The White Bull Read online

  Time passed. A grayish rock-speck of an island, uninhabited, waterless, useless except in the most immediate emergency, passed beneath us. We conferred in low, calm voices. If we were to stop upon that speck of land to rest, we would have to try to take off again from somewhere on its nearly level surface, scarcely above the level of the sea. And in my mind's eye I could visualize bronze Talus commandeering a boat, and rowing after us with inhuman speed and endurance. We decided that we should not stop.

  The tiny island passed behind us.

  From the look of the waves below, I thought that there might still be a mild breeze behind us, helping, pushing us toward our destination. But the only motion I could feel in the air was in the opposite direction, as we flew through it. When I thought upon the matter, I realized that this was logical.

  Now a much larger island, one that could only be Antikythera, was coming clearly into our view ahead. There must, I thought, be Cretan settlements upon this isle; certainly there were patches of green, and some of them looked like cultivation.

  Icarus now had to struggle continually to stay on course, as his right wing began to betray him more and more. Looking as carefully as possible at the constantly moving surface of the wing, I saw what turned my spirit dim within me. The hole made by Talus's missile was gradually tearing farther open, a little and a little more.

  "Head this way, son. This way!"

  "I can't, father—I—can't—fly straight—any more—" The child was laboring fiercely with his arms, running out of breath with which to talk. Panic was growing in his dark eyes, as he fiercely struggled to keep himself airborne.

  In desperation I tried to fly close above my son, to help him somehow from above. But our hands were all but helpless, with our arms bound into wingstraps as they were. As I flew closer to my son I saw how the wax was starting to melt and run out of Icarus's right wing.

  Next I flew underneath my son, and tried to offer support from that direction. But the necessary feat of balance appeared to be impossible to coordinate in midair. His feet that would have rested on my back slipped off, fell free, again and again.

  Icarus's weakness was forcing him to fly lower and lower. Meanwhile another speck of land had appeared out of the sun-dazzling sea. It was closer than Antikythera, much closer. Now, tantalizingly, it was almost within reach.

  "Father! Help! Help—"

  My son's feet, that I had been trying to balance on my back in flight, slipped free one final time. Spinning out of control entirely, the boy's body plummeted away from me. Falling and falling. Shrinking and shrinking. By all the gods, and were we still so far above the water? Falling, like a bird struck in flight by a hurled stone, he splashed at last into the dark sea.

  "Icarus. Icarus!"

  But my cries went all unanswered by any gods of sea or sky. Only the raucous gulls flung back my shrieks of grief into the wind. The small splash made by the body of my son disappeared instantaneously amid the gentle waves.

  I flew spiraling lower, my eyes still riveted upon the spot where he had vanished, my throat still screaming, hoarse and useless cries. I am sure that one or two tufts of feathers came to the surface, plumes that I in my pride had added to decorate my construction, and perhaps in hopes of some lingering effect of magic. Those feathers had pleased Icarus, the lad so interested in birds and egg-collecting.

  I circled in the air. Nothing more came to the surface from below. Only the salt spray struck my face when I flew too low.

  Wrenching myself free of the wave-crests, I flew on, borne by the freshening wind to the nearby beach of the tiny islet, where I landed hard, bruising and scraping myself on gravel and hard-packed sand. Not until much later was I aware that I had hurt myself.

  One of my wings had been broken cleanly in the middle in the crash of my descent, and that fact made my movements a little easier when I began to try to tear the useless things completely from my arms.

  Still the remnants of my wings impeded my progress as I raced into the mild surf, looking out to sea and screaming my child's name. The exact spot where Icarus had vanished was of course impossible to determine, yet in my madness I was sure that I knew just where it was. I believed that above the dulling roar of surf and wind I could somehow hear my son's voice as he cried continuously to me for help.

  I do not remember retreating from the surf again. What I remember next is sitting on the sand or shingle, facing into a wind that carried the beginning of rain, a wind that streaked my graying beard across my face and out behind me.

  How long I sat there staring madly out to sea I do not know. I was oblivious to the squall as it broke over me, and to the wind as it tore further at the fragments of my wings that were still strapped to my arms and shoulders.

  At some point I lapsed into unconsciousness.

  I awakened slowly, lying on my side, chilled and stiffened in the lighter, different breeze of another morning. Before full wakefulness arrived, there was one tolerable moment in which I thought that Kalliste and I were somehow together again, back in Athens. Then the moment of respite passed. Stirring slowly, I squinted my eyes in a new day's sun. Gulls were walking on the sand nearby, prowling the littoral in search of food, and it was their cries that had dragged me out of slumber.

  Then I sat with a groan. I could feel that my lips were cracked; I was intensely thirsty.

  The surf was never still. It mocked me. Somehow it seemed that I had been listening to those mumbling, pounding waves for years.

  My eyes were closed again. It may be that once more I fainted. But presently new sounds were demanding my attention. In time the realization penetrated my thoughts that some of the cries I now heard were issuing from the throats of men and not of birds.

  Opening my eyes again, I saw that a ship was standing only an arrow-flight offshore, her sails furled and her oar-banks, twelve blades on a side, all manned. Even as I shaded my eyes to see, someone hailed me from the ship again. Unable to answer, unable to think of what these people might want of me or even to see them clearly, I waited dumbly to see what would happen next.

  When those aboard her were sure that I was alive, the ship—a Phoenician by the look of her—turned her prow in to shore, and presently her oarsmen had driven her neatly upon the beach. Figures leaped into the gentle surf.

  "What have we here?" A man was saying in accented Greek as he came close to me. Then I was surrounded by men. I could hear their voices, speaking Phoenician, as from a distance. Presently someone was holding a skin of water to my lips. I was helped to my feet.

  The captain of the ship was a spare and wiry man a few years younger than myself, with a bold eye, and his dark hair tied up in a long queue. He introduced himself as Kena'ani. The captain and his crew were obviously impressed by the remnants of my wings, though they hardly knew what to make of them.

  They kept asking me: "How did you come here?"

  I stirred myself at last, and answered them, fearing that otherwise they might return me to Crete. "I am a castaway, as you see," I said. We were both speaking Greek by this time, as educated strangers encountering each other commonly do.

  By now Kena'ani's men had pulled their lightly-laden ship up halfway onto the beach, and, with an eye to taking practical advantage of her situation, were looking at some spots of the hull that I supposed must be starting to give them trouble. Out had come the calking pitch and fiber, as well as the mallets and chisels with which to force the stuff into the seams between her planks.

  Then a cry was raised by one of the men, who, posted as lookout, had walked some way down the beach.

  "A dead boy, drowned! And he still has wings strapped onto him."

  That roused me, and in my grief I rushed past those startled men to reclaim what was left of Icarus from where the waves had tossed him. The traders watched, not without sympathy, and waited to see what burial customs I would want to follow. Presently I was able to regain some control of myself, and went about doing what had to be done. I placed a speck of gold in the dead
mouth, and hacked off my own gray hair and beard as a sign of mourning.

  What remained of the tiny amount of gold Icarus had been carrying I gave to the ship-captain, in return for a live bird to kill over the grave in sacrifice, and some wine to pour on it. Though Kena'ani's ship was far from heavily laden, her cargo was able to afford these.

  By this time I had so far regained my senses as to be able to thank the captain for his kindness to a strange castaway.

  The captain had helped me gently remove the wings from the dead body of Icarus; and he asked me if I wanted them.

  "I never want to see them again."

  Quietly Kena'ani ordered one of his men to put them away on board the ship, though at the time I did not realize this, and thought the wings had simply been discarded.

  "So you and your son were flying?" The captain's disbelief was plain in his tone. "Is that how you arrived here?"

  "Yes. We were flying." I cared nothing whether I was believed or not.

  "Where were you bound?"

  "To Sicily—to anywhere but Crete."

  "We have nothing better to do than go to Sicily," said Kena'ani. And again he had private conversation with some of his crew.

  I started, at the sound of a wild cry from the sea, for I thought that again I had heard Icarus screaming. But this time it was only a gull.

  * * *

  FIELD TRIP

  Since mainland Greece had dropped from sight astern we had made a long voyage. Struggling for many days, at times beset by unfavorable winds, we were at last able to effect a passage straight west across the Ionian Sea. This voyage gave me time to recover from the first raw grief attendant upon the death of Icarus. And thanks to my new friend the Phoenician captain, who insisted upon giving me gifts from the hodgepodge of freight with which his ship was laden, I was able to exchange my Cretan loincloth for garments more suitable for a man of wealth and substance to wear in Sicily. Not that I was wealthy, or wanted to appear so, but I had retained a morsel of gold, and so was not dependent upon charity.

  The fact that I had never visited Sicily before rather surprised me, when I thought of it. Of course I knew that the land just below the toe of Italy was a huge island, much larger even than Crete; and my first sight of our destination, as we approached the coastline near Siracusa, reminded me somewhat of my late place of exile. The mountains of Sicily, like those Cretan peaks, were impressive when seen from sea level; I took particular note of the smoldering volcano Etna, which was easily visible from the sea though a considerable distance inland.

  Then as now, Phoenician traders were generally welcome in any of the Sicilian ports, as they were almost everywhere. Kena'ani said that he had several good friends in the port of Siracusa, where we put in.

  The port at Siracusa could not compare with Heraklion in the matter of size. But it was busy, and on the docks one heard the same babel of tongues as in the harbor beneath the castle of Minos. No single sovereign had yet been able to unite under his rule this oversized island, but boundaries in general did not mean much to a Phoenician trader.

  Kena'ani's friends were helpful. Within a day after we put into port, I was on my way inland, headed in the direction of the territory governed by King Cocalus, which I was informed compromised something less than a third of the whole island. Kena'ani accompanied me, leaving his ship and crew in charge of his mate, a countryman of his in whom he appeared to have every confidence.

  Our journey to the interior of the island was fortunately uneventful. We traveled accompanied by a local guide, first by donkey and then on foot. Scarcely two more days had passed before we were standing in the presence of Cocalus himself, whose palace, of which he was quite proud, would have made a respectable manor house in some suburb of Knossos. Our meeting with the king took place in an audience room that I at first glance took to be some adjunct of Cocalus's stables, so great was the contrast between what passed for grandeur in this petty kingdom and what I had grown accustomed to while dwelling in the House of the Double Axe.

  Kena'ani was admitted first, while I waited in an anteroom. Then it was my turn. The king here sat on a great chair of black wood, somewhat larger than the Cretan throne though of vastly less importance. Cocalus was a spare, wizened man with a face like a dried fruit, very much less impressive than Minos, and not only because of the disparity in dress and personal appearance.

  This Sicilian monarch, twice widowed, had at this time no visible queen, but was supported on his throne and sometimes overwhelmed by an entourage of three buxom daughters, named Aglaia, Euphrosyne, and Thalia, after the Three Graces of ancient legend. Aglaia and Euphrosyne, the elder two, were certainly of an age to be considered eligible for marriage. And assuredly they were in no danger of being sent to school in Crete, in view of the smoldering, long-standing antagonism between Minos and their father.

  The dress of all three Sicilian princesses would have been unexceptional in Greece, but struck me as startlingly modest, accustomed as I was to the fashions of the Cretan court. Still, certain hints of facial expression and behavior by the princesses, even at that first meeting, gave me to suspect that these young women might not always be models of propriety.

  From the suspicious way in which the king gazed at me when I was presented to him, and from the tenor of his first questions, I realized at once that he had some doubts about my true identity.

  My benefactor the ship captain had had his conversation with Cocalus first, and I, on entering the room, soon realized that one of the chief topics of their talks must have been the wings removed from the body of my son. Ever since leaving the grave of Icarus I had assumed that Kena'ani or his men had buried or discarded those hateful devices somewhere, and indeed I had no wish to see them ever again; but there those poor relics were when I came in, spread out on a table before his Majesty.

  The pinions which had borne Icarus to his doom had been completely ruined by their immersion in the sea and violent return to land. The fine pores of the leather surface were clogged with sand, and all the slender stiffening members broken by the impact of sand and surf. Indeed, those wings were so badly damaged that no one looking at them would be likely to suspect that they had ever functioned properly.

  I stared at those crumpled pieces of leather and wax, and was surprised at how little emotion I felt on beholding them; the weight of my son's death was still with me, and those wings could do nothing to bring back a burden that had never lifted.

  "Wings, hey?" said the king now, as if he had just noticed them. He reached out a jeweled hand and toyed with the frayed leather end of one poor pinion, making it flap back and forth. It looked very ineffectual indeed. "Daedalus, do you expect anyone to believe that you actually flew, with wings like these, from Crete to that nameless little island where you were picked?"

  "I do not expect anything, sire." Then I understood from the king's eyes that that was too blunt a reply. "Your pardon, Majesty. What I meant was that I am confident your royal wisdom will penetrate to the essential truth of the matter. The truth is that the wings were an experiment that had initial success, but ultimately failed. I am not anxious to repeat that effort, nor would I recommend it to anyone else."

  There was a silence. King Cocalus, who had doubtless been prepared to deal with a slippery imposter pretending to have priceless secrets, or even a genuine inventor out to impress him with exaggerated claims, appeared not to know quite what to make of a man who was not out to convince him of anything.

  His daughters however did have something to say at this point—a number of things, in fact�and all three of them began to speak at once. The older two in particular appeared to take my part, for which I was grateful, and they looked at my poor son's wings with interest and sympathy, and questioned me about him, and about any other close relatives that I might have. They shook their heads in apparently genuine sadness when I reported that there were none.

  At last, when the princesses had for the moment satisfied their curiosity and their urge to talk, the ki
ng looked at me closely once again. In a more kindly voice he said: "Rest, then, Daedalus. Rest and heal, if you can. I will send my physicians to look at you, and I will talk to you again when you have begun to expect things once more."

  I was somewhat annoyed with Kena'ani, for preserving the wings without my knowledge and then trying to sell them to this king, along with my services as wingmaker. But when the captain and I were outside the audience room again and I had a chance to speak to him privately, I found that he was even more annoyed with me. He had been in hopes of receiving a quick reward from the king, for bringing him such a treasure as myself, but, in Kena'ani's view, my behavior had spoiled this plan.

  "So now," the captain complained, "he has got it into his head that we are out to swindle him somehow. He doesn't know whether to order you to begin making wings at once, or to forbid it."

  Shortly after we had left the audience chamber a message came to both of us from the king; he was insisting that we both stay on indefinitely as his royal guests.

  Kena'ani on hearing this brightened noticeably, while I did not know whether to be pleased or not.

  The next day I was summoned to talk to the king again, this time alone.

  Another surprise awaited me at this second meeting with Cocalus, in the form of another exile from the court of Aegeus. I had known this man slightly at the court of King Aegeus, and despite my changed appearance—I was worn by grief, imprisonment, and danger, and my hair and beard had been cut crudely short in mourning—he was able to identify me as the almost legendary Daedalus, fellow exile from Athens.

  Despite this positive identification, Cocalus was still skeptical of my credentials—or of something about me. Still, the king seemed to be trying sincerely to settle his persistent doubts; and in the course of this meeting it occurred to him that the best way to do so would be to set me a task and see if I fulfilled it in a truly Daedalian way.