“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.
Our ships ride at anchor, sturdy of cypress, twin-masted, with dolphin-shaped pennants hanging from the beaked prows and purple moons painted along the hulls. Today, the last pithoi of olive oil, the last kegs of water and wine, the last foodstuffs of cheese and hard-crusted bread, raisins, dates, and dried figs, will be carried on board from the mule-drawn wagons sent by Aeacus. Tomorrow, if the gods send favorable winds, we will sail for the Isles of the Blest, a voyage of great distances and many perils, of dog-headed monsters with teeth as long as daggers and waves as tall as a three-storied palace. But Cretan ships can swim like dolphins, play in the troughs and mount the tallest wave. They have circumnavigated the great continent of Libya; I think they will find their way to our blessed islands. Leaving my ship in the later afternoon, calling to Pandia as she painted the letters I-C-A-R-U-S below the prow, I have climbed for the last time to the cave which I call the Chamber of the Blue Monkeys, a forgotten shrine to the Great Mother. I have come to finish my history, written laboriously on papyrus and fastened together into a scroll like the famous Egyptian Book of the Dead. I shall leave the finished scroll in a copper chest for the Men of the future.
After we have sailed to the islands, I think that legend will not be kind to us. The Centaurs will thunder through many a battle as the barbarous foe of Men and their well-ordered cities; and the Minotaur, the Bull that Walks Like a Man, what will they say of him? His tail will grow forked, his horns will sprout like the antlers of a stag, and the gloom of his lightless caverns will terrorize children and young virgins. “Beast” will become synonymous with “animal,” and “bestial” will be an epithet applied to savages and murderers. Men of the future, open this cave and find my scroll and read that we were neither gods nor demons, neither entirely virtuous nor entirely bad, but possessed of souls like you and in some ways kinder; capable of honor and sacrifice—and love. Consider if bestiality is not, after all, akin to humanity. Read and understand us, forgive us for having once defeated you, and forgive the author if he has allowed his own loss to darken his story.
I, Eunostos, Minotaur, thus conclude my history, the Passing of the Beasts.
No sooner had I written the black, sprawling letters of my name than a hand touched my shoulder.
“Dearest Eunostos,” she said. “I will not ask to read what you have written. If it is true, it has not drawn a pretty picture of me.” A nimbus of light from the mouth of the cave illuminated her scarlet, belled skirt and the golden serpents around her wrists.
The nearness of her numbed me like a draught of wolf’s-bane. At last I said: “Is it going well in Knossos? The Achaeans have not returned?”
“Not yet. One day, I think, they will surely conquer us. But not soon. We shall have a little more time in which to deserve a little more time.”
“And Icarus is well?”
“He is a great hero. All the girls of Knossos are in love with him.”
“And he with them?”
“With none of them.”
“And you have come to tell me good-bye. It was kind of you, Thea.”
“To tell you good-bye? My poor, foolish Minotaur, I have come to go with you, and not out of kindness either!”
“But the sea is treacherous,” I cried. “Do you know the perils beyond the great pillars? The dog-headed monsters, the whirlpools, the clashing rocks—”
“It was I who chose your ships. The best in my father’s fleet—at least, in what is left of his fleet.”
“You will leave your father?”
“I have always loved him. But I came late to loving my mother. Now her people have called me.”
I seized her hand and brought it reverently to my lips. “I will be your eternal friend!”
“Friend indeed! I will come as your wife or your woman, but not your friend. How shall we meet except through the flesh? The soul must see through the body’s eyes and feel through the body’s fingers, or else it is blind and unfeeling.”
“You say that our bodies should meet. But you are beautiful—and I am a Beast.”
“Yes, a Beast like my own mother, and lordlier than any Man I have ever known! Do you know why I tried to eclipse you with clothes? Because you stirred me with feelings which had no place in my tidy garden of crocuses.”
She removed the signet ring I had given her in the forest and laid it lovingly and yet with great finality beside my scroll. “This, my most loved possession, I shall leave for the Goddess and in memory of my friends, the blue monkeys. Having found my Minotaur, I can part with his ring.”
With grave simplicity, she knelt at my feet. “Love has been a climbing for me, Eunostos. Now I have climbed until I can kneel to you.”
“No, no,” I pleaded. “You mustn’t kneel!” I lifted her from the earth and held her in my arms, and she kissed me with such a sweet and burning ardor that she might have been one of the naughty Dryads who have studied the secrets of love for three hundred years. I held her with fierce tenderness and without shame and knew that love is not, as some poets say, a raging brush fire, but a hearthfire, which burns hotly, it is true, but in order to warm the cold sea-caves of the heart and light its pools with anemones of radiance.
“If only,” I cried, “if only Icarus had come too!”
And of course he had, with Perdix.