Chara went up.
Go back, some part of her thought, as she fell to her knees in the muck. Find the others. There’s nothing you can do except go back.
But she climbed. Crawled, because it was so dark and the earth was so wet. She learned quickly to pat the way ahead with her hands; while some patches of grass burned a sullen orange, many of the other hot bits were invisible. She tried to keep the horrible burning smell out of her lungs, but it was hard; she was breathless and weak.
What do you hope to find, on this mountain?
She panted and slid.
Another way in. There must be another way in.
Not long after that she started up from the ground, gasping, shuddering with cold. I was asleep. Gods and goddesses and soft-shelled crabs: what is wrong with me? He’s down there and I sleep?
She stood up slowly. The air was lightening, though it was still thick with smoke—Minos’s, or the mountain’s, or both. She blinked at the slope above. She saw the earth and where it ended, in a long, bumpy edge that looked like Asterion’s bull-spine.
“Goddess,” she said aloud, “I’m nearly at the top!”
“Yes,” said another voice, out of the smoke, “you are.”
She turned slowly, though her heart was racing. A shadow loomed on the slope to her left—distended and warped, but she knew it, just as she knew its voice.
“Icarus,” she said, and walked up to him.
He was standing with his left foot tucked behind his right knee. A wading bird, waiting for fish. She waved her hand so that the smoke between them drifted away.
“Well,” she said, staring at the matted, layered mess of his hair, “at least you didn’t run after the princess.” She wasn’t sure why these words had come out. Why she sounded angry instead of cold and lost and sad.
Icarus flexed his hands. The bird talons on the ends of his boy fingers glinted. “Asterion’s my friend, too. You know that.” His voice was high and quavery; he’d just changed. She glanced at his arms and saw clusters of livid red marks and two stray, tufty feathers.
She hadn’t understood her anger, and now it was gone. “I know,” she said. “I’m sorry. You’ve been looking for him, just like I have.”
“No.” He moved his foot from behind his knee and set it very slowly on the ground. His knobbly toes sank into mud. “I’m sorry, but I haven’t been looking for him. Just thinking about him. He can’t be found now.”
“No.” She was whispering because otherwise she’d be shouting. “He can. There has to be another way in or out—and you know this! You know what it’s like in there! You were there when your father built it—so you must know this other way!” She cleared her throat, trying to retrieve the whisper, or at least the steadiness. “Take me to it.”
“There is no other way, Chara. I’m sorry. I know I said that before, but I really am.”
She shook her head. “There must be another way—a fissure, a cleft—some place where the mountain’s rock is thin. . . . Daedalus says that anywhere hidden must have two doors—I heard him say this once, to Ariadne!”
Icarus opened his mouth. His lips were so swollen that she couldn’t see his teeth or tongue.
His beak, she thought, his change, his godmark; the torture of it.
“Well,” he said slowly, “there are shafts. Made long ago, my father said. By the mountain, when it still ran with living flame.”
She stepped closer to him and put her hands on his bony chest. She felt him shudder. “Take me to these things,” she said quietly. “Now.”
“It’s no use.”
“Take me.”
He blinked at her. His eyes were beady silver. “Very well,” he said at last. “But you’re not allowed to be cruel to me when you see that I’m right.”
He picked his way delicately over the slanting earth as she stumbled behind him. He led her up, over and down a slope that wasn’t muddy or pocked with dying fire. “As you can see,” he said over his shoulder, “the king and queen didn’t come this way.” She snuffled out a laugh. A few moments later he stopped, and she stopped too, and raised her eyes.
The sky was so blue and bright that she had to stare back at her feet. Blue and sun—but blurred by smoke, she saw when she looked again. Up and up and up some more—because the ridge was not the top of the mountain: this was. This jutting, crumbling, endless cliff face, which was studded with black, gleaming necks.
“They’re like pipes,” Icarus said from beside her. “Made of cooled fire.”
“Lava.” Daedalus had used this word once, in his courtyard workshop at Knossos. Ariadne had wanted to pretend to disdain Karpos, and Chara had trailed behind her—willingly this time, as Daedalus’s workshop was so full of wonders. Lava. Daedalus had said this to Ariadne, pointing to a shard of shiny black on the ivy-thick ground.
“They’re big enough for a person,” Chara said now. She walked down a little dip and up again, to where the cliff bowed out above her. She knew, many paces before she got there, that the angle was impossible. She knew that the cliff would crumble into pebbles and clots of earth beneath her gouging, slipping fingers; that she’d get nowhere.
“Chara.”
She could barely hear him over the roaring in her head. Two of her fingernails had broken. She watched blood seep onto the cliff she couldn’t climb and then hit her head against it, hard.
“He’s in there.” She thought she’d whispered the words, but Icarus said, “Yes.” He was beside her—suddenly, silently. He flexed his talons on the stone beside her head.
“He’s in there, but you can’t reach him. You must see this.”
“But if I could! If I could, I could drop down . . .”
Her voice cracked. She ground her forehead into the rock. I’m here, Asterion. I’m right here.
She lifted her head quickly. “That string you carry!” His hand went to his belt, where the metal ball hung. “You could weight one end of it, throw it up into the mouth of one of those pipes, and I could climb it—it’s strong; I’ve seen you climb it often enough. . . .”
Icarus rolled his shoulders and stretched his arms like featherless wings. “I’ve thrown it to the tops of columns, yes—but those pipes are far too high.”
“Try. Please, Icarus.”
He took a few paces back, to where the mountain’s flank sloped sharply down. He dug his heels into the ground and pulled the string out and out until it was looped around his feet in a slippery, shining pile. He swung it above his head in widening circles as Chara slithered down behind him, out of the string’s range. With a grunt he let it go, and for a moment it soared. Then it fell.
“Again,” she said.
He glanced at her over his shoulder. The circles seemed wider, this time, and her breath caught in her throat—but again the string hissed back to the ground.
“Again.” Her voice was quieter.
He tried, over and over. He tried until he could barely raise his arm, and the circles were small and low.
Chara swallowed a lump of tears as she walked back to the mountainside. She set her shoulder blades against the cliff and slid slowly down until she was sitting. “We could build a ladder,” she said, as Icarus bowed his head. “Your father could. Before you leave.”
Icarus didn’t answer. She hadn’t expected him to.
“If only Prince Androgeus were here,” she went on after a while. “I’ve heard the stories. He could have whispered in a bird’s ear; it could have flown with the string’s end in its beak and fastened it to a pipe.”
“Yes,” Icarus said. “If only we had a bird that could do that.” He yelled and smacked his fist against the stone. Chara watched the rock dust settle on her bare legs.
“Gods, but I envy him.” He raised his small round eyes to the sky. He didn’t blink, even though the sun was blinding gold. His purple, misshapen lips were cracked and dry: not human, not bird. “I said so
mething like this before, that night when we tried to find him in Artemis’s cave. It’s still true. Even now, it’s true.”
“You . . .” Chara licked her lips and tasted ash.
“You know how it’s been for me!” he cried, thrusting himself away from the cliff. He paced—a heron, she thought again. A leggy, awkward wading bird whose wings weren’t quite ready.
“I’ve been sprouting feathers since I was two, but Asterion—yes, Asterion gets to be a bull at four, and now he’s a god. He used to try to help me—he told me I just had to find the thing that would change me forever—he was quiet and calm while I thrashed about trying to be a bird—and now he’s in the mountain. He’s six years younger than I am! He’s got an altar. I’ve seen it: it’s amazing. He’s a bull and a boy and he’s a god’s son and yes, I envy him. Because look at me. I can’t help. I’m useless.”
Chara gave a laugh that hurt her throat. “Please, Icarus. He gets to eat some Athenians. He gets to wander around beautifully carved corridors and lounge around on a beautifully carved altar—but he’s trapped. He’s never coming out until I find a way to let him out. And that may not be for a while.”
She tipped her head back and squinted up the curve of the cliff at the lava tubes. Even so, she knew he was shaking his own head in slow, jerky arcs. “For a while. Oh, Chara. I wish I could be here for this rescue attempt of yours. I do.”
“Stay, then. Your father’s always longed to leave, but surely you get to make your own choice.”
Icarus shrugged one thin, crooked shoulder. “There is no choice. When he and my mother sail, so shall I.”
“I wish you wouldn’t,” Chara said. “I wish . . .” That Glaucus was walking along thwacking his stupid stick against rocks, and you were scattering rainbows from your wings. That Asterion was here with us. That we were still children.
Icarus was craning up, too, though not at the lava tubes—at the speck of a bird, drifting in and out of cloud. “Where will you go?” she said. Speaking felt strange—echoing, vanishing, solid as the cliff.
He looked back at her and shrugged his other shoulder. “Anatolia, maybe. Or Egypt. Anywhere that isn’t an island.”
“Well, please tell me you won’t miss her.”
He smiled. His lips were less swollen now. “She’s never been anything but cruel to me. You and Asterion always told me so, and of course I knew it myself. But I’ll miss her. And you,” he added.
“Though I’ve always been kind.”
They both laughed, but only for a moment. The wind sighed across the lava pipes—four descending notes, like something red-haired Polymnia would have sung. “Chara?” Icarus said at last, and she rose, before she could think or feel, and said, “Yes. Let’s go.”
It rained for two days after the procession returned, raggedly, from the mountain. Ariadne listened to it drumming against her bedchamber’s roof and watched it turning the little courtyard’s earth to mud, and yet she was in neither of these places: she was in Asterion’s mountain box, drifting its corridors like a restless shade, sniffing out helpless Athenians. She smiled and didn’t care who saw it.
“The Queen is mad.” She heard people say these words, or ones like them. “She is mark-mad and we will all drown—but the king is mad too, so maybe we will burn, when he returns to us! Gods protect us. . . .”
Ariadne smiled.
On the third day she woke to her slave’s hand on her shoulder. “Princess,” the slave said, in her flat, quiet voice, “your mother is standing on the gallery above the courtyard. She has ordered everyone to attend her there.”
“Ordered, has she?” Ariadne said as she sat and stretched away sleep-knots. “Perhaps none of us should obey.” But everyone did—even Ariadne, though she didn’t stand with the rest; she stood above them, at the end of the gallery in which the queen also stood, in shadow.
“Mother,” Ariadne said. When Pasiphae didn’t move, Ariadne thought, She didn’t hear me because of the rain. But the rain was slackening—sheets thinning to mist; mist scattering in a gust of wind that stirred Ariadne’s hair. The people who’d been wraiths, below, were clear now. They craned up at the shadows as silence fell.
“Mother,” Ariadne said again, and stepped forward. The queen still didn’t turn to her. Instead she too took a step, out of the gallery’s shade and into a wash of bright new sunlight. Ariadne watched arms go up to shade eyes. She heard cries of wonder. Please, she thought, be crazed. Soak them again, so that I can come out behind you and reassure them as a queen should.
Pasiphae smiled a steady, loving smile. She lifted her arms, and the jewelled snakes wrapped around them flashed gold.
“I am sorry if I frightened you,” she said, in the voice she hadn’t used with Ariadne since she was small and trembling, just woken from a nightmare. In the voice she’d almost always used with Asterion. “I was a mother at that mountain. A mother whose child had been taken from her forever. All of you who are mothers will understand this pain. Some of you may have felt pain like it—but mine was godmarked and fierce, and I am sorry.” Her arms came down. Her hands hung, palms out, in front of her. “I was a mother, then. Now I am a daughter. Poseidon’s . . . the Mother’s. I am theirs, and wiser for it. They have given me peace—as has the great Daedalus.”
Heads bobbed and turned, but the great Daedalus was nowhere to be seen.
And where is Icarus? Ariadne wondered. He should be lurking on the roof somewhere. . . . She looked up and saw only sky and rain-darkened stone, and was briefly, stupidly sorry.
“He has told me much of the place that he made, beneath the mountain. Of the food that shall be delivered to the temple—for that is what it is. My son’s temple. Men will provide for him, and so will the goddess. The flesh and blood of the sacrifices will make him even stronger. I thank Daedalus for this knowledge and for every one of his many gifts to us. We will all lament his leaving.”
“So we will.”
Ariadne gasped along with everyone else as Minos appeared between the pillars of the opposite gallery. No godfire rippled beneath his skin; no ashes fluttered down from his fingertips. He looked dimmer but more solid. For a moment Ariadne imagined taking his hands and burrowing in against his chest as she had when she was a child. Then she thought, Stop remembering: think only of what is now and what’s to come.
Minos and his wife gazed at each other across the sunlit air of the courtyard. A bird trilled, somewhere very close. Water dripped. Ariadne waited for clouds to mass and flames to kindle, but there was none of that—just a man nodding slowly at a woman, who nodded slowly back.
“His ship is ready, then,” Pasiphae said, as if Minos hadn’t been gone for days; as if the two of them hadn’t fought each other with fire and rain the day before that.
“It is,” Minos replied. “And we must go there, to say farewell. All of us must do this.” He smiled. “Lead us to the ship, Queen of Crete.”
I don’t understand them. The words circled in Ariadne’s head as she watched her mother descend to the courtyard and walk across it and out, with Minos behind her and the crowd behind him.
“I’m fairly sure they’re both mark-mad,” Deucalion said from beside her. Ariadne started and turned to him. He was staring down at the final few, hurrying people. “But at least they’re not bringing fire and flood down on us all anymore.”
She glanced past him at the stairway. Glaucus was there, of course, poised to follow his brother wherever he might go next. “Aren’t you going with them?” she asked Deucalion. “To summon the wind that will bear the great Daedalus out of his long exile?”
“Yes. But you were up here, and you looked . . . I thought I’d see if you wanted company, on the way to the harbour.”
“Yes,” Glaucus said, “what about you? You going to come and say goodbye to your pet bird?”
“Glau,” Deucalion began, but before he could say anything else, Ariadne strode past him to the stai
rcase. She slapped Glaucus so hard her palm tingled and scarlet bloomed across his cheek. Then she went down the stairs, quickly, her feet barely touching them.
“Ari!” Glaucus called, his voice cracking. “I was joking—I’m sorry. . . . Come back; come with us. . . .”
She walked faster.
I don’t know where to go. Not to the cliff above the harbour—I’m sure of that—but where, then? Just away. Away from my brothers and my parents and all their chattering, dimwitted subjects. They’ll miss me, surely—ask each other why I’m not there—but no: I won’t go to wave at Daedalus’s ship with them.
Her mind did nothing but chatter. Her feet took her to Daedalus’s workroom.
An enormous crab’s shell hung by a cord from the ceiling. There were things inside it—tiny levers and gears that whirred and spun and sometimes sparked. The shell glowed. When Ariadne sat down on a stool beneath it, the glow was light blue; eventually it shifted to pink; sometime after that it was a bruised purple scattered with golden specks. She watched the colours ripple on the pillars that separated the chamber from the corridor. No fire- or lamplight; just Daedalus’s magic in the damp, silent dark.
Time passed. She thought that the shell’s colours had been set to mimic the sky, and so it must be night. She wasn’t hungry or tired. Her muscles weren’t sore at all, though she held herself stiff and straight. She imagined that she was sitting on the throne at Knossos, flanked by images of scaled, beaked monsters and towering plants. She imagined priests and priestesses in lines before her, raising their hands in a new salute—one devised just for her. She would acknowledge them by bowing her own chin to her chest, just for a moment. . . .
The Door in the Mountain Page 17