his presence. If you find an animal dead in the forest for no apparent reason, examine the back of his neck for the marks of two small fangs.
Thea was visibly shaken. She put a protective arm around Pandia’s shoulder and whispered, “My dear, it’s all right now. This will never happen to you again.”
“Yes,” I said, “it’s all right, but I think we shall all feel safer sleeping together in the bedroom.”
We lay close to each other, Icarus, Thea, Pandia, and I, and shared the warmth of hope in one of those bleak and endless-seeming hours which end as surely as banqueting, games, and love. Pandia clutched my hand until she fell asleep, and then I held her fingers, her almost-paw, loving her tenderly, yet wishing, must I confess, that she was Thea). I was tired and sad and missing my workers, and my wounded ankle throbbed as if the tentacles of an octopus alternately squeezed and released, squeezed and released the parted flesh. The usually soft moss aggravated the bruises and burns on my back.
I awoke in the night, when the thinly flickering flame announced the near-exhaustion of its oil. Thea was gone. I thought: she has gone to give herself to the Achaeans.
Chapter X
WOLF’S-BANE
“I’m going to get her back,” I said when Icarus and Pandia, awakened by urgent shakes, blinked in the light of the dying lamp. “I’m going to get her back, and kill that murderous Ajax. He’s a wicked Man, and his Men are wolves, and they will not leave this forest with Thea.” I felt like the stony bed of a stream in summer, dry and parched and sprayed with the fine dust which blows from Libya. I felt—untenanted.
“I’m going too,” said Icarus.
I shook my head and explained impatiently why he and Pandia ought to stay in tye house, she for protection, he to protect her.
“I can go where you can’t,” he continued, the rare soldier who knows the rare time when he ought to question his commander. “They can see your red hair for a mile, and even when you stoop, you look as big as a griffin. But I can
“I’m going too,” said Pandia. “I can’t sneak but I can bite.” She bared her small but numerous teeth. “They’re made for fish heads as well as berries.”
“Someone has to stay here,” I explained to her. “To let Icarus and me back in the house. You’ll be quite safe. If you hear any tunneling, then and only then you can leave by the back door.”
Pandia acquiesced with such ill humor that I hesitated to turn my back and risk my tail within the range of her teeth. Fortunately, Icarus mollified her with a brotherly kiss on her head. Gilded with loincloths and armed with daggers, we bent to enter the tunnel. In a limited space, we did not wish to be encumbered with bows and arrows.
The tunnel was never tall enough in which to stand, and only sometimes tall enough in which to crawl; sometimes we had to wriggle on our stomachs, scraping our bare legs and chests over roots and stones, and I found myself forcibly reminded that my workers had built the passage for their own peregrinations and not for the egress of a seven-foot Minotaur and the five-foot son of a Dryad.
“Icarus,” I called behind me, booming in the cramped, earthen corridor like the angry Bull-God before he sends an earthquake. “We are going to come to some water which leads out of the tunnel. I’ll go first. If everything is clear outside, I’ll swim back and get you. Otherwise, wait a few minutes and then return to the house.”
The underground water was almost as cold as the melting snow which fed it in the mountains. I dived, negotiated a passage the size of a door, and slid to the surface in the same stream which ran by Pandia’s village. I sent the merest of ripples widening to the bank, where a large water rat eyed me from the mouth of a burrow belonging to a Paniscus, and green branches swayed in the current like the tresses of drowned Dryads. I returned for Icarus and, shivering violently, both of us climbed onto the bank and shook ourselves to restore warmth.
“Eunostos,” he chattered. “R-remember when you s-said that one day we would be old c-comrades facing battle together?”
“Yes.”
“Well,” he said. “We are. Not old, but comrades. I want you to know that wherever you are, I am. To fight at your side and stand guard when you fall asleep. I want you to know that you are—friended.”
I have known two loves, I thought, one for a girl who wished to be my sister and therefore cut me like broken coral; one for a boy who wished to be my brother and therefore comforted me like the moss in which I sleep. If I had died before they came to the forest, my soul would have been a serpent, kind but ugly and earthbound. Now it will be a butterfly, and no barriers of wind will hold me from the perilous chasms of the clouds or the tawny orchards of the sunflower.
Warmed at last, we crept to the edge of the field which held my house. A tendril of smoke arose from the garden, like a beansprout climbing the sky, and the scent of venison piqued our nostrils.
“The swine,” said Icarus. “Gorging themselves in your house.”
“Yes,” I said, “but at least they haven’t burned it.”
“Think of the housecleaning after they’re gone,” he sighed. “Bones in the fountain. Grape skins on the bench. And you know”—he lowered his voice—“they won’t bother to use the watercloset.”
When we turned from the house to pursue our mission, the snake Perdix coiled at our feet.
“Uncle,” said Icarus, muffling his joyful cry into a whisper.
He clasped the snake in his hand and addressed him with great solemnity, careful to speak each word with separate emphasis. “Did you know that Thea has been captured?”
Perdix opened his mouth and flickered his forked tongue.
“He says he understands,” explained Icarus. “It’s the only way he can communicate, since I’ve never learned to speak in real snake. He really does understand what I say. Not everything, of course. Adjectives gives him trouble. But if I speak slowly, he catches the nouns and verbs. That time when Ajax was chasing Thea, just before we came to the forest, it was I who sent Perdix into the room to make Ajax angry. He can help us now, I think.” He restored Perdix to his familiar haunt in the pouch of his loincloth. I was still not convinced that the snake could help our mission, but I dared not belittle him within the range of his fangs.
Icarus with his snake was no longer a child with a pet. Rather, he treated Perdix as a warrior treats a dependable ally, a horse or a war dog, with trust, affection, and dignity. The three of us headed toward the town of the Centaurs, the obvious place for the main host of Achaeans and also for Thea’s surrender.
Along the way, we found that Ajax had preceded us to Pandia’s village. No house had escaped a pilfering, and Pandia’s log had been split down the middle by an axe. Shattered crockery and a few smoked fish, evidently not to the taste of the conquerors, testified to what had once been her well-stocked larder. They had emptied her Cretan Bears-tail out of its pot, as if they suspected a cache of coins, and worst of all, they had turned the communal berry patch into a small wilderness of raucous crows, uprooted posts, and stripped vines. The Bears themselves, it appeared, had been captured by Ajax and carried on his march.
Icarus glanced at the crows and scattered them with a well-aimed handle from a honey pot. “I’m glad Pandia didn’t come,” he said. “It would have broken her heart.”
“Or turned her stomach,” I said, and resumed our journey with revenge as well as rescue to spur my hooves.
We approached the farms of the Centaurs with great stealth, in case the besieging Ajax had stationed guards to protect his rear. Where the forest met the vineyards, Icarus climbed a tree to locate the enemy. I myself am not adept at climbing (except the oaks of Dryads). The branches have a way of buckling under my weight or catching my tail. But Icarus insinuated himself into the foliage with a skill which did credit to his mother’s race; and after his reconnoitering, extricated himself without a rustle.
A cobweb stretched over one of his eyes and gave him the look of a pirate, and a pirate’s ferocity crackled in his voice when he told me what he had seen.
“They are not besieging,” he said. “They have already captured the town! It’s too far to see clearly, but I could just make out bands of helmeted men wandering through the streets, as if they owned the place. I’ll have to
