“I’m not crying,” I snapped so sharply that the monkey jumped from my shoulder. “I’m trying to comfort you.”
“You’re always trying to comfort someone—Thea, Pandia, me—and doing very well at it. In fact, you’re the most comfortable person I know. But sometimes you need comforting too. I think you ought to marry Thea as soon as you rescue her.”
He did not doubt that we would be successful or that, once rescued, she would wish to marry me. To be admired by such a boy—well, it made me want to reach and aspire until my heart more nearly equaled my height.
The monkeys followed us in a long, vociferous stream, and I earnestly hoped that no Achaeans would issue from the trees to contest our advance. Once, a Dryad called to us from her bower, her face poised in the branches like a water lily in a green pool. In the past she had always scorned me, but now she called in a husky whisper:
“Eunostos, take care of yourself. The forest depends on you.”
At the edge of the forest, still under cover of trees, we fed the monkeys. With a touching but not entirely successful attempt to avoid biting or scratching us, they plucked the roots from our hands and ate them so quickly that they did not have time to notice their bitterness. Then we waved our daggers and ran at the unsuspecting creatures with a show of great ferocity. At first they mistook our actions for a game and tried to wrestle the knives out of our hands. We had to strike them with the flats of our blades to prove our hostility. I shall never forget their cries of astonishment and disbelief. We watched them vaulting across the trellises of the vineyard, still in a pack and more aggrieved than frightened.
We could not follow them into the fields by daylight, but Icarus, climbing another tree, witnessed the meeting between the monkeys and the Achaeans, who heard their arrival and came from the compound to investigate. Already the monkeys were growing sluggish with the poison, which strikes painlessly but with first a tingling and then a deadening of all sensations, and the men dispatched them with swords and returned to the compound. The Achaeans, who were not acquainted with the monkeys’ usual vigor, had no reason to suspect their condition. They received the congratulations of their friends on a good catch; they paused; they seemed to deliberate, no doubt asking themselves if they ought to share their prize with those in the town. Generosity or fear of Ajax provided the answer, and selecting the plumpest to keep in the compound, they strung the remaining bodies on a rope and headed for the town.
When the absence which is night had made our presence reasonably undiscoverable, we crossed the fields and, encountering no patrols, resumed our vantage points in the trees beside the moat. Two bonfires writhed in the darkness, like orange squids in the lightless depths of the sea: one in the theater, one in the compound. It was the many-tentacled fire in the theater which held my attention.
Tonight the Achaeans did not lack women. They seemed to have spent the afternoon hunting in the woods, and three Dryads, drawn and haggard, their long hair disheveled and, in places, apparently torn out by the roots, represented their catch. I rejoiced that Zoe was not among them. The four queens of the Thriae and several of the drones had also come to the banquet, but as guests instead of captives and of course without the workers, who are not endowed for orgies. The four queens strutted around the pit as if they had conquered the forest through their own prowess, and they jangled more than their usual number of bracelets—spoils, no doubt, from the gutted homes of the Centaurs. Later, I learned that the queens had indeed proved helpful traitors by surprising the Centaurs in the gate-tower and lowering the bridge to Ajax’s Men. The hope occurred to me that they might forget themselves in the flush of victory and scatter their fatal kisses among their allies, but they chose to stand on their dignity as queens—they smiled and received compliments but did not descend to the familiarities of love. The drones, however, simpered like courtesans among the rugged Achaeans, who, along with the Cretans, enjoy a considerable versatility in sexual practices, and Amber’s brother seemed to be collecting a small fortune in arm-bands, pendants, and rings.
Achaeans are altogether indiscriminate in their pleasures. They can eat, drink, and wench in the same breath, and tonight they lost no time in cooking the blue monkeys, together with fish, venison, and the last of the Centaurs’ pigs. Even while fondling a skin of wine, a drone, or a Dryad, they lifted the deadly meat to their lips and ate with relish. Haunches and limbs were passed from hand to hand until everyone received at least a modicum of the tender meat and enough poison, I trusted, to drug even if not to kill him. On the topmost row of the theater, a sly little chap concealed himself in the shadows to enjoy an undivided monkey, but three of his comrades followed him from the pit, dismembered the animal, and left him only the head, which, however, he ate without protest. The vegetarian Thriae did not partake of the meat, nor did the Dryads, and when Ajax presented a skinny leg to Thea, she flung it in his face. He slapped her onto the stones, retrieved the leg, and shredded the meat from the bone with one raking bite.
“Bloody barbarian,” I muttered. “I’ll ram that bone right down your throat.”
“Shhhhhh,” warned Icarus. “You’re starting to bellow. After we rescue Thea, you can ram it anywhere you like.”
When men have drunk enough wine to float a pentecopter and eaten enough meat to sink a round-built merchant ship, they usually want to sleep, but the sudden sleep which overpowered the Achaeans resembled the miasmic mists which rise from the bowels of Sicily and prostrate travelers when they leave their litters to drink at wayside fountains. They began to slump on the stairs; they stretched in the pit, swords clattering, wine cups falling from limp fingers. Those who had eaten lightly succumbed more slowly; had time in which to view their friends with dazed astonishment before they joined them in heaped and sprawling confusion.
The Thriae could not account for the strange sleep of their hosts. Intoxicated? Drugged? Exhausted by the rigors of conquest? They fluttered above the prostrated bodies, their dulcet tones growing shrill; they shouted, prodded with jeweled fingers, clamored—the queens for attention, the drones for caresses. Quietly the three Dryads congregated around Thea and began to help her collect the Achaean daggers.
Amber, kneeling to prod a recumbent body, lifted her head to confront an armed and determined Thea, who seized the gauzy membrane of her wing and delivered a slap which spun her head as if it had been struck by the boom of a sail. By now the drones and the other queens had mounted the air, and the oldest queen, she of the mottled skin and bulging eyes, pelted Thea with bracelets until the girl relaxed her hold on Amber’s wing. With a fury of fluttering, Amber rejoined her sisters and called to Thea as if she were spitting:
“Dearest one, I hope that a Strige will suck your blood and blue-flies pick your bones.”
The Thriae began to mass above the pit, stripping their bracelets to use as missiles; though one of the queens was old, and the drones were effeminate cowards, Thea and three harrassed Dryads could hardly hope to repel an attack.
“Thriae,” I boomed, “I am coming to get you with my army!” I thrashed about in my tree like a small whirlwind, and my army of one gave a roar which suggested Minotaur in his veins.
The Thriae retreated with such precipitous haste that two of the drones collided and almost fell to the ground before they could disentangle their wings and, casting regretful looks at the prone, manly bodies of their allies, flutter after their queens. It is said that queens, drones, and workers flew to the land of the Achaeans to live on Mount Parnassus, deliver oracles of doubtful authority, and receive the tribute accorded to deities. (If this were a tale instead of a history, you may rest assured that I would have drowned them in the sea like Icarus’ namesake, the ill-fated son of Daedelus.)
Thea and the Dryads resumed their task of disarming the Achaeans. Some were dead or dying; some would awaken with wracking pains and without weapons. Ajax, kneeling dazedly beside his friend Xanthus, struggled to his feet and held his great sword between him and the girl who had caused his ruin.
“She-wolf,” he groaned. “I am going to kill you!” For a wicked man attributes his own sins, his own wolfishness, to those who oppose him.
Slowly, laboriously, he raised the sword above his head, as if through fathoms of water. She did not wait for its descent; she drove her dagger between his ribs. The sword fell from his hand and clattered onto the stones. At first, he did not fall, but faced her with draining defiance.
“Goddess,” he said, and crumpled at her feet, his yellow beard pressing against her sandals.
She stared at his body with stricken horror. Even from a distance, I saw the rigidity of her arms and the enormity of her eyes. But she did not weep. She had killed a man and the act appalled her, but the gods had forced her hand. She knelt to remove his dagger.
Icarus and I climbed from our tree. First we entered the compound and, disarming the drugged or slain
