Dark of the Moon

ARIADNE

chapter 24

MY MOTHER'S servant Iaera ran into the inner chamber. Usually the servants avoided the dark, twisting corridors under the palace like the mouth of Hades, so I was already on my feet with surprise at the sight of her when she grabbed my wrist. The shock of her touch made my throat squeeze shut. "What is it?" I managed to squeak.

"You must come." Iaera dropped my arm as though it had burned her. But her urgency propelled me forward, and I ran out, forgetting Asterion, Theseus, everything except the unknown danger that had alarmed the maid enough to touch me. Iaera was close behind. "Your mother—She-Who-Is—it's the baby."

"What baby?" I asked stupidly.

"Her baby. Its coming."

"No, it isn't," I insisted, even as I took the stairs two at a time, holding my robe up out of the way. "It's not due for more than another moon." Iaera was silent, which chilled me more than a contradiction would have done. I flew down the corridors and threw open the curtain at the doorway of my mother's chamber.

I must have taken a wrong turn, I thought. This was not where my mother and I lived and worked and slept. This must be some other room, this place where priestesses stood in silence, each holding a candle whose light illuminated her white face, making a circle around the high bed where something writhed.

I don't know how long I stood in the doorway trying to take it in, that my mother, not Goddess, not She-Who-I s-Goddess, but a woman like any other, was delivering a baby and that Goddess was sending the baby much too early.

Damia spoke from her place next to my mother's head. "Come now. Only She-Who-Will-Be-Goddess may touch her at this time." The familiar odor of birth, of blood and something else sharp that I smelled only when a baby was coming, made me almost forget who it was that looked at me with reddened eyes, her black hair stuck to her sweaty cheeks, and I got down to work.

I knelt, rolled up my sleeve, and felt for the baby. My stomach wrenched; I couldn't understand what I was touching. It was the head, wasn't it? I pushed my hand farther in and winced as my mother gave a little whine. Where were the eyes, the nose? Dear Goddess, is this a child without a face?

Then I realized something almost worse. The child was the wrong way up. My mother and I had once safely delivered a baby who was looking toward the heavens, like this one. My mother had said it was a wonder that Goddess had not killed both the child and the woman. I didn't trust that Goddess would allow such a wonder to me, especially after She had allowed me such a short time to train.

Almost the worst part of the long night—as I tried to turn the baby over, as I gave up on that and tried to pull it out by force, as the floor grew slippery with blood, as the candles flickered and shadows moved like imps around the room—was the silence. My mother made no sound after the whine that I had ripped out of her, and the priestesses stood like trees. Many of them were experienced midwives, but when I asked them to help my mother sit up, they looked through me as though I were crystal. When I screamed and knocked the candle from Perialla's hand, she didn't wince. She picked it up and relit it at the one that Damia clutched in her own white claw.

When at last I held the tiny baby, wet and squalling, the priestesses blew out their candles—I had not noticed that pale light was coming in through the columns—and bustled about. One took the child from my arms and wrapped her in a white fleece. Another dipped a cloth in a basin of water and sponged my mother's face, clucking and murmuring.

Perialla rubbed the birth slime and blood from the child and held her up for me to inspect. The tiny thing was purplish, but as she screamed, she brightened to pink and then red. She was covered with fine black hair, and I recoiled. Had my mother given birth to a monster?

"Just like my son, my firstborn." Perialla's voice was tender. "Furry as a little squirrel at birth. He lost it all in a few weeks, as she will too." The words "if she lives" hung in the air between us. I knew her son; he was large and handsome, with no more hair than any other man. Perialla put the baby in my arms. I wrapped her snugly, and her screams turned to whimpers and then silence as she looked around with large, milky-gray eyes.

My mother was lying so still. Didn't she want to see the baby? I brought the child around, and my mother didn't move as I held the tiny bundle up to her.

"She's small, but she's strong," I said.

My mother turned her face away. "Call her Phaedra," she said. Why didn't she say, "I'll call her Phaedra"? I picked up her hand. It seemed small and thin, and she hardly returned the pressure of my fingers. I pressed my face into her palm, my tears mingling with her sweat.

"Phaedra," I agreed. It was a pretty name, and one I had not heard before.

One of the priestesses did something to the bedding that caused my mother to gasp and catch her lower lip between her teeth. I looked back sharply, ready to scold the woman, when I saw that she was carrying away a blanket so heavy that it dragged on the floor, leaving a dark smear behind it. I handed the baby to the nearest woman and stood to see what I could do to stanch the bleeding.

"Stop." Something in the way Damia spoke halted me. She turned to my mother and said, "You must tell her." My mother's head moved back and forth, back and forth, on her pillow in a firm negation. "Pasiphaë." The use of my mother's name startled me, but Damia repeated it. "Pasiphaë, you must tell her now."

Still nothing.

"If you do not..." The old woman's voice faltered, and then she went on more firmly, "If you do not, I will."

"Let me stop the bleeding first," I pleaded. Damia moved aside, and I inspected the damage that the baby had caused. That I had caused. I did what I could to slow the flow of my mother's life from her body, but I had only given her another hour, if that. When I finished, I went back to her side and picked up her hand once more. It was cold, but I felt a weak pulse in the wrist.

The silence lasted until my heart squeezed at the thought that she must have died, but then she whispered, "Leave us."

Damia hesitated, looking from me to the white face surrounded by black hair unloosed from its usual knots and coils and spread over the sweat-soaked pillow. The priestess pressed her thin lips together, bowed, and withdrew out of earshot, but still within the chamber. Why can't the old turtle leave us alone? was my miserable thought, but then my mother's fingers tightened almost imperceptibly on mine, and I bent in closer.

I knew that I was about to hear the answer to the question that had plagued me ever since I could remember—Why is Goddess punishing my mother?—and, I fervently hoped, to the new one that had been brought up by Damia and Perialla— Who am I? Yet, suddenly, I didn't want to know. If my mother revealed the secret she had guarded for so long, it meant that she knew that Goddess was taking her.

I smoothed a lock of damp hair off her face. She opened her eyes with a great effort. "Come closer," she said. "I know you have wondered why Goddess is angry with us."

"I don't need to know, Mother," I said, but she stopped me with a look that had something of her usual command.

"You do need to know, and you need to hear it from me. I must make clear to you what I did, so that you don't do the same." The dread that settled in my chest threatened to sicken me, and I didn't dare speak again. I merely bowed my head.

"Long ago," she said slowly, "when I was your age ... I had been She-Who-Is-Goddess for only one year. It was the Planting Festival and I—oh Goddess, there is so much you don't know!" Her lips were as pale as the moon behind a cloud. I chafed her cold hand between mine; surely if I could warm her, she would return to herself. But she pulled away.

"Listen to me," she said hoarsely. "Soon I will be Goddess Forever and you will be She-Who-Is-Goddess. No!" she said as she saw me starting to speak. "This is how it must be. Look to Damia for anything you need to learn. She will not dishonor Goddess by leading you incorrectly. It should be Thoösa, who will return as senior priestess, but she harbors too much ill will."

And Damia doesn't? I thought, but all I said was, "I will, Mother."

Her breath was shallow. "Damia would never dishonor Goddess, as I did."

"No," I protested. "No, Mother, you never—"

"Hush. It was long ago, so long ago." Her voice faded, and then grew stronger. "I had undergone the Ordeal before, but sometimes it is more powerful, sometimes less. This time—the time of which I speak—I was Goddess, yet I was not. I was also, in some way, Pasiphaë. I saw with Pasiphaë's eyes, and I heard with Pasiphaë's ears." A pause; then, so faintly that I could barely hear her, "And I loved with Pasiphaë's heart."

"No, Mother," I whispered. "I don't want to hear."

"You will hear. When I stepped out of the shrine, the people rejoiced that Goddess had returned. I wanted to tell them that they were wrong, that I was still She-Who-Is-Goddess, still Pasiphaë, and that the Ordeal had failed. But Goddess stopped my tongue. And I suppose that in some way I was Goddess. But there was more woman than Goddess in me, and the woman in me failed my people. I knew my husband. I saw Velchanos. He had taken the body of Nikanor." Her voice lingered over the name, a new one to me.

"Who is Nikanor?"

She squeezed her eyes tight, and a tear slid from the outside corner of each. Her breath barely stirred my hair. "He was—he was a man. A simple man, really, a carpenter who had grown up near the palace, my playmate as a child. He was the one I loved above all others. And so, even though I saw that he was Velchanos, even though I knew I had to choose him to be my consort until the Goddess in me returned to the moon, I could not. I could not bear to watch my brother open the pathway of Nikanor's life and give him to the fields." Silence. The gray sky outside was growing brighter, but darkness hung heavily around me.

"No," I said. "No."

My mother went on as though she hadn't heard me, and I think in truth she had not. She seemed to be speaking to someone else—to herself, or perhaps to Nikanor. "How could I? How could I spill the blood of my sweet one, my darling? We would have three days together, and then I would see my own brother open his neck, and for all that year, whenever I saw a plant, I would know that it had grown on his blood. How could I eat bread, knowing that the wheat grew and gave me life only through the death of the one I loved most in the world?

"So," went on her inexorable voice, "I chose another. He was a good man, glad to give his life for the people. He did not know that his death was wasted. I rewarded his family richly after the small part of Goddess in me returned to the sky, and they have never wanted for anything. Yet his life was gone for no purpose." The silence returned and lengthened.

"I don't know anyone named Nikanor," I ventured.

"He was ... he died. One moon after the Festival. A beam in a house he was building fell on him. He knew what I had done, and he knew that Goddess was killing him in a shameful way, making him waste his death, instead of honorably on the stone altar. He died cursing me.

"But then I thought I had finally been forgiven when you were born—you, my lovely Ariadne, who learned Goddess's dance the first time we stepped it together; you who have the skill of our grandmothers in helping babies into the world and in casting charms." She licked her cracked lips, and I moistened them with a cloth dipped in cool water. Her head fell back on the pillow. "Do you understand?"

"I understand." I finally did. I finally knew what made my mother weep in the night, why her eyes were dark with terror as she surveyed the crowds at the Planting Festival.

"And you know what you must do when you become Goddess?"

"I must be true to Velchanos. I am to choose the man whose body he inhabits, no matter who it is." I shuddered. Velchanos might decide to test me by taking the form of a sick old man or a stinking farm boy. No matter. I would do what was required.

Even as I looked to her for confirmation, my mother's eyes closed and her grip on my hand slackened. "No," I said again, but the other priestesses, alerted in some way that I did not understand, filed in. One loosened the ties of my mother's robe while another gently sponged blood from her legs and belly. I wiped away spittle from the corners of her mouth.

Her hand moved, and I could tell that she was trying to form a blessing. I curved her thumb and finger and pressed it to my forehead. Her eyelids opened a crack, showing eyes as lifeless and flat as a dead fish's. "Never dishonor Goddess." And then they closed.

"Come, child." Damia's creaky voice was unexpectedly gentle. "Come. She has joined your grandmothers."

"No!" I screamed, but the priestesses ignored me and even pushed me aside. I could not watch them treat her body like that of any other woman taken by Goddess, so I went to the window. My legs shook under me, feeling as limp as the tentacles of a dead octopus.

The stars were no longer visible. Damia stood behind me, and together we watched the moon set. I shook to the rhythm of the earthquake within me.

"She has gone home," the old woman said softly. "Karia has returned to Her husband, and already he has forgiven and cherishes Her."