The Door in the Mountain Read Online Free Page B

the royal household was to set out again for Knossos, they all returned to the sacred cave. It looked darker than it had last year. The owl looked the same. It was plump and white, and its round golden eyes were framed with brown, and it sat on its gnarled, leafless branch without blinking even once. Ariadne had reached out her hand to it, when she was only five, but her father had scolded her, and the priest had nodded and stroked his oiled, pointy beard. Now she just stared at it. Its chest feathers were sunlit; its back ones were duller, sunk in the dimness of the cave’s entrance.
    “Ariadne!” She turned toward Glaucus’s voice. He was silhouetted on the ridge behind her, waving his arms. “Come back here!”
    “You come and get me!” she called and grinned when he put his hands on his hips. He’d been too afraid to come close to the cave last year. She’d already mentioned this today, as they bumped and jostled in the palanquin; he’d hit her in the stomach, and she’d hit him back, and Androgeus had had to wrest them apart.
    “Fine—don’t come,” he shouted. “You’ll just miss Androgeus, that’s all.”
    She ran up and into full sunlight. People were gathered on the plateau—the palanquin bearers, her brothers, the queen, the king, Pherenike, with her own small, squirming infant—all murmuring and gazing down the mountain slope. She turned to look where they were, her belly already knotting and sick.
    “Amazing,” she heard one of the bearers say, “he’s never returned so quickly from the hunt. . . .”
    Androgeus’s skin was brown and his curly hair looked like jet and the cloth wrapped around his hips was very white: he shone as he walked up toward them. The stag that walked beside him shone, too, russet and gold. His antlers dipped and climbed. Androgeus’s hand was light and sure on the animal’s neck.
    “Amazing,” breathed the same bearer. “Such a size—the biggest yet . . .”
    Androgeus’s first animal had been much smaller: a swallow, brought down by a servant boy’s slingshot. Ariadne had heard their father tell the story countless times: Androgeus, four years old, had taken the wounded bird in his hands and bent his head down to it and it had stopped its frantic flapping. Its tiny brown eye had fastened on the boy, who whispered words no one else could hear. It had died quietly, bathed in a silver light that seemed to come from his cupped palms, and everyone watching had known: Artemis had marked him. It had been proven time after time, over the years: he touched animals and spoke to them and they understood; they
followed
if he led. Men had tried to use his gift in the hunt, but from childhood he refused. “He only leads beasts to death for the gods’ glory, or the goddesses’,” Minos would say. “He is the purest of all their children.”
    I hate him
, she thought, every time she heard the story—and she thought it now, too, watching everyone watching him.
    This beast’s eyes rolled back, the closer it came to the group on the plateau. Androgeus stroked the stag’s thick, burnished neck. Ariadne watched his lips move and heard the lilt of his marked voice, though, as ever, she couldn’t make out the words.
    “My King.” These words she did understand; Androgeus spoke them very clearly, when he and the stag reached Minos. “Father. The goddess has blessed us.”
    Minos looked solemn, but his eyes were bright. Pasiphae stood beside him, smiling. Ariadne saw with another lurch of her belly that Asterion was asleep on the queen’s shoulder. She was swaying a bit, tracing circles on his back.
    “She blesses us through you, my son,” said Minos. “Now come—let us sacrifice to her so that she will know the strength of our devotion.”
    Ariadne’s heart began to pound as she followed her family down the slope again. This time was different—this time they walked past the squat, twisted tree and the owl, and past the priest who stood beside them. They