“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 from 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 his 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 conquerors 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.”
“Well then, my girl with the furless ears, I will come to see you within the hour. See that you robe yourself as becomes a woman and not a child. I have no wish to be reminded of my daughter.”
The Room of the Dolphins was small, like most of the rooms in the sprawling palaces of Crete. It was intimate and gaily decorated, with terracotta lamps, as yet unlit, perched like pigeons in wall-niches; folding chairs of fragrant citrus wood; and a raised stone platform billowing cushions of goose feather. On one end, it opened between two columns into a light well with a black wooden pillar to honor the Great Mother; on the other, into a bathroom with a sunken floor and a small clay bathtub around whose sides an impudent painted mouse pursued a startled cat. In the center of the room stood an open chest whose contents were strewn on the floor like a treasure cast from the sea: golden pendants aswarm with amber bees, sandals of blue kidskin, gowns of wool, leather, and linen with wide, flaring skirts. The earless Xanthus pointed to the dresses, nodded to Thea, and paused with eager expectancy, hoping no doubt to watch her disrobe in front of him. Because they display their breasts, the ladies of Crete are sometimes thought to be shameless.
She could not be cross with the man in spite of his impudence. There was something pathetic about his missing ears; without them, his head looked undressed. She smiled tolerantly and pushed him toward the door. The merest touch of her hand impelled him to motion, and he moved before her like a ship before a breeze.
Leaving Icarus to admire the fresco of dolphins, she climbed in the tub and turned a frog-shaped spigot to immerse her body with hot, steaming water. In the larger mansions, rain was trapped on the roof, heated by a brazier, and carried to the bathrooms through pipes of terracotta. Cretan plumbing was admired even in Egypt. She drowsed and forgot to lament the past or dread the future; anxieties flowed from her body along with dust and sweat and the stains of grass and flowers. A sound awoke her, a lapping of water.
“Thirsty,” said Icarus. He had knelt by the tub to offer Perdix a drink, and the snake’s forked tongue was narrowly missing