe it! No respectable chieftain’s daughter would know tricks like that.”

  But those five men, who included the woman’s eldest brother, did not look amused. Divos folded his brawny arms across his chest and glowered. Knos’s three wives, meanwhile, regarded him from their corner like a trio of she-demons from whom he would surely suffer an earful later.

  “She swears it was you,” Divos insisted.

  Knos did not have to feign surprise. “Me? Your sister’s but a child. I like my women older, more experienced, as my wives will tell you.” He jerked his thumb backward.

  An older man of the Dolphin Clan shook his head. “Sinopi named you.” Nurbas thrust a finger into Knos’s chest. “And everybody knows your reputation in the ports.”

  Did Nurbas have to say that in front of the women? Knos cleared his throat. “Friends, you know that’s a grievous exaggeration, and must you say it in front of my dear wives. I’m always on my best behavior. Why should I stray, when I’m happily married?” He felt three icy stares at his back. “You’d better go home and ask Sinopi again. She’s probably named me to avoid naming her real lover—that is, if she’s committed adultery. I don’t know anything about that.” He shrugged nonchalantly before wiping the perspiration from the back of his neck. Gods, the late afternoon was hot. “The woman I had was painted and must have been above twenty-five.”

  Divos narrowed his eyes, but the older men with him looked bewildered, uncertain of their own judgment. Even Knos was puzzled. Sinopi was a slip of a girl. Pretty enough, too, but not his type. “Go home,” he urged. “There must be some mistake.”

  Once the men of the Dolphin Clan left, Knos’s wives descended on him with a vengeance, pinching, slapping, and reviling him. “What in the hells were you doing with a slut from the waterfront?” Hariana, the youngest of his wives, fetched him a blow to the temple hard enough to set his ears ringing.

  Urope kicked his shin with her sandaled foot. “Sinopi’s barely old enough to have tits!”

  “Ladies, ladies!” Knos shielded his head with both arms. “What could I do? The woman threw herself at me!” Seeing his second wife about to strike, he grasped Fidra’s wrists. “Would I ever betray you with some other man’s wife?” he implored. “Don’t I always provide for you and our children, and bring you gifts when I return?”

  “Don’t lie, Knos.” Urope, his first wife, braced her fists on her ample hips. “Your eyes are always wandering.”

  “Of course they are! Sea habits are hard to break,” Knos exclaimed, still holding onto Fidra. “What sort of captain relaxes his vigil? Only the gods know when danger threatens.” His spirits flagged. All three wives remained stone-faced. He could see he was going to have to work for their forgiveness. “Oh, come! Don’t be angry. The woman was shameless. I enjoyed none of it.”

  Hariana snorted unbecomingly. “Nobody forced you to thrust your pole inside her.”

  Knos released Fidra in frustration. “She beguiled me! You should have seen how many love amulets she was wearing. Why, even the soles of her feet were painted scarlet. But it wasn’t Sinopi. I swear on Potnidu’s balls that it wasn’t.”

  “Then why do her kinsmen say otherwise?” Urope challenged. “And don’t play us for fools.”

  Knos became aware of a burning odor. Turning, he noticed the gray smoke issuing from the hearth at the same moment Fidra rushed over to rescue the burnt porridge from the coals. “Look what you’ve made me do!” she cried. “Get out! I don’t care where you go, just get out.”

  “I’m not going anywhere,” Knos answered staunchly. Adding embarrassment to injury, his eight children, ranging in age from two to fourteen, were watching with interest from the ox-hide curtain separating the main room from the sleeping quarters. “Orana, you should’ve been watching the fire,” he scolded his eldest daughter.

  “Don’t sidestep the question.” Urope went over to comfort her chastened daughter. “Sinopi’s kinsmen say you’re to blame. She says you’re to blame.”

  Knos threw up his hands. “How many times do I have to tell you that she’s lying?” He caught himself starting to raise his voice. Like stirring a hive with a stick, shouting would only further agitate his strong-willed wives. Softening his tone, he continued, “I’m not a complete fool. I’d never dally with a chieftain’s daughter. Sinopi must’ve heard the tall tales about me. Why, she must’ve given them my name to protect her real lover.”

  Fidra beat at the lingering smoke with her hands. “Just go, Knos.”

  “You don’t mean that, dear.”

  “Yes, I do.” Her broad, plain face was flushed scarlet, and she refused to look at him.

  “Go stay with your kinsmen,” Urope added. Bestowing a kiss on Orana’s temple, she urged the girl to help Fidra roll fresh dough. “Go purify yourself and make an offering to the gods for having offended your wives.”

  Hariana said nothing, but her expression signaled agreement. Knos knew well enough to realize when his sweet talk had failed. There was no point in forcing the matter. Let them brood about the infidelities of men and sleep on their discontent, he decided. In the morning he would return with wildflowers, woo them with platitudes, and everything would be well.

  “In that case,” he said, “I’m going. But you’ll miss me.”

  Knos made his way through the fishing village’s narrow streets down to the beach, which was deserted except for a group of fishermen running their boat into the foaming surf. Dominating the sand, resting on her keel above the tidemark, was the hulk of his trading ship, a ninety foot, oar-driven vessel called Dolphin. He ran callused fingers along her planks, assessing by mere touch the mortise-and-tenon joints, the constricting yew lashings. Dolphin smelled like sun and salt, kelp and the pitch sealing her timbers, and the cypress from which she had been constructed; hers was a scent as welcome to him as that of a woman’s desire. Since he had inherited her from his late father fifteen years ago, Dolphin had never given him a day’s trouble; her sturdy construction had safel
y brought him and his men through gales and tempests on numerous occasions. Knos understood her, loved her, found her a more amicable mistress than the human wives who ruled his hearth.

  Knos lay down in the sand beside his ship, and pillowed his head on his elbow. The sand was soft, still warm from the day’s heat, and the midsummer evening was balmy. What did his wives have to complain about? Aside from that one dalliance under a canoe with a fisherman’s wife on Patmos, and that fumbling liaison with a buxom young widow inside the sanctuary of Raziya, and that pleasant hour fondling a woman through her clothes on Nissiros, he had behaved. Mostly.

  He could not help it that he was sensual and earthy, and that he preferred his women as uninhibited as he was. To judge from his frequent exploits, one might be forgiven for thinking that he was dashingly handsome, but outraged husbands and kinsmen were routinely shocked to discover that the infamous Knos was of middling height and appearance, a sinewy, brown man with salty gray strands threading through black hair which he wore clubbed at the nape of his neck. He kept clean-shaven, but spidery creases from constant exposure to wind and sun webbed the corners of his eyes and mouth.

  His sexual adventures would have been the end of him had he not also been an exceptionally easy man to like. People were more willing to forgive a sailor his misdemeanors when he was also a merchant who brought valuable wares: obsidian tools from Melos, fine linen, medicinal herbs, animal skins and semiprecious beads, as well as news, messages from kinsmen, and stories and songs he had collected during his many voyages. Given the accessibility and traffic of the sea lanes, Knos was not the only Rhodian merchant trading with the ports of the eastern Aegean and Anatolian mainland, but among those dozens he was certainly one of the most successful.

  Would that his wives appreciated that fact better! They were no longer entranced by tales of his voyages, of the foreign customs and sights he encountered. They no longer cooed over his gifts of beads and cloth as they once had. What was the matter with them, anyway? Had they taken lovers in his absence? Knos doubted that. His brothers and other kinsmen would have told him straightaway had his wives been unfaithful.

  He recalled the woman by the waterfront. Bare feet and nipples painted scarlet with red ocher, and an eager mouth that would not quit. A chieftain’s daughter would never paint herself thus, or behave so wantonly. Sinopi was so young—yes, he admitted, old enough for marriage to the fat, middle-aged man who was her husband—but nevertheless, barely out of childhood. It was all a misunderstanding, a false accusation. Things would sort themselves out once Sinopi started telling the truth. Slowly, his eyes closed, and he fell asleep.

  Knos jolted awake from a hazy dream of three luscious widows devouring his manhood to the reality of several men attacking him, sitting on his chest and pinioning his limbs. He instinctively lashed out as his captors dragged him upright, but landed no blows. Quite the contrary, someone slapped him so hard across the face that stars exploded behind his eyes. Not his wives again. No. When he recovered enough to get a glimpse of his assailant, he found himself staring straight into a very familiar but unwelcome face. Gods, but Divos was an ugly bastard when he sneered.

  “What are you doing here?” he choked.

  An elbow to the gut doubled him over before he even finished his query. Retching, Knos was too preoccupied with breathing to resist the hands wrenching his arms behind his back and binding his wrists with hemp rope. Someone looped a noose around his neck and tightened the knot against the back of his neck. What was this? Divos and his bully cohorts intended to throttle him right there on the beach, did they, without a hearing from the elders?

  “The council wants to see you.” Divos tangled thick fingers in his hair and wrenched his head up. Knos’s nose throbbed; he felt blood trickling from one nostril. “You think you can fuck my sister and get away with it?”

  Knos gasped for breath. “I never touched her.” Gods above, was he still dreaming? Where were his kinsmen and crew to defend him? “It’s all a misunderstanding.”

  Divos snapped his fingers at the men behind him. “Bring him.”

  They dragged him stumbling from the beach into the village, which at this early hour should have been busy with women headed to the well and the beach to browse through the morning’s catch. Instead, a crowd had gathered before the mudbrick structure where the village elders judged local disputes, dispensed justice, and appealed to the gods. Men and women surged toward him, jeering, shoving, and pelting him with pebbles. Amid the whirl, Knos saw no one from his own clan; they all looked like members of the Dolphin and Octopus clans.

  Divos jerked the rope around his neck; the crowd roared its approval. Knos grunted and clenched his teeth as the younger man’s brutes hauled him through an ox-hide curtain into the mudbrick house.

  The village’s eight elders sat cross-legged in a semicircle around a plastered central hearth decorated with cross-hatching and spirals of red and yellow ocher and black. The walls were banded with colors, various shades of ocher, except around the central flue where the escaping smoke had stained the plaster with soot.

  Shobai glowered at Knos from deep-set eyes under an oppressive monobrow. Obese Rabbas was perspiring heavily despite the early hour; his glistening face was drawn so tight with rage and humiliation that his treble chins quivered. Knos found Dravan, his own clan chieftain, appearing very small and insignificant in comparison with the other elders; the old man returned his gaze for a fraction of a second, then glanced away, shaking his head in dismay.

  Knos was astonished by the vehemence of the opposition, both within and without. Did people actually believe that he had committed adultery with Shobai’s daughter?

  “What is this?” Aramo, Knos’s husky elder brother, stepped forward and, shoving the nearest of Divos’s companions aside, fumbled with the substantial knot tightening the noose around Knos’s neck.

  Aramo unfastened and removed the noose, while younger brother Rauda cut his bonds. “You assured us an hour ago,” Aramo said, “that Knos would be given every opportunity to comply peacefully with the council’s summons.”

  “I didn’t do anything wrong,” Knos affirmed quickly.

  Abbek, Knos’s first cousin, glared murderously at Divos. “Did your ruffians bother to wake him before jumping on him?”

  “That was their idea of waking me,” Knos muttered.

  A hiss from behind him. “You deserve worse.”

  As usual, Shobai did not reprimand his eldest son; his grumbled command to come to order was intended for the rival accused and his kinsmen. “Let there be no further disruption to these proceedings, for we now stand before the all-knowing, all-powerful gods.” As the high priest of his clan, he uttered his pronouncement with a typically overblown flourish. “Nidnu, do us the honor of offering the libation. Let the gods of the clans hearken to us with eyes and ears open to the truth, and hearts ready to judge.”

  Those deities, of molded clay in the primitive style of the mainland, occupied a plastered platform to the far left. Among them were arranged the sacred clan tokens: the skulls of the the clans’ totem animals. Knos regarded the yawning eye sockets of his clan’s bull skull. It was an ancient relic, yellowed with age, its left horn broken, and some of its teeth were missing. Whenever he gazed upon the skull, which was not often, Knos always sensed its silent yet potent presence, and had to suppress a surge of indignation over how diminished the most ancient of totems had become, shoved to the cobwebs, dust, and shadows of the rear while the village’s more powerful clans allotted prominence to their own unimpressive relics.

  Knos drew in a steadying breath. The village’s most sacred enclosure stank of wood smoke, stale food, and what he immediately recognized as the smell of human fear—a distinctive juxtaposition of acrid sweat, urine, and shit. The compacted earth floor under his worn rush sandals exuded dampness. Someone had recently voided their bladder there.

  Nidnu, the elder of the Cypress Clan, raised a painted cup in his hands, and intoned in his mellifluous
voice, “Oh, gods of Rhodes, here is a sweet offering of milk and honey. Grant us your favor and attention. Hear the case against Knos, son of Manasi, a captain and merchant of the Bull Clan, who stands accused of committing adultery with the woman Sinopi, the late wife of Rabbas, revered elder of the Octopus Clan, and the late daughter of Shobai, high priest and elder of the Dolphin Clan.” Kneeling, Nidnu touched his forehead to the shelf’s plastered edge, and presented the cup.

  Late wife and late daughter. Had Shobai and Rabbas already put the young woman to death, then? “I never committed adultery with your daughter, Shobai. The woman I lay with was much older. She was—”

  “We ask the questions here.” Spittle sprayed from Shobai’s thin lips.

  “You violated my wife. We should stone you right here and now.” Rabbas wheezed whenever he spoke. His conspicuous rolls of fat meant he needed assistance with the most basic tasks, from sitting and standing to walking and, rumor asserted, relieving himself. How did a man like that fuck a virgin girl without crushing her or killing himself?

  “I swear on Potnidu’s testicles that I never touched her.” Knos considered it a genuine shame that Rabbas was angry with him; the chieftain of the Octopus Clan was not a particularly vindictive man, merely an overindulgent and slothful one. Knos even transacted business with him on occasion, always finding him amicable and ready to barter, not to mention the fact that he maintained an excellent table. A sensible wife would not have had to try very hard to have kept him satisfied. “The woman I had never even told me her name.”

  “This isn’t about adultery,” Abbek snorted. “Gods forbid another man consummate your marriage for you!” Knos winced at his kinsman’s unnecessarily callous remark, while simultaneously trying to avoid meeting Rabbas’s gaze; the man’s pudgy face had swelled purple with rage.