The Door in the Mountain

by Caitlin Sweet

  For a moment more the silver shimmered against the black. Then it died, bit by bit, from its altar heart to its furthest, curving edges. The daylight returned, and people cried out again. Chara blinked and rubbed at her eyes, as others were. She smiled a little because Ariadne was glaring at Amon—poor, godmarked boy, kneeling pale and spent on the yellow grass. Pasiphae bent and laid a hand on his neck. Chara thought that the neck was probably hot, and the hand cool and moist.

  Minos was staring at Daedalus. Chara felt her insides twist with fear, looking at the king’s face. He was a starving man; a starving, angry, exultant man, panting smoke and sparks.

  Daedalus’s right shoulder jerked convulsively and he raised his hands to his ears. His face was as twisted as Chara’s insides were. His eyes swivelled toward the Athenians, but hers didn’t, even though she was curious. All she wanted to do was hunker down beside Asterion in the dark.

  She shuffled even closer to the palanquin and set her hand on the door.

  “Amon!” Pasiphae’s voice was so commanding that Chara had to glance at her. The queen’s hand trailed up through Amon’s black hair, as if it were a smooth, black fall of water. The youth lifted his head and Chara saw silver licking around his mouth and eyes. “My thanks to you for revealing the wonders of your godmark. There is perhaps only one other here whose gift rivals yours: my son, Prince Asterion.”

  Everyone turned to gaze at Chara—or so she imagined, in the endless instant before one of the priestesses hissed, “Slave! Off with you!” and thrust her away from the palanquin. She stumbled backward, keeping her balance only because Glaucus and Icarus and Asterion had so often tried to trip her up when they were children, and she’d taught herself to dance around them. She straightened, ready to glare defiantly back at anyone who glared at her—but all were looking again at Pasiphae.

  “My husband the King, in his wisdom, has agreed that Asterion, Bull Prince of Poseidon, shall watch this first sacrifice—and that the Athenians shall, in seeing him, witness the might of the gods of this land.”

  The priestess who’d shooed Chara off was at the palanquin’s door. She set a tiny key to a lock Chara hadn’t seen, and turned it. A priest wrapped his fingers around the handle and pulled. The door swung silently open.

  Legs and backs closed in front of Chara as people drew nearer each other, watching. She craned between two of them—old women, gnarled as olive trees—and saw him. He was crouching in the doorway, because there wasn’t enough room for him to stand. One of his hands was in front of his eyes. Even from this far away, Chara could see the ribbons of scars, old white and new pink, on his palm and the inside of his arm. His horns seemed to be as long and curving as the ones that lined the highest roof at Knossos. He was wearing a white loincloth trimmed with gold. His chest heaved with breath.

  “My son!” Pasiphae’s voice broke on the words.

  His hand dropped. He blinked down into the crowd, though his eyes didn’t seem to be focusing on any of them. A priestess held up her hand; he didn’t seem to notice it, either. But he jumped. Everyone gasped again as he landed, on all fours. He stayed that way. He raised his head, but his shoulders were rounded, his back arched, his fingers and toes digging into the earth, white-knuckled.

  “Asterion, son of Poseidon!” cried Pasiphae. “Stand! Stand and see these youths from the land that murdered your brother!”

  Two priestesses put their hands on him: on his back and underneath, against his chest. He straightened slowly.

  Gods, Chara thought, he’s so tall!—but of course he was; it had been a whole year. Taller, and stronger, too: the scars on his chest wound over muscle.

  His eyes—bull-round, very dark—rolled a bit, then settled, not on the two rows of bald, masked Athenians, but on the king.

  “Phaidra,” Minos said, so quietly Chara almost couldn’t hear him. “Daughter. Come and open the Goddess’s door.” A gout of cinders fell from his waggling fingers. His gaze didn’t waver from Asterion’s.

  Phaidra walked to the door and set her palms against its metal. She looked tiny. Her golden hair gleamed as she leaned her forehead between her hands. Chara looked quickly at Ariadne, whose lips were pressed tightly together. The princess seemed to be studying an unremarkable piece of sky.

  Phaidra’s hands began to pulse with silver. She strained up onto her tiptoes and touched the enormous black lock. The godlight washed over it like Pasiphae’s water, licked it like Minos’s flame. Chara sucked in her breath, waiting for the massive halves to screech open—but instead, when the lock parted with a crack and a clang, a very small door sprang open beneath it. A door within the door; a door that looked like it had been made for a child to pass through.

  Minos laughed. “Ah, Daedalus! Greatest and cleverest of builders! Of course our noble sacrifices must enter their place of sacrifice as supplicants. Of course.” Daedalus sucked in his cheeks and said nothing, looked nowhere.

  A movement caught Chara’s eye: Polymnia’s head, bobbing down toward the ground. She was grinding her bound wrists together savagely in her lap. Chara thought she saw blood on them, and on the golden rope. She swallowed and looked back at Asterion, who was smiling a little, as he stared at the king. She didn’t recognize this smile.

  “My lady wife,” Minos said, “it is time. Speak of this sacrifice. Send them within.”

  Priestesses were walking among the Athenians—ten priestesses, twelve; where had they all come from?—and Asterion was twisting toward them, his nostrils flaring. Chara paid no attention to the queen. She watched Asterion’s eyes, and Polymnia’s slender shoulder jerking as a priestess put her hand on it. Chara listened to the murmuring that thrummed beneath Pasiphae’s droning: prayers, whispered in Athenian ears. She saw silver threads winding their way out of Polymnia’s mouth, though she couldn’t hear the girl’s song.

  The air feels like storm. Chara shivered, deep in her belly.

  Even though she wasn’t listening to Pasiphae, Chara knew when the queen’s voice stopped. Silence settled, just for a breath.

  Then the High Priestess cried, in a clear, ringing voice that Chara did listen to, “Accept our gifts, Great Mother!”

  A boy—the handsome one, and the closest to the open door—was first. An old priestess pulled his bull mask off while a young one cut the bonds at his ankles and wrists with a long, glinting knife. He rolled back on his heels, reeling as the light struck his eyes. He flailed his just-freed arms and his white robe flared.

  Minos laughed and strode toward Asterion. People fell back, leaving room for the flames that leapt from his heels and swinging hands.

  “O son of Poseidon,” the king said, still laughing. “Bull-boy. It is time.”

  “Time?” one of the old women in front of Chara muttered. “What can our Lord King mean?”

  The king was reaching his hands out, now. The Athenian youth was gaping, his narrowed eyes shifting from Minos to Asterion.

  Minos stopped walking and lifted his arm. Fire spat from his fingertips and dribbled from his palms.

  “You, Athenian,” he said, turning his smile on the handsome one, “you, whose eyes can see now: look on this, as your fellows will after you. Look on the might and horror of this land’s ocean god.”

  He reached toward the cloth at Asterion’s waist.

  No, Chara thought, as Pasiphae drew herself up, and Ariadne too—both of them smiling as Minos was, while the crowd went still. No—not now; not again, already . . .

  Asterion stepped forward to meet the flame. Chara heard a pop and flare and hiss as the cloth kindled. She watched Asterion bow his head.

  “Asterion,” she said. She spoke softly, but he looked up. His eyes rolled and found her. His lips parted—on his own smile, perhaps, or her name—but the flames had him, and he was changing. He dropped to his hands and knees again. His back arched and darkened with hair, and his legs bowed and bent. “Asterion,” Chara whispered. He didn’t look up, th
is time. He snuffled and pawed at the earth with his great, gleaming hooves.

  A cry rent the quiet. The Athenian youth sprang free of the hands that held him—but other hands were waiting. They seized him, pushed him toward the small, dark door.

  The High Priestess raised her snake staff. The gold trim on her bodice arms flashed. “Go to the Great Goddess,” she called. “Assuage her hunger.” The priestesses who grasped the youth’s arms shook him until he was mostly straight. They walked him to the yawning black emptiness of the doorway. His heels bobbed and scuffed, raising puffs of dirt and clots of grass that seemed to Chara to hang in the air forever.

  Asterion roared. An Athenian girl screamed. (Not Polymnia, Chara saw; she was turning her masked face toward the sounds, her lips pale and pressed together.) Two dragging steps, and the youth was at the door; two more and he was stooping inside; one more and he was gone. His second cry was loud, then soft, softer, nothing.

  He fell, Chara thought. They dug a hole or a trench—something so that the Athenians couldn’t turn and force their way back out, even for a moment.

  The bull snorted and snuffled as the next masks came off. Five boys, six, seven—all of whom were silent as they walked and bent and then disappeared.

  The first girl cried, “I die for all our gods!” and the observers shouted with approval or protest—Chara couldn’t tell and didn’t care.

  Beast-Asterion huffed his way closer to the girls after that first one had gone. His tail swished back and forth. Many of the onlookers raised their hands in the sign of the horns.

  Polymnia was the fourth girl. When the priestesses whisked her mask off and cut her bonds, she squeezed her eyes shut and then opened them wide. She fastened them on the bull, who was close enough for her to touch, and didn’t blink. Chara could see a shadow on her skull; the red of her hair, waiting just beneath her skin.

  The priestesses took her arms and she didn’t try to shake them away. She let them point her toward the darkness. She took a step before they urged her to. Just as she was about to pass beyond the daylight she craned over her shoulder. She smiled a broad, beautiful smile at the bull and at everyone beyond him, and her lips parted. Four notes: the ones she had sung the night before, when Chara had asked her name—except that this time they were just melody, silver and sweet. She wrenched her arms away from the priestesses and bent and took a long, last step.

  Chara’s eyes stung but she didn’t blink or rub them. She gazed at the door until it blurred, then turned to the bull. She watched the tufty hair along his spine quiver in the hot mountain wind.

  Asterion, she thought. Look at me?

  Ariadne hated the heat. It lapped at her in waves, from the sun and from her father’s skin. Even when the dark-haired boy had plunged them all into godmarked shadow and shown them the vision of the labyrinth, she hadn’t felt cooler—maybe because her heart had been pounding blood up into her head with such force. Those images: the corridors and chasms, the bridges, the filigree sprays of crystal—more beautiful even than the whorls of her dancing ground—that seemed to burst from the earth and walls like water.

  And they’ll see all of it, she thought as she watched the Athenians from beneath sweat-slick eyelids. I almost envy them.

  She turned to order her slave to fetch her some water, but Chara wasn’t beside or behind her.

  When one of the Athenian girls cried “I die for all our gods!” Ariadne couldn’t summon the strength to laugh. When another of the girls sang four lovely, silver notes, the princess could barely curl her lips in scorn. Phaidra’s demure posturing beneath the lock she’d opened made Ariadne feel mere ripples of annoyance.

  Only when her mother began to walk slowly toward the bull-thing, after the last of the Athenians had disappeared into the Goddess’s mountain, did she draw herself up and thrust heat and nausea away. It’s time, she thought. At last.

  The bull’s head swivelled toward the queen when she was still a few paces away. Ariadne saw one of his brown eyes widen and roll. He huffed and nodded his huge wedge of a head and she touched it with her dripping hands. The water soaked into his hair, turning it silver-black from neck to haunches. As it traced its path down over his sides, the hair shrank back into his skin, just as Icarus’s spiny feathers did when he was changing. Moments later the bull’s body wrenched and thinned and fell back into the boy’s.

  He looks more like a man than a boy, Ariadne thought, as she had when he’d stepped out of the palanquin. And he’s handsomer than Glaucus and Deucalion, both. The gods still favour him. She tore her eyes away as he rose, naked and scarred, and stood panting before them all: priests and priestesses, royal family and adoring crowd and . . .

  Chara. Ariadne narrowed her eyes at the slave, who was standing behind two wizened old women. Standing stiller than one of Karpos’s statues, her face so starkly pale that her freckles stood out like fever blotches.

  Pasiphae laid her hand on Asterion’s heaving shoulder. “Husband,” she said, “let us return my son to his secret home. Let us return, ourselves, to the summer palace, and celebrate in comfort.”

  “No.” Minos’s teeth shone. “We do not return, yet. There is one more thing that must be done.” Murmurs; shiftings of feet and cloth.

  At last . . . Ariadne thought again, as the queen’s lips tightened.

  “One more thing?” She spoke evenly, but Ariadne saw Asterion flinch as her fingers dug into his skin.

  Minos waved an ash-caked hand at her, and at the low, gaping doorway. He waved his other hand and watched its arc in the air and laughed.

  Daedalus was beside Ariadne. “What is he up to now, do you think?” she said innocently, and he sucked in his breath as if she’d struck him in the gut.

  “Who knows?” he said in a thin, tremulous voice. “Oh, Minnow—who ever, ever knows?”

  I do, Ariadne thought. She said—she was so excited that she had to say something—“Why do you call me that?”

  Daedalus’s upturned hands clutched at nothing. “You were a silver child,” he said. His voice was steady now. Deeper than she’d heard it in a long, long time. “Silver and small and graceful, slipping through the heavy corridors of Knossos as if they were nothing but water. My Minnow. Ours. Then.”

  Ariadne wanted to look at him, but just then Pasiphae stepped toward Minos with both her hands extended. As if she knew what would come—though of course she didn’t.

  The king stepped around his wife and cried, “It is not enough!” Silence fell and settled. The queen twisted her green-gold skirts sharply in her hands. “Not enough that the fourteen youths of our enemies wander the great Daedalus’s halls and chambers until they give themselves to the Goddess. No—they must be hunted, as all sacred prey is hunted.”

  Ariadne could barely breathe.

  Asterion stood behind his mother, gazing at Minos with round, bull-boy eyes, his arms swinging a bit.

  “Husband. What do you intend to do?”

  Minos didn’t even look at her. “Son of Poseidon,” he said. He held out his hand to Asterion, who’d begun to walk slowly past the queen. “You are the hunter.”

  Asterion blinked and frowned like a half-wit, but he kept walking. As he did, a voice from deep within the crowd called his name—just once, but it was enough. Asterion turned quickly and made a sound: “Fraxle” or “Freck”—something meaningless.

  Chara broke through the ranks of people like a dolphin-prowed ship. She ran toward Asterion, who was smiling now, stumbling to meet her.

  Poor, pining slave, Ariadne thought.

  Minos took two long strides and set Asterion’s hair alight.

  Chara fell against the bull-boy, flailing her arms at the fire. Pasiphae was behind her, fanning with her skirts—but it was too late. He was changing. God-taken. Gone.

  “For Androgeus!” Minos shouted, fastening a hand onto Asterion’s lengthening, bending forearm. “For Crete and her gods!” He wrenched
the bull-boy to the door. He shoved, hard.

  Asterion rocked on the threshold for what seemed like forever. Long enough for Chara and Pasiphae to cry out, as one, in their separate voices. Long enough for Ariadne to raise her hands in the sign of the Bull, and laugh.

  “Father!” Asterion cried, very clearly—and then the cry turned into the bellow of a beast, and he fell.

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  The mountainside sucked at Chara’s knees. Her fingers sank up to their knuckles in mud, even as her eyes and throat stung; smoke still rose from patches of smouldering grass around her. She could see the grass and mud, now that a thin, smoky dawn was breaking.

  Minos had sent blasts of flame from his hands and mouth and even his eyes, after Asterion had vanished into the darkness—because Pasiphae had thrown herself at him with a shriek, and all her priestesses had run toward her, followed by Minos’s priests, and the crowd had surged forward and back, gabbling with wonder and fear. The fire seared hissing trails into the earth and up against the mountainside. Chara was close to the doors, but for a moment she couldn’t see them: too many people, and too much pain, blazing along her palms, which had touched Asterion’s hair and skin. When she’d finally reached the small door-within-the-door, it was closed, the lock back in place. She couldn’t see Phaidra—and if she had, what would she have done? Grasped the princess by her slender shoulders and shaken her until a guard slit her throat?

  Hours later, crawling up into the stillness of the upper slopes, Chara tasted wet ashes. The queen, thrust back by her husband’s fire, had brought down rain. Chara had watched her turn her arms and face up toward it. Chara had heard her, above all the other sounds, crying out Poseidon’s name and other ancient, terrifying words. The rain hadn’t started gently: it had hammered and pierced, sheet after sheet of it. People had fled down the road, which was already more of a river. Chara had seen Ariadne turning her own face to the water, her mouth open and smiling, her curls flattening to long snakes that clung to her neck. She’d seen Glaucus and Deucalion leaning on each other as they stumbled down the river-path. Everyone had gone down—even, at last, Minos and Pasiphae, though they didn’t go the same way as their subjects. Chara watched Minos’s flames arcing and sputtering and blooming again, turning the cascades of water to orange-tinted silver. She watched king and queen wend their own path away and, after a long time, down.