Metamorphica

by Zachary Mason

  Eventually she feels the air move as the door silently opens. There’s the sense of pressure she always feels when he comes to her, and then his hand finds her shoulder and pulls her in.

  “Wait,” she says, and has a sense of his incredulity. “First grant me a favor.”

  “Anything,” he says, a grin in his voice. “I swear by Styx.”

  “I’ve never seen your face,” she says. “You say you’re a king, but you might be no one, so tell me who you really are.”

  “In fact, I am a king,” he says, “and one greater in dignity than your husband, so set your heart at rest.” He pulls her closer but she turns her face away from his and says, “You haven’t really told me who you are.”

  “Very well,” he says, and his voice is different now, filling the room and vibrating in her bones. “I am cloud-gatherer and storm-king, lord of lightning and the upper air, Zeus, Cronos’ son.”

  His strength is irresistible but even so she says, “You still haven’t told me who you really are.”

  His hands relax and let her go. There’s a moment of silence, and then he says, “In fact, I’m no one, or very nearly. I’m the strongest, and I carry the lightning, and I remember a few things from the early days, but beyond that there’s nothing much at all, just these few attributes and a handful of stories.”

  She finds herself pitying him. She reaches up to touch his face and says, “Tell me the stories.”

  “In one, Zeus becomes the lover of a princess of Thebes by pretending to be a mortal king, and though he comes to her every night, she’s never seen his face. His wife Hera discovers the affair and takes the shape of the princess’s old nurse to make her wonder whether some man of low rank is exploiting her. She persuades the princess to press her lover to reveal himself three times in succession.”

  “And then?”

  “He honors his oath, though he has a kindness for her.”

  Now there’s nothing under her hand. She says, “How does the story end?”

  “Full of regret, he returns to his dream of the world. As for her, she was never much at all, no more than the barest outline of the feminine, a querulousness, and a sense of waiting in the night. At the end of the affair she vanishes.”

  18

  PHAEDRA

  Phaedra was the daughter of Minos and Pasiphae and the granddaughter of Europa. Theseus killed her half-brother Asterion, who was also called the Minotaur. Theseus then seduced her sister Ariadne, whom he later abandoned.

  Theseus’ son Hippolytus was beautiful.

  I sat up blinking, drowning, fending off Ariadne as she shook me awake, but then she said once again that she wasn’t coming back. “Find me in Athens when you can,” she said, “and until then goodbye,” and before I could find words she ran away into the dark.

  I reached the hall in time to see her white nightgown disappearing. I’d often spied on her in the white hills, brooding on the walls, lying with her young men on the beaches, but I was still half asleep and stumbling and the palace was like a dense confusion of cold wind, low whispers, servants peering myopically from corners, and I soon lost her. I stood there listening, trying to intuit her trajectory, then found the thread in the distant echoes of her steps which I followed to the labyrinth, but its foyer was empty, the moonlight shining on the mosaic of the bull carrying a girl over the sea, and then the labyrinth’s bronze doors opened.

  There emerged a boy of pale, lupine beauty, and in his hand he held a knife as long as his forearm that seemed to gather in all the light. The sun rose in my chest as I saw the black blood staining his hands and arms and I couldn’t look away from the blade which he turned in his hand so the moonlight rippled on the watermark. He stepped toward me, poised, but I couldn’t seem to move or focus on anything but the knife. Ariadne rushed in then, white face flushed and blue eyes streaming as she flung her arms around him like a drowning sailor grasping a spar.

  As my sister sobbed into his neck he watched me over her shoulder, impassive, his eyes catching the light the way the knife did, and I saw him decide. “Your people,” he said in a surprisingly gentle mainland voice, “they aren’t so good. Maybe you won’t be like them,” as Ariadne wept the harder. His eyes were cold as he stroked her neck and I could see him wondering how long he had to hold her, and I wanted to warn her, but I knew she wouldn’t listen, and finally he saluted me with the knife and led her away.

  * * *

  From the battlements I watched their ship on the lightening sea, white sails fading into blue of distance.

  * * *

  I went to my bedroom and burrowed into the bedclothes. When I woke it was full light and someone was hammering on my door; Ariadne has been kidnaped, they cried, and Theseus has escaped, and Asterion is dead.

  * * *

  Poseidon’s temple flickered with firelight as the surging flames of the funeral pyre consumed Asterion’s great body. We stood watching as the fire burned down to coals, his long, blackened horns protruding from the ashes.

  * * *

  That night I dreamed of lightless, echoing rooms where a massively horned shadow sat alone in the dark. He smelled like horses and old iron and blood, and gave no sign of noticing me until in a small voice I said, “Aren’t you lonely here?”

  “No,” he said, his voice vibrating the stones, “for Daedalus has told me of the world without, and it, too, is a prison and a maze without end. Here, at least, the walls are tangible. In any case, I’ve learned that my old home was only the least of all the antechambers of the vast and intricate labyrinths of Hell.”

  * * *

  The day after the funeral my father was unnaturally cheerful, striding through the palace clasping shoulders and slapping backs, though I’d never known him to touch anybody. He couldn’t stop talking about the invasion of Athens, which, he said, was imminent—he would raze the city, rescue his daughter, mount Theseus’ head on a spike. Daedalus, his black-robed engineer, followed behind him like a watchful, disinterested crow.

  * * *

  The slaves said it was bad luck to leave the labyrinth without a center and in fact every week brought more bad news—ships wrecked, colonies burned, our allies turned against us, and as Crete’s star tumbled Athens’ rose, their ships sweeping the sea-roads clean. From the harbor wall I watched the war-ships’ lading, wondering when they’d bring her back, but the few that left never returned.

  I wrote letters to my sister and sent them by ships bound for Athens, or for anywhere, like arrows fired into the sky. I wanted to ask her how she could leave me, how she couldn’t have foreseen what would happen, but, as anyone might open them, I worded them so carefully their very emptiness became a kind of code. There were no replies, and the sailors told me that she hadn’t made it to the mainland, or that Theseus had cut her throat, or that some god took her and tired of her and left her in the desert.

  The ships dwindled in the harbor, and rain dripped through the holes in the roof, and the servants left, one by one, unless they were too old to find another place. I heard nothing more of the invasion, and never heard my sister’s name except when my father called me Ariadne by mistake. He seemed to shrink, as the years passed, and to be surprised he could actually lose. He only looked happy when he was playing chess with Daedalus.

  * * *

  One day my father summoned me to his study, where he and Daedalus were drawing a map in black ink. He focused on me with an effort, and as though speaking over a great distance said, “It’s time you were married.”

  I was only fifteen, and it was still years till it was time I was married, but I only said, “To whom?”

  “Athens,” he said, taking up his pen again.

  “Theseus?”

  My father didn’t look up but Daedalus steepled his fingers and embarked on a lengthy explanation involving access to markets, the untimely defection of the Tyrians, the strategic value of the Piraeus, and the ships committed to the war in Rhodes, all of which, he said, made an alliance with Athens unavoidable.


  “How could you?” I asked my father.

  Surprised, he thought for a moment, then said, “Reasons of state.”

  * * *

  I stood on the battlements in the first light of morning, watching the white sails of the ship coming to fetch me.

  * * *

  While we were at sea we could have been going anywhere, and somehow I expected strange islands, empty shores, a journey without an end, but on a starless night a sailor cried out and I looked up to see the lights of a city.

  As they led me up the stairs to the Acropolis I realized that there had been a time when I could have changed things—flung myself into the water, run off down an alley, hid myself in Crete’s white hills—but that time had passed unnoticed. I wondered if Ariadne had walked up these same steps.

  The Acropolis was a high, broad platform full of temples whose boundaries were defined by long lines of torches. There were many people, all of them strangers, but none of them looked at me except a boy who I at first thought was Theseus but he was too young, and too beautiful, and he looked lost. They brought me before a soldier marked by years and war and it was only when he told me how he hoped I’d be happy there that I recognized my sister’s lover, my half-brother’s killer, my husband-to-be. He seemed more like my father’s peer than mine; I felt like an unwelcome guest to whom he had to be polite. Some friend of his came and whispered in his ear; Theseus said we’d tend to the formalities another time, squeezed my shoulder, and left. Before they were out of earshot I heard his friend say I was pretty and ask if Minos had other daughters to sell.

  It took an hour to find the chamberlain, and another hour for him to find me a room.

  I asked the servants about my sister but no one had ever heard of her. My father sent no letters.

  One day in the orangery I saw the boy from that first night. He was shy, but didn’t run, and I realized he’d been following me. His name was Hippolytus. He outshone his father’s memory, but was unaware of it, and no one seemed to want him.

  His tutor drank all day whenever Theseus was off hunting, which was almost all the time, so we were left to ourselves. We spent the summer exploring the palace gardens, the cellars, the odd corners of the city, and every afternoon he fell asleep with his head on my lap.

  There was a soldier who was supposed to escort me when I went beyond the city walls but I left him sleeping in the orchards and rode with Hippolytus to the sea. He showed me a steep path that led down to a cove he said he alone knew. We sat together on the sand, grasping our knees, not talking, and then a heat rose in me. He tried to conceal his fear, and didn’t pull away as I undressed him, though he did say it was unseemly. He clung to me as I stroked his back; I said it didn’t matter, that no one was watching and no one cared, that we were past consequences.

  19

  ICARUS

  Icarus was Daedalus’ son. He fled Crete on wings his father built.

  This continent of cloud so far below me. The curve of the radiant world. These stars burning on a black sky. This silence.

  I recollect myself, draw a deep breath, and heave once again against the thin air, the wings my father made me sweeping soundlessly. The world is remote, and the sun flares among the stars in the night sky, its light glaring on my pinions. It’s like rising through dark water, and the sun is so bright now it seems close enough to touch. Just a little longer, I tell myself, but there’s no goodness in the air, and I can’t move my wings.

  As my breath fails the constellations blur and though I fight my eyes close, flicker open, close again. I turn my face to the sun and through my eyelids see the red of dawn, or of blood, and then I’m falling.

  Dreams of ice floes under polar nights, of stars rising behind glaciers, and of a white bird abandoned to the wind.

  I wake in a void. There’s no sense of motion, no wind of passage, and I’m finally afraid, not that I’ll die but that gravity has failed and I’ll float here forever, but then the cloud mass below me has come perceptibly closer, then closer still, and then I’m plunging through rushing white.

  Below the clouds the stars have disappeared behind blue skies and the thick air is heady, and then my shoulders burn as I spread my wings to catch the wind. I spiral over an archipelago, then descend toward an island surrounded by even ripples that become waves breaking on white beaches—tumult and churning water, and then I’m staggering through blood-warm breakers, letting them wash over me as I fall onto my back and look up into the sky that’s evicted me once again.

  The tide goes out, leaving me lying in the warming sand. I unstrap my wings, and my hands trace the broken feathers and singed armature, but it’s nothing I can’t repair, for I’m my father’s son, and soon I’ll rise again, and this time touch the sun.

  20

  MINOS

  Minos was king of Crete. Europa was his mother. Daedalus was his oldest friend and the foundation of his power.

  The bow creaks as I draw the arrow to my eye. The sun gleams on the whitecaps crawling across the harbor and on the glory of Icarus’ broad white wings; he banks, giving me a clear shot, and my arms and the bow are one tension, but I imagine his smooth parabola turned to ragged tumbling and Daedalus’ face when he sees his son’s body, and hesitate, and the moment passes. As he disappears into the grey fog coming in over the sea I fire my arrow high into the air, pointlessly, and share for a moment his flight’s euphoria.

  * * *

  Deep in the labyrinth’s mass I stand before the door to Daedalus’ cell. The key is in my hand but I’m waiting, listening, for he’s the master of artifice and nothing is more probable than that he’s vanished with his son, and though I strain to listen there’s nothing but a silence that foretells only evil, and then I unlock the door.

  I find him bent over his book with his pen in his hand. The little light of the one barred window shows the cell’s squalor—the equations scribbled on the walls, the loose papers on the floor, the sour residue of meals pushed into a corner—and the light is at such an angle that I see the black pouches under his eyes, the skin hanging from his face like dessicated silk; he’s never looked so old or so weary and I wonder if I’ve worked him too hard and if he’s been sleeping. When he raises his head to look out the window I follow his gaze but see only white cumulus whorling in the wind and below that the sprawling rooftops of the labyrinth, and as though drawn by its complexity my mind turns to its dust and shadows, the white passages and the chambers and the echoing arcades. Mustering myself, I break in on him and say, “Icarus fled Crete today on the white wings you built him. I could have shot him out of the sky, but I held fire, and watched him bank over the waves and vanish into the fog.”

  Daedalus closes his eyes and then says, “Your Majesty is a gracious king, and I thank you for sparing him.”

  “The one pair of wings implied another. I searched your workshop and found the second pair.”

  He smiles and says, “I’m too old for skylarking.”

  “You’re not so old,” I say, though he’s ten years my senior, and few men my age still go to war.

  “The wings were a necessary misdirection—my son only left when he was sure I would follow.”

  “Your son is less wise than his father.”

  “My son was right—I’ll be gone soon.”

  “And yet, I prefer that you stay.”

  “You made my son a hostage, and me a prisoner, so yes, your preferences are clear.”

  “You’re too valuable to let go.”

  He closes his book, turns to me and says, “Minos, I have served you long enough. I have been the architect of your island and of your wars and of your cities; there’s nothing in Crete that does not bear my imprimatur. I made your ships and roads and siege-engines, and I made you a king, though you made me a slave, and now I’m done with you.” I can see he’s been waiting a long time to say these words and watch him closely, weighing his certainties.

  I start to speak but he raises an imperious hand and says, “I am old,
and I am sick, and I will die soon. Now that Icarus is free, my one concern is this book,” and he holds up the book in which he’s been writing, and the day has turned to dusk already and the book’s black cover seems to soak up the little light in the small room and he holds it up just a beat too long which lets me know there’s something I’m missing. Guessing that the book is a distraction I scan the room for weapons or traps but all that’s here are the old man, his bed and the scholar’s clutter. “This book is all of me,” he says, and his voice has the ring of truth. “It’s my soul, my life’s work, the sum of my mathematics, the key to the hidden order in the world. I’ve wasted decades winning your wars, doing my own work in rare stolen hours. My time is short now, though the book is far from done, and soon I will leave you to finish it.”

  My rage comes close to the surface but I don’t lash out because behind my anger is an intuition that somehow he’s already gone, though he’s right here before me, locked in a cell to which I have the key on the island that’s the center of my power. The imminence of his absence howls all around me and I foresee how when he’s gone Crete and the palace will be empty shells and there will never again be anyone who knows how things were, and I think of that first night when he came to Crete and we talked till dawn over the roar of the wind of the empire we’d build and of mathematics. I say, “You’re not dying, but I’ll bring doctors, the best there are. And you can go abroad soon, but just wait a little longer, because for now our kingdom needs you.”

  “Our kingdom is yours, and always has been.”

  “I’ve laden you with wealth, and rank, and honor.”

  “I’m a slave with a golden collar.”

  “You’re Crete’s second citizen.”

  “That distinction, like every distinction craved by your courtiers, is worthless, a complicated way of organizing nothing, as lasting and as valuable as smoke.”

  The day is failing rapidly and he’s faded to planes of shadow and pale light as I say, “Then I’ll build you a monument in stone, a colossal statue to stand by the harbor, and every man who sails into Knossos will see your face and know your name. Your fame will be written in granite.”