The back of my throat burned, but I could feel the eyes watching us. I did not want to make it worse for him. “Will you tell Ariadne farewell for me?”
“I will,” he said.
I stepped onto the ship and lifted my hand. He lifted his. I had not fooled myself with false hope. I was a goddess, and he a mortal, and both of us were imprisoned. But I pressed his face into my mind, as seals are pressed in wax, so I could carry it with me.
I did not open those crates until we were out of sight. I wish I had, so I might have thanked him properly. Inside one were undyed wools and yarns and flax of every kind. In the other, the most beautiful loom I had ever seen, made from polished cedar.
I have it still. It stands near my hearth, and has even found its way into the songs. Perhaps that is no surprise, poets like such symmetries: Witch Circe skilled at spinning spells and threads alike, at weaving charms and cloths. Who am I to spoil an easy hexameter? But any wonder in my cloth comes from that loom and the mortal who made it. Even after so many centuries, its joints are strong, and when the shuttle slides through the warp, the scent of cedar fills the air.
After I left, Daedalus built his great maze indeed, the Labyrinth, whose walls confounded the Minotaur’s rage. Harvest piled upon harvest, and the twisting passageways grew ankle-deep in bones. If you listened, the palace servants said, you could hear the creature clattering up and down. And all the while, Daedalus was working. He daubed two wooden frames with yellow wax and onto them he pressed the feathers he had collected from the great seabirds that fed on Crete’s shore, long-pinioned, wide and white. Two sets of wings, they made. He tied one to his own arms, and one to his son’s. They stood atop the highest cliff of Knossos’ shore and leapt.
The ocean draughts caught them, and they were borne aloft. East they went, towards the rising sun and Africa. Icarus whooped, for by then he was a young man, and this was his first freedom. His father laughed to see him diving and wheeling. The boy rose higher still, dazzled by the sky’s vastness, the sun’s unfettered heat on his shoulders. He did not heed his father’s cries of warning. He did not notice the melting wax. The feathers fell, and he fell after, into the drowning waves.
I mourned for that sweet boy’s death, but I mourned more for Daedalus, winging doggedly onwards, dragging that desperate grief behind him. It was Hermes who told me, of course, sipping my wine, his feet upon my hearth. I closed my eyes, to find that impression I had made of Daedalus’ face. I wished then that we had conceived a child together, to be some comfort to him. But that was a young and silly thought: as if children are sacks of grain, to be substituted one for another.
Daedalus did not long outlive his son. His limbs turned gray and nerveless, and all his strength was transmuted into smoke. I had no right to claim him, I knew it. But in a solitary life, there are rare moments when another soul dips near yours, as stars once a year brush the earth. Such a constellation was he to me.
Chapter Twelve
WE WENT THE LONG way back to Aiaia, avoiding Scylla. Eleven days it took. The sky bent its arc over us, clear and bright. I stared into the blinding waves, the white-flaring sun. No one disturbed me. The men averted their gazes when I passed, and I saw them cast a rope I had touched into the waves. I could not blame them. They lived on Knossos and knew too much of witchery already.
When we landed on Aiaia, they dutifully carried the loom up through the woods and set it before my hearth. They led up the eight sheep. I offered them wine and a meal, but of course they did not accept. They hurried back to their ship, strained at their oars, eager to vanish over the horizon. I watched until the moment they winked out, like a snuffed flame.
The lion glared from my threshold. She lashed her tail as if to say, That had better be the last of that.
“I think it will be,” I said.
After Knossos’ sunny, out-flung pavilions, my house was snug as a burrow. I walked its neat rooms, feeling the silence, the stillness, the scuff of no feet but my own. I put my hand to every surface, every cupboard and cup. They were all as they had been. As they would ever be.
I went out to my garden. I weeded the same weeds that always grew, and planted the herbs I had gathered on Dicte. They looked strange away from their moonlit hollows, crowded in among my glossy, bright beds. Their hum seemed fainter, their colors faded. I had not considered that perhaps their powers could not survive transplanting.
In the years I had lived on Aiaia, I had never chafed at my constraint. After my father’s halls, the island seemed to me the wildest, most giddy freedom. Its shores, its peaks, all of them yawned out to the horizon, filled up with magic. But looking at those fragile blooms, for the first time I felt the true weight of my exile. If they died, I could harvest no more. I would never walk again the humming slopes of Dicte. I could not draw water from its silver pool. All those places Hermes had told me of, Araby, Assur, Egypt, they were lost forever.
You will never leave, my sister had said.
In defiance, I threw myself into my old life. I did what I liked, the moment that I thought of it. I sang upon the beaches, rearranged my garden. I called the pigs and scratched their bristled backs, brushed the sheep, and summoned wolves to lie panting on my floor. The lion rolled her yellow eyes at them, but she behaved herself, for it was my law that all my animals bear each other.
Every night, I went out to dig my herbs and roots. I did whatever spells came to mind, just to feel the pleasure of them knitting in my hands. In the morning I cut flowers for my kitchen. In the evenings after dinner, I set myself before Daedalus’ loom. It took me some time to understand it, for it was like no loom I had ever known in the halls of the gods. There was a seat, and the weft was drawn down rather than up. If my grandmother had seen, she would have offered her sea snake for it; the cloth it produced was finer than her best. Daedalus had guessed well: that I would like the whole business of it, the simplicity and skill at once, the smell of the wood, the shush of the shuttle, the satisfying way weft stacked upon weft. It was a little like spell-work, I thought, for your hands must be busy, and your mind sharp and free. Yet my favorite part was not the loom at all, but the making of the dyes. I went hunting for the best colors, madder root and saffron, the scarlet kermes bug and the wine-dark murex from the sea, and alum powder to hold them fast in the wool. I squeezed them, pounded, soaked them in great bubbling pots until the stinking liquids foamed up bright as flowers: crimson and crocus yellow and the deep purple that princes wear. If I had had Athena’s skill, I could have woven a great tapestry of Iris, goddess of the rainbow, flinging down her colors from the sky.
But I was not Athena. I was happy with simple scarves, with cloaks and blankets that lay like jewels upon my chairs. I draped my lion in one and called her the Queen of Phoenicia. She sat, turning her head this way and that, as if to show off how the purple made her fur shine gold.
You will never see Phoenicia.
I rose from my stool and made myself walk the island, admiring the changes every hour brought: the water-striders skimming over the ponds, the stones rolled green and smooth by river currents, the bees flying low, freighted with pollen. The bays were full of lashing fish, the seeds broke from their pods. My dittany, my lilies from Crete, they thrived after all. See? I said to my sister.
It was Daedalus who answered. A golden cage is still a cage.