Monsters of Greek Mythology, Volume Two

by Bernard Evslin

  Aphrodite looked down from Mount Olympus and saw the young man at her altar. She was struck by his appearance. He was altogether elegant, a cleanly made youth, his eyes aflame with intelligence. When prayed to, the goddess seldom paid heed to what was being said, but based her decision on whether or not she liked the looks of whoever was doing the praying. And she liked this young man very much. Aphrodite came down from the mountain of the gods and hovered invisibly over the workshop where Daedalus was finishing his wooden bull. The old man suddenly found himself unable to breathe; he was choking on sawdust. He rushed outside, panting, and hurried down to the meadow. It was midafternoon. The sun was pressing close, making heat waves dance, turning the meadow into a rippling green lake.

  Crossing the lake was a golden galleon. Daedalus blinked and rubbed his eyes. He couldn’t believe what he was seeing. In the blur of brightness, a ship drifted and burned. It became a bit of the sun itself, melting and congealing on the grass. Then his vision cleared. A golden bull came ambling toward him. At the sight of this magnificent animal, his heart shriveled within him. He realized how shabby, how futile his wooden bull would seem to Pasiphae, who had looked upon this throbbing mountain of hot blood, this golden beast.

  How could he have hoped that she would be deceived? Icarus was right. He was no lover … no longer an artisan even, for if his judgment were failing then his hands must surely follow. Splendor had gone. And hope. He was a poor, enfeebled, crazed old man whose plain duty was to go back to his workshop, take his sharpest knife, and cut his own throat, claiming a place in Hades while his deeds were still being hailed on earth. The mad queen could have her wooden cow and her unspeakable rendezvous.

  That night, as the moon was rising, the great golden bull saw the form of a graceful cow gliding toward him over the meadow, mooing musically. He bugled softly in return, swished his ropy tail, and pawed the earth. By the end of the evening, Pasiphae was very happy. And the next night she thought she would burst with joy as she rolled into the meadow, peering through the eyeholes of the wooden cow. For the same molten moon hung low in the sky, and very soon, she knew, her bull would come to her.

  The moon climbed and paled, and no bull came. She tried calling him, mooing musically as she had the night before, but heard only her own thin, scratchy voice. Suddenly, she hated her voice, hated everything about herself, loathed her entire human condition.

  The bull did not come to her that night. Nor the night after. Nor the night after that. Every night she fitted herself into the wooden cow, and rolled into the meadow and waited. Every dawn she departed.

  Then, one night, she found she could no longer fit into the wooden frame and knew why. Some months later, she gave birth to a child, half boy, half bull-calf. Pasiphae refused to name her son, but as rumors spread, the populace dubbed him Minotaur, or Minos’s Bull.

  5

  The New Monster

  Minos was very much disturbed by these rumors and the gossip of the populace. He summoned Daedalus and said, “I have a different kind of project for you—one that will serve me against domestic enemies as your weapons have served me against the foreign foe. I want you to design and build a kind of puzzle-garden, a maze so cunningly wrought that no prisoner will be able to find a way out. Make it big; it will house many guests of the state as they await their turn with my busy executioners. Start immediately. You may have a thousand slaves.”

  Daedalus designed a maze and supervised its construction. It was a marvel. Its walls were tall, impenetrable, thorny hedges. It was full of blind lanes, lanes that angled, circled, doubled back on themselves, and trailed off into nowhere. When the work was done, Daedalus reported to the king, whom he had not seen for six months. Minos toured the maze, which he named the Labyrinth or Ax-Garden.

  “You have done your usual fine job,” said Minos, “and I mean to reward you.”

  “Pleasing you is reward enough,” said Daedalus, who detected something in the king’s manner that filled him with terror.

  “Permit me to differ,” said Minos. “I know your modest, undemanding nature, but I can’t allow myself to take advantage of it. Now hear me. You shall immediately move your workshop into this Labyrinth amd attach such dwelling quarters as you require. You shall take your son and your servants too. In other words, loyal friend, this beautiful puzzle-garden shall be your home from now on.”

  “You mean I am to be the first prisoner in your maze?”

  “You, a prisoner?” cried Minos. “How absurd! I’m only trying to please you. I know you like to be surrounded by your own artifacts. And here I am putting you in the middle of your greatest construction—and giving it to you on a lifelong lease. And mind you, in the exclusive residential area, not the prisoners’ quarters.”

  “Oh, how touching,” continued Minos. “You’re weeping tears of pure gratitude, aren’t you, old fellow? And yet, so foul is human nature that there are those who actually tell me that you’re the most ungrateful of mortals. Can you credit such wickedness?”

  Daedalus started to say something, but Minos stopped him.

  “No … no, not a word of thanks, please! I haven’t finished describing the benefits to be heaped upon you. For you shall have interesting neighbors: the ex-queen Pasiphae and her son—a most unusual youngster, I’m told. Well, I’m off now, Daedalus. We’re sailing against Athens. It may be a lengthy campaign, but I can leave with my mind at rest, knowing that I have fully repaid my old artisan for his matchless service to me and my family.”

  Living in the maze, Daedalus saw Pasiphae every day but never spoke to her. Nor did she speak to him, or even seem to know that he was there. She was aware of nothing but her horned child, whom she cared for tenderly. She was never heard speaking to him, only singing a crooning, wordless song.

  When the child was barely six months old, he was the size of a twelve-year-old boy, but much more muscular. His rippling torso was covered with dense golden fur and his horns were ivory knives growing into ivory spears. The boy’s face was rather squashed, with upturned coral nostrils and huge brimming eyes like pools of molten gold. He trotted after his mother wherever she went.

  At this time, Daedalus never sought to leave the Labyrinth. Through sheer inventiveness he had refined its grid work of paths, shifting them into new patterns every day. But he had also made a spool that rolled through the twisting lanes, heading inexorably toward the exit, unreeling its thread as it went, so that whoever held the other end could leave the Labyrinth by the quickest route.

  His only visitor from outside was the princess Ariadne, and he suspected that she came only to claim the dolls he kept making for her and that she never outgrew.

  “But,” he thought, “greed can imitate love too, as long as I can satisfy it. And I do care for the selfish child as much as I can care for anyone now.”

  One day, when Ariadne came to him with a sullen face because she had lost her way and wandered for hours, he gave her the pathfinding spool and taught her how to use it. He didn’t need it for himself any more. The shifting grid of the maze was stamped on his brain now.

  Pasiphae, like many women misled by the Love Goddess, turned to eating. She kept trying to stuff food into her aching emptiness, but the more she ate, the emptier she felt. She was a tall woman, so her face went first, blurring and then ballooning. Then her body bloated. She grew a gut, then a paunch. Her legs became quivering blobs, her arms two gelatinous bolsters.

  One day she simply burst. She had devoured an entire shoulder of ox and washed it down with a half barrel of wine. She burst with the dipper still at her lips, exploding into gobs of flesh. The ground where she had stood looked like the floor of a slaughterhouse.

  Her son watched all this. He was the size of a half-grown bull-calf now and was growing fast. But his brimming golden eyes still seemed too large for his head. Bewildered, he ran in circles, bawling, searching for his mother. When he realized that she was gone, that the bloody offal littering the grass was all that was left of her warmth, her f
ragrance, her singing voice, a puzzled rage began to work on him. His anger swelled into unfocused hatred and became pure murder seeking occasion.

  He grew now with monstrous speed, and in three days had reached his full size. The Minotaur stood ten feet tall, had long, needle-pointed ivory horns and a set of razor-sharp hooves, and was as powerful as a wild bull. But he had the wits of a man, the brooding, vengeful nature of man, and a pair of huge hands that closed into fists of bone.

  He began to prowl the lanes of the Labyrinth, looking for something to kill. He entered a holding area where prisoners were kept, awaiting the return of Minos, who would pass final sentence upon them. They were to wait no longer. As soon as the Minotaur saw them—they were the first living creatures he had seen since the death of his mother—he charged. Before they understood what the hurtling figure was, it was goring them with its sharp horns, lifting them into the air, and hurling them into the thorn hedge, where they hung dying. Others were knocked to the ground as the monster charged. He turned then and trampled them into bloody rags.

  Those who were still alive after the first charge scattered and fled. But the Minotaur’s rage was a separate organism, nourished by blood, growing with every murder. He snorted and bellowed down the lanes, pursuing the survivors, hunting them down systematically and cornering them in blind lanes. He gored them, trampled them, and battered them to death with his fists. By the end of the long afternoon, when the last bloody light was fading from the hedge tops, he had killed every one.

  Among the corpses were a few of Daedalus’s smithy slaves, for the old man had sent a party out to see what the screaming meant. Only two of them returned, both badly gored, and they gasped out their tale. Daedalus immediately closed the hedge gaps, encircling his area with a single wall so thick and thorny that not even the Minotaur could break through. He also sealed all the gaps in the outer wall of the Labyrinth, penning the monster in.

  6

  The Tribute

  The ships of Minos went off to battle and they swept the Athenian fleet off the sea, forcing Athens to surrender. The young Theseus watched the battle from a hilltop. His heart grew sick within him as he saw what was happening. The long, brass-prowed Cretan ships fell upon the slower Athenian vessels like hawks among pigeons. Theseus watched his father’s ships being grappled and boarded, saw double-bladed axes flash in the sun and the sea redden with Athenian blood. The Cretans did not even bother to board some of the enemy ships but simply rammed them, driving brass prows into wooden hulls. Their archers stood on deck and calmly sent arrows into the Athenian seamen who had leapt overboard. Those who tried to swim were gaffed like fish.

  Aegeus was forced to surrender and accept the terms imposed by Minos. Every year, on the first day of the Spring Sowing, twenty of the strongest and most handsome young men of Athens and twenty of the healthiest, most beautiful maidens were to be sent to Crete to enter the slave pens of Minos. But not as ordinary slaves. They were to be trained as bull dancers for a year and the next year sent into the arena against the wild bulls of the Minos herd.

  Their deaths would be useful and not without honor, Minos proclaimed. After all, when the bulls had finished with them, they would be buried in the wheat fields, where their bodies would fatten the crops.

  Theseus had sneaked into the council room, where the terms of surrender were being dictated. No one saw him; he had blended in with the shadows and stood very still, listening. He studied the cold, pinched face of Minos, who was black-cloaked and wore no ornament except a spiked iron crown, as if to emphasize his role as pirate king. And the lad saw how that runty figure breathed power, and how crushed and humiliated Aegeus looked as he accepted the terms of his defeat. Bitterly the boy learned how fortune alters physique, how victors grow and losers shrink.

  Then and there Theseus vowed to himself that he would be among those sent to Crete and that he would fight the wild bulls and the ax men on their own territory. He told himself that one day he would stand in the throne room at Knossos, dictating terms of surrender to this same Minos … or be buried in the wheat field, as losers deserve.

  Two springs passed. Forty of the best young Athenians were taken to Crete, where they died dancing in the arena and were planted in the ploughed fields. Then the rite was changed. One day Minos was informed that Pasiphae’s crossbreed child had grown into a fearsome monster and had slaughtered the prisoners in the Labyrinth. All Crete was abuzz with tales of the beast. This pleased Minos tremendously. The monster, once a source of shame to him, now offered a rich opportunity to spread the name of Minos into every corner of every island in the Middle Sea and to charge that name with horror.

  This was exactly what he wanted—for the mere sound of his name to strike terror into the hearts of everyone, to have the mere sight of a Cretan ship or a Cretan chariot freeze an enemy with fear, making him flutter helplessly as a dove before a diving hawk.

  The Minotaur, who had just enjoyed its first orgy of murder in the maze, would now serve the king. It would not lack for victims. There were still those suspected of treason. Or, if not of treason exactly, of dissent. Or, if not quite of dissent, then of insufficiently enthusiastic approval of everything Minos did, had done, and would do. In other words, there were still those whom Minos disliked, and this was enough to qualify them for residence in the Labyrinth and the attentions of the Minotaur.

  Still, domestic victims were not the big issue. They were only something for the Minotaur to practice on. It would be upon the occasion of the next Spring Sowing, when again the flower of Athenian youth would be brought as sacrificial tributes to Knossos, that the monster could be most profitably employed. The Minotaur would replace the ordinary wild bulls and go into the arena against the beautiful young people. Their blood would dung the roots of royal prestige and make the name of Minoan Crete shine darkly forever.

  The king’s daughters drank in the rumors. The word Athens held a special resonance for them. It was Theseus, a young prince of that land, whose name had been sung by the bones. By twisting ways, then, the Hag’s prophecy was coming true. Theseus would come to Crete. Once there, he could be persuaded to change his destiny from victim to husband.

  Ariadne, of course, did not know that her sister had been promised a share in this fiancé, and Phaedra was careful to keep her secret. Being very much Minos’s daughter, she had begun spinning plans of her own.

  7

  Theseus Embarks

  When the third spring rolled around, Theseus was ready to go to Crete, but not as a sacrifice. During the past year he had prepared himself for mortal combat by roaming the dangerous parts of the Hellenic Peninsula posing as a harmless traveler with a heavy purse. He had invited the notice of the most savage bandits who infested the mountain roads, had been bush-wacked many times and sliced and battered, but was young enough to heal rapidly, especially while enjoying himself so.

  Theseus had learned much from his journey through the mountains. “This I now know,” he said to himself. “To learn about your enemy before the fight, not during it; never to accept his terms of combat, but to impose your own; and, above all, to avoid doing what he expects. The key to victory is surprise, surprise, surprise … especially when your foe is bigger, which he always is.”

  So it was that when the next spring tribute came, Theseus did not sail to Crete with the other young Athenians. He went to the port at Piraeus in the garb of an apprentice seaman, and he shipped aboard a merchant vessel bound for the southern islands of the Middle Sea. He did not mean to stay with the ship. His intention was to sail with it until it reached Cretan waters, then dive overboard and swim ashore. Once there, he would pose as a shipwrecked sailor from a land other than Athens and scout around Knossos, learning as much as possible about Minos and the Minotaur.

  That same night, Minos, who after a string of victories was sleeping more or less dreamlessly, had his rest broken—not by the livid pictures of a dream, but by a voice speaking out of the darkness. It was a soft, melodic voice, but ful
l of authority:

  It creeps ashore, the danger.

  Your land to be cursed,

  maddened by thirst.

  Beware the stranger.

  When you have passed away,

  Crete will be ruled

  by a castaway.

  Burning sky,

  fountains dry.

  Take care,

  Beware

  the castaway.

  Minos took the voice very seriously. He issued orders to his coastal troops to keep close watch and seize any shipwrecked sailors who came ashore.

  “Be vigilant,” he told his captain. “I have learned that spies, very dangerous ones, are attempting to sneak ashore and probe our defenses. If a single one gets past the beaches, the company patrolling the area can report to the Minotaur.”

  One dawn, Theseus leaped overboard and swam toward a land dimly hulking on the horizon. Threading his way among rocks with the fluid skill of someone spawned by the sea, he made his way to the beach and waded ashore. He lifted his face to the kindling sky and said: “Thank you, whoever you are, wherever you are, for bringing me this far.”

  Then he turned to the sea and spoke: “Oh, Lord, who is supposed to be my father, if you really did steal my mother from her husband, you can repay us both by helping me now. I cannot tell you exactly what I want, but with such vast oceanic powers as yours, you should be able to do something.”

  Now Poseidon was good-natured when not offended and had always been entertained by this smallest and most combative of his sons. However, he was used to doing things in a big, gusty way and had no mind for detail. Those he wished to reward, he heaped with gifts of pearl and galleons full of sunken gold. When he wished to punish, he sent drought or tidal wave. Hearing his son’s prayer, then, he decided to withhold his waters from the thirsty spring sky over Crete. And no rain fell.