It was two hours’ journey by litter to the palace. Every turn of the steep road showed another vista of beauty for our eyes: white beaches of little bays, gold beside the foam of breaking waves; the sea, patterned with its changing hues, shading from green and turquoise to purple blue; an olive tree entwined with honeysuckle; and wild roses cascading down a rock. The little villages were painted white or yellow or dusty pink; it seemed that to cling to the steep slopes the houses must be as sure-footed as a mountain goat. The breeze was gentle, and sweet with the flowery scent of mountain valleys. The twisted branches of the olive trees were heavy with years: clothed in the silver green of their young leaves, they were like some old man of learning who had renewed his youth. Children ran out of houses that we passed and threw flowers into our litters; for here the hillsides were gardens of the Gods.
In the distance, the palace of Kiodas looked like a splendid city on the mountainside, or like some staircase made for giants fifty cubits high. As we approached the great entrance, Artemiodes came down the long steps to greet us. Her voice was warm and sweet as she welcomed me. She was like a lovely figurine of copper and ivory: her skin smooth as pale honey, her hair challenging the colour of marigolds.
When she showed me the beauties of her house and the flowering joys of terraces and woods, she was eager as a happy child who shares its toys with some fond playmate. The gardens, sentinelled by cypress trees, flowed steeply down to join the olive woods; and so well had man and nature shared their work that each rose, each spreading drift of violets, each army of hyacinths marching in the sun, seemed to have grown there for their own delight.
The rooms of the palace opened on to wide terraces that roofed the ones below. My bedroom had a frieze of dancing-girls in black and red; and spaced above it on the walls were the heads of bulls, carven in white stone, their horns linked with ropes of dew-fresh flowers. The bed, its head shaped like a scallop-shell, was mattressed and cushioned soft in yellow silk. Woven rugs of black and white covered the stone floor—in Minoas even their palaces are built in stone. Pink oleanders in red pottery jars stood before the pillars of three archways, which opened on to the private terrace, and filled one end of the room, making it like a pavilion open to the sun. The archways could be closed against rain by slatted shutters; and inside there were blue curtains if I wanted darkness for a noonday sleep.
My bath, not set in the floor like ours, reminded me of a stone sarcophagus. Cold water spouted into it through the mouth of a stone fish, and it was drained through a little channel cut in the floor. Pottery vases of elaborate shapes, to hold dried herbs and flowers to scent the bath, were set on shelves against the walls, which were painted with seabirds and shells and branching coral.
At one end of the terrace, walled with the distant view of sea and sky, there was a swimming pool; and at the other, an arbour invited us to rest, shaded by vines and climbing roses with sharp-pointed buds.
When I returned to my rooms to prepare for the banquet, which was being given in our honour, my women had taken my clothes from their travelling boxes and laid them away in long chests of painted cedarwood. Maata told me that she had found twelve wig stands in the room where my clothes were kept, and that she supposed the people of Minoas thought our people were bald, just because they had heard that sometimes we wore wigs for ceremonies. Dear Maata! She took much more pride in my hair than she had ever done in her own, and she felt its lustre was due to her fierce combing of its tangles when I was a child.
Her thoughts crowded each other for her tongue; and as she polished my hair she told me that the girls who brought the hot water for my bath had bare breasts and their nipples painted scarlet, “and their hair was dyed orange and yellow, and curled and be-ribboned, instead of wearing decent wigs and linen tunics like our attendants. I doubt if there is any girl in this whole country whom a husband could surprise on her marriage day.”
I laughed and told her to be more tolerant of other people’s customs or they would think us dull as a room full of statues.
Maata sniffed fiercely. “Sly, giggling women! Not one of them would I let work in our palace for half a day, not even to clean out the lion stalls. If the ones I’ve seen are not big with child it’s no virtue of theirs, but because the men here are too busy painting their faces and curling their hair to have time even to remember that they are men.”
“Hush, Maata. They are different from us; perhaps they are younger than us. But they are our friends. We may be able to teach them a little wisdom—from what I know of their priests they have need of it. But frowns and disapproval lock hearts against words that might guide them. To see your face we might be surrounded by a forest of spears, and our wine poisoned, and our beds full of scorpions.”
“If it is your pleasure, I will hide my thoughts. As to my speech, it matters not what I say; they can no more understand my words than I can make out their heathen chatter.”
“Please me then, and smile, Maata. I also find it difficult to express myself in their language, but I am glad I learned something of it before their visit last year. It was gracious of them to welcome us in our own tongue.”
Maata had left me when Neyah came to my room to see if I was ready, and I told him what she thought of the Minoans. He was in a very good humour and kept laughing to himself; as we walked down to the banqueting hall he said, “It is well that Maata has not been to my room, for when I went to bathe I found six young girls to wait on me. And when I told them to go they pretended not to understand me, and they pointed to each other and to the bed to ask which I should like to wait on me to-night.”
One side of the banqueting hall was pillared, and curtained with the sunset. There were two long marble tables down each side of the room, and a shorter one on a dais at one end, where Neyah and I sat between Kiodas and his queen. Her flounced dress, of flax-blue edged with violet, was draped tightly round her waist and thighs; the bodice was cut low and showed her breasts with their gilded nipples. Her hair, piled high on her head in little curls, was kept in place by silver pins headed with amethysts.
At the King’s table, also, were Ptah-kefer and Zertar; the high-priests of Minoas, Kioda’s chief vizier, and the captain of his fleet. The nobles and captains sat with the women of both our households on cushioned benches at the long tables. Here each must spend the banquet with those on either side of them and cannot select those they wish to talk to, as we can in Kam.
The pale gold wine, soft on the tongue and very cool, was poured from long-necked jars with two handles of graceful shape by boys in short tunics, whose curled hair was bound with ribbons.
Many kinds of fish that I had never tasted before were served, and many sweet dishes, one being of honey, crushed almonds, and sugared rose-leaves. The table was strewn with violets and white roses. And while our tongues were beguiled with pleasant foods, musicians charmed our ears, and dancers our eyes.
To the sound of reed pipes, a dancer came running into the centre of the floor, his loins girdled with vine-leaves. He held the ends of long ropes of flowers, by which he dragged six girls, dressed as he, who were as slaves that he was bringing to his king. Then suddenly the girls whirled into a dance. He stood in the middle of them, while they danced round him, their steps weaving about each other, until he was plaited in the garlands of their ropes and bound, their captive. Then, as they rang their mockery of him, he burst his flowery chains, and they fled in pretended terror as he chased them out into the night.
Then followed two men and a girl, who though they were very graceful, were more acrobats than dancers. The men flung her to each other across the room; and as her arms back-stretched like wings, she flew through the air like a bird breasting the wind.
After each dance the company acclaimed the dancers and threw flowers to them. The first time this happened, I was startled. In Kam to praise a dancer when she has danced would be as if one stood looking at a sculptor, admiring him, and took no notice of the statue he had made. To us the rhythm of a dance is as separate from the one that creates it as is a statue from its carver; but here it is the dancer herself who is praised, and not only that thought which, through her body, she has brought alive.
I took a white rose that was lying beside my plate and threw it to a girl who had just danced, and I saw that in so doing I had pleased Kiodas. When he stayed with us in Kam, he must have thought us grudging in our praise, unknowing that for us to praise the makers of a shadow dance would be as if we sang to the moon for patterning a fig tree on a wall.
That night before I slept Neyah came to my room. He had been swimming in the pool; his hair still ran with water, and I told him to dry it before he went to bed.
He said, “I have no bed, for in it there is a sleeping girl who waits for me. I do not like this over-hospitality. I wish to sleep. If I send her from my room Kiodas may think I hold his women unworthy of me.…I like to choose for myself who shares my bed.”
“Poor Neyah! Tell her that on this day there is a sacred festival in Kam when all men swear celibacy for a night and leave the world of women to the god Min. She will believe anything of us. They think us magicians, who might turn them into frogs, or ride across the sky on crocodiles!”
“I am glad you threw that rose, Sekeeta; it pleased Kiodas. I found conversation difficult with his wife; it would have been easier had she been to Kam, but they were only married in the spring.
“They are such a happy people, gayer than we were, Neyah, even when we were little. They may not know who they are or where they come from or where their journey leads, but they live with laughter in that flash of time which is the present.”
“Yes, but their gaiety is like foam that soon will fade.”
“That may be, Neyah, but foam holds magic colour while it lasts, more beautiful than the deeps of all the seas. Though we may have the contentment of the long in years, they strain the present to their pointed breasts, closing their fingers round each grain of time as if it were a rose, fiercely distilling each drop of scent before its petals fall to free its heart.”
“But they know nothing of wisdom; if I could make Kiodas fill these temples with my priests…”
“They are young, and glad; and this is good for them. To change their lives would be as cruel as if I were to take Tchekeea’s favourite toy and rip it up and let the feathers out and show her that it was a linen cloth, and not a cat to whom she told her stories. Leave them. They are not evil, they are young. And when they are older they will be re-born into a land like ours.
“But it is late; the day has been long and we must sleep. Good-night, my Neyah; go to your room and in the morning tell me how you slept!”