last to emerge. People pressed cups of wine into our hands, and we drank while we waited for Goddess to emerge and find Her husband.
My mother told me that before he became too large to control, my brother had always roamed through the crowd at this time, squeezing people he liked in his strong arms, bumping into or ignoring those he didn't. His grunts and babbling were loud and irritating as the afternoon wore on, but he had seemed unaware that he was causing a disturbance. One year, when he had grown big enough for his behavior to worry the Minos, Asterion had been tethered to a stake on the edge of the crowd, but he roared and bellowed until I let him free. The Minos fed him dried figs laced with a sleeping drug, and when he became meek and biddable, my uncle led my brother down to his chambers.
The next year, Asterion was confined under the palace, along with several boys to keep him company. They were so far away that their screams went unheard, and it was only afterward, when torchlight revealed the bloody horror of my brother's chamber, that we discovered how Asterion had amused himself during the long wait. I was only five years old, but still I comforted him and tried to make him understand that the broken bodies could not be fixed.
For a few years, Asterion was left alone during the ceremony, despite the Minos's warnings that the unhappiness of the god's son might cause our father, Velchanos, to frown on us. The people were made so uneasy at this arrangement, fearing the wrath of the god, that finally the Minos declared that the next time tribute-children were sent from Athens, they would provide Asterion with companionship. That way, he would be kept pacified, and my uncle's fierce desire to avenge the killing of his beloved son would be somewhat satisfied. I tried to comfort myself with the thought that their death would be swifter than if they had been sent to the mines, like the first group of Athenians that had landed on our shore.
Together everyone waited, the crowd of shepherds and fishermen and traders and farmers, women and men, old people barely able to walk and children. We waited in the field, regardless of sun or rain or wind. Sometimes we stood for only a few minutes and sometimes for so long that babies slept and woke and nursed at their mothers' breasts and slept again. Once, the year before I became a priestess, the sun had already touched its lower edge to the horizon before the door opened.
But when it finally did open, it seemed that no time had passed. One figure emerged and stood motionless as everyone leaped and shouted, even the tiny children who could not have known what was happening but who were caught up in the general relief and joy. Discordant sounds burst out as musicians played their instruments without attention to what the others were doing. Women and men laughed and shrieked. Some fainted.
Men ran to smother the flames under the pots where lambs, kids, and calves had been boiled in milk into sweet tenderness. They uncovered the enormous pits where pigs had been roasting since the night before. The Minos scattered red wine over the ground to awaken it and to prepare it for the more vital fluid that would come in just a few days.
In all that noise and in the swirling mass of joy, only two figures never moved. One was me, rooted to the spot in fear and misery, staring up the long stairway. The other stood above me in the doorway, a writhing snake clutched in each fist, as She gazed out at Her people with glittering eyes, a frozen smile on her lips. What is She doing? I always wondered. Counting them, to see who has died and how many have been born since the last Festival? Seeking Her beloved husband, whom She hasn't seen for a year? Her cold eyes always passed over me as though I were any other girl, or a dog, or even a tree.
For although the figure looked like Pasipha毛, like She-Who-Is-Goddess, She was not. Something had happened, something to do with the cold creatures that had lain coiled up in the heavy pots and that now twisted and squirmed in Her grasp, arching back and gaping, their fangs curving at the black sky, knowing that in a short time they would be chopped