Thomas Swann - Day of the Minotaur

“Icarus,” I said. It was neither a cry nor a plea, but the simple, final utterance of a name which I loved. I did not watch him when he left the garden.

We sat in the midst of the fountain as if it could wash our pain to the insubstantiality of moonlight. The sadness of moonlight is real but a little remote. Stars cry out in loneliness, and the moon, I think, is the loneliest of goddesses. Still, they are far away, and the loss they tell has the wistful sweetness of a tale about the maidenhood of the Great Mother or an old song sung by the Dryads when they turn their handmills and grind the barley to flour. But the sadness of a house and a garden is different and very close; as close as the hot coal which burns your hand or the captured bat which screams to free itself from the tangle of your hair.

“I had hoped,” she said, “to see your trellises hold new vines.” She caught my hand between the coldness of her fingers. “Eunostos, it is a Man’s—or a Beast’s—tragedy that two loves may call him in different directions. By following one, he is bound to leave the other. Leave, I say, not lose. No love is ever lost. It changes its form like water, from lake to river to cloud, and when we are most a desert, it falls from the sky in fructifying rain.”

“I don’t know about rain,” I said. “I was never a philosopher, and I’m no longer a poet. If you have to go, I want to go with you. Protect you till you join your father and then fight in his army. You know I can fight. You’ve seen me with my bow!”

“How can you leave your people? There is only you to lead them. You see, my dear, you also have two loves. Those with a single love—how poor they are! Ajax and war, and Thriae and gold. Ours is the treasure of pharaohs.”

“I don’t feel like a pharaoh. I feel like a palm tree without any coconuts.”

“You’ll get them back. And blue monkeys to play in your branches. I’m going to leave you now. You must close your eyes. They stare and stare and ask what I cannot give.”

Her sandals leaving the garden were as hushed as the hooves of a fawn.

Aeacus did not forget the Beasts who had sheltered his children. He sent a second messenger, who drank from a coconut in the house of a Centaur, loosened the belt which constricted his narrow waist, and told me about the war. The Achaean army, it seemed, had fought to the gates of the palace, which, lacking the walls of mainland citadels like Mycenae and Tiryns, had been frantically buttressed with timbers, rubble, and even the stone bathtubs from the royal suite. Aeacus himself lay wounded and close to death when his battered Cretans, among them Icarus, marched through the corbeled arch of the gate to what appeared to be their last and mortal defeat. But even while the lamentation of the women resounded through the gardens and the pillared courtyards, the Princess Thea appeared on the walls and urged her warriors to victory in the name of the Great Mother and the Minotaur. The besieging Achaeans gasped when they saw her beauty: the crimson, helmet-shaped skirt emblazoned with jet-black ants; the bared breasts, flaunting fertility in the very graveyard of war; the golden serpents coiled around her wrists; the pointed ears and the greenly tumbled hair which lent to her chiseled features a wild and intoxicating barbarism.

Archers forgot to draw their bows. Swordsmen fell to their knees and raised their swords like talismans above their heads.

A hush and then an outcry.

“Sorceress!”

“Goddess!”

“Beast Princess!”

It was then that the boy Icarus charged them with his shield Bion. They saw his pointed ears. They knew him to be her brother. They had come to fight puny Men—sailors and merchants and perfumed courtiers—and not these bright, avenging children from the Country of the Beasts. “The Beast Prince!”

They stared; they dropped their weapons. They reeled toward the sea, trampling vineyards, stampeding goats among the hillocks of red poppies, fleeing, fleeing the Children of the Beasts. To their wooden ships they fled, scrambling up the hulls like avid crabs, hoisting the black sails until they bellied with wind and bore them away and away from the sword-strewn beach and the boy who waved his shield and hurled after them the curse of the Minotaur.

“And now,” concluded the messenger, flushed with the telling, “the smoke of hecatombs has made a forest of the afternoon. Burnt offerings to the god of battles! Sandarac and myrrh in the caves of the Great Mother! Flowers gathered from the liberated fields—poppies and roses, violets and asphodels to garland the victors. Thea, the Beautiful, and Icarus, Prince of Warriors. Aeacus himself was carried to watch the garlanding. He has not forgotten your kindness to his children nor the loss you suffered fighting against Achaeans. It is he who has sent me to offer you the gift of two ships to return you to the safety of your homeland, the Isles of the Blest. His own sailors will man them, and no country is beyond their sailing. You will find both ships at the port of Phaestus. They will be provisioned on your arrival.”

I carried with me only the wicker basket from my picnic with Thea and Icarus, and in it my green tunic, a flask of beer, a few honey cakes, a reed pen, and some strips of papyrus (you see, I had started to write my history); and over my shoulder a hoe. There would always be gardens.

I met my friends in the town of the Centaurs. Pandia led the Bears, who had never returned to live in their own village with its plundered logs and withered vines. In spite of her tender years, she had won a name for being something of an Amazon and she bared her teeth proudly as the Girls trooped after her across the drawbridge, the oldest of them looking no more than twelve and holding the hands of daughters or granddaughters who might have been their sisters.

“Wouldn’t Icarus be proud to see me?” she said.

“Yes,” I said, “and so am I.”

Next came the Centaur children, some of them very young and trying to gallop in several directions at once, and last, the mothers with their few belongings strapped to their backs: a lantern, a wicker cage for crickets (empty), a coverlet for cold nights at sea. At the edge of the woods, we found the Dryads waiting in covered litters built from their trees. After they had boarded the ships, the wooden hulls would protect them until they could find new trees in the Isles of the Blest. The Panisci had offered to carry them. You would hardly have recognized the once mischievous goat boys as they lifted the litters on their hairy shoulders and moved through the forest with no attempt to frighten their passengers or race their friends. I took my place at the head of the company.

“Eunostos,” called Zoe from her litter. “Will you walk beside me?”

She had started to look her three hundred and seventy years. Was this the great-hearted temptress who had danced the Dance of the Python and emptied a skin of beer with a few gulps? No longer did she stir my blood, but she stirred my heart to a deep, aching tenderness.

She took my hand. “You’re not the Eunostos I used to love. You have—how shall I say?—grown up.”

“Up, perhaps. Not wise.”

“A truly wise man is too modest to recognize his own wisdom. If I had not grown old while you were growing up, I could have loved you the best of all my lovers!”

The trees of the Dryads, denuded of branches to build the litters, had dropped their leaves in premature autumn. The village of the Bear Girls had been entirely occupied by the crows, who had gutted the logs and the berry patch with the thoroughness of a forest fire, and the burrows of Panisci had fallen to water rats who, with twigs and mud, were busy diminishing the large entrances to their own size. Do you know the story that the Forest was once a god, young as the sun who steps from the sea in the morning? That he ruled the earth until the Coming of the Great Mother and then willingly retired to the foot of the hills with memories enough to content him for many centuries? If the story is true, I think he has now grown tired of remembering.