We scrambled down the ladder, cringing as the hot droplets began to strike our backs, and gained the easeful coolness of the stairs. The last to descend, I paused to stare through the mist of the fountain at the ruined garden and the shredded parasol, the vines and the leafless fig tree. A Beast’s love for a garden can be as strong as his love for another Beast, since gardens are beings. Who can say if the poppies dream of butterflies in amethyst clouds, the fig tree dreads the coming of the ravenous bees to puncture its fruit, the vines exult in the sun and, growing warm, drowse in the lengthening shade of a parasol? Dreams, dreads, exultance, and repose—and love, always love. Leaves instead of limbs, but hearts and brains, identity and individuality. It is not necessary to walk in order to love.
The taste of loss was wolf’s-bane in my mouth.
At the foot of the stairs I pulled the lever which loosed a hidden panel and choked the stairwell with earth. The Pharaohs of Egypt utilize the same principle in their tombs to guard their mummies and their boat-shaped catafalques. (Where do you think the Egyptians learned their secret? From my own ancestors.)
“They can dig us put,” I said, “but I doubt if they brought any shovels. Achaeans are fighters, not plumbers.”
“And if they try?”
“We’ll leave by the back door.”
“Back door?” cried Thea and Icarus in unison.
“Yes,” I said, pausing to heighten their expectation. It is always pleasant to divulge a secret under dramatic circumstances. “You didn’t think I would live in a house with a single door, did you? Remember my cave? Two doors, in spite of its apparent rusticity. Here, it’s the same. Let me show you.”
Between the roots in the far wall of the bedroom, a large stone, the width of my shoulders, rested in gray anonymity. I delivered a sharp blow with my hoof and the stone turned on a pivot to disclose a narrow passageway no taller than a Minotaur on all fours. “It cuts right under the field and comes out in the forest. Tomorrow or the next day, I can slip from the house and reconnoiter to see if the Achaeans have left the trunk. They are not going to stay up there permanently. There are too many riches to steal on other parts of Crete. When I return, I’ll rap six times and then you can open the door.”
“It’s time for supper,” said Pandia, rising from her nap in the moss, or rather, rising with the moss and resembling a per-ambulatory thicket. “Have you beaten off the enemy?”
I told her about our retreat.
“You’ve laid in supplies, I trust?”
“Adequate but not elaborate.”
“We shall just have to diet.”
We climbed the ladder to prepare our frugal dinner. In the light of a single lamp, the usually amiable vines looked somber and strangling, as if they might drop on our heads and tighten their leathery tendrils around our necks. Between us lay platters of cheese and the kind of bread called gouros (dough mixed with lentils), a skin of beer, and a cup of water for Pandia. When Pandia asked for sweets, Icarus fetched her a jar of pennyroyal from the workshop. But the sight of the forge and tables without their faithful workers took his appetite.
“Eunostos,” he said, “do you think you could say some words in memory of Bion and the others?”
“I’ll try,” I said, and made up a tiny poem, rough and unpolished but at least loving:
There was a long silence, and then we tried to talk. I touched Thea’s hand. “We’re perfectly safe down here. They can’t reach us without a lot of digging, and we would hear them in time to leave by the back door. Even if they shut off the fountain, dry out the trunk, and set a fire, we’re well insulated by the roots.”
She forced a smile. “The roots, you say. They look—well, as if they had turned poisonous and begun to watch us.”
“Nothing that lives underground will hurt you. Not here, I at least. Only the things that come from the surface.”
“Achaeans,” she said, “and those witchy Thriae. It’s all I my fault, Eunostos. If I had accepted Ajax’s advances, none of this would have happened. He would have taken me back to Mycenae with him as his concubine—Achaeans, they say, are surprisingly gentle to women in their own country— and reared Icarus like his son.”
“But you wouldn’t have come to the forest. You wouldn’t have known about your mother.”
“Or you. I don’t regret the forest, Eunostos. I regret what I brought with me from the world of Men. I opened a door.”
“A forest is like a snake,” I said. “Occasionally it needs to shed its skin, just for the sake of change. Sometimes it sheds with the seasons. Now, it is shedding in a different, harsher but still necessary way. It is shedding safety which threatened to become stagnation. You can be sure, though, that its new skin will be strong and beautiful.”
“You’re being kind,” she said, “but not very honest.”
Pandia seemed to be napping. She had closed her eyes and opened her mouth. But the rest of us tried to talk and avoid the apprehensions which come with silence.
“I expect,” said Icarus, “that the Achaeans want your shop as well as us. The gold, I mean.”
“Yes,” I said. “To melt down in their own land. You know, they are excellent goldsmiths, if you don’t mind morbid subjects. You ought to see their death masks.”
“Death masks,” said Thea pensively. “And dead vines above our heads. The friendly snakes have died. Or something has killed them.”
“Nonsense. It’s the way the lamp is burning. It makes us all look dead. Like Pandia there. I think it’s time for bed.”
Thea and Icarus rose to their feet.
“Take the lamp,” I suggested. “I’ll light another for myself.”
Pandia kept her place.
“Pandia, wake up and come to bed,” said Thea. “You’ll be more comfortable on the moss.” She held the lamp under the girl’s face. The round eyes were closed like clenched fists; the vivid mouth was drained to a deathly pallor.
The reason lay at the back of her neck, a small, dark hump. I crushed it between my fingers—its little bones snapped easily; its feathers oozed blood, Pandia’s blood—and threw the pulp to the floor with a spasm of uncontrollable shivering. A Strige, a vampire owl. Pandia raised her head and struggled to open her eyes. She rubbed the back of her neck.
“I dreamed of bears. They were chasing me until I was very tired. I couldn’t lift my feet. I felt their hot breath on my neck.”
I pointed to the crushed body.
She gasped and clung to Icarus. “A Strige?”
“Yes, but we found him in time, You’ll feel all right in the morning. It must have flown down the stairs while we were fighting the Thriae in the garden. No doubt, they sent it to devil us. Rats, moths, all night-flying creatures are their friends. There may be others.”
We searched the house, sifting the moss on the floor of the bedroom, peering under the tables in the workshop, standing on benches with a raised lamp to examine the roof of the den, and found a second Strige, balled among the roots and apparently asleep. Soft, brown, seemingly all feathers, he looked as harmless as a baby rabbit, but I knew that he lived on blood, which he sucked so unobtrusively that the victim might die without discovering
