The Door in the Mountain Read Online Free Page A

continued to squat, and she grunted, and another thing slipped out of her. It wasn’t a baby; it was round and flat, and it looked like something the priestesses would cut out of a calf at an altar. The queen nudged it with her foot until it fell into the wine basin with a
plop
.
    “Pass him to me.”
    He was still slick, but this time he seemed to cling to Ariadne. He wrapped his arms and legs around her hands and made a mewling noise.
    He doesn’t want to go to her; he wants
me. Pasiphae reached over and disentangled him. She put him to her breast.
No
—
his mouth is too little for there
—but apparently it wasn’t. He suckled and coughed and suckled, both fists waving until Pasiphae grasped them and held them to her lips.
    “Asterion,” she murmured.
    Ariadne stood up. The room had stopped rumbling, and the last of the silver water was sluicing away. She looked down on the baby’s head, with its dark hair (tufty, now that it was drying) and saw two bumps in it. Two nubs with rounded-off tips pushing out from the hair on either side of his brow. She bent and touched one; she had to—it was so strange. Her mother’s hand came down over hers and kept it still.
    “You see? Already he shows his father’s mark. Imagine, Ariadne, how these horns will grow.”
    Pasiphae might have said Ariadne’s name, but it didn’t sound as if she were really speaking
to
her. Ariadne glanced up and followed the direction of her mother’s eyes. Pherenike was standing just inside the pillar by the doorway, but Ariadne didn’t look at her; she looked instead at her father. Minos was framed in the doorway itself. It was lighter behind him, so she couldn’t see his face, at first. She felt her stomach lurch, waiting for his features to get clearer—but when they did, there was nothing frightening about them. His eyes were steady and his mouth was a bit open, neither frowning nor smiling.
    “Yes,” Pasiphae said, “look at how fine and strong Poseidon’s son is.”
    Ariadne shrank back against the column. She wished suddenly that she could do things over—that she could drop the baby on the ground, this time, or cut the horn-nubs from his skull with the bronze axe. For she was nothing now—nothing, next to the bull god’s son. She pressed herself against the stone so hard that she could feel the edges of the double-axe carvings, even through her sleeping shift. The baby’s suckling sounded very loud.
    A shadow-smile curved Minos’s lips. He stayed still a moment longer, and then he turned and walked away. Smoke and sparks flowed out into the dark behind him and were gone.

CHAPTER THREE
    The summer after Asterion’s birth was full of gold and blue. Ariadne remembered it so well, later: the sunlight on the sea below the palace; the pleats of her mother’s skirts and the embroidered sleeves of her short jacket; her brothers’ skin and hers too, burnished and rimed with salt.
    The summer palace at Amnisos was even lovelier than Knossos. It was set on a cliff, halfway—she imagined—between sea and sky. Between Poseidon and Zeus, she also thought, and even Pasiphae and Minos seemed to sense this balance. She heard them arguing in Pasiphae’s chamber, but only twice, and both times the shouting eased into murmuring and muffled laughter. It was all quite wonderful: baby Asterion was sickly and weak and hardly ever anywhere but with his nurse, and Minos smiled all the time and called Ariadne “the king’s jewel,” and Glaucus disappeared after Deucalion into the olive groves and didn’t bother her. She turned six, too, in the palace above the sea. Everyone cheered and sang to her, and Naucrate made fig tarts. But best of all was afterward, on her way to bed, when she overheard Asterion’s nurse speaking to someone in a corridor. The nurse said, quite clearly, “Perhaps the princess
is
marked, after all, for is she not as lovely as if Aphrodite herself had made her?”
    Ariadne was happy, that summer.

    The day before