Maidens and Bulls
The parallel stories of Princess Ariadne and the god Dionysos eventually intersect to provide a satisfying conclusion to Maidens and Bulls. Not narratively satisfying, that is, more like the satisfaction that comes from ridding your house of fruit flies. While the book features many maidens, true to its title, they share the stage with only one-and-a-half bulls. The half-bull is, of course, the Minotaur. Theseus, unsurprisingly, also appears, along with other characters familiar to scholars of ancient Greek legend: King Minos, McTeague the sea captain, a hippie called Peas, and a severed spaceman head.
Maidens and Bulls is a short story that should have been abandoned before becoming a novel. Better still, abandoned before becoming a paragraph. But the author is a rebel, as are all authors of fiction by nature, by their sheer refusal to accept reality as it is; and while the rebel spirit has created much of value, it is also responsible for most of the misery in the world. Among this misery, include the text of Maidens and Bulls. Perhaps this is excessive underselling. It's not all that bad, the problem is its length! As a very short story it might have been amusing. Perhaps one day the author will reshape it into one. Or, more likely, will deem the following randomly selected excerpts to be the entirety of the story, and leave it at that.
Following are a few excerpts from the novel...
Excerpt 1 ――
(from BOOK II - Telling How Theseus Arrived in Krete)
The Herald redirected his stroll up the beach toward a high dune below which Theseus brooded silently over his dreadful circumstances. A few youths and maidens had made themselves comfortable in the shadow of the same dune—among these little Penelope, who sat by herself building a pyramid out of stones.
Theseus eventually shook off his reverie. He bid everyone cluster around so that he might explain the itinerary for the next several days.
Little Penelope, irritated by the crush of youths and maidens, and lacking interest in anything Theseus might have to say, relinquished her pyramid to the mob. She wandered inland, off the beach and across the boardwalk, where she noticed unusual license plates among the many parked cars.
But license plates did not interest her.
She had no interest in cars, nor of the far-off lands from which they’d come. She did not care about spaceships. She did not, unlike many girls her age, daydream about becoming a pop star, an online influencer, or a big game hunter. Penelope did not daydream about being a blushing bride, nor a bored bride, nor even a bride so disinterested she sleeps in and misses her wedding. Penelope did not daydream about hanging cattle thieves. She did not daydream about heaps of skulls or about the ugly lampshades for sale in a nearby window. Penelope did not daydream about robots.
No, Penelope did not daydream about these things. She did not wonder where ink came from. She did not puzzle over the mystery of the pyramids—particularly not this, not even a little, since she had just built a pyramid of her own without breaking a sweat. She did not puzzle over the transit of the planets nor about what’s on the other side of a black hole.
But most of all, Penelope did not wonder what red lights meant. She was struck by a van and went somersaulting across the highway.
Excerpt 2 ――
(from BOOK IV - Telling How Ariadne Received the Captain’s Will)
Princess Ariadne was a less than enthusiastic acolyte in the local Temple of The Dionysian Mysteries. She’d have preferred to be a glamourous and heavily-sequined magician’s assistant. Her father, King Minos, aware of her discontent, sat her down to explain, “Daughter, sometimes we can follow our dreams, but other times we must follow the arbitrary whims of a madman.”
“That would be me,” he made clear. “I’m the madman.”
Ariadne nodded and sighed.
Such is as it had always been for Ariadne, and such, she feared, it would always be.
After halfheartedly dragging her mop across the main courtyard, Ariadne returned to her little room and began to write a letter—
Dearest Father,
By the time you read this, I will be gone. Do not bother to search for me because I will already have crossed the far mountains and the wide dessert (sic), I will have found passage across the sea to some distant port, where I will have hired the fastest horse and—
Ariadne crumpled the letter and tossed it aside. Running away would be too much work. Work was the main reason she hated the temple. Glamourous and heavily-sequined magician’s assistants, by contrast, suffered no more onerous duty than pointing at stupid magician stuff and saying “Tada!” No, she would find some easier way to get what she wanted.
Just then, the Superior of the Temple called to her.
“Some kid barfed in the pond!”
“Is this any life for a princess?” Ariadne mournfully asked herself, as she trudged down the steps with her mop and pail.
“Noooooooo,” mooed a nearby cow.
Excerpt 3 ――
(from BOOK XIV - Telling How the Youths and Maidens Entered the Labyrinth)
Penelope studied the back of the Minotaur’s head. His imposing neck muscles had relaxed somewhat, but his horns remained frighteningly pointy—how badly it must hurt to be punctured by them! She hoped that everyone in the car would decide, rather than continue to the labyrinth, to go instead to the mall or to the water-park, or to anywhere else, really, even the textile museum! Yes, even there!
The labyrinth parking lot was nearly completely empty. The Minotaur pulled into his usual spot. While he fiddled with the steering wheel lock, his passengers disembarked.
“Where is everybody?” Ariadne wondered aloud, arms akimbo, brows ascowl. “Where are the youths and maidens? Where’s the High Priest?”
The Minotaur ensured all the doors were locked and windows rolled up, then made silently and directly for the labyrinth entrance.
“What’s your hurry?” asked Ariadne.
“It’s a long walk to my lair in the middle of the labyrinth, so give me at least ten minutes before you send anyone in,” the Minotaur replied, without looking back.
“I’m not going in without the others!” Penelope fairly argued.
Another youth and another maiden then appeared, at first only to the Minotaur. Les and Cardinal had been resting in the shaded labyrinth entrance. They each grabbed the others’ hand in terror at their first glimpse of the man-beast. The Minotaur returned their gaze with a hasty look-over, and then, without a word, continued past and disappeared around the first dark bend in the tunnel.
Les and Cardinal turned to the sunny parking lot to face the newly arrived and refreshingly hornless silhouettes of Theseus and Penelope.
“Where are the others?” Theseus asked.
Cardinal remained too terror-frozen to speak, but Les had just enough nerve to whisper, “I don’t know. Our friend Roger disappeared but we weren’t able to find him.”
Cardinal returned his horrified stare to the darkness of the labyrinth and toward the steadily receding clip-clop of the Minotaur’s step. Being a tribute had sounded exciting not very long ago. “A great honour,” as many had put it. But now, having briefly cowered below the bull-man’s dreadful bulk, abstraction boiled into hot-spitting reality. That monster was not awaiting an abstraction, rather, a very real thing of flesh and blood—his flesh and blood! And bones, what of his bones? Soon to be crunched between that monster’s jaws! Crunched! My bones, crunched!
Theseus, unaware of (and disinterested in) Cardinal’s anxious inner monologue, lifted from Les’ head an enormous ceremonial hat.
“What’s this?”
“It was just lying here.”
Theseus stepped back out into the sun to show the hat to Ariadne. She had made herself comfortable on an employee picnic table beside an old tobacco tin of cigarette butts to fix one of her heels. She glanced over, a little bored.
“Nice hat.”
“So, we’ve got one youth and two maidens,” Theseus sighed, “no High Priest, no King, and no audience.”
“We don’t need the King,” Ariadne assured him. “I know how to do the ceremony. I’ve done it often when he’s been away.”
“But my youths and maidens aren’t all here.”
“I thought you said they were disappearing because the island was getting larger, or—something to do with a spaceman—?
“You don’t care if there are only the four of us?”
“No.”
“Well then,” Theseus shrugged, “let’s get this over with.”
Excerpt 4 ――
(from BOOK XV - Telling How the Minotaur Realised His Error)
In the dead centre of the labyrinth, into a small room furnished with only a desk, a chair and a messy makeshift bookcase, the Minotaur flung himself despondently before a pile of unfinished homework. Although on this day he had ostensibly arrived to receive (and dismember) the Athenian tribute, he intended also to use the opportunity to prepare for an upcoming exam, away from the distractions of campus.
But he found himself up for neither dismembering nor study. He was tormented by the mystery of the spaceman head that Penelope had found on the beach, and its supposed connection to the expanding island. For the first time in his brutish life, the Minotaur was troubled. Truly troubled! He, the fearsome Minotaur, troubled by something as inconsequential as a severed spaceman’s head!
“Great Zeus!” he bellowed, “What does it all mean?”
If Penelope’s calculations were correct, Krete would reach its point of maximum expansion early the next morning. The rapid contraction that would then follow would probably take less than an hour.
He jotted down a few numbers from memory but could not find an equation allowing the severed head and the island to neatly coexist.
The Minotaur’s head began to ache from mental overexertion.
If the current batch of youths and maidens travelled through the maze at an average speed, they would be passing by his chamber in about twenty minutes. He should be sharpening his horns, not scribbling arcane formulae! But alone in his little grey chamber he could no longer ignore the cataclysm awaiting Krete. Suffocation! The walls were surely closing in on him! The whole island, soon to compress to the size of a grain of sand! What madness it all seemed. Mad, yet—? He rubbed his throbbing temples.
A fortuitous gesture!
The answer came in a flash!
The temples! Penelope had measured the circumference of the spaceman’s head around the temples! The Minotaur could not believe he had overlooked such a simple mistake. The circumference should have been measured from the top of the skull, down the nose, under the chin, and up the back!
This changed everything!
But the Minotaur’s jubilation slid quickly back to frustration. After all, disproving the theory did not dismiss the problem, only altered its character. How he wished he had that little spaceman head with him now so he could measure it again and start his calculations afresh, alas!
Excerpt 5 ――
(from BOOK XIX - Telling of the Romance of Theseus and Ariadne)
While Theseus was eager to hear the end of the story, Ariadne’s story-telling enthusiasm had waned. Had she ever had it—enthusiasm? For anything? At that moment she’d have laughed at the very idea of being enthusiastic had she not been too unenthusiastic to bother. “Well,” Theseus goaded, “what happened next?”
“I took poison and died,” she groaned while flopping into a beanbag chair.
Theseus waited.
Ariadne, sprawled and limp, looked for a moment like she’d actually taken poison and died. Unfortunately for her, she hadn’t. Poison is never there when you need it. Theseus waited.
And waited.
“You haven’t any poison, have you?” Ariadne whispered.
Theseus shook his head.
Ariadne groaned, cleared her throat, and braced herself against the misery of remaining alive in a world ideally suited for being dead.
“So—,” she grudgingly started up again, slowly, with just enough spirit to form words, “As I said, Pasiphae and Minos locked themselves in a secret room high in the castle tower where they set before themselves the task of doing away with the troublesome Kretan Bull. Minos believed the deed required a catapult. Pasiphae preferred a subtler approach—a very sad poem, she argued, might drive the Bull to suicide.
“While Pasiphae beckoned her muse, Minos set off with a hammer to build a catapult.
“His work complete, Minos then approached the Bull with a net and a company of his most fearless warriors. The Bull, who’d been at the buffet working his way across the remnants of the Sadie Hawkins Dance spread, casually turned, his cheeks full of sweet croissant and his lips dusted with icing sugar, to address the nearing party with his usual greeting—‘How now brown cow?’
“Down went the net.
“Sproing! went the catapult.
“Into the sky went the Bull.
“Pasiphae had, in Minos’ absence, finished her poem, and although with the Bull launched far out to sea her eloquent verse was no longer needed, she was eager to share it at least with her fiancé.
The Giant Cat
by Pasiphae (Age 19)
The giant cat eats villagers,
Chomps them one by one,
He does it without malice,
It’s all for him in fun.
One day he sniffed a goblin,
That was offered to him fried,
A gift from frightened villagers,
To keep themselves alive.
But the giant cat eats villagers,
No more than is his due,
You say that you’re a villager?
Perhaps he’ll come for you.
“Pasiphae could barely finish reading for the tears welling in her eyes. She wept piteously for the cat-beplagued villagers. And Minos also wept. Howling with sorrow, tears pooling around his ankles, he caught a glimpse of the tower window, and, seeking relief from his unbearable distress, without a moment’s deliberation, chose to fling himself out onto the paving stones far below. But Pasiphae had the same idea at the same moment, causing the wailing couple to get jammed together in the window frame.
“After an awkward struggle, Minos and Pasiphae recovered their wits, and with it, the will to live.
“And with the Kretan Bull gone, their wedding went off without a hitch. Despite a baby-bump that might have been hiding a mid-size sedan, nobody suspected that Pasiphae was already carrying the Bull’s child.
“And that,” Ariadne concluded, with a very loud raspberry, “is how the Minotaur came to be. Ta-da!”
“Now bug off and let me sleep.”
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