Day of the Minotaur

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.”

“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.

We came to the clump of olive trees which I had previously noticed beside the moat, and one of them looked so staunch and concealing that I felt emboldened to risk my weight in the branches. I saw that most of the Achaeans had gathered in the theater to hold a banquet. They had built a fire in the pit and, using their swords as spits, begun to roast their dinner. Thea, our precious, surrendered Thea, sat on one of the tiers and seemed oblivious to men, fire, and food. The earless Xanthus pointed toward the fire as if to say: “Will you share in our feast?” She shook her head. “Thea,” I wanted to cry, “accept his invitation. Your supper last night was a bit of cheese and a slice of bread. You went to the Achaeans of your own will and now you must eat their food in order to keep your strength.” Then I discovered the reason for her abstinence. The Men were eating not only the domesticated pigs of the Centaurs, but some of the blue monkeys from the forest. The skinned and spitted bodies were clearly recognizable in the light of the fire, as eager cooks jostled each other to lower them into the flames and turn them from side to side. Blue monkeys. Thea’s monkeys. The forest’s laughter, she had said. I thought of what she must feel to have them offered her on a spit or a platter.

The men who were not cooking tippled from horns or wineskins, sang ribald songs about the women of their conquests—raw-boned Israelites who would slip a knife in your back when you closed your eyes; olive-skinned Egyptians who bragged about their sphinxes and pyramids and made you feel like crass barbarians; and Cretans with bare breasts who were good mistresses once they had satisfied their pride by making a show of resistance. One man sang a ballad about the famous Cretan bosom, which he variously compared to ant-hills, burial mounds, and helmets, none of them happy comparisons, it seemed to me (being a poet, perhaps I am too critical). Laughter, coarse and brutal, interrupted the songs, and Ajax, the swaggering victor, moved among his Men, drank their wine, and claimed the tenderest morsels from their swords.

Thus, the conquerors. The conquered lay in the streets. The sad, ungainly bodies of those gracious farm-folk, the Centaurs, together with splintered houses, broken lanterns, and torn tapestries, attested to a fierce battle in the very heart of the town. The surviving Centaurs, I saw, had been shut in the animal compound with their sheep and oxen and were now being guarded by a small contingent of soldiers, most of whom stood at the gate while two of their number patrolled the high and virtually unclimbable walls of thorn. None of the males had survived the battle; and a handful of females and children, along with the hapless Bears of Artemis and three Panisci, comprised the prisoners. I felt as I had when I saw my workers slaughtered before my eyes; if anything, worse, for Centaurs are higher beings, no less loyal and far more kind and intelligent. Chiron, the blameless king; Moschus, a bore but lovable: their faces came to haunt me, noble of mane, and the thunder of their hooves. But tears are a luxury not permitted to warriors on the threshold of battle. I stifled my grief into a far corner of my brain and let my anger flare like the fires in the forge of Hephaestus, the smithy god, when he works his bellows: anger which spurs the body to valor, the mind to craft.

“Those poor Centaurs,” said Icarus when we had left our trees and met to whisper plans. “And the blue monkeys. How do you think the Achaeans got them?” It was the lingering child in him which lamented the Centaurs and the monkeys with the same grief.

“They are trusting creatures. Ajax may have lured them right into the town with the offers of food. Or maybe they followed Thea.”

“I wish we could enter the town as easily as the monkeys.”

I deliberated. “Perhaps we can send a weapon even if we can’t go ourselves.”

“A secret weapon?” The harmamaxa had fascinated him. But the weapon I had in mind was less obvious and much more devilish.

“Remember my telling you about our war with the wolves and how Chiron thought of feeding them wolf’s-bane? It’s a rather innocuous looking root, a bit like a dark carrot. But the monkeys love roots of all kinds. If we could get them to eat wolf’s-bane, and drive them toward the town before they died—”

“The Achaeans would eat them, but Thea wouldn’t. They would poison themselves!”

“Exactly.”

“Is the poison always fatal?”

“When taken in sufficient quantities. Smaller quantities act like a sedative. Either way, the enemy would be knocked out long enough for us to release the captives and take the town.”

We spent the night in my cave, sitting back to back and sharing each other’s warmth in the damp, cold air: friend and friend, remembering what we had lost; warrior and warrior, plotting tomorrow’s vengeance and what we hoped to win:

Icarus said at last: “Eunostos, I am cold all over except for my back,” and I cradled him in my arms until he slept. He had no wish to remain a child, but it pleased him for the moment to relax from the stance of a warrior into the old childish ways of need and dependence, and it pleased his friend to father and shield him. It is one of the ways of love to delight in the youngness, the littleness, the helplessness of the beloved.

When the sun crept yellow feelers into the cave, we went to look for wolf’s-bane. The plant had never thrived on temperate Crete. Its favorite habitat is the cold northern mountains of the mainland, where the sun is a sometime visitor instead of a king.

“Perdix will help us,” Icarus announced. “A snake should know about roots of all kinds. He lives among them.” He drew the snake from his pouch and addressed him with tenderness. “Don’t you, Perdix?”

“Does he understand the word ‘wolf’s-bane’?”

“It explains itself, doesn’t it?” To the snake he said with great emphasis: “WOLF’S-BANE. ROOTS TO KILL A WOLF.”

The tongue flickered with what I presumed to be comprehension and perhaps a touch of petulance because Icarus spoke to him as if he had no tongue to catch the vibrations of human speech. Icarus stooped to release him and, before he could touch the ground, the snake escaped from his fingers. We hurried to follow him through the undergrowth.

“I think he’s after a female,” I whispered when the sweat of the chase had begun to mat my hair.

“He’s doing his bit for Thea. After all, she’s his great-great-niece. Though,” he admitted, “I expect he loves me best. I’ve never stepped on his tail.”

Possessed of a tail myself (though its altitude preserves it from treading sandals), I could understand the snake’s preference.

In less than an hour, he led us to the ragged and unscalable cliff which formed the eastern boundary of the forest. In the shadow of the cliff and the further shade of a large carob tree, we found a clump of wolf’s-bane. Like their four-legged namesake, the plants prefer shadows to sunlight. I knew that in late summer they would burst into showy but somewhat sinister hooded flowers, like visored helmets, of blue, yellow, purple, or white; now, however, leaves like slender, tapering hands. We pulled them up by their stalks and shook the dirt from their thick, tuberous roots. They did not look appetizing, but neither does a carrot, a raw fish, or a plucked chicken.

It was not hard to find a congregation of blue monkeys, the happiest of animals and perhaps the most talkative. You can hear that chattering from a great distance, a multitude of cries which merge their separate sharpnesses into a single music. Merry, trusting, affectionate, they recognized Icarus and me as familiar faces and, at the same time, spied the bait in our hands. One of them jumped on my shoulders and, twining his legs around my neck, bent to clutch at a root. I made a soft chattering which I supposed to approximate monkey and gestured toward the town of the Centaurs, as if to say that I would feed him when we reached the town.

I looked at Icarus and saw the tears in his eyes. “We’re killing them for Thea,” I reminded him. “To save her from those ruffians.”

“I know,” he said, “but treachery is still treacherous. Otherwise, why are you crying?”

“I’m not crying,” I snapped so sharply that the monkey jumped from my shoulder. “I’m trying to comfort you.”

“You’re always trying to comfort someone—Thea, Pandia, me—and doing very well at it. In fact, you’re the most comfortable person I know. But sometimes you need comforting too. I think you ought to marry Thea as soon as you rescue her.”

He did not doubt that we would be successful or that, once rescued, she would wish to marry me. To be admired by such a boy—well, it made me want to reach and aspire until my heart more nearly equaled my height.

The monkeys followed us in a long, vociferous stream, and I earnestly hoped that no Achaeans would issue from the trees to contest our advance. Once, a Dryad called to us from her bower, her face poised in the branches like a water lily in a green pool. In the past she had always scorned me, but now she called in a husky whisper:

“Eunostos, take care of yourself. The forest depends on you.”

At the edge of the forest, still under cover of trees, we fed the monkeys. With a touching but not entirely successful attempt to avoid biting or scratching us, they plucked the roots from our hands and ate them so quickly that they did not have time to notice their bitterness. Then we waved our daggers and ran at the unsuspecting creatures with a show of great ferocity. At first they mistook our actions for a game and tried to wrestle the knives out of our hands. We had to strike them with the flats of our blades to prove our hostility. I shall never forget their cries of astonishment and disbelief. We watched them vaulting across the trellises of the vineyard, still in a pack and more aggrieved than frightened.

We could not follow them into the fields by daylight, but Icarus, climbing another tree, witnessed the meeting between the monkeys and the Achaeans, who heard their arrival and came from the compound to investigate. Already the monkeys were growing sluggish with the poison, which strikes painlessly but with first a tingling and then a deadening of all sensations, and the men dispatched them with swords and returned to the compound. The Achaeans, who were not acquainted with the monkeys’ usual vigor, had no reason to suspect their condition. They received the congratulations of their friends on a good catch; they paused; they seemed to deliberate, no doubt asking themselves if they ought to share their prize with those in the town. Generosity or fear of Ajax provided the answer, and selecting the plumpest to keep in the compound, they strung the remaining bodies on a rope and headed for the town.

When the absence which is night had made our presence reasonably undiscoverable, we crossed the fields and, encountering no patrols, resumed our vantage points in the trees beside the moat. Two bonfires writhed in the darkness, like orange squids in the lightless depths of the sea: one in the theater, one in the compound. It was the many-tentacled fire in the theater which held my attention.

Tonight the Achaeans did not lack women. They seemed to have spent the afternoon hunting in the woods, and three Dryads, drawn and haggard, their long hair disheveled and, in places, apparently torn out by the roots, represented their catch. I rejoiced that Zoe was not among them. The four queens of the Thriae and several of the drones had also come to the banquet, but as guests instead of captives and of course without the workers, who are not endowed for orgies. The four queens strutted around the pit as if they had conquered the forest through their own prowess, and they jangled more than their usual number of bracelets—spoils, no doubt, from the gutted homes of the Centaurs. Later, I learned that the queens had indeed proved helpful traitors by surprising the Centaurs in the gate-tower and lowering the bridge to Ajax’s Men. The hope occurred to me that they might forget themselves in the flush of victory and scatter their fatal kisses among their allies, but they chose to stand on their dignity as queens—they smiled and received compliments but did not descend to the familiarities of love. The drones, however, simpered like courtesans among the rugged Achaeans, who, along with the Cretans, enjoy a considerable versatility in sexual practices, and Amber’s brother seemed to be collecting a small fortune in arm-bands, pendants, and rings.

Achaeans are altogether indiscriminate in their pleasures. They can eat, drink, and wench in the same breath, and tonight they lost no time in cooking the blue monkeys, together with fish, venison, and the last of the Centaurs’ pigs. Even while fondling a skin of wine, a drone, or a Dryad, they lifted the deadly meat to their lips and ate with relish. Haunches and limbs were passed from hand to hand until everyone received at least a modicum of the tender meat and enough poison, I trusted, to drug even if not to kill him. On the topmost row of the theater, a sly little chap concealed himself in the shadows to enjoy an undivided monkey, but three of his comrades followed him from the pit, dismembered the animal, and left him only the head, which, however, he ate without protest. The vegetarian Thriae did not partake of the meat, nor did the Dryads, and when Ajax presented a skinny leg to Thea, she flung it in his face. He slapped her onto the stones, retrieved the leg, and shredded the meat from the bone with one raking bite.

“Bloody barbarian,” I muttered. “I’ll ram that bone right down your throat.”

“Shhhhhh,” warned Icarus. “You’re starting to bellow. After we rescue Thea, you can ram it anywhere you like.”

When men have drunk enough wine to float a pentecopter and eaten enough meat to sink a round-built merchant ship, they usually want to sleep, but the sudden sleep which overpowered the Achaeans resembled the miasmic mists which rise from the bowels of Sicily and prostrate travelers when they leave their litters to drink at wayside fountains. They began to slump on the stairs; they stretched in the pit, swords clattering, wine cups falling from limp fingers. Those who had eaten lightly succumbed more slowly; had time in which to view their friends with dazed astonishment before they joined them in heaped and sprawling confusion.

The Thriae could not account for the strange sleep of their hosts. Intoxicated? Drugged? Exhausted by the rigors of conquest? They fluttered above the prostrated bodies, their dulcet tones growing shrill; they shouted, prodded with jeweled fingers, clamored—the queens for attention, the drones for caresses. Quietly the three Dryads congregated around Thea and began to help her collect the Achaean daggers.

Amber, kneeling to prod a recumbent body, lifted her head to confront an armed and determined Thea, who seized the gauzy membrane of her wing and delivered a slap which spun her head as if it had been struck by the boom of a sail. By now the drones and the other queens had mounted the air, and the oldest queen, she of the mottled skin and bulging eyes, pelted Thea with bracelets until the girl relaxed her hold on Amber’s wing. With a fury of fluttering, Amber rejoined her sisters and called to Thea as if she were spitting:

“Dearest one, I hope that a Strige will suck your blood and blue-flies pick your bones.”

The Thriae began to mass above the pit, stripping their bracelets to use as missiles; though one of the queens was old, and the drones were effeminate cowards, Thea and three harrassed Dryads could hardly hope to repel an attack.

“Thriae,” I boomed, “I am coming to get you with my army!” I thrashed about in my tree like a small whirlwind, and my army of one gave a roar which suggested Minotaur in his veins.

The Thriae retreated with such precipitous haste that two of the drones collided and almost fell to the ground before they could disentangle their wings and, casting regretful looks at the prone, manly bodies of their allies, flutter after their queens. It is said that queens, drones, and workers flew to the land of the Achaeans to live on Mount Parnassus, deliver oracles of doubtful authority, and receive the tribute accorded to deities. (If this were a tale instead of a history, you may rest assured that I would have drowned them in the sea like Icarus’ namesake, the ill-fated son of Daedelus.)

Thea and the Dryads resumed their task of disarming the Achaeans. Some were dead or dying; some would awaken with wracking pains and without weapons. Ajax, kneeling dazedly beside his friend Xanthus, struggled to his feet and held his great sword between him and the girl who had caused his ruin.

“She-wolf,” he groaned. “I am going to kill you!” For a wicked man attributes his own sins, his own wolfishness, to those who oppose him.

Slowly, laboriously, he raised the sword above his head, as if through fathoms of water. She did not wait for its descent; she drove her dagger between his ribs. The sword fell from his hand and clattered onto the stones. At first, he did not fall, but faced her with draining defiance.

“Goddess,” he said, and crumpled at her feet, his yellow beard pressing against her sandals.

She stared at his body with stricken horror. Even from a distance, I saw the rigidity of her arms and the enormity of her eyes. But she did not weep. She had killed a man and the act appalled her, but the gods had forced her hand. She knelt to remove his dagger.

Icarus and I climbed from our tree. First we entered the compound and, disarming the drugged or slain Achaeans, released the prisoners. No one spoke; there are no appropriate words to greet a victory which comes too late and at too great a cost.

Finally, I said: “We will go to the town and bring the survivors to the compound where we can watch them.”

They trooped after me in a proud and sorrowful file. The Panisci, furtive and mysterious, vanished into the night to return to their burrows in the banks of the stream. I thought: I will feed the Bears of Artemis from the leavings of the Achaean feast—the fish and the venison—and make them beds under the stars with the fatherless children of the Centaurs.

“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.