Smiling, she motioned Ajax to a chair. “He’s a lonely child,” she said, gesturing toward the closed door behind which she did not doubt that Icarus had knelt to listen. “He misses a man’s company. You see, our father was killed by pirates three years ago.”
“Achaean?”
“Yes,” she sighed. “They attacked the ship on which he was sailing to Zakros.” It was not hard to invent a touching story. “Women have raised us. Not our mother, who died when Icarus was born, but servants and aunts. Always women. How we have missed a man.” She offered him a cup of wine. He touched the brim to his lips, tasting gingerly, as if he suspected poison. She walked behind him and placed her hand on his forehead.
“You must let me bathe your wound,” she said. “Pretend that I am your own daughter. Before he was killed, I used to tend my father with soft unguents and comb his wind-tossed hair. Like you, he was a fighter and often hurt.”
He seized her wrist with unpaternal roughness and drew her into his lap. “The skirt becomes you,” he said, draining his cup in one continuous swallow. “But not the blouse.” With a single and surprisingly deft movement for such a ponderous hand, he tore the gauze from her breasts. His body reeked of leather and sweat. He could not have bathed in weeks, possibly months; he had doffed his armor but he wore the same tunic which he had worn in battle (in several battles, she decided; it was stained with blood, dirt, and food). Furthermore, he was densely wooded with hair: his legs, his arms, even the tops of his sandaled feet. He reminded her of a large hirsute goat, and like a goat he seemed to her foolish rather than threatening. She had not yet learned that a strong fool is the most dangerous of men.
“You need more wine,” she said, trying to disengage herself. Perhaps she could incapacitate him with drink. According to a universal proverb, variously claimed by Cretans, Egyptians, and Babylonians, drinking increases desire, but limits its performance.
“Not wine. This—” He buried her mouth with a kiss which tasted of onions. She remembered that Achaean soldiers chewed them as they marched. She felt as if heavy masculine boots were trampling the delicate offerings—murex, coquina, starfish—in a seaside shrine to the Great Mother. It was not that she feared dishonor, like the god-fearing women of Israel, the faraway kingdom of shephered patriarchs. As a Cretan girl, she was realistic enough to recognize that there was nothing dishonorable if he took her, a woman and a captive, against her will. It was his dirt she feared, his ugliness, his hairiness, his affront to her feminine pride (remember, the Cretans worship a goddess as their chief deity). It was the supreme disorder of being forced to do what seemed to her not a wicked but an ugly and demeaning thing.
His kiss grew more impassioned. She clenched her teeth to withstand his probing tongue. Loathing burned in her like a black, bitter fire of hemlock roots.
“I lost my snake,” said a loud and determined voice from the door. Ajax leaped to his feet, and Thea embraced the hard but welcome coolness of the floor. Rising to her knees, she watched the advance of the snake. He was neither large nor poisonous but, flickering his forked tongue, he somehow managed to look as sinister as an asp from the deserts of Egypt. Ajax seized a stool and assumed the martial stance of a soldier defending a bridge against an army.
But Icarus intervened before they could meet. “You mustn’t scare him,” he said, restoring the snake to his pouch. “It makes him nervous, and then he bites.”
“Guard!”
Xanthus appeared in the door beyond the light well. As usual, he looked expectant; perhaps he hoped for an orgy.
“ Xanthus, you will take this brat and his snake into the bathroom and keep them there, if you have to drown them in the tub.”
The door to the bathroom closed with abrupt finality.
“You Cretan girls,” sneered Ajax. He came toward her, shaggy and menacing. “You tease and mince and show your breasts, and then you say, ‘No, you hairy old barbarian, you shan’t touch me!’ Barbarians, are we? Well, we know what to do with a woman!”
“My father will kill you if you touch me.” The words stabbed the air like little daggers of ice.
“Oh? He’s back from Hades, is he? Indeed, I should fear a man who escapes Persephone!”
In spite of his golden beard, he seemed all darkness and evil, a black whirlwind of fire and rock. The smell of him bit her nostrils like volcanic ash. She knotted her fists in tiny impotence.
Then she remembered the pins in her hair.
She watched their torch-bearing captors recede in the distance like fishing boats into the night and leave them to darkness that seemed to smother their senses like a shroud of black wool. The air was rank with the droppings of bats. Icarus clutched her hand, half in protection, half in fear. She too was afraid; much more than he, she guessed, since caves and cliffs and roaring rivers, all of the fierce faces of nature, had long been familiar to him from his roving near Vadrypetro.
“Possibly,” said Icarus without reproach, “if you had struck him somewhere else, he wouldn’t have been so angry.”
“Nowhere else would have stopped him.”
“He certainly had to be stopped,” agreed Icarus. “I heard him screaming at you. And all for a kiss.”
It was hardly the time to tell him the facts which he had resisted from Myrrha. The cave, of course, belonged to the Minotaur.
She drew him close to her and felt his big head against her shoulder, “Forgive me,” she said. “Forgive me, little brother.”
“But I wanted to come to the Country of the Beasts,” he reminded her, not yet frightened enough for a sentimental exchange of endearments. “Now we’ve come.”
“You didn’t want the Cave of the Minotaur.”
“Perdix will bring us luck.”
“Not against the Minotaurs. They are much too big.”
“Maybe this one is out to dinner.”
“I’m afraid he dines at home. Shhhhh,” said Thea. “I hear—”
They heard a padding of feet (or hooves?), and then a low, long-drawn wail which deepened and reverberated into the curdling bellow of an enraged bull. Nausea crept to her throat like the furry feet of a spider.
“Mother Goddess, he’s coming!” groaned the boy.
“We must separate,” said Thea. “Otherwise, he will get us both at once. We’ll try to slip past him in the dark and meet at the mouth of the cave.”
“Won’t he be able to see us? This is his lair.”
“He can’t chase us both at once.”
“Let him chase me first. If he’s a slow eater, you may have a chance.”
“He will make his own choice.” She both expected and hoped to be chosen before her brother. If the Minotaur added the instincts of a man to those of a bull, he ought to prefer a girl to a boy.
She loosened Icarus’ hand. His fingers lingered; he hugged her in a quick, impulsive embrace and darted ahead of her, moving from darkness to darkness, scraping his sandals on the floor of the cave. She started to call his name. No, she must not alert the Minotaur. She began to feel her way along the walls; their dampness oozed like blood between her fingers. Once, she stumbled and cut her knee on stalagmites, for she wore her kilt and not the bell-shaped skirt in which she had greeted Ajax. A stench pervaded the air, rancid and sweet at the same time: putrescent flesh and dried blood. She stopped often to catch her breath; fear had drained her as if she had breasted a strong, outgoing tide and washed on the beach with driftwood and shells. Little by little, her eyes became used to the darkness and distinguished the pronged stalactites which hung from the roof like seaweed floating above a diver’s head.