The Door in the Mountain (8 page)

Nearly
everyone else.

“Stop,” Ariadne said. Chara, who’d nearly reached the outer pillars, slowed. “You are mine now, remember? You go nowhere unless I say you may.”

Chara walked back, her toes curling and dragging just before she lifted her feet. When she reached Ariadne again they stood in silence, looking at each other.

“I’m sorry, Princess,” Chara said at last.

Ariadne laughed. “Are you indeed? For what?”

The girl drew a hand over her head, patting at the neat little knots and the hair beneath them (which was beginning to curl and would likely soon tangle). “Well,” she said hesitantly, “what just happened with your sister—I know what it is to be unmarked, you see—other children tease me for it, and I know it’s even harder for you because—”

“Enough.” Ariadne’s voice was so low that she could barely hear it leaving her. “If you say any more I shall flog you myself. And stop staring at me”—suddenly the words were shrill—“stop—do you hear me?”

Chara looked at her for a moment longer, then away. “I’m sorry,” she said again, quietly, as Ariadne sank onto the throne and put her head in her hands.

On the sixth day after the royal household returned to Knossos, the Priests of the Sky and the Priestesses of the Sea met in the palace courtyard. These two daily processions usually took place at different times; times decreed before dawn by their respective gods. But on this day the two winding lines came together in the great rectangle of the courtyard, where the shadows of the horn carvings lay long and dark.

“Princess!” Diantha gasped. Ariadne stopped walking and looked where Diantha was looking: between two crimson pillars on the highest level of the palace and down into the westering sunlight. She saw the priests’ black robes glinting with gold and the priestesses’ white ones glinting with silver—two long serpents of cloth and flesh, winding, stopping, holding still.

“The priestesses will fall back,” Ariadne said. “Zeus has grown more powerful than Poseidon, these past many years.”

“Forgive me, Princess,” Diantha said slowly, “but I’m not sure that’s true. And look who’s there with them . . .”

Asterion’s hair and horns shone as they always seemed to; Ariadne was surprised that she hadn’t noticed them immediately. He was standing behind the High Priestess, who stepped aside as Ariadne watched, and drew him out to stand before her. From so far up, he was smaller than usual—but all the others were, too, even the High Priest, who usually towered above even Minos.

Diantha leaned forward. Her fingertips whitened as she pressed them into the pillar’s grooves. “You see—the priestesses are demanding that the priests make the sign of the horns to your brother—look—you can tell, even without hearing their words.”

Diantha was right. The priestesses were fanning out on either side of the prince, all of them holding their hands up in the sign. The priests spread out as well, so that each faced a priestess. The men’s hands were at their sides.

“The priestesses won’t yield,” Diantha said.

Suddenly Ariadne was dizzy with rage—at everyone and at no one; at the beautiful, burnished sky and the gleam of horns, robes, coiled hair, oiled beards. She started running before she could tell herself to. “Ariadne—wait!” she heard Diantha call, but she was already on the staircase.

Three flights and half a courtyard length, and yet she was barely breathing hard when she stopped. (Ariadne the dancer, so swift and tireless that she might have been marked by Artemis or Hermes. Might have been, but had not.) She walked between the two rows until she reached Asterion. The silence was heavy—
Because they were talking until I got here
, she thought. Her anger ebbed and vanished.
Because now they’re watching me, not each other.
She felt a smile but didn’t show it on her lips.

“Princess.” The High Priestess’s voice sounded tight.

“Sister of Poseidon,” Ariadne said. She made sure her own words were warm and strong, as her father’s so often were. “This is a curious gathering. Explain, if you would.”

The High Priestess wasn’t old, but her frown made unsightly lines in her forehead and beside her eyes. “It seems that the Priests of the Sky will not acknowledge the Sea’s son.”

The High Priest inclined his head to Ariadne. His brow was smooth, she noted. “Princess, it has been a long time since Zeus’s children have made obeisance to Poseidon’s. We greet your brother as a prince, as is his due, but that is all.”

“This is far less than his due!” the priestess said, and Ariadne said, “You must not speak to the High Priest that way!” and a tide of murmurs rose, with Asterion’s voice ringing out above it: “Stop! Please stop!”

They all looked down at him.
Diantha would say he seems older than eleven
, Ariadne thought.
I’m glad she stayed behind and can’t see him
.
And I’m glad I told Chara to tidy my chamber instead of attending to me.

“I thank you, Sisters,” he said, gesturing with one small hand at the line of priestesses. “Your reverence pleases me. But,” he went on, raising his other hand toward the priests, “I’ve never
expected
anyone to make the sign of the Bull. I know that my father has honoured me, and that’s enough.”

“My Lord,” the High Priestess began, but this time it was Ariadne’s voice that rose above the rest and made the murmurs stop. “Sweet little brother,” she said, smiling her most generous smile, “your faith in a god’s regard shouldn’t stop you from demanding it from people. You should
want
them to worship you.”

Asterion shrugged—a graceful movement that seemed more regretful than careless. “I don’t want the same things you do, Sister.”

Rage swept through her again. If she had been Minos, she would have burned him to ash with godfire. “You would not speak to me this way if our father were here.”

She saw something flicker in his eyes before they slid away from hers. “He isn’t my father—ask him; he will say so.”

“Of course,” she said, willing him to look back at her so that she would see more of the flickering, and maybe something else, “your father was a man these priestesses chose to rut with our mother.
My
father killed him.”

Asterion looked at her. The flicker had gone; there was a dark stillness in its place. “If someone here had a torch,” he said, very clearly into the silence, “I’d use it—I’d change into the shape my true father gave me and I’d hurt you so badly you’d never, ever dance again.”

For a moment Ariadne, too, was still. Then, because something was beginning to tremble inside her, she laughed. It was shrill, but that was fine: it was louder than all the other noise that had risen around her. “You fools!” she cried at the priestesses before her. “How dare any of you raise your voices when I am here? How dare—”

“Silence! All of you:
silence
.”

Ariadne saw Asterion smile, just before she turned toward their mother. Pasiphae was standing at the end of the rows. Phaidra was beside her, her left hand clinging to one of the queen’s skirt folds.

“Mother,” Ariadne said into this newest quiet. The queen was staring at the High Priest. “Mother—the priests have greeted Asterion as a prince but not a god—the priestesses seek to force them to—I have simply been trying to—”

“
Silence
, I said.” Pasiphae walked forward until she was only a pace away from Ariadne. “Hypatos,” Pasiphae said to the High Priest. His honey-coloured eyes narrowed. “You will make the sign to Poseidon’s child. You and all of Zeus’s men will do this. Now.”

None of the priests moved.

“You will do this, Hypatos, because if you do not, I shall call upon the Great Mother who bore all the gods. I shall sacrifice to her, deep beneath the earth, and she shall right the wrong you have done to her son’s son.”

Ariadne drew in her breath and held it as she watched the High Priest. He blinked down at Pasiphae, his lips twisted above his gold-dipped beard.
He won’t do it
, Ariadne thought, and breathed out. But then he raised his hands. They came up slowly, and cloth rustled as the other priests’ did too.
Stupid old men—such stupid, cowardly men,
Ariadne thought.

“Thank you,” Asterion said as they stood there.

Ariadne looked back at the queen and, because she couldn’t bear the light in her mother’s green eyes, past her at the upper gallery where she and Diantha had been. It was too dim between the pillars to see if Diantha was still there—but the sky above was golden-red, and the shape that crouched upon the roof was very clear. It was moving back and forth, arms tucking and untucking like restless wings.
Bird-boy
, Ariadne thought, with a surge of disgust,
why must you always watch me? And you—
Phaidra, who was craning up over her own shoulder
—why must
you
always watch
him
?

“Yes,” Pasiphae said, “thank you. And now you must go—all of you. You have already done grave disservice to both your gods.” She placed her hand on Asterion’s hair as he turned to follow the priestesses. He swung his head up as if it had been the bull’s and she ran her fingers over his horns. They smiled at each other.

“Daughter,” she said, her voice abruptly hard, “come with me.”

No
, Ariadne wanted to say,
I won’t;
I
will not obey you
. But she followed Pasiphae and Phaidra, who stumbled a few times because she was still glancing up at the dark blot that was Icarus. Ariadne walked with her head held high; there were people gathered around the courtyard, staring and muttering, and she wouldn’t let them see her bend.

Pasiphae led her to the throne room. The last of the sunlight shimmered in the doorway, and lamplight melted the colours on the painted walls: the griffin’s scarlet and green, and the white of the mountain irises.

Phaidra skipped over to the throne and pulled herself up onto it. “Mother!” Ariadne said as her sister drummed her heels on the stone. “She shouldn’t do that! You’ve never let me—”

Pasiphae whirled and slapped Ariadne across the face. Her head snapped back and fire coursed over her skin, and tears blurred the griffins even more.

“You meddle,” the queen hissed. “You meddle and scheme because this is all you can do, without a mark—and you turn everything around you into chaos.”

Ariadne wiped her tears away with the tips of her littlest fingers. She held her hands at her sides then, even though she wanted to put a palm against her burning cheek.

“You weren’t out there at the beginning,” she said. It was rage that made her words ripple—only rage. “How do you know that I had anything to do with what happened in the courtyard?”

Pasiphae leaned against the throne. Phaidra leaned against her. The girl’s eyes and hair looked like spun gold in the lamplight. “I am not speaking only of what happened in the courtyard.” The queen sounded weary. “And I know you. That is enough.”

Ariadne said, almost exactly as she had to Asterion, “You would not speak to me like that if my father were here. And you would not dare hit me.”

The queen raised her brows and smiled a crooked, fleeting smile. “You think? Well, we shall soon find out. I had word only hours ago: the great King Minos has been victorious, on land and on sea. The great King Minos is coming home.”

“Father’s coming home today,” Ariadne said in a voice that sounded very loud, in the pre-dawn stillness. She waited for a reply from Chara, who was likely curled up in the alcove by the doorway, but there was none.

“Girl. Did you hear me? Father’s coming home today.”

Cloth rustled against stone. “Is that so?” Chara called, her own voice rough and crackly.

“Yes. I feel it.” This feeling had come to her as she slept and it hadn’t dissipated, now that she was awake. “It’s been weeks since Mother told me of his triumph over the Athenians, and yet only this morning am I sure of it: he is coming home today. Help me dress. We’re going to wait at the western wall.”

As it turned out, Ariadne waited
atop
the western wall. She clambered onto Chara’s shoulders and hauled herself up to stand between the two massive stone horns that loomed above the gate pillars. Chara stayed beneath, except when Ariadne commanded her to fetch food and water. She heard laughter, a few times, and knew that Asterion was beneath too, but this time his and the slave girl’s unseemly association didn’t bother her.

The first she saw of the returning army was the flash of the heralds’ horns, far out along the road. She stood, even though she knew it would be ages until she would be able to see the men who held them. But soon she heard the horns too—waves of sound rising and receding like tidewater—and she strained forward into the cooling wind, bracing herself on the two curving stones that rose on either side of her. “Princess!” Chara called out from below. “Take care!” Ariadne thought,
Ignore her; just look for them—o gods, let me make out their forms before the darkness falls . . .

But the darkness fell swiftly. The people of Knossos gathered in thick rows on either side of the road; she watched the bending and craning of their shadow-heads and heard the distant murmur of their voices, and she blinked at the bobbing of their lamps or godfire—but she noticed these things only in passing. They were unimportant. Even Pasiphae and her other children, standing at the foot of the outer staircase, were unimportant.

The line of soldiers was speckled with light as well: orange and pink and blue sparks that dipped and wove like godmarked fireflies. One light was much larger. It pulsed dark orange to crimson and back again, curves and splotches that coalesced, as the soldiers grew closer, into the shape of a body.

Father
. Ariadne backed out between the stone horns and slithered over the roof’s edge. Chara was no longer waiting, beneath. Ariadne wished that Karpos were there to catch her—his hands would wrap around her waist and tighten but she would wrest herself away from him and leave without looking back. Now, without him, she landed hard and ran.

“Where’ve
you
been?” Glaucus muttered when she slipped between him and Deucalion. She was silent. He jabbed her in the ribs with his elbow; she didn’t move at all.
Unimportant
, she thought as he growled and Phaidra craned to look.
All of them
.

The soldiers came into view—lines of ten that stretched across the width of the road. Some bore horns (silent, so close to the palace); others held torches. The torchlight seemed feeble, lost in the glow that shone behind. It flowed over the bronze of horns, spearheads and short swords, the wood of bows, the hide of quivers. It lit sweat-slick brown skin and oiled beards and all the pairs of eyes that gazed ahead, at home. The light’s source was six lines from the front.
Father
, Ariadne thought again, even as Deucalion murmured the same thing.

Minos was made of godfire. He had limbs but they were indistinct, lying like wood at the heart of the blaze. His face warped and smoothed in heat shimmer. The soldiers left a wide space around him; the ones who walked behind stepped in the black, smoldering holes his feet left.

“He’s gone mark-mad,” Deucalion muttered, and Glaucus hissed, “He hasn’t; he’s just excited. . . .”

The front rows fanned out on either side of the palace steps. The king walked between them. He crackled. The cloth wrapped around his waist and thighs spat gouts of golden sparks (though it burned only a little, itself, because it was touching Minos’s godmarked skin). He stopped before Pasiphae, whose fingers dripped water onto the flagstones.

“Husband,” she said over the sounds of the other soldiers who were approaching. “Knossos hails her triumphant king. Your people welcome you home.”

The flames were dimming—the ones outside him, anyway. Rivulets of light still ran beneath his skin. He didn’t speak.

Pasiphae shifted. “Husband,” she said again. Ariadne heard the anger in the word, and she clenched her fists.
He won’t say anything to her; he’ll turn and look at us
—
at me. . . .

He turned. Embers spiralled from his hair and beard. He looked at Phaidra, at Deucalion; his orange-lit eyes leapt past Ariadne, to Glaucus and Asterion.
Now
, Ariadne thought, already smiling.
Only now—because he’s saving me for last.

He looked at her. A moment passed. His mouth didn’t move. His gaze was steady, but it didn’t change. “Father?” she whispered, and he turned once more, and walked past all of them, up into his palace.

“Ariadne,” Deucalion said, “calm down.”

Ariadne whirled to face him and Chara thought,
Oh, Prince, why did you have to speak?
The princess’s face was mottled, as if she’d been crying, but Chara was fairly sure she hadn’t been. What she
had
been doing was pacing—the length of her room and the corridor outside it.

“How can I?” she said in a low, rich voice that sounded very much like her mother’s. (
And Ariadne
would have me flogged, if I told her so
.) “How can I be calm when he has not come to me? It has been two days!”

Deucalion took a deep breath, as if he were about to summon a wind, but all that came out was a sigh. “Sister. He’s been fighting a war. Allow him a few days of peace, now that he’s home. And in any case,” he went on as she opened her mouth to reply, “you’ll see him at the feast tonight. Perhaps he’ll even put you at his right hand, as he does so often.”

But he didn’t. The royal children sat at a long trestle table that had been set up by one of the throne room’s walls. Chara sat at the end of the bench, beside Asterion—because he’d said that she should, “since you’re my sister’s special slave—but really because you’re my friend.”

The king and queen were on their thrones. Pasiphae looked at ease except for her hands, which clutched at the carved armrests. Minos’s skin still glowed faintly orange, and smoke wreathed his head—
Like a crown of cloud over his real gold one
, Chara thought. He gazed into the glowing embers in the hearth, smiling a thin, hungry smile, and didn’t speak. He did eat, at least; Chara heard grease hiss in his beard when he wiped it with the back of his hand.

When the last of the food had been cleared away, and the folding table removed from its place in front of his throne, he stood. His people’s murmuring stopped abruptly.

“People of Knossos!” The king’s voice cracked on the first word, then steadied and rolled like his god’s thunder over the crowd. “I have returned to you a conqueror—victor and master, mightier than I have ever been. And yet,” he went on, more quietly, “in the days following my triumph, I was wretched. My son, who should have ruled this island, was dead. My victory had not brought him back to me. And it seemed, in my grief, that my god was lost to me as well—for while his fire burned even more hotly beneath my flesh than it had before, I received neither comfort nor counsel from him.”

Minos cast his eyes over his family and the ranks of onlookers, to the dark sky beyond the columns. “I pleaded with Zeus, in my battle tent, and at an altar in the city I had laid low. I begged him to show me his favour again. I sacrificed to him: a sheep, every day for the seven days, and then a calf for seven more. And on the fourteenth day, the Great Father came to me.”

Pasiphae’s green eyes were wide, as she gazed up at Minos. Her knuckles were whiter than they had been.
She hasn’t heard this before,
Chara thought. She glanced at Ariadne, who was frowning.
He hasn’t told his family anything. . . .

Minos raised his hands and clasped them in front of his heart. “Zeus told me what I must do to show my devotion and earn my ease. I ravaged Athens’ water and land with my fire, but it was not enough. He told me what more I must take from them: their young.”

Chara’s throat went dry. She glanced sidelong at Asterion, who shrugged both shoulders at her. People stirred and milled at the pillars and beyond, as the word was passed to those who couldn’t hear the king.

“At first I thought to demand the life of Theseus, the son who not long ago returned to Aegeus, after years of concealment. I have seen him: he is a fine, strong youth, as golden as Androgeus was dark. But I could not, for I wished the Athenian king to see that Zeus the Father marked me with compassion, as well as flame.

“And so,” Minos said, holding his hands out so that everyone would see his fire-limned palms, “I had him brought to me, in his own audience chamber. I sat upon his throne and he knelt before me—just him, without his counsellors or the remnants of his guard. I commanded him to send seven young men and seven young women here to us—fine Athenian calves and sheep, fourteen of them, to be offered up as sacrifices to the Great Goddess. Every two years, I said, as his shoulders shook.”

Minos smiled. “He raged against me. He refused to accede. I set the chamber on fire and said I would do the same to what remained of his city. I said that if he still did not relent, I would set his golden son alight, too. He wept. He grovelled and begged me to be kind. He promised fourteen Athenian young, every two years, for the Goddess. I have simply to tell him when to begin. And I
shall
tell him, the moment my god speaks to me again. For I know now that he has not forsaken me.”

The noise outside had stopped. The noise inside Chara’s head hadn’t; it was like a roar of distant water. She blinked, but Minos’s face swam. Asterion’s hand on hers was clear, though. She put her own hand over it and pressed down hard.

The king was swaying—and not just in Chara’s strange, blurred vision.

“Now, Husband!” Pasiphae said, wrapping her hand around his arm. Steam rose in ribbons between her fingers. “Enough talk of vengeance! You have won a great victory, and there are those here who wish to do you honour for it.”

She gestured with her free arm and a little girl approached the thrones, holding two figs in her upturned palms. Squeezing her eyes shut, she raised them into the air without touching them. They spun in wide, silver-blurred circles, even when she added a ball of thread, a little round box, and an oatcake from Glaucus’s plate (he reddened and grinned as the crowd cheered). The king stared, hardly blinking, as an old man skirted the hearth and lifted his hands. Wisps of colour bloomed between them: orange, pink and green streamers that twisted as if in a wind. They lengthened and drifted over the hearth’s glow, and twined among the objects the girl was juggling.

“My King,” the old man said, a bit haltingly, “see the breath of the gods, who watched your victory over the Athenians and rejoiced with all of us.”

Minos stared. Chara thought briefly that the smoke curling from his skin might join with the colours, but it didn’t; it wended up, and vanished.

“Lord Minos!” Daedalus emerged from between two pillars at the end of the chamber. He walked a few paces and bowed.

Asterion’s hand clenched around his piece of bread. “What is it?” Chara whispered.

“Daedalus never bows to my father,” Asterion whispered back. “Something’s not right. Maybe all that talk of punishing Athens . . . ?”

Daedalus straightened. “Your son could command all beasts. He spoke to them, and they to him.” He smiled, but something in it—beneath it—made Chara draw back on her bench.

“Androgeus did this, my King—and so, now, do I.”

There was a noise—a hundred skittering feet, a hundred swishing tails. “Gods and winds!” Glaucus gasped—and other people muttered too, and some cried out. Creatures flooded across the floor. Snakes, except they had legs—and fish, except they wriggled through air and over stone.

“Come to me!” Daedalus cried, leaping from foot to foot, beckoning with open hands. “Come and show the Great King that his beloved son’s godmark lives on in you!”

Pasiphae stood up so quickly that one of her shoes tangled in her skirts. “Daedalus!” she called as people murmured and the metal beasts whirred and scampered toward the throne. “
Master Daedalus
—”

Minos rose. Sparks showered and settled and died.

“You mock me.” He sounded as if his mouth were full of rocks. He sounded half-asleep, or drunk. “Though you were exiled, you will always be Athenian. My triumph angers you, and now you seek to wound me.”

The last words were clearer than the first, but they were difficult to hear over the creatures’ noise. Two of the snakes—scarlet with green spots—bent around the angle of the hearth and clattered up to the throne. Minos brought his foot down on one, then the other. They flattened and stilled with a singing sigh of metal.