But she was sorry about Staphos, so she told the priest, “He was only joking. The god wanted him, so the god took him. That’s all I can tell you.”
A messenger came two days later to summon her down to her father’s palace. Ariadne didn’t want to go. In her father’s house, there would be guards and rooms with locked doors and lies shut up inside them, and if she said the wrong thing, she’d be shut up into one of them too. “I have to make the offering first,” she said, and took a jar of oil out to the seal, and after she poured it down she said softly, “I have to go to the palace. I don’t know if he’ll let me come back.”
The deep faint tremor lingered beneath her feet all the way to the labyrinth’s end, and there it paused for a moment, and came on with her. The messenger and the escort of guards looked over their shoulders uneasily as they walked; and Reja, who had insisted on coming as chaperone, kept moving her lips silently in the formal chant to the god; and when they stopped for water, a few times, she knelt and prayed aloud, a prayer for mercy, while the soldiers opened and closed their hands around their hilts.
When Ariadne stepped onto the paved streets of Knossos, the sensation didn’t disappear, but it receded deeper, muffled, and the soldiers relaxed in relief. They took her to the palace, and up another muffling flight of stairs into the higher chambers, until there was barely a faint echo lingering when the Oreth themselves took her the last of the way into the throne room, her father sitting with stern downturned mouth in state, the high priest standing important beside the throne in robes, and both of them looking down at her from the height of the dais, so she had to look up at them. There was no one else in the room, only the Oreth on either side of her, and Minos said, “Daughter, two men have died at the god’s shrine, under your hands. What have you to say of it?”
His voice bounced against the walls of the room, the heavy stone clad in marble: he knew how to pitch it to make the reverberations bright and loud, so his voice came at her from all sides, a whispering echo arriving a moment after the first sound reached her ears. But the floor under her swallowed the sound, and it fell away deadened.
“They didn’t die under my hands,” she said. “They went to the god. All three of them.”
Her father’s lips thinned, his hands closing around the gilded bull’s-head ends of the arms of his throne, flexing. He looked at the Oreth around her, and then back at her, a warning to keep quiet, but he didn’t need to worry. The high priest didn’t care: he thought the third one was a shepherd, some poor man, someone who didn’t matter. “It is not for you to decide who will go to the god, girl,” he said to her.
“It’s not for you, either,” she said, without looking away from her father.
“You dare too far!” the high priest said, sharp and indignant, with a quick look at Minos, a demand.
“Strike her across the buttocks with the flat of your blade,” Minos said, to the head of the Oreth, and the man drew his sword instantly and struck her with it, a hard painful shock that rolled through her body, up to her head and down in a tingle along her spine and back out through her legs, down, down into the ground, down into the ground where it began to echo back and forth, an echo that didn’t die away, an echo that built a thunder-rumble far, far below that grew and grew until it came back up through the floor, and the room trembled all over, so the servant holding the tray of gilded cups stumbled, and the cups rang against each other, and the dewed jug of cool wine fell over and crashed to the ground, spilling green and pungent.
It died away slowly, but not all the way; the rumble was still there, close beneath her feet. The Oreth recoiled, stepping back from her. Her father’s face was still and frozen, the high priest staring, and Ariadne finished breathing through the pain and looked up at them and said, “Tell him to hit me again if you want. But the god hits back harder. You know he does.”
So she went back up the hill, and her father gave orders that no one was to go to the shrine, on pain of death. But it was too late. Minos told no one what had happened inside the throne room, and the high priest didn’t either: he didn’t want to be replaced by a high priestess. The Oreth couldn’t tell anyone. But too many people had heard some story about the labyrinth by then, and too many of those had been waiting in the court with interest as the king’s daughter, rumored beloved of the god, went in to face the king and the high priest. Her mother had sent someone to watch, and some of Staphos’s family had come hoping to see her punished, and many others who only had nothing better to do had come to see if perhaps the god would perform some miracle in front of them, either because they hoped it would happen or because they were sure it wouldn’t. And all those people were there when she went inside, and they were there when the whole palace shook, and they were there when she came out again alone, unpunished, and went back up the hill.
They lived with the shaking of the earth in Crete. The footsteps of the god, people called it, and when the god walked too heavily, he cast a long shadow of death. So people came to the shrine afterward anyway, even though Minos forbade it. It was too much of a miracle, too big to be ignored. Minos himself understood that almost at once, just as soon as his temper cooled. He changed the command: no one was to go to the shrine until the festival of the god, in the spring. And then he sent his warships over the water, the fleet that his wealth and his cunning had built, filled with tall strong warriors fed on his fat cattle, with her eldest brother Androgeos in command.
The sails were white against the dark shimmer of the water as they sailed out. Ariadne watched them out of the window until they vanished over the world’s edge. Six months later they came back, without Androgeos, but with seven maidens and seven youths of Athens in his place, as tribute for the god. They came up the hill at dusk, at the head of a parade, a great noisy crowd of stamping feet and cheering: her father trying to make another lie, a new lie, a lie big enough to bury the god deep. And it might work: the god could hit harder, but he couldn’t lie.
They stopped by the tower, and in front of the labyrinth erected a great platform for the king’s throne, facing the other way, with Pasiphae and the high priest on either side. Ariadne sat silent and angry in a chair one step down from her mother, in a wine-red gown that her father had sent and insisted she wear: a gown for a princess instead of a priestess, with her chains of gold heavy upon her. The night came on, dark enough to hide the faint yellowed lines of grass with the glare of torches and feasting, singing and smoke that went up to the sky, not into the earth: a funeral for Androgeos, and honor for the sacrifices, who were bunched up under guard on a dais next to her father’s throne.
Minos rose and said, “May the god accept this tribute,” with savage bitterness, tears on his face. Androgeos had been his eldest son. Pasiphae too had tears, but Ariadne was dry-eyed, still angry.
Then the Oreth came to take the sacrifices, the girls weeping softly and the youths trying not to look afraid, all except one: a young man with hair as bright as gold, strange among the others with their shining olive-black hair. Ariadne looked at him, and he really wasn’t afraid. He stood and looked up at Minos, and his eyes weren’t dark and deep like her brother’s, but even in torchlight they were clear all the way through: the sea on a calm day near the shore, shafts of sunshine streaming straight down to illuminate waves captured in pale sand, ripples on the ocean floor.