The Age of Zeus

38. BULLS AND BULLIES

"I 'm empty-handed," she told the monster. Her voice seemed to come from a distance, from elsewhere, not her own mouth. "See? No battlesuit. No weaponry. Nothing. Just me. Because I know you don't want to hurt me. I know there's intelligence somewhere in there, there's a mind that knows that hurting and killing is not what you want to do."

She doubted the Minotaur understood a word, but what she was saying didn't matter so much as how it was said. She was adopting as soft and unthreatening a tone as possible, and her whole manner was designed to give the monster no sense of antagonism or loathing. She held her head down and her hands open, palms out. This was the way she'd been taught in the Met to deal with hostile behaviour. Meet it with reasonableness, and let just enough of your fear show through that the other person knew you were intimidated but not to the point of quivering-jelly terror. Bullies and lunatics thrived on other people's terror. It was their drug, and the trick was to give them a tincture of it, enough to keep them happy but nowhere near enough to ignite a narcotic frenzy.

She kept talking, even as the Minotaur began to stalk closer to her. She kept talking because there was nothing else she could do.

"Were you a man once? Before you became a man-bull? Did someone turn you into this? Did they take you and do something to you that made you a monster? Did they do it against your will? I think maybe they did. And then they trained you like a fighting dog. They used threats and brutality to make you violent. I think you used to be ordinary, a human being like me, and you can remember that. From time to time the memory of what you were floats to the surface, and you realise what you've become, and it causes you distress. I'm sorry about that. I'm sorry, too, that I hurt you back in Corsica. There's so much pain in your life, and I only added to it. I want to make up for that. I want to help."

The Minotaur continued to close in on her, but it was moving slowly. It appeared to be listening. And it hadn't attacked her yet, which was definitely something. Definitely progress.

"Look." She bent and picked up a corncob. "Food." She proffered it. "This is for you, if you want. You must be hungry. If it's not what you like, I can get something else. Water too. I bet you're thirsty. I could fetch a nice big bowl of water."

A flicker in those red eyes. A glimmer. A spark?

"I'm not your enemy. I could be your friend, if you'd like."

The Minotaur loomed over her. For several moments — very long moments — Sam could see some kind of struggle going on within it. A part was telling it to crush her like a bug. Another part was telling it not to.

Then, with a snort, the monster slapped her hand aside. The corncob went flying, and Sam bit back a yelp of shock and pain.

The Minotaur spun round and strode off to a far corner, where it hunkered down with its back to her.

Sam's hand throbbed.

But the Minotaur had held back, she knew. It could easily have shattered every bone in her hand and hadn't.

The monster had just given her a message.

Not corncobs. Something else.