because the baby’s cries continued ... although by the time Rosie began to get really close, they had become intermittent. Twice she heard the bull’s hooves go thudding dully along the stone floor, once at a distance, once so close that she stopped short, hands clasped between her breasts, as she waited for it to appear at the head of the passageway she was in.
If she had no backtrail, she always picked up the last seed so she should suffer no confusion on her way back out. She had started with almost fifty; when she finally came around a comer and observed a much brighter green glow straight ahead, she was down to three.
She walked to the end of the passageway and stood at its mouth, looking into a square stone-floored room. She glanced up briefly, looking for a roof, and saw only a cavernous blackness that made her dizzy. She looked down again, registered several more large pats of dung scattered across the floor, and then turned her attention to the center of the room. Lying there on a pad of blankets was a plump, fair-haired baby. Her eyes were swollen with crying and her cheeks were wet with tears, but she had fallen quiet again, at least for the time being. Her feet were in the air and she appeared to be trying to examine her toes. Every now and then she gave out a watery, sobbing little gasp. These sounds moved Rosie’s heart in a way the baby’s all-out wails had not been able to do; it was as if the infant knew somehow that she had been abandoned.
Bring me my baby.
Whose baby? Who is she, really? And who brought her here?
She decided she didn’t care about the answer to those questions, at least not now. It was enough that she was lying here, perfectly sweet and all alone, trying to comfort herself with her own toes in the chilly green light at the center of the maze.
And that light can’t be good for her, Rosie thought distractedly, hurrying toward the center of the room. It must be some kind of radiation.
The baby turned her head, saw Rosie, and raised her arms toward her. The gesture won Rosie’s heart completely. She wrapped the top blanket in the pile over the child’s chest and belly, then picked her up. The infant looked to be about three months old. She put her arms around Rosie’s neck and then dropped her head—clunk!—downon Rosie’s shoulder. She began to sob again, but very weakly.
“That’s all right,” Rosie said, patting the tiny, blanket-wrapped back gently. She could smell the infant’s skin, warm and sweeter than any perfume. She put her nose against the fine hair which floated around the perfectly made skull. “That’s all right, Caroline, everything’s fine, we’re going to get out of this nasty old—”
She heard thudding hooves approaching from behind her and shut her mouth, praying that the bull hadn’t heard her alien voice, praying that the hooves would turn and begin to fade as Erinyes chose some path that would lead it away from her again. This time that didn’t happen. The hoofbeats grew closer—sharper, too, as the bull closed in. Then they stopped, but she could hear something big breathing hard, like a heavy-set man who has just climbed a flight of stairs.
Slowly, feeling old and stiff, Rosie turned toward the sound with the baby in her arms. She turned to Erinyes, and Erinyes was there.
That bull would smell me and come running. That was what the woman in the red dress had told her ... and something else. It’s me it’d come to, but both of us’d get killed. Had Erinyes smelled her? Smelled her even though the moon was not full for her? Rosie didn’t think so. She thought it was the bull’s job to guard the baby—perhaps to guard whatever might be at the center of the maze—and that it had been drawn by the sound of the baby’s cries, just as Rosie had been. Perhaps that mattered, perhaps it didn’t. In any case, the bull was here, and it was the ugliest brute Rosie had ever seen in her life.
It stood at the mouth of the passageway it had just run, somehow as unsettled in its shape as the temple she had passed through—it was as though she were looking at it through currents of clear, rapidly moving water. Yet the bull itself was, for the moment at least, completely still. Its head was