Day of the Minotaur mt-1

by Thomas Burnett Swann

  “Despoilers of women,” I thundered. “Burners, looters, pillagers, and Zeus-damned Northerners!”

  The Achaeans awaited our charge with stupefaction. Their mouths dropped open as if they had broken their jaws, and their blue eyes widened to utter vacuity. Well, perhaps they had reason to blanch. Forty thundering Centaurs can raise more clatter than a hundred horse-drawn chariots. Then I saw that the cause of their dread was not the Centaurs. It was me. The Minotaur. The Bull That Walks Like a Man. They scattered before my advance like chickens surprised by a wolf. They risked the multiple hooves of Moschus or Chiron to escape the mere two arms of a Minotaur. No sooner had I swung my axe than I found myself swinging at empty air. One of them, two, I laid on the ground with well-aimed blows, but the others kept out of reach. Enough. I did not intend to tire myself in futile pursuit.

  “ Ajax,” I boomed. “In the name of the Princess Thea, I challenge you to mortal combat!”

  No true warrior, least of all a battle-loving Achaean, can ignore a personal challenge, and Ajax, in spite of his ignorance, lechery, and dirt, was not a coward. He lost no time in answering my summons, though I cannot say that he exactly charged me; rather, he squeaked: “Minotaur, here I am!” and tensed himself to receive my blows.

  Somewhat doubtfully protected by my shield of cow’s hide, I charged him with the anything but doubtful deadliness of my double-headed axe, its bronze blade smelted and sharpened in my own shop. My battle-axe was much less wieldy than Ajax’s sword, but much more deadly if I landed a blow. You never jab with an axe like a fisherman spearing fish— you swing and slash in great half-circles, from side to side or head to foot. He jabbed, withdrawing: I swung, advancing. When his potent shield deflected my blows, I discarded my useless framework of hide and pressed him with such abandon that he dropped his shield and clutched the hilt of his sword with both of his hands. The muscles which Thea had once admired in my arms tautened to the struggle; leaped beneath my skin like the slashing claws of a crab. You know, I am clumsy when I walk in the house. I stumble on carpets and trip on stairs. I overturn pitchers of wine and spill bones in my lap. But a furious rhythm directed me as I lunged and parried, lunged and parried, gaining a foot, holding my ground, gaining, holding, gaining. The clash of metal became a martial music which stirred my feet, my hands, my torso to the long exhilarating dance of war. And Ajax started to tire. He blinked the sweat from his hairy-browed eyes; he gasped like a diver wrestling an octopus.

  “ Xanthus,” he called at last. “Pluton, help me!” and two of his cohorts, battling a wounded Centaur, leaped to defend their chief. Two, mind you! Three men against one Minotaur. I swung my axe in a rapid, deadly circle. But the earless Xanthus used his sword like a spear and threw it at my legs. It slashed me above the ankle. I gave such a roar that a momentary silence settled across the field; Achaeans and Centaurs poised between their blows and stared at me with gleeful or sorrowful eyes; awaited the fall of the Beast which had walked like a Man.

  While Xanthus recovered his sword, Ajax and Pluton pressed their attack. They thought, no doubt, to find me lamed and helpless. But my roar had vented anger and not defeat. The side of my axe bit into Pluton’s neck; in the handle, I felt the spasms of his death-struck body. I had no time in which to recover my axe. Ajax came at me with murder in his hand. He looked like a hungry sphinx. The stench of him struck me in the face.

  “ Ajax,” I railed. “You ought to take a bath.” I lowered my horns and butted him off his feet.

  Then I heard Chiron’s cry: “Withdraw, withdraw to the woods!”

  Withdraw? Unthinkable! Had not my forefathers said: “Never turn tail until you have lost your horns?”

  But I saw the reason behind the command. A second army had entered the field.

  Chapter IX

  ARROWS AND HONEY

  A hundred fresh Achaeans had entered the field. Probably Ajax had lured them from the coast with promises of gold and slaves: Centaurs to draw their chariots; Panisci to sell in the marketplace at Pylos. Our retreat was rapid but not disorganized. We left behind us five dead Centaurs, their limbs awry in the grim ungainliness of death, and yet their eyes still open and seemingly as sentient as when they had scanned a new network of irrigation ditches or studied the secrets of the Yellow Men. Fortunately, the reinforcing Achaeans did not follow us into the trees; they seemed content to succor their battered comrades, who had lost a fifth of their numbers to hooves and battle-axes.

  “We shall go to defend our town,” said Chiron, when a grove of carob trees had separated us from the hateful field. “Eunostos, why don’t you get your friends and join us? We have enough food to withstand a long siege. Remember how we beat off the wolves for three whole weeks?”

  “You might bring us a few skins of beer,” whispered Moschus, who followed close on my tail.

  “If I stay in my house,” I explained, “we will make the Achaeans divide their strength. Small as it is, it can stand a siege.” I could not admit that I doubted the strength of their town, in spite of its bristling moat.

  “Do as you please,” said Chiron, though Moschus audibly grumbled. “I hope your little friends can draw a bow.”

  “They are both good fighters. And of course they blame themselves for the war. Thea offered to surrender herself to Ajax.”

  “Not a bad idea,” muttered Moschus, but Chiron silenced him with a glare.

  “Tell them they aren’t to blame. Sooner or later, Men were bound to attack us. We are too unlike them—our hearts as well as our bodies. Nature to us is sometimes irascible, sometimes unpredictable, but still—a friend. To them, in spite of all their talk about worshiping the Great Mother, she is either a slave or a master. They fear her unless they can put her in chains.”

  I traveled home by way of Pandia’s house. Her town was undefended, and I wanted to offer her asylum in my trunk. It was not really a town; a hamlet, no more, with a dozen hollowed logs placed in a ring around a carefully cultivated berry path—blackberries for food, bearberries for a bracing, astringent drink. The patch was crisscrossed with narrow paths and thickly quilled with posts where baskets of berries could be hung on wooden hooks. The open ends of the logs confronted the patch and allowed the owners to keep a watchful eye for the stealthy crows which came with twilight.

  I crossed the crooked stream which carried snow from the mountains and laved the town in a cool, perpetual breeze. No one greeted me; no one contested my approach. I paused at a low, thorn-rimmed fence and raised the latch of the gate with as much noise as possible to announce my arrival. The back ends of the logs, sealed with clay and stained with umber, stared at me like lidless eyes. I walked between two of the logs and emerged within the circle and facing the front doors. Each log was high enough to accommodate a standing Bear Girl and long enough to enclose two rooms, their rounded walls hewn and polished to a smooth finish. The first room served as a pantry, whose open shelves abounded with jars of honey and bowls of berries, and also with trays of freshly smoked fish, a little rank to the nostrils of a Minotaur. The second room, invisible behind a curtain of dried black-eyed Susans strung on silken strands, I knew to be the sleeping quarters or, in the term of the Girls, the Repositorium. One of the Girls was moving drowsily through the berry patch and filling a pail which hung from her paw.

  “Where is Pandia?” I asked without polite preliminaries.

  She pointed to one of the logs. “Asleep. It’s the Afternoon Repose, you know. I was sleeping too till I dreamed about dinner.”

  Stooping to half my normal height, I entered the porch of the designated house, flung aside the curtain of black-eyed Susans, and found Pandia asleep beneath a coverlet of rabbit skins, with a pot of Cretan Bears-tail twisting its yellow and purple flowers on a table beside her couch.

  “Pandia?” I called. “PANDIA.” She did not stir.

  “Bears,” I said.

  She threw back the coverlet and almost overturned the pot of flowers. “Bears?”

  “Human bears; Ach
aeans. They have won the first battle and entered the forest. Would you like to come to my house and stay with Icarus and me?”

  “Yes.”

  “Would your friends like to visit the Centaurs? They would be much safer there.”

  “We don’t like the pigs. Besides,” she added, “the Achaeans may not bother us. There is nothing here they could want.”

  She neatened her hair with a comb of tortoise shell, hurriedly tied her rabbit sash in a bow with unequal ends, and followed me out of the village with one regretful look at the berry patch.

  “Do you know what war is?” She sighed. “It’s giving up berries so you can stick swords in people.”

  “But if we don’t give up the berries, we shall have to lose Thea and Icarus.”

  “You’re right,” she admitted, “and Icarus is worth a whole patch. He’s rather like berries himself, you know. Good to have at the table or in the kitchen, sweet but not sugary. Except he doesn’t have thorns.”

  “He’s learning to grow them. He must.”

  We jogged through the forest on rapid, silent feet. I always lower my horns when spurred by danger, an instinctive reaction, no doubt, to shield myself with the fiercest part of me. Crippled as I was by a sword-slashed ankle, Pandia matched my pace and sometimes spurted ahead of me in her eagerness to join Icarus. Her nub of a tail quivered with fear and excitement.

  I felt an enormous relief when I saw my house, its friendly brown ramparts lifting an island in the afternoon. Then I stopped. The house was beleaguered by Thriae! A dozen of the dour workers, conspicuously absent before the battle, were wheeling above the trunk with dulcet cries of “Drown Icarus” and “Burn Thea” (you would rather expect them to boom like warring generals, but even the workers have honeyed voices). Arrows whirred from the trunk like the green woodpeckers whose feathers guided their shafts. One of the Thriae stiffened in the midst of a cry and fell from the air as if she had turned to stone. Good. Thea and Icarus were manning the parapet. But how could I reach the door with my lamed ankle?

  “Pandia, do you want to go back to your village? You may be safer there.”

  “Not while those Harpies are after Icarus.”

  I lifted her in my arms, bending to shield her body, and entered the deadly field. We had covered a third of the distance to the trunk when the Thriae saw us. Like geese in the shape of a wedge, they wheeled to attack us with a shower of rocks, which they carried in quivers at their sides and hurled with deft jabs of their hands. The drone of their wings made a low, continuous thunder. The rocks were small but jaggedly cutting. My large, bowed back made an excellent target, and so did the fiery thatch of my head. For once I was glad of my matted hair, which doubtless kept me from a broken skull. The rock I most resented struck the tip of a horn and made my entire body throb like the clapper of a swinging bell. If they’ve chipped my horn, I vowed, by Hippos, the god of horses, I will wring their scurvy necks!

  Then the door in the trunk opened to disgorge my three workers. I handed Pandia into their multitudinous legs and bounded after them, striking the door jamb and setting the cowbell to a frantic reverberation. Inside the door, I waved to Icarus and Thea on the walkway below the parapet. Suddenly the pain in my ankle erupted into my head. I was briefly conscious of falling to the ground and, at the same time, falling on sleep. The warm grass seemed a linen coverlet rising to enfold me.

  I awoke to Elysium. My head lay in Thea’s lap. She was fragrant as always with myrrh and marjoram, and her little hand touched coolness to my forehead. The ghost of a dream lingered in my brain: Before my waking, it seemed, a sweet, incredible fire had touched my lips (a dream surely?). I closed my eyes to recapture the fire.

  “I saw you blink, Eunostos. Open your eyes and tell me how you feel.”

  “First, tell me what happened here.”

  “When you came with Pandia, those dreadful women had been attacking us for an hour. They are gone now, but they’ve cut your garden to pieces with their stones.”

  My grapevines littered the ground like murdered snakes. The parasol hung in tatters, the clay oven had lost its door, and the fig tree looked as if locusts had stripped its branches. It resembled a quarry more than a garden.

  I sat up and touched my rock-battered horn; no chips were missing. I stretched my bloodied shoulders; Thea, I found, had eased their smart with a cloth soaked in olive oil. I tested my ankle, which promised to hold my weight.

  “We must look for total invasion,” I said, and told her about the second army. “First, we shall have to guard against fire. Do you mind a little rain?”

  With the help of a stone provided by the Thriae, I narrowed the mouth of my fountain until I had thinned and widened its shower to a misty spray which covered the entire trunk.

  “The wood will soak,” I explained. “Then it won’t be easy to set on fire, even with burning arrows.”

  Pandia opened her arms to the downfalling spray. “But there isn’t a rainbow,” she sighed, and entered the house to take a nap. “The better to do battle,” she called from the stairs.

  Thea, Icarus, and I assumed positions behind the parapet. The workers appeared to be guarding the door. They crouched in six-legged readiness as if they momentarily anticipated the assaults of a battering ram.

  It was Icarus who sighted the enemy. “Achaeans. Just a few, I think.” Probably the main host had gone to attack the Centaurs. “But they have a secret weapon.”

  The secret weapon advanced gigantically across the clearing, a humped, tented vehicle which somehow moved without wheels. After a few seconds of perplexity, I recognized a harmamaxa, a large wagon invented in Asia Minor and battle-covered with a rounded tent of canvas: Achaean booty, no doubt, from one of their innumerable and far-flung raids. In Babylonia, such vehicles were drawn by horses, but animals are vulnerable to arrows and this harmamaxa was powered by men who, having removed the floor and the wheels, pressed towards us on foot while holding the wagon over their heads and most of their bodies. Thus, except for their feet, which were shod in thick leather boots, they enjoyed complete protection from arrows. Instead of the stationary turtle we had faced this morning, here was a turtle in motion, slow, cumbersome, but almost unassailable from a distance. Through the embrasures in the parapet, we fired a stream of arrows at the rounded roof. They struck in the canvas harmlessly as if they were quills, and the turtle became a porcupine. I looked at Icarus as he fitted an arrow into his bow. His bare chest, sun-bronzed above a green loincloth, rippled with manly muscles. And yet he remained touchingly a boy, pitting his arrows against the well-guarded giants of Ajax. I gazed at Thea in wordless communion. Between us, I tried to say, we will shield him, fight for him, die for him. Somehow, it was always innocent Icarus who seemed to need protecting instead of Thea. Innocence has been called the strongest armor; it is only strong, however, in the company of goddess-fearing Men and godly Beasts; not Achaeans.

  “They’ll have to come out to attack,” said Icarus, wincing at his failure to slow the tortoise. “Then we’ll pick them off like the wild pigs they are.”

  “But they’ll be at the walls,” I said darkly.

  “Eunostos,” gasped Thea. “The door has opened. Your workers are leaving the fort!”

  Dear Zeus, did they mean to betray us? Perhaps unknowingly I had wounded their pride.

  “Bion!” I called, but I heard the frenzied buzz of their cry and knew that they meant to defend us and not betray us. The Achaeans stopped in their tracks. The harmamaxa swayed into rooted stillness.

  Attack!

  Like angry dogs, they darted between the exposed feet of the Achaeans and slashed at their leather boots with savage pincers. Their hard hides protected them from the half-hearted kicks of Men who were trying to hold a wagon above their heads and most of whom could not see the nature of their attackers. The wagon swayed and lurched as if it were bounding along a rocky road behind a pair of fright-crazed stallions, and finally heaved on its side. Twenty-five terror-stricken Men scrambled to t
heir feet and scurried in all directions to escape the pincers.

  Once they were free, however, and face to face with their determined but after all not very sizable attackers, the Achaeans regained their courage. I heard their commander rallying them:

  “Strike at their joints, Men!”

  Deflecting our arrows with their shields, they struck repeatedly at the waving, root-like limbs, and their sharp-edged swords began to slice through the joints. The result was no less lamentable for being inevitable. My workers were soon hobbling over the grass in complete helplessness, while the warriors struck at the tough but not impervious membrane which joined the halves of their bodies, till the halves lay twitching in separate agony. Thus died my brave and beloved friends, devoted as dogs and far more intelligent; artists of the beautiful as well as warriors.

  Icarus was sick at his stomach, and I—well, I ran down the ladder, waving my bow and hurling every oath which came to my tongue: “Butchers!” “Wolf-lovers!” “Northerners!” I meant to go to my friends, shieldless though I was, and avenge their dismemberment.

  An arrow struck at my feet and jarred me to a halt… “That’s what they want,” cried Thea, waving her bow. “To lure you into the open and hack you to death. Bar the door and come back to the parapet!” She spoke with the rough urgency of an Amazon, but tears had dampened her tunic and she looked like a little girl who had lost her doll. Rage in behalf of my workers melted to tenderness for the brave girl who, in spite of her grief, had acted to save my life. I barred the door and returned to the parapet to watch the determined Achaeans right their harmamaxa and resume their advance on the fort. Behind them, ten of their comrades had fallen to arrows and Telchin pincers.

  Icarus shaded his eyes and pointed to the western sky. Diminutive fly-shapes materialized into nine pairs of Thriae, each pair supporting a branch which in turn supported a large bucket. Directly above the house, they began to tilt the buckets and pour the contents down on our heads. Amber, brown, and yellow in turn, it was much too thick for oil, snaking as it fell like a heavy rope flung at our heads. Honey. It was scalding honey which hissed when it struck the spray from the fountain and, not yet cooled, lashed into streamers and droplets and spattered our skin like a horde of terrible mosquitoes. We slapped at our burns and tried at the same time to raise our bows, but the wavering mist of the fountain distorted our aim, and the Thriae emptied their buckets and wheeled out of range before we could thin their ranks.