The Door in the Mountain Read online

  “Very well,” Daedalus said, and ruffled his son’s hair. “But then you must rest. If you tire yourself out with changing now, you will never learn to fly—and you will not want to use that string forever, will you?”

  “No!” Icarus was already running back toward the tallest slab. “But watch, Princess—look—I don’t need to climb, anymore!”

  He was at the base of the marble, swinging something in wider and wider circles. Whatever he was holding (the string, Ariadne supposed) looked silver in the sunlight. When he let it go, it slithered up and up like an eel swimming for the surface of the sea. She heard a long whine and a snick as it caught the top of the marble.

  “But how?” she whispered. “He’s so small—how did he throw it all the way up there?”

  Daedalus chuckled. “Mysteries, Minnow, that only my god and I may share. Look, now. . . .”

  Icarus hardly seemed to be moving his arms and legs, yet he was ascending, smoothly and swiftly. A spider and a bird, she thought, and shuddered. He pulled himself onto the top of the stone, unhooked the string, and wound it up into a ball, which he waved in blinding silver arcs.

  “See?” he called. “Isn’t it wonderful? Come back tomorrow, Ari; I’ll show you how it gets me to the roof!”

  She swallowed. No, she thought, I won’t come back; you’re too strange—even more words she couldn’t speak aloud, if she was to continue being the favourite of the great Daedalus. Before she could say anything at all, though, voices and footsteps sounded from behind her.

  “Master Daedalus—we’ve brought the new hammers for the forge.”

  There were five men, their bare chests shining with sweat. Two were pulling a wagon, or something like a wagon (it seemed to have too many wheels; Daedalus had probably designed it as well). Ariadne turned and darted away from them. She didn’t look back, not even when Icarus called her name from the sky.

  CHAPTER TWO

  “Princess—wake up!”

  Ariadne thrashed in her sheets and thrust with both hands at her tangled hair—and then someone was drawing her up and out of her bed.

  “Is it morning?” she mumbled, but even as the words came out she knew it wasn’t. She could feel cool air sliding over her arms and legs—and the sky outside her doorway was very dark.

  “No.” Her mother’s night servant—Pherenike. “The queen wants you. Come.”

  The palace was silent except for the scuffing of Pherenike’s sandals on the stone. (The woman hardly seemed to be lifting her sandals at all, in fact; Ariadne thought that must be because her belly was so swollen. All the palace women, even the slaves, seemed to be having babies.) Ariadne’s bare feet made no sound at all. She followed Pherenike and her bobbing lamp, and as she did her head filled with a tired, knotted string of words: The god came to my mother because I was sleeping and he couldn’t wake me and he couldn’t wait so he had to tell her: he’s finally chosen my godmark—and now she’ll tell me. . . . Or maybe she’ll say something else—maybe she realizes I’m special in another way; even more special than the baby that’s inside her. Yes. She’ll be in her bed combing out her hair and that’s what she’ll say. . . .

  But they didn’t go to the queen’s chambers. Instead Pherenike took them between the pillars and through the doorways that led to the central courtyard. It looked much bigger at night, and the shapes of the sacred horns on the walls so far above lay long and stark in moon-shadow.

  Ariadne felt a stab of fear that pushed her sleepiness away. Why are we here? Where is my mother? She nearly whimpered, but thought, No—Glaucus would make a noise like that; I mustn’t.

  She and Pherenike crossed the courtyard and went down a shallow flight of steps into a chamber Ariadne knew well. But now there was no sunlight to slant across the floor, the stone bench, or the red, blue, and pink spines of the painted anemones, and there were no people sitting on the bench either, beneath the watchful eyes of priestesses of the Great Mother. This room was as silent and empty as the others they had passed through, though it wasn’t quite as dark. A pale strip of moonlight fell to just past the doorway, and an orange glow wavered behind the row of pillars within.

  “Stay close to me, Princess,” Pherenike said, very softly, as she drew Ariadne forward.

  Two braziers set on either side of the inner door washed the chamber beyond in light. It flickered off the rectangular column in the chamber’s centre. Ariadne leaned against Pherenike’s lumpy belly and stared at the little wriggling shadows that were the shapes of double axes, cut deep into the column.

  “Pherenike—is that you? Have you brought her?”

  Ariadne hardly recognized her mother’s voice: it was thin as thread, a winding echo.

  “Yes,” Pherenike said, and pushed at Ariadne’s shoulders so that she had to take a step.

  Pasiphae was squatting at the foot of the pillar, between the sunken altar basins. She was naked. Her flesh glowed: her shoulders, her breasts (even her nipples, which looked huge and black), her stomach, her thighs, which she was gripping. Her hair was unbound; it was a mass of snakes in the orange-dark, twisting, alive.

  “Mother?” Ariadne’s own voice cracked.

  “Come closer, child—come here.” The queen reached out and gripped Ariadne’s hands. She tugged until Ariadne was crouching too, and placed them flat on the swollen mound of her belly. It was slick—with olive oil, Ariadne realized as the scent of it surged over her. Beneath her right hand, her mother’s skin felt taut; beneath her left it was soft and yielding. A moment later the soft part went taut too, and a moment after this her entire belly was as hard as metal or marble.

  “He is coming,” Pasiphae breathed. Ariadne smelled wine and honey.

  “The god?” she said, because her mother always talked about the god, so who else could it be?

  The queen threw her head back and made a sound that was part laugh, part moan. The long line of her throat glistened with oil. “Oh, my girl, the god is already here. He is . . . always here. Lord Poseidon—let me speak of him now, so the babe may hear it too . . . Lord Poseidon: though when he first emerged on our shores he had a different name, one only the Great Mother still knows . . . We no longer speak his language, and some, like your father, believe that Zeus has grown stronger—and yet Poseidon is still . . . our master. And he rewards those of us who love him most . . . with the fish that feed us and the storms and volcanoes that raise islands like ours out of the depths . . . and also, sometimes, with children. With babies who are half blood and half sea.”

  She rolled back on her heels and quickly forward again. She leaned into Ariadne, her nails clawing and digging at the princess’s hands. Ariadne could feel her mother’s moan as clearly as she could hear it.

  “Babies,” Pasiphae hissed when she had finished moaning. She opened her eyes. They were as black as her nipples and her hair. “Like this one. This one—and he is the one who is coming, child. He is nearly here. Now go”—and she wrenched Ariadne’s hands away, shoved her so abruptly that Pasiphae ended up on all fours, panting and rocking—“go and . . . pour libations to the Great Mother and the Great Bull, so that they will . . . look kindly on us all.”

  Ariadne scrambled backward and into Pherenike’s legs. The servant pulled her upright and leaned down to her, at the same time. “There will be no priests or priestesses here tonight,” she murmured. “The queen said to me, ‘This child is different, and so shall his birth be.’ So it is just us, Princess. You must do as she says.”

  Just us. Just me—she wanted me. These words were enough to make Ariadne forget the ones her mother had spoken—the ones about the god and his precious baby. Ariadne looked beyond the pillar and the basins, to the stone table that stood by a wall she couldn’t see. The table was clear in the firelight, though; its three squat legs, and the pitchers and offerings that sat upon it. She walked over to it and stood up on her toes. Her hands were steady when she reached among the rows of shells an
d tiny bronze double axes and picked up the pitcher with the slenderest neck. Help me, she said silently to the goddess who was there on the table; the goddess who was smooth, fired, painted clay, but whose pleated skirts seemed to ripple in the light. The snakes coiled along her arms lifted their heads—Ariadne was almost sure of it—she saw the darting of their wet forked tongues.

  “Now, Ariadne!” Pasiphae cried.

  The basins were set deep into the floor. When Ariadne stood over the first, she couldn’t see the bottom—only a dull sheen of liquid. She tipped the pitcher and a thick stream of oil fell. “Great Mother,” she whispered, “aid us now—please.”

  “Again!” The word was shrill, and it sent Ariadne scurrying back to the table. She set down the oil pitcher and fumbled for another. This one was short and round, and the octopus painted on it seemed to undulate just as the Great Mother’s snakes had. Ariadne carried it to the farther basin. Her eyes were on the wine that sloshed about within it, but she could still see her mother, swaying beside her.

  The wine came out much more quickly than the oil had. It made a splashing noise and sprayed up and over her legs and Pasiphae gasped, “Clumsy, graceless girl—now you must . . . offer something else.”

  “But there is nothing else!” Ariadne said. “Just the oil and wine.”

  “Back to the . . . table. Bring me one of the axes. Metal, not . . . clay. Sharp.”

  Ariadne chose the one closest to the table’s edge. It was bronze and its haft fit perfectly into her fist. She tried to hold it out to the queen at arm’s length, but again Pasiphae gripped her hand and pulled her close. “Give it to me.” Ariadne let go, and Pasiphae straightened into a squat, clutching the miniature axe in one hand and her daughter’s fingers in the other.

  “We should offer a . . . calf. We cannot, here, now.” She shuddered then, and closed her eyes, and growled deep in her throat. Blood spattered the stone beneath her. Ariadne saw that the insides of her thighs were already smeared with it.

  After the shuddering had passed she opened her eyes and said, all in one breath, “Blood is what we must offer, and see, the baby has drawn mine already—but we need yours, too, child—yours”—and she tugged one of the axe edges sharply along Ariadne’s palm.

  She didn’t cry out. Glaucus would have. Even Deucalion might have—but Ariadne only flinched, and only a very little bit, as heat lanced along her palm and up her arm. Prickly, numbing cool came after it. She watched her own blood drip onto the edge of the basin.

  Pasiphae pressed Ariadne’s hands against her belly. She rubbed them in sticky circles, around and around, until her flesh looked like one of Daedalus’s inky maps. When another long shudder took her, she held Ariadne’s hands down even more firmly. Her skin hardened and stayed that way for long moments. She was breathing very fast, between her teeth. When the hardness finally eased, Ariadne felt something move—something both pointed and round. “See, daughter,” the queen said, “he is . . . greeting you!” The knobbly thing beneath Ariadne’s hands thrust at her once more and subsided.

  The queen threw back her head in a blur of dark curls. “Pherenike!” she called. “Go and tell the king—say that Lord Poseidon’s son is coming.”

  “My Queen, I do not think—”

  “Go to him now!” the queen shrieked. There were other words too, but they were lost in a rumbling that shook Ariadne free and sent her sprawling. The basin’s oil and wine churned and the brazier’s glow trembled wildly on the walls. She stared at the walls, as she thrust herself onto her knees. They looked different, wrong—and after she’d blinked at them a few times, she understood why. Water was coursing down from the ceiling and from all the seams between the stones, and it was bubbling up from the floor, white with foam. It washed over her legs and hands, warm, so salty that the cut on her palm stung. Almost as soon as she felt it, the sensation faded. The water bubbled and poured, silently, touching nothing, shining with the silver of Pasiphae’s godmark.

  She twisted around to look behind her. Pherenike was gone.

  “Ariadne. Need you.”

  She had to crawl because the ground still seemed to be tipping. The queen was squatting facing the pillar now, her brow and forearms leaning against it. “Help me.” Her voice was muffled and low. “Help him. He is here.”

  There was a dark, wet thing between her thighs. It moved down a bit—it was round, and the dark was hair—and then back up. The queen panted. Her silver-sheened limbs trickled water that beaded because of the oil. “My Lord,” she said. “Lord of the sea; bull from the sea.” She moaned, and Ariadne watched the muscles in her legs and shoulders and sides clench. “My Lady, Mother of us all . . .”

  The wet round thing moved again, farther down. Ariadne saw crumpled folds of skin that smoothed, as she watched, into a chin, cheeks, a pair of scrunched-up eyes—all upside-down and pointed toward her. Pasiphae cried a long, rising, giddy cry and the thing inside her slid out. Ariadne put up her hands. It slid right into them and almost through; she clutched it as she once had a wriggling soaked puppy she’d wanted to hug. It—her brother—he squirmed, and she held him more strongly yet, even though the cord that started inside her mother and ended in his belly was looping over her hands and making them slipperier.

  “Cut it,” Pasiphae said. “Use the axe.” Her words sounded matter-of-fact, as if she’d just demanded a fig, or told Ariadne to brush her hair.

  Ariadne laid the baby down carefully on his side. He rolled his head back and forth; his tiny plump shoulder rolled too. There were creases in his arms and drawn-up legs. She reached behind her and found the axe. She pinched the wound-up cord near his skin. It pulsed twice between her fingers and stopped, and she sawed at it. It was tough and spurted blood, but she didn’t pause because he didn’t cry. He gazed up at her with wide black eyes and waved one balled-up hand.

  Pasiphae turned herself around. Ariadne thought she would surely lie down now but she didn’t: she continued to squat, and she grunted, and another thing slipped out of her. It wasn’t a baby; it was round and flat, and it looked like something the priestesses would cut out of a calf at an altar. The queen nudged it with her foot until it fell into the wine basin with a plop.

  “Pass him to me.”

  He was still slick, but this time he seemed to cling to Ariadne. He wrapped his arms and legs around her hands and made a mewling noise.

  He doesn’t want to go to her; he wants me. Pasiphae reached over and disentangled him. She put him to her breast. No—his mouth is too little for there—but apparently it wasn’t. He suckled and coughed and suckled, both fists waving until Pasiphae grasped them and held them to her lips.

  “Asterion,” she murmured.

  Ariadne stood up. The room had stopped rumbling, and the last of the silver water was sluicing away. She looked down on the baby’s head, with its dark hair (tufty, now that it was drying) and saw two bumps in it. Two nubs with rounded-off tips pushing out from the hair on either side of his brow. She bent and touched one; she had to—it was so strange. Her mother’s hand came down over hers and kept it still.

  “You see? Already he shows his father’s mark. Imagine, Ariadne, how these horns will grow.”

  Pasiphae might have said Ariadne’s name, but it didn’t sound as if she were really speaking to her. Ariadne glanced up and followed the direction of her mother’s eyes. Pherenike was standing just inside the pillar by the doorway, but Ariadne didn’t look at her; she looked instead at her father. Minos was framed in the doorway itself. It was lighter behind him, so she couldn’t see his face, at first. She felt her stomach lurch, waiting for his features to get clearer—but when they did, there was nothing frightening about them. His eyes were steady and his mouth was a bit open, neither frowning nor smiling.

  “Yes,” Pasiphae said, “look at how fine and strong Poseidon’s son is.”

  Ariadne shrank back against the column. She wished suddenly that she could do things over—
that she could drop the baby on the ground, this time, or cut the horn-nubs from his skull with the bronze axe. For she was nothing now—nothing, next to the bull god’s son. She pressed herself against the stone so hard that she could feel the edges of the double-axe carvings, even through her sleeping shift. The baby’s suckling sounded very loud.

  A shadow-smile curved Minos’s lips. He stayed still a moment longer, and then he turned and walked away. Smoke and sparks flowed out into the dark behind him and were gone.

  CHAPTER THREE

  The summer after Asterion’s birth was full of gold and blue. Ariadne remembered it so well, later: the sunlight on the sea below the palace; the pleats of her mother’s skirts and the embroidered sleeves of her short jacket; her brothers’ skin and hers too, burnished and rimed with salt.

  The summer palace at Amnisos was even lovelier than Knossos. It was set on a cliff, halfway—she imagined—between sea and sky. Between Poseidon and Zeus, she also thought, and even Pasiphae and Minos seemed to sense this balance. She heard them arguing in Pasiphae’s chamber, but only twice, and both times the shouting eased into murmuring and muffled laughter. It was all quite wonderful: baby Asterion was sickly and weak and hardly ever anywhere but with his nurse, and Minos smiled all the time and called Ariadne “the king’s jewel,” and Glaucus disappeared after Deucalion into the olive groves and didn’t bother her. She turned six, too, in the palace above the sea. Everyone cheered and sang to her, and Naucrate made fig tarts. But best of all was afterward, on her way to bed, when she overheard Asterion’s nurse speaking to someone in a corridor. The nurse said, quite clearly, “Perhaps the princess is marked, after all, for is she not as lovely as if Aphrodite herself had made her?”