Heroes: Volume II of Mythos

F ATHER AND S ON Minos was awakened and told the terrible news. They had looked down through the high grating and seen the Minotaur slain in his chamber. The captain of his guard was dead too. The Athenians were gone and the great Minoan fleet was crippled. What is more Princess Ariadne could not be found. Perhaps she had been taken prisoner, perhaps … Minos knew who to blame. If the Minotaur was dead and his killer had escaped it could only mean that Daedalus had somehow betrayed the secret of the labyrinth. Minos ordered that the inventor and his son Icarus should be imprisoned in his tower room at the top of the palace, a twenty-four-hour guard posted outside. There they could await a sentence of death. Icarus stood at the windows of their prison and looked down at the sea below. ‘I suppose if we jump out far enough we might miss the rocks and land in the water?’ he said. Daedalus did not reply. He was busy. The tower in which they had been imprisoned was filled with roosting birds, their shit and their feathers. ‘What are you doing, dad?’ ‘Pass me those candle stumps.’ ‘Making something?’ ‘Sh! Don’t bother me.’ He always shushed him like that when he was working on something important. Icarus laid himself full length on the floor and went to sleep. He had no idea how much time had passed when his father shook him awake excitedly. ‘Up, Icarus, up! Put these on.’ ‘What are they?’ ‘Wings, boy, wings!’ Icarus rose groggily to his feet and allowed Daedalus to fit leather straps around him. He looked round to see what was happening and why his back and shoulders tickled. ‘Stand back and give yourself space and try to spread them.’ ‘You’ve really done it this time, dad.’ Daedalus was fitting his own set. ‘Stop giggling and give me a hand here.’ Slowly he instructed Icarus in their use. ‘But dad, are you saying we have to jump out the window and trust them to keep us in the air?’ ‘I have spent a lifetime studying birds. The air is not empty space to them, it is as solid as the earth is to us, or water to a fish. It holds them up and it will hold us up. Have faith.’ He adjusted the leather straps on his son’s wings so that they sat square and straight and took him by the shoulders. ‘Now listen to me, Icarus. We are flying over the sea to Athens, where I am sure Theseus will welcome us. But take care as you go. Fly too low and the waves will soak your wings and drag you under. Fly too close to the sun and the heat of its rays will melt the candle wax that is holding the feathers together, you understand?’ ‘Sure,’ said Icarus bouncing up and down with excitement. ‘Not too low, not too high.’ ‘Now, shall I go first?’ ‘Don’t worry, dad,’ cried Icarus rushing to the window, ‘I’ve got this. Whoooooooo!’ He jumped and heard his father’s voice calling behind him. ‘Spread your wings! Spread them! Present them to the air.’ He did as he was told and immediately felt the rush of the air press against the wings and hold him up. He was flying! His wings held in the wind and he knew that they would keep him there. His father was right, the air was a solid thing. He accustomed himself to using his arms to steer this way and that. The smallest movement from him was all that was needed to control his flight. Below him crawled the wrinkled sea, hugging the shoreline of Crete, the only home he had ever known. His father appeared in front of him, his own wings spread out. ‘The pillars of warm air rising from the cliffs below are holding us up for the moment,’ he shouted. ‘Once we’re over open sea we can beat and glide, beat and glide.’ ‘Like the gulls?’ ‘Just like the gulls. Follow me, Athens is this way. And remember …’ ‘I know – not too high, not too low,’ laughed Icarus. ‘And don’t forget it.’ ‘Whoah!’ Icarus cried out in sudden surprise as a seagull flew right in his path. He gathered himself together and dived after his father. From far below Theseus looked up and saw Icarus swooping and soaring, plunging and looping. Icarus was some way from Daedalus now, out of earshot, when he spotted the beak-prowed Athenian ship far below. Haha! he thought to himself, I’ll give them the shock of their lives. But first some height. Up and up he flew, gaining height for his planned dive-bombing. He was so high now he could hardly see Theseus’s ship below, so high that … so high that it was hot. He cried out in alarm as feathers began to fall from his wings. The wax was melting! He rolled over to point his head down and dive down as far from the sun as possible, but it was too late. The feathers were falling like snow all about him and he started to plummet. The air, now cold and hard, banged against him. He heard his father cry out. There was nothing he could do. The sea was rushing up towards him. Perhaps if he narrowed his shoulders he might be able to plunge below the surface and come up safe. Daedalus looked down in impotent despair. He knew that from such a height the sea would be like a bed of granite. He watched the body break on the waves and knew that his son’s bones would be smashed to pieces and the life gone from him. ‘Oh Icarus, Icarus, my beloved boy. Why couldn’t you listen? Why did you have to fly so close to the sun?’ Tragic laments like this, with changes of name, have been heard from generations of fathers ever since. It is the destiny of children of spirit to soar too close to the sun and fall, no matter how many times they are warned of the danger. Some will make it, but many do not.fn19 Daedalus dived down and rescued the broken body of his son, which he buried on a nearby island, called to this day Icaria. They say that a partridge witnessed the burial and flapped its wings, mewing with triumph. Perdix enjoyed the tragic justice of Daedalus’s son falling to his death, just as he had been pushed by Daedalus to his. The grieving father wandered the Mediterranean, finding employment at last in the court of King COCALUS of Camicus, in southern Sicily. The rage of Minos on finding that his birds had, quite literally, flown, was ungovernable. His daughter lost, his reputation as a mighty and unconquerable king severely dented, humiliated by the escape of Daedalus, he vowed that he would have his revenge. Accordingly, he scoured the Greek world for the inventor, taking with him a spiral seashell. At each kingdom, island or province he visited, Minos announced that he would reward with gold anyone who could successfully pass a thread through the shell’s complex helical chambers. He believed that Daedalus was the only man alive clever enough to hit upon a way of doing it. After years of searching, at last Minos arrived in Camicus. King Cocalus accepted Minos’s challenge and took the shell to Daedalus, who quickly solved the problem by tying one end of the thread to an ant, which he coaxed through the shell with drops of honey. King Cocalus triumphantly presented Minos with the threaded seashell and demanded the reward. Minos drew himself up to his full height. ‘Only Daedalus the artificer, Daedalus the inventor, Daedalus the traitor can have done this,’ he declared. ‘Give him up to me or I will leave this instant for Crete and return with a fleet to crush you and conquer your kingdom.’ Minos may have been bested by Theseus, but he was still the ruler of a great naval power. ‘Let me go to my council chamber and consult,’ said King Cocalus. By this he meant, ‘let me ask my daughters.’ He knew that his girls adored Daedalus, who had entertained them when they were growing up by teaching them all kinds of clever tricks. He gathered the girls together and told them about the threat. ‘Tell Minos,’ said the eldest daughter, ‘that you will offer Daedalus up in chains tomorrow. But tonight, let him bathe, eat, drink, listen to music and be royally feasted as befits so great a king.’ Cocalus, as he always did, obeyed his daughters and relayed the message. Minos bowed at the honour done to him. It so happened that the restless and ever inventive Daedalus had designed and installed a heating system for the palace, consisting of a network of pipes which carried hot water from a central boiler, the first of its kind in the world. Minos got into his bath that evening, but he never got out. Down in the hypocaust, the sisters heated the water until it boiled. It burst from the pipes in the bathroom and scalded Minos to an agonising death.