The Door in the Mountain (16 page)

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, this 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.

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.

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 something 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. . . .”