The White Bull (15 page)

My former patron, on being assured that I was present, soon found a chance to talk to me alone—I made no serious effort to avoid him, wanting to do my best to explain to him that I was guiltless in the matter of the downfall of his House.

The two of us encountered one another in near-darkness, with torches and naked dancers in the background. For the moment no one else was within hearing. Even in the darkness I could see that Minos had lost a considerable amount of weight, and that his face was haggard. His eyes gleamed with the sparks of the distant torches, and his clothing, that of an almost impoverished traveler, had been neglected.

"How is it with you, Daedalus?" King Minos's voice, far from being enraged, sounded uncharacteristically soft and almost wistful. There was nothing extreme in that voice—yet listening to it, I felt a chill, and understood why some who had talked to this man since he came to Sicily were certain that he was mad.

"It is well with me, great king." I bowed my head in fear, though here at Cocalus's court I felt—almost surely—that I was secure. "I have long feared the wrath of this great monarch of Crete."

"My wrath, Daedalus. No. No, all wrath has gone from me. Because I have listened to the teachings of the Bull, great is his wisdom. And the White Bull has told me that I must make peace with you, and with the king who has given you shelter." And here the King of Crete fell silent, gazing past me toward the firelight.

Having experienced the force of some of those teachings myself, I felt a shiver. But I said nothing.

"I have brought you a gift," King Minos went on at last, surprising me in no small measure. And he drew from inside his robe a small wooden chest, cunningly worked of several varieties of wood, inlaid and veneered together, and not much bigger than my two fists held together. He held the box out toward me, and made a gesture urging me to take it, and at last I did. The little chest was even lighter than I had somehow expected.

"Your Majesty is far too kind." I felt that was an appropriately logical reply to a completely mad speech.

"The gift is not only from me, but from my queen as well. And most especially it is from the White Bull, who sends his wishes that it may bring you the favor of all the gods of earth."

"I am glad to know that the Bull is still alive."

"Alive. Oh, yes. He is alive and teaching. He even told me to tell you that he regrets any harm that his bronze tool may have caused you or your son."

Muttering something that I cannot remember now, some confused statement in the nature of regrets or thanks, I ran my hands over the surface of the gift, which was hard to see clearly in the light of distant fires. The small coffer was closed by a tightly fastened lid. It was possibly of Egyptian workmanship, and I thought it must be of some considerable value in itself. The king had spoken of his gift in an almost reverent tone, as if it might be of truly enormous value. Certainly it was not nearly heavy enough to be full of gold.

"What is it, sire?" I asked.

"It is a sacrifice. If you offer it up properly, to the proper god, it will gain you—everything." And again the eyes of Minos glittered.

Again I thought some kind of madness trembled in his voice, and I was afraid.

"Daedalus," the king whispered.

;;Sire?"

"It will be better, perhaps, if you do not open your gift before you offer it as sacrifice. Better if you do not see what you are giving to the gods of earth. I brought it here—I brought it here to Crete…"

"Sire?"

Eventually the eyes of Minos came back to me. "… Daedalus?… yes. I brought the treasure here, to throw it with my own hands into Etna, that the benefit of the sacrifice might accrue to you, and to my brother Cocalus, and all his people. But the Fates have set their hands upon me, and my life is nearly finished."

I bowed my head.

"I owe you much, Daedalus. So now the gift, the sacrifice, is yours to make. Before you do so, you should first gather your friends about you. In particular your new patron and his daughters. It would be better if they were present too, that they may share more fully in the blessings of the goddess Gaea and the god Poseidon." The king's voice was growing stranger and stranger. "I shall tell Cocalus of the gift tonight."

"It shall be as you wish, Majesty," I murmured, feeling a great curiosity about the closed casket. At the same time I was in no great hurry to open it. I could wish that I had never accepted this particular gift, but the Fates had ordained otherwise, and now it was too late for such a wish.

The king was almost babbling. "I brought it here to Sicily to make sacrifice in my own interest. I was afraid that I would never see you again, Daedalus. But now I have seen you, and I have put the gift of the White Bull directly into your hands with my own." And then King Minos laughed; and presently, walking as if he were newly invigorated, he left me, and rejoined his host King Cocalus and the others who were watching the dancers.

For my part, I walked away in the other direction, with the small mysterious casket held in both my hands. Nothing moved inside the box when I shook it lightly, nothing made a sound. Sooner or later I would have to tell King Cocalus about it, but for the time being I took it to my lodgings and put it under my bed.

The visiting king was being lodged in the new wing of the modest palace, in the new apartment where only a few hours ago I had given the new plumbing its first complete test. From my own lodgings I went back to inspect the plumbing yet again. Everything, I thought, was in good working order; under the watchful care of a trusted servant, charcoal burned in the heater on the roof, keeping an ample supply of hot water in readiness.

Then I returned to the courtyard where the banquet was beginning. While it was in progress I failed somehow to find a good opportunity to revisit my own modest quarters and open the small chest. I ate moderately, and indulged only very lightly in wine. And as the hour grew late, before the King of Crete entered his guest quarters to retire, I returned yet again to his room to make a final inspection of the facilities. Something besides the gift was worrying me and I was not sure what.

The bath was as big as the bedroom, and contained a deep marble bathtub, almost an artificial pond, actually broad and deep enough for swimming. The tub was empty now, but it could be filled quickly, through the shower heads above it and the gold spouts and faucets at the side. All the newly designed fixtures were in readiness.

From somewhere out of sight I could hear a faint but steady drip of water; some imperfectly leaded pipe, I thought. Nothing worth bothering about tonight.

Yet I could not shake my restless mood. I tried my best to put away all thoughts of the secret gift of Minos and the Bull. Before retiring I took myself up to the roof once more, wanting to check yet again the new plumbing that had already been checked and tested a dozen times. I told myself that I feared some defect would show up, and that I would be blamed for it.

At the banquet Minos had spent a considerable time talking alone with Cocalus, and I worried about what the two kings might have decided in private, and if it had anything to do with me. Could their old enmity have been healed, and an alliance formed? Much would depend upon the attitude of the three Sicilian princesses toward their Cretan guest. They had attended the banquet too, of course, but I thought they might have been excluded from the discussions at the highest level.

The water tanks on the roof were not directly above the suite where Cocalus was lodging, but atop an adjoining wing of the palace, and the water from them went down through slanted pipes to the guest bathroom. Now I found an elderly slave tending the charcoal braziers that provided for hot water after sundown. The slave was doing a good job of keeping the fires up.

In fact it seemed to me that he was overdoing matters. I cautioned him: "No more fuel, or the water will start to boil and we'll have steam. That won't do at all."

The slave, like most of his class not afraid of me at all, stubbornly insisted that he had been ordered not to let the tank grow cool. But I persisted, and eventually persuaded him that some moderation in the fires was necessary.

From my vantage point on the roof beside the tanks, it was possible to see down at an angle through the roof-opening of a small atrium, directly into the very room where the visiting monarch was about to bathe.

Two or three other people were in the guest suite with Minos now. That would not have been surprising, but the people I observed were not the attendants who had been with him earlier. Nor were they concubines provided by his host. I experienced a chill near my heart when I saw that all three of the daughters of Cocalus had decided to pay Minos a nocturnal visit in his bath and bedroom.

I stood on the roof watching, wondering what this turn of events might portend for my future, while the princesses, who had come very informally dressed to begin with, delighted their royal guest by removing in turn certain items of their remaining clothing. Aglaia had come equipped with a set of pan-pipes, or had found them in the apartment, and piped a cheerful air with creditable skill. Meanwhile her sisters performed a teasing dance, that led their royal partner on a circuitous route through the room of the suite, ending in the new bath. At about this time I realized that the sisters had even persuaded Minos to send his personal bodyguards out of the room.

Now it appeared that the princesses were preparing to share with the befuddled king the inaugural bath of the new Daedalian plumbing. Some at least of the faucets had been opened, and a pond of steaming water was swelling up rapidly in the great tub. I wanted to leave my observation post—could they possibly discover that I was watching?—and at the same time I thought it vitally important to my own future that I know what was going on.

Meanwhile the hot water was still pouring heavily into the huge tub. From the way it steamed, it was easy to see that the admixture of cold water must be very small or nonexistent. I saw this, and yet in my simple artisan's innocence, I did not yet begin to understand.

Now Minos, himself naked, had been allowed to capture all three of his softly playful quarry. All were standing crowded together near the tub. With much laughter and energetic gestures the three girls, themselves in the last stages of disrobing, were assuring him that the bath facilities had already been tested. Suddenly for some reason I thought that they were talking about me. It was certainly not impossible that my name should have been mentioned, for the plumbing they were about to enjoy was mine, as was that which Minos was accustomed to using at home.

Only now did I fully realize that the sisters had managed to dismiss all of the slaves who would usually have been in attendance at a bath, their own as well as Minos's.

Minos was standing beside the sunken tub and fondling one of the sisters—I do not now remember which one—when the other two moved even closer to them, each of the two taking the monarch by one of his arms. In that moment, at last, I understood, too late to have done anything had there been anything for me to do. In the next moment, just after my shock of realization, the man had been tipped and pushed straight into the scalding water. A scream the like of which I have seldom heard tore out into the night.

Then, when Minos screamed again, and would have scrambled out of the burning tub, his three soft lovely killers shoved him fiercely back, with shrieks of laughter, so that the King of Crete, howling most pitiably, slid down the smooth and slippery side of the great tub, slid back helplessly into the steam and the murderous heat.

And now Euphrosyne was turning on yet another of the multiple shower heads, spouting yet more almost-boiling water in upon the helpless victim.

That was the last event inside the bath that I saw from the roof. In another moment I had broken free of my momentary paralysis and was scrambling down the nearest ladder, adding my own cries of alarm to the uproar Minos was still making. Charging into the nearest ground-level entrance of the palace, I turned toward the guest quarters. The door to Minos's private suite was latched, but Minos's Cretan bodyguards burst it open even as I arrived behind them.

I was next into the bathroom after them, and like them I was too late to be of the least help to the victim. By this time the three princesses had somehow disappeared.

Looping towels and sheets around the king's body where it floated, the Cretans and I dragged him from the still almost-boiling water. The soul of the victim had not yet quite departed, but he looked at us through eyes that seemed already to be peering from another world; it was obvious to me, from my first close look at the corpse-like whiteness of his steamed and parboiled body, that the King of Crete was already a dead man.

We laid him at full length on the tiles of the bathroom floor, and stood around him. There was nothing further we could do.

At the moment Minos did not seem to be in pain. He recognized me.

"Daedalus?"

"Sire, if there is anything that I—"

"Swear something to me, Daedalus." Word by word, the voice of Minos was sinking into a poisoned whisper.

"Anything, my lord." At such moments are rash words uttered that shock the gods.

"The gift I gave you…"

"Yes, Your Majesty."

"I want you to swear to me, Daedalus… that the gift I have brought you from myself, my queen, and the White Bull… swear by all you hold holy, that it will be sacrificed to the goddess and the god of earth, as I told you."

"I swear that it shall be as you say."

By now the three sisters, who had been nowhere in sight when the bodyguards and I burst in, had reappeared again. They were all wrapped in matrons' robes, as if they had retired decently for the night and then had been roused by the disturbance. And they were talking, sounding petulantly upset as at the spoiling of a party. They bustled about in the bathroom, giving irrelevant orders to the servants, who had also reappeared, and vaguely complaining that one of the slaves must be to blame for the tragic scalding.