Day of the Minotaur

Chapter VI THE LOVE OF A QUEEN IS DEATH

The death which comes at the end of a long life, in a warm bed surrounded by loving children, is a lying down and not a darkness; it is not to be feared. But a slow and agonizing death in the fullness of youth is dreadful to men and dreaded even by gods. It was such a death which confronted the forest, though its rightful span was a thousand tearing winters and a thousand springs of healing violets and resurrecting roses.

No one knew at the time; no one knew that the death throes began when Pandia saw the helmet. How could a warrior have entered the forest, I asked, without being seen by the guards? No conch shell had blown to alert the Beasts. Perhaps, suggested Thea, Pandia had glimpsed a spying Paniscus and mistaken his horns for the boar’s tusk of a helmet. Still, the mere possibility of Achaean infiltration left us with little appetite for the rest of our picnic. Returning to the Field of Gem Stones to recover our basket, we walked back to the house in thoughtful silence.

The following morning it was almost possible to forget the revelations and alarms of the preceding day. Breakfasting on bread, cheese, and carob pods, Thea did not refer to my unexpected embrace or to my story about her parents.

She fed me some choice pods from her own plate and then withdrew to the shop to watch the Telchines cut some intaglios, while I remained in the garden, wondering what I should plant in place of my carrots. Perhaps a row of pumpkins, as big and friendly as the domestic pigs of the Centaurs. The day was benign; a blue monkey perched on the wall, waiting for Thea to feed him carrots. He would have a long wait.

Icarus emerged from the stairs. His hair was tousled from sleep and very long, rather like a nest in which baby mice have played. He had not yet donned a loincloth.

“Eunostos,” he said. “I want to talk to you.” Fifteen years sat lightly on his face, but the weight of a lifetime burdened his voice.

“You miss Perdix, don’t you?” I said, trying to ease his very evident burden. The day before the picnic, he had suddenly announced that he had given Perdix his freedom—left him beside a carob tree in the forest. “To find a mate,” was his sole explanation.

“No,” he said. “Perdix was a child’s pet. I am now a man.” He used the word in the sense of a full-grown adult and not as a member of the human, as opposed to the bestial, race. We sat down on a stone bench in the shade of the parasol; splinters of sunlight jabbed through crevices in the reeds and pricked our shoulders. “Aren’t I?”

“A man is strong,” I said, “and strength makes him kind instead of tyrannical. A man is courageous, not because he lacks fear but because he conquers fear. Yes, Icarus, you are certainly a man, and one I am proud to call my brother.”

“But that’s not enough,” he said impatiently. “Even if I were those things, which I doubt, I am still not manly in other ways. With women.” His voice fell to a whisper, as if he ascribed to women the power and the mystery attributed to them in the days of stone implements, before it was known that the husband as well as the wife helped to produce a child. “I am—inexperienced.”

I studied him carefully and saw that his body had hardened since he came to the forest; he was tanned and firm, with a down of hair on his cheeks, and I understood why Zoe had looked at him with desire as well as affection. Manliness mingled with innocence and cried to be awakened to knowledge of its own power.

“And you think I can help you?”

“I know you can. You and Zoe used to be more than friends, didn’t you?”

I nodded, with perhaps a hint of a smirk.

“And other women too,” he continued. “You must have had hundreds. You’re just what they like. A regular bull of a man!”

Almost of itself, my chest expanded to its full dimensions, my tail twitched, my flanks felt the urge to strut. “It’s true that one kind likes me. Free-living women.”

“One kind admits she likes you. Secretly, all of them do. Look at Thea.”

The subject intrigued me. “Thea, you say?”

“Can’t take her eyes off you. But frankly, the other, non-sisterly kind interests me more. I don’t feel up to a long, exhausting courtship. I’m not as young as I was. That’s why I want you to take me wenching.”

“Wenching,” I repeated, possibilities flickering through my brain like a covey of quail. “Suppose we call on Zoe and ask her to fetch you a young friend from the next tree.”

“I don’t like them young,” he said with finality. “Experience, that’s what I want. You see—” He paused in acute embarrassment. “I am not very practiced. The palace at Vathypetro limited my education. What does one talk about at such a time?”

“Compliments,” I said. “One after another like pearls on a necklace. Give them something to wear—a bauble or an intimate garment such as a breast band—and then elaborate on how it becomes them. With my shop and workers, that’s no problem. Jewels, sandals, whatever they like I’ve got.”

“But you can’t talk all the time,” he said darkly. “Thea tried talking to Ajax when we were captives, but Ajax got tired of listening. He pushed her against the wall, and she had to use her pin. He wasn’t a conversationalist, and neither am I.”

“You’d be surprised how naturally the rest comes after the right gift and compliment. With the right woman, that is.”

“The right woman. That’s what I want you to help me find. And another thing. When I just think about wenching, I feel—well, a kind of fire creeping over my body. Arms. Chest. Stomach. Like a lizard with hot feet, if you know what I mean.”

“The problem,” I said, “is to find another lizard. We’ll visit Zoe tomorrow. We’ll ask her—”

“Eunostos! Icarus!” Thea called from the stairs.

“Later,” I whispered in the conspiratorial tone of men discussing their favorite subject under grave risk of detection. “Here comes the watchdog.”

“Eunostos, look at the intaglio I’ve cut!” she said, coruscating into the garden. She blazed in a lemon tunic which vied with the sun and gave her the look of a lithe young huntress; she had caught her hair in a knot behind her head and left her ears in piquant, pointed nakedness. I half expected a bow in her hand and a quiver at her back. Proudly she flaunted a large agate incised with the figure of a lion-haunched, eagle-headed griffin, the awesome but docile beast which the early Cretans had kept as pets in their palaces. “Where is Icarus? I wanted to show him too.”

Icarus had left the garden. “I have no idea,” I said, as convincingly as a bad liar can manage, though I had an idea of Icarus blithely making for a certain tree and a certain lady. The sly calf! He had wanted a woman of years and experience and no young friend from the next tree. I hoped that Zoe had told him the way.

“He shouldn’t walk in the forest alone. If Pandia did see a warrior—”

“You can’t keep him under foot all day. He isn’t domestic, you know.”

“No, I suppose not. He has seemed restless lately. Probably he needs a good walk in the forest to stir his blood. Call me when he returns, will you, Eunostos? I have to get back to the shop.”

“Thea,” I called after her. “Your ears—”

“Yes?” She smiled.

“Are very charming.”

Icarus, as he later explained, had gone to visit Zoe. Not knowing the way, he looked for Pandia to guide him. When he failed to attract her with calls and whistles, he hit on the plan of picking some blackberries which he ate or spilled as he walked. Pandia was not long in appearing to share the berries. No, she could not tell him the exact location of Zoe’s tree—there were dozens of Dryads, after all—but she knew that it was close to some large beehives where she often gathered honey. She would lead him to the hives and perhaps they would meet someone who could give them further directions. She took his hand in case there were bears on the prowl.

“Your hand is sticky,” he remarked.

“Oh,” she said, “I missed some,” licked her fingers to the last adhering seed, and reclaimed his hand. “You know,” she resumed, “you ought to wear a loincloth.”

“You think so?” said Icarus, flushing. In his hurry to leave the house, he had quite forgotten to dress.

“To hide your lack of a tail. It makes the back of you look lonesome.” She moved to weightier subjects. “Are you going to have beer with Zoe?”

“Possibly,” said Icarus. The thought occurred to him that the warm stimulus of beer might loosen his tongue and inspire him to dazzling compliments. Having come without a gift, he felt at a disadvantage.

“I wonder if she will have some cakes in the house.”

“No,” he said with authority. “She never keeps honey cakes. There is no need for you to go in with me. Or even wait.” Secretly, he hoped to linger with Zoe for several days, exploring the hidden tunnels and leafy porches and learning the harder steps in the Dance of the Python. He felt an unaccustomed and wholly exhilarating freedom. The voluptuous foretaste of manhood wetted his appetite like a roasted almond. He pictured Thea and Eunostos coming to Zoe’s tree, and himself ensconced in a bark parapet and calling down to them: “Don’t wait up for me. I’m spending the night.”

They slithered through a thicket of bamboo, the slender, jointed canes as tall as their heads, the light green leaves rustling about their bodies like papyrus. Those consummate farmers, the Centaurs, said Pandia, in their ancient wanderings, had imported the seeds from the Land of the Yellow Men.

Emerging from the thicket, they met a young man who seemed to be waiting for them. “You must be looking for my sister,” he said. Icarus noticed the sickly softness of his flesh; he was not fat but he seemed without muscle, and his skin looked as if it would yield to the touch like the soft meat of a blowfish’s belly. Otherwise, he was not unattractive: a golden down covered his arms and cheeks as if they had been dusted with pollen; his eyes were round and extraordinarily gold; and his tall wings were as black and pointed as the fin of a shark.

“Icarus, don’t listen to him,” hissed Pandia in a very audible whisper. “He is one of the Thriae. He may be planning to rob us.”

“And what would I steal, your belt of rabbit’s fur?” He smiled scornfully. “I am not stealing today, I am giving. Would you like to know what?”

Icarus did not intend to ask him. He resented the fellow’s remark about Pandia’s belt.

“What?” asked Pandia.

“Sisters,” he said. “Or rather, one sister. Isn’t that what you are looking for, Icarus? A man can recognize the look in another man’s eyes. It says: I am tired of hunting and tired of gardening, of a man’s work and the company of other men. I want soft lips and the teasing fragrance of myrrh, I want soft hands and the silken brush of hair.”

“I am going to call on Zoe, the Dryad,” said Icarus. (How, he wondered, had the young man learned his name?) “Do you know where she lives?”

“I know where everyone lives.” He captured Icarus’ arm and guided him through avenues of lofty carob trees, whose branches were freighted with pods like those which Thea had eaten for breakfast, while Pandia trailed behind them, peeling her eye in case the fellow should prove a thief after all and wish to steal her belt (or, horror of horrors, her pelt). Icarus, of course, had nothing to lose.

They stepped into a meadow riotous with flowers and murmurous with bees; flowers jabbing from the ground on pillar-straight stalks or undulating in green torrents of foliage; and bees which wavered above them like a black and golden nimbus and then exploded upward like sparks from a lightning-blasted tree and disclosed the cinnabar walls of black-hearted poppies, the lemon of green-backed gagea, the purpler-than-murex of hyacinths beloved by the gods. From just such a garden, thought Icarus, all the flowers of the earth, even the tame crocuses grown at Vathypetro, had come in the time before men, transported by bees and migratory birds and swift nomadic winds.

In the very midst of the flowers, a vine-covered pole like the mast of a ship uplifted a light-seeming house with hexagonal walls of reeds, a thatched roof of dried water lily fronds, and opaque windows of waxed parchment. The first storm, you felt, would scatter the walls and collapse the roof. A summer house, hardly more enduring than flowers and hardly less beautiful: built to please and not to endure.

“Here,” said the guide, “is the house.”

“But Zoe lives in a tree.”

“This is my sister’s house.”

Lifting aside a curtain of rushes, a young girl appeared in the door and looked down at Icarus with a confidence which seemed to say: “You will soon come up to me.”

“Icarus,” she chided. “You took your time in coming to call.”

“How do you know my name? I don’t know yours.”

“The whole forest has heard about the handsome boy who has come to live with Eunostos, the Bull. And also about his sister, the very fastidious Thea, who keeps a watchful eye on both of her men. Does she know that her little brother is up to mischief?”

Icarus bristled. “It’s no business of hers if I am.”

“And what would she think of me? The wanton Amber, soliciting innocent boys.”

“She would think you were very pretty.”

Indeed, she was smooth and bright as a tiger lily from the Land of the Yellow Men, with gold, violet-flecked eyes which did not change expression even when her lips curved to a smile, but looked like hungry mouths. When she spoke he saw that her tongue was long, thin, and freckled with gold like her.

She was even smaller than Thea. It should not be hard for her long wings to lift so small a body, thought Icarus. A winged lily she was, with catlike, sinuous grace; scarcely a girl at all except in the tightness she brought to his throat and the lizard with fiery feet she lashed across his limbs.

“Would you like to see my house?” she asked. “You will find it refreshing after your walk.”

“I am going to call on Zoe,” he repeated, with decidedly less enthusiasm than the first time he had made the announcement.

She laughed. “I think you are afraid of me. Of all women, perhaps, except little Bear Girls and blowsy old ladies like Zoe. Possibly you would prefer my brother. In the Cities of Men, I am told, the love of a man for a man is not uncommon. You will find it the same with drones like my brother. Among my people, the Thriae, queens like myself are rare and workers are no more excitable than a drudging mule. What can the poor drones do except console each other? They succeed rather well, I am told.” She turned to her brother. “Does Icarus please you, my dear? He is succulent as a fig, and no bees, I think, have rifled his hive.”

Her brother smiled and smiled; his golden tongue flickered between his moist lips and he did not need to speak.

“I’ve changed my mind,” said Icarus to the girl. “How do I climb to your door?”

She lowered a ladder with rungs of cowhide. “When you’ve tasted my honey, you will feel as if you have wings. You will hardly need a ladder.”

As he placed his foot in the first rung, Pandia caught at his arm. “I’m coming too.”

“She hasn’t any honey cakes, Pandia.”

“She said honey, didn’t she?”

“I think she meant hospitality.”

The Bear Girl was close to tears. “It isn’t really cakes I want. I don’t want her to hurt you, that’s all. She is a wicked woman. I can can tell by the way she darts her tongue.”

Laughter tinkled silverly above their heads. “Do you think me wicked, Icarus? Perhaps I am. How else would I know the thousand paths to pleasure?”

Hand over hand, his feet sinking in the hide of the rungs, Icarus climbed to the door. Amber gave him her hand and drew him over the threshold.

There were wicker chairs suspended from the ceiling on tenuous chains of grass. There were hangings of spider-spun silk through which the walls revealed their ribs of reed. Most of all, it was a room of flowers, which glowed in mounds like the heaped treasures spilled in Egyptian tombs when thieves are caught at their theft. One of the walls was coated with polished wax which mirrored the room like a misty garden and Amber’s face as the queenliest of the blossoms. Surely, thought Icarus, no evil can touch me among so many flowers—there are even bees at work collecting nectar.

And yet the garden was captured; shut from the sunlight He saw that Amber had quietly withdrawn the ladder.

“You have caught my friends at their trade,” she smiled, pointing to the bees above a mound of jonquils. “Those are my workers. When the nectar enters their sacks, their bodily juices turn it into honey. Then they eject it into waxen trays and beat their wings to evaporate the water, leaving pure honey, which I in turn will trade for silks, jewels, and gold. Your own Eunostos has sometimes traded me bracelets. But you must not think that I also am a worker. I am a queen.” She spoke the word with such impassioned pride that a crown seemed to glitter above her head and murex-colored robes tremble about her shoulders.

“What does a queen do?” He rather hoped that her answer would be mysterious and provocative. He was not disappointed.

“She lives like a flower, only for pleasure. For soft breezes and warm suns, the solicitations of butterfly and hawk moth, and all the sweet indolences of a vegetable existence. But one pleasure is known to her which the flowers cannot comprehend.”

He waited for her to reveal the name of this rarest pleasure.

“The gift of a man’s embrace,” she said at last, caressing the words as if they were priceless silk. “Shall I tell you the wealth of your own beauty? Number your masculine graces until a young god walks before the eye of your mind?”

“Would you?” he asked. He could not think of a more reassuring catalogue.

“A head of noble dimensions aureoled with luxuriant hair. A body swelling to manhood, the strong sinews of maturity asleep beneath the down of youth.” She looked at him with a look between calculation and desire. “My dear, I am weary of butterflies. I crave the golden savagery of the bumblebee.”

“I’m afraid,” said Icarus, “that you want Eunostos instead of me. I think like a bumblebee, but I haven’t learned how to buzz.”

She seated him in one of the chairs suspended from the roof. She handed him a dish of pollen; she heated wine in a copper vessel over a small brazier and poured honey into the steaming liquid.

“Drink,” she said. “Pleasure will stir in your veins even as the wine caresses your throat. Powerful wings will seem to beat at your shoulders.”

He emptied the cup with one quick swallow. Was it a sudden breeze through the thin door of rushes? Was it the pounding of his own heart which swayed the chair into motion and disembodied him from the honeyed room and the weight of his limbs? Or did he move at all except in his mind?

She took his hand and steadied him onto his feet and led him inexorably to a mound of flowers. “Don’t be afraid of crushing them,” she said. “They have already yielded their gold, and now they are useless.”

He felt as heavy as bronze. Insubstantiality had deserted him; reawareness of flesh, the imprint of stems against his bare body, and yes, the fiery feet of the lizard, assaulted his senses. Her hand touched his chest like a brand.

But her gold hypnotic eyes stared drowsiness into his limbs, and the sharp stems began to caress him like cool little tongues. He knew that he ought to crush her in his arms, possess her lips like a ravenous Ajax. Mimic the bumblebee and not the butterfly. But he seemed to be falling asleep. Zoe, he thought wistfully, Zoe aroused me to dance, but Amber puts me to sleep. Perhaps it is not I who am to blame.

Her face came toward him, a hungry golden moon, and swallowed him into the sky…

The cowbell rang as peremptorily as if it had been returned to its cow. When I opened the door, Pandia clutched my hand. She had lost her belt and scuffed her sandals.

“That woman has got him in her hive,” she whispered, as Thea appeared behind me.

“A Thria, you mean?” I gasped, incredulous, then comprehending. The queens were too diminutive to crave the embraces of Centaurs or Minotaur, and the small, hairy Panisci held no allurements for them. But a boy like Icarus—why had I never thought to warn him? Why had I failed to answer his question the day of the picnic?”

“Yes. He climbed up the ladder and sent me away.”

“Show us the house,” cried Thea, and Pandia gulped some air and gamely trotted ahead of us.…

The house loomed above our heads, as closed and apparently inaccessible as a tortoise shut in its shell. The girl had withdrawn the ladder, the doors and windows were latched. But for once my height proved a boon. I grasped the narrow ledge in front of the door and drew myself onto the sill. Flinging aside the curtain of rushes, I burst into the room. The sweetness hit me like syrup flung from a cup; at once it teased and sickened. The murmuring bees sounded like flies as they buzz around a dead body. I saw the ladder coiled inside the door, and I saw Icarus, pale as foam, in the Thria’s arms.

I lunged through mounds of flowers; the bees scattered before me, roaring, and returned to sting my legs. I did not feel them. I seized the girl by the wings and tore her off my friend as one tears a crab away from a stricken fish. She whimpered but did not fight me. There was something loathsome and predatory about her; or worse, scavenging, for she lacked the bold courage of the predator. She preyed on helpless boys.

“It is too late.” She smiled. “I have breathed death into his lungs.”

“Lower the ladder,” I gasped with a voice which was frozen between rage and anguish. She moved toward the door. I saw that she meant to escape. I sprang between her and the door and threw the ladder to Thea and Pandia.

“Watch her,” I said as they climbed into the room. When Thea saw Icarus, she paled and held back a cry, but she did not wallow in useless hysterics. To Amber she said:

“Help my brother, or I will tear the wings from your back.”

“There is only one way to help him,” I said. “I must try to draw the poison from his lungs.”

“Let me,” said Thea. It was not composure she showed, which implies a want of feeling, but courage wrestled from fear. She had hated and feared the forest; now she was facing its most insidious threat without dismay. “Let me, Eunostos. He is my brother.”

“And my friend,” I said.

“It may prove fatal to you?”

“Yes.” I pressed my mouth to his colorless lips. Like a hunter drawing the venom from the bite of a snake, I sucked the air which Amber had breathed from her noxious lungs. It did not burn, but entered my throat insidiously like a thick oozing of honey.

How suddenly small he seemed, how limp and white and seemingly lifeless! The yearning came to me that he should be my son by Thea: I kissed her, kissing him, and then we laughed through the forest, each of us holding his hand. Now he was a small boy with a large head, and now an infant swinging on our arms, the child I had loved in Kora’s treehouse. Icarus, Icarus, my son, breathe your poison into my lungs, for I am like your father, and a father’s part is to guard his son from the Striges of the night and the Ambers of the day; to take the arrow intended for his vulnerable breast, the flung stone, the rending claw. What is love but a shield of hammered bronze?

My head fell against his cheek, and sleep possessed me like a falling of leaves…

Daylight flooded the room. I saw that Thea had taken my place with Icarus; first, she must have broken the parchment out of the windows and flooded the room with light and air.

“Thea,” I whispered. “Now we have both been poisoned.”

“Divided the poison,” she said. “That is the difference.”

Icarus opened his eyes and spoke sleepily. “There was honey in my lungs. It was very sweet. It made me want to sleep.” Like a child in a warm bed with stuffed animals, he drew us close to him.

“You mustn’t sleep now,” I said. “There is still poison in your body.” I helped him to his feet. He took a faltering step, caught my arm, and managed to cross the room without help.

“I am ready now,” he said.

Thea watched him with pride, as if her were learning to walk for the first time. No sooner had he crossed the room, however, than she flung an accusing question:

“Icarus, why did you come to this house?”

He spoke without apology. “I was going to call on Zoe. I lost my way.”

She flared like a pine-knot torch. “Your friend, Eunostos. He was going to see your friend! You sent him to her, didn’t you?”

“No,” I said, “But I intended to take him myself the next day.”

“You wanted to be with her. Both of you. To lie with a harlot.”

Harlot indeed! Zoe, the kindest of women. Anger made me eloquent, and also cruel. “She is warm, generous, and womanly. It’s true that she gives her body. But you give nothing. Your body has no more warmth than a drift of snow. I was happy until you came. I had my friends, my house, and my garden, and no one asked me to behave like a eunuch. What did you do? Despised my friends, changed my house, and picked my flowers. Zoe is better than you, in spite of her lovers. She at least is a woman and you are a bloodless prude.”

She slapped me across the mouth before I had time to regret my accusation. I shoved her onto the floor. She fell with a startled gasp and sat in a mound of poppies like an image of the Great Mother on a throne of flowers, but without the Mother’s composure.

“Icarus,” she wailed, as if to say: “Give me a hand and take your sister’s part against this brute.”

But Icarus let her sit. “We are still going to call on Zoe,” he said.

“Watch the bee woman,” warned Pandia. “She’s up to something.”

Exchanging accusations, we had quite forgotten the cause of our quarrel. Pandia had been more vigilant.

“I’ve kept an eye on her,” she said. She had taken a stance at the door with fire tongs in her hand. “If she had tried to get by me, I would have let her have it. But she’s starting to cry, and that must mean a trick.”

Indeed, Amber had crouched among her now beeless flowers, and silent tears had diamonded her cheeks.

Icarus went to her side. “We are not going to hurt you.”

“You think I am weeping from fear?”

“Remorse then?” I asked. “Isn’t it a little late?”

“I am weeping for myself,” she said, “and my own pitiless heart; He lay in my arms, frightened and gentle—a boy’s innocence and a man’s body. Intimately lovable, infinitely pitiable. Yet I could not love him. I could not pity him. And so, when I saw the three of you hurling the anger which is another face of love, I wept for envy. I wept my first and my last tears. I live in a house of flowers, but I pick them only for their honey and never regret the crushed petal or the broken stem. I will always be a seeker of honey, it seems. The honey of flowers—or gold.”

“Gold?” I asked with suspicion. “Someone paid you, didn’t he? It was not your wish to love which made you seek out Icarus. You were paid to kill him with your kisses!”

She began to laugh. “What will you pay me to learn who paid me?”

“Your life.”

She looked at my knotted fist and powerful hooves. “Achaeans. As they paid the rest of my people. We have let some of their scouts enter the forest.”

“The Man called Ajax?” cried Thea. “Was he among them?”

“Yes. He has given us bracelets and offered a tortoise shell full of gold to the one who kills or betrays you into his hand. You, Icarus, and Eunostos. To get you, he will even launch an invasion.”