A BANDONMENT AND F LIGHT Theseus followed the thread out of the labyrinth. When he emerged through the door inset in the great gate he saw opposite him the captain of the guard asleep in a chair. He crept up to break the man’s neck and take his keys, but found that he had been dead for some time and that the great iron ring at his belt had already been stripped of its keys. Making his way towards the dungeon where his fellow Athenians were imprisoned, he found Ariadne standing outside. Her eyes were shining as she waved keys in front of Theseus’s face. ‘I knew you’d make it,’ she said. Theseus embraced her. She could not but recoil. ‘You’re covered in blood!’ ‘I’ll wash it off when we’re clear of here.’ ‘Was it horrible?’ ‘I gave him a quick death. Did you dispatch the captain of the guard?’ ‘The pig had it coming,’ said Ariadne. ‘The things he tried to do to me when I was little. Now, let’s free your friends.’ The pair of them and the joyful thirteen Athenians stole silently out of the palace by a side gate and made their way to the harbour, where they holed the bottoms of the Cretan ships at anchor before boarding their own vessel and setting sail. Day was breaking as they slipped into the open sea. The six youths and seven girls, Theseus and the crew added oar power to the sails and soon the landmass of Crete was out of sight. Although they had scuttled the Cretan fleet in Heraklion harbour there was still the risk of a patrolling warship, so they did not stop until they reached the island of Naxos where they dropped anchor and waded ashore to spend the night. Theseus, now cleaned of the caked blood of the Minotaur at last lay with Ariadne. They made love three times in the moonlight before falling asleep in each other’s arms. A most terrible dream came to Theseus while he slept. It began as a shouting in his ears. ‘Leave! Leave the island now. Go! Take your Athenians, but leave Ariadne, who is promised to me. Leave or you all die. You all die.’ Theseus tried to resist but the outline of a figure formed out of the mists of the dreams and came towards him. A young man with vine leaves in his hair approached. He was at once both beautiful and terrible to look upon. ‘Three choices. Stay here with Ariadne and you die. Take Ariadne with you and you and all your companions die. Leave with your people and you live. My ships are coming. Nothing can stop them. Go, go, go!’ Theseus knew the young man to be the god Dionysus. He sat up, sweating and breathless. Ariadne lay peacefully asleep beside him. Leaving her he went down to the beach to think. The sea-captain had also been unable to sleep and joined him. They paced up and down the sand in silence for a while. ‘I had a dream,’ said Theseus at last. ‘Just a dream, but it worries me.’ ‘The god Dionysus?’ Theseus stared. ‘Don’t tell me you had it too?’ They silently woke the others. ‘We don’t have a choice,’ the sea-captain said to Theseus time and again. ‘We have to leave her.’ When they were far out to sea Theseus looked back and thought he could see the desolate figure of Ariadne standing on the shore in the moonlight. Approaching the island from the other side they could already see the fleet of Dionysus. Theseus mourned the loss of the girl he had fallen in love with, but he knew that the safety of the young people in his charge overrode everything. He had to sacrifice his own happiness. He had to sacrifice her. That, at least, is the Athenian explanation of the abandonment of Ariadne on Naxos. Other versions maintain that Theseus left her on the island because he had no more use for her. She had served her purpose and could be dispensed with. In some Cretan tellings, Dionysus duly arrived in force on Naxos, married Ariadne (raising her wedding diadem to the heavens as the constellation Corona Borealis), had at least twelve children by her and rewarded her after her death by rescuing her from Hades, along with his own mother Semele, and they all lived happily ever after on Olympus. It is hard for us to like a Theseus who could coldheartedly abandon the girl who had been so instrumental in saving him and his companions, and doubtless that is why the Athenian version of the story lays emphasis on the hard choice that faced him and even goes so far as to suggest that Ariadne was already in some way engaged to Dionysus when she first met Theseus, thus throwing all the blame on her. The Athenians didn’t like to hear anything that showed their favourite hero in a bad light. On their way back to Athens, a gloomy and contemplative Theseus was shaken on the shoulders by the sea-captain. ‘Look up, sir, look up!’ Theseus saw that the entire ship’s complement was staring up at the sun. ‘What is it?’ he said, squinting up in the direction of their gaze. ‘What am I supposed the be looking at?’ And then he saw it. Two of them, flying in the sky above. An older and a younger man. They had wide white wings. The younger man swooped up and then down. Even from their distance it was clear that he was enjoying himself.
F ATHER AND S ON Minos was awakened and told the terrible news. They had looked down through the high grating and seen the Minotaur slain in his chamber. The captain of his guard was dead too. The Athenians were gone and the great Minoan fleet was crippled. What is more Princess Ariadne could not be found. Perhaps she had been taken prisoner, perhaps … Minos knew who to blame. If the Minotaur was dead and his killer had escaped it could only mean that Daedalus had somehow betrayed the secret of the labyrinth. Minos ordered that the inventor and his son Icarus should be imprisoned in his tower room at the top of the palace, a twenty-four-hour guard posted outside. There they could await a sentence of death. Icarus stood at the windows of their prison and looked down at the sea below. ‘I suppose if we jump out far enough we might miss the rocks and land in the water?’ he said. Daedalus did not reply. He was busy. The tower in which they had been imprisoned was filled with roosting birds, their shit and their feathers. ‘What are you doing, dad?’ ‘Pass me those candle stumps.’ ‘Making something?’ ‘Sh! Don’t bother me.’ He always shushed him like that when he was working on something important. Icarus laid himself full length on the floor and went to sleep. He had no idea how much time had passed when his father shook him awake excitedly. ‘Up, Icarus, up! Put these on.’ ‘What are they?’ ‘Wings, boy, wings!’ Icarus rose groggily to his feet and allowed Daedalus to fit leather straps around him. He looked round to see what was happening and why his back and shoulders tickled. ‘Stand back and give yourself space and try to spread them.’ ‘You’ve really done it this time, dad.’ Daedalus was fitting his own set. ‘Stop giggling and give me a hand here.’ Slowly he instructed Icarus in their use. ‘But dad, are you saying we have to jump out the window and trust them to keep us in the air?’ ‘I have spent a lifetime studying birds. The air is not empty space to them, it is as solid as the earth is to us, or water to a fish. It holds them up and it will hold us up. Have faith.’ He adjusted the leather straps on his son’s wings so that they sat square and straight and took him by the shoulders. ‘Now listen to me, Icarus. We are flying over the sea to Athens, where I am sure Theseus will welcome us. But take care as you go. Fly too low and the waves will soak your wings and drag you under. Fly too close to the sun and the heat of its rays will melt the candle wax that is holding the feathers together, you understand?’ ‘Sure,’ said Icarus bouncing up and down with excitement. ‘Not too low, not too high.’ ‘Now, shall I go first?’ ‘Don’t worry, dad,’ cried Icarus rushing to the window, ‘I’ve got this. Whoooooooo!’ He jumped and heard his father’s voice calling behind him. ‘Spread your wings! Spread them! Present them to the air.’ He did as he was told and immediately felt the rush of the air press against the wings and hold him up. He was flying! His wings held in the wind and he knew that they would keep him there. His father was right, the air was a solid thing. He accustomed himself to using his arms to steer this way and that. The smallest movement from him was all that was needed to control his flight. Below him crawled the wrinkled sea, hugging the shoreline of Crete, the only home he had ever known. His father appeared in front of him, his own wings spread out. ‘The pillars of warm air rising from the cliffs below are holding us up for the moment,’ he shouted. ‘Once we’re over open sea we can beat and glide, beat and glide.’ ‘Like the gulls?’ ‘Just like the gulls. Follow me, Athens is this way. And remember …’ ‘I know – not too high, not too low,’ laughed Icarus. ‘And don’t forget it.’ ‘Whoah!’ Icarus cried out in sudden surprise as a seagull flew right in his path. He gathered himself together and dived after his father. From far below Theseus looked up and saw Icarus swooping and soaring, plunging and looping. Icarus was some way from Daedalus now, out of earshot, when he spotted the beak-prowed Athenian ship far below. Haha! he thought to himself, I’ll give them the shock of their lives. But first some height. Up and up he flew, gaining height for his planned dive-bombing. He was so high now he could hardly see Theseus’s ship below, so high that … so high that it was hot. He cried out in alarm as feathers began to fall from his wings. The wax was melting! He rolled over to point his head down and dive down as far from the sun as possible, but it was too late. The feathers were falling like snow all about him and he started to plummet. The air, now cold and hard, banged against him. He heard his father cry out. There was nothing he could do. The sea was rushing up towards him. Perhaps if he narrowed his shoulders he might be able to plunge below the surface and come up safe. Daedalus looked down in impotent despair. He knew that from such a height the sea would be like a bed of granite. He watched the body break on the waves and knew that his son’s bones would be smashed to pieces and the life gone from him. ‘Oh Icarus, Icarus, my beloved boy. Why couldn’t you listen? Why did you have to fly so close to the sun?’ Tragic laments like this, with changes of name, have been heard from generations of fathers ever since. It is the destiny of children of spirit to soar too close to the sun and fall, no matter how many times they are warned of the danger. Some will make it, but many do not.fn19 Daedalus dived down and rescued the broken body of his son, which he buried on a nearby island, called to this day Icaria. They say that a partridge witnessed the burial and flapped its wings, mewing with triumph. Perdix enjoyed the tragic justice of Daedalus’s son falling to his death, just as he had been pushed by Daedalus to his. The grieving father wandered the Mediterranean, finding employment at last in the court of King COCALUS of Camicus, in southern Sicily. The rage of Minos on finding that his birds had, quite literally, flown, was ungovernable. His daughter lost, his reputation as a mighty and unconquerable king severely dented, humiliated by the escape of Daedalus, he vowed that he would have his revenge. Accordingly, he scoured the Greek world for the inventor, taking with him a spiral seashell. At each kingdom, island or province he visited, Minos announced that he would reward with gold anyone who could successfully pass a thread through the shell’s complex helical chambers. He believed that Daedalus was the only man alive clever enough to hit upon a way of doing it. After years of searching, at last Minos arrived in Camicus. King Cocalus accepted Minos’s challenge and took the shell to Daedalus, who quickly solved the problem by tying one end of the thread to an ant, which he coaxed through the shell with drops of honey. King Cocalus triumphantly presented Minos with the threaded seashell and demanded the reward. Minos drew himself up to his full height. ‘Only Daedalus the artificer, Daedalus the inventor, Daedalus the traitor can have done this,’ he declared. ‘Give him up to me or I will leave this instant for Crete and return with a fleet to crush you and conquer your kingdom.’ Minos may have been bested by Theseus, but he was still the ruler of a great naval power. ‘Let me go to my council chamber and consult,’ said King Cocalus. By this he meant, ‘let me ask my daughters.’ He knew that his girls adored Daedalus, who had entertained them when they were growing up by teaching them all kinds of clever tricks. He gathered the girls together and told them about the threat. ‘Tell Minos,’ said the eldest daughter, ‘that you will offer Daedalus up in chains tomorrow. But tonight, let him bathe, eat, drink, listen to music and be royally feasted as befits so great a king.’ Cocalus, as he always did, obeyed his daughters and relayed the message. Minos bowed at the honour done to him. It so happened that the restless and ever inventive Daedalus had designed and installed a heating system for the palace, consisting of a network of pipes which carried hot water from a central boiler, the first of its kind in the world. Minos got into his bath that evening, but he never got out. Down in the hypocaust, the sisters heated the water until it boiled. It burst from the pipes in the bathroom and scalded Minos to an agonising death.