Day of the Minotaur mt-1 Read online

  “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 Vathypetro, 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. I’ll 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 corner 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 is 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 ind 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 en 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. Moschus 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-h
undredth 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 (heh!).”

  “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 sweetbriar, 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 workshop. 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 fives, 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-armed 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! 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, Evoe!”

  “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.

  “I’ll 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.

  “Your 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 “Evoe! Evoe!”

  “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 ind 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 fl
ute 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 enwrearhed 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.