Thomas Swann - Day of the Minotaur

“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.