Despite the Angels Read Free

slow dance  in honour of the earth and if you do it right you can feel the little movements the earth makes when she is restless.” She shuddered with the memory of the first time she had been led in that slow sensuous dance and blushed slightly. The listening woman saw the colour change but said nothing. She could always pretend to see less than she did.
    “They let me join in when they danced at the Grand Palace at Knossos on the way here.” Now Alessia’s eyes were shining. “It was worth having to leave home to experience that. Helping to thank the earth’s spirit for the Queen!” Alessia grew silent as her own words struck home to her. The scribe put out a hand and stroked her shoulder.
    “It is hard, to leave your home. I know, I had to come here to be able to work. No-one needed writing in my village and there was nothing else I could do.”
    “I could. I was a good potter, my parents’ best apprentice,” said Alessia. “And I liked working with the clay spirit, it is soft and yielding, a feminine spirit. But then I met Mikolos when he was passing through and he talked of the gold things he creates here. I just felt I had to come, I don’t know why.”
    Trynor smiled to himself. “I know why, my darling girl, it was because I suggested it. You should have known too by now, but Danthys is away selling his bangles at a fair in Sitia. When he returns the story can continue.”
    “My mother cannot write, but she can make pictures. She gave me one to bring with me, it is my whole family on a clay tablet just like yours, as though they were pushing their faces out through the clay. So I have a little piece of their spirit with me. I miss them, especially Paslona. She is so little and maybe will have forgotten me when she sees me again. I do not know how long that will be,” Alessia grew silent.  She didn’t miss everyone in the village. She had been glad to get away from Niklon. He was a real nuisance, thinking Alessia was interested in him, trying to touch her and assuming she would bring him something gold when she went home because he heard her promising trinkets to her girlfriends. Niklon had shadowed her and she had come away largely because of him.  There was something about him she didn’t like. She shuddered , Trynor stretched out his energies to smooth Alessia’s, trying to remove the unwanted memory.
    “Not to worry, love. You don’t like him because you know him from two hundred years ago, when you beat him in a fight. He wants to get his own back. I managed to persuade his guide Roki that you should not be together in this life and I hope Niklon will get over it without ever needing to spend a life with you.  Your Danthys is coming soon. I was talking to Jotin not long ago.”
     

Chapter 3
     
    “Did I not tell you,” Trynor had asked Jotin, “about Alessia going up to see Planidi before she came here?”
    “No, who’s Planidi?”
    “The local oracle near Tylissos, her home place. Wretched woman, got herself a reputation for reading the stones, so now no one there listens to their guides at all. Alessia didn’t trust herself to make up her own mind even though I’d told her what to do. No, it had to be Planidi. It was a lovely evening when she went, just at new moon. That’s a good time to ask the Mother Goddess questions, you know.”
    “Oh really? Why?”
    “Because they think it means the Mother Goddess is returning and all will continue well so long as the moon behaves as normal.”
    “Well, that’s probably right, anyway.” Jotin laughed and Trynor joined in.
    “Yes, of course, but not for the mystical reasons they think.” He paused and looked around, “Where was I?”
    “Going to see an oracle,” said Jotin.
    “Oh, yes. Lovely night. Thyme scented air, moonlight, the works. Gorgeous, but she didn’t pay it any attention, just rushed on up to the top of the little hill. I would have tripped on the loose stones if I’d had to do it in a body, but she was young