IN THE CAVE OF THE MINOTAUR
Thea watched their torch-bearing captors recede
in the distance and leave them to the cave's darkness.
Her brother Icarus whispered, "Forgive me—I wanted
to come to the Country of the Beasts, but not to the Cave of the Minotaur. But maybe—"
Then they heard a padding of feet (or hooves?), and the curdling bellow of an enraged monster. It
was the-bull-that-walks-like-a-man, a hybrid of man and beast, monstrous to the eye, and roaring with
cold malevolence.
Thea began to feel her way along the walls; their dampness oozed like blood between her fingers. She
rounded a turn and looked up and up into the eyes of the Minotaur, and 'his red, matted hair. . . .
THOMAS
BURNETT SWANN was
bom in Florida in 1928 and served in the U.S. Navy during the Korean war. His education includes an A.B. from Duke University,
Master's from the University of Tennessee and Ph.D. from the University of
Florida; he is presently an English professor at Florida Atlantic University,
the nation's first Senior College. In addition to his fantasy and science
fiction, for which he has already received a "Hugo" nomination, he
has published books of literary scholarship (The Classical World of H.D.; Charles Sorley,
Poet of World War I; etc.)
as well as poetry (Wombats
and Moondust; Alas, in Lilliput). He has traveled extensively, doing research for both his nonfiction
and fiction; he gathered material for DAY OF THE MINOTAUR during a visit to Greece and Crete.
DAY of the MINOTAUR
by
THOMAS BURNETT SWANN
ACE
BOOKS, INC. 1120 Avenue of the Americas New York, N.Y. 10036
DAY OF THE MINOTAUR
Copyright ©, 1966, by Ace Books, Inc.
A
slightly different version of this novel was serialized in Science Fantasy #67, 68 and 69 under the title The Blue Monkeys, and is ©,
1964, 1965 by Science
Fantasy.
All Rights Reserved
Cover
art by Gray Morrow.
AUTHOR'S DEDICATION:
TO AUNT LITTLELY, BELOVED
Printed
in U.S.A.
In 1952, when the young cryptographer, Michael
Ventris, announced his partial decipherment of the clay tablets found in the
ruins of Knossos, archaeologists, linguists, and laymen greeted his
announcement with enthusiasm and expectation. Since the excavations of Sir
Arthur Evans at the turn of the century, the island of the fabulous Sea Kings
had piqued the imagination with its snake-goddesses and bull games, labyrinths
and man-killing Minotaurs. But instead of a Cretan Iliad, the tablets revealed
a commonplace inventory of palace furniture and foodstuffs, with occasional
names of a town, a god, or a goddess. In a word, they confirmed the already
accepted facts that the ancient Cretans had lived comfortably, worshiped
conscientiously, and kept elaborate records. Those who had hoped for an epic, a
tragedy, or a history—in short, for a work of literature to rival the Cretan
achievements in architecture and fresco painting—were severely disappointed.
In
1960, however, an American expedition from Florida Midland University excavated
a cave on the southern coast of Crete near the ancient town of Phaestus and
discovered a long scroll of papyrus, sealed in a copper chest from the
depredations of thieves and weather. I myself commanded that expedition and
wrote the article which announced our find to the public. At the time of my
article, we had barely begun to decipher the scroll, which I prematurely
announced to be the world's earliest novel, the fanciful story of a war between
men and monsters. But as we progressed with our decipherment, we marveled at
the accurate historical framework, the detailed descriptions of flora and
fauna, the painstaking fidelity to fact in costume and custom. We began to ask
ourselves: Were we dealing, after all, with a novel, a fabrication, a fantasy?
Then, last year, in the same cave, one of my colleagues discovered an intaglio
seal ring of lapis lazuli which depicted a field of crocuses, a blue monkey,
and a young girl of grave and delicate beauty. The discovery gave us pause:
The identical ring had been described in the scroll, and its
faithfully-rendered subjects, the monkey and the girl, were both participants
in the so-called War of the Beasts.
My
colleagues and I are scholars, objective and factual— the least romantic of
men. We do not make extravagant claims. We do suggest, however, that our
manuscript, instead of the world's first novel, is one of its first histories,
an authentic record of several months in the Late Minoan Period soon after the
year 1500 B.C., when the forests of Crete were luxuriant with oak and cedars
and ruled by a race who called themselves the Beasts. We realize that the consequences
of such a suggestion are breathtaking and may, in time, necessitate a complete
reexamination of classical mythology, since many of our so-called
"myths" may in fact be sober history. What is more, folklorists may
find in the scroll the prototype for a famous fairy tale long believed to have
originated in the Middle Ages. Now, with considerable
doubts and a rare, unscholarly excitement, we present to you the first English
text of the manuscript which we have designated Day of the Minotaur. Wherever possible, proper names have been
modernized for the convenience of the layman.
T.I. Montasque, Ph. D., Sc.D., L.L.D. Florida Midland
University,
July 29, 1964.
Chapter
I THE WOODEN WINGS
My
history belongs to
the princess Thea, niece of the great king Minos, and to her brother Icarus,
named for the ill-fated son of Daedalus who drowned in the sea when his glider
lost its wings. I, the author, am a poet and craftsman and not a historian, but
at least I have studied the histories of Egypt
and I will try to imitate their terse, objective style. You must forgive me,
however, if now and then I digress and lose myself in the glittering adjectives
which come so readily to my race. We have always been
rustic poets, and I, the last of the line, retain an ear for the well-turned
phrase, the elegant (yes, even the flowery) epithet.
Thea
and Icarus were the only children of the Cretan prince, Aeacus, brother to
Minos. As a young warrior, Aea-cus had led a punitive expedition against a band
of pirates who had raided the coast and taken refuge in the great forests of
the interior. For three years no one heard of him. Returning at last to
Knossos, he brought with him, instead of captured
pirates, two small children. His own, he told the court. By
whom? By a lady he had met on his wanderings. And where had he wandered?
Through the Country of the Beasts, a forest of cypress and cedar shut from the rest of the island by the tall limestone
ridges which humped from the range of Ida. Cynics concluded that Thea and
Icarus were the offspring of a peasant; romanticists questioned if a mere
peasant could have given birth to children as strange as they were beautiful,
with neatly pointed ears and hair whose luminous brown held intimations of
green. Thea took pains to hide her ears behind a cluster of curls, but she
could not hide the color of her hair. Icarus, on the other hand, displayed his
ears with a mixture of shyness and pride; he allowed no wisp of hair to cover
their tips, though his head was a small meadow of green-glinting curls.
The
children grew up in a troubled court. The power of the island kingdom had
become a thin crescent of its ancient fullness. Gargantuan earthquakes had
damaged the many-palaced cities. The famous fleet, scattered by tidal waves,
had fallen into disrepair or come to be manned by mercenaries from Egypt. The
bronze robot Talos, guardian of the coast, lay rusting beside the great Green
Sea, and no one remembered how to repair him. As the brother of Minos, Aeacus
spent most of his time in the royal palace at Knossos, and after Minos' death
he assumed the throne. A wise if somewhat forbidding ruler, he correctly
guessed that the barbarous Achaeans, who lived in the rock-built citadels of
Pylos, Tiryns, and Mycenae on the mainland to the north of Crete, were building
ships to attack his people. The Achaeans worshiped Zeus of the Lightning and
Poseidon, the Thunderer, instead of the Great Mother; their greatest art was
war; and their raids on the Cretan coast resembled small invasions, with a
dozen eagle-prowed ships descending on a town in the dead of night to steal
gold and capture slaves.
Foreseeing the eventual fall of Knossos,
Aeacus sent his children—Thea was ten at the time, Icarus nine—to his mansion
called Vathypetro, ten miles south of Knossos, a small, fortified, and self-sufficient palace which included a kiln, an olive press, and a weaving shop. Poised on
the roof in the arms of a catapult lay one of the gliders devised by the late
scientist, Daedalus. In case of siege, Aea-cus' servants had orders to
place the children on the fish-like body and strike the bronze trigger which,
releasing the catapult, would propel them to relative safety in the heart of
the island.
Six
years after her arrival in Vathypetro, when invasion had become a certainty
instead of a possibility, and the great palace at Mallia had fallen to pirates,
Thea was picking crocuses in the North Court. The bright yellow flowers, known
to poets as the cloth-of-gold, covered the earth like a rippling fleece, except
where a single date-palm broke the flowers with its bending trunk and
clustered, succulent fruit. She could hear, in the next court, the sounds of
the olive-press, a granite boulder crushing the black kernels, the mush being
poured into sacks and pressed under wooden levers weighted with stones. But the
workers, the old and the very young who had not been called to the army
defending Knossos, did not sound joyful; they did not sing their usual praises
to the Great Mother. For want of sufficient pickers, the fruit had been left
too long on the trees and its oil was crude and strong.
She
wore a lavender kilt and a blouse embroidered at the neck with beads of
amethyst. Though a young woman of sixteen, with shapely, swelling breasts, she
did not like the open bodices worn by the ladies of the court. Five brown-green
curls, artfully arranged by the handmaiden Myrr-ha, poised over her forehead,
and three additional curls concealed each ear like grapevines hiding a
trellis. Fresh and flower-like she looked, with the careful cultivation of a
garden in a palace courtyard, rather than the wildness of a meadow or a
forest; soft as the petals of a crocus, slender as the stem of a tall Egyptian
lotus. But the greenflecked brown of her hair and the bronze of her skin resembled
no flower in any earthly garden. Perhaps in the Lower World, where the Griffin
Judge presides on his onyx throne, there are gardens with flowers like Thea.
And
yet she was more than merely decorative. A firmness
tempered her fragility. Like the purple murex, she looked as if she had come
from the sea, fragrant and cleansed, with the shell's own hue in her eyes and
its hard strength in her limbs. A sandal can crush a flower but not a murex.
She was picking the crocuses for her father,
who, she hoped, was coming from Knossos to visit her. She saw him reflected in
the pool of her mind: Aeacus, the warrior-king. Tall for.
a Cretan, with broad shoulders tapering to a narrow
waist, he looked like a young man until you saw the lines around his eyes,
running like rivulets into his battle-scars: the v-shaped mark of an arrow, the
cleft of a battle-ax. She needed his strength to hush her fears of an invasion,
she needed his wisdom to help her manage Icarus, who sometimes acted as if he
were five instead of fifteen and liked to vanish from the palace on mysterious
journeys which he called his "snakings."
A blue monkey scampered out of the tree,
snatched a crocus, and tossed it into the wicker basket at her feet. She
laughed and caught him in her hands. Though a maiden of ^marriageable years,
she did not resent the fact that for friends she had only a monkey, a
handmaiden, and a lovable but exasperating brother; that instead of bull games
and tumblers and moonlit, dances beside the Kairatos River, she had for
amusement a distaff to wind with flax and linen robes to dye. Escaping from her
hands, the monkey, whose name was Glaucus, snatched her basket and carried it
up the trunk of the palm. In the top of the tree, he dislodged a swarm of bees
and waved the basket to advertise his theft. She shook her fist as if she were
very angry; she shook
the
tree and roared like an angry lion. It was part of their game. She remained,
however, Thea; she did not feel remotely leonine. When Icarus turned himself into a bear, he growled, he stalked, he actually
hungered after honey, berries, and fish. But even as a small child, the practical
Thea had not liked to pretend herself into other shapes. "But why should I
pretend to be a dolphin?" she had once asked a playmate. "I'm
Thea." It was neither smugness nor lack of imagination, but a kind of
unspoken acceptance, a quiet gratitude for the gifts of the Great Mother.
Always
in the past, the monkey had dropped the basket at her feet and she, happily
subsiding from lion into maiden, had rewarded him with a date or a honey cake.
Today, however, she sank to the ground and, hunched among the flowers as if
she had fallen from a tree, began to cry. It was not part of their game. She
had heard the talk of the servants, their whispers when she approached, their
abrupt silences when she tried to join them. She had seen the strain in her
father's face the last time he came from Knossos. Against the unnatural pallor
of his skin, his scars had glowed like open wounds. If my father comes, she thought, / will not let him return to Knossos. I will
keep him safe with us in Vathypetro. If he comes—
The monkey descended the trunk, lifted the
basket into her lap, and chattering amiably put his arm around her neck. She
looked at him with surprise. Even at sixteen she was used to comforting instead
of being comforted. Quickly she dried her eyes on a handkerchief of blue linen,
with flying fish cavorting about its edges, and returned to picking.
"These
are for my father," she said to Glaucus. "Do you suppose he will like
them?" But she was not really thinking about the flowers. She was
thinking about invasion. "If die walls are breached," her father had
said, "you will go with Icarus to the Winged Fish. Myrrha will strap you
to the board which is shaped like a mullet, and Icarus will hold to your back.
Once in the air, you can shift your weight and help to change direction, climb
or dip. Head for the mountains. Whatever you do, try
not to land in the Country of the Beasts." He paused. He had spoken an
ominous name, the part of the island where he had met their mother. It was
hard to tell if he spoke with fear or with anguished longing for something
which he had lost and did not want his children to find and also lose.
"Pass over the forest before you land. By leaning heavily forward, you can
bring the craft down. There are friendly villagers who will give you
shelter."
She looked above the roofline of the mansion.
To the north, Mount Juktas reared the gentle crags which, viewed from the sea,
resembled the features of a sleeping god and barred the way to Knossos. Achaean
invaders would come from the sea and around the mountain. To the west lay the
hills, terraced with olive trees and vineyards, which climbed gradually into
the Range of Ida and the Country of the Beasts, the forests which no one
mentioned without a shudder, much less entered; the haunt, it was said by the
cook, the gatekeeper, and the gardener, of the Minotaur, the Bull That Walks
Like a Man. "Try not to land in the County of the Beasts." She would
not forget her father's warning.
Myrrha,
the handmaiden, exploded into the garden. At the same instant, Thea heard
sounds beyond the walls. Marching feet, the clank of armor, the
voices of men who march with such confidence that they want the whole
countryside to hear their coming.
"Achaeans,"
Myrrha gasped. "We must go to the glider." She was black of skin, a
Libyan bom into slavery among the Cretans, and fearful of everything: monkeys,
snakes, bats, mice, strangers, and as for the Achaeans—well, they were giants who boiled their captives in olive
oil and ate them to the last finger, Thea did not know her age; it was doubtful
whether Myrrha knew. Fifty? Sixty?
But her face was as smooth as a girl's until, as now, it fell into wrinkled terror
and her eyes seemed ready to burst from her head like overripe figs.
Myrrha
seized her hand as if to comfort the girl, but it was Thea who imparted the
strength and soothed the woman's fears. "The walls are strong. We may not
need the glider." But privately she thought: The Achaeans come from the sea and from
Knossos. There has been a battle; perhaps my father is dead.
She sprang up the stairs to the roof and
surveyed the olive grove between the house and Mount Juktas. The green-silver
limbs of the trees, some of them laden with fruit, glinted like the wings of
dragonflies in the morning sun. But much of the glitter did not belong to the
trees. Warriors, perhaps a hundred, advanced through the grove. Armored in
leathern tunics, bronze cuirasses and crested helmets, with shields of bull's
hide, they carried swords and spears, and their beards looked so coarse and
pointed that they too might have been weapons. Sharp men,
bristling men; yellow-bearded killers. Happily, the walled house was
built to withstand a siege. The gate was hewn from cedar, and men in the
flanking towers could harass attackers with relative impunity.
But the towers, it appeared, were no longer
manned. The slaves and servants had begun to desert the house and trail down
the road of cobblestones which led to the olive grove. They were laden with
bribes for the conquerers— amphorae of wine, yellow cheeses on platters of
beaten gold, wicker baskets heaped with linen and wool. Thea's impulse was to
hurry after them and order them back by name: Thisbe, who had woven her kilt,
Sarpedan, the porter, who called her "Green Curls," Androgeus. . . .
Surely they would listen, they who had seemed to love her and whom she had
loved? No, there was not time. There was only time in which to find Icarus.
She
ran along corridors with walls of porous ashlars and roofs supported by red,
swelling columns like turned trees. Her sandals clattered on the gray ironstone
tiles. She ran until she came to the Room of the Snake. The room was empty
except for a low, three-legged table with four grooves which met in the middle
and held a small cup, its rim on a level with the surface of the table. The snake's table. The grooves were to rest his body, the
cup to hold his food. But the snake Perdix, protector of the mansion and, in
the view of Icarus and the servants, a reincarnated ancestor, was not to be
found on his table, nor in his sleeping quarters, a terracotta tube with cups attached to its ends. He lay in her brother's
hand.
With
utmost leisure, Icarus ambled toward her: a boy of fifteen, chunky rather than plump, with a large head and a tumult of
hair and enormous violet eyes which managed to look innocent even when he was
hiding Perdix in Myrrha's loom or telling Thea that she had just swallowed a poisonous mushroom. He never hurried unless he was leaving the house.
Thea embraced him with sisterly ardor. He
submitted with resignation and without disturbing his snake. His sister was
the only female he would allow to embrace him. Even as a small boy, he had
spurned the arms of Myrrha and various ladies of the court at Knossos. Under
normal circumstances—had he remained at court, for example—he could hardly have
remained a virgin to the age of fifteen. He might be
married; certainly he would be betrothed. For the last five years, however,
most of his playmates had been animals instead of boys and girls. The birth of
a lamb, the mating of bull and cow: these were the familiar and hardly shocking
facts of life to him. But he strenuously resisted the knowledge that men and
women propagated in the same fashion.
"Perdix
is ill," he explained. "I'm feeding him dittany leaves. They're good
for cows in labor. Why not snakes with indigestion?"
"The
Achaeans have come." She spoke the words in quick, breathless gasps. "Outside the palace. We must go to the glider."
Myrrha by now had overtaken them.
His
eyes widened but not with fear. "I will stay and fight them. You and
Myrrha go."
She
heard a scuffling in the outer chambers, the shouts of Cretans, the oaths of
Achaeans: "Poseidon!" "Athenel" A few of the servants, it
appeared, had chosen to fight. A man screamed, and the scream became a groan.
Never had she heard such a sound except when her cat, Rhadamanthus, had been
crushed by the stone wheel of a farmer's cart.
She
fought back the nausea which clawed at her throat. "There are too many to
fight."
"I
will bring Perdix," he said. That flatness of his statement allowed no
argument. A remarkable bond united the boy and his snake. For three years
Icarus had squeezed and dropped him without arousing his wrath. The boy
insisted that Perdix was the avatar of his great-great-uncle who had once
sailed around the vast continent of Libya and returned with six pythons and a
male gorilla.
"Yes. He will bring us
luck."
And
the blue monkey, Glaucus? Why had she not remembered to bring him from the
garden? His little weight would not have slowed their flight.
They
climbed the last stairs and burst into sunlight like breathless divers from the
bottom of the sea. Raised on a catapult such as besiegers use
to storm a city, the glider poised like a monster from the Misty Isles.
Its wings were those of an albatross, with a framework of peeled willow rods
covered by tough canvas; its wooden body was that of a fish with round, painted
eyes and upturned tail. When the trigger of the catapult was struck with a
hammer, two twisted skeins, made from the sinews of a sheep, would start to
unwind and propel the craft upward along a trough at a 45-degree angle and into the air. There was
room for two passengers, one on top of the other.
Myrrha was stooped with terror. She had
started to mumble an incantation in her native tongue, a plea, no doubt, to the
gods of the jungle.
"You
and Icarus go," said Thea, touching the woman's shoulder. "I will
strike the trigger."
But
Myrrha shook her head and the terror ebbed from her face. She lifted the girl
in her arms (for Cretans are little people, and Thea, although she had reached
her full height, was less than five feet tall) and strapped her to the glider,
securing leather straps to her arms and ankles. With a single, larger strap,
she fastened Icarus to Thea's back.
"Hold
to your sister," she ordered with unaccustomed authority. "The strap
may break."
"How can I hold my
snake at the same time?"
She took the snake, of which she was mortally
afraid, and settled him in the pouch at the front of Icarus' loincloth.
"He will think it's his tube," she reassured the boy.
They
did not hear the arrow. Myrrha was speaking to Icarus; then, without a scream,
she settled onto the roof and almost deliberately seemed to stretch her limbs
in an attitude of sleep. The arrow was very small and nearly hidden in the
folds of her robe. With its feathered tail, it looked like a bird gathered to
her breast.
Icarus freed their straps and slid with Thea
onto the roof. He knelt beside his nurse and kissed her cheek for the first and
last time. She lay with her usual expression of doubt and perplexity. Thea stifled a sob; there was no time for tears.
She jerked Icarus to his feet. She herself would have to strike the trigger and
send him to safety without her.
He
saw her intention. "No," he protested. "I am a man. It is you who must go." She was always surprised when her brother
issued commands; in his placid times, people forgot his stubbornness. He shoved
her towards the glider.
She
slapped him across the mouth. "Do you want us both to die?" she cried. "Now do as I say. Remember, you are not to land in the Country of the
Beasts."
A
giant had barred their path. An Achaean, though not the
deadly bowman. The topmost rung of his ladder leaned against the edge of
the roof. A bronze helmet, crested with peacock feathers, concealed his
forehead, but she saw his blond eyebrows and beardless cheeks; he was very
young. There was blood on his hands and on the sword which he raised above his
head. She smelled the leather of his tunic as he strode toward her. With a
speed which belied his great, clumsy-looking arms, he dropped the sword and
locked both children in a fierce hug. They wriggled like netted tunnies and
slid to the floor, gasping for breath—fish spilled on a beach.
He
knelt beside them and brushed the curls from Thea's ears. She shuddered at the
touch of his fingers.
He
grinned. "Pointed ears," he said in the rich Achaean tongue which she
had learned at court, a strangely musical language for a race of warriors.
"You are not Cretan at all. I think
you have come from the woods, and it's time you returned." His eyes were
as blue as the feathers of a halcyon, the bird which nests on the sea and
borrows its color from the waves; and a faint amber
down had dusted his cheeks. She thought with a wave of tenderness: he is trying
to raise a beard and resemble his bristling comrades. In spite of his size and strength, he seemed misplaced in armor.
He
placed them on the glider and fastened their thongs. "You had better go.
My friends are rough."
He
struck the trigger with the hilt of his sword. She hoped that his friends would
not be angry with him.
She
could not breathe; her brother's body seemed a weight of bronze. Up, up, they
shot; up into sunlight and lapis lazuli, where Daedalus had flown, and that
other Icarus, for whom her brother was named, until he lost his wings and
plunged into the sea like a stricken albatross.
She
opened her eyes. The wind's invisible cobwebs had ceased to sting. She felt
like a Dancer in the Games of the Bull, swimming the air above the deadly homs;
or a dolphin, leaping a wave for the sheer joy of
sun above him and sea below him, and air around him like a coolness of silk.
Then she saw their direction.
"Shift,"
she cried to Icarus. "We are heading for the coast!" Silence.
"Icarus,
listen to me. You mustn't be afraid. You must help me steer for the
mountains I"
"Afraid?"
he protested. "I wasn't afraid. I was thinking about birds. Now I know what it means to get a bird's-eye view!"
"Shift," they cried in unison,
abandoning themselves to the breathless joy of flight. "SHIFT!"
Below
them the captured palace twinkled its giant mosaic —the blue-black clay of the
roofs, the red gypsum of the courtyards, punctuated by gardens and fountains
and swelling toadstools of smoke which did not come from the hearth in the
kitchen. Scarlet blades of flame began to probe among the mushrooming
blacknesses. So, too, she thought, had burned the palace of Knossos. Capture,
pillage, and burn: that is the way of Achaeans. And her
father? She blanched to think of him among such flames.
Grief
froze in her like water in a pool, and high among the clouds, time too seemed
frozen, as if all the water clocks had turned to ice and the shadows on all the
sundials were fixed to a certain hour. And yet they moved. Time and pain were
frozen but not the earth, which changed below them from stone villages linked
by roads to hamlets linked by footpaths; from vineyards and olive groves to
pastures scattered with thickets and shepherds' huts and undulating upwards,
upwards toward the Mountains of Ida.
A peak surged toward them
like an angry whale.
"Shiftl"
They
skirted the snowcapped crags, and winds lashed them like spray from a wintry
sea.
And
then, cupped in the arms of the old, white-haired mountains, lay a green
forest, its single egress a narrow strip to the south which faced toward the
rich Messara Valley and the great city of Phaestus.
The
Country of the Beasts.
They
began to descend, gently but irrevocably, toward the forest. Cypresses, bronze
in the afternoon sun; cedars as old as the time when the infant Zeus had been
nursed in these very mountains; pines and firs, and lesser trees which they did
not recognize, wafting a strange fragrance up to meet them, sweet and acrid at
once (myrrh? sandarac?): a green immensity of trees, with grassy glades and a
stream of flawless malachite, and there, there—was it a town or only a natural
clearing with stunted trees like houses and a ditch like a girdling moat? No
man except their father was known to have entered the Country of the Beasts.
Shepherds, following sheep, had skirted the southern boundary and seen among
the shadows boys with the hooves of goats, winged females with staring golden eyes,
and yes, the Minotaur, the Bull That Walks Like a Man.
"Thea,"
whispered Icarus, a hushed eagerness in his voice. "Why don't we try to
land in the forest?"
"No," she cried with sudden
vehemence. "You know what Father said."
"But
nothing happened to him. And he left our mother in there."
"Our mother is dead. Now shift."
She threw her weight to the left, but Icarus
stared at the forest and did not move. "Icarus!"
"Yes," he said quietly. "Yes, Thea."
The
treetops, soft from a distance, bristled with gnarled fingers to puncture their
wings; but together they managed to guide their craft beyond the forest to a
clearing of grass and yellow, early-blooming asphodels. They struck with such a
thud that they broke their straps and tumbled onto the ground. The lily-like
asphodels cushioned their fall.
"Thea,
look!" whispered Icarus. "There is something watching us." She
looked to the edge of the forest and saw the face.
"Her
ears," said Icarus, forgetting to whisper. "They're just like ours I"
"No,"
said Thea quickly. "Hers are furry. Ours are merely pointed. And besides,
she has—paws!"
The face eclipsed itself behind a tree.
"We frightened her away," sighed Icarus.
"It was something else that frightened
her."
Achaeans. At least a score of them, issuing onto the meadow.
"We can follow the girl," cried
Icarus.
"No," said Thea. "Better
Achaeans than Beasts."
Chapter II THE MINOTAUR
His helmet
of boar's tusk glittered
yellowly in the light from the clerestory windows. His bronze cuirass fell
below his thighs; he removed his greaves, grunting with easeful release, and
his huge, hairy legs resembled trees rising from the undergrowth of his rawhide
boots. To Thea, he looked elderly; he must have been forty. He lifted the
helmet from his sweat-matted hair and faced his young captives. In the hall of
a Cretan nobleman's captured mansion, Thea and Icarus awaited his judgment. His
name was Ajax; his men had taken them beside their glider.
On the frescoed walls, blue monkeys played in
a field of crocuses. Red-stained columns, swelling into bulbous capitals,
supported the roof, and the alabaster floor was divided by strips of red
stucco. A riot of color and movement, freedom and playfulness: unutterably
foreign to the hard-bitten conquerers with their shields and swords. They
seemed to sense their unwelcome; they stood gingerly on foam-white alabaster
and stared at the painted walls as if they expected the monkeys to drown them
with derisive chattering.
She sought her brother's hand and felt his
returning pressure. A warmth of tenderness, like the
current from a glowing brazier, enveloped her; then a chill of remorse, as if
the brazier had been extinguished. It was she who had caused their capture,
preferring known barbarians to unknown Beasts.
Ajax
sighed and slumped in a chair with a back of carved griffins. To such a man,
thought Thea, fighting is not an art but a livelihood; he is not a hero but a
strong, stupid, reasonably brave animal who fights
because he is too lazy to plant crops or sail a ship.
A small,
wedge-shaped wound glowed in his forehead. "You Cretans," he said,
pointing to the wound. "For such little creatures you have sharp claws.
The lady of the house gave me this." He laughed. "She was suitably
punished." He motioned Thea and Icarus to approach his chair.
Icarus
stepped in front of his sister. "You are not to harm her."
"Harm
her? Not if she pleases me," Ajax grunted without rancor, disclosing a
gap in place of his middle teeth. His voice was high and thin; it squeaked from
his hulking body like a kitten's mew from a lion. But he gestured and flared
his nostrils as if he were Zeus, the sky-god. "My men saw your ship come
down. You almost landed in the Country of the Beasts."
"I wish we had,"
said Icarus.
"Do
you?" Ajax laughed. "You'd like for the Minotaur to get your sister?
He takes his pleasure with girls and then he eats their brothers. A Cretan boy
like you would make one good bite—except for your head. That might stick in his
throat."
"Does
he live in the woods where we landed?" asked Icarus, totally uncowed.
A
young warrior, both of whose ears had been sliced from his head as neatly as
mushrooms from a log, anticipated his leader. "His lair is a cave a
little to the west. The people hereabouts offer him lambs and calves so"
he won't come out and eat their children. When we
took this house, they called his curse down on us."
Ajax
silenced the speaker with an oath. "To Hades with Cretan
curses! They're no more potent than Cretan goddesses. Now take these
children to the Room of the Dolphins and see that the girl has the means to
bathe and change."
She
felt his eyes on her wind-disheveled hair and instinctively reached a hand to
rearrange her curls.
"Pointed
ears," he remarked, apparently noticing for the first time. "And your brother as well. Are you from the
forest?"
Angrily
Thea restored her curls. "We are Cretans, not Beasts. If I were a Beast,
my ears would be tipped with fur."
"Well
then, my girl with the furless ears, I will come to see you within the hour.
See that you robe yourself as becomes a woman and not a child. I have no wish
to be reminded of my daughter."
The Room of the Dolphins was small, like most
of the rooms in the sprawling palaces of Crete. It was intimate and gaily
decorated, with terracotta lamps, as yet unlit, perched like pigeons in
wall-niches; folding chairs of fragrant citrus wood; and a raised stone
platform billowing cushions of goose feather. On one end, it opened between
two columns into a light well with a black wooden pillar to honor the Great
Mother; on the other, into a bathroom with a sunken floor and a small clay
bathtub around whose sides an impudent painted mouse pursued a startled cat. In
the center of the room stood an open chest whose contents were strewn on the
floor like a treasure cast from the sea: golden pendants aswarm with amber
bees, sandals of blue kidskin, gowns of wool, leather,
and linen with wide, flaring skirts. The earless Xanthus pointed to the
dresses, nodded to Thea, and paused with eager expectancy, hoping no doubt to
watch her disrobe in front of him. Because they display their breasts, the
ladies of Crete are sometimes thought to be shameless.
She
could not be cross with the man in spite of his impudence. There was something
pathetic about his missing ears; without them, his head looked undressed. She
smiled tolerantly and pushed him toward the door. The merest touch of her hand
impelled him to motion, and he moved before her like a ship before a breeze.
Leaving
Icarus to admire the fresco of dolphins, she climbed in the tub and turned a
frog-shaped spigot to immerse her body with hot, steaming water. In the larger
mansions, rain was trapped on the roof, heated by a brazier, and carried to the
bathrooms through pipes of terracotta. Cretan plumbing was admired even in
Egypt. She drowsed and forgot to lament the past or dread the future; anxieties
flowed from her body along with dust and sweat and the stains of grass and
flowers.
A sound awoke her, a lapping of water. "Thirsty," said Icarus. He had knelt by the
tub to offer Perdix a drink, and the snake's forked tongue was narrowly missing
her aim.
She
shrank to the rear of the tub. She was not embarrassed in front of her
brother—often they had bathed or swum together without clothes—but she did not
wish to be bitten by her great-great uncle. Though none of the snakes of Crete
were poisonous, some like Perdix possessed sharp fangs.
"Does he have to drink now?" she
cried.
"He
likes it hot, you know. It reminds him of underground springs." When the
snake had drunk his fill, Icarus raised him from the water and held him as
casually as one might hold a piece of rope or a few links of chain. "I chose a gown for you," he continued.
"Hurry up and dress before the water gets cold. Perdix and I want a bath
too."
Icarus
and Perdix possessed the vacated tub, which lacked a drain and would have to be
emptied by Ajax's attendants before it could be refilled. While Icarus splashed
in the tub and complained about slow sisters who let the water cool, Thea
examined the gown he had chosen for her. It was very bold. The crimson skirt
was embroidered with golden heads of gorgons, the puffed sleeves with matching
serpents. The bodice was open to reveal the breasts. She smiled at Icarus'
taste and chose a more decorous gown which covered her breasts with a thin, diaphanous gauze. Sleeves of saffron fell to her
elbows, and the skirt, supported by hoops, flared like an amethyst bell.
"He is going to be disappointed,"
said Icarus, entering the room. "He wanted you to dress 'as becomes a
woman.' "
"Haven't IP"
"You know very well what he meant. He
wanted to see your breasts. Myrrha always said they were like melons, and if
they kept on growing they would soon be pumpkins. I expect he feels like gardening."
"He can see enough of
them now."
"I know, but you've diminished them.
Perhaps you could paint your nipples with carmine."
"Do you want me to look like a Moabite
temple girl?" she protested, though nipples were also painted in worldly
Knossos.
"It can't hurt to pacify him," said
Icarus realistically.
She
thought with a start: He
does not suspect what Ajax really wants of me. He still believes that a woman
pleases a man only by showing her breasts and perhaps giving him a kiss.
"You see," he went on, "if he
likes your dress, he may not make you kiss him."
"If he likes my dress, he will make me
kiss him."
Icarus
looked surprised. "But that seems greedy. Must he get everything the first
night?"
"Achaeans
are greedy men. That's why they've come to Crete."
"Of
course," he admitted. "You are right then to veil your breasts."
From the contents of the chest he selected a pendant of amber and placed it protectively around her neck.
"This," he said, "will diminish them even more."
She
arranged her curls with the help of copper pins, their heads like tiny owls;
reddened her cheeks with ochre; and darkened her eyes with kohl. She was not
vain; she was fastidious. She did not dress to make herself beautiful, but to
perform an indispensable ritual by which she emphasized the degree and
discipline of her ancient civilization. The application of cosmetics was an
affirmation of order in a world which, because of earthquakes and Achaeans,
threatened to grow disorderly to the point of chaos.
Hardly
had she finished her toilet when Xanthus invaded the room with a swollen platter of grapes, figs and pomegranates, withdrew, and returned
with a copper flagon of wine and two cups, which he placed on a three-legged
table of stone. Then, with the help of coals from a portable brazier, he lit
the flaxen wicks of the clay lamps and went to fetch his master.
"Xanthus," said Afax, entering the
room with the leer of a man who is about to enjoy a woman and be envied by other men, "stand guard at the door with
Zetes and don't disturb us." Withdrawing, Xanthus returned the leer, and
Thea ceased to pity him for his severed ears.
"You will sleep in there," Ajax
said to Icarus. He handed the boy a cushion and indicated the floor of the bathroom,
beside the tub. "Your sister and I are going to dine."
"I'm not sleepy," said Icarus.
"The evening is still youthful. However, I am hungry."
"Help yourself to the
fruit, but eat it in the bathroom."
Icarus
eyed the fruit without enthusiasm and eyed his sister as if he hoped for a
sign. It was plain to see that Ajax had kisses in mind. What should they do?
But
Thea could not help him. Fear had left her speechless. A disagreeable
adventure threatened to become a disaster. Ajax could break her back with the
fingers of one hand.
"You
know," continued Icarus valiantly, "it's not the food I want so much
as the conversation. My great-great uncle Perdix used to say: 'Good company is worth a broiled pheasant, a flagon of wine, and
all the honey cakes you can get on a platter.' "
Thea
recovered her speech. "Icarus would enjoy eating with us. You see, he
hasn't known any warriors except his father. You could show him how to handle a
dagger."
"Yes,"
said Icarus, reaching toward the dagger in Ajax's belt, a bronze blade with a
crystal hilt. "It's the biggest I every saw. Why, even a wild boar—"
Before he could finish his sentence, Ajax had
swallowed him in his massive arms and swept him toward the door to the
bathroom. There was something almost paternal about the scene. In the giant's
embrace, the chunky Cretan looked like a small boy being carried to bed by an
irate, but loving father. Thea remembered that Ajax had mentioned a daughter.
When Ajax returned, the door shutting behind
him on its vertical wooden pivot, Thea had formed a plan. At the age of eleven
in Knossos, before she had gone with Icarus to Vathypetro, she had learned to
parry the advances of amorous boys; on sun-dappled Crete, young bodies ripened
like succulent dates and love came with first adolescence.
Smiling, she motioned Ajax to a chair. "He's a lonely child," she said, gesturing toward the
closed door behind which she did not doubt that Icarus had knelt to listen.
"He misses a man's company. You see, our father was killed by pirates
three years ago."
"Achaean?"
"Yes,"
she sighed. "They attacked the ship on which he was sailing to
Zakros." It was not hard to invent a touching story. "Women have
raised us. Not our mother, who died when Icarus was born, but servants and aunts. Always women. How we have
missed a man." She offered him a cup of wine. He
touched the brim to his lips, tasting gingerly, as if he suspected poison. She
walked behind him and placed her hand on his forehead.
"You
must let me bathe your wound," she said. "Pretend that I am your own
daughter. Before he was killed, I used to tend my father with soft unguents and
comb his wind-tossed hair. Like you, he was a fighter and often hurt."
He
seized her wrist with unpatemal roughness and drew her into his lap. "The
skirt becomes you," he said, draining his cup in one continuous swallow. "But not the blouse." With a single and
surprisingly deft movement for such a ponderous hand, he tore the gauze from
her breasts. His body reeked of leather and sweat. He could not have bathed in
weeks, possibly months; he had doffed his armor but he wore'the same tunic
which he had worn in battle (in several battles, she decided; it was stained
with blood, dirt, and food). Furthermore, he was densely wooded with hair: his
legs, his arms, even the tops of his sandaled feet. He reminded her of a large
hirsute goat, and like a goat he seemed to her foolish rather than threatening.
She had not yet learned that a strong fool is the most dangerous of men.
"You
need more wine," she said, trying to disengage herself.
Perhaps she could incapacitate him with drink. According to a universal
proverb, variously claimed by Cretans, Egyptians, and Babylonians, drinking
increases desire, but limits performance.
"Not
wine. This—" He buried her mouth with a kiss which tasted of onions. She
remembered that Achaean soldiers chewed them as they marched. She felt as if
heavy masculine boots were trampling the delicate offerings—murex, coquina, starfish—in a seaside shrine to the Great
Mother. It was not that she feared dishonor, like the god-fearing women of Israel,
the faraway kingdom of shephered patriarchs. As a Cretan girl, she was
realistic enough to recognize that there was nothing dishonorable if he took
her, a woman and a captive, against her will. It was his dirt she feared, his
ugliness, his hairiness, his affront to her feminine pride (remember, the
Cretans worship a goddess as their chief deity). It was the supreme disorder of
being forced to do what seemed to her not a wicked but an ugly and demeaning
thing.
His kiss grew more impassioned. She clenched
her teeth to withstand his probing tongue. Loathing burned in her like a black,
bitter fire of hemlock roots.
"I
lost my snake," said a loud and determined voice from the door. Ajax
leaped to his feet, and Thea embraced the hard but welcome coolness of the
floor. Rising to her knees, she watched the advance of the snake. He was
neither large nor poisonous but, flickering his forked
tongue, he somehow managed to look as sinister as an asp from the deserts of
Egypt. Ajax seized a stool and assumed the martial stance of a soldier
defending a bridge against an army.
But Icarus intervened before they could meet.
"You mustn't scare him," he said, restoring the snake to his pouch.
"It makes him nervous, and then he bites."
"Guardl"
Xanthus appeared in the door beyond the light
well. As usual, he looked expectant; perhaps he hoped for an orgy.
"Xanthus,
you will take this brat and his snake into the bathroom and keep them there, if
you have to drown them in the tub."
The door to the bathroom closed with abrupt
finality.
"You
Cretan girls," sneered Ajax. He came toward her,
shaggy and menacing. "You tease and mince and show your breasts, and then
you say, 'No, you hairy old barbarian, you shan't touch me I' Barbarians, are we? Well, we know what to do with a woman I"
"My
father will kill you if you touch me." The words stabbed the air like
little daggers of ice.
"Oh?
He's back from Hades, is he? Indeed, I should fear a man who escapes Persephonel"
In
spite of his golden beard, he seemed all darkness and evil, a black whirlwind
of fire and rock. The smell of him bit her nostrils like volcanic ash. She
knotted her fists in tiny impotence.
Then she remembered the
pins in her hair.
She
watched their torch-bearing captors recede in the distance like fishing boats
into the night and leave them to darkness that seemed to smother their senses
like a shroud of black wool. The air was rank with the droppings of bats.
Icarus clutched her hand, half in protection, half in -fear.
She too was afraid; much more than he, she guessed, since caves and cliffs and
roaring rivers, all of the fierce faces of nature, had long been familiar to
him from his roving near Vathy-petro.
"Possibly," said Icarus without
reproach, "if you had struck him somewhere else, he wouldn't have been so
angry." "Nowhere else would have stopped him."
"He certainly had to be stopped,"
agreed Icarus. "I heard him screaming at you. And all
for a kiss."
It
was hardly the time to tell him the facts which he had resisted from Myrrha.
The cave, of course, belonged to the Minotaur.
She
drew him close to her and felt his big head against her shoulder. "Forgive
me," she said. "Forgive me, little brother."
"But
I wanted to come to the Country of the Beasts," he reminded her, not yet
frightened enough for a sentimental exchange of endearments. "Now we've
come."
"You didn't want the
Cave of the Minotaur."
"Perdix will bring us luck."
"Not against the Minotaurs. They are
much too big." "Maybe this one is out to dinner."
"I'm
afraid he dines at home. Shhhhh," said Thea. "I hear—"
They heard a padding of feet (or hooves?),
and then a low, long-drawn wail which deepened and reverberated into the
curdling bellow of an enraged bull. Nausea crept to her throat like the furry
feet of a spider.
"Mother Goddess, he's
coming!" groaned the boy.
"We
must separate," said Thea. "Otherwise, he will get us both at once.
Well try to slip past him in the dark and meet at the mouth of the cave."
"Won't he be able to
see us? This is his lair."
"He can't chase us
both at once."
"Let him chase me first. If he's a slow
eater, you may have a chance."
"He will make his own choice." She
both expected and hoped to be chosen before her brother. If the Minotaur added
the instincts of a man to those of a bull, he ought to prefer a girl to a boy.
She loosened Icarus' hand.
His fingers lingered; he hugged her in a quick, impulsive embrace and darted
ahead of her, moving from darkness to darkness, scraping his sandals on the
floor of the cave. She started to call his name. No, she must not alert the
Minotaur. She began to feel her way along the walls; their dampness oozed like
blood between her fingers. Once, she stumbled and cut her knee on stalagmites,
for she wore her kilt and not the bell-shaped skirt in which she had greeted
Ajax. A stench pervaded the air, rancid and sweet at the same time: putrescent
flesh and dried blood. She stopped often to catch her breath; fear had drained
her as if she had breasted a strong, outgoing tide and washed on the beach with
driftwood and shells. Little by little, her eyes became used to the darkness
and distinguished the pronged stalactites which hung from the roof like seaweed
floating above a diver's head.
Why,
she asked herself, do I fear the Minotaur more than Ajax and his
killers? At
Knossos, she had often attended the Games of the Bull; once, it is true, she
had seen a boy impaled, but the bull had not been vicious. The boy had tried to
somersault over his back but landed on his horns. The bull had seemed surprised
instead of murderous; he had lowered his horns to help the attendants remove
the body.
Sounds, muffled and dim (Icarus' voice,
perhaps?). Then, again, the long-drawn, chilling roar.
A
bull that walks like a man, that was the terror. Walks on two legs. Thinks with a man's
cunning, hates with a man's calculated cruelty. A
hybrid of man and beast, monstrous to the eye, monstrous of heart, and roaring
with cold malevolence.
A yearning for Icarus hushed her fears. The tentative touch of his hand, restless to dart away like a plump
wood-mouse. The big head, not really big except for
its wreath of hair, and the pointed ears which he did not allow the hair to
conceal. His childish games and hardly childlike
courage. She bit her tongue to keep from calling his name. She rounded a
turn and looked up and up into the eyes of the Minotaur, and his red, matted
hair.
When I entered the cave, I was hungry as a
bull. Once a week the farmers outside the forest bring me a skinned animal.
Bellowing lustily to justify my reputation, I fetch the meat and take it home
with me to cook in my garden. They call me the Minotaur, the Bull That Walks Like a Man. In spite of my seven feet, however, I am not a
freak, but the last of an old and illustrious tribe who settled the island
before the Cretans arrived from the East. Except for my pointed ears (which are
common to all of the Beasts), my homs (which are short
and almost hidden by hair), and my unobtrusive tail, I am far more human than
bovine, though my generous red hair, which has never submitted to the
civilizing teeth of a comb, is sometimes mistaken for a mane.
As I
said, I came into the cave with a hearty appetite. I also came harassed by a
trying day in my workshop. My lapidaries, the Telchines, had quarreled and
bruised each other with chisels and overturned a vat of freshly fermented beer.
My stomach rumbled with anticipation of the plump, neatly skinned lamb (perhaps
two) which would soon be revolving on the spit in my garden.
Almost
at once I heard the noises. I stopped in my tracks. Had my dinner been brought
to me unkilled, un-skinned, and uncleaned? Intolerable! It looked as if I would
have to prowl the countryside after dark and strike terror into the hearts of
the shiftless peasants.
But no. The
sounds were voices and not the ululations of animals. I stalked down the
twisting corridors of what is called the Cave of the Minotaur but which might
better be called his Pantry. I paused. I peered. I sniffed. Man-scent was
strong in the air. A trap? Well, they were not likely
to trap a Minotaur. I could see in the dark, and my nose was as keen as a
bear's. I advanced warily but confidently hoof over hoof. I— Crunch I
A
rock struck my outstretched hoof. I roared with pain, hobbled on the other leg,
and looked up to face my attacker, who was crouched on an overhanging ledge and
readying another rock.
I
saw a chunky boy of about fifteen, with a large and very engaging head, a
thicket of greenish hair, and pointed ears. The ears, to say nothing of the
hair, marked him as a Beast.
At least, half of him. I liked both halves. He was the
kind of boy that one would like to adopt as a brother. Help him to carve a bow
from the branches of a cedar tree and spear fish with a sharpened willow-rod
and, at the proper time, introduce him to the Dryad, Zoe, and her free-living
friends, who could teach him about a boy's way with a wench.
"Come down from there," I cried.
"What do you think you are, a blue monkey? I
won't hurt you."
"Oh,"
he said, surprised. "You can talk, and in Cretan too."
"What did you expect me to do, moo or
speak Hittite? As a matter of fact, your people learned their language from my
people several hundred years ago."
"Till
now I have only heard you bellow." He was already climbing down from his
ledge.
I
reached out and seized hold of him and, suddenly mischievous, delivered my
heartiest bellow right in his face. He trembled, of course, but looked me
straight in the eye.
"You
shouldn't have come down so quickly," I chided. "I might have been luring you down to eat."
"But you said you wouldn't hurt
me."
"Don't
believe everything you're told. If I had been a Cyclops, I would have smiled
and coaxed and stirred you in the pot I"
"What should I have done?"
"Argued a bit. Asked for proof of my good intentions. Found
out what I meant to do with you."
"But you didn't eat me, and I saved time and questions. I want you to meet my sister."
My
heart sank like a weight from a fisherman's net. The sister of such a brother
was certain to be a lady. Let me say at once: wenches have always liked me, but
ladies shut their doors. I would frighten her, she would call me (or, being a
lady, think me) uncouth and uncivilized. She would want me to comb my hair,
shave my chest, and trim my tail. She would wince when I swore, glare if I tippled beer, and disapprove of my friends, Zoe, the Dryad,
and Moschus, the Centaur.
"Oh," I said, "I don't think
she will want to meet me."
"She
will be delighted. She thought she was going to have to pleasure you."
We walked to meet her while Icarus told me
about their adventures. The meeting was to change my life.
Chapter
III THE TRUNCATED TREE
Do you
know the pottery called
Kamares Ware? Thin as an eggshell, swirling with creatures of the sea:
anemones, flying fish, and coiling octopi. You would think that the merest
touch would crack the sides, and yet in a hundred years the same cup can still
hold flowers or wine or honey. That was Thea. The littleness of her, the soft
fragility, stirred me to tenderness. At the same time, I saw her strength. Her
slender waist, slim as the trunk of a young palm tree, rose into powerful
breasts like those of an Earth Mother; her tiny hands were clenched and raised
like weapons.
Icarus
ran ahead of me and took her hand. "Don't be afraid," he cried.
"He wants to be our friend." He added, rather proudly: "Even
though I bashed him with a rock."
I
stood awkwardly, shifting my weight from hoof to hoof, and wondered what I
could say to reassure her. "He's right," I blurted. "I want to
be your friend, and you won't have to pleasure m-m-me." I stammered into
silence. To mention pleasuring to a lady—well, it was just such tactless remarks,
together with my physiognomy, which had branded me as a boor for most of my
twenty-six years. I awaited the lifted eyebrow, the frigid smile, the stinging
slap.
She took my hand—paw, I should say, since her
small fingers could not encircle its girth. I returned the pressure as shyly as
if I were holding a thrush's egg.
"Sir,"
she said, "we have come to your face without invitation. May we remain as
grateful guests?"
"I
don't live here," I cried with some vexation. "I have a comfortable
house in the forest." Had she been the Dryad Zoe, words would have tripped
from my tongue with the ease of fruit from an upturned cornucopia, and my own
eloquence would have put me in mellow spirits. As it was, I was desperately
frightened of her and trying to hide my fear with a show of petulance.
"May we then—"
she began.
"Follow
me," I growled, turned my back, and strode toward the mouth of the cave.
When I did not hear them directly behind me, I paused and looked over my
shoulder. They were limping and stumbling across the rough stalagmites. Thea
had bruised her knee and Icarus had taken her hand. I went back to them, lifted
her in my arms, and ordered Icarus to ascend my back.
"You don't mind
carrying a snake too?" he asked.
"Snakes,"
I said, "are symbols of fertility and domesticity. They bring growth to
the fields and fortune to the house. Besides that, they are somebody's
ancestors."
"Great-great-uncles,"
said Icarus. He started to wave his arms and shout, "Giddyapl"
"With two riders, I am doing well to
lope," I said. "If you want to gallop, I suggest you find a Centaur. Bend down now or you'll bump your head."
"Better
than goose feathers," he mumbled, making a pillow out of my hair, and Thea lay in my arms as lightly as a sleeping child. It came to me with startling
suddenness that I had gone to the cave in search of dinner and found a family. To a confirmed and somewhat dissolute
bachelor like myself, the new responsibility was
terrifying.
At the mouth of the cave, I set them down on the moss and caught my breath.
"What
big trees," cried Icarus, looking at the forest which stretched around us
like tall Egyptian obelisks. "Big
enough to hold houses in their branches."
"Or
in their trunks," I said. "That's where the Dryads live." There
were cedars with clustered needles and small, erect cones; wide-spreading,
many-acorned oaks with bark like the cracked, discarded skin of a snake; and
cypresses, lithe and feminine, their leaves misting with sunlight.
"How
sad they look," said Thea, pointing to the cypresses.
"Like women. The women of all ages who have known the wrenchings of
childbirth or the caged swallow which is unrequited love."
"And
yet," I said, "they look as if they have borne these things proudly
and willingly. It is courage you see as well as sadness."
"Of
course," she agreed. "You must forgive me for sounding morbid. Ever
since we lost our home, I have felt as if— as if sadness had fallen on me like
a hunter's net!"
I
understood her needs. She wanted a house to shut her from forests, Achaeans,
and—who knows?—Minotaurs. She wanted a warm hearth, a father, and perhaps a
husband (for she was ripe for marriage).
"Little
princess," I said. "We will soon be safe in my house. There you will
not feel lost."
She
smiled at me with a sweetness older than Babylon,
older than the pyramids at Gizeh which house the mummified bodies of Egyptian
pharaohs. The sun of the late afternoon kindled her hair to a smoky radiance.
Why do you fight the forest, I thought. The brown of
your hair is the rich soil from which the barley grows; it is the trunk of a
tree or the wing of a thrush. The green is the first tentative blade that
reaches for sunlight; it is leaves and grass and the young grape. Brown and green. Earth's two colors.
Why do you fear the forest?
Then,
through the blue smoke of time, I remembered my own boyhood. In the branches of
a tree, I saw a small girl weeping, and a small boy who laughed and waved his
pink fist, and the Dryad, their mother, who leaned to the sunlight and combed
her hair. And him, not a Beast, but a man.
To
reach my house we followed a secret path whose signs were a woodpecker's nest
and a mound of yellow hill-ants, a stone in the shape of a fist and a blackened
stump. Sometimes we walked in a darkness of tangled limbs which withheld the
sun except for a few golden icicles; in a closeness of air which dampened and
weighted us as if we were walking the bottom of the sea. High in the trees,
blue monkeys flickered like fish, and only their cries reminded us that we
walked in a forest of trees instead of coral and holothurians. Thea waved to
them gaily and coaxed their leader to sit on her shoulder, draping his tail
like a necklace around her throat.
"Ihad one in Vathypetro." She smiled. "They don't seem part of
the forest. They are tame like Egyptian cats."
"Too
tame for their own good," I said. "Sometimes
they get themselves eaten by bears."
"Look,"
cried Icarus suddenly. "A sea of flowers and a little
brown fort in the middle."
"Yellow
gagea," I said, adding modestly, "the fort is my house."
The house had once been a mountainous oak,
broad as the Ring of the Bulls at Knossos, but thanks to a bolt of lightning,
only the trunk remained to a height of twenty feet, like the walls of a
palisade with a walkway and narrow embrasures near the top in case of a siege.
I went to the door and rang the sheep's bell which hung above the lintel.
Behind
the red-grained oak I heard the quick pattering steps of a Telchin as he came
to raise the bolt. In the forest, it was always necessary to lock one's door.
According to an old proverb, "Where locks are not, the Thriae are."
The shy Telchin did not wait to greet us. He and his race are frightened of
strangers, though among themselves they boast and wench and fight at the drop
of a toadstool.
I
had hollowed the trunk of my tree to encompass a garden, which held a folding
chair of citrus wood, a large reed parasol like those of the Cretan ladies when
they walk by the sea, a clay oven for bread and honey cakes, a grill for
roasting meat, and a fountain of hot spring water which served as my bath and
also to wash my dishes. Around the fountain grew pumpkins, squashes, lentils, a
grapevine hugging a trellis, and a fig tree with small but shapely branches and
very large figs. Between the hearth and the parasol grew my favorite flowers,
scarlet-petaled, black-hearted poppies, and Zeus help the weed which stole
their sunlight or the crow which bruised their buds I
I have always felt that a garden should
extend and not circumscribe nature; I plant my flowers haphazardly instead of
in rows, and sometimes I scatter my tools in pleasant disorder, like branches
under a tree. But Thea was used to the tidiness of palace courtyards. I felt
rebuked by her look and hurried to pick up a rake, muttering, "I wonder
how this got there," though of course I had laid it there myself three
weeks ago and stepped around it every morning.
We
descended a wooden staircase which coiled below the garden like the winding
heart of a conch shell and opened abruptly into my den. One of my Telchines had
lit a lamp, which hung from the ceiling by a chain of electrum and swayed in
the breeze from he stairs. The walls of the den were
roots, twisted and smoothed into shape; and sturdier roots, resembling gnarled
pillars, divided the room into separate nooks or dells. You could almost say
that I had captured a little corner of the forest. No, not captured. I have
never liked that word. Rather, I had trusted myself to the forest, given my
safety into the keeping of her labyrinthine roots, which held the earth above
my head and below my feet, supported and sustained me. There was beauty in
them as well as utility. Just as the convolutions of an old piece of driftwood
may leap to color when thrown in a fire, so the brown roots of my house glowed
malachite, amber, and lapis lazuli—sea-color, woods-color, sky-color—in
the light of a clay lamp. Like Thea's hair, you could say, for brown is not
colorless but the reservoir of many colors, which only need to be awakened by
the soft fingers of light.
The
roots, being dead, were neither moist nor clammy, and the reed mats on the
floor, together with a pair of open and gently glowing braziers, lent to the
room the warmth and intimacy of a squirrel's nest. Many a night I had tippled
beer with my friends until the roots seemed to writhe above us like big
friendly snakes, guardian spirits intent on then-good offices of cheering and protecting. On other nights, I preferred to read. Of all
the room's possessions, my favorite, I think, was the low, cylindrical chest of
scrolls—The
Isles of the Blest: Are They Blessed?, Centaur Songs,
Hoofbeats in Babylon—which
I read to compensate for my very limited travels (you see, I had never left the
forest). As Icarus' great-great uncle might have said, "An untraveled
Minotaur is a hungry Minotaur, and reading feedeth him like beer and honey
cakes."
But
comfortable rooms aio rarely neat, and today, hardly expecting
guests, I had stacked my cooking utensils, a platter with scraps of bread and
a tripod which had held a bird's-nest stew, beside the hand-mill where I ground
my-grain and occasionally (as today) spilled some flour.
"I will have to see about supper,"
I said. Remember, I had found no meat in my cave. The carnivorous Telchines would rather
turn cannibal than resort to vegetables. "First I will show you your room.
I will sleep in here, and you may have my bedroom."
It lay at the foot of a ladder: round and
snug as a rabbit's burrow; small for me but large for Thea and Icarus. The
floor was carpeted with moss and the down of bird's nests. There was no
furniture except for a three-legged stool and a citron chest in which I kept a
tunic to wear on cold days and a pair of round sandals to shod
my hooves when I went to gather gemstones in the quarry.
Icarus
threw himself on the floor and uttered a cry like the neigh of a donkey which
has pulled a cart since sunrise and come home at dusk to a bed of straw.
"Soft as clover," he said, snuggling into the down and releasing
Perdix to find his own nest.
Thea, I saw, did not share his enthusiasm. I
had rather expected a compliment on my room, but she thrust an explorative toe
into the down to see if it were clean. Suddenly I realized that the room was
not designed for a woman.
"We'll
find you some toilet articles tomorrow," I promised. "I have a
friend with a Babylonian mirror. Shaped like a swan, with the neck for a
handle."
"Your
room is charming," she said with well-meant insincerity. "You must
forgive me if I appear unappreciative. I'm very tired."
"I'll bring you a tub of hot
water."
Escaping
up the ladder, I remembered the time a fastidious Dryad (not Zoe) had told me
that I needed a haircut: all over. Unkempt, I thought. That's what I am, and so
is my house.
In
the garden, I found the tub which I used for washing vegetables and, thrusting
it under the fountain, began to plan my dinner. I could pick some figs and
squashes in my garden; I could bake a loaf of bread and gather mushrooms and
woodpecker-eggs for an omelette. But what would I do for meat? Perhaps I had
time before dark to shoot some hares-It was then that I heard the scream. When
a woman screams, sometimes she means: I need some help but there is no real
hurry. It's just my way of attracting attention and pointing up my
helplessness. But Thea's scream was sheer, spontaneous terror; it bubbled onto
the air like the black poison of hemlock. I jumped down the stairs in three
large leaps, slid down the ladder almost without touching the rungs, and found
a Telchin crouched at the foot, waving his feelers in consternation. Behind
him, Thea was brandishing the three-legged stood and shouting, "Out, out!"
It
was, of course, her first meeting with a Telchin, a three-foot ant with almost
human intelligence and with six skillful legs which make him the best lapidary
in the world; he can carve and set gems more delicately than the surest human
craftsman. But Thea saw only the great bulbous head, the many-faceted eyes, the black, armored skin.
"It
crawled down the ladder," she said in a whisper. "Then it came at me,
waving its feelers."
"He
didn't come at you, he came looking for me," I snapped emphasizing the he, for I saw that her scornful it had
hurt his feelings. "And he understands every word you say. He is quite
harmless except to other Telchines." I stroked his antennae. He indicated
pacification with a pleased buzzing which vibrated through my fingers. Icarus,
belatedly rousing himself from his nap, climbed to his feet and walked without
hesitation to the trembling Telchin. He knelt and leaned his head against the
creature's armor. "What's his name?" he asked.
"Telchines
hide their names except from their mates. I call him Bion."
"Bion," said Icarus. "I want
you to meet Perdix." The pleased buzzing became a roar.
Thea, meanwhile, had
started to cry.
"Don't cry," I
said. "He's forgiven you now."
"But I'm still afraid. Of—of everything in the forest!"
"Of
me?"
She looked at me for a long moment before she
spoke. "At first, in the cave. Even after Icarus
said you were friendly. Not any more, though. Not since I saw your flowers.
But the forest terrifies me. I thought I was safe down here, and then I saw
Bion, and it seemed as if the forest had followed me."
"It
had," I said, "but the good part. The forest is like a Man or a
Beast, with many moods. Bion would rather eat his brother than than hurt my
guests. Wouldn't you, Bion?"
"I'm a terrible coward, Eunostos."
"You
were very brave when you met me in the cave. You waved your fist in my
face."
"I
seemed to be brave, but I wasn't really. My heart was jumping like a startled
quail."
"It
doesn't matter what your heart does so long as your feet stand still. In the
last two days your heart has had good reason to jump. You have lost your home,
crashed in a glider, fallen into the clutches of Ajax, and faced the Minotaur
in his cave. But all those things are behind you."
"Yes."
She smiled. "You will protect me here. I see that now."
She
was the first real lady to look on me for protection. I did not know, however,
that she planned to improve my manners and redecorate my house.
Chapter IV
DOMESTICATIONS AND
DOMESTICITY
She never said to me, "Eunostos, you ought to comb your
hair or get a new pair of sandals." It was always "Perhaps you should
. . ." or "Don't you think . . ." Sometimes she worked through
her brother. Two weeks after their arrival he told me in confidence, "Thea
hasn't complained, but I think she misses Cretan plumbing."
"But
she has a hot shower," I protested. "Or else I bring her a tub. What
more does she want?"
"What
she wants is a bathroom," he confided. It is universally acknowledged
that the Cretans are the best plumbers in all the lands of the great Green Sea.
Not only do they pipe water into their palaces, but they build limestone
toilets with wooden seats and, wonder of wonders, a lever for flushing. Like
my ancestors, I am something of an engineer, and I lost no time in diverting a
part of the spring from the garden. With her usual delicacy, Thea did not
refer to my innovation, but she showed her gratitude by making me a pair of
leather sandals which pinched my hooves like chains on a mule. At least in the
house, I had to wear them or hurt her feelings.
Once out of the house, however, I kicked them
under a tree and happily pursued my business in the
forest; now that
my cave no longer received a weekly
"sacrifice—the local farmers, it seemed, were feeding the conquerors
instead of the Minotaur—I hunted daily to keep my guests in meat. But one such
hunt landed me in a much more serious predicament than the mere
discomfort of sandals. I had bagged a wild pig with my first arrow and started
back to the house with the carcass strapped across my shoulder.
"Ho
there," a voice boomed from the trees, and Moschus, the Centaur, cantered
up beside me with thumping hooves and a swirl of dust. A
robust fellow, Moschus, in spite of his years. His flanks glistened with
olive oil; powerful muscles rippled beneath his coat; chestnut hair tumbled
down the back of his neck in a glossy mane. It was true that his hair had begun
to thin, for Moschus was a good two hundred years old; he had been a colt in
the days when the Beasts had lived on the coast, sharing their secrets with the
fast-leaming and still friendly Cretans. But age became him as it did the oaks and the cedars.
Physically, at least. His intelligence, never high, had begun to
decline before I was bom. His noble exterior suggested learning and promised
wise utterances, but his only interests were wenching, storytelling (bawdy),
and playing the flute, and his conversation was
threadbare on all other subjects.
Heard about you and the kids," he said.
'Oh," I said, noncommittal. "Did you?" I did not want him to
suggest a meeting. Thea would not understand his
libertine ways.
"Big daddy himself. Though I hear the girl is not exactly a child (heh)."
"Not in years," I said loftily,
"but she's led a sheltered life."
"Time for a party then—lower the parasol I How about tonight?"
"Busy.
Tanning hides." I pointed to the pig on my shoulder. "Tomorrow night?"
"Cutting gems."
A
look of suspicion narrowed his equine eyes. "I thought your workers did
that."
"Too
many gems; not enough help." "The next night?"
"At your house?" I sighed, defeated.
"You're a better host. More beer, more
room. Zoe and I will come after lamplighting time." "Zoe
too?"
"Who else? You know we're keeping company." With a loud, anticipatory neigh,
he galloped into the trees.
I groaned. Zoe, the Dryad, and Moschus, the
Centaur. I loved them devotedly as friends, but together they well might
precipitate an orgy.
I knelt to retrieve my sandals, wondering how
I would broach the party to Thea.
I found her visiting with my three workers.
With the help of Icarus and several bribes of raw meat, she had won their
confidence—at least, their acceptance—and often watched them work. Not only
were they lapidaries, but blacksmiths, weavers, dyers, shoemakers, and tanners,
and their various tools of trade—loom, forge, anvil, assorted vats and
tables-lent to my shop the air of a small but handily equipped marketplace. To
see only three of them with so much equipment had astonished Thea until I
explained that I myself was the fourth worker and, like my extinct countrymen,
equal to any four Men or two Telchines. It was not a boast but a simple
statement of fact.
The
shop was illuminated by six large lamps in the shape of fishtailed ships which
navigated the air on swaying chains. One of the workers stood at the forge,
holding a bent dagger over the flames; another worked at a table, cleaning the
dirt and shale from gemstones; and the third examined a large carnelian,
smoothed to the round flatness of a seal, and bobbed his head in evident
perplexity.
Thea
was watching the holder of the stone as he turned it over and over between his
multiple legs. The room was warm with the heat of the forge, but she looked
immaculate in her saffron kilt; as far as I knew she never perspired. Three
meticulously arranged curls adorned her forehead like pendant snails.
"Eunostos," she said. "Have
you ever seen such a gem?" Its smoky gray surface imprisoned the six fires
of the lamps in a small constellation, and the many-faceted eyes of the Telchin
reflected them again to numbers beyond counting.
"Would you like it to wear as a
ring?" I asked.
She
looked like a child who has just been offered a dolphin or a rare,
white-plumed griffin. "Oh, yes, but don't you trade these things to the
other Beasts?" I had told her how every Beast contributed to the
self-sufficiency of the forest: I traded my gems to the Centaurs for seeds to
plant in my garden; the Dryads built wooden chests and swapped them to the
Thriae for the honey stored in their great hexagons; and even the little Bears
of Artemis gathered black-eyed Susans in the fields and strung necklaces to
trade for dolls.
"Not this one," I said. "What
design would you like?"
She
thought. "A blue monkey." Her eyes looked
beyond me, wistful no doubt with memories of the palace at
Vathy-petro, the well-ordered garden, and of course her father. "Is
that possible?"
"A blue monkey and—" I whispered to
the Telchin. In spite of their skill, they are not' inventive, and unless you
give them suggestions, they will settle on one design and duplicate it a
hundred or more times. Nodding sagely, he set to work with a pointed file.
"May I watch?" Thea asked.
"No," I said. "Surprises are
best." And then, unobtrusively: "Thea, some friends are coming to
call. After supper, two nights from now."
She reserved judgment. "How many?"
"Just two. A Centaur and a
Dryad."
"Zoe," she said. "You've
mentioned her several times." It was almost an accusation. "An old
friend," I explained. "Older than you?"
"Let's see. About
fourteen times as old." "Elderly then."
"Not exactly. Dryads reflect the state of their trees. Zoe's oak is
well-preserved."
She
stifled a sigh. "But have we enough wine in the house?"
"Beer," I said. "Beer is what they drink. Both
of them." "A woman drinks beer?"
"She
can outdrink me!" Then, subdued: "I brew it from barley right here in
the shop. You ought to try some."
She
smiled magnanimously. "Perhaps I will. You attend to the beer and I will
bake some honey cakes." She paused. "It's good I've finished your new
tunic."
"Tunic?" I cried. In the spring and summer, no male Beast wore clothes. Why
should he? The air which blew from the torrid continent of Libya was warm and
dry, and female Beasts were no more disturbed by a free expanse of masculine
flesh than Cretan males by the bare breasts of their women.
"Yes," she said, fishing the depths
of a basket with nimble fingers. "The
Telchines wove it, but I did the dyeing and needlework."
"I see you did." Lavender,
with embroidered sleeves. "Why not a loin
cloth?"
"For
Icarus, perhaps, not for you. You are—well, more mature." She observed the hair on my chest as
if she were thinking of scissors. "Try it on now and see if it fits."
The
tunic pinched me in seven places. I felt like a snake imprisoned in his old,
discarded skin. "I can't move," I said. "I can't breathe. I
think I'm going to suffocate. And," I added delicately, "you forgot to leave
access for my tail."
"Hush.
All it needs is a bit of taking out." She proceeded to pinch and pat me as
if I were no more animate than a side of beef. "Or else you could reduce, if only the party were
next week instead of in two nights."
"I
can't postpone it," I snapped. "Besides, I'm not fat, I'm
muscular." I guided her hand to the stomach as firm and hard as a coconut.
"You're right. Sheer muscle.
Ill have to let out the waist."
As soon as I entered the den, I saw a change.
Ever since Thea's arrival, the room had been orderly: No more unwashed dishes
stacked by the grainmill; for that matter, no more mill, which now scattered
its flour beside the fountain. The change at the moment,
however had been added rather than subtracted. In the glow of a freshly lit
lamp, three dove-shaped vases nested among the roots and bristled with poppies
out of my garden. The sad little heads of my flowers stared reproachfully from
every comer of the room, five heads to a dove.
"You've
killed them," I cried. "You've cut their throats." "Housed,
not killed. In the garden, nobody noticed them." "I did. Every day. Here it's like putting them in jail."
"I shall try to be a kind
jailer," she smiled, straightening a flower.
At the mention of jailer, I recalled my own imprisonment in the tunic. Her alterations had not
improved the fit, nor had she remembered the access for my tail, which pressed
stiffly against my back like a sun-dried
reed. As soon as she turned her back to straighten another flower, I filled my
chest with air, hoping to burst my belt and split the tunic. I only increased
my discomfort. I stared with envy at Icarus in his new loincloth, which was
green and unembroidered. He looked both spruce and comfortable. Thea herself
wore a blue, divided skirt almost to her ankles, each side falling in tiers
embossed with gold-leaf. Her hair, combed as always to hide her ears, rippled
in three rivulets down her back like cascading autumn leaves with faint
twinkles of summer's departed green. On her middle finger she wore the agate
ring which the Telchin had already finished incising, not only with a blue
monkey but with a Cretan maiden who was unmistakably Thea, receiving from her
pet the gift of a crocus. From my whispered description of her garden at
Vathypetro, the artist had realized the scene beyond my expectations. After
cutting the figures, he had filled them with microscopic particles of lapis
lazuli. A scene of play, you would think, but the austere blue stone imparted a
dignity and sadness which seemed to say: playful moments endure only in stone.
"It's
exquisite," she said, caressing the ring as if it were an amulet to ensure
fertility. She came to me and, standing on tiptoe, grasped my horn and drew my
cheek to her lips. "Dear Eunostos, you are like a brother to me. I'm glad
I had the tunic to give you in return. Otherwise, I could never have accepted
such an expensive gift."
Above
our heads the cowbell tinkled the arrival of our guests.
"We must let them
in," said Thea.
I
shook my head. "I had better meet them alone. Mos-chus needs plenty of
room on the stairs." I did not want her to hear their comments about my
tunic.
But
one of my workers, roasting a late chop in the garden, had already opened the
door, and Zoe thumped down the stairs like a sack of coconuts. Moschus labored
behind her, managing his four legs with obvious difficulty, and I half expected
to see him lose his balance and tumble head over hooves. At the end of her
descent, Zoe caught me in a huge embrace. I submitted rather than responded.
Not that I scorned a friendly hug. More than once we had frolicked away the
night in the windy heights of her tree. But Thea was watching us with cool, unblinking
eyes.
"Thea,"
I said, "I want you to meet my friends, Zoe and Moschus."
"Little
Thea," cried Zoe, opening her arms for another engulfment, and I feared
for Thea's ribs.
Smiling
thinly, Thea offered her hand. "Eunostos has told me about you."
Zoe
looked at her as if with recognition. "Your ears," she said.
"Are they—?"
Thea
evaded the question. "And Moschus," she said, as she reached to
steady him down the last stair. "How good of you to
come."
"Isn't
he pretty," cried Zoe, discovering Icarus in time to hide her
embarrassment over Thea's rebuff. "Eunostos, you should have sent me word.
I would have worn sandals." She was barefoot as usual and dressed in a
gown as dingy and mottled as an old wineskin. When she held out her hand to Icarus,
her shell bracelets jangled like tin gew-gaws from the -Misty Isles. Icarus
ignored the hand and gave her the kind of hug she had given me. A radiant smile
suffused her face and flaunted the three gold teeth which a Babylonian
dentist, her three-hundredth lover, had left her when they parted. She patted
the boy on the head.
"Head's not as big as I thought."
She laughed when his mass of hair depressed beneath her fingers. "But
there's plenty of room for brains." She looked at me and winked.
"Though
there might be some things I could teach him, eh, Eunostos?"
Icarus
was fascinated. The generosity of her breasts, like an overhanging cliff,
magnetized his gaze; he seemed to expect a landslide. "I'm a good
pupil." He grinned.
Then she turned to me.
"Eunostos, have you gotten fat?"
"Certainly
not," I said. In truth, I had lost six pounds since Thea's arrival.
"Then
why do you hide your belly in that—tunic, is it
called?"
"Lavender," snickered Moschus. "Embroidered
(hehl)."
"It's a present," said Thea. "From me."
"One
of the city styles, I expect," said Zoe. "Well, it's good to keep
abreast of the fashions. But, Eunostos, I miss that manly chest."
But Zoe and Moschus were not our only guests.
A minikin figure, no more obtrusive than a shadow, crouched at the foot of the
stairs. I recognized Pandia, one of the Bears of Artemis.
"She
met us in the woods and wanted to come," apologized Zoe. "Since she
doesn't drink, you'll hardly know she's here."
She
was four feet tall. Her hair was short; in fact, it was fur, but neatly trimmed
so that it resembled a felt cap. She wore a fillet of sweebriar, a necklace of
green acorns, a tunic of woodpecker feathers caught at the waist by a belt of
rabbit skin, and a pair of kidskin sandals from my own workship. Her nub of a
tail protruded from a small hole in the back of her tunic. Before the coming of
Men, it was said, the goddess Artemis had visited Crete and given her love to a
bear. Just as the offspring of Pan are the little hooved Panisci, so the
offspring of Artemis are the stub-tailed bears, and the two tribes, who keep
their childlike bodies throughout their long lives, mix and propagate from the
age of fourteen. Pandia, though, was no more than the ten years she looked.
"Do
you mind?" she asked in a small but husky voice. "I heard about the
party from one of your workers and came to watch. I don't drink, you
know."
"She
came to keep me company," said Icarus, though he himself had every
intention of drinking. "We've already met from a distance. The day Thea
and I crashed in the glider." You might have thought that a boy of fifteen
would disdain the company of a little girl, but Icarus never seemed to notice
the difference in people's ages. He had a remarkable gift for making youth feel
mature and old age young. Foregoing Zoe and her monumental cliffs, he drew
Pandia to a bench with moss-filled cushions.
"Here we can watch
without getting stepped on," he said.
"When
I saw you crash," she was saying, "I expected to find just bodies and
have to beat off the crows I Then the soldiers came and dragged you off to
their camp."
Among
my other guests, conversation had died; rather, it had not survived the first
stiff exchange of formalities. Zoe's exuberance had faded to a wan smile, and
Moschus, who had misinterpreted Thea's help on the stairs, had fixed the girl
in a silent, lecherous stare.
"Time for a drink," I called like
any practiced host, and pointed to a large, pitch-covered goatskin of beer,
with an upraised hoof for a spout. I handed Zoe a cup and lifted the skin.
"You know I don't need a cup," she
said, and took the skin from my hands. Tilting her head, she placed the foot to
her mouth and threatened to empty the contents with one resounding gurgle. A
thin trickle of beer meandered down her neck and vanished between her breasts
like a freshet between two mountains.
"Here,
let Moschus have a drink," I said
at last. "He looks parched."
Interspersing his gulps with appreciative
"heh's," Moschus drank his fill and relinquished the skin. "Thea?" I asked.
"Why not?" Carefully she wiped off the foot with a
linen handkerchief and poured a modest portion into a cup. Dainty as a bird drinking dew from a leaf, she quaffed the liquid.
"Tastes
like good old vintage," she said, resisting a wry face.
"Vintage?" Moschus grinned.
"That's beer, dear, and it's fresh from the vat."
To
cover Thea's embarrassment, I seized the skin and raised the hoof to my lips.
"Moschus, start the music," I cried between gulps. He withdrew a flute from
his sole item of clothing, a wolfskin sash, and began to play. The flute was a
crude cylinder of tortoise shell, but Moschus' music was wild, sweet, and
eloquent with many voices: the slow creaking groan of palm trees in the wind;
the tumble of waves subsiding into a long-drawn hiss; the hoot of an owl; the
shriek of a hunting wolf. Zoe motioned an invitation to Icarus.
"Go ahead," said Pandia. "I
don't dance."
He occupied Zoe's arms, and she led the boy
in a sinuous undulation which alternated with leaps in the air and throaty
cries of "Evoe, Evoel"
"The Dance of the Python!" he cried
with recognition. "But we haven't a snake." He darted from the floor
and Zoe, muttering about the vagaries of youth, cast about for a new partner. I
was ready to offer myself when Icarus returned with Perdix. "Our
python!"
"Pipe
that flute!" cried Zoe, and she flung back her head till her green,
gray-streaked tresses bobbed like the snakes of a Gorgon. She was three hundred
and sixty-nine years old (a lover for each year, she claimed), and like her
tree she looked as if many a woodpecker had mottled her skin and many a storm
weatherbeaten her complexion; but beauty had not forsaken her: the full-blown
beauty of an earth mother whose ample lap could pillow a lover's head and whose
opulent breasts could suckle a score of children. She stirred my blood like a
skin of beer. "My turn," I called
Restraining fingers caught
at my belt. "Mine," said Thea.
"Ill step on your
toes," I protested, edging toward Zoe.
"Not
in my dance." Her fingers were irresistible. "We call it the Walk of
the Cranes." We linked hands and she led me through stately, meandering
steps like those of the young virgins when they dance beside the River
Kairatos, though the music seemed more appropriate to the opium-drugged
priestesses of the Great Mother, when they yield themselves to ecstasy, writhe
on the ground, and tear the bark from a tree with their savage teeth.
'Tour friends are very"—she paused to
select a word—"exuberant. I'm afraid they will tire my brother."
"He seems to be holding his own," I
observed as the boy and his partner, her capacious bulk grown seemingly weightless,
mimicked snakes on the ground and birds in the air, leaped with exultant cries
of "Evoel Evoel"
"Eunostos," she
said. "Do you like my dance?"
"Well, it has
dignity."
"Yes, but sometimes you men seem to like
something more animalistic." A wistfulness
softened her voice. She looked even less than her sixteen years, a very young
girl whose knowledge of men was limited to a father, a brother, and a few palace retainers. I tightened my grip on
her hand.
"I
think," she said sadly, "that most men like
innocence only because it challenges them to change it into experience."
"Physical innocence, yes," I said.
"That we like to change —after all it is merely ignorance. But the innocence
of the heart—that is as rare as the black pearls from the land of the Yellow
Men, and no honorable Beast wishes to threaten it, any more than he would drop a pearl in a glass
of wine and watch it dissolve."
"But
the body encloses the heart. When the body falls, what dignity is left to the
heart?"
"None,
when the body falls; but when it is given, like a proud city to a noble king, then it grows
rich—then it enriches the heart."
Against
the feverish background of the flute, our shouted words seemed strangely
impersonal, strangely divorced from the girl and Beast who spoke them. When the
music ended, our words faltered in the great silence.
"That's
all," said Moschus, wiping his lips and returning the flute to his
wolfskin sash. "Musician wants a drink." But he came at Thea with a
thirst which was not for beer.
She
disengaged her hand and hurried up the stairs toward the garden and the oven.
Moschus glared after her. "Skittish colt, eh, Eunostos?"
She
returned with a heaping aviary of cakes in the form of owls, woodpeckers,
swallows, eagles, and partridges, whose piquant scents enwreathed the platter
and titillated our nostrils. She was justly proud of her baking.
"Not
for me, honey," said Zoe, heading for the beer. "I don't eat while I'm drinking. Spoils the kick."
"Same here," said
Moschus, slapping Zoe's flank.
Thea's
smile vanished. Her one contribution to the party was being ignored.
"Pandia?" she asked doubtfully. Pandia sprang to her feet and
converged on the birds, scooping them into her mouth so quickly that they
seemed to flutter from the plate.
"You see why I don't drink," she
said as she licked the last crumbs from her stubby hands (paws, should I say?).
"It would waterlog the food."
Now
the drinking began in earnest. Six times I had to replenish the skin, while
Thea followed me, mopping the beer which trickled onto the floor. Moschus
watched her and brooded over what he whispered was youth's lack of appreciation
for mature years. "She treats me like an old dray," he muttered.
Icarus rested his head in Zoe's lap; with one hand, she trickled beer down his throat
from a rhyton shaped like a bull, with the other she stroked his pointed ears.
"Sly
little Beast," she said in a hoarse whisper. "Why did you take so
long to come back to the forest?"
Between
swallows he raised his head and caught Pandia's eye. "All
right, Pandy?" he called.
Pandia
nodded vehemently. She had the look of a child who has
caught her parents drinking, but there was no disapproval in the wide,
watchful eyes; there was expectation of further excesses.
An increasingly nervous host, I alternated
between swigs of beer and anxious looks at Thea, whose expression was dire
enough to dismay a Gorgan. Suddenly I felt defiant. It was my house and my
friends, and she had no right to mistake our good-natured mischief for
misbehaving. A little horseplay on the part of Moschus; Zoe
expansively maternal but hardly wanton; Icarus enjoying himself and Pandia
enjoying the view. What was the harm in that? I sat down on the rug
beside Zoe and twined an arm around the hill of her shoulders. Without
displacing Icarus, she lent me the arm with which she had stroked his ears.
"Moschus, there's room for you
too," she called with perhaps excessive optimism.
"Thea," I bellowed. "Fetch us
some more beerl Your guests are thirsty."
A cold streamer of beer swatted me across the
mouth.
"You're
drunk," snapped Thea, "and so is Icarus," and, turning to Zoe:
"You're to blame!"
Zoe's voice was relaxed. "Dear, your
brother is fifteen and it's time he learned to hold his liquor. As for
Eunostos, he's hardly begun to drink. You ought to see him after another
skin!" She gave a body-wrenching sigh. "However, I expect it's time
to go. It's a long way to my tree, and there are Striges about at night, to say
nothing of those thieving Thriae." Still unhurried, with the slow
deliberate movements of a mother placing her baby in a crib, she lifted Icarus'
head from her lap and cradled it on a cushion.
He
looked up at her with sleepy disappointment. "Your lap was softer."
She
winked. "Boy, when you want a lap
instead of a cushion, come to my
tree. It's a royal oak. Eunostos knows the way I"
I saw them up the stairs and across the
garden. The silver palm of the fountain swayed in the moonlight; the crude
parasol stood like the silk pavilion of an Eastern king; and even the homely
oven looked dim and mysterious, fit for incense instead of bread. But the
headless stalks of my poppies made me sad, in spite of the moon and its white,
ennobling foam.
"Zoe,"
I said. "Moschus. You will have to forgive her.
She isn't used to our ways."
"You
think that's it?" Zoe smiled. "Inexperience,
innocence, and all that? I would have said she was jealous."
"Of
Icarus?"
"Of
you."
Chapter
V KORA
I awoke
to singing. The singer was
Thea in the garden, and her song was about a tiger moth:
His
heart is dappled like his wing: Day-yellow spilled with night. The tiger-part
loves evening, The moth-part, candlelight.
I
disentangled myself from a pile of wolfskins, yawned mightily, and climbed the
stairs to investigate her high spirits.
In
the garden she was pulling my last carrots out of their earthen burrows. I
winced. Of course they were grown to be eaten, but after the decapitation of my
poppies, I resented any diminishment of my shrunken plot. Blue monkeys had
lined the walls to watch her, and one bold fellow had skittered onto the ground
to receive a carrot. I glared at his boldness but only managed to increase his
appetite.
She
climbed to her feet and smiled. "We're going on a picnic. I'm getting our lunch ready now."
"What
should I wear?" I asked. I had not taken time to dress.
"You
are dressed exactly right," she said. "Picnics should be
informal."
With
a lunch of hard-boiled woodpecker eggs, roasted chestnuts, wolf's milk cheese,
raw carrots (the last of their race), and honey cakes, together with a flask of wine encased in
wickerwork, we headed for the Field of the Gem Stones. Icarus was still drowsy
when we left the house. I had carried him up the stairs and held him under the
fountain, but the warm water had barely roused him enough to move his feet in
a kind of lethargic shuffle. Thea and I talked freely, however, and as soon as
our conversation turned to those incorrigible thieves, the Thriae, he began to
listen.
"Their
women are very beautiful," I said, "if you don't mind golden eyes and
billowy wings. But never fall in love with one."
"Why
not?" he asked.
"Because,"
I began, but then we came to the Field of Gem Stones, and I left his question
unanswered. Imagine a field which Titan horses have ploughed, with furrows like
the troughs of waves in a tempest and enormous boulders poised like ships on
the crests. Actually an earthquake had ravaged the land instead of giants, and
vegetation—grass, thickets of sweetbriar, and poppies with scarlet heads—had
soothed without quite healing the wounded soil; had clung to the curves, the
abrupt rises, the sharp pinnacles with wild green tenacity. Thea admired the
poppies—picked one, in fact— but shuddered at the savagery of the landscape.
"The
earth looks angry," she said. "It is not the handiwork of the Great
Mother, but one of those northern gods, Pluto' perhaps. It might be his very
playground."
"But
it's private," I said. "And safe. The
furrows shut us from view. The Panisci, you know, love to heckle picnickers.
One of them attracts your attention with his goatish antics and his friends
make off with the lunch." I brushed off a stone for her seat. "Chalcedony. I'll take it home with us, and my workers
will cut you a necklace. You can find just about anything you want here—
carnelian, agate, jasper."
No sooner had I laid our basket on a tuft of
grass than a small felt hat bobbed above the nearest ridge. No, it was Pandia's
hair.
"I
smelled the cakes," she said. "They smell like more than you can
eat."
"Come and join us," said Icarus,
nobly if reluctantly, since the cakes in fact were less than we could eat. Thea
had yet to learn the extent of a Minotaur's appetite.
"Too
many are bad for you," Pandia explained. "One of my acquaintances—not
a friend, fortunately—gorged herself and got so sweet that a hungry bear came
out of the trees and ate her. Ate his own cousin. Didn't leave a crumb." As always before a meal, she
looked immaculate. She had spruced her tail, cleaned her kidskin -sandals, and
tied her belt of rabbit's fur in a neat bow with exactly equal ends.
"I've thought of a poem about
bears," I said. "It goes:
Bears
like berries Ras- and blue-. Speckled trout, And
catfish too. Best of all, Bears like
snacks Smuggled out of Picnic packs!
And
here's one about that dreadful bear that ate your acquaintance.
Brownest,
broadest, Hungriest, hairiest— Of all the bears, He
is beariest." "I
like your poems, Eunostos," said Pandia. "They are almost as charming as your tail, which is very
slender and elegant. But all that business about eating has made me too hungry
to appreciate any more recitation."
Icarus
handed her our entire supply of honey cakes, packaged in a linen handkerchief.
"There are no bears in the neighborhood," he said.
She
ate most of the cakes between two breaths and stuffed the remnants into her
tunic.
"Shall
we gather stones?" asked Icarus. "The Telchines will polish them for
us. We can use our picnic basket."
"I
would like an amulet to ward off the Striges," she admitted, and followed
him up the ridge, fishing a fragment of cake out of her tunic.
Thea,
meanwhile, nibbled a carrot so fastidiously that she managed to avoid a crunch.
A persistent wind frolicked the hair from her ears and
the hand which was not occupied with the carrot replaced the hair.
"Thea," I said, "you look like
a circumspect rabbit."
She
smiled and wriggled her nose. "But I don't have whiskers."
Then she was not a rabbit but utterly a
woman, so soft of hair, so tiny of hand, that I wanted
to cry and be comforted on her bosom like a sad child.
"Thea," I whispered.
"Yes, Eunostos."
"Thea, I-"
"Would you like a carrot?"
"No."
"How do you grow them so crisp and
yellow?"
"Fertilizer,"
I said. "Fish heads, mostly." At that point a god or a demon
possessed me, like the quick flush of heat from a sun which breaks through the
clouds on a chilly day. I removed the carrot from Thea's fingers and then I embraced
her. To me, the action seemed as natural as taking a shower in the hot plume of
my fountain or kneeling in my garden to measure the bud of a poppy. But
possessed as I was by the god (or demon), I forgot my strength. Perhaps I was
rough; certainly I was sudden. She lay in my arms like a fawn pierced by an
arrow. I have broken her back, I thought. Crushed her
fragility with my brutish lust, as if I had taken a swallows's egg in my palm
and closed my fingers.
"Thea,"
I groaned, loosening my grip but still supporting her body. "Are you—"
With
unhurried dignity, she disengaged herself from my arms. "Eunostos, I am
ashamed of you. You are acting like Moschus."
Better
to be insulted, railed against, slapped, than chastised
like a naughty child or a mischievous Centaur. Moschus indeed!
Angrily
I blurted: "He kisses everyone he meets at the first chance. You've shared
my house for a month, and I haven't
touched you until today. But I'm not a eunuch."
"I look on you as a
brother. I told you that."
"But
I don't want to be your brother. I don't feel fraternal at all. Besides, you
already have Icarus. I want to be—"
"My
father?
It's true you're ten years older—"
"No, that's worse. I don't like your
father anyway."
"You
don't like him? But you never met him. He's a kingly man!"
"I do know him," I said. "I
wasn't going to tell you, but I knew
him before you were born."
She gasped. "In the forest?"
"And I knew your
mother, the Dryad."
"I don't think I want
to hear about her."
"I
can't tell you about your father without mentioning your mother." I called
loudly: "Icarus, Pandial"
They hurried over the ridge with dirty hands
and a basket of stones between them.
"Is
it bears?" whispered Fandia with terror-rounded eyes. "Are we going
to be eaten?"
"Not bears," I
said. "Something I want to show you."
A
mile from the Field of Stones, in a small clearing green with moss and fem, I
showed them a fire-blackened Stump which
had once been a royal oak. Through the gutted walls, you could see the ruined
beginnings of a staircase, spiraling around the trunk and ending abruptly in
air.
"Your
mother's tree," I said. And I told them about Aeacus, their father. . ..
I
was nine years old when he came to the forest. My father had built a house of
reeds in a tamarisk grove, and after my mother was killed by lightning, we
lived alone with the feathery trees shutting away the sunlight and shutting us
in with the shadows of our loss. Except at night when I needed a place to sleep,
I kept away from the house, preferring to roam the woods where I had gathered
chestnuts with my mother and listened to her stories about the coming of out
people from the Isles of the Blest. It was in the forest that I met
Aeacus—dagger in hand, blood on his beardless face, eyes vacant like those of a
Strige's victim. I learned later that he had come into the mountains pursuing
Achaean pirates. He and his men met and killed them just beyond the forest, but
only Aeacus had survived the skirmish. Wounded and delirious, he had wandered
into the forest, but strength had failed him and he sank to his knees like a
murderer before a judge, dropping his dagger, blinking without awareness.
I
crept out of the undergrowth. "May I help you, sir?" I asked from a safe distance, for he was a Man and therefore dangerous.
"He
cannot speak." A tall Dryad had come to stand beside me.
"Your dress is sunlight!" I cried.
"Sunflowers." She smiled. "Every moming I weave it anew, since the petals endure
only for a day. Like love.
"And
your hair is a green waterfall. It sings around your shoulders."
"Perhaps,"
she said, "it has learned its song from the trees in which I live. Listened to woodpeckers nesting in the branches, or those smaller
birds, the wind-ruffled leaves. But now we must help our friend."
"He's
a Man," I whispered. She did not look as if she understood the danger.
"And
therefore the more to be pitied."
His
hair, worn long and drawn behind his head in a fillet, was a wonder of
darkness, and his face was as white and smooth as the alabaster from which the
Cretans carve the thrones of their kings: such a face as the artisan god, Hephaestus,
might carve in his underground workshop—unflawed by toil, untouched by time.
Each
of us took an arm and supported him to her tree. She did not invite me to enter
the trunk. She smiled when she saw my disappointment; for I had heard of the
marvels within a Dryad's tree: the winding stairs cut into the trunk, the
secret doors which opened onto rooms where noiseless spiders weave in the light
of glowworms, the platforms among the branches, where the Dryads comb their
tresses to the soft fingerings of the sun.
"You
must not enter, Bull Boy. I am bringing sorrow into my tree, and you have
enough of your own."
"He will do you
injury?"
"Perhaps."
"Why do you shelter him then?"
"I have lived too long in sunlight.'*
No Man can enter the forest without alerting
the Beasts. All of us, even the light-fingered Thriae and the careless Panisci,
take our turns patrolling the narrow access to the world of Men. Everywhere
else the cliffs uprear impassable walls (except for my cave, which no one dares
to invade). When Aeacus entered the trees, I was not the first to see him. Even
as Kora helped him into her house, a conch-shell boomed a warning to all the
Beasts, and the next day Chiron, king of the Centaurs, arrived at her tree to
question her about the stranger.
"I am going to bear
his child," she said.
Chiron
was stunned. A human father and a bestial mother! Would the child be a Man or a
Beast? Shaking his mane, he left this foolish Dryad to the sorrow of her own
choosing.
I
was ten years old at the birth of Thea, eleven when Icarus followed her into
the tree and laughed with his first breath. High in the branches, a porch
surrounded the trunk, with a bench and a bamboo rail. I used to stand on the
ground and wait until Kora appeared with the babies.
"Eunostos,"
she called one morning. "Come and visit with me.
"Through the door?" I asked,
hoping at least to glimpse the interior.
"Up
the outside ladder."
I
saw with dismay that her hair looked as withered as broken ferns, and her gown
was woven of brown leaves instead of sunflower petals. She lifted Thea into my
arms.
"Is she
breakable?" I asked doubtfully.
"Not unless you drop
her out of the tree." She laughed.
At
first Thea was crying. "I expect it's my hair," I said. "The
color has frightened her."
"No,"
she said. "It's the forest. She always cries when I bring her onto the
porch."
I took her tiny hand and placed the fingers
on one of my
horns. "See," I said. "It won't
hurt you. It is like a carrot." She fell asleep in my arms.
"I
want to hold Icarus too," I said. "One baby for
each arm. They will balance each other." He was much the fattest
baby I had ever seen. When no one held him, he would lie in the crib which his
mother had hollowed from the shell of a tortoise and coo at friendly
woodpeckers or empty air. He made me think of a fledgling which has gorged itself
on worms and grown so plump that it has no wish to fly. It would rather stay in
the nest and wait for the next worm.
Without
telling their mother, I adored both of them— Thea because she was sad, Icarus
because he was plump and joyful. Sometimes Kora would let me look after them
when she followed Aeacus into the forest (it must have broken her heart to see
him walk to the edge of the trees and stare wistfully at the farms across the
meadow). I fed them nectar which I squeezed out of honeysuckle blossoms and
made up stories in which I rescued them from wicked bears and slavering wolves.
They seemed attentive, both of them, and never fell asleep until I had finished
my story, though few of my words could have been intelligible to such young
ears.
Soon
after Icarus' first birthday, I climbed to the porch and discovered Kora in
tears. Since the death of my mother, I had seen my father cry and I knew that
the tears of adults were wetter, saltier, and much, much sadder than those of a
child like me. I started down the ladder.
"Stay,
Eunostos," she said. "It will be your last chance to see the
children."
I
balanced awkwardly on the third rung from the top and rested my chin on the
porch. "I'm not to be invited again?"
"They are going
away."
"How can you go with
them?" I knew that no Dryad could leave her tree for more than a few days.
Its wooden walls sustain her as salt water sustains a dolphin.
"Their father is
taking them to Knossos without me."
"To the cities of Men!" I cried with dismay. Remember that Beast
children fear Men as much as human children fear Beasts. I imagined the babies
spitted on sharp spears and served up at a banquet, or lowered on giant fish
hooks to bait sharks.
"Their father will protect them,"
she said. "But they will miss us, won't they, my little Bull?"
"Can they live outside the tree?"
"Aeacus
thinks so. He says they have not grown dependent on the tree as I have. That's
why he wishes to take them now, before they do." She drew me into her arms
as if I were one of her own children.
"Don't
be sad," I said, though her news was the worst I had heard since the death
of my mother. I rested my horns against the leaf-sweet fragrance of her breast.
Neither
of us heard Aeacus climb the ladder. He was not angry;
he had no reason for anger. But he looked like a staring pharaoh carved from
stone. He drew me from Kora's arms and placed me on the ladder. His fingers
were very hard, almost like coral, though he did not hurt me. As I started down the ladder, I screamed:
"You shouldn't take them away from their
mother!"
For six mornings I went to Kora's tree,
placed an ear to the trunk, and listened to Thea's cries resounding through the
bark. But no one appeared on the porch to ask me up the ladder, and when I
knocked at the door on the seventh morning, Aeacus answered and closed the door
in my face.
The
next day I met him in the forest. You have seen the twin panniers on the backs
of donkeys? They are baskets for carrying produce home from the market or
kindling from the woods. He had rigged such panniers for his children and
placed both Thea and Icarus on his back. In spite of the vines which strangled
the branches above her head, Thea was poised and smiling, but Icarus was crying
almost for the first time.
I
sprang out of the trees like the goat-god Pan when he frightens travelers.
"Where are you taking my babies?" I demanded in what I meant to be an
ear-sphtting bellow. But I was small at the time—I lived on roots and berries
between the rare occasions when my father remembered to hunt. No doubt my roar
emerged as a squeak. Aeacus looked at me vaguely and went on his way as if I
were no more significant than a toadstool. I lowered my head and butted him
with my horns, expecting to catch the babies if they threatened to spill. He
staggered but kept his balance and did not spill them. Turning, he seized my
horns and flung me into the bushes. The fall left me stunned.
In
seconds, or minutes, I am not sure which, I opened my
eyes to hairy haunches and cloven hooves. A Paniscus, looking about twelve but
possibly as old as a hundred, was dousing my face with milk from a split
coconut. I did not remember to thank him, but sprang to my feet and searched
frantically for signs of Aeacus and the children.
"Did you see him?" I cried. "The man from the Cities?"
"Nothing but squirrels." He sulked, hurt no
doubt because I had not thanked him for reviving me and sacrificing the milk
from his coconut.
I
ran toward Kora's tree to see if she knew that Aeacus had taken the children.
Perhaps, I thought, she will keep me in their place, and then I felt terribly
ashamed at having so selfish a wish at such a time.
A
score of Beasts had surrounded the tree: Dryads in great dishevelment, among
them Zoe; Moschus and two other
Centaurs; Panisci and Bears of Artemis; and even some Thriae, who flock
to misfortune as readily as to honey. The tree was a pillar of fire. Branches
crackled and fell in a swarm of sparks like glowing bees; the
watchers shielded their heads with upraised arms and drew back from the yellow,
lashing coils. The high porch had shriveled like a dead insect and begun to peel from the trunk. Yet the verdurous branches
still struggled valiantly to hold their greenness against the encroaching fire,
for the tree was young by the reckoning of the forest and three times her
lightning-blackened branches had sprouted leaves.
"We must save
her," I cried, running toward the ladder.
Zoe
stopped me. "It was she who set the fire. We must leave her with
dignity."
"But he's getting away
with her babies 1"
"Let him go. He was
never a Beast."
"But the babies are
half Beast."
Perhaps they will come back when they learn
to know themselves."
Icarus hugged me when I had finished the
story. "Eunos-tos, we did come back! You got your babies again."
"Yes,"
I said, "and this time I mean to keep you." I looked at Thea and
awaited the inevitable reprimand. She was certain to take her father's side,
and already I was angry with her, remembering how she had laughed as that
hateful man had carried her out of the forest.
At
last, she said, "You can't blame him for leaving when he did. He was only
thinking of us."
Icarus turned on her angrily. "But he
left our mother."
"She
always knew he would have to leave her," said Thea. But her eyes had
filled with tears, and not, I guessed, for her father.
DAY OF THE MINOTAUR Thea," I said.
"I didn't—"
Pandia
seized my hand. "There is someone watching us.'
"A bear?" I smiled.
"Do bears wear helmets?"
Chapter
VI THE LOVE OF A QUEEN IS DEATH
The
death which comes at the
end of a long life, in a warm bed surrounded by loving children, is a lying
down and not a darkness; it is not to be feared. But a
slow and agonizing death in the fullness of youth is dreadful to men and
dreaded even by gods. It was such a death which confronted the forest, though
its rightful span was a thousand tearing winters and a thousand springs of
healing violets and resurrecting roses.
No
one knew at the time; no one knew that the death throes began when Pandia saw
the helmet. How could a warrior have entered the forest, I asked, without being
seen by the guards? No conch shell had blown to alert the Beasts. Perhaps,
suggested Thea, Pandia had glimpsed a spying Paniscus and mistaken his homs for the boar's tusk of a helmet. Still, the mere
possibility of Achaean infiltration left us with little appetite for the rest
of our picnic. Returning to the Field of Gem Stones to recover our basket, we
walked back to the house in thoughtful silence.
The
following morning it was almost possible to forget the revelations and alarms
of the preceding day. Breakfasting on bread, cheese, and carob pods, Thea did
not refer to my unexpected embrace or to my story about her parents.
She
fed me some choice pods from her own plate and then withdrew to the shop to
watch the Telchines cut some intaglios, while I remained in the garden,
wondering what I should plant in place of my carrots. Perhaps
a row of pumpkins, as big and friendly as the domestic pigs of the Centaurs.
The day was benign; a blue monkey perched on the walL waiting for Thea to feed
him carrots. He would have a long wait.
Icaus
emerged from the stairs. His hair was tousled from sleep and very long, rather
like a nest in which baby mice have played. He had not yet donned a loincloth.
"Eunostos," he said. "I want
to talk to you." Fifteen years sat lightly on his face, but the weight of
a lifetime burdened his voice.
"You
miss Perdix, don't you?" I said, trying to. ease
his very evident burden. The day before the picnic, he had suddenly announced
that he had given Perdix his freedom-left him beside a carob tree in the
forest. "To find a mate," was his sole explanation.
"No,"
he said. "Perdix was a child's pet. I am now a man." He used the word in the sense of a
full-grown adult and not as a member of the human, as opposed to the bestial,
race. We sat down on a stone bench in the shade of the parasol; splinters of
sunlight jabbed through crevices in the reeds and pricked our shoulders.
"Aren't I?"
"A
man is strong," I said, "and strength makes him kind instead of
tyrannical. A man is courageous, not because he lacks fear but because he
conquers fear. Yes, Icarus, you are certainly a man, and one I am proud to call
my brother."
"But
that's not enough," he said impatiently. "Even if I were those
things, which I doubt, I am still not manly in other ways. With
women." His voice fell to a whisper, as if he ascribed to women the
power and the mystery attributed to them in the days of stone implements,
before it was known that the husband as well as the wife helped to produce a child. "I am—inexperienced."
I
studied him carefully and saw that his body had hardened since he came to the
forest; he was tanned and firm, with a clown
of hair on his cheeks, and I understood why Zoe had looked at him with desire
as well as affection. Manliness mingled with innocence and cried to be awakened
to knowledge of its own power.
"And you think I can
help you?"
"I
know you can. You and Zoe used to be more than friends, didn't you?"
I nodded, with perhaps a hint of a smirk.
"And
other women too," he continued. "You must have had hundreds. You're
just what they like. A regular bull of a man!"
Almost of itself, my chest expanded to its
full dimensions, my tail twitched, my flanks felt the urge to strut. "It's
true that one kind likes me. Free-living women."
"One
kind admits she likes you. Secretly, all of them do. Look at Thea."
The subject intrigued me. "Thea, you say?"
"Can't take her eyes off you. But frankly, the other, non-sisterly kind
interests me more. I don't feel up to a long, exhausting courtship. I'm not as
young as I was. That's why I want you to take me wenching."
"Wenching,"
I repeated, possibilities flickering through my brain like a covey of quail.
"Suppose we call on Zoe and ask her to fetch you a young friend from the
next tree."
"I
don't like them young," he said with finality. "Experience, that's
what I want. You see—" He paused in acute embarrassment. "I am not
very practiced. The palace at Vathypetro limited my education. What does one
talk about at such a time?"
"Compliments," I said. "One
after another like pearls on a necklace.
Give them something to wear—a bauble or an intimate garment such as a breast
band—and then elaborate on how it becomes them. With my shop and workers,
that's no problem. Jewels, sandals, whatever they like I've
got."
"But
you can't talk all the time," he said darkly. "Thea tried talking to
Ajax when we were captives, but Ajax got tired of listening. He pushed her
against the wall, and she had to use her pin. He wasn't a conversationalist,
and neither am I."
"You'd
be surprised how naturally the rest comes after the right gift and compliment.
With the right woman, that is."
"The right woman. That's what I want you to help me find. And another thing. When I just think about wenching, I
feel—well, a kind of fire creeping over my body. Arms.
Chest. Stomach. Like a lizard
with hot feet, if you know what I mean."
"The
problem," I said, "is to find another lizard. We'll visit Zoe
tomorrow. We'll ask her—"
"Eunostos! Icarus!" Thea
called from the stairs.
"Later,"
I whispered in the conspiratorial tone of men discussing their favorite
subject under grave risk of detection. "Here comes the watchdog."
"Eunostos, look at the intaglio I've cut!" she said,
coruscating into the garden. She blazed in a lemon tunic which vied with the sun
and gave her the look of a lithe young huntress; she had caught her hair in a
knot behind her head and left her ears in piquant, pointed nakedness. I half expected
a bow in her hand and a quiver at her back. Proudly she flaunted a large agate
incised with the figure of a lion-haunched, eagle-headed griffin, the awesome
but docile beast which the early Cretans had kept as pets in their palaces.
"Where is Icarus? I wanted to show him too."
Icarus had left the garden. "I have no
idea," I said, as convincingly as a bad liar can manage, though I had an idea of Icarus
blithely making for a certain tree and a certain lady. The sly calf! He had
wanted a woman of years and experience and no young friend from the next tree.
I hoped that Zoe had told him the way.
"He
shouldn't walk in the forest alone. If Pandia did see a warrior—"
"You
can't keep him under foot all day. He isn't domestic, you know."
"No,
I suppose not. He has seemed restless lately. Probably he needs a
good walk in the forest to stir his blood. Call me when he returns, will you,
Eunostos? I have to get back to the shop."
"Thea," I called
after her. "Your ears—"
"Yes?" She
smiled.
"Are
very charming."
Icarus, as he later explained, had gone to
visit Zoe. Not knowing the way, he looked for Pandia to guide him. When he
failed to attract her with calls and whistles, he hit on the plan of picking
some blackberries which he ate or spilled as he walked. Pandia was not long in
appearing to share the berries. No, she could not tell him the exact location of
Zoe's tree—there were dozens of Dryads, after all—but she knew that it was
close to some large beehives where she often gathered honey. She would lead him
to the hives and perhaps they would meet someone who could give them further
directions. She took his hand in case there were bears on the prowl.
"Your hand is sticky," he remarked.
"Oh,"
she said, "I missed some," licked her fingers to the last adhering
seed, and reclaimed his hand. "You know," she resumed, "you
ought to wear a loincloth."
"You think so?" said Icarus,
flushing. In his hurry to leave the house, he had quite forgotten to dress.
"To hide your lack of a tail. It makes the back of you look
lonesome." She moved to weightier subjects. "Are you going to have
beer with Zoe?"
"Possibly," said Icarus. The
thought occurred to him that the warm stimulus of beer might loosen his tongue
and inspire him to dazzling compliments. Having come without a gift, he felt at a disadvantage.
"I wonder if she will
have some cakes in the house."
"No,"
he said with authority. "She never keeps honey cakes. There is no need for
you to go in with me. Or even wait." Secretly, he hoped to linger with Zoe
for several days, exploring the hidden tunnels and leafy porches and learning
the harder steps in the Dance of the Python. He felt an unaccustomed and wholly
exhilarating freedom. The voluptuous foretaste of manhood wetted his appetite
like a roasted almond. He pictured Thea and Eunostos coming to Zoe's tree, and himself ensconced in a bark parapet and calling down to
them: "Don't wait up for me. I'm spending the night."
They slithered through a thicket of bamboo,
the slender, jointed canes as tall as their heads, the light green leaves
rustling about their bodies like papyrus. Those consummate farmers, the Centaurs,
said Pandia, in their ancient wanderings, had imported the seeds from the Land
of the Yellow Men.
Emerging from the thicket, they met a young
man who seemed to be waiting for them. "You must be looking for my
sister," he said. Icarus noticed the sickly softness of his flesh; he was
not fat but he seemed without muscle, and his skin looked as if it would yield
to the touch like the soft meat of a blowfish's belly. Otherwise, he was not
unattractive: a golden down covered his arms and cheeks as if
they had been dusted with pollen; his eyes were round and extraordinarily
gold; and his tall wings were as black and pointed as the fin of a shark.
"Icarus,
don't listen to him," hissed Pandia in a very audible whisper. "He
is one of the Thriae. He may be planning to rob us."
"And what would I steal, your belt of
rabbit's fur?" He smiled scornfully. "I am not stealing today, I am giving. Would
you like to know what?"
Icarus
did not intend to ask him. He resented the fellow's remark about Pandia's belt.
"What?" asked Pandia.
"Sisters," he said. "Or rather, one sister. Isn't that what you are looking
for, Icarus? A man can recognize the look in another man's eyes. It says: I am
tired of hunting and tired of gardening, of a man's work and the company of other
men. I want soft lips and the teasing fragrance of myrrh,
I want soft hands and the silken brush of hair."
"I
am going to call on Zoe, the Dryad," said Icarus. (How, he wondered, had the young man learned his name?) "Do you know
where she lives?"
"I know where everyone lives." He
captured Icarus' arm and guided him through avenues of lofty carob trees, whose
branches were freighted with pods like those which Thea had eaten for
breakfast, while Pandia trailed behind them, peeling her eye in case the fellow
should prove a thief after all and wish to steal her belt (or, horror of
horrors, her pelt). Icarus, of course, had nothing to lose.
They
stepped into a meadow riotous with flowers and murmurous with bees; flowers
jabbing from the ground on pillar-straight stalks or undulating in green
torrents of foliage; and bees which wavered above them like a black and golden
nimbus and then exploded upward like sparks from a lightning-blasted tree and
disclosed the cinnabar walls of black-hearted poppies, the lemon of
green-backed gagea, the purpler-than-murex of hyacinths beloved by the gods.
From just such a garden, thought Icarus, all the flowers of the earth, even the
tame crocuses grown at Vathypetro, had come in the time before men, transported
by bees and migratory birds and swift nomadic winds.
In
the very midst of the flowers, a vine-covered pole like the mast of a ship
uplifted a hght-seeming house with hexagonal walls of
reeds, a thatched roof of dried water lilly fronds, and opaque windows of waxed
parchment; The first storm, you felt, would scatter the walls and collapse the
roof. A summer house, hardly more enduring than flowers and hardly less
beautiful: built to please and not to endure.
"Here," said the guide, "is the house."
"But Zoe lives in a
tree."
"This is my sister's
house."
Lifting
aside a curtain of rushes, a young girl appeared in the door and looked down at
Icarus with a confidence which seemed to say: "You will soon come up to
me."
"Icarus,"
she chided. "You took your time in coming to call."
"How do you know my name? I don't know
yours."
"The
whole forest has heard about the handsome boy who has come to live with
Eunostos, the Bull. And also about his sister, the very fastidious Thea, who
keeps a watchful eye on both of her men. Does she know that her little brother
is up to mischief?"
Icarus bristled. "It's no business of
hers if I am."
"And
what would she think of me? The wanton Amber, soliciting
innocent boys."
"She would think you were very
pretty." Indeed, she was smooth and bright as a tiger lily from the Land
of the Yellow Men, with gold, violet-flecked eyes which did not change
expression even when her lips curved to a smile, but looked like hungry mouths.
When she spoke he saw that her tongue was long, thin, and freckled with gold
like her eyes. She was even smaller than Thea. It should not be hard for her
long wings to lift so small a body, thought Icarus. A winged lily she was, with
catlike, sinuous grace; scarcely a girl at all except in the tightness she
brought to his throat and the lizard with fiery feet she lashed across his
limbs.
"Would
you like to see my house?" she asked. "You will find it refreshing
after your walk."
"I
am going to call on Zoe," he repeated, with decidedly less enthusiasm than
the first time he had made the announcement.
She
laughed. "I think you are afraid of me. Of all women, perhaps, except
litde Bear Girls and blowsy old ladies like Zoe. Possibly you would prefer my
brother. In the Cities of Men, I am told, the love of a man for a man is not uncommon.
You will find it the same with drones like my brother. Among my people, the
Thriae, queens like myself are rare and workers are no
more excitable than a drudging mule. What can the poor drones do except console
each other? They succeed rather well, I am told." She turned to her
brother. "Does Icarus please you, my dear? He is succulent as a fig, and
no bees, I think, have rifled his hive."
Her
brother smiled and smiled; his golden tongue flickered between his moist lips
and he did not need to speak.
"I've
changed my mind," said Icarus to the girl. "How do I climb to your
door?"
She
lowered a ladder with rungs of cowhide. "When you've tasted my honey, you
will feel as if you have wings. You will hardly need a ladder."
As
he placed his foot in the first rung, Pandia caught at his arm. "I'm
coming too."
"She hasn't any honey cakes,
Pandia."
"She said honey, didn't she?"
"I think she meant hospitality."
The Bear Girl was close to tears. "It
isn't really cakes I want. I don't want her to hurt you, that's all. She is a wicked woman. I can
can tell by the way she darts her tongue."
Laughter tinkled silverly above their heads.
"Do you think me wicked, Icarus? Perhaps I am. How else would I know the
thousand paths to pleasure?"
Hand
over hand, his feet sinking in the hide of the rungs, Icarus climbed to the
door. Amber gave him her hand and drew him over the threshold.
There
were wicker chairs suspended from the ceiling on tenuous chains of grass. There
were hangings of spider-spun silk through which the walls revealed their ribs
of reed. Most of all, it was a room of flowers, which glowed in mounds like the
heaped treasures spilled in Egyptian tombs when thieves are caught at their
theft. One of the walls was coated with polished wax which mirrored the room
like a misty garden and Amber's face as the queenliest of the blossoms. Surely,
thought Icarus, no evil can touch me among so many flowers—there are even bees
at work collecting nectar.
And
yet the garden was captured; shut from the sunlight. He saw that Amber had
quietly withdrawn the ladder.
"You
have caught my friends at their trade," she smiled, pointing to the bees
above a mound of jonquils. "Those are my workers. When the nectar enters
their sacks, their bodily juices turn it into honey. Then they eject it into
waxen trays and heat their wings to evaporate the water, leaving pure honey,
which I in turn will trade for silks, jewels, and gold. Your own Eunostos has
sometimes traded me bracelets. But you must not think that I also am a worker.
I am a queen." She spoke the word with such impassioned pride that a crown
seemed to glitter above her head and murex-colored robes tremble about her
shoulders.
"What
does a queen do?" He rather hoped that her answer would be mysterious and
provocative. He was not disappointed.
"She
lives like a flower, only for pleasure. For soft breezes and
warm suns, the solicitations of butterfly and hawk moth, and all the sweet
indolences of a vegetable existence. But one pleasure is known to her
which the flowers cannot comprehend."
He
waited for her to reveal the name of this rarest pleasure.
"The
gift of a man's embrace," she said at last, caressing the words as if they
were priceless silk. "Shall I tell you the wealth of your own beauty?
Number your masculine graces until a young god walks before the eye of your
mind?"
"Would
you?" he asked. He could not tiunk of a more reassuring catalogue.
"A head of noble dimensions aureoled with luxuriant hair. A body swelling to
manhood, the strong sinews of maturity asleep beneath the down of youth."
She looked at him with a look between calculation and desire. "My dear, I
am weary of butterflies. I crave the golden savagery of the bumblebee."
"I'm
afraid," said Icarus, "that you want Eunostos instead of me. I think
like a bumblebee, but I haven't learned how to buzz."
She seated him in one of the chairs suspended
from the roof. She handed him a dish of pollen; she heated wine in a copper
vessel over a small brazier and poured honey into the steaming liquid.
"Drink," she said.
"Pleasure will stir in your veins even as the wine caresses your
throat. Powerful wings will seem to beat at your shoulders."
He emptied the cup with one quick swallow.
Was it a sudden breeze through the thin door of
rushes? Was it the pounding of his own heart which swayed the chair into motion
and disembodied him from the honeyed room and the weight of his limbs? Or did
he move at all except in his mind?
She
took his hand and steadied him onto his feet and led him inexorably to a mound
of flowers. "Don't be afraid of crushing them," she said. "They
have already yielded their gold, and now they are useless."
He
felt as heavy as bronze. Insubstantiality had deserted him; reawareness of
flesh, the imprint of stems against his bare body, and yes, the fiery feet of
the lizard, assaulted his senses. Her hand touched his chest like a brand.
But
her gold hypnotic eyes stared drowsiness into his limbs, and the sharp stems
began to caress him like cool little tongues. He knew that he ought to crush
her in his arms, possess her hps like a ravenous Ajax. Mimic the bumblebee and
not the butterfly. But he seemed to be falling asleep. Zoe, he thought
wistfully, Zoe aroused me to dance, but Amber puts me to sleep. Perhaps it is
not I who am to blame.
Her
face came toward him, a hungry golden moon, and swallowed him into the sky. . .
.
The cowbell rang as peremptorily as if it had
been returned to its cow. When I opened the door, Pandia clutched my hand. She
had lost her belt and scuffed her sandals.
"That
woman has got him in her hive," she whispered, as Thea appeared behind me.
"A
Thria, you mean?" I gasped, incredulous, then compre-handing. The queens
were too diminutive to crave the embraces of Centaurs or Minotaur, and the
small, hairy Panisci held no allurements for them. But a boy
like Icarus-why had I never thought to warn him? Why had I failed to
answer his question the day of the picnic?"
"Yes. He climbed up the ladder and sent
me away."
"Show
us the house," cried Thea, and Pandia gulped some air and gamely trotted
ahead of us. . ..
The
house loomed above our heads, as closed and apparently inaccessible as a
tortoise shut in its shell. The girl had withdrawn the ladder, the doors and
windows were latched. But for once my height proved a boon. I grasped the
narrow ledge in front of the door and drew myself onto the sill. Flinging aside
the curtain of rushes, I burst into the room. The sweetness hit me like syrup
flung from a cup; at once it teased and sickened. The murmuring bees sounded
like flies as they buzz around a dead
body. I saw the ladder coiled inside the door, and I saw Icarus, pale as foam, in the Thria's arms.
I
lunged through mounds of flowers; the bees scattered before me, roaring, and
returned to sting my legs. I did not feel them. I seized the girl by the wings
and tore her off my friend as one tears a crab
away from a stricken fish. She whimpered but did not
fight me. There was something loathsome and predatory about her; or worse,
scavenging, for she lacked the bold courage of the predator. She preyed on
helpless boys.
"It
is too late." She smiled. "I have breathed death into his
lungs."
"Lower
the ladder," I gasped with a voice which was frozen between rage and anguish.
She moved toward the door. I saw that she meant to escape. I sprang between her
and the door and threw the ladder to Thea and Pandia.
"Watch her," I said as they climbed
into the room. When Thea saw Icarus, she paled and held back a cry, but she did not wallow in useless hysterics. To Amber she said:
"Help my brother, or I will tear the
wings from your back."
"There is only one way to help
him," I said. "I must try to draw the poison from his lungs."
"Let me," said Thea. It was not
composure she showed, which implies a want of feeling, but courage wrestled
from fear. She had hated and feared the forest; now she was facing its most
insidious threat without dismay. "Let me, Eunos-tos. He is my
brother."
"And my friend,"
I said.
"It may prove fatal to
you?"
"Yes."
I pressed my mouth to his colorless lips. Like a hunter drawing the venom from
the bite of a snake, I sucked the air which Amber had breathed from
her noxious lungs. It did not burn, but entered my throat insidiously like a
thick oozing of honey.
How suddenly small he seemed, how limp and
white and seemingly lifeless! The yearning came to me that he should be my son
by Thea: I kissed her, kissing him, and then we laughed through the forest,
each of us holding his hand. Now he was a small boy with a large head, and now
an infant swinging on our arms, the child I had loved in Kora's treehouse.
Icarus, Icarus, my son, breathe your poison into my lungs, for I am like your
father, and a father's part is to guard his son from the Striges of the night
and the Ambers of the day; to take the arrow intended for his vulnerable
breast, the flung stone, the rending claw. What is love but a shield of
hammered bronze?
My
head fell against his cheek, and sleep possessed me like a falling of leaves. .
. .
Daylight flooded the room. I saw that Thea
had taken my place with Icarus; first, she must have broken the parchment out of
the windows and flooded the room with light and air.
"Thea," I
whispered. "Now we have both been poisoned."
"Divided the
poison," she said. "That is the difference."
Icarus
opened his eyes and spoke sleepily. "There was honey in my lungs. It was
very sweet. It made me want to sleep." Like a child in a warm bed with
stuffed animals, he drew us close to him.
"You
mustn't sleep now," I said. "There is still poison in your
body." I helped him to his feet. He took a faltering step, caught my arm,
and managed to cross the room without help.
"I am ready now,"
he said.
Thea
watched him with pride, as if her were learning to walk for the first time. No
sooner had he crossed the room, however, than she flung an accusing question:
"Icarus, why did you
come to this house?"
He
spoke without apology. "I was going to call on Zoe. I lost my way."
She
flared like a pine-knot torch. "Your friend, Eunostos.
He was going to see your friendl You sent him to her,
didn't you?"
"No,"
I said, "but I intended to take him myself the next day."
"You
wanted to he with her. Both of you.
To lie with a harlot."
Harlot
indeed! Zoe, the kindest of women. Anger made me
eloquent, and also cruel. "She is warm, generous, and womanly. It's true
that she gives her body. But you give nothing. Your body has no more warmth
than a drift of snow. I was happy until you came. I had my friends, my house,
and my garden, and no one asked me to behave like a eunuch. What did you do?
Despised my friends, changed my house, and picked my flowers. Zoe is better
than you, in spite of her lovers. She at least is a woman and you are a bloodless prude."
She slapped me across the mouth before I had
time to regret my accusation. I shoved her onto the
floor. She fell with a startled gasp and sat in a mound of poppies like an image of the Great Mother on a throne of flowers, but without the Mother's composure.
"Icarus,"
she wailed, as if to say: "Give me a hand
and take your sister's part against this brute."
But
Icarus let her sit. "We are still going to call on Zoe," he said.
"Watch
the bee woman," warned Pandia. "She's up to something."
Exchanging
accusations, we had quite forgotten the cause of our quarrel. Pandia had been
more vigilant.
"I've
kept an eye on her," she said. She had taken a stance at the door with fire tongs in her hand. "If she had tried
to get by me, I would have let her have it. But she's starting to cry, and that
must mean a trick."
Indeed,
Amber had crouched among her now beeless flowers, and silent tears had
diamonded her cheeks.
Icarus went to her side. "We are not
going to hurt you." "You think I am weeping from fear?" "Remorse then?" I asked. "Isn't it a little
late?" "I am weeping for myself," she said, "and my own
pitiless heart. He lay in my arms, frightened and
gentle—a boy's innocence and a man's body. Intimately lovable, infinitely pitiable. Yet I could not
love him. I could not pity him. And so, when I saw the three of you hurling the
anger which is another face of love, I wept for envy. I wept my first and my
last tears. I live in a house of flowers, but I pick them only for
their honey and never regret the crushed petal or the broken stem. I will
always be a seeker of honey, it seems. The
honey of flowers—or gold."
"Gold?" I asked with suspicion. "Someone paid you, didn't he? It was not
your wish to love which made you seek out Icarus. You were paid to kill him
with your kisses I"
She
began to laugh. "What will you pay me to learn who paid me?"
"Your
life."
She
looked at my knotted fist and powerful hooves. "Ach-aeans.
As they paid the rest of my people. We have let some
of their scouts enter the forest."
"The Man called Ajax?" cried Thea.
"Was he among them?"
"Yes.
He has given us bracelets and offered a tortoise shell full of gold to the one
who kills or betrays you into his hand. You, Icarus, and
Eunostos. To get you, he will even launch an invasion."
Chapter
VII INVASION
We
reached the lands
of the Centaurs shortly before twilight. Moschus and his countrymen were
fighters as well as farmers, the strongest of the six tribes of Beast, and
their leader Chiron was the uncrowned king of the forest. We were coming to
tell them about the treachery of the Thriae. In times of peace, each of the
tribes retained and jealously guarded its independence, but in times of danger
everyone looked to Chiron: for example, the cold winter when the wolves came
down from the mountains to steal our game and children. "Dip your arrows
in the juice of the wolf's-bane root," suggested Chiron. We routed the
wolves with our first charge, and Moschus acquired his sash.
We
crossed an irrigation ditch and entered a trellised vineyard where little
kernels, green and hard like sea grapes, would sweeten and purple with
approaching summer until they lured the bees even from the houses of the
Thriae; an olive grove whose silver leaves had tarnished with the dying sun to
the fitful sheen of old jewelry; and then a grove of palm trees imported from
Libya and nurtured to the date-clustered, full-branched opulence of a desert
oasis. Next, we skirted the enclosed compound of the cattle, whose fence of
sharpened stakes withheld nocturnal bears and the occasional hardy wolf which
still descended from the mountains, and came to the wall-less
town of the Centaurs.
I
walked to the edge of the moat and peered at the sharpened stakes which
bristled from its depths like the teeth of a barracuda. A surer defense than
walls, I thought with a shudder. And yet the shrewd Achaeans were not likely to
balk at such an obstacle. I knew of their battering rams which, if two were
placed end to end, could erect a narrow bridge, and I noticed a clump of olive
trees dangerously close to the moat and offering cover to an enemy wishing to
cross in the dead of night.
"Chiron,"
I boomed, and the tallest and kingliest of all the Centaurs detached himself
from his friends and galloped toward us along a path which was strewn with
seashells.
"Eunostos,"
he neighed, rearing to a halt on the other side of the moat. "We don't
hear that bellow often enough. And I see you've brought your new friends, and
little Pandia, hungry no doubt." He entered a low wooden tower with a flat
roof, and presently a narrow, railed drawbridge, supported by bronze chains,
eased over the moat with the soundlessness of a great eagle descending from the
sky (it was one of my own designs). We met on the bridge and I told him about
the Thriae.
His face darkened. "I am not surprised.
They are capable of any mischief. We will have to take steps."
We
followed him into the town. His mane seemed a drift of snow, newly fallen and
not yet hard, and his wide, unblinking eyes held the blue clarity of a lake in
the Misty Isles on one of those rare days without mist. His eyes saw everything;
they could hold anger but never rancor. They understood and sometimes even
judged, but they never condemned. He was not an ascetic, you understand. Those
who live close to the soil like the Centaurs, growing crops and raising
cattle, always keep something of earth in their veins and in their faces. They
are farmers and not philosophers. But earth in Chiron had been purified to the
white, finely sifted sand of a coral beach.
The
bamboo stalls of the Centaurs were twinkling on their lights. They were long,
slender houses built of bamboo, with pointed roofs and open ends, and above
each threshold hung a lamp enclosed in an orange parchment and called a "lantern" and a small wicker cage which held a humming
cricket, the luck of the house (remember, the Centaurs had traveled to the Land
of the Yellow Men). At night the Centaurs slept on their feet, leaning against
the wall, which they covered with silken tapestries from the looms of the
Dryads to ease their sensitive flanks, and resting their hooves in a carpet of
clover, renewed each morning by the diligent females while their husbands
worked in the fields.
Some
of the males were bathing in terracotta tubs adapted to their long frames and
ending with a trough in which they could rest their arms and head. They snorted
and flailed their legs and kicked water at friends who happened to pass within
their range. The females were building fires in front of the houses or cleaning
the hoes and rakes which the males had brought from the fields or feeding the small,
plump, and immaculate pigs which they kept for pets as Men keep dogs or
monkeys. My good friend Moschus erupted from one of the tubs and, lathered with
konia, a cleansing lye with a base of ashes, cantered
to greet us. He nodded curtly to Thea, paternally to Icarus, and seized both my
hands. Before he could hint for an invitation, Chiron told him our news.
"Blow the conch, will you,
Moschus?" he asked. "It is time for a conclave."
Moschus
blew the conch as forcefully as he blew the flute, and an oceanic summons
compounded of many sounds —the indrawing tide, the foaming disintegration of
waves as they meet the beach, the bodiless wails of drowned mariners-boomed
implacably across the land. The Centaurs dropped their tools, forsook their
baths, and, accompanied by their pigs, followed us to the theatrical area in
the center of town, a round pit open to the sky, circled with
flaring torches, and ringed with twelve stone tiers of seats. It was here that
they performed their dramas in honor of the Great Mother, whom they call the
Corn Goddess, and her son, the Divine Child, and raised their resonant voices
in dithyrambs of praise.
After
the Centaurs came the other Beasts: the Panisci from their burrows, annoyed at
being summoned before they had stolen their supper; the Bears of Artemis, who,
roused from their hollow logs, were rubbing their eyes sleepily and combing
their fur with combs of tortoise shell; the Dryads, tall and beautiful like
their trees and redolent of bark and tender buds of spring. And of course the
Thriae, ignorant, it seemed, of Amber's betrayal. They fluttered out of the sky
in three swarms: the drones with busy titterings and quick feminine jerks of
their wings; the workers dour, unsmiling, and heavy of movement, as if encased
in armor; and last, three of the queens (Amber, the fourth, did not appear)
with their dignity somewhat lessened by the heavy gold bracelets jangling on
their arms.
Chiron, lord of the Centaurs, descended the
twelve stone tiers and entered the pit. No sooner had he raised his noble head
then silence enveloped his audience. You could hear the bleat of a sheep in the
compound of the animals, and close at hand, the peremptory squeal of a pig, whose master silenced him with a thump to his tail.
Chiron spoke. His words had the ringing
urgency of a trumpet blast. "Grave charges have been
made. Grave warnings offered. We will hear from Eunostos, our esteemed
friend."
Rustic that I am, gardener and artisan, I have no skill at oratory
(though perhaps a modicum as a poet), and the sullen crowd dismayed me.
Summoned without explanation, they poised rather than sat and waited to be
cajoled and convinced—except for my friends, who stood on the edge of the pit.
Thea was smiling encouragement; extending her little hand in a gesture of
affection and support. Pandia was trying her best to look attentive and conceal
the fact that she would rather eat supper than listen to a speech. Icarus
looked —well, worshipful. Whatever I said would sound inspired to him.
I
spoke: "Ever since we came to the forest to escape the harassment of Men,
we have lived in peace and abundance. Each of us has worked in his own way to
make his own contribution. Each of us has done what the Great Mother designed
him to do. Our hosts, the Centaurs, have supplied us with produce from their
well cultivated farms. The Dryads have woven silk on the looms in their trees.
The Thriae, the Bears of Artemis, the Panisci—need I remind you of their skill
and their dedication?" (It was also unnecessary, I felt, to remind them that
the Thriae had always made good thieves as well as workers). "In the past,
we have been content to live to ourselves. Self-completeness has been our aim
and our achievement. No longer. One of our tribes has
hungered for foreign gold."
I paused, not for dramatic effect like a
Centaur reciting a dithyramb,
but to catch my breath and find the words for my peroration. I had caught their
interest. Now I must goad them to action.
I pointed my finger at the queens of the
Thriae. "There stand the guilty Beasts—traders for gold and traitors to
our people. I have it from the mouth of their fourth queen that she and her
people have accepted gold to betray my friends into the hands of the Achaeans.
To gain this end, they have promised to help the Achaeans invade the
forest."
INVASIONI An audible gasp, incredulous, ■
astonished, rippled along the tiers like a wind in the boughs of a palm tree.
Such was the fear which our bestial characteristics— homs,
hooves, tails—had inspired among Men, such was our isolation among the
mountains, that invasion had never threatened us in all the years since the
Beasts had come to the forest. Only Aeacus, by our own sufference, had strayed
among our fastnesses and returned to Knossos with tales or silences to
strengthen our legend. Nevertheless, Chiron and other elderly beasts remembered
the time when we had lived near the sea and pirates had landed in Gorgon-prowed
ships to burn our farms and capture slaves. Remembered the splintering doors,
the red dragons of fire constricting their coils around our reed-built houses,
the cries of infant Panisci caught in nets and Dryads dragged by their hair
through burning olive groves . . . the haughty sneer of the Cretan king when
those who survived the. attack demanded justice:
"Protect your own. I am not responsible for the chance attack of
pirates." . . . the final agonizing decision to retreat to the safety of
the forest and forsake the Men with whom we had lived in harmony for many
centuries . . . the angry farmers, reluctant to lose our help in the fields,
trying to stop us and Chiron confronting them with a terrible ultimatum:
"Prevent our flight and Blue Magic will destroy your crops." . . .
Centaurs burning the fields at night with a cloud of fertilizer . . . blackened
vines in place of luxuriant vineyards and terrified farmers urging us on our
way with gifts of milk and cheese and all the while exalting us into Legend,
not Men, not Beasts, but four-legged, cloven-hoofed demons who could blight
the crops with their evil, witching eyes.. ..
Chiron advanced to the edge of the pit and
leveled a steely gaze at the three queens. "What is your answer to these
charges brought by Eunostos?"
One of the queens, the oldest, made her way
down the tiers and occupied the pit as if it were a throne. A wizened woman,
with mottled skin and huge golden eyes, she had hidden her arms with bracelets
which clattered when she walked.
Her
voice was honey and salt. "His human friends have bewitched our good
Eunostos. Whatever plot is afoot, it is they—the girl and her brother—who have
perpetrated it, and we poor Thriae are its victims. I know of no gold from
Achaean soldiers, unless it has gone to the witch-child Thea and her big-headed
brother."
"And this?" I asked, pointing to a bracelet strung with
miniatures of the death masks worn by Mycenaean kings. "Did you get this
from my shop?"
She
looked at her wrist. "Where else? Your workers
traded it to me for six jars of honey."
"No
Telchin made it," I said. "In my shop or anywhere
else in the forest. They can only copy what they have seen. Death masks
belong to Mycenae and Tiryns."
She
shrugged. The Thriae are quick to lie and brazen when they are caught. Her
wings unruffled, she said: "Suppose it is true that we accepted a few
Achaean bracelets in return for the human children. If we let your Thea and
Icarus stay in the forest, they will surely bring evil down on us just as their
father did. Need I remind you that their mother, Kora, was burned to death in
her tree? My people and I merely wish to see these dangerous intruders driven
from our midst. We did not conspire to see the forest invaded. If you do fear
invasion, I suggest you deliver the children to us, and we in turn will give
them to the Achaeans and remove all threat."
"She calls us the human children,"
protested Icarus. His voice was strong and compelling. "She does us a
terrible wrong. By her own admission, our mother was the Dryad Kora. Look at my
ears and tell me I am a Manl"
"Keep
the children! They belong here as surely as I do." It was Zoe. I wanted to
hug her.
And Moschus: "Keep the
children!"
"KEEP THE CHILDREN!"
Welling
from a hundred throats, the plea had become a command, sharp, imperious, not to be denied. The old queen fluttered her
bulging eyes, but Chiron silenced her before she could speak.
"Keep
them we ■ will. Defend them we will against invaders. And you," he
blazed at the queen, "you and your people are no longer welcome at our
counsels or in our forest. Go to the men who have bought you with gold. Tell
them that they attack us at their risk."
The
queen smiled and her thick lips writhed like a jellyfish. "Have you
shields to withstand the bite of their axes?" she asked. "Have you
greaves and breastplates and helmets? I think we will soon be returning with
the conquerors. Fatten your pigs to feast us when we come."
The
Centaurs closed their hooves protectively around their pigs and shrank from the
opening wings of the drones, who, tittering nervously,
kicked themselves from the ground with a decorous
lilt of their toes. The workers lumbered after them, ■ their customary
sullenness darkened to a glowering rage, and the three proud queens ascended
the sky as if they were climbing the stairs of a palace and extinguished themselves in the labyrinth of night.
Chapter
VIII THE DULL THAT WALKS LIKE A MAN
In
the time preceding
a battle, the trivialities of peace become eloquent. The lamplit roots of my
den, twisting their friendly protection above our heads, seemed to say: Enjoy
while you can the pungent musk of scrambled woodpecker eggs and the amber
conviviality of beer poured from a skin. Tastes sharpen, colors intensify, and
love, like a friendly ancestral serpent, leaves a
beneficent trail across the floor. Thea and I had fought each other in the
house of Amber: with blows and crueler words. But no one alluded now to our
differences. After the war, we could speak again of the old anger and the old
pride and admit, perhaps, that each had needed to speak yet spoken too much.
But now, in the forest's last tranquility, I knew that I loved her with all the
ardors of my once fickle heart. It is said that the Great Mother was formerly a
maiden, slender and virginal, who lived in a house of willow boughs where all
the animals came to bring her food and lay their horns and antlers beneath her
hands. Willingly would I have laid my tangled mane beneath my Thea's hand. She did not touch me, but sometimes her hand trembled
in the air between us, as if with the least encouragement it would come to rest
like a tired butterfly. Shyness held me from touching her, and the fear that, once
having touched, I would love her to my despair and perhaps destruction.
Every
morning we met in my shop. Icarus whittled arrows from the boughs of linden
trees and Thea fitted them with heads of flint, sharpened to lethal points. My
workers and I were hammering a shield for Icarus.
"I
ought to surrender," said Thea. "It's me they want, much more than
you and Icarus. It was I who angered Ajax—hurt his pride. If I went to him now,
he might forget his invasion."
"He's
a warrior," I said, "with a taste for battle. Any
battle. His hurt pride is merely an excuse for launching him on a new
adventure. Achaeans are always getting their pride hurt to give them a pretext
for war. They hold it over their heads like a parasol and rattle their swords
when it catches a few raindrops. Even if you went to him, he would still attack
us. In addition to our gold, we're worth a fortune as slaves. It's been a long
time since Panisci performed in the court of Egypt."
"And
a Minotaur," said Icarus. "They would probably send you to pleasure
the queen. I expect you would bring two fortunes. Much more
than my sister."
"And," I continued quickly to Thea,
"even if you could stop the war, I wouldn't let you go to him. I don't
mean to let you out of the forest again."
"I have no wish to leave." She
touched my hand at last. "What are our chances, Eunostos? I have seen
those dreadful Achaeans. Their only love is to fight. They are brutally strong
and foolishly brave and so girded with armor—greaves, cuirasses, helmets—that
their flesh is almost unassailable."
"The
Centaurs also are stout fighters," I said. "Farming keeps them in
shape. Being both horse and rider, they sur-
pass the
best cavalry. They can charge like the wind, grapple with their hands, and
kick with their hooves."
"But
numbers are against us, I think. How many Centaurs are there?"
"Forty
males."
"There
must be a hundred Achaeans with Ajax, and all of them armed to the teeth. The Centaurs have only their clubs and their
bows and arrows."
"Don't
forget the Panisci, and don't mistake them all for children. Some are
middle-aged and very wily. There must be fifty of them." (They were much
too furtive for an exact count.)
"And
how many Thriae?"
"Fifty,
but some are drones and of little account. The queens, I suspect, will
guide the Achaeans and show them every secret turning in the forest. There will
be no chance for us to lay an ambush, except in the deeply wooded sections
where the Thriae can't fly."
"But
we have you," said Icarus proudly. "You're worth an army of Achaeans.
I am going to fight at your side."
"In
time you will," I said. "In time we will fight together like two old
comrades. For the moment, however, I want you to stay with Thea and the
Telchines to store supplies and guard the house. If the Centaurs and I should
lose the first battle, I will need a place in which to lick my wounds, and as
you know, this tree is as good as a fort."
He sighed heavily but did not protest the
disagreeable order. Truly, I thought, he is learning to be a warrior.
"I will guard your house," he said,
"and keep it safe."
"Now
look at the shield my workers have made for you I" I said, touched by his vow. Shaped like a figure eight, embossed with luck-bringing serpents inspired by Perdix, it was such a shield as kings
have bome into battle to give their names to legend. Accepting the gift from
Bion's two front legs, Icarus held it at arm's length and waved his free aim as
if to brandish a sword.
"Ho,"
he cried, "ho," as he stepped and lunged, parried and ducked,
pretending to run me through the chest. Then he remembered to thank the
Telchin. He patted his head. "It is very beautiful." The Telchin was
not impressed. "It is quite the most fearful and deadly shield I have ever
seenl" he continued. "It will help me to slay a dozen warriors, and
mingle their blood with its golden snakes. I will name it for you. I will name
it Bion."
The Telchin bobbed his head
in wordless devotion.
It
was Pandia who came to tell us that Chiron had blown the conch shell to
assemble his army against the Achaeans.
They marched across the field in ragged but
resolute lines, their leather boots tearing the yellow gagea and cracking the
willow rods of our fallen glider. They moved toward the trees like walking
flames, yellow of armor, its bronze enkindled by sunlight; yellow of beard
below their crested, sun-bright helmets. The queens of the Thriae, Amber among
them, circled busily above the soldiers. The sullen workers had yet to make
their appearance, but the drones were dimly visible on the far side of the
field, beyond the range of our arrows but close enough for their animated
chatter to reach us like a distant droning of bees.
We lurked in the trees, and clumsy shields of
cow's hide, hurriedly made by the Centaurs in our few days of grace, lay at our
feet like the belts of animals. At Chiron's signal we stepped between the
trunks, aimed with unhurried precision, and loosed a volley of arrows. The
queens of the Thriae shot above the threatening shafts. They shook their fists
and their sweet voices piped incongruous oaths; Amber, the youngest, was also
the loudest in her denunciation of the
"foul horses" and the "rutting Minotaur." The
hundred Ach-aeans fell to their knees in a ring and raised their broad round
shields above their heads. They resembled a giant tortoise, and our well-aimed
arrows fell noisily but harmlessly onto their collective shell. Again, the
creak of the linden bow, the twang of the arrow guided with the green tail
feathers of a woodpecker. Again, the stout, resistant shell.
Six times we drew and loosed our arrows. At last a few of them began to
penetrate the crevices between the shields, and one of the shields, two, three
collapsed as if a giant invisible foot had stepped on the tortoise and broken a
part of its shell. But our quivers would soon be emptied.
"Enough,"
said Chiron. "Let them advance. We will fight them among the trees."
Once
among the trees, they had to advance in narrow files, and the branches above
their heads were so heavy with vines that the Thriae could not guide them and
point out our hidden presences. But arrows were useless in such terrain and
among the close-set trees the long Centaurs and a tall Minotaur were limited
in their prowess. Here, the best fighters were the sly, agile Panisci. Their
little hairy bodies could blend with the vegetation. They could crawl where
Centaurs could not walk: retreat, advance, circle,
harass with their bruising slings. They fired at the areas of flesh which were
not protected by armor—the face—the arms, the thighs. Their stones moved so
quickly that they might be mistaken for large, soundless insects; they were no
less painful for the fact that they disabled instead of killed.
Cries
of astonishment greeted the first barrage. Men clapped hands against their
wounded flesh and drew them away when their fingers oozed with blood.
"It's children," squealed Ajax (I knew him from Thea's
description). "They've sent their children against usl"
"Children, Hades," cried Xanthus,
the one who had lost his ears. "It's goats!" He lunged at a flying
hoof and received a blow to his chin. "And watch those hooves!"
One
of the Achaeans, harrassed out of his line by the slingers, leaned on the trunk
of an oak to catch his breath. A faint groaning of wood alerted him to scan the
leaf-shrouded limbs. Did the rascally slingers—children, goats, demons,
whatever they were—hide in trees? A noose-shaped vine tightened around his neck
and jerked him from his feet. He kicked and waved his arms; he could not
scream. The friends who cut him down discovered a corpse who had bitten through
his tongue. Above their heads, a woman's laughter tinkled among the branches;
her green hair was indistinguishable from the leaves.
But
furtive slingers and gallant Dryads could not be expected to stop the Achaean
advance. Only the Centaurs and I could hope for decisive victory, and not among
trees but in the first clearing. We watched them stagger with slain or wounded
comrades into the open grasses and imbibe courage from the bountiful sun. We
counted their losses: three we had killed with arrows; four had been stunned by
the slings of the Panisci; and three had been hanged by Dryads. It was time for
the Centaurs and me.
By choice I am not a fighter, but a worker of
gems and metals, a sometime gardener, a peace-loving rustic, and finally a
poet. But who can follow a trade or write a poem when helmeted warriors are
stomping about the country and threatening to ravish the women? The time to
fight is not the time to garden, and no Beast should hesitate to exchange his
hoe for a sword. I preferred the hoe. On the other hand, I did not fear the
sword.
"Despoilers
of women," I thundered. "Burners, looters,
pillagers, and Zeus-damned Northerners!"
The Achaeans awaited our charge with
stupefaction. Their mouths dropped open as if they had broken their jaws, and
their blue eyes widened to utter vacuity. Well, perhaps they had reason to
blanch. Forty thundering Centaurs can raise more clatter than a hundred
horse-drawn chariots. Then I saw that the cause of their dread was not the Centaurs.
It was me. The Minotaur. The Bull That Walks Like a Man. They scattered before my advance like
chickens surprised by a wolf. They risked the multiple hooves of Moschus or
Chiron to eacape the mere two arms of a Minotaur. No sooner had I swung my axe
than I found myself swinging at empty air. One of them, two, I laid on the
ground with well-aimed blows, but the others kept out of reach. Enough. I did
not intend to tire myself in futile pursuit.
"Ajax,"
I boomed. "In the name of the Princess Thea, I challenge you to mortal combat!"
No
true warrior, least of all a battle-loving Achaean, can ignore a personal
challenge, and Ajax, in spite of his ignorance, lechery, and dirt, was not a
coward. He lost no time in answering my summons, though I cannot say that he
exactly charged me; rather, he squeaked: "Minotaur, here I am!" and
tensed himself to receive my blows.
Somewhat
doubtfully protected by my shield of cow's hide, I charged him with the
anything but doubtful deadliness of my double-headed axe, its bronze blade
smelted and sharpened in my own shop. My battle-axe was much less wieldy than
Ajax's sword, but much more deadly if I landed a blow. You never jab with an
axe like a fisherman spearing fish— you swing and slash in great half-circles,
from side to side or head to foot. He jabbed, withdrawing: I swung, advancing.
When his potent shield deflected my blows, I discarded my useless framework of
hide and pressed him with such abandon that he dropped his shield and clutched
the hilt of his sword with both of his hands. The muscles which
Thea
had once admired in my arms tautened to the straggle; leaped beneath my skin
like the slashing claws of a crab. You know, I am clumsy when I walk in the
house. I stumble on carpets and hip on stairs. I overturn pitchers of wine and
spill bones in my lap. But a furious rhythm directed me as I lunged and
parried, lunged and parried, gaining a foot, holding my ground, gaining,
holding, gaining. The clash of metal became a martial music which stirred my
feet, my hands, my torso to the long exhilarating
dance of war. And Ajax started to tire. He blinked the sweat from his
hairy-browed eyes; he gasped like a diver wrestling an octopus.
"Xanthus," he called at last.
"Pluton, help me!" and two of his cohorts, battling a wounded
Centaur, leaped to defend their chief. Two, mind you! Three
men against one Minotaur. I swung my axe in a rapid, deadly circle. But
the earless Xanthus used his sword like a spear and threw it at my legs. It
slashed me above the ankle. I gave such a roar that a momentary silence settled
across the field; Achaeans and Centaurs poised between their blows and stared
at me with gleeful or sorrowful eyes; awaited the fall of the Beast which had
walked like a Man.
While
Xanthus recovered his sword, Ajax and Pluton pressed their attack. They
thought, no doubt, to find me lamed and helpless. But my roar had vented anger
and not defeat. The side of my axe bit into Pluton's neck; in the handle, I
felt the spasms of his death-struck body. I had no time in which to recover my
axe. Ajax came at me with murder in his hand. He looked like a hungry sphinx.
The stench of him struck me in the face.
"Ajax,"
I railed. "You ought to take a bath." I lowered my horns and butted
him off his feet.
Then
I heard Chiron's cry: "Withdraw, withdraw to the woods!"
Withdraw? Unthinkable I Had not my
forefathers said: "Never turn tail until you have lost your horns?"
But
I saw the reason behind the command. A second army had entered the field.
Chapter
IX ARROWS AND HONEY
A hundred
fresh Achaeans had entered
the field. Probably Ajax had lured them from the coast with promises of gold
and slaves: Centaurs to draw their chariots; Panisci to sell in the marketplace
at Pylos. Our retreat was rapid but not disorganized. We left behind us five
dead Centaurs, their limbs awry in the grim ungainliness of death, and yet
their eyes still open and seemingly as sentient as when they had scanned a new
network of irrigation ditches or studied the secrets of the Yellow Men.
Fortunately, the reinforcing Achaeans did not follow us into the trees; they
seemed content to succor their battered comrades, who had lost a fifth of their
numbers to hooves and battle-axes.
"We
shall go to defend our town," said Chiron, when a grove of carob trees had
separated us from the hateful field. "Eunostos, why don't you get your
friends and join us? We have enough food to withstand a long siege. Remember
how we beat off the wolves for three whole weeks?"
"You
might bring us a few skins of beer," whispered Mos-chus, who followed
close on my tail.
"If
I stay in my house," I explained, "we will make the Achaeans divide
their strength. Small as it is, it can stand a siege." I could not admit
that I doubted the strength of their town, in spite of its bristling moat.
"Do as you please," said Chiron,
though Moschus audibly grumbled. "I hope your little friends can draw a
bow."
"They
are both good fighters. And of course they blame themselves for the war. Thea
offered to surrender herself to Ajax."
"Not
a bad idea," muttered Moschus, but Chiron silenced him with a glare.
"Tell
them they aren't to blame. Sooner or later, Men were bound to attack us. We are
too unlike them—our hearts as well as our bodies. Nature to us is sometimes
irascible, sometimes unpredictable, but still—a friend. To them, in spite of
all their talk about worshiping the Great Mother, she is either a slave or a
master. They fear her unless they can put her in chains."
I
traveled home by way of Pandia's house. Her town was undefended, and I wanted
to offer her asylum in my trunk. It was not really a town; a hamlet, no more,
with a dozen hollowed logs placed in a ring around a carefully cultivated berry
path—blackberries for food, bearberries for a bracing, astringent drink. The patch
was crisscrossed with narrow paths and thickly quilled with posts where baskets
of berries could be hung on wooden hooks. The open ends of the logs confronted
the patch and allowed the owners to keep a watchful eye for the stealthy crows
which came with twilight.
I
crossed the crooked stream which carried snow from the mountains and laved the
town in a cool, perpetual breeze. No one greeted me; no one contested my
approach. I paused at a low, thom-rimmed fence and raised the latch of the gate
with as much noise as possible to announce my arrival. The back ends of the
logs, sealed with clay and stained with umber, stared at me like lidless eyes.
I walked between two of the logs and emerged within the circle and facing the
front doors. Each log was high enough to accommodate a standing Bear Girl and
long enough to enclose two rooms, their rounded walls hewn and polished to a smooth finish. The first room served as a
pantry, whose open shelves abounded with jars of honey and bowls of berries,
and also with trays of freshly smoked fish, a little rank to the nostrils of a
Minotaur. The second room, invisible behind a curtain of dried black-eyed
Susans strung on silken strands, I knew to be the sleeping quarters or, in the
term of the Girls, the Repositorium. One of the Girls was moving drowsily
through the berry patch and filling a pail which hung from her paw.
"Where is Pandia?" I asked without
polite preliminaries.
She
pointed to one of the logs. "Asleep. It's the Afternoon Repose, you know.
I was sleeping too till I dreamed about dinner."
Stooping to half my normal height, I entered
the porch of the designated house, flung aside the curtain of black-eyed
Susans, and found Pandia asleep beneath a coverlet of rabbit skins, with a pot
of Cretan Bears-tail twisting its yellow and purple flowers on a table beside
her couch.
"Pandia?" I called. "PANDIA."
She did not stir.
"Bears," I said.
She threw back the coverlet and almost
overturned the pot of flowers. "Bears?"
"Human bears; Achaeans. They have won the first battle and entered
the forest. Would you like to come to my house and stay with Icarus and
me?"
"Yes."
"Would your friends like to visit the
Centaurs? They would be much safer there."
"We don't like the pigs. Besides,"
she added, "the Achaeans may not bother us. There is nothing here they
could want."
She
neatened her hair with a comb of tortoise shell, hurriedly tied her rabbit
sash in a bow with unequal ends, and followed me out of the village with one
regretful look at the berry patch.
"Do
you know what war is?" She sighed. "It's giving up berries so you can
stick swords in people."
"But
if we don't give up the berries, we shall have to lose Thea and Icarus."
"You're
right," she admitted, "and Icarus is worth a whole patch. He's rather
like berries himself, you know. Good to have at the table or in the kitchen,
sweet but not sugary. Except he doesn't have thorns."
"He's
learning to grow them. He must." We jogged through the forest on rapid,
silent feet. I always lower my horns when spurred by danger, an instinctive
reaction, no doubt, to shield myself with the fiercest part of me. Crippled as
I was by a sword-slashed ankle, Pandia matched my pace and sometimes spurted
ahead of me in her eagerness to join Icarus. Her nub of a tail quivered with
fear and excitement.
I
felt an enormous relief when I saw my house, its friendly brown ramparts
lifting an island in the afternoon. Then I stopped. The house was beleaguered
by Thriael A dozen of the dour workers, conspicuously absent before the battle,
were wheeling above the trunk with dulcet cries of "Drown Icarus" and
"Burn Thea" (you would rather expect them to boom like warring
generals, but even the workers have honeyed voices). Arrows whirred from the
trunk like the green woodpeckers whose feathers guided their shafts. One of the
Thriae stiffened in the midst of a cry and fell from the air as if she had
turned to stone. Good. Thea and Icarus were manning the parapet. But how could
I reach the door with my lamed ankle?
"Pandia, do you want to go back to your
village? You may be safer there."
"Not while those Harpies are after
Icarus."
I lifted her in my arms, bending to shield
her body, and entered the deadly field. We had covered a third of the distance
to the trunk when the Thriae saw us. Like geese in the shape of a wedge, they
wheeled to attack us with a shower of rocks, which they carried in quivers at
their sides and hurled with deft jabs of their hands. The drone of their wings
made a low, continuous thunder. The rocks were small but jaggedly cutting. My
large, bowed back made an excellent target, and so did the fiery thatch of my
head. For once I was glad of my matted hair, which doubtless kept me from a
broken skull. The rock I most resented struck the tip of a horn and made my
entire body throb like the clapper of a swinging bell. If they've chipped my
horn, I vowed, by Hippos, the god of horses, I will wring their scurvy necksl Then the door in the trunk opened to disgorge my three
workers. I handed Pandia into their multitudinous legs and bounded after them,
striking the door jamb and setting the cowbell to a frantic reverberation.
Inside the door, I waved to Icarus and Thea on the walkway below the parapet.
Suddenly the pain in my ankle erupted into my head. I was briefly conscious of
falling to the ground and, at the same time, falling on sleep. The waim grass seemed a linen coverlet rising to enfold me.
I awoke to Elysium. My head lay in Thea's
lap. She was fragrant as always with myrrh and marjoram, and her little hand
touched coolness to my forehead. The ghost of a dream lingered in my brain:
Before my waking, it seemed, a sweet, incredible fire had touched my hps (a
dream surely?). I closed my eyes to recapture the fire.
"I saw you blink, Eunostos. Open your
eyes and tell me how you feel."
"First, tell me what happened
here."
"When you came with Pandia, those
dreadful women had been attacking us for an hour. They are gone now, but
they've cut your garden to pieces with their stones."
My
grapevines littered the ground like murdered snakes. The parasol hung in
tatters, the clay oven had lost its door, and the fig tree looked as if locusts
had stripped its branches. It resembled a quarry more than a garden.
I sat up and touched my rock-batttered horn;
no chips were missing. I stretched my bloodied shoulders; Thea, I found, had
eased their smart with a cloth soaked in olive oil. I tested my ankle, which
promised to hold my weight.
"We
must look for total invasion," I said, and told her about the second army.
"First, we shall have to guard against fire. Do you mind a little
rain?"
With
the help of a stone provided by the Thriae, I narrowed the mouth of my
fountain until I had thinned and widened its shower to a misty spray which covered the entire trunk.
"The
wood will soak," I explained. "Then it won't be easy to set on fire,
even with burning arrows."
Fandia
opened her arms to the downfalling spray. "But there isn't a
rainbow," she sighed, and entered the house to take a nap. "The
better to do battle," she called from the stairs.
Thea, Icarus, and I assumed positions behind
the parapet. The workers appeared to be guarding the door. They crouched in
six-legged readiness as if they momentarily anticipated the assaults of a
battering ram.
It was Icarus who sighted the enemy. "Achaeans. Just a few,
I think." Probably the main host had gone to attack the Centaurs.
"But they have a secret weapon."
The
secret weapon advanced gigantically across the clearing, a humped, tented
vehicle which somehow moved without wheels. After a few seconds of perplexity,
I recognized a harmamaxa, a large wagon invented in Asia
Minor and covered with a rounded tent of canvas: Achaean booty, no doubt, from
one of their innumerable and far-flung raids. In Babylonia, such vehicles were
drawn by horses, but animals are vulnerable to arrows and this harmamaxa was
powered by men who, having removed the floor and the wheels,
pressed towards us on foot while holding the wagon over their heads and most of
their bodies. Thus, except for their feet, which were shod in thick leather
boots, they enjoyed complete protection from arrows. Instead of the stationary
turtle we had faced this morning, here was a turtle in motion, slow,
cumbersome, but almost unassailable from a distance. Through the embrasures in
the parapet, we fired a stream of arrows at the rounded roof. They struck in
the canvas harmlessly as if they were quills, and the turtle became a
porcupine. I looked at Icarus as he fitted an arrow into his bow. His bare chest, suri-bronzed above a green loincloth, rippled with
manly muscles. And yet he remained touchingly a boy, pitting his arrows
against the well-guarded giants of Ajax. I gazed at Thea in wordless communion.
Between us, I tried to say, we will shield him, fight for him, die for him.
Somehow, it was always innocent Icarus who seemed to need protecting instead of
Thea. Innocence has been called the strongest armor; it is only strong,
however, in the company of goddess-fearing Men and godly Beasts; not
Acha-eans.
"They'll
have to come out to attack," said Icarus, wincing at his failure to slow
the tortoise. "Then we'll pick them off like the wild pigs they are."
"But they'll be at the
walls," I said darkly.
"Eunostos,"
gasped Thea. "The door has opened. Your workers are leaving the
fortl"
Dear
Zeus, did they mean to betray us? Perhaps unknowingly I had wounded their
pride.
"Bion!" I called, but I heard the frenzied buzz of
their battle-cry and knew that they meant to defend us and not betray us. The
Achaeans stopped in their tracks. The harma-maxa swayed into rooted stillness.
Attack!
Like
angry dogs, they darted between the exposed feet of the Achaeans and slashed at
their leather boots with savage pincers. Their hard hides protected them from
the half-hearted kicks of Men who were trying to hold a wagon above their heads
and most of whom could not see the nature of their attackers. The wagon swayed
and lurched as if it were bounding along a rocky road behind a pair of
fright-crazed stallions, and finally heaved on its side. Twenty-five
terror-stricken Men scrambled to their feet and scurried in all directions to
escape the pincers.
Once
they were free, however, and face to face with their determined but after all
not very sizable attackers, the Achaeans regained their courage. I heard their
commander rallying them:
"Strike
at their joints, Men!"
Deflecting
our arrows with their shields, they struck repeatedly at the waving, root-like
limbs, and their sharp-edged swords began to slice through the joints. The result
was no less lamentable for being inevitable. My workers were soon hobbling
over the grass in complete helplessness,' while the warriors struck at the
tough but not impervious membrane which joined the halves of their bodies,
till the halves lay twitching in separate agony. Thus died my
brave and beloved friends, devoted as dogs and far more intelligent; artists of
the beautiful as well as warriors.
Icarus
was sick at his stomach, and I—well, I ran down the ladder, waving my bow and
hurling every oath which came to my tongue: "Butchers!" "Wolf-lovers!" "Northerners!"
I meant to go to my friends, shieldless though I was, and avenge their
dismemberment.
An
arrow struck at my feet and jarred me to a halt. "That's what they
want," cried Thea, waving her bow. "To lure you into the open and
hack you to death. Bar the door and come back to the parapet!" She spoke
with the rough urgency of an Amazon, but tears had dampened her tunic and she
looked like a little girl who had lost her doll. Rage in behalf of my workers
melted to tenderness for the brave girl who, in spite of her grief, had acted
to save my life. I barred the door and returned to the parapet to watch the
determined Achaeans right their harmamaxa and resume their advance on the fort.
Behind them, ten of their comrades had fallen to arrows and Telchin pincers.
Icarus shaded his eyes and pointed to the
western sky. Diminutive fly-shapes materialized into nine pairs of Thriae, each
pair supporting a branch which in turn supported a large bucket. Directly above
the house, they began to tilt the buckets and pour the contents down on our
heads. Amber, brown, and yellow in turn, it was much too thick for oil,
snaking as it fell like a heavy rope flung at our heads. Honey.
It was scalding honey which hissed when it struck the spray from the fountain
and, not yet cooled, lashed into streamers and droplets and spattered our skin
like a horde of terrible mosquitoes. We slapped at our bums and tried at the
same time to raise our bows, but the wavering mist of the fountain distorted
our aim, and the Thriae emptied their buckets and wheeled out of range before
we could thin their ranks.
By
now the harmamaxa had reached the walls and attached itself to the door like a
huge fungus. We felt the blows of axes under our sandals. Without leaving
then-tent, the Achaeans had cut through the canvas wall and now they threatened
to smash the oak rectangle of the door. The loss of their comrades had given
them room in which to wield their axes.
"Icarus," I said, "help me
lift the oven onto the paarapet." His eyes brightened with expectation.
"We'll drop it on their heads I"
We dragged, heaved, and wrestled it up the
ladder; we poised it, hollow but heavy, above the harmamaxa. "Now!"
The
canvas roof, which had stopped a score of arrows, buckled under the oven. A thud. A body-wrenching groan.
Hurried movements concealed beneath the partially deflated but still unbroken
canvas. Then, again, the deadly crunch of the axe, which bit into wood like a
hungry weaseL a little more hungrily with each bite, and would only sate itself
when it swung on air.
There were no more ovens to drop on their
heads. I considered other defenses. Shower them with arrows when they toppled
the door? Charge among them with my battle-axe? The sudden return of the Thriae
settled the question.
"Retreat,"
I shouted. "We can't fight two enemies at the same time."
We scrambled down the ladder, cringing as the
hot droplets began to strike our backs, and gained the easeful coolness of
the stairs. The last to descend, I paused to stare through the mist of the
fountain at the ruined garden and the shredded parasol, the vines and the
leafless fig tree. A Beast's love for a garden can be as strong as his love for
another Beast, since gardens are beings. Who can say if the poppies dream of
butterflies in amethyst clouds, the fig tree dreads the coming of the ravenous
bees to puncture its fruit, the vines exult in the sun and, growing warm,
drowse in the lengthening shade of a parasol? Dreams, dreads, exul-tance, and
repose—and love, always love. Leaves instead of limbs, but
hearts and brains, identity and individuality. It is not necessary to
walk in order to love.
The taste of loss was wolf's-bane in my
mouth.
At the foot of the stairs, I pulled the lever
which loosed a hidden panel and choked the stairwell with earth. The Pharaohs
of Egypt utilize the same principle in their tombs to guard their mummies and
their boat-shaped catafalques. (Where do you think the Egyptians learned their
secret? From my own ancestors.)
"They
can dig us out," I said, "but I doubt if they brought any shovels.
Achaeans are fighters, not plumbers."
"And if they try?"
"We'll leave by the
back door."
"Back door?"
cried Thea and Icarus in unison.
"Yes,"
I said, pausing to heighten their expectation. It is always pleasant to divulge
a secret under dramatic circumstances. "You didn't think I would live in
a house with a single door, did you? Remember my cave? Two
doors, in spite of its apparent rusticity. Here, it's the same. Let me
show you."
Between the roots in the far wall of the
bedroom, a large stone, the width of my shoulders, rested in gray anonymity. I
delivered a sharp blow with my hoof and the stone turned on a pivot to disclose
a narrow passageway no taller than a Minotaur on all fours. "It cuts right
under the field and comes out in the forest. Tomorrow or the next day, I can
slip from the house and reoonnoiter to see if the Achaeans have left the trunk.
They are not going to stay up there permanently. There are too many riches to
steal on other parts of Crete. When I return, I'll rap six times and then you
can open the door."
"It's
time for supper," said Pandia, rising from her nap in the moss, or rather,
rising with the moss and resembling a per-ambulatory thicket. "Have you
beaten off the enemy?"
I told her about our
retreat.
"You've laid in supplies, I trust?"
"Adequate but not elaborate."
"We shall just have to diet."
We
climbed the ladder to prepare our frugal dinner. In the light of a single lamp,
the usually amiable vines looked somber and strangling, as if they might drop
on our heads and tighten their leathery tendrils around our necks. Between us
lay platters of cheese and the kind of bread called gouros (dough mixed with
lentils), a skin of beer, and a cup of water for Pandia.
When Pandia asked for sweets, Icarus fetched her a jar
of pennyroyal from the workshop. But the sight of the forge and tables without
their faithful workers took his appetite.
"Eunostos,"
he said, "do you think you could say some words in memory of Bion and the
others?"
"I'll
try," I said, and made up a tiny
poem, rough and unpolished but at least loving:
Elegy
to a Telchin
Who
will guard the nest, Gather mushrooms now, Milk his aphid-cow? Lightly let him
rest.
There was a long silence, and then we tried
to talk. I touched Thea's hand. "We're perfectly safe down here. They
can't reach us without a lot of digging, and we would hear them in time to
leave by the back door. Even if- they shut off the fountain, dry out the trunk,
and set a fire, we're well insulated by the roots."
She
forced a smile. "The roots, you say. They look—well, as if they had turned
poisonous and begun to watch us."
"Nothing
that lives underground will hurt you. Not here, at least. Only
the things that come from the surface."
"Achaeans," she
said, "and those witchy Thriae. It's all my
fault, Eunostos. If I had accepted Ajax's advances, none of this would have
happened. He would have taken me back to Mycenae with him as his
concubine—Achaeans, they say, are surprisingly gentle to women in their own
country— and reared Icarus like his son."
"But
you wouldn't have come to the forest. You wouldn't have known about your
mother."
"Or
you. I don't regret the forest, Eunostos. I regret what I brought with me from
the world of Men. I opened a door."
"A
forest is like a snake," I said. "Occasionally it needs to shed its
skin, just for the sake of change. Sometimes it sheds with the seasons. Now, it
is shedding in a different, harsher but still necessary way. It is shedding
safety which threatened to become stagnation. You can be sure, though, that
its new skin will be strong and beautiful."
"You're being
kind," she said, "but not very honest."
Pandia
seemed to be napping. She had closed her eyes and opened her mouth. But the
rest of us tried to talk and avoid the apprehensions which come with silence.
"I
expect," said Icarus, "that the Achaeans want your shop as well as
us. The gold, I mean."
"Yes,"
I said. "To melt down in their own land. You
know, they are excellent goldsmiths, if you don't mind morbid subjects. You
ought to see their death masks."
"Death
masks," said Thea pensively. "And dead vines above our heads. The
friendly snakes have died. Or something has killed them."
"Nonsense. It's the way the lamp is burning. It makes us all look dead. Like
Pandia there. I think it's time for bed."
Thea and Icarus rose to
their feet.
"Take
the lamp," I suggested. "I'll light another for myself."
Pandia kept her place.
"Pandia, wake up and come to bed," Said Thea. "Youll be more comfortable on the moss." She held the
lamp under the girl's face. The round eyes were closed like clenched fists; the
vivid mouth was drained to a deathly pallor.
The
reason lay at the back of her neck, a small, dark hump. I crushed it between my
fingers—its little bones snapped easily; its feathers oozed blood, Pandia's
blood—and threw the pulp to the floor with a spasm of uncontrollable shivering.
A Strige, a vampire owl. Pandia raised her head and
struggled to open her eyes. She rubbed the back of her neck.
"I
dreamed of bears. They were chasing me until I was very tired. I couldn't lift
my feet. I felt their hot breath on my neck."
I
pointed to the crushed body. She gasped and clung to Icarus. "A
Strige?" "Yes, but we found him in time. You'll feel all right
in the morning. It must have flown down the stairs while we were fighting the
Thriae in the garden. No doubt, they sent it to devil us. Rats, moths, all
night-flying creatures are their friends. There may be others."
We
searched the house, sifting the moss on the floor of the bedroom, peering under
the tables in the workshop, standing on benches with a raised lamp to examine
the roof of the den, and found a second Strige, balled among the roots and
apparently asleep. Soft, brown, seemingly all feathers, he looked as harmless
as a baby rabbit, but I knew that he lived on blood, which he sucked so
unobtrusively that the victim might die without discovering his presence. If
you find an animal dead in the forest for no apparent
reason, examine the back of his neck for the marks of two small fangs.
Thea was visibly shaken. She put a protective
arm a-round Pandia's shoulder and whispered, "My dear, it's all right now.
This will never happen to you again."
"Yes," I said, "it's all
right, but I think we shall all feel safer sleeping together in the
bedroom."
We
lay close to each other, Icarus, Thea, Pandia, and I, and shared the warmth of
hope in one of those bleak and endless-seeming hours which end as surely as
banqueting, games, and love. Pandia clutched my hand until she fell asleep, and
then I held her fingers, her almost-paw, loving her tenderly (yet wishing, must
I confess, that she was Thea). I was tired and sad and missing my workers, and my wounded ankle throbbed as if the tentacles
of an octopus alternately squeezed and released, squeezed and released the
parted flesh. The usually soft moss aggravated the bruises and burns on my
back.
I
awoke in the night, when the thinly flickering flame announced the
near-exhaustion of its oil. Thea was gone. I thought: she has gone to give
herself to the Achaeans.
Chapter X WOLF'S-BANE
"I'm
going to get
her back," I said when Icarus and Pandia, awakened by urgent shakes,
blinked in the light of the dying lamp. "I'm going to get her back, and
kill that murderous Ajax. He's a wicked Man, and his Men are wolves, and they
will not leave this forest with Thea." I felt like the stony bed of a
stream in summer, dry and parched and sprayed with the fine dust which blows
from Libya. I felt—untenanted. "I'm going too," said Icarus.
I
shook my head and explained impatiently why he and Pandia ought to stay in the house,
she for protection, he to protect her.
"I
can go where you can't," he continued, the rare soldier who knows the rare
time when he ought to question his commander. "They can see your red hair
for a mile, and even when you stoop, you look as big as a griffin. But I can sneak. I'm very good at it. At Vathypetro, I learned to sneak out of the palace
when I was six years old, and I've been practicing ever since."
"I'm
going too," said Pandia. "I can't sneak but I can bite." She
bared her small but numerous teeth. "They're made for fish heads as well
as berries."
"Someone has to stay here," I
explained to her. "To let Icarus and me back in the
house. Youll "be quite safe. If you hear any tunneling, then and
only then you can leave by the back door."
Pandia acquiesced with such ill humor that I
hesitated to turn my back and risk my tail within the range of her teeth.
Fortunately, Icarus mollified her with a brotherly kiss on her head. Girded
with loincloths and armed with daggers, we bent to enter the tunnel. In a
limited space, we did not wish to be encumbered with bows and arrows.
The
tunnel was never tall enough in which to stand, and only sometimes tall enough
in which to crawl; sometimes we had to wriggle on our stomachs, scraping our
bare legs and chests over roots and stones, and I found myself forcibly
reminded that my workers had built the passage for their own peregrinations and
not for the egress of a seven-foot Minotaur and the five-foot son of a Dryad.
"Icarus,"
I called behind me, booming in the cramped, earthen corridor like the angry
Bull-God before he sends an earthquake. "We are going to come to some
water which leads out of the tunnel. I'll go first. If everything is clear
outside, I'll swim back and get you. Otherwise, wait a few minutes and dien
return to the house."
The
underground water was almost as cold as the melting snow which fed it in the
mountains. I dived, negotiated a passage the size of a door, and slid to the
surface in the same stream which ran by Pandia's village. I sent the merest of
ripples widening to the bank, where a large water rat eyed me from the mouth of
a burrow belonging to a Paniscus, and green branches swayed in the current like
the tresses of drowned Dryads. I returned for Icarus and, shivering violently,
both of us climbed onto the bank and shook ourselves to restore warmth.
"Eunostos," he chattered.
"R-remember when you s-said that one day we would be old c-comrades facing
battle together?" "Yes."
"Well,"
he said. "We are. Not old, but comrades. I want you to know that wherever
you are, I am. To fight at your side and stand guard when you fall asleep. I
want you to know that you are—friended."
I
have known two loves, I thought, one for a girl who wished to be my sister and
therefore cut me like broken coral; one for a boy who wished to be my brother
and therefore comforted me like the moss in which I sleep. If I had died
before they came to the forest, my soul would have been a serpent, kind but
ugly and earthbound. Now it will be a butterfly, and no barriers of wind will
hold me from the. perilous chasms of the clouds or the
tawny orchards of the sunflower.
Warmed
at last, we crept to the edge of the field which held my house. A tendril of
smoke arose from the garden, like a beansprout climbing the sky, and the scent
of venison piqued our nostrils.
"The
swine," said Icarus. "Gorging themselves in
your house."
"Yes," I said,
"but at least they haven't burned it."
"Think
of the housecleaning after they're gone," he sighed. "Bones
in the fountain. Grape skins on the bench. And you know"—he lowered
his voice—"they won't bother to use the watercloset."
When we turned from the house to pursue our
mission, the snake Perdix coiled at our feet.
"Uncle,"
said Icarus, muffling his joyful cry into a whisper. He clasped the snake in
his hand and addressed him with great solemnity, careful to speak each word
with separate emphasis. "Did you know that Thea has been captured?"
Perdix opened his mouth and flickered his forked tongue.
"He says he understands," explained
Icarus. "It's the only way he can communicate, since I've never learned to
speak in real snake. He really does understand what I say. Not everything, of
course. Adjectives gives him trouble. But if I speak
slowly, he catches the nouns and verbs. That time when Ajax was chasing Thea,
just before we came to the forest, it was I who sent Perdix into the room to
make Ajax angry. He can help us now, I think." He restored Perdix to his
familiar haunt in the pouch of his loincloth. I was still not convinced that
the snake could help our mission, but I dared not belittle him within the range
of his fangs.
Icarus
with his snake was no longer a child with a pet. Rather, he treated Perdix as a
warrior treats a dependable ally, a horse or a war dog, with trust, affection,
and dignity. The three of us headed toward the town of the Centaurs, the
obvious place for the main host of Achaeans and also for Thea's surrender.
Along
the way, we found that Ajax had preceded us to Pandia's village. No house had
escaped a pilfering, and Pan-dia's log had been split down the middle by an
axe. Shattered crockery and a few smoked fish, evidently not to the taste of
the conquerors, testified to what had once been her well-stocked larder. They
had emptied her Cretan Bears-tail out of its pot, as if they suspected a cache
of coins, and worst of all, they had turned the communal berry patch into a small wilderness of raucous crows, uprooted posts, and stripped vines.
The Bears themselves, it appeared, had been captured by Ajax and carried on his
march.
Icarus
glanced at the crows and scattered them with a well-aimed handle from a honey pot. "I'm glad Pandia didn't
come," he said. "It would have broken her heart."
"Or
turned her stomach," I said, and resumed our journey with revenge as well
as rescue to spur my hooves.
We approached the farms of
the Centaurs with great stealth, in case the besieging Ajax had stationed
guards to protect his rear. Where the forest met the vineyards, Icarus climbed
a tree to locate the enemy. I myself am not adept at climbing (except the oaks
of Dryads). The branches have a way of buckling under my weight or catching my
tail. But Icarus insinuated himself into the foliage with a skill which did
credit to his mother's race; and after his re-connoitering, extricated himself
without a rustle.
A
cobweb stretched over one of his eyes and gave him the look of a pirate, and a
pirate's ferocity crackled in his voice when he told me what he had seen.
"They
are not besieging," he said. "They have already captured the town I
It's too far to see clearly, but I could just make out bands of helmeted men
wandering through the streets, as if they owned the place. I'll have to move
closer to get a real look."
"Wait till night. Then
we'll go together."
Darkness
is a going instead of a coming; an absence of light rather than a presence of
bat wings, mummy wrappings, ravens, or whatever other fanciful figure of speech
we poets use to describe her. But a going can be as welcome as a coming, and
daylight, hateful for what it showed, faded like a lamp which has burned its
olive oil and left us to the kind secrecy of night. We crossed the vineyards,
their green grapelets invisible beneath a moonless sky, and bypassed the
compound to avoid exciting the animals. We saw, after first hearing, two
Achaean patrols. They had been celebrating; they were still imbibing. They
sang or laughed as they made their rounds, and paused whenever they met to swap
convivialities. Under their belts they carried little flasks which they swapped
and tipped to their mouths with a maximum of contented smacks. It was not hard
to avoid them. If they saw us at all, they must have mistaken us for a pair of
palm trees with broad trunks and without fronds.
We came to the clump of olive trees which I
had previously noticed beside the moat, and one of them looked so staunch and
concealing that I felt emboldened to risk my weight in the branches. I saw that
most of the Achaeans had gathered in the theater to hold a banquet. They had
built a fire in the pit and, using their swords as spits, begun to roast their
dinner. Thea, our precious, surrendered Thea, sat on one of the tiers and
seemed oblivious to men, fire, and food. The earless Xanthus pointed toward the
fire as if to say: "Will you share in our feast?" She shook her head.
"Thea," I wanted to cry, "accept his
invitation. Your supper last night was a bit of cheese and a slice of bread.
You went to the Achaeans of your own will and now you must eat their food in
order to keep your strength." Then I discovered the reason for her
abstinence. The Men were eating not only the domesticated pigs of the Centaurs,
but some of the blue monkeys from the forest. The skinned and spitted bodies
were clearly recognizable in the light of the fire, as eager cooks jostled each
other to lower them into the flames and turn them from side to side. Blue monkeys. Thea's monkeys. The
forest's laughter, she had said. I thought of what she must feel to have them
offered her on a spit or a platter.
The. men
who were not cooking tippled from horns or wineskins, sang ribald songs about
the women of their conquests—raw-boned Israelites who would slip a knife in
your back when you closed your eyes; olive-skinned Egyptians who bragged about
their sphinxes and pyramids and made you feel like crass barbarians; and
Cretans with bare breasts who were good mistresses once they had satisfied
their pride by making a show of resistance. One man sang a ballad about the
famous Cretan bosom, which he variously compared to ant-hills, burial mounds,
and helmets, none of them happy comparisons, it seemed to me (being a poet,
perhaps I am too critical). Laughter, coarse and brutal, interrupted the songs,
and Ajax, the swaggering victor, moved among his Men, drank their wine, and claimed
the tender-est morsels from their swords.
Thus, the conquerors. The conquered lay in the streets. The sad, ungainly bodies of those
gracious farm-folk, the Centaurs, together with splintered houses, broken
lanterns, and torn tapestries, attested to a fierce battle in the very heart of
the town. The surviving Centaurs, I saw, had been shut in the animal compound
with their sheep and oxen and were now being guarded by a small contingent of
soldiers, most of whom stood at the gate while two of
their number patrolled the high and virtually unclimbable walls of thorn. None
of the males had survived the battle; and a handful of females and children,
along with the hapless Bears of Artemis and three Panisci, comprised the
prisoners. I felt as I had when I saw my workers slaughtered before my eyes; if
anything, worse, for Centaurs are higher beings, no less loyal and far more
kind and intelligent. Chiron, the blameless king; Moschus, a bore but lovable:
their faces came to haunt me, noble of mane, and the thunder of their hooves.
But tears are a luxury not permitted to warriors on the threshold of battle. I
stifled my grief into a far comer of my brain and let my anger flare like the
fires in the forge of Hephaestus, the smithy god, when he works his bellows:
anger which spurs the body to valor, the mind to craft.
"Those poor Centaurs," said Icarus
when we had left our trees and met to whisper plans. "And
the blue monkeys. How do you think the Achaeans got them?" It was
the lingering child in him which lamented the Centaurs and the monkeys with
the same grief.
"They are trusting creatures. Ajax may
have lured them right into the town with the offers of food. Or maybe they
followed Thea."
"I wish we could enter the town as
easily as the monkeys."
I
deliberated. "Perhaps we can send a weapon even if we can't go
ourselves."
"A secret weapon?" The harmamaxa had fascinated him. But the
weapon I had in mind was less obvious and much more devilish.
"Remember
my telling you about our war with the wolves and how Chiron thought of feeding
them wolf's-bane? It's a rather innocuous looking root, a bit like a dark
carrot. But the monkeys love roots of all kinds. If we could get them to eat
wolf's-bane, and drive them toward the town before they died—"
"The Achaeans would eat them, but Thea
wouldn't They would poison themselves I"
"Exactly."
"Is the poison always
fatal?"
"When taken in sufficient quantities. Smaller quantities act like a sedative.
Either way, the enemy would be knocked out long enough for us to release the
captives and take the town."
We
spent the night in my cave, sitting back to back and sharing each other's
warmth in the damp, cold air: friend and friend, remembering what we had lost;
warrior and warrior, plotting tomorrow's vengeance and what we hoped to win.
Icarus said at last: "Eunostos, I am
cold all over except for my back," and I cradled him in my arms until he
slept. He had no wish to remain a child, but it pleased him for the moment to
relax from the stance of a warrior into the old childish ways of need and
dependence, and it pleased his friend to father and shield him. It is one of
the ways of love to delight in the youngness, the litdeness, the
helplessness of the beloved.
When
the sun crept yellow feelers into the cave, we went to
look for wolf's-bane. The plant had never thrived on temperate Crete. Its
favorite habitat is the cold northern mountains of the mainland, where the sun
is a sometime visitor instead of a king.
"Perdix
will help us," Icarus announced. "A snake should know about roots of
all kinds. He lives among them." He drew the snake from his pouch and
addressed him with tenderness. "Don't you, Perdix?"
"Does he understand
the word 'wolf's-bane'?"
"It
explains itself, doesn't it?" To the snake he said with great emphasis:
"WOLF'S-BANE. ROOTS TO KILL A WOLF."
The tongue flickered with what I presumed to
be comprehension and perhaps a touch of petulance because Icarus spoke to him
as if he had no tongue to catch the vibrations of human speech. Icarus stooped
to release him and, before he could touch the ground, the snake escaped from
his fingers. We hurried to follow him through the undergrowth.
"I
think he's after a female," I whispered when the sweat of the chase had
begun to mat my hair.
"He's
doing his bit for Thea. After all, she's his great-great-niece. Though,"
he admitted, "I expect he loves me best. I've never stepped on his
tail."
Possessed of a tail myself (though its
altitude preserves it from treading sandals), I could understand the snake's
preference.
In less than an hour, he led us to the ragged
and unscalable cliff which formed the eastern boundary of the forest. In the
shadow of the cliff and the further shade of a large carob tree, we found a
clump of wolf's-bane. Like their four-legged namesake, the plants prefer
shadows to sunlight. I knew that in late summer they would burst into showy but
somewhat sinister hooded flowers, like visored helmets, of blue, yellow,
purple, or white; now, however, leaves like slender, tapering hands. We pulled
them up by their stalks and shook the dirt from their thick, tuberous roots.
They did not look appetizing, but neither does a carrot, a raw fish, or a
plucked chicken.
It
was not hard to find a congregation of blue monkeys, the happiest of animals
and perhaps the most talkative. You can hear that chattering from a great
distance, a multitude of cries which merge their separate sharpnesses into a
single music. Merry, trusting, affectionate, they recognized Icarus and me as
familiar faces and, at the same time, spied the bait in our hands. One of them
jumped on my shoulders and, twining his legs around my neck, bent to clutch at
a root. I made a soft chattering which I supposed to approximate monkey and
gestured toward the town of the Centaurs, as if to say that I would feed him
when we reached the town.
I looked at Icarus and saw the tears in his
eyes. "We're killing them for Thea," I reminded him. "To save her from those ruffians."
"I
know," he said, "but treachery is still treacherous. Otherwise, why
are you crying?"
"I'm not crying," I snapped so
sharply that the monkey jumped from my shoulder. "I'm trying to comfort
you."
"You're
always trying to comfort someone—Thea, Pandia, me—and doing very well at it. In
fact, you're the most comfortable person I know. But sometimes you need
comforting too. I think you ought to many Thea as
soon as you rescue her."
He did not doubt that we would be successful
or that, once rescued, she would wish to marry me. To be admired by such a
boy—well, it made me want to reach and aspire until my heart more nearly
equaled my height.
The
monkeys followed us in a long, vociferous stream, and I earnestly hoped that no
Achaeans would issue from the trees to contest our advance. Once, a Dryad
called to us from her bower, her face poised in the branches like a water lily
in a green pool. In the past she had always scorned me, but now she called in a
husky whisper:
"Eunostos,
take care of yourself. The forest depends on
you."
At
the edge of the forest, still under cover of trees, we fed the monkeys. With a
touching but not entirely successful attempt to avoid biting or scratching us,
they plucked the roots from our hands and ate them so quickly that they did not
have time to notice their bitterness. Then we waved our daggers and ran at the
unsuspecting creatures with a show of great ferocity. At first they mistook our
actions for a game and tried to wrestle the knives out of our hands. We had to
strike them with the flats of our blades to prove our hostility. I shall never
forget their cries of astonishment and disbelief. We watched them vaulting
across the trellises of the vineyard, still in a pack and more aggrieved than
frightened.
We
could not follow them into the fields by daylight, but Icarus, climbing another
tree, witnessed the meeting between the monkeys and the Achaeans, who heard
their arrival and came from the compound to investigate. Already the monkeys
were growing sluggish with the poison, which strikes painlessly but with first
a tingling and then a deadening of all sensations, and the men dispatched them
with swords and returned to the compound. The Achaeans, who were not acquainted
with the monkeys' usual vigor, had no reason to suspect their condition. They
received the congratulations of their friends on a good catch; they paused;
they seemed to deliberate, no doubt asking themselves if
they ought to share their prize with those in the town.
Generosity or fear of Ajax provided the answer, and selecting the plumpest to keep in the compound, they strung the remaining bodies on a rope and headed for the town.
When
the absence which is night had made our presence reasonably undiscoverable, we
crossed the fields and, encountering no patrols, resumed our vantage points in
the trees beside the moat. Two bonfires writhed in the darkness, like orange
squids in the lightless depths of the sea: one in the theater, one in the
compound. It was the many-tentacled fire in the theater which held my
attention.
Tonight
the Achaeans did not lack women. They seemed to have spent the afternoon
hunting in the woods, and three Dryads, drawn and haggard, their long hair
disheveled and, in places, apparently torn out by the roots, represented
their catch. I rejoiced that Zoe was not among them. The four queens of the
Thriae and several of the drones had also come to the banquet, but as guests
instead of captives and of course without the workers, who are not endowed for
orgies. The four queens strutted around the pit as if they had conquered the
forest through their own prowess, and they jangled more than their usual number
of bracelets—spoils, no doubt, from the gutted homes of the Centaurs. Later, I learned that the queens had indeed proved helpful traitors by surprising the Centaurs in the gate-tower and lowering the bridge to
Ajax's Men. The hope occurred to me that they might forget themselves in the
flush of victory and scatter their fatal kisses among their allies, but they
chose to stand on their dignity as queens—they smiled and received compliments
but did not descend to the familiarities of love. The drones, however, simpered
like courtesans among the rugged Achaeans, who, along with the Cretans, enjoy a
considerable versatility in sexual practices, and Amber's brother seemed to be collecting
a small fortune in arm-bands, pendants, and rings.
Achaeans
are altogether indiscriminate in their pleasures. They can eat, drink, and
wench in the same breath, and tonight they lost no time in cooking the blue
monkeys, together with fish, venison, and the last of the Centaurs' pigs. Even
while fondling a skin of wine, a drone, or a Dryad, they lifted the deadly meat
to their lips and ate with relish. Haunches and limbs were passed from hand to
hand until everyone received at least a modicum of the tender meat and enough
poison, I trusted, to drug even if not to kill him. On the topmost row of the
theater, a sly little chap concealed himself in the shadows to enjoy an
undivided monkey, but three of his comrades followed him from the pit, dismembered
the animal, and left him only the head, which, however, he ate without protest.
The vegetarian Thriae did not partake of the meat, nor did the Dryads, and when
Ajax presented a skinny leg to Thea, she flung it in his face. He slapped her
onto the stones, retrieved the leg, and shredded the meat from the bone with
one raking bite.
"Bloody
barbarian," I muttered. "I'll ram that bone right down your
throat."
"Shhhhhh,"
warned Icarus. "You're starting to bellow. After we rescue Thea, you can
ram it anywhere you like."
When
men have drunk enough wine to float a penteconter and eaten enough meat to sink
a round-built merchant ship, they usually want to sleep, but the sudden sleep
which overpowered the Achaeans resembled the miasmic mists which rise from the
bowels of Sicily and prostrate travelers when they leave their litters to drink
at wayside fountains. They began to slump on the stairs; they stretched in the pit,
swords clattering, wine cups falling from limp fingers. Those
who had eaten lightly succumbed more slowly; had time in which to view their
friends with dazed astonishment before they joined them in heaped and
sprawling confusion.
The
Thriae could not account for the strange sleep of their hosts. Intoxicated? Drugged? Exhausted
by the rigors of conquest? They fluttered above the prostrated bodies, their dulcet tones
growing shrill; they shouted, prodded with jeweled fingers, clamored—the queens
for attention, the drones for caresses. Quietly the three Dryads congregated
around Thea and began to help her collect the Achaean daggers.
Amber, kneeling to prod a recumbent body,
lifted her head to confront an armed and determined Thea, who seized the gauzy
membrane of her wing and delivered a slap which spun her head as if it had been
struck by the boom of a sail. By now the drones and the other queens had
mounted the air, and the oldest queen, she of the mottled skin and bulging
eyes, pelted Thea with bracelets until the girl relaxed her hold on Amber's
wing. With a fury of fluttering, Amber rejoined her sisters and called to Thea
as if she were spitting:
"Dearest one, I hope that a Strige will
suck your blood and blue-flies pick your bones."
The Thriae began to mass above the pit,
stripping their bracelets to use as missiles; though one of the queens was old,
and the drones were effeminate cowards, Thea and three harrassed Dryads could
hardly hope to repel an attack.
"Thriae,"
I boomed, "I am coming to get you with my armyl" I thrashed about in
my tree like a small whirlwind, and my army of one gave a roar which suggested
Minotaur in his veins.
The Thriae retreated with such precipitous
haste that two of the drones collided and almost fell to the ground before they
could disentangle their wings and, casting regretful looks at the prone, manly
bodies of their allies, flutter after their queens. It is said that queens,
drones, and workers flew to the land of the Achaeans to live on Mount
Parnassus, deliver oracles of doubtful authority, and receive the tribute
accorded to deities. (If this were a tale instead of a history, you may rest
assured that I would have drowned them in the sea like Icarus' namesake, the
ill-fated son of Daedelus.)
Thea
and the Dryads resumed their task of disarming the Achaeans. Some were dead or
dying; some would awaken with wracking pains and without weapons. Ajax,
kneeling dazedly beside his friend Xanthus, struggled to his feet and held his
great sword between him and the girl who had caused his ruin.
"She-wolf,"
he groaned. "I am going to kill you!" For a wicked
man attributes his own sins, his own wolfishness, to those who oppose him.
Slowly, laboriously, he raised the sword
above his head, as if through fathoms of water. She did not wait for its descent;
she drove her dagger between his ribs. The sword fell from his hand and
clattered onto the stones. At first, he did not fall, but faced her with
draining defiance.
"Goddess,"
he said, and crumpled at her feet, his yellow beard pressing against her
sandals.
She
stared at his body with stricken horror. Even from a distance, I saw the
rigidity of her arms and the enormity of her eyes. But she did not weep. She
had killed a man and the act appalled her, but the gods had forced her hand. She
knelt to remove his dagger.
Icarus
and I climbed from our tree. First we entered the compound and, disarming the
drugged or slain Achaeans, released the prisoners. No one spoke; there are no
appropriate words to greet a victory which comes too late and at too great a
cost.
Finally,
I said: "We will go to the town and bring the survivors to the compound
where we can watch them."
They trooped after me in a proud and
sorrowful file. The Panisci, furtive and mysterious, vanished into the night to
return to their burrows in the banks of the stream. I thought: I will feed the
Bears of Artemis from the leavings of the Achaean feast—the fish and the
venison—and make them beds under the stars with the fatherless children of the
Centaurs.
"Thea,"
I called across the moat. "Will you lower the bridge for us?"
She
came to me along the path which Chiron had walked in the time before the
invasion, a woman who, at sixteen, had put behind her the girlhood which, even
at Vathypetro, had been shadowed by the owl-wings of maturity. The Dryads
followed her in deference and awe. At last she was one of them, utterly, yet
also the strongest of them.
"Thea,"
I said, as she walked from the glowing heart of the fire, out of the light and
into the darkness; salamander, phoenix, goddess, illuminating the great
fastnesses of the night and my own heart.
Chapter
XI THE PASSING OF THE BEASTS
Twenty-one
Achaeans in all had
survived the poison. Those in the theater stirred with fitful groans and rolled
their heads as if to dislodge the demons that haunted their dreams. We lost no
time in carrying them to join their comrades in the compound.
"After I surrendered, they refused to
leave the forest," Thea explained when the drowsy warriors, clutching
their stomachs or rubbing their eyes, were safely lodged behind the walls of thom. "According to Ajax, I had caused him so much
trouble that he meant to repay himself with all the riches in the forest. If I
showed him the underground passage to your workshop, he promised to set me
free. Of course I showed him nothing."
"What
did he intend to do with you? Take you back to Mycenae?"
"I think he intended to kill me.
Somehow, I seemed to frighten
him. He called me the Beast Princess." "He was right, you know."
The
next morning, while Icarus entered my house through the tunnel to rescue
Pandia, I led a band of Panisci to the edge of the field and blared
a challenge to the garrison in the trunk. The Panisci were armed with slings, I
with a battle-axe, and we dragged a red-eyed Xanthus on a rope to corroborate
our claims to victory. The Achaeans were not long in appearing behind the
parapet. I could see the glint of their helmets through the embrasures.
"We
have won the war," I boomed, "and killed your leader, Ajax. Those of
your friends who survive are now our hostages. If you wish to save them and
yourselves, discard your weapons and leave the forest before sunset."
They
greeted my claims with derisive laughter. Smug in their captured retreat,
feasting from cockcrow to the time of lamps, they had good reason to scom an
ultimatum.
We
jerked our captive out of the trees and flaunted him in his ignominious ruin.
"Listen
to them," he urged his friends. "Ajax is truly dead and every one of
us has been poisoned by their magic." He pressed his stomach for emphasis.
"It will get you too unless you do as he says I"
Laughter
yielded to consultation, excited voices to the groan of the crude timbers which
served as a door. Framed in the doorway behind his shield, a single warrior
addressed us. His insolence could not conceal his fear:
"Send us Xanthus and let us question
him."
We
could spare one hostage to prove our claims. An eager Paniscus prodded him with
his sling, and the earless Xanthus, dragging his rope and casting timorous
glances over his shoulder, reeled to join his friends.
Led by Xanthus, the Achaeans left my house in
the afternoon, and the next morning we sent their comrades from the compound
to overtake and join them beyond the forest. I had taken their weapons, armor,
and tunics and, knowing the Achaeans cultivate their beards as the visible sign
of valor, I had force them to shave with a coarse bronze razor which left their
cheeks the color of a radish. Kings and conquerors, they had come to humble us,
and they left like a column of slaves being marched to the infamous marketplace
in Pylos.
Again,
the forest belonged to the Beasts, but to people whose heroes are dead, whose
towns he in ruins, and who must momentarily expect another invasion, the taste
of victory can be as bitter as hemlock.
Two weeks after the departure of the Acheans,
a patrol of Panisci caught a Cretan just as he entered the forest and brought
him none too gently to the town of the Centaurs, where Thea, Icarus, and I were
helping the females to rebuild their houses. Black-haired, nanrow-waisted,
thin as the peasants who live in the reed hovels along the Nile, he blinked
nervously; he looked like a man who had come from a long and grueling battle,
not yet won. Aeacus, of course, had sent him.
"Thea," I called, wanting secretly
to butt him into the moat. "Will you bring your guest some coconut
milk?" It was all we had to offer. The Achaeans had drunk our wine, and
the grapes were not yet ripe. I left him with Thea and Icarus in one of the
bamboo stalls, newly rebuilt and hung with the few silks which had not been
dirtied by the boots of the conquerors or used to clean their armor.
I
crossed the bridge. Every evening, usually with Thea and Icarus, I returned to
my house to work and sleep. Centaur females patrolled the moat and guarded the
animals—two cows, a bull, seven sheep—which remained in the compound.
"They have come for your friends?"
asked the Centaur whose name was Rhode, daughter of the noble Chiron. Before
the war, she had worn a white lily in her hair. She had cut her hair the day of
her father's death, and the short tresses no longer could hold a stem.
"Yes, Rhode."
"Will Thea and Icarus return with the
Cretan?"
"I don't know."
"There will always be someone who comes
to invade our peace. They will never leave us alone, will they, Eunostos? Isn't
it time we left the forest? Returned to the Isles?"
The
Isles of the Blest, she meant. The land in the Western Sea from which we had
come, in the age before men: a pleasant and sunny land, without dangers—and
also without adventures.
"The
gods will tell us the time," I said. "It will be soon, I think."
I
waited in my garden for Thea and Icarus. In the ivory moonlight, the fountain
swayed like a rain-drenched palm touching the earth with its fronds. I had dug
a new staircase under the ground, and of course my workshop and other rooms
had escaped the depredations of war. Not the garden, however. There was no
parasol, and my fig tree had been uprooted and burned for wood. My trellises
were bare, and the new seeds I had planted had not had time to sprout. It was
still a garden without greenery.
"Knossos
has not yet fallen," said Thea excitedly when she arrived with Icarus.
"Our father is still fighting. He learned from Xanthus, who is now his captive, that Icarus and I were here in the forest. He could
not come himself because the city-is under siege. But he sent his messenger to
urge us to stay where we are until the war is won. That's what my father says,
but—"
"But you want to go to him. You think
you can help him."
The
ardor died from her voice. "I don't want to go," she said dully.
"I want to stay here with you and our friends. But he is my father, and
the Cretans were once my people. In spite of their faults, they are better than
Achaeans. It will be bad for all of us if Knossos falls."
"And what can you and Icarus do to keep it from falling?"
"You yourself have taught us how to
fight."
Silence
returned to the garden; silence, except for the cricket-voices of the fountain
and the quick breaths of Icarus, who looked at me with the unquestioning
worship of a boy who expected the one decisive action, the
one infallible command which would solve his dilemma.
"I
don't want to go back to my father," he said. "He was like a shadow.
He carried darkness wherever he walked."
"Sadness," said
Thea. "Not darkness."
"Whatever
it was, it was cold. You couldn't touch him, you know. He had a way of drawing
back as if your fingers might dirty his robe. It's you I love, Eunostos.
Haven't I become a Beast?"
"You always were," said Thea.
"You didn't have to come here, as I did, to find the Beast in you. Perhaps
you ought to go back to find the Man. At least, a little of
him."
"What
Thea means," I said, "is that you and I, Icarus, have hearts like forests. Maybe we need to cut down a few of the trees and build a city."
"Or
save a city," she said. "Knossos. Will you
come with me, Icarus? If only for a little?"
For
a little?
Forever, I thought.
"Must I go,
Eunostos?"
"Thea
will need you," I said, wrenching the words like an arrow from my heart. I
held him in my arms for the last time. I held the young forest before it had
lost the singing of its sweetest birds and the lifting of its tallest trees; I
held its fawn and rabbit, bear cub and pink Paniscus with cloven hooves and
tail like the curl of a grapevine, and the warm fledgling of the woodpecker,
enclosed in his fort of twigs; all things small, vulnerable, and hopeful, all
things that wish to grow. But I could not arrest the passage of that
treacherous lizard, time.
"Icarus," I said. It was neither a cry nor a plea, but the simple, final utterance of a
name which I loved. I did not watch him when he left the
garden.
We
sat in the midst of the fountain as if it could wash our pain to the
insubstantiality of moonlight. The sadness of moonlight is real but a little
remote. Stars cry out in loneliness, and the moon, I think, is the loneliest
of goddesses. Still, they are far away, and the loss they tell has the wistful
sweetness of a tale about the maidenhood of the Great Mother or an old song
sung by the Dryads when they turn their handmills and grind the barley to
flour. But the sadness of a house and a garden is different and very close; as
close as the hot coal which burns your hand or the captured bat which screams
to free itself from the tangle of your hair.
"I
had hoped," she said, "to see your trellises hold new vines."
She caught my hand between the coldness of her fingers. "Eunostos, it is a Man's—or a Beast's—tragedy that two loves may call him in different
directions. By following one, he is bound to leave the other. Leave, I say, not
lose. No love is ever lost. It changes its form like water, from lake to river
to cloud, and when we are most a desert,
it falls from the sky in fructifying rain."
"I
don't know about rain," I said. "I was never a philosopher, and I'm no longer a poet. If you have to go, I want to go
with you. Protect you till you join your father and then fight in his army. You
know I can fight. You've seen me with my bowl"
"How can you leave your people? There is only you to lead them. You see, my dear, you also have
two loves. Those with a single love—how poor they arel Ajax
and war, and Thriae and gold. Ours is the treasure of pharaohs."
"I don't feel like a pharaoh. I feel
like a palm tree without any coconuts."
"You'll get them back. And blue monkeys
to play in your branches. I'm going to leave you now. You must close your eyes.
They stare and stare and ask what I cannot give."
Her
sandals leaving the garden were as hushed as the hooves of a fawn.
Aeacus did not forget the Beasts who had
sheltered his children. He sent a second messenger, who drank from a coconut in
the house of a Centaur, loosened the belt which constricted his narrow waist,
and told me about the war. The Achaean army, it seemed, had fought to the gates
of the palace, which, lacking the walls of mainland citadels like Mycenae and
Tiryns, had been frantically buttressed with timbers, rubble, and even the
stone bathtubs from the royal suite. Aeacus himself lay wounded and close to
death when his battered Cretans, among them Icarus, marched through the
corbeled arch of the gate to what appeared to be their last and mortal defeat.
But even while the lamentation of the women resounded through the gardens and
the pillared courtyards, the Princess Thea appeared on the walls and urged her
warriors to victory in the name of the Great Mother and the Minotaur. The
besieging Achaeans gasped when they saw her beauty: the crimson, helmet-shaped
skirt emblazoned with jet-black ants; the bared breasts, flaunting fertility in
the very graveyard of war; the golden serpents coiled around her wrists; the
pointed ears and the greenly tumbled hair which lent to her chiseled features a
wild and intoxicating barbarism.
Archers
forgot to draw their bows. Swordsmen fell to their knees and raised their
swords like talismans above their heads.
A hush and then an outcry.
"Sorceress I"
"Goddess!"
"Beast Princessl"
It was then that the boy Icarus charged them
with his shield Bion. They saw his pointed ears. They knew him to be her
brother. They had come to fight puny Men—sailors and merchants and perfumed
courtiers—and not these bright, avenging children from the Country of the
Beasts.
"The Beast
Prince!"
They
stared; they dropped their weapons. They reeled toward the sea, trampling
vineyards, stampeding goats among the hillocks of red poppies, fleeing, fleeing
the Children of the Beasts. To their wooden ships they fled, scrambling up the
hulls like avid crabs, hoisting the black sails until they bellied with wind
and bore them away and away from the sword-strewn beach and the boy who waved
his shield and hurled after them the curse of the Minotaur.
"And
now," concluded the messenger, flushed with the telling, "the smoke of hecatombs has made a forest of the afternoon.
Burnt offerings to the god of battles! Sandarac and myrrh in the caves of the
Great Mother! Flowers gathered from the liberated fields—poppies and roses,
violets and asphodels to garland the victors. Thea, the Beautiful, and Icarus,
Prince of Warriors. Aeacus himself was carried to watch the garlanding. He has
not forgotten your kindness to his children nor the
loss you suffered fighting against Achaeans. It is he who has sent me to offer
you the gift of two ships to return you to the safety of your homeland, the Isles
of the Blest. His own sailors will man them, and no
country is beyond their sailing. You will find both ships at the port of
Phaestus. They will be provisioned on your arrival."
I carried with me only the wicker basket from
my picnic with Thea and Icarus, and in it my green tunic, a flask of beer, a
few honey cakes, a reed pen, and some strips of papyrus (you see, I had started
to write my history); and over my shoulder a hoe. There would always be
gardens.
I met my friends in the town of the Centaurs.
Pandia led the Bears, who had never returned to live in their own village with
its plundered logs and withered vines. In spite of her tender years, she had
won a name for being something of an Amazon and she bared her teeth proudly as
the Girls trooped after her across the drawbridge, the oldest of them looking
no more than twelve and holding the hands of daughters or granddaughters who
might have been their sisters.
"Wouldn't Icarus be proud to see
me?" she said. "Yes," I said, "and so am I."
Next
came the Centaur children, some of them very young and trying to gallop in
several directions at once, and last, the mothers with their few belongings
strapped to their backs: a lantern, a wicker cage for crickets (empty), a
coverlet for cold nights at sea. At the edge of the woods, we found the Dryads
waiting in covered litters built from their trees. After they had boarded the
ships, the wooden hulls would protect them until they could find new trees in
the Isles of the Blest. The Panisci had offered to carry them. You would hardly
have recognized the once mischievous goat boys as they lifted the litters on
their hairy shoulders and moved through the forest with no attempt to frighten
their passengers or race their friends. I took my place at the head of the
company.
"Eunostos," called Zoe from her
litter. "Will you walk beside me?"
She had started to look her three hundred and
seventy years. Was this the great-hearted temptress who had danced the Dance of
the Python and emptied a skin of beer with a few gulps? No longer did she stir
my blood, but she stirred my heart to a deep, aching tenderness.
She
took my hand. "You're not the Eunostos I used to love. You have—how shall
I say?—grown up."
"Up, perhaps. Not wise."
"A
truly wise man is too modest to recognize his own wisdom. If I had not grown
old while you were growing up, I could have loved you the best of all my
lovers!"
The
trees of the Dryads, denuded of branches to build the litters, had dropped
their leaves in premature autumn. The village of the Bear Girls had been
entirely occupied by the crows, who had gutted the
logs and the berry patch with the thoroughness of a forest fire, and the burrows
of Panisci had fallen to water rats who, with twigs and mud, were busy
diminishing the large entrances to their own size. Do you know the story that
the Forest was once a god, young as the sun who steps from the sea in the morning?
That he ruled the earth until the Coming of the Great Mother and then willingly
retired to the foot of the hills with memories enough to content him for many
centuries? If the story is true, I think he has now grown tired of remembering.
Our ships ride at anchor, sturdy of cypress,
twin-masted, with dolphin-shaped pennants hanging from the beaked prows and
purple moons painted along the hulls. Today, the last pithoi of olive oil, the
last kegs of water and wine, the last foodstuffs of cheese and hard-crusted
bread, raisins, dates, and dried figs, will be carried on board from the
mule-drawn wagons sent by Aeacus. Tomorrow, if the gods send favorable winds,
we will sail for the Isles of the Blest, a voyage of great distances and many
perils, of dog-headed monsters with teeth as long as daggers and waves as tall
as a three-storied palace. But Cretan ships can swim like dolphins, play in the
troughs and mount the tallest wave. They have circumnavigated the great
continent of Libya; I think they will find their way to our blessed islands.
Leaving my ship in the later afternoon, calling to Pandia as she painted the
letters I-C-A-R-U-S below the prow, I have climbed for the last time to the
cave which I call the Chamber of the Blue Monkeys, a forgotten shrine to the
Great Mother. I have come to finish my history, written laboriously on papyrus
and fastened together into a scroll like the famous Egyptian Book of the Dead.
I shall leave the finished scroll in a copper chest for .the Men of the future.
After
we have sailed to the islands, I think that legend will not be kind to us. The
Centaurs will thunder through many a battle as the barbarous foe of Men and
their well-ordered cities; and the Minotaur, the Bull that Walks Like a Man,
what will they say of him? His tail will grow forked, his horns will sprout
like the antlers of a stag, and the gloom of his lightless caverns will terrorize
children and young virgins. "Beast" will become synonymous with
"animal," and "bestial" will be an epithet applied to
savages and murderers. Men of the future, open this cave and find my scroll and
read that we were neither gods nor demons, neither entirely virtuous nor
entirely bad, but possessed of souls like you and in some ways kinder; capable
of honor and sacrifice—and love. Consider if bestiality is not, after all, akin
to humanity. Read and understand us, forgive us for having once defeated you, and
forgive the author if he has allowed his own loss to darken his story.
I, Eunostos, Minotaur, thus conclude my
history, the Passing of the Beasts.
EUNOSTOS,
MINOTAUR
No
sooner had I written the black, sprawling letters of my name than a hand
touched my shoulder.
"Dearest
Eunostos," she said. "I will not ask to read what you have written.
If it is true, it has not drawn a pretty picture of me." A nimbus of light
from the mouth of the cave illuminated her scarlet, belled skirt and the golden
serpents around her wrists.
The
nearness of her numbed me like a draught of wolf's-bane. At last I said:
"Is it going well in Knossos? The Achaeans have not returned?"
"Not
yet. One day, I think, they will surely conquer us. But not
soon. We shall have a little more time in which to deserve a little more
time."
"And Icarus is well?"
"He
is a great hero. All the girls of Knossos are in love with him."
"And
he with them?" "With none of them."
"And you have come to tell me good-bye.
It was kind of you, Thea."
"To tell you good-bye? My poor, foolish Minotaur, I have come to go
with you, and not out of kindness either!"
"But
the sea is treacherous," I cried. "Do you know the perils beyond the
great pillars? The dog-headed monsters, the whirlpools, the clashing
rocks—"
"It
was I who chose your ships. The best in my father's fleet—at least, in what is left of his
fleet."
"You will leave your father?"
"I have always loved him. But I came
late to loving my mother. Now her people have called me."
I seized her hand and brought it reverently
to my hps. "I will be your eternal friend!"
"Friend indeed! I will come as your wife or your woman, but
not your friend. How shall we meet except through the flesh? The soul must see
through the body's eyes and feel through the body's fingers, or else it is
blind and unfeeling."
"You
say that our bodies should meet. But you are beautiful—and I am a Beast."
"Yes, a Beast like my own mother, and
lordlier than any
Man
I have ever known! Do you know why I tried to eclipse you with clothes? Because you stirred me with feelings which had no place in my tidy
garden of crocuses."
She
removed the signet ring I had given her in the forest and laid it lovingly and
yet with great finality beside my scroll. "This, my most loved possession,
I shall leave for the Goddess and in memory of my friends, the blue monkeys.
Having found my Minotaur, I can part with his ring."
With
grave simplicity, she knelt at my feet. "Love has been a climbing for me,
Eunostos. Now I have climbed until I can kneel to you."
"No,
no," I pleaded. "You mustn't kneel!" I lifted her from the earth
and held her in my arms, and she kissed me with such a sweet and burning ardor
that she might have been one of the naughty Dryads who have studied the secrets
of love for three hundred years. I held her with fierce tenderness and without
shame and knew that love is not, as some poets say, a raging brush fire, but a
hearthfire, which burns hotly, it is true, but in order to warm the cold
sea-caves of the heart and light its pools with anemones of radiance.
"If only," I cried, "if only
Icarus had come tool"
And of course he had, with Perdix.
If you want to keep up with the best science-fiction stories of the year, you will want to get your copy of:
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BEST SCIENCE FICTION 1966
Selected
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Fifteen outstanding stories selected from the science-fiction and fantasy magazines of the world, including
great tales by Arthur C. Clarke, Fritz Leiber, Clifford D. Simak, James H. Schmitz, and others.
"Entertaining and Imaginative"
—Publishers Weekly
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Day of the Minotaur
In
DAY OF THE MINOTAUR American readers will at last have an opportunity to enjoy
the imaginative genius of Thomas Burnett Swann, a writer whose works have been
compared with the marvel-packed sagas of J.R. R. Tolkien, the sweeping
adventure-tales of Mary Renault, and the sheer story-telling magic of Jack
Vance and Edgar Rice Burroughs.
This
is the novel of Eunostos, the last of an ancient and powerful race of bull-men,
of the Achaean conqueror Ajax, and the beautiful Thea, known as the Beast Princess.
You will not soon forget these characters, nor the unusual Bears of Artemis,
the treacherous, bee-like creatures called Thriae, and the rest of the humans
and non-humans who come to final battle in the thunderous War of the Beasts.
Here
is a world of wonder and excitement that will grip your imagination from first
page to last.