The Sea King’s Daughter

Chapter 5

“WHAT THE HELL WAS THAT ALL ABOUT?” JIM ASKED blankly.

“I-” My voice cracked. I cleared my throat and went on. “I would say that they recognized each other.”

“That was more than recognition, Sandy. It was like some old-fashioned farce. You know what I mean: ‘Good God, it is my husband, back from the dead, the man I thought I murdered thirty years ago!’ Bette Davis and Ronald Colman.”

“Joan Crawford,” I corrected. “Only she didn’t murder him. It was the other way around.”

“Not Ronald Colman, then. He was too noble to murder wives. Broderick Crawford?”

“Robert Montgomery, maybe. He was a smooth murderer in one old movie.”

“Night Must Fall?”

“I don’t remember. Jim, it really isn’t funny.”

“Neither of them seemed to be amused.”

“But-”

“But that’s no reason why we have to get uptight. It’s not our problem. Listen, I don’t even brood about my own past sins. Why should I stew about other people’s? The present-the here and now-is complicated enough without going out of your way to find additional worries.”

He leaned forward, his elbows on the table, his face serious.

“What is that?” I asked. “Some kind of creed? Your philosophy of life?”

“I guess it is.”

“Keep out of other people’s lives,” I repeated. “Don’t get involved.”

Jim frowned. His eyebrows made an elongated, flattened capital M.

“I didn’t mean it that way. Sure you should get involved. You have to get involved; people don’t live in a vacuum, their lives get wound up with other people’s. But why go out looking for trouble? Both these people are strangers to you. You’ll never be a friend of Frederick. He doesn’t have friends. And he sure as hell wouldn’t thank you for worrying about him.”

I sat back in my chair, hoping I didn’t look as startled as I felt. I kept forgetting Jim didn’t know I was Frederick ’s daughter. To him I was a casual acquaintance of Frederick; there certainly was no excuse for my concern about him. There was no excuse in any case. He was right. I would never be a friend of Frederick. I didn’t want to be one.

“So I’m nosy,” I said. “People interest me.”

“So be interested. From a safe distance. The farther away from him, the safer.”

“Are you trying to tell me something?”

“I’m trying to tell you that Frederick is bad news. Maybe you ought to find some other place for a vacation.”

“Thanks a lot.”

“Oh, hell, I didn’t mean I want you to leave.” Jim gestured helplessly. “I don’t know why I keep saying the wrong things to you. Normally I’m considered a very smooth conversationalist. Let’s change the subject. Have some more wine.”

“No, thanks. I really had better get back to the house. If I remember my guidebooks, they don’t eat dinner in these parts till nine or ten o’clock. Usually I’m tucked into my little sleeping bag at that hour, reading heavy tomes about Minoan archaeology.”

“Stick around, please. Angelos will have some food ready pretty soon. I want you to meet Chris.”

“Why?” I had started to rise. Now I sat down again. “So he can give me some more dire warnings about Frederick?”

“I don’t like your being up there alone with him,” Jim said.

I stared at him for a minute. Then I laughed.

“You don’t really think-”

“No! Listen, I’d worry less if that were what I thought. The man doesn’t have a spark of normal warmth in him. Chris says he’s been on the ragged edge of sanity for years. He may slip over anytime and decide you’re his hated mother or the reincarnation of Helen of Troy, or something.”

He reached for my hand. I pulled it away and stood up.

“I never heard of anything so ridiculous in my life,” I said coldly. “Who was it who was giving me that line about noninvolvement?”

Jim’s eyebrows made alphabetic convolutions. Then they went back to their normal shape and he grinned sheepishly.

“‘Consistency is the hobgoblin of little minds,’” he said.

How can you stay mad at a man like that? I grinned back at him.

“Okay,” I said. “No hard feelings, but I really had better go. I’ll have dinner another night. Please?”

“Sure. What about that swimming date? We don’t work on Sunday.”

“Sunday at ten. I’ll meet you here.”

Before leaving the plaza, I stopped at one of the shops and bought some tomatoes and a fish. The woman cleaned and gutted the fish for me and wrapped it in a piece of newspaper.

There was no moon, and it was dark as pitch once I had left the lighted windows of the village behind. I kept stubbing my toes, and I cursed myself for not having thought to bring a flashlight. Frederick had several. But I hadn’t expected to be gone so long.

Finally I saw the light ahead. A candle in the window, to guide the wandering child… No, Frederick wouldn’t light a candle for me. He was probably reading.

Now that I could see where I was going and did not have to concentrate on walking, a wild confusion of ideas crowded into my mind, all the new facts and impressions the day had brought. I stopped a few feet from the house. Before I went inside, I had some things to sort out with myself.

Most of them were disturbing things. Frederick ’s strange reaction to the woman-his incredible news about the sunken ships… For the firsttime the enormity of that idea engulfed me. Either he was crazy, or there really were wrecked Minoan ships down in the bay. No, but he was insane either way, because he would have to be out of his mind to tackle a project like that with just me. Even I knew that a trained archaeologist doesn’t grab with both hands when he excavates. And that was all I could do. I didn’t know how to map a site or keep proper records. I didn’t even know what to look for. Minoan ships were about three thousand years earlier than my Spanish galleon. Did they carry anchors? If so, what kind? How about ballast-masts… And there was theproblem of equipment. A camera was an absolute necessity. Did Frederick have an underwater camera? I doubted it. The customs officials would have checked his equipment carefully, and an item like that would have been a dead giveaway. I couldn’t have used such a camera in any case. I didn’t even know how. The more I thought about what I didn’t know, the more I felt like groaning out loud.

Then an idea hit me. I was dazzled by the brilliant simplicity of it. It made a sort of syllogism. Frederick was a first-rate archaeologist. No first-rate archaeologist would mess up a discovery as big as this one. Ergo-no discovery.

So it wasn’t a very good syllogism. It made sense to me. Frederick was fantasizing, the result of years of frustration in his field. He didn’t really believe in his dream ships, but the dream was so glorious he couldn’t give it up. And if there were no ships, there was nothing for me to do except swim around for a couple of hours a day and report no results. I wouldn’t say there was nothing down there, I would just say I couldn’t find it. In a few weeks we would pack up and go home. At least I would go home. Frederick could go to-wherever he was going.

Somewhat cheered by this reasoning, I went on to the next problem. Frederick and…Medea. That was a good name for that dark, ruined beauty. She looked like a Medea-quite capable, in my estimation, of killing her children to get back at a man who had betrayed her. As Medea had slaughtered her sons to revenge herself on their father.

Medea was a born constitutional psychopathic inferior. At the very beginning of her career, when she fled from her father’s court with Jason, after helping him steal the Golden Fleece, she had committed a horrendous crime, chopping up her young brother and throwing the pieces overboard to delay the pursuing galleys of her father. The poor old king had stopped to collect the fragments and Medea had escaped with her lover. The story had given me a chuckle at the time, it was so corny and melodramatic, like the Tom Lehrer song:

One day when she had nothing to do

She cut her baby brother in two

And served him up as an Irish stew…

In the pitch-black night of a far-off Greek island, the story wasn’t funny. It was horrible. No wonder Freud got the names of his classic psychoses out of Greek legends. Maybe I was getting a little psychotic myself, seeing ancient Greeks all over the place… Medea wasn’t Greek, though, any more than Theseus and Ariadne were. They came from further back in time, back in the dark abysses of prehistory when people still believed in human sacrifice and killed the king every nine years and sprinkled his blood around to bring back the spring.

I said a word out loud, a vulgar four-letter word. This was not the time, and it was certainly not the place for gruesome fantasies like the ones that had seized my mind. The point was that Frederick and Medea-yes, use the name, use it and go on-had nothing to do with me. Maybe she was an old girl friend. Maybe she was an old mistress. The key word was “old.” It was all in the past and it had nothing to do with me.

So that took care of two worries. The third one wasn’t so easy to solve. It had to do with Jim.

Not that Jim was a depressing thought. Far from it; he was the only bright spot in a dark world. The worrisome part was my relationship with him. I had lied to him, and I hated having lied. I took it for granted that he would find out. I always get caught when I try to lie, that’s why I gave it up years ago…till I met Frederick. Mostly I was in the habit of being honest. And if I didn’t break down and confess, he was sure to find out some other way. Sir Christopher, for instance-if he knew Frederick, he must know that Frederick had a daughter. Maybe he had dandled me on his knee when I was an infant and he and Frederick were bright young beginners in the field.

I had a feeling that Jim wouldn’t like it if he found out I had lied to him. His eyebrows might be crooked, but his mind wasn’t.

Off in the blackness behind me something made an odd moaning sound. It was probably a goat or a bird or some other equally natural phenomenon, but it made my hackles rise. There was no solution to the third problem, none that I could think of at any rate, and in spite of my resolution to forget the Greek myths, the night was beginning to swarm with monsters. I stumbled on toward the house. I had mashed one of the tomatoes and it was dripping down the front of my fancy dress, which, I suspected, would not wash very well. The fish was leaking too.

By the time I reached the kitchen I was in a rotten mood. The sight of Frederick hunched over his book and the remains of some awful-looking mess in a saucepan did not improve my humor. I dumped the fish in a pan along with some olive oil and started peeling tomatoes. No point in changing my dress, it was a wreck anyhow.

The smell of the frying fish made me realize how hungry I was, so I opened a can of baked beans and ate that, cold, while the fish cooked. It improved my disposition slightly. I looked at Frederick and for a second I almost felt sorry for him. Not that he wasn’t perfectly happy with his cold stew and his boring book, but he looked so alone.

“Want some fish?” I asked.

“I have eaten.” He didn’t look up from his book.

“Nothing that did you any good. It’s ridiculous the way we’ve been living on this canned junk. The bay is full of sea food and there are some nice-looking vegetables in the shops. From now on I’m going to the village every afternoon and buy stuff to cook for supper.”

He didn’t answer, but his nose quivered a little when I pushed a plate of fish and tomatoes under it. He reached for a fork.

I grabbed the book out of his hand. He started to expostulate. I said severely, “I refuse to waste good food on a man who isn’t giving it his full attention. Anyhow, I want to talk to you.”

“Mph,” said Frederick, or words to that effect. He took a bite of fish and burned his mouth and swore.

“Tsk, tsk,” I said. “Such language.”

“You might have mentioned-”

“That it was hot? You’re a brilliant scholar; I assumed you could figure that out yourself.”

Frederick blew on the next bite. He managed to look dignified and disagreeable even when performing this homely act.

“What do you want to talk about?”

“Lots of things. For a starter, who was that woman?”

“Woman?” He frowned. For a minute I thought he was putting on an act. Then I realized he wasn’t that good an actor.

“Oh,” he said, his brow clearing. “That woman. I have no idea. She reminded me momentarily of someone I knew-briefly-many years ago. It could not possibly be the same person.”

He fell silent, staring at the fish poised on his fork. Whatever his relationship with that someone he had known years ago, the memory of it was not a happy one. His face looked almost human; there was pain and regret in its lines. Then he shook his head and went on eating.

“Even if she were the same,” he said, as if to himself, “it would not matter. It was in the past. Over. Finished.”

“You sound like Jim,” I said, watching him curiously. “He was telling me tonight how people have to forget the past.”

“An unorthodox attitude for an archaeologist,” said Frederick dryly.

“You know what he means.”

“Quite possibly I do. The past is a subject for scholarly study, not for emotion. Now-is there any other topic you wish to discuss? I am anxious to finish my chapter. Vermeule’s arguments are so puerile-”

“Don’t you want to talk about the-the underwater business? We have a lot of plans to make, seems to me.”

“I have made plans. For the time being you will continue to work at the dig in the morning. After lunch, while the men take their infernal siesta, you will dive. If you are late in returning, I will complain to Nicholas about the irresponsibility of modern youth. That will hide our real intent.”

He looked so pleased at this childish stratagem that I almost laughed.

“No,” I said patiently. “I told you, I won’t dive alone. Especially not right after lunch! These are strange waters to me. I don’t know what the hell is out there.”

“I see. In that case we will have to get in a few hours before we go to the dig. The sun rises before six-”

I groaned. Frederick ignored me.

“And all day Sunday,” he went on. “Perhaps in a few days you will feel more competent and can continue alone.”

There was no point in arguing with him. I shrugged.

“Okay. You’ll have to wake me up; I don’t get up before dawn willingly. Now suppose you tell me what I’m supposed to be looking for.”

“Anything that is not a natural formation.”

“That’s a lot of help. Jars, I suppose. What about anchors?”

“The question of anchors is interesting.” Frederick ’s face brightened. “It has been claimed that before the seventh century B.C. ships did not carry anchors. That seems to be extremely poor reasoning. There must have been some method of stopping a ship, and the pierced stone, tied to a cable or rope, would seem an obvious solution that would occur to the most primitive mind. A triangular stone, with a hole in the center, has been identified by one authority as a Minoan anchor. Certainly metal anchors were not used until-”

I sighed ostentatiously and interrupted.

“Pierced stones. They are not going to be very conspicuous. How about masts?”

“They used them, of course. Whether they would survive-”

“These amphorae you talked about. Would they be the same shape as the ones we found on the dig?”

“Yes. Long, two-handled, with a narrow neck and a pointed base.”

“What else?”

“There could be,” said Frederick, “anything down there.”

“Well, I guess that gives me something to go on with. Suppose I do find something. How do I mark the spot so I can find it the next time I dive?”

“I have given that matter some thought. An inflatable globule of some sort is the obvious answer; yet I am reluctant to leave a marker that might alert others. The process of triangulation…”

He went on talking, but I stopped listening. The conversation had become pointless and rather pathetic. We were like a couple of kids making solemn plans to build a rocket ship. Neither of us knew the first thing about what we were doing.

“We’ll start tomorrow, then,” I said, collecting the dishes. There was no use being Women’s Lib about the housework; if I had been a man, Frederick would still have expected me to do it.

I had my back turned when he said unexpectedly, “You don’t believe you will find anything, do you?”

“Huh?” I turned. “I didn’t say-”

“Your conviction is implicit in every word you have said.” His eyes narrowed. “Nor can I blame you. You seem to have the rudiments of a logical mind; a pity it hasn’t been trained. I suppose I must show you this. It was found in the bay.”

He held out his hand.

The light wasn’t good. For a second I had the horrible impression that his palm had turned hard and shiny. Midas? Then I saw that he was holding something, a flat, irregular object that covered his palm from the wrist to the base of his fingers. It shone with the glint of gold-the one substance that does not corrode, in soil or seawater.

I snatched at it. He snarled a warning, but there was no need, it wasn’t as fragile as it looked. The underlying metal was badly corroded; it showed green and rotten around the ragged edges, but the flat top surface was covered with a hard, shiny substance like black plastic. Into this black surface tiny golden figures of animals and flowers and men had been set. There was a cat, with a bird in its mouth; two lotus blossoms; and a man, a hunter, with a long spear and one of the man-tall, figure-eight Minoan shields. The tiny figures were done with such delicacy and vigor that you could sense the agonized struggle of the bird and the lithe ferocity of the cat.

Frederick didn’t have to tell me what it was. I had seen the daggers from the Shaft Graves at Mycenae in the Athens Museum. This was part of the blade of another such inlaid dagger. The daggers in Athens had been found on the mainland, but they were believed to be of Cretan workmanship. They had been found only in royal graves-rare imports, so highly prized that they were buried with their dead owners.

“Okay,” I said, with a long breath. “I don’t know whether I believe in your ships. But you’ve convinced me; there’s something down there.”