The White Bull Read online

  I couldn't stand it. "Oh great teacher! Master of the science and art of Transmission of Learning! I beg you—"

  "Not Master, Dae-dal-us. My a-ca-dem-ic rank is that of Doc-tor, which is high-er."

  "Master or Doctor or Divinity or what you will. You say that you are going to instruct the prince in the science of tactics. I suppose it means nothing that the fate of Theseus in battle, insofar as it is not determined by all the chance stupidities of war, is not at all likely to depend on his ability to grope his way out of a maze?"

  "He has been all-owed to choose his course of stu-dy, Dae-dal-us, Be-yond that, spe-cial treatment can-not be ac-cord-ed any non-dis-ad-van-taged stu-dent."

  "Well." There were times when I despaired of ever getting a direct answer to a question. "White Bull, I have never fought anyone with a sword. Have you?"

  The figure on the high chair was silent. Perhaps it was outraged already that anyone dared to cast doubt upon its competence.

  But I pressed on. "I have never bullied men and challenged them and cheered them on to get them into combat. But once, shortly before I left the mainland, watching them from the highest and safest place that I could reach, I saw Prince Theseus do these things. He must have been not quite fifteen years old at the time. Some vassal's uprising somehow got started against Athens, and Theseus put it down, almost single-handedly, you might say. I think he would not be likely to learn much from me in the way of military science, were I to lecture on the subject. No doubt you, however, have some great skill and knowledge in the field to impart?"

  The Bull showed no emotion, none at least that I could understand. "My qual-i-fi-ca-tions as tea-cher are be-yond your a-bil-i-ty to com-pre-hend, much less to ques-tion. Your own pro-gress in school should be your con-cern."

  "White Bull!" I paused, raising both hands to my own grizzled hair; I felt like tearing handfuls of it out. Why, why, was I feted to spend so much of my life in this insane struggle with this inhuman creature? "Try to understand. If Theseus should fail here, fail spectacularly, then I may not be on hand to make any kind of progress through your school. Minos will be angry with me. And not with me alone."

  "You are worth too much to Min-os for him to kill you."

  "I am not at all sure of that. Am I worth more than an Athenian alliance? I think not. And how much do you think that you are worth to him?"

  "I?" For once the Bull's voice had real tone in it. Surprise, I thought. "Ed-u-ca-tion is priceless."

  Argue with the chief educator as I might, I was unable to get my princely ward excused from Tactical training and testing in the Labyrinth. I returned to my own living quarters in a cloud of worry.

  Still, for the next couple of days, the situation seemed to ease. The prince at least was attending school, and I thought he must be applying himself to his studies.

  Foolishly I did nothing, and allowed my hopes to rise. Then, as I emerged one afternoon from my own classroom, I saw a page from the Inner House coming to get me, and I knew a sinking feeling. But the message was not quite what I had feared: it was the Princess Ariadne who required my presence in the audience chamber at once.

  Going along with the page, now more puzzled than alarmed, I found Ariadne perched regally on the small throne. She greeted me formally, and dismissed the page and her other attendants. As soon as they were out of the room, the princess came down from the chair and spoke to me with her usual lack of ceremony.

  "Daedalus, before my father's departure he told me—"

  "Departure!—but I beg your pardon for interrupting, princess. Then your mother and father have already departed on their state tour?"

  "Of course. Where have you been for the past two days, Daedalus, that you don't know what's going on?"

  "In school—but never mind, Your Highness. What were you going to tell me?"

  "My father has informed me that Prince Theseus has been having—difficulties—in school, and he impressed upon me the importance of this problem. Also I have—I have talked with the prince myself, and I find that the situation does not seem to be improving." Ariadne sounded nervous, vaguely distracted—as well she might, I supposed, with the cares of a kingdom suddenly left upon her shoulders.

  "I fear that you are right, princess, about the situation in the school," I began. Then, before I had time to say anything more, I was interrupted by the entrance of another page, come to announce the arrival of Theseus himself.

  No escort of soldiers accompanied the prince when he walked in—evidently the princess had wasted no time in setting aside the house arrest ordered by her father. I thought that the exchange of greetings between the two young people sounded somewhat too stiffly formal, and I noted also that Ariadne scarcely looked at Theseus as she spoke to him. Certainly she had made no such effort to avoid looking at him when he entered the wrestling ring on the day of his arrival, or during the days that had passed since then. But now she did. And now, when the prince looked at her, his face was wooden.

  For a few moments I entertained the idea that the two of them were quarreling, but I soon decided that the absolute opposite was much more likely. An affair, then, and they were naturally trying to hide it. What next? As if there were not problems enough already. Silently I breathed unpracticed prayers, addressed to any god who might deign to listen.

  Theseus, in response to an awkward-sounding question from Ariadne, was now relating his continued difficulties in school. Their dialogue had a rehearsed quality.

  Now she turned back to me, almost pleading, in a voice that sounded much more natural. "Daedalus, he will fail his Labyrinth tests again unless we do something, and perhaps he will be expelled. What are we to do? We must find some means of helping him."

  And a glance flashed between the two young people. It was a very brief glance, but it was quite enough to make me feel certain of what was going on. My sinking feeling grew worse. Something told me that this affair was neither completely casual nor formalized by an official engagement—that would have been announced with such fanfare that even I, isolated from much of what went on at court, must have heard the news. No, then it must be Love—the cause of no end of trouble, especially among royalty.

  Still, now that I had grasped the situation, I could almost begin to relax. I suppose I gazed at the two young people with something like a smile. I could only hope that the Princess Ariadne would not allow infatuation to lead her into any real craziness, such as trying to arrange a secret marriage. Meanwhile, it occurred to me, Theseus's problems might actually be easier to solve while Minos, with his secret fear of the Bull, was not around.

  Was it even possible that Minos had planned his diplomatic trip, and taken his queen with him, in the hopes that someone would take care of the embarrassment for him while he was gone?

  Conferring with the prince—while Ariadne hovered near and listened to our talk—I made sure that the key to the young man's worst difficulties was the maze itself. In his courses other than Tactics, all of them taught in ordinary classrooms, the prince might, probably could, do well enough to scrape by.

  Having heard Theseus out, I took a charred stick from a sacrificial brazier nearby, and began to draw on the smooth stone floor beside the narrow rug. From memory I sketched there a crude plan of a key portion of the Labyrinth, the very area in which Tactical Training began each day. The painted griffins on the walls glared down balefully at the three people who squatted near the foot of the throne, like three children at some game.

  Theseus, saying little, stared gloomily at the patterns as I drew them, and appeared to listen while I talked. Once the slender brown hand of Ariadne came over, forgetfully, to touch her lover's hand. Then her hand flew back, while her eyes jumped up to search my face. I affirmed that I had noticed nothing, by holding my own scowling concentration on the floor.

  "Now, prince," I said, "I am going to reveal a secret that you must tell no one." I raised my gaze deliberately to meet the eyes of Theseus. "I hope you understand."

  "Of course. I can ke
ep a secret. What kind of secret is it that'll help me, though?"

  "If you felt confident of being able to find your way completely out of that portion of the Labyrinth, anytime you wanted, that would help you, would it not?"

  Theseus started to answer, then settled for drawing a deep breath. "Yes," he said at last.

  I frowned at him. "One way is to take advantage of a gentle, very subtle slope of the floor, away from the center—but that may be hard to detect. The foolproof way is this: If you were in the center of the maze, trying to find your way out, the idea would be to let your right hand touch the wall at the start—hey? Follow me?"

  "I think so. I can always tell my right hand from my left." The reassurance was offered to me quite seriously. "At least when I'm outside the Labyrinth. My right hand's the one in which I always—almost always—hold a sword. I just imagine myself picking one up." The Prince of Athens nodded grimly.

  "Ah—yes. So, as I say, if you are trying to find your way outward from the center, or from any point inside, you must just let your right hand glide continuously along the wall as you move. You may not reach the exit by the shortest path, but you'll certainly get there."

  The handsome, scarred face frowned. "If I'm carrying something in my right hand, though…"

  "Well then, imagine your right hand gliding along the wall. Or use your right shoulder. Now, there is one important exception to this rule. If, in that section of the maze, you should find yourself climbing a stair, you must remember to switch at the top of the stair. Then you glide your left hand along the wall. Keep doing that until you have descended at least one step again, then switch back to using the right hand. Now, of course, if you should be trying to find your way inward from the entrance to the center, simply reverse—"

  "Daedalus." The prince's voice was not very loud, but still it stopped me in mid-sentence. "Thanks for what you are trying to do. But I tell you, when I am put in there, I cannot help myself."

  Theseus got to his feet, moving as if he were unconscious of the movement. His eyes were fixed on something in the distance, beyond the audience chamber's confining walls. "Once I get in there I forget all about left and right, except I know that the walls are crushing in on me, the doors are all sealing themselves off—" Ariadne, who now was standing too, put out a hand again, then drew it back. "—so there is nothing left but stone walls, all coming closer. I wish you had never told me that some of them are four men's bodies thick."

  Theseus was shivering now, as if with cold, although the afternoon was warm. There was a look in the prince's eyes that I had seen there on only one occasion in the past, and now I too got to my feet, moving with deliberate care.

  The prince said, without any particular feeling in the words: "If that god-blasted cow dares to lecture me on courage and per-sev-er-ance in my stu-dies one more time, I swear by all the real gods I'll break its neck."

  "Very well, my friend." I laid a hand gently and briefly on the prince's shoulder. "Very well. We will do all that we can to help."

  It was midafternoon on the day following that conference, and I, in my own classroom, half-hypnotized by the drone of an assistant teacher's voice, had fallen into a daydream of numbers that my stubborn mind kept trying to match with flying gulls. I was roused from this state by a hand shaking me.

  Stomargos stood at my side, looking down at me with an expression of obscure triumph. "Daedalus, the White Bull wants to see you, at once."

  I would not give him the satisfaction of asking why, although I knew a premonition of sickening fear. Getting to my feet in a silence of outward calm, I followed the educator from the classroom.

  I had expected that when we reached the White Bull's private chambers, Stomargos would immediately be dismissed. But the Bull, who was waiting for us on its tall chair, made no gesture to send the young man away. And Stomargos, with a smug look on his face, remained standing at my side.

  And today the Bull, for once, did not say learn from me, Daedalus. Rather it rumbled: "We have dis-co-vered the prince's cheat-ing, Dae-da-lus."

  "Cheating? What do you mean?" But I had never been any good at trying to brazen out a lie.

  "I mean the thread tied on his right wrist. In his pock-et, the ti-ny inet-al balls, to bounce and roll and seek al-ways the down-ward slope of floor, how-ev-er gen-tle. How do you make a ball so smooth and round? Ex-act-ly spher-i-cal?"

  I had dropped them molten from a tall tower, into water. I wondered if the Bull would be impressed to hear this method. "I see," I said, trying to be noncommittal and admitting nothing. "What do you intend to do now?"

  There was a silence. Then the White Bull said at last, in a changed voice: "Leave us a-lone, Sto-mar-gos." And then, when the two of us were finally alone, it said to me: "Now learn from me, Dae-dal-us. As you have sought to learn."

  … and before I was able to sit down, I reeled and almost fell into the moat, with the painful power and clarity of the pictures that were being forced into my mind. There, in front of me, as if pinned up on air, were spread the wings of which I had long dreamed. These wings were not very greatly different in their gross structure from the ones I had pinned on my workbench; but in the fine structure there was a great difference between the two. The wings in the vision were pierced through in a thousand places with tiny, peculiarly curved channels. Presently, when the finest scale of the structure was enlarged so I could see it, I saw how the channels would have to be made. Each of them was a soft, sculpted cavity, that would enlarge just slightly each time the wing was beaten downward and air flowed into it. Then in my vision the wing finished its downward motion and the cavities all contracted, forcing air out of each channel at the bottom.

  The strangest part of the cycle of operation was the way in which the air just below the wing, on encountering all the suddenly closed entrances, changed pressure wildly. A thin layer of that air, much broader than the wing itself, became momentarily almost as hard as wood. Somehow in the vision I was able to feel, as well as see, the fluid alterations… and I could see also, with no feeling of haste, no need to hurry, that the length and width of the pinions must be just so, in relation to the height and weight of the human being who was to wear them. And just so must be the variation in the different channels that pierced the different sections of the wing…

  It was all, in every least detail, burned into my brain. From that first learning I knew that there would be no forgetting this lesson, even if forgetfulness were someday willed. But the imprinting did not take long. Soon it was over.

  I, Daedalus, feeling like a clay tablet on which someone's signet ring had just been impressed, got shakily to my feet and stood at my full height once more.

  "Bull—why did you never before give me such a teaching?"

  The soft brown eyes blinked at me, as if the Bull had been expecting a different kind of comment. "It will not make of you an ed-u-ca-ted man, Dae-dal-us."

  "AH right, then, it will not. I do not know what you think an educated man is like, or even whether I want to be one by your standards. I thank you for this teaching, though… you refused it to me before, why did you give it now?"

  The Bull was no longer looking directly at me; its eyes and its face were human enough so that at least I could be sure of that. When it answered, its voice was almost soft.

  "Because I think this tea-ching will re-move you from my pre-sence. In one way or a-nother. I see now you are not wor-thy of fine ed-u-ca-tion. One way or a-nother your dis-rup-tion of my school must stop."

  "I see." But no, I did not really think about it. Because in my mind the plan for the new wings was burning, as urgent as a fire in my workshop.

  Stomargos, his triumph fading into puzzlement when he beheld my elation, was my escort once again. But the image of the wings still burned before my eyes, blinding me to almost everything else, and I allowed myself to be marched away through the Labyrinth for a hundred paces or so before the realization came to me.

  When that happened I stopped and grabbed Stom
argos by his flabby arm. "And Prince Theseus? What of him?"

  "I myself am a witness to the prince's attempt to cheat," said Stomargos, firmly and primly. "There is no doubt of his guilt, and the Bull has decided rightly that he must be expelled."

  "But that cannot be!" My reaction was so strong that even the educator was shaken for a moment.

  But for a moment only. "Oh, the Bull and I are quite agreed that expulsion is necessary. The prince is probably receiving his formal notification at this moment."

  On hearing that I spun around in my tracks and ran, back toward the inner Labyrinth.

  "Stay! Stay!" Stomargos shouted, running clumsily after me. "You have been expelled also. You are to leave the grounds of the school at once…"

  He was much younger than I, but still I outsped him easily. The voice of the educator faded behind me in the windings of the maze. From somewhere ahead, in the direction of the Bull's habitation, there came inhuman roaring noises and the sounds of physical struggle.

  Moments later, I burst into the central room, to behold Theseus and the Bull grappling on the central dais, arms locked around each others necks, the prince gripping a horn with one fist. Theseus was slightly taller. The heavy stone chair had already been overturned, and a Bull-meal of fresh fruit was scattered and trampled under their feet and hooves. In the broad back of the Prince of Athens—even now I can see it vividly—the great bronzed, cabled muscles stood out like structural arches new-glowing from the forge.

  The end came even as I, yelling at the combatants, splashed through the moat, running to reach them before it was too late. I heard the sickening bony crack, and the Bull's hoarse warbling cry at the same instant, I saw the prince move staggering back, and then stand motionless, staring down at what his hands had done. At his feet lay a gray-white mound of fur, suddenly no more human than a dying bear.