Bull God

by Roberta Gellis

  “I feared it,” Ariadne said, tears filling her eyes. “He knows it, too.” The tears ran over. “He said he didn't remember things anymore the way he used to remember them.” Her voice broke into sobs as the memories came clear again, unblurred by the glories of Olympus. “I can't bear it. He's only a little boy, and now he'll be all alone. So lonely. So frightened inside that monstrous body.”

  Dionysus held her close. After a few moments he said, “Shall I tell Hekate I can't go with her and why?”

  She clung to him, kissed his lips with a tear-wet mouth. “No.” She sighed. “He still knows me now and that won't change in the few ten-days you're gone. I feel—” she remembered the empty, hollow shrine and felt a reluctance to name the Mother despite the evidence she had of the Goddess' power, “that there's something I must still do.” The cold that had clung to her heartflower, even though the silver strands were free, warmed. She sighed again. “Have patience, my lord. My time of caring for the Minotaur is ending. Poor Minotaur. Poor creature. Poor, lost little boy.”

  She broke into weeping again, recalling her sense of a bewildered child dimly aware that he has done wrong but driven by an urge for which he had no name to tear at the specially sweet and soft flesh of what had been a man.

  “You'll be happier here when you're free,” Dionysus murmured, stroking her hair.

  Then he rose, lifting her as he did, and again she was cold and dizzy but safe in his arms. When her eyes opened, he was carrying her into her bedchamber. He unlaced her sandals and slipped her under the coverlet, then gestured at a stool, which moved through the air to settle itself by the bed, and he sat beside her and took her hand.

  The image of a cowering child overlaid by the huge body and brutish head of the Minotaur, blood smeared and with shreds of flesh in the jaws, faded as Ariadne became absorbed in a more personal puzzle. There was nothing of withdrawal in Dionysus now. He hadn't leapt away from her kiss; he had carried her into her bedchamber and set her into her bed without balking. What was different? Her grief? His imminent departure? Had he forgotten the visualization of his own fears in what Aphrodite had exposed? Could she forget it? She was too exhausted to decide among the questions; a warm and enveloping darkness overtook her before she found an answer, and she slept.

  Dionysus was gone when Ariadne awakened, but that last memory of him sitting patiently beside the bed, holding her hand, reinforced by the stool still in place, soothed her. The pleasant feeling was replaced by a sharp sense of loss, which surprised her. She was accustomed to living her own life while Dionysus lived his quite separately. Surely four days in Olympus could not have changed that.

  Then the reason for the sense of loss came to her. Dionysus' presence protected her from demands by anyone else. Even Minos and Pasiphae did not dare intrude while Dionysus was with her. Now she would be without that protection for several ten-days. And just when the Minotaur had broken past the restraints placed on him . . . killing ... devouring ... Not today, she told herself—and touched Hagne's mind to tell the priestess that she was at home again—only to learn that her hope of one day's respite was in vain.

  Hagne greeted her with a burst of welcome—and relief. Phaidra had been to the shrine every day growing more and more insistent that the priestesses send a message to her sister to demand that she return.

  Ariadne sighed, pulled off the Olympian peplos and drew on a Cretan robe. She asked Hagne to make ready a bath and bring a meal, and then went out to the sitting room. As she passed the dark goddess, she thought a light tug of satisfaction twitched the lock of consecration closest to the image and when she looked at it, she could swear that lips, which were not truly carven into the face, were curved upward.

  As she entered the room, Phaidra leapt to her feet. “Where have you been? Do you realize that until this afternoon your women wouldn't tell me where you were or agree to scry for you and tell you you were needed?”

  “And quite right they were,” Ariadne said rather coldly. “I've been away with Dionysus. Gods don't like to be disturbed by little mortal troubles.”

  Phaidra's lips parted, then closed. In a far less aggressive voice she said, “Is he gone now? Mother and father want you to come to the palace. Father wants to know what really happened in the Minotaur's apartment.” She hesitated and then said quickly, in a lower voice, “He does not trust what mother told him.”

  Ariadne sighed. “You may tell them I will come when I have bathed and eaten.”

  “They want you now,” Phaidra insisted.

  “They know the answers I will give them.” Ariadne shrugged. “I have nothing to say that either will want to hear, so whenever I come will be soon enough.”

  After several protests Phaidra reluctantly left to carry Ariadne's message. By then the bath was ready. At another time, Ariadne might have lingered, relaxing in warm scented water while she tried to decide whether Dionysus' new loving warmth should encourage her to try again to tempt him into her bed. She did think about it briefly. Like the bloodstained image of the Minotaur, the vision of Aphrodite as Lust personified was fading and Ariadne's hunger for his body was renewed.

  Sighing she put the thought aside. She suspected that her “soon enough” wouldn't suit the king's and queen's impatience after five days' waiting, and she cleaned herself briskly, considering dressing in full formal attire. That seemed excessive and she ended up calling for one of her most elegant long, straight gowns. Her suspicion was actually a good prognostication. Before she'd more than tasted the meal Hagne had brought for her, she heard voices in the corridor, and as the door to her chamber was opened, Pasiphae's speaking with angry intensity.

  “I don't see why you've insisted that I come here or what Isadore's death has to do with Ariadne. The Minotaur has always been my concern.”

  Ariadne saw Minos and Pasiphae framed in the doorway, heads turned to each other, and she said sharply, “Not yours alone any longer, Queen Pasiphae.”

  Both queen and king stopped abruptly. Both stared at her and then around the room. It was the first time either one had been inside her apartment since she had rid it of its clutter. Brief expressions of surprise touched each face, but were immediately supplanted by a kind of anxious eagerness. Ariadne could guess that both hoped she would say that she could and would control the Minotaur. Nonetheless, Pasiphae couldn't easily yield her authority, especially to her rather despised third daughter.

  “Why?” Pasiphae asked, drawing herself up.

  “Because you can no longer control him, madam. Nor—before you ask it of me—can I.”

  “Why is there such a need to control the Minotaur?” Minos asked. “He killed an attendant because he was angry. You yourself have said over and over, Ariadne, that he's only a child despite his size. He's enormously strong. He may not even have realized—”

  Ariadne put aside the little table holding her food. What time and Olympus had blurred, Minos' words had brought back all too vividly. She would eat no more now.

  “He not only killed Isadore, King Minos,” she said, “he ate him. And when I told him that men don't eat each other, he answered that he was a god, that Isadore was a sacrifice to him, and that he liked human flesh. Is this a creature you want loose among the people?”

  “He must have gored Isadore and got blood on his face,” Pasiphae said.

  Ariadne swallowed. “There were strings of flesh hanging out of his mouth.” She swallowed again. “Madam, you are sacred to the Mother—”

  The queen jerked on the words, as if she'd been slapped, but then a kind of mad determination hardened her expression. “The Mother,” she repeated. “But I am the Mother, and I have borne a god as my son. He is an angry and vengeful god—” she cast a sidelong glance at Minos “—because of the bull from the sea. If he demands human sacrifice, who are we to stand against a god's will?”

  That broke Ariadne's control and she stood up abruptly. “The Minotaur is no god!” she cried. “He's a poor, deformed creature of weak mind who's been changed i
nto a monster by one moment being told he's an all-powerful god and can do and have anything and the next moment being thwarted in the most innocent desire.”

  Pasiphae seemed to swell with rage and was about to step forward, but Minos—whose expression Ariadne noted was more thoughtful than horrified—put a hand on her arm. “We certainly wouldn't wish to have the wrong persons end up as sacrifices,” he said. “Nor do we desire that the priestess of Dionysus speak her mind abroad when the Minotaur doesn't appear in his temple.”

  This time Pasiphae didn't make any remark about Dionysus having been driven from Crete by the more powerful Bull God or the lack of importance of a minor godling. Ariadne wondered briefly what, if anything, Dionysus had said to the queen or whether he'd merely flicked her with the lash of his rage. Whatever it was, Pasiphae was subdued.

  Having seen his wife silenced, Minos turned to Ariadne. “For a day or two, only a short time, do you think you could bring the Minotaur to his temple—”

  “I don't go to the temple of the Bull God,” Ariadne replied quickly. “I have my own shrine and my own god.”

  “We aren't asking you to appear in the temple,” Minos said. “Only to bring the Minotaur to the back entrance. He likes going to the temple, but no one has dared enter his apartment—”

  “You mean you haven't fed him or given him water for five days?”

  “If what you say about his victim is true, he's had food enough,” Minos said stiffly.

  “I couldn't ask any of the attendants to enter after what happened,” Pasiphae added, with a glance at Minos that told Ariadne she might have done otherwise if the attendants hadn't been well born. “And Phaidra screamed so when I brought her to the door that the Minotaur began to roar.” She shrugged. “Should I go in to feed and water him?”

  He's your god, Ariadne thought, you brought him upon us. But she felt a stab of coldness inside her replacing the Mother's usual warmth, and what she said was, “No, that would only enrage him for he hates you bitterly, Queen Pasiphae.”

  “Even a god should love his mother,” Pasiphae snapped.

  “Gods are notoriously ungrateful,” Minos said with a wry twist to his mouth. “Men—and women—also. You were once my daughter, Ariadne. You have your god now, but I hope you haven't forgotten it was I who sent you to his shrine. There is a debt, if not a bond of blood, between us. Right or wrong, the Minotaur has become important to my hopes for the future of Crete. I have the treaty with Athens almost in my hand. I expect to receive tokens from their king within the month, and Androgeos will go to Athens to bring our tokens to them by midsummer.”

  “Wasn't there resistance to the treaty in Athens?” Ariadne asked.

  “Yes, which is why I want the Minotaur to appear just as usual until all is confirmed. I'm having a stair built that will go from his bedchamber down to the underground passage to the temple. Until that's finished, won't you take him through the room of the pillars to that passage and tell him to take his seat in the temple so his priests and priestesses can dance for him?”

  Ariadne thought of the frightened, lost child inside the Minotaur growing hungrier and, if he couldn't remember how to get water from the bathroom where the cisterns on the roof had outlets, thirstier. “He doesn't like the dark passage,” she said, not quite agreeing but not refusing either, hoping she could bargain for good treatment for the poor creature.

  “The passage can be lighted.”

  “Not with torches!” Ariadne exclaimed. “His attendants threatened him, perhaps even burnt him, with torches.”

  Minos grimaced. “I'll tell Daidalos to provide mage lights for the passage.”

  He didn't like to appeal to the artificer, but so far so good, Ariadne thought. One thing more and she would agree to shepherd the Minotaur to his temple. “And do you think it safe to have all those tasty priestesses and priests dancing before him with no protection? Think of the reaction of those who come to see him if he should seize one of them.”

  “What if he does?” Pasiphae put in sharply. “They're his consecrated votaries; he may do what he likes with them.”

  Minos glanced at his wife and Ariadne bit her lip. His look betrayed sorrow and puzzlement, a terrible sense of loss, but it was quickly overlaid with calculation, followed by decision and distaste, and his eyes came back to Ariadne.

  “I'll have his chair moved back into the passage and ask Daidalos to set a magical wall across the doorway. That should keep him in until we can decide whether a more permanent restraint is needed.”

  “Then for a few days I will walk him through the chamber of pillars. Don't forget to have the passage to his temple lighted. Remember that I can't force him to do anything. I don't fear he'll hurt me, but he'll simply put me aside and do what he likes.”

  “Could Dionysus—”

  “No!”

  The denial came simultaneously from both Ariadne and Pasiphae, but Ariadne's indignation seemed insignificant even to her, compared with the shame, fear, and startled recognition that appeared briefly on Pasiphae's face. For the first time the queen must have contrasted the Dionysus who had appeared before her to carry Ariadne away and the beast-man behind the barred doors.

  Minos had shrugged again in the face of the unity of denial. “Will you come soon?” he asked Ariadne. “The guards say he is beginning to shout for you.”

  “I'll come now,” Ariadne replied, “before he becomes so hungry he can't think of anything else. I must have prepared for me a large bowl of raw meat, the most tender and succulent, and haunches of kid and lamb skinned but uncarved. I'll come as soon as I have changed my gown.”

  The meat was ready and should distract the Minotaur, Ariadne thought, but she was a little frightened as she approached the door and heard him bellowing. She did her best to suppress it and resolutely thought only of her brother and not of Dionysus. She hoped Dionysus had gone with Hekate already. He would be furious to find that she had rushed to help the Minotaur after he begged her to stay away. Fortunately, there was no need for her to have been frightened. Her thrown voice produced instant silence within the room and then a meek promise to go sit in his chair while “Ridne” came in with nice fresh food for him.

  She had a little difficulty controlling her stomach once inside the room because blood and dried scraps of flesh and odd bones were scattered about, but the odor of putrefaction was not yet very strong, and she had eaten very little. The Minotaur was doing what he thought was smiling at her, holding out his hand and saying her name with obvious delight.

  “It's very dirty in here,” she said, pretending to look about disapprovingly while her eyes were actually closed. “Let's go into your bedchamber so you can eat this delicious dinner I've brought for you. And will you let me call in some servants to clean this room? We can keep the door to your bedchamber closed so the noise will not trouble you.”

  He seized a gobbet from the bowl she carried and chewed. “Dirty,” he mumbled around the chunk of meat. “Clean.”

  To Ariadne's relief, he hadn't carried any of Isadore into the bedchamber although the sheets of the bed were tumbled and stained with old blood. Setting down the meat, Ariadne found a bowl in which to get water and, between chunks of flesh, handed that to him. He drank eagerly, but refused more, reaching for the meat again. When he was busily engaged in gnawing on the lamb's haunch, Ariadne said she wished to oversee the cleaning. The Minotaur only nodded.

  She found that the cleaning crew, three men and two women, was made up of criminals condemned to death, their executions commuted while they served the Minotaur. There were no weapons in the room; the torches had been replaced by mage lights; the poor devils had no way to protect themselves or to hurt the Minotaur.

  Their faces, though seamed and hardened with old sin, were now pale, and hands and voices trembled. Gathering up and scrubbing away the remains of Isadore had showed them all too clearly what might befall them—not a clean death by the stroke of the double axe but being torn apart. They looked on Ariadne, who'd
come unscathed from the Minotaur's inner chamber, with awe.

  She pointed out some places that needed better cleansing and they hurried to obey. Then she told them that the Minotaur probably wouldn't harm them if they didn't anger him and that the easiest way to anger him was to oppose him. Let him do what he liked and mend matters afterward, if they could, she advised. If he asked for something, and they could obtain it, they should do so as quickly as possible. If he asked them to do something, they were to do it at once. Likely he would ask to go out, she said finally; then all they could do was show him they couldn't go out either.

  “When I've taken him to the temple, change the linens on his bed and familiarize yourselves with everything in his apartment so you can bring him anything he asks for and groom him, which he likes done.”

  “Where do we go to sleep?” one man asked.

  “Nowhere,” Ariadne replied. “You sleep here. I don't think you'll ever go anywhere again,” she added sadly. “I imagine food and bedding will be passed in to you—”

  A woman gasped and they all drew back. Ariadne turned to see the Minotaur standing in the doorway.

  “Go out now?” he asked, barely glancing at the cowering servants.

  “It will soon be time to go to the temple,” Ariadne agreed, “but your fur is all sticky. Sit here and let me and these other folk groom you. Then we'll go.”

  He sat down at once and Ariadne ran back to the bedchamber to fetch his combs and brushes and the cloths used to dampen his fur.

  “Bath?” he asked, when she arrived.

  “I don't think there's time to heat the water,” she suggested. “When you come back from the temple, ask for a bath and these people will arrange it for you.” And then she sent a man to get water from the bathroom and summoned a woman to her to wet the cloths and begin to rub down the Minotaur's fur. She thought the two might faint, but they tottered through their tasks and the Minotaur did nothing to alarm them further.

  Nor did he give her any trouble when she walked with him along the corridor to the stairwell that led down to the room of the pillars. She was certain that guards watched through barely opened doors along the way, but nothing disturbed them until the Minotaur slowed his pace as they neared the end of the pillared room.