Day of the Minotaur mt-1 Read online

  “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!” “Athene!” 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 horns; 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!”

  “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. “Shift!”

  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 stre
am 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!”

  “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 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 is 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 arm.

  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 I?”

  “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.”