Day of the Minotaur

Chapter III THE TRUNCATED TREE

Do you know the pottery called Kamares Ware? Thin as in eggshell, swirling with creatures of the sea: anemones, flying fish, and coiling octopi. You would think that the merest touch would crack the sides, and yet in a hundred years the same cup can still hold flowers or wine or honey. That was Thea. The littleness of her, the soft fragility, stirred me to tenderness. At the same time, I saw her strength. Her slender waist, slim as the trunk of a young palm tree, rose into powerful breasts like those of an Earth Mother; her tiny hands were clenched and raised like weapons.

Icarus ran ahead of me and took her hand. “Don’t be afraid,” he cried. “He wants to be our friend.” He added, rather proudly: “Even though I bashed him with a rock.”

I stood awkwardly, shifting my weight from hoof to hoof, and wondered what I could say to reassure her. “He’s right,” I blurted. “I want to be your friend, and you won’t have to pleasure m-m-me,” I stammered into silence. To mention pleasuring to a lady—well, it was just such tactless remarks, together with my physiognomy, which had branded me as a boor for most of my twenty-six years. I awaited the lifted eyebrow, the frigid smile, the stinging slap.

She took my hand—paw, I should say, since her small fingers could not encircle its girth. I returned the pressure as shyly as if I were holding a thrush’s egg.

“Sir,” she said, “we have come to your face without invitation. May we remain as grateful guests?”

“I don’t live here,” I cried with some vexation. “I have a comfortable house in the forest.” Had she been the Dryad Zoe, words would have tripped from my tongue with the ease of fruit from a cornucopia, and my own eloquence would have put me in mellow spirits. As it was, I was desperately frightened of her and trying to hide my fear with a show of petulance.

“May we then—” she began.

“Follow me,” I growled, turned my back, and strode toward the mouth of the cave. When I did not hear them directly behind me, I paused and looked over my shoulder. They were limping and stumbling across the rough stalagmites. Thea had bruised her knee and Icarus had taken her hand. I went back to them, lifted her in my arms, and ordered Icarus to ascend my back.

“You don’t mind carrying a snake too?” he asked.

“Snakes,” I said, “are symbols of fertility and domesticity. They bring growth to the fields and fortune to the house. Besides that, they are somebody’s ancestors.”

“Great-great-uncles,” said Icarus. He started to wave his arms and shout, “Giddyap!”

“With two riders, I am doing well to lope,” I said. “If you want to gallop, I suggest you find a Centaur. Bend down now or you’ll bump your head.”

“Better than goose feathers,” he mumbled, making a pillow out of my hair, and Thea lay in my arms as lightly as a sleeping child. It came to me with startling suddenness that I had gone to the cave in search of dinner and found a family. To a confirmed and somewhat dissolute bachelor like myself, the new responsibility was terrifying.

At the mouth of the cave, I set them down on the moss and caught my breath.

“What big trees,” cried Icarus, looking at the forest which stretched around us like tall Egyptian obelisks. “Big enough to hold houses in their branches.”

“Or in their trunks,” I said. “That’s where the Dryads live.” There were cedars with clustered needles and small cones, wide-spreading, many-acorned oaks with bark like the cracked, discarded skin of a snake; and cypresses, lithe and feminine, their leaves misting with sunlight.

“How sad they look,” said Thea, pointing to the cypresses. “Like women. The women of all ages who have known the wrenchings of childbirth or the caged swallow which is unrequited love.”

“And yet,” I said, “they look as if they have borne these things proudly and willingly. It is courage you see as well as sadness.”

“Of course,” she agreed. “You must forgive me for sounding morbid. Ever since we lost our home, I have felt as if— as if sadness had fallen on me like a hunter’s net!”

I understood her needs. She wanted a house to shut her from forests, Achaeans, and—who knows?—Minotaurs. She wanted a warm hearth, a father, and perhaps a husband (for she was ripe for marriage).

“Little princess,” I said. “We will soon be safe in my house. There you will not feel lost.”

She smiled at me with a sweetness older than Babylon, older than the pyramids at Gizeh which house the mummified bodies of Egyptian pharaohs. The sun of the late afternoon kindled her hair to a smoky radiance. Why do you fight the forest, I thought. The brown of your hair is the rich soil from which the barley grows; it is the trunk of a tree or the wing of a thrush. The green is the first tentative blade that reaches for sunlight; it is leaves and grass and the young grape. Brown and green. Earth’s two colors. Why do you fear the forest?

Then, through the blue smoke of time, I remembered my own boyhood. In the branches of a tree, I saw a small girl weeping, and a small boy who laughed and waved his pink fist, and the Dryad, their mother, who leaned to the sunlight and combed her hair. And him, not a Beast, but a man.

To reach my house we followed a secret path whose signs were a woodpecker’s nest and a mound of yellow hill-ants, a stone in the shape of a fist and a blackened stump. Sometimes we walked in a darkness of tangled limbs which withheld the sun except for a few golden icicles; in a closeness of air which dampened and weighted us as if we were walking die bottom of the sea. High in the trees, blue monkeys flickered like fish, and only their cries reminded us that we walked in a forest of trees instead of coral and holothurians. Thea waved to them gaily and coaxed their leader to sit on her shoulder, draping his tail like a necklace around her throat.

“I had one in Vathypetro.” She smiled. “They don’t seem part of the forest. They are tame like Egyptian cats.”

“Too tame for their own good,” I said. “Sometimes they get themselves eaten by bears.”

“Look,” cried Icarus suddenly. “A sea of flowers and a little brown fort in the middle.”

“Yellow gagea,” I said, adding modestly, “the fort is my house.”

The house had once been a mountainous oak, broad as the Ring of the Bulls at Knossos, but thanks to a bolt of lightning, only the trunk remained to a height of twenty feet, like the walls of a palisade with a walkway and narrow embrasures near the top in case of a siege. I went to the door and rang the sheep’s bell which hung above the lintel.

Behind the red-grained oak I heard the quick pattering steps of a Telchin as he came to raise the bolt. In the forest, it was always necessary to lock one’s door. According to an old proverb, “Where locks are not, the Thriae are.” The shy Telchin did not wait to greet us. He and his race are frightened of strangers, though among themselves they boast and wench and fight at the drop of a toadstool.

I had hollowed the trunk of my tree to encompass a garden, which held a folding chair of citrus wood, a large reed parasol like those of the Cretan ladies when they walk by the sea, a clay oven for bread and honey cakes, a grill for roasting meat, and a fountain of hot spring water which served as my bath and also to wash my dishes. Around the fountain grew pumpkins, squashes, lentils, a grapevine hugging a trellis, and a fig tree with small but shapely branches and very large figs. Between the hearth and the parasol grew my favorite flowers, scarlet-petaled, black-hearted poppies, and Zeus help the weed which stole their sunlight or the crow which bruised their buds!

I have always felt that a garden should extend and not circumscribe nature; I plant my flowers haphazardly instead of in rows, and sometimes I scatter my tools in pleasant disorder, like branches under a tree. But Thea was used to the tidiness of palace courtyards. I felt rebuked by her look and hurried to pick up a rake, muttering, “I wonder how this got there,” though of course I had laid it there myself three weeks ago and stepped around it every morning.

We descended a wooden staircase which coiled below the garden like the winding heart of a conch shell and opened abruptly into my den. One of my Telchines had lit a lamp, which hung from the ceiling by a chain of electrum and swayed in the breeze from he stairs. The walls of the den were roots, twisted and smoothed into shape; and sturdier roots, resembling gnarled pillars, divided the room into separate nooks or dells. You could almost say that I had captured a little corner of the forest. No, not captured. I have never liked that word. Rather, I had trusted myself to the forest, given my safety into the keeping of her labyrinthine roots, which held the earth above my head and below my feet, supported and sustained me. There was beauty in them as well as utility. Just as the convolutions of an old piece of driftwood may leap to color when thrown in a fire, so the brown roots of my house glowed malachite, amber, and lapis lazuli—sea-color, woods-color, sky-color—in the light of a clay lamp. Like Thea’s hair, you could say, for brown is not colorless but the reservoir of many colors, which only need to be awakened by the soft fingers of light.

The roots, being dead, were neither moist nor clammy, and the reed mats on the floor, together with a pair of open and gently glowing braziers, lent to the room the warmth and intimacy of a squirrel’s nest. Many a night I had tippled beer with my friends until the roots seemed to writhe above us like big friendly snakes, guardian spirits intent on their good offices of cheering and protecting. On other nights, I preferred to read. Of all the room’s possessions, my favorite, I think, was the low, cylindrical chest of scrolls—The Isles of the Blest: Are They Blessed?, Centaur Songs, Hoof beats in Babylon—which I read to compensate for my very limited travels (you see, I had never left the forest). As Icarus’ great-great uncle might have said, “An untraveled Minotaur is a hungry Minotaur, and reading feedeth him like beer and honey cakes.”

But comfortable rooms are rarely neat, and today, hardly expecting guests, I had stacked my cooking utensils, a platter with scraps of bread and a tripod which had held a bird’s-nest stew, beside the hand-mill where I ground my grain and occasionally (as today) spilled some flour.

“I will have to see about supper,” I said. Remember, I had found no meat in my cave. The carnivorous Telchines would rather turn cannibal than resort to vegetables. “First I will show you your room. I will sleep in here, and you may have my bedroom.”

It lay at the foot of a ladder: round and snug as a rabbit’s burrow; small for me but large for Thea and Icarus. The floor was carpeted with moss and the down of bird’s nests. There was no furniture except for a three-legged stool and a citron chest in which I kept a tunic to wear on cold days and a pair of round sandals to shod my hooves when I went to gather gemstones in the quarry.

Icarus threw himself on the floor and uttered a cry like the neigh of a donkey which has pulled a cart since sunrise and come home at dusk to a bed of straw. “Soft as clover,” he said, snuggling into the down and releasing Perdix to find his own nest.

Thea, I saw, did not share his enthusiasm. I had rather expected a compliment on my room, but she thrust an explorative toe into the down to see if it were clean. Suddenly I realized that the room was not designed for a woman.

“We’ll find you some toilet articles tomorrow,” I promised. “I have a friend with a Babylonian mirror. Shaped like a swan, with the neck for a handle.”

“Your room is charming,” she said with well-meant insincerity. “You must forgive me if I appear unappreciative. I’m very tired.”

“I’ll bring you a tub of hot water.”

Escaping up the ladder, I remembered the time a fastidious Dryad (not Zoe) had told me that I needed a haircut: all over. Unkempt, I thought. That’s what I am, and so is my house.

In the garden, I found the tub which I used for washing vegetables and, thrusting it under the fountain, began to plan my dinner. I could pick some figs and squashes in my garden; I could bake a loaf of bread and gather mushrooms and woodpecker-eggs for an omelette. But what would I do for meat? Perhaps I had time before dark to shoot some hares.

It was then that I heard the scream. When a woman screams, sometimes she means: I need some help but there is no real hurry. It’s just my way of attracting attention and pointing up my helplessness. But Thea’s scream was sheer, spontaneous terror; it bubbled onto the air like the black poison of hemlock. I jumped down the stairs in three large leaps, slid down the ladder almost without touching the rungs, and found a Telchin crouched at the foot, waving his feelers in consternation. Behind him, Thea was brandishing the three-legged stood and shouting, “Out, out!” It was, of course, her first meeting with a Telchin, a three-foot ant with almost human intelligence and with six skillful legs which make him the best lapidary in the world; he can carve and set gems more delicately than the surest human craftsman. But Thea saw only the great bulbous head, the many-faceted eyes, the black, armored skin.

“It crawled down the ladder,” she said in a whisper. “Then it came at me, waving its feelers.”

“He didn’t come at you, he came looking for me,” I snapped emphasizing the he, for I saw that her scornful it had hurt his feelings. “And he understands every word you say. He is quite harmless except to other Telchines.” I stroked his antennae. He indicated pacification with a pleased buzzing which vibrated through my fingers. Icarus, belatedly rousing himself from his nap, climbed to his feet and walked without hesitation to the trembling Telchin. He knelt and leaned his head against the creature’s armor. “What’s his name?” he asked.

“Telchines hide their names except from their mates. I call him Bion.”

“Bion,” said Icarus. “I want you to meet Perdix.” The pleased buzzing became a roar.

Thea, meanwhile, had started to cry.

“Don’t cry,” I said. “He’s forgiven you now.”

“But I’m still afraid. Of—of everything in the forest!”

“Of me?”

She looked at me for a long moment before she spoke. “At first, in the cave. Even after Icarus said you were friendly. Not any more, though. Not since I saw your flowers. But the forest terrifies me. I thought I was safe down here, and then I saw Bion, and it seemed as if the forest had followed me.”

“It had,” I said, “but the good part. The forest is like a Man or a Beast, with many moods. Bion would rather eat his brother than than hurt my guests. Wouldn’t you, Bion?”

“I’m a terrible coward, Eunostos.”

“You were very brave when you met me in the cave. You waved your fist in my face.”

“I seemed to be brave, but I wasn’t really. My heart was jumping like a startled quail.”

“It doesn’t matter what your heart does so long as your feet stand still. In the last two days your heart has had good reason to jump. You have lost your home, crashed in a glider, fallen into the clutches of Ajax, and faced the Minotaur in his cave. But all those things are behind you.”

“Yes.” She smiled. “You will protect me here. I see that now.”

She was the first real lady to look on me for protection. I did not know, however, that she planned to improve my manners and redecorate my house.