Buried Deep

THE LIE MINOS TOLD, WHICH no one believed and no one was expected to believe, was that his youngest son had been shut up for the sake of the servants, whom he had begun brutalizing even as a babe. The lie everyone believed, and told in whispers, was that the queen had played the king false with a handsome guardsman, and he’d shut up the child to keep another man’s son from any chance of inheriting his throne.

But Ariadne had been five years old, herself a late and unexpected child, when her even more unexpected brother had begun to grow under Pasiphae’s heart, and she had been so very excited. Her other brothers were all grown men, big men, warriors; Minos’s bull-strong sons, the court called them, her father’s pride and irrelevant to her. Her sisters had been married off and gone before she was even born. And she had already been clever and good at creeping, so she’d been in the birthing room when the baby had come out bellowing, with the nubs of the horns still soft and rounded on his forehead, and her mother’s attendants had begun to scream.

Minos had all of them put to death, along with three particularly handsome guardsmen with fair hair, to start the second lie and keep the secret. His secret, not her mother’s. Everyone in all of Crete knew of the white bull the sea had sent him, and that Minos had bred it to his cattle instead of putting it to the knife the way the priests had wanted, but Ariadne and her mother knew more than that: they knew that Minos had asked for a sacrifice, one great enough to mark him for the throne over his brothers, and the god had sent the bull for that purpose, to be given back to him, not kept. So it was Minos’s fault, and not her mother’s, but Pasiphae had paid for it, and so had her women, and Ariadne’s little brother most of all.

Ariadne shouted at her mother, the day her father’s men came to take Minotaur away. “We could go to Grandfather!” she said; she was twelve, and her silent, frightened brother was holding her hand tight and trying to stay hidden behind her, futilely: he was a foot taller than her already, with the big cow-eyes large and dark and liquid on either side of his broad soft nose.

They lived with their mother and a few cowed servants—some of them had been killed, but by her father’s orders, not by Minotaur—in a single tower perched on the edge of a green meadow in the hills far above Knossos. It had been built as a watchtower, to give warning of men coming from the sea. They could see for a long way from the windows of the narrow top story, all the way to the sea far below, glossy and deep, like her brother’s eyes. Mother usually stayed in the more comfortable rooms below, but when she came up, she never looked at the sea, only the other way, down at the city—the red columns of the temple, and the people in the markets or thronging the streets to celebrate a festival—and her face was hard and bitter.

Father never came to them. But once a year, on Ariadne’s birthday, someone came and took her down the long dusty hill to the palace, to be presented to him and to receive another heavy necklace of gold, each one growing with her, so that now she had seven of them, the smallest one close around her neck and the largest hanging over her growing breasts. A great dowry accumulating in chains, to apologize for her imprisonment.

It was the only apology Minos ever made. He avoided being alone with her; she was always taken in to him by a nurse or a maidservant, who warned her strictly not to ask her father to let her come and live in the palace, as if he wanted to pretend that he wasn’t refusing her just because he told her no through someone else’s mouth. But she wouldn’t have asked, anyway. She didn’t want to live in the palace, with her father and his lies, even before he’d sent men to take her brother away.

She had instead begun to worry about being taken away herself; she’d started to be old enough, that year, to understand that soon her father would begin to look for someone else to hold her chains. That was why she’d already thought of going to her grandfather: Pasiphae’s father was Helios, the great lord of the easternmost city of Crete, the place where the sun rose, and a power in his own right, with a fortress that not even Minos’s navy could have shattered.

But Pasiphae shook her head and said flatly to Ariadne, “You’re old enough to stop being a fool. The king of Crete needs the sea god’s favor. If the priests learn your father’s lost it, they won’t stop with his blood to buy it back. It’ll be your brother on the altar, and me, and you as well, likely as not.” And after she said that, Minotaur carefully pulled his big hand out of hers—he was only seven, but he’d already learned how easily he could hurt people, if he wasn’t careful—and he put on the heavy wide-hooded cloak that Ariadne had sewn for him so they could go walking in the hills together at night, and then he went out to the waiting guards.

Minos had sent the Oreth to take him: his slave guards, warriors all bought from countries so far away that they had little hope of making a safe return. Their tongues had all been cut out. They were brutal men, hardened by their own misery and everything they saw in their work. They didn’t fear death or the gods, or thought they didn’t, and they would have cut off the head of a seven-year-old boy if her father told them to, much less put him into a prison. But when Minotaur came out a big silent hulk in his cloak, they all went still and afraid, even though they couldn’t see his face, and their hands went to the hilts of their swords. After they shut the door in her face, and Ariadne ran upstairs to look out of the window, she saw them walking in a group ten paces ahead, not looking back at all. Minotaur was trudging after them alone, his head in the cloak bowed, following them to the door, which wasn’t a door, only a hole in the earth.

She had watched them build the shrine all the last year, Minotaur peeking one eye out from behind a curtain next to her, both of them fascinated: it was the most interesting thing that had ever happened. First the priests had come to bless the site, and after them Daedalus, walking over the meadow for days marking the ground with long sticks left poking out. Then the digging began, which took a long time, because there were only six workmen on the whole project: four big slaves to dig the passage, twenty feet down into the ground, and two skilled ones to follow them, putting in the slabs of beautiful polished marble that came in on laden carts to make the floor and the walls.

The shape hadn’t made any sense to her. The workmen had started in the very middle of the meadow, digging out the single round central chamber, and they even dug a well in the middle of it. She thought it would be the first room of many. But instead, from there they dug out a single circling passage, only one, with no rooms and no branching paths, that curved and folded back on itself like a bewildered snake that had lost sight of its own tail. They kept going and going, digging in that one line, filling in one quarter of the circle after another, until they had honeycombed the whole meadow.

On moonlit nights sometimes Ariadne and Minotaur would sneak out and walk on the narrow dirt walls left between the passages, balancing with their arms stuck out and the deep passages looming on either side. They couldn’t run back and forth across the meadow anymore the way they had used to, because the winding passage covered the whole thing in an enormous circle, ripples spreading out from that central well. The walls were just wide enough that it wasn’t very hard to balance for Ariadne’s small feet, but it was just a little bit hard, enough that you had to pay attention to how you put your feet, one after the other. It was harder for Minotaur. He didn’t eat, not since their mother had finally refused to nurse him anymore, to try and make him take food, but it didn’t seem to matter. He was growing very big, and very quickly. By the time the men finished digging, he was teetering on the edges, having trouble not falling in.

She was waiting impatiently for the workmen to finish the last quarter of the circle, to see what they would do when the passage got to the end. The digging seemed like it had taken forever, and so much work. So she was sure it must be meant for a shrine to the god. She imagined steps coming up, and then flagstones being laid on top of the mysterious cellar, and pillars for some great temple. But when the workmen finished digging to the border of the great circle, the passage only stopped. They dug a very small circular room there just outside the rest of the maze, like an antechamber, and then they didn’t do any more work the rest of that day, even though it was morning. They only sat down in the small bit of shade on the edge of the hillside with their tools scattered around them and drank from their jug of watered wine, watching the skilled workmen coming the rest of the way behind them.

The next day, the skilled workmen began to work back along the passageway toward the center, laying flat stones atop the passage to make a ceiling. The diggers followed them now, burying the stone under dirt from the enormous mound they had dug up out of the passages. They didn’t leave anywhere for stairs to go down, only the one little round hole on the outside, above the antechamber, and the one big center hole in the middle. Ariadne was baffled. They had dug that whole enormous winding passage for nothing. Once it was buried, no one would even know it was there under the meadow. They weren’t even marking the surface. By the time the men got back to the middle again, there was already a thick furry coat of grass covering everything behind them: it was late spring, and the sky had been generous with both sunshine and rain.

Then yesterday, the final cart had come, hauled up from the city by a team of four big oxen, carrying two circular metal slabs braced on their sides, one big and one little, like coins for giants, and just the right size to fit over the two rooms. But they had been shrouded in sheets, so Ariadne still hadn’t understood what the shrine was really for. But now the six workmen were standing by to put the big slab into the ground, and they had uncovered it, just barely visible in the coming light: a massive bronze disc covered with beaten gold, with a central hatch, engraved with the great head of the bull, surrounded by great locks of iron.

The Oreth led Minotaur to the waiting open hole. They went around to the far side and stood there watching him. The workmen drew back against the cart as he passed by. They had left a rope dangling down inside the hole. Minotaur stood on the edge looking down, and Ariadne gave a cry from the window, shouted, “Don’t, don’t!” but it worked the wrong way; his hood twitched, where his big ears underneath had twisted around to hear her, and then he sat down on the edge of the hole with his sandaled feet hanging over, and he let himself down inside.

The workmen didn’t move even after he vanished. Finally one of the Oreth made a sharp, impatient gesture, and one of them went with dragging steps to the edge and then hurriedly pulled out the rope, hand over hand quickly, and backed away as soon as he could. Then they rolled the big golden seal to the edge and tipped it over carefully to fit perfectly into the hole. They hurriedly buried the seal all the way up to the edge of the central hatch, and the Oreth checked the locks. There was a narrow circular grating that went around the head of the bull, an opening for air.

The workers had already put the smaller seal over the anteroom. It also had a hatch in it, but without the seal of the bull. Ariadne watched from the tower while the Oreth opened the hatch and shoved all the workmen in, one after another, screaming for mercy and struggling and disappearing nevertheless, one after another, down into the dark, until the Oreth slammed the metal hatch back down on top of them, and turned the locks. Six was a wrong number, and she wondered where Daedalus had gone; she hadn’t seen him for the last week. A long time later, she heard that he’d fled by ship to Greece, abandoning his wife and son, just before the labyrinth had been finished. By then people were saying he was a sorcerer and the labyrinth was magic, but she knew that the only magical thing in it was her brother, her little brother, a piece of the god put down into the dark.

In the morning she opened her eyes and knew right away that Minotaur was gone. She got up and went to the window. The meadow was a smooth, ordinary green meadow, the grass verdant and lush. Everything buried deep and silent, and only the two golden seals set into the earth, so low that in the dim light they were hidden in the grass, unless you knew where to look to catch a glimpse of gold.

Her mother had kept Ariadne inside all day yesterday, even after the Oreth had gone, but it was still early in the morning and no one else was awake. Her mother stayed up in the evenings, drinking wine, and after she went to bed, her two women finished whatever she had left, so they all slept late and heavily. Last night, her mother had opened a second jar of wine, leaving it almost unwatered, and she had poured Ariadne a glass. Ariadne had left it standing untouched on the table, along with her food.

She crept past the snoring women on the floor and her mother lying sprawled behind the thin curtains of her bed, and got outside without being stopped. She ran to the meadow, but she couldn’t open the hatches herself, no matter how she turned the locks back and forth, no matter how she poked her fingers and branches into the cracks around them and strained. Either she didn’t know the trick of the locks, or the doors were just too heavy. The metal was cold and slick with dew under her fingers as she struggled. Finally she gave up and she went back to the central seal, to the narrow grating, and called through the dark opening.

But Minotaur couldn’t answer her, if he was there: he couldn’t speak. Once after a month of coaxing he’d tried to say something to her, and she’d woken up three days later in her bed, her ears and nose still crusted with dried blood. He’d refused even to try, after that. He might be somewhere wandering in that endless passage, alone in the dark, and not have heard her coming.

She fell silent, kneeling in the dirt by the seal, tears dripping off her face, and then she got up and went to the small seal, over the antechamber, and did her best to walk all over the meadow, stamping and jumping every so often, so that he’d hear her footsteps overhead, and know that she was there. And when she finally came back to the big seal in the center, she knelt there and talked to him until the sun was well up and her throat was dry, and then she stole back into the tower before anyone noticed she was gone. That day, and every day after. She crept out of her mother’s tower in the hour of dawn, and she told Minotaur every day that she’d be back the next, so when at last she didn’t come, he’d know that the chain around his neck was gone, and he could leave.

The third time she started to walk over the meadow, the grass suddenly began to wither just ahead of her toes, green blades curling in to form dusty yellow lines that she could see even in the early light. She stamped along between them, all the way until they brought her finally to the waiting center, and there she turned around and looked out over the meadow as the sun came up, and the yellow grass lines made an outline, faint but there, marking out the buried passageway underground.

After that, when she walked the path, she felt something moving beneath her feet: not quite a sound, not quite a vibration, but like heavy footfalls echoing against marble walls, deep within. So then she knew he was there, walking with her, the way they’d once walked together balancing over the walls. Only he had fallen inside, after all.

One week after they put Minotaur into the labyrinth, a priest came to dedicate the new shrine. It was only a young one, in a red robe, with a slightly younger acolyte leading a tired, skinny bull for a sacrifice; the hill was a hot, steep walk up from the city. Minos had needed to give some excuse, for sending Daedalus and the workmen up to dig and dig for months, but he didn’t mean for the shrine to be important. It was meant to be forgotten. From the tower, Ariadne saw the priest and the acolyte come to the edge of the meadow, where they saw the pattern. They stood there staring, and they didn’t kill the bull, after all. They went away instead.

The next day they came back, the young priest and two older ones. They stood beside the pattern for a long time, hesitating, as though they wanted to step onto it but didn’t quite dare. Then they went away too, and the day after that they came back, the three priests, the acolyte leading the bull again and carrying water jugs dewed with moisture slung on his back, the high priest puffing along in his white robe with the red bands, and Minos himself with them. But this time they came in the early hours of the morning, before the sun was up, and Ariadne was still walking along the pattern to the seal. They saw her, and the young priest called out angrily, “What do you mean by this, girl? How dare you put your feet on the god’s path. Do you think this is a dancing floor?”

She stopped and turned. The deep echoing was there under her feet; it stopped, too. The men were standing on the edge of the pattern, her father’s face darkened, all of them waiting for her to cringe and apologize. She stood for a moment without moving. If she obeyed them, and came off, they would leave a priest here to watch over the labyrinth, so she could never come again. Minotaur would never know when they sent her away. There was a waiting beneath her feet, like the change in the light before rain came, even though the sun was coming up and lining the next mountains over with brilliance.

“It is for me,” she said.

Her father said sharply, “Watch your tongue, girl,” which meant now she was going to be whipped for impertinence. “Come here at once.”

She took a breath and faced forward again and kept going along the path. “With your permission, I will bring her back,” the young priest said to the king, to the high priest.

He untied his sandals before he came to get her. She saw him coming for her, cutting across the lines of the pattern, and then she had to turn her back on him to follow the next turn, one single foot’s length along the pattern, and when she turned again with the following step, moving a little closer to the center, he wasn’t there anymore. It wasn’t a vanishing. There was only a moment when he was there, and then there was a moment when he wasn’t, and all the moments in between those two moments were one moment, and endless.

The other men were still waiting impatiently. They were farther away, and they were watching her; it took them a little longer to notice that he was gone. They looked around for him, confused at first, and then they looked at the empty sandals standing at the side of the pattern, and then they all drew back several steps from the labyrinth, and said nothing more. Ariadne kept going all the way to the seal, with thunder moving beneath her feet, and she knelt and said to the dark crack around the door, “I’m here.”

They were still waiting when she came back to them. She could just have walked away, but she stayed on the pattern, and she didn’t go quickly, letting the hot sun come up and bake them a little in their wigs and their crimped, oiled hair. Their robes were stained with growing dark patches of sweat when she came out finally, and stepped off the labyrinth.

She stood before them, and they looked at her, faces downturned and unsmiling, and then the high priest turned to her father and said, “She must be consecrated to the god,” insistent, and her father’s jaw tightened—thinking mostly, Ariadne knew, of all those heavy golden chains he’d put around her neck, his false apology, and how he wouldn’t be able to use them and her to buy some lord’s loyalty.

“I have to be back here tomorrow,” she said.

They all paused and stared at her, and the high priest said, sternly, “My daughter, you will enter the temple—”

“I’m not your daughter,” she interrupted. “I have to be here tomorrow morning. He’ll be waiting for me.”

The acolyte blurted, “Yidini?” meaning the young priest. His voice was ragged with desperation, but he flinched when the high priest gave him a hard narrowed look, and subsided; the other priests shifted uneasily, looking away from him.

Ariadne looked straight at her father and said, “Do you need me to say?” A threat, and even in his anger, his eyes darted to the labyrinth, to the gold seal on his hidden shame.

Minos was a clever man. He’d thought of one trick after another: to win the throne over his brothers, to keep it in his grasp, to build his wealth. And now he turned back to the high priest and said, “You will consecrate the tower as a temple, and my daughter will abide here, and tend the god’s shrine, which he has chosen to favor.”

Pasiphae went back to the palace in the city, gladly. Three women of the temple came to live with Ariadne instead. Reja, the eldest and a priestess, had a mouth whose corners turned down and plunged into dark hollows. Her hand often flinched when she taught Ariadne, as though she would have slapped a different novice, who wasn’t the daughter of the king and the chosen of the god. When she came, she tried to make herself the mistress of the tower: she wanted to take the queen’s room for herself, and put the rest of them together on the two higher floors.

Ariadne didn’t do anything about it. She didn’t see what she could do. The other women did what Reja told them. That night they came upstairs with her, to the room where she had slept with Minotaur, and the two novices lay down on the big cot where he had slept. It was wide enough for both of them. Then they put out the candle, and even as Ariadne was falling asleep, one of the young women jerked up and said, “Who’s there?” into the dark.

The other one sat up too. They both sat there shaking, and after a moment they scrambled up with all their bedclothes and went creeping silently down the stairs, and they wouldn’t come back upstairs even when Reja scolded them. Then she came up angry herself to accuse Ariadne of scaring them, and Ariadne sat up on her own cot and looked at her and said, “I didn’t do anything. You lie down, if you want,” and Reja stared at her, and then she went to the cot and lay down on it, on her back staring up into the dark with her angry frowning mouth, and then after a few moments she twitched, and twitched again, and then she got quickly up off the bed and stood in the middle of the room and looked down at Ariadne, who looked back at her, and then Reja said, in a very different voice, not angry, hushed, “Who slept in this room with you?”

The moon was outside, so she could see Reja’s eyes, each one a small gleam in the dark, nothing like the deep shine of her brother’s eyes, as if he hadn’t ever been here at all. “His name is Minotaur,” Ariadne said, defiantly. “He’s under the hill now.”

Reja was silent, and then she went downstairs and didn’t scold the other priestesses anymore. The next morning she sat up when Ariadne went out, waking even though Ariadne was creeping out of habit, and she got up and followed her outside. She stood and watched her dance through the labyrinth all the way to the center, and when Ariadne came back out, Reja said, “I will show you how to pour the libations,” and the rest of that day, Reja taught her with a jug of water, and then the next morning she was awake and waiting, before Ariadne went to the labyrinth, with a stoppered jug full of olive oil, deep green and fragrant, from the first pressing. Ariadne took it. She carried it with her along the path, all the way to the seal, where she didn’t follow the ritual. Instead she poured the oil all around the hatch, its locks, through the cracks, hoping to make it easier to open. But when she tried, it didn’t help. The hatch was still too heavy for her. She couldn’t even shift it a little bit in its groove. But as she knelt by the hatch with her fingers sore, unhappy and angry all over again, the seal beneath her moved a little, the whole hillside taking a deep sighing breath, and a little air came out of the grating from inside, full of the strong smell of the olive oil, fresh and bright, instead of the faint musty smell of earth.

It frustrated Reja that Ariadne wouldn’t do the rituals properly, but she didn’t scold her any more than she slapped her; she only grimly kept teaching her, one after another, the proper words and gestures for wine instead of oil, perfume instead of wine, as if hoping if she did it often enough, one day it would stick. Ariadne did the lessons, a little out of boredom and a little to be at peace with Reja, who managed things with ruthless efficiency and also sent the novices down to the city each day to bring something else to pour out, another bright living smell to send into the dark.

The acolyte who’d come up with the priests was set to guard them. There was nothing to guard them from, at least no danger that hadn’t always been there, the last seven years while Ariadne had lived there with the queen and all her jewels, but the acolyte had seen something uncomfortable, and it was easier for the high priest and the king to forget about it if he wasn’t around.

He wasn’t allowed to stay with the women, of course; instead he had to build a hut to shelter in farther down the hillside, and Reja kept a hawk’s cold eye on him any time he came up to their well for water, close enough to see the novices. The second day after they arrived, she paused in the prayer she was teaching Ariadne, and she got up and marched to a bush near where the trail down the mountain began. She pulled Nashu out of it by his ear and told him sharply if she caught him at it again, she would have him whipped out of the temple.

But he wasn’t spying on the novices, even though they had their skirts hiked up around their waists, working on the garden. “I want to know where Yidini is!” he said, his voice wobbling up and down through a boy’s soprano, and wrenched himself loose to take a step toward Ariadne, his fists clenched. “Where did you send him?”

She hadn’t been sorry for the priest; to her, the priests were the ones who’d made her brother hide, who’d have put him to death. And Yidini had meant to drag her away. But she was sorry for Nashu, because someone he loved had been taken away and sent into the dark. She still couldn’t help him, though, and when she said, “I don’t know,” he was angry, and he hated her for it.

He crept up the hill sometimes after that to watch her walking to the seal, in the dim early mornings. He hid in the bushes along the edge of the hill. Reja with her older eyes didn’t catch him, but Ariadne knew he was there. She didn’t say anything. There was something a little comforting in how much he cared; it meant she wasn’t stupid for caring, either. She kept coming every day herself to pour the offerings down, a little bit of the mortal world, so her brother wouldn’t disappear forever into the earth.

She wanted the days to change, sometimes; she had been afraid of being taken away, and now some small part of her wanted to go, wanted the life she’d avoided. She could still have had it. The golden chains sat in a locked chest in her room, the room where no one went but her, except hurriedly, in broad daylight, to sweep and clean. Her father, who had kept a bull the god had sent, would gladly have made some excuse for releasing her from the temple to buy a lord with her. And then her brother would melt back into the god like a little pond of water draining into a stream, and the vegetation would creep over the seals, and new grass would grow where the yellowed lines stood.

So she stayed.

The days did begin to change a little, over time. It was the poor hill folk who came first, the ones who couldn’t afford to go to the temple in the city. They brought cups of milk, and an egg or two, and foraged greens. Once an anxious young man came with a lamb on a rope, and when Ariadne came out of the tower that morning, he was waiting on the edge of the labyrinth, and he knelt to her as if to the king and said, low, “My wife is giving birth soon, and the ewe died,” a plea to turn aside the evil omen.

Reja looked at the lamb with greedy pleasure, thinking of the priest’s portion, the best meat, and she said to Ariadne, “I’ll show you how to make sacrifice,” but Ariadne looked at the lamb with its wide uncertain liquid eyes, deep and brown, and said, “No.” She took the rope and led the lamb with her through the passage to the seal. It butted at her as they went, bleating and trying to suck at her fingers, hungry, but she stayed on the track, and at the seal, she said, “There’s a lamb here, if the god will take it to its mother, and let the shepherd’s wife stay with her child up here,” and then she took the rope off the lamb’s neck, and rubbed the matted wool underneath it soft, and let the lamb go. It ran away from her bleating.

Reja and the shepherd were watching her from the edge of the labyrinth. It was like the last time: their faces didn’t know that the lamb was gone at first, and then they looked around wanting to believe it had just run away, but there was nothing for it to have hidden behind on the bare hill, and then finally they had to understand that it was gone. The shepherd fell on his face, pressing his forehead into the dirt, and Reja drew back herself, staring, and then she knelt too, when Ariadne came out of the labyrinth.

Nashu was there, too. Later that afternoon, when Ariadne went down the hill to get some water, and she was alone, he came out of the bushes and stood staring at her with his face twisted up, and then he said, “Why Yidini? He was a true servant of the god! You could have sent that old fat priest.”

Ariadne didn’t bother trying to tell him she hadn’t sent the young priest anywhere. She wasn’t sure it was true, anyway. “Why would the god want an old fat priest?” she said instead, and Nashu was silent, and then he said, “Then I hate the god, if he took Yidini,” defiantly.

“It’s not worth your hating him,” Ariadne said, after a moment; she had to think it out for herself. “He doesn’t care.”

Nashu glared at her. “Why does he care about you, then?”

“He doesn’t,” she said slowly.

The next morning, she didn’t dance. She only walked straight to the center and knelt down by the seal and whispered, her throat tight, “It’s all right if you want to go. You don’t have to stay for me. I’ll be all right,” because she hadn’t thought, before, that she was being selfish by holding on to the little part of the god that could care about her, keeping him there buried in the earth, instead of letting him go back to the rest of himself.

There wasn’t any answer. She left the labyrinth, walking slowly with her head down, and went back into the tower, where the two novices darted sideways looks at her and Reja determinedly looked at her directly and scolded her to eat her supper of olives and bread and honey. That night, Ariadne opened her eyes and looked over at the empty cot across the room from her, and Minotaur was sitting there looking at her. He was bigger than the last time she’d seen him, much bigger: two feet taller than the biggest of the Oreth, and his pale cream-ivory horns were wide and gleaming at the points, deadly. She knew she was dreaming, because he was too big. If he had really been there, she didn’t think she could have stood it. But when she sat up and looked back at him, his eyes were still soft and liquid, and she knew he didn’t want to go back into the god, either. He wanted to keep this piece of himself separate, this part that could love her, for as long as he could. Even if he had to stay down there in the dark.

A rich man from the city sent a lamb, for the sake of his wife, but Ariadne told the slave who had brought it up the hill, “It’s not a fair trade. Take it back.”

The sweaty, thin boy stared at her and said uncertainly, “You don’t want it?”

“A lamb doesn’t mean the same thing to a rich man as a poor one,” she said. “And if he cares, he should come himself.”

So the boy went away, and two days later, the rich man did come himself: fat, even more sweaty despite the servants who had trailed him with fans and water jugs, and irritated. “What’s this nonsense?” he said to Reja, complaining. “Now I had to come: my wife’s father took it into his head that if I didn’t, I’d as good as be killing her myself. And in this heat!”

Reja was going to be polite, because he was rich, and a nobleman, but Ariadne heard him and came down the stairs and out of the tower and said coldly, “You’re asking for the god to put his hand into your life. Do you think that’s a small matter? Go away again, if you don’t want to be here.”

The rich man scowled, but he said grudgingly, “Forgive me, Priestess,” because he knew she was the king’s daughter, and then he waved to the ass laden with rich gifts. “I have brought many fine offerings for the god.”

The gifts were all for her, though: red and purple silks shot through with gold, a necklace, a box of coin, candied fruit. Ariadne shook her head in frustration as she looked over them, because there wasn’t anything that she could send down into the dark; he hadn’t even brought wine or perfume, because those weren’t sophisticated enough: only a chest of sandalwood for her clothing and a luxurious loaf of dried cherries pressed with honey and nuts. There wasn’t anything, but that was his fault, not his wife’s, whose father had sent him to ask for her life, and Ariadne looked at his dripping, sweaty face, and said, “Come with me.” She took him by the hand, and led him to the labyrinth, and said, “Stay on the path, and stay right behind me, no matter what.”

It was the middle of the day. She’d already gone, that morning. But the deep thunder came soon under her feet: Minotaur had heard her. She heard the man’s breathing go more and more ragged behind her, a faint whimpering deep in his throat. She didn’t look back at him. The sun was hot on the crown of her dark hair, beating on her like a hammer, and the air over the golden seal shimmered. But the ground beneath her breathed coolness over her, and she kept dancing, all the way to the seal, and then she turned and the man went to his knees gasping, crouched over the seal, so wet with sweat that the drops were rolling off his earlobes and his nose and chin, his clothing soaked through.

“Take off your robes and squeeze out the sweat,” she said, and he stripped down to his loincloth and wrung the robes like a woman getting clothing ready for drying, and the pungent sharp sweat trickled out of them and went into the grating, and the earth stirred beneath her.

She took him out after, back to his servants and his ass, and told him, “Now you can go back to your wife, and tell her and her father that you made a true offering to the god for her. And give the gifts to the people you meet on your way back home.”

She didn’t guess what that would do. It just sounded like the stories Reja taught her, of priests and oracles speaking, and Ariadne liked those, even as she knew that it wasn’t anything like real priests, who needed offerings to live on and in exchange made a comforting show to distract men from death. But it worked, even if she hadn’t meant it to work. The rich man came stumbling down the hill still full of terror, and pressed wealth into the hands of shepherds and a bewildered milkmaid and beggars in the street, and the whispers came down from the country folk and went in through the city gates with him, and after that even the city people said, The god is there on the mountain, and the king’s daughter is beloved of him.

Reja didn’t have to send the novices down to get offerings anymore. People came and brought them, often without any request attached. And a few fools came to see the god, because they didn’t think it was real. Once it was a group of six drunken young noblemen whose fathers were too healthy and didn’t give their sons enough work to do, and they showed up in the early hours shouting up at the tower windows that they wanted to speak with the god.

Ariadne was coming down anyway, because it was time; in summer the sun came early and quick. The drunken youths smiled at her, and one of them took her hand and bowed over it and said mournfully, putting it to his chest, “But you’re too pretty to be locked up here with no lover but a buried god.”

“He’s my brother,” Ariadne said. The young man was good-looking, at least in the dim light, and she half liked the silliness, but Reja was at her shoulder, tense, afraid of something Ariadne had never had to fear before. That fear was trying to creep into her, telling her without words that she was a woman now, with breasts and her hair unbound, and fair game for drunk men who didn’t believe in the god.

“Even worse!” the young man said. “Won’t you have a drink with us? Here, we’ve the finest mead, brewed from my father’s hives.”

“It’s time for me to go to the labyrinth,” Ariadne said. “You can come if you want. You can bring it as an offering.”

“Then lead on, and let me meet your brother!” the young man declared. “I’ll show him a man worthy to court his sister!” His name was Staphos, and he kept smiling at her, and touching her hand. “Hurry and make the offering,” he murmured to her as they walked. “I know what I want to ask the god for.” His friends were singing, arm in arm with one another.

They were near the labyrinth when the bushes stirred, and Nashu came out and blurted, “Don’t go in there with her!”

“Oh, so you do have some company up here!” one of the other youths said, gleefully, and Nashu said angrily, “I’m trying to save you! If you go with her, the god will take you,” and they all started laughing, a drunken joyful noise, and Ariadne turned and took the jug of mead from Staphos and said, “He might. It’s up to you if you want to come. Don’t stray from the path, if you do,” and she turned and put her foot on the path as the sun began to come up.

Staphos laughed again, and fell in behind her. The others came, too, singing a marching song and doing a mocking high-step behind her own dance, but the deep drumming echo rose beneath to meet them, and their song began to die away little by little. “Keep singing,” she said, over her shoulder, but they kept fading out, until suddenly Staphos began a faint and wavering temple song, one Reja hadn’t taught her, deep and chanted: one of the men’s songs, probably. She felt that Minotaur heard it, and wanted to listen, and the deep echoes went quieter beneath them. Soon the young noblemen could sing it too, the repetition of the chant at least, which was only four syllables strung together in two different patterns.

They came to the seal, and Ariadne poured out the honey-strong mead, with all of them in a ring around her clutching hands and still singing. They followed her out again in silence, without singing, without saying a word. She stood on the hill watching them go down the trail in sunlight, and only then she noticed herself that Staphos wasn’t with them anymore. She wasn’t sure when he’d gone.

Staphos wasn’t a lamb, or even a young priest. He was the eldest son of one of her father’s richer lords, and he’d been betrothed to the daughter of another. It made trouble below for her father, who wanted to make it someone else’s trouble, as he always did. He sent a group of priests up to question her, one of them Staphos’s cousin, and they questioned the novices, and Reja, and the acolytes also.

Nashu tried to get her into trouble, but he was too young and bad at lying. He told three different made-up grotesque stories about her butchering men on the seal, and then he gave up and told them that her brother the god lived under the hill, and she gave him offerings, and he took people who made her angry. And when the interrogating priest said, “Why my cousin, then?” Nashu blurted, “He tried to lie with her,” which would have required the family to chisel Staphos’s name off his tomb and cast him into the dark forever, if she had confirmed it.

But she was sorry about Staphos, so she told the priest, “He was only joking. The god wanted him, so the god took him. That’s all I can tell you.”

A messenger came two days later to summon her down to her father’s palace. Ariadne didn’t want to go. In her father’s house, there would be guards and rooms with locked doors and lies shut up inside them, and if she said the wrong thing, she’d be shut up into one of them too. “I have to make the offering first,” she said, and took a jar of oil out to the seal, and after she poured it down she said softly, “I have to go to the palace. I don’t know if he’ll let me come back.”

The deep faint tremor lingered beneath her feet all the way to the labyrinth’s end, and there it paused for a moment, and came on with her. The messenger and the escort of guards looked over their shoulders uneasily as they walked; and Reja, who had insisted on coming as chaperone, kept moving her lips silently in the formal chant to the god; and when they stopped for water, a few times, she knelt and prayed aloud, a prayer for mercy, while the soldiers opened and closed their hands around their hilts.

When Ariadne stepped onto the paved streets of Knossos, the sensation didn’t disappear, but it receded deeper, muffled, and the soldiers relaxed in relief. They took her to the palace, and up another muffling flight of stairs into the higher chambers, until there was barely a faint echo lingering when the Oreth themselves took her the last of the way into the throne room, her father sitting with stern downturned mouth in state, the high priest standing important beside the throne in robes, and both of them looking down at her from the height of the dais, so she had to look up at them. There was no one else in the room, only the Oreth on either side of her, and Minos said, “Daughter, two men have died at the god’s shrine, under your hands. What have you to say of it?”

His voice bounced against the walls of the room, the heavy stone clad in marble: he knew how to pitch it to make the reverberations bright and loud, so his voice came at her from all sides, a whispering echo arriving a moment after the first sound reached her ears. But the floor under her swallowed the sound, and it fell away deadened.

“They didn’t die under my hands,” she said. “They went to the god. All three of them.”

Her father’s lips thinned, his hands closing around the gilded bull’s-head ends of the arms of his throne, flexing. He looked at the Oreth around her, and then back at her, a warning to keep quiet, but he didn’t need to worry. The high priest didn’t care: he thought the third one was a shepherd, some poor man, someone who didn’t matter. “It is not for you to decide who will go to the god, girl,” he said to her.

“It’s not for you, either,” she said, without looking away from her father.

“You dare too far!” the high priest said, sharp and indignant, with a quick look at Minos, a demand.

“Strike her across the buttocks with the flat of your blade,” Minos said, to the head of the Oreth, and the man drew his sword instantly and struck her with it, a hard painful shock that rolled through her body, up to her head and down in a tingle along her spine and back out through her legs, down, down into the ground, down into the ground where it began to echo back and forth, an echo that didn’t die away, an echo that built a thunder-rumble far, far below that grew and grew until it came back up through the floor, and the room trembled all over, so the servant holding the tray of gilded cups stumbled, and the cups rang against each other, and the dewed jug of cool wine fell over and crashed to the ground, spilling green and pungent.

It died away slowly, but not all the way; the rumble was still there, close beneath her feet. The Oreth recoiled, stepping back from her. Her father’s face was still and frozen, the high priest staring, and Ariadne finished breathing through the pain and looked up at them and said, “Tell him to hit me again if you want. But the god hits back harder. You know he does.”

So she went back up the hill, and her father gave orders that no one was to go to the shrine, on pain of death. But it was too late. Minos told no one what had happened inside the throne room, and the high priest didn’t either: he didn’t want to be replaced by a high priestess. The Oreth couldn’t tell anyone. But too many people had heard some story about the labyrinth by then, and too many of those had been waiting in the court with interest as the king’s daughter, rumored beloved of the god, went in to face the king and the high priest. Her mother had sent someone to watch, and some of Staphos’s family had come hoping to see her punished, and many others who only had nothing better to do had come to see if perhaps the god would perform some miracle in front of them, either because they hoped it would happen or because they were sure it wouldn’t. And all those people were there when she went inside, and they were there when the whole palace shook, and they were there when she came out again alone, unpunished, and went back up the hill.

They lived with the shaking of the earth in Crete. The footsteps of the god, people called it, and when the god walked too heavily, he cast a long shadow of death. So people came to the shrine afterward anyway, even though Minos forbade it. It was too much of a miracle, too big to be ignored. Minos himself understood that almost at once, just as soon as his temper cooled. He changed the command: no one was to go to the shrine until the festival of the god, in the spring. And then he sent his warships over the water, the fleet that his wealth and his cunning had built, filled with tall strong warriors fed on his fat cattle, with her eldest brother Androgeos in command.

The sails were white against the dark shimmer of the water as they sailed out. Ariadne watched them out of the window until they vanished over the world’s edge. Six months later they came back, without Androgeos, but with seven maidens and seven youths of Athens in his place, as tribute for the god. They came up the hill at dusk, at the head of a parade, a great noisy crowd of stamping feet and cheering: her father trying to make another lie, a new lie, a lie big enough to bury the god deep. And it might work: the god could hit harder, but he couldn’t lie.

They stopped by the tower, and in front of the labyrinth erected a great platform for the king’s throne, facing the other way, with Pasiphae and the high priest on either side. Ariadne sat silent and angry in a chair one step down from her mother, in a wine-red gown that her father had sent and insisted she wear: a gown for a princess instead of a priestess, with her chains of gold heavy upon her. The night came on, dark enough to hide the faint yellowed lines of grass with the glare of torches and feasting, singing and smoke that went up to the sky, not into the earth: a funeral for Androgeos, and honor for the sacrifices, who were bunched up under guard on a dais next to her father’s throne.

Minos rose and said, “May the god accept this tribute,” with savage bitterness, tears on his face. Androgeos had been his eldest son. Pasiphae too had tears, but Ariadne was dry-eyed, still angry.

Then the Oreth came to take the sacrifices, the girls weeping softly and the youths trying not to look afraid, all except one: a young man with hair as bright as gold, strange among the others with their shining olive-black hair. Ariadne looked at him, and he really wasn’t afraid. He stood and looked up at Minos, and his eyes weren’t dark and deep like her brother’s, but even in torchlight they were clear all the way through: the sea on a calm day near the shore, shafts of sunshine streaming straight down to illuminate waves captured in pale sand, ripples on the ocean floor.

And the Oreth taking his arm had a second sword, a spare sword, thrust through his belt.

Ariadne stood up also, despite her mother’s grasping hand, and said through a tight knot in her throat, afraid herself suddenly, “I will lead them.”

Minos only said, “Let it be done,” and gave a nod to the leader of the Oreth, at his side.

She led the way through the cheering crowd and past the dais into the dark, groping her feet out one after another. The way felt strange to her, though she’d walked it every day for three years now. The night was a solid tunnel, the torches in the hands of the Oreth behind her only making small circles on the ground. She thought she had gone too far, that she’d missed it, and then she caught sight of the gold torchlight flickering over the golden seal.

The Oreth unlocked the hatch and heaved it open, two big men straining. The girls were weeping noisily now, crying protests, and one of the youths suddenly broke for it and tried to run, but one of the Oreth caught him roughly; he was a slim boy, and the Oreth was a head taller and gripped his arm in one hand, fingers easily meeting around the skinny limb, and held him.

“Have courage,” the golden-haired one said to them, low and clear, his voice going out over them like wind stilling, and they quieted into a huddle. The captain of the Oreth was waiting with the sword in his hand, the spare sword, and he held it out, offering the hilt. The golden youth took it, grasping it easily. Ariadne stood, tense, waiting for a chance. She was only thinking that she had to warn Minotaur: she had to get to the central seal and call to him, let him know that a golden-haired Athenian was coming, with a sword in his hand and the god looking out of his face with different eyes.

And then the Oreth looked at her—looked at her waiting on the other side of the hatch—and jerked his chin toward the dark hole, a command: go in. Ariadne realized too late that she hadn’t thought about her father, who had now buried a son he had wanted because of her, his daughter who knew his lies, who was held under the god’s hand, so he couldn’t strike her down.

She stood frozen on the edge of the dark, for a single blank moment. She could have run away: she was farther away than the Athenian youth had been, and she could have fled into the dark, across the labyrinth. The god would take anyone chasing her, who tried to hurt her, surely. Surely. But if she ran, the golden Athenian boy would go down into the labyrinth. He would find her brother, her sleeping brother, and make a way for his friends to come out of the labyrinth at the other end: in the first light of morning they would come out, stained with her brother’s blood, and there would be no more earthquakes, no piece of the god left under the hill, and the green grass would grow over the lines. Her father would reward him, call him blessed of the god, to have fought his way through the underworld. If Ariadne came back out with him, maybe Minos would even give the Athenian his own daughter to wife, and send him back to be a great lord in Athens, far away, where people wouldn’t put her to death if she told them about her father’s lies, because they wouldn’t care at all.

She said instead, to the Oreth, “Come and help me down,” and held her hands out to him across the dark hole. The man stood there a moment wary of her, his hand moving uneasily on the hilt of his sword. She remembered his face. He had helped to put the workmen down into this hatch. He had thrust them down roughly, pushing with his big arm and his sword held in his other hand, shoving them until they fell inside. He’d been ready to do that to her; he was ready to do it to the Athenians. He was slower to take a step to the edge, and reach out his hand to her. She gripped his hand and braced her foot against the far edge of the hole, and he let her down, kneeling to lower her into the dark, until her straining toes found the floor and she let go of his hand.

The torchlight made a golden circle of the hatch above. Inside there was only a cool dark, impenetrable. She could just make out the mouth of the passage, darkness on darkness, and a faint sense of the marble walls around her. There was a sluggish whisper of air coming out of it, like someone sighing faintly. She made herself start going, at once.

She heard the Athenians being pushed down behind her, cries and muted protests and soft weeping echoes, but worse than that footsteps, footsteps that she felt through the marble beneath her feet. She tried to run, for a little way, but she judged the distances wrong, and struck a wall before she expected it, ramming into stone with her forehead, although she’d thought she had a hand stretched out in front of her. She fell down hard, blinking away a dazzle that didn’t belong, her eyes watering with the shock of pain.

But the dazzle wasn’t just pain: a golden glow of light was coming down the hallway. The Oreth had given the Athenians one of the torches, too, along with the sword. They caught her, or nearly: she staggered up even as she saw them coming in a pack around the corner behind, staying close to their leader. She shut her eyes to keep the glare from getting into her eyes, and groped for the wall and went onward dancing instead, her stamping dance meant to wake her brother up, the dance her feet knew even in the dark.

That knowledge was what saved her. She kept her hand on the wall as she danced, along the familiar long curving stretch where the passage turned back outward, moving away from the center and back out to cross a great half-circle from one quarter to the other, and halfway along it, the wall fell away suddenly and unexpected from beneath her fingers: another way to go, a branching in the path, where there shouldn’t have been one. She kept going several curving steps past it on sheer habit, until her seeking fingers bumped against the wall on the other side of the opening, and only then stopped, shivering. The passage air was warm and moist around her, but out of the branching the air came spring-cool and brisk, a scent of olive oil and wine.

She made herself keep going, keep the dance going, and before she reached the next turning she heard the Athenians arguing behind her in the mainland tongue: which way to go, which way the wholesome air was coming from. And the footsteps seemed fewer, afterward, as if some of them had gone the other way. Ariadne went on dancing, putting her feet down as quietly as she could. She passed another branching, another breath of clear air and freedom, even a hint of roast spring lamb, a smell of feasting. In the passage, the sense of something breathing was growing stronger: the slow rise and fall of enormous lungs. More of the Athenian footsteps fell off. Only a handful left behind her.

But she was coming closer. There was one more long curving, back into the last quarter. It wasn’t far now to the seal, to the central chamber. When she passed another branching, a pungent waft of sweat came out of it, sweat and honeyed mead: a living, human smell, full of wanting and lust and strong liquor. On the other side, the thick air was so humid the walls were dewed with moisture, and they almost felt spongy, like the marble of a bathhouse worn into curves by years and bodies, next thing to flesh itself, yielding to an impossible pressure. Ariadne stood with just her very fingertips on the surface, her hand wanting to cringe away. She was afraid, so afraid. She wanted to turn around and run back to the torchlight flicker she could just see coming up from behind her. The god looking out of that golden youth’s eyes wasn’t the god down here. The god down here was the god in the dark, the god grown large and terrible, maybe too terrible to bear.

She remembered suddenly without remembering, a voice that burst into her ears and came out of her again, bloody. She still couldn’t remember what it had said, but she remembered feeling it move through her like an earthquake, cracking open fault lines. She felt a whisper of it moving through her now, finding its way.

She had been pleased when the god had shook the earth under her, so pleased when she’d seen fear on her father’s face, looking out of the high priest. She’d liked it, walking back up the hill to the shrine that made her a priestess and a power, that spared her the fate of her sisters. She’d been angry, and she’d been brave, and she’d brought her brother one offering after another to distract him in his prison, but there was the one thing she hadn’t done, the one thing bigger than all the others: she hadn’t told. She’d told Reja, and she’d told Staphos, small whisperings at night in dark places, but when the priest had come asking questions—Staphos’s cousin, the one who had asked her in the light of day—she hadn’t told him what was in the labyrinth. She hadn’t told the high priest, either the first time he’d come up beside her father or in the palace—the high priest who would have cast her whole family down if he’d believed her. She hadn’t told the people in the square, when she’d come out of the king’s palace with the earth trembling beneath her feet, and she hadn’t told the people come up the hill reveling. Her brother, her little brother, had pulled his hand out of hers and gone down into the dark to save her life, and she hadn’t run down the hill shouting, begging a shepherd, a priest, a rich man for help.

So it was her lie, too. She was in the lie, and the lie was in her, and the lie couldn’t go any farther into the dark. If she kept holding on to the lie, she could only take this last branching. It wouldn’t take her to death. It would go somewhere living and human, because there was no death for her in the labyrinth. Her brother wasn’t angry with her. He didn’t blame her. It wasn’t her fault, and he loved her, and he would never hurt her.

Anyway, she knew where it went. She had watched them dig every inch of the passage out of the ground. There were no branches. The only magic in the labyrinth was what was in it. Her, and her choice. If she followed the branching, she would come to the chamber at the end: and it would be an empty chamber, with a stagnant well, and an open hatch above that she would be able to reach. There would be no one else there. It had been three years. Her bastard half-brother had starved to death; his bones were somewhere in the passage, along with the bones of those poor workmen, and the priest, and Staphos, and soon the Athenians, who had all gotten confused and turned around in the dark. The lie would come up out of the ground with her and turn into that truth. And the people would see her come out of the ground, in the first light of morning, and they would kneel to her. Her father himself would kneel; he would make her high priestess, and she would have a voice that no woman had in Crete, and be safe and powerful, all her days.

She stood there, and then she turned around and waited while the torchlight came down the passage, until the last handful of Athenians came around. The golden one held the torch and the sword, and there were three others behind him, a young woman and two youths, all dark-haired, pale, shivering. They saw her and stopped. “Which way is it?” one of the dark-haired boys blurted, a little older than the others, and taller. “Tell us or we’ll make you!”

“There’s only one way,” Ariadne said.

“There’s a branching right there!” the girl said, a little shrill.

“No, there isn’t,” Ariadne said. She looked the golden-haired young man in the face. “There’s only one way. The branching’s in us, not in the labyrinth.”

He looked back at her, his eyes clear and brilliant as jewels, but somehow familiar after all, and then he said, “Will you lead us?”

“Theseus!” the elder boy said. “Don’t be a fool! The only way she’ll lead you is straight into the maw of whatever thing they have penned up in here.”

“Why would she help us?” the girl added. “Minos is her father; I heard them say so. Androgeos was her brother.”

Then Theseus did pause, and looked at her. “Well?” he said, quietly. “Why would you show us the way?”

“I have another brother,” Ariadne said. “And my father put him down here. If you’ll help me get him out, get away with him, then I’ll help you.”

The other three Athenians wouldn’t come. They stood at the branching, watching them go, holding the torch. The curve of the passageway swallowed them into the dark almost at once. Only Theseus came with her. She heard his footsteps following as she danced her way onward, finding the way with rhythm, the thick heavy damp smell ahead, a warm stink of sweat and musk, a breathing all around her, getting stronger, and then suddenly the wall slipped out from under her fingers, going not into a branching but into a round chamber, and there was a little brightness ahead of her. Not much, only the glimmer of starlight seeping in through the tiny grating, which she could see in darker lines against the night sky overhead and reflected in the still waters of the well.

“Minotaur,” she said softly. “Minotaur, I’m here.”