The Mythic Dream

by Dominik Parisien

  It was the middle of the day. She’d already gone, that morning. But the deep thunder came soon under her feet: Minotaur had heard her. She heard the man’s breathing go more and more ragged behind her, a faint whimpering deep in his throat. She didn’t look back at him. The sun was hot on the crown of her dark hair, beating on her like a hammer, and the air over the golden seal shimmered. But the ground beneath her breathed coolness over her, and she kept dancing, all the way to the seal, and then she turned and the man went to his knees gasping, crouched over the seal, so wet with sweat that the drops were rolling off his earlobes and his nose and chin, his clothing soaked through.

  “Take off your robes and squeeze out the sweat,” she said, and he stripped down to his loincloth and wrung the robes like a woman getting clothing ready for drying, and the pungent sharp sweat trickled out of them and went into the grating, and the earth stirred beneath her.

  She took him out after, back to his servants and his ass, and told him, “Now you can go back to your wife, and tell her and her father that you made a true offering to the god for her. And give the gifts to the people you meet on your way back home.”

  She didn’t guess what that would do. It just sounded like the stories Reja taught her, of priests and oracles speaking, and Ariadne liked those, even as she knew that it wasn’t anything like real priests, who needed offerings to live on and in exchange made a comforting show to distract men from death. But it worked, even if she hadn’t meant it to work. The rich man came stumbling down the hill still full of terror, and pressed wealth into the hands of shepherds and a bewildered milkmaid and beggars in the street, and the whispers came down from the country folk and went in through the city gates with him, and after that even the city people said, The god is there on the mountain, and the king’s daughter is beloved of him.

  Reja didn’t have to send the novices down to get offerings anymore. People came and brought them, often without any request attached. And a few fools came to see the god, because they didn’t think it was real. Once it was a group of six drunken young noblemen whose fathers were too healthy and didn’t give their sons enough work to do, and they showed up in the early hours shouting up at the tower windows that they wanted to speak with the god.

  Ariadne was coming down anyway, because it was time; in summer the sun came early and quick. The drunken youths smiled at her, and one of them took her hand and bowed over it and said mournfully, putting it to his chest, “But you’re too pretty to be locked up here with no lover but a buried god.”

  “He’s my brother,” Ariadne said. The young man was good-looking, at least in the dim light, and she half liked the silliness, but Reja was at her shoulder, tense, afraid of something Ariadne had never had to fear before. That fear was trying to creep into her, telling her without words that she was a woman now, with breasts and her hair unbound, and fair game for drunk men who didn’t believe in the god.

  “Even worse!” the young man said. “Won’t you have a drink with us? Here, we’ve the finest mead, brewed from my father’s hives.”

  “It’s time for me to go to the labyrinth,” Ariadne said. “You can come if you want. You can bring it as an offering.”

  “Then lead on, and let me meet your brother!” the young man declared. “I’ll show him a man worthy to court his sister!” His name was Staphos, and he kept smiling at her, and touching her hand. “Hurry and make the offering,” he murmured to her as they walked. “I know what I want to ask the god for.” His friends were singing, arm in arm with one another.

  They were near the labyrinth when the bushes stirred, and Nashu came out and blurted, “Don’t go in there with her!”

  “Oh, so you do have some company up here!” one of the other youths said, gleefully, and Nashu said angrily, “I’m trying to save you! If you go with her, the god will take you,” and they all started laughing, a drunken joyful noise, and Ariadne turned and took the jug of mead from Staphos and said, “He might. It’s up to you if you want to come. Don’t stray from the path, if you do,” and she turned and put her foot on the path as the sun began to come up.

  Staphos laughed again, and fell in behind her. The others came, too, singing a marching song and doing a mocking high-step behind her own dance, but the deep drumming echo rose beneath to meet them, and their song began to die away little by little. “Keep singing,” she said, over her shoulder, but they kept fading out, until suddenly Staphos began a faint and wavering temple song, one Reja hadn’t taught her, deep and chanted: one of the men’s songs, probably. She felt that Minotaur heard it, and wanted to listen, and the deep echoes went quieter beneath them. Soon the young noblemen could sing it too, the repetition of the chant at least, which was only four syllables strung together in two different patterns.

  They came to the seal, and Ariadne poured out the honey-strong mead, with all of them in a ring around her clutching hands and still singing. They followed her out again in silence, without singing, without saying a word. She stood on the hill watching them go down the trail in sunlight, and only then she noticed herself that Staphos wasn’t with them anymore. She wasn’t sure when he’d gone.

  * * *

  Staphos wasn’t a lamb, or even a young priest. He was the eldest son of one of her father’s richer lords, and he’d been betrothed to the daughter of another. It made trouble below for her father, who wanted to make it someone else’s trouble, as he always did. He sent a group of priests up to question her, one of them Staphos’s cousin, and they questioned the novices, and Reja, and the acolytes also.

  Nashu tried to get her into trouble, but he was too young and bad at lying. He told three different made-up grotesque stories about her butchering men on the seal, and then he gave up and told them that her brother the god lived under the hill, and she gave him offerings, and he took people who made her angry. And when the interrogating priest said, “Why my cousin, then?” Nashu blurted, “He tried to lie with her,” which would have required the family to chisel Staphos’s name off his tomb and cast him into the dark forever, if she had confirmed it.

  But she was sorry about Staphos, so she told the priest, “He was only joking. The god wanted him, so the god took him. That’s all I can tell you.”

  A messenger came two days later to summon her down to her father’s palace. Ariadne didn’t want to go. In her father’s house, there would be guards and rooms with locked doors and lies shut up inside them, and if she said the wrong thing, she’d be shut up into one of them too. “I have to make the offering first,” she said, and took a jar of oil out to the seal, and after she poured it down she said softly, “I have to go to the palace. I don’t know if he’ll let me come back.”

  The deep faint tremor lingered beneath her feet all the way to the labyrinth’s end, and there it paused for a moment, and came on with her. The messenger and the escort of guards looked over their shoulders uneasily as they walked; and Reja, who had insisted on coming as chaperone, kept moving her lips silently in the formal chant to the god; and when they stopped for water, a few times, she knelt and prayed aloud, a prayer for mercy, while the soldiers opened and closed their hands around their hilts.

  When Ariadne stepped onto the paved streets of Knossos, the sensation didn’t disappear, but it receded deeper, muffled, and the soldiers relaxed in relief. They took her to the palace, and up another muffling flight of stairs into the higher chambers, until there was barely a faint echo lingering when the Oreth themselves took her the last of the way into the throne room, her father sitting with stern downturned mouth in state, the high priest standing important beside the throne in robes, and both of them looking down at her from the height of the dais, so she had to look up at them. There was no one else in the room, only the Oreth on either side of her, and Minos said, “Daughter, two men have died at the god’s shrine, under your hands. What have you to say of it?”

  His voice bounced against the walls of the room, the heavy stone clad in marble: he knew how to pitch it to make the reverberations brig
ht and loud, so his voice came at her from all sides, a whispering echo arriving a moment after the first sound reached her ears. But the floor under her swallowed the sound, and it fell away deadened.

  “They didn’t die under my hands,” she said. “They went to the god. All three of them.”

  Her father’s lips thinned, his hands closing around the gilded bull’s-head ends of the arms of his throne, flexing. He looked at the Oreth around her, and then back at her, a warning to keep quiet, but he didn’t need to worry. The high priest didn’t care: he thought the third one was a shepherd, some poor man, someone who didn’t matter. “It is not for you to decide who will go to the god, girl,” he said to her.

  “It’s not for you, either,” she said, without looking away from her father.

  “You dare too far!” the high priest said, sharp and indignant, with a quick look at Minos, a demand.

  “Strike her across the buttocks with the flat of your blade,” Minos said, to the head of the Oreth, and the man drew his sword instantly and struck her with it, a hard painful shock that rolled through her body, up to her head and down in a tingle along her spine and back out through her legs, down, down into the ground, down into the ground where it began to echo back and forth, an echo that didn’t die away, an echo that built a thunder-rumble far, far below that grew and grew until it came back up through the floor, and the room trembled all over, so the servant holding the tray of gilded cups stumbled, and the cups rang against each other, and the dewed jug of cool wine fell over and crashed to the ground, spilling green and pungent.

  It died away slowly, but not all the way; the rumble was still there, close beneath her feet. The Oreth recoiled, stepping back from her. Her father’s face was still and frozen, the high priest staring, and Ariadne finished breathing through the pain and looked up at them and said, “Tell him to hit me again if you want. But the god hits back harder. You know he does.”

  So she went back up the hill, and her father gave orders that no one was to go to the shrine, on pain of death. But it was too late. Minos told no one what had happened inside the throne room, and the high priest didn’t either: he didn’t want to be replaced by a high priestess. The Oreth couldn’t tell anyone. But too many people had heard some story about the labyrinth by then, and too many of those had been waiting in the court with interest as the king’s daughter, rumored beloved of the god, went in to face the king and the high priest. Her mother had sent someone to watch, and some of Staphos’s family had come hoping to see her punished, and many others who only had nothing better to do had come to see if perhaps the god would perform some miracle in front of them, either because they hoped it would happen or because they were sure it wouldn’t. And all those people were there when she went inside, and they were there when the whole palace shook, and they were there when she came out again alone, unpunished, and went back up the hill.

  They lived with the shaking of the earth in Crete. The footsteps of the god, people called it, and when the god walked too heavily, he cast a long shadow of death. So people came to the shrine afterward anyway, even though Minos forbade it. It was too much of a miracle, too big to be ignored. Minos himself understood that almost at once, just as soon as his temper cooled. He changed the command: no one was to go to the shrine until the festival of the god, in the spring. And then he sent his warships over the water, the fleet that his wealth and his cunning had built, filled with tall strong warriors fed on his fat cattle, with her eldest brother Androgeos in command.

  The sails were white against the dark shimmer of the water as they sailed out. Ariadne watched them out of the window until they vanished over the world’s edge. Six months later they came back, without Androgeos, but with seven maidens and seven youths of Athens in his place, as tribute for the god. They came up the hill at dusk, at the head of a parade, a great noisy crowd of stamping feet and cheering: her father trying to make another lie, a new lie, a lie big enough to bury the god deep. And it might work: the god could hit harder, but he couldn’t lie.

  They stopped by the tower, and in front of the labyrinth erected a great platform for the king’s throne, facing the other way, with Pasiphae and the high priest on either side. Ariadne sat silent and angry in a chair one step down from her mother, in a wine-red gown that her father had sent and insisted she wear: a gown for a princess instead of a priestess, with her chains of gold heavy upon her. The night came on, dark enough to hide the faint yellowed lines of grass with the glare of torches and feasting, singing and smoke that went up to the sky, not into the earth: a funeral for Androgeos, and honor for the sacrifices, who were bunched up under guard on a dais next to her father’s throne.

  Minos rose and said, “May the god accept this tribute,” with savage bitterness, tears on his face. Androgeos had been his eldest son. Pasiphae too had tears, but Ariadne was dry-eyed, still angry.

  Then the Oreth came to take the sacrifices, the girls weeping softly and the youths trying not to look afraid, all except one: a young man with hair as bright as gold, strange among the others with their shining olive-black hair. Ariadne looked at him, and he really wasn’t afraid. He stood and looked up at Minos, and his eyes weren’t dark and deep like her brother’s, but even in torchlight they were clear all the way through: the sea on a calm day near the shore, shafts of sunshine streaming straight down to illuminate waves captured in pale sand, ripples on the ocean floor.

  And the Oreth taking his arm had a second sword, a spare sword, thrust through his belt.

  Ariadne stood up also, despite her mother’s grasping hand, and said through a tight knot in her throat, afraid herself suddenly, “I will lead them.”

  Minos only said, “Let it be done,” and gave a nod to the leader of the Oreth, at his side.

  She led the way through the cheering crowd and past the dais into the dark, groping her feet out one after another. The way felt strange to her, though she’d walked it every day for three years now. The night was a solid tunnel, the torches in the hands of the Oreth behind her only making small circles on the ground. She thought she had gone too far, that she’d missed it, and then she caught sight of the gold torchlight flickering over the golden seal.

  The Oreth unlocked the hatch and heaved it open, two big men straining. The girls were weeping noisily now, crying protests, and one of the youths suddenly broke for it and tried to run, but one of the Oreth caught him roughly; he was a slim boy, and the Oreth was a head taller and gripped his arm in one hand, fingers easily meeting around the skinny limb, and held him.

  “Have courage,” the golden-haired one said to them, low and clear, his voice going out over them like wind stilling, and they quieted into a huddle. The captain of the Oreth was waiting with the sword in his hand, the spare sword, and he held it out, offering the hilt. The golden youth took it, grasping it easily. Ariadne stood, tense, waiting for a chance. She was only thinking that she had to warn Minotaur: she had to get to the central seal and call to him, let him know that a golden-haired Athenian was coming, with a sword in his hand and the god looking out of his face with different eyes.

  And then the Oreth looked at her—looked at her waiting on the other side of the hatch—and jerked his chin toward the dark hole, a command: go in. Ariadne realized too late that she hadn’t thought about her father, who had now buried a son he had wanted because of her, his daughter who knew his lies, who was held under the god’s hand, so he couldn’t strike her down.

  She stood frozen on the edge of the dark, for a single blank moment. She could have run away: she was farther away than the Athenian youth had been, and she could have fled into the dark, across the labyrinth. The god would take anyone chasing her, who tried to hurt her, surely. Surely. But if she ran, the golden Athenian boy would go down into the labyrinth. He would find her brother, her sleeping brother, and make a way for his friends to come out of the labyrinth at the other end: in the first light of morning they would come out, stained with her brother’s blood, and there would be no more earthquake
s, no piece of the god left under the hill, and the green grass would grow over the lines. Her father would reward him, call him blessed of the god, to have fought his way through the underworld. If Ariadne came back out with him, maybe Minos would even give the Athenian his own daughter to wife, and send him back to be a great lord in Athens, far away, where people wouldn’t put her to death if she told them about her father’s lies, because they wouldn’t care at all.

  She said instead, to the Oreth, “Come and help me down,” and held her hands out to him across the dark hole. The man stood there a moment wary of her, his hand moving uneasily on the hilt of his sword. She remembered his face. He had helped to put the workmen down into this hatch. He had thrust them down roughly, pushing with his big arm and his sword held in his other hand, shoving them until they fell inside. He’d been ready to do that to her; he was ready to do it to the Athenians. He was slower to take a step to the edge, and reach out his hand to her. She gripped his hand and braced her foot against the far edge of the hole, and he let her down, kneeling to lower her into the dark, until her straining toes found the floor and she let go of his hand.

  The torchlight made a golden circle of the hatch above. Inside there was only a cool dark, impenetrable. She could just make out the mouth of the passage, darkness on darkness, and a faint sense of the marble walls around her. There was a sluggish whisper of air coming out of it, like someone sighing faintly. She made herself start going, at once.

  She heard the Athenians being pushed down behind her, cries and muted protests and soft weeping echoes, but worse than that footsteps, footsteps that she felt through the marble beneath her feet. She tried to run, for a little way, but she judged the distances wrong, and struck a wall before she expected it, ramming into stone with her forehead, although she’d thought she had a hand stretched out in front of her. She fell down hard, blinking away a dazzle that didn’t belong, her eyes watering with the shock of pain.