To compound my disgrace Eunostos at that very moment loomed over the horizon, stooping and trying to minimize his almost seven feet but still looking like a Minotaur or, to the country folk if they had seen him, a demon from the Underworld.
“But Zoe,” he cried, “you only have to talk to him.” He turned to the ox, muttered a few, to me, unintelligible sounds, and the stupid animal sauntered, yes, sauntered, in spite of his bulk and with undisguised scorn for me and affection for Eunostos, from under the lean-to and over to the cart, which leaned against another wall of the house. A few more words, some quick, sure movements of his hands, and ox was joined to cart for the journey to Knossos.
“What did you say to him, Eunostos?”
“I invited him to join us on a trip.”
“But he’s going to have to pull us. You make it sound as if he’s going to ride in the cart.”
“I know, but he has his pride. It’s better to make him feel like an equal.”
“I didn’t know you spoke ox.”
“You forget I have an affinity for the race. I expect we have a common ancestor. Besides, his vocabulary is limited-a mere hundred or so words.”
“Eunostos, you’re a wonder.”
He gave me an impulsive hug. “Aunt Zoe, you’re the wonder. The way you handled the farmer!”
I shushed him with a finger. “And his wife and pig. But they may wake up. Into the cart with you now.”
“Can’t I drive while it’s dark?”
“Not even while it’s dark.”
“But the farmers are all asleep.”
“But not their sons and daughters.”
It was like squeezing a Triton into a lobster box.
“Leave me a breathing hole,” he pleaded as he lay on his back, knees drawn up, arms pressed against his sides, chin on chest.
I shoveled hay over him. “It’s only a foot deep over your head. I have to hide your horns. You won’t suffocate.” It was no time to pamper him. “Just don’t sneeze,” I cautioned with a last toss of the pitchfork. Then I mounted the driver’s seat and addressed the ox:
“Ho there, fellow, off to Knossos.”
The ox refused to respond.
“My good Beast, let’s be on our way!”
His inertia bordered on insolence.
A sound filtered through the straw, rather like a series of grunts.
“That’s the most primitive language I ever heard,” I snorted. “And he’s not my equal, even if I did call him Beast.”
But the cart began to move.
CHAPTER XIV
We had driven our oxcart for three days and lived on blackberries and mushrooms and crayfish caught in streams swollen by the melting snows from the mountains. Once I inveigled goat’s milk and eggs from a credulous farmer’s wife, who took me for a widow light in the head, while Eunostos remained in his crypt of hay. Every night, when we stopped to rest and my body seemed one intolerable ache from the jolts of the oxcart, I ate of the acorns in my pouch and scarcely thought of my tree. With the resilience of youth, Eunostos unbent himself and slept soundly under the cart, his horns and hooves concealed by straw or wrapped in old strips of linen torn from the folds of the gown I had borrowed from Chloe. The last night before Knossos, I waited among the papyrus stalks and watched for intruders while he swam in a pool and cleansed himself from the journey, and then I took his place in the sweet-chilling water, though careful to guard my hair and not expose the forbidden Dryad’s green.
I dare not call it a happy time, while childless Kora waited in the Country of the Beasts, her strained white face a spectre in our minds. But the plans, the risk, the hope-and hope seemed almost a certainty while we were on the move-bound us together with the comradeship of soldiers sharing danger, and also with the tenderness only possible between a boy and a woman who might have been his mother (or except accident of years, his beloved).
The morning of the fourth day, Knossos spread incredibly below us.
“Eunostos,” I called down to him. “We’re there. But we mustn’t be seen together. When we reach the marketplace, I’ll leave the cart. Give me a few minutes before you show yourself. Then you know what to do.”
His head erupted from the straw. “It’s like a rainbow fallen out of the sky!”
I submerged the head and the incriminating horns. “Not yet, simpleton. But yes, it is, and it looks as if it might return to the clouds at any minute.” I blinked my eyes. It was not a city, it was witchery, and at such a time I could not afford to be bewitched. As an antidote to sheer, open-mouthed wonderment, I reminded myself that, according to my Cretan lover, the Egyptians did not approve of Knossos. Streets which meandered when they ought to advance. End beams projecting from houses as if the builders had forgotten them and wandered off to make love. Flat roofs unexpectedly bulging into impertinent attics. Story built upon story like so many afterthoughts. Little blue huts side by side with scarlet villas. Sprawling apartments whose windows were filled with fiery orange parchment. Such a riot of colors-garishness, said the Egyptians. Where was the dignity of grays and browns, of sand colors, pyramid colors? Such a want of planning. Wastefulness, said the Egyptians. Where was the grandeur of temples with pylon gates and obelisks as straight as the shaft of a spear?
But the Cretans laughed and made no excuses for their fallen rainbow. “You say we squander our colors. Look at a field in spring. Do the flowers offend your eyes, whatever hues they mingle? You say we build crookedly. Look at the forest. Do the trees grow in rows? Do the branches make perfect spheres above their trunks? Beside, we did not build our city, Zeus built it. When he was a little boy, the Great Mother said to him, ‘You’re restless, my son, on the mountaintop. Descend into the valley and build me a town to delight my heart.’ And the child took stone from the mountain, clay from the banks of a stream, wood from the fir tree; and he snatched a whole rainbow right out of the sky and went into the valley without a plan in his quick little brain, but with a vision, and built his town in a single morning. And the Great Mother said, ‘But the streets are crooked.’ And the child answered, ‘So is a stream,’ and his mother smiled.”
“Zoe, I thought we were almost there. I’m about to sneeze.”
“We are I said, prodding the ox, who had finally learned to obey my commands. “I was just catching my breath. But now to practical matters.”
Knossos alone among the great cities of Men was totally unfortified; its walls were its bull-prowed ships. But though there were neither forts nor gates nor even guards, except for the palace garrison, it was understood that farmers would not enter the city with their carts, or warriors with their chariots. The farmers marketed their grapes, olive oil, melons-whatever the season’s crop-in a large open field flanked by vineyards and olive groves, or walked into the city to make purchases in the canvas-covered stalls, which fluttered like big butterflies, or in the arcades of shops, whose bare-breasted proprietresses were as pert and impudent as their pottery and figurines. In the absence of the farmers, no one bothered their carts, for theft belonged to the countryside, not to Knossos. It was not a virtuous city by any means: its consumption of beer and wine was legendary, its sexual practices imaginative and prodigious; but its sins (said the Egyptians), or rather its pleasures (said the Knossians), lay in partaking, not in taking. As they approached the city, the peasants somehow forgot their wariness and relaxed in a beneficent glow of brotherly and other kinds of love. Oh, they would bargain and haggle over a price, raise their voices even scowl on occasion-but to steal in Knossos? Unthinkable. There were no watchdogs, or dogs of any kind, only Egyptian cats, snoozing on rooftops or walking the clean unlittered streets as if they felt no yearning for their original homeland. For cats, like Cretans, abhor rules.