“Master Karpos.” The king’s deep voice trembled. He stroked the bird’s tiny scarlet head and it puffed out its chest. “The god has sent this creature to show us: this likeness is my son. He is complete.”
Karpos shifted his bare feet and marble dust turned them white. “My King,” he said, “there is still the paint to apply—I was hoping you would advise me as to—”
“No. He is complete; he himself has stirred and shown us so.”
“My King,” Karpos said, “forgive me, but it was my godmark that made him stir.”
Minos’s head swivelled around to face him.
Ariadne saw a spark float from between his lips; she thought, with a shiver that might have been dread or excitement, His fire never seems to leave him anymore. Perhaps he is going mark-mad, just as Deucalion said.
“Master Karpos. The gods have spoken, as have I. Your work is done.”
Karpos nodded. “Very well, sire. I shall just . . .” He stopped speaking and turned toward the road, and a sound of swift, running footsteps. The rest of them turned, too: the king, and Ariadne and Phaidra, and the knots of people who had begun to gather. The runner crested the rise that hid much of the road from view. He was little more than a boy, lanky and smooth-cheeked.
“Minos King!” he gasped, doubling over and straightening quickly with a hand to his side. “I bear . . . tidings . . . Master Daedalus has completed . . . the Great Goddess’s sanctuary!”
The bird shook its wings, in the sudden stillness. It sang four pure, climbing notes and then it climbed too, up into the wide blue of the sky. Minos watched it until it was gone.
“A year,” he said, running his finger around the knob of Androgeus’s knee. “A year to remake my son; a year to remake a mountain.” He smiled an orange-tinted smile. The young messenger swallowed and took a step backward. “And the first young Athenians will be on their way to us before this week is out.” The king tipped his head back and closed his eyes. He gave a guttural roar, and the messenger fell back even farther to escape the sparks that cascaded from the king’s mouth.
“Excellent,” Minos said as the sparks faded to cinders on the earth. He turned and looked steadily at Ariadne, and suddenly she felt as light and lovely as the bird. “We leave for the summer palace tomorrow.”
Ariadne imagined the Athenians’ arrival, as the palanquins jolted toward Amnisos. Rain, she thought. It will rain, and the ship will be hidden by fog and the young people’s dull clothing will make them invisible: grey against grey. In any case, their audience will be inside. It will be a damp, dark, unremarkable arrival.
But it wasn’t.
“Look at what the gods have given us!” said Minos that day, sweeping his arm out toward the sea, the sky, the perfect horizon between that curved away forever. Even in the brilliant sunshine Ariadne could see the light that pulsed from his fingertips to his shoulders. “They have made the way clear for their sacrifices. And look—look there!”
“A ship!” cried Phaidra. She took three steps toward the cliff’s edge and Pasiphae pulled her gently back.
Oh, gods, thought Ariadne, you gave her your mark. There’s no justice at all. She dug her linen boot’s heel into the grass and flower scent wafted up to her. When she raised her head, her slave was gazing at her—inquiringly, perhaps, but maybe also a little impudently? Cleverly? Ariadne scowled and looked back at the water.
The harbour was far below, but the cheering reached them in waves that grew louder as the ship drew closer. It was very different from a Cretan ship: it was much longer and sat lower in the water, and its wood was all black with a single scarlet line painted on it in from bow to stern. Its square white sail was full of wind—precisely the right wind, it seemed, for the oars didn’t come out until the ship was nearly at the harbour mouth. Ariadne watched it slip into Amnisos’s mirror-water, and then she stared at her feet. Even though the cheering was like thunder now, she heard the captain’s shout and the heavy splash of the anchor.
“Silence!” cried Pasiphae—and silence did fall somehow, along the cliffside, down the snaking staircase, over the crescent of beach. Ariadne lifted her gaze and saw the priestesses’ altar-boat sliding toward the Athenian ship. The boat was much smaller, and yet so bright that it looked immense. The seahorse prow reared and twisted—the work of a man with a godmark like Karpos’s, who’d lived a hundred years ago. The seahorse glowed as well, staining the altar behind and the water beneath to a green like firelit emerald. The priestess had one hand on its ridged neck and the other on an altar-horn; she stood straight and still, even though both creature and sea were moving.
“I see them!” Glaucus murmured. His breath was warm on Ariadne’s cheek and she bent her head to escape it. “Coming to the ship’s side: six—no, seven—all youths. . . . Where are the maidens?”
Ariadne snorted. “Don’t be too hopeful, Glau: I doubt you’ll have any more luck with a sacrificial Athenian maid than you’ve had with that olive farmer’s daughter—or indeed with any of those palace slaves you’re always pursuing.”
“Ari.” She didn’t shy away from Deucalion’s breath on her other cheek. “Be nice. Just for once.”
She glanced at him. His beard was nearly as thick and dark as Minos’s, and his smile was nearly as gleaming, though it was much, much kinder.
“Why must you always defend me before I can defend myself?” Glaucus hissed. “Oh,” he continued, in a very different voice, “there they are.”
They’ll be ugly, Ariadne had also thought, when she imagined the Athenians’ arrival. The girls, especially. King Aegeus will choose the plainest, plumpest ones he can find, so that he can give silent insult to our land and goddess. But even from this distance she could see that these were girls with long, straight hair in shades of honey-gold and ebony and even red; girls whose white shifts clung to their slender limbs and the gentle curves of their breasts and hips.
“You’re right,” Glaucus said. “I’ll have no luck with them, even if they are about to die.”
And the youths are fine, themselves, Ariadne thought, squinting beneath her hand at the seven young men. Such crisp, clean tunics (for Athenians, it was said, considered loincloths immodest), and all of them were tall except one, whose shoulders, at least, were broad.
It took a long time for the priestess to ferry them all to shore. Their wrists were bound with silver cord, so they had to be lifted over the side of the Athenian ship and into the waiting altar-boat. Four of them crossed at a time. Ariadne expected that some of the observers would drift away, but they didn’t: they remained, murmuring as the Athenians were set on the black pebbles of the beach, and quiet in between, when the only sound was the seahorse’s snuffling and the surging of water as it drew the boat forward.
When all of them were across, the priestess led them through the crowd and up the cliff stairs. A child screeched, and then a gull. Ariadne stepped to the cliff’s edge and peered down. She saw heads, bent in concentration, and feet lifting and falling—and a girl with long, straight, red hair, spinning on her narrow step and lunging toward the open air. Even as the people below stirred and gasped, the priestess leapt, too. She landed on the girl’s step just as her bare feet were about to leave the stone. The priestess grasped the girl’s shift in both hands and pulled her sharply back. They fell together, their shoulders knocking hard against the cliff.
“She’s got spirit,” Glaucus said.
Ariadne snorted again. “Anyone who’s afraid of dying should.”
The cheering began again and didn’t stop, not even when all fourteen were standing before the king and queen. This time Pasiphae didn’t call for silence. She smiled at the priestess, and she smiled at the Athenians. (The red-headed girl was crying two perfect, soundless rivulets of tears.) Ariadne couldn’t remember the last time she’d seen her mother so happy.
“I bid you welcome,” the queen said in a voice so low it cut through all the other noise.
“I and the Great Goddess who is mother to us all. We honour the journey you have just made and the one that awaits you.”
One of the young men was very handsome. He lifted his head, as Ariadne looked at him, and he looked back at her from beneath his tousled brown hair. His eyes were a blue she’d never seen anywhere but the sky. She took her lower lip gently between her teeth and smiled at him. His own full lips were slightly parted; she imagined him breathless from the climb, and his nearness to her.
“Come,” Minos said. Ariadne saw some of Athenians gazing at the smoke that came from his mouth and the flame that coursed beneath his skin and fingernails. She saw their sweat and snot, their clenched fists, their shoulders, either rounded or thrust pitifully back. Thank you, Androgeus, she thought.
She managed to slip up beside the king, when he turned to lead them all back to the summer palace. He gestured to the soldiers who lined the road, and held up his arms to watch the coursing of his own fiery blood. He didn’t notice her.
“Father.”
He blinked. “Ariadne.” He spoke the word thickly, as if it belonged to another language.
She laughed lightly. “What—no longer ‘Little Queen’, am I?”
He blinked again and frowned at her. Red light ran along the furrows in his brow like incandescent threads. “Little Queen?” he repeated. “Little Queen . . . ?”
A long, cold shiver slid up Ariadne’s back. Father, she thought, what is wrong with you? “So,” she said lightly, “when will we be taking these Athenian wretches to the mountain?”
He smiled into the air above her head. “The gods know,” he said. She waited, but he said nothing more.
“And Daedalus and Icarus. Asterion—when will you move him from Apollo’s cave to the other?”
Minos tipped his head back. He closed his eyes and swerved into Ariadne and laughed as he stumbled and righted himself. She pressed her arm, which ached where his own hot skin had touched it.
“The gods know all,” he said, his eyes open again and fixed on the gauze of cloud that hung above the palace walls. “They speak to me, and I to them.”
“Speak to me!” Ariadne cried. “Please, Father: you haven’t even looked at me in days!”—but he was striding ahead, so quickly that she faltered.
“Not doing your bidding any more, is he?” Glaucus said—and then he was past her; they all were, Cretans and Athenians alike, and Ariadne stood alone, breathing smoke and strange, hot tears.
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
For three days the palace rang with the sounds of flutes and laughter and the singing of amphorae and goblets as they met, with wine between. It seemed like one feast that went on and on because every time Chara followed Ariadne past the courtyard, she thought she saw the same people: Pasiphae and Phaidra, Minos, the Athenians with their bound hands being fed from gold plates by novice priestesses. Ariadne didn’t join them.
“They are too taken up in their own affairs to miss me,” she said on the third morning, as Chara was twisting her curls into rows of tiny, delicate knots. “So I will not go to them.”
She paced her chamber instead, once the knots were done. It made Chara dizzy to watch her; these quarters were much smaller than the royal rooms at Knossos.
“Why has even Icarus not sought me out, now that we are closer to him?”
“Because he and the great Daedalus are probably doing very important things, at the Goddess’s mountain. Where you sent him.”
“Yes, of course. And tell me,”—turning, smiling coldly—“have you managed to guess where the great Asterion has been hidden? Go ahead: speak. I won’t beat you just for guessing.”
Chara slid her gaze to the fresco on the wall behind Ariadne. It was made of different shades of green: green for sea grass and water, dragonflies, fish with great fans for wings. Chara thought these walls were even more beautiful than the ones in Ariadne’s chamber at Knossos, though Ariadne claimed that they bored her.
“No, Princess. Please do not tease me.”
“You poor thing. I am sorry. And I will tell you something, so that you will not think me too unkind.” She smiled and touched Chara’s cheek with a fingernail. “Asterion will join us for the procession to the mountain.”
The fresco blurred, for a moment—the many greens, running and spinning—and then was so abruptly clear and bright that Chara had to close her eyes.
“He will be contained, of course,” Ariadne’s voice said, from a distance. “In a litter. You will not be able to tussle with him in the dirt, as you used to.”
“Of course.” Chara’s ears hummed; she could hardly hear her own words.
“It will be tantalizing to all, for no one except his guards and the queen have seen him in nearly a year.”
Chara watched her own hands arranging combs and vials on the table. Straight lines; metal and glass. When she spoke again, the words were as clear as all the fresco greens.
“Even you have not seen him this year?”
The princess snorted. “Why would I have wished to? Only my mother is weak enough to miss him. My mother and you.”
Chara had crept to the queen’s chamber door at night, after the palanquin had borne Asterion away. One night, two, three—knowing the mother would seek out the son; hoping to follow. And yet the queen never emerged from between the two scarlet pillars of her doorway while Chara watched. Enough, she’d thought on the last night, as she scuttled toward deeper shadows as priestesses or guards approached. This isn’t how you’ll find him.
“Wherever he is,” she said now, her eyes cast down but wide, all the same, “the gods will keep him safe.”
Ariadne laughed, and Chara raised her head. The princess fanned one of her skirt’s pleats before her. It looked like a small blue sail filling with wind. “They say my brother is a god—and he did a very poor job of keeping himself safe, not long ago.”
Chara imagined retorting, And how was he to keep himself safe when he was barely more than a baby and you set him alight? She felt these sounds filling her mouth, but before she could blurt them or bite them back, a slave appeared in the doorway.
“Princess,” he said, his hands up in the sign of the Bull. “The king summons you.”
Chara saw Ariadne’s eyes go bright and her hands tighten—but just for a moment. She blinked, loosened her fingers, lifted her chin.
“And why does he summon me, after all these days?”
The slave lowered his eyes. “He wishes you to dance, my Lady. For the Athenian sacrifices.”
Ariadne whirled so that her back was to him. Chara watched her smile.
“Very well,” she said. “After all, my royal father commands it, and my people will be expecting it. Chara—find me my dancing dress.”
The red-haired Athenian girl cried again as Ariadne danced. The others looked quiet and composed, sitting on the benches on either side of the thrones—no more snot or clenched fists. In fact, the blue-eyed boy Chara knew had caught Ariadne’s fancy smiled as a novice leaned over his bound wrists and set a piece of honeycomb on his tongue. But the red-haired girl cried and shook her head, and her piece of honeycomb flew from her mouth and stuck to the wall.
He’s nearby, Chara thought later that night, twisting from her back to her side on the low bed. I’ll see him tomorrow. Tomorrow. May Poseidon’s oldest fishes send me patience—or sleep, at least. . . . But they didn’t.
The morning sun was so strong that it hurt her dry, aching eyes. Ariadne insisted that she redo her hair knots several times, and Chara did, her hands steady and sure, as if they had no connection at all to her heart. By the time the knots were done and breakfast eaten (by the princess, at least), the courtyard was full of voices and music.
“Oh, child,” Ariadne sighed, leaning out beyond two pillars that overlooked the crowd, “is it not a perfect day for a sacrifice?”
The Athenians were standing in two rows just inside the main gate. Char
a saw them immediately—not because of the girl’s red hair, but because there was no hair. One of the other slaves had told Chara that all of their heads would be shaved by the priestesses’ razors during the night, in the privacy of a chamber far below the earth. Now all she saw of them was dark leather masks, covering them from crowns to just beneath noses. The masks were topped with bronze bull horns. Though they shone in the sunlight, they looked nothing like Asterion’s.
The princess descended the steps to the courtyard so lightly that she seemed already to be dancing. Chara followed almost as quickly, but far less gracefully. Colours blurred by her: the dark blue and scarlet of the columns; the white and gold of the friezes with their black shell patterns; Ariadne’s layered skirts, which were all of these colours and green, too (for it matched her eyes so well). Chara’s vision swam even more once they reached the courtyard, which was awash in embroidered banners and girdles and drums with metal rims that caught the light.
Minos and Pasiphae went out onto the road first. The Athenians, in their rows, were next, flanked by priests on one side and priestesses on the other.
When Chara fell back to walk behind Ariadne, the princess said, “No, no: walk beside me, today.” Her smile was sly and sparkling.
She smiles at me that way because she knows everything that’s going to happen, Chara thought, and dread chilled her, even as her skin throbbed with heat.
The procession made its way along the eastern road, which curved slowly north and up. Chara had loved this walk the other times she’d accompanied the royal family to the Goddess’s mountain shrine. Clumps of cypresses covered the slopes to the left of the road. Olive groves fell away sharply to the right in rows that were silver, then green, then silver again as the wind touched them. Beyond the olives and the parched, red ground was the flat and endless gleam of the sea.
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