Achaeans, released the prisoners. No one spoke; there are no appropriate words to greet a victory which comes too late and at too great a cost.
Finally, I said: “We will go to the town and bring the survivors to the compound where we can watch them.”
They trooped after me in a proud and sorrowful file. The Panisci, furtive and mysterious, vanished into the night to return to their burrows in the banks of the stream. I thought: I will feed the Bears of Artemis from the leavings of the Achaean feast—the fish and the venison—and make them beds under the stars with the fatherless children of the Centaurs.
“Thea,” I called across the moat. “Will you lower the bridge for us?”
She came to me along the path which Chiron had walked in the time before the invasion, a woman who, at sixteen, had put behind her the girlhood which, even at Vathypetro, had been shadowed by the owl-wings of maturity. The Dryads followed her in deference and awe. At last she was one of them, utterly, yet also the strongest of them.
“Thea,” I said, as she walked from the glowing heart of the fire, out of the light and into the darkness; salamander, phoenix, goddess, illuminating the great fastnesses of the night and my own heart.
Chapter XI
THE PASSING OF THE BEASTS
Twenty-one Achaeans in all had survived the poison. Those in the theater stirred with fitful groans and rolled their heads as if to dislodge the demons that haunted their dreams. We lost no time in carrying them to join their comrades in the compound.
“After I surrendered, they refused to leave the forest,” Thea explained when the drowsy warriors, clutching their stomachs or rubbing their eyes, were safely lodged behind the walls of thorn. “According to Ajax, I had caused him so much trouble that he meant to repay himself with all the riches in the forest. If I showed him the underground passage to your workshop, he promised to set me free. Of course I showed him nothing.”
“What did he intend to do with you? Take you back to Mycenae?”
“I think he intended to kill me. Somehow, I seemed to frighten him. He called me the Beast Princess.”
“He was right, you know.”
The next morning, while Icarus entered my house through the tunnel to rescue Pandia, I led a band of Panisci to the edge of the field and blared a challenge to the garrison in the trunk. The Panisci were armed with slings, I with a battle-axe, and we dragged a red-eyed Xanthus on a rope to corroborate our claims to victory. The Achaeans were not long in appearing behind the parapet. I could see the glint of their helmets through the embrasures.
“We have won the war,” I boomed, “and killed your leader, Ajax. Those of your friends who survive are now our hostages. If you wish to save them and yourselves, discard your weapons and leave the forest before sunset.”
They greeted my claims with derisive laughter. Smug in their captured retreat, feasting from cockcrow to the time of lamps, they had good reason to scorn an ultimatum.
We jerked our captive out of the trees and flaunted him in his ignominious ruin.
“Listen to them,” he urged his friends. ” Ajax is truly dead and every one of us has been poisoned by their magic.” He pressed his stomach for emphasis. “It will get you too unless you do as he says!”
Laughter yielded to consultation, excited voices to the groan of the crude timbers which served as a door. Framed in the doorway behind his shield, a single warrior addressed us. His insolence could not conceal his fear: “Send us Xanthus and let us question him.” We could spare one hostage to prove our claims. An eager Paniscus prodded him with his sling, and the earless Xanthus, dragging his rope and casting timorous glances over his shoulder, reeled to join his friends.
Led by Xanthus, the Achaeans left my house in the afternoon, and the next morning we sent their comrades from the compound to overtake and join them beyond the forest. I had taken their weapons, armor, and tunics and, knowing the Achaeans cultivate their beards as the visible sign of valor, I had force them to shave with a coarse bronze razor which left their cheeks the color of a radish. Kings and conquerors, they had come to humble us, and they left like a column of slaves being marched to the infamous marketplace in Pylos.
Again, the forest belonged to the Beasts, but to people whose heroes are dead, whose towns are in ruins, and who must momentarily expect another invasion, the taste of victory can be as bitter as hemlock.
Two weeks after the departure of the Acheans, a patrol of Panisci caught a Cretan just as he entered the forest and brought him none too gently to the town of the Centaurs, where Thea, Icarus, and I were helping the females to rebuild their houses. Black-haired, narrow-waisted, thin as the peasants who live in the reed hovels along the Nile, he blinked nervously; he looked like a man who had come from a long and grueling battle, not yet won. Aeacus, of course, had sent him.
“Thea,” I called, wanting secretly to butt him into the moat. “Will you bring your guest some coconut milk?” It was all we had to offer. The Achaeans had drunk our wine, and the grapes were not yet ripe. I left him with Thea and Icarus in one of the bamboo stalls, newly rebuilt and hung with the few silks which had not been dirtied by the boots of the conquerors or used to clean their armor.
I crossed the bridge. Every evening, usually with Thea and Icarus, I returned to my house to work and sleep. Centaur females patrolled the moat and guarded the animals—two cows, a bull, seven sheep—which remained in the compound.
“They have come for your friends?” asked the Centaur whose name was Rhode, daughter of the noble Chiron. Before the war, she had worn a white lily in her hair. She had cut her hair the day of her father’s death, and the short tresses no longer could hold a stem.
“Yes, Rhode.”
“Will Thea and Icarus return with the Cretan?”
“I don’t know.”
“There will always be someone who comes to invade our peace. They will never leave us alone, will they, Eunostos? Isn’t it time we left the forest? Returned to the Isles?”
The Isles of the Blest, she meant. The land in the Western Sea from which we had come, in the age before men: a pleasant and sunny land, without dangers—and also without adventures.
“The gods will tell us the time,” I said. “It will be soon, I think.”
I waited in my garden for Thea and Icarus. In the ivory moonlight, the fountain swayed like a rain-drenched palm touching the earth with its fronds. I had dug a new staircase under the ground, and of course my workshop and other rooms had escaped the depredations of war. Not the garden, however. There was no parasol, and my fig tree had been uprooted and burned for wood. My trellises were bare, and the new seeds I had planted had not had time to sprout. It was still a garden without greenery.
“ Knossos has not yet fallen,” said Thea excitedly when she arrived with Icarus. “Our father is still fighting. He learned from Xanthus, who is now his captive, that Icarus and I were here in the forest. He could not come himself because the city is under siege. But he sent his messenger to urge us to stay where we are until the war is won. That’s what my father says, but—”
“But you want to go to him. You think you can help him.”
The ardor died from her voice. “I don’t want to go,” she said dully. “I want to stay here with you and our friends. But he is my father, and the Cretans were once my people. In spite of their faults, they are better than Achaeans. It will be bad for all of us if Knossos falls.”
“And what can you and Icarus do to keep it from falling?”
“You yourself have taught us how to fight.”
Silence returned to the garden; silence, except for the cricket-voices of the fountain and the quick breaths of Icarus, who looked at me with the unquestioning worship of a boy who expected the one decisive action, the one infallible command which would solve his dilemma.
“I don’t want to go back to my father,” he said. “He was like a shadow. He carried darkness wherever he walked.”
