Great ladies and gentlemen traveled the meandering roads in sedan chairs carried by servants or slaves, but everyone else walked, for it was not a vast metropolis, like Babylon, but a relatively small city with small buildings for small people, and unwieldy wagons or clattering chariots were as unthinkable as elephants in a vineyard.
I had parked the wagon at the edge of the field, in the shade of an olive tree, since poor Eunostos must be roasting under his straw blanket.
“I’m going now, Eunostos,” I whispered, standing by the ox as if I were talking to him like a farmer who dotes on his animal. No one was close enough to catch my exact words. “But I’ll be watching you from a distance. Once you enter the palace, I’ll go to the agreed spot and wait till lamp-lighting time. If you don’t come, I’ll assume they have captured you and do what I can to set you free. If you do come-”
“It will be with the children. Or else the children will come without me. And if they do, you must get them right back to the country and not try to rescue me. Promise, Zoe?”
I promised but whispered under my breath, “Mother Goddess, I didn’t promise by you.”
I sauntered casually away from the cart and mingled with a group of peasants, nodding and smiling but careful not to speak and betray my Bestial accent. Everybody else seemed to be talking, buyers to sellers, sellers to buyers. But suddenly the talk began to subside and then there was not a sound in all that crowd. It was like the wind leaving a field of barley and letting the stalks ripple into silence. Eunostos had climbed from the cart. I watched him as he shook himself free of the straw and started for the cobbled road which led through the field and directly to the palace. They won’t harm him here in the shadow of the city, I thought, not even the superstitious country folk. Still, they will fear him and some will make sport of him.
I was mistaken. They stared with awe rather than fear at this seven-foot, horned, tailed demon who had materialized-from a cart, was it? More likely from the air! They did not throw rocks, they did not ridicule, they parted to let him pass, as if it were his city to which they had come, and where they remained by his sufferance. Perhaps because of his boldness-perhaps because he somehow glowed with divinity-they took him for a god instead of a demon. Now he had reached the road to the palace. Now he was overtaking peasants bound for audience with the king, and meeting ladies and gentlemen bound in the opposite direction for the market place. Voices lilted from curtained sedan chairs, the bearers halted, the curtains opened, and bare-breasted ladies dangled out of the windows. Children gathered on rooftops, pointing, gesticulating, but not ridiculing, and a small boy cried in a high, sweet voice.
“Mama, is it a Minotaur?”
“Yes, son. It may be the last Minotaur.”
“Has he come to hurt us?”
“I think this one has come to bring us luck. You see, he is like the god we worship. The same noble horns!”
Looking straight ahead of him, never stumbling, holding himself at his full height, his red mane a splendor of silk and sun, his horns like potent but unthreatening weapons, Eunostos entered the stepped portico of the palace and mounted toward the gate. He did not need a forest to give him dignity. He brought the forest with him and walked in the courage of his purpose. Guards advanced to meet him, not to capture but to escort, and together they vanished between the red, down-tapering columns and into the palace of Minos and his brother Aeacus and the royal children, Thea and Icarus.
Eunostos was afraid. He felt as if he were drowning in a vat of honey. Beauty too beautiful. Softness too soft. Not even a hint of menace behind a smile, as in a Bee queen’s face. He could have fought monsters, certainly soldiers; young though he was and, so he thought, ineloquent, he could have argued against wrath or cunning. But this implacable gentleness, this tyranny of softness. It was beyond him and he was baffled. The rainbow city, its toy people, and now, here, the little king with his triple-plumed headdress, seated on his gypsum throne and flanked by two stone griffins who looked as august but unmenacing as the frescoed griffins-green, red, and blue-which shared the walls with reeds and water birds. Where were the spears to bar his path? These slim-waisted boys who passed for guards-no older than himself-why, he would scatter them with one sweep of his arm! Besides, they were guiding, not guarding him. He might have been a visiting ambassador.
The king was holding court and granting audiences. Peasants mingled with courtiers; the raw sweet smell of earth with nard and sandarac. Everyone equal now before the king and come to plead his case, present his gift, ask his boon. Eunostos paused in the rear of the room. His hooves seemed made of bronze. His head spun with a bewilderment of colors and costumes. The men in their loincloths were bright and trim, but not particularly variegated except that here was a cloth which reached to the knees, and there was one which covered no more than the name implied; here was the wool of a peasant, there was the linen of a courtier. But the women… There were skirts like bells, skirts like upturned saffron crocuses, skirts like crowns with many tiers, and here was a lady in-what was the word? Not even Men wore them, except in parts of the East. Trousers!
The king smiled and motioned him at once to advance to the throne, between the throngs of petitioners on foot and spectators lounging on stone benches which ran the length of the walls. Eunostos did not flinch. He knelt before the throne as I had instructed him and waited to be recognized.
“Arise and be heard.”
“I have come from the Country of the Beasts,” he said.
“I know, my son.” Minos was a young-faced king with hair as white as foam. What strange bird-phoenix perhaps-had given him the plumes for his headdress? What fishers had dived among coral and anemones and gathered the murex shells to empurple his loincloth? Bracelets of lapis lazuli; a necklace of coral like a strand of sea horses. Female adornments, but the Man was anything but feminine. Eunostos liked him. He is more than Aeacus, more than any of his people, he thought. Stronger yet kinder. Once his wounds had healed, he would not have stayed in the Country of the Beasts to steal the heart of a Dryad. Had he stayed, he would not have forsaken her.
“And you are Eunostos, the last Minotaur. My brother has told me about you. You were his friend. I have sent for him now.”
Aeacus entered the room without surprise and walked to meet Eunostos without hesitation. They might have been meeting to hunt together as in the old days. In the forest, he had been a beautiful alien. Here, he was beautiful, but intimately at home with dolphin-dancing walls and dolphin-gay people. He wore no adornment except a silver fillet in his hair. He needed no adornment, with his body richer than bronze, with hair like shadows caught in a loom and woven to intricate strands. Eunostos keenly felt his own dishevelment. His gray loincloth of homespun wool. The wisps of hay clinging to his arms and legs. And his hooves, his poor ridiculous hooves which no sandals in the world could hide. Yet no one had laughed at him, and even Aeacus looked at him with a kind of grudging and, at least to Eunostos, unaccountable wonder.
Aeacus extended his hand in the remembered gesture of fellowship. Eunostos did not return the gesture. The beautiful ones, the hurtful ones, he thought. Kora and Aeacus. They smile and their enemies drop their daggers or lose their hearts. They can only be wounded by others like themselves. And I, in my roughness and plainness have dared to tread in the very fount of beauty.
Almost furtively Aeacus dropped his hand. Almost too quickly, he spoke. “I did love your friend, Eunostos. I do love her, in my way. But I love my children more. Would you deny them-this?” He swept his hand in a circle around the room, but the circle seemed ever-widening-palace beyond room, city beyond palace, island beyond city. The Minoan Empire, athwart the sea like an ocean-shouldering whale (and no one yet knew how close were the deadly sharks).