“Eunostos,” he said, “do you think you could say some words in memory of Bion and the others?”
“I’ll try,” I said, and made up a tiny poem, rough and unpolished but at least loving:
There was a long silence, and then we tried to talk. I touched Thea’s hand. “We’re perfectly safe down here. They can’t reach us without a lot of digging, and we would hear them in time to leave by the back door. Even if they shut off the fountain, dry out the trunk, and set a fire, we’re well insulated by the roots.”
She forced a smile. “The roots, you say. They look—well, as if they had turned poisonous and begun to watch us.”
“Nothing that lives underground will hurt you. Not here, I at least. Only the things that come from the surface.”
“Achaeans,” she said, “and those witchy Thriae. It’s all I my fault, Eunostos. If I had accepted Ajax’s advances, none of this would have happened. He would have taken me back to Mycenae with him as his concubine—Achaeans, they say, are surprisingly gentle to women in their own country— and reared Icarus like his son.”
“But you wouldn’t have come to the forest. You wouldn’t have known about your mother.”
“Or you. I don’t regret the forest, Eunostos. I regret what I brought with me from the world of Men. I opened a door.”
“A forest is like a snake,” I said. “Occasionally it needs to shed its skin, just for the sake of change. Sometimes it sheds with the seasons. Now, it is shedding in a different, harsher but still necessary way. It is shedding safety which threatened to become stagnation. You can be sure, though, that its new skin will be strong and beautiful.”
“You’re being kind,” she said, “but not very honest.”
Pandia seemed to be napping. She had closed her eyes and opened her mouth. But the rest of us tried to talk and avoid the apprehensions which come with silence.
“I expect,” said Icarus, “that the Achaeans want your shop as well as us. The gold, I mean.”
“Yes,” I said. “To melt down in their own land. You know, they are excellent goldsmiths, if you don’t mind morbid subjects. You ought to see their death masks.”
“Death masks,” said Thea pensively. “And dead vines above our heads. The friendly snakes have died. Or something has killed them.”
“Nonsense. It’s the way the lamp is burning. It makes us all look dead. Like Pandia there. I think it’s time for bed.”
Thea and Icarus rose to their feet.
“Take the lamp,” I suggested. “I’ll light another for myself.”
Pandia kept her place.
“Pandia, wake up and come to bed,” said Thea. “You’ll be more comfortable on the moss.” She held the lamp under the girl’s face. The round eyes were closed like clenched fists; the vivid mouth was drained to a deathly pallor.
The reason lay at the back of her neck, a small, dark hump. I crushed it between my fingers—its little bones snapped easily; its feathers oozed blood, Pandia’s blood—and threw the pulp to the floor with a spasm of uncontrollable shivering. A Strige, a vampire owl. Pandia raised her head and struggled to open her eyes. She rubbed the back of her neck.
“I dreamed of bears. They were chasing me until I was very tired. I couldn’t lift my feet. I felt their hot breath on my neck.”
I pointed to the crushed body.
She gasped and clung to Icarus. “A Strige?”
“Yes, but we found him in time, You’ll feel all right in the morning. It must have flown down the stairs while we were fighting the Thriae in the garden. No doubt, they sent it to devil us. Rats, moths, all night-flying creatures are their friends. There may be others.”
We searched the house, sifting the moss on the floor of the bedroom, peering under the tables in the workshop, standing on benches with a raised lamp to examine the roof of the den, and found a second Strige, balled among the roots and apparently asleep. Soft, brown, seemingly all feathers, he looked as harmless as a baby rabbit, but I knew that he lived on blood, which he sucked so unobtrusively that the victim might die without discovering his presence. If you find an animal dead in the forest for no apparent reason, examine the back of his neck for the marks of two small fangs.
Thea was visibly shaken. She put a protective arm around Pandia’s shoulder and whispered, “My dear, it’s all right now. This will never happen to you again.”
“Yes,” I said, “it’s all right, but I think we shall all feel safer sleeping together in the bedroom.”
We lay close to each other, Icarus, Thea, Pandia, and I, and shared the warmth of hope in one of those bleak and endless-seeming hours which end as surely as banqueting, games, and love. Pandia clutched my hand until she fell asleep, and then I held her fingers, her almost-paw, loving her tenderly, yet wishing, must I confess, that she was Thea). I was tired and sad and missing my workers, and my wounded ankle throbbed as if the tentacles of an octopus alternately squeezed and released, squeezed and released the parted flesh. The usually soft moss aggravated the bruises and burns on my back.
I awoke in the night, when the thinly flickering flame announced the near-exhaustion of its oil. Thea was gone. I thought: she has gone to give herself to the Achaeans.
Chapter X
WOLF’S-BANE
“I’m going to get her back,” I said when Icarus and Pandia, awakened by urgent shakes, blinked in the light of the dying lamp. “I’m going to get her back, and kill that murderous Ajax. He’s a wicked Man, and his Men are wolves, and they will not leave this forest with Thea.” I felt like the stony bed of a stream in summer, dry and parched and sprayed with the fine dust which blows from Libya. I felt—untenanted.
“I’m going too,” said Icarus.
I shook my head and explained impatiently why he and Pandia ought to stay in tye house, she for protection, he to protect her.
“I can go where you can’t,” he continued, the rare soldier who knows the rare time when he ought to question his commander. “They can see your red hair for a mile, and even when you stoop, you look as big as a griffin. But I can sneak. I’m very good at it. At Vathypetro, I learned to sneak out of the palace when I was six years old, and I’ve been practicing ever since.”
“I’m going too,” said Pandia. “I can’t sneak but I can bite.” She bared her small but numerous teeth. “They’re made for fish heads as well as berries.”
“Someone has to stay here,” I explained to her. “To let Icarus and me back in the house. You’ll be quite safe. If you hear any tunneling, then and only then you can leave by the back door.”
Pandia acquiesced with such ill humor that I hesitated to turn my back and risk my tail within the range of her teeth. Fortunately, Icarus mollified her with a brotherly kiss on her head. Gilded with loincloths and armed with daggers, we bent to enter the tunnel. In a limited space, we did not wish to be encumbered with bows and arrows.
The tunnel was never tall enough in which to stand, and only sometimes tall enough in which to crawl; sometimes we had to wriggle on our stomachs, scraping our bare legs and chests over roots and stones, and I found myself forcibly reminded that my workers had built the passage for their own peregrinations and not for the egress of a seven-foot Minotaur and the five-foot son of a Dryad.
“Icarus,” I called behind me, booming in the cramped, earthen corridor like the angry Bull-God before he sends an earthquake. “We are going to come to some water which leads out of the tunnel. I’ll go first. If everything is clear outside, I’ll swim back and get you. Otherwise, wait a few minutes and then return to the house.”