The sweaty, thin boy stared at her and said uncertainly, “You don’t want it?”
“A lamb doesn’t mean the same thing to a rich man as a poor one,” she said. “And if he cares, he should come himself.”
So the boy went away, and two days later, the rich man did come himself: fat, even more sweaty despite the servants who had trailed him with fans and water jugs, and irritated. “What’s this nonsense?” he said to Reja, complaining. “Now I had to come: my wife’s father took it into his head that if I didn’t, I’d as good as be killing her myself. And in this heat!”
Reja was going to be polite, because he was rich, and a nobleman, but Ariadne heard him and came down the stairs and out of the tower and said coldly, “You’re asking for the god to put his hand into your life. Do you think that’s a small matter? Go away again, if you don’t want to be here.”
The rich man scowled, but he said grudgingly, “Forgive me, Priestess,” because he knew she was the king’s daughter, and then he waved to the ass laden with rich gifts. “I have brought many fine offerings for the god.”
The gifts were all for her, though: red and purple silks shot through with gold, a necklace, a box of coin, candied fruit. Ariadne shook her head in frustration as she looked over them, because there wasn’t anything that she could send down into the dark; he hadn’t even brought wine or perfume, because those weren’t sophisticated enough: only a chest of sandalwood for her clothing and a luxurious loaf of dried cherries pressed with honey and nuts. There wasn’t anything, but that was his fault, not his wife’s, whose father had sent him to ask for her life, and Ariadne looked at his dripping, sweaty face, and said, “Come with me.” She took him by the hand, and led him to the labyrinth, and said, “Stay on the path, and stay right behind me, no matter what.”
It was the middle of the day. She’d already gone, that morning. But the deep thunder came soon under her feet: Minotaur had heard her. She heard the man’s breathing go more and more ragged behind her, a faint whimpering deep in his throat. She didn’t look back at him. The sun was hot on the crown of her dark hair, beating on her like a hammer, and the air over the golden seal shimmered. But the ground beneath her breathed coolness over her, and she kept dancing, all the way to the seal, and then she turned and the man went to his knees gasping, crouched over the seal, so wet with sweat that the drops were rolling off his earlobes and his nose and chin, his clothing soaked through.
“Take off your robes and squeeze out the sweat,” she said, and he stripped down to his loincloth and wrung the robes like a woman getting clothing ready for drying, and the pungent sharp sweat trickled out of them and went into the grating, and the earth stirred beneath her.
She took him out after, back to his servants and his ass, and told him, “Now you can go back to your wife, and tell her and her father that you made a true offering to the god for her. And give the gifts to the people you meet on your way back home.”
She didn’t guess what that would do. It just sounded like the stories Reja taught her, of priests and oracles speaking, and Ariadne liked those, even as she knew that it wasn’t anything like real priests, who needed offerings to live on and in exchange made a comforting show to distract men from death. But it worked, even if she hadn’t meant it to work. The rich man came stumbling down the hill still full of terror, and pressed wealth into the hands of shepherds and a bewildered milkmaid and beggars in the street, and the whispers came down from the country folk and went in through the city gates with him, and after that even the city people said, The god is there on the mountain, and the king’s daughter is beloved of him.
Reja didn’t have to send the novices down to get offerings anymore. People came and brought them, often without any request attached. And a few fools came to see the god, because they didn’t think it was real. Once it was a group of six drunken young noblemen whose fathers were too healthy and didn’t give their sons enough work to do, and they showed up in the early hours shouting up at the tower windows that they wanted to speak with the god.
Ariadne was coming down anyway, because it was time; in summer the sun came early and quick. The drunken youths smiled at her, and one of them took her hand and bowed over it and said mournfully, putting it to his chest, “But you’re too pretty to be locked up here with no lover but a buried god.”
“He’s my brother,” Ariadne said. The young man was good-looking, at least in the dim light, and she half liked the silliness, but Reja was at her shoulder, tense, afraid of something Ariadne had never had to fear before. That fear was trying to creep into her, telling her without words that she was a woman now, with breasts and her hair unbound, and fair game for drunk men who didn’t believe in the god.
“Even worse!” the young man said. “Won’t you have a drink with us? Here, we’ve the finest mead, brewed from my father’s hives.”
“It’s time for me to go to the labyrinth,” Ariadne said. “You can come if you want. You can bring it as an offering.”
“Then lead on, and let me meet your brother!” the young man declared. “I’ll show him a man worthy to court his sister!” His name was Staphos, and he kept smiling at her, and touching her hand. “Hurry and make the offering,” he murmured to her as they walked. “I know what I want to ask the god for.” His friends were singing, arm in arm with one another.
They were near the labyrinth when the bushes stirred, and Nashu came out and blurted, “Don’t go in there with her!”
“Oh, so you do have some company up here!” one of the other youths said, gleefully, and Nashu said angrily, “I’m trying to save you! If you go with her, the god will take you,” and they all started laughing, a drunken joyful noise, and Ariadne turned and took the jug of mead from Staphos and said, “He might. It’s up to you if you want to come. Don’t stray from the path, if you do,” and she turned and put her foot on the path as the sun began to come up.
Staphos laughed again, and fell in behind her. The others came, too, singing a marching song and doing a mocking high-step behind her own dance, but the deep drumming echo rose beneath to meet them, and their song began to die away little by little. “Keep singing,” she said, over her shoulder, but they kept fading out, until suddenly Staphos began a faint and wavering temple song, one Reja hadn’t taught her, deep and chanted: one of the men’s songs, probably. She felt that Minotaur heard it, and wanted to listen, and the deep echoes went quieter beneath them. Soon the young noblemen could sing it too, the repetition of the chant at least, which was only four syllables strung together in two different patterns.
They came to the seal, and Ariadne poured out the honey-strong mead, with all of them in a ring around her clutching hands and still singing. They followed her out again in silence, without singing, without saying a word. She stood on the hill watching them go down the trail in sunlight, and only then she noticed herself that Staphos wasn’t with them anymore. She wasn’t sure when he’d gone.
Staphos wasn’t a lamb, or even a young priest. He was the eldest son of one of her father’s richer lords, and he’d been betrothed to the daughter of another. It made trouble below for her father, who wanted to make it someone else’s trouble, as he always did. He sent a group of priests up to question her, one of them Staphos’s cousin, and they questioned the novices, and Reja, and the acolytes also.
Nashu tried to get her into trouble, but he was too young and bad at lying. He told three different made-up grotesque stories about her butchering men on the seal, and then he gave up and told them that her brother the god lived under the hill, and she gave him offerings, and he took people who made her angry. And when the interrogating priest said, “Why my cousin, then?” Nashu blurted, “He tried to lie with her,” which would have required the family to chisel Staphos’s name off his tomb and cast him into the dark forever, if she had confirmed it.