THE MURDER OF ICARUS

The world was mourning, Daedalus’ brave but headstrong and foolish son had perished. The father wore black in his new home in Sicily, far from the shores of brilliant, prodigal Crete which had been his prison before his daring escape. The father with tears dripping from his eyes and digging like worms into his unkempt white beard said, "Only half of me has escaped. I would be more whole if I had lost my arm or leg. My son, my son!" The king and his advisers and his statesmen and his generals gathered around the renowned inventor with condolences, while beautiful women were sent to try to soothe him in the night, to heal his soul with their soft hands, always searching in the dark for broken things. A workshop was set up for him, with tables and tools and windows that were great friends of the light, for when he might be ready to work again. Perhaps the sound of his hammers making new inventions could do for him what the best lovers of the land could not!

While the whole of Sicily, which was held precariously and lovingly in valleys beneath impetuous volcanoes, trying to live in green obliviousness in the place where the gods made their armor, hung its head in sorrow for the loss of the great inventor, the second judge of the high court noted how quickly Daedalus’ lost eyes became sharp with only a drop of wine. Some men when they drink lose their inhibitions, and lunge at women like dogs; some become bears and stand up on their hind legs to fight; some forget that they are men and weep; some stagger, no longer able to walk the straight line of a lie.

The second judge knew he was alone on Sicily, that everyone else in the kingdom wished to embrace the grief of Daedalus, but he swore that there were times when he saw craft rather than passion in the tragic refugee’s eyes; he saw a man beating gold leaf with a hammer, not a man who had lost everything in a disaster.

"He does not need to be unhappy," the first judge told the second, "and you have no right to demand it of him. If you are right about what you have seen, why can’t it mean that he is merely wiser than the rest of us, that he does not mourn the lake that has dried up because he knows it will return as rain? And what of freedom, does it have no value? Though he has lost a son, he has gained freedom. He is no longer a prisoner of the labyrinth, no longer a tortured spectator of his confinement, with all the sea and sky laughing at him as he lived on a cliff from which he could not descend. Imagine, to be a captive of the heights! Sometimes the lash of wide-open windows is worse than the bite of a whip!"

But the second judge said, "Superior, I do not wish to close the case, to sign the papers that will forever define this as a misadventure. I want permission to investigate."

"Are you saying that Daedalus neglected Icarus, his son? That he should be accused of recklessly endangering his welfare, or perhaps even of negligent manslaughter? Remember, they were both prisoners, and King Minos was unpredictable. Men who have the power of a god most always are. With his ships swarming all over the Mediterranean like sharks, and the bowels of his palace filled with slaves fed to the razor-sharp horns of bulls, what safety was there for a young boy there? What guarantee that Icarus would not, himself, be dragged into the sunlit pit to leap over bulls for the amusement of the jewel-clad courtiers and priests, until one day he leapt not far enough, and perished like a bird caught on the ground by a cat? Daedalus had to risk escape!"

But the second judge said, "No, Superior, I do not wish to accuse Daedalus of reckless endangerment nor of negligent homicide. The escape made sense. I only wish to make sure that he did not murder Icarus along the way!"

With eyes notably enlarged by amazement, the first judge said, "But Daedalus has wept! He has wept!"

"Perhaps it is for the soul he has damned," the second judge said. "I have not eaten at the same table with him, so I am not yet bound to suppress my instincts. When I approach this grief of his, I smell something that I cannot see, something not as fresh as the sea, not as wholesome as bread being baked; the odor of sulfur coming from the earth, something that might drive a priestess mad and make her scream secrets to the deaf. You know my instincts, Superior."

"I do. You knew it when they bribed the Oracle, you told us not to trust words that were meant to doom us. You knew it, also, when the traitor killed the sacred sheep to bring a curse upon the land."

"My instincts are once more walking in the night," the second judge told him, "but they are still harmless. They are like a mighty archer, who has no arrows in his quiver. I need facts. I need permission to sail to Crete, to return to the scene of the disaster."

The first judge said: "I will write the orders at once, and have them affixed with the seal of the king."

*********

The Mediterranean is like a house filled with ghosts, no other body of water in the world has so much history, so much power in every protruding rock, in every cloak of mist it wears upon its shoulders. Every hour away from home offers death and gold, the arms of a goddess who will love you or a voice that will never let you go. Here are strange islands like huge white rocks made to help the sun blind men, with dark shadows clinging to the sides that might be caves, and yet, you cannot give them too wide a berth, for then the hungry mouth of the waves will open wide to devour you, or the sudden tantrums of gods in the shape of the wind will crash into you far from shelter. Their shouts are like hammers that splinter ships, they have no need to learn to be wise, to give up the sensuality of their tempers. There are creatures with six arms and an insatiable hunger hiding in the dark, mermaids who will crush you like bears with their delicate arms, bite your head off with a kiss and sink you to the bottom of the sea with the heavy stone of your love for them; there are witches who could put dragons to sleep or turn men into pigs, there are hags with the wings of bats who will not let you eat, giant monsters with one eye who have no more regard for you than you have for sheep, men who kill themselves with visions, and pirates who ambush adventurers, waiting at the entrance of the mine to steal gold brought up from the depths of the earth. There are men who are half-animals, drunk on wine; creatures that were made from lions, goats, and bulls that learned how to live together in one body only by hating everything else; women who reject men by firing arrows into their hearts, and glimpses of naked maidens rushing into the sea foam pursued by bulls, and of laughing gods riding by on porpoises. When you close your eyes to wash away insanity, and then open them again, you see only a vast blue sea that will not talk.

*********

On this sea, the second judge rode in a swift black ship, like an arrow driven by his sense of justice, towards the rocky crags of Crete, the fierce and brilliant island where the mystery had begun. A sailor on a ship, which had stopped by a small piece of rock for drinking water, thanked the Sicilians for not being pirates, and told the second judge: "One day’s sail from here, there is a small island filled with goats, tended only by an old man, not kind enough to love, not wealthy enough to disturb. He lives there with his daughter, a twisted wreck of a thing who no man wants. She seems broken, like Bellerephon when he was struck from Pegasus the winged horse by lightning, for men trying to be gods is a sin; and Zeus was right to destroy him, as he was right to chain Prometheus to a stake and to torment him with an eagle every day. The girl, who her own father calls ‘Broken’, is more pitiful, however, for she was not crushed by heaven for some great deed, nor for some envy- producing virtue such as pride or beauty, but merely because the gods became bored by the human form, like pot-makers tired of the mold that chokes the art of their hand. They drank too much on the night she was born and said let us break the mold inside her mother’s belly and fashion her with our drunken hands. And so they did, and her mother died of grief to see what a ruined creature she had brought into the world."

The second judge asked the sailor, "So far you have only told me of the sorrow that belongs to this island. What does it offer of Daedalus and Icarus?"

The sailor said: "Two witnesses, for both of them saw them flying by. And a piece of the wing. On the beach near where they live is where it washed up."

The second judge thanked the sailor, pressing a silver coin into his hand.

"Thank you, Sir. May the Gods favor you."

**********

The old man and Broken stood waiting for him on the beach, they could see the ship coming in for miles, like a holiday approaching slowly through days marked on a calendar. They could not hide the fact that their lives were boring, and that they would greet a man who was penniless and mute with the same enthusiasm that they greeted a storyteller or a king. Just to see another face – for them, any sea-weathered, wizened face was like the Acropolis. When they found out what the second judge wanted, they were overjoyed, for it meant that, for one moment in their lives, they would be important.

"It’s a pity," said the old man, shaking his head, though the only tragedy he had to compare it with was the death of a wife who he never really loved and the birth of a daughter who he detested. "A shame what happened. Do you believe we were the only ones to see it?"

The whole world knew the story, but only from the tongue of Daedalus. He and his son Icarus had been held prisoner by King Minos of Crete. The great inventor, a refugee from Athens, had at first been welcomed by the King. Who would not have been elated at the arrival of such a gifted mechanic, such a visionary artisan and builder of machines, to one’s court? But then, strange things had begun to happen. There were rumors of sordid goings-on between Queen Pasiphae and Daedalus, and then the accusation of treason as Daedalus helped the King’s daughter, Ariadne, to save the Athenian prince Theseus who was imprisoned in the Labyrinth. Daedalus and Icarus, his son by a Cretan slave, were confined to the Labyrinth as a punishment, but escaped. However, they could not escape from Crete itself, which was an island protected by the wildness and broadness of the ocean and by the prowling, unforgiving ships of Minos. To escape, there was but one path: the sky! And so, master inventor that he was, Daedalus built two pairs of wings made of feathers, some of the feathers threaded together, and others held in place by wax. As the heartbroken Daedalus recalled it, he told his son, "Fly neither too high nor too low. For if you fly too high the heat of the sun will melt the wax that holds your feathers in place; your wings will come apart and you will plunge into the sea; while if you fly too low, the moisture from the waves will make the feathers heavy and your wings will fail; you will be dragged by their weight into the sea and drown." And with these words, the two of them leapt off of their hiding place, a cliff by the sea, and flew like birds into the sky, away from the dark land which hungered for them. But Icarus, headstrong, exuberant youth that he was, would not listen to the wise counsel of his father. Euphoric and thrilled by the experience of flight, he could not restrain himself from climbing upwards towards the sun, from conquering greater heights and seeing more of the world as it shrunk in size with every gigantic beat of his wings. Until, at last, the inevitable happened. The nearby fire of the sun loosened the form of the wax which held his wings together, they grew weak and suddenly came undone, he fell like a comet into the sea. Desperate, horrified, Daedalus, who had been leading the way, circled back and searched for his missing son, but all he could find were feathers floating on the surface of the sea; and he knew that his dear child had succumbed to ambition he was not equal to.

"What did you see?" the second judge asked the old man, dying of curiosity to hear the story, for the first time, from someone other than Daedalus.

"The two of them were flying over there," he said, pointing out towards the sea. With his hands he indicated their size. "They were about this size to our eyes, we could see them clearly, men with wings."

"I saw them first," the girl said. The second judge found her hard to look at, and hard not to look at, she stooped like an abused donkey in the body of a woman and dragged one leg behind her like a log as she walked; one of her arms was half-withdrawn into her body, shriveled up or merely disgusted with the world and expressing that disgust with its appearance; she spoke with slurred, animal-like words, as though she were something else pretending to be human, and yet her face was pretty with shining eyes, that seemed trapped in the wreckage of her body. She was like the head of a goddess sewn onto a mangled corpse, frightfully alive though the rest of her was dead. "Icarus – he was beautiful! A beautiful boy with golden hair!" she said in words that one’s mind somehow managed to put together several seconds after they were spoken.

"Nonsense!" the old man exclaimed. "We couldn’t see their faces clearly! For her, appearing as she does, a dog has the beauty of Adonis!"

"What is missing from my body has gone to my mind and eyes," she told the second judge. "I saw Icarus clearly. His face was beautiful. But it was troubled. Something was about to go wrong."

"Can you describe their position relative to each other as they were flying?" the second judge asked the old man.

"Certainly," he said. "The father was out in front, flying low, but not too low, maybe one hundred yards above the sea. Right out there. The boy was far behind him and flying much higher, up there. They were not both visible at once, you had to look first at one, then turn and tilt your head to look at the other. That was how far apart they were."

"And then what happened?"

"My daughter called to me to tell me that the boy was in trouble. So I looked over there."

"My heart was pounding!" the girl exclaimed.

"And what did you see?" the second judge asked.

"I saw him twisting and turning and flapping his wings," replied the father. "He was like a man losing his balance on wet stones, except that these wet stones were in the sky. He tried to stay on his feet – I mean his feet in the sky. You know what I mean?"

"Yes, of course."

"But he could not. All of a sudden, he began to fall."

"My heart fell with him!" cried the girl.

"He tried to stop himself, he seemed to try to stretch his body out, to turn himself into a leaf that might flutter to the ground, but his winged arms were suddenly thrown back with tremendous force. It was an unnatural angle, his arms must have been broken, even pulled out of their sockets, he pointed downwards like an arrow, streamlined to die, and began to plummet."

"He tried," the girl wept. "He tried to live!"

"His wings showed signs of life," the father agreed. "Every once in a while, they fluttered, they crept back into the rushing streams of air which whipped them shut again. Clouds of feathers trailed out from behind him, like smoke from a fire, as he fell. He crashed into the sea over there. There was a huge splash, beautiful really, like a fountain turned on by the Nereids that lasted only for the moment of his death. Broken, don’t cry, tears only call attention to your deformity."

"He was so beautiful!"

"Too beautiful for you. With golden hair, as you say, and wings! You should have rejoiced at his catastrophe, Broken, for when he hit the ocean at such speed his body must have become nearly as mangled as yours, brought back within your reach. I am sure if his shattered corpse had washed up on the beach, you would have made love to it. "

The second judge was as disturbed by the father’s cruelty, expressed with the same ease with which one asks a servant for a glass of water, as he was by the girl’s frightening, damaged form. "What did Daedalus do while all this was taking place?" he asked, fleeing from a tragedy without a following to one that would be remembered by all the world.

"Nothing!" the girl spat. "Fathers!"

"Go feed the goats!" the old man ordered. She took a few steps back towards the hills, then waited.

"Daedalus?" the second judge asked, dragging her father’s eyes back to him.

"He heard his son screaming."

"Icarus screamed?"

"He did."

"What did he say?"

"Who could hear? The falling, the wind. It sounded like a bird being cut with a knife while it was still alive. It was just pain, pure pain, no words. Like they were cutting off its wing."

"He said ‘Help!’," the girl said. "Then ‘Father!’, then ‘Naucrate! Naucrate!’"

"The slave girl who was his mother," the second judge explained.

"Daedalus looked over his shoulder," the old man said. "He beat his wings, rose higher, banked, and circled back towards the place his son had fallen. He glided past it once, then maneuvered to glide past it again."

"The feathers were like flowers scattered across the waves," said Broken. "Icarus was buried in Poseidon’s palace. Though he died knocking on the door of the sun, it was the sea that let him in."

"And then?" asked the second judge, remaining with the narrative of the father.

"Seeing that his son had perished, he gave a mighty beat of his wings, and rose to catch a current of air taking him westwards towards the wild shores of Italy, where Greeks too lonely for Greece lose themselves in a new beginning. Once he had caught the current of air, he just lay there in the sky with his wings outstretched, disappearing into the horizon. And that was the end of it. Except for the wing that washed up on the shore."

"Do you still have it?" the second judge asked.

"Do not take it!" the girl cried.

The father raised his hand and took a step towards her as if to strike her.

"I will not take it," the second judge promised. "I only wish to examine it."

**********

It was night time, they were eating meat off of a spit turning around in a blazing fire, outside the old man’s battered abode and the daughter’s pitiful hut; they would inspect the wing in the morning.

"What reason is there to continue the investigation?" asked the second judge’s assistant. "The eyewitnesses have essentially corroborated Daedalus’ story. If they had seen him strangling Icarus in the air, or plunging a dagger into his back, or pushing him out of an airstream and causing him to plummet out of control into the sea… But they saw the disaster with their own eyes, and Daedalus and Icarus never touched, they were never even close to each other! Why even look at the wing? You don’t believe the old man?"

"There are many ways to murder," the second judge said.

The assistant looked at him, puzzled. Then he said, in amazement: "The wing? You think Daedalus gave Icarus faulty wings?!"

**********

As dawn broke over the miserable little island, unable to deny it the light which it had come to give to the rest of the world, Broken led the investigators up a rugged little trail with a few trees, which were cursing the seeds that had brought them here, clinging to the rocks. Because the way up was torturous for one of her limited physical means, the second judge helped her, discovering, to his discomfort, that she seemed to relish his hands upon her body; in fact, she tried to push herself closer against him as he assisted her up the slope, and seemed so unfamiliar with her body that she did not think he would notice. At the top of the trail, in a little grove of olive trees with stretched-out branches seemingly crying for succor, they came upon a thatched shelter she had built, a kind of temple in which she had laid the wing, which she prayed to every day. Her father despised the religion his daughter had invented: the absurdity of a cripple praying to a wing, when there were goats to follow through the rocks!

"Please – treat it well," she begged them. "It is all I have. This wing, and the goat bells, which are, for me, the lyre of Orpheus. And the sea, which is the grave of my beloved."

The second judge assured her he would treat the wing with reverence; and carefully, with the aid of his assistant, as though it were made of dust which might fall apart in their hands, they brought it out of the shelter and into the plain light of day.

"It’s a fragment," the second judge noted.

"Most of the wing no doubt disintegrated in the plunge," the assistant reminded him; but the judge did not want to reel in his eyes, not yet.

"These feathers, here," the second judge said, carefully examining the form and texture of what remained, "are the feathers of terns and gulls, and they were woven together with thread in the manner of a quilt."

"Daedalus said as much," the assistant said. "The larger feathers were threaded together. The rest of the wing, which was made of wax and filled with carefully layered arrays of smaller feathers, must have melted and fallen off; disintegrated, as Icarus approached the sun. The part of the wing lost from the melting wax must have wrecked the structure of the wing as a whole: this section which is still intact could not sustain nor control the flight by itself, and, in fact, is likely to have become separated from the wing as the stress on it increased."

"According to the eyewitnesses, Icarus still had his wings when he hit the sea; they simply would not keep him in the sky."

"Agreed," the assistant said, "but the wings had been in the process of coming apart. They saw a trail of feathers behind him. The wings were present, as fragments, but inoperable."

Holding the wing with intimate attention, like a man reading a book that means more to him than what is left to him in life - gently caressing the feathers like the hair of a lover in the night who he does not wish to waken – the second judge said: "The thread here is not secured, and many of the holes through which it should have been drawn have been bypassed. The structure is flawed, poorly crafted."

The assistant bent down closer to look at where the second judge’s finger was pointing. After a moment he said: "So it is, or seems to be…"

"As you can see, a lot of air would be penetrating the wing at this point. The wing’s ability to bear the weight of Icarus would be compromised."

"And yet it did bear him," protested the assistant, "and, if the eyewitnesses are to be believed, it bore him up to the threshold of heaven, until he almost wore the burning sun as his crown. Perhaps the threading came loose as the stress on this part of the wing was increased by the collapse of the rest of the wing – as he struggled to brake his fall by stretching his wings out into the sky he was plunging through."

The second judge, continuing to coddle the wing, nodded. "There are obvious signs of damage from the plunge. But look here – these holes are ripped, and here the thread is torn. But in this place – right here – the holes are not ripped through, nor is the thread – as you can see from this strand – torn. This part of the wing was never properly constructed."

The assistant felt anxious, he wished the case to be closed quickly, without drama or complication. He would not suppress the truth to obtain peace of mind, but why chase exotic alternatives when there was an obvious and popular solution? "However flawed the workmanship, it did not prevent Icarus from successfully flying from Crete to here."

"True," admitted the second judge, "but perhaps the wing was calculated to slowly come apart as he flew. Perhaps the wing was not constructed to catastrophically fail at the outset, but to gradually wear out over time. And here - right here," he said, pointing to the sea beyond them, "is where it finally ceased to function."

"Wax!" the assistant discovered, hopefully.

The second judge looked closer. Indeed, there were traces of melted wax along the rim of the feather quilt, and below it, signs of the rest of the wing that was no longer there, forensic gestures of support for the version of the tragedy which Daedalus had made famous throughout the world.

"In all events," said the assistant, "this wing is not enough to prove a thing! Icarus’ death may just as probably, and in fact is more likely to be, the result of melting wax than poorly threaded feathers."

"Perhaps it may indicate intention," suggested the second judge. As the assistant only looked at him, needing the insinuation to be made explicit, he explained: "The intention to kill."

But the assistant just shook his head. "We cannot infer that either, your honor. Perhaps they were in a rush. Perhaps they had been discovered by the agents of Minos. Perhaps they had to leave before Daedalus had time to perfect Icarus’ wings. This fragment of a wing reveals neither the physics of the wing’s demise, nor Daedalus’ attitude towards his son. We cannot make such leaps to a man’s ruin!"

The second judge smiled. He knew the rules of evidence, the difference between the tiny traces, the specks of factual dust, which nourished his intuition, and the hard weight of indisputable truths needed by the court to condemn a man. He ordered a scribe from the ship to make intricately detailed sketches of the wings, and had the testimony of the witnesses put into writing.

"Here," he told Broken, at the end of their visit on the little island which had no claim to glory but for the fact that a man who tried to fly died within its sight: "here is the wing you pray to." As though it were a holy relic, he and his assistant placed it gently back into the wretched shelter that was the only temple she could make for it.

"Please," she whispered to him before they left: "make love to me before you go! You are a man who seeks justice! It is unjust that my soul is trapped in such a broken body! You can right the wrong! Give me one more thing worth remembering on this lonely island. Just one little bite of reality to feed my daydreams for the next twenty years! I doubt I shall last any longer than that."

The second judge did not know what to do or say. Finally, he said, "It would not be right of me to use you and leave you. To make you long for me, and stare at the sea wondering where I am for the rest of your life."

"No," she said. "Do not flee from me by being kind. It is I who will use you. I who will haunt you for the rest of your life, like a monster whose image you cannot rid yourself of, because I want to cheat my destiny and have one moment of happiness!" And she added, "You will not be you, I will close my eyes, and dream that I am making love to Icarus! The sin will be his, not yours!"

Some hours later, sweating and disturbed, the second judge, whose sense of right was not easy to appease, appeared back on the beach where the ship was waiting to leave. The pursuit of justice was a terrible thing: like seeking an orgasm in the arms of the night!

**********

"Why?" the assistant asked him, as their ship coasted slowly through the darkness towards the island of Crete. "Why do you persist in investigating this case? We have nothing conclusive in our hands, and are unlikely to find any evidence more relevant than that which has already proved insufficient to convict, or to even indict. It is all your intuition. Of course, I respect your intuition, your honor, but just because you believe in something strongly does not mean that others are compelled to agree, or will agree. And now we are headed towards the kingdom of Minos – a fierce and unpredictable ruler who could just as easily have us put to death as welcome our investigation."

For a time, they looked together at the stars by which the ship was steered, and listened to the billowing of the sails and the creaking of the wood, and the splash of the sea all around the ship, caressing it, exploring it. The assistant drew his woolen mantle more tightly about himself, then asked the second judge: "Your honor, may I ask you a personal question?"

He saw the second judge nodding in the darkness.

"Why? Why are we doing this? Is it pride? Will you lose face if your intuition is wrong this time? Or lose your trust in it? Or is this about your father? Was your own father a tyrant, did he try to kill you in some way, to shear off some inner flower, to snuff out the candle of a dream? Must Daedalus fall to prove that fathers are not invulnerable, and that their sins are not untouchable!? Or is it history? History that impels you? Will you not let a man rise above his past, will you not let Daedalus step free of the one day he wishes had never happened?"

The second judge smiled, though the assistant could not see it in the dark, and after a while he said: "A dog can smell things that people cannot. We see the forest and know nothing of it except for the trees that hide everything that is in it. The dog already knows what is inside it: the deer, the wild boar, the bear, the bandit. My intuition is like that. Like the nose of a dog. I can smell what is inside the forest of a man, past the towering trees of a smile, or the green leaves of a tear. Daedalus bears a great sin on his shoulders. One far newer than Talos!"

Talos was the name of Daedalus’ nephew, the son of his sister Polycaste. Early in his career, as a brilliant and flourishing craftsman in Athens, Daedalus had been surprised by the talent of Talos, an up-and-coming artisan, whose accomplishments, even at the tender age of twelve, quickly swelled to rival that of his more famous uncle. Not only did Talos invent the potter’s wheel and the mechanical compass, used to draw the perfect circle, but he also claimed to have invented the saw, after having discovered the jawbone of a serpent lying on the ground which inspired him to make one of his own in iron. Daedalus disputed his nephew’s claim, insisting that he had created the invention first. Finally, one night, consumed by a fiery fit of jealousy which was, nonetheless, cool enough to shape into a plan, Daedalus led his young nephew up to the roof of Athena’s temple, and as they looked together at the majestic stars, he pushed him off of it to his death. Hurrying down from the temple in the night, he dumped the body into a bag, but he was discovered soon afterwards as he dragged it towards the site where he intended to bury it. Suspicions citizens, patrolling the streets against robbers, saw him struggling with the weight, and noted the bloodstains leaking out from it. At his trial, Daedalus claimed that he had slain his nephew to defend the honor of his sister, who the child, not only precocious with inventions it seemed, had taken to bed in an abominable act of incest. In shame, Polycaste hung herself. But the judges of Daedalus, and the city as a whole, did not accept his pious pretext, they found him guilty of murdering his nephew in order to save himself from being eclipsed by the young protégé who was about to surpass him. It was not a holy act done on behalf of the gods, but a wretched act born of envy, the hateful act of clouds which wish to hide the sun, and they would not have such a man living in their midst, no matter how talented, no matter how brilliant. Daedalus’ punishment was to be banished from Athens for life, and that is how he ended up on Crete, seeking a second chance from King Minos, who was willing to provide him with a sanctuary from the loathing of the Greeks; to risk a sinner in his midst, for the glory of the inventions he could make.

"We are all sinners in one way or another," mused the assistant. "That is Daedalus’ great sin, and it is behind him. Legally, he was prosecuted and punished by Athens, and the case is closed. He has paid the price demanded by the law for what he did to Talos, and morally, since then, he has risen far above the man he was. Do we have the right to attack him on the summit of the new man he is, to grab him by the ankles of his past and try to drag him down from the progress he has made? Do you wish to avenge Talos through Icarus?"

But the second judge only shook his head. "There is no more justice for Talos in this world," the second judge said. "He has got all that he will get. This is about Icarus. What if Daedalus has not grown as much as you believe? What if his progress has really been nothing more than the absence of Talos? If there are only stones around, the lion will not eat, he will merely lie down on the ground and you will say, ‘How tame the lion has become! He has changed, he is no longer a beast!’ But see what happens when a deer wanders into the picture! That is when you will see how deep the lion’s reform really goes!"

"And Icarus, you think, was the deer?"

The second judge did not answer, but his silence was a kind of answer.

"But did he have talent? Could he have in anyway been Daedalus’ rival? In any way a threat to him?"

Once again, the second judge did not speak; the ship heading towards Crete, towards the frightening island where the answers might lie spoke for him.

One more time, the assistant protested: "Even if we find a motive, what of the mechanics? The mechanics of the murder!? There is no indication from the eyewitnesses, nor any substantial proof from the condition of the wing which we examined! Even if we find out that Daedalus hated Icarus! Even if we find out that Icarus was about to invent a candle that never stops burning, or a chariot that needs no horses, or a book that speaks, or a ladder that reaches up to heaven, even if we can demonstrate that Daedalus was seething with jealousy against his son, there will be no way to connect the motive to any identifiable crime! There is no way to get beyond the plausibility of a misadventure!"

"One day, I was late, late for a very important appointment at the court," the second judge said, a long story, most likely with a purpose, beginning to form beneath the stars. "The wheel of my chariot was loose and I could no longer travel in it. I had evidence for a very important case. Oh no, I thought, I must get to the court before the sun is at its peak, or the case will be lost! But how? I am running out of time! Of course, the solution was to unhitch one of the horses. As my servant remained behind with the chariot, I mounted the horse and began to ride into town. But the horse fell into a pit, injuring its ankle. It was lame, and I tethered it to a tree along the way. I was shaken up but unhurt. But the time! The time!"

"Surely, by now, you must have thought the gods were against you in this case," the assistant suggested.

"Not at all," the second judge replied. "I thought, they have put my dedication to what is good for society in the balance against the defendant’s dedication to what is good for himself at the expense of society. If justice does not have a will equal to that of the criminal, what will come of the world!? Still, I was on foot now and there was a great distance to go! A part of me felt like giving up. Like the man who is wounded in battle and falls down on the ground, not because he is not a patriot, but because he has been vanquished. Why hurl yourself against the impossible? But I thought, do not give up! Just continue on foot, continue walking as quickly as you can, even though it seems impossible to arrive on time, arrive the least late possible! And I persisted. I did not give up, I walked hard, developing a new admiration for horses as I struggled. Along the way, I tried to convince a man to let me up onto the back of his chariot. He accepted, but would not change the direction he was going, which was far from the court. So I continued walking. Then I asked a man if I might borrow his horse. I showed him the insignia of the court, but he said, ‘What if you are not in a hurry to convict a robber, as you say, but only to steal a horse?’ I was discouraged, but did not let that spirit take possession of my legs. I continued! I pushed myself! And when, at last, I arrived late at the court, I found out that I was not as late as I had supposed and that, in fact, there was still time to deliver the critical papers, due to certain unexpected delays which had occurred in the proceedings." After a moment allowed for the assistant to absorb the lesson, the second judge said: "Even when there does not appear to be hope, keep walking in the direction of hope. If you do not, you will never find what you are looking for. But if you do, there is a chance you will, even if it does not look at all like what you were expecting!"

**********

The Sicilian ship seemed so vulnerable as it rowed into the harbor waiting for it, escorted by sleek dark ships with menacing, bronze-studded prows and crews of tanned, powerful oarsmen who seemed like children of the sea.

"Welcome to Crete," said a warrior who met them on the shore, indicating that they should climb into the chariots provided for them to ride up the winding trail to the place where King Minos was waiting. "You will dine with us tonight," said the warrior, whose sword in the background whispered ‘I am here’ as he treated them with the utmost civility. "Tomorrow, we will discuss business. Do not bring it up today, do not sour the occasion by even mentioning the name of Daedalus."

Amazed, the crew from Sicily entered the spectacular palace, stunned by the mighty, decorated pillars, the golden statues of bulls, the walls painted with schools of dolphins diving in and out of the sparkling sea, and images of beautiful youths jumping over the backs of bulls. Gracious women, their naked breasts billowing out over the tops of colorful, layered costumes, smiled at them as they passed, their long hair falling over their shoulders in elaborate tresses. Servants led them to a room in which they were refreshed, stripped naked and bathed with water that flowed out of pipes, then massaged with olive oil, then given luxuriant robes and sent onwards towards the king. At this time, in Greece and in Sicily, men washed themselves with cold water out of jugs, and shit in holes dug in the ground. Here there were baths and flushing toilets. "We had these before the traitor came," the warrior told them. "He made things of convenience and power; before him we made things of joy."

King Minos, sitting on a high couch, smiled as they came. Here was the fearsome king, the tyrant of Knossos! His skin was tan, beautifully tan, his hair fell long and dark all the way down to the small of his back, his eyes blazed like suns made of black; there was terrible intelligence in those eyes, passion like lightning that could strike you down, cleverness and pride, but also the willingness to meet strangers if they could endure him looking into their soul. His might was evident, but it seemed more like a sword that only strikes its enemy than a fire that burns down everything around it. There was also something hurt in him, something in his eyes that revealed loss and disappointment through a certain soft quality in the rage that remained in him, he was like an eagle with a great scar, spreading expansive wings outwards from his pain. Beside him sat his queen, Pasiphae, beautiful but somehow disordered inside; glowing with shame, as if an inner moon that knew exactly who she really was, was shining from behind the clouds of her appearance; it was as though Minos’ high expectations of her had thrown her down into the mud, and both of them thought they were the only ones who could see her soiled. Together, they made a strange couple, regal yet sorrowful in each other’s presence, he unable to stop picking his wound, she like a porcupine, with quills made of his anger.

"Welcome to Knossos!" Minos told them, serving them with wine and delightful dishes of the sea, as he nodded his head at the servants, who were his hands. "So, you come from Sicily? From the western outposts of the Greeks? We will not discuss anything tonight, but the beauty of the sea and the power of the volcanoes. Here, too, on Crete, the people live under the shadow of a volcano. I am that volcano, but I only erupt when a law is broken. Tell me, have you seen Hephaestus there, by the Sicilian shore? Have you seen the sparks of his hammer, beating the armor of the Gods into shape in the fire of Vulcano Island? I wonder why the Gods need armor. What a God, eh?, that Hephaestus! How clever the way he caught his wife Aphrodite in infidelity by dropping a net down on her bed in the middle of the night!"

Pasiphae flinched, but in a royal sort of way, like a bird that falls lower in the sky as it flies, but quickly finds another current of air to carry it back to where it was.

"Your palace is astounding," the second judge told him.

"I know," said Minos, winking at him, then laughing. "Our ships have brought the whole world into reach; the treasures of a thousand lands flow like rivers into Crete. This is what humanity can be. The world can either learn from us, or destroy us. It can soar into heaven, which is but a wing-beat away, or lose a thousand years of history and crawl back to where we are, after generations have slithered through the dirt."

The second judge struggled not to drink too much wine, and Minos saw it. He smiled, once again. "Tomorrow we will talk," he said. "Tonight, we drink."

**********

The Minos who they met the next day was intense but not anxious, he was like a lion with powerful legs crouching in the grass, alert to everything that moved. He was not festive, but rather, dressed in a long black robe, his bare arms strong and sensuous. Beside him, garbed in a long purple garment, sat Pasiphae, distant and tired in advance, and at her feet, a maid and Naucrate, the mother of Icarus, still attractive though grief had greatly humbled her. Warriors and counselors were also in attendance.

The second judge sat before them, in a lower position than the Cretans, with his assistant and two scribes beside him.

"We have some questions to ask about Daedalus," the second judge began.

No one spoke.

"You are all aware of the events in question."

"Most regrettable," said Pasiphae.

Minos smiled fearfully. Then he said, "I am aware that nearly the whole Mediterranean has expressed its sympathy for this man, and cast me into the role of the terrible villain. Well – let me say something first. This wonderful man, this murderer who I provided a refuge to…"

"In spite of being a murderer," noted Pasiphae.

"… betrayed my trust. I never in any thing did him wrong before that. First – disgraceful ingrate that he was – he took advantage of my friendship to accost my wife."

The inner counselors and generals who knew this looked down at their feet. The common people did not know, and these men of rank could barely bear to know.

"You betrayed Poseidon," said Pasiphae.

"The white bull," he told them. "The beautiful white bull. Poseidon gave it to me as a gift. I was supposed to sacrifice it in the temple that we built to him. In that way, we would win the eternal favor of the sea which surrounds us, and is the source of all our might. Absolute power was in my hands. All I had to do was to kill the bull, to slit its throat by the altar of Poseidon as men held it down with ropes, and watch its blood drip into the sacrificial pot. But it was too beautiful. The white bull. I, who they call the monster of the Mediterranean, the tyrant of the sea, the slayer of the flower of Greece, I could not even kill this bull."

"You betrayed Poseidon," Pasiphae repeated.

"She says Poseidon brought a curse against her, to avenge himself against me. He made her fall in love with the white bull. Perverse woman, it was your own madness! Your own love of the bizarre, the insatiable lust of your sweet interior that longed for deeper pleasures than men could give! And that swine of an inventor, he entered into her sick world so that he might, as the only man capable of holding the hand of her shame, love the pieces of her after he had helped her to fall! He constructed for her a wooden bull and stationed her inside of it, naked like a whore, with her rear pressed against the opening, then lured the white bull to mount her and – shame! Shame of the ages! And that Daedalus, he was the one who made it possible!"

"It was Poseidon’s doing, he only served the god by giving me the means to manifest my longing. And have I not loved you well since then? And was it not better once I was freed of my obsession?"

"You loved him, too – and more," whispered Minos, bitterly: "Daedalus. For when I loved you, I drew back from what you had done; but the sin did not leave him with inhibitions. Instead, for him, loving you was a way of celebrating his cleverness. After the bull, I could never please you…"

"That is because you make love like a bull. Not all men do."

"Is it true that Daedalus built the Labyrinth?" the second judge asked, uncertain whether it was wise to step into this storm, but wishing to keep the meeting focused, or at least to prevent it from utterly collapsing as man and wife turned upon each other with hatred, or with pain which was far worse.

"He built the Labyrinth to contain the Minotaur," Minos said.

"My son," retorted Pasiphae.

"The shame of our lives! One half a bull, one half a man. He was a danger to us all…"

"It was your pride, Minos, your pride that hid him from the world! And the solitude that turned him into a beast!"

"He had to be locked away, shut away from humanity! Some called Daedalus a hero for building the labyrinth in which to keep the Minotaur – an intricate maze which only his mind of endless twists and turns could have conceived of – but what choice did he have? It was the very least he could do to atone for the perverse crime he had collaborated in producing – to protect the world from the monster he had created!"

"And what of the youths of Athens?" the second judge asked, while the assistant shuddered, fearful of such a delicate question which might trigger the rage of Minos, who held their lives in his hands.

"The seven young men and seven maidens who we brought every ninth year to sacrifice to the Minotaur, until Theseus killed him?"

"Poor children," said Pasiphae.

"They had to know what it was like!" exclaimed Minos, practically bleeding from something he had recalled. "My son – my dear, dear son! I, at least, loved my son!"

"On a visit to Athens, their foolish king, Aegeus, let our boy participate in a hunt too dangerous for his years, and he – he lost his life."

"Fool! Negligent fool!" exclaimed Minos. "As the Athenians made me suffer, I vowed to make them suffer – and to sacrifice the joy of their hearts, the light of their eyes, the most beautiful of their young, to the beast in the bowels of my palace! Yes, yes, I know! Ruthless! Who hasn’t called me that? But how easy it is to sin when you do not know what a sin entails! If the world felt hunger in its stomach, would it be indifferent to the man who starved? If every warrior could be turned into the mother of the man he raised his spear against, would there be war? I came to Athens as a teacher of dark things, to train their people never more to be careless with the hearts outside their city walls."

"You were cruel."

"The Minotaur who slaughtered them came from your womb!"

The silence was long and difficult, until at last Minos remembered where he had been in the narrative, and said: "Theseus came to kill the Minotaur, to ‘liberate’ Athens from me. He would not have succeeded, had he not seduced my daughter Ariadne, who was instructed by Daedalus to tell Theseus how to safely navigate his way through the Labyrinth by means of a ball of yarn, so that he did not become lost, as all others before him had, in the deadly reflection of the great inventor’s pathologically complex mind."

"My poor, half-human son," said Pasiphae. "Poor Greeks, poor Asterion."

"The name she gave to the Minotaur."

"Poor world. Why do we do this to each other? Why is there no end? Why do tears which should close the book only begin a new chapter?"

"You are idealistic as long as you are not empty." And he meant it in a crude, physical way.

"Minos, if your bed were a happier place, you would not need to mount the world."

"My bed is a wasteland; too many people have been in it." Then, finally ripping himself away from distress that was too personal, he said: "For this act of treason – for abetting the enemy, even after I forgave him for his perversity and for the ungrateful shadow of his lust, disguised as sympathy, which fell across my wife’s body – I banished Daedalus to live forever in his own twisted mind – in the Labyrinth he had built to constrain a beast that was hundred times better than he was. For at least the Minotaur did not pretend to be anything but a beast. Was that unjust, I ask you? Did I punish a guiltless man?"

"You sent Icarus along with him," said Naucrate, speaking up as Pasiphae touched her hair. "He was blameless."

"He was Daedalus’ son," said Minos. "How could I trust him? The son of a slave and a traitor? If the father is fallen, beware the revenge of the son!"

"They escaped from the Labyrinth," said the second judge.

"Thanks to the help of Pasiphae, and her maid here."

"We had nothing to do with it. He had invented the Labyrinth. What a foolish idea to attempt to imprison him in his own creation! Of course he found his way out. But not off of the island of Crete. The sea would not let him flee, not with your fleet patrolling every wave. That is when we helped him. We gave him shelter and food in the house on the cliff where he plotted his escape."

"Do you see what a monster I am?" demanded Minos. "What other king would not have put his wife and her maid to death for such treason? At least to have blinded them, and made them spend the rest of their lives in darkness, and in chains? Yet here I am, the cuckold king, the most powerful fool in all the world! Look at the beautiful jewels she is wearing. I have not even taken them away! It is I who some god has put a spell on – do you see Eros’ love arrow here?" he said, pounding his chest. "It has pierced the center of my pride!"

As the second judge watched his scribes rapidly scribbling down notes of the meeting into sections of the giant empty scrolls in their laps, it was clear that the character of Daedalus was not in any way being favored. The noble mystique fostered by his incredible inventions and by the tragic tale of his fatherhood was disappearing, leading them back to a very brilliant, very opportunistic man, unable or unwilling to resist the callings of the energy which had made him famous. This was not a man above suspicion. But that was still a long way from finding him a murderer.

**********

To draw the interview to the place where he now needed it to go, the second judge asked them: "What I need to know, now, is what kind of relationship Daedalus had with his son. How did the two of them get along? Were they close? Did they quarrel? Was there resentment, jealousy?"

"Most certainly, Icarus was a second Talos," said Minos.

"Why do you say that?" asked the second judge.

"Once a killer always a killer."

"Did the boy have talent?"

"Of course," his mother, Naucrate said.

"Could you describe his talent?"

"He was beautiful. Is that a talent?"

"Perhaps more a god’s talent than his. Did he have any others?"

"He had a talent for feeling."

"How so?"

"He was sensitive to the needs of others. If he saw you having trouble reaching for something, he came at once to help you. You did not have to speak. In the same way, if he saw you struggling with something heavy, he would come to share the burden with you. He listened to you lament, and did not become discouraged when you went around and around in circles, or when you wished for impossible things. He understood that listening was a way of holding you. He wept easily. He forgave just as easily. When a bee stung him, he said, ‘It’s all right; he has stung me, but he has also sweetened someone’s mouth with honey.’"

Minos just shook his head.

"Was he clever at invention?" asked the second judge. "At crafts? At using tools? In imagining machines or cutting jewels?"

"Not at all," said Pasiphae, interrupting the mother’s testimony. "He was a dreamy boy. While his father dug deep into the real world and changed things, the boy merely fantasized, and then he had no need to make a thing. He merely closed his eyes and he flew, he walked on the water, he waved his hand and fruits appeared on all the trees, he defeated the chimera and the Medusa like Perseus, he put to sleep the dragon that guarded the golden fleece like Medea. All in fantasies that did not leave a trace except for the far-off look in his eyes. He dreamt so strongly that he did not stir a leaf in the world outside of him. He did not need the real world as his father did, to brand it like a cow with the things he did for it, or to reap golden fields of praise. If he saw a stone, he would not invent the lever to move it, he would sit on it as it was. Daedalus could not be jealous of such a boy! Icarus was a threat to nothing except the placid surface of a lake in the summertime!"

"Was Daedalus ashamed of the boy?" asked the second judge, considering another possibility.

"No," said Naucrate. "The boy was beautiful, and he wasn’t slow-minded, even though many people think that the child of a slave should be. Was he dull?"

"No," said Pasiphae.

"No," agreed Minos. "He was very sharp, it is just that he seemed to prefer to be inside himself more than anywhere else."

"Unless someone was suffering," said his mother.

Now Pasiphae’s maid spoke. "That is very true," she said. "And that is the one time I ever heard them have a disagreement."

The second judge gave her all his attention.

"While they were living in a hut by the beach, before they moved to the house on the cliff where Daedalus actually constructed the wings, they would go out every night to collect feathers from the seabirds which lived along the beach. In fact, Daedalus left poisoned food along the beach, which he put down at dusk, and the queen and I, as well as Daedalus and Icarus, would come by to gather together the dead birds just before the dawn. I remember Icarus and his father having an argument about it."

"Do you remember what they said?" asked the second judge.

"Icarus said it was cruel, what they were doing. His father asked him, ‘Do you want to be free?’ And the boy told him, ‘It isn’t fair to the birds, they have as much right to fly as we do! Can our flight only be made from the theft of theirs?’"

"And then what?"

"Daedalus called him an impractical and sentimental fool, and said ‘Greatness is above fear: both physical fear and moral fear.’" She saw the second judge waiting for more and said, "That’s all."

But now, Pasiphae added: "The boy wanted to wait, to find feathers that had fallen off the birds, and to collect them without killing them. His father was in a rush and said that every day they remained on Crete they were in danger of being discovered. He had no time to be merciful with mere creatures." She hesitated for a moment, as though she did not want to say something more which was being regurgitated from her soul, rising up into her mouth, and practically being expelled from her like vomit.

The second judge saw her on the brink, and pushed her over the edge. "Please continue," he said.

Trembling, she said, "When they were on the house on the cliff, and it was actually time to make the wings, Daedalus was having problems. He had us bring him a tern which we had drugged, and placed inside a large basket. One day, as I came to visit him, I heard the angry shouts of Icarus, and the shrill and terrible sounds of a screaming bird, tearing my head to pieces with its agonized cry. I burst into the house and saw the injured tern, bound by a tether attached to its leg, lunging into walls and calling out to the gods, or so it seemed. One of its wings hung off to the side in an obviously damaged state, its very position seemed to have a voice. Icarus was lying against the wall holding his face as though he had just been struck, and Daedalus, who had just broken the bird’s wing as he twisted it to study it more closely was shouting, ‘I have learned all that I can from dead birds, and from birds flying in the sky! What is wrong with you, boy? Men have armies to fight for freedom, walls of spear-points moving through the fields, and you will not even face the pain of a bird! It must be your mother’s slave blood!’"

Naucrate winced to hear this, then said, "Daedalus is an arrogant man. He despised me, but I was lonely. I was like a speck of dust, happy to land on a piece of gold. I did not know he struck my son. My poor, harmless child!"

The light coming through the window was now beginning to wane.

The second judge asked Minos if his men had been close to capturing Daedalus on the day that he and Icarus took flight from the cliff where they had been hiding.

"No," he said. "Thanks to the heights of cleverness which love lifted her to, the queen had us looking in other places, convinced that she, herself, was a decoy."

Turning to Pasiphae, the second judge asked: "Did Daedalus believe that Minos was closing in?"

"He was always concerned with time," she said. "The longer he waited to escape, the greater was the chance of being discovered. But up until the very end, he felt secure in the integrity of his hiding place."

"He did not, then, leave under pressure?"

"No, in fact, the wings were ready one week before they left. He was able to wait for the perfect conditions to fly – fair weather and favorable winds."

"I understand," said the second judge, "that he left behind some notebooks – some journals and sketches."

"I will bring them to you tomorrow," Minos told the second judge. "But we have already looked at them, with translators and cryptic experts as well. Although we were mainly searching for a clue as to his destination, for it was our intention to track him down and make him pay for his crimes, we have read every word and looked at every picture. We found nothing that will be of interest to you. However, he removed many leafs from the books and must have thrown them into the fire before he left. Ashes of the truth must by now have fallen all over Thera, Naxos and Rhodes, and lighted like dust upon the sea. Only the Gods know what really happened. But I want this man to be punished. I will help you build a case against him, if need be, from lies. I will produce a hundred witnesses who will say they saw Daedalus plunge a dagger into his son’s back. Try him and kill him, so that I do not have to send my fleet into Sicilian waters to hunt him down and do it myself!"

And Minos, rising up like Poseidon from the sea, with his men splashing like waves around him, signaled that the audience was at an end. "At dawn," he said, "you will have the books." And he extended his hand to Pasiphae. She took it, then winced, for he was squeezing her hand, nearly breaking the bones in it as his eyes seared hers. Then, with a dangerous sensual look, with the unquenchable desire that lay at the bottom of his rage, he led her out towards the green pastures of the room that had broken his heart.

**********

The second judge and his assistant spent much of the night sitting by candles, comparing notes and throwing around ideas beneath the exaggerated shadows of the objects in their room. The assistant had returned to his former stance. Murder could not be proved. "Daedalus killed before as an act of domination," the assistant said. "He was jealous and afraid of being overtaken by Talos. To retain supremacy in his world, he had to eliminate the threat. Icarus was no threat, it seems. Daedalus was secure in his dominance, the boy lived in another world altogether, an inner world of fantasies. A lion has no need to challenge a dolphin. Let the dolphin swim the length and breadth of the sea; the lion is master of the land! I no longer see the motive for a murder. Perhaps Daedalus drove a sensitive soul to suicide, instead! Perhaps Icarus, with his strange deep feelings, felt guilty to use wings built from the suffering of so many birds, and deliberately flew towards the sun to kill himself. Perhaps he felt a mysterious bond with things destroyed, and must join them as an act of solidarity."

The second judge listened and took in the thoughts of his capable assistant. But still, his instincts could not be quieted. "For one thing, Daedalus has proved himself to be a liar," said the second judge. "He has portrayed Icarus as a reckless, spirited youth, driven to disobedience by an untamed spirit. He has portrayed him as a rebel, a boy mad to experience things, crazy to interact with the outside world, to jump into waters over his head. It seems that Icarus was, in truth, nothing like this. Why misrepresent him, if not to incline others towards believing the misadventure story, to cover up something else?"

"Still," pointed out the assistant, "the witnesses saw him soaring by the sun. Perhaps Icarus had more spirit than any of us give him credit for. Or perhaps he merely chose this moment to come out of his fantasy world, but without the knowledge of the real world needed to prevent that emergence from becoming catastrophic. Perhaps he had not taken enough steps in life to know what it meant to fall. Perhaps the first step he ever took was in the sky, and that is where he stumbled."

For a moment, the two of them sat in silence in the dark, each lost in his own thoughts, before the assistant exclaimed, one more time "But what motive? What motive?!"

The second judge said: "Perhaps he killed Icarus for the same reason he killed Talos. Only this Talos did not excite his envy with the saw, or the potter’s wheel, or the compass, or a brilliantly fashioned jewel, or a machine equal to a team of horses pulling a plow through a field, but with a soul that made his feel polluted. A soul whose purity exposed his degradation, and poisoned every star he had put into the sky. A soul which condemned the ladder of achievements with which he had tried to climb out of the pit of his vices without overcoming them; a soul which had shattered every brilliancy in his mask, with its humility. Talos’ inventions threatened to usurp Daedalus, to knock him off the pedestal of the world’s greatest inventor. Icarus’ soul would leave Daedalus unchallenged as the world’s greatest inventor, but strip away the pride and joy he derived from that position, by setting it in conflict against another standard. The king of the candles would meet the sun, the king of the insects with tiny buzzing wings would meet the albatross. To save the greatness he had won in the eyes of men, Daedalus must eliminate any other way of seeing the world! To be praised for the wings he had given man, he must destroy the man who was greater than those wings: the man whose soul already flew!"

The assistant admired the fertility of the second judge’s mind, the insights he could bring to the depths of the human heart. But it was still no case! Fine, a motive, perhaps: a poetic motive. But the proof?! What proof?!

The second judge said, "Tomorrow we will take a close look at the books, we will search for anything, even the footsteps of an ant across the page! If we find nothing, there is still the temple to Apollo at Cumae on the shores of southern Italy, the place where Daedalus left his wings in homage to the god after his successful escape from Crete. We will compare those wings with the fragment of Icarus’ wing which we have already studied. There was no rush to flee from Crete, no excuse for the poor workmanship of Icarus’ wing. If there is a substantial difference in the workmanship between the two wings…"

"Your honor," said the assistant, "you believe Daedalus is guilty and you are making a brilliant effort to prove your theory. Sometimes, more than the results, it is the effort which makes a man great."

"Thank you," said the second judge. "But I feel that I owe more to Icarus."

And they put their heads down on pillows to sleep, so that in the morning, they might think.

**********

The books arrived at dawn, as promised. By a wide-open window with the sea in sight, on a huge table generously caressed by Aurora, the goddess of the day’s return, the second judge, his assistant, and the scribes sat down and began the painstaking, subtly thrilling work of examining the volumes set before them. There were two books of handwritten notes made of pages threaded together, two leather cases filled with loose pages stored in order, which seemed to contain journal entries as well as scientific sketches, and seven scrolls filled with diagrams of machines and wings, off-the-cuff remarks, and long enciphered passages. King Minos’ liaison provided them with the code-breaking tables which Crete’s military experts had devised and then used to translate the passages, as well as with the transcripts of those translations.

At once, the promising avenue of the ciphers, in which one would expect to find the most sensitive and incriminating information hidden, was proven to be utterly useless. Daedalus had used a series of elaborate, but not unbreakable codes, to create a wealth of false information for King Minos, which included diversionary escape plans, and unworkable inventions. Already, on the basis of this misinformation, King Minos’ liaison informed them, ten Cretan ships had been lost in a whirlpool off the island of Lebinthos, and an unnecessary war begun against the King of Caria, who was erroneously believed to be providing Daedalus with shelter and support. Thousands of Cretan soldiers had also spent a year building a giant war machine from blueprints and encrypted information which turned out to be nothing more than a gigantic waste of resources and time. Energy that could have been devoted to pursuing Daedalus was instead, spent on constructing an all-powerful mechanical warrior who would not take a step, but instead, smiled upon them with a sneer set in bronze that mocked the boundless capacities of sacrifice of their gullibility. Besides that, over a hundred men were lost in an explosion of the mighty chamber of fire which was to have generated the steam needed to move the mighty arms and legs. The mechanical man, named Talos in honor of Daedalus’ slain nephew, had never lifted a finger on behalf of the King. But Minos, to save face, invented the story that the giant had, indeed, come to life; he attributed a great Cretan naval victory to the intervention of the giant, then blamed an enemy for crippling the robot through a clever act of sabotage. Thus, a whole myth was created merely to hide the fact that he had been deceived.

"Against a genius such as this we have no chance," the second judge’s assistant exclaimed. "Even if he did foment a plot to murder Icarus, Daedalus will not have left behind a single trace of his intentions!"

"On the contrary," the second judge told him, "he already has. The way in which he designed the steam chamber of the great robot! The walls were too weak to constrain the pressure being created within. What he left the Cretans with, in cipher, was a deliberately flawed engineering design, subtle enough to appear sound, yet substantial enough to kill. The same principle as was applied to Icarus’ wings!"

The assistant opened his eyes wide, then said: "I see the nature of your mind; how you fly high above what is clear and seize patterns missed by others! But courts need more than a man’s inspiration! They do not want a poem. They want something like a piece of iron in their hand; a handle, a hilt. Can you give the light in your eyes a physical form?"

"There is still an enormous quantity of material to go through," noted the second judge, tenacious with hope.

**********

For an entire week, the second judge’s team used the hospitality of Minos to go through the notebooks of Daedalus with a fine-toothed comb. In the mornings, they would sit by one window, in the afternoons move to a different room to sit by another window, so that they were constantly bathed in light, their eyes always supported in their meticulous search by the radiance of the sun, which seemed to be on their side. It was not I who killed Icarus, it seemed to want to say, I will illuminate the pages which will exonerate me.

The work was fascinating, and sometimes shocking. It was not easy to remain focused, there was such a broad and irresistible universe here, set down on these pieces of paper. It was like searching for a needle in a haystack made of golden straws.

"Wings, wings, and more wings," said one of the scribes. "Daedalus is not only a great inventor, but a masterful artist – such fineness of detail! Such an unfailing eye, such control of his hand!"

"Look at this," another scribe said. "Mere doodling. As though he were bored and daydreaming with a pen in his hand. And yet, in these doodles, ideas most pregnant! Here, what appears to be some kind of flying machine made of an enormous sail – see the man below it, sitting in this little chair? And pulleys connected to a rudder of sorts? And this, over here – what appears to be an enormous lens concentrating the rays of the sun on a ship and setting it on fire! Some moment of frustration as he studied wings that inspired him to concoct an instrument of revenge! He vented not as the common man, but with brilliant fertility!"

"Some chemical mixture inside a clay jar," said another scribe, showing them the paper in his hands. "The exact formula is encrypted, and this time, not to be broken. And there are metal disks in the jar, some of brass and some of iron, and metal threads leading in and out."

"And what’s that?"

"Daedalus writes, in the margins, Generator of the secret force: this tingling in my hands will one day move the wheels of a chariot with no need of horses." They looked at each other bewildered, wondering if it were true.

Meanwhile, another scribe was turning red, and as he saw them all turning towards his silent commotion, he finally showed them what he was looking at. There were pictures of hand-crafted phalluses, and the tellingly accurate diagram of a vagina with a little mechanical ball placed inside it, then a larger picture of a woman standing with a special belt and support strap holding in the ball, and then a larger diagram of the ball showing some liquid inside it and a smaller ball moving around inside the liquid. Hours of pleasure, the caption stated. There were also lovingly drawn pictures of breasts with gentle clamps on the nipples, and another chemical formula protected by encryption which Daedalus’ handwriting proclaimed would heighten arousal so that even the graceless unloading of the most callous husband who uses his woman as the latrine of his lust will seem as the love-making of a god. Somewhat below all the pictures, Daedalus went on to write: Too many beautiful women! I cannot make love to them all, but through these inventions I will make them all love me, I will come to mean more to them than their husbands! Those lines were scratched out, but not so completely that they could not still be read.

"This is what we need to find," the second judge stated decisively, as they sat there mesmerized by the limitless directions of the great inventor’s mind. "Unguarded moments of honesty which he neglected to conceal! Slip-ups he forgot to tear out of his notebooks, and to burn!" And he added, "No wonder Minos hates him so much! This is a man who wants to be everything! He wants to be all the trees of the forest, and even once he has succeeded in becoming every branch and every leaf, he will still be jealous of the grass that lives in the shadow of the trees! Even the wife of the crippled laborer living in a foreign land he will not leave alone, he must steal her from her husband with his inventions! Every helpless body must belong to him; every great thought must be his! If he could – if he did not need us to revere him – he would kill us all!" gasped the second judge.

"You go too far," said one of the scribes. "He has ambition. No white chariot was ever pulled by a white horse. White needs black. The world needs lusting, of some kind or another, to rise above the hole the gods put us in."

"Perhaps he only wishes to be kind to the women of the world," said another scribe. "We men crush them; like roofs we fall upon them in the night and bury them without giving them anything except swarms of crying children to care for before it is time to send them, if they are daughters, to new homes to live without air; or if they are sons, to surrender them to helmets and armor, and feed them to the jaws of war, lined with the sharp teeth of our insatiable pride and our immunity to heartbreak. We give tears to women, and funerals to the things they love. Maybe Daedalus, with his little toys like kisses, was only creating an oasis for them that we will not give."

The second judge did not agree. The selfish motives of Daedalus were too clearly expressed, and the fact that the lines were crossed out showed that he knew the motives did not present him well. But the scribes’ objections did help to restore the focus of the second judge. Concrete information pertinent to Icarus was required. He thanked them for their eloquent views, and reminded them of this. "It is not easy to stay on track," he admitted, "in the presence of such a gifted and all-encompassing thinker as this! But we must try!"

Nonetheless, after more than a week of painstaking study, they could find no more, in the way of suggestive statements regarding Icarus, than two brief and far from legally decisive comments. In one of the journal entries, Daedalus wrote: Weeping pest that you are, Icarus! You eat the flesh of the sheep and cow, and the fish from the sea! Why pretend to be the mother of the birds that fly? And in one other, he wrote: Today, more experiments with wings, and problems with the squeamish boy. He dared to compare me to Tantalus!

"It doesn’t help us much," the assistant told the second judge.

"Those statements contribute to my theory that Daedalus’ resentment against Icarus grew during the months that they plotted their escape," said the second judge. "Icarus’ sensitivity infuriated him, it made him feel cruel and base, and he could not stand to feel that way about himself. In some ways, Icarus was the embodiment of Daedalus’ conscience, whose presence would not allow him to bury his past or to reconstruct it, to reshape it into some expiatory fantasy. Deep pain armed with a great imagination is no slave of history, it rides even the darkest tale of man or nation like a horse, back to the comfort of the soul. Victims become villains, killers become defenders, the order of events is changed like a pea beneath a shell, by the artistry of the con man, who cons the world and himself! A little myth sneaks in, a pussycat amidst the overturned tables and the shouts – who notices? But once it becomes a part of the house, it begins to grow, until, at last, it has become a lion, a lion hungry to eat what little is left of the truth! Icarus interfered with the delicate reconstruction! He was, in fact, very much like the ghost of Talos which haunted Daedalus in the night, stealing the joy which was what his hands of genius existed to give to him. Icarus was like the voice inside Daedalus’ head, the demon who would not let him enjoy the taste of wine! He must be eliminated, so that life could begin anew."

"Those are only two lines," the assistant pointed out. "Although what you suggest is supported by those lines, so are other more innocent possibilities! Life is filled with resentment. You cannot walk without being unjust to your feet! It is a part of life to be angry, to be jealous. We could convict the entire world of murder, if we were to hang Daedalus by these two lines!"

"Of course, we cannot hang him by them," the second judge said. "They contribute to our understanding of a possible motive, but do not, in any way, prove murderous intent. You are absolutely right."

"Why compare Daedalus to Tantalus in the first place?" one of the scribes asked the second judge, feeling knowledgeable enough about the case at this point to butt in. "Tantalus spent eternity standing, thirsty and hungry, in a pool of water. When he reached down for the waters of the pool to drink, they receded from him and then dried up. When he reached upwards towards the luscious fruits hanging from the tree branches just above his head, the wind blew in and raised the branches beyond his reach. Perhaps Icarus only meant that his father was frustrated by the technical problems which arose as he struggled to design the wings. He was like Tantalus, in that every solution he reached for evaded him."

"More likely," said the second judge, "Icarus was referring to the reason that Tantalus was meted out this punishment by the gods."

The assistant agreed. "Tantalus killed his own son, Pelops, and had his flesh, which was disguised as the meat of an animal, served to the gods at a banquet."

The scribe winced. No good Greek could bear to hear this tale. "He tried to turn the gods into cannibals!"

"He tried to win glory for himself by killing his own son and feeding him to the divine power that he wished to manifest," said the second judge, providing his own interpretation of the story. "In the same way, Daedalus fed his nephew, Talos, like fuel to the flame of his own genius. He gave him to the gods of his mind to be devoured! Let my brilliance climb high like a fire from the burning logs of you! It was not prudent of Icarus to point this out to such a volatile, dangerous man. It must have smashed through years of attempts to repair himself. Certainly, the comment reflects a recognition of Daedalus’ merciless ambition. It shows beyond the shadow of a doubt that Icarus saw it; and that may have played a major role in his demise."

The team contemplated the second judge’s perspective for a moment, then, impressed, yet also knowing that much more than this was needed to convict, and even to indict, got back to work. But time was running out. They could not stay here, forever, and Minos’ men were becoming anxious about the amount of time they were spending with the books, lest they contain some secret that the Sicilians might find which they had not: secrets which they might bring back home with them to Sicily, and use to end the supremacy of Crete before its rightful time. Yes, time was running out.

**********

I feel clear about the case, the second-judge wrote in a journal of his own, that night by the flickering light of a candle. Absolutely clear. We have the proof of a violent, treacherous character, underneath the mesmerizing luster of the achievements: the murder of Talos, the betrayal of Minos’ confidence, the dedication to ambition above loyalty, the rages against Icarus. We have a motive: resentment against Icarus for penetrating through the luster to the character, for stirring up Daedalus’ sense of guilt, for making him have to face that part of himself which he could not bear to face, the savagery which undermined his greatness. To definitively recover from the crime of murdering Talos, Daedalus must eliminate the one person in the world who would not let him forget! We also have the means of murder: flawed wings given to Icarus to disguise the crime as an act of benevolence gone wrong. However, the argument of the faulty wings needs to be strengthened by our examination of Daedalus’ still intact wings at the Temple of Apollo at Cumae; and we are still at the mercy of the tale which Daedalus has concocted regarding the ‘accident’, and by the testimony of the witnesses who saw Icarus soaring high near the sun, which seems to support that tale. This would surely convince the court that the melting of the wax was responsible for the failure of the wings, and not any deliberate flaws in the threading of the feathers. I am certain of my instincts, but I feel at an impasse regarding how to mount an effective presentation of the case before the court.

As the second judge’s pen was feeling eloquent that night, and his heart heavy with burdens he wished to share with the wise empty pages that might begin to speak answers to him in his own handwriting, he turned the page he had just written on to begin another when, all of a sudden, he stopped in amazement. He had just written: My mind is confident but my soul is anxious, seeking proofs that may not exist, the footsteps of a clever man in the river, a trail I cannot follow… But the words he had just finished writing were not alone! He became aware that he was writing them into the faint traces of ones he had written on the previous page, little indentations in the paper, like scratches, like scars, where his pen had pressed down, which had come through one page onto the next. Over these little indentations came the ink of the new words he was writing: new words like explorers disembarking from a ship onto an island that already existed in the sea. The living tread among ghosts! "The books!" he cried out, rushing in to other chambers to awaken the sleeping scribes and his assistant. "The books! The books! Find each place where a page was torn out or a leaf removed. Near all the missing pages, search for the ghostly footprints of what was too dangerous to leave! Search for what is written not in ink, but in the faint impressions of words left behind from the pages that went before!"

At first they thought him mad, driven out of his mind by the intensity of the case. But after he had roused them all, and showed them how traces of what a man wrote on one page were left on the page directly underneath it, and often on several more pages after that, they recovered from their alarm and accepted his enthusiasm.

"But our eyes," protested one of the scribes. "We were sleeping. It is night."

The second judge, realizing that he was as inconsiderate and involuntary as a rainstorm, quickly agreed. "Yes, I am sorry," he said. "I could not restrain myself from informing you of this technical development. Tomorrow, you will know what to do." And they all went back to sleep, or at least to the beds in which they could not sleep, to await the sure light of dawn to see if the gods had anything more to give them on behalf of Icarus.

**********

Another two days were spent on this phase of the search: days of intense labor that seemed to be idleness. They stared and stared, they changed the distance of the pages from their faces, and the angles at which the pages were held, they scrutinized them in the light, and sometimes in the shadows, they drew curtains and lit candles, each went over what the other had done, and compiled transcripts of the fragments they could disinter from the whiteness of the paper and from the tangled ink of new words which cut into the traces. Certainly, they found things. But most of it was either incomprehensible, or harmless:

"We are getting some interesting fragments," the assistant reported to the judge, who was also scrutinizing his own mass of papers, "but nothing that is in any way a breakthrough."

The second judge nodded. "Here. Take a look at this," he said, feigning nonchalance but apparently very excited by something.

The assistant, more dutiful than hopeful, read a transcript of Daedalus’ words prepared by the second judge:

"Here," said the second judge, handing him the original, one page of oh so many, in no way more interesting than the others.

The assistant squinted, then, after a time, nodded: "Yes, I can see it. Your transcription is accurate. But it means nothing."

"Give it to the First Scribe," the second judge told him, pushing the original back into his hands. "But don’t give him my transcript. See if he comes up with the same words."

Puzzled, the assistant did so. Some minutes later he returned with the transcript written by the First Scribe, and gave it to the second judge. It read:

Observing the blank stare of the assistant, the second judge told him: "Here. Sit down. On this chair. There, make yourself comfortable. Do you understand?"

"No," said the assistant. "I see a list of disconnected, useless statements here. As though Daedalus were just writing down random ideas that popped into his head."

"What you have here, actually," said the second judge, "is the coherent development of the methodology used to murder Icarus!"

The assistant started in his chair, becoming stiff and alert, as though an arrow had just flown past his head. He blinked, not stupidly, for he was a very intelligent man; but in the face of great mysteries, even those who are astute become senseless things standing in the field, like cows.

"My old and aching arms," said the second judge. "Implying what?"

The assistant just listened.

"Here is the excuse!" the second judge exclaimed. "Daedalus is saying that because of his age and the real or imaginary condition of his arms resulting from his age, the flight will be difficult for him; not as easy for him as for his strong-armed young son."

"An excuse for what?" protested the assistant.

"The crow’s nest," continued the second judge. "What is the crow’s nest?" he demanded of the assistant.

"The basket or platform, or sometimes merely the foothold, at the top of the mast that allows the sailor to position himself above the deck and survey the seas around him from a higher vantage point."

"The place where you post the look-out."

The assistant nodded, puzzled.

"Now, if you are not in a ship, but flying above the sea with wings, where do you place the lookout?"

The assistant’s eyes were jolted, the first step towards understanding was taken, but resistance was enormous. "Up high – in the sky – near the sun!"

"And why cannot Daedalus take that position?"

"Because of his aged and aching arms! But wait – why the need for a lookout in the first place? They are both flying! They both can see far ahead of them, they are higher than masts. And what can harm them if they are in the air?"

The second judge read the next lines: "Need a danger! NEED A DANGER! Something so dangerous that it can threaten us even if we can fly. Something so dangerous that we need a huge amount of distance between it and us. Being as high as a mast will not be high enough. We need to be higher. Much higher. At least one of us, to see it from a long way off, so we can adjust our course in time to avoid it by a wide margin. It is so dangerous we must have a sweeping panorama of the entire ocean and the ships and islands in the ocean to be safe. Need a danger! I must invent a danger to justify the need for a lookout! I must invent a danger to trick Icarus into flying up high near the sun!"

"The arrows of Artemis!" gasped the assistant. And he remembered the lines that the bards sang as they recounted the powers and the glories of the gods:

and as straight and as far as her eyes can see, to set the world right.

"By inventing the fiction that great Goddess Artemis had given her famous silver arrows with the power of migrating birds to stay in the sky, as the poets expressed it, to Minos, whose archers are already renowned throughout the Mediterranean, Daedalus created an imaginary environment so threatening that even with the power of flight he and Icarus were at great risk should they be spotted by a Cretan outpost along the way, or by a Cretan ship during the escape. For that reason, they must give any Minoan vessel an especially wide berth, which meant that they must spot that vessel from a very great distance, and take evasive action while it was still very far away. This need, to be satisfied, required the posting of a lookout in a very high position in the sky."

It was essentially the second time that the second judge had made the same point, but it was not redundant, it was necessary, like the refrain in a poem or the chorus in a song.

Still, the assistant tried to doubt; it was the instinct in him against horror, the need to believe in man. "But his father told him that the sun would melt the wax!"

"Did you hear his father tell him?"

The assistant’s face froze. It was as if he had just embraced Medusa.

"What if Icarus actually knew very little about the capacities of the wing?" pressed the second judge. "What if he did not know the crucial role of the wax in the overall structure of the wing, or if he thought that other safeguards of the wing would prevent its degradation by the heat? What if he trusted his father’s workmanship? What if his father never told him not to fly too high? What if his father, on the contrary, told him that he must fly as high as he could in order to survey the seas ahead of them? What if Icarus was not the rebellious, foolhardy son his father portrayed him to be in front of the world, but, in spite of his disappointment in his father, a loyal son who dutifully took the fatal lookout position assigned to him, and died in an effort to protect his father? What if he did not die because he disobeyed Daedalus, but because he obeyed him to the letter!?"

"Murder by means of a lie! Infamy! But no, it cannot be! Daedalus was seen to be flying ahead of Icarus! If Icarus had assumed the position of lookout, he should have taken the lead, so as to see the dangers sooner, and so as to more easily signal Daedalus, who, otherwise, would constantly have to look over his shoulder to see if Icarus had spotted danger."

"Perhaps Daedalus was in the lead for the very simple reason that as Icarus was climbing high into the sky, Daedalus was flying straight ahead. This would have allowed Daedalus to fly beyond him early in the escape, and very probably, Icarus died before he could catch up."

The assistant regarded the second judge, who was determined like a hunting dog that will not relent. Why? Why this obsession to bring down Daedalus? But they had been through that before. Justice was his God. What towered in the sky must respect the earth it stood on, or the earth must bring it down. In innocent victims, some precious lost thing of his own must reside. Daedalus had become his object of fascination, as the Chimera was Bellerephon’s, as the Gorgon Medusa was Perseus’, as the Hydra was Hercules’, as the Minotaur was Theseus’: the monster is the jewel of the hero. And as Daedalus had turned into the radiant gem of his world, Icarus had become his friend. Naucrate’s powerless grief personalized the instinct of which the second judge was a captive, gave a human face to the stone rolling down the mountain, gave a beating heart to the compulsion to right wrongs, changed the high-minded neurosis into something approaching love. The second judge was like rain falling down from the sky, but as he fell, he learned to be human.

One more time, the assistant protested. "The words – too vague! Perhaps we are reading meanings into them that do not exist! Why such cryptic words, if the pages were destined to be destroyed? My old and aching arms. The crow’s nest. Need a reason. NEED A REASON! Artemis: arrows to Minos. Why not just spell it all out if it was destined for the fire?"

"Icarus was living with Daedalus in the house on the cliff," the second judge reminded him. "It made sense to be discreet."

The assistant shook his head again. "I cannot tell if you are a master sleuth, or merely a genius for making the world fit into your vision! You are convincing me, but is it because what you say makes sense, or because you are persuasive? Am I the ocean, or merely the land that has been washed away?"

"You see now that we have a motive for murder, as well as a two-pronged method for executing that murder," the second judge continued. "The use of mechanically flawed wings, and the use of a lethal lie to trick Icarus into flying beyond the wings’ capabilities."

"The court," groaned the assistant weakly. "The court. What will the court say?"

"Our next stop is Cumae," the second judge informed him.

**********

But before they could take leave of Crete to proceed to the shores of southern Italy to examine the last critical piece of evidence in the case, it was necessary to be entertained by Minos.

The King, glad to have the captured books back, questioned the judge for many hours about his findings, and reminded him that if Sicily did not punish the transgressor by means of its own laws, he, Minos, would muster a vast fleet and sail to its distant shores to apprehend the criminal himself. "What he has done no man should do without consequence. I will respect the judicial process of your land, but your process must respect Justice, which is not what is written in a book of law, or on the stone wall of a city by men, but what is written in the hearts of men by the hands of the gods."

"I will do my best to see that justice is done," the judge assured him, "because that is the passion of my soul."

Minos, dark and mighty, beautiful with his power of life and death, smiled; every once in a while, a nymph appeared among the rocks of his masculine heart. "You are courageous, judge," he said approvingly. "I like the way you use words to avoid submitting, without offending. You do not bend to the genius of Daedalus, nor to the spears of Minos! Still," he laughed, "you will not escape from my island without receiving a bribe! Her name is Therma."

A beautiful woman clad in a white robe stepped lightly before them. So naturally that it did not at all seem predatory, Minos’ hand tugged confidently on a strand that made the robe glide off of her body. Its plunge from her faultless form was beautiful like a waterfall.

"Therma, this man will be your god for the next two nights. Do you understand?"

She knelt before the second judge, without any sign of regret.

"Be the lantern of his heart. He is a long way from home." Then, turning to the second judge, Minos said: "Tomorrow, we shall have a festival of bull-jumping. I invite you. How could you come to our island without seeing the horns of bulls flashing in the sun?"

**********

The Minotaur had been but one beast, the bulls were many. In a great enclosed stockade the beautiful captive youths of Greece and Asia, naked but for flimsy loincloths played with by the breeze, stepped out into the pit of hope and death to jump over the backs of bulls. The animals were strong, perfect examples of vigor; each was a living homage to virility, and a memory of savagery.

In awe, the second judge and his team watched from the benches above the spectacle, seated directly beside the king’s box. So, the stories of the deadly pageant were true! The youths appeared like flowers in the field. A bull with gigantic hanging balls and fierce horns as sharp as spears and as heavy as clubs appeared; the youths approached and seizing the lowered horns as the bull charged, leapt over its back in dazzling acrobatic feats, one after the other. It was a magnificent kind of gymnastics on the edge of death. As one young man, stolen from his home, emerged from a somersault onto the earth, his friends rushed in to embrace him, and danced and leapt with him away from the danger, like a beautiful serpent made of human bodies; as one maiden, surrendered by her people to the shadow of Crete, flew through the air like Aphrodite emerging from the sea and wringing out her hair while the whole world watched, other bull-jumpers waited to catch her. Then all together, they ran away like a band of children running from their mother who is calling them back to home too soon.

It was a strange mixture, this lightness, this flight, above the dark land of death of the bull’s body, and the hungry horns. It was thrilling, joyful, and sensual and at the same time frightening and tense. One felt like the lover of these youths and like their killers.

"King Minos, please!" protested the second judge. "This is too difficult to watch."

The King smiled faintly, his face was strong now, like a rock, that needs a hundred years of storms to yield a sign that it can be affected.

"Why do you do this?" the second judge persisted.

"Is not life like this?" Minos asked. "Dark and dangerous, with sharp horns? And is not our task as human beings to live gracefully in the midst of peril, and when the hateful time comes, to die like dancers? Let our gods be honored by the sacrifice; and let those who watch be reminded how to live."

Before the second judge could say another word, there was a sudden cry from the crowd; one of the bull-jumpers had just been caught on a horn and was flying through the air towards the earth he would not rise from. The second judge could only think of Icarus plunging into the sea. As other jumpers rushed in to try to help their fallen comrade, the bright red stains on the bull’s horn, as well as the location of the wounded jumper’s hands on his body, indicated the futility of their efforts. The gods, who tired of the artlessness of wars, would be satisfied today, by a far more imaginative gift of human tragedy. And here this episode will end, for to this chronicler, it is far too close to home. Some scars are as fresh as if they happened yesterday.

"Daedalus must pay," Minos, unaware of the menacing quality of his voice, told the second judge, who understood, now, why they had been invited to the festival.

**********

Once more, and feeling vastly relieved, they were again upon the open sea. Before departing, Minos had assured them that the goddess Artemis had given him no arrows, confirming the second judge’s belief that the gift of divine weapons hinted at in the scientist’s notebooks had been fabricated by Daedalus as part of his intricate plot to murder Icarus. "Artemis is no friend of mine," Minos had assured the second judge. "My mortal enemy Theseus built her a temple in Greece, and now she is madly grateful. You know how the Gods are. Whoever kisses their feet the most wins. And she is especially difficult. Shoot the wrong stag with an arrow, or let one of your dogs stray into one of her innumerable forests - and, heaven forbid, come back with a rabbit in its jaws - and you are her enemy for life. And me – a womanizer – and she, being some kind of savage virgin who would burn out the eyes of any man who saw her naked – how could anyone ever think she would take my side in anything? Thankfully, great Father Zeus protects me from the whims of his crazy children! But I don’t doubt that Icarus believed his father’s story. Daedalus was so knowledgeable – he could tell you how many grains of sand are on the beach, how many apples are in the world, how many fish have been eaten by other fish since the beginning of time - who wouldn’t believe him? And you know the Gods – fickle – one day they’ll put a crown on your head and the next day they’ll chop it off. They will give you a golden harp so that you may sing songs that win the love of the most beautiful woman in the world, then transform themselves into a poison snake and bite her in the foot. They’ll make love to you even though they know their husband or their wife will kill you for it. They’ll give you some incredible gift, and then they’ll turn you into a spider! I give thanks to Father Zeus for his constancy! No, given the incessant shifting of the immortal winds, it would not be impossible for Daedalus’ story to be true! If Icarus was still capable of believing him, he could have believed that."

Meanwhile, Pasiphae informed them that Daedalus’ arms were powerful and vigorous. "He had the arms of a worker, not a thinker; his mind did not take anything away from his body. I can attest to that! But in the last weeks, he began, strangely I thought, to complain about his arms. I thought it odd, especially how he began to ask Icarus to lift things for him as though he were an invalid." Obviously, the second judge thought, Daedalus had begun to set up his scheme shortly before the escape, pretending to have become a cripple in order to explain to Icarus why he could not fly high beside him near the sun. None of the women had heard anything about the arrows, though Naucrate told them that her son had told her, not long before the escape: "Please pray to Artemis, dear mother, please pray for forgiveness for all the sins my father has committed, and promise her, she will be my goddess once I arrive at my new home." When Naucrate asked Icarus why, he only told her: "Father has told me to say nothing to anyone. No one must know what we know and do not know. But please, do not fail me. No one can escape the power of a God except through humility and devotion." Thought the second judge: Does this not support my theory that Daedalus concocted the story of Artemis’ arrows to create the necessity for a lookout, as a means of sending Icarus high into the sky, close to the sun?

Now, as the waters of the Mediterranean rolled swiftly by, thanks to the kindness of the wind and the eagerness of the oarsmen to return home, the second judge and his assistant let their eyes feast upon their speed as they wondered what awaited them at Cumae. Did they have enough evidence already to damn Daedalus, or was the case too much the ingenuity of the second judge and too little of anything else? Did they have a strong and worthy argument, or only a collage of shiny disconnected inspirations, brilliant pieces put into the wrong puzzle? If you believed Daedalus was guilty, their work explained the crime; but if you did not, could it prove the crime? "The court loves what is tangible," the second judge admitted, as waves vied to touch the ship like the hands of water spirits starved to caress something that was not of their world. "They do not like evidence that is as subtle as smoke rising up in the air, or the smell of the sea when you are still miles away from it. They do not want to see something in the distance that you tell them is a swan, but for them it is only a white dot on the water. They need something that they cannot deny, something that has a shape, that feels like fur or wood or iron, something that can cut them and scrape them and will break their foot if it falls on it."

"Look, a dolphin!" exclaimed the assistant.

"Where?"asked one of the scribes. There was only water, which seemed happy as though something uncommon had passed through it – like the face of a person who has had a beautiful thought.

"The wings of Daedalus at Cumae are tangible," the second judge said. "The physical contrast we can make between his wings, and the wings of Icarus, is something that the court will respect."

**********

The shore by Cumae was rugged. There was the small town, and up higher, the impressive temple to Apollo built by Daedalus, and somewhere beyond it, the frightening cavern of the wild prophet woman, the Sibyl, who they had no desire to meet. As most shores of the Mediterranean, this one sparkled with the light of the sun. You could feel its heat from far away, and the necessity of the sea breeze which had brought them.

"Either they are glad to see us or we are not welcome," said the second assistant, as they rowed a small boat into the cove. A band of armed warriors waited for them on the beach, cold eyes only peering at them from underneath menacing, plumed helmets. On their shields, they had pictures of bleeding serpents; in their hands they carried long spears with dark, fierce points. The second judge noted how the plumes shuddered slightly, like the high branches of trees trembling in the wind. He could imagine leaves and flowers falling, unwanted, off of the branches to the ground.

"We come in peace," said the second judge, as he and his party dragged their small boat onto the beach, under a white flag.

The warriors said nothing.

"We represent King Cocalus of Camicus in Sicily," the second judge continued. "We are here on official business. I have letters bearing the seal of the King, and the High Court."

There was no answer but for a slight smile that appeared on the face of the man who seemed to be the leader of the soldiers, and a look of amused curiosity in his eyes, as though he wondered what blunder their fear would make them commit. The second judge’s party struggled not to be blatant with its discomfort.

"He is playing a game with us," the assistant grumbled. "As though we were men without a family or a city, wretched beggars to be mistreated with impunity." Then, he called out: "Is this not a sanctuary of Apollo? Is this not a place for the pious to come in peace to conduct their business with the God, without impediment by man? Is this not holy ground? Why, then, the blasphemy of these spears? More kindly a host is Minos, he who wears a dark cloak in the eyes of Greece. Yet he welcomes travelers with warm baths and wine."

The warriors did not move, but now the second judge detected that they were waiting. They who seemed all-powerful were actually powerless, powerless to make a decision of their own, they must wait for someone else to come to tell them what to do. In the meantime, they could only stand there like the most threatening storm. "Be patient," the second judge told his men. "They are waiting for the one who will decide our fate."

After a good while, long enough to show them that he considered himself far more important than mere Sicilian emissaries, a temple priest arrived, dressed in a long, flowing white gown, his face hidden behind a golden mask which was delicate and at the same time imperious, like the proud youthful face of Phoebus Apollo, himself. Without waiting for them to speak, he demanded: "Are you the ones who have come to pillage the Temple of Apollo? To steal the mighty wings which our great benefactor, Daedalus, most blessed and gifted of men, has donated to our hallowed shrine?"

"We are not pirates," the second judge said simply. "Your benefactor is now living in the city which we represent, in the palace of our King, the most generous Cocalus. We are here conducting business on the behalf of the benefactor of your benefactor, and we are requesting access to the wings, not to remove them from your possession, but to examine them as a part of an official investigation which we have been commissioned to carry out." With great solemnity, the second judge handed him letters from the King, which urged all who read them to cooperate fully with his representatives.

"You are the ones who wish to damn Daedalus," the priest countered, carefully refolding a letter whose seal he had broken. The expressionless face of gold looked up and accosted the second judge with its unchanging beauty – it was unsettling like a sun that would not set. "You are the one who would usurp the Erinyes, the goddesses of fury, hissing like snakes, and haunt him forever because he is not perfect! For one moment of weakness, you would deny the world his gifts, and hurl him into the darkness of a prison, and the whole human race along with him, which is thirsting for the fruits the tree of his mind has yet to bear. Is this Justice, or selfishness?"

The priest motioned that the second judge and his party should follow him, and the soldiers, like plates after a banquet being removed from the table by servants, simply disappeared. "Come with me, up to the temple," said the priest.

They walked up some steps, then a trail, passing by a grove of tall, firm trees along the way, with a little stream rushing by. The priest, accompanied by a robust, out-of-breath man with a scroll in his hand, told his companion to spit into the stream. "Do you believe that purification is possible?" the priest asked the second judge.

The second judge understood. Men spit foul deeds into the world, but the pure rushing waters of streams embrace and overwhelm their sins, dilute the filth and carry it away; mothers and children can come to the bank where a murder took place, and drink clear water. Prayers and true repentance are our streams; sincere remorse and deeds of atonement.

"Whatever crimes Daedalus may have committed have been erased by this temple," the priest told the second judge. "Here, Daedalus purified himself. He knelt in homage to Phoebus Apollo. And his kneeling became this sacred place of worship."

Amazed, the Sicilians beheld the elegance of the massive temple, and the intricacy of the artwork etched into the gold leaves on the giant double door, done by Daedalus’ own hand. Here, there were scenes of life in Athens and the adventures of Theseus, and brilliant engravings of the Labyrinth and Crete, the epic tale in which Daedalus had become enmeshed. There was also the image of Daedalus flying with his wings towards freedom.

"And where is Icarus?" asked the second judge.

The golden mask turned towards him. "His father’s heart could not bear to reproduce the image of his departed son. His father’s hand shook with grief each time it tried to hold the tools with which to engrave his beloved child’s form upon the door. I saw it myself. The tears in his eyes, the trembling hand. Do you see this empty place, like a clearing in the forest of his art, a place where there has been a fire and nothing is left standing? This is where Icarus was to have been placed. But the father could not do it! He could not revisit the tragedy, even to immortalize the one whose loss had broken him!"

The second judge said nothing, but thought to himself: And now the murder is complete; Icarus is not only removed from the world but from history! Daedalus flies alone as it was always meant to be.

"What are you thinking?" the man in the golden mask asked him.

"Nothing," replied the second judge, though he was thinking: What a craftsmen, to make such perfect tears from an empty heart!

Taking off their shoes, they entered through the doors of Daedalus into the sacred temple sanctuary, and bowed down to a large, frighteningly real statue of Apollo: god of the Sun, though most still prayed to Helios and his flaming chariot; more than that, god of the inner sun, the light of truth, the light of seeing clearly, the light of fearful understanding; god of art and song, the miracle of creation and the mastery of form, shaping the divine so that it could be held by the human sense of beauty; the god of archery with deadly, straight arrows like his sister Artemis; the god of healing, though his son Aesculapius, by the mortal Coronis, was more ardently sought by the sick. As they looked up at the statue, lithe and naked, a great stone that had sacrificed itself to become his image, the second judge thought he could see the god’s face move, a slight smile appearing at the corner of his lips of rock, a trace of awareness passing quickly through his eyes. Silently, to himself, the second judge prayed: Oh great Apollo, to whose temple I have come, great thanks to you for the truth you cherish and uphold. I come here as a pilgrim of the light with which you have filled the world. I ask you to help me to always honor and advance the cause of the truth. Is any man above the law of life? Is any man too great to spare another? I see the mighty pillars that hold up the roof of your temple. What pillars hold up the world of men? Is there any man who is worth more than those pillars? Great Apollo, is this temple enough to erase a murder? Great Apollo: I implore you to let me discover the truth. Whether Daedalus is guilty or innocent, I implore you to let me serve the ideals you have put into the world, to let me be a servant of the light.

As they left the temple, with incense burning in a brazier, the priest said: "Daedalus is our friend. There is no need for you to examine his wings. There is no need to drag him through his tragedy all over again. He has built us a great temple. We will give you gifts to bring back to him when you return to Sicily." But just then, a silent flock of night-black crows alighted near them on a branch, falling into the tree like quiet rain. The golden mask looked up, helplessly unmoved, but the body of the priest flinched as though struck by a whip, and then began to shake. He led them quickly back towards the harbor, but a huge bird suddenly flew in front of him, its beating wings thrashing the air as it hovered by his face; he fell down, sobbing, and covered his metal face with his hands. "All right! All right!" he cried. "We will consult the Sibyl!"

**********

The Sibyl was the priestess of Apollo, Italy’s version of the Pithia, the holy madwoman who prophesied the future from the sacred, fume-filled pit of Delphi. Here, at Cumae, the sacred woman lived alone in a vast cavern beyond the temple. Men who were tortured by doubt, men who had to know things that were beyond their power to know, came humbly to the cavern mouth, begging for answers from the strange, small woman who greeted them bewildered and puny, blinded by the light outside her cave and frightened by men, unless the god came into her, crowding into her mind with his massive knowledge, possessing her, shaking her and turning her from a frail and vulnerable misfit into a godly storm, a reign of terror dwelling inside a woman. Through her vocal cords, he would speak mercilessly clear answers, sometimes hidden in baffling words so that men might still choose to make mistakes if they wished; for stubbornness was too towering a virtue to take away from men, who had the right to ruin their lives.

"The Sibyl will tell us what to do," the priest said, accompanied by four other priests, each wearing a mask like his, as he led them up the hill behind the temple towards the startling rupture in the rock that was the gateway to the god’s mind. "If she grants you permission to examine the wings, you will not be denied," he said. "I am Apollo’s priest, but I am not Apollo. She is a fool, but some