Day of the Minotaur mt-1

by Thomas Burnett Swann

  By now the harmamaxa had reached the walls and attached itself to the door like a huge fungus. We felt the blows of axes under our sandals. Without leaving their tent, the Achaeans had cut through the canvas wall and now they threatened to smash the oak rectangle of the door. The loss of their comrades had given them room in which to wield their axes.

  “Icarus,” I said, “help me lift the oven onto the parapet.”

  His eyes brightened with expectation. “Well drop it on their heads!”

  We dragged, heaved, and wrestled it up the ladder; we poised it, hollow but heavy, above the harmamaxa. “Now!”

  The canvas roof, which had stopped a score of arrows, buckled under the oven. A thud. A body-wrenching groan. Hurried movements concealed beneath the partially deflated but still unbroken canvas. Then, again, the deadly crunch of the axe, which bit into wood like a hungry weasel, a little more hungrily with each bite, and would only sate itself when it swung on air.

  There were no more ovens to drop on their heads. I considered other defenses. Shower them with arrows when they toppled the door? Charge among them with my battle-axe? The sudden return of the Thriae settled the question.

  “Retreat,” I shouted. “We can’t fight two enemies at the same time.”

  We scrambled down the ladder, cringing as the hot droplets began to strike our backs, and gained the easeful coolness of the stairs. The last to descend, I paused to stare through the mist of the fountain at the ruined garden and the shredded parasol, the vines and the leafless fig tree. A Beast’s love for a garden can be as strong as his love for another Beast, since gardens are beings. Who can say if the poppies dream of butterflies in amethyst clouds, the fig tree dreads the coming of the ravenous bees to puncture its fruit, the vines exult in the sun and, growing warm, drowse in the lengthening shade of a parasol? Dreams, dreads, exultance, and repose—and love, always love. Leaves instead of limbs, but hearts and brains, identity and individuality. It is not necessary to walk in order to love.

  The taste of loss was wolf’s-bane in my mouth.

  At the foot of the stairs I pulled the lever which loosed a hidden panel and choked the stairwell with earth. The Pharaohs of Egypt utilize the same principle in their tombs to guard their mummies and their boat-shaped catafalques. (Where do you think the Egyptians learned their secret? From my own ancestors.)

  “They can dig us put,” I said, “but I doubt if they brought any shovels. Achaeans are fighters, not plumbers.”

  “And if they try?”

  “We’ll leave by the back door.”

  “Back door?” cried Thea and Icarus in unison.

  “Yes,” I said, pausing to heighten their expectation. It is always pleasant to divulge a secret under dramatic circumstances. “You didn’t think I would live in a house with a single door, did you? Remember my cave? Two doors, in spite of its apparent rusticity. Here, it’s the same. Let me show you.”

  Between the roots in the far wall of the bedroom, a large stone, the width of my shoulders, rested in gray anonymity. I delivered a sharp blow with my hoof and the stone turned on a pivot to disclose a narrow passageway no taller than a Minotaur on all fours. “It cuts right under the field and comes out in the forest. Tomorrow or the next day, I can slip from the house and reconnoiter to see if the Achaeans have left the trunk. They are not going to stay up there permanently. There are too many riches to steal on other parts of Crete. When I return, I’ll rap six times and then you can open the door.”

  “It’s time for supper,” said Pandia, rising from her nap in the moss, or rather, rising with the moss and resembling a per-ambulatory thicket. “Have you beaten off the enemy?”

  I told her about our retreat.

  “You’ve laid in supplies, I trust?”

  “Adequate but not elaborate.”

  “We shall just have to diet.”

  We climbed the ladder to prepare our frugal dinner. In the light of a single lamp, the usually amiable vines looked somber and strangling, as if they might drop on our heads and tighten their leathery tendrils around our necks. Between us lay platters of cheese and the kind of bread called gouros (dough mixed with lentils), a skin of beer, and a cup of water for Pandia. When Pandia asked for sweets, Icarus fetched her a jar of pennyroyal from the workshop. But the sight of the forge and tables without their faithful workers took his appetite.

  “Eunostos,” he said, “do you think you could say some words in memory of Bion and the others?”

  “I’ll try,” I said, and made up a tiny poem, rough and unpolished but at least loving:

  Elegy to a Telchin

  Who will guard the nest,

  Gather mushrooms now,

  Milk his aphid-cow?

  Lightly let him rest.

  There was a long silence, and then we tried to talk. I touched Thea’s hand. “We’re perfectly safe down here. They can’t reach us without a lot of digging, and we would hear them in time to leave by the back door. Even if they shut off the fountain, dry out the trunk, and set a fire, we’re well insulated by the roots.”

  She forced a smile. “The roots, you say. They look—well, as if they had turned poisonous and begun to watch us.”

  “Nothing that lives underground will hurt you. Not here, I at least. Only the things that come from the surface.”

  “Achaeans,” she said, “and those witchy Thriae. It’s all I my fault, Eunostos. If I had accepted Ajax’s advances, none of this would have happened. He would have taken me back to Mycenae with him as his concubine—Achaeans, they say, are surprisingly gentle to women in their own country— and reared Icarus like his son.”

  “But you wouldn’t have come to the forest. You wouldn’t have known about your mother.”

  “Or you. I don’t regret the forest, Eunostos. I regret what I brought with me from the world of Men. I opened a door.”

  “A forest is like a snake,” I said. “Occasionally it needs to shed its skin, just for the sake of change. Sometimes it sheds with the seasons. Now, it is shedding in a different, harsher but still necessary way. It is shedding safety which threatened to become stagnation. You can be sure, though, that its new skin will be strong and beautiful.”

  “You’re being kind,” she said, “but not very honest.”

  Pandia seemed to be napping. She had closed her eyes and opened her mouth. But the rest of us tried to talk and avoid the apprehensions which come with silence.

  “I expect,” said Icarus, “that the Achaeans want your shop as well as us. The gold, I mean.”

  “Yes,” I said. “To melt down in their own land. You know, they are excellent goldsmiths, if you don’t mind morbid subjects. You ought to see their death masks.”

  “Death masks,” said Thea pensively. “And dead vines above our heads. The friendly snakes have died. Or something has killed them.”

  “Nonsense. It’s the way the lamp is burning. It makes us all look dead. Like Pandia there. I think it’s time for bed.”

  Thea and Icarus rose to their feet.

  “Take the lamp,” I suggested. “I’ll light another for myself.”

  Pandia kept her place.

  “Pandia, wake up and come to bed,” said Thea. “You’ll be more comfortable on the moss.” She held the lamp under the girl’s face. The round eyes were closed like clenched fists; the vivid mouth was drained to a deathly pallor.

  The reason lay at the back of her neck, a small, dark hump. I crushed it between my fingers—its little bones snapped easily; its feathers oozed blood, Pandia’s blood—and threw the pulp to the floor with a spasm of uncontrollable shivering. A Strige, a vampire owl. Pandia raised her head and struggled to open her eyes. She rubbed the back of her neck.

  “I dreamed of bears. They were chasing me until I was very tired. I couldn’t lift my feet. I felt their hot breath on my neck.”

  I pointed to the crushed body.

  She gasped and clung to Icarus. “A Strige?”

  “Yes, but we found him in time, You’ll feel all ri
ght in the morning. It must have flown down the stairs while we were fighting the Thriae in the garden. No doubt, they sent it to devil us. Rats, moths, all night-flying creatures are their friends. There may be others.”

  We searched the house, sifting the moss on the floor of the bedroom, peering under the tables in the workshop, standing on benches with a raised lamp to examine the roof of the den, and found a second Strige, balled among the roots and apparently asleep. Soft, brown, seemingly all feathers, he looked as harmless as a baby rabbit, but I knew that he lived on blood, which he sucked so unobtrusively that the victim might die without discovering his presence. If you find an animal dead in the forest for no apparent reason, examine the back of his neck for the marks of two small fangs.

  Thea was visibly shaken. She put a protective arm around Pandia’s shoulder and whispered, “My dear, it’s all right now. This will never happen to you again.”

  “Yes,” I said, “it’s all right, but I think we shall all feel safer sleeping together in the bedroom.”

  We lay close to each other, Icarus, Thea, Pandia, and I, and shared the warmth of hope in one of those bleak and endless-seeming hours which end as surely as banqueting, games, and love. Pandia clutched my hand until she fell asleep, and then I held her fingers, her almost-paw, loving her tenderly, yet wishing, must I confess, that she was Thea). I was tired and sad and missing my workers, and my wounded ankle throbbed as if the tentacles of an octopus alternately squeezed and released, squeezed and released the parted flesh. The usually soft moss aggravated the bruises and burns on my back.

  I awoke in the night, when the thinly flickering flame announced the near-exhaustion of its oil. Thea was gone. I thought: she has gone to give herself to the Achaeans.

  Chapter X

  WOLF’S-BANE

  “I’m going to get her back,” I said when Icarus and Pandia, awakened by urgent shakes, blinked in the light of the dying lamp. “I’m going to get her back, and kill that murderous Ajax. He’s a wicked Man, and his Men are wolves, and they will not leave this forest with Thea.” I felt like the stony bed of a stream in summer, dry and parched and sprayed with the fine dust which blows from Libya. I felt—untenanted.

  “I’m going too,” said Icarus.

  I shook my head and explained impatiently why he and Pandia ought to stay in tye house, she for protection, he to protect her.

  “I can go where you can’t,” he continued, the rare soldier who knows the rare time when he ought to question his commander. “They can see your red hair for a mile, and even when you stoop, you look as big as a griffin. But I can sneak. I’m very good at it. At Vathypetro, I learned to sneak out of the palace when I was six years old, and I’ve been practicing ever since.”

  “I’m going too,” said Pandia. “I can’t sneak but I can bite.” She bared her small but numerous teeth. “They’re made for fish heads as well as berries.”

  “Someone has to stay here,” I explained to her. “To let Icarus and me back in the house. You’ll be quite safe. If you hear any tunneling, then and only then you can leave by the back door.”

  Pandia acquiesced with such ill humor that I hesitated to turn my back and risk my tail within the range of her teeth. Fortunately, Icarus mollified her with a brotherly kiss on her head. Gilded with loincloths and armed with daggers, we bent to enter the tunnel. In a limited space, we did not wish to be encumbered with bows and arrows.

  The tunnel was never tall enough in which to stand, and only sometimes tall enough in which to crawl; sometimes we had to wriggle on our stomachs, scraping our bare legs and chests over roots and stones, and I found myself forcibly reminded that my workers had built the passage for their own peregrinations and not for the egress of a seven-foot Minotaur and the five-foot son of a Dryad.

  “Icarus,” I called behind me, booming in the cramped, earthen corridor like the angry Bull-God before he sends an earthquake. “We are going to come to some water which leads out of the tunnel. I’ll go first. If everything is clear outside, I’ll swim back and get you. Otherwise, wait a few minutes and then return to the house.”

  The underground water was almost as cold as the melting snow which fed it in the mountains. I dived, negotiated a passage the size of a door, and slid to the surface in the same stream which ran by Pandia’s village. I sent the merest of ripples widening to the bank, where a large water rat eyed me from the mouth of a burrow belonging to a Paniscus, and green branches swayed in the current like the tresses of drowned Dryads. I returned for Icarus and, shivering violently, both of us climbed onto the bank and shook ourselves to restore warmth.

  “Eunostos,” he chattered. “R-remember when you s-said that one day we would be old c-comrades facing battle together?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well,” he said. “We are. Not old, but comrades. I want you to know that wherever you are, I am. To fight at your side and stand guard when you fall asleep. I want you to know that you are—friended.”

  I have known two loves, I thought, one for a girl who wished to be my sister and therefore cut me like broken coral; one for a boy who wished to be my brother and therefore comforted me like the moss in which I sleep. If I had died before they came to the forest, my soul would have been a serpent, kind but ugly and earthbound. Now it will be a butterfly, and no barriers of wind will hold me from the perilous chasms of the clouds or the tawny orchards of the sunflower.

  Warmed at last, we crept to the edge of the field which held my house. A tendril of smoke arose from the garden, like a beansprout climbing the sky, and the scent of venison piqued our nostrils.

  “The swine,” said Icarus. “Gorging themselves in your house.”

  “Yes,” I said, “but at least they haven’t burned it.”

  “Think of the housecleaning after they’re gone,” he sighed. “Bones in the fountain. Grape skins on the bench. And you know”—he lowered his voice—“they won’t bother to use the watercloset.”

  When we turned from the house to pursue our mission, the snake Perdix coiled at our feet.

  “Uncle,” said Icarus, muffling his joyful cry into a whisper.

  He clasped the snake in his hand and addressed him with great solemnity, careful to speak each word with separate emphasis. “Did you know that Thea has been captured?”

  Perdix opened his mouth and flickered his forked tongue.

  “He says he understands,” explained Icarus. “It’s the only way he can communicate, since I’ve never learned to speak in real snake. He really does understand what I say. Not everything, of course. Adjectives gives him trouble. But if I speak slowly, he catches the nouns and verbs. That time when Ajax was chasing Thea, just before we came to the forest, it was I who sent Perdix into the room to make Ajax angry. He can help us now, I think.” He restored Perdix to his familiar haunt in the pouch of his loincloth. I was still not convinced that the snake could help our mission, but I dared not belittle him within the range of his fangs.

  Icarus with his snake was no longer a child with a pet. Rather, he treated Perdix as a warrior treats a dependable ally, a horse or a war dog, with trust, affection, and dignity. The three of us headed toward the town of the Centaurs, the obvious place for the main host of Achaeans and also for Thea’s surrender.

  Along the way, we found that Ajax had preceded us to Pandia’s village. No house had escaped a pilfering, and Pandia’s log had been split down the middle by an axe. Shattered crockery and a few smoked fish, evidently not to the taste of the conquerors, testified to what had once been her well-stocked larder. They had emptied her Cretan Bears-tail out of its pot, as if they suspected a cache of coins, and worst of all, they had turned the communal berry patch into a small wilderness of raucous crows, uprooted posts, and stripped vines. The Bears themselves, it appeared, had been captured by Ajax and carried on his march.

  Icarus glanced at the crows and scattered them with a well-aimed handle from a honey pot. “I’m glad Pandia didn’t come,” he said. “It would have broken her heart.”<
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  “Or turned her stomach,” I said, and resumed our journey with revenge as well as rescue to spur my hooves.

  We approached the farms of the Centaurs with great stealth, in case the besieging Ajax had stationed guards to protect his rear. Where the forest met the vineyards, Icarus climbed a tree to locate the enemy. I myself am not adept at climbing (except the oaks of Dryads). The branches have a way of buckling under my weight or catching my tail. But Icarus insinuated himself into the foliage with a skill which did credit to his mother’s race; and after his reconnoitering, extricated himself without a rustle.

  A cobweb stretched over one of his eyes and gave him the look of a pirate, and a pirate’s ferocity crackled in his voice when he told me what he had seen.

  “They are not besieging,” he said. “They have already captured the town! It’s too far to see clearly, but I could just make out bands of helmeted men wandering through the streets, as if they owned the place. I’ll have to move closer to get a real look.”

  “Wait till night. Then we’ll go together.”

  Darkness is a going instead of a coming; an absence of light rather than a presence of bat wings, mummy wrappings, ravens, or whatever other fanciful figure of speech we poets use to describe her. But a going can be as welcome as a coming, and daylight, hateful for what it showed, faded like a lamp which has burned its olive oil and left us to the kind secrecy of night. We crossed the vineyards, their green grapelets invisible beneath a moonless sky, and bypassed the compound to avoid exciting the animals. We saw, after first hearing, two Achaean patrols. They had been celebrating; they were still imbibing. They sang or laughed as they made their rounds, and paused whenever they met to swap convivialities. Under their belts they carried little flasks which they swapped and tipped to their mouths with a maximum of contented smacks. It was not hard to avoid them. If they saw us at all, they must have mistaken us for a pair of palm trees with broad trunks and without fronds.