She pointed to one of the logs. “Asleep. It’s the Afternoon Repose, you know. I was sleeping too till I dreamed about dinner.”
Stooping to half my normal height, I entered the porch of the designated house, flung aside the curtain of black-eyed Susans, and found Pandia asleep beneath a coverlet of rabbit skins, with a pot of Cretan Bears-tail twisting its yellow and purple flowers on a table beside her couch.
“Pandia?” I called. “PANDIA.” She did not stir.
“Bears,” I said.
She threw back the coverlet and almost overturned the pot of flowers. “Bears?”
“Human bears; Achaeans. They have won the first battle and entered the forest. Would you like to come to my house and stay with Icarus and me?”
“Yes.”
“Would your friends like to visit the Centaurs? They would be much safer there.”
“We don’t like the pigs. Besides,” she added, “the Achaeans may not bother us. There is nothing here they could want.”
She neatened her hair with a comb of tortoise shell, hurriedly tied her rabbit sash in a bow with unequal ends, and followed me out of the village with one regretful look at the berry patch.
“Do you know what war is?” She sighed. “It’s giving up berries so you can stick swords in people.”
“But if we don’t give up the berries, we shall have to lose Thea and Icarus.”
“You’re right,” she admitted, “and Icarus is worth a whole patch. He’s rather like berries himself, you know. Good to have at the table or in the kitchen, sweet but not sugary. Except he doesn’t have thorns.”
“He’s learning to grow them. He must.”
We jogged through the forest on rapid, silent feet. I always lower my horns when spurred by danger, an instinctive reaction, no doubt, to shield myself with the fiercest part of me. Crippled as I was by a sword-slashed ankle, Pandia matched my pace and sometimes spurted ahead of me in her eagerness to join Icarus. Her nub of a tail quivered with fear and excitement.
I felt an enormous relief when I saw my house, its friendly brown ramparts lifting an island in the afternoon. Then I stopped. The house was beleaguered by Thriae! A dozen of the dour workers, conspicuously absent before the battle, were wheeling above the trunk with dulcet cries of “Drown Icarus” and “Burn Thea” (you would rather expect them to boom like warring generals, but even the workers have honeyed voices). Arrows whirred from the trunk like the green woodpeckers whose feathers guided their shafts. One of the Thriae stiffened in the midst of a cry and fell from the air as if she had turned to stone. Good. Thea and Icarus were manning the parapet. But how could I reach the door with my lamed ankle?
“Pandia, do you want to go back to your village? You may be safer there.”
“Not while those Harpies are after Icarus.”
I lifted her in my arms, bending to shield her body, and entered the deadly field. We had covered a third of the distance to the trunk when the Thriae saw us. Like geese in the shape of a wedge, they wheeled to attack us with a shower of rocks, which they carried in quivers at their sides and hurled with deft jabs of their hands. The drone of their wings made a low, continuous thunder. The rocks were small but jaggedly cutting. My large, bowed back made an excellent target, and so did the fiery thatch of my head. For once I was glad of my matted hair, which doubtless kept me from a broken skull. The rock I most resented struck the tip of a horn and made my entire body throb like the clapper of a swinging bell. If they’ve chipped my horn, I vowed, by Hippos, the god of horses, I will wring their scurvy necks!
Then the door in the trunk opened to disgorge my three workers. I handed Pandia into their multitudinous legs and bounded after them, striking the door jamb and setting the cowbell to a frantic reverberation. Inside the door, I waved to Icarus and Thea on the walkway below the parapet. Suddenly the pain in my ankle erupted into my head. I was briefly conscious of falling to the ground and, at the same time, falling on sleep. The warm grass seemed a linen coverlet rising to enfold me.
I awoke to Elysium. My head lay in Thea’s lap. She was fragrant as always with myrrh and marjoram, and her little hand touched coolness to my forehead. The ghost of a dream lingered in my brain: Before my waking, it seemed, a sweet, incredible fire had touched my lips (a dream surely?). I closed my eyes to recapture the fire.
“I saw you blink, Eunostos. Open your eyes and tell me how you feel.”
“First, tell me what happened here.”
“When you came with Pandia, those dreadful women had been attacking us for an hour. They are gone now, but they’ve cut your garden to pieces with their stones.”
My grapevines littered the ground like murdered snakes. The parasol hung in tatters, the clay oven had lost its door, and the fig tree looked as if locusts had stripped its branches. It resembled a quarry more than a garden.
I sat up and touched my rock-battered horn; no chips were missing. I stretched my bloodied shoulders; Thea, I found, had eased their smart with a cloth soaked in olive oil. I tested my ankle, which promised to hold my weight.
“We must look for total invasion,” I said, and told her about the second army. “First, we shall have to guard against fire. Do you mind a little rain?”
With the help of a stone provided by the Thriae, I narrowed the mouth of my fountain until I had thinned and widened its shower to a misty spray which covered the entire trunk.
“The wood will soak,” I explained. “Then it won’t be easy to set on fire, even with burning arrows.”
Pandia opened her arms to the downfalling spray. “But there isn’t a rainbow,” she sighed, and entered the house to take a nap. “The better to do battle,” she called from the stairs.
Thea, Icarus, and I assumed positions behind the parapet. The workers appeared to be guarding the door. They crouched in six-legged readiness as if they momentarily anticipated the assaults of a battering ram.
It was Icarus who sighted the enemy. “Achaeans. Just a few, I think.” Probably the main host had gone to attack the Centaurs. “But they have a secret weapon.”
The secret weapon advanced gigantically across the clearing, a humped, tented vehicle which somehow moved without wheels. After a few seconds of perplexity, I recognized a harmamaxa, a large wagon invented in Asia Minor and battle-covered with a rounded tent of canvas: Achaean booty, no doubt, from one of their innumerable and far-flung raids. In Babylonia, such vehicles were drawn by horses, but animals are vulnerable to arrows and this harmamaxa was powered by men who, having removed the floor and the wheels, pressed towards us on foot while holding the wagon over their heads and most of their bodies. Thus, except for their feet, which were shod in thick leather boots, they enjoyed complete protection from arrows. Instead of the stationary turtle we had faced this morning, here was a turtle in motion, slow, cumbersome, but almost unassailable from a distance. Through the embrasures in the parapet, we fired a stream of arrows at the rounded roof. They struck in the canvas harmlessly as if they were quills, and the turtle became a porcupine. I looked at Icarus as he fitted an arrow into his bow. His bare chest, sun-bronzed above a green loincloth, rippled with manly muscles. And yet he remained touchingly a boy, pitting his arrows against the well-guarded giants of Ajax. I gazed at Thea in wordless communion. Between us, I tried to say, we will shield him, fight for him, die for him. Somehow, it was always innocent Icarus who seemed to need protecting instead of Thea. Innocence has been called the strongest armor; it is only strong, however, in the company of goddess-fearing Men and godly Beasts; not Achaeans.
“They’ll have to come out to attack,” said Icarus, wincing at his failure to slow the tortoise. “Then we’ll pick them off like the wild pigs they are.”