by Sean T. Collins

The following story is intended for mature readers.

The hammer fell for the last time. Its bronze face drove the spike home deep, its head now flush with the wood. The craftsman stood back, wiped the sweat from his brow with the back of the corded arm that held the hammer, and looked at what he’d built. Truth be told, on a project this unconventional he wasn’t sure what he was looking for.

After a moment he exhaled sharply and turned to the workbench, laying the hammer down. He picked up a plane and faced his construction once more. Nodding to himself, he stepped forward and gently scraped the plane against the wood, moving up and over the crest of its curved surface. He did this more out of habit than necessity: The object’s exterior was already smooth to the point of seamlessness, every joint and crevice fitted perfectly. But in all his years of renown his’ habits had yet to fail him, and he trusted them like friends. 

Daedalus walked to the rack near the wall of his workroom and took down the hide hanging from it. Being careful to keep it off the sawdust-covered floor, he slung it over the structure. It was always the structure, the object, the construction in his mind, and never what it so clearly looked like, never what it was intended to deceive its intended recipient into believing it was in truth. Never the cow.

The next little while he spent tacking the hide into place, light work he was in no particular hurry to finish. I’m covering up that beautiful smooth surface, he thought to himself. Shame. But the effort had not been wasted, he knew. Perfecting even such parts of the project as would never meet the eye was the key to craftsmanship. People sense the work even if they can’t see it, he’d told his nephew long ago. It shines through in what they can. His nephew—

“Is it finished?”

A woman’s voice shook Daedalus from his reverie. He realized he’d been resting his forehead against the rear of the object, eyes closed. He had been working very hard without respite, and he’d long found the afternoon sun to be a natural soporific, as many an unplanned nap at the drawing table could attest. Snapping to, he turned to look at the figure in the doorway — and immediately bowed his head. Pasiphaë, Queen of Crete, stood there, her gown yellow as the sun.

“My Queen!” Daedalus’ exclamation was apologetic. “I— ”

“Oh.” The Queen’s voice silenced his. “It is finished.” She was gazing, wide-eyed, at what he only now found himself thinking of, first and foremost, as the cow.

Pasiphaë approached the wooden animal. Extending a delicate hand the color of golden sand, she touched the cover of cowhide, her fingers gliding over the fine fur. She traced the features of its wooden head, its likeness to one of Minos’ own herd impeccable. From there she caressed the simulacrum’s neck, its flank, its haunches. “And it’s wonderful.”

The Queen turned to Daedalus, the jewels on her diadem gleaming in the golden sun. “How does it work?”

She is your client, he reminded himself. And with Athens closed to you, she is your Queen. 

“Ah.” He walked to creature’s right side, standing between it and the Queen. He reached down and lifted a panel of the hide he hadn’t tacked down. There, in a flank of otherwise unblemished wood, could be discerned the faint outline of a small, square door. “You pull up the flap,” he said, “and press here…” He pressed his fingers against a small panel next to the door, which opened with a click.

The Queen approached the entrance, stooping to gaze inside. “I see,” she said. She turned to look at Daedalus. “And…?”

“Of course,” he replied. He gestured toward the back of the cow, where he’d been dozing when she first came in. Now she could see what his body had obscured: a hole, in the lower rear of the body, between its sturdy hind legs. The hole’s edges were rounded smooth and upholstered in leather.

“Once inside, turn to face the front of the edifice and ease backwards. The opening is…” He froze momentarily. “…enough to accommodate,” he said at last.

Pasiphaë reached out a hand and traced the edge of the orifice with her jewel-encrusted fingers. Slowly they curled around the lip of the opening. Extending her arm, she inserted her hand in the hole, which swallowed her up to the elbow. While she was distracted, Daedalus dared a glance at her eyes. The gaze he found there was warm, and dark. He looked away.

“You’ve grown quiet,” the Queen said. She withdrew her hand from the hole. Try as he might, Daedalus could not cloak the dismay on his face — no, not even he who’d dissembled his way through meetings with countless clients who thought they knew better, until he showed them otherwise. “What’s wrong, Architect?” Her pretty brow lifted in concern. 

“I fear this whole business, my Queen,” he said honestly, scratching his beard without realizing he was doing so, an old tic. “I’ve feared since first the king refused the sacrifice. I fear it will go ill for all of us.”

Paisphaë put her hand on Daedalus’ bare shoulder. He tensed, despite himself. She was a beautiful woman. 

“Architect,” she said, “your crime is behind you.” 

And there it was. All it once, everything he now realized he’d been trying to forget by burying himself in this mad project came rushing back. Perdix was his nephew — just his nephew! — but his craft had already outmatched that of the great Daedalus. They had quarreled, well really he had attacked the lad, and there was a window, and…

He started to speak, but Pasiphaë shushed him. “Ah, ah. The goddess of that city saw fit to give young Perdix new life as a bird to spare him the fall, did she not? And with his flight so too departed your guilt. Take heart, sir. You are in Crete now, and you are free.”

He watched as she turned her eyes on the cow. There’s that look again. “As am I.”

Pasiphaë removed her diadem. “I am the daughter of the Sun, the white bull a gift of the Sea,” she said, setting it down on the crowded workbench. “How could our union go ill?”

Daedalus was in his own head, where his thoughts had grown dark. He busied himself by straightening the cowhide, which was already straight. “As you say, my Queen.”

“Now, let’s give this a try.”

“Let’s—?” Daedalus realized he’d only been half paying attention to the wife of King Minos and blinked, turning. Then he saw Pasiphaë, her gown a yellow pool around her tanned feet. Her hair flowed from her head, rippling down her bare body like the reflection of the sun in wavy water.

Before the craftsman could say anything, the Queen walked back to the door in the side of the wooden cow and began climbing inside as he watched. When she reached the halfway mark, her soft belly bisected by the portal, she shifted her weight for better access. Daedalus saw the muscles within her ass and thighs clench, moving the flesh of her lower body around them. As he stared, she stood on her toes and pushed upward, sliding inside with one final motion. 

“Does it close from the in—oh, there it is” she said. The door slid shut with another click. 

Suddenly chastened, Daedalus averted his gaze from the cow. You had no right. “You should find padding inside,” he said without facing it, his voice thick in his throat. “Reach into the head to—”

“Show me how it works,” came the muffled voice inside the cow.

“My Queen?” Daedalus was confused. “I’m sorry, but I’ve already shown you how it—” He heard the wooden beast creak as if it had been jostled and turned to see the source of the noise. 

There in the hole between the thing’s legs, he could see the Queen’s cunt. 

Show me how it works. 

When he realized what she wanted of him the fear he felt only grew…but so did another feeling, hungry and hot. He leaned his head against the cowhide and closed his eyes. But the apertures of his other senses widened accordingly. He heard the Queen — or rather he heard the Queen’s body, the Queen’s naked body — wrlggling inside the cow. He felt his cock stiffening against his clothes. And even amid the aromas of sawdust and cowhide, he smelled, faint and rich and slightly maddening, the scent of her arousal.

He began to undress. He tossed his robe onto the workbench, then his undergarment, the plain fabric of which obscured the Queen’s diadem entirely. Turning, his cock throbbing as it rose to full stiffness, he walked forward and touched the cow. The cow. Now I can say it. He made a full circuit of it, his hands making a study of all he’d built. He needed it to be real to him, as it would have to be for the sacred animal that was, in the end, his true client.

When his hands finished their tour, he found himself behind the cow once more. He was ready now. He licked his hand and stroked the shaft of his cock, wetting it. He positioned it at the opening in the cow, the opening in the Queen, and — hhhhh — slid inside. 

How hot she burned!

He knew right away he would not be long in climaxing. Not out of pleasure, though it was intense — forbidden and perverse and as keen and sharp as ever he’d known it. No, it was as if his body felt a sense of duty. He was demonstrating the efficacy of his creation, nothing more. If he allowed himself to savor this, how could he look himself in the mirror and adjudge himself an honest craftsman?

The Queen moaned within, grunted, sounding muffled and animal from inside the cow’s hide-covered carapace. His arms wrapped around the cow, stretching forward. He clung to it — to her. He bent his head to it one more time and covered it with desperate, delicate kisses. 

The sensation of her cunt spasming around his shaft shook him loose. He looked down and saw her jeweled fingers sticking through the opening in the cow, rubbing her swollen clitoris amid a cloud of golden hair as she brought herself off. It was too much for him at last, then. Paisphaë, the cow, the job, all of it, too much.

“My Queen,” he gasped as her own cries faded. “I’m there…”

“Not in me!” came the muffled command from inside. “Spill it on the floor.”

Had he been able to think clearly Daedalus could have foretold this outcome, which instead took him by surprise. No matter. It was all too far along now. The machine would serve its function.

“Ahhh…” He pulled himself out of her and began stroking furiously, his hand sliding up his cunt-slick foreskin up and down. Swooning, he leaned hard to his left, his shoulder bracing him against the cow as he turned to face the workbench. “Ahhh!” His climax overtook him then. He forced his eyes open, the muscles of their lids wavering, and watched his own semen gush out of his pulsating cock to the sawdust-strewn floor. 

As it ended, he leaned back and slid down, his ass colliding with the floor as he leaned back against the beast’s legs. His semen lay in a puddle between his knees.

He felt the cow shake from within, heard the click and whoosh of the door unlocking and sliding open. In seconds, the Queen was by his side, naked and sweaty as he was. 

“Oh, good,” she said, looking down beteween Daedalus’ splayed legs. She stuck out one finger and swirled it through his spunk, drawing patterns in the sawdust. “It works.”

Without another word she stood. He looked up and saw her smear her cummy finger against the cowhide, then turn to the workbench. Tossing his clothes to the floor, she retrieved her diadem. It sat there in her hands for a moment, then another.

She looked back at Daedalus. “I love him, you know. I do. I can’t expect anyone else to understand what I myself cannot, but I love him.”

Pasiphaë put the crown back on her head began to dress. “And so I thank you, Architect, for what you have done for me today.” He knew what she meant, and what she didn’t.

She was already leaving. “Have it brought to the pens,” she said. It was a command, not a request.

Daedalus was still sitting naked against the leg of the cow. “Yes, my Queen,” he said. 

After a minute, maybe two, he stood, wiped the sawdust from his ass, and began cleaning up.

—

The servants scampered out of the pens, leaving the wooden cow behind. In the shadows stirred a massive shape the color of sea foam in the light beyond. The bull approached the cow slowly, warily even, the tips of its ivory horns parallel to the earth below, but already its excitement was evident. 

The white bull of Poseidon reared up and mounted the cow. From his window, Daedalus watched its engorged cock stop, thwarted, then push forward and disappear within the hide-covered container he’d built.

Daughter of Helios, by Aphrodite accursed, I beg of you, he thought. Gods of Olympus, architects of existence, I pray of you. Please, turn not my invention to evil. But even as he thought this, his cock was hard.

He ran his hand through his hair, higher up his forehead with each passing year, and turned from the window. The drawing board awaited, and with it the designs he’d been working on since he’d finished the cow. The Queen had inspired it, in more ways than the obvious.

He was just pressing his reed pen to paper when he heard small footsteps approaching. “Papa!” His son appeared in the doorway of his study, grinning ear to ear, as if privy to a wonderful secret he would soon share.

Daedalus felt the yoke of care that bound him begin to fall away. He put down his pen, arresting his study of his nephew in flight — not as the mere bird into which Athena had transformed him, no, but as the man himself, full grown and yet wingéd still, soaring nigh unto the Sun. 

“Yes, Icarus,” he said, returning the boy’s smile. He stood and abandoned his work, for now. “I’m right here.”