Lost in the Labyrinth (2 page)

Next in age are my brothers Deucalion and Catreus, who are twins, seventeen years old. Ariadne is sixteen, I am fourteen, my brother Glaucus is seven, little Phaedra is three, and Molus, the baby, is one.

If you have been keeping count you know that is only nine children, not ten. I have not forgotten my brother Asterius—I could not do that. He has just turned twelve years of age. He was born, Ariadne says, nine months to the day after our mother heard about the death of Androgeus. Our father, Minos, was far away, sacking Athens, on the day that Asterius was conceived. He could not be Asterius's father. Indeed, no one who looks at my brother Asterius could ever believe that his sire was human. Our mother, says Ariadne, was so angry at our father for the death of Androgeus that she swore to make another son who would bring shame and sorrow down upon Minos's head so long as our father lived.

I do not like to think about it too much, myself.

But I love my brother Asterius. I always have, ever since I first saw him. I was only three and did not understand how odd he was. He was a young thing who needed nurturing, like a puppy or a kitten. Our mother could not feed him; she almost died at his birth. Once they had taught him to suck cow's milk from a little pottery jar fitted with a sponge, the servants sometimes allowed me to nurse him. He would butt up against me, knocking me down in his eagerness.

"Bad, bad!" I would cry, and the servants would roar with laughter as I pulled myself upright by his tail, holding the jar imperiously out of his reach.

No one laughs anymore; they fear him.

It worries me to see how strong he grows. He is terribly powerful now, and as he grows toward adulthood he is subject to fits of moodiness and intermittent rages. It never happens when I am near, but I cannot always be near. And someday even I might not be able to control him in one of his passions.

I am the only one who loves him. He needs me, you see.

I do not fear him; I fear for him.

"If you do not come away this very moment, Xenodice, our mother will have us
both
whipped, and I have no intention of letting that fat Graia lay one finger on me," said Ariadne.

"Oh, very well," I said, and, bidding our brother good-bye, I followed in Ariadne's train.

W
HEN
I
WAS A SMALL CHILD
I
DETERMINED THAT
I
WOULD
never marry if I could not have Icarus, son of Daedalus and Naucrate, as my husband, and so I think to this day.

I have not yet had the courage to inform my mother, or Icarus himself, of this decision. I did tell Ariadne, who laughed.

"You, a royal princess of Knossos, marry the son of a palace workman and an Athenian slave? Our mother will give you in marriage to a wild goat before she lets you marry Icarus."

I was a fool to speak of my love to Ariadne. I spoke as a child does, a child who still believes that what she wants she must have.

"Daedalus is no common palace workman!" I protested. "He is a distinguished inventor and artist. And Naucrate was a wise woman whose counsel our mother valued."

"Oh, and what marriage settlements could we expect your husband to make? Of what political use would such a marriage be? Don't be such a baby, Xenodice. Leave Icarus to the goldsmith's daughter. She has had her eye upon him for some time."

Not the goldsmith's daughter alone, as Ariadne knew quite well. Nearly every woman in all of Knossos had at one time or another found her eyes turning toward Icarus, as flowers will turn toward the sun.

He was so beautiful! I am not myself beautiful, but it is a trait I admire in others, particularly in men.

Ariadne's gaze had strayed in his direction not a year ago, though she might not be pleased to know that I was aware of it. Everything that concerned Icarus concerned me; I had therefore seen and noted every step of her infatuation with him. I watched her as she came upon him sleeping on a wall one day, his black curls spilling down the stones, his body washed with sunshine. She stood silent for a long moment, contemplating perfection.

Thereafter she was attentive to him, trying to engage him in conversation. He had responded as he always did: he was gentle and courteous, but his eyes were remote. I knew the very moment when she began to doubt her power to ensnare him, the moment when she decided that he was beneath her notice because he did not notice her.

Now Ariadne's unusual interest in my brother's servants gave me an excuse to seek Icarus out and talk to him. He was himself more than half Athenian, though one of us, a Keftiu, by birth and training. His mother, Naucrate, had been an Athenian woman, a slave. Minos, our father, had given her to Daedalus the inventor in recognition of his skill, and Daedalus, half Athenian himself, had loved her and married her. It was therefore natural that Icarus would understand the language and customs of my brother's servants.

I lay in wait for him by the paint-grinding shed, where he often did work for his father.

His face lightened when he saw me. If he did not love me as a man loves a woman, he did at least like me.

"Hello, little mouse," he said, smiling.

"I am the Princess Xenodice," I said, "You should not address me so."

"No?"

"No. And you should stand up and salute me properly. Icarus, why do you suppose that Ariadne is so interested in the Athenians? Not the ones that are coming, but the ones from last year." I told him of Ariadne making us late for dancing class in order to inspect them. "What is she up to, do you think?"

"Perhaps it is because your mother has promised that Ariadne may choose one as her personal servant when the new lot comes in," Icarus said. He shook several small charred animal bones out of a leather sack onto his worktable.

"Oh! Has she?"

"I am not certain, but that is what they believe," he said. "They have been arguing amongst themselves about which one she will pick."

It was reasonable. Any of them would be pleased to be the trusted servant of the next Queen of the Keftiu. The work of such a one would be light, his bed soft. For the ambitious, there was also the possibility of great political power in the palace.

"And when do the new ones come? Do you know?"

"If you run down to the harbor right now you may see their sail approaching," he said, beginning to grind the blackened bones with a stone pestle.

"Is that true, or are you saying it to be rid of me?"

"I am grieved that you think I would be so discourteous, Princess."

"Icarus!"

He smiled. "To tell true, my lady, I don't know. They will be here soon: today, tomorrow, perhaps in three days' time. I cannot say what day they left, or what winds they've had. There will be plenty of excitement making ready for them down on the wharf. I thought it would amuse you to see it."

As if I were a spoilt child whining for entertainment! Standing here so close to him as he worked, observing him, and listening to his voice was the only entertainment I could ever want or need. His beautiful, strong fingers were growing smudged with black, I noticed. Making paints for his father meant that yellow, blue, or brown pigment often discolored his nails and stained his hands. I watched for a few moments longer the flexing of the muscles in his arms and back as he worked and then tore my eyes away.

"Yes, well, if you think that the ship will be here soon, perhaps I shall go and look for it," I said reluctantly. I always left Icarus long before I had drunk my fill of his company. I could not bear for him to wish me gone.

But he had forgotten me during that brief silence; his mind was far away and only recalled to me by an effort of will.

"Do, little one," he said absently.

Then he spoke again; "I dreamt of the Athenians who are coming. I dreamt that they rode toward us on the gales of a great storm. And one in the ship commanded the storm and bade it bear them along."

"Oh," I said. For want of anything else to say, I asked, "What ... what did she look like, the one who ruled the winds?"

"It was a man, a young man barely older than myself" (Icarus was sixteen, Ariadne's age). "He seemed—very sure of himself."

"A man!" I said, surprised. "How should a man use weather magic? Your dream makes no sense, Icarus."

Icarus smiled at me again, coming out of his abstraction. The sweetness of that smile completely unnerved me; I had to cling to the paint-grinding table for support.

"You're right, little mouse, little bird. Not all dreams tell true. When I was done dreaming about unnatural male magicians from Athens, I commenced to dream another dream, one even less likely."

"What dream was that?" I asked uneasily.

"I dreamt—" he paused a moment, then shook his head. "It doesn't matter, Princess. Dreams are nothing but colored shadows in the mind. I cannot believe they tell the future, whatever the priestesses may say."

I frowned and bit my lip. I wanted to know his dream.

"When the ship does arrive," said Icarus, "you shall question the captain yourself and prove to me that no man has learnt the mastery of the winds."

"I will," I promised him. I could see that he was humoring me, and also that his dreams weighed more with him than he would admit. I longed to be able to tell him that these were false images. I did not like the look of secret happiness on Icarus's face when he spoke of the second dream. Jealousy bit deep into my heart; I did not think he dreamt of me.

"Perhaps the captain awaits my interrogation even now," I said, and with a familiar twist of grief in my chest I walked out of the paint-grinding shed. I didn't look back.

As I walked down toward the harbor I passed the cages of the menagerie, which was almost a second home for me. I spent as much time as I could spare helping Lycia, the chief keeper. I fed the animals, talked to them—I even occasionally did servants work by mucking out kennels and cages. I was happy there; it was my refuge in good times and bad.

Now my favorite monkey, Queta, spotted me and indicated with an imperious cry that she wished to accompany me. As I opened the door of her cage she shrieked with delight and leapt to my shoulder.

"Bring her back soon, Princess," said Lycia. "She'll be hungry and thirsty before long." Queta was still a young monkey and needed frequent nourishment, like a human child.

Icarus was right about the preparations for the ceremonial reception of the new Athenian servants. Carts of potted plants were being wheeled into place and the pier posts decked with wreaths of greenery. Every idler in Knossos Town milled about, pretending to have work to do on the wharves so that they might be present when some sharp-eyed person first spotted the black sail.

Queta was excited, her hair standing up in a fluff all over her body and her tail stretched out rigid as a poker behind her. I held tight to her leash; monkeys do not like large, noisy crowds. Queta might decide she would prefer to observe the scene from atop a fifty-foot carob tree rather than from my shoulder, and then Lycia would be angry with me.

We found a spot on top of a wall where we might watch the jostling crowds without being jostled ourselves, and there we perched while the sun slid slowly down her track in the sky. Queta grew bored with the spectacle before us and occupied herself with picking through my hair, pretending to find and eat nonexistent lice. At length, grunting softly to herself she curled up and went to sleep on my shoulder. I sat unmoving, lulled by sunshine, thinking of Icarus.

I saw my brothers Deucalion and Catreus being carried by on a litter above the crowd. They were twins, born out of my mother within a few moments of eath other. Like many of that kind, they seemed born with but one soul between them: they had little use for anyone outside their charmed circle of two. They had chosen two pairs of twins to bear their litter so that the onlooker was given the uneasy sense of looking at both reality and its reflection. My brothers were as usual talking to each other and did not notice me.

"Princess Xenodice!"

Someone else had spotted me, however. It was Graia, the bossy old woman who had tended me from my cradle, with little Phaedra trailing behind her and the baby Molus in her arms. "Get down from that wall and go at once back to your quarters. Dress yourself properly. You look like a bag of old rags."

"I do n—" I began protesting, when I looked down and caught sight of my dress. Straw clung to the hem from my visit to Asterius, and a great streak of yellow ocher recalled my visit to the paint-grinding shed. Furthermore, a combined aroma of monkey urine and perspiration from my efforts in dancing class wafted up to my nostrils.

"And bathe," Graia said. "Come. I will see to it myself."

She would have taken me by the ankle and dragged me off of the wall by main force had she not a healthy respect for Queta's teeth. Queta did not care for people laying hold of me and forcing me to do things. As my sister Phaedra now began to object to being removed from the scene of so much excitement, Graia resigned herself to not overseeing my ablutions.

"Very well. I see I must stay here. Tell that worthless girl of yours to stir herself up and do something for a change." She wrinkled her nose. "And make sure she uses some perfumed oils in that bath."

"But I want to be here when the Athenians arrive," I protested.

"No doubt," she said. "That event may happen anytime from now until midsummer. There will be plenty of time to make yourself presentable. And, Xenodice, when you return, have yourself carried on a litter. You are growing too old to run wild like this."

Queta, roused from her nap, was scandalized that Graia should speak to me so. She stood up on my shoulders, gripped my hair by the roots, and began a long, vigorous scold.

"
Aii!
Queta, don't pull so!" I clapped a hand to my damaged scalp as I slipped down from the wall and began to trudge up the road to the palace again.

Having returned Queta to her keeper, I obediently searched out my slave girl, Maira, and directed her to prepare my bath. I had argued with my nurse, fearing to miss the arrival of the Athenians, but in my heart I knew she was right and that they might not come for days. And besides, like all my race, I dearly love a good bath.