I, Eunostos, Minotaur, thus conclude my history, the Passing of the Beasts.
EUNOSTOS,
MINOTAUR
No sooner had I written the black, sprawling letters of my name than a hand touched my shoulder.
“Dearest Eunostos,” she said. “I will not ask to read what you have written. If it is true, it has not drawn a pretty picture of me.” A nimbus of light from the mouth of the cave illuminated her scarlet, belled skirt and the golden serpents around her wrists.
The nearness of her numbed me like a draught of wolf’s-bane. At last I said: “Is it going well in Knossos? The Achaeans have not returned?”
“Not yet. One day, I think, they will surely conquer us. But not soon. We shall have a little more time in which to deserve a little more time.”
“And Icarus is well?”
“He is a great hero. All the girls of Knossos are in love with him.”
“And he with them?”
“With none of them.”
“And you have come to tell me good-bye. It was kind of you, Thea.”
“To tell you good-bye? My poor, foolish Minotaur, I have come to go with you, and not out of kindness either!”
“But the sea is treacherous,” I cried. “Do you know the perils beyond the great pillars? The dog-headed monsters, the whirlpools, the clashing rocks—”
“It was I who chose your ships. The best in my father’s fleet—at least, in what is left of his fleet.”
“You will leave your father?”
“I have always loved him. But I came late to loving my mother. Now her people have called me.”
I seized her hand and brought it reverently to my lips. “I will be your eternal friend!”
“Friend indeed! I will come as your wife or your woman, but not your friend. How shall we meet except through the flesh? The soul must see through the body’s eyes and feel through the body’s fingers, or else it is blind and unfeeling.”
“You say that our bodies should meet. But you are beautiful—and I am a Beast.”
“Yes, a Beast like my own mother, and lordlier than any Man I have ever known! Do you know why I tried to eclipse you with clothes? Because you stirred me with feelings which had no place in my tidy garden of crocuses.”
She removed the signet ring I had given her in the forest and laid it lovingly and yet with great finality beside my scroll. “This, my most loved possession, I shall leave for the Goddess and in memory of my friends, the blue monkeys. Having found my Minotaur, I can part with his ring.”
With grave simplicity, she knelt at my feet. “Love has been a climbing for me, Eunostos. Now I have climbed until I can kneel to you.”
“No, no,” I pleaded. “You mustn’t kneel!” I lifted her from the earth and held her in my arms, and she kissed me with such a sweet and burning ardor that she might have been one of the naughty Dryads who have studied the secrets of love for three hundred years. I held her with fierce tenderness and without shame and knew that love is not, as some poets say, a raging brush fire, but a hearthfire, which burns hotly, it is true, but in order to warm the cold sea-caves of the heart and light its pools with anemones of radiance.
“If only,” I cried, “if only Icarus had come too!”
And of course he had, with Perdix.
The End
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Document creation date: 12.02.2012
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Day of the Minotaur mt-1 Page 14
