but forbid their reeds to caress tablets
until she had finished. She told them how much
she admired their patience and communed with their fear
her unstable dominion menaced the archives:
The love I found in my first look at him
has indited my heart’s indelible gloss.
He’s the only man I’d ever marry.
But love is no reason to lose control.
I’ll find a better form of succession.
I’ll devote myself to preventing your scrolls
from coming to harm. You have my word.
The scribes all dipped decorous scowls
to the ground in assent—except for one,
a newcomer named Suladade,
who smiled at the queen’s smug assurances,
gnashing the teeth nearest the lips.
He came from Kasch after killing his nephew
or after, some said, his supple glyphs
aroused a murderous amount of envy.
At The White Walls, he worked his way
through the scribal ranks and rapidly
secured a position at court, although
his color made his colleagues look pale
and he spoke Egyptian with a jagged accent.
It was the queen’s custom to climb her tower
and doze watching The White Walls below.
And the scribe from Kasch was scratching the door
and reaming the keyhole with his reed, and she couldn’t
move or speak, and her maids were gone,
and it dripped on the floor, and he drew a snail
between her breasts, and it twirled its gray
track through her ribcage and rasped her heart.
When she awoke, she wanted to touch
the white bull and feel his fur on her belly.
Each sunrise found him at the sandy cartouche
rewriting the glyphs he’d read in the evening.
She wanted to give him a gift, but he suffered
from no apparent needs or desires:
he couldn’t use reeds, so he wrote with a forehoof;
he seemed content with sand and grass,
with well water and the wind’s music.
Berenib bent her bare belly
before the bull the better to inspect
the glyphs sowing sense in the sand.
Asterion panicked when she started to snub him.
After a night that denied him sleep,
he sat in a window and saw the bull
write a message in the moonlit cartouche:
a seated man beside a hoe
and a rhombus beneath it. The robe glided
down royal thighs to rest at her ankles.
Asterion missed the message’s adverb,
an arm the bull blocked with his bulk.
Asterion rushed toward his rival and gored him
with little horns that loosed more blood
than anyone would’ve expected.
Berenib held the bull’s head in her lap
and watched him die and wailed curses
at his murderer. Her mind stuttered,
and the scribes were ruling as her regents till rest
could restore their sovereign to sanity.
Justice demanded the murderer’s death,
but his execution would incur the people’s
justified anger. All Egyptians believed
what the scribes had claimed, that the Cretan was a god,
so how could they call for killing him now?
How many lambs and how much labor
had the people given to the god’s temples?
The scribes bickered about this problem,
till Suladade conceived a plan
for a new temple whose narrow halls
would form a maze, immuring the murderer,
where the people couldn’t see him. This punishment
(worse than beheading) wouldn’t work
unless the maze were massive and intricate
with halls that would wander with the wanderer
and upset anyone’s orientation,
pirouetting on impatient paths—
like Phrygian Maeander, who flows for fun,
backward and forward, confusing his waves,
now to the source, now to the sea,
keeping his precarious current busy—
so the craftsman crammed uncountable paths
with circumlocution; the arcades were so tangled
it was difficult for Daedalus himself
to retrieve their only entrance and exit.
The Minotaur’s removal repaired
the king’s relish for the royal bed.
Pasiphaë groaned, and Glaukos crowned,
an orange scalp, a solar insult.
As the labyrinth arose, it deranged Knossos:
the harbor’s piers procreated,
despising ships and aspiring to weave
a lattice no one could navigate;
the marketplace multiplied stalls
until newcomers needed to pay
a guide to escape the scrum of peddlers;
the palace, once a patent hall,
became a place where a curious boy
could lose himself. Pasiphaë let
Glaukos roam. Glad to purge
orange from her sight, she consumed the blue
where sky caught sea across her sill.
The boy was playing with a ball named Sminth,
which he thought was really a rolling mouse.
Glaukos chased the cheese-lover
until the slaves lost track of him.
When Minos arrived for the midday meal,
he said he wanted to see the boy,
but nobody knew where he’d gone.
At the king’s command, his mercenaries
searched all Knossos, but nothing turned up.
Minos compelled Hupakoë
to go back to Greece with gifts for Apollo’s
priests at Delphi and induce them to find
where Glaukos was hiding. Harvest had ended,
and the sea would craze: if they safely reached
the mainland, they’d still be stuck in Phocis,
and the Pythia was a pitiless bitch.
But Hupakoë obeyed, and he bore the storms
better than Minos bore the waiting.
Minos wondered whether his wife did
something to Glaukos. Her grief smirked
through the mourning season.
He decided to die, / He decided to kill her,
but Hupakoë forestalled him. The Pythia announced
that Crete would welcome a weird creature
in the evening of the equinox,
and the one who had the wit to find
the metaphor that matched it best
would also find the orange heir.
A cowherd brought a calf to Knossos
that was white in the morning, vermilion at noon,
and black by sunset. Summoned to the court,
Daedalus watched the weird creature
an entire day yet didn’t know
what to call it. The king grew tired
of watching Daedalus watch the calf:
You’re supposed to be the big inventor!
Daedalus, make me a metaphor!
But the calf dazzled poor Daedalus:
the more he stared, the more he stuttered.
A bard was at hand, a hard up Argive
named Polyeidos, who played the harp
and sang sad songs for Pasiphaë.
Forgive me, Lord Minos, for meddling.
Permit me to suggest a metaphor.
Minos nodded at him. No one else,
will do my bidding today, it seems.
Am I right, De-de-de-daedalus?
Argive, make me a metaphor.
Polyeidos completed the task:
This mutant calf is a mulberry.
Minos smiled, Pasiphaë laughed,
and Daedalus hid his eyes with his hands.
Minos said: Argive, marvelous work!
But you’ve only begun. He gave the bard
a helmet, a sword, and a hive of keys.
Start in the palace: he’s probably hiding
somewhere nearby. If the boy’s not here,
you’ll have to look in the labyrinth.
But Asterion is always starving.
With a sword in your hand, you’ll have a chance.
Polyeidos went to the west garden
while the calf was still stippling white.
He walked the footpaths and waded the fishponds
and looked under every bush
that was high enough for a hiding place.
He proceeded to the cabins where the slaves kept
their gardening tools. Glaukos wasn’t
lurking amid the mildewed retreats
of rakes and pails, but Polyeidos
liked exploring this part of the palace:
he couldn’t hear the king’s tantrums,
just the Minotaur’s remote sobs—
a shady margin Minos disdained,
long addicted to grandiloquent glare.
Polyeidos almost forgot
that he roamed the garden on royal business.
He followed a wall aware its moss
had barred murals. Buzzing stopped him:
an owl swooped, and swarming bees
vacated their place: perched on a cellar
door, its cardiac disk ogling
Polyeidos, the owl sipped
the rainwater rilling the sill,
then screeched and flew off on silent wings.
Polyeidos supposed the sun
would set before he found the key
that fit the cellar; he considered using
his sword, but the king would accuse him of mischief.
The lock admitted the last key he tried.
In the murk he beheld a honey urn
and a boy’s ankles—brim antenna.
The feet fell off when the bard grabbed them.
He put them in his helmet and pulled the rest
of Glaukos out, his glaring hair
a viscid sheaf. Shouldering the boy
and clutching his helmet’s capsized skullcap,
Polyeidos transported the remains
back to the palace. A buzzing shroud
soon covered both the boy and his escort.
Minos added ocular salt
to the candied corpse, while the Minotaur’s mother
worked her balm in the bard’s collection
of fireless burns. The bee plunder
had discouraged decay, so the king couldn’t
doubt the body’s identity.
Daedalus began drafting the prince’s
mausoleum, but Minos refused
to bury Glaukos. I’ll bring him back.
I conquered all Greece, and the gods themselves
adore Minos: Death can’t keep him
without my approval. Hupakoë,