The Door in the Mountain (19 page)

Minos tossed a knife to the ground next to her. She picked it up and set it to the rope around Icarus’s ankles. They took a while to part, but the ones around his wrists were quicker. He shifted and writhed, and she stood and tucked the knife into the hem of her open bodice. Then she threaded the ball’s hook next to it.

As she ducked out after Minos, Daedalus made a sharp, agonized sound behind her, and Icarus yelled, full-throated and raw. She heard him scrabble for the tunnel; she felt the air ripple behind her as he threw himself in behind her. She crawled faster, panting. Minos’s orange glow bobbed and vanished briefly, as he reached the air. Something brushed the sole of her foot; she kicked out and crawled faster yet, whimpering now. When she reached the opening Minos leaned in and pulled her and she cried out at the burning of his hands but at least she was free, and he slammed the rusted metal door home with a clang that echoed over the sound of Icarus’s scream.

“You fear that I am mark-mad.”

Ariadne slid her gaze to her father. They were walking side by side, back along the tunnel Theron had led her through earlier. It seemed like an age since she’d been here. Theron himself was behind them—far behind, at Minos’s command. (This had made her smile, despite the sickness that lingered in her gut.) The king wasn’t looking at her now. His eyes were fixed on the way ahead—so fixed that she wondered whether he were seeing anything at all.

“Your godmark is terribly strong,” she said slowly, “and I worry . . . We agreed, after Asterion wounded you, that you would send Icarus and Daedalus away—yet you made this decision without me! This is not like you. So, yes: I worry.”

“I may well be mad,” he said briskly. “But there is no cause for you to fear this. In fact, I call you ‘Little Queen’ for a reason!” His voice leapt. For a moment he sounded like an excited child. “For I will make you queen before I give myself to the fire.”

She stopped walking. He continued on for a few paces before he realized she was no longer beside him. He turned: dark shadow, to shadow with silver-orange teeth.

“But I have no godmark,” she said hoarsely. “It would not be permitted. The priests and priestesses—the people would never accept me.”

She hadn’t ever spoken these words aloud before; had barely spoken them within her own head.
The people would never accept me.
As they echoed from the rock, she shrank even farther back, more fearful than she had been in the cave.

Minos shook his head as he walked back to her. “Sweet girl—how could you think this? Priests, priestesses, people—all will heed
me
. And if they do not, I shall unleash my madness upon them.” He stroked her hair with both his hands. She leaned into them.

“But Deucalion—your heir, since Androgeus . . .” she murmured.

“No. He is not cruel enough. And it is not a matter of sequence, my dear—you know this. It is the reigning monarch who chooses the next one. This choice is mine, alone.”

She nodded until her vision swam. “Glau—but of course not.” She laughed unsteadily. “And you will not choose a husband for me and make him king, and me queen only through him?”

He chuckled. “And what husband of my choosing would be strong enough for you, Daughter?”

She pulled slowly away. Blinked against the heat that lapped at her skin like the breath of the Goddess’s mountain. “Queen,” she whispered. “Do you swear this?” The dank walls grasped her words and sent them back to her, over and over.

“I do. You shall rule. You may well take a husband of your own choosing and produce godmarked children—but this does not matter.
You
, Daughter, shall rule.”

The chuckle was a laugh, then a bellow. Ariadne covered her ears. Fire streaked from the centre of his chest and out along his arms and blasted from his fingertips like molten rain. She ducked and felt sparks pattering on her neck and arms. Behind her, Theron gave a startled yelp.

When she looked up, Minos was walking away from her. Though she hurried, he didn’t glance at her again—not even when they emerged into the storeroom. Not even when they came to the staircase that led to the royal apartments. She put her foot on the lowest stair, expecting him to do the same; instead, he turned sharply and strode across the courtyard and out between the gate columns. She watched pulsing flame fade into darkness.

“Princess,” Theron murmured. He was leaning against a pillar. The light from a brazier at its base flickered over his scarred flesh and his grin. She turned and walked up the stairs.

Chara was in her room, arranging food on a tray. “Go,” Ariadne snapped.

“Princess?” The slave raised her eyebrows, which disappeared beneath the unruly thatch of her hair. “What is wrong?”

Ariadne lifted a hand as if she would strike the girl, but Chara didn’t blink, let alone flinch. “Out,” Ariadne snapped. “Before I beat you. Again.”

Chara set a fig carefully on the tray. She lifted a tiny spoon from a tiny jar and drizzled honey over the fig. “Princess,” she said, and bowed her head, and slipped from the room.

Ariadne waited until the sound of the slave’s footsteps had faded. Then she removed Icarus’s ball of metal string from her girdle pocket. She reached up and placed it on the shelf above her bed. Daedalus’s maze box already sat there; she’d brought it with her from Knossos, knowing she’d exult, as she imagined Asterion in his own prison. She set the thrumming ball up against it. It rolled a bit because her hand was shaking.

“Queen Ariadne,” she said. Her laugh shook too, at first, but then it rang from the painted stone, hard and cold and sure.

Asterion
,

This is silly, but I have to do it. I’m much better at writing now than I was when you were here—and this, if you can believe it, is due to your sister. She makes me write her letters for her, on long scrolls of Egyptian paper. (She says pressing lines into clay takes far too long, and the tablets are far too heavy. She’s actually right about some things.) They’re love letters, mostly. “Thalcion—if you continue to gaze at me with such fervour, I shall have you flogged. Come to my chamber tomorrow at moonrise.” Sometimes hate letters too. “Diantha—you have been less than nothing to me for years. Stop flaunting your lovers or I shall have you flogged.” I’ve become very good at writing. So, now that she’s sleeping, all I want to do is write to
you
. It makes me feel as if I’m talking to you. As if you might laugh and reply.

For a very long time after they put you under the mountain nothing much happened. Ariadne made me write to her would-be lovers, especially Karpos (who never answered). Ariadne tried to talk to Minos, who kept wandering off with his limbs on fire, burning up the countryside. Ariadne tried to make your mother smile at her. She hardly ever succeeded at any of these things, but that didn’t matter. She’s a tenacious woman, your sister. (I learned “tenacious”
from the physician, who was talking about Minos.) Glaucus still carried his stick-sword everywhere. Deucalion still defended Glaucus. Everything was the same—until the time for the second sacrifice came.

Notice that I didn’t say
I’d
been the same, since they put you under the mountain. I’m sure I seemed the same. I’m sure no one saw me pacing, muttering about how I’d free you. I missed Icarus so much (still do). I imagined talking to him, instead of to myself—we used to listen very well to each other—but no, it was just me, and I couldn’t stop thinking about the lava pipes and the great metal door with the littler one in it. I wanted to go back to the Goddess’s mountain alone, but there just wasn’t a chance. So I planned to find a way in at the time of the second procession. And because Icarus wasn’t around to tell me otherwise, I swore I’d succeed.

Ariadne went on and on about how pathetic the second procession would be. “It was one thing when those first Athenians came. Remember that red-headed girl who wouldn’t stop crying? And then Asterion, being pushed in there after them: that was wonderful and exciting, but it won’t happen again. The people won’t care, this time.”

She was so, so wrong.

You used to tell me that I knew far more than any of the royal family did. And I’d tell you that this was because being a slave was like having a godmark of invisibility. It’s so true, Asterion. I clear tables and wash Ariadne’s clothes and scrub her floor and walls—and I hear people saying things, while I’m working. I watch them, even though my head is always bowed. So I knew, as the time for the second sacrifice came, that Karpos was making statues, some at Minos’s command, some at the queen’s. I knew that the priestesses’ acolytes were stitching banners with Asterion’s name on them. That children were learning dances, and that, while they danced, they wore bull masks just like the Athenians’. Somehow Ariadne was ignorant of all this.

The second group of Athenians looked like the first, except that there was no girl with red hair. There was another handsome youth, whom Ariadne fed figs to, in front of everyone. He could weep silver tears that tasted like wine. Quite a godmark—and imagine the princess’s delight as she stood, in front of everyone, and ordered him to cry, then licked the tears from his cheeks. Ugh.

She wasn’t nearly so cheerful when the procession began. Because of the children and their bull masks, and the banners—but especially the statues. There were six of them: three of you (as boy, and bull-boy, and bull) and three of your brother Androgeus. They were Karpos’s, of course, so they stood on their little wagons and seemed to breathe, and sometimes to blink. When the procession was underway, I touched the boy one on the hand and the fingers twitched, which was so strange that I nearly tripped. Anyway, Ariadne turned very pale and hissed at Karpos, “You didn’t tell me about these,” and he shrugged and said, “You’ve stopped visiting my workshops; I imagined you wouldn’t be interested.”

There seemed to be more people than the last time. More priests and priestesses, more Bull worshippers. Singers sang about you all day and night. (I admit that even I found this annoying.) Ariadne sulked in her tent. “How can he be more popular than ever? Why? Such fools!” She stared at the sky as the sacrifices were pushed into the darkness. I stared at the darkness. I’d half expected to see you standing there, when Phaidra unlocked the door. No, not half expected—less than that. And you weren’t standing there.

It took ages for her to fall asleep that night. When she finally did, I crept out of the tent. I spent the night climbing—much easier to do this time, with the ground all hard and parched, not scalding and running with mud. I heard the lava pipes before I saw them: the wind was making music with them again. I remembered Polymnia and her own lovely silver voice, and wondered whether she was still alive, under all that rock. Whether you were. Whether, gods forgive me, you’d killed her and the others and were now hunting the newest ones. (I felt very sick, thinking about this.) I jumped and scrabbled as I had before and got no closer to touching the pipes. I looped down and around, looking for some miraculous crevice, some hole I could leap down into. There wasn’t anything, though. Just as Icarus had told me. I missed him even more, just then.

I was so tired and sad the next day on the road home that Ariadne actually demanded to know what was wrong with me. Then she laughed and said, “Ah—you must be missing your dear little friend Asterion again.” She didn’t wait for me to answer; she was already striding ahead so quickly that children stumbled and bull masks fell onto the road.

She might have recovered from the humiliation of the procession, in time. But before she could, something even more horrifying happened to her: an announcement. Minos waited until we were all back at Knossos to make it.

(It’s now the day after I began this letter. I can’t believe I was able to write so much at once. I’m a little afraid of how long the whole thing will be, how long it will take to write. But I must keep going. I feel so
other
while I’m writing. Is that what godmarks feel like?)

“My people!” the king cried. He was standing on Ariadne’s dancing ground with his hand on the enormous statue of Androgeus. (He’d ordered it moved a little, so that it would be in the very centre.) He’d been gone from the palace for at least a week, but someone called out, that day at dawn, that they saw a plume of smoke. It was Minos, staggering back from wherever he’d been. He didn’t enter the palace. He stood there in the lovely circle Daedalus had made for Ariadne, and the people who’d been waiting for him listened.

“My people! I have been gone from you, but thinking only of you.” He sounded drunk. He looked drunk. He slurred and swayed, and we all had to glance away from him because he was so bright with fire. “I have been thinking as a father thinks of his child. Pondering what will become of you when I am gone. Others have been pondering this, too, it seems.” He gestured up at the High Priest and Priestess, who were side by side on the gallery above the gate. “Look at them: so fretful about the state of my mind that they have made peace with each other!” The priest shook his head slightly, his dark brows drawn. The priestess lifted her chin.

Minos staggered and groped for the statue’s cupped hand. “At last I know what I will tell all of you. At last I know who will sit on that throne when I am consumed by flame.”

I was standing beside Ariadne. I almost always am when some speech or other happens. Wedged between her and one of her brothers (though them I don’t mind at all, not even Glaucus, who makes her mad with irritation). Phaidra’s always close to Pasiphae, and she was that day, too, on the steps above the dancing ground.

“Godsblood,” Ariadne hissed. “It’s time. He’s going to do it now.
Godsblood
.” She took two steps toward Minos, then fell back to where I was. Her feet moved on the outermost arm of the shell spiral as if she was trying not to dance. Her lips smiled and trembled at the same time.

“Of course,” the king said, “it should have been you.” He was pressing both hands against the statue now, leaning on its hip, gazing up at its marble face. “You, only beloved—you were going to be king. Until the spawn of that other king took you from me.” I could see the stone giving a little beneath his red-gold-silver hands. The stone was silver too, where he touched it. I craned to look for Karpos but couldn’t see him. Maybe it frightened him or angered him to see his godmarked work touched this way? Or maybe mark calling to mark is a desirable thing? I find it all very strange.

Minos pulled away from the statue and turned again to the crowd. “Pasiphae. My Queen. I have not chosen you, for you are no longer young, and this land needs a young ruler.”

The queen didn’t frown or start, but her fingers started to glow silver, and within moments water was dripping from them. “Indeed,” she said. Phaidra looked up at her mother and raised a slender hand, which her mother ignored. Pasiphae said nothing else. Just watched her husband as he crackled and shone.

“My sons: I have not chosen you either.” I felt Glaucus stiffen. Deucalion bowed his head, smiling a little. He’s never wanted power over anything but the wind, so I wasn’t surprised.

“Yes,” Ariadne whispered. She grasped my hand and held it so hard that it went numb almost right away. I didn’t try to disentangle myself. I waited, hoping she’d let go.

Minos took a step. Black craters smoked where he’d been standing. “Ariadne. Daughter.”

She drew herself up and dropped my hand. “Yes, Father.” Her voice wasn’t quavery at all. I tell you: your sister is impressive.

“Despite my promise, I have not chosen you.”

I heard people murmur, right away. “Why would he have chosen her? She’s unmarked!” said someone near me. “He is already mad, to have made such a promise!” hissed someone else. Ariadne blinked once, and again, and her teeth crept down onto her lower lip and fastened there.

“No,” Minos called, holding up his hand to quiet the crowd. “Not you, for I love you too much. You are not as Androgeus was—you are too precious for the world I have known, these many years. No,” he went on, sweeping both hands up, sizzling, as she drew breath to say something, “the throne needs someone who has toiled and failed and toiled again. Someone who has strength and godmarked silver in his hands.”

“What?” Ariadne said. This time her voice cracked. Pasiphae threw back her head and laughed as the crowd began to murmur again.

“Karpos,” Minos cried. “Master Karpos: step forward.”

Karpos did. He walked and everyone murmured and made way for him, but when he stopped before the king, silence fell. “Master Karpos, you are strong and godmarked. You have laboured to make my son Androgeus live in this stone, though he is long dead. You are my choice.”

For a moment Karpos stood very still, staring straight into the king’s molten eyes. Then he knelt—gracefully somehow, not fawningly—and smiled. He said nothing. He didn’t need to. The silence shattered as the crowd cheered. Some of them fell to their knees, too.

Ariadne’s shriek rose above everything else as she launched herself at Karpos and her father. She was stumbling, as drunk-looking as the king was. “No!” she screamed, over and over. She thrust herself past Karpos and into the shimmering space around her father. “How dare you? You promised. You
promised
!”

She battered at him with her fists. “Daughter,” he growled. She didn’t stop. “Daughter. Ariadne!”—and as he yelled her name a great gout of flame burst from his chest and blew her backward. She fell. She clawed at the earth, moaning, twisting her body around like a fish on dry land, seeking the sea. The flesh of her hands and forearms was bubbling. I could see it; I thought I could smell it. I remembered you, and thought that while your own flesh had often bubbled, you’d never grovelled and wept.

“Come, Karpos,” Minos said, and Karpos rose smoothly. “I must teach you things before I give myself forever to the fire.” They went up the steps and under the doorway into the palace. Karpos didn’t even glance at Ariadne.

Glaucus took one pace toward his sister. “No, Glau,” Deucalion muttered. “Leave her be.” Pasiphae was already gone, and Phaidra, too. The crowd dispersed in bits and pieces.

Everyone left except me. I went over to her and said, “Princess.” The smell was very strong, right beside her. No water from her mother’s hands to soothe her, as you’d always been soothed.

Her head rolled around. One of her eyes gazed up at me. I don’t know if it saw me. “Princess,” I said, “get up. I’ll see to those burns.” I wanted to say much more, but had no idea what this much more would be. She was biting her lip again. She was bleeding.

“Get up. Please.”

She heaved herself onto her knees. I put my hands under her armpits and pulled her up, very slowly, gagging at the stench of her. Blisters burst water all over my hands. We staggered up the steps and into the courtyard. It took us a very long time to climb the stairs to her rooms. I could feel people watching us. I could hear them whispering.

“He promised,” she gasped when I had gotten her onto her own bed. “Tell me why. Why did he take this away from me?”

Because you’re unmarked. Because you’re almost as mad as he is.
I shook my head. “No,” I said. “I can’t. I have no idea.”

She cackled, then coughed and turned her face to the wall. “Just a slave,” she said. “No wonder.”

I dribbled olive oil on her burns and snipped her singed hair off. I wrapped her hands and forearms in clean dry cloth. I pretended she was you. That’s the only way I managed it.

I thought she’d fallen asleep, or maybe fainted, when she said, in a soft, slurred voice, “The king of Athens has a son.”

“Princess?”

“A fine and heroic son. Theseus. My father ranted about him. Daedalus told me . . . other things. Theseus. He can speak straight into people’s minds. He is a warrior who hates my father nearly as much as I hate my father.”