Thomas Swann - Day of the Minotaur

“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 The girl had withdrawn the ladder, the doors and windows were latched.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.”

We beached the lands of the Centaurs shortly before twilight. Moschus and his countrymen were fighters as well as farmers, the strongest of the six tribes of Beast, and their leader Chiron was the uncrowned king of the forest. We were coming to tell them about the treachery of the Thriae. In times of peace, each of the tribes retained and jealously guarded its independence, but in times of danger everyone looked to Chiron: for example, the cold winter when the wolves came down from the mountains to steal our game and children. “Dip your arrows in the juice of the wolf’s-bane root,” suggested Chiron. We routed the wolves with our first charge, and Moschus acquired his sash.