The Flame in the Maze (22 page)

The thought of Ariadne flooded his head with a white rage that cleared it. For three paces he felt stronger and steadier, but his right ankle crumpled on the fourth. He teetered, his arms flailing. As he righted himself he felt yet more feathers thrusting out from his flesh—from forearms and thighs and the tops of his feet, all of them glowing silver at their roots. His godmark, awake again; his man's body weak. He stood gasping, staring down at himself and the ground, because the sky's light hurt him, now.

Next time
, he thought as he let himself slowly down to the ledge,
I'll be stronger. I'll go farther.

His father was still sitting with his legs dangling and his gaze fixed on the island.

“I'm sorry,” Icarus said. “It was difficult. I couldn't . . .” His throat was rough and sore, as if he'd been shouting, or trying not to cry.

Daedalus leaned his head back and smiled. He looked at Icarus; his smile vanished, and his eyes widened as they traced the lines of feathers, up and down, down and up.

“I know; they just burst out of me the moment I got up there—as if my godmark's been waiting for open air, saving up all the feathers that used to take ages to grow, under my skin. Saving them and making them grow much faster. Maybe it's why I'm so tired.”
And hungry. Gods and magpies, so hungry: next time I'll find food; something other than salt fish and stale bread.

Daedalus wriggled backward and lurched to his feet. He leaned close to Icarus's forearm, which (Icarus saw with a start) had grown longer, thinner, tapering toward the talons. The feathers on it were as lush as if he had been mostly changed for months. His father gestured from the feathers to his own arms to the island, over and over again, as Icarus shook his head. At last Daedalus blew out his breath and cried, “Ah fai air!
Ah
fai!”

Icarus sagged against the cliff wall.
I'll fly there.
I'll
fly.

His father spoke on—more words than he'd uttered in a year, tripping and melding so that Icarus shouldn't have been able to understand them. Only he did.

“I can't climb without breaking my fingers. So we won't go up: we'll go down. You'll be able to glide at least as far as the island. If I build a framework for my arms, just like I built my new hands—if your feathers keep growing, so there are enough for both of us—I'll be able to glide there too. You could steal a fisherman's boat; you could come and get me.”

Icarus was still shaking his head. His skin and bones ached. “There has to be another way,” he said when his father's words dribbled to silence. “There has to be. I could make a sling for you just as easily as I could steal a boat—maybe
more
easily. I could let it down from above, pull you up, and we would . . .” He didn't say the words he heard in his head:
We would end up trapped on the big island, when that small one down there would get us close to open sea. Down would be quicker and safer than up.

Daedalus lifted one of his stone hands. Two of his crab-claw fingers closed gently around a feather on Icarus's shoulder. The stone and paste and flesh pulsed with silver. His wild, hungry eyes met Icarus's.

“I understand,” Icarus said. “Another way wouldn't be enough for you. It's your godmark telling you to do this. The Great Daedalus, who needs to make things.” He shook his head slowly. “But I can't. It already hurts so much—and remember when those boys pulled my feathers out, years ago, to see me cry? Please don't ask this of me.”

His voice cracked. He couldn't bear to look at his father's eyes, but he had to: they hadn't burned like this since the workroom at Knossos. “No,” he whispered. “I
can't
”—and he ducked out of the light, back into the gloom of the tunnel and the smothering darkness of the cavern. He squatted with his forehead pressed against stone, next to a clump of mushrooms. He rocked a little, as if his mother's arms were around him. He heard the door squeal and
clang
shut. He heard his father crawl into the cavern behind him, and then he heard nothing except his own shallow breathing.

He dozed. When he woke, the cavern was bathed in silver: from his feathers, bristling thick and layered from his skin; from his father's lumpy, hinged fingers. The little island seemed like a dream. The bare tree with the eagle's nest, the waves that broke on sand and stone, the bright emptiness above that had no end.

Daedalus was standing beneath the stalactite. His hands (both silver) were at his sides, though his head was tipped back. He didn't look down until Icarus said, “Father.”

Daedalus's eyes still burned. Icarus took a silver hand and lifted it to his own silver arm. Daedalus's fingers closed once more on a feather. He blinked and Icarus nodded and the fingers pinched and pulled. Icarus gasped and squeezed his eyes shut so tightly that he saw points of multi-coloured fire spinning in blackness. When he opened them, they were dry. They stayed that way, even as Daedalus plucked and plucked, and feathers drifted, soft and silver, to the ground.

The next month, after Theron left, Icarus followed him. He waited a good long while before he gestured to his father to open the door; it would all be over if Theron heard the screaming of the metal. They waited so long, in fact, that Icarus feared he would be out of sight—and he was, but it didn't end up mattering.

This time it was night. Icarus had brought the light, just in case, and its pink and gold played over the ledge and the stairs. He gazed past its glow at the stars, which were everywhere: in the water and the sky and spinning behind his eyelids when he closed them. The moon hung among them, nearly full. Feathers thrust through his skin the moment he felt the wind and saw the stars, and the emptiness below him.
Father
, he thought,
you'll have so many, when I get back.

When he hoisted himself up off the last step, the first thing he saw was the path. The moon plucked it out for him: a narrow, sinuous line that led through the silvered grass and out of sight.
Theron walks here every month
, Icarus thought.
His feet fall on the same ground every month. I can't see him now, but I can see where he's been. Thank you, O Terrible Theron.

Icarus ate, as he walked: a handful of figs and an oatcake, taken from the latest delivery. It was strange: he wasn't hungry, though the feather-plucking usually made him ravenous. Nerves, perhaps, because this time he intended to reach something—a palace, temple, a hive of sleeping bees—he
had
to find something and bring the news of it back to the cave.

The path wound down hills and around olive trees and ended, quite suddenly, in the middle of a pasture. He pushed at the cropped grass with his toe-talons and felt a seam, almost immediately. One seam, another, another: a hinged door, with grass on top. He was sure of this, even without bending to scrabble at it; he knew, now, about small, secret doors. He wanted to scrabble, though—to haul the door up and throw himself inside the tunnel that had to be there, beneath. He wanted to follow it to wherever Theron ended up, when
he
followed it.
No
, he thought.
There'd be nowhere to go, if someone was already in there. So it'll be overland for me, not under.

He went to the edge of the pasture, where it met rockier ground. Here he found another path, this one lined with stones, and obvious enough that he slipped the light beneath his filthy shirt, in case there was someone close enough to see it. This path led him up toward a peak that loomed blackly against the stars. Icarus was so transfixed by the peak that he almost walked right past the hut—but he caught himself, fell back, stared.

A beehive-shaped hut—a shepherd's, he was sure. An open doorway with nothing but darkness beyond it.
Maybe not nothing
, he thought.
Maybe something I can use.

His heart thudded as he ducked inside. Star- and moonlight seeped in after him, and in a moment his eyes had adjusted. He saw a shelf, high up on one of the curving walls. An empty, overturned trough on the hard-packed earthen floor. A staff of gnarled olive wood.

He reached up and patted his hand along the shelf. He felt a wooden cup, which fell over and made a hollow, rolling sound.
Good
, he thought, imagining his father holding it between his palms, rather than leaning awkwardly forward to drink from their bowl. Then he felt cloth. He pulled it down: a cloak, hooded and thick; the kind shepherds wore to protect themselves from rain and gales. It was far too big for him—the hood came down nearly to his lower lip, and he could have wrapped it around himself twice—but he felt safer in it.

He sat in the doorway until the light of his lamp dimmed and died against the grey-blue light in the sky. The sun rose, just after that, and he knew which way to go: south and west, because that's where the summer palace had to be.

His head was filled with words, which tripped and rushed as his feet did:
Only the slaves, acolytes and apprentices will be up
.
I'll use the entrance that leads to the priests' quarters, and I'll pull my hood down. Maybe I'll see Chara—because it's summer—the heat and the colours tell me so—and the royal family will definitely be there. Chara! You'll turn pale when you see me; your freckles will look so dark.

But his feet slowed, long before he reached the palace. He'd begun to recognize his surroundings: rocky outcroppings he'd jumped from years ago, flapping his useless boy's arms. A stream Glaucus had dropped his stick into by accident; the thing had snagged among rocks halfway down a waterfall, and Asterion had almost fallen in, reaching for it. Icarus stood where Asterion had, that day. He closed his eyes and felt the spray on his lids and brow. He saw the water that trickled down the wall in his prison. He saw his father crouched in the unnatural light, weaving feathers onto the branches Icarus would soon gather from the bushes on the cliff.

No
, Icarus thought.
Not the palace—not yet, or maybe ever. Think only of him: keeping him strong and safe; getting him onto the little island. Getting away.

He turned back the way he'd come.

When he finally crawled into the cave, Daedalus was crouched in the unnatural light, his stone fingers splayed beside three neat, curving rows of feathers. Icarus knelt in front of him. His hands shook with weariness. The shepherd's cloak weighed on him as if it were made of iron. The stench of the pit they'd dug, which he tried to cover with dirt every time either of them used it, was even viler because he'd been away from it.

“Here,” he said. “Look what I have for you.” The wooden cup. Four slender branches: three very long, one shorter. Three ripe lemons. A handful of thyme. And feathers, layers and layers of them, covering him from neck to ankles.

Daedalus nodded and smiled, then went to lock the door again.

Icarus and Daedalus were laughing, when the door opened. Later, Icarus tried to remember what they'd been laughing at, and couldn't.

Theron's visit had happened only a few days earlier: the fresh bread was teetering in one stack, the salt fish in another. Icarus had just carved a fresh scratch into the wall, where it joined four years' worth of other scratches.

Their eyes met:
Not Theron—

Icarus seized his father's wings. The layers of feathers were thick and glossy; the frame was huge but light. He thrust the wings into the tunnel behind them and sat down beside Daedalus just as someone stepped into their cave.

“Icarus?” a strange voice called. “Icarus: it's Phaidra. Where are you?”

Not a strange voice, after all—but not a girl's, either. And she'd been a girl, the last time he'd seen her: a thin, long-legged, golden-haired girl.
How old is she now? Sixteen?

He glanced at Daedalus, who lifted one of his long-fingered hands and shook his head. Icarus shook his own and slipped into a crouch. “Phaidra,” he said, and went forward into the guttering light.

This new Phaidra took two paces and held out her hands to him. He rose, stumbled, took them. He touched his forehead to hers, hardly needing to bend because she was so tall. “Phai,” he murmured, “gods, how you've changed.” Then he called up the red he'd been holding within him for years, and spun, and cried, “Ariadne! Show yourself!”

Phaidra pulled her hands free and backed away from him. Ariadne stepped forward. “Here I am,” she said.

Icarus heard himself shout—a sound that was just a pale, weak echo of the red. Ariadne was smiling as she took three more paces and stood before him, bathed in the light that was green now—new olive leaves, or the pool below the waterfall where he'd leapt as a child, trying to fly.

“Icarus,” she said. “I am sorry it has taken me this long to return to you.”

He felt very clear-headed, somehow. He felt as if he'd seen her only yesterday; as if he were accustomed to speaking to people other than his father. “Ah, Princess. Imagine how sorry
I've
been, not to have seen you all this time! For when last you were here, you took my ball of string—oh, and you broke my father's hands with a hammer, and watched as
your
father cut his tongue out—oh, and then you watched my mother throw herself into the sea.”

Phaidra gave a wordless cry.

Ariadne held out her hands. “I have longed to visit you, and why not—for how well you speak! The palaces have not been the same since you left them.”

She was going to say more, but Daedalus's raspy, moist breathing stopped her. He drew himself up from the floor, and suddenly Icarus saw him as Ariadne and Phaidra would be seeing him: as a hairy, ragged, filthy creature that didn't look much like a man. For a moment Icarus remembered how tall his father had been, and how his hair had been a neat, close-cropped black, threaded with white.

He sprang at Ariadne with his remade hands extended.

Icarus threw himself between them. “No, Father,” Icarus panted. “You leave her to
me
.” He clutched Daedalus's warped hands and turned back to her. “Princess,” he said, as calmly as if he wasn't actually himself. “Why are you here?” He was dimly aware that Phaidra had retreated and was standing by a rock, and that his father had curled up on the ground.

“My old friend,” Ariadne said, “I need you.”

Icarus laughed. His head spun with so many words that he couldn't choose any.

“Yes. I need you—for my father is mad, and intends to give himself to godmarked fire at the door to the mountain. The door
you
made, Master Daedalus”—she slid her gaze to the man at their feet—“and I cannot bear the thought that the place will be destroyed, because there may be people living within: Athenian sacrifices, and my brother, of course . . . And only you.” She drew a deep breath. “Only you and your father can show me how to find them so that they may be saved.”

He couldn't laugh, this time, and he still couldn't speak. At last he said, “You cannot bear the thought.” He drew a shuddering breath. “You, Princess Ariadne . . .” Laughter bubbled in his throat again, and he spun in place, feathers rustling and whining in the wind that was hardly a wind. One of his feet sent the lamp scudding into the rock where Phaidra was; the light went from pink to blue to gold to green in a breath, then died entirely. Ariadne held up her own lamp, whose glow seemed very dim.

“You wish to save them,” Icarus gasped as he stopped spinning. He pointed his taloned fingers at her and waggled them. “The Athenians whose entry into the mountain was so dull to you that you watched the sky instead. And your brother! The boy you set on fire when he was, what? Two years old? Yes, Chara told me—and she told me much else, besides. About how much you hated him. And now you can't bear the thought that he might die?”

Phaidra had sunk into a crouch. Her hands were clasped; her eyes darted between Icarus and Ariadne and Daedalus.

“I am glad you mentioned Chara,” Ariadne said, her voice catching a little. “Because she, too, is in the labyrinth. Yes,” she went on, as he felt his mouth-beak fall open, “she is. She disguised herself as an Athenian, and I noticed her too late—as she was leaping through the doorway. A month ago, Icarus. And in barely two more the mountain will be on fire.”

He went to Phaidra and hunkered down in front of her. “Phai,” he said quietly. “Is it true?”

Phaidra nodded. “Though I didn't,” she began, and cleared her throat, “I didn't know about Father's plan.”

They gazed at each other, as unblinking as Minos, until Ariadne said, “So, Icarus?”

He glanced over his shoulder at her. “Your mother will put the fire out.”

“She will try. But this will be like no other fire. Her power may be no match for his.” She put her lamp on the ground and walked around Daedalus. She set her hand on Icarus's hair. He didn't flinch, though he wanted to wrench himself free of her, and of the old hunger that had begun to stir.

“It should not matter why I want in,” she said. “You should not care.” She drew her fingertips down through his hair and he shivered. “Four years ago you would have longed to do my bidding.”

She knelt behind him and wove her arms around his chest. She pressed her skin against his and breathed slowly. His own traitorous breath shuddered and rasped.
You don't want her
, he thought.
You can't. Remember the last time she was here; just remember her hand holding his down as Minos shattered it. . . .

He stood, drawing Ariadne up with him, and turned in the circle of her arms so that he was facing her. She smelled unbearably sweet: fresh air and clean skin, and the perfume she always dabbed behind her wrists, which reminded him of grass and honey. He straightened. “And what will you give me, if I help you?”

She flinched a bit. She slipped out of his arms and took two paces back. She undid the clasp of her jacket and pulled it open and he couldn't help it—he felt his eyes travel from her face to her breasts.

Phaidra rose and ran for the mouth of the corridor, and Daedalus stirred and moaned, but Icarus hardly noticed. Ariadne lifted her hands and ran her middle fingers around her nipples, and as they hardened she began to untie the girdle at her waist.
O gods and goddesses you've punished me enough though I've done nothing wrong please please do not make me suffer any more than I already have please lend me some of your own strength—

“No,” he whispered.

Just then the outer door screeched open and clanged shut.
Phaidra
, he thought, and felt something else—a different kind of desire.

“No,” he said again. She cupped her breasts lightly as she stepped toward him. They weren't smooth, as they had been when he'd last seen them (shining with oil, as she danced): they were patchy with scars, as were her arms and even her hands. The scars didn't disgust him, though he wanted them to—especially as her thumbs made languid circles on her own skin.
Phaidra,
he thought again, and remembered how firm and cool her forehead had been against his, and felt stronger.

“Yes, Icarus. You will have me here, now—perhaps again at the mountain, under the open sky? Put your hands on me and—”

He walked to where she was and stopped with his feather-splotched chest almost touching her. “No,” he said, and smiled, and walked away from her.

He knelt beside Daedalus, whose eyes were closed. She whirled to look down on them both. “So your hatred of me is stronger than your desire to help your friends.”

Icarus shrugged. “The gods will see to their fates. And yes.”

Ariadne fumbled with the clasp of her jacket. “Then your father will help me, because I'll make sure neither of you gets any food; I'll starve you, and he'll beg to show me the labyrinth—you will both—”

“Starve us?” Icarus said. “In the two months before the king gives himself to the mountain?”

Daedalus moved abruptly, straining up from his knees. “Ihoh,” he said, with his tongueless mouth, and Icarus knew that the word was “Minnow.” “Ihoh”—beseeching, sad, not quite hopeless.

Ariadne picked up her lamp and walked, very slowly, to the corridor.

Icarus's strength left with her. He hunkered down and rocked back and forth. He rocked for a long time, as Daedalus blinked at him from across the cave.
Who's moaning like that?
Icarus wondered; a moment later he thought, dully,
Oh—that's me.

He stared at nothing, but what he saw was Ariadne's smile; Ariadne touching her bare, scarred breasts with her fingers; Ariadne pressing herself against him. He'd imagined, over all the years that had passed since she'd last come, that he'd kill her, if she were ever in front of him again. He'd imagined wrapping his hands around her throat. Slamming her head against a rock. Gouging at her eyes with his talons. And yet there she'd stood, in front of him, and he'd done nothing except say “No” to her, as the blood pounded in his head and his groin.

Phaidra
, he thought at some point, because this had chased Ariadne from his eyes, before.
Phaidra
. Tall and slender, smiling at him from the woman's face she hadn't had when he'd last seen her. Taking his hands in hers, which were warm and strong. He imagined lying down with his head in her lap; he knew she would have stroked his hair and spoken to him in her newer, deeper voice.

He stood up thinking of Phaidra's face, but hearing Ariadne's voice.
“So your hatred of me is stronger than your desire to help your friends.”
He'd said yes—but other words had been tumbling through his head:
Chara . . . Chara under the mountain . . . Chara and Asterion . . .
These words returned now and circled, circled until they drove him over to his father. Icarus dropped to his knees before him.

“We have to go in there,” he said. His voice wobbled, then smoothed. “We have to rescue them.”

Daedalus sat up and reared back as if Icarus had struck him.

“If you can open this lock, you'll be able to open the other one too. Won't you?”

Daedalus shook his head wildly. He grunted “No,” over and over, then gabbled something like, “Too hard; not the same; no way I'd do it.”

Icarus said, “I'll to go Phaidra, then—she'll help us with the lock. And you and I are the only ones who could find our way in and back out again. So we'll do that. We'll get them out—whoever's in there—before the king's mark-madness destroys the mountain.”

Daedalus rose and staggered to the stalagmite. He stared down at it, his palms turned up, his long fingers twitching.

“I know you didn't want to go back up, ever,” Icarus said. “That you wanted to use the wings you're making to glide down to the islet. But I also know you're ashamed,” he went on slowly. “That it haunts you—that place, where Athenians have gone to die. So this is a change of plans. Let's go end it now.”

He remembered the way his father had looked at him, years ago, when Icarus had said, “How can you do this to your own people?” They'd been standing on a bridge, both of them coursing with sweat; the labyrinth had been belching hot steam. Daedalus had gazed at him—through him, really.

“The king is always watching me,” he whispered. “With godmarked men who record my work after I've done it and relay their findings back to Minos.”

“But you're stronger than they are,” Icarus had said, glancing over his shoulders at the workers' shadows, bending and stretching on the walls behind them. “You could make another door somewhere and they'd never know; you could—”

“No.” Daedalus's voice was splinter-thin. “I won't waste time with pity. I won't risk my freedom to help children from a city that rejected me.”

Icarus had put his hand on his father's arm. Their skin slipped and stuck. Daedalus was panting. “The gods will decide,” he said. “They'll decide everything, for all of us. In the meantime, I do the king's will and await my freedom.”

“Let's go end it,” Icarus said again now, as his father continued to stare at his own ruined hands. “You said once that the gods would decide—and they did, when Minos took your freedom away. But it's not too late; the gods have given us a way. You can let me out of here, and I can go and find Phaidra. We'll come back and get you up the cliff, and then we can go back into that place.”

Icarus set his fingertips on Daedalus's lumpy palm and Daedalus twitched. “And whatever Ariadne wants,” Icarus said, “whatever she might be trying to do by getting in there herself—we'll stop it. We'll stop
her
—that bitch.”

Daedalus put his other hand on top of Icarus's. “Ech,” he said, and Icarus heard, “Yes,” and tried to smile.