I ate. Not very much, but enough to satisfy Professor Warnick. He dabbed strawberry jam on a roll and nibbled at it, finally set it aside and poured coffee into two cups.
“Here,” he said. He handed one to me and pushed the tray to the other side of the table. “Do you feel better?”
I nodded. For several minutes we sat without talking. Balthazar stared broodingly at the bay window. I drank my coffee gratefully, pouring myself a second cup. When Balthazar remained silent I turned my attention back to the folio. At first its sepia-toned images seemed to share the same detached, rather prim gravity that all old photographs possess, each picture carefully numbered and named, dated and referenced—
But as I perused the volume, photographic plates like moths pinned to the oversized pages, the images began to take on a stranger, even malevolent, cast.
Dionysos…
I moved the folio so that its contents were not visible to Balthazar, lowering my face until it was scant inches above the page. The first picture showed three young women carrying branches, hair hanging around angular faces as they followed a distinctively unperturbed-looking man whom I guessed must be Dionysos. The man had lean features and slanted, blank eyes, and carried a long staff topped with a pinecone.
I turned the page. The next one showed an orgy, the women slim, unclothed save for fillets of ivy pinning elaborately dressed hair. The single male figure was naked, too, and had the same lean features, the same oblique eyes and dark locks framing an unlined brow. In this picture, the god appeared to sit in midair, one hand grasping an immense and swollen penis. His expression was neither lascivious nor even sensual. He looked thoughtful, even sorrowful; and more than anything else that unnerved me. I turned the page again.
This time I could not help drawing in my breath sharply. Unlike the others, this plate was in color, tinted in rich, dark tones like the embellishments of a medieval text. It showed a painting of a room, its walls daubed a lurid red and crowned by the repeating pattern of a labyrinth, all crossed squares and intricately linked shapes like swastikas. There were figures in the chamber, but also figures painted on the wall, so that the whole thing was a skillful trompe l’oeil of a room within a room, and the figures on the wall appeared to be watching those in the chamber.
There was a lot to watch. A naked man, bound, was kneeling on the floor. His head was crowned with ivy and what looked like pinecones, or acorns; his expression, unlike that of the Greek god, was anguished. Three women were grouped around him, also naked, but these had none of the detached calm of the Greek figures. Their bodies were rounded, where the Greek maenads had been slender and boyish, and their faces looked sly and gleeful and aroused, by turns. One stood with arm raised above the kneeling man. In her hand she held a wooden stake with a leather thong attached to it, like a flail.
Flagellation rites involving initiates and the God of the Vine, from a religious series, 1st century B.C., Villa of the Mysteries, Pompeii
“Ah,” said Balthazar, his voice tinged with distaste. “I see you have discovered the heart of the labyrinth. Villa dei Mysteri, where the initiates take their first steps into the underworld. Their experiences set them apart to such a degree that they had their own cemetery, the bebaccheumeoi. A remarkable likeness, isn’t it?”
I said nothing, just nodded as he continued. “What is most amazing is not that the god himself should be so utterly recognizable to us, two thousand years later, but that these images survived at all.”
Balthazar moved his chair beside mine. “Because it really is a miracle, isn’t it?” I could feel the warmth of his body, the wispy touch of his hair where it grazed against my cheek as he leaned over the page. “More of a miracle, in its way, than the death and rebirth of a god…”
“How could anything be weirder than that?” I said, my voice cracking. I tried to keep my eyes from the picture of the kneeling suppliant who was not really a suppliant but a god, not a god but a man I had eaten with, spoken with that evening. The same finely drawn mouth, its faint cruelty made exquisite by suffering; the same beautifully muscled arms, filigreed with ivy as though tattooed.
But what was most terrible was the young woman who stood above him, her ice-pale eyes wide open and staring calmly, almost dreamily, from the page, her auburn hair threading to her bare shoulders. With a cry I shoved the book and sent it flying onto the floor.
“How could anything be weirder than that?” I shouted.
Balthazar reached to comfort me and I yanked away. “Don’t touch me! Don’t you fucking touch me!”
Despair flickered in his eyes. “We didn’t paint those frescoes, Lit—”
“I know you didn’t fucking paint it! Who did?” I leaned down to grab the book, stabbed at the first page from the Villa dei Mysteri and turned to the next one. It showed the same red-haired girl, now lying on a settee and embracing the god while men and women watched, all with the same eerily calm expressions. “Tell me—who did?”
Balthazar stared at me, then down at the book. “A Malandante, an artist commissioned by the man who owned the Villa two millennia ago. The work is very similar stylistically to that of the House of the Stags, at Herculaneum, and also to the images in the Villa of Ariadne at Pompeii. The girl—”
He inclined his head toward the page. “The redhaired girl is Ariadne, beloved of Dionysos. Or his victim, depending on which account you read. In the version that Plutarch gave us, Ariadne rescued Theseus when he came to Crete—Theseus and a number of Athenian boys and girls had been given as sacrificial tribute to Ariadne’s father, King Minos. It was Minos, of course, who kept the Minotaur, the monster who was half-man and half-beast, imprisoned in the labyrinth; and it was to the Minotaur that the youths of Athens were given to be slain and devoured.”
“But that’s not true,” I said, fighting to keep my voice steady. “That’s just a myth.”
“A myth? More likely a memory—we know that there was bull-worship at Crete and the Cycladic Islands, brought there from Anatolia, where all sorts of animals were worshipped. Be that as it may, Ariadne fell in love with Theseus, and helped him escape from the labyrinth. In so doing, of course, she betrayed not just her father but her people.
“And her god as well. It is fairly evident that the story of the Minotaur is a remnant of a far more ancient religion, one that reaches us only as fragments—myths, stories, vase paintings and bits of statuary, rituals like the Crane Dance, which is still performed on Crete.
“Whatever happened there, Ariadne ran away with Theseus, but no sooner had they escaped but he betrayed her. He abandoned her on the island of Dia, near—”
“No!” I broke in. “It had another name—I just heard it, where did I hear it—Naxos! It was the name of the opera that Axel was going to do…”
My voice trailed off. I looked at Balthazar in despair. “But—it all fits together. Why?”