To true the walls, we put a drib of oil in a shallow cup and lay on top an olive leaf and on the leaf a flake from off the Anatolian hammers we use to set the lintels and split beams. Those shards lay everywhere, peppering the floor, like beetles scuttling in the dust. They would recollect, each to the others, in a clot.
You hear princess, you think some child. She was not young. She lived a life apart at Gortyna, away from palace things, more like a nun almost, to tend her brother. She spoke to him like others couldn’t, calmed, perhaps, by the tea-scent of her hair, her nails on him, the gentle way she poulticed mud to salve the wounds he gave himself.
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Suffice to say the suitor who appeared that year in autumn in his dark-beaked galley took her by surprise. Her father sent no herald. But she liked his plumpish northern face. He gave her splendorous non-promises: I’ve come to make these things all right again and I come to you with mercy of the gods for him and thanks to you the sad fellow will at last be free.
So the halfmoon past his coming she made gifts of sage and beeswax, tallow soaps and stones to tell the gods her eagerness (she never could do goats or even birds) and told him secrets one-two-three and showed him threadwork from her girlhood. With confiding hand she traced love plans upon his chest and abdomen of meals they would share and abundant teeming garden hives.
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I know you think you know. But I am just the beam and chisel guy. I built a portico as would befit a prison. Full stop. The rest are fairy tales told by swindlers. This much I can tell you: No magic ball of string or ball of magic string what have you rolled forward like some schnauzer snout-down de-vermining the cave.
She was the magic. She herself. And when the day came, she tied onto the high doorframe a hem- thread of her bleachwhite gown and danced him forward, unraveling until at last the dress was gone, and they stood where he sat in cowfilth, allayed to hear her breathing near, she now naked to both. Then it was one-two-three and afterward, spindling the thread around the bludgeon, he walked out.
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The desolation calls are hard to tell. The cave could not contain them. The insects stopped their skittly hiss. After some time alone she must have found one of the cups with olive leaf and hammer shard and learned its art: However she might turn amazed in gyral darkness, in frenzy pandemoniac, bereft, it trued her dismal course and pointed her the other way.
As she emerged, I found a painter’s tarp to wrap her body in. She was from head to foot enameled in cattle blood. She had torn her tea-scent hair in sheaves and plastered it with gore along the cavern walls. I gave her water from a skin. She tightly held the little cup and went its unremitting way, the leaf and shard recoiling by degrees and pointing her through Knossos to the Cyclades.
GREG SENDI is a Chicago writer and former fiction editor at Chicago Review. His career has included broadcast and trade journalism as well as poetry and fiction. In the past year, his work has appeared or been accepted for publication in a number of literary magazines and online outlets, including Apricity, Beyond Words Literary Magazine, The Briar Cliff Review, Burningword Literary Journal, Clarion, CONSEQUENCE, Flashes of Brilliance, Great Lakes Review, The Headlight Review, The Masters Review, New American Legends, Plume, Pulp Literature, San Antonio Review, Sparks of Calliope, and upstreet. He is done with this shit. So done.
