Dion: His Life and Mine Read Online Free Page B

and businesses had closed for the appropriate length of time, due to a king’s son. Andro must have written the letter just after he had won his last contest. I slipped down to the Labyrinth to see Aster.
    “ Tell little brother that I’ve done it! I’ve got enough. What did he mean?” I looked up from the letter to ask Aster.
    “He’d got enough prize money.”
    “Enough for what?”
    “For us to go away together, buy a little house on an island where nobody would know us,” Aster told me before turning his face to the wall. I looked at him for a few minutes. At first I was hurt that neither of them had included me in their plans. Aster must have sensed it.
    “We were going to send for you after we were settled and Phaedra too, if she wanted. Andro said you could have a herb garden.” Guilt and grief washed over me. 
    “We could still do it, I could take you away.”
    Aster moved slightly.
    “It could be just like Andro promised, we could have a new home together.”
    “How?” Aster asked.
    It was a good question, and as I promised him I would find a way, I naively thought I had the answer. Despite my overwhelming grief, I couldn’t help feeling elated, like I had when I first met Bris. I had a purpose, a way of fulfilling my brothers’ wishes.
    Like I said, I was naive. I thought that, somehow, the money Andro had won would save us. No will was made public. If Andro had made one and stated what he wanted, father would have found a way to invalidate it. So father spent the money, on a school for young athletes, in Andro’s honour. However, it did not temper his anger at his son’s death. He blamed Athens and was determined to make the whole city pay. I had other things on my mind, finding a way for Aster and me to escape our respective prisons. His was a physical prison, mine psychological. I’ve never been able to decide which was worse. I often envied Aster his private world where his thoughts could roam free and I’m sure he envied my inconspicuous physicality.
     
    To compensate for the loss of his son, my father came up with a cruel scheme. One day, a servant was sent to him for punishment after dropping a sack and spilling its precious contents on the floor of the cellar. My father, wanting to give the impression of being a fair man, asked the servant, in a terrifying voice, to explain herself before he thought up a suitable punishment (which would have probably involved his bed).
    “It was the monster sire, it gave me a fright.”
    “The monster? What monster?”
    “The monster who lives in the Labyrinth, I, I mean the cellar. I heard it howling and I was so afraid I dropped the sack. I’m so sorry sire, I...”
    “Yes, yes of course, accidents happen,” my father told the astonished servant, “tell me more about this monster.” The servant, finding herself seated in a chair with a cup of sugared tea, in her hands, “for the terrible shock”, grew in confidence and elaborated on the ‘monster’. She chatted away about how she’d been warned by the other servants not to go near a certain part of the cellar because, she might not find her way back and a terrifying monster lived down there. Some of the servants had heard it and the noise it made would turn your blood cold.
    “And what do you suppose this monster would do if it came across a beautiful young woman like yourself?”
    “Well, eat me,” the girl replied, trying to hide the fact that the man who owned her life had asked such a perfectly stupid question.
    However, my father wasn’t a stupid man. He knew who was really down in the cellar and he remembered the cruel name the papers had christened his once-beloved son. He sent the astonished girl back down to the kitchens with a few gold coins and told her to tell the rest of the servants to be wary, in case they heard the Minotaur howling for food.
    Thanks to my father’s media-advisers, Aster’s distorted reputation travelled further than he ever did. Soon all the world