Metamorphica

by Zachary Mason

  “My face,” he says, “is a face like any other, and my name is a noise with no meaning. The only thing about me that deserves to survive, if anything does, is my mathematics, my aesthetic, my way of seeing the world. Faces are drawn in water, and names written in dust. Even persons are ephemeral—in the end, there’s only pattern.”

  “Stay with me,” I say, “for there are kings left to conquer, and we’ll break them, you and I, and build an altar to our victories from their brittle white bones.”

  “It would be a monument to vanity and ruin.”

  “Stay with me,” I say, “and I’ll give you libraries like gardens, and gardens like labyrinths.”

  “What’s worth reading, I have read. The only book for me now is the one I’m writing.”

  “Stay with me,” I say, “and I’ll give you time and silence and solitude. Write your book, and forget the affairs of men and cities. I’ll bring you mathematicians, if you want them, the best Hellas has.”

  “I doubt you’d find another of the kind I need,” he says, smiling at me for the first time in as long as I can remember, and once again I feel a secret in the air, and I remind myself that Daedalus’ wit has been many strong men’s undoing. He says, “You could have been a great mathematician, you know—you have talent, a talent not unlike mine. What a shame you grew into a hard-headed man-of-affairs with no use for mere abstractions.” He coughs wetly, and as the evening light fades in the window he’s all but invisible though he’s right there before me and then in a gentle voice he says, “My friend, you must learn to get along without me. My course is set—I’m going away.”

  He’s my oldest friend, in fact my only one, and he’s spent his life building my empire, and to my fathomless disgust my eyes begin to water. Moreover, if I let him go it would mean the end of my wars and so an end to the cries of the dying and the dead eyes of new slaves and the ash and stench of burned-out cities, but I remind myself I’m a man of will, and as the last light disappears I stifle my weakness and say, “The prince you serve will rule the Middle Sea, and that will be me, or that will be no one, and Knossos, which has been your home, is now your prison, and I swear to you, you will die here.”

  * * *

  That night I dream of the days when Daedalus and I were never apart and a supplicant knelt not to me but to him, and death was in the supplicant’s face when he realized his error but I raised him up and said, “Never mind—he too is Minos,” and in the morning my chamberlain wakes me to tell me that Daedalus is gone.

  * * *

  I look for him in the workshops, in the smithies, in the deep tangle of the labyrinth, in dry wells, in oubliettes, in the winding canyons of the inland mountains. I let no ship leave the harbor. I send soldiers to search the towns, huntsmen to set brindled hounds belling through the wood, divers to sink among the reefs. I search the deepest cellars, listen to their silences, look for footprints in the dust. I sit on the beach where we planned our empire the first night he came to Crete, shouting to be heard over the wind; silent now, but for the waves’ hiss and lap. In his cell I watch the light fade in his window. He’s gone, as are all his papers, leaving nothing but the book.

  A darkness settles on my mind and I lack the energy even to stand as my thoughts move sterilely and interminably over the locked gates, the inaccessible beaches, the crenelated towers that should have kept him here. My vacantly circling thoughts bring me no closer to a solution and I catch myself wanting to ask Daedalus for his advice. In the gathering dusk the book seems terrible, its cover a black hole absorbing all the light, and I find I can’t look away, as I can’t bring myself to touch it, for Daedalus’ resource was endless, and he must have hated me, and he had years to give his malice form in spring-loaded needles or poisoned ink or some subtler trap. For a moment I long to burn the book as I once longed to break cities but, having nowhere else to turn, I open it.

  * * *

  When I close the book the one window frames the glow of dawn, or perhaps of dusk, and my mind is full of the forms of clouds, all the shades and gradients of vapor forming ethereal massifs, towering spires, vast plateaus, and for just a moment I understand the elusive calculus of the upper air, but as I try to hold it in my mind lucidity becomes confusion and I’m left with only fragments. I look out the window but the incandescent sky is cloudless, and I’m distantly aware that I haven’t eaten in a long time, and then I go back to the book.

  * * *

  I’m stifled, drowning, the hard hand of black water pressing me down; I rise out of the dream with a lurch, sitting up and knocking my dagger from the desk; blood streaks my forearm from the wounds on my wrist where I pricked myself awake. The book lies open to the page I’ve read and re-read and dreamed of re-reading, and once again my eyes go to the ranks of equations that abstract the crushing weight of water on the abyssal plains, the way the wind’s force on the surface stirs the cold currents in the deep; the densely written symbols swim before my eyes, and I know I’ll never understand them, but my heart is a soldier’s, so I blink, steel myself and try again.

  * * *

  Black vault of night and then as the stars fade the sky lightens until there are only a few lingering planets and then nothing but swallows arcing after insects through the morning air over the empty streets. I’m happy, for it’s not far to the center of the city, and all the answers are there, waiting to be revealed, though they’re fragile, and might disperse if I so much as think of them. As I go deeper into the city the walls rise and the light fades, and the street becomes a canyon of uniform planes of shadow, and then I’m feeling my way through lightless, claustrophobic alleys where there’s only the pale quadrilateral of colorless sky, the wind’s restless octaves, the rough stone under my hands. Then there’s a sheer wall before me, and sheer walls all around, and the sky has disappeared, but even so I’m elated because I know the center is close at hand, and then I wake to someone shouting in my ear.

  I’m sweating on Daedalus’ cot, which still smells of him, clutching the book to my chest, and with relief I recall I’m still many pages from the end. A general watches from the doorway as the minister squatting beside me shakes my arm again and asks me another question but I turn my back on him, pull the blanket tighter, and sleep comes back in a black tide.

  * * *

  When next I wake it’s morning and I’m alone. Without rising I open the book and immediately my mind is full of the forms of forked lightning, branched rivers, blood vessels, but I haven’t been reading an hour when the writing stops. I flip ahead but the rest of the pages are blank, except for the very last which is covered with scrawled notes, a sort of diary, mostly about his work and the wings he built for his son. The last entry reads: Minos has a predictable mind, and as of now it’s a certainty that the book will be finished. I have one last thing to do, and then I’m gone.

  I remember how my generals swore Crete was bound in iron, bound in adamant, that not even a bird now could escape, and I’m on the verge of relieving them first of their commands and then of their lives, but then my rage collapses because the fault was mine, for who but a fool would expect those unremarkable men to contend with Daedalus and his sublimity? I throw the book at the wall, then gather it up tenderly.

  He’s gone to Athens, I think, that city of chatter and philosophy, where my old enemy Theseus is king and certain to make Daedalus welcome. At first it seems that the only possible plan is to gather my armies and my fleets and commit everything to an invasion first of Athens and then of all Attica and either win a new empire or see all my works destroyed, but armies are slow, while news travels fast, and he’d be gone long before my siege train reached Athens’ walls.

  That night in the small hours I go to the harbor carrying a bag of gold, a sword, and the book swaddled in canvas. Among the creaking ships I find one whose captain has often served me with discretion. The sentry is asleep on the gunwales; I nudge him with my foot and say, “Wake up. The king has a message for your master.” The captain comes on deck i
n a night-cap, his sleep-blurred face clarifying when he recognizes me, and soon the deck is full of hushed activity and then the sweeps are out and then the sails are filling. As we leave the harbor I watch the city lights and in the receding spattered glow I intuit the presence of a pattern I can’t quite articulate.

  We sail for days but see no other ships. On the third day we drop anchor an hour before dawn, the shore implied by white breakers and a sense of the land. The Piraeus, the captain says, is two hours’ walk north. “Good luck, sir!” he calls as I wade through the warm swell. From the beach I watch faint sails disappearing.

  I build a fire and sit with my back to a stone and watch the rising sun define the horizon as I listen to the sea’s sizzling blankness. The fire burns low and I let it fade. I’ve so rarely been alone.

  I dream I’m on the battlements of the walls around the harbor watching Daedalus make adjustments to the rows of mirrors that glow like low moons. The harbor is fathoms below us and there at its mouth are ships sailing in, rank upon rank of them, and they’re innumerable, an armada blackening the sea and the great void below is pulling at me as I say, “So many—I never thought the sea had held so many,” but Daedalus only points into a mirror’s silver concavity which holds a light so bright it blinds me, for it’s suddenly noon, and the mirrors blaze like a rank of suns, and their light is a bridge plunging down through the gulf of air to the prow of the foremost ship which kindles before my eyes, the orange flame engulfing its sails, and the wind brings faint screams and woodsmoke, as ship by ship the armada ignites, its rigid formations dissolving into an incandescent scrawl, and I know I should be rejoicing but my mind is full of angles of incidence and reflection, flash points, burn rates, luminosity.

  When I reach Athens I present myself as a free-lance at its gate, though I’m ill-at-ease, for Theseus hates me and has many soldiers and my armies are far away. The slouching guard rubs his stubble and waves me through with hardly a glance and I master the impulse to call him to attention and say that I’m Minos, by god, whose hands are steeped in Athenian blood, and I demand the respect and the hatred that are due me, but in fact I say nothing and enter the city as no one in particular.

  I’ve known Athens from a distance as an abstract locus of shipyards, fortification and supply, and I’m bemused to find myself wandering through the tangled streets, past the jumbled tombs, the walled gardens, the derelict factories, and the city seems to have a significance I can’t quite name.

  In the evenings I linger in the inns and the caravanserais nursing endless cups of watered wine and though I buy many drinks and listen carefully I hear of no new engineer in Theseus’ court, no resurgent barbarian princes, no sage unraveling the riddles of antiquity. An officious Theban mercenary says he knows a Cretan when he hears one and wants to know what I’m doing in Attica; I tell him I’ve come to find a certain teacher of mathematics, and when he asks the teacher’s name I have to overcome an absurd reluctance to say it’s Daedalus, Daedalus who I’m seeking.

  One day in the agora I find walls covered with graffiti and among the lovers’ names and vulgar drawings is a row of scribbled symbols that seem almost to float off of the wall, that seem almost to glow, and I realize that what I’d taken at first for a haphazard scrawl is in fact a theorem of the first water, and at first I’m rapt and then relieved for Daedalus’ style is unmistakable.

  A few feet away are men with serious faces and chalk on their hands, deep in conversation. I say, “Where is the man who wrote that on the wall?”

  “That?” says one. “That’s nothing, just some rubbish—it’s been there for months.”

  “Who wrote it,” I ask again, controlling my breathing, and again he says he doesn’t know and turns away from me, and I’m relieved to finally have a tangible enemy. I tap him on the shoulder and when he turns I punch him in the face, and when he clutches his nose I drive my knee into his stomach. “Who wrote it,” I ask again as I draw my sword and he raises his hand to ward off the blow that doesn’t come for in his terror there’s an innocence that gives me pause, and then he and the other men have scattered and someone’s shouting for the guard. If I’m to meet Theseus again I don’t care to do it in chains so I scramble over a wall and run through a maze of alleys and soon find the gates and leave Athens behind.

  * * *

  Daedalus is the father of weapons and I expect to find war in the wastes between cities but in the event there are no crumbled walls, no shattered towns, no siege trains sprawled across the desert, just city walls rising where I’d looked to find ruins.

  * * *

  Before the walls of Thebes I find an old man drawing diagrams in the sand and mumbling about geometry. He has dried gruel in his beard and can’t bear to look me in the eye but his work has a grace and fluency I think I recognize. Having learned discretion I spend weeks listening to him ramble on about his work before I dare to drop a hint that I, too, have known a great teacher, one he might know himself, but he ignores me, even when I repeat myself, and then something breaks in me and I seize his shoulder and insist that he tell me how and when he knew Daedalus but he writhes weakly in my grasp and weeps with fear and there’s nothing for it but to swallow my rage, let him go and move on.

  * * *

  I’m sleeping rough in the hills on the road to Arcadia on a night of brilliant cold clarity and wake with the full moon in my eyes and before the fog of sleep disperses I realize I know what the moon’s phase was a year ago, and a century ago, and what it will be in ten thousand years, but how I know this is closed to me.

  * * *

  One day in Corinth I’m hungry and find all my gold spent. I could turn mercenary, but that’s beneath the dignity of a king and of no interest to a mathematician, so I trade my sword for bread. It gives me pause to be without a weapon but I’m no longer afraid of being recognized and in fact am often mistaken for a holy man or scholar.

  * * *

  Soon it seems I’ve always been walking through the white dust of Attica. Sometimes I wonder what will become of me, a line of thought that raises questions that can only be avoided by stopping and reading the book. In each new city I seek out the mathematicians, who often seem to be expecting me and are generally kind, though I always find them disappointing; I’d been expecting men of my friend’s caliber but almost invariably their technique is crude even by my standards. When they ask me to critique their work I do so honestly, which is to say I tell them it’s worthless, except in those rare cases when it has a beauty in which I recognize my friend’s hand. When I confront them they insist on pretending that Daedalus is a figure out of parable, or perhaps a way of speaking, and it’s shocking how much this wounds me. My despair deepens as my acuity grows and I find his imprimatur in the faded graffiti on temple walls, in patterns of white stones scattered by road, in the striations of dust storms, in the sickly illumination of thunderheads, and I wonder who it was who once served me.

  * * *

  I sometimes hear that Daedalus has been seen in this city or that but as much as I pursue I never can find him, and I wonder why he still flees from me, as he must know by now that my anger is gone, that I just want to see him again, even for a few minutes, and talk about the book.

  In one city in the endless succession of cities someone says, “But are you not him?”

  “Not who?” I say.

  “Daedalus,” he says, smiling, looking intently into my face, and I laugh and admit that though once I was his master now I’ve lost him.

  * * *

  I’m sitting in the sun in a garden colonnade in what I think is Athens and my host, whose work verges on the competent, dips his bread in olive oil as he says, “We’re founding an academy, my friends and I, to which we hope to attract the best minds.” I nod abstractedly and he waits a beat and then says, “We’d be honored, of course, if you’d join us.” I’m taken by surprise, but there’s something to be said for an end to wandering, and a garden of my own where I could sit and think through ancient proble
ms away from the road’s dust and weariness, and perhaps there’d even be a woman, and for a moment I think of going back to Crete—I’m king, so why not?—but the pomp and intrigue belong to someone else’s life. That night asleep in the guest room the book’s logic burns behind my eyes and I wake certain that the academy is a trap and steal silently out into the garden and then over the wall into the night.

  Soon I’m in high broken country where there’s no road and in that solitude my mind becomes a void the book rushes in to fill. I find a shallow cave in an arroyo scoured by the wind and as the day passes nothing moves but the light and the shadow gliding over the stone. I read while the light lasts and my thoughts crystallize around the negative space of the blank pages at the book’s end. Somehow I know Daedalus isn’t far away, and is coming ever closer, and if he ever arrives I’ll embrace him, tell him all is forgiven, and show him that I, even I, have attained a certain standard of mathematics.

  Time passes, and sometimes I find bread and water waiting at the cave-mouth, which I accept without question. I have the book by heart now—in fact, I know it so well I feel I wrote it. I’m surprised to find a few mistakes, but it seems even Daedalus erred, that even he was getting old. I have an intuition of how the book would have ended had Daedalus had time to finish, and had he still been the man he once was, but though I try a long time it won’t quite come into focus. I wish I were more intelligent and am on the verge of giving up but instead I accept that the failure and the pain will always be with me forever and shortly thereafter I know how to end the book.

  I write out the last pages, and as the ink dries I know I’m alone, and that Daedalus has been dead a long time. I wonder how I’d ever been content to be no more than a king and a soldier, blind to all the beauty in the world.