I didn’t choose, but still must pay in full,
or rile the god who made my soul a bull,
a Cretan shoal my mother’s womb, and Crete
the place where I must die.” He did not cheat
the god. Although we must lament his death,
his murder shouldn’t make us call on Seth.
While we despise the murderer—rightly so—,
Egyptians have no right to overthrow
Minos to avenge a sacrifice our friend
freely submitted to. A war won’t bend
the sea god’s will or bring the white bull back.
We still have something your old people lack:
his letter’s wisdom. Let’s cultivate it here,
rather than watch our virtue disappear
in an unjust war against an unjust king.
He’s old and sick. He'll have his reckoning
before Osiris soon. Everything
Berenib said seemed true. Asterion
let out the tears suitable to the son
he never learned he was. Deucalion
preferred to mourn his mother’s death with wine.
His drunkenness compelled him to recline
on parapets one night. An owl hooted
in the west garden, and that sound diluted
his sleep enough to make Deucalion roll
off the high wall. Unable to console
Minos by giving him another heir,
Scylla discovered the uselessness of prayer.
They said the royal member had gone numb
or crammed her womb with some inhuman cum.
It’s true, he did lose feeling in his feet
and stayed in bed all day, since any seat,
especially the throne, would break his skin.
Hupakoë thought it prudent to begin
the next reign early. Minos was demented
and didn’t register the unprecedented
installation of his eldest daughter
as princess regent. The daily cattle slaughter
diminished as the palace underwent
proleptic mourning. Ariadne meant
to escape becoming queen, but Phaedra took
after her mother, and Hupakoë shook
his head: he’d never approve of that replacement.
Ariadne pondered modes of self-effacement
and asked her mother’s bard which was the best.
Time was her enemy: it dispossessed
her of the things she loved and burdened her
with what she never wanted. If to immure
herself inside her room were possible,
she’d do it, but Hupakoë was full
of plans for her bleak future. Polyeidos
offered advice: One day your mother bade us
to consult the Idaean Kuretes to solve
a spatial problem time would not dissolve:
a love sickness. They’re the ones who showed
the Cretans how to find a mountain lode
and melt it into statues, bowls, and swords,
and the war horns drowning out the lyre’s chords.
Then showed them how to put the honeybees
to work for them. If time’s metamorphoses
are not unstoppable, the Kuretes
are the only ones who might know how to freeze
change into space. Hupakoë
will head out next week to Messara Bay
and inspect the fleet he stationed there. We’ll take
advantage of his absence to go slake
the Kuretes’ thirst for sheep blood. So they climbed
from Ida’s foothills to her always rimed
crests, which they followed to the hideaway
where Zeus had not become his father’s prey.
Ten boulders underpropped the Kuretes,
whose flippers tapped the tablets on their knees,
causing the cave to imitate a host
of soldiers banging shields—a sonic ghost.
The Kuretes engorged their jagged trunks
to rip the sheep and drop raw chunks
into their mouths, which privatized the herd
from hoof to horn. The Kuretes conferred
on how to stop time, but the words they used
sounded like gibberish until they fused
their voices and delivered this conclusion:
Ariadne, your wish is more than mere delusion:
in some worlds, you become a crown and seem
unchanging from the far end of each beam
its gems burn through your long mortality
across the void. One possibility
remains for you to make things stay the same
in this world. Ariadne, write your name
backward. She did so, but an early moon
kept rising brighter, and the shadows hewn
by the quitting sun kept lengthening
beside the ten. She told the bard to sing:
he did so, proving time had not abstained
from channeling change. The Kuretes explained:
You see, this world’s not ready for that word.
Possible elsewhere, here it looks absurd.
Go home and reconcile yourself to life
and eat the morphing death of daily strife.
By the year’s end, demented Minos died.
Weighing the advantages of suicide
and coronation, his heir chose the lesser
evil. In contrast with her predecessor,
Queen Ariadne was so competent
and just she obliged her people to repent
they ever thought a woman couldn’t rule
as well as any man. A crimson spool
supplied the thread with which she stitched the laws
she gave Crete on the white Megaran gauze
Scylla considered clothes. Distributed
to every town, these texts replaced blind dread
of Minos, which had been the only thing
that kept the Cretan state from sundering.
Her daughter Endaïra took her place
upon the throne and governed with such grace
all Crete repudiated patriarchy,
making itself a grateful matriarchy.