Day of the Minotaur

Chapter I THE WOODEN WINGS

My history belongs to the princess Thea, niece of the great king Minos, and to her brother Icarus, named for the ill-fated son of Daedalus who drowned in the sea when his glider lost its wings. I, the author, am a poet and craftsman and not a historian, but at least I have studied the histories of Egypt and I will try to imitate their terse, objective style. You must forgive me, however, if now and then I digress and lose myself in the glittering adjectives which come so readily to my race. We have always been rustic poets, and I, the last of the line, retain an ear for the well-turned phrase, the elegant (yes, even the flowery) epithet.

Thea and Icarus were the only children of the Cretan prince, Aeacus, brother to Minos. As a young warrior, Aeacus had led a punitive expedition against a band of pirates who had raided the coast and taken refuge in the great forests of the interior. For three years no one heard of him. Returning at last to Knossos, he brought with him, instead of captured pirates, two small children. His own, he told the court. By whom? By a lady he had met on his wanderings. And where had he wandered? Through the Country of the Beasts, a forest of cypress and cedar shut from the rest of the island by the tall limestone ridges which humped from the range of Ida. Cynics concluded that Thea and Icarus were the offspring of a peasant; romanticists questioned if a mere peasant could have given birth to children as strange as they were beautiful, with neatly pointed ears and hair whose luminous brown held intimations of green. Thea took pains to hide her ears behind a cluster of curls, but she could not hide the color of her hair. Icarus, on the other hand, displayed his ears with a mixture of shyness and pride; he allowed no wisp of hair to cover their tips, though his head was a small meadow of green-glinting curls.

The children grew up in a troubled court. The power of the island kingdom had become a thin crescent of its ancient fullness. Gargantuan earthquakes had damaged the many-palaced cities. The famous fleet, scattered by tidal waves, had fallen into disrepair or come to be manned by mercenaries from Egypt. The bronze robot Talos, guardian of the coast, lay rusting beside the great Green Sea, and no one remembered how to repair him. As the brother of Minos, Aeacus spent most of his time in the royal palace at Knossos, and after Minos’ death he assumed the throne. A wise if somewhat forbidding ruler, he correctly guessed that the barbarous Achaeans, who lived in the rock-built citadels of Pylos, Tiryns, and Mycenae on the mainland to the north of Crete, were building ships to attack his people. The Achaeans worshiped Zeus of the Lightning and Poseidon, the Thunderer, instead of the Great Mother; their greatest art was war; and their raids on the Cretan coast resembled small invasions, with a dozen eagle-prowed ships descending on a town in the dead of night to steal gold and capture slaves.

Foreseeing the eventual fall of Knossos, Aeacus sent his children—Thea was ten at the time, Icarus nine—to his mansion called Vathypetro, ten miles south of Knossos, a small, fortified, and self-sufficient palace which included a kiln, an olive press, and a weaving shop. Poised on the roof in the arms of a catapult lay one of the gliders devised by the late scientist, Daedalus. In case of siege, Aeacus’ servants had orders to place the children on the fish-like body and strike the bronze trigger which, releasing the catapult, would propel them to relative safety in the heart of the island.

Six years after her arrival in Vathypetro, when invasion had become a certainty instead of a possibility, and the great palace at Mallia had fallen to pirates, Thea was picking crocuses in the North Court. The bright yellow flowers, known to poets as the cloth-of-gold, covered the earth like a rippling fleece, except where a single date-palm broke the flowers with its bending trunk and clustered, succulent fruit. She could hear, in the next court, the sounds of the olive-press, a granite boulder crushing the black kernels, the mush being poured into sacks and pressed under wooden levers weighted with stones. But the workers, the old and the very young who had not been called to the army defending Knossos, did not sound joyful; they did not sing their usual praises to the Great Mother. For want of sufficient pickers, the fruit had been left too long on the trees and its oil was crude and strong.

She wore a lavender kilt and a blouse embroidered at the neck with beads of amethyst. Though a young woman of sixteen, with shapely, swelling breasts, she did not like the open bodices worn by the ladies of the court. Five brown-green curls, artfully arranged by the handmaiden Myrrha, poised over her forehead, and three additional curls concealed each ear like grapevines hiding a trellis. Fresh and flower-like she looked, with the careful cultivation of a garden in a palace courtyard, rather than the wildness of a meadow or a forest; soft as the petals of a crocus, slender as the stem of a tall Egyptian lotus. But the green-flecked brown of her hair and the bronze of her skin resembled no flower in any earthly garden. Perhaps in the Lower World, where the Griffin Judge presides on his onyx throne, there are gardens with flowers like Thea.

And yet she was more than merely decorative. A firmness tempered her fragility. Like the purple murex, she looked as if she had come from the sea, fragrant and cleansed, with the shell’s own hue in her eyes and its hard strength in her limbs. A sandal can crush a flower but not a murex.

She was picking the crocuses for her father, who, she hoped, was coming from Knossos to visit her. She saw him reflected in the pool of her mind: Aeacus, the warrior-king. Tall for a Cretan, with broad shoulders tapering to a narrow waist, he looked like a young man until you saw the lines around his eyes, running like rivulets into his battle-scars: the v-shaped mark of an arrow, the cleft of a battle-ax. She needed his strength to hush her fears of an invasion, she needed his wisdom to help her manage Icarus, who sometimes acted as if he were five instead of fifteen and liked to vanish from the palace on mysterious journeys which he called his “snakings.”

A blue monkey scampered out of the tree, snatched a crocus, and tossed it into the wicker basket at her feet. She laughed and caught him in her hands. Though a maiden of marriageable years, she did not resent the fact that for friends she had only a monkey, a handmaiden, and a lovable but exasperating brother; that instead of bull games and tumblers and moonlit dances beside the Kairatos River, she had for amusement a distaff to wind with flax and linen robes to dye. Escaping from her hands, the monkey, whose name was Glaucus, snatched her basket and carried it up the trunk of the palm. In the top of the tree, he dislodged a swarm of bees and waved the basket to advertise his theft.

She shook her fist as if she were very angry; she shook the tree and roared like an angry lion. It was part of their game. She remained, however, Thea; she did not feel remotely leonine. When Icarus turned himself into a bear, he growled, he stalked, he actually hungered after honey, berries, and fish. But even as a small child, the practical Thea had not liked to pretend herself into other shapes. “But why should I pretend to be a dolphin?” she had once asked a playmate. “I’m Thea.” It was neither smugness nor lack of imagination, but a kind of unspoken acceptance, a quiet gratitude for the gifts of the Great Mother.

Always in the past, the monkey had dropped the basket at her feet and she, happily subsiding from lion into maiden, had rewarded him with a date or a honey cake. Today, however, she sank to the ground and, hunched among the flowers as if she had fallen from a tree, began to cry. It was not part of their game. She had heard the talk of the servants, their whispers when she approached, their abrupt silences when she tried to join them. She had seen the strain in her father’s face the last time he came from Knossos. Against the unnatural pallor of his skin, his scars had glowed like open wounds. If my father comes, she thought, I will not let him return to Knossos. I will keep him safe with us in Vathypetro. If he comes—

The monkey descended the trunk, lifted the basket into her lap, and chattering amiably, put his arm around her neck. She looked at him with surprise. Even at sixteen she was used to comforting instead of being comforted. Quickly she dried her eyes on a handkerchief of blue linen, with flying fish cavorting about its edges, and returned to picking.

“These are for my father,” she said to Glaucus. “Do you suppose he will like them?” But she was not really thinking about the flowers. She was thinking about invasion. “If the walls are breached,” her father had said, “you will go with Icarus to the Winged Fish. Myrrha will strap you to the board which is shaped like a mullet, and Icarus will hold to your back. Once in the air, you can shift your weight and help to change direction, climb or dip. Head for the mountains. Whatever you do, try not to land in the Country of the Beasts.” He paused. He had spoken an ominous name, the part of the island where he had met their mother. It was hard to tell if he spoke with fear or with anguished longing for something which he had lost and did not want his children to find and also lose. “Pass over the forest before you land. By leaning heavily forward, you can bring the craft down. There are friendly villagers who will give you shelter.”

She looked above the roofline of the mansion. To the north, Mount Juktas reared the gentle crags which, viewed from the sea, resembled the features of a sleeping god and barred the way to Knossos. Achaean invaders would come from the sea and around the mountain. To the west lay the hills, terraced with olive trees and vineyards, which climbed gradually into the Range of Ida and the Country of the Beasts, the forests which no one mentioned without a shudder, much less entered; the haunt, it was said by the cook, the gatekeeper, and the gardener, of the Minotaur, the Bull That Walks Like a Man. “Try not to land in the Country of the Beasts.” She would not forget her father’s warning.

Myrrha, the handmaiden, exploded into the garden. At the same instant, Thea heard sounds beyond the walls. Marching feet, the clank of armor, the voices of men who march with such confidence that they want the whole countryside to hear their coming.

“Achaeans,” Myrrha gasped. “We must go to the glider.” She was black of skin, a Libyan born into slavery among the Cretans, and fearful of everything: monkeys, snakes, bats, mice, strangers, and as for the Achaeans—well, they were giants who boiled their captives in olive oil and ate them to the last finger. Thea did not know her age; it was doubtful whether Myrrha knew. Fifty? Sixty? But her face was as smooth as a girl’s until, as now, it fell into wrinkled terror and her eyes seemed ready to burst from her head like overripe figs.

Myrrha seized her hand as if to comfort the girl, but it was Thea who imparted the strength and soothed the woman’s fears. “The walls are strong. We may not need the glider.” But privately she thought: The Achaeans come from the sea and from Knossos. There has been a battle; perhaps my father is dead.

She sprang up the stairs to the roof and surveyed the olive grove between the house and Mount Juktas. The green-silver limbs of the trees, some of them laden with fruit, glinted like the wings of dragonflies in the morning sun. But much of the glitter did not belong to the trees. Warriors, perhaps a hundred, advanced through the grove. Armored in leathern tunics, bronze cuirasses and crested helmets, with shields of bull’s hide, they carried swords and spears, and their beards looked so coarse and pointed that they too might have been weapons. Sharp men, bristling men; yellow-bearded killers. Happily, the walled house was built to withstand a siege. The gate was hewn from cedar, and men in the flanking towers could harass attackers with relative impunity.

But the towers, it appeared, were no longer manned. The slaves and servants had begun to desert the house and trail down the road of cobblestones which led to the olive grove. They were laden with bribes for the conquerers— amphorae of wine, yellow cheeses on platters of beaten gold, wicker baskets heaped with linen and wool. Thea’s impulse was to hurry after them and order them back by name: Thisbe, who had woven her kilt, Sarpedan, the porter, who called her “Green Curls,” Androgeus… Surely they would listen, they who had seemed to love her and whom she had loved? No, there was not time. There was only time in which to find Icarus.

She ran along corridors with walls of porous ashlars and roofs supported by red, swelling columns like turned trees. Her sandals clattered on the gray ironstone tiles. She ran until she came to the Room of the Snake. The room was empty except for a low, three-legged table with four grooves which met in the middle and held a small cup, its rim on a level with the surface of the table. The snake’s table. The grooves were to rest his body, the cup to hold his food. But the snake Perdix, protector of the mansion and, in the view of Icarus and the servants, a reincarnated ancestor, was not to be found on his table, nor in his sleeping quarters, a terracotta tube with cups attached to its ends. He lay in her brother’s hand.

With utmost leisure, Icarus ambled toward her: a boy of fifteen, chunky rather than plump, with a large head and a tumult of hair and enormous violet eyes which managed to look innocent even when he was hiding Perdix in Myrrha’s loom or telling Thea that she had just swallowed a poisonous mushroom. He never hurried unless he was leaving the house.

Thea embraced him with sisterly ardor. He submitted with resignation and without disturbing his snake. His sister was the only female he would allow to embrace him. Even as a small boy, he had spurned the arms of Myrrha and various ladies of the court at Knossos. Under normal circumstances—had he remained at court, for example—he could hardly have remained a virgin to the age of fifteen. He might be married; certainly he would be betrothed. For the last five years, however, most of his playmates had been animals instead of boys and girls. The birth of a lamb, the mating of bull and cow: these were the familiar and hardly shocking facts of life to him. But he strenuously resisted the knowledge that men and women propagated in the same fashion.

“Perdix is ill,” he explained. “I’m feeding him dittany leaves. They’re good for cows in labor. Why not snakes with indigestion?”

“The Achaeans have come.” She spoke the words in quick, breathless gasps. “Outside the palace. We must go to the glider.” Myrrha by now had overtaken them.

His eyes widened but not with fear. “I will stay and fight them. You and Myrrha go.”

She heard a scuffling in the outer chambers, the shouts of Cretans, the oaths of Achaeans: “Poseidon!” “Athene!” A few of the servants, it appeared, had chosen to fight. A man screamed, and the scream became a groan. Never had she heard such a sound except when her cat, Rhadamanthus, had been crushed by the stone wheel of a farmer’s cart.

She fought back the nausea which clawed at her throat. “There are too many to fight.”

“I will bring Perdix,” he said. That flatness of his statement allowed no argument. A remarkable bond united the boy and his snake. For three years Icarus had squeezed and dropped him without arousing his wrath. The boy insisted that Perdix was the avatar of his great-great-uncle who had once sailed around the vast continent of Libya and returned with six pythons and a male gorilla.

“Yes. He will bring us luck.”

And the blue monkey, Glaucus? Why had she not remembered to bring him from the garden? His little weight would not have slowed their flight.

They climbed the last stairs and burst into sunlight like breathless divers from the bottom of the sea. Raised on a catapult such as besiegers use to storm a city, the glider poised like a monster from the Misty Isles. Its wings were those of an albatross, with a framework of peeled willow rods covered by tough canvas; its wooden body was that of a fish with round, painted eyes and upturned tail. When the trigger of the catapult was struck with a hammer, two twisted skeins, made from the sinews of a sheep, would start to unwind and propel the craft upward along a trough at a 45-degree angle and into the air. There was room for two passengers, one on top of the other.

Myrrha was stooped with terror. She had started to mumble an incantation in her native tongue, a plea, no doubt, to the gods of the jungle.

“You and Icarus go,” said Thea, touching the woman’s shoulder. “I will strike the trigger.”

But Myrrha shook her head and the terror ebbed from her face. She lifted the girl in her arms (for Cretans are little people, and Thea, although she had reached her full height, was less than five feet tall) and strapped her to the glider, securing leather straps to her arms and ankles. With a single, larger strap, she fastened Icarus to Thea’s back.

“Hold to your sister,” she ordered with unaccustomed authority. “The strap may break.”

“How can I hold my snake at the same time?”

She took the snake, of which she was mortally afraid, and settled him in the pouch at the front of Icarus’ loincloth. “He will think it’s his tube,” she reassured the boy.

They did not hear the arrow. Myrrha was speaking to Icarus; then, without a scream, she settled onto the roof and almost deliberately seemed to stretch her limbs in an attitude of sleep. The arrow was very small and nearly hidden in the folds of her robe. With its feathered tail, it looked like a bird gathered to her breast.

Icarus freed their straps and slid with Thea onto the roof. He knelt beside his nurse and kissed her cheek for the first and last time. She lay with her usual expression of doubt and perplexity. Thea stifled a sob; there was no time for tears. She jerked Icarus to his feet. She herself would have to strike the trigger and send him to safety without her.

He saw her intention. “No,” he protested. “I am a man. It is you who must go.” She was always surprised when her brother issued commands; in his placid times, people forgot his stubbornness. He shoved her towards the glider.

She slapped him across the mouth. “Do you want us both to die?” she cried. “Now do as I say. Remember, you are not to land in the Country of the Beasts.”

A giant had barred their path. An Achaean, though not the deadly bowman. The topmost rung of his ladder leaned against the edge of the roof. A bronze helmet, crested with peacock feathers, concealed his forehead, but she saw his blond eyebrows and beardless cheeks; he was very young. There was blood on his hands and on the sword which he raised above his head. She smelled the leather of his tunic as he strode toward her. With a speed which belied his great, clumsy-looking arms, he dropped the sword and locked both children in a fierce hug. They wriggled like netted tunnies and slid to the floor, gasping for breath—fish spilled on a beach.

He knelt beside them and brushed the curls from Thea’s ears. She shuddered at the touch of his fingers.

He grinned. “Pointed ears,” he said in the rich Achaean tongue which she had learned at court, a strangely musical language for a race of warriors. “You are not Cretan at all. I think you have come from the woods, and it’s time you returned.” His eyes were as blue as the feathers of a halcyon, the bird which nests on the sea and borrows its color from the waves; and a faint amber down had dusted his cheeks. She thought with a wave of tenderness: he is trying to raise a beard and resemble his bristling comrades. In spite of his size and strength, he seemed misplaced in armor.

He placed them on the glider and fastened their thongs. “You had better go. My friends are rough.”

He struck the trigger with the hilt of his sword. She hoped that his friends would not be angry with him.

She could not breathe; her brother’s body seemed a weight of bronze. Up, up, they shot; up into sunlight and lapis lazuli, where Daedalus had flown, and that other Icarus, for whom her brother was named, until he lost his wings and plunged into the sea like a stricken albatross.

She opened her eyes. The wind’s invisible cobwebs had ceased to sting. She felt like a Dancer in the Games of the Bull, swimming the air above the deadly horns; or a dolphin, leaping a wave for the sheer joy of sun above him and sea below him, and air around him like a coolness of silk.

Then she saw their direction.

“Shift,” she cried to Icarus. “We are heading for the coast!”

Silence.

“Icarus, listen to me. You mustn’t be afraid. You must help me steer for the mountains!”

“Afraid?” he protested. “I wasn’t afraid. I was thinking about birds. Now I know what it means to get a bird’s-eye view!”

“Shift,” they cried in unison, abandoning themselves to the breathless joy of flight.

“SHIFT!”

Below them the captured palace twinkled its giant mosaic —the blue-black clay of the roofs, the red gypsum of the courtyards, punctuated by gardens and fountains and swelling toadstools of smoke which did not come from the hearth in the kitchen. Scarlet blades of flame began to probe among the mushrooming blacknesses. So, too, she thought, had burned the palace of Knossos. Capture, pillage, and burn: that is the way of Achaeans. And her father? She blanched to think of him among such flames.

Grief froze in her like water in a pool, and high among the clouds, time too seemed frozen, as if all the water clocks had turned to ice and the shadows on all the sundials were fixed to a certain hour. And yet they moved. Time and pain were frozen but not the earth, which changed below them from stone villages linked by roads to hamlets linked by footpaths; from vineyards and olive groves to pastures scattered with thickets and shepherds’ huts and undulating upwards, upwards toward the Mountains of Ida. A peak surged toward them like an angry whale. “Shift!”

They skirted the snowcapped crags, and winds lashed them like spray from a wintry sea.

And then, cupped in the arms of the old, white-haired mountains, lay a green forest, its single egress a narrow strip to the south which faced toward the rich Messara Valley and the great city of Phaestus. The Country of the Beasts.

They began to descend, gently but irrevocably, toward the forest. Cypresses, bronze in the afternoon sun; cedars as old as the time when the infant Zeus had been nursed in these very mountains; pines and firs, and lesser trees which they did not recognize, wafting a strange fragrance up to meet them, sweet and acrid at once (myrrh? sandarac?): a green immensity of trees, with grassy glades and a stream of flawless malachite, and there, there—was it a town or only a natural clearing with stunted trees like houses and a ditch like a girdling moat? No man except their father was known to have entered the Country of the Beasts. Shepherds, following sheep, had skirted the southern boundary and seen among the shadows boys with the hooves of goats, winged females with staring golden eyes, and yes, the Minotaur, the Bull That Walks Like a Man.

“Thea,” whispered Icarus, a hushed eagerness in his voice. “Why don’t we try to land in the forest?”

“No,” she cried with sudden vehemence. “You know what Father said.”

“But nothing happened to him. And he left our mother in there.”

“Our mother is dead. Now shift.”

She threw her weight to the left, but Icarus stared at the forest and did not move. “Icarus!”

“Yes,” he said quietly. “Yes, Thea.”

The treetops, soft from a distance, bristled with gnarled fingers to puncture their wings; but together they managed to guide their craft beyond the forest to a clearing of grass and yellow, early-blooming asphodels. They struck with such a thud that they broke their straps and tumbled onto the ground. The lily-like asphodels cushioned their fall. “Thea, look!” whispered Icarus. “There is something watching us.” She looked to the edge of the forest and saw the face.

“Her ears,” said Icarus, forgetting to whisper. “They’re just like ours!”

“No,” said Thea quickly. “Hers are furry. Ours are merely pointed. And besides, she has—paws!”

The face eclipsed itself behind a tree. “We frightened her away,” sighed Icarus.

“It was something else that frightened her.” Achaeans. At least a score of them, issuing onto the meadow.

“We can follow the girl,” cried Icarus.

“No,” said Thea. “Better Achaeans than Beasts.”