Ariadne

Taurus and I made a game of those visits. Sometimes I would play at being an Athenian maiden, alone and afraid in the darkness. He would stalk me, and seize me as I pretended to struggle, and hold me against the damp, cool stone wall as he shredded my garments and penetrated me. Ultimately, pinned there with my legs hooked around his hips, my arms around his waist, I would let my struggles give way to complete surrender.

Other times, I would sit with his horned head in my lap and tell him stories of the gods, and the wide world beyond the labyrinth. He yearned for such tales, though they saddened him as well. He knew as well as I that his fate was to be forever locked away.

Whenever I sensed his melancholy growing too great, I would coax him to playact with me, and we would be Europa being carried away by Zeus in the form of a bull, or Deianera's ravishing by the centaur, or the seduction of Persephone by Hades.

This went on for nearly a year, and then I realized that the time of the tribute was upon us. Another black-sailed Athenian ship arrived, bringing its freight of seven youths and seven maidens.

I was not now so shocked as I once had been. That innocent Ariadne seemed to belong to eras long gone. I understood Minos better now, and Pasiphae as well. I forgave them when I learned how Icarus, my childhood friend and half-brother, had perished when he flew too near the searing sun.

Daedalus, my true father, escaped on the wings he had made of wood and wax and feathers, but Icarus' body fell into the sea. I was not reunited with Daedalus, who had wisely assumed that a return to Crete would not be in his health's best interest. But to know that he was alive, that he had ultimately outsmarted his cruel king, gladdened my spirits.

On the day of the tribute, I was troubled by a worry that was hard to put name to. Only when the Athenians were brought in did I divine it – I looked on the seven maidens, and realized that they might find more than death awaiting them in the dungeon below. Had I taught Taurus to enjoy the company of women too much? Somehow, I imagined that he would not find the reality to be as our games were. If he chased down one of these Athenian maidens in the darkness, and stripped her, and thrust into her, she would most likely not give in to an unexpected passion.

But these worries were dashed from my mind with a startling suddenness. One among them, one of the Athenian youths, captured and held my attention.

He stood apart from the rest, with a proud and defiant stance untouched by fear or groveling humility. He looked upon Minos with a scathing hatred, but it was also a look of equals.

This man, tall and well-made, with curling hair the very color of polished bronze and eyes bluer than the sky, was no common Athenian. This man was royal.

Seeing him, I was as one shaken from a year-long trance. The Athenian man was not the exact image that I had once imagined, my adoring husband whose peerless lovemaking was surpassed only by his absolute adoration of me, but he was closer than I had ever seen by the waking light of day.

I loved him.

From the very instant I set eyes upon him.

The events of the past year were forgotten. The passions in which Taurus and I had indulged were cast from my mind as the vile and wrong acts that they had been. The Minotaur was a monster, and I had been tricked, misused by Pasiphae. She had perhaps even worked some sorcery on me, to bend my will and force me into becoming her misbegotten son's mistress.

Here, before me now, was the man for whom I'd been waiting.

True, he was Athenian, a son of our enemies … but the war was long over. What better gesture of peace between our countries than a marriage?

I hid a laugh at my folly. Minos would never accept it. He would go on demanding the annual tribute from Crete, and no doubt attempt to impress upon his successor the importance of continuing it.

No, this group like the ones before them would be sent down into the dark. They would die as their countrymen had died. I had seen the pile of Athenian bones, gnawed clean, cracked apart that he might suck the marrow.

They would die.

A coldness gaped in my heart. They would die.He would die. The man I loved, the prince of my fondest desires, would be torn apart by the Minotaur.

I could not bear it. I had to find some way to help him. If I provided him with a weapon, and with the golden ball of twine … why, might he not slay the beast, and escape?

Pasiphae would know at once. My choice, then, was clear. I would have to leave. To flee Crete with my true love, and never look back.

He proclaimed himself to Minos as a prince of Athens.

His name was Theseus.

**

The End