Hupakoë sheltered his pride (which the king’s
routine rudeness rarely ruffled)
and continued performing foolish commands.
But Minos was right: there was something wrong
with Hupakoë’s hearing. A hollowed hiss,
not dissimilar to the tide’s slither
but seeming to enter his ears from the south
punctuated by avian peeps—
as though Minos hadn’t commanded the felling
of Ida’s forests for his foreign war—
drowned out his master’s miserable discourse.
He told himself he’d return the same day,
but the hissing led him on a lengthening journey
till he found the rebels faking birdsong,
the leaves’ rustling, and the rollers’ fall
on their instruments. He mingled with peasants
and slept in their tents. They taught him to share,
and he helped them get ready for the revolution
they’d hoped would rescue a remnant of Crete
before Knossos annulled it all.
From their songs he learned to love justice
and to hate slavery and the hoards he’d defended.
He was soon singing those songs himself.
With his tactical advice, they attacked the king’s
outposts, escaping unscathed in the darkness,
having horrified his hungry soldiers
and humiliated the men who commanded them.
He fed and armed the defectors and trained
the shepherdesses who ditched their flocks
to say that they helped unseat Minos
from his cushioned throne. The king ordered new
statues of himself instead of rearing
walls around Knossos, which would’ve made
the last attack less easy.
Having been dumped in a dungeon, Minos
heard his people hacking away
at his bronze statues with breathless joy.
The loyalists lost all their riches,
but Hupakoë knew economic injustice
would endure if he stopped at distributing hoards.
He tried to coordinate talent and labor
so a one-time princeling might work the fields
that were now managed by his manumitted chattel.
But the harvests yielded hardly any
increased production from Cretan soil;
the rebels’ reforms failed to do more
than partition their people’s destitution evenly.
The commune endured a decade, but he died
happily before its final days.
Begetting bastards was his big weakness.
One of those bastards abused the people’s
memory of his father and made himself king.
But this demagogue and his dynasty
didn’t put an end to every achievement
of the revolution, which liberated
slaves and women, warded off warfare,
and deposed a self-styled son of Zeus,
proving a country is capable of change
just as blue heavens can bleed snow.