Day of the Minotaur mt-1 Read online

  “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 Ajax, 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 unpaternal 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 its 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.”

  “Guard!”

  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!’ Barbarians, are we? Well, we know what to do with a woman!”

  “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 Persephone!”

  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 gues
sed, since caves and cliffs and roaring rivers, all of the fierce faces of nature, had long been familiar to him from his roving near Vadrypetro.

  “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. We’ll 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 Centaur, and his red, matted hair.

  When I entered the cave, I was hungry as a bull. Once I 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 land before the Cretans arrived from the East. Except for my pointed ears (which are common to all of the Beasts), my horns (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, unskinned, and uncleaned? Intolerable! It looked as if I would have to prowl the countryside after dark and strike terror 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!

  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!”

  “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.”

&nb
sp; “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 in 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 a 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.