The Stolen Goddess

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.