The Door in the Mountain (23 page)

“Princess.”

Ariadne started up from her bed. The first thing she thought was,
Theseus—oh, thank the gods, I hear you; it’s been far too long. . . . 
But even before she opened her eyes she knew it wasn’t Theseus—for the word had been spoken aloud, not in her head; because he’d been silent for ages, and something was definitely very wrong.

The second thing she thought, as her vision wobbled and cleared, was,
Chara.
Chara, thank the gods you’re back
—but it wasn’t Chara, either. Of course it wasn’t: Chara had run into the labyrinth months ago, along with the Athenian sacrifices and Theseus.

All Ariadne had heard of her were some garbled words Theseus had sent her at the very beginning: ::
Chara is here and says you . . . Chara knows the . . . 
::

No: this would be the other slave, who hardly ever said anything and lurked in corners, staring with her dull, close-set eyes. The other, whose name she didn’t know.

But it wasn’t the other slave.

“Ariadne,” Queen Pasiphae said. “Get up and follow me.”

Ariadne remembered another night when her mother had needed her; just the one, so many years ago, when Ariadne had been six. Pasiphae had been in the Goddess’s altar room, naked, straining to birth a baby. Ariadne’s half-brother: Asterion, who was half-bull, half-boy. Asterion, marked from the beginning by his god, when none (not gods, not goddesses) had given Ariadne anything.

“Mother,” she said now, sitting up, reaching for skirt and jacket, “what is it?” She couldn’t help it: her voice shook with eagerness or anger or dread or curiosity—one, all of these.

“Your father,” Pasiphae said.
Her
voice was steady and hard. “His mark-madness is worse.”

Ariadne stood up. Her vision was entirely clear, thanks to the moonlight that streamed down through the roof of the corridor beyond her chamber. She could see the painting on the wall behind the queen, though the green plant spirals looked black, and the brown fauns and hares were blurry, as if they were moving. She could see her mother’s eyes glinting, along with the gold at her ears and throat. She could see her long fingers, curling and uncurling around the flounces below her girdle.

“Why do you care?” Ariadne said, steadily this time. “You haven’t cared about him in years. About either of us. It’s Phaidra you favour—why is
she
not helping you?”

Queen Pasiphae turned and took a step toward one of the pillars that framed the doorway. She looked over her shoulder at Ariadne. A coil of dark hair slid across her back and over her shoulders and settled against her neck like a snake on marble. “Minos is a danger to all of us, now more than ever. I am thinking only of my people.” She looked away. “He refuses to speak to anyone, including me, of course. And he used to listen to you. Never to Phaidra.”

Ariadne smiled and stretched her arms above her head, because her mother was gazing at her again.
You stupid woman,
the princess thought as her heart stuttered and sped.
He promised to make me queen. He broke his promise. He burned me when I protested. How can you possibly imagine that I’d
help
him? And yet . . . 
She smiled again, a true smile, this time.
There just may be some new thing to find out.

“Very well,” she said, running her fingertips lightly over the scars on her arms. Puckered, pink ropes, scored by godfire. “Take me to him.”

Minos was standing between the stone horns where Ariadne had stood, years ago, the day he and his army had returned from the war in Athens. He was leaning out into the air above the gate, just as she had. She remembered how he’d looked that other night; the flame-bright lines of him sharpening as he drew closer. The loincloth, hair, beard and skin that hadn’t burned, because his mark had protected him, even as it seared holes into the earth.

He was naked now. The loincloth, Ariadne knew, had long since blackened, curled and fallen away. His jaw and cheeks showed in livid red patches through the remnants of his beard. His skull was blistered and smooth, though there were wisps of charred hair just above his ears. His godmark, consuming him because he could no longer contain it—or perhaps because he no longer wanted to.

“Husband!” Pasiphae called. He strained even farther into the wind, which whipped the flames in long, streaming lines behind him. Ariadne saw a knot of people on the steps far below, craning, staring. High Priest Hypatos; another, shorter priest; a man with a bow in one hand and an arrow in the other. “Husband, I have brought someone. Turn around. Come down from there.”

He didn’t. Ariadne stepped up level with the horns and laid her fingertips on one of them. It was as hot as sunbaked sand. She eased her head around the front of it and saw his face. She’d imagined he’d be smiling, exulting in mark-madness as she’d seen him do before—but his eyes and mouth were holes, black and gaping and wild with pain.
Ah
, she thought, pressing her hand against the pillar.
Good
.

“Father,” she said, over his crackling and the wind.

He turned to her. His hole-eyes didn’t blink—no lids, she saw. His raw, oozing lips shaped her name, though he made no sound.

How long has it been since I saw him?
she thought.
How much longer can he possibly live?
“Come down,” she said. “Please.”

He gave a whoop and she stumbled backward. As she steadied herself, she saw the guard below nock the arrow to the bow and raise them both.

“Ariadne!” Minos bellowed. Gouts of flame spewed from his mouth and into what was left of his beard, and Ariadne choked on a waft of burned hair and flesh. He leapt down from the horns’ pediment to stand before her; he seized her hands and she gasped, though she wanted to scream—
Not again, not again; no more burns!

Pasiphae was between them both, suddenly. Her own hands were silver and running with water, and she wrapped them around Minos and Ariadne’s. Ariadne felt the godmarked moisture drip and seep and numb; she moaned with relief and then with anger.
Why didn’t you do this for me when he hurt me last time? And why did you tend to Asterion’s burns whenever he changed from bull back to boy? You hateful, cruel woman . . . 

“Minos,” Pasiphae said in a low, urgent voice. “One of your men is below us with his bow trained on you. Others will join him soon, if you do not come down—all the way down, to the ground. We will talk more there.”

He stared at Ariadne with his empty eyes. They were weeping a thick, yellowish fluid, she saw, and drew her hands away from her parents so that she could wrap her arms around herself.

He stared and stared, until she said, “Yes. We should get down now.” The moment the last word was spoken he was past her—two long strides and a leap, and a hissing plume of flame that faded to smoke as Pasiphae and Ariadne gazed at it.

Ariadne fell to her knees and peered over the edge of the roof. She’d never seen anyone jump, or jumped herself; had always clung to a pillar with her hands and feet and eased herself up or down with her dancer’s muscles. Minos was beneath her, facedown, his limbs outstretched.

“Do not fret, daughter,” Pasiphae murmured at Ariadne’s shoulder. “He will get up.”

I’m not fretting
, Ariadne thought.
And I don’t care if he gets up.

He did, of course. His limbs twitched and snapped, and he raised his head and stared up at her. His blistered lips moved. She heard nothing but wind, and her mother’s breathing, but she understood.

Ariadne
.
Come down to me.

She slid down the column, unaware of muscles or effort or care. She knelt at his head. Tendrils of smoke wove through her fingers. He laughed a spray of sparks.

“Your mother . . . wishes to speak to me of weighty . . . things.”

“I do,” Pasiphae said, above Ariadne’s left shoulder.

Minos wrenched himself up—a molten caterpillar on a leaf, hovering and clinging at the same time. “Speak, Wife. It has been a long time . . . after all.”

Ariadne glanced up at her mother. The queen was bending down, her green eyes even greener, in the light from his fire. “Minos. Minos King. Even your priests are demanding that you be put out of the palace. Exile on an island, they say, and my priestesses agree. Karpos is begging me to summon the kings of Phaistos or Mallia, to get their advice.”

“Karpos?” He was panting. His lower lip was dripping blood slowly onto the ground. “Who is that?”

Ariadne bit her own lip so hard that there were bits of skin between her teeth, when she let go. She didn’t make a sound, though, which pleased her.

“Daedalus’s apprentice,” Pasiphae said, her voice suddenly very low. “The young man you have made your heir, thereby humiliating your own two sons, and me.”

And your daughter
, Ariadne thought.
Your daughter most of all.
All of her scars seemed to throb, suddenly: on her arms and hands, her chest and belly. Her hands twitched to touch them but she kept them still.

“Karpos,” Minos said, his breath whistling as he panted. “How odd. What does Daedalus . . . think of this?”

Pasiphae sucked in her own breath and coughed. Ariadne dug her fingernails into her palms. “Daedalus is dead,” the queen said at last. “Are you truly so far beyond this world? Do you not remember? He and Icarus and everyone else who worked on the altar within the Great Goddess’s mountain—they all died in a pirate attack more than
six years ago
.”

“Did they,” he said, in a low, smiling voice. “Did they . . . indeed—Daughter?”

He swung his sightless eyes toward Ariadne, whose head spun with words:
You and I and that horrible Theron are the only ones who know they didn’t die, and you know it very well: you’d be
winking
at me now, if you had eyelids—gods, no one else must know! Not my mother; not anyone. It’s
our
secret and I’ve been keeping it close, waiting to make use of it . . .
soon, perhaps, if Theseus’s silence continues. . . .

As she waited for her voice to stir in her soot-thickened throat, he waved a hand. “Never mind, my dear, never . . . mind. And what of you, my water lily, my seahorse, my . . . queen? What do
you
think . . . should be done with me?”

“I think,” said Pasiphae, “that you are a king, not a lizard. I think that you should get up and come with us to your Throne Room, where we will continue this discussion.”

Minos sat up, very quickly. Ariadne heard a wet ripping sound, saw gobbets of what had to be flesh glistening on the dusty ground. She tried not to look at his chest and thighs. “I will speak with Ariadne now,” he said to Pasiphae, so sharply that he almost sounded like his old self. “And I will speak with her here. Leave us.”

Pasiphae lifted her chin so that she was not looking at either of them. Water flowed from her hands—from all her skin, Ariadne knew, because the queen’s jacket and skirt had begun to cling to her, and because her curls had straightened flat against her neck and back. Her moist lips parted; Ariadne saw the tips of her perfect teeth before her lips closed again. She whirled and walked away from them, toward the staircase that would lead her to the royal apartments.

Minos growled a laugh, and it, too, sounded so terribly familiar.

It’s just the two of you
, Ariadne thought.
Just like before, when he loved you and promised you the queenship, and you loved him. Only it’s not. Remember: he betrayed you, and he is mad, and you
do not love him
.

When his laugh had faded into tendrils of silver smoke, he said, “They are all right—the people who worry about me. I
am
mark-mad. And my god and father, Lord Zeus, no longer wishes me to live in the world of men.”

He wasn’t breathing hard, anymore. His words slid out of his cracked, blistered, bleeding mouth and he could have been sitting on his throne, leaning toward Ariadne with his fists on his knees, as he had so many times before. She closed her eyes to quell this image, or to pull it closer; she didn’t know which.

“So I am going to give myself to my god.”

She opened her eyes. “When?” she whispered, when he said no more.

“In two months, on the festival of his birth.”

“Where?” Though she knew, of course.

“The place of his birth, child. The Great Goddess’s mountain.” This time his laugh trembled a bit, and a tongue of silver-blue flame slithered out between his teeth. “Since Daedalus built his box inside it, the mountain has belonged more to your mother’s god than it has to mine—and more to Athenians than Cretans. It is time that the people remembered Zeus. And they will, as they watch me burn myself to ash for him.”

He stood up so quickly that Ariadne had to scramble to rise with him. He moaned and doubled over. His flesh seemed to fade and thin, until it looked transparent. Rivers of fire branched and boiled and overflowed; he was Zeus’s lightning and Apollo’s sun, silver and gold, red and white. She felt the heat of him pulse against her own scarred skin.

“What of the Athenian sacrifices, when you go?” Her words rushed out as if she’d planned them. “King Aegeus will no longer fear us—it’s you he’s feared. He’ll stop sending the youths of his city here—and then the priestesses will demand that Asterion be freed. Who will do that? Where is the key?”