BURIED DEEP
BY NAOMI NOVIK
THE LIE MINOS TOLD, WHICH no one believed and no one was expected to believe, was that his youngest son had been shut up for the sake of the servants, whom he had begun brutalizing even as a babe. The lie everyone believed, and told in whispers, was that the queen had played the king false with a handsome guardsman, and he’d shut up the child to keep another man’s son from any chance of inheriting his throne.
But Ariadne had been five years old, herself a late and unexpected child, when her even more unexpected brother had begun to grow under Pasiphae’s heart, and she had been so very excited. Her other brothers were all grown men, big men, warriors; Minos’s bull-strong sons, the court called them, her father’s pride and irrelevant to her. Her sisters had been married off and gone before she was even born. And she had already been clever and good at creeping, so she’d been in the birthing room when the baby had come out bellowing, with the nubs of the horns still soft and rounded on his forehead, and her mother’s attendants had begun to scream.
Minos had all of them put to death, along with three particularly handsome guardsmen with fair hair, to start the second lie and keep the secret. His secret, not her mother’s. Everyone in all of Crete knew of the white bull the sea had sent him, and that Minos had bred it to his cattle instead of putting it to the knife the way the priests had wanted, but Ariadne and her mother knew more than that: they knew that Minos had asked for a sacrifice, one great enough to mark him for the throne over his brothers, and the god had sent the bull for that purpose, to be given back to him, not kept. So it was Minos’s fault, and not her mother’s, but Pasiphae had paid for it, and so had her women, and Ariadne’s little brother most of all.
Ariadne shouted at her mother, the day her father’s men came to take Minotaur away. “We could go to Grandfather!” she said; she was twelve, and her silent, frightened brother was holding her hand tight and trying to stay hidden behind her, futilely: he was a foot taller than her already, with the big cow-eyes large and dark and liquid on either side of his broad soft nose.
They lived with their mother and a few cowed servants—some of them had been killed, but by her father’s orders, not by Minotaur—in a single tower perched on the edge of a green meadow in the hills far above Knossos. It had been built as a watchtower, to give warning of men coming from the sea. They could see for a long way from the windows of the narrow top story, all the way to the sea far below, glossy and deep, like her brother’s eyes. Mother usually stayed in the more comfortable rooms below, but when she came up, she never looked at the sea, only the other way, down at the city—the red columns of the temple, and the people in the markets or thronging the streets to celebrate a festival—and her face was hard and bitter.
Father never came to them. But once a year, on Ariadne’s birthday, someone came and took her down the long dusty hill to the palace, to be presented to him and to receive another heavy necklace of gold, each one growing with her, so that now she had seven of them, the smallest one close around her neck and the largest hanging over her growing breasts. A great dowry accumulating in chains, to apologize for her imprisonment.
It was the only apology Minos ever made. He avoided being alone with her; she was always taken in to him by a nurse or a maidservant, who warned her strictly not to ask her father to let her come and live in the palace, as if he wanted to pretend that he wasn’t refusing her just because he told her no through someone else’s mouth. But she wouldn’t have asked, anyway. She didn’t want to live in the palace, with her father and his lies, even before he’d sent men to take her brother away.
She had instead begun to worry about being taken away herself; she’d started to be old enough, that year, to understand that soon her father would begin to look for someone else to hold her chains. That was why she’d already thought of going to her grandfather: Pasiphae’s father was Helios, the great lord of the easternmost city of Crete, the place where the sun rose, and a power in his own right, with a fortress that not even Minos’s navy could have shattered.
But Pasiphae shook her head and said flatly to Ariadne, “You’re old enough to stop being a fool. The king of Crete needs the sea god’s favor. If the priests learn your father’s lost it, they won’t stop with his blood to buy it back. It’ll be your brother on the altar, and me, and you as well, likely as not.” And after she said that, Minotaur carefully pulled his big hand out of hers—he was only seven, but he’d already learned how easily he could hurt people, if he wasn’t careful—and he put on the heavy wide-hooded cloak that Ariadne had sewn for him so they could go walking in the hills together at night, and then he went out to the waiting guards.
Minos had sent the Oreth to take him: his slave guards, warriors all bought from countries so far away that they had little hope of making a safe return. Their tongues had all been cut out. They were brutal men, hardened by their own misery and everything they saw in their work. They didn’t fear death or the gods, or thought they didn’t, and they would have cut off the head of a seven-year-old boy if her father told them to, much less put him into a prison. But when Minotaur came out a big silent hulk in his cloak, they all went still and afraid, even though they couldn’t see his face, and their hands went to the hilts of their swords. After they shut the door in her face, and Ariadne ran upstairs to look out of the window, she saw them walking in a group ten paces ahead, not looking back at all. Minotaur was trudging after them alone, his head in the cloak bowed, following them to the door, which wasn’t a door, only a hole in the earth.
She had watched them build the shrine all the last year, Minotaur peeking one eye out from behind a curtain next to her, both of them fascinated: it was the most interesting thing that had ever happened. First the priests had come to bless the site, and after them Daedalus, walking over the meadow for days marking the ground with long sticks left poking out. Then the digging began, which took a long time, because there were only six workmen on the whole project: four big slaves to dig the passage, twenty feet down into the ground, and two skilled ones to follow them, putting in the slabs of beautiful polished marble that came in on laden carts to make the floor and the walls.
The shape hadn’t made any sense to her. The workmen had started in the very middle of the meadow, digging out the single round central chamber, and they even dug a well in the middle of it. She thought it would be the first room of many. But instead, from there they dug out a single circling passage, only one, with no rooms and no branching paths, that curved and folded back on itself like a bewildered snake that had lost sight of its own tail. They kept going and going, digging in that one line, filling in one quarter of the circle after another, until they had honeycombed the whole meadow.
On moonlit nights sometimes Ariadne and Minotaur would sneak out and walk on the narrow dirt walls left between the passages, balancing with their arms stuck out and the deep passages looming on either side. They couldn’t run back and forth across the meadow anymore the way they had used to, because the winding passage covered the whole thing in an enormous circle, ripples spreading out from that central well. The walls were just wide enough that it wasn’t very hard to balance for Ariadne’s small feet, but it was just a little bit hard, enough that you had to pay attention to how you put your feet, one after the other. It was harder for Minotaur. He didn’t eat, not since their mother had finally refused to nurse him anymore, to try and make him take food, but it didn’t seem to matter. He was growing very big, and very quickly. By the time the men finished digging, he was teetering on the edges, having trouble not falling in.