“I know, but I have plans.”
“LOVERS?”
Zeus save us, it was the Great Centaur, haughty as a pharaoh about to dispose of a slave. Because of my delay, he had come to fetch his beer, and the coming had made him petulant, and the finding of me, his hostess, in Oryx’s arms—well, his rage was predictable.
“We shall cast them afloat tomorrow. Humans indeed! All alike, every bloody one of them. ‘To err is Human . . . uh . . . uh, etc.’ But Zoe, I am shocked at you, a Beast.”
Chapter Five
Oryx
We sat on three-legged stools in the lowest room of an old and mottled oak. It was usually reserved for terminal cases, sufferers from the White Sleep or the Demon of Fever and Shakes. Fortunately, nobody in the compound suffered such a disease, though the Great Centaur had chosen the room for Marguerite and me with an obvious hope to alarm. Winding sheets lay folded between the pallets, and holy water, blessed with the secret name of the Griffin Judge, rested mournfully in a rock crystal urn. The light from the oval windows was thin and tentative; and Marguerite’s roseate face was blanched to the deathly white of a lotus bloom.
“I feel imprisoned,” she said.
“You are,” I said. “There are Whinnies guarding the door.” The only animal-hunters among the Beasts, they wore their leathern jerkins and cracked their ribald jokes. Cocking an ear to catch the latest dirt, I resumed my explanation to Marguerite. “Chiron is taking no chance that we will escape. And one of them told me he’s also punishing Zoe. An other sentence of chastity. Two months.”
“It’s what she deserves, trying to seduce my little cousin. Why, she must have given you the fright of your life. You seem to have shrunk by an inch. And the color has left your cheeks.”
“Marguerite, I grabbed her. And I solicited her too. After the grab had failed. I was, you could say, a lecher.”
“If you were, she must have enticed you. Poor innocent boy, what do you know about such worldly women?”
“A lot,” I said, naming no names. (Was there another kind? Alyssum was dead. Hermes be thanked that little Melissa must always remain a child!) “And she didn’t mean to entice me. She was just too delectable to resist.”
“She’s big in the hips.”
“Voluptuous, I would say. A lot of woman, but built to tease and please.”
“Zoe exciting? Why, that woman could be my mother. Didn’t you notice the gray in her hair?”
“She could be your great-great-great, etc., grand-mother, but she somehow manages to improve with age, like an opulent tree, and no, I didn’t see any gray, but if I had, it would have just seemed a bit of moss in an oak, and I would have liked it too. Zoe is one fine woman, and I won’t hear her badmouthed even by my cousin.”
“Well, there’s no accounting for tastes,” shrugged Marguerite. “Now if you’re looking for quality—I expect Alyssum had it in generous measure. Otherwise, Silver Bells would never have married her. He is the best.”
“At least we agree on him. If we weren’t going to be deported and drowned or eaten, I had planned to ask him if he would like to adopt us.”
“I had thought about something else, but apparently he didn’t. He’s only thirty, you know.” (Indeed? You could never guess the age of a Beast. I suspect that Marguerite had inquired of Zoe.)
“Cousin,” I said. “Have we forgotten our vow? No attachments, I mean. We’re likely to ruin our trade.”
“Not that it matters any more—here come our captors—to lead us to our fate. . . . The same four Whinnies from the night of the orgy.”
Leering, ogling, snickering, they led us out of the tree and one of them pinched Marguerite on the cheek and smirked,
“Need a speck o’ color in them cheeks, queenie.” I knocked his hand to his side and he gave me such a kick with his hoof that I fell on my back and consciousness fled from me like a light from a windblown lamp. It was Silver Bells who lifted me to my feet—I was still befuddled but I heard his bells I thought of a time when I had been a child and both a father and mother had loved and protected me. . . . yes, in the dreadful confrontation. (But memory must be guided, even as speech. I had promised Marguerite.)
He smelled of rue because he often gathered the aromatic and medicinal plants for Zoe to use in her potions (before Alyssum had died, he had gathered thyme). On Silver Bells the herb was a manly scent, in spite of its feminine name; or rather the scent of a valiant Beast, whose heart, like the nautilus, holds several chambers, and one was courage, and one was tenderness.
“You won’t let those bloody Whinnies pinch Marguerite?” I gasped.
“Never again,” he said, and I cleared the haze from my eyes and saw them trotting a cautious distance behind us, and the pincher was nursing a bruise on his head. Zoe had joined us on the way, and of course Eunostos, who helped his uncle to lift me from the ground—strong little chap—and together they steadied my walk. I liked Eunostos, feather atop his hat; ruddy of skin that would sprout a ruddier hair when he became a youth; and already blessed with a handsome broad-tipped tail. Suppose he sometimes burned a pheasant because he liked to dream. Suppose his poems could use some polish and style. He was only eight.
“Thank you, Eunostos,” I said. “That was quite a blow I took.”
“That Whinny named Horse-Brier took a worse one from my uncle. I wish you could have seen—”
“So do I, Eunostos.” Then to Silver Bells: “I think I can walk alone, now, with your nephew’s help. Maybe Marguerite needs some consolation.”
She did; daylight had not restored her coralline cheeks. Merry Marguerite, ripe for an escapade, looked like a walking figure of alabaster, as white and hushed. I could tell from Silver Bell’s face that he saw her fear and knew the fearful fate which awaited us, and I could see an anger against the King for his cruel and capricious sentence, and wistful memories of a time when the woods had bellowed with Minotaurs, and no dim-witted, vainglorious Chiron, even a king, could impose such a judgment without a fight. But Chiron employed an army of Whinnies and bribed the Panisci girls, to run him errands and spy on peaceful folk. He was not a heartless Beast, he was a cowardly beast; but cowardice borrows from Proteus in its many disguises.
Zoe gave me a sisterly pat on the cheek. Her scent of coriander went to my head. My thoughts were revelers at a festival.
“It was all my fault,” I said. “If I hadn’t been so lecherous and conniving—”
“It was nobody’s fault, except that bigot we call a King.”
“But to punish an innocent Dryad—”
“You know, he once asked me to be his second wife—or was it third?—but I declined and I must have hurt his pride. The ones he got apparently haven’t sufficed.”
“Two months this time.”
“Oh, I shan’t mind too much,” she said. “After all, I’ve weathered a month before. I’ll just keep twice as busy. That’s the answer. Garden and heal by day, study scrolls at night.” (She was trying to ease my concern. She was not an omnivorous reader like Silver Bells. I believe that her favorite scroll was a trashy romance, Hoof beats in Babylon.) “It’s you who worry me. You and Marguerite. You don’t know these Cretan waters, and you can’t just sail down the coast and come ashore or your own people will capture you for the theft you committed on Pseira and give you to the bulls. The magistrate never meant you to reach Phaistos, you understand.”
“I know a bit about sailoring. The rest I’ll learn.”
“You must.” She gave my hand a squeeze. Aphrodite forgive me, I thought of a second grab.
At last we came to the ship. An hour-glass could have emptied its sands in the time we took, but the walk passed as quickly as making a theft, except without the fun, and the end of the journey was getting caught in the act.
The ship . . . the boat . . . was old, with one cracked oar, neither seats nor sail, and rainwater in the bottom aswirl with frogs. We found ourselves in a rocky cove where cypresses leaned their heads from over-hanging cliffs like curiou
s ladies at the Bull Games in Knossos or Phaistos (the bull and the Dancer stab each other to death, the one with his horns, the other with short-sword or knife); and sweet-scented thyme grew in clefts and crevices, mocking the scent of the ladies. As for the beach, it looked like a place for thieves to count their loot, but the Great Centaur, in his pique and stupidity, had converted it into a sort of bull-ring, a place of judgment and doom.
Silver Bells waded into the surf, and Zoe joined him. She made no effort to keep the water from wetting her tunic or ruining her sandals of bark.
“You call them, Zoe,” he asked. “It’s the Tritons we want to hear, and they won’t even listen to me. Not since I hoofed their King.”
“ALL RIGHT NOW, YOU TRITONS,” boomed Zoe. “These are friends of mine and I want you to guide them to a friendly island or find them a merchant ship.”
I heard the quietly insolent lapping of wavelets on the beach; I saw the lazuli splash of a kingfisher seeking fish. Otherwise, silence. . . .
“Nobody heard?” asked Marguerite.
“Oh, they heard all right,” shrugged Zoe. “It’s just that they don’t much like anything or anybody on the land. They don’t choose to answer.”
“Not even Zoe,” said Silver Bells, “but they don’t dislike her quite so much as the rest of us. They rather fancy her pointed ears.”
“Breasts,” she whispered to me. “Silver Bells is terribly naive about such things.” Then, loudly, “They always want to be paid for everything, but I do have my principles. Besides, for two months, I lack the wherewithal. One little indiscretion and I would follow you in a boat. Not that I wouldn’t take the risk if I thought it would help. . . .”
Eunostos pulled the hair-ring from his head and threw it into the bay. Aquamarine, it seemed returning from exile to its home.
“King of the Tritons!” he cried. “Take my gift and protect my friends.”
“That was a generous gift,” said Marguerite as hair spilled over Eunostos’ ears. She knew how he prided himself on his circumspect dress.
“But it won’t help, will it?” sighed Eunostos. “I forgot. Aquamarines are like pebbles to a Triton.”
“There’s really nothing they like on Crete,” said his uncle. “But once in awhile you’ll find a Triton with heart. He may understand the gesture. I am proud of you, Eunostos.”
Marguerite had started to cry. She wore neither kohl and galena to run from her eyes or carmine to streak her face; clear, silent tears diamonded her cheeks; she had learned how to weep in her trade, and not to redden her eyes. A man is only moved by a woman’s tears if she does not blubber or spoil her looks. Not that she wept for effect at such a time. But she had forgotten unbecoming tears. I hugged her, and then I turned to Zoe and Silver Bells and said,
“We won’t say goodbye. We’re going to return, you know.”
“You can’t,” sighed Silver Bells. “The Great Centaur will never allow it.”
“Well, one way or another, we’re going to meet again.” (One way or another. . . . I am not a seer; why did I see for once what the dark should not have disclosed?)
The ladies did not embrace, but at least they exchanged smiles, the friendliest gesture between them since they had met on Bumpers, the hill. My cousin embraced Eunostos, however, as if he belonged to her (recalling her mother, perhaps, my father’s sister, in Egypt).
“I wish I had a child like you,” she said, and Eunostos cried like a little boy, including the blubbers and snuffles, and Marguerite wiped his nose with the strap of the tunic she wore. Brotherly, Silver Bells took her into his arms and cradled her heart-of-a-daisy hair against his russet chest, and patted her on the back, and—do you know?—the butterfly from the party was circling around his head, and he smiled at her, and it seemed as if she told him to kiss Marguerite on the cheek, for he kissed her and said, “Chiron says that ‘parting is such sweet sorrow.’ He stole the line and probably got it wrong, but maybe he’s right in what he said. We musn’t lose the sweetness in the sorrow.”
My cousin smiled like a girl who thinks that she hears her father’s footstep at the gate—father gone to the war and girl unsure of his safe return, but daring to hope.
“Oryx.” He turned to me, and his grave, sweet face was father-brother-and-friend. Would he think me unmanly to hug him? (But I was hungry for family hugs, you see, and I thought, “What the Styx!” and hugged him as if Eunostos’ bear had taught me the art, and smelled his rue and felt like a dormouse snug in a hollow tree while a hawk is searching the sky.)
He made a fortress out of his arms.
“Be strong,” he said. “But then I know you will. Be safe. And never say good-bye.”
When Zoe and I embraced, I did not want a nest or a snuggery; it was her I wanted to hold, hoard, protect. I was a rock-girt Mycenaean citadel, and she was the queen I held against pirates and thieves.
Alas, imagination can be a cheat.
“Take care of yourself, boy,” she said, gently maternal (and what a passionless kiss!).
“Man,” I corrected. “Seventeen.”
“Beast,” she smiled. How could I take offense?
Together we dragged the boat into the cove, dislodging slugs and ants, and Zoe peered at the bottom in case of leaks and Silver Bells turned to the Whinnies who had lurked in the forest to insure our departure.
“Bring my friends an oar,” he snapped. “This one is broken.” In the time it takes an acorn to fall from a medium oak and roll on the leafy ground and come to rest, one of the Whinnies appeared with a perfect oar (there were better boats in the cove, and hiding places for gear and such).
Smiles instead of goodbyes (at what a cost!), a usable oar, and then we had put to sea, Marguerite and I, in our cockleshell, with Silver Bells calling, “Make due west. You’ll find a friendly island. Nothing on it ‘but wild sea birds and a Satyr or two.”
But suddenly something—was it a current?—seemed to snatch us across that tranquil bay toward the East, and I heard a cry from Zoe:
“Tritons have got them already!”
And Silver Bells shouted, “Not if I can help it,” and lunged in our wake and swam like a dolphin to catch a squid! His hooves made powerful propellants, and soon he had seized our prow and clambered into the boat, his wet red hair a splendor in the sun, his tail upraised like the banner of conquering troops.
A face leered evilly at us from the stern. Seaweed for hair; skin the green of a frog; popped, lidiless eyes like those of a blowfish beached on the sand; and of course a slimy tail with barnacles on its tip.
“Arena . . . folk . . . ‘ull . . . pay . . . us . . . triple,” he said in slow, barely recognizable words. He spoke through sharp, broken teeth; he spoke with a hiss and a threat. If a shark could speak, he would make such a sound.
Silver Bells raised the oar and started to whack the creature’s head, but the Triton grinned and the sea erupted with slime and scales, and their owners lifted us bodily out of the water and shook our boat, as a griffin shakes a bird he intends to eat.
“What do they mean?” cried Marguerite.
“Arena folk?”
“The Bull Games. They’re going to sell us to Cretan fishermen, who will pay them in murex shells and sell us in turn to the masters of the games.”
Eunostos and Zoe stood on the shore—to enter that green and living tide was to sink and drown—and waved forlorn hands.
The Bull Games. Yes, of course. A Minotaur, a bull-man, the last adult of his race. What a spectacle for the arena, a bull-man against a butt, with Marguerite and me for the prize!
Chapter Six
Oryx
No sensible man walks within reach of a Triton. If he fails to snatch you with his snaky hand, he swats you with his tail or bites you with his ragged teeth. A typical Triton covets whatever he sees, if only to scrutinize and decide its value to him; if valueless, he will first destroy and then discard. Tritons are children of the sea, which raises storms, sinks vessels, drowns sailors, and sends an occasi
onal tidal wave against the land. The sea is acquisitive, and what it acquires it likes to keep, except in the form of drowned bodies and broken spars and scattered shells. There are exceptions, of course, and just as the sea has sunny moods, so Tritons have even been known to imitate dolphins and rescue drowning mariners. But never count on the sun. . . .
The fishermen—there were four of them in a flat-bottomed, oval boat with cages instead of cabins—were leaning on poles and looking uneasily at the Tritons. Their boat had the innocent look of a platter with three, neatly molded helpings of crushed pulse. Innocence, however, did not require the tall, spiked rail which enclosed the deck and whose doorway was fastened with leather thongs. It was not a fisherman’s boat; it was meant to hold or exclude something vastly larger than fish.
Silver Bells, it appeared, was not the only Beast to be captured for barter with Humans, at least from the forested area to which we had sailed in the south. The fishermen must have designed their boat for carrying Beasts to the Masters of the Games, and for trading with dangerous Tritons who, if you did not pay them a price to suit their whims, would seize the would-be trader and flail him to death with their tails. Silver Bells, Marguerite, and I peered from our cockleshell—a head raised too high invited the flip of a tail—and watched the bartering of our fates, and doubtless our lives, between malignant Tritons and avaricious fishermen. Silver Bells crouched between us and enfolded us in a large, protective embrace. His silken-hairy arms were equally gentle and strong. He did not talk; he seemed to sense that his touch was far more comforting to us than words. Furthermore, we were straining to hear what the fishermen said to the Tritons. Having never been sold, we wondered about our value in such a bizarre transaction. If I had been a buyer, I would have paid a fortune for Marguerite or Silver Bells and—dare I confess?—a sizable sum for me. To race, to stud, to regale with raunchy tales: such were my arts and skills. Strange, I did not number thievery among the list. Ah, Zoe Zoe, you are the thief! You have stolen my heart and told me not to steal!
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