“ Xanthus, you will take this brat and his snake into the bathroom and keep them there, if you have to drown them in the tub.”
The door to the bathroom closed with abrupt finality.
“You Cretan girls,” sneered Ajax. He came toward her, shaggy and menacing. “You tease and mince and show your breasts, and then you say, ‘No, you hairy old barbarian, you shan’t touch me!’ Barbarians, are we? Well, we know what to do with a woman!”
“My father will kill you if you touch me.” The words stabbed the air like little daggers of ice.
“Oh? He’s back from Hades, is he? Indeed, I should fear a man who escapes Persephone!”
In spite of his golden beard, he seemed all darkness and evil, a black whirlwind of fire and rock. The smell of him bit her nostrils like volcanic ash. She knotted her fists in tiny impotence.
Then she remembered the pins in her hair.
She watched their torch-bearing captors recede in the distance like fishing boats into the night and leave them to darkness that seemed to smother their senses like a shroud of black wool. The air was rank with the droppings of bats. Icarus clutched her hand, half in protection, half in fear. She too was afraid; much more than he, she guessed, since caves and cliffs and roaring rivers, all of the fierce faces of nature, had long been familiar to him from his roving near Vadrypetro.
“Possibly,” said Icarus without reproach, “if you had struck him somewhere else, he wouldn’t have been so angry.”
“Nowhere else would have stopped him.”
“He certainly had to be stopped,” agreed Icarus. “I heard him screaming at you. And all for a kiss.”
It was hardly the time to tell him the facts which he had resisted from Myrrha. The cave, of course, belonged to the Minotaur.
She drew him close to her and felt his big head against her shoulder, “Forgive me,” she said. “Forgive me, little brother.”
“But I wanted to come to the Country of the Beasts,” he reminded her, not yet frightened enough for a sentimental exchange of endearments. “Now we’ve come.”
“You didn’t want the Cave of the Minotaur.”
“Perdix will bring us luck.”
“Not against the Minotaurs. They are much too big.”
“Maybe this one is out to dinner.”
“I’m afraid he dines at home. Shhhhh,” said Thea. “I hear—”
They heard a padding of feet (or hooves?), and then a low, long-drawn wail which deepened and reverberated into the curdling bellow of an enraged bull. Nausea crept to her throat like the furry feet of a spider.
“Mother Goddess, he’s coming!” groaned the boy.
“We must separate,” said Thea. “Otherwise, he will get us both at once. We’ll try to slip past him in the dark and meet at the mouth of the cave.”
“Won’t he be able to see us? This is his lair.”
“He can’t chase us both at once.”
“Let him chase me first. If he’s a slow eater, you may have a chance.”
“He will make his own choice.” She both expected and hoped to be chosen before her brother. If the Minotaur added the instincts of a man to those of a bull, he ought to prefer a girl to a boy.
She loosened Icarus’ hand. His fingers lingered; he hugged her in a quick, impulsive embrace and darted ahead of her, moving from darkness to darkness, scraping his sandals on the floor of the cave. She started to call his name. No, she must not alert the Minotaur. She began to feel her way along the walls; their dampness oozed like blood between her fingers. Once, she stumbled and cut her knee on stalagmites, for she wore her kilt and not the bell-shaped skirt in which she had greeted Ajax. A stench pervaded the air, rancid and sweet at the same time: putrescent flesh and dried blood. She stopped often to catch her breath; fear had drained her as if she had breasted a strong, outgoing tide and washed on the beach with driftwood and shells. Little by little, her eyes became used to the darkness and distinguished the pronged stalactites which hung from the roof like seaweed floating above a diver’s head.
Sounds, muffled and dim (Icarus’ voice, perhaps?). Then, again, the long-drawn, chilling roar.
A bull that walks like a man, that was the terror. Walks on two legs. Thinks with a man’s cunning, hates with a man’s calculated cruelty. A hybrid of man and beast, monstrous to the eye, monstrous of heart, and roaring with cold malevolence.
A yearning for Icarus hushed her fears. The tentative touch of his hand, restless to dart away like a plump wood-mouse. The big head, not really big except for its wreath of hair, and the pointed ears which he did not allow the hair to conceal. His childish games and hardly childlike courage. She bit her tongue to keep from calling his name. She rounded a turn and looked up and up into the eyes of the Centaur, and his red, matted hair.
When I entered the cave, I was hungry as a bull. Once I week the farmers outside the forest bring me a skinned animal. Bellowing lustily to justify my reputation, I fetch the meat and take it home with me to cook in my garden, they call me the Minotaur, the Bull That Walks Like a Man. In spite of my seven feet, however, I am not a freak, but the last of an old and illustrious tribe who settled the land before the Cretans arrived from the East. Except for my pointed ears (which are common to all of the Beasts), my horns (which are short and almost hidden by hair), and my unobtrusive tail, I am far more human than bovine, though my generous red hair, which has never submitted to the civilizing teeth of a comb, is sometimes mistaken for a mane.
As I said, I came into the cave with a hearty appetite. I also came harassed by a trying day in my workshop. My lapidaries, the Telchines, had quarreled and bruised each other with chisels and overturned a vat of freshly fermented beer. My stomach rumbled with anticipation of the plump, neatly skinned lamb (perhaps two) which would soon be revolving on the spit in my garden.
Almost at once I heard the noises. I stopped in my tracks. Had my dinner been brought to me unkilled, unskinned, and uncleaned? Intolerable! It looked as if I would have to prowl the countryside after dark and strike terror the hearts of the shiftless peasants.
But no. The sounds were voices and not the ululations of animals. I stalked down the twisting corridors of what is called the Cave of the Minotaur but which might better be called his Pantry. I paused. I peered. I sniffed. Man-scent was strong in the air. A trap? Well, they were not likely to trap a Minotaur. I could see in the dark, and my nose was as keen as a bear’s. I advanced warily but confidently hoof over hoof. I—
Crunch!
A rock struck my outstretched hoof. I roared with pain, hobbled on the other leg, and looked up to face my attacker, who was crouched on an overhanging ledge and readying another rock.
I saw a chunky boy of about fifteen, with a large and very engaging head, a thicket of greenish hair, and pointed ears. The ears, to say nothing of the hair, marked him as a Beast. At least, half of him. I liked both halves. He was the kind of boy that one would like to adopt as a brother. Help him to carve a bow from the branches of a cedar tree and spear fish with a sharpened willow-rod and, at the proper time, introduce him to the Dryad, Zoe, and her free-living friends, who could teach him about a boy’s way with a wench.
“Come down from there,” I cried. “What do you think you are, a blue monkey? I won’t hurt you.”
“Oh,” he said, surprised. “You can talk, and in Cretan too.”
“What did you expect me to do, moo or speak Hittite? As a matter of fact, your people learned their language from my people several hundred years ago.”
“Till now I have only heard you bellow.” He was already climbing down from his ledge.
I reached out and seized hold of him and, suddenly mischievous, delivered my heartiest bellow right in his face. He trembled, of course, but looked me straight in the eye. “You shouldn’t have come down so quickly,” I
