Ariadne(6)

I expected to hate and fear him; the beast whose existence was an aberration. Creeping into the room from which the birth attendants swayed, pale and shaken, breathing the salty scent of butchered meat, I felt a dread that nearly anchored my feet to the floor altogether.

But my mother sat by the same window that she had leaned against with her other newborns, bathed in the same exhausted glow I had seen before. Although her eyes were empty panes of glass now and her face was ravaged, she cradled a mass of blankets to her breast and she pressed her nose softly to her baby’s head. He snuffled, hiccuped and opened a dark eye to stare into mine as I moved slowly forward. I noticed that it was fringed with long, dark eyelashes. A chubby hand fluttered against my mother’s breast; one tiny, perfect pink nail at the end of each finger. I could not yet see beneath the blanket where the soft pink infant legs gave way at the ankles to dark fur and hard, stony hooves.

The infant was a monster and the mother a hollowed-out shell, but I was a child and drawn to the frail spark of tenderness in the room. Tentatively, I drew closer and mutely asked permission, one finger extended, as I searched my mother’s countenance for some recognition. She nodded.

I took another step. My mother sighed, shifted and resettled. My breath felt thick and heavy in my throat and I couldn’t swallow. That round, dark, implacable eye still held fast to mine.

Holding his gaze, I reached that final inch and bridged the gulf between us. My fingers stroked the slick fur of his brow, beneath the bulging edifice of rocky horns that emerged at his temples. I let my hand sweep gently across the soft spot just between his eyes. With a barely perceptible movement, his jaw loosened and a little huff of breath blew warm against my face. I glanced up at my mother but even though her gaze rested upon us, it was empty.

I looked at the baby. He looked steadily back at me.

When my mother spoke, it made me jump. It wasn’t her voice but that of a rasping stranger. ‘Asterion,’ she told me. ‘It means star.’

Asterion. A distant light in an infinity of darkness. A raging fire if you came too close. A guide that would lead my family on the path to immortality. A divine vengeance upon us all. I did not know then what he would become. But my mother held him and nursed him and named him and he knew us both. He was not yet the Minotaur. He was just a baby. He was my brother.

Phaedra wanted nothing to do with him. She jammed her fingers in her ears if I spoke of him: how he was growing so rapidly, how so soon after birth he was attempting to walk, hooves slipping beneath him and the awkward imbalance of his great heavy head pulling him forward, toppling him over again and again but, determined, he persisted. She especially did not want to know what we fed him, how he turned away from the breast and refused milk after only weeks had passed, and how Pasiphae, grim and silent still, scattered meat before him, slippery with blood, and he devoured it, rubbing his slick head against us both afterwards. I spared Phaedra the details.

Deucalion wanted to see him, but I saw that whilst he jutted his jaw forward in an approximation of our father’s manly stance and attempted to dispense some cool words of interest, he was shaken inside.

Minos did not come near.

So it was I alone who tended to him, alongside Pasiphae. I never let my thoughts stray to the future – for what were we preparing him? I hoped, and I think she hoped, to nurture the human within him. Maybe she did not even go that far, perhaps she was driven only by maternal instinct by that point, I don’t know. I focused firmly on the here and now: how to teach him to walk upright, an attempt to instil some decorum at meals, how to respond to talk and touch with gentle reciprocity. To what end? Did I imagine him semi-civilised one day, shuffling constrainedly around the court, nodding his great bull’s head in polite greeting to the gathered nobles? A Prince of Crete, honoured and respected? Surely I was not so obtuse as to dream of that. Perhaps I hoped that our efforts would impress Poseidon, that he would marvel at his divine creation and claim him for his own.

Perhaps that is what happened. For I had not considered what the gods truly value. Poseidon would not want a stumbling bull-man, lurching in a facade of humanity and dignity. What the gods liked was ferocity, savagery, the snarl and the bite and the fear. Always, always the fear, the naked edge of it behind the smoke rising from the altars, the high note of it in the muttered prayers and praise we sent heavenward, the deep, primal taste of it when we raised the knife above the sacrificial offering.

Our fear. That was how the gods grew great. And by the close of his first year, my brother was swiftly becoming the epitome of terror. The slaves would not come near his quarters, on pain of death. The high keening of his screeches as food was brought scraped icy claws of dread across my back. He was no longer content with slabs of raw, bloody meat – these would be met with a low growl that curdled my insides. Blank and unmoved, Pasiphae would step forward with the rats, unflinching as they twisted and screamed in her grasp before she flung them to her son. He delighted in their panicked zigzagging, back and forth and around the stables in which we kept him now, ready to pounce and tear their living bodies to shreds.

He had grown much faster than a human infant and I noted the ripple of muscles across his torso as he hunted his rats. His thighs gleaming pink through the dark hair, his chest sculpted like the marble statues adorning the palace courtyard, his flexed biceps and the power of his clenched fists, all crowned with the weight of horned head and blood-smeared snout.

I would have been foolish not to fear him. Or mad, like Pasiphae. But terror wasn’t the only thing I felt for him. Revulsion, certainly, disgust as I saw him snort and huff and paw the ground in anticipation of his squirming feast – but under it all was a seam of raw pity, so painful it would make me gasp sometimes, my eyes brimming with pain as he shrieked for more blood, more suffering. It was not his fault, I thought fiercely, he did not choose to be this way. He was Poseidon’s cruel joke, a humiliation meant to degrade a man who’d never even deigned to set eyes upon the beast. It was Pasiphae and I who were tasked with his welfare. And however powerful my horror became, it was so inextricably wound up with the pity – and, stirring beneath that, a slowly boiling anger – that I could not bring myself to end him while I still could. To smash a brick down upon his head as he ate, to jam a spear into the vulnerable human flesh at his side – even as a girl, I suppose I could have done it whilst he was still a calf. But I could not bring myself to do it, and by the time I had truly grasped what he was – and what use Minos would have for him when he grasped it, too – he was well beyond my strength.