Day of the Minotaur mt-1

by Thomas Burnett Swann

  “Thea,” I called across the moat. “Will you lower the bridge for us?”

  She came to me along the path which Chiron had walked in the time before the invasion, a woman who, at sixteen, had put behind her the girlhood which, even at Vathypetro, had been shadowed by the owl-wings of maturity. The Dryads followed her in deference and awe. At last she was one of them, utterly, yet also the strongest of them.

  “Thea,” I said, as she walked from the glowing heart of the fire, out of the light and into the darkness; salamander, phoenix, goddess, illuminating the great fastnesses of the night and my own heart.

  Chapter XI

  THE PASSING OF THE BEASTS

  Twenty-one Achaeans in all had survived the poison. Those in the theater stirred with fitful groans and rolled their heads as if to dislodge the demons that haunted their dreams. We lost no time in carrying them to join their comrades in the compound.

  “After I surrendered, they refused to leave the forest,” Thea explained when the drowsy warriors, clutching their stomachs or rubbing their eyes, were safely lodged behind the walls of thorn. “According to Ajax, I had caused him so much trouble that he meant to repay himself with all the riches in the forest. If I showed him the underground passage to your workshop, he promised to set me free. Of course I showed him nothing.”

  “What did he intend to do with you? Take you back to Mycenae?”

  “I think he intended to kill me. Somehow, I seemed to frighten him. He called me the Beast Princess.”

  “He was right, you know.”

  The next morning, while Icarus entered my house through the tunnel to rescue Pandia, I led a band of Panisci to the edge of the field and blared a challenge to the garrison in the trunk. The Panisci were armed with slings, I with a battle-axe, and we dragged a red-eyed Xanthus on a rope to corroborate our claims to victory. The Achaeans were not long in appearing behind the parapet. I could see the glint of their helmets through the embrasures.

  “We have won the war,” I boomed, “and killed your leader, Ajax. Those of your friends who survive are now our hostages. If you wish to save them and yourselves, discard your weapons and leave the forest before sunset.”

  They greeted my claims with derisive laughter. Smug in their captured retreat, feasting from cockcrow to the time of lamps, they had good reason to scorn an ultimatum.

  We jerked our captive out of the trees and flaunted him in his ignominious ruin.

  “Listen to them,” he urged his friends. ” Ajax is truly dead and every one of us has been poisoned by their magic.” He pressed his stomach for emphasis. “It will get you too unless you do as he says!”

  Laughter yielded to consultation, excited voices to the groan of the crude timbers which served as a door. Framed in the doorway behind his shield, a single warrior addressed us. His insolence could not conceal his fear: “Send us Xanthus and let us question him.” We could spare one hostage to prove our claims. An eager Paniscus prodded him with his sling, and the earless Xanthus, dragging his rope and casting timorous glances over his shoulder, reeled to join his friends.

  Led by Xanthus, the Achaeans left my house in the afternoon, and the next morning we sent their comrades from the compound to overtake and join them beyond the forest. I had taken their weapons, armor, and tunics and, knowing the Achaeans cultivate their beards as the visible sign of valor, I had force them to shave with a coarse bronze razor which left their cheeks the color of a radish. Kings and conquerors, they had come to humble us, and they left like a column of slaves being marched to the infamous marketplace in Pylos.

  Again, the forest belonged to the Beasts, but to people whose heroes are dead, whose towns are in ruins, and who must momentarily expect another invasion, the taste of victory can be as bitter as hemlock.

  Two weeks after the departure of the Acheans, a patrol of Panisci caught a Cretan just as he entered the forest and brought him none too gently to the town of the Centaurs, where Thea, Icarus, and I were helping the females to rebuild their houses. Black-haired, narrow-waisted, thin as the peasants who live in the reed hovels along the Nile, he blinked nervously; he looked like a man who had come from a long and grueling battle, not yet won. Aeacus, of course, had sent him.

  “Thea,” I called, wanting secretly to butt him into the moat. “Will you bring your guest some coconut milk?” It was all we had to offer. The Achaeans had drunk our wine, and the grapes were not yet ripe. I left him with Thea and Icarus in one of the bamboo stalls, newly rebuilt and hung with the few silks which had not been dirtied by the boots of the conquerors or used to clean their armor.

  I crossed the bridge. Every evening, usually with Thea and Icarus, I returned to my house to work and sleep. Centaur females patrolled the moat and guarded the animals—two cows, a bull, seven sheep—which remained in the compound.

  “They have come for your friends?” asked the Centaur whose name was Rhode, daughter of the noble Chiron. Before the war, she had worn a white lily in her hair. She had cut her hair the day of her father’s death, and the short tresses no longer could hold a stem.

  “Yes, Rhode.”

  “Will Thea and Icarus return with the Cretan?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “There will always be someone who comes to invade our peace. They will never leave us alone, will they, Eunostos? Isn’t it time we left the forest? Returned to the Isles?”

  The Isles of the Blest, she meant. The land in the Western Sea from which we had come, in the age before men: a pleasant and sunny land, without dangers—and also without adventures.

  “The gods will tell us the time,” I said. “It will be soon, I think.”

  I waited in my garden for Thea and Icarus. In the ivory moonlight, the fountain swayed like a rain-drenched palm touching the earth with its fronds. I had dug a new staircase under the ground, and of course my workshop and other rooms had escaped the depredations of war. Not the garden, however. There was no parasol, and my fig tree had been uprooted and burned for wood. My trellises were bare, and the new seeds I had planted had not had time to sprout. It was still a garden without greenery.

  “ Knossos has not yet fallen,” said Thea excitedly when she arrived with Icarus. “Our father is still fighting. He learned from Xanthus, who is now his captive, that Icarus and I were here in the forest. He could not come himself because the city is under siege. But he sent his messenger to urge us to stay where we are until the war is won. That’s what my father says, but—”

  “But you want to go to him. You think you can help him.”

  The ardor died from her voice. “I don’t want to go,” she said dully. “I want to stay here with you and our friends. But he is my father, and the Cretans were once my people. In spite of their faults, they are better than Achaeans. It will be bad for all of us if Knossos falls.”

  “And what can you and Icarus do to keep it from falling?”

  “You yourself have taught us how to fight.”

  Silence returned to the garden; silence, except for the cricket-voices of the fountain and the quick breaths of Icarus, who looked at me with the unquestioning worship of a boy who expected the one decisive action, the one infallible command which would solve his dilemma.

  “I don’t want to go back to my father,” he said. “He was like a shadow. He carried darkness wherever he walked.”

  “Sadness,” said Thea. “Not darkness.”

  “Whatever it was, it was cold. You couldn’t touch him, you know. He had a way of drawing back as if your fingers might dirty his robe. It’s you I love, Eunostos. Haven’t I become a Beast?”

  “You always were,” said Thea. “You didn’t have to come here, as I did, to find the Beast in you. Perhaps you ought to go back to find the Man. At least, a little of him.”

  “What Thea means,” I said, “is that you and I, Icarus, have hearts like forests. Maybe we need to cut down a few of the trees and build a city.”

  “Or save a city,” she said. ” Knossos. Will you come with me, Icarus? If
only for a little?”

  For a little? Forever, I thought.

  “Must I go, Eunostos?”

  “Thea will need you,” I said, wrenching the words like an arrow from my heart. I held him in my arms for the last time. I held the young forest before it had lost the singing of its sweetest birds and the lifting of its tallest trees; I held its fawn and rabbit, bear cub and pink Paniscus with cloven hooves and tail like the curl of a grapevine, and the warm fledgling of the woodpecker, enclosed in his fort of twigs; all things small, vulnerable, and hopeful, all things that wish to grow. But I could not arrest the passage of that treacherous lizard, time.

  “Icarus,” I said. It was neither a cry nor a plea, but the simple, final utterance of a name which I loved. I did not watch him when he left the garden.

  We sat in the midst of the fountain as if it could wash our pain to the insubstantiality of moonlight. The sadness of moonlight is real but a little remote. Stars cry out in loneliness, and the moon, I think, is the loneliest of goddesses. Still, they are far away, and the loss they tell has the wistful sweetness of a tale about the maidenhood of the Great Mother or an old song sung by the Dryads when they turn their handmills and grind the barley to flour. But the sadness of a house and a garden is different and very close; as close as the hot coal which burns your hand or the captured bat which screams to free itself from the tangle of your hair.

  “I had hoped,” she said, “to see your trellises hold new vines.” She caught my hand between the coldness of her fingers. “Eunostos, it is a Man’s—or a Beast’s—tragedy that two loves may call him in different directions. By following one, he is bound to leave the other. Leave, I say, not lose. No love is ever lost. It changes its form like water, from lake to river to cloud, and when we are most a desert, it falls from the sky in fructifying rain.”

  “I don’t know about rain,” I said. “I was never a philosopher, and I’m no longer a poet. If you have to go, I want to go with you. Protect you till you join your father and then fight in his army. You know I can fight. You’ve seen me with my bow!”

  “How can you leave your people? There is only you to lead them. You see, my dear, you also have two loves. Those with a single love—how poor they are! Ajax and war, and Thriae and gold. Ours is the treasure of pharaohs.”

  “I don’t feel like a pharaoh. I feel like a palm tree without any coconuts.”

  “You’ll get them back. And blue monkeys to play in your branches. I’m going to leave you now. You must close your eyes. They stare and stare and ask what I cannot give.”

  Her sandals leaving the garden were as hushed as the hooves of a fawn.

  Aeacus did not forget the Beasts who had sheltered his children. He sent a second messenger, who drank from a coconut in the house of a Centaur, loosened the belt which constricted his narrow waist, and told me about the war. The Achaean army, it seemed, had fought to the gates of the palace, which, lacking the walls of mainland citadels like Mycenae and Tiryns, had been frantically buttressed with timbers, rubble, and even the stone bathtubs from the royal suite. Aeacus himself lay wounded and close to death when his battered Cretans, among them Icarus, marched through the corbeled arch of the gate to what appeared to be their last and mortal defeat. But even while the lamentation of the women resounded through the gardens and the pillared courtyards, the Princess Thea appeared on the walls and urged her warriors to victory in the name of the Great Mother and the Minotaur. The besieging Achaeans gasped when they saw her beauty: the crimson, helmet-shaped skirt emblazoned with jet-black ants; the bared breasts, flaunting fertility in the very graveyard of war; the golden serpents coiled around her wrists; the pointed ears and the greenly tumbled hair which lent to her chiseled features a wild and intoxicating barbarism.

  Archers forgot to draw their bows. Swordsmen fell to their knees and raised their swords like talismans above their heads.

  A hush and then an outcry.

  “Sorceress!”

  “Goddess!”

  “Beast Princess!”

  It was then that the boy Icarus charged them with his shield Bion. They saw his pointed ears. They knew him to be her brother. They had come to fight puny Men—sailors and merchants and perfumed courtiers—and not these bright, avenging children from the Country of the Beasts. “The Beast Prince!”

  They stared; they dropped their weapons. They reeled toward the sea, trampling vineyards, stampeding goats among the hillocks of red poppies, fleeing, fleeing the Children of the Beasts. To their wooden ships they fled, scrambling up the hulls like avid crabs, hoisting the black sails until they bellied with wind and bore them away and away from the sword-strewn beach and the boy who waved his shield and hurled after them the curse of the Minotaur.

  “And now,” concluded the messenger, flushed with the telling, “the smoke of hecatombs has made a forest of the afternoon. Burnt offerings to the god of battles! Sandarac and myrrh in the caves of the Great Mother! Flowers gathered from the liberated fields—poppies and roses, violets and asphodels to garland the victors. Thea, the Beautiful, and Icarus, Prince of Warriors. Aeacus himself was carried to watch the garlanding. He has not forgotten your kindness to his children nor the loss you suffered fighting against Achaeans. It is he who has sent me to offer you the gift of two ships to return you to the safety of your homeland, the Isles of the Blest. His own sailors will man them, and no country is beyond their sailing. You will find both ships at the port of Phaestus. They will be provisioned on your arrival.”

  I carried with me only the wicker basket from my picnic with Thea and Icarus, and in it my green tunic, a flask of beer, a few honey cakes, a reed pen, and some strips of papyrus (you see, I had started to write my history); and over my shoulder a hoe. There would always be gardens.

  I met my friends in the town of the Centaurs. Pandia led the Bears, who had never returned to live in their own village with its plundered logs and withered vines. In spite of her tender years, she had won a name for being something of an Amazon and she bared her teeth proudly as the Girls trooped after her across the drawbridge, the oldest of them looking no more than twelve and holding the hands of daughters or granddaughters who might have been their sisters.

  “Wouldn’t Icarus be proud to see me?” she said.

  “Yes,” I said, “and so am I.”

  Next came the Centaur children, some of them very young and trying to gallop in several directions at once, and last, the mothers with their few belongings strapped to their backs: a lantern, a wicker cage for crickets (empty), a coverlet for cold nights at sea. At the edge of the woods, we found the Dryads waiting in covered litters built from their trees. After they had boarded the ships, the wooden hulls would protect them until they could find new trees in the Isles of the Blest. The Panisci had offered to carry them. You would hardly have recognized the once mischievous goat boys as they lifted the litters on their hairy shoulders and moved through the forest with no attempt to frighten their passengers or race their friends. I took my place at the head of the company.

  “Eunostos,” called Zoe from her litter. “Will you walk beside me?”

  She had started to look her three hundred and seventy years. Was this the great-hearted temptress who had danced the Dance of the Python and emptied a skin of beer with a few gulps? No longer did she stir my blood, but she stirred my heart to a deep, aching tenderness.

  She took my hand. “You’re not the Eunostos I used to love. You have—how shall I say?—grown up.”

  “Up, perhaps. Not wise.”

  “A truly wise man is too modest to recognize his own wisdom. If I had not grown old while you were growing up, I could have loved you the best of all my lovers!”

  The trees of the Dryads, denuded of branches to build the litters, had dropped their leaves in premature autumn. The village of the Bear Girls had been entirely occupied by the crows, who had gutted the logs and the berry patch with the thoroughness of a forest fire, and the burrows of Panisci had fallen to water rats who, with twigs and mud
, were busy diminishing the large entrances to their own size. Do you know the story that the Forest was once a god, young as the sun who steps from the sea in the morning? That he ruled the earth until the Coming of the Great Mother and then willingly retired to the foot of the hills with memories enough to content him for many centuries? If the story is true, I think he has now grown tired of remembering.

  Our ships ride at anchor, sturdy of cypress, twin-masted, with dolphin-shaped pennants hanging from the beaked prows and purple moons painted along the hulls. Today, the last pithoi of olive oil, the last kegs of water and wine, the last foodstuffs of cheese and hard-crusted bread, raisins, dates, and dried figs, will be carried on board from the mule-drawn wagons sent by Aeacus. Tomorrow, if the gods send favorable winds, we will sail for the Isles of the Blest, a voyage of great distances and many perils, of dog-headed monsters with teeth as long as daggers and waves as tall as a three-storied palace. But Cretan ships can swim like dolphins, play in the troughs and mount the tallest wave. They have circumnavigated the great continent of Libya; I think they will find their way to our blessed islands. Leaving my ship in the later afternoon, calling to Pandia as she painted the letters I-C-A-R-U-S below the prow, I have climbed for the last time to the cave which I call the Chamber of the Blue Monkeys, a forgotten shrine to the Great Mother. I have come to finish my history, written laboriously on papyrus and fastened together into a scroll like the famous Egyptian Book of the Dead. I shall leave the finished scroll in a copper chest for the Men of the future.

  After we have sailed to the islands, I think that legend will not be kind to us. The Centaurs will thunder through many a battle as the barbarous foe of Men and their well-ordered cities; and the Minotaur, the Bull that Walks Like a Man, what will they say of him? His tail will grow forked, his horns will sprout like the antlers of a stag, and the gloom of his lightless caverns will terrorize children and young virgins. “Beast” will become synonymous with “animal,” and “bestial” will be an epithet applied to savages and murderers. Men of the future, open this cave and find my scroll and read that we were neither gods nor demons, neither entirely virtuous nor entirely bad, but possessed of souls like you and in some ways kinder; capable of honor and sacrifice—and love. Consider if bestiality is not, after all, akin to humanity. Read and understand us, forgive us for having once defeated you, and forgive the author if he has allowed his own loss to darken his story.