Korinna’s body sagged. Her eyelids dipped. They fluttered a little when her throat opened—but only a little.
Polymnia’s father had taught her so much about dead things. She remembered him now, as she hadn’t in a very long time. The smell of fresh blood made her think of him. She remembered his face as he bent down to shift her hands on the haft of the skinning knife. She remembered his hands, which were always slick with blood, but somehow never slippery. The light had been muddy, in the slaughterhouse. She’d had to do so much by touch.
“Be firm,” he’d told her in his low, whistly voice. “Be sure, before you cut, where the blade will lead you. Otherwise it will cut you.” And he’d hold his left hand up, and she’d see his three fingers and two stubs wiggling at her in the murky air, and she’d nod and bend to the carcass.
“Over here, girl,” he’d say. “This one’s restive.” She’d leave the skinning tools and go to where the cow was, stamping and bellowing and tossing its head so that no cut would have been clean.
She was always embarrassed, at first. They weren’t alone, after all; there were other people in the room, skinning rank, fresh things that hung or lay in patches of filth that would suck at your heels and trip you. But her father would brandish his three fingers and his long, curved knife and flash his crooked teeth at her and command her over and over to sing, and she would, in the end, because everything frightened her until she was singing, and because he’d beat her if she didn’t.
Silver came out of her mouth. It came out in ribbons that turned to sheets like summer rain. It swept through her body, as cool and clean as the blood was warm and filthy. The cow would go still and quiet; it would make no sound at all, even when the knife made its long, deep cut.
Later, as they worked side-by-side, her father would say, “Now sing again. The gods didn’t mark you so you’d sit skinning dead animals—but you’re doing that for now, and you should get their attention. Remind them, so they take notice and lift us both out of this muck. Sing, girl.”
Her hands moved on the wet flesh beneath her but the rest of her was far away—too far for embarrassment or fear. Artemis and Apollo had both blessed her, folk said. They’d sung their marks into her ear when she was born.
“You’re too good for us,” her father said, gesturing from himself to her little sister, who was unmarked and always sick and had no skill at butchering. “Your godmarked voice and your fine red hair—someday your gods will see to it that we’re all taken away from here.” Leaning over dead beasts in the slaughterhouse, she’d wanted to believe him. She hadn’t, though. She’d doubted Artemis and Apollo and her father.
Now she leaned over rank, fresh things and thought how wrong that old Polymnia had been.
She traced the girl’s blood into Master Daedalus’s words. She traced entirely new patterns, too: other, smaller spirals and lines of bull’s horns, crimson on the white. She sang of Daedalus and Asterion, Kosmas and Zenais and Korinna. She sang of cattle and pigs and sheep. The flames around the island flickered with her godmarked silver.
When she was finished painting, she slid out of her soiled robe and spread it out on the stone. She stacked as many pieces of meat in it as she thought she’d be able to carry and tied the cloth ends together. Korinna’s clean robe she plucked carefully up and wedged beneath one of her armpits, where it would get only a little dirtier. She set the rest of the meat in long rows across each of the bridges. By the time she returned for it, it would be cooked. He’ll like that, she thought. It’ll be such a treat.
When she returned to the altar chamber, he was waiting for her.
In the months that followed, Polymnia searched every tunnel and chamber she knew, and several she’d somehow missed, in her other wanderings. In the chamber of stalactites she found four Athenians so frightened and wounded that she had to sing to them right there, instead of luring them to the Goddess’s heart. It took days to bring the first three, bit by bit, to the altar chamber. When she was nearly finished her last trip with the fourth, the corridors took so long to reshape themselves into the familiar pattern that everything she was carrying had spoiled by the time she set it down on the snake altar. She raged, ripping and tearing, retching at the smell—and he didn’t come, of course. In the end she gathered it all back up and tossed it into the lake of fire.
As she was leaving the lake, she heard a wolf’s howl. You—but the name wouldn’t come, wouldn’t . . . Ligeia, she thought at last, with a rush of relief and anger. Where have you been hiding, all this time? The howl climbed and climbed, then trailed into a whine, and silence. I’m glad you’re still alive, she thought. I’ll enjoy hunting you.
In a low, tiny chamber she’d never seen before, she found a body that had obviously been there for a long time: just bones, with bits of hair and cloth hanging off them. There were gnaw marks on the bones, and she wondered whether they were from his teeth—but no, he’d never have been able to fit into the space, not even if he’d been mostly human. Who, then? she thought with a stab of anger. Who stole this from my bull-god’s mouth? And where are all the others? Fourteen each time, and I’ve found only a handful of these. She imagined tiny white lizards burrowing into flesh and re-emerging from nostrils or ears. She imagined tiny white spiders picking their way daintily over whatever was left, when the skin was gone.
She began to wedge stones and thick shards of broken pottery into the spaces where there were cables, between altar room and passages, and passages and other doorways. Sometimes the gears ground and stone moved and her bits and pieces held; other times they didn’t, and the corridors changed with even more shrieking, and a rat-a-tat popping of rock and clay.
By the time she dug the thousandth mark into the altar chamber wall, there were many more pieces of stone to move around. He always dislodged some, in the frenzy of strength after he fed, and when she went to put them back, she always seemed to have more than she’d started with. She imagined that she was the Great Daedalus, as she worked—him, only greater. Her materials were far more interesting than his: she had large rounded stones, which added a wonderful sort of texture to the walls, and smooth, slender branches that wove snugly. She’d run her hands over them, once they were firmly set, and imagine that her old mistress was beside her. Her old mistress, and King Aegeus too.
“Such artistry!” the king would say, and her mistress would nod.
“Indeed—two godmarks—have you ever heard of such a thing? I’ve decided not to sell her, after all. Child: come, now, and we’ll walk by the sea, and you’ll sing birds down into our hands, and I’ll shower you with gold and bright dyed cloth, and you’ll never, ever leave—no—you and your Asterion will stay here with me forever.”
Polymnia no longer counted the marks on the wall, after she’d made a new one. When she tried, her vision and fingers faltered—and anyway, she was starting to forget some of the words that went with the numbers. When she gazed at the marks, though, she knew that the door in the mountain would soon open again—so she kept digging her obsidian into stone, day after day.
She sang and cut. She cooked and stacked. She carried and stacked again, as rain pattered or sun wavered. She gathered up the figs and loaves and fish when they fell. She watched him—she always did, whether he was feeding (his fingers the only human things about him), or hunkered down with his furred head in the waterfall, his thick tongue lapping. She waited for him when he wasn’t there; she arranged figs and salt fish and bread, while she waited, and nibbled some herself, when she remembered to. Sometimes pictures from another world bloomed behind her eyes: the sun setting over a harbour crowded with ships; a kitchen full of cooks and slaves and steam that smelled of soup and roasting meat. She saw the pictures, but she was forgetting the names for what she saw, just as she was forgetting numbers. She smiled and sang and stopped trying to count or remember.
For a long time he came and went, as he had since the beginning. He fed and slept
, paced the perimeter of the altar chamber, gazed at her with his god-eyes, then disappeared for time she was able to measure as weeks. She never spoke to him, not even when he had a human mouth and could maybe have answered, and he was silent too, and always distant, even if he was close.
Until one night. She assumed it was spring, because the world above was often stormy. It had just stormed, in fact: thunder outside that the mountain seemed to answer with its own rumblings, and lightning that turned the chamber’s stone ceiling white. Polymnia had closed her eyes and smiled because she could see the white behind her lids, flashing just before the ground shook. She looked for him, between flashes, but he wasn’t there. When the storm passed, she stretched out on her robe and slept.
She woke to his hands on her skin. He was mostly a boy—but not a boy, anymore: a man, so much taller and broader than he had been when they’d fallen together—and he was straddling her, touching her breasts and belly with his hands while his foot-hooves jittered on the stone. His bull’s head dipped and she felt hot breath on her face and whimpered, because she was so full of hunger for him that she felt no fear. He pawed at her hair, so long and smooth again, and flattened his palms on it, on either side of her head, so that she couldn’t move it at all. He raised himself up and thrust into her and she cried out and wrapped her hands around his scarred, straining arms.
Just that one thrust—and he changed. His bull’s muzzle shortened and his fur turned to flesh. In a moment he was a man, gazing down at her with his head bobbing and swaying under the weight of his horns. “Son of Poseidon,” she said raggedly, and he groaned and pulled out of her and away. He crouched with his arms wound around his knees, panting, staring at her with a man’s eyes.
“God’s son?” she whispered.
His eyebrows rose and his eyes widened and he laughed a short, sharp laugh. Before she could reach for him he scrambled and stood. He ran from her, beneath a high-up blur of light that might have been the moon.
This time she wasn’t patient, and she didn’t wait for him to return. She went down corridors and into every chamber she could find. She cursed the gears when they shifted and kept her away from the altar chamber, because maybe he’d gone back there while she was somewhere else—but she kept looking, imagining that five days, six, seven, had passed. Imagining weeks. She heard nothing of him—no hoofbeats or breathing that might be close or far away—but she could feel him with her, a silver spark beneath the mountain, whirling just beyond the light her own spark made.
When she finally found her way back to the chamber, it was empty.
There were no more storms. Summer, then. The old Polymnia had hated summers in the slaughterhouse, when the heat had made the regular stench and sweat unbearable. The new Polymnia drew the Goddess’s heat up through her skin and into her head. She thought about the god’s body on hers, in hers, and knew that that could not be the only time. My love, she thought, as her chest ached with tears. Why did you run from me?
He still hadn’t come back when the door in the mountain opened again. Two more years, some part of her thought; I knew it would be soon.
She rose. She shook with the need to run to them—to the newest Athenians, whose cries she could already hear, snaking through the Goddess’s tunnels like blood through veins. But the corridor wasn’t right. She waited. She washed in the waterfall, her skin puckering, and brushed her hair out with her fingers as she stood drying. She slipped Korinna’s robe over her head and thought, Lucky there’s a fresh batch: I’ll be needing a cleaner one of these.
She was calmer by the time the corridor changed, three days later. As it settled, she slipped her obsidian blade into the cloth belt at her waist and stood up very tall, pulling her shoulders and head back. I’ll hunt for you, again, my god, she thought. You must be so hungry; this will bring you back. She said, as if they were already in front of her, “Greetings, Athenians.” She cleared her throat. “Greetings, Athenians. I am Polymnia. Do not be afraid.”
She smiled and stepped between the columns.
Book
Three
CHARA
Third Athenian Sacrifice
Chapter Eleven
Chara didn’t mean to scream. She knew where she was going, after all; she knew she was going to fall. But the sound came from her throat anyway, as the mountain darkness seized her and pulled her down. She screamed and flailed, and fear dissolved any strength she might have felt on the other side of the great metal door.
Ariadne came to her, as she fell. Ariadne, not Asterion—and even breathless with wind and terror, Chara fought against this. But there she was: the princess, scowling, wrenching at all the tiny knots Chara had just made in her hair. The princess, simpering at Karpos; raising her hand to strike Chara; crying out Chara’s name as she ran into the labyrinth.
All these images vanished when she landed. She lay on her back gazing up into an explosion of gold and crimson sparks. Her fingers clawed at something that felt like moss, and something else that felt like stone. She flexed her toes and rotated her ankles, as she began to hear again. Sobbing, very close, and screaming, farther away—or maybe the sounds were coming from the same place; all of them leapt and blurred.
“Quiet, now: Sotiria will help,” Chara heard someone say, from right beside her. But when she took a deep breath and sat up, she was by herself.
All right, then, she thought as she looked around. Here you are.
She was on a ledge that was indeed thick with green-brown moss. Above her stretched a wall glowing with tiny Daedalus-lamps and gleaming with Daedalus-metal—cables, which began to move before she could decide what to do next. The ledge lurched beneath her. It moved down, down; she stretched to peer over the side, though her bones and skin hurt so much she wondered how she could move at all. She saw darkness, and steam that coiled up toward her. Her hands slipped; her body was running with sweat. The steam thickened and scalded her cheeks and lungs as the ledge crept lower. She tried to swallow and couldn’t; she retched and vomited a string of bile onto the moss.
Asterion, she thought. Asterion, Asterion, O all the gods and giant clams—Asterion. . . .
When the ledge bumped against floor, she pushed herself to her feet. The world tipped around her, but only for a moment. She was aching and bruised—but that was all. She stood and breathed smoke and heat and slow, new calm.
Her ledge had come to rest in a corridor. There was a smooth wall to her left; to her right, the corridor stretched away into more steam-clotted darkness. Urns were set along it at intervals—one fallen and cracked in half, and past it two more, upright. Beyond the second, Chara saw people.
“That other ledge!” said the same voice that had spoken before. “It’s down! Maybe Sotiria’s on it—she has to be—we need her—Sotiria? Is that you?”
Chara pushed herself away from the wall and stepped off her ledge. She walked a few careful paces, into the flickering light of the wall lamps. A girl gaped at her. A boy was kneeling beside the girl, cradling his left arm. And Theseus was near them both, his golden brows drawn together in a puzzled frown.
“Who are you?” the girl demanded.
Before Chara could answer, Theseus said, “I remember: you are the Princess Ariadne’s slave.”
“Yes,” Chara said. “I’m also Chara, daughter of Pherenike.”
The girl lurched for her and grasped her robe, twisting it tight in her fists. “How did you get here? Where’s Sotiria? Where is Sotiria?”
“Melaina,” Theseus snapped. “Enough.” He stepped forward and put his hands over hers; he held them until she let Chara go. “Explain, Chara,” he said, and suddenly she heard him in her mind too, speaking words that she could feel all the way down to her bones: ::Daughter of Pherenike: tell us why you are here.::
She was shaking. She wondered how long she’d been shaking. Somehow, though, her voice was steady. “I arranged with Sotiria to take her pla
ce. I need to find Asterion.”
Melaina scowled and opened her mouth, but Theseus spoke before she could. “Asterion. The monster.”
“No,” Chara said, and swallowed around a hard knot of tears. “Asterion, Pasiphae’s son, and Poseidon’s, and even Minos’s. Princess Ariadne’s half-brother. My friend.”
Theseus’s eyes gleamed as he looked at her. “The Princess Ariadne told me nothing of a half-brother—only that this was a vile, murderous creature; she begged me to come here, promised me aid, so that I might rid the world of him.”
“She begged you for something else, too.” Chara wanted to curl herself into a dark corner and sleep. She wanted to run somewhere, everywhere, shrieking Asterion’s name until he called back to her. “I wrote the letter to you,” she went on. “For Ariadne. I know she asked that you take her away from here, once you’d killed Asterion. I know she expects you to someday make her queen of Athens.”
The hum of Theseus’s mind-voice splintered and crackled, and Chara closed her eyes for a moment.
“Well, well,” Melaina growled. “How very interesting. Tell me, O Prince: are you intending to do as the Cretan whore wishes?”
The boy blinked and slid his wide-eyed gaze to Chara. His mouth was wide too; he looked so much like a fish that she felt a laugh push away the tears in her throat. She bit her lower lip hard enough that she tasted blood, and both laughter and tears vanished.
“I intended,” Theseus said, his own voice slow and deep, “to kill the monster that has been killing Athenians.”
Chara shook her head, half expecting tangled curls to fall across her eyes, as they always did—except that no, of course, her skull was rough with stubble and razor cuts. “You can’t. My Lord—Theseus—please trust me. If he’s . . . if we find him still alive, please let me go to him before you try to use that knife Ariadne gave you.”
The Flame in the Maze Page 11