The Flame in the Maze

by Caitlin Sweet

  The rope of the ladder was coarse against her palms. She clutched it as she swung, close to the ground but abruptly dizzy. When she felt steadier she pulled herself up the eight rungs. There was no steam at the top; she gazed down at it, roiling and dense, and almost laughed because she seemed to have no body except for her grasping hands and her sweat-slick head. Above her was a jagged hole filled with light that was as bright and rippling as sun. Her heart raced as she tilted her face toward it, even though the rest of her knew it was just more of Master Daedalus’s godmarked work. She took a breath and hauled herself up. Her already tattered robe snagged on the hole’s teeth, and she grunted as she tore it free.

  The sun was an enormous glass globe filled with golden flames so bright that she couldn’t see how it had been suspended. She closed her eyes a bit, so that she could imagine that it really was the sun, hot and low, surrounded by a sky that was made of air, not rock. Enough, she told herself, opening her eyes as wide as she could. This is your place now. Yours and his.

  She set off into the light. Tiny, hard things cracked under her bare feet; she guessed without looking at them that they were the bones of white cave creatures like the lizard she’d caught for him. Perhaps these had died fleeing the false sun. When she reached a wall with three doorways in it, she leaned over to brush the creatures’ remnants from her skin. The tunnel beyond one doorway was dark, and another was a sickly yellow; the last flickered with fire she knew was real. She chose the last.

  After only a few steps she wondered if she’d chosen wisely; heat surged against her flesh and into her lungs in stifling waves. He’d be all bull in an instant, if he were here with me—but this thought made her ache with longing and fear, so she concentrated on her own tight breathing, and the way the tunnel’s earthen floor was sloping down toward the light. She was soaked with sweat by the time it opened into a cavern vaster than any she’d yet seen beneath the mountain. A cavern of rock that looked red, because its floor was a lake of fire with a scorched black island at its centre.

  She stood where the ground fell sharply away and rubbed sweat out of her eyes. The fire bubbled beneath her; plumes of it rose and subsided into steaming dimples in the lake. A few paces took her to a stone bridge that arced above the flames. She walked onto it and slowly across. The heat was unbearable, but she bore it. She thought of him: his scars, and fresh blisters rising on his skin. She glanced from side to side at the popping, hissing liquid and sucked in her breath when a shower of sparks fell on her shoulders and arms. You’re just like Asterion, she thought. You’re brave.

  She was blind with heat and dizziness. When she paused she felt earth beneath her feet again, and turned to look back. The bridge was already several paces behind her. The doorway she’d come from was wreathed in steam. She wriggled her toes in the black soot, which was scattered with obsidian shards. She tried to avoid them, as she walked on, but there were too many: they pierced her flesh, and she knew that she was leaving twin trails of blood, though they were invisible against the black. The pain of the heat was so great that she couldn’t feel the pain of the cuts.

  Four three-legged tables stood in the middle of the island; a circle of clean, white stone had been set among them. Polymnia half-stepped, half-stumbled onto the stone, which was flat, and much cooler than the ground. Through the bright haze of fire and sweat, she saw words, carved in a spiral:

  Pray, Athenian, for you have reached the

  Great Goddess’s heart.

  She stared down at the words, and at her blackened, bloodied feet. She stared at the tables, which had been covered in tiny, painted statues: the golden-skinned Goddess with crimson snakes coiling around her arms and over her naked breasts; the green Goddess with a bright blue double axe clasped in her hands. Words, flesh, and paint trembled in Polymnia’s vision.

  Pray, she thought, in some faraway place in her head. She knelt on the white stone and closed her eyes and the world was a bit stiller, a bit firmer.

  “Great Goddess,” she whispered. Her voice was splintered and faint, and she wondered, briefly, when she’d last used it. For a moment, no other words came out of her mouth, because there were too many in her head.

  “Great Goddess,” she said again, at last, and this time she felt her voice filling her throat and the scalding air. “He can hear my words. Please let him hear my song, as well. Please let me comfort him.”

  She stood up slowly, and swayed, and opened her eyes. Another bridge shimmered before her, and she set off toward it, singing his name into the smoke.

  She was aching with hunger and weariness when she finally reached a place she recognized: the vaulted cavern lit with stars that weren’t stars. The glowing green constellations spun as she did; she held her arms out, laughing as if she were already strong again. Because she knew that she’d find the mark of an obsidian flake, on the wall at the foot of the staircase that curled around the thickest of the stalagmites. And there it was. She ran her finger along the groove, which grew thready and thin wherever Kosmas had hesitated (maybe Zenais had been hanging off his back?), or wherever the flake had grown too weak. It led her out and away, and back.

  Gears ground and corridors shifted and settled, and she stood once again in the altar chamber—though she didn’t stand so much as hunch. Her bones felt as if they’d melted and fused, and her skin was tight. But she thought, I’m back; I’m home.

  She heard something, in the silence. A pattering that was so familiar and so strange that she was as breathless as she’d been by the lake of fire. She forced her head up, imagining how he must feel, dragged down by horns, and she looked at the floor and walls and saw water. Rain. It was flowing down the pipes, dappling the walls and floor with darkness—but there was light too, seeping and muddy. She remembered what rain was like, during the day; how it would wash the slaughterhouse blood from her hands and arms and clothes, when she slipped away. How the water made her close her eyes a little, so that the blossoms hanging over the wall across the street looked like smears of paint.

  Enough, she thought. That life’s done, thank all the gods and goddesses.

  She pulled her tattered robe off, after she’d eaten and drunk, and spread it out on the altar. She lay on her side and closed her eyes. The rain was like mist on her bare, filthy skin. She fell asleep quickly and woke slowly. The rain had stopped, and there was no light at all, from above. Her limbs were heavy, but there was a strange weight on her back that had nothing to do with sleepiness. She rolled her head carefully up to look over her shoulder—and she saw an arm. A dangling hand. A bare, filthy hip.

  Asterion was curled against her. His human knees were drawn up into the space behind hers. The bone of his cloven bull’s hooves was cool on her ankles and heels. She felt the point of one of his horns digging into her shoulder blade, and for a moment she thought he was trying to hurt her—but then she realized that he was simply breathing, as he slept. Her own breath burned in her chest because she didn’t want to let it out. No breath no motion of any kind be so still he’ll never ever wake up because the moment he does he’ll go away.

  An itch crept along her shoulder and then her spine. She tried to imagine that it was a beetle that would skitter across her and away—but that single itch spread into innumerable itches. Sweat eased down her face and pooled beneath her cheek. A muscle stiffened painfully in her calf. A cascade of sensations, each of them intolerable: she eased herself away from him and onto her back, so gradually that she hardly felt it herself. He twitched and sighed. She could see him now: his sideways-turned body, and his head. His face was pointed up at the roof; his horns wouldn’t let him put his cheek to the ground. His features were frozen somewhere between bull’s and boy’s: a nose and mouth that jutted, though the lips were Asterion’s. Hollow human cheeks coated in fur. A slender scar wound from the fur to his chin and her fingertips tingled with the need to touch it—it, and all the others that puckered his skin, as if someone had been tr
ying to mend him.

  She didn’t feel the sneeze coming: it simply did, with a force that drove her up onto her elbows. The sneeze ended in a sob—because he was twisting up too, of course, his brown eyes opening and rolling over her and everything around them, his hands scrabbling against stone and air. “Ari?” he cried, and “Chara?” Polymnia froze for a moment, shocked by the sound of his voice—but when he fell backward, she threw herself after him. “No!” Her own voice was much too loud, and it hurt her throat. “Asterion—wait!”—but he was already past the jars and down the steps.

  When he reached a column. he paused and turned back. She watched fur spread across his face and down his neck, then over both shoulders at once. His nose and mouth were all bull now, and his nostrils flared. He tossed his head and huffed. She didn’t speak again, didn’t move except to lift her hands and hold them out to him. Come back come back please come back . . .

  He edged slowly over to the water jug and hunkered beside it. She knotted her fingers together and squeezed so hard that tears filled her eyes. Now stay stay please stay . . . She eased herself down into a crouch and smiled at him. He tossed his head again, and scuffed the floor with a hoof.

  He stayed.

  Polymnia started measuring time with obsidian flake slashes on the altar chamber wall, where she could see sunlight turning to darkness—because she was often deep inside the mountain, and saw no lights except Daedalus’s fireflies and little lamps. The first of the marks seemed to wobble up from the floor; the ones after that were deeper and straighter, which made her proud. She sometimes remembered Zenais murmuring, “It’s been two days . . . five days . . . seven . . .” as her leg frothed and her red eyes squinted and rolled.

  Polymnia had just carved the fiftieth mark on the wall when a sound like distant thunder rumbled from the sky beyond the chamber. Lord Zeus sends a storm, she thought, and her belly lurched with excitement because the other rain had been so light and brief. The sunlight in one of the openings wavered, but that was all. She glanced at Asterion, who was sitting in what was now his favourite place: by the water jar, his legs and arms outstretched to catch spray that might be cool. He was all boy, except for his horns and one foot. His eyes were closed; they remained closed, even when the rumbling stopped and a new noise began: a rat-a-tat bouncing that was faint, then louder, then all around them. She threw up her hands as the source of the sound rained down around her: hundreds, thousands of fat, moist figs.

  She imagined Kosmas beside her, craning up, narrowing his blue eyes. “How is that happening?” he’d ask her. (Though he wouldn’t have asked her: he would have thought of an answer himself.)

  “Probably just someone shovelling,” she imagined replying. “Though who knows how they got up that far. It doesn’t matter: it’s fresh, and we were running low on everything.” She heard Asterion’s hoof drag; she knew he was pulling his legs up under him so that he could stand. Maybe he was looking at her now, or maybe at the figs that bounced and scattered as they hit the ground.

  Imaginary Kosmas turned to her eagerly. “So a person could slide down to us, too!”

  “And break all the bones in their body?” she said, shaking her head. “Why? Why would anyone even try?”

  “Maybe to help him.” A thumb crooked in Asterion’s direction. “Maybe someone up there won’t like that he was shut in here. Maybe that’s why there’s food coming down at all. Why would anyone want to feed us when we were supposed to be the food?”

  The stream of figs thinned to nothing. A moment passed before it was replaced by a thumping that turned out to be round loaves of bread. She whooped as she dodged them. “All ours!” she sang. “Ours and only ours!” She sang and she spun, and then she caught a glimpse of Asterion, and stopped.

  He was holding a fig to his mouth, staring down at it as if it were something horrifying. He let it fall and sent it halfway to the altar with a swift kick of his hoof. He shook his head so violently that he fell backward, and lay where he’d fallen, curled and small.

  So small, she thought—and suddenly she saw him as she hadn’t allowed herself to see him, for all these weeks. His shoulder blades and spine jutted from sallow skin; his neck looked too slender for his head; the fingers on his human hand were more like claws.

  So much food, but he’s starving. He has to eat again. Not bread or figs or salt fish: fresh meat. He told me, all that time ago: meat and blood will be the only things that will give him strength here. It’s been too long since Zenais. I have to find him something else, somehow.

  Three days later, something found her.

  Chapter Nine

  Polymnia recognized Kosmas’s voice, even though it was doing nothing but moan. His ankle was broken, or maybe his leg. She knew this even before she saw him: she heard his foot dragging, as he moaned.

  She slipped behind a column.

  She might have recognized his voice, but when he finally lurched into the altar space, she didn’t recognize him. His face—which the Princess Ariadne had slavered over, in some other lifetime—was streaked with blood and dirt. His eyes were pinched smaller with pain, so Polymnia couldn’t see their vivid blue. He was an injured animal, an old man—something that stank of weakness and promise.

  “Polymnia?” The word was splintered and faint, but it echoed from the walls. She drew herself deeper into shadow.

  Asterion’s body stiffened. Kosmas wouldn’t be able to see him; the bull-boy was lying behind the wide, squat fig jar. He lifted his heavy head off the floor. One of his horns whined on the altar’s stone but Kosmas didn’t seem to hear it over the sounds that were coming out of his own throat. As he advanced she could see them both. She had a sudden desire to sing to them—to wrap them in silver until they lay down next to each other, sleepy and slow. But no: Asterion was hungry, and Kosmas was bleeding.

  Asterion rose and crouched, bobbing a little on his human feet as his bull’s head swung, looking. Kosmas paused where his corridor met the chamber’s wall. Gears ground, somewhere close, and each of them froze, waiting—but floor and corridor mouths stayed still. The grinding echoed and echoed and stopped. Kosmas resumed his lurching.

  Asterion rose to his full height and roared.

  A cry left Polymnia’s throat before she could quell it. They didn’t hear her. Kosmas’s handsome head jerked up; Asterion scuffed the ground with his feet and leapt across the space between them. Polymnia could see the blue of Kosmas’s eyes, spreading, brightening, filling her own eyes with their fear. No, she thought, he saved you both, remember? Don’t let this happen—but then she thought, Yes. Asterion: yes.

  Kosmas turned, somehow. She saw the bone protruding, glistening and jagged, from the skin of his calf, and yet he spun and ran. Asterion was only paces behind him; Polymnia wasn’t sure whether he was grunting or whining, but whatever the sound was, it made Kosmas run faster. She followed them. They were in a tunnel carved with scarlet nautilus shells and dark green seaweed. The colours pulsed from dim to bright and back again. She heard whimpering and snuffling and the dull thudding of bare skin on stone. She saw Asterion lunge, in the strange, changing light. Kosmas screamed and fell, and she stopped short, panting.

  “No.” Asterion’s whisper was thick, almost human. She hadn’t heard him speak in months. He bent and touched and backed away. Kosmas’s arms and legs lashed, and his back arched and strained. “No.” Asterion turned, his horns shrinking, his fur becoming golden hair. His eyes narrowed and blinked sightlessly at Polymnia. He was no longer the bull; he was a young man, plunging toward the open space of the altar—plunging past her, so that she was alone in the corridor with Kosmas.

  He was dying. She knew this as soon as she squatted beside him and saw his wounds: the gaping flesh and the blood, which was spurting in beautiful arcs and collecting on the ground like dark tidal pools. His eyes rolled past her and then back. He gazed at her. Blood streamed out of his mouth and he coughed; he choked
and writhed and reached for her with clawed hands.

  The first notes of her song were so soft that their silver shimmered in the air above him, thin as ocean spray. The godmarked light thickened as she sang; very soon she could hardly see his face through the film of silver. But she knew he was quieting. His limbs loosened and he sighed a long, slow sigh, and she sang on, weaving peace and surrender as she had so many times before. She put her hand under his head, which rocked and stilled. She held her breath and the silver curtain parted and she saw his eyes, steady and finished.

  The obsidian was ready. She drew it from her belt; she drew it along his throat. He gurgled as all the sheep and cows and pigs had. He subsided as they had, with a hiss and a thunking of bones and a flopping of skin. Her voice dipped so that it was barely a murmur. “Quiet,” she sang. “Be quiet and certain. Sleep, now and forever.”

  She stopped singing only when she knew he was dead. She looked into the fixed blue of his eyes and then she leaned forward and closed them, as she had the eyes of those sheep and cows and pigs. And now? She didn’t need this question, but she wanted it; it reminded her of purpose and home.

  The obsidian was sharp enough. She doubted this, when she set it to his armpit, but the flesh parted and the bone splintered and the pieces fell to the ground as she wished them to. Great slabs of flesh; quivering, wet bits, large and small, crimson and oozing, as much alive as dead. She set the head and hands and feet aside, as she always had before, in the slaughterhouse. She’d throw them somewhere: off her bridge, maybe, beyond sight or care.

  The pieces were heavy. She knew they would be, and yet she wondered, as she dragged them back to the altar room: Why do bits of body feel like stone? They were very red, on the altar. They shone and shook and steamed, a little, as distant gears spun.