“I’ve been poor company of late, haven’t I, my brother?”
“It is true that a sad Cretan is no asset to a happy court. If you stay in your present mind, you’ll have the ladies in tears, and their cheeks will be streaked with kohl. Go to the hills and find your lost laughter.”
The brothers embraced each other with more than ritual formality. Aeacus loved Minos above all other men. To other races, he knew-the solemn Egyptians, the vainglorious Babylonians-the Cretans seemed light and fickle, incapable of deep, enduring love, because their funerals resembled festivals and they rarely shed tears. To a Cretan, however, death was not oblivion but another country, where all that one loved, all those one loved, were restored and immortalized beneath the radiant smiles of the Great Mother and her Griffin Judge. Yes, the Cretans could love, and if they fell into love as easily as a child falls into a sand pit and climbed out with neither bruises nor scratches, it was not from fickleness, Aeacus would have argued, but abundance of affection. Aeacus himself loved thirty friends, uncountable women and even more children, his brother, himself, and most of all, the someone or something he had not yet found.
The chase led inland, upward, away from the salt-sweet wind of the sea and toward the mountains which ridged the island like an exposed backbone. Burning farmhouses…slaughtered sheep…a rooster crowing incessantly from the top of an olive tree… Thus the marauders had branded the earth in passing. Such raids were becoming more frequent now that the Cretan ships had so many colonies to visit, so little time to guard their own coastline with its innumerable indentations, its coves and projections and rocky headlands, its perfection of concealment. But the Achaeans were still regarded as a minor annoyance, the price of empire. If anyone anticipated a wholesale invasion by those blond, awkward, sword-wielding barbarians, he kept such foolish anticipations from the king. A minor annoyance except, Aeacus mused, to the fishermen or the country folk who lost their houses and often their lives and had not the consolation of a fixed, firm faith, but only a body of shapeless superstitions in which the Underworld loomed as a dark and sinister habitat of monsters and monstrous torments.
It was not often that Aeacus thought of fishermen and farmers. They existed; they provided the court with fish, meat, vegetables, fruit, olive oil, and wool; they performed the function designated for them in the scheme of the Great Mother. Did they love? Did they sorrow? He felt a twinge of guilt that he so rarely thought of them, then the guilt of feeling guilty when he was the king’s beloved brother embarked upon a gallant adventure, and then the happy abandonment of a race not given to introspection.
A small child came running to them across a field. Behind him, smoke billowed from a wattle hut, hens collided with pigs and sought refuge in a torn vineyard. The child, a lean little boy of perhaps five, was weeping with uncontrollable tears. Aeacus lifted him in his arms and felt the beating heart and waited patiently till the boy could speak.
“Mama and papa…”
“Dead, my child?”
“Yes.”
“Don’t cry, don’t cry.” Strange, the sight of tears. No one cried in the court. Or at least they hid their tears. “My men will give them a proper burial. They’ll be waiting for you in the Underworld. The Griffin Judge will appraise them kindly and watch over them and keep them safe.”
“Will he?” The child looked up at him with astonishment. He was ugly, almost monkeylike in his small brown leanness. In the court of Knossos, such ugliness might have repelled him. Not now. Not here. “I thought it was only the great lords like you he watched over.”
“It’s everyone.” He spoke with assurance, but until that moment had never considered if peasants, like kings and courtiers, went to the Underworld. Was there room for them? Did they continue to serve their earthly masters?
“And one of my men will stay with you till we come back, and then we will find a home for you closer to a town, where you will be safe.”
The child clung to him with the tenacity of the animal he resembled. Aeacus had to disengage his fingers, gently but firmly, and hand him to one of his men. He would have liked to stay in the ruined house, bury the parents with the proper services (wherever their ghosts might roam), feed the child, and tell him stories of friendly dolphins and dog-headed fish. When I return to the court, he told himself, I will wed and have a child. Many children. Perhaps it was for them I have sighed, for my unborn children. The tree had whispered of-something.
An hour’s march from where he had left the boy, in the midst of a rocky, pitted meadow, he met the Achaeans. The pits disgorged warriors, the rocks came to life, and the little Cretans found themselves beleaguered before they could draw their daggers.
Draw them they did at last, and then it was an equal fight. Like blue monkeys beset by dogs, they fought the big-bodied, blond intruders, nimbly sidestepping their sword thrusts, thrusting with their own daggers, until a single Achaean limped from the field, and Aeacus stood alone among his fallen men, too tired to give chase, scarcely strong enough to support his own weight, wounded-if not to death-at least to a dazed benumbment.
He looked at his slain friends in the midst of the field and looked around him dazedly and saw that he was not far from two great cliffs with a forest narrowed between them like a wedge. He caught the healing fragrance of bark and oak leaves and heard the faint rustling of water. Perhaps he could find a stream and bathe his wounds and return to bury his friends. Could he walk so far?
Dimly he recognized the forest. The Country of the Beasts, where no Cretan ventured, half from fear and half from remembering a covenant made before the beginning of recorded time, before there had been any scribes to scratch history on clay tablets, that this one forest belonged inviolably and eternally to the Beasts.
Still, the trees whispered to him: cone-shaped cypresses, smoothed and sculptured as if by the nimble fingers of the Great Mother, and tumultuous oaks whose branches seemed little jungles. “You may break the covenant,” they seemed to say. “Enter our deepest shadows and learn our mysteries and yes, our terrors, but even terror can be beautiful.”
The sun gaped like a wound; the limbs were succoring hands which comforted and promised to heal even while they threatened to hold.
He stumbled into the forest.
He lay on the ground, eyes closed, poised between sleep and waking. He heard the rustle of bushes. Painfully he opened his eyes and saw a young boy, no, a young bull. No, a brawny bull-boy with silken red hair punctuated by horns. He tried to raise his hand. The boy stepped back from him with evident alarm.
“I can’t get up,” Aeacus said. He lay in his own blood and wondered with more curiosity than fear if he were going to die. The boy circled him, approached, confirmed his helplessness, and spoke in a deep but musical Cretan.
“Shall I help you up?”
Aeacus deliberated. “I don’t know. I might start to bleed again. Perhaps you could first bind my wounds.”
“Let me bind your wounds.”
She had come so quietly that Aeacus and evidently the Minotaur boy (for that seemed to be his race) had not even heard her approach. She had come through the trees, or out of a tree, it was hard to say. She was taller than Cretan ladies and she wore, in place of their bell-shaped skirts and open bodices, a loose flowing gown the color of leaves and a necklace of orange berries. Her hair was green like her gown, swept above her head in a knot, and held by a silver pin in the shape of a grasshopper. Her ears, thus revealed, were delicately pointed. The boy looked at her with surprise and doubt.