Then she saw their direction.
“Shift,” she cried to Icarus. “We are heading for the coast!”
Silence.
“Icarus, listen to me. You mustn’t be afraid. You must help me steer for the mountains!”
“Afraid?” he protested. “I wasn’t afraid. I was thinking about birds. Now I know what it means to get a bird’s-eye view!”
“Shift,” they cried in unison, abandoning themselves to the breathless joy of flight.
“SHIFT!”
Below them the captured palace twinkled its giant mosaic —the blue-black clay of the roofs, the red gypsum of the courtyards, punctuated by gardens and fountains and swelling toadstools of smoke which did not come from the hearth in the kitchen. Scarlet blades of flame began to probe among the mushrooming blacknesses. So, too, she thought, had burned the palace of Knossos. Capture, pillage, and burn: that is the way of Achaeans. And her father? She blanched to think of him among such flames.
Grief froze in her like water in a pool, and high among the clouds, time too seemed frozen, as if all the water clocks had turned to ice and the shadows on all the sundials were fixed to a certain hour. And yet they moved. Time and pain were frozen but not the earth, which changed below them from stone villages linked by roads to hamlets linked by footpaths; from vineyards and olive groves to pastures scattered with thickets and shepherds’ huts and undulating upwards, upwards toward the Mountains of Ida. A peak surged toward them like an angry whale. “Shift!”
They skirted the snowcapped crags, and winds lashed them like spray from a wintry sea.
And then, cupped in the arms of the old, white-haired mountains, lay a green forest, its single egress a narrow strip to the south which faced toward the rich Messara Valley and the great city of Phaestus. The Country of the Beasts.
They began to descend, gently but irrevocably, toward the forest. Cypresses, bronze in the afternoon sun; cedars as old as the time when the infant Zeus had been nursed in these very mountains; pines and firs, and lesser trees which they did not recognize, wafting a strange fragrance up to meet them, sweet and acrid at once (myrrh? sandarac?): a green immensity of trees, with grassy glades and a stream of flawless malachite, and there, there—was it a town or only a natural clearing with stunted trees like houses and a ditch like a girdling moat? No man except their father was known to have entered the Country of the Beasts. Shepherds, following sheep, had skirted the southern boundary and seen among the shadows boys with the hooves of goats, winged females with staring golden eyes, and yes, the Minotaur, the Bull That Walks Like a Man.
“Thea,” whispered Icarus, a hushed eagerness in his voice. “Why don’t we try to land in the forest?”
“No,” she cried with sudden vehemence. “You know what Father said.”
“But nothing happened to him. And he left our mother in there.”
“Our mother is dead. Now shift.”
She threw her weight to the left, but Icarus stared at the forest and did not move. “Icarus!”
“Yes,” he said quietly. “Yes, Thea.”
The treetops, soft from a distance, bristled with gnarled fingers to puncture their wings; but together they managed to guide their craft beyond the forest to a clearing of grass and yellow, early-blooming asphodels. They struck with such a thud that they broke their straps and tumbled onto the ground. The lily-like asphodels cushioned their fall. “Thea, look!” whispered Icarus. “There is something watching us.” She looked to the edge of the forest and saw the face.
“Her ears,” said Icarus, forgetting to whisper. “They’re just like ours!”
“No,” said Thea quickly. “Hers are furry. Ours are merely pointed. And besides, she has—paws!”
The face eclipsed itself behind a tree. “We frightened her away,” sighed Icarus.
“It was something else that frightened her.” Achaeans. At least a score of them, issuing onto the meadow.
“We can follow the girl,” cried Icarus.
“No,” said Thea. “Better Achaeans than Beasts.”
Chapter II
THE MINOTAUR
His helmet of boar’s tusk glittered yellowly in the light the clerestory windows. His bronze cuirass fell below his thighs; he removed his greaves, grunting with easeful release, and his huge, hairy legs resembled trees rising from the undergrowth of his rawhide boots. To Thea, he looked elderly; he must have been forty. He lifted the helmet from is sweat-matted hair and faced his young captives. In the hall of a Cretan nobleman’s captured mansion, Thea and Icarus awaited his judgment. His name was Ajax; his men had taken them beside their glider.
On the frescoed walls, blue monkeys played in a field of crocuses. Red-stained columns, swelling into bulbous capitals, supported the roof, and the alabaster floor was divided by strips of red stucco. A riot of color and movement, freedom and playfulness: unutterably foreign to the hard-bitten conquerers with their shields and swords. They seemed to sense their unwelcome; they stood gingerly on foam-white alabaster and stared at the painted walls as if they expected the monkeys to drown them with derisive chattering.
She sought her brother’s hand and felt his returning pressure. A warmth of tenderness, like the current from a glowing brazier, enveloped her; then a chill of remorse, as if the brazier had been extinguished. It was she who had caused their capture, preferring known barbarians to unknown Beasts.
Ajax sighed and slumped in a chair with a back of carved griffins. To such a man, thought Thea, fighting is not an art but a livelihood; he is not a hero but a strong, stupid, reasonably brave animal who fights because he is too lazy to plant crops or sail a ship.
A small, wedge-shaped wound glowed in his forehead. “You Cretans,” he said, pointing to the wound. “For such little creatures you have sharp claws. The lady of the house gave me this.” He laughed. “She was suitably punished.” He motioned Thea and Icarus to approach his chair.
Icarus stepped in front of his sister. “You are not to harm her.”
“Harm her? Not if she pleases me,” Ajax grunted without rancor, disclosing a gap in place of his middle teeth. His voice was high and thin; it squeaked from his hulking body like a kitten’s mew from a lion. But he gestured and flared his nostrils as if he were Zeus, the sky-god. “My men saw your ship come down. You almost landed in the Country of the Beasts.”
“I wish we had,” said Icarus.
“Do you?” Ajax laughed. “You’d like for the Minotaur to get your sister? He takes his pleasure with girls and then he eats their brothers. A Cretan boy like you would make one good bite—except for your head. That might stick in his throat.”
“Does he live in the woods where we landed?” asked Icarus, totally uncowed.
A young warrior, both of whose ears had been sliced from his head as neatly as mushrooms from a log, anticipated his leader. “His lair is a cave a little to the west. The people hereabouts offer him lambs and calves so he won’t come out and eat their children. When we took this house, they called his curse down on us.”
Ajax silenced the speaker with an oath. “To Hades with Cretan curses! They’re no more potent than Cretan goddesses. Now take these children to the Room of the Dolphins and see that the girl has the means to bathe and change.”
She felt his eyes on her wind-disheveled hair and instinctively reached a hand to rearrange her curls.
“Pointed ears,” he remarked, apparently noticing for the first time. “And your brother as well. Are you from the forest?”
Angrily Thea restored her curls. “We are Cretans, not Beasts. If I were a Beast, my ears would be tipped with fur.”