Barbara Michaels - The Sea King’s Daughter

When I could see again, the two, man and monster, were wrapped in a struggle to the death. They rolled over and over, in and out of the light, arms and legs entwined as if they were being molded together into a single, even more monstrous, being. And I knew that one of the two must die; and I knew that whichever one it was, I would suffer a loss in that dying, for the monstrous thing was part of me, bone of my bone. As the two rolled and tore at each other, among the brittle, breaking bones of earlier victims, I woke up.

I remembered the whole thing now, and it was almost as bad as dreaming it. Then somebody’s arm went around me and rolled me across the deck. Two sleepy brown eyes stared into mine and a fur-fringed mouth opened in a wide grin.

“Guten Morgen,” said-I had forgotten his name. He was Austrian.

“Hi,” I said, and freed myself. I stood up, holding the rail for support.

The view almost made me forget my queasy stomach. The air is so clear in that part of the world that everything seems to sparkle. The water was aquamarine, sprinkled with lines of foamy white bubbles. The sky was a big inverted bowl of blue, with fat white clouds in it. We were gliding along the coast of Crete, and I could see the harbor of Herakleion, with a rash of houses and buildings enclosing it. The island was a bright, cheerful green, but behind the coast rose brown, bare mountains, and in that marvelous brilliant light it seemed as if I could make out the separate boulders on the slopes.

“We come into harbor,” said Hans, or Fritz, or whatever his name was. Joining me at the rail, he threw an enormous arm around me and squeezed my shoulders till the joints cracked. He was a great believer in touching. That arm had been around somebody, usually me, the whole evening. He was a big, blond, sleepy-looking guy who looked like a linebacker. There were 220 or 230 pounds of him, and most of it showed; he was traveling in a pair of shorts, sandals, a knapsack, and a beard. I put my arm around him and squeezed him back. The solid warm feel of him was wiping away the memory of my nightmare. But what a dream that had been!

“So,” said Fritz, or Hans. “Where we go? First we drink a beer, eh? Then to museum, then to Knossos, then to Haggia Triada, then-”

“First some coffee,” I said.

There was no dining room on the boat, but the crew cook ran a little concession on the side. I got coffee for me and Hans, at an exorbitant price. I figured Frederick was paying for it, so why should I be cheap?

Fritz continued to hang around. I didn’t know whether it was the coffee or my girlish charm that kept him, but I didn’t care. He knew a few words of Greek and found a guy, one of the ones who were lounging around the dock, who had a sister who rented rooms. He-the brother-agreed to take my luggage to the house. He told Hans where it was-the house-and I gave him my luggage check and some money, and we went looking for a café. I might add that when I describe such transactions to adults they almost die; but I never lost a piece of gear or a drachma.

After I had stocked Hans up with food-he ate an incredible amount-we headed for the museum.

The minute I walked in the front door I began to feel funny. I’ve tried to think of how to express it; the only thing I can say is that I recognized the objects in those cases. Not all of them. But some things… It was like the time I found a beat-up, half-disintegrated object under a bush in the backyard and recognized it as the remains of a doll I had lost a few years earlier.

I remember what brought on the first stab of recognition-it felt like that, like a sharp, physical pain. The object was described as a gaming board. I could see that it had been absolutely gorgeous, all inlaid with lapis and crystal and gold and ivory. There was a border of daisies around the edge, and reliefs of shells and things, in miniature. The board was cracked and battered, but it didn’t take much imagination to see it the way it had looked when some proud artisan presented it to the king. It had to have been a king’s plaything, that glitter of crystal and gleam of gold could not have been designed for any but a royal household.

Okay. So an imaginative person could picture that without much strain. Only I knew that board. I knew how to play the game. The pieces started on the right side, in the central one of the four circular spaces, and followed a path I knew, ending in the ladderlike section at the left-“home.” The men moved according to the throw of dice-ivory dice, larger than the ones we use today. I could almost feel them between my palms; one was a little jagged because I had flung it against the wall one time, when I made a losing throw…

The room came back into focus, and I realized that Hans-Fritz was holding my arm in a grip that hurt.

“Do not fall on the case,” he said calmly. “It is always so in museums, do not fall on the case.”

I realized that he had not seen anything peculiar in my behavior. That was a relief. He was a relief, with his big, lazy, good-natured grin. Not a nerve in him.

“You mean, don’t lean on the cases,” I said. “Uh-Hans, I think we ought to go. Let’s go to Knossos or someplace.”

“No, no, we must see museum. All in order.”

I don’t think I could have gotten through the museum except for Hans. Although he looked like a football player, he had a brain like a Rhodes scholar-the two are not necessarily incompatible, in fact. He knew a lot about the Minoan culture, and he communicated it to me in his cheerfully ungrammatical English. I just nodded and made noises. I was feeling queerer and queerer, Hans’s hand, to which I clung like a kid afraid of losing his mother, was a lifeline anchoring me in the present.

Some of the other objects hit me almost as hard as the gaming board-a gold necklace, a mirror-but the one that shook me most was the clew box.

It’s a small, squarish box made of clay, with holes in it. It could be used to hold a ball of string; I’ve seen similar gadgets in modern kitchens, containers with a hole for the string to come through so you can pull out the length you need without having the ball unwind all around the room. Such a device would have been equally practical for Ariadne and Theseus; the clew, or ball of twine she gave him, so he could find his way back out of the Labyrinth, might well have been enclosed in such a box. But there’s no way of proving that theory. The name of the mysterious object in the Herakleion museum is pure fancy, the suggestion of some imaginative scholar. Ariadne is a mythological character, and nobody knows what the function of the clay box was. Nobody but me.

I don’t remember what else we saw in the museum. I must have walked and talked and looked normal, like a well-constructed mechanical doll, because when I got my wits back, Hans didn’t appear to have noticed anything unusual about me. We were in a grocery store at the time. It was almost noon. I gathered that we had decided it would be romantic to eat lunch among the ruins of Knossos. So we bought goat’s cheese and a loaf of bread and a bottle of local wine and went to the plaza to catch the bus.

The bus ride was so normal and crowded and human, I forgot what had happened in the museum. We were jammed in like sardines. Hans took up a lot of room, and he kept apologizing to people, who nodded and grinned back at him. Everybody seemed to be in a good mood. I couldn’t help thinking of the buses in Miami at rush hour during the tourist season-the scowling, worried faces and hard voices.

Knossos was the end of the line, so we all piled out. It seemed funny to ride a bumpy little local bus to an ancient Minoan palace; twenty kilometers and three thousand years out, so to speak. There was a grape arbor outside the entrance to the city. The grapes were little green balls, but the leaves were thick and shady, so we sat on the ground in the shade and ate lunch, with Hans quoting inaccurately from Omar Khayyám. Then we paid our entrance fees and went in.