“But they’ll be at the walls,” I said darkly.
“Eunostos,” gasped Thea. “The door has opened. Your workers are leaving the fort!”
Dear Zeus, did they mean to betray us? Perhaps unknowingly I had wounded their pride.
“Bion!” I called, but I heard the frenzied buzz of their cry and knew that they meant to defend us and not betray us. The Achaeans stopped in their tracks. The harmamaxa swayed into rooted stillness.
Attack!
Like angry dogs, they darted between the exposed feet of the Achaeans and slashed at their leather boots with savage pincers. Their hard hides protected them from the half-hearted kicks of Men who were trying to hold a wagon above their heads and most of whom could not see the nature of their attackers. The wagon swayed and lurched as if it were bounding along a rocky road behind a pair of fright-crazed stallions, and finally heaved on its side. Twenty-five terror-stricken Men scrambled to their feet and scurried in all directions to escape the pincers.
Once they were free, however, and face to face with their determined but after all not very sizable attackers, the Achaeans regained their courage. I heard their commander rallying them:
“Strike at their joints, Men!”
Deflecting our arrows with their shields, they struck repeatedly at the waving, root-like limbs, and their sharp-edged swords began to slice through the joints. The result was no less lamentable for being inevitable. My workers were soon hobbling over the grass in complete helplessness, while the warriors struck at the tough but not impervious membrane which joined the halves of their bodies, till the halves lay twitching in separate agony. Thus died my brave and beloved friends, devoted as dogs and far more intelligent; artists of the beautiful as well as warriors.
Icarus was sick at his stomach, and I—well, I ran down the ladder, waving my bow and hurling every oath which came to my tongue: “Butchers!” “Wolf-lovers!” “Northerners!” I meant to go to my friends, shieldless though I was, and avenge their dismemberment.
An arrow struck at my feet and jarred me to a halt… “That’s what they want,” cried Thea, waving her bow. “To lure you into the open and hack you to death. Bar the door and come back to the parapet!” She spoke with the rough urgency of an Amazon, but tears had dampened her tunic and she looked like a little girl who had lost her doll. Rage in behalf of my workers melted to tenderness for the brave girl who, in spite of her grief, had acted to save my life. I barred the door and returned to the parapet to watch the determined Achaeans right their harmamaxa and resume their advance on the fort. Behind them, ten of their comrades had fallen to arrows and Telchin pincers.
Icarus shaded his eyes and pointed to the western sky. Diminutive fly-shapes materialized into nine pairs of Thriae, each pair supporting a branch which in turn supported a large bucket. Directly above the house, they began to tilt the buckets and pour the contents down on our heads. Amber, brown, and yellow in turn, it was much too thick for oil, snaking as it fell like a heavy rope flung at our heads. Honey. It was scalding honey which hissed when it struck the spray from the fountain and, not yet cooled, lashed into streamers and droplets and spattered our skin like a horde of terrible mosquitoes. We slapped at our burns and tried at the same time to raise our bows, but the wavering mist of the fountain distorted our aim, and the Thriae emptied their buckets and wheeled out of range before we could thin their ranks.
By now the harmamaxa had reached the walls and attached itself to the door like a huge fungus. We felt the blows of axes under our sandals. Without leaving their tent, the Achaeans had cut through the canvas wall and now they threatened to smash the oak rectangle of the door. The loss of their comrades had given them room in which to wield their axes.
“Icarus,” I said, “help me lift the oven onto the parapet.”
His eyes brightened with expectation. “Well drop it on their heads!”
We dragged, heaved, and wrestled it up the ladder; we poised it, hollow but heavy, above the harmamaxa. “Now!”
The canvas roof, which had stopped a score of arrows, buckled under the oven. A thud. A body-wrenching groan. Hurried movements concealed beneath the partially deflated but still unbroken canvas. Then, again, the deadly crunch of the axe, which bit into wood like a hungry weasel, a little more hungrily with each bite, and would only sate itself when it swung on air.
There were no more ovens to drop on their heads. I considered other defenses. Shower them with arrows when they toppled the door? Charge among them with my battle-axe? The sudden return of the Thriae settled the question.
“Retreat,” I shouted. “We can’t fight two enemies at the same time.”
We scrambled down the ladder, cringing as the hot droplets began to strike our backs, and gained the easeful coolness of the stairs. The last to descend, I paused to stare through the mist of the fountain at the ruined garden and the shredded parasol, the vines and the leafless fig tree. A Beast’s love for a garden can be as strong as his love for another Beast, since gardens are beings. Who can say if the poppies dream of butterflies in amethyst clouds, the fig tree dreads the coming of the ravenous bees to puncture its fruit, the vines exult in the sun and, growing warm, drowse in the lengthening shade of a parasol? Dreams, dreads, exultance, and repose—and love, always love. Leaves instead of limbs, but hearts and brains, identity and individuality. It is not necessary to walk in order to love.
The taste of loss was wolf’s-bane in my mouth.
At the foot of the stairs I pulled the lever which loosed a hidden panel and choked the stairwell with earth. The Pharaohs of Egypt utilize the same principle in their tombs to guard their mummies and their boat-shaped catafalques. (Where do you think the Egyptians learned their secret? From my own ancestors.)
“They can dig us put,” I said, “but I doubt if they brought any shovels. Achaeans are fighters, not plumbers.”
“And if they try?”
“We’ll leave by the back door.”
“Back door?” cried Thea and Icarus in unison.
“Yes,” I said, pausing to heighten their expectation. It is always pleasant to divulge a secret under dramatic circumstances. “You didn’t think I would live in a house with a single door, did you? Remember my cave? Two doors, in spite of its apparent rusticity. Here, it’s the same. Let me show you.”
Between the roots in the far wall of the bedroom, a large stone, the width of my shoulders, rested in gray anonymity. I delivered a sharp blow with my hoof and the stone turned on a pivot to disclose a narrow passageway no taller than a Minotaur on all fours. “It cuts right under the field and comes out in the forest. Tomorrow or the next day, I can slip from the house and reconnoiter to see if the Achaeans have left the trunk. They are not going to stay up there permanently. There are too many riches to steal on other parts of Crete. When I return, I’ll rap six times and then you can open the door.”
“It’s time for supper,” said Pandia, rising from her nap in the moss, or rather, rising with the moss and resembling a per-ambulatory thicket. “Have you beaten off the enemy?”
I told her about our retreat.
“You’ve laid in supplies, I trust?”
“Adequate but not elaborate.”
“We shall just have to diet.”
We climbed the ladder to prepare our frugal dinner. In the light of a single lamp, the usually amiable vines looked somber and strangling, as if they might drop on our heads and tighten their leathery tendrils around our necks. Between us lay platters of cheese and the kind of bread called gouros (dough mixed with lentils), a skin of beer, and a cup of water for Pandia. When Pandia asked for sweets, Icarus fetched her a jar of pennyroyal from the workshop. But the sight of the forge and tables without their faithful workers took his appetite.