“Husband,” she said over the sounds of the other soldiers who were approaching. “Knossos hails her triumphant king. Your people welcome you home.”
The flames were dimming—the ones outside him, anyway. Rivulets of light still ran beneath his skin. He didn’t speak.
Pasiphae shifted. “Husband,” she said again. Ariadne heard the anger in the word, and she clenched her fists. He won’t say anything to her; he’ll turn and look at us—at me. . . .
He turned. Embers spiralled from his hair and beard. He looked at Phaidra, at Deucalion; his orange-lit eyes leapt past Ariadne, to Glaucus and Asterion. Now, Ariadne thought, already smiling. Only now—because he’s saving me for last.
He looked at her. A moment passed. His mouth didn’t move. His gaze was steady, but it didn’t change. “Father?” she whispered, and he turned once more, and walked past all of them, up into his palace.
“Ariadne,” Deucalion said, “calm down.”
Ariadne whirled to face him and Chara thought, Oh, Prince, why did you have to speak? The princess’s face was mottled, as if she’d been crying, but Chara was fairly sure she hadn’t been. What she had been doing was pacing—the length of her room and the corridor outside it.
“How can I?” she said in a low, rich voice that sounded very much like her mother’s. (And Ariadne would have me flogged, if I told her so.) “How can I be calm when he has not come to me? It has been two days!”
Deucalion took a deep breath, as if he were about to summon a wind, but all that came out was a sigh. “Sister. He’s been fighting a war. Allow him a few days of peace, now that he’s home. And in any case,” he went on as she opened her mouth to reply, “you’ll see him at the feast tonight. Perhaps he’ll even put you at his right hand, as he does so often.”
But he didn’t. The royal children sat at a long trestle table that had been set up by one of the throne room’s walls. Chara sat at the end of the bench, beside Asterion—because he’d said that she should, “since you’re my sister’s special slave—but really because you’re my friend.”
The king and queen were on their thrones. Pasiphae looked at ease except for her hands, which clutched at the carved armrests. Minos’s skin still glowed faintly orange, and smoke wreathed his head—Like a crown of cloud over his real gold one, Chara thought. He gazed into the glowing embers in the hearth, smiling a thin, hungry smile, and didn’t speak. He did eat, at least; Chara heard grease hiss in his beard when he wiped it with the back of his hand.
When the last of the food had been cleared away, and the folding table removed from its place in front of his throne, he stood. His people’s murmuring stopped abruptly.
“People of Knossos!” The king’s voice cracked on the first word, then steadied and rolled like his god’s thunder over the crowd. “I have returned to you a conqueror—victor and master, mightier than I have ever been. And yet,” he went on, more quietly, “in the days following my triumph, I was wretched. My son, who should have ruled this island, was dead. My victory had not brought him back to me. And it seemed, in my grief, that my god was lost to me as well—for while his fire burned even more hotly beneath my flesh than it had before, I received neither comfort nor counsel from him.”
Minos cast his eyes over his family and the ranks of onlookers, to the dark sky beyond the columns. “I pleaded with Zeus, in my battle tent, and at an altar in the city I had laid low. I begged him to show me his favour again. I sacrificed to him: a sheep, every day for the seven days, and then a calf for seven more. And on the fourteenth day, the Great Father came to me.”
Pasiphae’s green eyes were wide, as she gazed up at Minos. Her knuckles were whiter than they had been. She hasn’t heard this before, Chara thought. She glanced at Ariadne, who was frowning. He hasn’t told his family anything. . . .
Minos raised his hands and clasped them in front of his heart. “Zeus told me what I must do to show my devotion and earn my ease. I ravaged Athens’ water and land with my fire, but it was not enough. He told me what more I must take from them: their young.”
Chara’s throat went dry. She glanced sidelong at Asterion, who shrugged both shoulders at her. People stirred and milled at the pillars and beyond, as the word was passed to those who couldn’t hear the king.
“At first I thought to demand the life of Theseus, the son who not long ago returned to Aegeus, after years of concealment. I have seen him: he is a fine, strong youth, as golden as Androgeus was dark. But I could not, for I wished the Athenian king to see that Zeus the Father marked me with compassion, as well as flame.
“And so,” Minos said, holding his hands out so that everyone would see his fire-limned palms, “I had him brought to me, in his own audience chamber. I sat upon his throne and he knelt before me—just him, without his counsellors or the remnants of his guard. I commanded him to send seven young men and seven young women here to us—fine Athenian calves and sheep, fourteen of them, to be offered up as sacrifices to the Great Goddess. Every two years, I said, as his shoulders shook.”
Minos smiled. “He raged against me. He refused to accede. I set the chamber on fire and said I would do the same to what remained of his city. I said that if he still did not relent, I would set his golden son alight, too. He wept. He grovelled and begged me to be kind. He promised fourteen Athenian young, every two years, for the Goddess. I have simply to tell him when to begin. And I shall tell him, the moment my god speaks to me again. For I know now that he has not forsaken me.”
The noise outside had stopped. The noise inside Chara’s head hadn’t; it was like a roar of distant water. She blinked, but Minos’s face swam. Asterion’s hand on hers was clear, though. She put her own hand over it and pressed down hard.
The king was swaying—and not just in Chara’s strange, blurred vision.
“Now, Husband!” Pasiphae said, wrapping her hand around his arm. Steam rose in ribbons between her fingers. “Enough talk of vengeance! You have won a great victory, and there are those here who wish to do you honour for it.”
She gestured with her free arm and a little girl approached the thrones, holding two figs in her upturned palms. Squeezing her eyes shut, she raised them into the air without touching them. They spun in wide, silver-blurred circles, even when she added a ball of thread, a little round box, and an oatcake from Glaucus’s plate (he reddened and grinned as the crowd cheered). The king stared, hardly blinking, as an old man skirted the hearth and lifted his hands. Wisps of colour bloomed between them: orange, pink and green streamers that twisted as if in a wind. They lengthened and drifted over the hearth’s glow, and twined among the objects the girl was juggling.
“My King,” the old man said, a bit haltingly, “see the breath of the gods, who watched your victory over the Athenians and rejoiced with all of us.”
Minos stared. Chara thought briefly that the smoke curling from his skin might join with the colours, but it didn’t; it wended up, and vanished.
“Lord Minos!” Daedalus emerged from between two pillars at the end of the chamber. He walked a few paces and bowed.
Asterion’s hand clenched around his piece of bread. “What is it?” Chara whispered.
“Daedalus never bows to my father,” Asterion whispered back. “Something’s not right. Maybe all that talk of punishing Athens . . . ?”
Daedalus straightened. “Your son could command all beasts. He spoke to them, and they to him.” He smiled, but something in it—beneath it—made Chara draw back on her bench.
“Androgeus did this, my King—and so, now, do I.”
There was a noise—a hundred skittering feet, a hundred swishing tails. “Gods and winds!” Glaucus gasped—and other people muttered too, and some cried out. Creatures flooded across the floor. Snakes, except they had legs—and fish, except they wriggled through air and over stone.
“Come to me!” Daedalus cried, leaping from foot to foot, beckoning with open hands. “Come and show the G
reat King that his beloved son’s godmark lives on in you!”
Pasiphae stood up so quickly that one of her shoes tangled in her skirts. “Daedalus!” she called as people murmured and the metal beasts whirred and scampered toward the throne. “Master Daedalus—”
Minos rose. Sparks showered and settled and died.
“You mock me.” He sounded as if his mouth were full of rocks. He sounded half-asleep, or drunk. “Though you were exiled, you will always be Athenian. My triumph angers you, and now you seek to wound me.”
The last words were clearer than the first, but they were difficult to hear over the creatures’ noise. Two of the snakes—scarlet with green spots—bent around the angle of the hearth and clattered up to the throne. Minos brought his foot down on one, then the other. They flattened and stilled with a singing sigh of metal.
“Do I?” Daedalus was very still, now. “If Androgeus were here, I believe he would delight in these creations.”
“Do not speak his name.”
Minos’s right arm burst into flame. He took a step toward Daedalus, who didn’t move.
“Prince Androgeus,” Daedalus said, over all the skittering and ringing. “Prince Androgeus, who went to Athens for sport, not slaughter.”
Minos sprang forward. The fire leapt out before him. Someone screamed, and the bench lurched beneath Chara. Asterion hunched forward; Glaucus scrambled back; Deucalion stood, his fists on the tabletop, with Ariadne beside him. Phaidra sat motionless, big-eyed.
“Asterion.” Chara couldn’t hear her own voice over the noise, but she was certain she’d spoken. “Asterion . . .”
He slipped beneath the table and ran.
Chara was up and didn’t remember rising. She watched Asterion throw himself between Minos and Daedalus. It was all so slow: the boy’s flailing advance, Daedalus’s surprised stumble backward, Minos’s bright, smoky recoil.
“Stop! Just stop! Father—please . . .”
A mechanical crab tipped onto its back. Its pincers screeched open and closed in the silence. The other machine animals had stopped in their tracks.
“What?” Minos’s voice seemed to ripple as the lines of his face did, beneath the fire’s glow. “What did you call me?”
Asterion stood facing Minos. The boy’s hands were up, palms out, as if they’d be enough to combat the flames. His legs were planted wide. But his lips trembled, even as he spoke.
“Father?”
Minos’s eyes widened. The whites of them were orange; the pupils were silver-blue. “You.” The word was a rumble. “You should have died.” And he lunged, reaching and flaming.
Asterion stepped to meet him.
No no no no! This time Chara didn’t say the words: she thought them, only, as fire licked along Asterion’s fingers and arms and kindled in his hair. Turn around—run. Her heart hammered as he knelt, arms spread wide, head thrown back. Smiling up into Minos’s face.
The king fell back a pace. “Lysander!” he called. “You and your men—take this thing from my sight.”
The soldiers clustered together between the pillars stepped forward, but too late: the change had already begun. Asterion fell to his side, writhing, his bones cracking and popping like the fire. Within moments his broadening head and stretching limbs were covered in pelt. He heaved himself up—When did he start changing this fast? Chara thought. He snorted, sweeping his head back and forth so that his horns scraped across the floor and tossed mechanical beetles and snakes and snails up into the air. When they fell, onto plates and into the laps of those few people who were still sitting, no one even looked at them. Everyone was gazing at the bull-boy.
He huffed and turned away from Minos. Picked his way almost delicately around the hearth, his round brown eyes rolling. Daedalus put out his hand, as Asterion passed, but didn’t touch him.
“Seize him!” Minos bellowed, spewing smoke. The soldiers put their hands on their bows, but when Pasiphae cried, “No! Do not dare harm the god’s son!” they glanced at each other and didn’t stir again.
The bull-boy swung around when he reached the end of the room. He pawed at the ground twice.
“My King,” said the High Priest in his voice that was soft and ringing at the same time, “move back, behind me . . .”
He walked from the throne to where Minos stood, but the king held up at hand.
“No, Hypatos. I will not hide from this creature.”
Pasiphae made a strangled sound and raised a hand with fingers hooked like claws. Before she could move, though, the bull did. He roared and charged, and his hoofs struck sparks from the floor. Minos laughed a great plume of fire and held his burning arms up. The bull ran faster, around the curve of hearth. He shifted his head sideways and down. Minos laughed again, and a wall of flames sprang up in the air before him—but the bull broke through it without slowing and wrenched a horn up and into the king’s belly.
Chara heard Minos’s flesh tear. Even though Glaucus was screaming, and Phaidra too, and many others besides, Chara heard it: a wet, ripping sound that ended very quickly but went on and on inside her head. The wall of flames dissolved. The light in Minos’s body went out. He sagged to one knee, holding a hand against his stomach. Hand and cloth were instantly wet and black. He laughed—breathlessly this time—and sat down, hard.
The three soldiers sprinted from the pillars to the king, as did Ariadne. Three more soldiers appeared from somewhere, short swords in their hands. They edged toward the bull, who was tossing his head, his feet firmly planted. “No!” Pasiphae cried, and pushed her way past them. She put her arm across the bull’s neck and murmured something into one twitching ear. He sagged almost as Minos had and lay down, pelt melting to skin and tousled golden hair.
“Take it.” The king’s voice was thin and slurred. A priest was kneeling behind him; Chara saw the gold-dipped beard shudder as he tried to hold him upright. Ariadne was crouched in front, clinging to her father’s hands. “Take it away . . . from here. Do not . . . kill. I will not have a god. Angry. But take it from me. Quickly. And take it . . . from her.”
“No. No no no no.” Chara thought these words, too, were hers, but they weren’t. Each sound rose until it wasn’t a word—just a meaningless, gurgling shriek—and water coursed down Pasiphae’s arms as she scrabbled at the soldiers who were trying to wrest her away from Asterion. She raked their cheeks and arms with one dripping hand while she clung to Asterion with the other. The boy was lying on his side. He was facing Chara, staring—too far away for her to see the gold flecks in his eyes, though she could imagine them. There were fresh pink ribbons of burn on his arms. Run, slave girl, she thought. Go to him. She couldn’t move.
The soldiers turned to Minos, their swords hanging limp in their hands. As they waited, priestesses drew forward—a line of white, encircling the men who encircled the queen.
“God Brother.” The king’s voice was just a whisper, now. The High Priest bent close to him. “Call upon your . . . mark. Upon our Father. Send all these . . . fools away.”
Hypatos rose to his full height. He tucked his chin in against his chest. Already people were scrambling to leave the chamber. Glaucus was among the first to flee; Deucalion followed more slowly, glancing over his shoulder. Phaidra stayed at the table where she’d been all night. She was nibbling on her thumb.
Chara stepped closer to the hearth. One step—and then lightning flashed: not in the courtyard, but in the throne room. For a breath, everything was flat and stark and white. As the light died, thunder cracked. The palace’s stones shuddered. A brazier fell onto its side with a clang, and plates and cups slid off the table. Daedalus’s mechanical beasts juddered and leapt as if he’d just wound them. Daedalus himself was standing with his eyes closed, smiling.
The High Priest turned in small, swaying circles. He stood straight, even when the earth shook again, though everyone else—Pasiphae, Chara, Ariadne, the soldiers—lurched or stumbled. He
turned and he chanted, and there was more lightning, more thunder. A crack zigzagged across the floor, from throne to hearth. The stones parted right where Pasiphae was kneeling; Asterion’s hand flopped into the dark space between them.
“Stop!” A priestess’s cry, which echoed in the silence after the thunder. “Call off your brute of a god, Hypatos!”
Four priests converged on the five priestesses. The soldiers in the room raised their swords; the ones by the pillars nocked their bows. The High Priest didn’t stop his turning. He lifted his arms as if he were trying to touch the lightning that forked above them. Thunder shook the chamber once more. This time, when it growled into nothing, it was a child’s voice that called, “Stop!”
Asterion was standing. Pasiphae put her hand on his shoulder and he shook it free. He craned up at her, then looked at the priestesses, the priests, the soldier, Minos. Minos last and longest, though the king’s head was slumped against his shoulder and his eyes were closed. “No more,” Asterion said thickly. “I’ll go—take me—I don’t care where. I started this; let me end it, too.”
“Asterion!” Pasiphae’s wet curls were clinging to the corners of her mouth but she didn’t wipe them free. “Don’t say such things! You’ll go nowhere—you’ll stay here with—”
“I’ll go.” His voice trembled a bit, and his hands clenched and unclenched at his sides, but he stood very tall.
“The king must go, too,” said the priest who was holding him up. “To his chamber, immediately. His wound is grave—see, he has just fainted. . . .”
Two priests carried Minos out of the throne room. His hands dragged on the floor; each one left a dark, snaking trail. The other two priests led Asterion away. He turned back, when Pasiphae cried out his name, but he didn’t look at her; he looked at Chara, who started toward him with a cry that hurt her throat.
The Door in the Mountain Page 9