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.