She ran along corridors with walls of porous ashlars and roofs supported by red, swelling columns like turned trees. Her sandals clattered on the gray ironstone tiles. She ran until she came to the Room of the Snake. The room was empty except for a low, three-legged table with four grooves which met in the middle and held a small cup, its rim on a level with the surface of the table. The snake’s table. The grooves were to rest his body, the cup to hold his food. But the snake Perdix, protector of the mansion and, in the view of Icarus and the servants, a reincarnated ancestor, was not to be found on his table, nor in his sleeping quarters, a terracotta tube with cups attached to its ends. He lay in her brother’s hand.
With utmost leisure, Icarus ambled toward her: a boy of fifteen, chunky rather than plump, with a large head and a tumult of hair and enormous violet eyes which managed to look innocent even when he was hiding Perdix in Myrrha’s loom or telling Thea that she had just swallowed a poisonous mushroom. He never hurried unless he was leaving the house.
Thea embraced him with sisterly ardor. He submitted with resignation and without disturbing his snake. His sister was the only female he would allow to embrace him. Even as a small boy, he had spurned the arms of Myrrha and various ladies of the court at Knossos. Under normal circumstances—had he remained at court, for example—he could hardly have remained a virgin to the age of fifteen. He might be married; certainly he would be betrothed. For the last five years, however, most of his playmates had been animals instead of boys and girls. The birth of a lamb, the mating of bull and cow: these were the familiar and hardly shocking facts of life to him. But he strenuously resisted the knowledge that men and women propagated in the same fashion.
“Perdix is ill,” he explained. “I’m feeding him dittany leaves. They’re good for cows in labor. Why not snakes with indigestion?”
“The Achaeans have come.” She spoke the words in quick, breathless gasps. “Outside the palace. We must go to the glider.” Myrrha by now had overtaken them.
His eyes widened but not with fear. “I will stay and fight them. You and Myrrha go.”
She heard a scuffling in the outer chambers, the shouts of Cretans, the oaths of Achaeans: “Poseidon!” “Athene!” A few of the servants, it appeared, had chosen to fight. A man screamed, and the scream became a groan. Never had she heard such a sound except when her cat, Rhadamanthus, had been crushed by the stone wheel of a farmer’s cart.
She fought back the nausea which clawed at her throat. “There are too many to fight.”
“I will bring Perdix,” he said. That flatness of his statement allowed no argument. A remarkable bond united the boy and his snake. For three years Icarus had squeezed and dropped him without arousing his wrath. The boy insisted that Perdix was the avatar of his great-great-uncle who had once sailed around the vast continent of Libya and returned with six pythons and a male gorilla.
“Yes. He will bring us luck.”
And the blue monkey, Glaucus? Why had she not remembered to bring him from the garden? His little weight would not have slowed their flight.
They climbed the last stairs and burst into sunlight like breathless divers from the bottom of the sea. Raised on a catapult such as besiegers use to storm a city, the glider poised like a monster from the Misty Isles. Its wings were those of an albatross, with a framework of peeled willow rods covered by tough canvas; its wooden body was that of a fish with round, painted eyes and upturned tail. When the trigger of the catapult was struck with a hammer, two twisted skeins, made from the sinews of a sheep, would start to unwind and propel the craft upward along a trough at a 45-degree angle and into the air. There was room for two passengers, one on top of the other.
Myrrha was stooped with terror. She had started to mumble an incantation in her native tongue, a plea, no doubt, to the gods of the jungle.
“You and Icarus go,” said Thea, touching the woman’s shoulder. “I will strike the trigger.”
But Myrrha shook her head and the terror ebbed from her face. She lifted the girl in her arms (for Cretans are little people, and Thea, although she had reached her full height, was less than five feet tall) and strapped her to the glider, securing leather straps to her arms and ankles. With a single, larger strap, she fastened Icarus to Thea’s back.
“Hold to your sister,” she ordered with unaccustomed authority. “The strap may break.”
“How can I hold my snake at the same time?”
She took the snake, of which she was mortally afraid, and settled him in the pouch at the front of Icarus’ loincloth. “He will think it’s his tube,” she reassured the boy.
They did not hear the arrow. Myrrha was speaking to Icarus; then, without a scream, she settled onto the roof and almost deliberately seemed to stretch her limbs in an attitude of sleep. The arrow was very small and nearly hidden in the folds of her robe. With its feathered tail, it looked like a bird gathered to her breast.
Icarus freed their straps and slid with Thea onto the roof. He knelt beside his nurse and kissed her cheek for the first and last time. She lay with her usual expression of doubt and perplexity. Thea stifled a sob; there was no time for tears. She jerked Icarus to his feet. She herself would have to strike the trigger and send him to safety without her.
He saw her intention. “No,” he protested. “I am a man. It is you who must go.” She was always surprised when her brother issued commands; in his placid times, people forgot his stubbornness. He shoved her towards the glider.
She slapped him across the mouth. “Do you want us both to die?” she cried. “Now do as I say. Remember, you are not to land in the Country of the Beasts.”
A giant had barred their path. An Achaean, though not the deadly bowman. The topmost rung of his ladder leaned against the edge of the roof. A bronze helmet, crested with peacock feathers, concealed his forehead, but she saw his blond eyebrows and beardless cheeks; he was very young. There was blood on his hands and on the sword which he raised above his head. She smelled the leather of his tunic as he strode toward her. With a speed which belied his great, clumsy-looking arms, he dropped the sword and locked both children in a fierce hug. They wriggled like netted tunnies and slid to the floor, gasping for breath—fish spilled on a beach.
He knelt beside them and brushed the curls from Thea’s ears. She shuddered at the touch of his fingers.
He grinned. “Pointed ears,” he said in the rich Achaean tongue which she had learned at court, a strangely musical language for a race of warriors. “You are not Cretan at all. I think you have come from the woods, and it’s time you returned.” His eyes were as blue as the feathers of a halcyon, the bird which nests on the sea and borrows its color from the waves; and a faint amber down had dusted his cheeks. She thought with a wave of tenderness: he is trying to raise a beard and resemble his bristling comrades. In spite of his size and strength, he seemed misplaced in armor.
He placed them on the glider and fastened their thongs. “You had better go. My friends are rough.”
He struck the trigger with the hilt of his sword. She hoped that his friends would not be angry with him.
She could not breathe; her brother’s body seemed a weight of bronze. Up, up, they shot; up into sunlight and lapis lazuli, where Daedalus had flown, and that other Icarus, for whom her brother was named, until he lost his wings and plunged into the sea like a stricken albatross.
She opened her eyes. The wind’s invisible cobwebs had ceased to sting. She felt like a Dancer in the Games of the Bull, swimming the air above the deadly horns; or a dolphin, leaping a wave for the sheer joy of sun above him and sea below him, and air around him like a coolness of silk.