Dark of the Moon

ARIADNE

chapter 36

I KNEW THAT my dear Minos would never willingly harm me. Still, the unmoving bronze face with its flared nostrils and cold, blank eyes, and most of all, the figure's silence, turned my stomach to water. The Minos was a talkative man, and when not talking, he sang or hummed to himself.

As he turned to the table, I saw the red robes he still wore under the bull's hide, which had a pungency that I would normally find distasteful but whose stench of death seemed appropriate in this place, at this time. It was only when he laid a firm hand on my wrist that I stopped trembling. He touched me not merely to calm me, though—he turned my palm up and placed the sacred bronze cup in it.

When he finally spoke, it was in the archaic language used for prayer, but I had no trouble understanding him: "It is time for She-Who-Will-Be-Goddess to die." For a desperate moment I thought, I'll throw the cup on the floor and run away—I'll run to Asterion and stay with him forever under the palace. I hardened myself to stay, but I couldn't move. The cup sat on my open palm, its contents' oily surface shimmering as my hand shook, until the Minos gently curled my fingers up around it and raised it toward my face. A pungent odor, acrid yet earthy, rose to my nostrils. It smelled like rotten leaves and mushrooms and pine needles; it smelled ancient and deadly, yet somewhere in it was the scent of spring and renewal.

"All of it?" I managed to whisper. The huge bronze head moved up and then down. I lifted the cup, and before I could change my mind, I swallowed its contents. I handed the cup to the Minos and watched him as I waited to die.

He removed the lid from the largest of the twelve jars lined up inside the door and reached inside it. He appeared to be moving as unhurriedly as the sun moves across the sky. When his hand came out of the jar, it was holding a long snake, whose tail slashed the air like a bullwhip, but so slowly that I felt I could dance around it.

I tried to speak but made only a raspy grunt, and the big horns swung in my direction. I thought the head gave a little shake, as though my uncle were telling me to be still. I watched the serpent as it moved sluggishly. Was the creature in a holy trance, or had the Minos drugged it?

After a time that seemed interminably long yet infinitesimally short, the Minos's voice said, again in the beautiful language of prayer, "It is time for She-Who-Is-Goddess to be born and to let Goddess enter her." Still holding the snake in his right hand, he grasped my wrist in his left, and before I knew what he was going to do, he had scraped the tips of the serpent's fangs along my flesh.

I squinted; even the light that came through the cracks around the door was now—When? A moment later? The next day? One hundred years later?—unbearably brilliant. Then heat traveled from my heart through my body and out my fingers and toes, tingling and burning.

The Minos was speaking, but I had no interest in his words. I stretched out my fingers. My left wrist felt tight, and I saw that it was swollen and pink and that my hand looked like it belonged to a fat baby.

The Minos lifted off his mask and gazed at me, his grizzled hair sticking to his head with sweat. To my mute astonishment, I saw tears spilling out of his eyelids. Then he did a very strange and unexpected thing. He bowed, so low that I thought his forehead was going to knock into his knees, and said in the ancient language, "My lady Karia."

Then I understood. Ariadne was gone; She-Who-Will-Be-Goddess would be dead until my own daughter, born at some future Birth of the Sun, became a woman. Now I understood my mother's loneliness. I was alone, even though I would always be surrounded by people, because unlike me, they were all fated to die, while I would live forever and one day would look down on them from the sky.

The Minos slumped a bit, exhausted. I understood that now that his duty was done, now that he had summoned Goddess, he had turned back into the old, familiar Minos. He would laugh and talk and eat and drink and play with babies and flirt with girls for the length of the Festival. And then, afterward, he would move to his cottage with Orthia and with someone else—who was it? I racked my brain trying to remember if he had another wife who was going to share his retirement with him. Then I gave up. It was not important.

What was important was this: My mother was with me. I could not see her, but I felt her presence as strongly as if I were lying on her lap, as I had when I was a baby, or as if we were sitting companionably together knotting wool into intricate patterns for a particularly difficult healing, or as if I were standing behind her, massaging her head to drive away a pain.

And not only my mother, but her mother and all our Mothers since time was time were suddenly with me, invisible but present nonetheless. I turned to the Minos to ask him where they had come from, but he was no longer there—at least, not to my eyes. Instead, I saw the moon, full and white and bright. It didn't occur to me to question why She was there, in that small, window less room, and especially how I could see Her now, during Her dark phase. Nor did I wonder when She hovered over the edge of the sea, making a brilliant white path that stretched toward me. She dipped her edge into the water.

And now I saw my mother. She looked as she had when I was a child, her shining black hair untouched by gray, her grave eyes, and only a hint of a smile. Behind her was one I knew to be She-Who-I s-Goddess who was her mother, although I had never seen my grandmother while she was alive. She was shorter than my mother and had a laughing countenance and thick hair like mine that escaped from its fastening. Her own mother was behind her, a woman with a withered arm and a gentle face. On and on they stretched in a line, and they didn't speak, but all looked at me with an expression that I couldn't read. Compassion? Pity? Fear?

I wanted to ask them why they were there, but as one they turned from me and started dancing in a line. The Goddess farthest from me, whose features I couldn't make out, took a step toward the moon. At first I thought she was dancing in the water, and then I realized that she was on the water. She trod the silver path that the moon made, moving straight toward the white disk. The next woman followed close behind, and the next and the next, until they stretched far away, looking like a line of ants, purposeful in their parade, bending and straightening, twirling and prancing.

My mother glanced over her shoulder at me. I took an eager step toward her, but she held up her hand, her face serious.

"No." Her voice was as I remembered it from my girlhood, lighter than in her later years. "No, Ariadne, my darling, my dearest, you are not to come."

"I am not to come now?"

"You are not to come," she repeated, and then she was far away, dancing along that bright road, and in an instant she was swallowed by the last shining sliver as the moon sank below the horizon, leaving the world, and especially me, in darkness.

Someone was saying the same words over and over. I didn't want to listen. I wanted to follow my mother. Was I never to go with her?Was I not meant to join her and our mothers and live eternally in the moon? Or was it that I was not yet ready and could not go now but would at some later time?

The voice was insistent, and reluctantly I made myself listen. "You must meet your people, my lady Karia," the Minos was saying patiently. "You must show yourself to them." I turned obediently toward the door, but he stopped me. "You have forgotten something." I wrenched my thoughts and remembered the rehearsals, and the white Goddess ball.

There came to me a sickening feeling that made Goddess retreat a bit and Ariadne try to reveal herself. Ariadne had something to tell the Minos, but Goddess wouldn't let her. Goddess was too strong; She was ancient and powerful, and She was not only my mother but all our Mothers since time was time. Goddess choked off the speech in my throat, Goddess turned my feet; Goddess opened the richly carved wooden chest and pulled out the sham ball.

The Minos gave an exclamation, but I couldn't tell what the sound meant—surprise or dismay or something else. No matter. The ball was heavy, far heavier than it had been before, and it lay cold and inert in my hands. Some ancient memory told me that it should feel alive and should glow. It had always glowed like moonlight during the ceremony, ever since I had first become Goddess, back when Knossos was no more than a collection of huts by the river Theren, with the Goddess stone that had fallen from the sky in their midst. But now it felt dead.

I could do nothing about it. I turned left and paced the thirteen steps that took me to the Goddess stone. It gleamed white under its draping of red garments. I knelt and held the ball of yarn up to it. I counted to thirteen in my head and then stood and nodded to the Minos. He hesitated a long moment before he bowed and pushed the door open.

My eyes clamped shut against the brilliant light, and my arm felt like it would break with the weight of the ball I held out in front of me. The cheering that reached my ears was sweet, and I was tempted to look, but even a crack in my lids was painful. Behind me, the Minos shouted, "Goddess walks among you!" I doubted that anyone heard his words over their own noise.

Far, far inside me, I was still Ariadne. I wondered what to do next; I worried that I did not know how to find my husband. Something in me even felt hungry when the smells of roasted meat and hot bread reached my nostrils. But mostly, Ariadne was gone. Dead, as the Minos had said? Or merely hiding? Almost all of me was Goddess, and as my eyes adjusted to the light, I half opened them.

I looked out over my people and felt a rush of love. They were so imperfect, and different one from the other, yet so similar. They were beautiful, even the old ones deformed with stiffening bones and the tall, young ones whose faces bore the angry red marks of youth. My eyes passed over tiny Phaedra, who was cradled in her wet nurse's arms, and she was no more or less dear to Me than any of the others. They were all My children, and they were all beautiful.

Yet at the same time, they were hideous, because every one of them was dying. As I gazed at them, I saw rotting corpses, even the babies, even the rosy maidens and the youths hanging over them. I found this neither frightening nor disgusting; instead, I felt renewed love, as well as pity for their fate. None of them would be alive for more than a few years, while I would look down on their children and their children's children forever from the night sky, except when I descended and lived among them for a few precious days.

I had been Goddess since time was time, and I would be Goddess forever.