He took a big bite of the tuna fish I shoved in front of him.

I said impatiently, “I know all that, I had to study Greek legends in school. What about the snakes?”

Frederick put down his fork and looked at me critically.

“After all I have taught you you ought to know the answer to that. Kore and Demeter are two aspects of the same Cretan goddess, the mother and maiden, mistress of life and death. Surely you have seen the statuettes of the Cretan mother goddess, with the serpents twining around her arms. It appears that Kore, in her mature years, has very properly assumed the role of mother rather than maiden-a title to which she lost the right long before I knew her.”

I decided to overlook the cattiness in the last sentence.

“You mean she thinks she’s a snake goddess?” I demanded.

“The crudity of youth,” Frederick muttered. “Actually, her fantasy seems to be fairly consistent. No doubt she is terrorizing these simple peasants by pretending to have occult powers. Many of them still worship the old gods in their hearts, although they call them by the names of the saints.”

“Jim said he’d heard someone refer to her as Potnia. That’s a Greek title; at least it appears in the Linear B tablets, which are Greek. I thought you said the goddess was Minoan.”

“Minoan-Mycenean connections are well known,” Frederick said. “The Myceneans were certainly Greek, but they derived a certain amount of their culture from the Minoans. After Knossos and the other Cretan centers were destroyed by the explosion at Thera, a Mycenean dynasty ruled at Knossos for a time. The last Minos-the word is a title, like the Egyptian Pharaoh, not a name-was Greek. Like his predecessors he worshiped the mother goddess, and his daughter-your namesake-was priestess of the goddess. Your name means ‘Most Holy’; were you aware of that?”

“No,” I said unenthusiastically.

“You might read Levy’s study of Stone Age religion and its effect on later religious beliefs,” Frederick went on, in his lecturing voice. “It seems obvious that-”

“Never mind,” I interrupted. “You’ve already told me more than I wanted to know. How about answering some more important questions? The man in the villa-”

“His identity is irrelevant,” Frederick said. He rose, closing his book. “If you choose to leave, I can’t prevent you. Assuming, of course, that you have enough money for a return ticket…”

I stared at him in unwilling admiration.

“My god, you are an unscrupulous rat,” I said.

“I’m going to bed,” said Frederick.

If there had been a rack or thumbscrew handy, I would have considered applying them. Nothing short of torture could make him talk when he didn’t want to. And, knowing Frederick, I suspected even the rack wouldn’t do much good.

I was awakened in the cold gray dawn by someone shaking me.

“Hurry, it is getting light,” said Frederick.

I got up. What can you do with a man like that?

Chapter 9

I

FOR THE NEXT FEW DAYS FREDERICK STAYED ON WATCH while I swam. He still hadn’t done anything about a boat, and I didn’t push. The man at the villa was watching me. I had seen him on the cliff top, and once a flash of reflected light indicated he was using binoculars. I was pretty sure he had not noticed Frederick, who always chose a perch where he could not be seen from the villa. There seemed to be no objection to my presence, but I was afraid that if I brought a boat or dinghy to the bay, the watcher would suspect that I was not swimming for pleasure.

Why was I going on with a pursuit I considered both dangerous and futile? I can see now that the answer is a lot more complicated than I realized at the time. For one thing, I didn’t really believe it was all that dangerous. I was young enough then to have a child’s faith in my own invulnerability. As for my feelings about Frederick -well, psychiatrists use the word ambivalent. That’s putting it mildly. I was never conscious of it at the time, but what I really wanted was to find his treasure for him single-handed. Then I could walk away, free. I suppose it sounds silly, but that’s how I felt.

However, I had a more practical reason for continuing. I had found a pot.

You might think, from the way I have been sneering at pots, that this would not be an exciting discovery. This wasn’t an ordinary pot, though. It was an amphora, a whole one, and it was a beauty.

I found it on Tuesday, almost as soon as I got into the water. It was half sunk in the sand at the base of the cliff. My friend Alice the fish actually found it. He and I had become quite matey. In fact, he was a nuisance; I had to push him out of the way when I investigated objects on the bottom, and he was waiting for me every morning when I went in. That morning-Tuesday-he nudged me and flipped away as if he wanted to play tag. I went after him and there it was-a symmetrical black hole, too round to be anything but man-made. It was the mouth of the amphora.

I scraped the sand away with my hands. In the translucent water the painted designs stood out as if they had been freshly retouched-spirals and bands of orange and black, and a row of nautilus shells circling the shoulder of the pot. Two of the handles were still intact.

I had a coil of nylon line with me, but I didn’t dare use it for fear that any strain on the handles might snap them off. Nor could I empty the pot; there might be something inside, buried under the sand that had drifted in. I just about killed myself lifting it. Frederick came running to help when I neared the shore. He was incoherent with excitement. This was not an ordinary storage vessel, but a luxury item, one that might have been used in a nobleman’s home.

For the next two days I found nothing, but the infection had seized me. I would have spent all day in the water if I could.

I think it was Thursday afternoon when I went to the village again. I was getting sick of canned food. At least that’s what I told myself. Actually, I was hoping to see Jim.

I hung around the plaza for a while, but he was nowhere in sight. The shops were just reopening from the long siesta. I bought fish and tomatoes and lentils and onions and olives, and then I bought a straw bag to put everything in, since the newspapers in which my purchases were wrapped were getting soggy. I bought some postcards, too-and then realized there was nobody I could send them to.

I had written to Betsy when I first arrived, telling her to forward mail to the hotel in Zoa. So far nothing had come, but that wasn’t surprising. Jim had told me that mail sometimes took weeks to get here from the States. I hadn’t thought about it then, but as I looked foolishly at the brightly colored pictures of Phira perched on the multicolored cliff, I realized that I was truly cut off from my family and home. A wave of homesickness washed over me. How could I find out if anything happened to Dad or Mother? How could they reach me? It was that thought that made me determined to see Jim if I had to wait all day. I wasn’t going to let pride cut me off from the sole source of warmth I had found in this faraway place.

It was still early. He probably had not left work yet. I sat down on the terrace to wait for him.

I waited for quite a while. At first I was too preoccupied with my mournful thoughts to notice anything else, but finally I realized that nobody had come to take my order. Eventually Angelos came out; I ordered coffee, and he brought it, but he didn’t linger, as he usually did, and he didn’t smile, either.

His behavior brought into focus something I had been too distracted to notice earlier-the behavior of the other villagers whom I had encountered while shopping. Now that I thought about it, they had seemed unusually sober and uncommunicative. Usually they were very friendly people; I would try out my new Greek vocabulary, which was always received with cries of admiration, no matter how bad the pronunciation. But today…