The Mythic Dream

by Dominik Parisien

  He frowned. His fork clattered onto the plate. Hock locked his gaze on Emily, who stared right back. Meaty forearms pressed against the table as he leaned toward her. He held the position for what seemed like minutes before he finally sat back. His gaze stayed fixed on her.

  “It’d be easier for you and your investors if you came back.”

  “Of course. Then my lawyers won’t have to talk to your lawyers.” She smiled as she set down her cup. “But, honestly, that’s not enough.”

  “Come back and you can work on your passion. You’ve shown there’s funding for it.”

  “Really?” Emily sat up, her chair sliding back.

  “Really.” Hock’s gaze softened.

  “Well, that’s an interesting offer.” Emily stood. “Thank you for lunch.”

  She walked away. Part of her expected Hock to reach out and pull her back. The rest of her guessed that even though Hock was more than physically capable of tossing her like a stick, he was too savvy to actually do that.

  “Wait, the apples and the headset.” Hock’s resonant voice made everything in the restaurant vibrate. “They’re Jazz property and I’d like them back.”

  Emily turned around. She held Hock in her gaze and everything made sense. Broadened shoulders and slimmed hips were permanent, just as transformed organs would be once Emily figured them out. He’d always be towering with a voice that boomed. The muscle, however, was atrophying from disuse, and it’d take months for any new apples to mature. Whether or not she returned to Jazz, he wanted apples to keep him buff in the meantime. The price of that—and Hock would pay it to cover the gap—would be an agreement that let both of them exploit their mutual patents. It wasn’t like he could call the police, not without also implicating himself in unauthorized human testing.

  “In a minute.” If there was one thing Hock loved, it was for Emily to keep him waiting. “After our lawyers work something out.”

  Emily didn’t have to jump at his command anymore. She just walked away, finally in charge of her own destiny.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  * * *

  Every once in a rare while, a story practically writes itself. One moment, an editor is prompting you, and the next, the story springs fully formed from your head and splatters itself across the page. This is not one of those stories. When Navah and Dominik asked me, I agreed because I wanted the opportunity to work with them, not because I had any clue what to write about. As a result, writing this story was akin to jumping out of an airplane, then stitching the parachute as I plummeted, hoping to finish it and deploy it in time to avoid splatting on the ground. If you’re reading this, then I am, presumably, not an unsightly stain upon this good earth.

  Navah and Dominik helpfully suggested Norse mythology. I decided on apples because they were symbolically important across a bunch of cultures. The intersection of the two, of course, is the goddess Idunn, who tends the golden apples that keep the Norse gods immortal. And, honestly, that’s about all we know about her. She has surprisingly little to do with the one Prose Edda story that features her. In that, she is kidnapped, replaced with an acorn, and rescued. What I wrote isn’t so much a retelling as much as it is a reaction. I wanted to see what might happen if Idunn were her own rescuer instead. As it turned out, in order to free herself, she needed to fight the system. Kind of like life . . .

  * * *

  JOHN CHU

  BURIED DEEP

  BY

  * * *

  NAOMI NOVIK

  THE LIE MINOS TOLD, WHICH no one believed and no one was expected to believe, was that his youngest son had been shut up for the sake of the servants, whom he had begun brutalizing even as a babe. The lie everyone believed, and told in whispers, was that the queen had played the king false with a handsome guardsman, and he’d shut up the child to keep another man’s son from any chance of inheriting his throne.

  But Ariadne had been five years old, herself a late and unexpected child, when her even more unexpected brother had begun to grow under Pasiphae’s heart, and she had been so very excited. Her other brothers were all grown men, big men, warriors; Minos’s bull-strong sons, the court called them, her father’s pride and irrelevant to her. Her sisters had been married off and gone before she was even born. And she had already been clever and good at creeping, so she’d been in the birthing room when the baby had come out bellowing, with the nubs of the horns still soft and rounded on his forehead, and her mother’s attendants had begun to scream.

  Minos had all of them put to death, along with three particularly handsome guardsmen with fair hair, to start the second lie and keep the secret. His secret, not her mother’s. Everyone in all of Crete knew of the white bull the sea had sent him, and that Minos had bred it to his cattle instead of putting it to the knife the way the priests had wanted, but Ariadne and her mother knew more than that: they knew that Minos had asked for a sacrifice, one great enough to mark him for the throne over his brothers, and the god had sent the bull for that purpose, to be given back to him, not kept. So it was Minos’s fault, and not her mother’s, but Pasiphae had paid for it, and so had her women, and Ariadne’s little brother most of all.

  Ariadne shouted at her mother, the day her father’s men came to take Minotaur away. “We could go to Grandfather!” she said; she was twelve, and her silent, frightened brother was holding her hand tight and trying to stay hidden behind her, futilely: he was a foot taller than her already, with the big cow-eyes large and dark and liquid on either side of his broad soft nose.

  They lived with their mother and a few cowed servants—some of them had been killed, but by her father’s orders, not by Minotaur—in a single tower perched on the edge of a green meadow in the hills far above Knossos. It had been built as a watchtower, to give warning of men coming from the sea. They could see for a long way from the windows of the narrow top story, all the way to the sea far below, glossy and deep, like her brother’s eyes. Mother usually stayed in the more comfortable rooms below, but when she came up, she never looked at the sea, only the other way, down at the city—the red columns of the temple, and the people in the markets or thronging the streets to celebrate a festival—and her face was hard and bitter.

  Father never came to them. But once a year, on Ariadne’s birthday, someone came and took her down the long dusty hill to the palace, to be presented to him and to receive another heavy necklace of gold, each one growing with her, so that now she had seven of them, the smallest one close around her neck and the largest hanging over her growing breasts. A great dowry accumulating in chains, to apologize for her imprisonment.

  It was the only apology Minos ever made. He avoided being alone with her; she was always taken in to him by a nurse or a maidservant, who warned her strictly not to ask her father to let her come and live in the palace, as if he wanted to pretend that he wasn’t refusing her just because he told her no through someone else’s mouth. But she wouldn’t have asked, anyway. She didn’t want to live in the palace, with her father and his lies, even before he’d sent men to take her brother away.

  She had instead begun to worry about being taken away herself; she’d started to be old enough, that year, to understand that soon her father would begin to look for someone else to hold her chains. That was why she’d already thought of going to her grandfather: Pasiphae’s father was Helios, the great lord of the easternmost city of Crete, the place where the sun rose, and a power in his own right, with a fortress that not even Minos’s navy could have shattered.

  But Pasiphae shook her head and said flatly to Ariadne, “You’re old enough to stop being a fool. The king of Crete needs the sea god’s favor. If the priests learn your father’s lost it, they won’t stop with his blood to buy it back. It’ll be your brother on the altar, and me, and you as well, likely as not.” And after she said that, Minotaur carefully pulled his big hand out of hers—he was only seven, but he’d already learned how easily he could hurt people, if he wasn’t careful—and he put on the heavy wide-hooded cl
oak that Ariadne had sewn for him so they could go walking in the hills together at night, and then he went out to the waiting guards.

  Minos had sent the Oreth to take him: his slave guards, warriors all bought from countries so far away that they had little hope of making a safe return. Their tongues had all been cut out. They were brutal men, hardened by their own misery and everything they saw in their work. They didn’t fear death or the gods, or thought they didn’t, and they would have cut off the head of a seven-year-old boy if her father told them to, much less put him into a prison. But when Minotaur came out a big silent hulk in his cloak, they all went still and afraid, even though they couldn’t see his face, and their hands went to the hilts of their swords. After they shut the door in her face, and Ariadne ran upstairs to look out of the window, she saw them walking in a group ten paces ahead, not looking back at all. Minotaur was trudging after them alone, his head in the cloak bowed, following them to the door, which wasn’t a door, only a hole in the earth.

  She had watched them build the shrine all the last year, Minotaur peeking one eye out from behind a curtain next to her, both of them fascinated: it was the most interesting thing that had ever happened. First the priests had come to bless the site, and after them Daedalus, walking over the meadow for days marking the ground with long sticks left poking out. Then the digging began, which took a long time, because there were only six workmen on the whole project: four big slaves to dig the passage, twenty feet down into the ground, and two skilled ones to follow them, putting in the slabs of beautiful polished marble that came in on laden carts to make the floor and the walls.

  The shape hadn’t made any sense to her. The workmen had started in the very middle of the meadow, digging out the single round central chamber, and they even dug a well in the middle of it. She thought it would be the first room of many. But instead, from there they dug out a single circling passage, only one, with no rooms and no branching paths, that curved and folded back on itself like a bewildered snake that had lost sight of its own tail. They kept going and going, digging in that one line, filling in one quarter of the circle after another, until they had honeycombed the whole meadow.

  On moonlit nights sometimes Ariadne and Minotaur would sneak out and walk on the narrow dirt walls left between the passages, balancing with their arms stuck out and the deep passages looming on either side. They couldn’t run back and forth across the meadow anymore the way they had used to, because the winding passage covered the whole thing in an enormous circle, ripples spreading out from that central well. The walls were just wide enough that it wasn’t very hard to balance for Ariadne’s small feet, but it was just a little bit hard, enough that you had to pay attention to how you put your feet, one after the other. It was harder for Minotaur. He didn’t eat, not since their mother had finally refused to nurse him anymore, to try and make him take food, but it didn’t seem to matter. He was growing very big, and very quickly. By the time the men finished digging, he was teetering on the edges, having trouble not falling in.

  She was waiting impatiently for the workmen to finish the last quarter of the circle, to see what they would do when the passage got to the end. The digging seemed like it had taken forever, and so much work. So she was sure it must be meant for a shrine to the god. She imagined steps coming up, and then flagstones being laid on top of the mysterious cellar, and pillars for some great temple. But when the workmen finished digging to the border of the great circle, the passage only stopped. They dug a very small circular room there just outside the rest of the maze, like an antechamber, and then they didn’t do any more work the rest of that day, even though it was morning. They only sat down in the small bit of shade on the edge of the hillside with their tools scattered around them and drank from their jug of watered wine, watching the skilled workmen coming the rest of the way behind them.

  The next day, the skilled workmen began to work back along the passageway toward the center, laying flat stones atop the passage to make a ceiling. The diggers followed them now, burying the stone under dirt from the enormous mound they had dug up out of the passages. They didn’t leave anywhere for stairs to go down, only the one little round hole on the outside, above the antechamber, and the one big center hole in the middle. Ariadne was baffled. They had dug that whole enormous winding passage for nothing. Once it was buried, no one would even know it was there under the meadow. They weren’t even marking the surface. By the time the men got back to the middle again, there was already a thick furry coat of grass covering everything behind them: it was late spring, and the sky had been generous with both sunshine and rain.

  Then yesterday, the final cart had come, hauled up from the city by a team of four big oxen, carrying two circular metal slabs braced on their sides, one big and one little, like coins for giants, and just the right size to fit over the two rooms. But they had been shrouded in sheets, so Ariadne still hadn’t understood what the shrine was really for. But now the six workmen were standing by to put the big slab into the ground, and they had uncovered it, just barely visible in the coming light: a massive bronze disc covered with beaten gold, with a central hatch, engraved with the great head of the bull, surrounded by great locks of iron.

  The Oreth led Minotaur to the waiting open hole. They went around to the far side and stood there watching him. The workmen drew back against the cart as he passed by. They had left a rope dangling down inside the hole. Minotaur stood on the edge looking down, and Ariadne gave a cry from the window, shouted, “Don’t, don’t!” but it worked the wrong way; his hood twitched, where his big ears underneath had twisted around to hear her, and then he sat down on the edge of the hole with his sandaled feet hanging over, and he let himself down inside.

  The workmen didn’t move even after he vanished. Finally one of the Oreth made a sharp, impatient gesture, and one of them went with dragging steps to the edge and then hurriedly pulled out the rope, hand over hand quickly, and backed away as soon as he could. Then they rolled the big golden seal to the edge and tipped it over carefully to fit perfectly into the hole. They hurriedly buried the seal all the way up to the edge of the central hatch, and the Oreth checked the locks. There was a narrow circular grating that went around the head of the bull, an opening for air.

  The workers had already put the smaller seal over the anteroom. It also had a hatch in it, but without the seal of the bull. Ariadne watched from the tower while the Oreth opened the hatch and shoved all the workmen in, one after another, screaming for mercy and struggling and disappearing nevertheless, one after another, down into the dark, until the Oreth slammed the metal hatch back down on top of them, and turned the locks. Six was a wrong number, and she wondered where Daedalus had gone; she hadn’t seen him for the last week. A long time later, she heard that he’d fled by ship to Greece, abandoning his wife and son, just before the labyrinth had been finished. By then people were saying he was a sorcerer and the labyrinth was magic, but she knew that the only magical thing in it was her brother, her little brother, a piece of the god put down into the dark.

  * * *

  In the morning she opened her eyes and knew right away that Minotaur was gone. She got up and went to the window. The meadow was a smooth, ordinary green meadow, the grass verdant and lush. Everything buried deep and silent, and only the two golden seals set into the earth, so low that in the dim light they were hidden in the grass, unless you knew where to look to catch a glimpse of gold.

  Her mother had kept Ariadne inside all day yesterday, even after the Oreth had gone, but it was still early in the morning and no one else was awake. Her mother stayed up in the evenings, drinking wine, and after she went to bed, her two women finished whatever she had left, so they all slept late and heavily. Last night, her mother had opened a second jar of wine, leaving it almost unwatered, and she had poured Ariadne a glass. Ariadne had left it standing untouched on the table, along with her food.

  She crept past the snoring women on the floor and her mother lying sprawled behind the
thin curtains of her bed, and got outside without being stopped. She ran to the meadow, but she couldn’t open the hatches herself, no matter how she turned the locks back and forth, no matter how she poked her fingers and branches into the cracks around them and strained. Either she didn’t know the trick of the locks, or the doors were just too heavy. The metal was cold and slick with dew under her fingers as she struggled. Finally she gave up and she went back to the central seal, to the narrow grating, and called through the dark opening.

  But Minotaur couldn’t answer her, if he was there: he couldn’t speak. Once after a month of coaxing he’d tried to say something to her, and she’d woken up three days later in her bed, her ears and nose still crusted with dried blood. He’d refused even to try, after that. He might be somewhere wandering in that endless passage, alone in the dark, and not have heard her coming.

  She fell silent, kneeling in the dirt by the seal, tears dripping off her face, and then she got up and went to the small seal, over the antechamber, and did her best to walk all over the meadow, stamping and jumping every so often, so that he’d hear her footsteps overhead, and know that she was there. And when she finally came back to the big seal in the center, she knelt there and talked to him until the sun was well up and her throat was dry, and then she stole back into the tower before anyone noticed she was gone. That day, and every day after. She crept out of her mother’s tower in the hour of dawn, and she told Minotaur every day that she’d be back the next, so when at last she didn’t come, he’d know that the chain around his neck was gone, and he could leave.