The third time she started to walk over the meadow, the grass suddenly began to wither just ahead of her toes, green blades curling in to form dusty yellow lines that she could see even in the early light. She stamped along between them, all the way until they brought her finally to the waiting center, and there she turned around and looked out over the meadow as the sun came up, and the yellow grass lines made an outline, faint but there, marking out the buried passageway underground.
After that, when she walked the path, she felt something moving beneath her feet: not quite a sound, not quite a vibration, but like heavy footfalls echoing against marble walls, deep within. So then she knew he was there, walking with her, the way they’d once walked together balancing over the walls. Only he had fallen inside, after all.
One week after they put Minotaur into the labyrinth, a priest came to dedicate the new shrine. It was only a young one, in a red robe, with a slightly younger acolyte leading a tired, skinny bull for a sacrifice; the hill was a hot, steep walk up from the city. Minos had needed to give some excuse, for sending Daedalus and the workmen up to dig and dig for months, but he didn’t mean for the shrine to be important. It was meant to be forgotten. From the tower, Ariadne saw the priest and the acolyte come to the edge of the meadow, where they saw the pattern. They stood there staring, and they didn’t kill the bull, after all. They went away instead.
The next day they came back, the young priest and two older ones. They stood beside the pattern for a long time, hesitating, as though they wanted to step onto it but didn’t quite dare. Then they went away too, and the day after that they came back, the three priests, the acolyte leading the bull again and carrying water jugs dewed with moisture slung on his back, the high priest puffing along in his white robe with the red bands, and Minos himself with them. But this time they came in the early hours of the morning, before the sun was up, and Ariadne was still walking along the pattern to the seal. They saw her, and the young priest called out angrily, “What do you mean by this, girl? How dare you put your feet on the god’s path. Do you think this is a dancing floor?”
She stopped and turned. The deep echoing was there under her feet; it stopped, too. The men were standing on the edge of the pattern, her father’s face darkened, all of them waiting for her to cringe and apologize. She stood for a moment without moving. If she obeyed them, and came off, they would leave a priest here to watch over the labyrinth, so she could never come again. Minotaur would never know when they sent her away. There was a waiting beneath her feet, like the change in the light before rain came, even though the sun was coming up and lining the next mountains over with brilliance.
“It is for me,” she said.
Her father said sharply, “Watch your tongue, girl,” which meant now she was going to be whipped for impertinence. “Come here at once.”
She took a breath and faced forward again and kept going along the path. “With your permission, I will bring her back,” the young priest said to the king, to the high priest.
He untied his sandals before he came to get her. She saw him coming for her, cutting across the lines of the pattern, and then she had to turn her back on him to follow the next turn, one single foot’s length along the pattern, and when she turned again with the following step, moving a little closer to the center, he wasn’t there anymore. It wasn’t a vanishing. There was only a moment when he was there, and then there was a moment when he wasn’t, and all the moments in between those two moments were one moment, and endless.
The other men were still waiting impatiently. They were farther away, and they were watching her; it took them a little longer to notice that he was gone. They looked around for him, confused at first, and then they looked at the empty sandals standing at the side of the pattern, and then they all drew back several steps from the labyrinth, and said nothing more. Ariadne kept going all the way to the seal, with thunder moving beneath her feet, and she knelt and said to the dark crack around the door, “I’m here.”
They were still waiting when she came back to them. She could just have walked away, but she stayed on the pattern, and she didn’t go quickly, letting the hot sun come up and bake them a little in their wigs and their crimped, oiled hair. Their robes were stained with growing dark patches of sweat when she came out finally, and stepped off the labyrinth.
She stood before them, and they looked at her, faces downturned and unsmiling, and then the high priest turned to her father and said, “She must be consecrated to the god,” insistent, and her father’s jaw tightened—thinking mostly, Ariadne knew, of all those heavy golden chains he’d put around her neck, his false apology, and how he wouldn’t be able to use them and her to buy some lord’s loyalty.
“I have to be back here tomorrow,” she said.
They all paused and stared at her, and the high priest said, sternly, “My daughter, you will enter the temple—”
“I’m not your daughter,” she interrupted. “I have to be here tomorrow morning. He’ll be waiting for me.”
The acolyte blurted, “Yidini?” meaning the young priest. His voice was ragged with desperation, but he flinched when the high priest gave him a hard narrowed look, and subsided; the other priests shifted uneasily, looking away from him.
Ariadne looked straight at her father and said, “Do you need me to say?” A threat, and even in his anger, his eyes darted to the labyrinth, to the gold seal on his hidden shame.
Minos was a clever man. He’d thought of one trick after another: to win the throne over his brothers, to keep it in his grasp, to build his wealth. And now he turned back to the high priest and said, “You will consecrate the tower as a temple, and my daughter will abide here, and tend the god’s shrine, which he has chosen to favor.”
Pasiphae went back to the palace in the city, gladly. Three women of the temple came to live with Ariadne instead. Reja, the eldest and a priestess, had a mouth whose corners turned down and plunged into dark hollows. Her hand often flinched when she taught Ariadne, as though she would have slapped a different novice, who wasn’t the daughter of the king and the chosen of the god. When she came, she tried to make herself the mistress of the tower: she wanted to take the queen’s room for herself, and put the rest of them together on the two higher floors.
Ariadne didn’t do anything about it. She didn’t see what she could do. The other women did what Reja told them. That night they came upstairs with her, to the room where she had slept with Minotaur, and the two novices lay down on the big cot where he had slept. It was wide enough for both of them. Then they put out the candle, and even as Ariadne was falling asleep, one of the young women jerked up and said, “Who’s there?” into the dark.
The other one sat up too. They both sat there shaking, and after a moment they scrambled up with all their bedclothes and went creeping silently down the stairs, and they wouldn’t come back upstairs even when Reja scolded them. Then she came up angry herself to accuse Ariadne of scaring them, and Ariadne sat up on her own cot and looked at her and said, “I didn’t do anything. You lie down, if you want,” and Reja stared at her, and then she went to the cot and lay down on it, on her back staring up into the dark with her angry frowning mouth, and then after a few moments she twitched, and twitched again, and then she got quickly up off the bed and stood in the middle of the room and looked down at Ariadne, who looked back at her, and then Reja said, in a very different voice, not angry, hushed, “Who slept in this room with you?”
The moon was outside, so she could see Reja’s eyes, each one a small gleam in the dark, nothing like the deep shine of her brother’s eyes, as if he hadn’t ever been here at all. “His name is Minotaur,” Ariadne said, defiantly. “He’s under the hill now.”
Reja was silent, and then she went downstairs and didn’t scold the other priestesses anymore. The next morning she sat up when Ariadne went out, waking even though Ariadne was creeping out of habit, and she got up and followed her outside. She stood and watched her dance through the labyrinth all t
he way to the center, and when Ariadne came back out, Reja said, “I will show you how to pour the libations,” and the rest of that day, Reja taught her with a jug of water, and then the next morning she was awake and waiting, before Ariadne went to the labyrinth, with a stoppered jug full of olive oil, deep green and fragrant, from the first pressing. Ariadne took it. She carried it with her along the path, all the way to the seal, where she didn’t follow the ritual. Instead she poured the oil all around the hatch, its locks, through the cracks, hoping to make it easier to open. But when she tried, it didn’t help. The hatch was still too heavy for her. She couldn’t even shift it a little bit in its groove. But as she knelt by the hatch with her fingers sore, unhappy and angry all over again, the seal beneath her moved a little, the whole hillside taking a deep sighing breath, and a little air came out of the grating from inside, full of the strong smell of the olive oil, fresh and bright, instead of the faint musty smell of earth.
It frustrated Reja that Ariadne wouldn’t do the rituals properly, but she didn’t scold her any more than she slapped her; she only grimly kept teaching her, one after another, the proper words and gestures for wine instead of oil, perfume instead of wine, as if hoping if she did it often enough, one day it would stick. Ariadne did the lessons, a little out of boredom and a little to be at peace with Reja, who managed things with ruthless efficiency and also sent the novices down to the city each day to bring something else to pour out, another bright living smell to send into the dark.
The acolyte who’d come up with the priests was set to guard them. There was nothing to guard them from, at least no danger that hadn’t always been there, the last seven years while Ariadne had lived there with the queen and all her jewels, but the acolyte had seen something uncomfortable, and it was easier for the high priest and the king to forget about it if he wasn’t around.
He wasn’t allowed to stay with the women, of course; instead he had to build a hut to shelter in farther down the hillside, and Reja kept a hawk’s cold eye on him any time he came up to their well for water, close enough to see the novices. The second day after they arrived, she paused in the prayer she was teaching Ariadne, and she got up and marched to a bush near where the trail down the mountain began. She pulled Nashu out of it by his ear and told him sharply if she caught him at it again, she would have him whipped out of the temple.
But he wasn’t spying on the novices, even though they had their skirts hiked up around their waists, working on the garden. “I want to know where Yidini is!” he said, his voice wobbling up and down through a boy’s soprano, and wrenched himself loose to take a step toward Ariadne, his fists clenched. “Where did you send him?”
She hadn’t been sorry for the priest; to her, the priests were the ones who’d made her brother hide, who’d have put him to death. And Yidini had meant to drag her away. But she was sorry for Nashu, because someone he loved had been taken away and sent into the dark. She still couldn’t help him, though, and when she said, “I don’t know,” he was angry, and he hated her for it.
He crept up the hill sometimes after that to watch her walking to the seal, in the dim early mornings. He hid in the bushes along the edge of the hill. Reja with her older eyes didn’t catch him, but Ariadne knew he was there. She didn’t say anything. There was something a little comforting in how much he cared; it meant she wasn’t stupid for caring, either. She kept coming every day herself to pour the offerings down, a little bit of the mortal world, so her brother wouldn’t disappear forever into the earth.
She wanted the days to change, sometimes; she had been afraid of being taken away, and now some small part of her wanted to go, wanted the life she’d avoided. She could still have had it. The golden chains sat in a locked chest in her room, the room where no one went but her, except hurriedly, in broad daylight, to sweep and clean. Her father, who had kept a bull the god had sent, would gladly have made some excuse for releasing her from the temple to buy a lord with her. And then her brother would melt back into the god like a little pond of water draining into a stream, and the vegetation would creep over the seals, and new grass would grow where the yellowed lines stood.
So she stayed.
The days did begin to change a little, over time. It was the poor hill folk who came first, the ones who couldn’t afford to go to the temple in the city. They brought cups of milk, and an egg or two, and foraged greens. Once an anxious young man came with a lamb on a rope, and when Ariadne came out of the tower that morning, he was waiting on the edge of the labyrinth, and he knelt to her as if to the king and said, low, “My wife is giving birth soon, and the ewe died,” a plea to turn aside the evil omen.
Reja looked at the lamb with greedy pleasure, thinking of the priest’s portion, the best meat, and she said to Ariadne, “I’ll show you how to make sacrifice,” but Ariadne looked at the lamb with its wide uncertain liquid eyes, deep and brown, and said, “No.” She took the rope and led the lamb with her through the passage to the seal. It butted at her as they went, bleating and trying to suck at her fingers, hungry, but she stayed on the track, and at the seal, she said, “There’s a lamb here, if the god will take it to its mother, and let the shepherd’s wife stay with her child up here,” and then she took the rope off the lamb’s neck, and rubbed the matted wool underneath it soft, and let the lamb go. It ran away from her bleating.
Reja and the shepherd were watching her from the edge of the labyrinth. It was like the last time: their faces didn’t know that the lamb was gone at first, and then they looked around wanting to believe it had just run away, but there was nothing for it to have hidden behind on the bare hill, and then finally they had to understand that it was gone. The shepherd fell on his face, pressing his forehead into the dirt, and Reja drew back herself, staring, and then she knelt too, when Ariadne came out of the labyrinth.
Nashu was there, too. Later that afternoon, when Ariadne went down the hill to get some water, and she was alone, he came out of the bushes and stood staring at her with his face twisted up, and then he said, “Why Yidini? He was a true servant of the god! You could have sent that old fat priest.”
Ariadne didn’t bother trying to tell him she hadn’t sent the young priest anywhere. She wasn’t sure it was true, anyway. “Why would the god want an old fat priest?” she said instead, and Nashu was silent, and then he said, “Then I hate the god, if he took Yidini,” defiantly.
“It’s not worth your hating him,” Ariadne said, after a moment; she had to think it out for herself. “He doesn’t care.”
Nashu glared at her. “Why does he care about you, then?”
“He doesn’t,” she said slowly.
The next morning, she didn’t dance. She only walked straight to the center and knelt down by the seal and whispered, her throat tight, “It’s all right if you want to go. You don’t have to stay for me. I’ll be all right,” because she hadn’t thought, before, that she was being selfish by holding on to the little part of the god that could care about her, keeping him there buried in the earth, instead of letting him go back to the rest of himself.
There wasn’t any answer. She left the labyrinth, walking slowly with her head down, and went back into the tower, where the two novices darted sideways looks at her and Reja determinedly looked at her directly and scolded her to eat her supper of olives and bread and honey. That night, Ariadne opened her eyes and looked over at the empty cot across the room from her, and Minotaur was sitting there looking at her. He was bigger than the last time she’d seen him, much bigger: two feet taller than the biggest of the Oreth, and his pale cream-ivory horns were wide and gleaming at the points, deadly. She knew she was dreaming, because he was too big. If he had really been there, she didn’t think she could have stood it. But when she sat up and looked back at him, his eyes were still soft and liquid, and she knew he didn’t want to go back into the god, either. He wanted to keep this piece of himself separate, this part that could love her, for as long as he could. Even if he had to stay down there in the dark
.
* * *
A rich man from the city sent a lamb, for the sake of his wife, but Ariadne told the slave who had brought it up the hill, “It’s not a fair trade. Take it back.”
The sweaty, thin boy stared at her and said uncertainly, “You don’t want it?”
“A lamb doesn’t mean the same thing to a rich man as a poor one,” she said. “And if he cares, he should come himself.”
So the boy went away, and two days later, the rich man did come himself: fat, even more sweaty despite the servants who had trailed him with fans and water jugs, and irritated. “What’s this nonsense?” he said to Reja, complaining. “Now I had to come: my wife’s father took it into his head that if I didn’t, I’d as good as be killing her myself. And in this heat!”
Reja was going to be polite, because he was rich, and a nobleman, but Ariadne heard him and came down the stairs and out of the tower and said coldly, “You’re asking for the god to put his hand into your life. Do you think that’s a small matter? Go away again, if you don’t want to be here.”
The rich man scowled, but he said grudgingly, “Forgive me, Priestess,” because he knew she was the king’s daughter, and then he waved to the ass laden with rich gifts. “I have brought many fine offerings for the god.”
The gifts were all for her, though: red and purple silks shot through with gold, a necklace, a box of coin, candied fruit. Ariadne shook her head in frustration as she looked over them, because there wasn’t anything that she could send down into the dark; he hadn’t even brought wine or perfume, because those weren’t sophisticated enough: only a chest of sandalwood for her clothing and a luxurious loaf of dried cherries pressed with honey and nuts. There wasn’t anything, but that was his fault, not his wife’s, whose father had sent him to ask for her life, and Ariadne looked at his dripping, sweaty face, and said, “Come with me.” She took him by the hand, and led him to the labyrinth, and said, “Stay on the path, and stay right behind me, no matter what.”
The Mythic Dream Page 30
