The Stolen Goddess:
Book Two of the Kaphtu Trilogy
Ducalion finds that
the road to Hades is paved with bad intentions when he must venture to the
deathlands in search of a kidnapped goddess.
“Richard Purtill has
done a masterly job of breathing life into what scant detail we have recovered,
like the physical restoration which has raised the palace of M’nos up again,
and built new walls to rejoin old, so that the modern visitor can imagine what
a glorious thing once stood there--a breath and a step removed from gods and
demons, where magic lived in the land.” –CJ. Cherryh
“Richard Purtill is
both a clear and commonsensical philosopher and an accomplished fantasy
writer.” –Peter Kreeft, author of Between Heaven and Hell.
“Purtill’s tales of
ancient Crete bring myth to life with exciting action, colorful detail, and
magic. Don’t miss the Bull Leapers!” –Sara Stamey, author of Islands.
The
Kaphtu Trilogy:
The Golden Gryphon Feather
The Stolen Goddess
The Mirror of Helen
I can always tell an Olympian, even if he chooses to
walk among us mortals in disguise, so I knew that the young man was one of the
Immortals as soon as he entered the wineshop, a sailors' gathering place on the
docks at Amnisos. I know the Olympians because I am used to them; of my
mother's three best friends two were mortal women who had become Olympians and
one was a goddess who had become a mortal woman. The tale of their adventures
had been my favorite story as a child and my love for those stories had brought
me here to the chief port of the land of Kaphtu.
It had started when my mother was a young girl in
Athens. She had been chosen as one of the seven maidens who, along with seven
youths, were sent to Kaphtu by Aegeus, King of Athens, after M'nos, the Sea
King, had defeated him. The war had
started when Andaroko, son of M'nos, had been killed by a bull in Athens.
According to my mother, this was probably the fault of Andaroko. He had been
trained as a bull-leaper in the great Dance which the Kaphtui dance in honor of
Posudi, the sea god, although when he was killed by the bull it was not in the
Dance. He was drunk and trying to show off his prowess to the Athenians.
Perhaps Aegeus encouraged him for his own ends, but my mother said that
Andaroko had deserved his fate by making a game of the Dance, which is a
serious and holy thing.
M'nos, at any rate, had blamed Aegeus and had
gathered the great fleet of Kaphtu for an attack on Attika and Athens, its
capital. When military force produced a stalemate, M'nos called on the Gods
Below, with whom he had already begun meddling. No one knows what they did to
Aegeus, or threatened him with, but Aegeus soon gave in and granted the demands
of M'nos.
The vengeance of M'nos was as much a blasphemy of
the Dance as his son's drunken daring had been. He planned to take seven youths
and seven maidens of royal, or at least noble, Athenian blood every year and
pretend to train them for the Dance. Without the skill of the Kaphtui Dancers
and without anyone with the power to control the bull, he expected them to be
killed as his son had been killed. It did not seem to bother him that Posudi
might be offended by this misuse of the Dance for vengeance. Posudi was the
Earthshaker as well as the Lord of the Sea and the palace of M'nos at N'sos
might well have been shaken down about his ears if his plot had succeeded and
blood was shed on the Court of the Dance.
The plans of M'nos were defeated mainly by one of
the Athenians sent in the Tribute of Fourteen, a girl called Chryseis whose
real name was Britomartis. She made friends first with P'sero, the captain of
the ship that brought the Fourteen to Kaphtu, and then with Ariadne, daughter
of M'nos. Between them, Ariadne and Britomartis managed to get the Athenians
properly trained as Dancers, and Britomartis discovered that she herself had
the power over animals which would enable her to act as the Tauromath, the
Dancer who controls the bull with his or her mind so that the other Dancers may
dance with him, leap over his back and roll under his hoofs without being
killed.
To increase her power, Britomartis had walked the
Path, the mysterious passage between worlds that can lead either to the Lower
World or to the Bright Land, the home of the gods. Britomartis found herself in
the Bright Land and able to live there without being destroyed, as most mortals
would be. As she learned later, this was because her mother was an Olympian,
the goddess called Aphea by the Danaans but Britomartis by the Kaphtui. Aphea
had fallen in love with Lykos, a master craftsman, who was a younger brother of
Aegeus, King of Athens. They had lived together in peace for eight years, a
cycle which has some mysterious significance for the Olympians. After eight
years, Aphea was forced to return to the Bright Land, leaving her daughter,
Britomartis, with Lykos, who was living quietly as a poor craftsmain the city
his brother ruled. Seven years Later Britomartis was chosen along with my
mother and the others as part of the Tribute of Fourteen and came to Kaphtu.
Britomartis and Ariadne, with powerful help from the
Bright Land, defeated the plans of M'nos and afterward shielded the land of
Kaphtu from the worst effects of the Great Wave, which ravaged the coast of
Kaphtu when the fire-mountain on Dariapana exploded. Then they helped the
Kaphtui fight off the invasion of Argive sea raiders which followed the
destruction made by the Great Wave. In the course of these events, Ariadne had
discovered that her real father was not M'nos but Posudi and that she, too,
could live in the Bright Land.
Ariadne and Britomartis trained and protected the
first two groups of Athenian Dancers. The third group was led by Theseus, heir
of King Aegeus, who had already met Britomartis on a reconnaisance of Kaphtu.
With the help of Ariadne's friend Daedalus, the Athenian craftsman who had
lived in Kaphtu for many years, Theseus almost persuaded Ariadne to marry him
and unite the kingdoms of Kaphtu and Attika against the Argive threat. M'nos
had reacted by sending Theseus down the Path to be killed by Astariano, the
monstrous being who was the son of P'sephae, the wife of M'nos and one of Those
Below. With the aid of Ariadne and Daedalus, Theseus defeated Astariano and
fled with Ariadne. But on the island of Naxos, where their ship had been blown
by a storm, Ariadne was claimed as a bride by Dionysus, son of Zeus, and
Theseus had to content himself with Ariadne's sister, Ph'dare.
Ariadne, however, had vanished from the ken of
mortals and was thought to be dead, so Theseus's marriage with Ph'dare made him
the heir of M'nos, since in Kaphtu the husband of the Ariadne, the oldest
daughter of the current M'nos, is the next M'nos. When M'nos pursued Daedalus,
who had fled to Sicily and there went down into the Lower World, Theseus became
King of Kaphtu, as he had become King of Athens on the death Aegeus. I knew,
though, that Theseus had never been comfortable with the name or style of M'nos
and largely governed Kaphtu by viceroys sent from Athens.
