move closer to get a real look.”
“Wait till night. Then we’ll go together.”
Darkness is a going instead of a coming; an absence of light rather than a presence of bat wings, mummy wrappings, ravens, or whatever other fanciful figure of speech we poets use to describe her. But a going can be as welcome as a coming, and daylight, hateful for what it showed, faded like a lamp which has burned its olive oil and left us to the kind secrecy of night. We crossed the vineyards, their green grapelets invisible beneath a moonless sky, and bypassed the compound to avoid exciting the animals. We saw, after first hearing, two Achaean patrols. They had been celebrating; they were still imbibing. They sang or laughed as they made their rounds, and paused whenever they met to swap convivialities. Under their belts they carried little flasks which they swapped and tipped to their mouths with a maximum of contented smacks. It was not hard to avoid them. If they saw us at all, they must have mistaken us for a pair of palm trees with broad trunks and without fronds.
We came to the clump of olive trees which I had previously noticed beside the moat, and one of them looked so staunch and concealing that I felt emboldened to risk my weight in the branches. I saw that most of the Achaeans had gathered in the theater to hold a banquet. They had built a fire in the pit and, using their swords as spits, begun to roast their dinner. Thea, our precious, surrendered Thea, sat on one of the tiers and seemed oblivious to men, fire, and food. The earless Xanthus pointed toward the fire as if to say: “Will you share in our feast?” She shook her head. “Thea,” I wanted to cry, “accept his invitation. Your supper last night was a bit of cheese and a slice of bread. You went to the Achaeans of your own will and now you must eat their food in order to keep your strength.” Then I discovered the reason for her abstinence. The Men were eating not only the domesticated pigs of the Centaurs, but some of the blue monkeys from the forest. The skinned and spitted bodies were clearly recognizable in the light of the fire, as eager cooks jostled each other to lower them into the flames and turn them from side to side. Blue monkeys. Thea’s monkeys. The forest’s laughter, she had said. I thought of what she must feel to have them offered her on a spit or a platter.
The men who were not cooking tippled from horns or wineskins, sang ribald songs about the women of their conquests—raw-boned Israelites who would slip a knife in your back when you closed your eyes; olive-skinned Egyptians who bragged about their sphinxes and pyramids and made you feel like crass barbarians; and Cretans with bare breasts who were good mistresses once they had satisfied their pride by making a show of resistance. One man sang a ballad about the famous Cretan bosom, which he variously compared to ant-hills, burial mounds, and helmets, none of them happy comparisons, it seemed to me (being a poet, perhaps I am too critical). Laughter, coarse and brutal, interrupted the songs, and Ajax, the swaggering victor, moved among his Men, drank their wine, and claimed the tenderest morsels from their swords.
Thus, the conquerors. The conquered lay in the streets. The sad, ungainly bodies of those gracious farm-folk, the Centaurs, together with splintered houses, broken lanterns, and torn tapestries, attested to a fierce battle in the very heart of the town. The surviving Centaurs, I saw, had been shut in the animal compound with their sheep and oxen and were now being guarded by a small contingent of soldiers, most of whom stood at the gate while two of their number patrolled the high and virtually unclimbable walls of thorn. None of the males had survived the battle; and a handful of females and children, along with the hapless Bears of Artemis and three Panisci, comprised the prisoners. I felt as I had when I saw my workers slaughtered before my eyes; if anything, worse, for Centaurs are higher beings, no less loyal and far more kind and intelligent. Chiron, the blameless king; Moschus, a bore but lovable: their faces came to haunt me, noble of mane, and the thunder of their hooves. But tears are a luxury not permitted to warriors on the threshold of battle. I stifled my grief into a far corner of my brain and let my anger flare like the fires in the forge of Hephaestus, the smithy god, when he works his bellows: anger which spurs the body to valor, the mind to craft.
“Those poor Centaurs,” said Icarus when we had left our trees and met to whisper plans. “And the blue monkeys. How do you think the Achaeans got them?” It was the lingering child in him which lamented the Centaurs and the monkeys with the same grief.
“They are trusting creatures. Ajax may have lured them right into the town with the offers of food. Or maybe they followed Thea.”
“I wish we could enter the town as easily as the monkeys.”
I deliberated. “Perhaps we can send a weapon even if we can’t go ourselves.”
“A secret weapon?” The harmamaxa had fascinated him. But the weapon I had in mind was less obvious and much more devilish.
“Remember my telling you about our war with the wolves and how Chiron thought of feeding them wolf’s- bane? It’s a rather innocuous looking root, a bit like a dark carrot. But the monkeys love roots of all kinds. If we could get them to eat wolf’s-bane, and drive them toward the town before they died—”
“The Achaeans would eat them, but Thea wouldn’t. They would poison themselves!”
“Exactly.”
“Is the poison always fatal?”
“When taken in sufficient quantities. Smaller quantities act like a sedative. Either way, the enemy would be knocked out long enough for us to release the captives and take the town.”
We spent the night in my cave, sitting back to back and sharing each other’s warmth in the damp, cold air: friend and friend, remembering what we had lost; warrior and warrior, plotting tomorrow’s vengeance and what we hoped to win:
Icarus said at last: “Eunostos, I am cold all over except for my back,” and I cradled him in my arms until he slept. He had no wish to remain a child, but it pleased him for the moment to relax from the stance of a warrior into the old childish ways of need and dependence, and it pleased his friend to father and shield him. It is one of the ways of love to delight in the youngness, the littleness, the helplessness of the beloved.
When the sun crept yellow feelers into the cave, we went to look for wolf’s-bane. The plant had never thrived on temperate Crete. Its favorite habitat is the cold northern mountains of the mainland, where the sun is a sometime visitor instead of a king.
“Perdix will help us,” Icarus announced. “A snake should know about roots of all kinds. He lives among them.” He drew the snake from his pouch and addressed him with tenderness. “Don’t you, Perdix?”
“Does he understand the word ‘wolf’s-bane’?”
“It explains itself, doesn’t it?” To the snake he said with great emphasis: “WOLF’S-BANE. ROOTS TO KILL A WOLF.”
The tongue flickered with what I presumed to be comprehension and perhaps a touch of petulance because Icarus spoke to him as if he had no tongue to catch the vibrations of human speech. Icarus stooped to release him and, before he could touch the ground, the snake escaped from his fingers. We hurried to follow him through the undergrowth.
“I think he’s after a female,” I whispered when the sweat of the chase had begun to mat my hair.
“He’s doing his bit for Thea. After all, she’s his great-great-niece. Though,” he admitted, “I expect he loves me best. I’ve never stepped on his tail.”
Possessed of a tail myself (though its altitude preserves it from treading sandals), I could understand the snake’s preference.
In less than an hour, he led us to the ragged and unscalable cliff which formed the eastern boundary of the forest. In the shadow of the cliff and the further shade of a large carob tree, we found a clump of wolf’s-bane. Like their four-legged namesake, the plants prefer shadows to sunlight. I knew that in late summer they would burst into showy but somewhat sinister hooded flowers, like visored helmets, of blue, yellow, purple, or white; now, however, leaves like slender, tapering hands. We pulled them up by their stalks and shook the dirt from their thick, tuberous roots. They did not look appetizing, but neither does a carrot, a raw fish, or a plucked chicken.
It was not hard to find a congregation of blue monkeys, the happiest of animals and perhaps the most talkative. You can hear that chattering from a great distance, a multitude of cries which merge their separate sharpnesses into a single music. Merry, trusting, affectionate, they recognized Icarus and me as familiar faces and, at the same time, spied the bait in our hands. One of them jumped on my shoulders and, twining his legs around my neck, bent to clutch at a root. I made a soft chattering which I supposed to approximate monkey and gestured toward the town of the Centaurs, as if to say that I would feed him when we reached the town.
I looked at Icarus and saw the tears in his eyes. “We’re killing them for Thea,” I reminded him. “To save her from those ruffians.”
“I know,” he said, “but treachery is still treacherous. Otherwise, why are you crying?”
