Five brown-green curls, artfully arranged by the handmaiden Myrrha, poised over her forehead, and three additional curls concealed each ear like grapevines hiding a trellis. Fresh and flower-like she looked, with the careful cultivation of a garden in a palace courtyard, rather than the wildness of a meadow or a forest; soft as the petals of a crocus, slender as the stem of a tall Egyptian lotus. But the green-flecked brown of her hair and the bronze of her skin resembled no flower in any earthly garden. Perhaps in the Lower World, where the Griffin Judge presides on his onyx throne, there are gardens with flowers like Thea.
And yet she was more than merely decorative. A firmness tempered her fragility. Like the purple murex, she looked as if she had come from the sea, fragrant and cleansed, with the shell’s own hue in her eyes and its hard strength in her limbs. A sandal can crush a flower but not a murex.
She was picking the crocuses for her father, who, she hoped, was coming from Knossos to visit her. She saw him reflected in the pool of her mind: Aeacus, the warrior-king. Tall for a Cretan, with broad shoulders tapering to a narrow waist, he looked like a young man until you saw the lines around his eyes, running like rivulets into his battle-scars: the v-shaped mark of an arrow, the cleft of a battle-ax. She needed his strength to hush her fears of an invasion, she needed his wisdom to help her manage Icarus, who sometimes acted as if he were five instead of fifteen and liked to vanish from the palace on mysterious journeys which he called his “snakings.”
A blue monkey scampered out of the tree, snatched a crocus, and tossed it into the wicker basket at her feet. She laughed and caught him in her hands. Though a maiden of marriageable years, she did not resent the fact that for friends she had only a monkey, a handmaiden, and a lovable but exasperating brother; that instead of bull games and tumblers and moonlit dances beside the Kairatos River, she had for amusement a distaff to wind with flax and linen robes to dye. Escaping from her hands, the monkey, whose name was Glaucus, snatched her basket and carried it up the trunk of the palm. In the top of the tree, he dislodged a swarm of bees and waved the basket to advertise his theft.
She shook her fist as if she were very angry; she shook the tree and roared like an angry lion. It was part of their game. She remained, however, Thea; she did not feel remotely leonine. When Icarus turned himself into a bear, he growled, he stalked, he actually hungered after honey, berries, and fish. But even as a small child, the practical Thea had not liked to pretend herself into other shapes. “But why should I pretend to be a dolphin?” she had once asked a playmate. “I’m Thea.” It was neither smugness nor lack of imagination, but a kind of unspoken acceptance, a quiet gratitude for the gifts of the Great Mother.
Always in the past, the monkey had dropped the basket at her feet and she, happily subsiding from lion into maiden, had rewarded him with a date or a honey cake. Today, however, she sank to the ground and, hunched among the flowers as if she had fallen from a tree, began to cry. It was not part of their game. She had heard the talk of the servants, their whispers when she approached, their abrupt silences when she tried to join them. She had seen the strain in her father’s face the last time he came from Knossos. Against the unnatural pallor of his skin, his scars had glowed like open wounds.
The monkey descended the trunk, lifted the basket into her lap, and chattering amiably, put his arm around her neck. She looked at him with surprise. Even at sixteen she was used to comforting instead of being comforted. Quickly she dried her eyes on a handkerchief of blue linen, with flying fish cavorting about its edges, and returned to picking.
“These are for my father,” she said to Glaucus. “Do you suppose he will like them?” But she was not really thinking about the flowers. She was thinking about invasion. “If the walls are breached,” her father had said, “you will go with Icarus to the Winged Fish. Myrrha will strap you to the board which is shaped like a mullet, and Icarus will hold to your back. Once in the air, you can shift your weight and help to change direction, climb or dip. Head for the mountains. Whatever you do, try not to land in the Country of the Beasts.” He paused. He had spoken an ominous name, the part of the island where he had met their mother. It was hard to tell if he spoke with fear or with anguished longing for something which he had lost and did not want his children to find and also lose. “Pass over the forest before you land. By leaning heavily forward, you can bring the craft down. There are friendly villagers who will give you shelter.”
She looked above the roofline of the mansion. To the north, Mount Juktas reared the gentle crags which, viewed from the sea, resembled the features of a sleeping god and barred the way to Knossos. Achaean invaders would come from the sea and around the mountain. To the west lay the hills, terraced with olive trees and vineyards, which climbed gradually into the Range of Ida and the Country of the Beasts, the forests which no one mentioned without a shudder, much less entered; the haunt, it was said by the cook, the gatekeeper, and the gardener, of the Minotaur, the Bull That Walks Like a Man. “Try not to land in the Country of the Beasts.” She would not forget her father’s warning.
Myrrha, the handmaiden, exploded into the garden. At the same instant, Thea heard sounds beyond the walls. Marching feet, the clank of armor, the voices of men who march with such confidence that they want the whole countryside to hear their coming.
“Achaeans,” Myrrha gasped. “We must go to the glider.” She was black of skin, a Libyan born into slavery among the Cretans, and fearful of everything: monkeys, snakes, bats, mice, strangers, and as for the Achaeans— well, they were giants who boiled their captives in olive oil and ate them to the last finger. Thea did not know her age; it was doubtful whether Myrrha knew. Fifty? Sixty? But her face was as smooth as a girl’s until, as now, it fell into wrinkled terror and her eyes seemed ready to burst from her head like overripe figs.
Myrrha seized her hand as if to comfort the girl, but it was Thea who imparted the strength and soothed the woman’s fears. “The walls are strong. We may not need the glider.” But privately she thought:
She sprang up the stairs to the roof and surveyed the olive grove between the house and Mount Juktas. The green-silver limbs of the trees, some of them laden with fruit, glinted like the wings of dragonflies in the morning sun. But much of the glitter did not belong to the trees. Warriors, perhaps a hundred, advanced through the grove. Armored in leathern tunics, bronze cuirasses and crested helmets, with shields of bull’s hide, they carried swords and spears, and their beards looked so coarse and pointed that they too might have been weapons. Sharp men, bristling men; yellow-bearded killers. Happily, the walled house was built to withstand a siege. The gate was hewn from cedar, and men in the flanking towers could harass attackers with relative impunity.
But the towers, it appeared, were no longer manned. The slaves and servants had begun to desert the house and trail down the road of cobblestones which led to the olive grove. They were laden with bribes for the conquerers— amphorae of wine, yellow cheeses on platters of beaten gold, wicker baskets heaped with linen and wool. Thea’s impulse was to hurry after them and order them back by name: Thisbe, who had woven her kilt, Sarpedan, the porter, who called her “Green Curls,” Androgeus… Surely they would listen, they who had seemed to love her and whom she had loved? No, there was not time. There was only time in which to find Icarus.
She ran along corridors with walls of porous ashlars and roofs supported by red, swelling columns like turned trees. Her sandals clattered on the gray ironstone tiles. She ran until she came to the Room of the Snake. The room was empty except for a low, three-legged table with four grooves which met in the middle and held a small cup, its rim on a level with the surface of the table. The snake’s table. The grooves were to rest his body, the cup to hold his food. But the snake Perdix, protector of the mansion and, in the view of Icarus and the servants, a reincarnated ancestor, was not to be found on his table, nor in his sleeping quarters, a terracotta tube with cups attached to its ends. He lay in her brother’s hand.
With utmost leisure, Icarus ambled toward her: a boy of fifteen, chunky rather than plump, with a large head and a tumult of hair and enormous violet eyes which managed to look innocent even when he was hiding Perdix in Myrrha’s loom or telling Thea that she had just swallowed a poisonous mushroom. He never hurried unless he was leaving the house.
Thea embraced him with sisterly ardor. He submitted with resignation and without disturbing his snake. His sister was the only female he would allow to embrace him. Even as a small boy, he had spurned the arms of Myrrha and various ladies of the court at Knossos. Under normal circumstances—had he remained at court, for example— he could hardly have remained a virgin to the age of fifteen. He might be married; certainly he would be betrothed. For the last five years, however, most of his playmates had been animals instead of boys and girls. The birth of a lamb, the mating of bull and cow: these were the familiar and hardly shocking facts of life to him. But he strenuously resisted the knowledge that men and women propagated in the same fashion.
“Perdix is ill,” he explained. “I’m feeding him dittany leaves. They’re good for cows in labor. Why not snakes
