The next night I was going to her through the vaults, when in the shadows of the temple store I saw something move. I reached to my belt for my homemade dagger; then the figure stepped into the light, and it was she. We embraced between the gilded death-car and the stack of dolls. She was wrapped in the dark cloak she had worn before. “Come with me,” she said. “There is someone you must speak with.”
She gave me from a shelf a round clay lantern, such as one can darken by covering the hole. When I opened my mouth to question her she laid her hand on it, saying, “Don’t make a sound. We must pass right under the Palace.” After she had led me past the archive room, she turned aside. There was another thread tied to a different pillar. She whispered softly, “It is a hard way to find. Once I was almost lost myself.” She took the thread in one hand, and my wrist in the other. The lamp was dim, and the place pitch-dark around.
The way went winding, through the Labyrinth’s very bowels. We passed old uncouth masonry that looked like the work of Titans or the first earth men. For this was the core of the foundations, belonging to the earliest House of the Ax, the stronghold of Cretan Minos, two palaces ago. These mighty piers, made strong with the blood of a thousand victims, had withstood the rage of Poseidon when every wall had fallen that stood above the ground.
Sometimes she would squeeze my hand, warning me to shade the lamp; there would be a fine crack in the stone above, with light glinting through, and voices arguing or making love. Little by little our way slanted lower, which made me think we were going westward, with the slope of the hill.
Here were no stores, but now and then the rubbish of the ancient earthquakes, broken pots shaped without the wheel, or old crude tools. And once, where the earth had settled, there was a man’s white skull sticking out of the ground from the eye-sockets upward, before one of the great pillars. He still wore shreds of an old hide helmet. He was the Watcher of the Threshold, the strong warrior they bury living under a sacred place, for his ghost to fight off demons from it. I started, and then saluted him as became his honor. Ariadne had passed that way before, and only drew her skirt aside.
At last we came to a few steps and a narrow door. She signed to me to take my sandals off, and not to speak. She took the lantern from me, and quenched it, and set it down.
The door opened softly. Two plates of my necklace chinked together; she stilled them with her hand and made me hold them. Then she led me through some small dark room, where my feet felt polished tiles. Beyond was another door; then air and space, and what seemed light after the blackness. It was starlight coming from three flights above, through the roof-hole over a great stairway.
Beyond the stair-foot was a hall, and going down from it a sunken shrine. There was a solemn, old, sacred smell. On the wall that faced the shrine were paintings it was too dark to see, and midway of the wall a tall white throne.
Through all this she led me, and out beyond. Then there was a door, under which a dim lamplight showed. She whispered, “Wait,” and opened it; within was an embroidered curtain, which fell to behind her. I heard whispers, and a sound of metal. Then a voice spoke, which was not hers. It was the voice of a man, but strangely altered; muffled, and dimly booming. It made me shiver. Yet it was gentle and weary, even sad. It said, “You may come in.”
I put aside the curtain, and smelled sweet gums burning. The air was blue with the smoke. I peered through it and stopped dead, with my heart knocking my ribs.
The room was small and plain, with dying embers on the hearthstone. There were shelves for cups and plates and toilet vessels, a shelf of scrolls, and a table with writing things, on which burned a lamp of greenstone. In a chair beside it, hands laid on knees, sat a man with a golden bull-head, and crystal eyes.
The weary voice, hollow within the mask, said, “Come, son of Aigeus, and stand where I can see.”
I came forward, and touched my fist to my brow.
He drew a long sigh, which rustled in the mask like wind in reeds. “Do not be affronted, Shepherd of Athens, that I cover my face from your father’s son. It is a long while now since I sent away my mirror. This face which Daidalos made for the Cretan Minos is better for a guest to see.” He lifted the lamp from the table, and held it up, moving his head because the mask blinkered his eyes. Then he said, “Go out, my child, and watch the stairway.”
She went softly out, and I waited. It was so still that I could hear the sputter of the incense in its porphyry dish. Behind its precious scent hung the heavy smell of sickness. His right hand, bare on his knee, was long and fine; the left was covered with a glove. Presently he said, “I had heard King Aigeus was childless. Tell me something of your mother.”
I told him about my birth, and, when he asked, about my rearing. He listened quietly. When I mentioned some sacred rite, he reached for his tablets, and made me tell it all, and wrote quickly, and nodded. Then he said, “But you changed the custom at Eleusis. How was that?”
“It came by chance,” I said, “from putting my hand to what I found.” And I told him how it was. Once I stopped, hearing him choke within the mask and thinking his breath had failed him. But he motioned me to go on; and I perceived he had been laughing.
When I had told him how I got to Athens, he said, “They say, Theseus, that you wrote your own name on the lot to come here. Is this true? Or is Lukos trying to excuse himself? I should like to know.”
“Oh, it is true,” I said. “He is a man who loves order. I was sent by the god. He gave me his sign, to sacrifice for the people.”
He leaned forward in his chair, and lifted the lamp again. “Yes, so she told me. Then it is true.” He pulled a fresh tablet toward him, and took up a new sharp pen, moving briskly, like a man who is pleased.
“Come,” he said, “tell me of this. The god spoke to you, you say. You have heard the voice that calls the king. How does it speak? In words? In a sound of music, or the wind? How does it call?”
I thought, “He is right, seeing my birth is unattested, to prove if I have the Hearing.” But I had scarcely spoken of it even to my father, and the words came hard.
He said, “I shall be beholden to you. My time hangs heavy here. I am making a book upon the ancient customs, and this is a matter where the archives give no help.”
I stared at him. Amazement rooted my tongue. I thought I must have heard wrong, yet knew not how to ask. For courtesy’s sake I began to stammer something; but the words died, and we were silent, looking at one another.
He was the first to speak. He leaned his head on his hand, and said in his sad muffled voice, “Boy, how old are you?”
I said, “If I live till spring, my lord, I shall be nineteen.”
“And after dark, when the bats fly over, you hear their cry?”
“Why, yes,” I said. “Often the night is full of it.”
“They cry to the young. And when the old man passes, they are not silent; it is his ear that has hardened. So also with kings’ houses; and it is time then to think of our going. When the god calls you, Theseus, what is in your heart?”
I paused, remembering. In spite of what I knew, I thought he would understand. Which is strange, for it had not always been so with my father. Finding what words I could, I opened my heart in this small close room to Star-Born Minos, Lord of the Isles.
When I had said my say, his heavy mask sank forward on his breast; and I paused, ashamed to have tired him. But he raised his crystal eyes again, and slowly nodded. “So,” he said, “you made the offering. And yet, it is your father who is King.”
His words went sounding through me, deeper even than my grandfather’s long ago; deeper than my own thought could follow. “No matter,” I said. “A good Shepherd will give his life for the sheep.”