Cry Silver Bells Read online

  THOMAS

  BURNETT SWANN

  CRY SILVER

  BELLS

  THOMAS

  BURNETT SWANN

  “He writes his own golden thing his own way. . .”

  —Theodore Sturgeon, New York Times

  “Swann’s neo-romantic fantasies of the past are unique. He uses the stuff of myth with twists and inventions of his own.”

  — The Village Voice, New York

  Golden... unique…many have been the words used by readers of Swann’s marvelous fantasy novels. But this weaver of wonders will weave his tales no more.

  CRY SILVER BELLS may be his last, for its talented author passed away shortly after sending it to DAW for publication.

  It is, like all his works, a delectable fantasia of the mythical past. It is the story of the last of the fabled Minotaurs, a tale of the shadowy world of Minoan Crete, of the pre-humans who found refuge there, and of wanderers who came among them….

  CRY SILVER BELLS will stand alongside GREEN PHOENIX, THE MINIKINS OF YAM, and his others as unmatched peaks of colorful imaginative talent.

  —A DAW BOOKS ORIGINAL—

  NEVER

  BEFORE IN PAPERBACK

  FROM DAW

  By Thomas Burnett Swann;

  GREEN PHOENIX UY1222—$1.25

  HOW ARE THE MIGHTY FALLEN UQ1 100—95c

  THE MINIKINS OF YAM UY1219—$1.25

  THE GODS ABIDE UY1272—$1.25

  THE NOT-WORLD UY1158—$1.25

  Prologue

  I am Zoe, Dryad of Crete. Yes, I live in a tree, my ears are pointed, my hair is green (Irefuse to disclose my age). But the story I wish to tell is less of me than of Silver Bells, the last of the Minotaurs (except for his nephew Enostos, still a child), and the Humans, Lordon and Hora, who invaded my country but not to conquer or kill. (Lordon, bless him, will help me with my tale, for he knows the human heart.)

  I must also describe the Sphinx, the monster from Egypt, though the tiniest thought of her is like a thunderous wave, which churns you and chokes you and bruises your face with coral; and threatens to drown.

  A good listener never interrupts.

  Copyright ©, 1977, BY MARGARET GAINES SWANN

  All Bights Reserved.

  Cover art by George Barr.

  Acknowledgments: “The Star Birds” is reprinted with the permission of the long-defunct New York Herald-Tribune; “The

  Snow and the Seed” with the permission of the New York Times.

  DEDICATION

  To Edith,

  my beloved niece

  FIRST PRINTING, DECEMBER 1977

  1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9

  DAW SF

  BOOKS

  PRINTED IN U.S.A.

  Chapter One

  Lordon

  “Poppies,” I said. “The city looks like a swirl of poppies.”

  “Men,” retorted my cousin Hora, her eyes enlarging with expectation. “Stalwart young men in loin cloths. Older men with money bags at their waists. Being a courtesan is the best of occupations. You are paid to please, but the pleasing can be delightful as well as profitable. If the men are young or rich.”

  “You know you can’t see that far. They just look like bluebottle flies crawling about in search of mates. Why, you can’t even make out the nets of those fishermen in their little boats.”

  “No, but I can imagine.”

  “And how about me? Do I look properly roguish?” I cocked an eye and attempted a suitable leer.

  “You look like a pirate,” she said. Hora was tactful. I looked like a pauper in my tattered loin cloth and my old, scruffed sandals from Egypt. Oh, for a ring, an armlet, a pectoral. . . . To be a successful thief, you must either appear to be rich or simple-minded and then the people will trust you.

  Hora and I, exiled from Egypt after the unfortunate incident of my arrest for theft and assault, had sailed to Crete to ply our twin trades of thievery and prostitution.

  “Poppies,” I repeated. Blue and red, blue and red. . . No other colors obtruded into the rock-island city of Pseira, except for the coconut palms which swayed like enormous stems among the poppies. Titanic flowers in a living mound, the building seemed, the oblong houses, the local palace, the marketplace and the ships with their colored sails. Red bulbous columns like upended trees, supporting roofs abristle with furniture—stone couches shaded by flaxen parasols; lustral basins; urns of sun-baked clay. Blue, rounded facades. Staircases spiraling into the waveless sea. No city walls, of course. Ships were the walls of Crete, and instead of jetties or buoys, the sandy, surrounding beach was fingered with berths whose separations were rows of driftwood and seashells. “Poppies and riches. I think we are—Hora, the sun is gone! And there—a black cloud. Are we in for a storm?”

  A storm in truth, but worse than wind and rain. . . .

  Thus did the Harpies attack an unarmed merchant ship. The sailors brandished oars in place of swords, but onyx-hard talons snatched them from the oarsmen and splintered them over our heads. A rent and the sail fell in shreds. A blow and the mast was a falling tree. Hora seized my arm but not out of fear. Older, she liked to protect me, and she was unshakeable under attack. She hurried me into the deck house and fastened the leathern hanging which served for a door.

  “I don’t even have a dagger,” I said. “They took it from me in Egypt.”

  “Maybe they won’t come looking for us in here.”

  They did not come through the door; they came through the wall of bundled papyrus reeds; one, at least.

  “Pimp and thief though I am, dear Hermes, be with me now!” I prayed. “I have stolen nothing from her!”

  She was not a woman except for her face. She stared at me through the rent she had clawed in the wall, and her hands indeed were talons, and twisted like driftwood old from the sea. I caught a glimpse of wings, black, leathery, bat-like, and feathers around her flanks. The stench of her was worse than a rotting squid.

  Only her face seemed human. The face of a queen who has sacrificed her husband to insure fertility for the fields. Hair, brows, scowl: implacable black. But skin as white as a nautilus bleached in the sun. The Harpies inhabit caves and only dare the light in search of food or murder, or to visit their friends; the Sphinxes (hateful word!), across the sea. A Harpy is stupid and cruel. A Sphinx is canny and cruel. There is something of woman distorted in each of them, and the Sphinx, it is thought by some, can metamorphose herself into human form, and then she is known as a Lamia, and she lures a man in order to drink his blood.

  But Lamias were a possibility; the truth was a Harpy clawing the wall.

  “The Lady is dead,” she spat.

  It was not a time to inquire what lady or why a Harpy would care for any lady. It was a time to prevent her from enlarging the hole and springing into the cabin and at my throat. (Hora was searching frantically for a makeshift weapon.) I seized a lamp and sloshed the olive oil in her face. She shrieked—the oil was hot—and rubbed her eyes and forgot for the moment her mission: that is to say, the imminent death of a blond and inoffensive youth of seventeen whose only transgression had been to crack an occasional skull and steal an occasional money bag, which he graciously shared with his cousin, the courtesan, in those difficult times when her lovers were insufficient for her wants (and when it suited his whim). I liked my work. A pirate at heart, I performed my petty thefts with the hope of amassing a fortune and buying a ship with a Gorgon prow and staring, lidless eyes, and then let the virgins look to their maiden heads!

  Swat! Hora had found her weapon, the lid of a cedar chest, and the Harpy reeled into sleep (at least I think it was sleep; she never closed her eyes; they never lost their hate).

  “Lordon,” cried Hora, clutching my arm. She was ra
rely ruffled, my cousin; control was the mark of her trade. But danger to me aroused her to action. “Did she hurt you, that black-feathered bitch?”

  “Not a scratch.”

  “But we’ve hit something—shoals, do you think? And what on earth is that!”

  The ship gave a sudden lurch and began to sink; water rose murkily around our feet; we made for the door in time to find ourselves afloat on a tranquil sea with our ship unaccountably sinking beside us. Chest, lidless and overturned . . . cedar table . . . hammocks . . . oars . . . spars . . . griffin figurehead . . . littered the surface as if there had been a storm. Harpies circled above us, cawing like gulls, swooping to claw at a sailor’s eyes or shove him under the water. Three of the creatures were dragging a sailor into the air and licking his blood as they flew.

  “The chest,” breathed Hora. “Under it.” We clung to the underside of the chest, breathing the air trapped above us. The chest, overturned, had lost its store and become both a shield and a buoy.

  “Well,” said Hora, her whisper multiplied in our cramped asylum. “We’ve seen worse times, cousin dear. I expect we shall survive. We can swim to Pseira. After those Harpies depart.”

  “They’ve departed,” I said, peering from under the chest. I sniffed the air. “Except their stench. As swiftly as they came. They seem to live on a rock over there beyond the town. But the sea’s been calm. We couldn’t have hit a wreck. Why did we sink?”

  “It wasn’t a natural wreck. Harpies can swim, you know. They simply dragged us, ship and all, under the surface. First they clawed holes in the hull to let in the water.”

  “Harpies this close to Crete? I thought the island was civilized.”

  “So is Lower Egypt, but it still has its Sphinxes.”

  “Marguerite, you were never to say that word. We promised each other, you know.”

  “I will say the word Sphinx. Now we are safe from them and we don’t have to move from place to place and hide.”

  “Hush, Marguerite!”

  Her bravado faded into a pitiful gasp. “You’re right. No one is ever safe from a Sphinx, and I tempted the gods with my foolish claim. Anyway, Crete is only settled along the coast. Inland, there are forests and mountains nobody has ever seen. There are Satyrs and Minotaurs and Panisci and Centaurs and Harpies, I have no doubt.”

  “And Gorgons perhaps? We’ll stick to the coast,” I said, shoving the chest from over our heads and onto its bottom and making it into a raft. “With your yellow hair, your trade should flourish among these black-haired folk.”

  “Yes,” she sighed. “As it did in Egypt until you hit a prince. We didn’t even need the money.”

  “I just didn’t hit him hard enough. He came to and recognized me. And as for the money, he hadn’t paid, you recall. Besides, I fancied his dagger with chrysolite in its hilt, and you’d been spending everything on yourself. Here. Let me help you off with your slippers.” Already I had discarded my sandals. The water felt cool and clean to my unencumbered feet.

  “I’m not a spring peahen, you know. Twenty last month. At twenty-five, one is over the mountain in my profession. Already I am spending a fortune on kohl, carmine, galena, myrrh, to say nothing of mirrors—”

  “Eleven? Or is it twelve?”

  “I weary of looking into the same bronze. Mirrors and tweezers and, of course, robes. You know I could never stand parsimony.”

  “You haven’t been parsimonious with yourself since your first assignation.”

  My words were lost in a gurgle as she shoved me under the water.

  I rose with a sputter and splashed her in the face. Hora and I were cronies even before we were cousins.

  “It is a bit of a Satyr,” I laughed. I had learned the phrase on the ship from one of the sailors. “Satyr” meant “escapade.” “We’ve never been shipwrecked by Harpies before. And think of all the men—and purses—that wait on the shore. But here. Let me wipe your face.”

  “Ho there,” cried a mullet-faced fisherman from an open boat with two red eyes on its prow. “Need a ride? Saw the whole thing. Them Harpies can be real bitches. Keep to the rocks, usually, but some-thin’ ‘pears to have riled them.” His head had the look of having been squashed by Charybdis. The nose did a lamentable job of separating protrusive eyes.

  With the help of the fisherman and his crew of one, a cross-eyed child of tender years—fifteen at the most—we clambered into the boat and cleared a space amidst nets, a wriggle of squids, and the smell of yesterday’s catch. The child gaped at Hora and dropped his oar.

  “Am I still a mess?” she whispered to me.

  Cleansed of kohl and carmine, she looked like a fine lady who had lost her ship but not her dignity. Her skin was conch-shell pink, her eyes so blue that kohl would seem an affront.

  “Adequate.”

  “But I need to look plyful.” Then to the fisherman: “Sir, we are deeply in your debt. We have lost everything. How can we ever repay you?”

  “You know very well how you can repay him,” I whispered. She stifled me with a furtive slap.

  “Got a good catch. Don’t need pay.” He pointed to the bustling rock of Pseira. “There’s my town. Island, really. Special berth for my boat. Boy and me lives in a cave. Not fit for a fine lady like you. Show you to the caravanserai, and the folk ‘ull doubtless see to your wants.”

  “I doubt it,” I said, but the child responded with a squinty glare and turned to examine Hora. He wore a knife with a cypress hilt and a blade which had doubtless gutted many a fish.

  She had started to make arrangements for our arrival.

  Egyptian ladies never bare their breasts; it is only the slave girls who frolic naked in palace corridors. But the Cretan custom of open bodices and painted nipples was universally known, often condemned, secretly admired by the whole of the civilized world.

  Somehow, Hora had removed her bodice. Her breasts, even unpainted, were a double wonderment.

  “Two moons,” said the child, with the tone of an oracle. “Harvest at that.”

  For once I agreed with him.

  “‘Tis a rare catch we’ve made today, boy,” said his father. “Aphrodite from the foam!” He poled his boat into one of the fingered berths.

  “Wish we had drowned her friend,” mumbled the child. I dealt him a secret kick and gave his father my sweetest smile.

  The town was a miracle of controlled spontaneity. It was as if the flower-like buildings had grown in their own fashion and not been planted in neat, Egyptian-style rows. But the fashion suited the place, for a rounded island needed rounded houses, where the mainland cities crouched in rectangular buildings, roughly the shape of Crete. Now in truth we could see the inhabitants, the ladies in purple, bell-shaped skirts like inverted violets (for the murex dye is much in demand for garments); daisies too, since saffron dyes were imported along with tin, gold, papyrus, and ostrich eggs from Egypt, Libya, and other adjacent lands. And the breasts—well, they winked and teased in the sun, and to enclose them would have been like caging a rare bird.

  “I think,” whispered Hora, “that we have been cast into—what do the Achaeans call it?—Elysium. I have never seen such splendid men.” Our parents had come to Egypt from Mycenae, the proudest Achaean city; thus our golden hair among a dark-haired folk.

  If the women flaunted their breasts, the men displayed their thighs. Their loin cloths at most were afterthoughts. Clothes to a Cretan were a convenience against a change in the weather, an adornment which emphasized their natural endowments, never a necessity, never a modesty. He liked his world, whether sea, land, or air; he did not like a separation of cloth. They were a small, trim race, brown-skinned from the sun, but lighter as well as smaller than Egyptians. The ladies had carefully teased their hair into ringlets over their foreheads and ears; the men had drawn their hair behind their heads and caught it in leather fillets. Both men and women walked in the pride of their beauty, and satisfaction beamed from-their faces.

  The fisherman pointed the way t
o the caravanserai: “May the Goddess shower you with gifts.”

  “Already has,” said the child, meaning Hora, excluding me. (Wretched urchin, might his eyes become double-crossed.)

  We entered a gate which was flanked with squat limestone griffins, and found before us a lustral basin where we sat on projecting slabs and bathed our feet. The coconut palms above us rustled duskily in the dying sun, for twilight had started its swift descent. Beyond us loomed a maze of small, two- and three-story octagons of brick, faced with limestone and painted a cobalt blue which glittered even in the lessening light.

  “Cousin dear,” she said. “Do you think they will put us up for the night without pay? The thought of plying, for once, is intolerable to me. Even to be plied. I could sleep through two cockcrow times.”

  As a rule, Hora required a minimum of sleep. But after our mishap, how could she work her trade (and she worked with a conscientiousness which her lovers—four or five hundred, I forget the count—found to be irresistible)? If payment were needed, my nimble fingers could find the wherewithal. (In fact the cross-eyed child was missing his dagger.)

  Voices, soft, insinuating, surmounted the rustle of palms. Ladies in flounced skirts, invariably accompanied by men, wafted out of the octagons. Was every one young on Crete except for the fisherman? Did everyone have a lover or a spouse? Perhaps a stray young girl would wander across my path. . . . Perhaps a stray young woman, ripe with maturity. . . . Perhaps an older woman, mindful of youth’s sweet ways. . . .

  A young man approached us with purposeful steps and an air of ownership. “My name is Talos. This is my inn.” He was small and trim and his face had the look of having been treated and polished like an expensive saddle. If he was leathery from his trade, at least the leather was fine. He wore a phallus sheath and a bronze belt—and I started to feel overdressed in my topless Egyptian tunic which reached to my knees.