The Door in the Mountain (18 page)

“Of course,” he said, abruptly solemn. “Over there. To your right. Step carefully—yes, good—one more . . . now put down your hand. Do you feel it?”

She felt metal, rough with rust. Another door, she realized as she knelt and looked. At the level of her knees, if she had been standing; tiny and rounded, with rusted bolts and a rusted lock.

Her father leaned past her and inserted a stubby key into the lock. The door screeched as he pulled it open. “Close, now,” he said. He touched her cheek with his palm. She didn’t flinch at the heat.

She’d had to crouch to enter the tunnel behind the jars, but here she had to crawl. She couldn’t remember the last time she’d crawled. On the ground of the ring, perhaps, when she’d been a child learning to bull-dance and had fallen and needed to scrabble out of the way of the beast’s churning legs? But she’d hardly ever fallen, and the ring had been smooth and cool, not dirty and prickly with stones as this place was. Minos’s glow from behind her flickered off a low, curving ceiling and root-encrusted walls—much narrower than the others had been, tonight—and an opening—thank Zeus, a space not that far ahead where she could stand and stretch and brush the dirt from her legs and hands.

It was a cavern, and it soared far, far above her, glittering with crystal veins and hardened drippings of something that looked gold in the godlight. She craned up at it as Minos straightened beside her. The light grew brighter and steadier then, and she shifted her gaze back down and saw bodies on the floor.

There were three of them, lying on their sides against the cavern’s far wall. Their wrist and ankle bonds had been tied together so that their backs were bowed inward. They’d been arranged in a row with their faces all pointing the same way. They looked like three empty mussel shells. Minos gestured at them with one silver-red hand.

“Go closer, Daughter. Go and see this secret that is now ours.”

She walked over to them. The king’s light followed her. It played over their faces: Icarus’s, Daedalus’s, Naucrate’s. Their skin was streaked with dirt and dried black blood. Their eyes glistened as they rolled their heads to look at her.

“Ari.” Ariadne hardly recognized Icarus’s voice; it sounded like cloth tearing. His twisted lips twisted even more, and a bead of fresh blood welled between them. The talons at the end of his fingers scrabbled weakly at the dirt.

Ariadne turned to her father. “The pirate attack,” she said. “Was there one?”

He smiled down at her. “Oh, yes. The ship went down—after my men got these three off. Just before it burned. It sank, and everyone else with it. But these three . . .” He was smiling down at them, now. “They deserved more.”

Daedalus lifted his head and spat. He’d probably meant the mucus to land on the king’s feet, but instead it clung to Daedalus’s chin. “And now,” he rasped, “you have come to give us this ‘more.’”

Minos’s laugher echoed off the cavern’s walls and up into the emptiness above them. “I have,” he said. “And my daughter, who deserves to know this secret, will be here to watch.”

A sour taste surged into her mouth—fear and anticipation; disgust too, because the prisoners’ own fear stank so badly.
I told you: no more blood
, she thought.
I told you to send them away. Why this?

Minos spun on his heel and strode back toward the cavern’s opening. “I thought about starting with Naucrate,” he said as he picked something up from the ground there, “but I have reconsidered. I believe I will start with the great and clever Daedalus.”

He walked back. His hand was wrapped around a hammer—one that Daedalus or Karpos might have used to work their colossal blocks of stone. Minos’s other hand closed around Daedalus’s dirty collar and hauled him up and over to a low, flat rock that Ariadne hadn’t noticed until now. Daedalus choked, and his bent-back body lashed like a snake.

“Now, then,” said the king, and drew a dagger from his boot. He cut the rope that attached Daedalus’s wrist and ankle bonds. “Let us get you settled properly. You are an artisan, after all; arrangement and order matter to you.” He pulled Daedalus’s bound hands onto the rock and pinned them there, pressing down on the rope around his wrists. Ariadne stared at his upturned palms. The lines in them looked so deep, in the dancing light. His fingers jerked inward as if he wanted to make fists, but Minos adjusted his hold and flattened them out.

“Little Queen,” he said. “Come and help me.”

Her feet felt heavy, but she forced them to carry her across to the rock. Minos took her hand. His skin was so hot that the sick feeling burst up inside her again, but she didn’t flinch.

“Kneel behind him. . . . Yes. Now press here on the rope, as I did. . . . Good. He will try to move, in a moment. Use all your strength to keep him still.”

She licked her dry lips. “Yes, Father,” she said.

Daedalus turned his head so that one bright eye was on her. “Ariadne,” he said, in a low, rough voice. “Minnow.”

“No. Don’t call me that. Do not.” She tightened her grip on his wrists and looked up at her father.

Minos raised the hammer and brought it down on Daedalus’s right palm.

His hands flapped and a tremor went through the rest of him—Ariadne saw it bend his spine, from buttocks up to skull. He hardly moved, otherwise. He screamed, but only once. As the hammer came down on his other palm and all his fingers, one by one, he dug his chin into his chest and shuddered. Bones cracked in skin and Icarus shouted and Naucrate wailed and Ariadne sucked in her breath with every hammer strike, but Daedalus was silent.

When Minos was done he laid the hammer down and crouched in front of Daedalus. “You will never make anything again, old friend,” he said, shaking his head regretfully. Red light glowed behind his teeth. Cinders drifted between them and into his beard. “Surely this will be a relief: first exile, then endless seeking for things you could never quite touch; your art has only ever caused you pain.”

Ariadne let go of Daedalus’s wrists. Her hands were slick with sweat. She rubbed her fingers together and didn’t look at his. Her blood pounded in her head so loudly that it almost drowned out Naucrate’s sobbing.

“Little Queen,” Minos said, rising, “would you agree that it is not just the great Daedalus’s hands that have caused unhappiness in our palaces?”

Ariadne swallowed hard.
Speak firmly
, she thought.
Don’t let them imagine that you’re afraid. And think—
think
what he’ll want to hear.

“I would agree,” she said firmly. “He has also
spoken
wrongly—yes; I remember the feast at which he said my noble brother Androgeus’s name over and over, in defiance of your command.”

Minos nodded. A blotch of flame appeared beneath his flesh, at the hinge of his jaw. She watched it wriggle up past his ear to the pouch beneath his left eye, where it stopped and pulsed, perhaps in time with his heart. “Precisely, dearest. His words have wounded us. What else, then, might we do to him?”

The knife was in his hand. His fingertips stained the haft with coursing, molten orange.

She could feel Icarus’s little round bird eyes boring into her back. She could hear his talons, still scritching at dirt and pebbles. She could hear Naucrate too, whispering Daedalus’s name over and over.

“We might cut . . .” Ariadne’s voice cracked.
Godsblood
, she thought savagely,
if you falter now you don’t deserve to rule anywhere, ever
. “We might cut out his tongue,” she said, and smiled at Minos.

The king smiled back at her and thrust Daedalus onto the ground and fell to his knees beside him and pried open his jaws—which stayed open, gaping, fish-like—and with that same hand he pulled Daedalus’s tongue out between his teeth and with his other hand he raised the knife and set it to the tongue and sliced.

Icarus and Naucrate had gone quiet. The only sounds were a far-off, steady dripping and the low moan that bubbled from Daedalus’s weeping mouth.

“Minnow.”

Naucrate spoke softly, but the cavern’s rock caught the word and made it louder.

Ariadne watched Minos drop the wet, dark tongue onto the dirt. She swallowed more convulsively than she had before, and turned to look behind her.

“
You
will not call me that, either.” She sounded calm and threatening at once. This surprised her.

Naucrate was holding her head up as best she could, but it was trembling, bent at an angle. Tears had made clean streaks on her skin. “Princess,” she said, “I loved you. Even as I watched you grow and change and scheme, I loved you, because when I looked at you I always saw the little girl who used to bury her face in my lap and cry. The little girl who ached for her life to be different.”

Her dresses always smelled like lemon
, Ariadne thought, before she could stop herself.
She kept oatcakes in an alabaster jar beside the doorway that led to the workroom with all those blocks of marble and the ivy and the tiny little Knossos made of wood. . . .

“I do not know why you expect me to feel mercy.” Ariadne heard herself speaking but didn’t feel it. She was very far up, where the cavern’s roof became a second sky. “I do not know why you even try. After all, I am my father’s daughter.”

Naucrate’s head sagged back onto the ground. Her eyes were wide and fixed on nothing. A long, tangled strand of hair slid across her forehead and nose. It rose and fell gently, with her breath.

Minos pointed at her. Sparks hissed and fell from his forearm. “Look here: the beautiful, brave Naucrate does know how to fear!” He went to stand above her. More sparks fell. Ariadne watched them light and linger on Naucrate’s hair; she smelled burning. “You have never feared
me
enough,” he said, suddenly quiet. “Even when I took you as my lover, you never trembled. I would have killed you then, except that I grew too bored with you to bother. And I am glad. For this, now, will be far more pleasing.”

Naucrate’s head came up again. Her lips parted and the singed strand of hair sank between them, but she didn’t seem to notice. “I have always hated you,” she said in a cold, flat voice Ariadne hadn’t heard before, “but I have never feared you. So do this pleasing thing. Do it quickly or do it slowly. It will not matter. And remember: I hate but do not fear.”

Minos made a growling noise deep in his throat. The fire that had lit him from beneath throbbed brighter and higher until it leapt from his skin and out into the air. It fell on Naucrate like a sheet of rain. Her hair, her neck, the grimy cloth stretched tight over her back: all of it kindled and glowed. She thrashed until she was on her stomach. Minos chuckled as he bent down and cut all of her bonds. Ariadne covered her nose and mouth but the stench of filth and burning was still terrible.

She remembered another thing, though she didn’t want to: Naucrate bending down to her, murmuring,
But even though it crackled and smoked and made me very hot, it never hurt me.
Now it was: now Minos’s fire was turning her to sizzling hair and spitting fat and a high, broken voice.

Ariadne didn’t see how Naucrate rose, but she did. She wrenched herself around and up, streaming, screaming. She reached her blazing hands out to Icarus, who curled himself away from her. She reached for Daedalus, who was crouching with his hands swollen and limp behind him, his mouth still dribbling blood. He tipped toward her but she was already past him, stumbling for the hole that led out to the sky. Minos held his hands up and sent flames after her. It didn’t matter: she was gone, leaving smoke and skirling sparks in her wake.

Ariadne stumbled after her.

No. What are you doing? Go back; go, and attend to your father the king. . . .

She crawled until the tunnel opened onto sky. She rose and teetered on the ledge, her arms and mouth wide, grasping at air. She peered over the edge and saw a ball of fire, falling very slowly. She heard a long, high, warbling bird cry, swelling and dying over the sea.

When she ducked back into the cavern, Minos was waiting for her. Smiling.

“What now?” Icarus’s voice was scratchy and stark. “How will you break
me,
great king?”

Minos didn’t turn to him. Ariadne didn’t want to, but she did. Icarus was lying still, his face turned up to the king. His pale eyes were steady and unblinking.

“Poor bird-boy,” the king said, still smiling at Ariadne. “He cannot fashion anything—certainly not wings that fly, despite the mark his god has given him. I shall let him stay here to keep his father company.” At last he looked down at Icarus. “Perhaps you will chirp while he gabbles?”

“Ari.” She’d heard Icarus sound shy and awkward and unsure before, but she’d never heard him plead. It made her feel sick in a way that the sound of Daedalus’s shattering hands had not.

“Ari, please. Your father listens to you. Don’t let him do this.”

She crouched beside him and reached for him slowly, with her steady hands. She watched him watch her. Watched his horrible beady eyes brighten a little, on her face.

The ball of string was where it always had been: wrapped up under his belt. He flinched when she put her fingers on the cloth, and again when she drew the hook out of the end of the ball and pulled it free. She sat back on her heels and tossed it up and down as if it were a child’s plaything.

“Ari—no—leave me something. . . .”

She laughed. “Oh, Icarus: why would we leave you with this, when it might help you escape this cave? No: you have no more need of it. Not ever.” The ball felt light and cool in her palm. Its hum vibrated from her wrist into her chest, which unsettled her—but she didn’t drop it.

Minos said, “You will find that the walls, deeper in, run with fresh water. Do not imagine you will be able to follow it out; it comes from rock and returns to rock. One of my men will come, once a month, with food and wine. Take care not to eat and drink too much.”

Icarus looked away from Ariadne at last. “My King,” he said, “why not kill us and be done with it?”

Minos walked toward the exit. His feet left black impressions in the dirt. “I may yet have need of you,” he said over his shoulder. “And also, gods enjoy the suffering of mortals. That is simply the way of things. Daughter: cut him free.”