She was still studying her face and hair in her hand-held mirror when she felt the shift in the air behind her.
Ariadne put down the mirror with deliberate slowness, calmly rose from her stool, and turned to face her murdered half-brother Asterion.
For an instant she thought him more shadow than substance, but then he took a single step forwards, and she saw that his flesh was solid and real…as was his anger.
“You betrayed me,” he said in his thick, guttural, familiar voice. “See.” He waved a hand down his body. “See what your lover did to me.”
She looked, for she owed him this at least.
Theseus’ sword had cut into Asterion’s body in eight or nine places: across his thickly muscled black throat, his shoulder, his chest, both his flanks, laying open his belly. The wounds were now bloodless lips of flesh, opening and closing as Asterion’s chest rose and fell in breath (and why did he need to breathe at all, now that he is dead?), revealing a rope of bowel here, a lung there, the yellowed cord of a tendon elsewhere.
Ariadne swallowed, then very slowly lifted her eyes back to Asterion’s magnificent head.
It was undamaged, and for that she was profoundly grateful. The beautiful, liquid black eyes still regarded her clearly and steadily from the bold countenance of the bull, and his graceful horns still curved unbroken about his broad brow.
Her eyes softened, and at that he snarled, deliberately vicious, spraying her beautiful face with thick spittle.
“You betrayed me!”
She had not flinched. “Aye, I did. I did it for Theseus, for I thought he loved me. I was wrong. Deluded with love I betrayed you, and for that I am most sorry.”
He snorted in laughter, and she turned aside her head very slightly. “Most sorry?” He stepped forward, close enough to run prying fingers over her breasts and her belly. She stiffened at his touch, but did not move away. “You have given birth to his child.”
Her eyes flew back to his. “You shall not harm her!”
“Why not?”
“Do not harm her, Asterion. I beg this of you.”
He merely wrinkled his black brow in that peculiar manner of his that demonstrated mild curiosity. “And why not? Why not? Why should her death not be my vengeance for what you did to me?”
“I will give you vengeance enough, Asterion. For you and for me.”
He slid his hand in the waistband of her skirt, jerking her towards him, smiling at the pain on her face. “What nonsense. I am capable enough of taking my vengeance here and now.”
Their heads were very close together, her aristocratic beauty almost completely overshadowed by his dark and powerful countenance.
“I want you—” she began.
He smiled, horribly, and his hand drew her yet closer.
“—to teach me your darkcraft.”
Surprised, his grip loosened a little.
“You are the only one who has ever learned to manipulate the power in the dark heart of the Labyrinth. Now I want you to teach me that darkcraft. I will use it to destroy Theseus. I will use it to destroy his entire world. Every place that Theseus lays foot, everything he touches, every part of his world, everything will fall to decay and death. And yet even that is not all. I will combine your darkcraft with my powers as Mistress of the Labyrinth, Asterion, to free you completely.” She paused, using her brief silence for emphasis. “I will combine our powers together, beloved brother, to tear apart the Game once and for all. Never again will it ensnare you. That will be my recompense to you for my stupidity in betraying you to Theseus and my payment to you for giving me the power to tear apart Theseus and all he stands for.”
He held her eyes steady, looking for deception. “You would destroy the Game? Free me completely so that I may be reborn into life as I will?”
“Yes! This is something that only I can do, you know that…but you must also know I need the use of your darkcraft to do it. Teach it to me, I beg you.”
“If you lie—”
“I do not!”
“If you do not destroy the Game—”
“I will!”
He gazed at her, unsure, unwilling to believe her. “If I give to you the darkcraft,” he said, “and you misuse it in any manner—to trick me or trap me—then I will destroy you.”
She started to speak, but he hushed her. “I will, for there is one thing else that I shall demand of you, Ariadne, Mistress of the Labyrinth.”
“Yes?”
“That in return for teaching you the darkcraft, for opening to you completely the dark heart of the Labyrinth, you shall not only destroy the Game forever, but you will allow me to become your ruler. Your lord. Call it what you want, but know that if you ever attempt to betray me again, if you do not destroy the Game completely, I demand that you shall fall to the ground before me, and become my creature entirely.”
“Of course!”
His expression did not change. “‘Of course’? Taking not a breath to consider? How quickly you agree.”
“I will not betray you again, Asterion. Teach me the darkcraft and I swear—on the life of my daughter!—that I will use it to destroy the Game utterly. It shall never entrap you again.”
He nodded, very slowly, holding her eyes the entire time. On the life of her daughter? No Mistress of the Labyrinth ever used the name of her daughter lightly. Yes…yes, she was being honest with him.
As honest as Ariadne could be.
He smiled, tight and hard. “Your hatred of Theseus must be great indeed to arrange such dark bargains. First with the Crone, and then with me.”
She inclined her head. “He thought to cast me aside,” she said. “No one does that to the Mistress of the Labyrinth.”
“Very well,” he said. “I accept. The bargain is concluded.” His hand tightened once more in the waistband of her skirt, but this time far more cruelly. “You shall have the darkcraft, but I shall take my pleasure in it. Pain, for the pain you inflicted on me. Pain, to seal the bargain made between us.”
He buried his other hand in her elaborately braided hair and, with all the strength of the bull that was his, he lifted her up and hurled her down to the bed.
That night was agonisingly long, and she emerged from it barely alive, but at the end of it Ariadne had what she wanted.
Two days later, stiff, sore, her badly damaged body protesting at every step, Ariadne made her way into the village’s herb garden. In her arms she carried the wicker basket, and in that basket rested her sleeping daughter.
Two of the village midwives who had attended the birth of her daughter watched uneasily from the shadowed doorway of the house Ariadne had left.
Since her daughter’s birth, the midwives—indeed, everyone in the village—had become aware that Ariadne was highly dangerous. Yet they could not clearly define the why of that awareness. Ariadne had not said or done anything which could have made the villagers so deeply afraid of her, and yet there seemed to hover about the mother and her newborn child a sense of danger so terrible, so imminent, that few people could bear to spend more than a moment or two in her company.
The entire community wanted Ariadne gone. Gone from the village. Gone from the island. Gone so completely that all sense of danger vanished with her.
Gone, taking her daughter and her hatred (and no one knew which one Ariadne loved and nurtured the more) with her.
Ariadne, although aware of the women and their nervous watchfulness behind her, paid them no heed. She moved step by careful step along the gravelled path between the raised beds of fragrant herbs and flowers. The basket which contained her daughter she carried with infinite care, and as she walked, she rocked the basket gently to and fro, singing to her child in a slow, rhythmic, almost hypnotic voice.
She sang no lullaby, but the secret whisperings of the exotic darkcraft that she had so recently learned, twisting it together with her own power as Mistress of the Labyrinth.
Most infants would have woken screaming in nightmare at her dark and twi
sted song, but Ariadne’s daughter slept soundly to its meanderings.
Eventually Ariadne’s singing drew to a close, and she halted, gazing on her daughter with great tenderness.
“Your father will die,” she said, “as all that he touches will die, as all that declares its love for him will die, and as all that surrounds him will die. Everything. Everything. Everything.”
Ariadne raised her head, and looked before her. She had come to a halt before a large shrub that delineated the carefully tended herb garden from the wilds beyond it. The shrub’s dense grey-green foliage was broken here and there by large, white, open-petalled flowers.
Ariadne reached out a hand and touched very gently one of the flowers.
They trembled at her contact.
Around the Aegean, in their hidden, mysterious places, so also trembled the flower gate sorceries that guarded the entrances to the founding labyrinths of several score of cities.
“Such dear flowers,” said Ariadne. Then, with an abrupt, savage movement, she twisted the flower free from the shrub.
“Thera,” she said, “shall be the first.”
She held the flower in the palm of her hand for a moment, smiling at it with almost as much tenderness as she bestowed on her daughter, and then, resuming her strange, low singing, she wound the flower into the wickerwork of her daughter’s basket.
So Ariadne continued, her voice growing stronger, the words she sang darker. Flower after flower she snapped, pausing in her singing only long enough to bestow upon each flower the name of a city in which she knew lurked a labyrinth, a city which depended for its wellbeing on the labyrinth within its foundations. Eventually, as Ariadne plucked flower after flower from the shrub, her child was surrounded by a ribbon of woven flowers about the top of the basket.
Ariadne’s thread. The filament that either saves, or destroys.
When she had finished, and her darkcraft was woven, Ariadne cradled the flowered basket in her arms and smiled at her daughter.
“Soon,” she whispered. “Soon, my darling.”
She looked back to the shrub. It was denuded of all flowers save one, and at the sight of that remaining flower Ariadne’s mouth curled in secret delight.
That labyrinth was particularly well-hidden in a city extraordinarily undistinguished, and she doubted Asterion knew of its existence. If it survived, its influence would be minimal. Her brother would never sense its presence, and it would not serve to hold him.
But it would be enough for her purpose, when it was time.
When she was safe.
When she was strong enough to dare.
THREE
Irrelevance. Decay. Death. Catastrophe. Every place that Theseus lay foot; everything he touched; every part of his world. This was Ariadne’s curse.
And with it, in gratitude to Asterion for teaching her the darkcraft, Ariadne did what only she had the power to do.
She unwound the Game—that great and ancient sorcery which underpinned and protected the entire Aegean world.
It began nine days after Ariadne twined the flowers into the basket that cradled her daughter. Meriam, the midwife who had thought to cut Ariadne open to save her child, was standing in the village’s central open space, the beach where Theseus had abandoned Ariadne a bare two weeks previously some sixty paces distant to the south. It was dawn, the air chill, only the faintest of pink staining the eastern sky, the birds in their trees chirping quietly to start the day.
Meriam had no thought for the beauty of the beach, the dawn light or even for the sweet melodies of the birds.
Instead, she stared frowning at the empty wicker basket lying at her feet; flowers, withered and colourless, still wound about its rim.
“Why didn’t she take it with her?” Meriam muttered, then bent to pick up the basket.
In the instant before her fingers touched the basket, one of the flowers slid free from the wickerwork and fell to the earth.
The instant it hit, the chorus of the birds turned from melody to a frightful, fractured screaming.
Instinctively, Meriam straightened and looked about her, her heart thudding. Birds rose in chaotic clouds from the trees surrounding the village and milled briefly in the air, then turned to fly north.
Their screams sounded like the shriek of a blade on a whetstone.
Meriam put her hands over her ears and half-crouched, panicked, but not knowing what to do.
She wanted to run, but she did not know what to run from, or where to run to.
About her, men, women and children were stumbling from doorways, pulling clothes around themselves, shouting in confusion.
Something terrible was about to happen. Meriam knew it, just as certainly as she knew that whatever was going to happen was as a result of Ariadne.
“Why?” Meriam whispered. “Why hate us this much?”
Then…everything went still. The birds had gone, their panic and their screeching gone with them. The folk who had tumbled from their beds into the village’s open space now stood, their voices quiet, looking south over the beach to the calm sea.
It was south. Whatever was so very wrong was south.
A dog whined, then another, and Meriam had the thought that the cacophony of the birds was about to be replaced by an equally frightful shrieking of the village dogs.
At the very moment that that thought crossed Meriam’s mind, there was a blinding flash of light far to the south. The light, first white then a terrible orange, was reflected both in the thin haze of clouds and in the sea, magnifying its effect a hundredfold.
Meriam, as all who stood transfixed with her, barely had time to gasp before first they felt their eardrums swell and burst, and then were lifted far off their feet by a pressure blast of such magnitude and heat that most were dead before they hit the ground.
Those who were not killed in that initial blast died when the molten rock rained from the sky or when, just as the sun finally crested the flaming horizon, the first of six successive tidal waves washed over the lowlying lands of Naxos.
By the time the sun had reached its noon peak the Aegean world had turned grey and black. Dense clouds of ash, pulverised rock, deadly gases and steam mushroomed twenty miles into the sky and spread over the entire eastern Mediterranean region; thick, choking, poisonous ash drifted down to layer corpses and ruins alike with, eventually, two hundred feet of death.
The island of Thera, which sat almost halfway between Crete and Naxos, and which contained in its harbour the glorious shining city of Atlantis, had exploded with such force that the entire island—save for a thin, sorry rim of smoking rock—vanished beneath the waves.
In its dying, Thera poisoned every land and every city within four days’ sailing.
Thera was only the first, but admittedly the most spectacular, step in Ariadne’s curse. Thera’s eruption not only largely destroyed Naxos, but also the northern coastline of Crete. Tidal waves and the murderous rain of molten rock and ash inundated villages, harbours, and the Great Founding Labyrinth which lay partway between the coast and the city of Knossos, almost two miles inland.
Thera, Naxos, and Crete—as well as a score of smaller islands within reach of either the initial cataclysmic blast or the tidal waves—were devastated. Further distant, to the north and south in the lands of Greece, Anatolia, the Levant and Egypt, the effects were not so initially devastating, but crept secretly upon the peoples of the region.
Crops failed for years afterwards, and any man or woman who had breathed too deeply of the ash that continued to trickle out of the sky for months after the initial explosion often succumbed to terrible growths in their lungs in later life. Wells were poisoned, and livestock and children alike sickened and died. People rebelled and overthrew governments and abandoned their gods and their communities. In Egypt a man called Moses used the death that rained down from Thera to force the Pharaoh to set his people free.
In Athens, Theseus watched as his queen, Phaedre, died in an agonising childbed calling out
her sister’s name. In sorrow, he comforted himself with a young virgin called Helen, before he set off on many wandering adventures about the Aegean looking for his own revenge on the woman who had cursed him.
He never found her, but found everywhere the effects of her curse, and, in his very wanderings, spread the effects of Ariadne’s curse further and further.
It was why she had not killed him outright.
Having lived through Thera’s massive destruction, the people of surviving Aegean cities discovered to their horror that the Game, which had protected them for countless generations, was failing. A labyrinthian mystery of great power and sorcery, the Game was used to entrap the evil that was always drawn to communities of wealth and contentment. Without it, cities became increasingly vulnerable to the predations of evil, of wrongdoing, of misfortune, of greed and sloth and hubris; all those mischiefs that haunt success and happiness. Cities fell to invaders from the north and west, or were consumed by earth tremors, or by fire.
Evil incarnate itself walked free. Ariadne’s destruction of the Game and of its protective sorcery meant that Asterion was reborn into life to work his malevolence and depravity where and as he pleased.
In vain did the Kingmen, who through birth and training worked the magic of the Game alongside their city’s Mistress of the Labyrinth, try to arrest the decline. It was pointless, because the malaise that ate at the Game’s powers had been generated by the greatest Mistress of them all, Ariadne. She had controlled the founding Game at Knossos on Crete and had most apparently found the means to undo all the workings of lesser Mistresses about the Aegean.
And Ariadne could not be found. She could not be stopped, and her sorcery (as that of her half-brother) could not be arrested.