Thomas Swann - Day of the Minotaur

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?”

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.”