CHAPTER ONE #2
I slid closer to the centre of the room, my footsteps lithe and languid.
Beneath me, I heard that breathing. Harried, almost excited.
Footsteps echoed in tandem with mine and for a moment I let my eyes flutter closed and imagined that the spirit, whatever it was, delighted in the rhythm just as I did.
Phaedra’s eyes were shut too, her fingers a dance of her own over the holes in the reed. All three of us lost in the music.
Athenians. My father had gone to war, won and now … there was a tribute from Athens. The servants said that sometimes, didn’t they – that in a few years the tributes would arrive? Had those fourteen people brought grain? Gold?
The aulos picked up speed and so did my feet and suddenly those twirling circles grew tighter and tighter until I was in the centre, spinning on my toes, and close – so close to understanding.
There was more, wasn’t there? Confusing things the adults said.
The way they looked at my mother – the deviant queen, they called her.
The way she never let Glaucus out of her sight.
The way the walls bled in my dreams, sticky and red, and when I looked down it coated my palms, wouldn’t wipe off no matter how hard I tried …
Like the palace wasn’t haunted – we were.
A creak groaned below. I dived for Phaedra and clapped my hands over her ears, that instinct within burning. Wrong wrong wrong.
Beneath my feet, the ghosts screamed.
The door slammed open and I jolted, keeping my hands firmly over Phaedra’s ears though she could hear, of course she could – the screaming so blisteringly loud that Phaedra had dropped her aulos and was clinging to my wrists so tightly her nails carved into my skin.
In the doorway stood our tutor, Daedalus. His hair was starting to grey at the temples, his eyes lined at the corners – but within them shone something you didn’t see very often in the court of Knossos: sympathy.
‘Let’s get you out of here.’
We took Phaedra to bed. She was shaking and I lay with her, let her curl her fists into my chiton until her breathing deepened, and then I snuck out, determined to find my mother. But as I approached her quarters, I heard shouting. Arguing. I stilled to listen.
‘You have to tell her,’ Daedalus insisted.
‘I am protecting her,’ Mother shot back. ‘Like I couldn’t do him.’
‘Ignorance isn’t protection and it’s not going to save them.’
Mother sighed and I pressed closer, a floorboard creaking beneath me.
The next I remember, I was on my mother’s bed and she was pushing a plate into my hands. On it, in red clay, was the etched shape of a woman with a child sitting on her knee. A child with curling horns and the head of a bull.
‘This is Asterion,’ my mother said. ‘Your brother.’
When my mother told me the tale, I nodded rather calmly.
Daedalus had fought her for quite a while, demanding she tell me the truth.
I didn’t want to overreact and prove him wrong.
Besides, I was constantly being told I was mature for my age.
I did not need to be sheltered from the realities of this world – and how could Mother hope to do that, anyway, when they screamed beneath my feet?
‘You dance in the storeroom of the kitchens?’ she started, and I said yes, wondering if I was in trouble.
But that seemed to settle it in her mind.
She sighed. ‘They built those kitchens afterwards – easy access to the courtyards and the grated-hatch within to pour food down into the prison below. But once I dreamt that prison … Fates, I’m doing this wrong.
I’m sorry, Ariadne. Let me start again.’
The first time my mother fell pregnant, a seer told her it would be a girl and so Mother set about building a dance floor for her soon-to-be daughter.
She dreamt of parties and banquets, of filling the palace with joy and music.
And my father, still having a heart at this time, hired Daedalus, the best architect in the land, to construct a tiled floor with a long gradated spiral, winding in and winding out.
My mother gave birth to a son. And then another.
Androgeus and Deucalion. And she was so happy she forgot all about her one-time dream of a daughter.
Then my father decided to become a king.
He said he had a right to it, given he had married a child of an actual god.
He even created rumours he himself was descended from Zeus.
He declared he could ask anything of the gods.
And so to prove he belonged on the throne he requested a bull to rise from the ocean and promised to sacrifice it in return.
Poseidon, the king of the oceans, obliged.
Father did not. He took that sacred bull and sacrificed another in its place.
So Poseidon cursed the child growing in my mother’s womb. Asterion was born with slight curling horns, an upturned snout and blunt teeth gnashing in a wailing mouth. My father had asked for a bull for a legacy, so a bull for a legacy he had.
My father had not been born a tyrant so I might have imagined it was his grief that transformed him into one. But it was the humiliation. My father hid Asterion away, kept him behind palace doors while my elder brothers thrived, until one day Androgeus set off for Athens and he did not come home.
Father went to war and, in his victory, he realized a way to transform his greatest humiliation into his greatest strength.
So he charged Daedalus with building up those spiralling mosaics into walls, a labyrinth to encase a beast within. And he imprisoned his own son, only eleven years old, inside it.
He filled the world with terror of the monster beneath the palace.
In exchange for a cessation of war, my father demanded fourteen Athenian tributes to feed to the beast. Every nine years – one for each day the battle was waged.
If they wanted longer, they ought to have fought harder.
My mother was so lost in grief it took months for her to realize she was pregnant again. One son dead, another imprisoned. And then on the day of the first tributes, there I came.
Now, nine years later, it was time to feed the monster – gods, my brother – again.
The same mother who gleefully spun tales of witches told me all of this like it was empty – the words carved out and hollow. One son dead, another imprisoned by her own husband. Her womb cursed for his misdeeds. Her son sacrificed for his vengeance.
And it was clear to me, as I watched my mother cry, that this was no world in which to be a monster, and none to be a woman either.
I never mentioned any of it again, and she didn’t either.
But every day I returned to my dancing room and, beneath the floorboards, I heard my brother dancing in my shadow.
I thought of him – scared and alone down there. Made into a monster not by Poseidon but by the same tyrant terrorizing us all – my father, whose cruelty faltered in the years following those first tributes, only to ramp back up again towards the next.
Nine years was half a lifetime.
Enough to grow from a strange, lonely girl into a dutiful, obedient woman.
Or enough time to perfect the act of it, at the very least – sneaking off to kiss servants in cupboards or dance my whorish little dances or play pretend at witchcraft, again and again and again.
Enough time to watch Phaedra associate her terror with those transgressions – that maybe screams had filled the palace because she had listened to forbidden stories and played on a banned aulos.
Enough time to plot treason.
I turn eighteen tomorrow. Which means the palace is about to bleed again.
But this time, I’m going to cauterize the wound – and I’m going to set my whole life aflame to do it.