Ariande's Web

by Fred Saberhagen

  The tall youth nodded sympathetically. "I thought so. It took me much longer than that before the thing began to feel at all natural. I've had more than a year now to get used to it."

  Alex let out a sigh. "Lord Apollo—"

  "Jeremy, if you prefer."

  "Jeremy, then. There are about a hundred questions I would like to ask you. But I expect most of them can wait."

  "I expect you are right," Apollo said. "But I have a few that had best be answered quickly. Tell me where you are from. And how you got your Face."

  The Sun-God listened attentively, and when the story was finished, he advised the neophyte deity to take the Princess Ariadne back to Corycus with him.

  "It could be more dangerous for her there than here," Alex suggested.

  "Possibly. But in my opinion, even riskier to leave her here, unprotected. Understand that whatever you do, I can offer no help as bodyguard; I'm going to be very busy."

  "I understand."

  "Besides, there is another reason why she ought to go on with you to Corycus. From what you tell me, it might be possible to see this lady here—or more likely her sister, Phaedra—installed on that island as the true queen."

  Alex shook his head. "Realistically, I can't believe that I am strong enough to overthrow the usurper. Not if he has the help of Shiva."

  "I wanted to be sure you understood that point."

  "I do. And to make matters worse, I fear Shiva may have assistance from the Underworld."

  "No one would expect you to overcome such an alliance—without substantial help."

  The two had many things to discuss.

  Especially Alex wanted to pass on to Apollo the information he'd recently had from Silenus, that the satyr had in fact been spreading the rumor that the Face of Zeus was really hidden in the Labyrinth.

  "There is no truth to that rumor, then?"

  "Ah, there, Jeremy, we run into complications. Truth and lies and guesses are so entangled in what passes for the satyr's mind that I doubt he could give us a straight accounting if he tried. Ages of debauchery, of celebration without thought, have warped his—"

  "I see. I believe I understand. We can't afford to deny the possibility that the Face of Zeus is really there."

  "I think that's it." And Alex heaved a sigh of relief.

  When the recent developments involving Corycus had been explained to him, Apollo reiterated, "I think the people of that island might rise to overthrow this usurper Perses, and support a decent human ruler, if you could find a way to offer them such a choice."

  "Many people would find it hard to believe that whatever happens in the lives of a few mere mortals, on one small island, could matter much to Apollo."

  "It could matter to Jeremy Redthorn."

  "I'm glad to hear that."

  "And Apollo, at least in my avatar, is very reluctant to see Hades increase his power."

  When the chariot and the leopards arrived, Alex and Ariadne left the Far-Worker in his temple and went out to meet Silenus, who lingered in the vicinity long enough to turn the reins over to Alex.

  And with her first ride in the chariot of Dionysus, Ariadne lost the last trace of any longing for the Prince of Pirates. Beside her now was not only a god, but, and this was foremost in her thoughts, the man whom she had once thought to embrace in the person of Theseus. She took his strong arm in both her hands, and he turned his head to smile at her.

  "Princess Ariadne." It was his human nature rather than divinity that gave him the strength to say the next few words. "I love you."

  For a long moment she did not respond. Then she said, "Once—how long ago it seems!—once I dared to ask my . . ." She paused, and started over. "I prayed and sacrificed to great Zeus, to send me the man who above all men I could love, and who would love me, and marry me."

  "And what happened?" Alex prompted when she fell silent.

  "I thought I had found that man in Theseus, but I was wrong. Terribly wrong."

  "Do you want to tell me more about it?"

  "No. Except that there was a moment—only a few hours ago, how strange!—when I came near throwing myself into the sea."

  "My dear—!"

  "But I could not see drowning as an improvement, and that impulse did not last long."

  "Let it never come near you again."

  Whether he himself or the princess was the first to raise the subject of marriage, Alex could not afterward remember. Spontaneously the princess admitted (or perhaps it was more of a complaint) that she and Theseus had never gone through any kind of ceremony.

  "Princess Ariadne. Will you be my wife?" Alex drew a deep breath. Somehow the moment he had thought might require all of his strength was past before he had time to dread it.

  "I will," said the princess at once. Then her eyes grew wide. "Oh, I will, I will!" After a moment she added in a small voice, "At this point, were I at home, and had I just become engaged to some prince from a neighboring kingdom, there would be required official testimony on the subject of my virginity."

  "When the world knows that the Lord Dionysus has proposed marriage, I believe it will also know that the time is long past for any such tests or testimony."

  Her eyes were miracles of joy, of promise. "I will gladly do whatever my Lord Dionysus asks of me. But I am only a mortal woman."

  "My Ariadne. Mortal or not, you are the only one that I have ever asked to marry me." And the immortal memory of Dionysus assured Alex that it was so.

  And Alex took Ariadne in his arms and kissed her tenderly.

  It was obvious, even without discussion, that any more formal ceremony was going to have to be postponed indefinitely, until certain great obstacles to true happiness should have been removed. But it would not be forgotten, and they could only hope that the delay would not be great. "One must make an effort to do these things properly," said the god who had fallen in love. But Alex could feel that Dionysus could never make more than a halfhearted effort at propriety.

  The god's memory held numerous examples of marriage between gods and mortals. The rate of success, both in terms of happiness and progeny, had been as varied as it was in unmixed human unions. Children born to such mixed unions were not gods—no Faces issued from their heads when they died. Nor did their identities survive death, in any form that could be passed on—but as humans they tended to be extraordinary in ways that were unpredictable, Asterion being a rather extreme example. Alex supposed it would be surprising if they were not.

  Ariadne protested the presence of the sprites and satyrs, who had quickly returned to close attendance on their lord, as soon as the Far-Worker's overpowering presence had been removed. "They make me feel faint."

  "Sometimes they have a similar effect on me," sighed Alex. "I will see to it that they stay farther away." And with a gesture Dionysus banished his escort to a greater distance. In his left ear he could still hear them, but by now he knew from experience that not even he could banish them entirely.

  One thing this avatar of Dionysus knew that he would never do with Ariadne—and that was to subject her to, or induce her to take part in, one of the rawer episodes of madness that now and then afflicted him, and especially afflicted his followers.

  With vague distaste Alex recalled his orgy of sex on the Isle of Refuge, and the later one of blood and death aboard the pirate ship.

  "Some call you the god of madness. Frenzy. Ecstasy." The young woman sounded frightened and fascinated at the same time.

  "Many do. And I call you my lady—my princess. Ariadne, I think that as long as you are with me, my madness will be only of the most welcome and creative kind."

  "My love and my lord!"

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  The young soldier Sarpedon was asleep in his bunk, dreaming that he had to perform some incomprehensible military exercise under the Butcher's eye. General Scamander was glaring at him, shouting orders in some language that Sarpedon had never heard before, and in another moment the general's temper was going to snap, an
d he was going to order some horrible punishment, worse than flogging.

  In the dream the executioner had Sarpedon in his grasp, but at the last moment whipped off his hood, revealing a great bull's head on a tall man's broad-shouldered body. And suddenly all the military trappings of the dream were gone, as was the dread scaffold of punishment.

  "My name is Asterion," said the bull's mouth in an odd voice. "Seek in the Labyrinth if you would find a friend."

  A moment after that, Sarpedon woke up gasping, relieved beyond measure to find himself amid the sights and smells and sounds of the familiar barracks, much as he had come to dislike the place in waking life. And as for the Minotaur . . . he had never dreamt or imagined a monster yet as terrible as the Butcher could be in his wrath.

  He had had the same dream, or one very like it, for several nights in a row. He could no longer try to convince himself that it was only an accident.

  After another morning of waking life, having worked his way through routine duties, including a weekly inspection that required polishing of weapons and uniform metal, Sarpedon was off duty for the next half-day. He changed into a civilian tunic and made ready to set out as if for an ordinary foray into town.

  Lurid rumors continued to circulate in the barracks, concerning the aborted ceremony of the Tribute, and what had really happened in the Labyrinth on that occasion. Sarpedon, as one of those who had actually been there when Theseus got away and their comrade Alex disappeared, told the truth as he had seen it. But soldiers, like people everywhere, tended to believe what they wanted to believe.

  As he left the palace complex behind, he felt the ground quiver faintly beneath his feet. Sometimes strange minor tremors passed underfoot, and the breeze brought a sulphuric smell. Now and then in the air there hung a sound so deep it might have been the whole earth groaning. Other parts of the island were said to be shuddering with a volcanic oozing, in which Cerberus, dread three-headed guardian of the nether regions, was said to be crafting a new opening to the Underworld, somewhere in the mountains. No one on the island had ever seen Cerberus, but almost everyone claimed to know someone who had done so recently.

  Sarpedon looked back over his shoulder. A wisp of cloud was indeed hanging over the high country, wisps of ashes in the air that city-dwellers breathed.

  There was griping in the barracks, but then there was always griping. Sarpedon wondered how many of the others were nursing ideas as rebellious as his own. So far as he knew, none of those thoughts had yet broken out into barracks conversation, even among close friends. Units had recently been reorganized, people shifted around. There were strangers everywhere, and probably informers were among them.

  One thing the men of the guard did talk about was the increasing presence on the island of mercenary troops.

  "Who're they going to fight? Not a hell of a lot of doubt about that. The plan has to be to use them against us. The king must think we're unreliable."

  "If the king's bringing in people like that, he already knows he doesn't want to trust us."

  The official announcement from the palace had said that new mercenary troops were being imported, as a precaution against a threatened invasion, and against terrorism by unspecified foreign troublemakers.

  The mercenary units were some which had a bad reputation, even among their kind.

  On the day of the aborted ceremony, when Alex had run after Theseus, Sarpedon had followed Alex for a short distance into the Maze. But as soon as Sarpedon had lost sight of the man he was chasing, he stopped and turned back in fear of getting lost.

  For a few hours, he had nursed hopes that some kind of coup was in progress, that a glorious conclusion of the day would see the usurper deposed, and, ideally, one of the princesses on the throne. Maybe their father hadn't been the greatest king who'd ever ruled anywhere. But he'd been a hell of a lot better than his replacement.

  But then Sarpedon, along with many others, had been plunged into gloom when it very quickly became obvious that nothing remotely resembling a coup was taking place. And when you thought about it, it was hard to see any way that could have happened. A Palace Guard might manage to depose a king, especially an unpopular one, but how could any combination of mere humans overthrow a god? At the last minute, old Minos had tried to enlist some divine help to save his throne, but the best he'd been able to come up with was Dionysus, in an avatar who looked almost dead when he arrived—such were the facts, as Sarpedon had heard them, from one of the few people who'd actually been present in the great hall on that momentous night. You could hardly do better than recruiting Dionysus if your objective was to have a party, but winning a civil war against the God of Destruction was quite a different proposition.

  When a quick roll call was taken, shortly after the debacle of the Tribute, and Alex still didn't show up, Sarpedon had been eighty percent convinced that his friend was dead.

  But now he wasn't at all sure. Day after day had passed, with no announcement made of the discovery of any of the escapees, living or dead. Shiva made an appearance now and then, in the palace or flying over the city, often enough to squelch any germinating hope that he was gone for good. As for the Princess Ariadne, the official story put out soon after the event was that she had been kidnapped—again "troublemakers" and foreign agents were to blame.

  When questioned by officers on the very afternoon of the great escape, and in several sessions after that, Sarpedon had stoutly denied having caught sight of Alex doing anything out of the ordinary on that day, or anything disloyal at any time. Nor had Sarpedon heard or seen anything else that might help in the search for the fugitives now.

  He could tell his questioners truthfully, and with impressive conviction in his voice, that he had been as much surprised by that day's events as anyone else.

  So far he had managed to divert suspicion from himself.

  "I don't know what happened to Alex. Maybe he was kidnapped, like the princess, and Daedalus."

  But the officers and Shivan priests who did the questioning were not so easily put off. They had fastened on the fact that Sarpedon and Alex were known to be friends. "I understand you went to town together fairly often?"

  "Once in a while, sir."

  "Did his girlfriend live in town?"

  "I don't know that he had any particular girl, sir. When he had some money he went to the houses, just like most of us."

  "Which house did he prefer? The one where men lie with each other, or with boys?"

  "No sir, not that I ever noticed. Just the regular ones."

  "The one for those who enjoy being beaten with whips?"

  Sarpedon hadn't heard of any such establishment in Kandak, and had serious doubts that one existed. But he wasn't going to debate the point. "No sir."

  They would stick with one line of questioning for a while, then switch abruptly to another, as if they expected to shatter his whole structure of lies by confusing him. Or maybe they were just doing it for practice.

  "Maybe his girlfriend worked in the palace?"

  "Sir, I don't know that he had any particular—"

  "Tell me what you know about a slave-girl named Clara, personal attendant of the Princess Ariadne."

  No official announcement had ever listed all the missing. But by now, everyone knew the names, and Clara's was on the list. "I've seen her around the palace. Everyone's seen her. Before the day when—"

  "Ever speak to her?"

  "No sir, not that I can remember—no sir."

  "Take her to bed?"

  "I—no sir."

  "What about your good friend Alex the Half-Nameless? How close was he with Clara?"

  "As far as I know, sir, no closer than I am. Was. Knew her by sight, and that was all. Never said anything to me about her. I can't remember ever seeing them together."

  "Who else was a particular friend of Clara's?"

  "Sir, I can't remember anyone. As I say, I hardly knew—"

  "One of the men in your barracks, maybe?"

  The interroga
tion sessions tended to run in a pattern. Eventually, after going over and over the same territory until Sarpedon thought he would go mad, they had told him to return to duty.

  "Keep thinking about it, soldier. Maybe something will come to you. Wait, don't be in such a hurry to leave. Before you do, let's go over again what happened on the day of the insurrection, and the kidnapping."

  And of course there still hadn't really been anything like insurrection on Corycus. The way things were going, though, it might not take much to start one. You could smell it in the air.

  Sarpedon thought there would be no use trying to get aboard a ship and leave the island altogether—everyone knew the harbor was being closely watched. Maybe if you had a friend with a ship, or even a small boat, departing from somewhere else along the coast could be managed readily enough. But Sarpedon was out of luck in that regard.

  Having made up his mind as to what he was going to do, he had gone into town, alone, taking care not to deviate from what he commonly did on his day off—except that today he was wondering if some agent of the Butcher's was following him. Once, only once, he looked back, casually, and could see no one.

  For several blocks after leaving the palace complex he stayed on the route he regularly took on the way to his usual taverns and houses. But on reaching a certain point he suddenly turned aside, careful to maintain the same steady walking pace. He was now headed straight for one of the entrances to the Labyrinth, that as he remembered always stood open.

  The few passersby seemed to be paying him no attention, and he ignored them as well. The opening ahead, drawing nearer with every stride, looked in fact quite ordinary, like an archway in the outer wall of the dwelling of any solid citizen. And it was still unblocked and unguarded. Evidently Shiva and his pet king had decided that if disaffected elements of the population wanted to lose themselves in the Labyrinth, they were welcome to it. There was nothing easier than to plunge inside . . . legend had it that once you got deep into the Labyrinth, there were fountains everywhere. You might be hunted down and eaten by the Minotaur, but you weren't going to die of thirst.