CHAPTERTWO
SKIA’S NEXT ACCOMPLISHED PROJECT
If skia, “that maid of brauron,” must seem the beginning and the end of all commercial novelties—as by some grand reciprocity—Cephalos was her maritime means to both vital imports through Lykos as well as for conveyance of Brauron’s vast surpluses for export. His boon friends the Princes Erechthëid had also continued his pioneered routes of caravan redistribution through the maintenance to and fro of traffics upon the trails of his overland mule trains.
Putting that aside for a nonce, Mentör addresses the fact that Cephalos greatly wanted to envision Skia again, on a glimpse of her in the past, even as he still did not know her name or her provenance. …
Unbeknownst to him, he’d remained in Skia’s dreams. She was allowed barely a daily thought of him, though, especially as pertinent to the divine promise declared of him to herself. Since that exquisite epiphany, her Goddess had taken over all her [conscious] sense of ardent partnerships. All of them of a workaday sort, Eos the Dawn induced intensive vocation instead, or the dreams so intricately rendered that she taught Skia at how best she should next apply herself.
This would seem to mean that the Goddess was absenting herself because she was so fully preoccupied otherwise or elsewhere. The truth to be learned, though, was that elsewhere and otherwise lay a whole new learning by the Goddess herself of so many novel and fascinating human endeavors. The Goddess was eager to apply herself—to feel herself so applied—most especially since all the springtimes [since 1372 BC]. What she inspirited, I hazard to intuit, renewed her zeal to have Skia daily in execution as her surrogate everywhere abroad the Basin. For how else to explain the tirelessly graced personage that Skia had become in her Sanctuary’s behalf?
Accordingly, even as Cephalos is described by Mentör in full haste homeward to Eleusis, to stay there for a briefest sojourn until his new residency upon the Kekropia of Attica, we also must believe him ardently intent to gaze anew upon Skia. She had been the lovely and silent sentinel whom once upon a time of a splendid dawn’s sunrise had proven an epiphany, an ideal visualization of all that alluring womanhood could be.
He’d been especially tenacious. He had found excuse of visiting Rhapthë below Brauron Cove and Inlet, and then made next excuse of fulfilling his return voyage by circumnavigating Point Sounion. He had hugged the coast of Bay Attica on the prowl of whomever most feminine might be standing statuesquely upon bluffs and sheer cliffsides. There had been no sighting while he ranged southward, none either by his suddenly compulsive return back to Brauron. There, after searching through the inland sororities, he’d hastened by mount of a mule overland to achieve Eleusis at the far end of the MesoGaia. Nothing had become of any probes inland by that entire haphazard itinerary. All that effort, all that futility to find her anew as a sentinel, dashed his fervent hope of his part in her Fates, that they should fuse, intertwined by their skeins, before he had to undertake another marriage, to whose bride he must and would irrevocably dedicate his soul.
Search for her at naught, he must accept what next has to preoccupy his homeland resettlement within the much vaster context of the North Rim Powers upon the Saronic Gulf. So Mentör observes, but also belatedly explains of Cephalos’ hopes to have been revisited of Skia.
I have only from Cephalos’ late-life remembrance his years briefly abroad the Saronic Gulf at this time. It’s in attestation of what he said of forlorn feelings for failure to sight Skia while his deliberate distraction offshore Rhapthë. I have learned, incidentally, of what most likely had fully removed her from his any opportunity, perchance, to renew some rapport with each other, perhaps for a second intense moment of rapturous gazes upon each other.
Skia had taken up a major project of three years’ duration. The southernmost sororal college and its [relatively] small residency and hamlet tenancies had centered upon a longtime and well-established governance over Brauron’s once small cattle lands. She’d rarely had to visit there because its holy order of sisters had managed well without her. There hadn’t been much in the way of new initiatives, either, or borrowings off her exemplary regimes abroad the northern sororal conservatories. So there wasn’t anything much to say about adoptions of her genius that the sisters could not implement well by themselves. What had brought off her much needed involvement south and beyond Brauron Basin was the great burden imposed by Brauron’s tremendous overland commerce. It was trending to exceed most everybody’s livestock, beasts of burden most obviously at dearth. So, too, for hostelries and a complete inadequacy of caravansaries. Most of the encroachment, welcome as it was, was by extension of the Lokrians’ long routes to terminus at Brauron Cove.
Even before Cephalos’ absence away to Magnesia, he had enticed such traders to explore Vice-Regent Pallas’ southernmost dominions of Aktika, for the purpose of worthwhile ore extractions [at Laurion]. Achievable only by coastal reach off the eastern royal road along an escarpment traverse cut into the long eastern flank of Mount Hymettos, such routes were well supervised by his veterans, his made surrogates. Thus they’d required little from him except the usual parlay over best trade goods, novel or enhanced, for lading over mules of caravan trains—or by lading their best replacements for better piece goods yet, often as discovered from origins along his newest routes. All of them had become well entrained by the time of his return to Attica. These goods, too, he’d brought into reliable distribution through his first cousins or their own proxies, who also aimed toward southern destination marketplaces by invitation of such outreach from Vice-Regent Pallas over Aktika.
Skia had not needed to lengthen or redirect by expansion the many cartways built over years past or just recently. The sororal colleges had offered sufficient hostelry, whereas newly safe shores, protected by rotating flotillas of coastal guard, bode well for new caravansaries staged at various landfalls. Recently, though, the broad carting roads reticulating southward screamed in demand for oxen, bullocks, and aurochs. New pasturage and breeding closes [corals alike a stockyard] would serve her best by location south of the Basin, as the forking vales to SSW and SSE and their wintertime feeder streams. The upland pasturage could tie into the several woodsmen’s hamlets and farmers at high foothill tract cultivation, whereby dense coastal coppice under development for the timber needs of Brauron Cove.
The fells by both demesnes so southerly located Skia anticipated would prove to much greater demand from Brauron Cove, once its fullest ascension as a maritime center all to itself. Dreams had told her so, of course, but that inclination was also a belief that the High Sisterhood had gathered from their liege Vice-Regent Lykos. Oddly, though, her dreams weren’t about shipwrights or lodging constructors, nor about culls off their new coppices upon coastal hillocks. Instead, she must learn of a strongest demand beyond those intents, for lodge buildings of many pillars to serve new caravansaries. …
[Such erections Cephalos had made commonplace abroad, but without her any knowledge whatsoever of his schemes. Still, she was all too capable of being possessed by thoughts of him, and of his naval prospects, as her schemes meaningfully confluent with his own ends for Brauron. Glimmering hopes of such coincidences with her plot and plans attended her constant gifts from dreams.]
… At her direction, accordingly, finest cattle were brought to the southern plantations after a brief breeding program in the northern countryside between Brauron and Aphidnai. Imported sires, intended to mount prize heifers, she had driven off all range to the northwest and southeast, from where they’d been under Lykos’ and Pallas’ cattle ranchers [respectively]. Skia had also directed the five northernmost sororal residencies to sponsor their own droves of heifers, most of which were by remuneration to the Sanctuary for her valued assistance to so many manor plantation demesnes, which had resurged at ranching since the last great parch. What they had bred of the heifers had become regularly granted tithes from neighboring demesnes to the High Sisterhood for it to allocate to the five colleges.
Her essentials [of program] had worked two ways, toward commingling the amassed heifers with breeding bulls to cover them, for such cattle breed stock was easily introduced from Vice-Regent Pallas’ cattle ranches throughout Aktika. He had been importing them from Crete for all the years of his acceded vice-regency. That way and means of exchange put his cow and calving herds under the able direction of the southernmost sororal college, for its sisters postulant to gradually cull over ensuing years to achieve prize calf yearling herds to sire beasts of burden. That college put all bull calves under Skia’s direct control,...