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 his source, now to the sea,
keeping his precarious current busy—
so the craftsman crammed uncountable paths
with circumlocution; the arcades were so tricky
it was difficult for Daedalus himself
to retrieve their only entrance and exit.
There they trapped the boy-bull, the two-fold figure,
and Athenian flesh fed it the ninth
and the eighteenth year, but a youth drafted
in the twenty-seventh, took him down.