The next day they came back, the young priest and two older ones. They stood beside the pattern for a long time, hesitating, as though they wanted to step onto it but didn’t quite dare. Then they went away too, and the day after that they came back, the three priests, the acolyte leading the bull again and carrying water jugs dewed with moisture slung on his back, the high priest puffing along in his white robe with the red bands, and Minos himself with them. But this time they came in the early hours of the morning, before the sun was up, and Ariadne was still walking along the pattern to the seal. They saw her, and the young priest called out angrily, “What do you mean by this, girl? How dare you put your feet on the god’s path. Do you think this is a dancing floor?”
She stopped and turned. The deep echoing was there under her feet; it stopped, too. The men were standing on the edge of the pattern, her father’s face darkened, all of them waiting for her to cringe and apologize. She stood for a moment without moving. If she obeyed them, and came off, they would leave a priest here to watch over the labyrinth, so she could never come again. Minotaur would never know when they sent her away. There was a waiting beneath her feet, like the change in the light before rain came, even though the sun was coming up and lining the next mountains over with brilliance.
“It is for me,” she said.
Her father said sharply, “Watch your tongue, girl,” which meant now she was going to be whipped for impertinence. “Come here at once.”
She took a breath and faced forward again and kept going along the path. “With your permission, I will bring her back,” the young priest said to the king, to the high priest.
He untied his sandals before he came to get her. She saw him coming for her, cutting across the lines of the pattern, and then she had to turn her back on him to follow the next turn, one single foot’s length along the pattern, and when she turned again with the following step, moving a little closer to the center, he wasn’t there anymore. It wasn’t a vanishing. There was only a moment when he was there, and then there was a moment when he wasn’t, and all the moments in between those two moments were one moment, and endless.
The other men were still waiting impatiently. They were farther away, and they were watching her; it took them a little longer to notice that he was gone. They looked around for him, confused at first, and then they looked at the empty sandals standing at the side of the pattern, and then they all drew back several steps from the labyrinth, and said nothing more. Ariadne kept going all the way to the seal, with thunder moving beneath her feet, and she knelt and said to the dark crack around the door, “I’m here.”
They were still waiting when she came back to them. She could just have walked away, but she stayed on the pattern, and she didn’t go quickly, letting the hot sun come up and bake them a little in their wigs and their crimped, oiled hair. Their robes were stained with growing dark patches of sweat when she came out finally, and stepped off the labyrinth.
She stood before them, and they looked at her, faces downturned and unsmiling, and then the high priest turned to her father and said, “She must be consecrated to the god,” insistent, and her father’s jaw tightened—thinking mostly, Ariadne knew, of all those heavy golden chains he’d put around her neck, his false apology, and how he wouldn’t be able to use them and her to buy some lord’s loyalty.
“I have to be back here tomorrow,” she said.
They all paused and stared at her, and the high priest said, sternly, “My daughter, you will enter the temple—”
“I’m not your daughter,” she interrupted. “I have to be here tomorrow morning. He’ll be waiting for me.”
The acolyte blurted, “Yidini?” meaning the young priest. His voice was ragged with desperation, but he flinched when the high priest gave him a hard narrowed look, and subsided; the other priests shifted uneasily, looking away from him.
Ariadne looked straight at her father and said, “Do you need me to say?” A threat, and even in his anger, his eyes darted to the labyrinth, to the gold seal on his hidden shame.
Minos was a clever man. He’d thought of one trick after another: to win the throne over his brothers, to keep it in his grasp, to build his wealth. And now he turned back to the high priest and said, “You will consecrate the tower as a temple, and my daughter will abide here, and tend the god’s shrine, which he has chosen to favor.”
Pasiphae went back to the palace in the city, gladly. Three women of the temple came to live with Ariadne instead. Reja, the eldest and a priestess, had a mouth whose corners turned down and plunged into dark hollows. Her hand often flinched when she taught Ariadne, as though she would have slapped a different novice, who wasn’t the daughter of the king and the chosen of the god. When she came, she tried to make herself the mistress of the tower: she wanted to take the queen’s room for herself, and put the rest of them together on the two higher floors.
Ariadne didn’t do anything about it. She didn’t see what she could do. The other women did what Reja told them. That night they came upstairs with her, to the room where she had slept with Minotaur, and the two novices lay down on the big cot where he had slept. It was wide enough for both of them. Then they put out the candle, and even as Ariadne was falling asleep, one of the young women jerked up and said, “Who’s there?” into the dark.
The other one sat up too. They both sat there shaking, and after a moment they scrambled up with all their bedclothes and went creeping silently down the stairs, and they wouldn’t come back upstairs even when Reja scolded them. Then she came up angry herself to accuse Ariadne of scaring them, and Ariadne sat up on her own cot and looked at her and said, “I didn’t do anything. You lie down, if you want,” and Reja stared at her, and then she went to the cot and lay down on it, on her back staring up into the dark with her angry frowning mouth, and then after a few moments she twitched, and twitched again, and then she got quickly up off the bed and stood in the middle of the room and looked down at Ariadne, who looked back at her, and then Reja said, in a very different voice, not angry, hushed, “Who slept in this room with you?”
The moon was outside, so she could see Reja’s eyes, each one a small gleam in the dark, nothing like the deep shine of her brother’s eyes, as if he hadn’t ever been here at all. “His name is Minotaur,” Ariadne said, defiantly. “He’s under the hill now.”
Reja was silent, and then she went downstairs and didn’t scold the other priestesses anymore. The next morning she sat up when Ariadne went out, waking even though Ariadne was creeping out of habit, and she got up and followed her outside. She stood and watched her dance through the labyrinth all the way to the center, and when Ariadne came back out, Reja said, “I will show you how to pour the libations,” and the rest of that day, Reja taught her with a jug of water, and then the next morning she was awake and waiting, before Ariadne went to the labyrinth, with a stoppered jug full of olive oil, deep green and fragrant, from the first pressing. Ariadne took it. She carried it with her along the path, all the way to the seal, where she didn’t follow the ritual. Instead she poured the oil all around the hatch, its locks, through the cracks, hoping to make it easier to open. But when she tried, it didn’t help. The hatch was still too heavy for her. She couldn’t even shift it a little bit in its groove. But as she knelt by the hatch with her fingers sore, unhappy and angry all over again, the seal beneath her moved a little, the whole hillside taking a deep sighing breath, and a little air came out of the grating from inside, full of the strong smell of the olive oil, fresh and bright, instead of the faint musty smell of earth.