than his dear cartouche, which returned to blankness:
“I owe Poseidon a sacrifice
that he can’t enjoy in Egyptian temples.”
He didn’t cheat. Though his death is our rage,
Seth won’t avenge Poseidon’s appeasement.
Let’s hope Minos gets murdered tomorrow
by his own people, but to punish him
wouldn’t justify Egyptians’ starting
a war on Crete. The white bull was safe;
he freely consented to his sacrifice.
War won’t negate the god’s demand
or distill our friend out of straying smoke.
But we have something your homeland lacks:
the letter’s reading. Our love of its author
should keep us here to cultivate
its wisdom, rather than directing us north
to wage a war and watch our virtue
undo itself damaging the innocents
that are always the woof to the wicked’s warp.
Asterion, remember Minos is old:
Osiris will weigh his wickedness soon.
What Berenib said seemed enlightened.
At last her lover released the tears
suitable to the son he didn’t
know that he was. In Knossos, mourning
the queen had become Deucalion’s excuse
for abridging his spells of sobriety.
A summer night’s solitary wine
compelled him to sleep on parapets.
From the West Garden’s unweeded darkness,
a heart-headed owl hooted just once,
but that was enough to nudge the prince
out of his drunken dreamlessness.
He rolled over, and the royal brow
fissured on cobbles too far below.
Unable to conceive a son to replace him,
patricidal Scylla rediscovered prayer.
There was something wrong with the royal prick,
the people gossiped: it had gone numb.
It’s true Minos remained in bed
all day because he couldn’t sit
on hard surfaces and his heels were swollen.
Hupakoë thought preparing the king’s
successor was prudent. Princess Regent
was a title no one in Knossos had heard of,
but Minos was too demented to protest.
Though his eldest daughter dreaded the throne,
Hupakoë refused to put Phaedra on it:
Ariadne was much less like their mother.
Proleptic mourning for Minos reduced
the number of cattle killed in Crete.
Ariadne considered suicide the only
way to relieve her life’s insults.
She told Polyeidos she detested time,
which took away what she cherished
and multiplied miserable duties.
She’d seal herself inside her room
were it possible, but Hupakoë had
a hoard of plans for her to enact.
The bard advised that vanquishing time
though certainly hard, was perhaps possible:
The queen, your mother, made us consult
the Kuretes when time refused
to alleviate a love sickness.
It was the Kuretes who taught your ancestors
how to draw metal out of mountain ore,
to melt it and pour it in molds to harden
as bowls and blades, as busts and platters—
and how to exploit the honeybees’
delicious labor was a lesson learned
from the Kuretes also. I can’t promise
that time would ever submit its metamorphoses
to gods or mortals to emend as they wish,
but no one on Crete would know a method
for making time settle except the Kuretes.
Hupakoë has announced that next week
he’ll leave Knossos: the navy banked
in Messara Bay will receive his inspection.
That’s the time for us to take a herd
to the Kuretes: they’re keen on sheep.
They reached Ida’s perennial rime
and stood near the refuge, which Rhea found
for Zeus: he preferred it to his father’s mouth.
Each of the Kuretes crested separate
boulders. Their fins busied tablets,
which provoked the cave to vomit percussion:
no need to dance or dent their shields
or blunt their swords. They descended the boulders,
and their snouts ripped the raw sheep,
and they drooled blood and debated how
to settle time, but their separate speeches
were pure gibberish to the princess regent.
They united their voices to announce their consensus
in Greek as lucid as her lonely thoughts:
Ariadne, your aspiration
to terminate time’s mutation
is not as absurd as it sounds: in other
worlds you become a crown of worlds,
which seems unchanging when seen from the end
of the beams boring the bitter void
between the gems and the twinkled gazers.
If it’s possible to pause or to slow
time in our world, it’s worth an attempt:
try writing your name — not right to left,
but letter by letter left to right.
The princess did so on a dial of snow,
but the early moon mounted brighter
and the boulders leached lengthening shadows.
The princess commanded her mother’s bard
to sing, and his song persuaded everyone
that time hadn’t halted at all.
The Kuretes told the princess:
Ariadne, this world’s not ready for that word.
And we won’t enter the worlds we want.
Go back to Knossos, and renounce renouncing.
Chew on your day’s death: choose life.
Undone by dementia, Minos perished
a few months after this meeting on Ida.
Having long debated the best option,
Ariadne decided that suicide
was slightly worse than wearing the crown.
An unforeseen sickness crippled
Hupakoë, impeding his plans for her reign.
The memory of Minos lingered,
and the people compared that petty despot
to the competent queen and questioned why
they once believed a woman couldn’t
wield a scepter as well as a man.
She cut Scylla’s skimpy peploi
into white rectangles, which she embroidered
with righteous laws in her reddest thread.
Each town on the island obtained a sampler
that replaced the fear of displeasing Minos,
formerly the lone force keeping
Cretan order from crumbling.
She fended off war and famine for decades.
In the end, she appointed Endaïra
as her successor. She excelled her mother
in graceful governance. The grateful Cretans
concurred in the making of a matriarchy.