The Flame in the Maze

by Caitlin Sweet

  Hours later, they found Ligeia—or she found them. This time there was no screaming or howling; she simply walked into the chamber where the blue-painted path had ended. They were sitting with their backs against the pillars that ringed the circular chamber. Smooth obsidian pillars with no open space between them: just bands of crystal-layered stone. No way out except the way they’d come.

  “Well,” Ligeia said as all of them except Zenais scrambled to rise. “This is it, then.” Her eyes glinted in the coppery light of five spherical lamps that hung from the ceiling, which was almost low enough to touch. “This is everyone. Polymnia the Meek, Kosmas the Handsome, Zenais the—”

  Her gaze fell on Asterion as he edged into her sight. She cried out and lifted her hand, which was wrapped around a large, pointed obsidian flake.

  “Don’t be afraid,” Kosmas said, as the muscles in Asterion’s shoulders twitched. “He’s fine. He won’t hurt you.”

  “He’s a monster,” Ligeia hissed. “He changed when the king touched him with flame. He’s a creature warped by his own god.” The obsidian shard shook in her hand. Asterion raised his face to look at her. His cheeks were scored with pink, rising burns. “I was marked by the gods to mimic the voice of a beast, but this—he—is a monster.”

  Zenais heaved herself away from her column with a grunt. Polymnia remembered a sheep that had tried and tried to walk, on its broken leg; it had bleated and stumbled and gazed at her with wild, helpless eyes before she’d sung it to sleep. Zenais’s eyes were steely in the pulsing light; Polymnia thought, I could sing to her; she’d be happier for a time.

  “’Geia,” Zenais said between her teeth. “He has a name.” She nodded encouragingly at Asterion, who clenched his hands and stared at his feet (the hoof had turned back, sometime, as they walked).

  “I’m . . .” His voice cracked, and Ligeia let out a sharp laugh. “I’m Asterion.”

  “Huh,” Ligeia said. “A monster with a name. How very odd.”

  Fall now, Polymnia commanded the ground. Fall, right beneath her; carry her into the flaming depths and let her breathe only smoke and fire, and make her suffer as even innocent beasts are made to suffer.

  “I’m sorry.” He spoke steadily now. “I didn’t know what would be done to you. To us. I didn’t . . . I have to get away from here. From you.” He lurched back toward the corridor.

  “No,” Zenais called, “don’t—wait—come back,” and he slowed, stopped, turned.

  “She’s right,” he said, his head dipping and swaying as if it were still as heavy as the bull’s. “I’m a monster, here. The heat; the hunger—they won’t let me be anything else. So I have to leave. Otherwise I might hurt you.”

  Polymnia wanted to go to him and say, quietly but firmly, “No. Don’t be silly. You must stay with us.” But she couldn’t. She stood, unmoving, while Zenais dragged herself to him, her arm reaching even as her broken leg trailed.

  “No,” Zenais said. “You don’t want to harm us; I can tell. We’ll need each other.”

  He turned to her. “Maybe,” he said. “I suppose I could stay for a bit, anyway—see if I get worse,” then, all in a rush, “Thank you; I don’t really want to be alone. . . .”

  “Lovely,” scoffed Ligeia. “But don’t expect me to let go of this.” She brandished the obsidian again, and its many facets winked. “Now, let’s see what else this charming place has to offer.”

  “Nothing,” Kosmas said. “There’s no way out of here except by that corridor.”

  Ligeia snorted. “You think so? Have you heard nothing of the skills of the Great Master Daedalus, Athens’ most dearly missed exile?” She ran her hand up each column in turn. She squinted at the walls between them, patting and poking. “Ha!” she said at last, and pressed her fingers against a knob of crystal. Metal ground together and a hinged stone door opened in the floor directly beneath her with a crack. Ligeia shrieked as she vanished. Her obsidian blade remained behind, glittering on the ground.

  “Come on!” she called up after a moment. “It’s smooth—you’ll slide. There’s another chamber here—another tunnel.” Her words and footsteps faded.

  Zenais winced as she sat down at the edge of the trapdoor. “I’ll go first,” Asterion said. “I’ll catch you.” Envy stirred in Polymnia’s belly again as he sat, slid, disappeared and, finally, cried, “Ready!” Zenais bit down on her lip and disappeared after him.

  Kosmas was tapping a finger on a column, looking down at the obsidian. “I want to know how to get back to that first corridor,” he said, as if Polymnia had asked him what he was thinking. “At least we know it’s directly underneath the mountain door.” He picked up the obsidian and drew it along the column. It made a creaking noise and left a thin, pale line. “You see? I’ll scratch every surface I can, as we go.” He smiled at her.

  She wanted to say, You poor, stupid boy: how can you feel any kind of hope? She lowered her gaze to her own feet. They were so dirty that she thought she should be a child again, picking her way across the slaughterhouse floor toward whatever beast needed to die, as her father bellowed curses at her back.

  “Come on,” Kosmas said, and she heard a hiss as he followed the others down the slide. She stood motionless. Turned her head to look at the tunnel that had led them here. Go back, she told herself. Find somewhere to die. No one will miss you; no one ever does. Not even your Mistress, who gave you to the king. No one.

  “Polymnia?” She lifted her head at Asterion’s voice. “Polymnia!”

  Her mouth was dry and tasted of smoke. She swallowed. “Coming,” she said.

  Chapter Seven

  So many tunnels: tunnels cut out of rippled bands of rock, with ceilings of transparent crystal that glowed as white as moonlight; tunnels lit by tiny lamps embedded in the walls, or what seemed to be fireflies, flitting always above their heads; still others that were completely dark. Different lights, like the ones far, far up in one great cavern: spots that looked like blue-green stars, sprayed in constellations that Polymnia learned to recognize during the interminable time she walked below them. Strange shapes, like the steps that were actually jutting, frozen runs of the mountain’s lava; other steps that were even and squared-off, smoothed by men as they would be in any palace or temple beneath the sky. A cavern ablaze with jewelled stalactites that tugged at their hair and bone-white stalagmites that tripped them and sliced the bottoms of their robes into ribbons. Water dripping somewhere, nowhere, everywhere.

  They shuffled and limped; once Kosmas had to crawl, to see if there was anything at the end of a narrow fissure carved with bunches of gaping clams. “Huh,” he said. “There’s a seat with a hole—by the gods, it’s a latrine!”

  “Of course it is,” Ligeia said. “The Great Daedalus would have hated the idea of the Athenian sacrifices defiling his work.”

  “And water,” Polymnia whispered—because there it was, at last: mere threads of it, wending down the wall. Ligeia fell upon it first, with her hands and mouth; Kosmas held Zenais up against the stone so that she wouldn’t fall, as she lapped, and he drank after that. Asterion nodded at Polymnia.

  “You saw it,” he said. “I’ll wait.”

  The water was colder than any she’d ever tasted before. Her head swam with numbness and relief that passed far too quickly.

  “Come,” Kosmas said, after they’d all taken several turns at the wall. “We have to keep moving.” They shuffled after her, licking the last of the moisture from their hands.

  Kosmas’s obsidian got smaller and smaller as he drew it along the endless stone, but they found a fresh pile of shards in a black chamber, and each of them took some. Soon Kosmas couldn’t use his at all, because Zenais grew so weak that he had to carry her.

  “How can this place be so big?” he gasped once, after he’d set her down by yet another set of corridor mouths.

  Zenais lifted a hand and gestured vaguely. “W
hat we see of the mountain from the outside isn’t all of it. We climbed and climbed out there, to get to the door; imagine—now we’re under everything. The earth could be hollow all the way through.”

  “Enough of your prattling,” Ligeia said, stepping around Zenais to reach the closest doorway. “Kosmas: pick her up. Bull-thing: you’d better be right that there’s food somewhere here. Food, and a whole lot more water.”

  Their pace slowed to a shamble, which seemed to prove that days were passing. Zenais claimed she felt them. “It’s been six days, now,” she said once—but sometime later she mumbled, “It’s been three, now,” and Polymnia heard Ligeia hiss to Kosmas, “You see? She has no idea. The fever’s addled her brain. Or the hunger. Or the thirst.”

  Not long after that, they stumbled across a bridge suspended between two tunnels. The one they left was lit with blue and silver; the one across the deep cleft was a crimson that undulated in waves along the walls. They rested here, because Kosmas had to put Zenais down again, and the others were weak as well. Polymnia’s body throbbed with dizziness and pain.

  “So how did they find you?”

  Polymnia sucked in her breath and glanced at Ligeia, who was scowling at her. The crimson light turned her lips black. “What’s wrong with you?” Ligeia snapped. “Why aren’t you answering me?”

  How are you so energetic? Polymnia thought. “Because,” she said slowly, “you never said a word to me on the ship, or here. You’ve barely even looked at me.”

  Ligeia cackled. Red danced across her teeth like flame. “Oh, I looked at you. When you tried to throw yourself off the cliff, for example. When you cried like a baby at dinner, the first night on the island, and snot ran into your mouth. We all looked at you.”

  “’Geia,” Zenais whispered, “don’t be cruel.”

  Ligeia tossed her head and the golden stubble on it glinted. “And you, Zenais! They found you in the whore’s quarter—Theodosia told us this one night on the ship, when you were asleep. One of King Aegeus’s men fell in love with you, he thought, and brought you to the palace. And they found him”—a tilt of her head at Kosmas, who had walked ahead with Asterion—“in with the boys who clean the athletes’ weapons during the Games. I just want to know how she came to be among us.”

  Polymnia traced a vein of crystal and imagined what she might have said, to someone else. To Zenais, maybe, if they’d been alone.

  They came for me the morning after I turned fourteen, on a hot day at the end of summer. I was sitting outside the slaughterhouse, fanning myself with the cloth I’d been wiping my hands on. I smelled the blood on it, every time I waved it, but I also smelled the salt of the harbour and the pink flowers that hung over the wall across from me. I was tired. My sister had been sick all night, whimpering and whining like a puppy. I’d had no sleep but once I got to the slaughterhouse I sang (the cows would sleep, anyway, before they died). My father was in a foul temper. I knew, as I sat outside, that he’d be angry when he found me gone from the killing floor. I knew he’d probably smack me with the haft of his knife, in front of everyone. But then a man came up to me—a slave, he said, except that he was dressed in dyed cloth, and had a bronze ring around his arm. “My mistress heard you singing in the market,” he said. “I’m here to take you to her.”

  “For how long?” I asked.

  “Forever,” he said, “if you like.”

  I stood up. I thought, Say farewell to your mother and sister, at least; go home, even if just to do that. But I didn’t. I followed the slave. I sang for his mistress, that day and for months after. They dressed me in cloth finer than the slave’s, and fed me meat from animals I hadn’t had to kill. They cooed over me like a pet. I slept in a clean bed and didn’t let myself think of my whimpering sister. Months after that, I sang for the king and Theseus, his son, and my mistress gave me to them, even though I didn’t want to go. She gave me away. And now I’m here, with you and Ligeia and a bull-boy, and I’m not sure which one of them is the beast.

  Polymnia looked at Ligeia. “It doesn’t matter now,” she sang, and then her weariness returned, and she closed her eyes on Ligeia’s startled face.

  Polymnia was dreaming about the slaughterhouse, so at first she didn’t realize it was Ligeia screaming. Instead it was cows—cows, and her father, shouting that she must sing, quickly, or he’d bring the knife’s hilt down on her flesh until it was flayed as the cows’ should be flayed, except that she wasn’t singing—godsblood, why would she not open her throat and sing?

  Ligeia’s scream was much shriller than a cow’s.

  “What is it?” Zenais, of course, trying to make things right, even though her leg was foaming and stinking and her skin burned with fever. “What, ’Geia?”

  “A lizard!” Ligeia shrieked. “Kill it—someone kill it!”

  Polymnia stood up. Half caught in the dream, she moved toward it—but Asterion was there first, leaning in, lifting a finger to touch. “It’s white,” he said, “but there were ones like it, at Knossos. Ones with spots.” His voice was strained. His hand trembled.

  It scuttled away from him, up almost to the place where the wall curved to meet the ceiling. “No,” he said breathlessly, and reached for it with a clawed hand.

  Polymnia crept up beside him. She started to sing before he could turn to her—but the lizard turned immediately. Its blunt, eyeless head swung and its translucent claws flexed as her voice washed it with silver. It went still, as the notes streamed on. She reached out and grasped it around its smooth, scaled middle, and it didn’t even twitch. She broke its neck quickly, and the silver ebbed away.

  Behind her, Ligeia made a disgusted sound and Zenais made a pained one. Beside her, Asterion breathed as raggedly as if he’d been running. She couldn’t look at him.

  “My brother,” he gasped. “He used to . . . he’d sing to creatures and calm them. You were marked by the same goddess—by Artemis.”

  She felt him lurch and slide and looked at him, at last, crouched by the wall, shuddering. His horns were so bright that she couldn’t see his face clearly. His breathing was wet, now. Hunger filling his mouth, she thought, and hunkered down next to him. She set the dead lizard on the ground next to one of his bull’s feet and watched his boy’s hands clench. She wanted to say something to him—something comforting and certain. Instead she rose and said, to Ligeia, “We’ll go that way and wait for him,” and, to Zenais, “Lean on me, now . . . More than that; I’m stronger than I look.” The words flowed from her as songs did; she felt dizzy and light.

  She glanced over her shoulder, as they moved off down the corridor. She watched as Asterion picked up the lizard; she heard him whimper as he put it to his mouth, and then she heard him groan. A few steps later, when he was out of sight around a corner, he roared.

  Later she lay on her side, staring at the phosphorescent spray of a plant on a wall. A constellation she could have touched, but didn’t. She was thinking about how she’d cowered, when her father had hit her for not singing quickly or loudly enough; when Asterion’s voice whispered, “Thank you,” from right above her, her stomach seemed to leap into her throat. She didn’t stir, though, which made her feel a brief flare of pride.

  “I was hungry,” he went on. He was speaking quietly, and Zenais’s moaning was echoing around them in waves that made his words even harder to hear. “But I couldn’t have killed the thing myself. So thank you.”

  She longed to roll over and look up into his face—to be as bold as her words to the others had sounded. But she stayed as she was, and after a moment she felt a curl of wind above her, as he left.

  Zenais had counted eight days, then four, then nine when they found the altar room.

  Kosmas was carrying her as he did all the time, now, at the front of their little line. Ligeia walked behind him and Polymnia behind her, digging lines into the walls wherever she could. Asterion was well back. His ragged breathing was
so loud that Polymnia didn’t have to look over her shoulder to make sure he was still there. In fact, his breathing was like its own sort of song, which made her forget the hunger and the heat. Walk . . . gently . . . walk . . . forever . . .

  Kosmas’s first cry was garbled; the second was, very clearly, “Food!” A moment later, Ligeia was standing beside him, howling at the space beyond in her wolf-voice. Polymnia stumbled toward them. Even with all the other noise, she could hear Asterion’s hooves on the stone behind her, jogging in their not-human rhythm.

  She tried to see everything at once—every single, wondrous thing. It’s the last picture that boy Amon showed everyone, with his godmark, she thought—and it was: the enormous circular space, the painted stairs up to the vast, round altar stone, which seemed to writhe with carven snakes. The urns. But there was more than there’d been in his image: two latrine seats, as grand as thrones, set between columns; two rings of jars, all of them as tall as the youths were, and all overflowing—one with figs, one with salt fish, another with honey cakes.

  As she ran forward, her arms already outstretched, she heard water, and daylight plucked at her vision from above. She stopped running, swayed with one foot on the first step up to the altar. She craned her head back. Daylight, yes: six wavering shafts of it, slanting from what looked to be polished black pipes, ranged in an uneven row a very long way up the endless rock walls. Slightly lower down, but still a head-spinning distance from the ground, was a stream—more a waterfall, really, that foamed from a band of red stone and plunged a hand’s breadth away from the wall. Polymnia followed it with her eyes—down, sunlit to shadowed, to where it hit the ground. In any other place it would have pooled there, deep and fresh and cool. But this was the Goddess’s mountain, and her breath was so hot that the water turned to hissing steam where it struck.