would weaken her. Once he became a king,
Asterion, so pliant now, might try
to rule alone. But she had to mollify
the royal scribes, who kept their fingers still
at her command. Your justly famous skill
in writing makes you anxious to protect
the archives against the dangers indirect
succession poses. I appreciate
your patience. Nine years is too long to wait
to hear these words: I love Asterion,
but I won’t marry him—or anyone.
Why is it necessary to deflower
a queen to make an heir? I’ll keep my power,
but promise you your archives will not burn.
The scribes all bowed with dutiful if stern
expressions on their faces—all, except
the recent exile Suladade, who kept
smirking at the queen while he seemed to gnash
the teeth behind his lips. He came from Kasch,
where he murdered his nephew, or, some said,
his glyphs provoked such jealousy he fled
to The White Walls, and won a place at court
through sheer talent, though he made his swart
colleagues look pale beside him and spoke Egyptian
with an accent requiring decryption.
Berenib climbed her tower that night and dreamed
that Suladade besieged her door and reamed
the keyhole with his reed. He drew a snail
between her breasts, which drilled its silver trail
into the heart beneath. When she awoke,
she felt an urgent need to hug and stroke
the white bull busy practicing his glyphs
at dawn. She couldn’t think of any gifts
that would appeal to him: he was content
with sand and grass and shade. Although she bent
before his latest efforts and pretended
to care about his writing, she intended
to entice him with her flesh. Asterion
panicked when the queen began to shun
his company. Then late one sleepless night
he rose from bed and saw the white bull write
a rhombus underneath a hoe beside
a sitting man, and saw the queen’s robe glide
to the dim ground. He didn’t see the arm
the bull’s bulk blocked. He rushed to do him harm
before he took more pleasure from the queen.
He gored white dewlaps, having not foreseen
how much blood his little horns would tap.
Berenib held the white head in her lap
and cursed Asterion. The scribes appointed
themselves as regents. Berenib’s disjointed
mind must rest. The white bull’s murderer
deserved a punishment that would incur
the people’s rage. How could the scribes, who’d said
the Cretan was a god, now want him dead?
The people built so many temples, brought
so many lambs to smooth palmed scribes who taught
them that the god would heed their piety
and guard their souls because their gifts were free.
This problem stumped the scribes till Suladade
came up with an idea: What if we made
the god a temple structured like a maze,
where we could hide him from the people’s gaze?
A simple one wouldn’t work. They’d spare no cost
to ensure that once he entered, he’d stay lost
deep in a copious network of corridors
whose bending walls would start to look like floors
to anyone who wandered there for long:
even the bricks would wander, like a song
without refrain or like the Phrygian river
who frustrates boatmen seeking to deliver
punctual freight: Maeander flows for fun,
backward and forward; his currents rarely run
from source to sea directly but loop back
doodling many a marshy cul de sac—
Daedalus made the maze so difficult
that it was necessary to consult
his blueprints for the engineer to find
his way out of the prison he designed,
in which the Minotaur patrolled the mortar
joints for the culms he craved, and where the slaughter
of seven youths twice ended nine-year fasts
from flesh. But when black-rigged Athenian masts
reached Crete the third time, Theseus led
the heptad offering, which did not shed
any of its own blood. The prince was no
better than those who’d braved the winding woe
within the winding woe: the Minotaur’s
entrails. But the Athenian carnivores
procured a mercy that they hadn’t earned.
The Minotaur, an upright grazer, spurned
their meat. He smiled and told the unhoofed stranger:
My bastard father stuck us in this manger.
He starved me till the hunger made me kill
and eat your uncles raw. But now my will
masters hunger, though there’s nothing green
left in the labyrinth. I won’t demean
myself by killing hornless men to fuel
the king’s revenge machine. I’m not his tool.
Cut my head off—that’s the quickest way.
Scouring bricks and flagstones every day
for grass, I learned that these four-sided things,
diagonally divided, spread two wings
whose three sides always follow one strict law.
Your exiled craftsman with his awl and saw
only works by instinct. What I know
is not a knack. The death I’ll undergo
when I stop talking cannot separate
this law from me, though I may immigrate
to a body even more misfortunate:
the mind remembers what the horns forget.
His belly couldn’t chymify the sword
the prince inserted, but the victim gored
none of the Athenians. He lunged in pain,
reddening bricks—and men he could’ve slain.
If treachery was easy, getting out