The White Bull

by Fred Saberhagen

  Stomargos, catching up with me at last, came pounding into the circular space and quickly splashed across the moat to stand beside me goggling at what lay on the dais. The schoolteacher pointed, goggled some more, and opened his mouth to begin an almost wordless cry for help. Then he turned and ran, and it was I who had to drop him with a desperate watery tackle in the moat.

  "Theseus! Help me! We must keep this one quiet." And in a moment the Prince of Athens had taken charge. Stomargos's head was clamped down in the deepest part of the little channel, and presently the bubbles ceased to come up out of his mouth.

  Then the two of us who were still alive climbed up out of the moat onto the dais. Theseus, still panting with the exertion of his struggle against the Bull, seemed to grow a little taller and straighter with every operation of his lungs, like some young tree freed suddenly of a deforming burden, reasserting its natural form.

  He nodded toward the fallen Bull. "Does he still breathe, Daedalus?"

  I was already crouching down, prodding and peering into gray fur, trying to find out. "I am not sure."

  "Well, let him go on breathing, if he can. It no longer matters to me. I'm leaving Crete."

  "But how?"

  "My ship is still here—didn't you know? She can be made ready in an hour or two—if I can get my men rounded up out of the taverns by then—and I am going home. Or somewhere else, if my father will not have me in Athens now. But better a pirate's life, even, than this." And his eyes swept round, making a scan of the circular stone wall.

  "You are right," I said after a moment's thought. "I think you should leave, must leave, if you can, before this is discovered."

  Theseus looked at me and said: "Ariadne is going to come with me. I am sure of it."

  "Gods of sea and sky! No! That would cause—"

  "And Phaedra too."

  I was stricken speechless for the moment.

  "And you are welcome to come with us too, old friend," Theseus offered, almost as an afterthought, "though I can promise you no safe workshop, nor slaves, nor high place at any court but my own—if ever I have one."

  "I want no place as high as a sun-dried pirate's, which I fear Minos might make for me here, as soon as he comes home. Comes home to find the Sacred Bull, the gift of Poseidon, dead. And you departed, with both his daughters who are his only heirs—come, you think they will really both go with you?"

  "I'm sure they will."

  He might not have been able to pass the tests of school, but in this I did not think he would be wrong. I said: "Then I must ask you as your friend if you have thought this through."

  "What is there to think about, Daedalus? I could not stay here after attacking the Bull, even if he were still alive. And now I have killed this miserable teacher in the moat. And when the princesses tell me they are too frightened to stay and face their father, as I am sure they will, then I cannot very well refuse to take them with me."

  "I suppose not," I said, and wondered if Theseus was having an affair with both princesses at the same time. "And if you go I certainly do not intend to stay and take all the blame. Very well, then, we must move swiftly, before this violence is discovered."

  "Dae-dal-us." The unexpected voice was a mere thread of sound, stretched thin and about to break.

  I bent down again, getting my ears closer to the furry head. "White Bull, how is it with you?"

  "As with a man whose neck is bro-ken, Dae-dal-us. After to-day I teach no more."

  "Would that I had been able to learn from you before today, White Bull. And would that you had learned from me."

  The tall Athenian prince and I walked out of the Labyrinth together. No doubt both of us looked a little shaken, as would be only natural for two students who had probably just been expelled. Through the windows of the elementary school the usual voices came droning out, from classrooms in which the usual lessons were no doubt in progress. When a pair of teachers approached us, heading in a direction that suggested they might be bound for a conference with the Bull, Theseus—displaying, as I thought, excellent Tactical Skill—stopped them and informed them in a subdued voice that the Bull and Stomargos were talking together and did not want to be disturbed just now. The teachers accepted this unquestioningly, and walked off uncertainly in another direction.

  The prince and I walked on, moving quickly but without hurrying. There was one more stop I had to make, within the precincts of the school. On doing so I was presented with more disturb-ing news—Icarus was truant yet again today, his teacher had no idea of where he might be found.

  The prince and I hurried on to Ariadne. A minute after our arrival the princess had dispatched one of her most trusted servants to begin the job of rounding up Theseus's crew�his ship had been here for a month now, and apart from a few practice cruises little had been done to keep the men and gear in shape. Despite his evident faith in his men, I thought it highly problematical how soon he might be able to hoist sail.

  A few minutes after the first servant left the royal quarters, a couple of others followed, detailed to help me look for my son.

  The wild, rugged lands where boys were wont to go searching for birds' eggs and dreams swept up and up, one hour's walk after another, behind and above the House of the Double Axe.

  The Prince of Athens said: "We can wait no longer for him, Daedalus. My men's lives are all in danger, and the lives of the two princesses too. As soon as those two bodies are discovered in the Labyrinth, some military man or sea captain is sure to take it upon himself to try to stop my sailing, no matter what the Princess Ariadne tells him. They know they'll stand responsible to the king when he gets back."

  And Ariadne said: "Theseus must get away. You are welcome to come with us, Daedalus, but if you stay, I feel sure my father will not deal too grievously with you; he depends too much on you for that."

  Only Phaedra, who had joined this hasty conference in the middle, had nothing at all to say to me. For the most part she was silent, biting her full lips. Her fingers, as if they moved without her awareness, had gone to caressing Theseus's arm as the prince stood beside her. I saw this, but Ariadne did not see.

  I in my mind's eye saw more: the sun-dried pirates on the dock. And his own workshop, and the hidden room that held the hidden, unfinished wings. All wrong; I would have to start again from scratch. And I saw my living quarters nearby, and how the small, trusting shadow would cross the threshold there, when Icarus came running home…

  Long, helmed shadows came across that threshold first, with the black triangles of shadow-spearheads thrust ahead of them. This time the soldiers grimly held their weapons as they marched me, the king's chief engineer, deeper into the House. Icarus, returning wearily from another of his adventures, was only just in time to see his father being arrested, and to be swept up like a dropped crumb by tidy soldiery.

  Grim military men, whose names and faces I scarcely knew, were now in charge. Minos was not due home for at least another month. The de facto military government, taking over after the defection of both royal princesses, did not want to assume responsibility for judging me. My son and I were both confined under strict house arrest, our movements restricted to the workshop and their living quarters.

  All of the ordinary entrances and exits of this small domain were promptly walled up—I tried to comfort my son by pointing out that the masonry was rough and temporary-looking. Icarus brightened somewhat after he had been convinced that this was not all some rather excessive punishment visited upon us both because he had played hooky once too often.

  A continuous guard was also established. One servant only was allowed us, the maid Thorhild. No one else was allowed in or out of our quarters, and any conversation with the prisoners was forbidden. Food was slid in to us through a tiny door, and garbage slid out, and the water continued to flow through the plumbing I had designed.

  Now at last I had plenty of time and privacy in which to work. Now at last I could let Icarus see what I was doing, and even set the lad to work
helping me.

  * * *

  UNAUTHORIZED ABSENCE

  What materials ought I to use, from which to sculpt the thousand channels in each wing? Offhand I could not have said. The names of the proper materials had not been included in the lesson seared into my brain; but the qualities those materials were required to possess had not been omitted. The substance at hand that most closely matched the requirements for the interior of the wings was wax, wax mixed with certain vegetable fibers, and sealed inside a sheathing of fine, thin leather. Fortunately for my project Minos had never been stingy; my workshop was well-stocked for a truly bizarre variety of projects, and by the favor of the gods everything I would need for this one was on hand.

  I began by weighing and measuring both my son and myself. Then I cleared my workbench of the false start I had made on my own; then I began to work hard, in sunlight by day, and lamplight by night.

  When I had the basic fabric of one large wing completed, and had pierced it with a hundred cunning perforations of the thousand that it must ultimately have, I strapped it firmly onto my left arm and shoulder and gave my arm a quick push downward through the air, as if I were a desperate bird. For just a moment my arm was halted in mid-air by a responding pressure; for just a moment it seemed to me as if the limb had rested upon something solid and ready to be climbed. In a state of considerable excitement I resumed my labors.

  Days passed; how many, I did not notice. One clouded night, when at last there were four wings finished, with a thousand tiny channels cut through each, I decided that we were ready for a real trial. It was very difficult for one person to put the wings on himself unaided, and we had to assist each other. Then we climbed up and out through the secret skylight above the secret workshop, and stood upon the low roof of the House. Ordering Icarus to wait, I drew a deep breath and, encouraged by the results of my limited indoor trials, launched myself headlong from the edge of the roof out over a ravine. Beating my wings, at first almost in a panic, I mounted steadily into the sky.

  There was a frantic initial awkwardness to be overcome, the breathless feeling that at every moment I was about to fall. But my confidence increased with every wingbeat, every moment of success, and before I had caused the lights of the House to revolve three times below me, I had started to learn to relax like a good swimmer. With each stroke the air beneath my wings felt alternately as supportive as springy tree branches, and as buoyant as sea water.

  When I glided back to the roof and landed, Icarus was waiting for me, clamoring as vociferously as he could in an enforced whisper for his own chance to try. Next we plunged together from the edge of the roof, and beat our way completely around the palace at perhaps ten times the height of a man, before I decided that we had flown enough for one night, and that we had better quit before we were seen.

  Hie following night was cloudy too. Mounting together once more into the air, we flew a greater distance, going as far from the palace as Heraklion and the edge of the ocean, rising as high as birds, until what looked like a great part of the northern shoreline of the island was vaguely visible, picked out by the dots of fires in fishing villages and isolated seashore camps and cottages.

  It was so quiet in the air that we could talk to each other almost in whispers.

  "Father, we could just keep going, right now. To anywhere we wanted."

  "One night soon, Icarus, we'll do just that. But there must be a few days left before the earliest time when the king and queen could possibly come back. And there are a few more preparations we must make."

  When after each flight we landed and crawled back into the workshop through the secret skylight, I found that the wings had somehow been warmed by their labor in the cool night air. And strain my thought as I might at the problem, I still had neither the words nor the ideas to make it clear to myself in my own mind just how they worked. That had not been part of the teaching.

  Continued experiments indoors, in the daytime when the light was good, allowed us to see some puzzling things. A strong push down, with one completed wing, and you could sometimes see a vapor-puff as big as a pumpkin appear as if by magic in the beaten air, and fly off rearward, spinning gently. Icarus extending a hand into one of these puffs said that it felt quite cool.

  Food and water and gold, in very small quantities, we were going to carry at our belts. We would wear a minimum of clothing, no more than loincloths, to save weight. My plan was to take wing just before dawn, and follow the northern coastline of Crete away from the onrushing sun, veering to the northwest when we came to the western end of the great island. The sun would be up by then, and the small island of Antikythera, and larger Kythera, must lie straight ahead of us. We ought to be able to reach Kythera in no more than a few hours' flight, if anything like the speed we had been able to attain at night could be sustained by day. I saw no reason why it should not be so.

  We would be able to stop and rest, if necessary, somewhere on Antikythera or Kythera. After that, if all went well, the western coast of mainland Greece would serve as our guide, until we were far enough north and felt confident enough to strike out straight west over the Ionian Sea in the direction of southern Italy and Sicily.

  On the island of Sicily ruled King Cocalus, who had long expressed his admiration of my work, and who had repeatedly invited me to come to work for him whenever I liked.

  "Must we leave before dawn, father?"

  "I think we must. Our servant will still be sleeping, and it will be safer. Now get some sleep."

  … and I, the father, who cared more for my son than anything else I then possessed, dreamt of the flight before it happened.

  I had not yet paid the price, but I knew that it would come. In my dream, squinting into the rising sun, feeling its touch already warm, I absently marked the dull sheen of its rays upon the wings of Icarus, and waited for the breath of wind that would come to help us rise among the gulls.

  The real dawn overtook us just as I had planned, while we were passing westward over the northern coastline of Greece. It revealed to our eyes a beautiful daytime high-altitude world that we had never seen before.

  For a brief period Icarus became very sportive with his wings, climbing and diving and trying to turn somersaults, urging his more cautious father to join in the fun. Momentarily tempted, I did an acrobatic twist or two. Then, after I had recovered from a temporary accidental plunge, I urged my son to greater caution.

  We saw a few low-flying birds, who veered away from us crying in alarm.

  We saw some people on the beach or in the water, fisherfolk up early, pointing at us and crying out in fear or admiration or perhaps both. Only the swifter runners below, racing on smooth sand, were able to keep up with the two flying figures in the sky.

  One of those scampering figures had a bow slung on its back, and I, taking what I thought was prudent alarm, urged my son to a somewhat higher altitude. Now, being as I thought somewhat beyond bowshot, we resumed speed in a horizontal direction.

  "Father, look there!"

  A bronze-bright speck, glinting in the early sun, was darting toward us from the east, moving along the beach, outpacing running dogs with ease. Fisherfolk fell back as if in fear as the bright dot passed. In a few moments I was sure that the figure was that of Talus, coming at a run along the coast to overtake us. Perhaps someone had seen us rising on wings from the palace; perhaps the Bull still lived, to give his metallic servant orders, or perhaps the Bronze Man was capable of taking revenge upon his own initiative.

  Though it seemed we must be safe from him at the distance we had attained, I did not in the least like the sight of that purposeful onrush, whatever authority had ordained it. "Higher, son. And we had better turn more out to sea."

  Scarcely had we altered course in that direction when something, a missile of some kind flying too fast for me to see it, sang past us through the air.

  "Faster, Icarus! Out to sea. And higher!"

  Glancing back I saw the bronze arm, almost invisible with distan
ce, draw back and then flash in a twinkling movement. A breath later, something, another invisible projectile, came whining straight between our airborne bodies.

  "Hurry, Icarus! Twist and turn in flight!"

  "Father—I—"

  Then it was as if the Sun himself had stabbed us. The atmosphere around us wavered, and I think we both cried out in the intense heat. An almost invisible lance of power had struck at us. Something like a violet afterimage danced in the air between us and the Bronze Man. But the pain and the burning reached us only erratically. Our dodging in midair kept the weapon from being focused on us long enough to do real damage.

  We labored on. The violet burning came again, but not quite as intense as before. I was beginning to think that we were safe, when, breaking the silence of mid-flight, there came a sound. In a moment I realized that this had been the muffled impact of some small missile tearing right through one of Icarus's wings, near the strapped root where it met the boy's shoulder.

  I cried out my son's name, and he responded bravely. His own flesh was undamaged, and he could still fly, though now more slowly. Turning from right to left, trying to get my own wider pinions and larger body between my son and those deadly missiles, I did my best to urge Icarus on.

  We continued to make steady headway out from shore. The next rock came more weakly, being visible through the upper portion of its trajectory and descending past us at an angle. The hurling machine, now standing up to its ankles in the waves, was working at the extreme limit of its range.

  The wind, I thanked the gods, was in our favor, helping to carry us away from shore. The last rock thrown after us by Talus must have fallen into the sea some distance behind and below us, and I never heard its passage.

  "Thank all the gods! You can still fly?"

  "Yes, father." The boy sounded frightened but game.

  "Then on, straight on. We dare not turn back."

  I was concerned that Icarus with his damaged wing had some trouble in holding to a straight course, but I was reassured that my son was still able to maintain altitude.