The Door in the Mountain Read Online Free

of the axe edges sharply along Ariadne’s palm.
    She didn’t cry out. Glaucus would have. Even Deucalion might have—but Ariadne only flinched, and only a very little bit, as heat lanced along her palm and up her arm. Prickly, numbing cool came after it. She watched her own blood drip onto the edge of the basin.
    Pasiphae pressed Ariadne’s hands against her belly. She rubbed them in sticky circles, around and around, until her flesh looked like one of Daedalus’s inky maps. When another long shudder took her, she held Ariadne’s hands down even more firmly. Her skin hardened and stayed that way for long moments. She was breathing very fast, between her teeth. When the hardness finally eased, Ariadne felt something move—something both pointed and round. “See, daughter,” the queen said, “he is . . . greeting you!” The knobbly thing beneath Ariadne’s hands thrust at her once more and subsided.
    The queen threw back her head in a blur of dark curls. “Pherenike!” she called. “Go and tell the king—say that Lord Poseidon’s son is coming.”
    “My Queen, I do not think—”
    “Go to him
now
!” the queen shrieked. There were other words too, but they were lost in a rumbling that shook Ariadne free and sent her sprawling. The basin’s oil and wine churned and the brazier’s glow trembled wildly on the walls. She stared at the walls, as she thrust herself onto her knees. They looked different, wrong—and after she’d blinked at them a few times, she understood why. Water was coursing down from the ceiling and from all the seams between the stones, and it was bubbling up from the floor, white with foam. It washed over her legs and hands, warm, so salty that the cut on her palm stung. Almost as soon as she felt it, the sensation faded. The water bubbled and poured, silently, touching nothing, shining with the silver of Pasiphae’s godmark.
    She twisted around to look behind her. Pherenike was gone.
    “Ariadne. Need you.”
    She had to crawl because the ground still seemed to be tipping. The queen was squatting facing the pillar now, her brow and forearms leaning against it. “Help me.” Her voice was muffled and low. “Help him. He is here.”
    There was a dark, wet thing between her thighs. It moved down a bit—it was round, and the dark was
hair
—and then back up. The queen panted. Her silver-sheened limbs trickled water that beaded because of the oil. “My Lord,” she said. “Lord of the sea; bull from the sea.” She moaned, and Ariadne watched the muscles in her legs and shoulders and sides clench. “My Lady, Mother of us all . . .”
    The wet round thing moved again, farther down. Ariadne saw crumpled folds of skin that smoothed, as she watched, into a chin, cheeks, a pair of scrunched-up eyes—all upside-down and pointed toward her. Pasiphae cried a long, rising, giddy cry and the thing inside her slid out. Ariadne put up her hands. It slid right into them and almost through; she clutched it as she once had a wriggling soaked puppy she’d wanted to hug. It—her brother—
he
squirmed, and she held him more strongly yet, even though the cord that started inside her mother and ended in his belly was looping over her hands and making them slipperier.
    “Cut it,” Pasiphae said. “Use the axe.” Her words sounded matter-of-fact, as if she’d just demanded a fig, or told Ariadne to brush her hair.
    Ariadne laid the baby down carefully on his side. He rolled his head back and forth; his tiny plump shoulder rolled too. There were creases in his arms and drawn-up legs. She reached behind her and found the axe. She pinched the wound-up cord near his skin. It pulsed twice between her fingers and stopped, and she sawed at it. It was tough and spurted blood, but she didn’t pause because he didn’t cry. He gazed up at her with wide black eyes and waved one balled-up hand.
    Pasiphae turned herself around. Ariadne thought she would surely lie down now but she didn’t: she