Ariadne(8)
Motionless and mute, she was sitting on the floor in the centre of the wide chamber. There was less life apparent in her than in one of Daedalus’ statues. Her hair was tumbled about her face and through its strands, I could make out the whites of her eyes.
‘Mother?’ I whispered.
She gave no sign that she had heard me. The stifling airlessness of the room choked me and I stepped backwards, groping for the door. I could not explain the claustrophobic horror that swelled in my throat, I did not know why this scene felt so wrong and why it chilled my flesh even in the overwhelming closeness of the heat. All I knew was that I had to get out, back into the fresh air, back to the scent of the lavender and the humming of the bees around my dancing-floor and everything that was natural and pure and sweet.
As my body jerked away, I noticed a figurine sprawled on the floor in front of her. It was made of wax, or perhaps clay, I could not be sure. I was not even certain that it was a human figure, so tortured and twisted were its limbs. My mother’s hand rested limply a few inches above it, an unfamiliar ornament hanging from her pale wrist – a piece of bone, I thought, something I’d never seen her wear before.
I had known enough horror; my brother’s birth had given me my fill of the monstrous, and I had no wish to stay a moment longer. Perhaps it was just a doll, just a bracelet and nothing more. I did not wait to find out. I turned and fled and I never asked her anything about it. I tried my best not to think of it again, but I had no power over the thoughts – and the voices – of others.
Like a tide, the whispers swelled and rose throughout Knossos. Scraps of speculation reached me wherever I went. A divine witch, she sought revenge on her husband, they said to each other – the washerwomen pounding soiled linen down at the river, the traders mingling in the markets, the handmaidens giggling in the palace chambers and the laughter between nobles drinking wine from the vast bronze bowls in our own great hall. They chuckled at the stories of how the girls Minos took to his bed were seized with agony at the moment of his pleasure, that they burned from the inside and screamed with stinging torment until they died and when a healer that Minos sought advice from cut one of them open, a swarm of scorpions scuttled from her body. They said that Pasiphae had done this with one of her curses and no one doubted what she was capable of, after all. I heard it everywhere, I could not escape it, the serpentine hiss that lingered in the air: She wanted it, the bull, the beast; I bet she squealed with delight and that bastard she spawned, a freak just like its mother . . .
The terrible words oozed around us like viscous oil. A miasma of filth clung to our family, settled on the polished marble and gold of our home, stained the opulent tapestries that hung across the walls and soured the cream, sharpened the honey with its vinegary taint and made everything rotten and poisonous and ruined. Deucalion, lucky in his sex, was sent away to Lycia to stay with our uncle and grow to manhood under the more kindly example of Minos’ gentler brother. Phaedra and I, doomed as daughters, had to stay. If Daedalus longed to run from us all, he no longer had the choice. Minos had him imprisoned now with Icarus, in a tower, allowed out only under the supervision of guards; he would not risk the secrets of his Labyrinth escaping to other shores, empowering another kingdom.
All of Crete despised us. Though they fawned at our feet and vied for our favour, to each other they spoke of our warped perversions and unnatural habits. They cringed before Minos in his court, but whilst they held their heads downcast in submission to him, their eyes flicked upwards in scorn. I didn’t blame them. They knew where the prisoners of Crete would now be cast; how any transgression they made could be punished in that dread maze cut into the rock atop which the palace of Knossos shone. I am sure that Minos knew of their contempt but he basked in the fear that held them in place. He wore their hatred like armour.
So I danced. I wove a complicated pattern across the wide, wooden circle, winding long red ribbons around my body. My bare feet beat out a wild, frantic rhythm on the polished tiles and the long red trails swooped through the air, intertwining and dipping and swinging in time with me. As I danced faster and faster, the pounding of my feet grew louder in my head and blotted out the cruel laughter I heard tinkling behind me wherever I walked. I couldn’t even hear my brother’s low, guttural howls or the pleading cries of the unfortunates who were forced between those heavy, iron-bolted doors with the labrys etched deep into the stone above. I danced and the slow, simmering anger boiled to rage in my veins, propelling me onwards, until I dropped in the dead centre of the floor, hopelessly entangled in scarlet skeins, panting for breath and waiting for the heavy clouds that fogged my brain and my vision to clear.
Time passed. My eldest brother, Androgeos, who had been away for many years honing his skill as an athlete, paid us a brief visit. No doubt horrified by what he found at home, he hastened away again to the Panathenaic Games where he won all of the medals and was rewarded with a lonely death on an Athenian hillside; gored on the horns of a wild bull. My father, with no genuine grief in his heart, sailed to wage his war and wreak his havoc, leaving behind him despair and suffering, not forgetting that amongst the corpses piled in his wake lay the girl who had loved him, the girl he had drowned.
He brought home good news for the inhabitants of Crete: no more would the sinners amongst them be sacrificed to the Minotaur’s appetite, for Athens had been brought to Minos’ heel and forced to yield up fourteen of its children each year to be fed to my youngest brother in payment for the life of my eldest.