The Door in the Mountain (15 page)

As soon as the palanquin bearers set it down, two priests and four priestesses arranged themselves around it, facing out. “I’m sorry,” Ariadne said to Chara. “You were probably intending to steal over there in the middle of the night. Maybe you and he had a secret whistle, when you were children? Ah, well. That was long ago. He’s probably forgotten—and in any case, you obviously won’t get close.”

Chara imagined herself whirling and clawing at Ariadne’s cheeks and breasts and perfect, pinned-up hair. She’d never imagined anything quite so vividly—and the vividness of it was what made her squeeze her eyes shut and wrap her fists up in the folds of her infernal skirt, sucking in air like an oyster diver returned to land.

She smiled as she opened her eyes on the princess’s sneer. “He hasn’t forgotten,” she said quietly.

“Now,” Minos cried, “here, outside the Great Goddess’s temple, hewn in her name by our own Master Daedalus, we shall eat!” Servants were setting braziers around the gathering; the king walked from one to the next, lighting them with his fingertips. Chara thought she could already smell the fat of the hares that were being spitted above them. “Yes, we shall eat and dance and sing, all in praise of our Mother—and tomorrow, just after dawn, we shall give her our greatest gifts: these fourteen youths of Athens, as strong and lovely as Androgeus’s majestic stags.”

Pasiphae stepped past her husband, into the sudden silence. “Yes,” she said, in a rich, ringing voice that reminded Chara of the way she’d sounded years ago, “we praise the Mother and her sons—
our
sons, absent and present. Now dance and eat. Rejoice!” Minos blinked sparks at her, brushing them absently away from his beard.

Night fell slowly in ribbons of crimson and pink. Chara slipped away from Ariadne and her brothers and hunkered down in the shadows beyond the braziers’ glow. Icarus found her there. “Chara,” he said as he crouched awkwardly beside her.

“Icarus.” She set her palm lightly on his finger talons, which seemed sharper than they had before. “It’s good to see you.”

He waved his other hand at the palanquin. “That’s the same palanquin they took him away from Knossos in. He’s in there again, isn’t he?”

A dancer spun past them. His feet weren’t touching the ground. They made silver trails in the air that lingered, thinned, vanished.

Chara said, “Yes.”

“Where was he?”

“I don’t know. The litter was just there on the path, when we came out of a mountain pass. But it doesn’t matter anymore where he
was
.”

“Have you seen him yet?”

She shook her head. They watched the priestesses arrange the sacrifices in two rows before the door—short ones at the ends, tallest ones in the middle—and then ease them to the ground, where they sat still. The girl who’d had red hair was in the middle, at the front. Her chin was touching her chest; her bull mask rose and fell a little with her breath.

“How was it here, all this time?” Chara asked, still watching the girl. She felt him shrug.

“Strange. Dusty. Amazing. But I missed home.”

They were silent, as the sky deepened to starry black. At last Icarus gave a ragged sigh and murmured, “The princess . . .”

Chara turned, about to say, “Where?”—but Ariadne was already above them, hands on hips.

“What are you
doing
, girl?” she demanded. “Come with me. I have a tent all to myself, thank the gods—Deucalion and Glaucus are sharing one, and Phaidra’s in Mother and Father’s—won’t that be charming for everyone. . . .” She paused and eyed Icarus, who’d lurched to his feet and was standing, swaying a little. Chara watched feathers sprout from his ankles to his knees, unfurling like tiny, downy blossoms.

“Bird-boy,” Ariadne said.

“Ari,” he said, and quickly, when she frowned, “Princess Ariadne.” His voice was as scratchy as ever but also deeper.

She waved her hand in the space between them as if she were dispersing smoke, or an unpleasant smell. “Girl. Come with me, now.”

Chara rose. Her knees and ankles ached. She rolled her eyes at Icarus, who grimaced and bobbed his head.

She undid all of the tiny knots in Ariadne’s hair as firelight swam over the dark blue cloth of the tent. After she finished this, she unfolded the princess’s quilted pallet. Ariadne lay down on it and rolled onto her side, away from Chara.

“Sing to me,” she said.

“Princess?”

“Sing, I said. I heard you and Asterion singing together once. You have a passable voice. I wish you to use it now.”

Sometimes he’d asked her to sing after a rite, when he was quiet and far away, nursing fresh burns. Chara would hold a damp sponge to the burns and croon something that was also quiet—and after a few moments he’d stir and smile at her and she’d sing nonsense verses they’d made up together.

The hermit crab’s got pretty clothes

Alas, he hasn’t got a nose . . .

Once, Asterion had laughed so hard that he’d made no noise at all. Once, after they’d sung a chorus about a man trying to wrestle a giant clam, the prince had fallen off the edge of the basin they were sitting on and lain on his back, squinting into the sunlight, grinning up at her.

She sat down by the tent opening and stared past the guttering braziers at the palanquin.
I’d go to you right now,
she thought,
but they’d stop me and I’d never get close again. No. I’ve been patient for an entire year; I can wait one more day.

She sang, softly, gently, until she and the mountain were the only things awake.

The red-haired girl was lying on her side when Chara emerged from the tent in the morning. The air was thick with steam and mist, except for a clear, bright, silver path that wound from the girl’s upturned mouth. Chara drew closer—past the palanquin that was still flanked by priests and priestesses—and heard what was making the path: singing, godmarked and pure. Her own voice in the darkness, the night before, had been nothing.

She picked her way around the other Athenians and stood above the red-haired girl. Her voice spun a coil of silver around Chara. She felt it against her skin, beneath it, tugging like longing or loss.

The melody stopped. “Who are you?” said the girl in her mortal voice, which was thin and trembling.

Chara shook her head to clear it of godmarked mist. “I’m . . .”

The girl rolled her head. She was looking up, though Chara couldn’t see eyes: just two blank, dark holes in the bull mask.

“I’m Chara. Your godmark is beautiful. Is it Apollo’s?”

“Yes.” The girl’s lips curved. “And it will save me, won’t it, when I’m inside this mountain prison.”

Her voice was stronger now, though the words sounded strange—Chara’s language but not quite; edges rounded or bitten off.

“And who are you?” Chara said.

The girl hummed. Two wisps of silver puffed from her mouth and disappeared. “The Great Goddess’s breakfast, I expect.” Her laugh turned into a sob.

“No,” Chara said—whispering, because other Athenians were stirring, and priestesses too, “please tell me your real name—I’ve wanted to know ever since you tried to run away, at the cliff—I don’t know why, but it seems important. Please: please tell—”

“Polymnia,” the girl sang, in four gleaming, descending notes. Then she said, “I’ve told you. Now leave. Unless you intend to rescue me, leave.”

She rolled her cheek back against the ground. Chara stared down at the smooth glint of her head, and at the livid red line where the mask had dug into it.

“Goddess protect you, Polymnia,” she said at last, and whirled away so quickly that she nearly tripped on the Athenian lying beside her.

A few hours later, sunlight had burned most of the mist away—though the smoke remained, clinging to the mountain’s slopes and smudging the sky. Chara was squinting at the crowd, looking for Icarus, when the king strode to the double doors.

“It is time!” he cried, and his people—rested, fed, eager—pressed in toward him. “Time to offer up the first of our gifts to the Goddess!”

Glaucus, Deucalion, and Ariadne were standing in front of Chara. She saw Glaucus lean in toward Deucalion and heard him mutter something. Deucalion growled a response. Ariadne elbowed Glaucus in the ribs and smiled at him.

Chara thought, as she had on the road,
She smiles that way because she knows everything that’s going to happen—
and again she felt clammy with dread.

“Come to my side, Wife. Ariadne, Deucalion, Glaucus, Phaidra . . .”

Ariadne and her brothers and sister walked over to Minos. Pasiphae followed them slowly, holding the long pleats of her skirt above the fuzz of grass and tiny, opening flowers. Chara was alone, now, at the front of the gathering. She glanced over her shoulder at the palanquin, then at Polymnia, who was standing with the others, her head hanging limply. No one was looking at Chara. She edged her way back and sidled over to the palanquin. Not even the priests and priestesses around it paid her any attention.

The return of Chara the invisible slave
, she thought, which made her remember a verse she and Asterion had made up, about a lobster with invisible claws. She slipped even closer to the palanquin, as she was remembering this. She was an arm’s length away. She could see the gleam of the paint and the grain of the naked wood, as whorled and wispy as the mist that parted before Polymnia’s godmarked voice.

“Daedalus!” the king called. “Great Daedalus, come here by me!”

Chara had to watch Daedalus walk to the door. He frightened her, as he had the one time he’d spoken to her, after she’d reeled into him, trying to escape Asterion. “Careful,” he’d said, “the world is hot and spinning.” He’d smiled down at her and placed his large, cool hand briefly on her head, but his eyes hadn’t truly seen her. His eyes were seeing things she couldn’t: she knew this, as his hand dropped away.

Now he was standing utterly still beside Minos. Chara didn’t think she’d ever seen him be so still before. His dark gaze was fixed and so were his feet—he didn’t bob or weave or pace. His hands dangled by his sides and didn’t seek out the close-cropped black and white of his hair. Something caught at Chara’s vision; she turned and saw Icarus perched on a jagged boulder halfway up the mountainside. Even from so far below, she could see that
he
was looking only at Ariadne.

“The Great Daedalus made the wondrous, sacred place that lies beyond these doors,” the king said. “The place that will soon welcome sacrifices and gods.” Pasiphae frowned. She was holding her chin high—haughty, but also, perhaps, unsure. Ariadne’s hands twitched, at her sides.

Chara inched closer to the palanquin. She’d be able to touch it soon.

“Because we who must live outside it will never see its riches, I have asked one who helped to build it to show them to us. Step forward, Amon.”

Amon was just a youth—maybe fifteen, bulge-eyed, tripping his way to the king. He inclined his head awkwardly to Daedalus, who didn’t seem to notice him. He inclined his head to the king, who beamed and set an orange-veined hand on his shoulder. Amon flinched. His smile trembled like water.

“Guide us with your godmark, boy. Show us the altar of the Goddess, blessed Mother of Zeus.”

Amon nodded and swallowed. Chara saw Ariadne smile that thin-lipped smile that was actually a sneer. The princess’s gaze was fastened on Amon, though. Everyone was gazing at him now, except for Chara and Icarus.

Just as she was reaching her hand past one of the priests to the palanquin door’s handle, the air went black and silver.

Her gasp was lost in the wave of sighs and shouts that rose around her. Silver images were stitching themselves into an impossible night sky: images of corridors and staircases; pillars and friezes and urns; bridges over empty spaces of deeper darkness—and, finally, above and beneath everything else, an enormous altar stone engraved with writhing, lashing lines: snakes, carved and living.

Blessed Mother
, Chara cried inside her own head, while others cried it aloud.

“Look at what Daedalus has wrought!” Minos called. The king was invisible except for his rippling, firelit outline, which seemed very far away. “See what
we
have made for these fine Athenian youths, and all those who will follow them! The most beautiful, most majestic temple in the world—and only its designer knows all its turnings and corners, all its steps and pits and scalding, steaming fissures!”

For a moment more the silver shimmered against the black. Then it died, bit by bit, from its altar heart to its furthest, curving edges. The daylight returned, and people cried out again. Chara blinked and rubbed at her eyes, as others were. She smiled a little because Ariadne was glaring at Amon—poor, godmarked boy, kneeling pale and spent on the yellow grass. Pasiphae bent and laid a hand on his neck. Chara thought that the neck was probably hot, and the hand cool and moist.

Minos was staring at Daedalus. Chara felt her insides twist with fear, looking at the king’s face. He was a starving man; a starving, angry, exultant man, panting smoke and sparks.

Daedalus’s right shoulder jerked convulsively and he raised his hands to his ears. His face was as twisted as Chara’s insides were. His eyes swivelled toward the Athenians, but hers didn’t, even though she was curious. All she wanted to do was hunker down beside Asterion in the dark.

She shuffled even closer to the palanquin and set her hand on the door.

“Amon!” Pasiphae’s voice was so commanding that Chara had to glance at her. The queen’s hand trailed up through Amon’s black hair, as if it were a smooth, black fall of water. The youth lifted his head and Chara saw silver licking around his mouth and eyes. “My thanks to you for revealing the wonders of your godmark. There is perhaps only one other here whose gift rivals yours: my son, Prince Asterion.”

Everyone turned to gaze at Chara—or so she imagined, in the endless instant before one of the priestesses hissed, “Slave! Off with you!” and thrust her away from the palanquin. She stumbled backward, keeping her balance only because Glaucus and Icarus and Asterion had so often tried to trip her up when they were children, and she’d taught herself to dance around them. She straightened, ready to glare defiantly back at anyone who glared at her—but all were looking again at Pasiphae.

“My husband the King, in his wisdom, has agreed that Asterion, Bull Prince of Poseidon, shall watch this first sacrifice—and that the Athenians shall, in seeing
him
, witness the might of the gods of this land.”

The priestess who’d shooed Chara off was at the palanquin’s door. She set a tiny key to a lock Chara hadn’t seen, and turned it. A priest wrapped his fingers around the handle and pulled. The door swung silently open.

Legs and backs closed in front of Chara as people drew nearer each other, watching. She craned between two of them—old women, gnarled as olive trees—and saw him. He was crouching in the doorway, because there wasn’t enough room for him to stand. One of his hands was in front of his eyes. Even from this far away, Chara could see the ribbons of scars, old white and new pink, on his palm and the inside of his arm. His horns seemed to be as long and curving as the ones that lined the highest roof at Knossos. He was wearing a white loincloth trimmed with gold. His chest heaved with breath.

“My son!” Pasiphae’s voice broke on the words.

His hand dropped. He blinked down into the crowd, though his eyes didn’t seem to be focusing on any of them. A priestess held up her hand; he didn’t seem to notice it, either. But he jumped. Everyone gasped again as he landed, on all fours. He stayed that way. He raised his head, but his shoulders were rounded, his back arched, his fingers and toes digging into the earth, white-knuckled.

“Asterion, son of Poseidon!” cried Pasiphae. “Stand! Stand and see these youths from the land that murdered your brother!”

Two priestesses put their hands on him: on his back and underneath, against his chest. He straightened slowly.

Gods,
Chara thought,
he’s so tall!—
but of course he was; it had been a whole year. Taller, and stronger, too: the scars on his chest wound over muscle.

His eyes—bull-round, very dark—rolled a bit, then settled, not on the two rows of bald, masked Athenians, but on the king.

“Phaidra,” Minos said, so quietly Chara almost couldn’t hear him. “Daughter. Come and open the Goddess’s door.” A gout of cinders fell from his waggling fingers. His gaze didn’t waver from Asterion’s.

Phaidra walked to the door and set her palms against its metal. She looked tiny. Her golden hair gleamed as she leaned her forehead between her hands. Chara looked quickly at Ariadne, whose lips were pressed tightly together. The princess seemed to be studying an unremarkable piece of sky.

Phaidra’s hands began to pulse with silver. She strained up onto her tiptoes and touched the enormous black lock. The godlight washed over it like Pasiphae’s water, licked it like Minos’s flame. Chara sucked in her breath, waiting for the massive halves to screech open—but instead, when the lock parted with a crack and a clang, a very small door sprang open beneath it. A door within the door; a door that looked like it had been made for a child to pass through.

Minos laughed. “Ah, Daedalus! Greatest and cleverest of builders! Of course our noble sacrifices must enter their place of sacrifice as supplicants. Of course.” Daedalus sucked in his cheeks and said nothing, looked nowhere.

A movement caught Chara’s eye: Polymnia’s head, bobbing down toward the ground. She was grinding her bound wrists together savagely in her lap. Chara thought she saw blood on them, and on the golden rope. She swallowed and looked back at Asterion, who was smiling a little, as he stared at the king. She didn’t recognize this smile.

“My lady wife,” Minos said, “it is time. Speak of this sacrifice. Send them within.”

Priestesses were walking among the Athenians—ten priestesses, twelve; where had they all come from?—and Asterion was twisting toward them, his nostrils flaring. Chara paid no attention to the queen. She watched Asterion’s eyes, and Polymnia’s slender shoulder jerking as a priestess put her hand on it. Chara listened to the murmuring that thrummed beneath Pasiphae’s droning: prayers, whispered in Athenian ears. She saw silver threads winding their way out of Polymnia’s mouth, though she couldn’t hear the girl’s song.

The air feels like storm.
Chara shivered, deep in her belly.

Even though she wasn’t listening to Pasiphae, Chara knew when the queen’s voice stopped. Silence settled, just for a breath.

Then the High Priestess cried, in a clear, ringing voice that Chara
did
listen to, “Accept our gifts, Great Mother!”

A boy—the handsome one, and the closest to the open door—was first. An old priestess pulled his bull mask off while a young one cut the bonds at his ankles and wrists with a long, glinting knife. He rolled back on his heels, reeling as the light struck his eyes. He flailed his just-freed arms and his white robe flared.

Minos laughed and strode toward Asterion. People fell back, leaving room for the flames that leapt from his heels and swinging hands.

“O son of Poseidon,” the king said, still laughing. “Bull-boy. It is time.”

“Time?” one of the old women in front of Chara muttered. “What can our Lord King mean?”

The king was reaching his hands out, now. The Athenian youth was gaping, his narrowed eyes shifting from Minos to Asterion.

Minos stopped walking and lifted his arm. Fire spat from his fingertips and dribbled from his palms.

“You, Athenian,” he said, turning his smile on the handsome one, “you, whose eyes can see now: look on this, as your fellows will after you. Look on the might and horror of this land’s ocean god.”