And above all, and with the best of reasons, she must be terrified of Shiva.
Vividly Alex could remember that dark autumnal night in the great hall of the palace, and how his own predecessor in the role of Dionysus had fled in abject terror from the God of Destruction. By all the gods, even had he lived out his human life as nothing more than human, he would never have forgotten that.
Already, he had enough experience of his own new powers to know that they were tremendous. But the memory he had from Dionysus assured him that they were also terribly disorganized just now; a certain period of confusion in the life of any god was only to be expected when one avatar died and another one took over. On top of that, Alex still had no idea just where the pirates' ship might have carried his princess by this time, or how to go about locating her.
From time to time Alex's new memory presented him with an item of disquieting information. For example: the sprites and satyrs could be expected to become distinctly unreliable, every now and then. Not that they had ever engaged in serious, deliberate treachery, or anything like it. But when those auxiliaries became involved in anything more important than an orgy, it would be a foolish avatar indeed who neglected to keep an eye on them. One or two of the members of his entourage in particular required watching.
Distracting the new god somewhat from such concerns was another question, now beginning to nag at both components of the dual mind of Alex/Dionysus. Why had the princess never told him about the treasure hidden in the medallion?
The first explanation to suggest itself was that Ariadne hadn't wanted to worried a callow young soldier prematurely. It would have frightened him, to know what treasure he was carrying, and ultimately the knowledge must have made his mission harder to accomplish. Of course, the princess must have intended at some point to reveal the truth to her chosen champion. She also ought to have let him know just what she expected from him when he became a god. But Fate had intervened to separate her from her servant before she'd had the chance to break these matters to him gently.
It took a little longer for Alex to become aware of a less flattering possibility. Princess Ariadne had trusted him to carry the Face, but only as she might have relied upon a faithful dog or a cameloid, to bear a burden without any idea of what it meant. At some point she would have asked for her medallion back, and her dazzled worshiper would hand it over. Never had the princess intended that such tremendous treasure should be buried inside the skull of Alex the Nameless, for the rest of that young man's life.
He had to face the fact that the glorious Ariadne must have intended that the Face of Dionysus should be worn by someone else.
It must be that she had intended it for Prince—if he really was a prince of any kind, which was looking very doubtful—Theseus.
Alex the Half-Nameless might well have been overawed by Prince Theseus, but Lord Dionysus certainly was not. And as far as Alex could tell, the Twice-Born seemed to have no innate preference for having his existence inside the brain of one avatar rather than another.
If Theseus had indeed been Ariadne's choice, she might well be displeased when she saw how Alex had taken personal advantage of the priceless object she had given into his care. Well, there was nothing he could do about it now—nothing but prove to the princess that he was worthy. Once a human had put on a Face, only death could separate it from him.
Alex's efforts to deduce the princess's motives inevitably led him to consider a second question, which he thought might well have a bearing on the first: how had Ariadne herself come into possession of the Face? Most likely, Alex thought, some of the invisible, comparatively minor powers who formed the Dionysian entourage had brought it to her, at some time during the interval of six months or so when the Twice-Born lay dead, his Face unworn by anyone.
Of course, once the princess had the Face of Dionysus in her hands, there would have been nothing to prevent her putting it on herself. The legends and stories all agreed, and the god's own memory confirmed, that humans of either sex could wear the Faces of either male or female deities. So it would seem that the only thing standing in the way of Ariadne's apotheosis must have been some innate reluctance on her part to undergo such an irrevocable transformation.
Dionysus now seemed to have nothing to say about that attitude. But Alex thought that his own mortal mind needed no divine help to understand it. Any princess, and particularly this one, was very like a goddess already; why should anyone as beautiful, as perfect, as Ariadne, ever want to change her identity, even to become a deity?
After sunset, a full twenty-four hours after Alex had put on the Face, he thought he had made a good start, but no more than that, on getting accustomed to the fact of his apotheosis. That word now lay handily within his vocabulary, part of the seemingly inexhaustible memory of his new partner. Some of the treasures waiting to be discovered within that memory were ideas which had never occurred to Alex before, even in the form of questions.
The experimental possibilities now open to him were endlessly fascinating. By a mere act of will, which he demonstrated to himself again and again, he could cause vines to grow, bursting from barren ground into the air. And, by the same token, induce even dead or dying plants to burst into bloom, or sag suddenly with fruit that developed and grew at a fantastic pace, and provided welcome food for the human component of the one who had brought it into being. The olive trees in the hills of the small island, and even those that had been dying along the shore, now burst out with a great new crop, the cycle of growth and ripening requiring only minutes instead of months. The god's power of promoting fertility and growth did not seem to fade or grow tired with repeated use, and in a day the whole island was notably greener than it had been. No doubt when autumn came, his new powers would at least decline somewhat—if only he could stay alive till then!
It worried Alex that he was still temporarily without his chariot—but the god's memory, extending back through a seemingly endless chain of avatars, assured the new possessor of the Face that the vehicle and its team of leopards would be restored to him in time. The process might take no more than a few days but it could require as long as months. Therefore he would have to find some other means to cross the sea, and that meant waiting for a ship.
Had he known that his wait to regain the chariot was going to be this long, he would have boarded the merchant ship with Daedalus and Clara, and started his journey to Dia by that means. But there was no use fretting about it now. Calling up Silenus, Alex asked if anything could be done to hurry the thing along. Silenus was not hopeful, but swore he would try.
And again and again, Alex's new memory brought him back to that scene in the great hall of the palace of King Minos, on what must have been the last night of the previous avatar's life. Now, through the god's vivid memory, Alex could see himself, his earlier, purely human self, as a clearly seen but generally inconspicuous figure in the background of that brief drama. Indeed, he had been, even then, a better-looking young man than he had imagined himself to be. And even, perhaps, a little taller.
Once I was like you.
Sleep and dreams were evidently going to be at least as large a part of his new life as they had been of the years when he was merely human. On the first night following his possession by the god he had not slept, in any sense of the word implying repose, but tonight he was alone and needed rest.
Even the tiredness of a god was somehow of a different quality than the same feeling in a mere mortal human. But Alex soon discovered that he could now see more sharply than ever before the faces and objects in his dreams, and also remember them more clearly when he awakened. This clarity of vision came from Dionysus, he was sure, but he thought much of the content of the dreams was sent him by Asterion.
In this one, his first real dream since his apotheosis, he remained throughout strangely but comfortably aware that he was dreaming. He was wandering a rocky shoreline, not that of the Island of Refuge, nor any place that either he or Dionysus could remember ever having bee
n before. The waves as they broke before his feet were the color of dark wine, and each time the withdrawing water left a fizzing, a whispering, of small bubbles on the rock. Like the sparkling white wine that once—how many centuries ago?—he and his colleagues in divinity had drunk in the crystal halls of a vast palace that he now thought might have been Olympus. But that scene lay beyond such a gulf of time that even the memory of divinity began to be uncertain.
"It is you," the odd voice of Asterion said, sounding behind him in his present dream. Dionysus identified the speaker even before he turned. The bull-man gave the appearance of wandering comfortably through this world created by the new man-god's sleeping imagination. He stood relaxed, wearing his usual kilt and sandals, looking around him at the odd scenery, as if he had come to visit an old acquaintance in a strange new house. In one of his very human hands Asterion was gathering what looked like spiderwebs, and somehow Alex knew that this was material used by Ariadne in some private and very mysterious weaving.
In his other hand the bull-man held a long, pointed stick, and with its tip had been sketching in the sand a diagram that Alex knew at once must be the map of the Labyrinth itself. Though each corridor in the map was only an inch or two wide, the whole plan was enormous, stretching over sandhill after sandhill, so that its far end was lost in darkness and distance.
Asterion threw the stick down, as if the diagram was now complete. Then he proceeded to ignore what he had sketched. His gaze remained fixed on Alex. "And yet," he continued, "it is not you any longer."
"Wrong. It is me, but it is someone else as well."
"Of course. You are a god now, and I think that is good." The Minotaur appeared to be pleased, but far from overwhelmed, by the discovery.
"Circe seems to think so too."
"So you know the enchantress now? I've never met her. I am enormously surprised, of course, at what has happened to you. Tell me as many details as you can."
Looking into his own mind as best he could, Alex could discover no Dionysian objections, and he related an outline of his recent adventures. In turn, Asterion told him of Shiva's plan to make Theseus a god.
The Twice-Born asked, "I suppose you have gained this knowledge in a dream?"
"It is the world in which I am most at home. And now in another dream I pass it on to you." Asterion's next question was: "Are you strong enough to oppose Shiva?"
Looking into his new memory for clues, Alex could find little to give him confidence on that point. "I don't know. I will do what I can, when the time comes. Where has the princess gone?"
The horned head turned slowly sideways, back and forth. "The dreams of both my sisters are always hard for me to find, difficult to enter. But I know, I feel, that Ariadne is beginning to consider herself lost. And once she understands that she is lost, she will probably be able to find her own way home."
"I don't understand." And now it seemed to Alex that the god inside him was speaking with him, sharing his concern. "If you can't tell me where Ariadne is, how am I to locate her?"
It seemed that the Minotaur could find no answer. From that point on, the dream gave promise of dissolving into the visions of the mad, with parts of the landscape that should not have been alive behaving as if they were. This was not the green and healthy growth normally inspired by the Twice-Born, but something cancerous and gray and ugly. Alex/Dionysus with an effort of will pulled himself free of it, awakening to the second morning of his new life.
He had not been awake for very long on that bright morning before there blew into sight, far out to sea, yet another ship with bellying sail, that appeared to be steering a course directly for the mouth of the harbor. Before it had come within a mile, Dionysus had descended from the hill to sit on the inner shoreline as before. He watched its approach from a seat so close to the water that the waves now and then lapped his sandaled feet, in the luxuriant shade of newly blooming olives.
He was not in the least dismayed to observe that, even at first glance, there was no possibility that this could be anything other than a pirate ship. It was a slightly larger vessel than the peaceful trader on which the princess and her new, crude entourage had departed only a few days ago. Two days ago, the sight of the dark flag, the swarm of armed men, would have sent Alex jumping to his feet and sprinting away for cover. But it would never have occurred to Dionysus to do anything of the kind, and Alex, bonded to his new partner inside the skull they now shared, felt quite secure enough to wait without fear.
It appeared there were a great many pirates in the sea. Well, the waters around the Isle of Refuge were probably one of their favorite hunting grounds. This vessel of freebooters, like its predecessor, anchored in the mouth of the harbor, blocking it while avoiding the possibility of being itself blocked in. Next the visitor, like its sister ship before it, launched a little boat; the difference was that instead of only two armed men, this dinghy contained five, one standing, in an attitude of command, while four others rowed.
Alex felt no apprehension, and little excitement, except that the way was now opening for him to go to Ariadne. With a sense of being intimately connected with the reassuring presence of Dionysus, he sat waiting, watching the men approach. He had no plan regarding them—except that they had brought him a ship.
When the small boat had come halfway across the harbor's inlet, he was suddenly struck by the pirate captain's strong resemblance to Theseus. The closer the man came, the greater the likeness seemed, and Alex was soon firmly convinced that this was Theseus's father, the Pirate King.
Splashing ashore through the shallows, and tugging their boat up after them, the pirates behaved cautiously, lodging only the very prow of their rowboat on shore, as if they feared an ambush, and wanted to be ready to put out again at a second's notice. But very soon they began to relax. The nearest cover that might possibly hide ambushers was more than a hundred paces from where Alex waited.
Alex studied the pirate captain, whose face was burned and wrinkled by the sun, his body richly scarred and tattooed in the course of an obviously eventful life, and hung with the sheaths of what seemed an inordinate number of weapons. With this model in view, it was easy to imagine what the son would look like in twenty or thirty years.
"Captain Aegeus?"
"Aye?"
"I have seen your son, Theseus," Alex told him.
If he had thought to surprise the buccaneer, he was mistaken. "Have you, now?" Aegeus did not seem startled by the news, or much impressed.
On impulse Alex asked the pirate chief, "Wouldn't you like your son to be a god?"
The King of Pirates did not seem startled by the question, or even much impressed; maybe he simply did not take the announcement seriously. "I don't know that it would make much difference. My lifelong tendency has been to ignore the gods, and so far they've done the same for me. Anyway, my son has considered himself to be endowed with divine powers, as far back as I can remember."
"You don't seem surprised to learn that Theseus is still alive; I understand you arranged to have him sent to Minos as part of the new Tribute."
"Did I? Must have slipped my mind." He gave vent to a burst of laughter. "That's one thing that I'll never be surprised to hear of my son. That he's still alive."
The captain and his four men surrounded him, their carefree voices booming now. "Someone's marooned you, hey, matey? How unkind!" And all five demonstrated that they thought it extremely funny.
Alex said no more. To argue with these men now, to try to persuade or threaten, would only delay his getting aboard the ship, if it had any effect at all. When they were at sea again, the Lord Dionysus would make his wishes known.
The most talkative of the sailors had some more to say. "Bad luck for you, good for us. Your family will pay a mighty ransom to have you back—I'll bet your life they will! Haw, haw, haw!"
Now two of the buccaneers menaced him with their weapons, while two others seized him. Dionysus tolerated their roughness, indeed scarcely felt it, nor did Alex—but o
nly because his thoughts were elsewhere, on matters of great moment.
They hauled him to his feet and started to drag him away. In less than a minute they had taken the utterly unrecognized Dionysus into their rowboat, where they pushed him down in the bottom of the boat, so that the glorious youth in his purple robe seemed to be practically cowering at the pirate captain's feet. But the god's mind, melded with the mind of Alex, was focused far ahead, on plans for dealing with serious enemies, and finding the princess. Scarcely did either of them notice the indignity. Now the quest for Ariadne would soon be under way in earnest, and their thoughts were concentrated on that.
The small boat had been pushed off and was halfway across the harbor, the four oarsmen pulling with a good will, when the captain called out something to one Acetes, who was evidently the helmsman among the crew still waiting on the pirate ship.
Roughly the captain cried out that they would be hoisting anchor immediately. A stroke of good fortune had changed his plans, and they would not delay even for the short time necessary to take on water.
Acetes, a lean fellow with a red cloth tied around his head, and a curved sword at his belt, shouted back some acknowledgement of the order. Then he added, with a shade of concern in his voice, "Who've ye got there, mates?"
One man pounded in triumph on the captive's shoulder. "A prince's ransom, that's who! A bag of gold in a purple cape!"
Chapter Twenty-Two
Minutes later, the little boat was right under the ship's bow, with its painted, staring, devil-face. There was a story in that painting for Alex's new right eye to read, but he would not allow himself to be distracted by it now. Rough hands were pulling and pushing him aboard the ship. Again the minor mistreatment was easy to ignore, with other things to think about. Flies droned, trying to extract nourishment from old bloodstains on the deck. Garbage lay about. Whatever the captain's serious interests might be, they did not include cleanliness.
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