Ariadne(4)
There were many such stories. It seemed the night skies were littered with mortals who had encountered the gods and now stood as blazing examples to the world below of what the immortals could do. Back then, my mother would fling herself into these stories as she would her dancing, with wild abandon, before she knew her innocent pleasures would be taken as evidence of her uncontrolled excesses. No one then was looking to call her unwomanly or to accuse her of wanton and unnatural feelings so she would dance with me, unconstrained, whilst Phaedra and Icarus played together, always absorbed in another game, another world of their own creation. The only judgement we were to fear was the chill of my father’s emotionless rationality. Together, we could dance away the dread as mother and child.
As a young woman, however, I danced alone. The tapping of my feet across the shining wood created a rhythm in which I could lose myself, a whirling dance that could consume me. Even without music it could muffle the distant rumble that groaned beneath our feet and the skitter of tremendous hooves far below the ground at the heart of the construction that had truly cemented Daedalus’ fame. I would stretch my arms out, reaching upwards to the peaceful sky, forgetting for the duration of the dance the horrors that dwelt underneath us.
This leads us to another story, one that Minos didn’t like to tell. A time when he was still newly King of Crete and, as one of three rival brothers, he was desperate to prove his worth. He prayed to Poseidon to send a magnificent bull and swore steadfastly that he would sacrifice the animal to bring great honour to the god of the sea, thus securing Poseidon’s favour and the kingship of Crete in one.
Poseidon sent the bull, the divine endorsement of Minos’ right to rule Crete, but its beauty was so great that my father believed he could trick the god and sacrifice another, inferior creature and keep the Cretan bull for himself. Insulted and enraged by this defiance, the sea god devised his revenge.
My mother, Pasiphae, is a daughter of Helios, the great god of the sun. Unlike the searing blaze of my grandfather, she shimmered with a gentle golden radiance. I remember the soft beams of her strange, bronze-tinged eyes, the warmth of summer in her embrace and the molten sunshine in her laughter. In the days of my childhood when she looked at me, not through me. She infused the world with her light; before she became a translucent pane of glass through which the light was refracted but never poured forth its precious streams of brightness again. Before she paid the price of her husband’s deception.
Briny and barnacled, from the depths of the ocean Poseidon rose in a mighty spray of salt and fury. He did not level his sleek, silver vengeance directly at Minos, the man who had sought to betray him and dishonour him, but turned instead upon my mother, the Queen of Crete, and riled her to insanity with passion for the bull. Incensed with an animalistic lust, the desire made her conniving and clever and she persuaded the unsuspecting Daedalus to create a wooden cow so convincing that the bull was fooled into mounting both it and the maddened queen, hidden within.
The union was the forbidden subject of gossip in Crete, but whispers of it reached me, snaking around me in tendrils of malice and mockery. It was a gift to resentful nobles, laughing merchants, brooding slaves, girls riven with fascinated, ghoulish horror, young men entranced with the daring freakishness of it – the mutterings and murmurings and disapproving hisses and sniggering jeers were carried on the wind into every corner of the palace itself. Poseidon, whilst seeming to miss his target, had struck with deadly accuracy. Leaving Minos untouched but disgracing his wife in so grotesque a fashion humbled the man – cuckolded by a dumb beast and wedded to a woman frenzied with unnatural desires.
Pasiphae was beautiful and her divine heritage had made her a magnificent prize to Minos in marriage. It was her very delicacy, her refinement and her sweetness that had made her his boast and must have made her degradation seem so very delectable to Poseidon. If you had anything that made you proud, that elevated you above your mortal fellows, it seemed to me that the gods would find delight in smashing it to smithereens. One morning, not long after Pasiphae’s ruin, I reflected on this. As I was combing through my little sister’s silken tresses, a gift we shared from our radiant mother, I began to weep; fearfully regarding each golden curl as bait to those divine colossi that strode the heavens and could snatch up our tiny triumphs and rub them into dust between their immortal fingers.
My handmaiden, Eirene, found me sobbing into a bemused Phaedra’s hair. ‘Ariadne,’ she crooned. She must have pitied me and the particularly grotesque way in which the innocence of my childhood had been so shaken. ‘What’s the matter?’
No doubt she thought I cried for my mother’s shame, but I had a child’s self-absorption and I was worried now for me. ‘What if the gods—’ I gulped through my tears. ‘What if they take my hair and leave me bald and ugly?’
Perhaps Eirene suppressed a smile, but she did not let me see. Instead, she gently shifted me away from Phaedra and took up the comb herself. ‘And why would they do such a thing?’
‘If Father makes them angry again!’ I cried. ‘Maybe they will take my hair so he is shamed by a hideous daughter.’
Phaedra wrinkled her nose. ‘Princesses can’t be bald,’ she said decisively.
A bald princess would be useless. Minos had always spoken of the marriage I would make one day; a glorious union that would heap honour upon Crete. He should not have boasted. The creeping realisation chilled my bones. How could I defend myself against his wrongdoing? If the gods were offended by him and struck down his wife, then why not his daughter?