The Lost Books of the Odyssey - By Zachary Mason Page 0,54
his footsteps. Sometimes he thought he heard the beast moaning and sighing in its sleep; the frisson made him bare his teeth. Mastering himself, Theseus reflected that these sounds were not so ominous; if it was asleep, like any man or animal, then the creature could not be an immortal with ichor in its veins and eyes wide for a thousand-year watch.* Furthermore, it was accustomed to killing terrified children, not an armed and determined warrior (though he was only sixteen, he merited the name).
From the layout of the palace he had inferred the rough dimensions of the labyrinth but either he had been wrong or got lost because he wandered through more corridors than he had thought the labyrinth could hold. As he went deeper, it appeared that Daedalus sometimes used the labyrinth as a workshop—in some rooms there were relief maps of Knossos carved into the walls, sometimes with notes in a spidery hand about strategic weak points and the relative merits of mangonels versus arbalests on wharves, walls, promontories and towers. In other rooms he found drawings of birds and sea creatures (some of the drawings remarkably life-like, others of carefully posed skeletons), waxy yellow crystals in numbered boxes and a shelf of books all of whose pages were parchment-thin mirrors with varying degrees of warp and translucency. In one room he discovered a map of the labyrinth but it was difficult to associate it with his recollections of the passages he had seen and he soon found other chambers with other maps, equally convincing and on inspection wholly contradictory.
He found the Minotaur sleeping in an arcade, flat on his back (he was innocent of clothing and evidently male), his huge limbs sprawled out around him. The creature was big—upright he would have been around seven feet tall, Theseus guessed. The Minotaur’s horns were long and sharp enough to skewer a man but Theseus was nevertheless relieved—in his imagination the monster had snorted fire and filled a cavern with its bulk, but now that he saw the beast he recognized him as just another victim. Theseus crept forward, surprised that the creature could sleep through his heart’s clamor. He raised his sword to strike the carotid, but hesitated at the thought of killing a sleeping foe—he was still half a boy and loved honor.
In that moment the Minotaur woke and swatted him away with a massive paw. Theseus recovered and sprang to his feet as the Minotaur bellowed and charged with lowered horns. Theseus feinted left and stepped right, as he had practiced so many times with his father’s bulls in Athens, and as the beast went roaring by he cut through its spine at the base of its neck. The Minotaur slowed, then teetered and fell heavily, comically, landing on its stomach with a loud slap. A blood bubble formed on its nostril, burst, and then stillness. Dead, the monster was pitiful, its glazed cow eyes full of terror. Theseus ineffectually tried to clean his sword on the walls (he did not want to sully his shirt and could not bear to approach the corpse), regarded his fallen enemy for a moment, and turned to trace his way back out of the labyrinth. It occurred to him to gather up the twine but it would have been hard to re-roll and anyway he thought, “Let them see the artifice by which their god was killed by Theseus the Athenian.”
Outside the labyrinth Ariadne was waiting for him. Her cheeks were tear-stained but she greeted him with composure. They plucked the other Athenians out of their cells and stole away to the docks where they waved torches in the damp night air and their ship, which had been cruising outside the harbor every night, came in to fetch them. Once they were well out to sea they stopped creeping around the deck and speaking in whispers and started laughing, shaking their fists at King Minos and the city whose tutelary demigod Theseus had just butchered. Now and then they fell silent and there were no sounds but the rippling of the sails and the murmur of the bow wave. After a while someone would say, “Steak, anyone?” and the laughter would begin again. Ariadne did not participate, but Theseus held her hand and kissed her and told her how beautiful Athens was.
When they arrived, King Aegeus embraced Theseus and welcomed Ariadne with the courtesy due a princess and the warmth due a daughter. She and Theseus were married