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And yet the garden was captured; shut from the sunlight He saw that Amber had quietly withdrawn the ladder.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 beat 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 think 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 lips 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 comprehending. 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, Eunostos. 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 lim
p 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 friend! You sent him to her, didn’t you?”
“No,” I said, “But I intended to take him myself the next day.”
“You wanted to be 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!”
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. “Achaeans. 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 beached 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.
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