The Door in the Mountain

by Caitlin Sweet

  “No!” he called to her. “Stay there or it’ll go badly for you, too. . . .” And then he was gone, and she stayed, her eyes leaping blindly for a bit, until they settled on the queen.

  Pasiphae stood staring down at the crack that had opened in the floor. Water dripped from her fingers into the crack, which looked deep. I’ve seen her summon waves from a calm sea. The words in Chara’s head were strangely clear, almost bright. I’ve seen her call water up from beneath the earth. Now look at her.

  Phaidra walked slowly over to her mother. She laid her head against Pasiphae’s skirts. The queen didn’t seem to notice her at all. Ariadne didn’t seem to notice either of them: her eyes were fixed on someone just behind Chara, and they didn’t waver as she drew closer.

  “Minnow.” Chara started and turned. Daedalus was right there, shifting from foot to foot, his eyes darting. “Princess—come away. To my workshop, if you like, or to Naucrate; she’ll have some sweets, I’m sure. . . .”

  Ariadne took one last step and tipped her head up so that she was staring past his close-cropped beard, at the eyes that wouldn’t be still. “This was your fault,” she said. “Yours, just as much as my brother’s. Did you intend to anger the king? Or are you simply stupid?”

  Finally Daedalus’s gaze fastened on the princess. “Ariadne,” he said in a hard, strange voice, “you are exceedingly clever, but you will never be wise.” He barked out a laugh that made Chara start again. Behind them, Phaidra was saying, “Mother? Mother, are you all right?” A cup was rolling on its side; perhaps the ground was moving yet, somewhere far below.

  Ariadne turned away from Daedalus. “You,” she said to Chara, in a strained, high voice Chara hadn’t heard before. “You. Slave. Come away with me, now.”

  Chara wanted to look at Daedalus, but instead she fixed her gaze on the sweat that was beading above Ariadne’s lip. “I will come to you later, Princess,” she said quietly.

  “Then you shall be flogged later.”

  “Very well,” Chara said. She lowered her eyes to the floor. There were Ariadne’s embroidered scarlet slippers, stitched with golden thread in patterns of sea fern and shells. Daedalus’s boots, plain leather, scuffed and caked with marble dust. Chara’s own, also plain, but clean. Chara watched Daedalus’s twitch and scuff at the ground, then move away. She watched Ariadne’s move away, too, lightly; she always seemed to be dancing.

  When Chara raised her eyes at last, she was alone.

  Go, she thought. Even though he commanded you not to—go and find him. But she couldn’t make her legs obey her. They wouldn’t stride; they would only crumple. She sat on the floor. Help me. If any gods can hear me: please help all of us.

  Ariadne couldn’t sleep, of course.

  Father will live—he has to—and he’ll do away with Asterion. He’s already said he won’t kill him, but there’s always exile. Asterion, banished—gone, invisible, powerless . . . Our mother

  and her priestesses cowed, and poor, sweet, newly-godmarked Phaidra, too . . .

  Her thoughts seemed very loud, and the sheets rustled as she twisted about in them, but even so, she heard the scritching. It was above her—on the roof? She slid her legs over the side of her bed and sat very still, barely breathing.

  Call for your slave, she thought, but then she remembered that the slave had disobeyed her, and likely wouldn’t be in her usual place. I won’t have her flogged, after all. Even though I have no godmark, people will think me generous and merciful. The scritching continued for a moment, then stopped. Ariadne stood up slowly and walked to the doorway, supporting herself on the balls of her feet as she did when she danced. She put her head out into the corridor—and something fell from the darkness, so close to her that she felt a prickly warmth against her skin before she stumbled backwards.

  Icarus folded his arms across his chest. His arms, his wings—whatever they were. She ran her hands over her own arms, where his feathers had touched her. “You.” Her heart was pounding up into her throat, but her voice was steady. “How dare you?”

  His pointy, elongated toes twitched on the stone. It must have been them making the scritchy noise, up on the roof. His lips were even more purple and twisted than usual; she imagined his beak retracting, grasping at flesh.

  “I wanted to see you—I heard about what happened. . . .”

  He swallowed and gulped and coughed a moist, trailing cough. “I’m sorry. I thought I would ask you if you needed anything.”

  “By lurking about on the roof above my bedroom in the middle of the night,” she said, as evenly as she could, “and then jumping down into my doorway?” She blinked at his strange little roll of metal string, which was glinting copper and silver from its usual place at his belt.

  He uncrossed his arms. They hung at his sides, patchy with feathers and the little red holes where other feathers had been. “I . . .” He shrugged and looked down at his bare, twitching feet. “I’m sorry.”

  “You’ve already said that, you idiot thing.” She giggled. She hadn’t expected to; the surprise of it made her giggle more. She bent over, her hands on her knees, and gasped around the tears that were rising with the laughter. When she finally straightened, Icarus was gone.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Ariadne stared at the screen in front of Minos’s quarters. It hadn’t slid aside in four hours, since the priest-physician had gone in. She was supposed to dance in another hour—a thanks to Zeus for sending such gentle autumn rains; a plea to Zeus for the Great King’s recovery. She wouldn’t leave, though. Not until she’d seen her father.

  He’d been shut in his rooms for a week, attended only by the priest-physician and his apprentice-boy. “No one may enter”—Ariadne had heard the boy say this to a kitchen girl who’d come, two days ago. The boy was short and officious, and Ariadne almost wished that her mother would come and strike him across the mouth as she passed him. But she didn’t. Pasiphae had spent the week in her chair beside the empty throne. She’d heard petitions and signed them, and dealt with tradesmen and ships’ captains. She’d spoken to them, calmly and clearly, but to no one else.

  Asterion was being held in the eastern arm of the palace, in a tiny room between storage chambers. Men with swords guarded him. Priests paced the length of the corridor, ten at a time, in pairs. Glaucus had told Ariadne this; she’d snorted and said, “There’d be no room! They’d bumble into each other like night beetles!”—but later, Deucalion had told her that it was true.

  She sighed and leaned her cheek against the wall. She was well along the hallway, away from her father’s doorway; the priest-physician always turned to go in the opposite direction when he emerged. She could still see enough of the screen, though, to focus on. She held its scarlet-painted linen in her vision until it blurred.

  The sun was casting low, pink light—dancing light, almost—when the screen slid open. Ariadne heard the scraping of its wooden frame on the stone, and the slapping of the priest-physician’s sandals, and then he was there, turning back to the room, calling, “I’ll be back before sundown, Ampelios. Close the screen behind me.”

  He walked away from her. He didn’t glance back.

  The screen scraped again, of course, when she started to move it. “No one may enter,” cried the boy, and he appeared in the opening, scowling and breathless.

  She shook her head so that her dark curls tangled briefly over her breasts, which were bare and oiled, because of the dance. “Now, now, boy—don’t be a fool.”

  He gulped. “No one may—”

  “I am the Princess Ariadne,” she snapped. “Open this screen. All the way.”

  He nudged it, his fingers white-knuckled on the frame.

  “All the way,” she said very sweetly, to his right eye (which was level with her left nipple).

  The screen edged wider. She thrust it aside with both hands and strode into the antechamber. The boy scuttled backward, his hand to his cheekbone, where th
e screen’s edge had grazed it.

  “My Lady!” he cried, and looked back over his shoulder at the entrance to the inner chamber. The pink sunlight was falling through the tall windows there; she could see its glow on the floor, in the air.

  “I must see my father.” She spoke slowly, in a reasonable tone she imagined the scrawny, big-eyed boy would understand.

  “I . . . I cannot, my Lady! No visitors—no one at all—the king himself has ordered it!”

  “Boy,” she began—and then the king’s voice called, “Who’s there, Ampelios? Who? I said no one—I’ll have you flogged . . .”

  He sounded strong and weak at the same time. Ariadne closed her eyes for a moment. When she opened them, Ampelios was standing in the open doorway, his mouth working soundlessly.

  “Leave,” she said. “He says he’ll give you trouble, but I’ll give you more. Go. Now.”

  He stayed motionless for another breath, his eyes fastened on her breasts. She thrust them out just a little more. “Now,” she said, and he went, with a whimper and a scuffing of sandals.

  “Ampelios!” Minos bellowed—but breathily, somehow.

  Ariadne took two paces. She was nearly at the entrance to the inner chamber.

  “Not Ampelios.” Her voice trembled, though she’d been sure it wouldn’t. “Ariadne.”

  Silence. She drew a deep breath; felt it filling her and leaving her again, sweet and fleeting. She took five more steps, these ones quick. She was inside, bathed in pink light, squinting at the low, broad bed beneath the columned windows. She was by the bed, kneeling, bending her head.

  “My King, I should not have come—but I could not bear it any longer. I had to see you for myself.”

  His hand was dangling by her forehead. It was bronzed, beneath its dusting of short black hairs. It was limp and knobby-knuckled, and it didn’t dribble smoke or sparks.

  She waited. She held her straining body still. She bit her lip so that she wouldn’t say anything else.

  “Look at me, then, child.”

  She could hear that he was smiling. Thank you, gods and goddesses, she thought, and lifted her head and shoulders up above the side of his bed.

  His own head was turned toward her. His teeth glinted in his beard, but his eyes were so sad that she had to look away from them for a bit.

  “Father,” she said, looking back at him, “I miss him, too.”

  It wasn’t what she’d planned to say, but the king looked so helpless—the words had rushed out before she could check them.

  Minos gazed at her. Too much, she thought; too fast—but then his hand came up. He raised it, held it flat, just touching her face. She lowered her head until her cheek was resting on his palm.

  A tear ran from his right eye, across the bridge of his nose. It fell onto the sheet and left a perfectly round mark.

  “Ariadne,” he said. “Love,” and he shut his eyes tight against all the other tears.

  Three days later the palace rang with shouts and stamping feet, and it glowed with torches and godfire.

  Ariadne sat at the little desk in her room, pressing seals into wax. A boar, a honeycomb, a stag’s branching horns—all crafted by Karpos. Under Daedalus’s supervision, it was true, but they bore Karpos’s mark: they moved when she held them, circling and warming her skin as she imagined his hands might. She’d pressed six stamps already, and intended to press eight more. One for every Athenian youth who would die: two straight rows, hunkering on Egyptian paper.

  Slow, halting footsteps sounded in the corridor outside. “Glau!” she called. “Go and make a little wind somewhere, why don’t you?”

  The footsteps stopped outside her doorway.

  “Glau.”

  “Princess.”

  She spun on her stool, so quickly that she nearly tipped off. Minos was leaning against the doorframe, smiling—or grimacing, maybe; she couldn’t tell. His left hand was pressed against his belly. No blood oozed there now.

  “I’ve taken worse wounds in battle,” he said. “I do not understand this weakness.” He was watching her eyes.

  Ariadne stood. There was wax drying on her fingers; she rubbed them against her skirts.

  “This wound was godmarked,” she said. “I am surprised you are not weaker.” She paused. “Girl!” she called, and the slave emerged from the inner chamber. “Leave us. Immediately.”

  “Very well, my Lady,” the girl said. “My Lord King,” she added as she passed Minos. He didn’t even glance at her, and so didn’t see her impertinently raised eyes.

  He was still for a moment, after the slave had gone. Then he cocked his head toward the corridor. “I came the back way,” he said. “To avoid the . . . unrest.”

  Ariadne cleared her throat. “Yes, well, the people are upset. The Sea God’s people.”

  “Upset.” She heard a ringing of metal—a sword tip meeting the stone floor, perhaps. Soldiers outside her door. “A riot, I heard.” Minos’s thick brows climbed. “No?”

  She nodded. “Yes. Yes—I saw, yesterday”—all the priestesses, and the others—people of Knossos, crowded down the stairs to the storeroom corridor. Shouting, “Asterion, Asterion! Sea God’s blessed godmarked son!” Priests and guards had pressed them back up to the courtyard. There were fewer of them today, but the courtyard was still filled with lamps and globes of godfire, and people were still chanting his name, brandishing bronze daggers and fashioning flaming nets out of air. She’d seen a bull’s head made of fire, as she went along the pillared walk above them. A bull that roared and burned as Asterion did, only even brighter.

  Minos took a step toward her. She said, “Sit, Father, please!” but he waved a hand at her.

  “Those people.” He bent over, pressing his belly even more firmly. “My wife—that bitch and her priest-gotten spawn. And Daedalus—that Athenian, daring to tell me what my own son would have wanted.” Smoke puffed out of his mouth as he panted. Ariadne pressed her own lips together, waiting.

  “I will not be able to keep him here,” he said at last. “Asterion.” He looked at her. He’s waiting for me to speak, she thought. Her blood sang with hunger and hope.

  “You will not,” she said.

  “And yet I cannot kill him. My wife and her priestesses would overrun the palace.”

  Ariadne laughed—she couldn’t help herself. “I’d kill him for you, if you asked it. But you’re right: it would be unwise. No—he needs to go away.” She could feel wax beneath her nails; she chipped at it with her thumbs, part of her thinking of stag’s horns splintering and honeycombs cracking.

  “He needs to disappear. If his people know he’s alive but can’t see him, they’ll stop causing trouble.” She paused and ran her tongue over her lower lip. “You could make it seem like he’s too divine to live among mortals. You could say that you will do him honour by sending him away.”

  He laughed. This made him gasp and take two heavy steps back. His shoulder thumped against the wall; the force of it dislodged Daedalus’s box from its place on the shelf by the doorway. The box fell. Its outer layer sprang open with a jangling of metal.

  “What,” Minos said through gritted teeth, “is that?”

  Ariadne picked the box up. The tin griffin had bent double, and its beak was curled like a pig’s tail. “Daedalus made it for me,” she said. “It was locked and Phaidra opened it with her godmark. At first I thought I’d throw it into the sea, the next time we went to the summer palace—but then I thought I’d keep it. Because I hate her”—she glanced at him under her eyelashes, almost certain that he wouldn’t care she’d said this, because Phaidra was Pasiphae’s pet and she, Ariadne, was his—“and I want to remember this all the time.”

  “And what of Daedalus? Do you hate him, too?” The king was leaning again, but he looked relaxed now, not pained. His bushy brows were raised. “He has been more your father than I, these many years.”

  Ariadne s
hook her head. “He amused me when I was a child. He doesn’t realize that I’ve grown up, and he still gives me children’s toys.”

  She let the box fall. A little tin wall leapt up behind the griffin. The dolphin tinkled free onto the stone, followed by another wall.

  “Walls,” she said, staring, seeing nothing for a moment. Nothing, and then an image, wobbly around the edges and dark within, but quite clear.

  “We need to put Asterion in a box,” she continued slowly. Her father’s face swam into focus. His bushy brows had drawn together. “A big one, with lots of walls and turnings—beautiful walls, but ones he can never escape from.”

  “A prison,” Minos said, “yes, of course—but there is no place here that would satisfy his followers, and in any case, I want him far away, beyond—”

  “The Great Mother’s sanctuary. The mountain that’s hollow and hot inside.” The words spilled out as if she had been planning them, but she hadn’t—they were just there, filling her mouth. She thought, even as she spoke, They should be silver—godwords glowing when I part my lips. “We could put him there because there are already tunnels—except that we would have to carve out new areas and close off the old ones—build walls that will lie within the ones the mountain built, to make sure there were no ways out. A sacred space, we’ll tell his people—and it will look like one; even his god will be well pleased. But it will be a prison, too, where he’ll roam and suffer and someday die, forgotten.”

  Her father stared at her. “By Zeus, you are my daughter.” His smile was slow. She thought she saw smoke coiling behind it.

  She walked to the doorway. Three soldiers were standing in the hallway: one on either side of the door and one across from it, looking out over the courtyard where the crowd seethed, with its fire and shouting. The voices sounded like waves from here. “A hot place,” she said slowly. “A place where he would always be the bull, wild and hungry . . .

  Father.” She turned to look at the desk—at the paper where she’d pressed a stamp for each Athenian youth. “The gods will want to see the Athenians die well. A simple altar stone would not be good enough. So we will send them into the mountain, too. We will send them into the hot earth, and the hungry bull-god will be waiting for them.”