Thomas Swann - Day of the Minotaur

“It’s exquisite,” she said, caressing the ring as if it were an amulet to ensure fertility. She came to me and, standing en tiptoe, grasped my horn and drew my cheek to her lips. “Dear Eunostos, you are like a brother to me. I’m glad I had the tunic to give you in return. Otherwise, I could never have accepted such an expensive gift.”

Above our heads the cowbell tinkled the arrival of our guests.

“We must let them in,” said Thea.

I shook my head. “I had better meet them alone. Moschus needs plenty of room on the stairs.” I did not want her to hear their comments about my tunic.

But one of my workers, roasting a late chop in the garden, had already opened the door, and Zoe thumped down the stairs like a sack of coconuts. Moschus labored behind her, managing his four legs with obvious difficulty, and I half expected to see him lose his balance and tumble head over hooves. At the end of her descent, Zoe caught me in a huge embrace. I submitted rather than responded. Not that I scorned a friendly hug. More than once we had frolicked away the night in the windy heights of her tree. But Thea was watching us with cool, unblinking eyes.

“Thea,” I said, “I want you to meet my friends, Zoe and Moschus.”

“Little Thea,” cried Zoe, opening her arms for another engulfment, and I feared for Thea’s ribs.

Smiling thinly, Thea offered her hand. “Eunostos has told me about you.”

Zoe looked at her as if with recognition. “Your ears,” she said. “Are they—?”

Thea evaded the question. “And Moschus,” she said, as she reached to steady him down the last stair. “How good of you to come.”

“Isn’t he pretty,” cried Zoe, discovering Icarus in time to hide her embarrassment over Thea’s rebuff. “Eunostos, you should have sent me word. I would have worn sandals.” She was barefoot as usual and dressed in a gown as dingy and mottled as an old wineskin. When she held out her hand to Icarus, her shell bracelets jangled like tin gew-gaws from the Misty Isles. Icarus ignored the hand and gave her the kind of hug she had given me. A radiant smile suffused her face and flaunted the three gold teeth which a Babylonian dentist, her three-hundredth lover, had left her when they parted. She patted the boy on the head.

“Head’s not as big as I thought.” She laughed when his mass of hair depressed beneath her fingers. “But there’s plenty of room for brains.” She looked at me and winked. “Though there might be some things I could teach him, eh, Eunostos?”

Icarus was fascinated. The generosity of her breasts, like an overhanging cliff, magnetized his gaze; he seemed to expect a landslide. “I’m a good pupil.” He grinned.

Then she turned to me. “Eunostos, have you gotten fat?”

“Certainly not,” I said. In truth, I had lost six pounds since Thea’s arrival.

“Then why do you hide your belly in that—tunic, is it called?”

“Lavender,” snickered Moschus. “Embroidered (heh!).”

“It’s a present,” said Thea. “From me.”

“One of the city styles, I expect,” said Zoe. “Well, it’s good to keep abreast of the fashions. But, Eunostos, I miss that manly chest.”

But Zoe and Moschus were not our only guests. A minikin figure, no more obtrusive than a shadow, crouched at the foot of the stairs. I recognized Pandia, one of the Bears of Artemis.

“She met us in the woods and wanted to come,” apologized Zoe. “Since she doesn’t drink, you’ll hardly know she’s here.”

She was four feet tall. Her hair was short; in fact, it was fur, but neatly trimmed so that it resembled a felt cap. She wore a fillet of sweetbriar, a necklace of green acorns, a tunic of woodpecker feathers caught at the waist by a belt of rabbit skin, and a pair of kidskin sandals from my own workshop. Her nub of a tail protruded from a small hole in the back of her tunic. Before the coming of Men, it was said, the goddess Artemis had visited Crete and given her love to a bear. Just as the offspring of Pan are the little hooved Panisci, so the offspring of Artemis are the stub-tailed bears, and the two tribes, who keep their childlike bodies throughout their long fives, mix and propagate from the age of fourteen. Pandia, though, was no more than the ten years she looked.

“Do you mind?” she asked in a small but husky voice. “I heard about the party from one of your workers and came to watch. I don’t drink, you know.”

“She came to keep me company,” said Icarus, though he himself had every intention of drinking. “We’ve already met from a distance. The day Thea and I crashed in the glider.” You might have thought that a boy of fifteen would disdain the company of a little girl, but Icarus never seemed to notice the difference in people’s ages. He had a remarkable gift for making youth feel mature and old age young. Foregoing Zoe and her monumental cliffs, he drew Pandia to a bench with moss-armed cushions.

“Here we can watch without getting stepped on,” he said.

“When I saw you crash,” she was saying, “I expected to find just bodies and have to beat off the crows! Then the soldiers came and dragged you off to their camp.”

Among my other guests, conversation had died; rather, it had not survived the first stiff exchange of formalities. Zoe’s exuberance had faded to a wan smile, and Moschus, who had misinterpreted Thea’s help on the stairs, had fixed the girl in a silent, lecherous stare.

“Time for a drink,” I called like any practiced host, and pointed to a large, pitch-covered goatskin of beer, with an upraised hoof for a spout. I handed Zoe a cup and lifted the skin.

“You know I don’t need a cup,” she said, and took the skin from my hands. Tilting her head, she placed the foot to her mouth and threatened to empty the contents with one resounding gurgle. A thin trickle of beer meandered down her neck and vanished between her breasts like a freshet between two mountains.

“Here, let Moschus have a drink,” I said at last. “He looks parched.”

Interspersing his gulps with appreciative “heh’s,” Moschus drank his fill and relinquished the skin.

“Thea?” I asked.

“Why not?” Carefully she wiped off the foot with a linen handkerchief and poured a modest portion into a cup. Dainty as a bird drinking dew from a leaf, she quaffed the liquid.

“Tastes like good old vintage,” she said, resisting a wry face.

“Vintage?” Moschus grinned. “That’s beer, dear, and it’s fresh from the vat.”

To cover Thea’s embarrassment, I seized the skin and raised the hoof to my lips. “Moschus, start the music,” I cried between gulps. He withdrew a flute from his sole item of clothing, a wolfskin sash, and began to play. The flute was a crude cylinder of tortoise shell, but Moschus’ music was wild, sweet, and eloquent with many voices: the slow creaking groan of palm trees in the wind; the tumble of waves subsiding into a long-drawn hiss; the hoot of an owl; the shriek of a hunting wolf. Zoe motioned an invitation to Icarus.

“Go ahead,” said Pandia. “I don’t dance.”

He occupied Zoe’s arms, and she led the boy in a sinuous undulation which alternated with leaps in the air and throaty cries of “ Evoe, Evoe! ”

“The Dance of the Python!” he cried with recognition. “But we haven’t a snake.” He darted from the floor and Zoe, muttering about the vagaries of youth, cast about for a new partner. I was ready to offer myself when Icarus returned with Perdix. “Our python!”

“Pipe that flute!” cried Zoe, and she flung back her head till her green, gray-streaked tresses bobbed like the snakes of a Gorgon. She was three hundred and sixty-nine years old (a lover for each year, she claimed), and like her tree she looked as if many a woodpecker had mottled her skin and many a storm weatherbeaten her complexion; but beauty had not forsaken her: the full-blown beauty of an earth mother whose ample lap could pillow a lover’s head and whose opulent breasts could suckle a score of children. She stirred my blood like a skin of beer.