The Elementals by Morgan Llywelyn Page A

not really dissatisfied with the house. It was her life and her husband that displeased her. She sat tapping her foot while Meriones ate, then sent him on his way with a negligible pat on the cheek, her mind already casting about for some way to avoid the chores waiting for her. She felt they were making her old before her time. Perhaps she could put off airing the bed until tomorrow—“Meriones will never notice anyway” she muttered to herself—and spend the morning with her friends Lydda and Dendria, gossiping over bowls of spiced fruit juice and comparing the faults of their husbands.
    â€œMen are all alike,” one of them would say with a sigh, and the other two would readily agree.
    Meriones swung around the corner and set off up the main street of Knsos, heading south, inland. He blended immediately into the crowd, one more slender, almond-eyed young man in a throng of chattering townspeople. He walked with his chest thrust out and his back arched, swinging his arms freely and flexing the arches of his feet to produce the exaggerated, jaunty gait that identified a Minoan of Crete anywhere in the known world. It was a walk that had taken him years to perfect. A strain of rogue blood in his veins resisted the effort, but had at last been overcome.
    Now anyone seeing him would have thought him pure Minoan. The dazzling sunshine of Crete had tanned his skin to copper. His black hair was folded and knotted at the nape, with oiled curls hanging over his ears in the latest fashion. Around his waist he wore a linen apron embroidered in gold thread, emblem of one who had access to the palace of The Minos, the greatest sea king of all, Lord of Knsos, god-king of the Minoan empire.
    Meriones’ waist was tightly girdled to accent its abnormal smallness, the result of wearing the heavy copper girdle that was
fastened on children of both sexes almost from birth. “The tinier the waist, the more elegant the person,” was a Minoan axiom.
    Meriones was considered elegant indeed.
    A stray hound trotted out of a narrow alleyway and came to a halt at Meriones’ feet, looking up at him hopefully. He stopped and returned the dog’s gaze. “I’d be glad of a companion as far as the Sun Gate,” he told the white hound, “but they won’t let you come into the palace.” When he began walking again the dog trotted at his heels, its feathery white tail waving like a plume.
    They threaded their way through a polyglot of lean dark Egyptians and ebony-skinned Nubians, Syrian traders and Cycladic purchasing agents, Libyans and Amorites and Hittites, porters and sailors and laborers who jostled one another and laughed or swore as the occasion dictated. Nobles in sedan chairs claimed right of way. Small donkeys, overburdened and uncomplaining, picked their way over the paving stones and ignored the impatient hands jerking their headcollars.
    As Meriones moved inland toward the great sprawling palace known as the House of the Double Axes, the shops and small businesses that lined the main street began to give way to public areas furnished with fountains and flowers. Curving walkways led to luxurious villas set well back from the road. The tang of the sea was replaced by the heady aroma of flowering trees. Behind walls painted in blue and yellow and coral, caged birds could be heard singing, their music mingling with the laughter of children.
    The land lifted, the houses climbing with it in a series of steps, bright blocks of color forming a random mosaic across the hills. Had he looked back, Meriones would have seen the cobalt sea and the mass of lateen-rigged ships crowding the harbor. Instead he gazed steadfastly ahead, contemplating immortality. Beyond Knsos great Zeus himself lay sleeping, pretending to be a mountain.
    Meriones and the dog passed a small stone shrine by the side of the road, heaped with floral offerings and containing a glazed jar of seawater with a realistically