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On the evening it began, Mycenae stood where he had always stood, that being the height of the citadel with the whole plain going gold beneath him.
It was here, Mycenae thought, as he thought most evenings: all of this is mine.
Now, this was not a boast. Rather, it was a thing he could feel. He felt the land the way a man could feel his own body in the dark, simply knowing it is there. The plain was his the way his own chest with his beating heart was his.
The lower town with its presses and its kilns and the tanneries sat in him like the ache of a long day's walking sits in the legs, burning and present, never vanishing. The being did not watch over it. He was it, and it went on humming under his attention without really asking anything of him.
A blissful existence.
Mycenae could even feel it over any horizon he could see. Somewhere out past the islands, something ran before the same wind that pulled now at his cloak, and he felt the answering drag of it as a tautness low within himself. He felt dim and queasy and far off when focusing on it, a turning unease, as of men sick over the side. He knew only the feel of this sense, the way it permeated on his skin.
It was nearness, not sight. He was a body the size of a kingdom, and like any body, he knew where he ached and where he was warm and almost nothing else for certain.
The ships that lay on those horizons were where everything came and went. A truth of the world no doubt, though he did not think to call it anything; it was simply how things were, and would go on being. Gold came up from the far south. The deep blue stone his craftsmen seemed to love came from further east than any of his people had walked, hand to hand along roads he could not have named.
And the tin?
Well, that came from the very edge of the world.
He thought about the tin more than a lord ought to. Copper, he had near enough of, off the great island to the east the traders called “Alashiya”[1], but bronze is copper and tin both. Without the tin, the copper was merely a soft red metal fit for pots.
Tin came from somewhere past the sunrise, carried so far and through so many hands that Mycenae suspected no man who fed it to his smiths' fires had ever laid eyes on the ground it came out of. A whole world of bronze, of swords and armour and chariot-fittings and the very wealth of the kings themselves, balanced on one thin bright thread running off into countries that were, to him, a rumour with nothing but a price on it.
It did not trouble him. After all, threads had held his whole life.
Why should they not hold forever?
Mycenae had not grown up alone, whatever he told himself later about how the world had come to him extraordinarily slowly.
No, instead, he had grown up in a crowd.
The mainland he was born upon was thick with palaces, each its own hearth, each its own wanax[2]. And each had its own deathless thing standing on its own height feeling its own plain. Ones such as he.
Mycenae had known them the way you know the other households of your valley, which is to say he had feasted them and squabbled with them and every now and then set his men against theirs and over a stretch of border or a slight half-remembered that could end with their own blades crossed.
There was Pylos away to the southwest, comfortable on its good land and oil. Tiryns was almost within his own sight, close enough to be forever in his business, much to his frustration and chagrin. Also to be found was Thebes, Orchomenos, and the others.
These were the near ones, his own kind, playing his own game. It was in their company that Mycenae had never once felt himself to be anything other than exactly what he was, which was one strong player among several.
Or perhaps even the strongest.
Out along his thread, he had others he dealt with as equals. Alashiya first and best, the copper island. It was close and constant, a hardheaded trading power he haggled with as a merchant-lords haggle with one another. The towns of the coast to the northeast. The proud citadel, its walls a marvel to behold, on the strait[3]; that took its toll off everyone who passed.
There was the old island to the south as well. But that old island was a different matter, for it had come so far before him. It was Crete that had been the great thing on the water once, in the age when the mainland still ran rough and sent the island what it asked and very much resented such sending.
And yet, within to his shame, Mycenae must admit that his ships, his palace-craft, the very signs his scribes pressed into clay, all of it had come up off that great island first, taken and bent to his own people's use. But the breaking of that island was older than he was; the sea had risen once, back at the very edge of his own beginning, when the far mountain in the water tore itself open[4], and the island's fleets had never truly stood up again after.
He did not remember it.
He had woken into a world that event had already shaped. By his own evening on the citadel the island had long gone quiet, and his people had moved into its halls, and Mycenae felt himself all the larger for it. There would be time, later, to look at it.
He did not know how little.
And then, there was one larger than any of them. Inland of the northeastern coast sat the Great King[5]. They were the mountain-power the coastal towns feared and served and schemed against, and Mycenae knew him only at a wary distance. It was this distance that he did not like, because the Great King dealt with his sea the way a man deals with a wasp at his table, with a swat and no respect.
It galled him to be the wasp.
But even the Great King was a thing he could hold in his head. Bigger, yes. A rival. They were players at a higher seat of the same board.
And such was his world: a crowded sea, with a few larger things at its rim, himself doing well in the middle of it.
And he had come to think, without ever framing the thought, that this was more or less the size of the world entire.
Oh, how quickly that had changed.
Egypt came to him off a ship, and such was the first of its several insults; though, admittedly, Mycenae did not know to call it one until later.
He had been to the yearly gatherings in that other place a good while by then, and they held no surprises for him. The near faces, the old-faded island, the copper-lord, the wary weight of the mountain-king at the edge of it. They were the market he had worked within his entire life, and he spent his time blissfully nodding at the known.
Then, one year, along the longest thread his ships had ever spun, something came clear that did not fit the market at all.
Mycenae had expected, if he expected anything, that a great southern power would arrive as he himself arrived, or as the mountain-king loomed, a larger rival at the same board. But instead, there was a stillness at the edge of the gathering, and it was a long moment before he understood that the stillness was a person.
"You came expecting to be admired," the stillness said. "I can see it on you. You are still braced for it."
Mycenae, who had indeed been braced for such a thing, found he had nothing ready.
"It is not a fault. It is only young." The old one regarded him without unkindness and without much warmth either. It was the way one regards weather.
Mycenae still didn’t know how to feel about that.
"You have met your neighbours, and one or two who are bigger than you, and you have decided that is the shape of things.”
A growing horror rested within him, that he would deny to this day.
“That is not the shape of things. It is but a mere corner of it. You have never yet met anything that made the whole of your sea look like what it is."
"And what is it," said Mycenae, before he could stop himself, and heard the wasp in his own voice.
He hated it.
There was a pause as the stillness though of its answer, regal and lurching like a glacier. “A busy little water at the top of the world. Rich. Clever. Full of proud small things that have never had to look up.” There was a pity in Egypt’s eyes that made Mycenae want to vomit. “I do not say it to shame you. Instead, I say it because you are one of a great many, more than these gatherings have ever shown you, and the thing you feel that makes you sure you are a god, the land lying in your body like your blood, the ending that comes for men passing you by in the dark, every one of us feels it. The largest of us and the least alike.”
The stare he received gained more weight, all but making him wish he could collapse to his knees. But his pride, ever present, prevented such from occurring.
“It is not godhood. It is the shape of what we are, and there are more beyond the edge of the world, and older, than you have any way yet of counting."
Now, Mycenae made him an answer. Or rather, he tried, afterward; and it had involved a gesture at his own gilded person.
Egypt let him finish, and the young being thought it was worse than being cut short.
He suspected the old one knew it.
"You are fortunate, in this hour. That is well." Egypt inclined his head a little closer.
"One thing more, and then I leave you your evening. When your people offer to set you above them, do not take the place. Stand down if you have done so already. When they bring you their hard things to decide, do not decide for them. For it will feel like honour, but it is naught but a tether.”
Mycenae’s own silence filled the casket that was his dwindling pride.
“I have watched a great many of us, even within my own reflection, suffered to rule the people we belong to, and each of them, so far as I have seen, did that people a harm in the end, and such harm fell heaviest where the honour had felt sweetest. Be their fortune. Do not be their king." He straightened. "Of course, you will not believe me. Perhaps you will believe me later, when there is a later to believe it in, little king."
And then he withdrew into his stillness again, as though he had not just reached into the middle of Mycenae's chest and moved the foundations of his very soul.
Mycenae spent that year, and, if he is honest, a good many after it, deciding that Egypt was old. Old, and diminished, and eaten through with envy, and that a power on the long road down will always find a reason to tell the power on its way up that the summit was never worth the climb. He had watched the old island do the same in its silence.
It was the oldest sourness there was. Ancient grapes gone to vinegar.
Mycenae had kept some of Egypt’s truths and drowned the rest. And it is remarkable, the precision with which a proud creature keeps the half of a truth that costs it nothing and lets the half that might have saved it sink out of sight.
Mycenae was not wrong that Egypt was old. Egypt was older than his understanding could properly hold.
He had grasped it dimly, from the way the southerner spoke, as though the years were a country he had walked the whole length of. Egypt could remember the raising of the great tombs, the mountains of dressed stone the southern kings built to cheat the dark. He had watched ruling houses come up out of the river-mud and go back down into it. He had died and been reborn, split and fused, more times than he could count. And yet, he always returned.
He had, if the older powers were to be believed, already been past all reckoning ancient on the day young Mycenae first opened his eyes on the citadel and took himself for a god.
That was the thing Mycenae could not forgive, in the quiet of himself.
Not that Egypt had corrected him.
That Egypt had been right to.
When the palace brought him into the great hearth-room on the days that carried weight and asked the deathless one what he made of the coming season, he took the honour gladly and warmed himself in it without shame.
Only once did it go otherwise. The old wanax was dying, and the question of which son should follow hung raw in the smoke of the room, and one of the elders, half in weariness, turned and asked whether the deathless one might not simply name the heir and be done.
And Mycenae, who had a mouth full of opinions on most things, found the words would not come. He did not know the future. He had perhaps more notions than any man in that room which son would rule well and which would ruin them; but they were only same guesses, dressed in gold.
He stood at the dying wanax's shoulder and gave his thoughts, before following that such a choosing belonged to men. He thought no further on it.
There was a feast that night, and he was fond of a feast, and by morning it had gone from his mind.
Mycenae kept his records the way other men keep their prayers, and this is the last thing worth knowing before it came the first time.
His palace set down everything, in the signs his people had taken off that old island and bent to their own tongue[6]. Now, this was not a thing all peoples did; that was something to be proud of. The great kingdoms had their scribes, and the south no doubt had its reeds and picture-signs, but a great many peoples of the world kept nothing at all, and trusted the whole of what they were to the memory of old men.
Such was a leaking vessel.
This was not the case for his people. His people counted. Every ingot of tin and copper weighed and set down. Every ewe and ram. Every jar of oil, every hide, every pair of chariot wheels, whole or awaiting repair.
Every bronze-smith owed his measure of grain against the work of his hands. The perfumed oil set aside for the gods, and the gods named in the giving, the Lady of the house, the ones who took their due at the turning of the seasons. And for he himself, the undying one. All of it pressed into wet clay in the small careful signs, row on row.
Mycenae loved the whole apparatus of it past what the counting of sheep has any right to earn. This was because the writing was his answer to the one thing that truly laid a cold hand on the back of his neck, beneath all the talk of the deathless ones.
The forgetting.
He had seen it done. Palaces that emptied and left not even a name. Only a low green hill with some tumbled stones on its crown, and no one anywhere who could tell you what those stones had been called, or who had loved the people that raised them. And when asking deathless ones, their minds so full of knowledge, it was half the time they would forget; confused by thousands of similar instances.
It was the single thing in all creation that reached all the way into him. And he had felt the near edge of it in the quiet grey thing that old island had become, though he preferred to read that as his triumph of string and sword rather than his warning.
The writing put an end to it, he was sure. A thing set down could not be forgotten; that was the whole purpose of the doing of it, the one truly good idea the race of men had found since the beginning. He would walk the scribes' rooms sometimes for no reason but to look at the tablets drying in their long-ordered rows, the whole of his world set down and made safe and made countable, and think, with the deep settled contentment of a creature that believes it has outwitted the dark:
They will know exactly what we were. Down to the last jar of oil.
We will be remembered exactly as we are.
And Mycenae was right that he would be remembered.
He had the single most important fact about his own future turned precisely and ruinously the wrong way about. He held it to his chest like a warm thing on a cold night, and there was no one near to tell him better, for the only one who might have was away in the south being old and unimpressed, and Mycenae had resolved, as a matter of principle, not to believe a word that one ever said.
He did not know that the signs his scribes pressed so carefully into the clay would one day go dark in every mind on earth. That a day was coming when not one living soul could read them, when they would be marks on baked mud that men turned over in their hands and could not sound, and that the only reason a single tablet survived to be turned over at all would be that the fires which ended his world baked the soft clay hard as stone on their way through.
He thought writing was how a thing refused to be forgotten.
He had it exactly backward, and he slept well on it.
And so, we find ourselves back on that evening. The evening of the light.
Not the small one. The small one was the yearly gathering in the dim half-blind feast where a being such as he sits sensing a great crowd he cannot see, nodding across the murk at the few faces trade and war have earned him.
The other one. The great one.
But this light?
Mycenae felt it coming. A pull, low and deep and older than anything he had a word for. It was older than the palace, older than his people, the other realm that it was gathering its strength to open all the way. He stopped where he had stood, with the plain going gold beneath him exactly as it had the evening he woke.
He had never felt it before. He had known only the dim yearly gatherings, and heard the great opening spoken of by those old enough to have stood in it, always in a hushed and proprietary tone he had privately found tiresome.
The old ones said that when it came, the dark did not merely thin. It lifted, wholly, and every organised power on the face of the earth and beyond came clear to every other, entire, in one great light, and an entity such as he learned then, for the few days of it, the true count of his own kind, which no other hour of the turning year would ever show him.
Now, Mycenae did not know the number of this thing. The old ones knew, or rather, they claimed to, the great southern and eastern powers who counted their lives in a manner he could not follow, and who spoke of the light having opened many and many a time before there was ever a Mycenae to stand in it.
They spoke of the very first, when there had been but two beings in all the earth and beyond grand enough to be worth the meeting, and the two of them, having nothing else to make of the occasion, fought. And made of the fighting a custom.
And the custom had never once, in all the age since, been let to lapse.
What Mycenae did not know was that this would be the last of the full ones. The last time the light would show the whole earth and beyond at once, every face, before the dark that was coming took the most of those faces out of the world and out of its memory together.
He could not have known.
It was never his to know.
He knew one thing only, standing on the height with his own smallness and his own rising gladness having it out in his chest.
He knew he was about to see the whole of it.
And so, he looked once more on his land. The stone that was his body, the plain that was his body, going gold in the last of the light. And under all the certainty and the swagger and the long comfortable belief in his own deathless greatness, it came up in him clean and small and young: the plain thrill of a young thing about to be shown, for the first time, how large the world truly is.
Then, he let go of the citadel, and went toward the light…
- The Bronze Age name for Cyprus, known from Egyptian and Hittite correspondence and the Amarna letters. A major source of copper and its own centralised kingdom. ↩
- Wanax is an ancient Greek term meaning "king" or "ruler," specifically in the context of Mycenaean society. Later, the term evolved into anax, used in Classical Greece to mean "lord" or "master." ↩
- The city of Troy, generally aligned with the Hittites, commanding the Dardanelles crossing. ↩
- The Thera (Santorini) eruption, one of the largest in human history, which crippled Minoan coastal power and, some scholars suggest, survives distantly in the legend of Atlantis. ↩
- The Hittite Great King, ruling from Hattusa in inland Anatolia (modern Türkiye). In Hittite records, the term for the Mycenaean-world power, our main character, was Ahhiyawa, whom they dealt with warily, at arm's length. ↩
- The syllabic script the Mycenaeans adapted from the Minoans' undeciphered Linear A to write early Greek. Used for palace accounts, not literature. Lost at the collapse and not deciphered again until 1952. ↩