The Sea King’s Daughter

I

I COULD HAVE RESPONDED TO THE APPARITION IN ONE of two ways. I might have said coolly, “Yes?” as if I didn’t know him. Or I might have come up with something coolly ironic-“Well, well, long time no see,” or some other equally witty remark. The key word is cool. I was not cool. I was thunder-struck; and my expression showed it.

I would have found him easier to deal with if he had been shabby and stooped and defeated. He was shabby, all right; his suit coat didn’t match his pants, and it was worn and spotted, but the impression was one of disinterest, not of poverty. And physically he looked impressive. He was taller than Jim and he didn’t have Jim’s little pot tummy. I couldn’t help making the comparison; it was disloyal, but I couldn’t help it. If you had seen the two of them side by side, you’d have picked this man as the athlete. He had hardly any gray in his thick brown hair. Even his face was young looking. His eyes were a funny, frosty gray; they studied me with detached interest from under heavy dark brows. He didn’t smile. His chin was square. It was my chin. I had never particularly liked the shape of my chin.

He looked me up and down, with that irritating, impersonal stare. I felt like a horse being appraised by a prospective buyer. Then he said,

“Ariadne. Yes, I would have recognized you, even without the photograph in National Geographic. Aren’t you going to invite me in?”

Still speechless, I stepped back. He came in and closed the door. Then he sat down in the sole armchair the room boasted. Casually, quite at ease, he glanced around. The room was a mess. Papers, books, clothes, sports gear all over. The bed wasn’t made. He didn’t seem to notice. His eyes lit on the photo on the dresser. It was my favorite picture of Mother and Dad, enlarged from a snapshot I had taken. They were in the front yard. It was a breezy day, and Mother’s hair was blowing. She was laughing, and she looked about twenty. Jim had his arm around her. He was laughing too, and he looked like the wonderful guy he is, bald head, pot, and all.

Something in my father’s expression made me angry. The warmth loosened my tongue.

“Mother is fine,” I said.

“I assumed she would be.”

“Oh, did you?” I sat down on the bed and glared at him. “You certainly never bothered to find out.”

“Why should I?”

If he had sounded angry or defensive, I would have had an answer. But he didn’t. He just sounded surprised. Before I could find sufficiently cutting words, he went on, in the same calm voice.

“It was obvious, even when you were an infant, that you would not be interested in pursuing a scholarly career. Perhaps if you had been a boy I might have communicated with you more regularly.”

“Male chauvinist,” I said.

“I beg your pardon?” His broad forehead wrinkled. Then it cleared. “No,” he said, in the same dispassionate voice. “It was not your sex, but your lack of intellectual capacity that guided my decision.”

A funny thing happened then. I looked at him sitting there, perfectly at home, with a daughter he hadn’t seen for almost twenty years-a daughter whom he had rejected because at the age of two she had failed to display sufficient intellectual capacity. He looked-no, not smug, that word is too strong-he looked self-satisfied. He had explained himself, and he expected me to understand, and to agree with his assessment. The notion that he might be wrong-that he might be irritating or cruel or unreasonable-had never entered his head.

Oddly enough, this didn’t anger me. You can’t feel anger with a blind man because he can’t see. For the first time in the insane interview I relaxed.

“How could you tell?” I asked curiously. “What tests do you administer to an infant to find out whether she has an aptitude for classical archaeology?”

He waved the question away with an impatient flick of his hand.

“That is beside the point, Ariadne. What does matter is that I was mistaken as to your usefulness. Not because my assessment was incorrect, but because circumstances have changed. The field of underwater archaeology has developed since then. Not that I had any reason to suppose that you would develop a talent for that sort of thing-”

“You should have tried throwing me into a pond,” I suggested.

Mother had once said my father was the only man she had ever known who had absolutely no sense of humor. My remark wasn’t all that funny, but it should have won a small social smile. The corners of my father’s long, thin lips remained straight.

“That would not have answered,” he replied, with complete seriousness. “And, as I have said, the field of underwater archaeology has developed since-”

“Okay, okay,” I interrupted. “I get the point. See here-uh-”

“You had better call me Frederick. A more intimate appellation would not only be out of place, considering our relationship, but it would prove an embarrassment in the situation I propose to outline.”

“ Frederick,” I said experimentally. “Fred?”

“I dislike nicknames.”

“Well, I don’t. Nobody ever calls me Ariadne. I hate the name. If I call you Frederick, you’ll have to call me Sandy.”

He considered the suggestion thoughtfully. Then he nodded.

“Although,” I added, “I don’t know why we should call each other anything. Is this supposed to be the beginning of a new and beautiful relationship? Because I don’t think-”

“You don’t think,” he interrupted. “If you did, you would understand what I am leading up to. I assure you, I should be more direct if you would stop distracting me with side issues.”

“Oh, I’m not that stupid. You saw the article in Geographic-what were you doing reading a pop mag like that? Anyhow, you decided that your stupid daughter might have a few talents you had not expected. Have you got a specific job in mind, or are you propositioning me generally?”

“I have a specific job in mind.”

It was the weirdest conversation. The most peculiar thing about it was that it didn’t seem weird, like the events of a bizarre dream that seem entirely reasonable in the context of the dream. The man’s self-confidence was so complete that it made his behavior seem right, somehow. I had never met anyone like him. Few people have, because most human beings suffer from self-doubt and insecurity, whether they express it openly or try to hide it under blankets of arrogance. Not this guy. Frederick. My father.

“…I could have obtained all the personnel I needed if those fools in the antiquities service hadn’t refused me permission to dive,” he was saying, as I came out of my reverie.

“Wait a minute,” I said dizzily. “You mean… Start at the beginning. Where is this dig of yours?”

“On Thera,” he said impatiently. “One of the islands in the Santorini group. They have assigned me an area where they do not expect me to find anything of importance. Fortunately Mistropolous has just been appointed head of the service and he has some respect for my ideas. But even he-”

He went on berating the Greek archaeological department, while I tried to sort things out. I suspected I would have to do a lot of sorting with him. He took so much for granted. I pitied his poor students, if he ever taught a class.

Thanks to the magazine article in the dentist’s office, I knew that Santorini was the volcanic island that had blown itself to pieces in the fifteenth century B.C. Several archaeological expeditions had worked on the main island of Thera; I gathered that Frederick ’s concession was not near any of the places that had produced juicy finds, but off in a corner where, it was fondly hoped, he wouldn’t cause any trouble. I already knew him well enough to suspect that was a vain hope.

Then another point hit me and I interrupted the tirade.

“What do you mean, you don’t have permission to dive?”

“The words seem plain enough to me.”

“Yeah,” I said. “They seem plain to me, too. In other words-correct me if I’m wrong-you have permission to dig, but not to dive. You can’t hire divers-no pro would be fool enough to risk his career and his reputation by breaking the law-so you are suggesting that I do so. Thanks a lot.”

“You have no career and no reputation to lose,” said Frederick.

“How tactfully you put it,” I said. “What makes you so determined to risk your reputation? Why can’t you just dig, like a good little archaeologist is supposed to do? It just so happens that I know about Thera, about the Minoan houses that were dug up-out of the dirt that is, not out of the ocean floor. And if you’re thinking about my diving down into the caldera, where the middle of the island was, forget it. A diver couldn’t work down there with ordinary scuba gear, it’s hundreds of feet deep.”

“Three to four hundred meters, to be exact,” Frederick said. “Obviously I wouldn’t propose any such absurd idea. Water pressure would have destroyed any remains in that area. If you knew as much as you claim to know, you would realize that the outer portions of the island were also subjected to seismic action. Parts of the coastline have subsided since ancient times. Local divers have reported seeing ruins underwater. I want you to investigate a-a particular area. The situation is ideal. Even our names are different. No one will suspect you of being motivated to-”

“Break the law,” I said. “Won’t they get just a teeny bit suspicious when they see me diving?”

“The village is remote. We will take all possible precautions.”

“But it’s impossible! I’ll need gear. Tanks. Air. How do I get my tanks filled without some smart character suspecting that I just possibly might be diving? It’s crazy!”

The madman-my father, for God’s sake-looked vaguely around the room.

“I’d like some coffee,” he said. “We’ll discuss the details. They can be worked out.”

I made him some instant on my hot plate. I didn’t want to go out to the coffee shop with him. I didn’t want to be seen with him. But I knew what was going to happen. I even knew why it was going to happen.

Breaking the law didn’t bother me, although I had made a big point of it to Frederick. As he said, I had no reputation to lose, and I didn’t consider that I was planning to commit a crime, merely bend a minor regulation. I doubted that they would put me in a Greek jail even if they caught me. I could always claim my revered parent had ordered me to do wrong.

That danger I could dismiss, but the other dangers were more serious. Diving is the greatest fun on earth, but it is not a game. You have to know what you’re doing, and you have to know the terrain. Thanks to Jim’s super coaching, I felt competent to take care of myself in home waters, but I didn’t know anything about the Mediterranean. For all I knew, they had man-eating plants down there. And my father didn’t strike me as the greatest person to have around if you got into trouble. I had a feeling I could drown ten feet away from Frederick if he happened to be thinking about something else.

Money was no problem, apparently. Somehow or other Frederick had conned some nutty foundation into sponsoring the dig. There are more of them-nutty foundations-than you might suppose, supported by millionaires with more money than sense, or by groups of earnest fanatics. They want to find the Fountain of Youth, or the secret of the Great Pyramid, or-in this case-Atlantis. The Atlantis bit suited Frederick ’s plans; that’s what he was really looking for, although he put the problem in more pompous terms. So I could get my fare and expenses out of Frederick. I might not be earning any money, but at least I wouldn’t be a drag on Mother and Dad.

Which brought me to the main problem.

I had no intention of telling my parents-my real parents-about Frederick. Mother would flip, and I wouldn’t blame her. It had taken me only half an hour to realize that my begetter was ruthless, unreliable, and incapable of feeling responsibility toward another human being. Mother had better reasons than anyone in the world to know these things. For the first time in my life I allowed myself to contemplate that marriage. It had lasted for three years… I shivered. Cold. Cold-it must have been like embracing a block of ice.

So what I had to do was think up a convincing story. I considered lying about my whereabouts, writing a dozen letters and arranging to have incoming letters forwarded by a confederate in some safe neutral town, or one of the state parks, where I might reasonably be expected to find a summer job. The idea didn’t appeal to me. If I got caught, it would destroy a relationship that had taken me twenty years to build up. I hated to risk it. And yet it was because of that relationship of trust that I could get away with what I planned to do that summer. Mother and Jim would believe me when I told them…anything. They trusted me that much.

I was already starting to talk away the difficulties. The decision wasn’t hard to make. It was a choice between Joe’s Pizza Parlor, with a lot of beer-drinking high-school big shots making grabs at me, and…Thera. Brilliant sunlight and cobalt-blue waters, olive groves and white beaches and bronzed Greek sponge divers with dazzling smiles… My ideas of Greece were pretty vague. But underlying the hazy tourists’ picture, motivating the decision that altered my life was the prospect of what might be waiting for me in the blue waters off Thera. Sunken treasure, cities under the sea. The columned halls of the sea kings. Gold ingots, piled in stacks. Crowns and diadems, jewels spilling out of rotted chests bound with silver. Pretty Sandy Bishop, the discoverer of the treasure…

I’m not ashamed to admit I was a fool. Even now, after all that happened, I’d rather be foolish than too dull to respond to a lure like that.

After Frederick had left I tried to get back to my term paper, but it was a lost cause. His aggressive presence still pervaded the room. After a while I put on my raincoat and went to the library. Instead of looking up references for my paper, I took out three books about ancient Greece.

Things worked out about the way I had expected. Lying to Mother and Jim left me with a nasty feeling. I hated to do it. But there was no other way.

So I set up a deal with Betsy, a friend of mine who was planning to spend the summer backpacking around Europe with a couple of other guys. She agreed to forward mail, read telegrams or anything that looked urgent, and telephone me right away if something came up. (That was before I found out about telephone service in remote parts of eastern Europe.) She was also supposed to scribble an unintelligible postcard from time to time.

Mother and Dad accepted my plans with a readiness that made me squirm inside. I had about two hundred dollars in the bank. I told them it was more. They believed me. And I felt like the A-I heel of the universe on graduation day when Jim handed me a check. He had to borrow the money, I was sure of it. I almost told them the truth then, they were so teary-eyed and proud and gullible. But I didn’t. I promised myself I would pay Jim back at the end of the summer, with interest. I could get the money from Frederick, and believe me, I had no qualms about doing just that.

I had seen him a couple of times since his first visit. Finally I told him not to come to the campus. He made me nervous. It was okay with him. We communicated by letter after that, and I must admit he was relaxing to deal with. He wasn’t like a parent at all. I mean, with parents-parents you love-you have to go through all kinds of contortions to keep from worrying them or hurting their feelings. I didn’t have to pretend with Frederick. He treated me like an equal-no, not like an equal, he didn’t think he had any; he treated me like a functioning adult, no more incompetent than the other adults he knew. Like, in making the arrangements for the trip. He just sent me a check. No reservations, no “I’ll meet you at three thirty-four at the customs desk, and for heaven’s sake, don’t miss the plane.” Love is fine. But it is also confining, it ties you down. My parents were the greatest, but even with them there were times when I felt like Gulliver, pinioned by a million tiny strings, and I wanted to leap up and yell and throw my arms wide and break loose.

I wanted to be free. And if that sounds corny, adolescent, immature-it’s the truth, and I’ve made up my mind to be as honest as I can. I know. Freedom’s just another name for nothing left to lose. I had plenty to lose and no intention of losing it. I didn’t want to be free of Mother and Dad, not permanently. But for a while… WithFrederick I was free. I didn’t give a damn about him and he didn’t give a damn about me. If I ever came into conflict with his precious work, then heaven help me. He would sacrifice me as quickly-and with less regret-than Agamemnon had sacrificed his daughter to get favorable winds. (You see, I had been doing my homework on ancient Greece.)

I knew from the start I couldn’t live long in that arctic cold that was Frederick ’s emotional environment. But after twenty years of cozy warmth, it felt bracing. He was an interesting man. I was curious to find out more about him. And there were the sunken halls of the sea kings, waiting…

They weren’t such bad reasons. There was no way I could have anticipated what was going to happen.

III

I took my time about getting to Thera. Frederick was probably pacing up and down the volcano, looking at his watch and cursing me in several languages; but after all, it was my first trip abroad. Besides, I felt I had to establish my relationship with Frederick right from the start. If I wasn’t firm with him, he would walk all over me.

So I spent a couple of days in London and a couple of days in Paris, seeing the sights and sending lots of postcards home. I was always with a crowd; there were a lot of people my age traveling, and it’s easy to spot a fellow student, whatever his or her nationality. I said good-bye to Mike and Sally and Joe in Paris, and met another group in Athens. We visited the Plaka together, and I learned how to do that Greek dance, the kind where the dancers have their arms around each other’s shoulders.

Oh, yes, we went up to the Acropolis one afternoon. If they would only fix the place up, it would be rather impressive. There’s no reason why they can’t patch the holes and put up some new columns.

I mention this not to show what a boor I am, but because my lack of response to the great antiquities of Greece proves that I am not susceptible to that sort of thing. I had no emotional reaction to the place, and it’s a place that brings out the hidden romanticism in many people. “The birthplace of democracy… The stones trodden by the sandals of Socrates…” That sort ofthing.

Which makes my experience in Crete all the more peculiar.

I hated to leave Athens. I had met this guy named Aristotle-really-who was a student at the university, and he was showing me parts of Athens most tourists don’t see. He wanted to show me some other things, too; and although I was having fun, I decided maybe it was time to move on. I wanted to spend a couple of days in Crete, to keep up my tourist pose, before I went to Thera. I suppose I was overdoing the camouflage, but I rather enjoyed it; it made me feel like Mata Hari.

I took a boat. There were quite a few other students on board, and we stayed up most of the night singing and talking. The cabins were stuffy little cubicles with four or five people in each of them. I guess every safety regulation was violated on that boat, especially the one that limited the number of passengers. I figured if we hit a rock or something, I’d have a better chance on deck, so instead of going to bed with my four roommates, I just lay down on the deck when I got sleepy.

When I woke up, with the sun shining down on my face, I felt awful-sick and stiff and depressed, the way I’d felt when I had Asian flu. It wasn’t the hard deck or the fact that I’d had only three hours sleep. I had done that plenty of times. I wondered if I was catching some kind of bug, and I lay there for a while with the smell of bilge and sour wine strong around me, regretting my boasts about never getting seasick. Then I remembered the dream.

When I was young I used to have nightmares-not often, but when I did, they were bad. It would take me a long time to fight free of the dream, even after I woke up; I can remember lying in bed in a cold sweat of terror, shaking and sick, before I came fully awake. It hadn’t happened for a long time. Until now.

I felt a little better when I realized that the main thing wrong with me was a bad dream. I tried to recall the details of this one; but the harder I concentrated, the more the memories slipped away, like small wet fish between my fingers. At first all I could remember was that it had something to do with Crete and the old legend-with which I was now very familiar-of Theseus and the Minotaur.

The Minotaur was a good theme for nightmares. Half man, half bull, he was the result of a temporary liaison between the queen of Crete and-right. The queen couldn’t help herself, actually. Poseidon, the god of the sea, had made her fall in love with the bull because her husband had kept the animal for himself, instead of sacrificing it. The Greek gods were always doing things like that. They were a mean, vindictive group of divinities, not nearly so well behaved as the poor humans they harassed.

Anyway, King Minos couldn’t destroy the Minotaur because it was sacred. So he had his brilliant architect, Daedalus, design the Labyrinth as a sort of kennel for the monster, and every nine years he fed it with hostages from the conquered city of Athens-seven young men and seven maidens. One year, when the sacrifice was due, the prince of Athens, Theseus, volunteered for the draft, hoping to kill the monster and save his fellow Athenians.

He wouldn’t have succeeded if the Princess Ariadne, Minos’ daughter, hadn’t fallen in love with him. She gave him a clew, a ball of string, to unwind as he went into the Labyrinth. Without it, he couldn’t have found his way out again, even if he succeeded in killing the monster, which of course he did, being a hero. He took Ariadne with him when he escaped from Crete, but he deserted her before he got home-sailed away, leaving her on an island where they had stopped for provisions. At least that’s what one version of the legend says, and it’s the one I’m inclined to believe. Another version claims Theseus’ ship was blown away by a storm while Ariadne was on shore.

The part I had dreamed about was the part where Theseus meets the Minotaur.

I had seen a picture of that scene in some mythology book. It was a line drawing in black and white-nothing like my dream picture, which had been in living color, complete with all the sensory impressions. As I lay there, the dream came back to me, my memory nudged by the Greek sun beating down on my upturned face, the boat rocking gently under me, the smell of fish and seawater and close-packed bodies…

The walls were rough, rock cut; they dripped with moisture and shone with a rotten greenish luminescence. There was a horrible smell-not the smell of manure and hay, which is wholesome and clean by contrast, but the stench of organic things decaying. The air was thick with it. No wind from outside had entered that place, to sweep it clean, since it was built. This was the heart of the Labyrinth, the lair of the monster. Maybe the outer walls and corridors were man-built and straight; I hadn’t seen that part in my dream-but here, at the very core, the rocky maze seemed to be cut out of the body of the earth itself. The earth mother was the oldest of all the gods, and the slimy, curving corridors were horribly suggestive of the entrails of some gigantic animal. The light pulsated feebly, as if something breathed.

In the center there was darkness, utter and absolute. But I knew something was there. I could sense it, waiting. The man knew it, too. He was afraid. The sweat ran down his face in streams, and yet his half-naked body shook convulsively, as if he were cold. He was wearing a queer short skirt, with a wide belt that shone like metal. It pulled his waist in and made his chest and shoulders look even broader than they were. There was a chain around his neck, with an amulet or locket hanging from it. He had dropped the clew. There was something on the ground at his feet. How could I tell it was a box, the box that held the ball of twine? I don’t know. But I was sure.

Yes, I was there. That was the worst part of the dream. I was there, invisible, impalpable; watching in an agony of fear and hope.

Something stirred in the central darkness. There was a rustling sound, not the rustle of dried grass or hay, but a clicking rattle, like dead bones rubbing together. Then It came out into the light.

Half man, half bull. It’s all right when you see something like that in a drawing. You can accept the grotesque because it is unreal. But this was real-alive and breathing. The mingling of animal and human wasn’t as neat as it is in the illustrations-a well-shaped man’s body with a bovine head, like a mask. This creature was indescribably blended. But the face was human, and that was horrible, because it was aware. It knew what it was, and it felt the same loathing its victims felt-for its own body. Imagine being trapped, not just for a single lifetime, but for eternity, inside something you loathe and despise with a sick hatred… Hate was its only emotion. Hatred for itself and for humanity and for the immortal gods. I caught one glimpse of that ghastly face and blacked out.

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.

Most archaeological sites are pretty boring, just low foundation walls, drab brown brick and gray stone, with dusty weeds growing up over the thresholds. Knossos has been restored by the excavator, Sir Arthur Evans; and although the purists criticize his restorations, claiming that he used more imagination than research, the result is so handsome you can’t condemn him. The palace is truly labyrinthine in size and complexity. The rooms, roofed and columned, are complete; the grand staircase really is grand, the queen’s bathtub is in place in her bathroom. And the colors! The queer Cretan columns, larger at the top than at the base, painted black and red; the faded terra-cotta of the giant storage jars; the soft blues and yellows of the painted walls. The frescoes are clean modern copies of the originals, which are now in the museum. Like most of Knossos, they have been restored-over-restored, according to some critics. But they give some idea of how gay and bright the place looked in its heyday. There are flying blue dolphins and golden griffins; processions of young men with long black curls falling over their shoulders and their waists pulled in by broad, tight belts; frivolous Cretan ladies in costumes that look like the latest Paris fashions, the skirts long and full and flounced, the bodices baring their breasts.

Perhaps the most famous fresco is the one of the bull leapers.

Hans liked that one.

“Achtung,” he exclaimed, or some vigorous German exclamation. “How could they do such dangerous thing? I would not jump over bull!”

“You might if the alternative was being killed,” I said. “Maybe the bull dancers were prisoners who were trained for the job.”

“Yes, yes, I have read the books that say so. But I doubt that it happened. Even, I doubt the picture when I see it! It is a fantasy.”

“No,” I said. “No, it could be done. It doesn’t require any more skill or coordination than modern-day gymnastics. The only difference is that it’s more dangerous. The mortality rate must have been high. But that didn’t seem to bother the Greeks. I wouldn’t choose you, though, Fritz. You’re too heavy. A bull dancer had to be light and lean-pure muscle.”

Like the man in my dream.

“Like you.” Fritz looked me over approvingly. “You would dance well with the bull, nicht?”

The big brown bull was in full charge, his head lowered. The three athletes were naked except for queer little calf-length boots and close-fitting loincloths, fastened at the waist by the broad, stiff belts that seemed to have been fashionable in Crete. One of them was standing behind the bull with her arms raised, as if she were about to catch the man who was doing a handstand on the bull’s back. His legs were flung back, and it was clear that he was about to somersault over the tail and land on his feet, behind the bull. The third of the three vaulters was just starting her leap. She had hold of the bull’s horns, and she was right in between them, you could see the points on both sides of her body. The technique couldn’t have been more clearly expressed in a games manual. The athlete grabbed the bull’s horns when he charged, and when he tossed his head back she vaulted up over his head, landed on his back, and jumped to the ground. That is, she did it unless she got caught on the horns.

Yes, I said “she.” Two of the athletes were girls. No mistake; not only were they shaped like girls, but they were painted a pale yellowish white, in contrast to the third athlete, who was reddish brown. Hans explained that coloring the men darker than the women was a convention in Minoan art. The Egyptians did the same thing, perhaps because the women usually stayed inside and protected their complexions from the hot Mediterranean sun.

I wondered if I could get a postcard of the scene. If so, I would send it to Mr. Barnes, the gym teacher who had refused to let me play baseball because girls were too fragile for such a violent sport.

This was one sport I wouldn’t have tried out for. Oh, it could be done; as I had said to Hans, it didn’t require any more coordination than a lot of the tricks gymnasts learn. Only here, if you slipped, you didn’t get up, rubbing a sore fanny, and try again. But the danger wouldn’t deter the bull vaulters, any more than it stops bullfighters and mountain climbers and Evel Knievel. Maybe the vaulters weren’t prisoners. Maybe they were kids who saw themselves as superstars, strutting down the stone-paved streets with everybody pointing and whispering and asking them for their autographs. And, as Hans said, there might have been a religious meaning to the game. That would strengthen an athlete’s nerve too. The bull was the sacred animal of Poseidon, the sea god, and the games might have been rituals in his honor. Remember the Minotaur, half man, half bull…

You see, I was thinking quite reasonably and coherently. All the while, however, another process was going on inside me. What had happened in the museum was only the overture before the main event, which began as soon as I set my sandaled foot on the soil of the city. The feeling was so strong that it overpowered my sense of congruity. It no longer seemed strange that I should find so many things familiar. It was as if I were two people in the same body. The real me- Sandy -was in control. She walked around and talked to Hans and admired the sights. But down underneath, in the dark places of my mind, someone else was waking up from a long, long sleep. That someone didn’t have a name. I didn’t dare give her one. But she knew this place, as she had known the gaming board and the clewbox.

“We” stood in the big central courtyard, and one of us remembered the games.

It was midafternoon by then, and hot. The sun beat down on the dusty gray surface, where a few hardy weeds survived the trampling of tourists’ feet. Along the four sides of the court were the walls and columns of the enclosing palace. There were quite a few sightseers. The ones who had come on the big gaudy tour buses were mostly over sixty and overweight. They had gray hair or white hair or no hair, except for a few of the women, whose bright-gold heads had come off a shelf in some shop. They huddled together like sheep, listening to the guide’s lecture. The younger tourists seemed to be students, for the most part. Some of them, with their long hair and short shorts, their legs and torsos bared, might have stepped out of the old frescoes-slim-waisted, brown young men.

“I” saw the tourists and the sunbaked earthen flooring. The other person in my mind saw great stone paving blocks, ominously stained; rows of spectators watching in breathless silence; the great brown bulk of the bull, and the man who stood waiting for its charge, hands raised and ready for the horns. His body was lean and brown, and his face was the face of the man in my dream.