Theseus sprang past Asterion and crouched behind her. He pressed his hands against her mouth. “Alphaios,” he said, “bring me a strip of cloth.”
After Theseus had pulled the gag tight, Polymnia sang a few notes—but no words came, and no silver. She sobbed in great, dry heaves as he walked away from her.
“You were trying to kill us!” Melaina shrieked, struggling onto her hands and knees. “You whore’s daughter!”
“Stop,” Asterion said, so quietly that no one seemed to hear him.
“We should do away with her now,” Alphaios said dully, his eyes on something far above them. “Why even bother imagining that any of us will get to Athens? She’s right about that, anyway.”
Theseus said, “We will return to Athens, and she will be judged according to the law of my father, King Aegeus.”
“And what about the head of the beast?” Melaina hissed. “Won’t you have to bring that back to your father King Aegeus too? Hmm, great prince?”
Chara leapt to her feet, her head suddenly clear. She was about to stride over to Melaina and perhaps seize her by the neck when the mountain shuddered, and gouts of scalding steam billowed into the chamber. Melaina fell, and Alphaios and Theseus stumbled. Chara was propelled forward, nearly to the steps. Asterion didn’t stumble or even sway—but as she righted herself, next to him, she saw his arm twitch, and twitch again, and sprout thick brown fur.
He turned to her, his eyes wide. “I need to be . . . away,” he gasped. “Come with me?”
“Of course,” she said, and took his shaking hand in his, just as his fingers melded into hard, ridged hoof.
“Are you just going to let them leave?” she heard Melaina cry as Chara gathered some food into a piece of her own robe. “Are you?”
“Yes,” Chara heard Theseus say, and, ::Come back soon, daughter of Pherenike; Chara who spoke truth::—and then she and Asterion walked together into the darkness.
At first she tried to pretend that they were weaving their way through Knossos—the underground part, of course, where they’d hidden themselves as children. But there were no chambers lined with olive oil jars here—no other slaves to dodge and greet, or flights of stairs that would lead them up to golden sunlight and the red of the courtyard’s earth and the silver-green of olive trees. Just close, hot spaces, and stairs that led only to more of these.
She held his hand, and sometimes he leaned on her. He shook, and his breath hissed between his teeth. When the altar chamber seemed far behind them and they’d shuffled along at least three corridors, he tripped over something and sprawled, pulling her down with him. He made a guttural sound and clawed at her with hands that had started warping into hooves. His eyes were unfocused and darting. “Crabs and oysters,” she blurted as she held his shoulders, which were twitching, trying to broaden. “Crabs and oysters and pearls, Asterion: imagine them!” He was still shuddering, but he blinked and blinked again, and saw her. “Big round pearls,” she went on, more quietly. “Imagine that we’re stringing them on thread Daedalus has made—wonderful soft humming thread that glows in the light—the kind of light that shines at noon in the summer: almost white.”
He was nodding, holding onto her forearms with hands now, not hooves.
“So hot,” he said, even as smoke coiled around them. “Can’t help it. . . .” A moment later he said, “Daedalus. Icarus. What happened to them?”
She tipped her head up because she felt tears and didn’t want him to see them. The ceiling above them was vaulted in a long series of arches, lit by criss-crossing veins of dark red light—Like we’re inside an enormous fish, she thought. Oh Master Daedalus: why did you have to make it all so beautiful?
She looked back down at Asterion, who was frowning, now. “They died.” Her voice wobbled, and she cleared her throat. “King Minos freed them and put them on a ship, and it was attacked, and . . .”
“Naucrate too?” Before she could reply, he said, “Of course Naucrate . . . too.”
She drew her finger from his cheekbone to his jaw to the thick tangle of hair at his neck. “Where are we going?” she said. “Not that I care, mind you. But.”
He raised himself up on an elbow and touched the tip of her nose with his. “It’s close,” he said. His breath still smelled of meat, though maybe not as strongly. “It’s cool. Usually. It’s . . .” He squeezed his eyes shut. “Icarus,” he said. “Oh, gods: you make no sense.”
They passed beneath the arches and onto a ledge above a wide space of nothingness. Chara peered down and thought she saw fire, flickering very far below them, but she pulled herself back before she could be sure. Across the chasm, another tunnel mouth gaped in rock. A soft, white glow lit it.
“Is there sometimes a bridge?” she said. “Or another bunch of ledges that come down from above, that you can walk across?”
Asterion smiled. “You know . . . Daedalus.” She watched his smile falter as he thought of what he’d said, and what she’d told him. He knelt and leaned into the empty space, patting at the stone beneath them. As he did, she thought, I can’t believe he’s right here. Can’t believe I’m talking to him as if all those years didn’t happen. Can’t believe I could touch him now.
He gave a tug, wincing as his shoulder wound stretched. A rumble ran up through her feet. Metal ground out from the ledge: like Daedalus’s sword, it emerged in pieces that gave way to smaller pieces, all of them patterned filigree that reminded her of the stone spirals on Ariadne’s dancing ground. When the last piece was out and touching the opposite wall, Asterion rose and turned to her.
“I’m the only one who . . . knows about this.” He swallowed and shook his head, frowning. “My voice isn’t . . . right. . . .”
“Of course it isn’t,” she said. “You haven’t used it in ages, have you? Anyway. You’re the only one who knows about this place—this bridge.”
He swallowed again. “I found it early, when I was still . . . mostly a boy. Couldn’t move the lever after that. I used to . . . stand here, when I couldn’t. Used to look at the light.”
He stared at the other corridor. His body was stiff, his shoulders high and hunched. As she watched, a shudder rippled down his naked spine and along his arms. She touched the small of his back and heard him suck in his breath—but when he looked at her, he was smiling.
He stepped onto the first section of the bridge. “Like walking on the edge . . . of the falls,” he said over his shoulder. Her laugh turned into a gasp as she went after him. The metal thrummed and bounced, no matter how gently she set her feet on it.
“Right,” she said in a voice that was as wobbly as the bridge, “just like that.”
“Be glad Deucalion . . . isn’t here to call up a wind, like he . . . used to.”
“Until Glaucus begged him to stop.” She was speaking through gritted teeth, hardly listening to herself. She wanted to drop and crawl, clinging to whatever she could, but instead she stared straight ahead. If he can make it on two legs, after everything, so can I.
There was a wind: hot, slow breath that eased up around her, then seemed to tug at her as it receded, like waves at wading feet. Halfway—the third section of bridge, ever-narrower; him leaping and turning to her from solid rock, waving.
Why a chasm under a mountain? Why?
Last section, barely wide enough for her feet, placed shoulders’-breadth apart. A blast of scalding wind made her cry out and wave her arms for balance, and look down.
There was definitely fire, in a place so deep that it had to be where the world ended, or where it had been born, or both. Black smoke reached long, hissing fingers toward her and made everything smudge and run together. She had no breath; she had no body, which was a relief, because now she wouldn’t feel the fall.
“Chara! You’re nearly there. Look up, and jump!”
She did all of this before she could think. The space between the daintily
tapered end of the bridge and the ledge was one she probably could have crossed in a single long pace, but fear, and his command, made her leap. She landed, sprawled, rolled onto her back, wheezing with laughter.
“Up, old woman,” he said from above her, his hands on his knees. She struggled to sit— her bones had all gone soft—and struggled to breathe, because now, suddenly, she was crying.
Asterion’s hands were on her shoulders. “I shouldn’t have brought you here. The mountain is . . . different. There was never this . . . much wind or heat, before. I’m sorry. . . .”
She gulped and dragged her hand under her nose. “That’s fine,” she said, smiling shakily up at him. “But whatever’s on this side had better be worth it.”
Chapter Seventeen
At first, Chara thought that the chamber was made entirely of crystal. There was no single source of light: it came from everywhere, rainbow and white; when she squeezed her eyes shut, she still saw its dazzle. If there was an end to the expanse, anywhere, she couldn’t tell: no ceiling, no rock wall anywhere but at the corridor’s mouth.
Asterion took three paces past her, to the place where hard-packed dirt became crystal. She couldn’t see his face. “How long has it been since you were last here?”
“Don’t know.” He looked back at her: a stranger with inward-turned eyes. “How long since they put me . . . inside?”
Questions, she thought, with a shiver made of dread and relief. At last. “Four years. A little more than that.”
“Ariadne . . . thought of it, didn’t she? Of putting me in here? And the king did . . . the rest?”
“Yes.”
“Who else knew?”
“Ariadne and your father were the only ones who weren’t surprised. It was their secret. She’d have wanted it that way. Asterion,” she said, wanting to touch him, but wary of his stranger’s gaze. “Show me this place?”
He stared a moment longer, then blinked as slowly as one of Karpos’s statues, and returned. “Of course,” he said, with a twitch of his shoulders, and a shadow-smile.
A path wound through the crystal, which rose in blocks that were jagged or smooth, knee-high or far, far taller than Chara and Asterion were. She started every time she moved and her reflection did the same, distorted and close; she tried to look only at him, padding slowly across the slippery ground. The path branched and he led her right, without hesitation. It’s a labyrinth within a labyrinth, she thought, and remembered Ariadne’s puzzle box, with its tiny metal figures.
After they’d taken two other, narrower paths, Asterion stopped. She was behind—no room beside—and saw something dark on the ground just beyond him. He blew out a long, slow breath. “Well. Here we are.”
She stepped after him onto a small patch of brown-red rock, fuzzed with moss so painfully bright that she thought, How had I already forgotten green? A trickle of water had carved a channel in the crystal of one of the enclosing walls; the trickle disappeared into the moss, soaking it almost black.
“Some of this light must be from the sun.” She whispered, because she wanted to be able to hear the burble and drip of the water.
“I thought that too, when I first came here. It hurt me. It hurt that there was . . . still sun, somewhere.”
She dug her toes into the moss—the dry green, then, paces later, the damp almost-black. She walked around the entire patch—thirty-two paces in all—and had taken fifteen steps across it when a piece of cloth made her stop. She hadn’t noticed it before, because it was folded up into a very small square, and was so dirty that it blended in with the rock.
“That was . . . someone’s,” he said. “Kosmas’s, maybe. She set it aside. I picked it up. I never had anything of my own; I was naked when I fell, because I was . . .”
“The bull,” she said, “or mostly. I know. I was watching.”
“. . . And I took this because I thought . . . it might make me feel more human. To wear it.”
He picked up the cloth and twisted it in his hands until his knuckles went white.
“Did it work?”
He shook his head. “But maybe now I could make a . . . loincloth out of it, anyway . . . Try again.”
“No—don’t,” she said, and felt herself flush. “I mean, you’re obviously a boy—a man.”
He grinned. It shocked her as the green had; she thought, I’d forgotten—O gods and snapping turtles, but he’s beautiful when he smiles like that.
“If I shouldn’t . . . neither should you.”
She slipped out of her own robe and dropped it at her feet. Her skin was blazingly hot; so was everything underneath it. We’ve been like this before, she thought, as if she could reason the heat away. When we were children. He’d be naked after a rite; I’d be wearing only a loincloth—gods, but it bothered Ariadne, and her mother. But this wasn’t the same. Of course it wasn’t.
She sat down by the damp moss with her legs drawn up under her chin. He knelt in front of her and leaned to put the edge of her robe in the water. He wrung it out over her shoulders and she gasped at its cold and its long, tickling trails. He dipped it again and squeezed it over her front, this time. When he sat back she saw the cloth tremble in his hands, and reached out to hold one of them. She shifted so that she was kneeling, and he put a hand on the back of her stubble-roughened head and pulled it closer to him—to his lips, which were dry and cracked and slightly parted.
If he kissed her, it was too quick for her to feel. What she did feel was him pulling his hand away, and bumping her shoulders with his as he thrust himself to his feet. She stood too, but he was already stumbling away from her. The crystal walls warped his shape and features; he wobbled, as if she were seeing him through receding veils of water. He took one path and then another, until he vanished into the glare.
She sat with her back next to the stream, even though she wanted to run after him. “No,” she said quietly—aloud, because her voice made her feel steadier. “Leave him. He’ll come back. Be patient.”
Darkness fell around her, almost between breaths. All that was left of the blaze of colour and white was a deep blue glow far above, which seemed to pulse in time with her heartbeat. The sky, she thought. The night sky above Knossos; the horns on the palace roof, darker than the sky. Ariadne standing up there, watching for her father’s return from Athens. The same sky, nights later, when Asterion gored the king. The High Priest made lightning and thunder; the ground split open at our feet. And they took Asterion away. Each word, each memory was thick and tangled with weariness.
When she woke it was still dark, except for the blue—but there was a shadow across from her. She saw him as the sleep cleared from her eyes: crouched, coiled, rocking. She didn’t speak. After a moment he crawled over the moss to her, and she saw that one of his legs was dragging behind him, and that it ended in a hoof. His horns were longer than they’d been when he left.
He took her hand, and she flinched, though she didn’t mean to. He guided her forefinger to some carved lines in the wall beside her, which she hadn’t noticed. He drew her finger along them, slowly, his hand shaking a little. The marks meant nothing, at first—but then, after he’d made her trace them again, she felt the shape of his name and, right beside it, hers. She drew in a quick breath and turned her fingers around so that they were gripping his.
“I wanted to remember,” he whispered. “I was afraid I’d lose . . . everything. I used obsidian to carve them. I . . .”
His belly hollowed as he sucked in his own breath.
She held herself still, though she wanted to draw him in against her. “Do you remember everything else?” she said. “Everything that’s happened to you in here, when you were the bull?”
He slid himself away from her and lay down on his side. He was silent for so long that she thought he’d gone to sleep. “Yes,” he said at last, and curled even more tightly into himself.
&nb
sp; She sat with her hand on their names and waited for dawn.
He didn’t leave again, in the days that followed, but he hardly spoke, either. One morning his hoof had turned back into a foot; the next, his arms were covered in fur, which became scarred flesh again by nightfall. She made her own way back and forth to the crevasse to empty her bladder and bowels of the very little food she was eating; when she returned he was always where she’d left him, silent, his eyes rolling away from hers.
He didn’t eat at all.
She left a fig near his hand, as she ate one. She broke off pieces of salt fish and dipped them in water and placed some on the stone, while she ate the others. He didn’t even glance at the food.
“You have to eat,” she finally said, though she’d promised herself she wouldn’t be the one to break their silence.
He was sitting cross-legged in the middle of the mossy patch, staring at nothing. “I don’t,” he said, and she started; she hadn’t expected his voice.
“Here: have one fig. Just one. You need strength; your shoulder won’t heal quickly enough, otherwise.”
“No!” he shouted, and leapt to his feet. There, she thought dully, now he’ll go—but he didn’t. He paced, stumbling a bit with every turn he took.
“Why did you bring me here with you?” She tried to speak quietly, but the words cracked and came out louder.
He stopped pacing and stood with his forehead against the crystal, facing away from her. She saw his reflection—his closed eyes, his parted lips, blurred.
“It was wonderful, being . . . back. It was—at first. Now . . .”
He turned and walked to her and sat down with a whoosh of breath that sounded like the bull’s.
She shook her head, though he wasn’t looking at her. “I can’t imagine what any of this has been like, for you. All these years. And I don’t have any idea what to do now, myself. I was so certain I’d find you—but I didn’t ever think past that.”
The Flame in the Maze Page 17