The Flame in the Maze

by Caitlin Sweet

  She thought of Icarus as she tripped the latch and crawled into the tunnel beyond the jars. She’d tried very hard not to think of him, these past two weeks, because it made her want to cry, or run straight to him without caring about discovery. Now, though, stumbling beneath the ground with a lamp clutched in her hand, she remembered it all: how he’d looked years ago, crouched on Knossos’s roof. His skin had glinted with half-grown feathers, but she knew that they’d vanish once he swung back down to the earth on the length of metal string that Daedalus had made him. He’d known she was watching, and gazed back at her with his bright, round eyes. He’d smiled at her: Princess Phaidra, six years old, holding onto Pasiphae’s skirts because that was the only way she could feel safe from Ariadne. Sometimes he’d taken the western road away from Knossos with Asterion and Glaucus and the slave-girl Chara. Phaidra had watched then, too, burning with jealousy but afraid to leave the walls. She’d squinted at the strange, lovely shine of Icarus’s feathery hair and Asterion’s horns until they were all out of sight.

  I’ve finally let go of Mother’s skirts and got down from the wall. She felt a little sick as she thought this, but her pace didn’t falter.

  She left the lamp on the ground beneath the trapdoor that led to the pasture: the day was bright, and she would need both her hands for the cliff stairs. She should have brought a length of rope, she realized. Icarus would be able to climb, but Daedalus, with his broken hands, would not. Stupid girl! she thought. You’ve had two weeks, yet you couldn’t come up with a decent plan—just that you’d lead Icarus to the ruined temple near the town and bring him food and watch him turn his face to the open sky. I’ll come right back, she decided as she slid her feet onto the top step. I’ll get Icarus settled and return for Master Daedalus tonight, when Ariadne’s asleep.

  Last time the moonlight had made the sea look blurred and far away; now she stood frozen on the ledge, staring down at water that seemed far closer and hungrier. She shifted her eyes from the base of the cliff to the island that lay just off the shore, and this made her feel steadier. It was green and red, scattered with tall, scraggly trees. Birds wheeled around the treetops: gulls, smaller ones that might have been swallows, and, abruptly and noisily, an eagle, beating its way up out of a nest to scatter the others.

  Phaidra swallowed and hunkered down carefully before the door. Her hands shook, even as silver blossomed in the threads of her palm and flowed to the ends of her fingers. Thank you, Apollo, she thought, as she always did when her godmark filled her with its cool ache. Thank you for helping me bring your light into closed places.

  Except that this time, the silver sputtered and died as she touched the lock. No. How can this be?

  The door was already open.

  She pushed it, flinching at its rusty shriek even though she knew it would come, and crawled into the corridor. She hardly glanced at all the details that had been so vague during the night: the sprays of stones on the ground; the roots braided into the damp earth of the walls; tiny white lizards, fleeing daylight. She was panting by the time she reached the cave.

  “Icarus! Daedalus!” She scrambled to her feet. The air in here was dim; she opened her eyes wide, trying to find them. “Icarus?” The rock threw her voice back to her again and again.

  There was another passageway on the far side of the cave. It was much narrower and lower, but she thrust her way along it, scraping her shoulders and palms, which she used to feel before her in the darkness. Water dripped and dripped. She whimpered and this sound, too, echoed, though only within her head.

  Time passed; hours, maybe. The passageway ended. She leaned her forehead against the stone, which was cool and slick (that dripping, on and on), then squeezed herself around and stumbled back the way she’d come.

  The cave seemed very bright, after the tunnel. She sat down heavily on the boulder in its centre and watched droplets falling from a stalactite. They were forming a conical mass underneath, she noted dully. A terraced lump that glowed faintly green.

  “Icarus?” she called once more, hopelessly, to the emptiness.

  Chapter Four

  Ariadne couldn’t stop thinking about the mountain, in the two weeks that followed her visit with Phaidra to the cave. She waited for more of Theseus’s mind-images, or for his mind-voice, at least—but there was nothing. No voice except her own, in her head, chattering and frenzied: I can’t just wait; he’s not coming out; Icarus and Phaidra won’t help me; I’ll have to go to the mountain myself.

  This last thought was so alarmingly simple that she stopped her pacing of the hall above the courtyard. She laid her palms on scarlet columns and gazed down at her father, who was still there, below, naked and flaming, his eyeless face turned up to the sky. His people came and went around him, raising their hands to ward off the heat and the smell.

  Yes. I’ll go to the mountain myself—when the priestesses deliver food. Maybe I’ll be able to figure out how to get inside; maybe I won’t need Phaidra, after all. I’ll bring string to mark my path once I’m in, at least until I find Theseus, and Icarus’s godmarked string. It will take much longer than if Icarus had led me, but so be it.

  When one of Poseidon’s acolytes told her that the next food delivery was a mere three days away, Ariadne thought, Yes. The gods are making the way clear for me.

  “I will join the priestesses at the mountain,” she said.

  The girl bowed her head. “It is not a thing that we share . . . that is, there is no need, Princess.”

  “I will join the priestesses at the mountain,” Ariadne said briskly. “My mother need not be told, nor Karpos. I simply wish to observe how Poseidon’s daughters are attending to his son.”

  The acolyte’s head was still bowed. Her pointed chin was pressing against the hollow of her throat. “Very well, my Lady,” she whispered.

  Three days later, Ariadne informed her dull-eyed slave that she’d be in the baths all day. “Wash the walls while I am gone,” she said, and the slave nodded slowly.

  The road to the Goddess’s mountain was wide and hot and nearly empty. She saw two shepherds and a child, who was attempting to drive a flock of geese with a long stick and a dog with tangled black and white fur and a hoarse bark. Mostly, though, Ariadne was alone. Her heart hammered with this solitude, and sweat pooled in the small of her back.

  I’m not afraid, she thought—though she was, a little. The slopes that fell and climbed and fell, the glint of sea, the shimmer of heat that blurred everything ahead and forced her to squint—these things made her long for the crowded courtyard and faces turned up to her.

  She’d never been to the mountain by herself. It looked different, as she approached it at last: it seemed to grow more slowly on the horizon than it had during the processions, and to be much larger, when she was finally beneath it. The broad path up to the door was eerily empty, and the place where children danced in their bull masks was springy with grass and flowers that didn’t fit, somehow. Even the sky was strange: larger and lower, layered with fog. Keep walking, she told herself. And, when her legs did not obey, Stupid Princess—why so meek, when all of this belongs to you? Imagine everyone is watching. She forced herself up the path, but the bright, empty silence still weighed on her.

  Master Daedalus’s doors were the same: the towering one and the waist-high one set in it. She crouched with her hands against the metal of the smaller door. Her palms warmed, as they used to when she laid them on her father’s arm. Long ago, when his fire was all beneath his skin.

  Hurry, she thought as the mountain quiet settled around her. Hurry, you priestesses of the Goddess: your bull-man is hungry. And my Athenian king-to-be is hungry, too, though you don’t know it.

  The sun was starting to slant toward afternoon when she finally heard voices and the creaking of wood. A few moments later, an enormous bird’s head rose above the line of the road. Ariadne scrambled to her feet, breathless, sweating again.
She hadn’t ever needed to think about how the priestesses delivered food into the mountain. It occurred to her only now to wonder why she hadn’t thought about it anyway—only now, with the wooden bird looming, lurching toward her. It was much taller than the top of the great metal door. Its head, neck and wings were painted red, its body green, its long, straight beak yellow. She saw gears turning within it. Wheels rolled beneath its splayed, taloned feet. Six priestesses held onto cables strung from its wings; the cables were taut, but Ariadne didn’t think the women were pulling on them. It was as if the giant bird was pulling them.

  By the time the priestesses reached her, Ariadne had schooled her expression to its customary smoothness. “Sisters,” she said, as the bird creaked to a towering, tilting halt. “I have come to observe, at my mother the Queen’s command. To ensure that her beloved son is receiving all the sustenance he should.”

  One of the priestesses held up her hands in the sign of the Bull. “We will be glad to have you here with us.” Her brow was shining with sweat. She licked her lips; Ariadne thought they must taste like salt, as hers did. “Follow us, Princess. But take care: the way is very steep.”

  “Of course it is,” Ariadne snapped—and yet moments after she’d started off after the bird, up the rocky slope, she was gasping with effort. She’d watched Chara climb this slope, after Asterion had disappeared into the mountain. The king’s flame had been burning up rocks and grass; the queen’s rain had been coursing down, but not heavily enough to quell the fire. And Ariadne had glimpsed Chara, when the water and smoke parted for a moment—scrabbling like a beetle up a stem, though Ariadne couldn’t imagine why.

  She was looking for another way in, the princess thought now, as she paused with her hands on her knees. Her breath burned in her throat, and it was nearly all she could hear when she resumed climbing. Even the grinding creak of the bird-thing faded to a murmur. But after a time she began to hear another sound: a high, whistling song. She straightened and stared.

  Black pipes jutted in a ring from the rock just below the mountain’s jagged peak. Glass? Polished, smooth—even the openings. The singing, she realized, was wind, blowing across these openings. She glanced at the priestesses, who were standing with their heads lifted to the wind, eyes closed. They’d positioned the bird-thing so that its beak was pointed down, nearly touching the highest of the pipes. She noticed suddenly that its wings were shifting gently: rows of scarlet feathers with graceful golden tips. Icarus, she thought, and felt a strange, sudden pang that she immediately twisted into scorn.

  “Receive our gift,” one of the priestesses cried, opening her eyes and lifting her arms as the others did the same. “Great Mother, receive this food; bestow it upon the Bull’s child; bestow it as you will.”

  One of the women pulled a lever that lay along the bird’s leg. Cables moved, beneath the wooden pieces. New noises began: a swishing, a whirring. Mere moments later, the bird’s beak swung open and something thumped and rattled down into the pipe.

  “Salt fish,” said a priestess from beside her.

  “That is Master Daedalus’s work, I presume,” Ariadne said. Her words were clipped, but the priestess kept smiling. The ones by the bird were singing a song without words, which sounded like waves on shore.

  “Yes. Minos King demanded a conveyance worthy of the Goddess, and Prince Asterion. We are honoured; this mighty creature was the Master’s final work before his death.”

  Priestesses hauled on cables. The bird swivelled; its beak lined up with another pipe. A different lever screeched.

  “Figs,” the priestess beside Ariadne said serenely, as they began to tumble from beak to pipe.

  Concentrate, Ariadne told herself. Think only of how you might use that thing to get inside.

  “So,” she said, trying to sound indifferent, “why do you not leave it here all the time?”

  The priestess turned almond-shaped brown eyes on Ariadne. “It is part of the honour we do the Goddess. Part of our obeisance. We must struggle to do her bidding, every second month: that is just. It is required.”

  “And do you ever think what it might be like to climb it yourself? To see the mountain from above?”

  The priestess was beaming, now. “I did climb it, four years ago, just after Master Daedalus presented it to us—the wood was still a little bit silver, from his godmark. He urged us to. It was remarkable. Looking down on the mountainside—I could see forever. To the sea! Chrysanthe said she thought she saw a dark line that was Athens, but I think she was just imagining it.”

  Ariadne raised her brows. “Indeed! And what of those black glass pipes? What did you see in them?”

  “Oh,” said the priestess, in a quieter voice, “nothing except darkness. Daedalus told us to take care; he said that if we tipped and fell inside one, we’d break all our bones when we stopped falling. He told us the pipes are smoother than any metal we know, and slipperier than oil. And he said that this was good, because otherwise people might try to get in and disturb the sanctuary.”

  “Indeed,” Ariadne said again. She spun so quickly that her skirts lifted and tangled briefly between her shins.

  “Princess? You will not wait for the end of the song, at least?”

  “No,” Ariadne said, over her shoulder. “I have seen enough. I will tell my mother that the Goddess’s work is being done well.”

  As she slid down the slope she thought once more of Chara climbing it. She imagined Chara craning up at the black pipes that would never lead her in, or out. Imagined the way her tears would have looked, clinging to her splotchy freckles.

  Even if you could have got in, Ariadne thought, how did you think you’d get out? And then, so abruptly that she tripped over her own feet, she remembered holding Icarus’s ball of string out to Theseus in his cell; she remembered Chara’s still, quiet presence behind them. Clever thing, she thought, flushing as if she were admitting aloud how foolish she’d been. Clever slave. And yet Theseus has gone silent, and no one’s come out. I’ll think of a way, though. I will—and I’ll be in Athens before the month is out.

  She stood still for a bit, her arms outstretched to keep her steady in the wind that had risen. Her stomach growled and twisted, and she swallowed hard. The stones and tufts of dried-up grass looked huge; the sky looked huge. I couldn’t dance here, she thought. Everything’s too big; I’d fall. She pushed herself down the mountainside before the fear could hold her still.

  The chattering in Ariadne’s head wouldn’t stop. Phaidra’s your only chance; you’ll have to involve her after all, and hope you’ll be able to get away with Theseus before she can make trouble. Go find her, now—and don’t forget to bring your own ball of string. She’d only just returned from the mountain, but she nearly ran from her chambers. Her steps faltered when she saw people clustered by Phaidra’s doorway.

  “Daughter,” Pasiphae said. “I was about to call for you. It seems the High Priestess wishes to speak to me of the king. I imagined you, too, would wish to hear what she has to say.”

  Karpos was beside the queen; Deucalion was a few paces away, leaning on a column overlooking the courtyard. Ariadne knew what he was seeing: their father, lit by the fire coursing over and through him. Their eyeless, bald, blackening father, who yesterday had shouted, to everyone and no one, his words as rough as coal, “My Father Zeus shall send me a sign! He has told me this! I shall not leave this place until then.” She saw that Deucalion’s lips were pursed and threaded with silver; he was making a wind, to carry the flames away from the courtyard and into the sky.

  “I see,” Ariadne said. She glanced between her mother and Karpos, at the entrance to Phaidra’s rooms, then forced her gaze back.

  “Speak, then,” Pasiphae said to the High Priestess, who inclined her head and smiled a thin, unhappy smile.

  “It is difficult, my Queen, Master Karpos: it is difficult for me to say this—and yet Lord Poseidon no long
er permits me to be silent. King Minos, and his intention to sacrifice himself at the Goddess’s mountain . . . my Lady: he must not do this.”

  Pasiphae’s plucked brows arched. “Oh? But it is the king’s god who drives him to do it.”

  “Zeus has removed his grace from Minos and replaced it with madness. Zeus no longer cares for him; you know this. Perhaps the madness will fade in time, and his mark will leave him forever, as others’ do—but it comes down to men, now, to stop him. Men, and women.”

  Karpos went to stand beside Deucalion. He put his hand on Deucalion’s shoulder; Deucalion covered it with his own. They both looked down on the king.

  “We will not be able to stop him,” Karpos said. “We will not even be able to get near him.”

  Pasiphae said, “And surely, my Sister, you are not suggesting that someone dispatch him with an arrow or a spear?”

  The priestess shook her head, and her black hair rippled. “Of course not. But if we cannot stop him, we can save Asterion the Bull, at least. The Princess Phaidra could open the door in the mountain—soon; now, even. The king will not know.”

  “And then what?” Ariadne said. Everyone turned to her, and she stood taller, gazed at them one by one. Her pulse hammered in her head. “Master Daedalus and all the men who made the labyrinth are dead. Who would go in and find my brother?”

  I would, I will—just let me get to Phaidra’s rooms first. “And do not tell me that your god would lead you through the maze. Surely it is plain to you that Lord Poseidon cares nothing for his own spawn.”