And the Oreth taking his arm had a second sword, a spare sword, thrust through his belt.
Ariadne stood up also, despite her mother’s grasping hand, and said through a tight knot in her throat, afraid herself suddenly, “I will lead them.”
Minos only said, “Let it be done,” and gave a nod to the leader of the Oreth, at his side.
She led the way through the cheering crowd and past the dais into the dark, groping her feet out one after another. The way felt strange to her, though she’d walked it every day for three years now. The night was a solid tunnel, the torches in the hands of the Oreth behind her only making small circles on the ground. She thought she had gone too far, that she’d missed it, and then she caught sight of the gold torchlight flickering over the golden seal.
The Oreth unlocked the hatch and heaved it open, two big men straining. The girls were weeping noisily now, crying protests, and one of the youths suddenly broke for it and tried to run, but one of the Oreth caught him roughly; he was a slim boy, and the Oreth was a head taller and gripped his arm in one hand, fingers easily meeting around the skinny limb, and held him.
“Have courage,” the golden-haired one said to them, low and clear, his voice going out over them like wind stilling, and they quieted into a huddle. The captain of the Oreth was waiting with the sword in his hand, the spare sword, and he held it out, offering the hilt. The golden youth took it, grasping it easily. Ariadne stood, tense, waiting for a chance. She was only thinking that she had to warn Minotaur: she had to get to the central seal and call to him, let him know that a golden-haired Athenian was coming, with a sword in his hand and the god looking out of his face with different eyes.
And then the Oreth looked at her—looked at her waiting on the other side of the hatch—and jerked his chin toward the dark hole, a command: go in. Ariadne realized too late that she hadn’t thought about her father, who had now buried a son he had wanted because of her, his daughter who knew his lies, who was held under the god’s hand, so he couldn’t strike her down.
She stood frozen on the edge of the dark, for a single blank moment. She could have run away: she was farther away than the Athenian youth had been, and she could have fled into the dark, across the labyrinth. The god would take anyone chasing her, who tried to hurt her, surely. Surely. But if she ran, the golden Athenian boy would go down into the labyrinth. He would find her brother, her sleeping brother, and make a way for his friends to come out of the labyrinth at the other end: in the first light of morning they would come out, stained with her brother’s blood, and there would be no more earthquakes, no piece of the god left under the hill, and the green grass would grow over the lines. Her father would reward him, call him blessed of the god, to have fought his way through the underworld. If Ariadne came back out with him, maybe Minos would even give the Athenian his own daughter to wife, and send him back to be a great lord in Athens, far away, where people wouldn’t put her to death if she told them about her father’s lies, because they wouldn’t care at all.
She said instead, to the Oreth, “Come and help me down,” and held her hands out to him across the dark hole. The man stood there a moment wary of her, his hand moving uneasily on the hilt of his sword. She remembered his face. He had helped to put the workmen down into this hatch. He had thrust them down roughly, pushing with his big arm and his sword held in his other hand, shoving them until they fell inside. He’d been ready to do that to her; he was ready to do it to the Athenians. He was slower to take a step to the edge, and reach out his hand to her. She gripped his hand and braced her foot against the far edge of the hole, and he let her down, kneeling to lower her into the dark, until her straining toes found the floor and she let go of his hand.
The torchlight made a golden circle of the hatch above. Inside there was only a cool dark, impenetrable. She could just make out the mouth of the passage, darkness on darkness, and a faint sense of the marble walls around her. There was a sluggish whisper of air coming out of it, like someone sighing faintly. She made herself start going, at once.
She heard the Athenians being pushed down behind her, cries and muted protests and soft weeping echoes, but worse than that footsteps, footsteps that she felt through the marble beneath her feet. She tried to run, for a little way, but she judged the distances wrong, and struck a wall before she expected it, ramming into stone with her forehead, although she’d thought she had a hand stretched out in front of her. She fell down hard, blinking away a dazzle that didn’t belong, her eyes watering with the shock of pain.
But the dazzle wasn’t just pain: a golden glow of light was coming down the hallway. The Oreth had given the Athenians one of the torches, too, along with the sword. They caught her, or nearly: she staggered up even as she saw them coming in a pack around the corner behind, staying close to their leader. She shut her eyes to keep the glare from getting into her eyes, and groped for the wall and went onward dancing instead, her stamping dance meant to wake her brother up, the dance her feet knew even in the dark.
That knowledge was what saved her. She kept her hand on the wall as she danced, along the familiar long curving stretch where the passage turned back outward, moving away from the center and back out to cross a great half-circle from one quarter to the other, and halfway along it, the wall fell away suddenly and unexpected from beneath her fingers: another way to go, a branching in the path, where there shouldn’t have been one. She kept going several curving steps past it on sheer habit, until her seeking fingers bumped against the wall on the other side of the opening, and only then stopped, shivering. The passage air was warm and moist around her, but out of the branching the air came spring-cool and brisk, a scent of olive oil and wine.
She made herself keep going, keep the dance going, and before she reached the next turning she heard the Athenians arguing behind her in the mainland tongue: which way to go, which way the wholesome air was coming from. And the footsteps seemed fewer, afterward, as if some of them had gone the other way. Ariadne went on dancing, putting her feet down as quietly as she could. She passed another branching, another breath of clear air and freedom, even a hint of roast spring lamb, a smell of feasting. In the passage, the sense of something breathing was growing stronger: the slow rise and fall of enormous lungs. More of the Athenian footsteps fell off. Only a handful left behind her.
But she was coming closer. There was one more long curving, back into the last quarter. It wasn’t far now to the seal, to the central chamber. When she passed another branching, a pungent waft of sweat came out of it, sweat and honeyed mead: a living, human smell, full of wanting and lust and strong liquor. On the other side, the thick air was so humid the walls were dewed with moisture, and they almost felt spongy, like the marble of a bathhouse worn into curves by years and bodies, next thing to flesh itself, yielding to an impossible pressure. Ariadne stood with just her very fingertips on the surface, her hand wanting to cringe away. She was afraid, so afraid. She wanted to turn around and run back to the torchlight flicker she could just see coming up from behind her. The god looking out of that golden youth’s eyes wasn’t the god down here. The god down here was the god in the dark, the god grown large and terrible, maybe too terrible to bear.
She remembered suddenly without remembering, a voice that burst into her ears and came out of her again, bloody. She still couldn’t remember what it had said, but she remembered feeling it move through her like an earthquake, cracking open fault lines. She felt a whisper of it moving through her now, finding its way.
She had been pleased when the god had shook the earth under her, so pleased when she’d seen fear on her father’s face, looking out of the high priest. She’d liked it, walking back up the hill to the shrine that made her a priestess and a power, that spared her the fate of her sisters. She’d been angry, and she’d been brave, and she’d brought her brother one offering after another to distract him in his prison, but there was the one thing she hadn’t done, the one thing bigger than all the others: she hadn’t told. She’d told Reja, and she’d told Staphos, small whisperings at night in dark places, but when the priest had come asking questions—Staphos’s cousin, the one who had asked her in the light of day—she hadn’t told him what was in the labyrinth. She hadn’t told the high priest, either the first time he’d come up beside her father or in the palace—the high priest who would have cast her whole family down if he’d believed her. She hadn’t told the people in the square, when she’d come out of the king’s palace with the earth trembling beneath her feet, and she hadn’t told the people come up the hill reveling. Her brother, her little brother, had pulled his hand out of hers and gone down into the dark to save her life, and she hadn’t run down the hill shouting, begging a shepherd, a priest, a rich man for help.