Day of the Minotaur

Chapter V KORA

I awoke to singing. The singer was Thea in the garden, and her song was about a tiger moth:

I disentangled myself from a pile of wolfskins, yawned mightily, and climbed the stairs to investigate her high spirits.

In the garden she was pulling my last carrots out of their earthen burrows. I winced. Of course they were grown to be eaten, but after the decapitation of my poppies, I resented any diminishment of my shrunken plot. Blue monkeys had lined the walls to watch her, and one bold fellow had skittered onto the ground to receive a carrot. I glared at his boldness but only managed to increase his appetite.

She climbed to her feet and smiled. “We’re going on a picnic. I’m getting our lunch ready now.”

“What should I wear?” I asked. I had not taken time to dress.

“You are dressed exactly right,” she said. “Picnics should be informal.”

With a lunch of hard-boiled woodpecker eggs, roasted chestnuts, wolf’s milk cheese, raw carrots (the last of their race), and honey cakes, together with a flask of wine encased in wickerwork, we headed for the Field of the Gem Stones. Icarus was still drowsy when we left the house. I had carried him up the stairs and held him under the fountain, but the warm water had barely roused him enough to move his feet in a kind of lethargic shuffle. Thea and I talked freely, however, and as soon as our conversation turned to those incorrigible thieves, the Thriae, he began to listen.

“Their women are very beautiful,” I said, “if you don’t mind golden eyes and billowy wings. But never fall in love with one.”

“Why not?” he asked.

“Because,” I began, but then we came to the Field of Gem Stones, and I left his question unanswered. Imagine a field which Titan horses have ploughed, with furrows like the troughs of waves in a tempest and enormous boulders poised like ships on the crests. Actually an earthquake had ravaged the land instead of giants, and vegetation—grass, thickets of sweetbriar, and poppies with scarlet heads—had soothed without quite healing the wounded soil; had clung to the curves, the abrupt rises, the sharp pinnacles with wild green tenacity. Thea admired the poppies—picked one, in fact— but shuddered at the savagery of the landscape.

“The earth looks angry,” she said. “It is not the handiwork of the Great Mother, but one of those northern gods, Pluto perhaps. It might be his very playground.”

“But it’s private,” I said. “And safe. The furrows shut us from view. The Panisci, you know, love to heckle picnickers. One of them attracts your attention with his goatish antics and his friends make off with the lunch.” I brushed off a stone for her seat. “Chalcedony. I’ll take it home with us, and my workers will cut you a necklace. You can find just about anything you want here—carnelian, agate, jasper.”

No sooner had I laid our basket on a tuft of grass than a small felt hat bobbed above the nearest ridge. No, it was Pandia’s hair.

“I smelled the cakes,” she said. “They smell like more than you can eat.”

“Come and join us,” said Icarus, nobly if reluctantly, since the cakes in fact were less than we could eat. Thea had yet to learn the extent of a Minotaur’s appetite.

“Too many are bad for you,” Pandia explained. “One of my acquaintances—not a friend, fortunately—gorged herself and got so sweet that a hungry bear came out of the trees and ate her. Ate his own cousin. Didn’t leave a crumb.” As always before a meal, she looked immaculate. She had spruced her tail, cleaned her kidskin sandals, and tied her belt of rabbit’s fur in a neat bow with exactly equal ends.

“I’ve thought of a poem about bears,” I said. “It goes:

And here’s one about that dreadful bear that ate your acquaintance.

“I like your poems, Eunostos,” said Pandia. “They are almost as charming as your tail, which is very slender and elegant. But all that business about eating has made me too hungry to appreciate any more recitation.”

Icarus handed her our entire supply of honey cakes, packaged in a linen handkerchief. “There are no bears in the neighborhood,” he said.

She ate most of the cakes between two breaths and stuffed the remnants into her tunic.

“Shall we gather stones?” asked Icarus. “The Telchines will polish them for us. We can use our picnic basket.”

“I would like an amulet to ward off the Striges,” she admitted, and followed him up the ridge, fishing a fragment of cake out of her tunic.

Thea, meanwhile, nibbled a carrot so fastidiously that she managed to avoid a crunch. A persistent wind frolicked the hair from her ears and the hand which was not occupied with the carrot replaced the hair.

“Thea,” I said, “you look like a circumspect rabbit.”

She smiled and wriggled her nose. “But I don’t have whiskers.”

Then she was not a rabbit but utterly a woman, so soft of hair, so tiny of hand, that I wanted to cry and be comforted on her bosom like a sad child.

“Thea,” I whispered.

“Yes, Eunostos.”

“Thea, I—”

“Would you like a carrot?”

“No.”

“How do you grow them so crisp and yellow?”

“Fertilizer,” I said. “Fish heads, mostly.” At that point a god or a demon possessed me, like the quick flush of heat from a sun which breaks through the clouds on a chilly day. I removed the carrot from Thea’s fingers and then I embraced her. To me, the action seemed as natural as taking a shower in the hot plume of my fountain or kneeling in my garden to measure the bud of a poppy. But possessed as I was by the god (or demon), I forgot my strength. Perhaps I was rough; certainly I was sudden. She lay in my arms like a fawn pierced by an arrow. I have broken her back, I thought. Crushed her fragility with my brutish lust, as if I had taken a swallow’s egg in my palm and closed my fingers.

“Thea,” I groaned, loosening my grip but still supporting her body. “Are you—”

With unhurried dignity, she disengaged herself from my arms. “Eunostos, I am ashamed of you. You are acting like Moschus.”

Better to be insulted, railed against, slapped, than chastised like a naughty child or a mischievous Centaur. Moschus indeed!

Angrily I blurted: “He kisses everyone he meets at the first chance. You’ve shared my house for a month, and I haven’t touched you until today. But I’m not a eunuch.”

“I look on you as a brother. I told you that.”

“But I don’t want to be your brother. I don’t feel fraternal at all. Besides, you already have Icarus. I want to be—”

“My father? It’s true you’re ten years older—”

“No, that’s worse. I don’t like your father anyway.”

“You don’t like him? But you never met him. He’s a kingly man!”

“I do know him,” I said. “I wasn’t going to tell you, but I knew him before you were born.”

She gasped. “In the forest?”

“And I knew your mother, the Dryad.”

“I don’t think I want to hear about her.”

“I can’t tell you about your father without mentioning your mother.” I called loudly: “Icarus, Pandia!”

They hurried over the ridge with dirty hands and a basket of stones between them.

“Is it bears?” whispered Pandia with terror-rounded eyes. “Are we going to be eaten?”

“Not bears,” I said. “Something I want to show you.”

A mile from the Field of Stones, in a small clearing green with moss and fern, I showed them a fire-blackened stump which had once been a royal oak. Through the gutted walls, you could see the ruined beginnings of a staircase, spiraling around the trunk and ending abruptly in air.

“Your mother’s tree,” I said. And I told them about Aeacus, their father.…

I was nine years old when he came to the forest. My father had built a house of reeds in a tamarisk grove, and after my mother was killed by lightning, we lived alone with the feathery trees shutting away the sunlight and shutting us in with the shadows of our loss. Except at night when I needed a place to sleep, I kept away from the house, preferring to roam the woods where I had gathered chestnuts with my mother and listened to her stories about the coming of out people from the Isles of the Blest. It was in the forest that I met Aeacus—dagger in hand, blood on his beardless face, eyes vacant like those of a Strige’s victim. I learned later that he had come into the mountains pursuing Achaean pirates. He and his men met and killed them just beyond the forest, but only Aeacus had survived the skirmish. Wounded and delirious, he had wandered into the forest, but strength had failed him and he sank to his knees like a murderer before a judge, dropping his dagger, blinking without awareness.

I crept out of the undergrowth. “May I help you, sir?” I asked from a safe distance, for he was a Man and therefore dangerous.

“He cannot speak.” A tall Dryad had come to stand beside me.

“Your dress is sunlight!” I cried.

“Sunflowers.” She smiled. “Every morning I weave it anew, since the petals endure only for a day. Like love.”

“And your hair is a green waterfall. It sings around your shoulders.”

“Perhaps,” she said, “it has learned its song from the trees in which I live. Listened to woodpeckers nesting in the branches, or those smaller birds, the wind-ruffled leaves. But now we must help our friend.”

“He’s a Man,” I whispered. She did not look as if she understood the danger.

“And therefore the more to be pitied.”

His hair, worn long and drawn behind his head in a fillet, was a wonder of darkness, and his face was as white and smooth as the alabaster from which the Cretans carve the thrones of their kings: such a face as the artisan god, Hephaestus, might carve in his underground workshop—unflawed by toil, untouched by time.

Each of us took an arm and supported him to her tree. She did not invite me to enter the trunk. She smiled when she saw my disappointment; for I had heard of the marvels within a Dryad’s tree: the winding stairs cut into the trunk, the secret doors which opened onto rooms where noiseless spiders weave in the light of glowworms, the platforms among the branches, where the Dryads comb their tresses to the soft fingerings of the sun.

“You must not enter, Bull Boy. I am bringing sorrow into my tree, and you have enough of your own.”

“He will do you injury?”

“Perhaps.”

“Why do you shelter him then?”

“I have lived too long in sunlight.”

No Man can enter the forest without alerting the Beasts. All of us, even the light-fingered Thriae and the careless Panisci, take our turns patrolling the narrow access to the world of Men. Everywhere else the cliffs uprear impassable walls (except for my cave, which no one dares to invade). When Aeacus entered the trees, I was not the first to see him. Even as Kora helped him into her house, a conch-shell boomed a warning to all the Beasts, and the next day Chiron, king of the Centaurs, arrived at her tree to question her about the stranger.

“I am going to bear his child,” she said.

Chiron was stunned. A human father and a bestial mother! Would the child be a Man or a Beast? Shaking his mane, he left this foolish Dryad to the sorrow of her own choosing.

I was ten years old at the birth of Thea, eleven when Icarus followed her into the tree and laughed with his first breath. High in the branches, a porch surrounded the trunk, with a bench and a bamboo rail. I used to stand on the ground and wait until Kora appeared with the babies.

“Eunostos,” she called one morning. “Come and visit with me.

“Through the door?” I asked, hoping at least to glimpse the interior.

“Up the outside ladder.”

I saw with dismay that her hair looked as withered as broken ferns, and her gown was woven of brown leaves instead of sunflower petals. She lifted Thea into my arms.

“Is she breakable?” I asked doubtfully.

“Not unless you drop her out of the tree.” She laughed.

At first Thea was crying. “I expect it’s my hair,” I said. “The color has frightened her.”

“No,” she said. “It’s the forest. She always cries when I bring her onto the porch.”

I took her tiny hand and placed the fingers on one of my horns. “See,” I said. “It won’t hurt you. It is like a carrot.”

She fell asleep in my arms.

“I want to hold Icarus too,” I said. “One baby for each arm. They will balance each other.” He was much the fattest baby I had ever seen. When no one held him, he would lie in the crib which his mother had hollowed from the shell of a tortoise and coo at friendly woodpeckers or empty air. He made me think of a fledgling which has gorged itself on worms and grown so plump that it has no wish to fly. It would rather stay in the nest and wait for the next worm.

Without telling their mother, I adored both of them— Thea because she was sad, Icarus because he was plump and joyful. Sometimes Kora would let me look after them when she followed Aeacus into the forest (it must have broken her heart to see him walk to the edge of the trees and stare wistfully at the farms across the meadow). I fed them nectar which I squeezed out of honeysuckle blossoms and made up stories in which I rescued them from wicked bears and slavering wolves. They seemed attentive, both of them, and never fell asleep until I had finished my story, though few of my words could have been intelligible to such young ears.

Soon after Icarus’ first birthday, I climbed to the porch and discovered Kora in tears. Since the death of my mother, I had seen my father cry and I knew that the tears of adults were wetter, saltier, and much, much sadder than those of a child like me. I started down the ladder.

“Stay, Eunostos,” she said. “It will be your last chance to see the children.”

I balanced awkwardly on the third rung from the top and rested my chin on the porch. “I’m not to be invited again?”

“They are going away.”

“How can you go with them?” I knew that no Dryad could leave her tree for more than a few days. Its wooden walls sustain her as salt water sustains a dolphin.

“Their father is taking them to Knossos without me.”

“To the cities of Men!” I cried with dismay. Remember that Beast children fear Men as much as human children fear Beasts. I imagined the babies spitted on sharp spears and served up at a banquet, or lowered on giant fish hooks to bait sharks.

“Their father will protect them,” she said. “But they will miss us, won’t they, my little Bull?”

“Can they live outside the tree?”

“Aeacus thinks so. He says they have not grown dependent on the tree as I have. That’s why he wishes to take them now, before they do.” She drew me into her arms as if I were one of her own children.

“Don’t be sad,” I said, though her news was the worst I had heard since the death of my mother. I rested my horns against the leaf-sweet fragrance of her breast.

Neither of us heard Aeacus climb the ladder. He was not angry; he had no reason for anger. But he looked like a staring pharaoh carved from stone. He drew me from Kora’s arms and placed me on the ladder. His fingers were very hard, almost like coral, though he did not hurt me. As I started down the ladder, I screamed:

“You shouldn’t take them away from their mother!”

For six mornings I went to Kora’s tree, placed an ear to the trunk, and listened to Thea’s cries resounding through the bark. But no one appeared on the porch to ask me up the ladder, and when I knocked at the door on the seventh morning, Aeacus answered and closed the door in my face.

The next day I met him in the forest. You have seen the twin panniers on the backs of donkeys? They are baskets for carrying produce home from the market or kindling from the woods. He had rigged such panniers for his children and placed both Thea and Icarus on his back. In spite of the vines which strangled the branches above her head, Thea was poised and smiling, but Icarus was crying almost for the first time.

I sprang out of the trees like the goat-god Pan when he frightens travelers. “Where are you taking my babies?” I demanded in what I meant to be an ear-splitting bellow. But I was small at the time—I lived on roots and berries between the rare occasions when my father remembered to hunt. No doubt my roar emerged as a squeak. Aeacus looked at me vaguely and went on his way as if I were no more significant than a toadstool. I lowered my head and butted him with my horns, expecting to catch the babies if they threatened to spill. He staggered but kept his balance and did not spill them. Turning, he seized my horns and flung me into the bushes. The fall left me stunned.

In seconds, or minutes, I am not sure which, I opened my eyes to hairy haunches and cloven hooves. A Paniscus, looking about twelve but possibly as old as a hundred, was dousing my face with milk from a split coconut. I did not remember to thank him, but sprang to my feet and searched frantically for signs of Aeacus and the children.

“Did you see him?” I cried. “The man from the Cities?”

“Nothing but squirrels.” He sulked, hurt no doubt because I had not thanked him for reviving me and sacrificing the milk from his coconut.

I ran toward Kora’s tree to see if she knew that Aeacus had taken the children. Perhaps, I thought, she will keep me in their place, and then I felt terribly ashamed at having so selfish a wish at such a time.

A score of Beasts had surrounded the tree: Dryads in great dishevelment, among them Zoe, Moschus and two other Centaurs; Panisci and Bears of Artemis; and even some Thriae, who flock to misfortune as readily as to honey. The tree was a pillar of fire. Branches crackled and fell in a swarm of sparks like glowing bees; the watchers shielded their heads with upraised arms and drew back from the yellow, lashing coils. The high porch had shriveled like a dead insect and begun to peel from the trunk. Yet the verdurous branches still struggled valiantly to hold their greenness against the encroaching fire, for the tree was young by the reckoning of the forest and three times her lightning-blackened branches had sprouted leaves.

“We must save her,” I cried, running toward the ladder.

Zoe stopped me. “It was she who set the fire. We must leave her with dignity.”

“But he’s getting away with her babies!”

“Let him go. He was never a Beast.”

“But the babies are half Beast.”

“Perhaps they will come back when they learn to know themselves.”

Icarus hugged me when I had finished the story. “Eunostos, we did come back! You got your babies again.”

“Yes,” I said, “and this time I mean to keep you.” I looked at Thea and awaited the inevitable reprimand. She was certain to take her father’s side, and already I was angry with her, remembering how she had laughed as that hateful man had carried her out of the forest.

At last, she said, “You can’t blame him for leaving when he did. He was only thinking of us.”

Icarus turned on her angrily. “But he left our mother.”

“She always knew he would have to leave her,” said Thea. But her eyes had filled with tears, and not, I guessed, for her father.

“Thea,” I said. “I didn’t—”

Pandia seized my hand. “There is someone watching us.”

^“A bear?” I smiled.

“Do bears wear helmets?”