The Flame in the Maze (14 page)

Chara didn't want to sleep.
No
, she told herself, as she felt her clean, wet body relax against a column.
No, no, no: take care; be alert.
She tried to sit up taller and blink the heaviness away from her eyelids so that she could keep everyone in her sight: Melaina, spread out on her back between two of the jars; Theseus, propped against a wall with Phoibe's head in his lap; Alphaios, sprawled so close to the waterfall that a puddle was forming beneath his cheek; and Polymnia, standing with her arms crossed, gazing at each of them in turn, slowly, her own eyes narrowed.
No,
Chara thought, one more time—but only faintly, because her hunger and thirst were gone, and so was she.

When she woke, the sunlight was gone too. It seemed to take a very long time for her eyes and limbs to work—but her ears worked right away. She heard the water. Deep breathing and ragged breathing. A murmur of voices.

“Believe me: there are wonderful places here.” Polymnia's words wove and wobbled before they took shape in Chara's head.

“Everything here frightens me.” Phoibe's words trembled, but in a way Chara recognized. “I don't know how you've endured it, all this time.”

Chara's vision was sharpening: she saw the dark shapes of Alphaios and Melaina and Theseus, exactly where they'd been before. Phoibe and Polymnia were side-by-side on the lowest of the steps that led to the altar. Phoibe was hunched; Polymnia was sitting up very tall.

“You'll learn,” Polymnia said. “And you'll learn quickly; I can tell you're clever.”

“Oh, no; I won't have to learn! Prince Theseus is going to kill the beast: that's why he came with us! He'll lead us out—with your help, I'm sure.”

The water sounded very loud, in the silence that fell. Chara tried to swallow and realized that she was achingly thirsty again, but she didn't move.

“Well,” Polymnia said after a time, “before any of that happens you'll have to rest more, eat more. Regain your strength and . . . fill out your skin. You're all far too thin.” She put her arm around Phoibe's shoulders, and Chara pushed herself onto her hands and knees and gave a loud, false yawn.

“Phoibe!” she said as she got to her feet. “Come here; we should wash our robes before the others wake up”—except that they
were
awake now, as she'd intended. They grumbled and stirred, stretching their arms up toward the dappled light of fireflies and invisible stars.

“So, Polymnia,” Theseus said a bit later, as he chewed on a strip of salt fish. “Tell me about the beast: its habits, say, and how I will find it. For I feel nearly strong enough to face it, now.”

Polymnia's tongue glistened between her parted lips. Alphaios's own mouth fell open as he stared at her. Chara jabbed him in the side and he grunted.

“He is . . .” Polymnia began, and stopped. “He is never only a man. His head is always the bull's, and his hands and feet are almost always hooves. He is strong: the muscles bunch across his shoulders and down his back, whether he is man or bull.” She rose from the step and walked slowly around the altar.

“And how will I find it?” Theseus asked. His hand was halfway to his mouth, as if he'd forgotten he was about to take another bite of fish.

Polymnia smiled at no one. “He has his own ways, and cannot be found. One day I hear the rumble of his hooves and his godmarked call, and I hide, and watch him as he feeds, or bends his great head to drink.” Her faraway gaze lighted on Chara, who held it, and watched it focus. Polymnia frowned and looked quickly away.

Theseus put the fish down. “And have you seen it kill Athenians, before it feeds on them? Because your companion Ligeia had not.”

“Ligeia,” Polymnia spat, “has been no companion of mine—nor of yours, I see, because where is she now?” She turned her back on them, shaking her hands at her sides as if they were wet. Melaina rolled her eyes, and for the first time, Chara understood why.

“I have,” Polymnia finally said, still facing away from them. “I have seen him kill.”

“You haven't.” Chara spoke quietly, despite a buzzing that had begun in her ears, and Theseus's mind-voice, which was pulsing in her, without words. “You're lying, and Ligeia was just wrong—neither of you have seen him kill because
he
hasn't killed
. No, my Lord,” she went on, holding a hand up as Theseus said her name, inside and out, “now I will tell you of him. Of him—because he is
he
, not it.”

As she drew a shaking breath, Theseus said again, “Chara.”

“No! Listen! You said you'd consider my words about him, and yet I've spoken hardly any. So let me tell you about Asterion—the boy. The boy who was always being burned for the glory of his father, Lord Poseidon, and all his priestesses. The boy who made up rhymes about sea creatures and laughed when I made up my own, until he had to scratch ‘Stop!' into the dirt. The boy whose sister Ariadne set him on fire when he wasn't much more than two years old, and never stopped hurting him after that—never until now, because she's convinced you to do it for her.”

Melaina's gaze was as wide as Alphaios's. Polymnia was looking over her shoulder, one of her eyes gleaming through the curtain of her hair. Phoibe was rocking a little, on her step. Theseus's expression hadn't changed: his broad brow was as smooth as ever, his lips as firmly set. Chara saw each of them very clearly because silver-grey light was seeping down above them. It was dawn, in the world outside the mountain.

“If he was so hurt already,” Theseus said, “and had suffered so much for the sake of gods and mortals, this place may well have made him mad.”

“Ariadne's the mad one. Unmarked Ariadne, whose beauty never really helped her. Until she sent you that wonderful little likeness of her that Karpos made—the one that smiled and blinked. I wrapped it up in cloth to send it to you, you know. And that was enough to make you come here—that, and your need to rescue her, because that's what you do, isn't it? You rescue beautiful young girls.”

“Godsbled bastard,” Melaina said, as Theseus's smooth brow furrowed. “Gods. Bled.
Bastard
.”

Chara's head was spinning as it had when she'd clung to Icarus's waist and he'd swung them both back and forth above the waterfall near Knossos. Exhilaration and fear, and an odd little sadness, because she knew these other feelings would have to end. “Does Ariadne realize you'll likely leave her on the first island we get to, if we ever get off this one? Not that we'll even make it out of this mountain, unless you let me find him and speak to him. I have to do this, Prince Theseus. Please.”

The water sang behind them. The wind sang, far above—and Chara remembered the black pipes that jutted from the mountain's peak, and thought,
Oh, Icarus: you tried; now so am I.

Theseus said, ::
Daughter of Pherenike
—:: and then he stopped, because a roar shook the stone beneath their feet.

Chara wanted to sink down on the step next to Phoibe, who'd already started to cry, but she didn't: she stayed standing, listening to Asterion's voice. It was deeper than it had been, the day his father had thrust him into the mountain with the first group of Athenians. It was much, much louder—though maybe that was partly because of the rock walls. She knew it didn't matter that she recognized it, or that he'd been a boy named Asterion: this was the voice of the beast Theseus had come to kill.

“Can you find it?” Theseus said breathlessly to Polymnia, when the roar and all its echoes had faded. “Can you make it come to us?”

Her red hair fell over her face as she shook her head. “I have told you, Lord: I cannot compel him. He will come if he wishes to—and now I think he does not.”

Do you really know so much about him?
All of a sudden, bits of the dates and fish Chara had eaten so eagerly surged up and nearly into her mouth. She pressed her hand to her lips and swallowed desperately, over and over, until her belly stopped its clenching.

“Very well,” said Theseus. “We will just have to wait for it.”

They sat without speaking, as the sun changed its angle and colour. They all ate again, except for Chara. Polymnia sang under her breath—just a tune, which didn't tug at Chara the same way her song had, when it had flowed through the rock to find them. Phoibe nestled in against Theseus's side and dozed, her dark-stubbled head lolling. Alphaios used his godmark to turn the cast-off skin of a many-legged insect into a tiny yellow ball, which he bounced against each of the columns until Melaina snapped at him to stop.

It seemed as if the sunlight had barely started to warm the chamber when darkness took its place. Again Chara tried not to sleep, when her own head started to bob; again she failed. She woke this time to a yell, and more silver-grey dawn light.

“Where is she?” Theseus shouted, as Chara tried to rise. “
Where is Phoibe?
”

After a frozen silence, Polymnia said, “She must have wandered away. She seemed fearful, even here.”

“She's always fearful,” Melaina said. She plucked at Theseus's arm as he strode by; he shook her away without looking at her and kept striding. He stopped only to stare down into the corridors as if Phoibe might simply have been asleep in one of them, waiting to be seen.

“She didn't wander away,” he said. “Or if she did, she wouldn't have gone far. How could I have slept so deeply? And for so many hours!”

Chara winced as his mind-voice growled inside her, low and harsh and wordless. Alphaios sidled up beside her and whispered, “He's so loud—his godmark—can we stop him?”

“I don't know,” she whispered back. “Just wait a little. Let him calm down.”

He didn't. When the sun's light was morning-gold, he grasped Polymnia's wrist and said, “I should not have waited so long; I will go after her.”

“My Lord,” she said, and put her long-fingered hand on top of his. “She is lost. The mountain has her. Stay here; stay safe.”

“Safe?” he thundered, aloud and in their heads—in all of them, because they cried out as if they'd been a single person, doubling over and covering their ears, even though this wouldn't help in the slightest.

Theseus took Polymnia by the hair that hung at her waist and pulled her in close to him. “Come with me,” he said. “You know these corridors; you will see evidence of her, while I might not.”

“But my Prince, I will not know where—”

“Have these corridors moved since I slept? Have they?”

“No,” she gasped, straining against his grip, waving her hands in the waterfall's spray so that they glistened.

“Then we go down this passageway first,” he said, jerking his chin at the one they'd come from. “It is the closest to where she was sleeping. It is the one she had already seen. You will lead me there, and beyond, if we do not find her.”

Polymnia stared back at him, motionless but breathing, as beautiful as one of Karpos's godmarked statues. “Very well,” she said, just as Chara was about to throw herself at both of them and scrabble at their eyes or their perfect chins. “But do not expect to find her.”

“So what do you think?” Alphaios said to Chara, a long, silent time after Theseus and Polymnia had disappeared down the corridor.

Melaina snorted and threw a piece of fish against the wall. Shards of it fell to the ground and glittered there, salt and light and old, dead flesh. “
I
think that he should die a death that no one will ever hear of, in Athens or anywhere else.” She smiled, but her lower lip trembled. “I think he should suffer.”

Chara cleared her throat and glanced at Alphaios, who shrugged back at her. “He may be our only chance of getting off the island,” Chara said. “He's going to call that ship's captain with his mind-voice, remember?”

Alphaios frowned. “But we'll have to get out of
here
first. Which won't be possible, now that there's no godmarked string.”

“Oh please,” Melaina said, “as if that was actually going to work! A trinket from a whore of a princess. No—Theseus won't be the clever one, this time. That Polymnia person will be able to help us find a better way. She'll show us where to gather big rocks, or we'll all crack stalagmites off of the floor of that cavern and stack them up to those openings. We'll build something. We'll . . .” Her voice trailed to silence. She sat down heavily beside the jar of figs, with her back to them.

Sunlight rippled on the walls. Chara stared up at it; she tried to imagine cloud and wind, and couldn't, because the stone pressing against her was so hot, and the air so heavy. She remembered hanging upside down from an olive tree in the grove near the waterfall. She and Asterion both, of course, side-by-side like bats, spying on Glaucus as he tried to kiss the farmer's daughter. She'd pushed him away and said, “I don't care if you're a prince; you look like a toad!” and stormed off down the sloping row of trees.

Asterion had swung down from the branch, laughing. “Toad!” he said—and then Glaucus looked at him, and Asterion stopped laughing. “Glau—I'm sorry. You're really quite handsome. Isn't he, Chara?”

“Don't pretend just to comfort me,” Glaucus mumbled. Chara handed him his painted stick. At first he crossed his arms and glared into the distance—but after a moment he took it, and sighed. When Asterion put his arm around the prince's shoulder, he didn't shake it away. They walked off together, the three of them. The silver-green leaves rustled and dappled the sun on the earth at their feet.

Trees
, Chara thought now, as she wiped at the sweat that was seeping from every bit of her skin.
What if I never see one again?

Hours after Theseus and Polymnia had left, the corridors shifted.
If Phoibe were here, she'd yelp—
but the screaming of metal and grinding of stone didn't frighten Chara anymore. Alphaios crouched next to her. “Polymnia will lead them all back to us,” he said, as a stone wall lifted on the corridor Polymnia and Theseus had gone down. There was a different one there now, which wavered in its own green glow.