My brother’s eyes are the easiest words to read, and the truest.
“Tell me about the sea,” he says. His eyes are amber pools, calm, unruffled.
We are sitting in his favorite gallery, the one that abuts the sea. From here, we can’t see the blue expanse, but we hear the waves lapping against the rock wall.
I smile. “The sea is a sky full of water.”
His eyes lighten into yellow, like butter, soft, melting. “Tell me about the sky.”
“Vast. Immense. Endless,” I chant.
“Massive. Enormous. Gigantic,” he intones.
I invented that game, moons ago. Whenever he asks a question I can’t answer, I unleash a litany of adjectives. He responds with a string of synonyms.
It is my way of keeping him out of that other labyrinth, the worse one.
Some days it works. Not today.
“I hear the sea,” he says. His voice is empty. “When the sea croons it reminds me of you, Ari. Then I sit, close my eyes, and listen until sleep comes. Other times the sea roars, a monster to terrify every other monster. I flee then, from gallery to gallery.”
Grief stills my tongue. I take his hand. His fingers are like our mother’s, slim, long, deceptive, human.
His eyes waver between earth and amber. “How can the same sea be so terrifying and so tender?”
I know the answer. Like our parents; so loving to me, so monstrous to him. But I can never say it.
“Tell me a story,” I say instead.
Inventing stories diverts him. They are set not in palaces or cities, but in plains and deserts, unbounded spaces where a bull-man can be free because he will not be judged. They are places of light, but dark things lurk just beyond the horizon, misshapen trees with branches like tortured limbs, distorted hills from which rocks jut out as sharp as fangs.
The stories make him happy, almost.
Not today.
He shakes his head. “You should go. It is late. There is no time.”
There’s time. But he wants me gone.
What does he do after I leave and he is alone? Does he wander through the physical labyrinth? Or does he vanish into the invisible one, the one inside him?
Is that when he roars louder than the sea at its angriest, bellows that pierce the marble walls of the palace that spurned him and echo across the city that fears him?
He never stops telling me it wasn’t my fault. But guilt assails me every time I see the sun and the moon, every time I feel the wind and the rain, every time our parents embrace me, every time my normal human face stares at me from the mirror.
We walk slowly, hand in hand. He knows the galleries, every inch, every stone, every crevice. He never gets lost in this labyrinth.
The other maze is different. It can never be known fully; it grows and changes. I fear that someday he will lose his way there, that he will be lost to himself, lost to me.
We embrace at the door. He breaks free first.
I tap on the door. It opens. I step out.
His voice follows me. “Take care, Ari.”
I wailed the day they took him away, my brother.
Or so my nurse told me, as she lay dying.
Necha and I were alone, in her room. It had been her refuge, since she was abducted from her faraway home, brought to this island, and sold to my father. That room became her universe when oncos, the crablike growth that begins as a dot and spreads into every nook and cranny of a body, consumed her.
She had nothing from her home except memories. I could never hear enough of her tales of a land that was a sea of trees, a place of dancing, music, and flowers, where the unnatural was not condemned but worshipped.
Now she lay, eyes closed, waiting for death, for release.
The windows were shut against the noonday heat. The smells of human detritus clogged the airless air. I sat by her pallet and held her hand.
She opened her eyes and wheezed the words on the wings of a noxious breath. “You didn’t come alone.”
I turned around to see if anyone has followed me. But there was just she and me.
She smiled, a pain edged grimace. “No, my love, my Ari, he came before you, the bull-boy… Twins. Teeny little thing. Bull-head, bull-tail, the rest a baby boy.” She paused to cough, spraying spittle on me, smelling like dead fish left too long in the sun.
I bent closer, face to face, ear to mouth.
“You were demanding, never satisfied with anything. He just wanted to be held. You wailed when they took him.”
I grabbed her other hand, my fingers turned claws digging into her withered skin, feeling the brittle bones through the dissipated flesh. “Where did they take him?”
A real smile spread across her place. “Sea, like a sky full of water,” she said and died.
I told no one. I was young, just turned ten, but old enough to know that I needed not the clear light of the day, but the shadows of a moonless night.
I listened to other people’s conversations. From words not meant for my ears, I learnt much, about Father, about Mother, but nothing about him, my brother.
I traversed every inch of the palace. I found not a trace of him.
I was still searching when the day sacred to the Sea God arrived.
The palace turned into a hive of activity. Everyone was distracted with a thousand duties. Sounds and smells filled the world, bells ringing in unison, voices raised in prayer, wails of animals, scent of flowers, incense, blood…
Mother and Father left early to join the chief priest and other priests, on the white-sanded beach by the harbor.
It was easy to give my maid the slip. I assured her I’d be occupied with a new book, knowing that she’d then occupy herself with the new guard, the one with stony eyes, quick hands, and oozing smiles.
No one saw me leaving through a side door.
I walked and walked until I came to a place I’ve never been before, a treeless cliff-top. The sea murmured below. The wind pulled at my hair, my robe. Wild grasses caressed and scraped my sandaled feet.
I crouched on the cliff top and stared down at the ireful sea. And remembered Necha’s last words, a sky full of water.
That was when I heard his bellow.
Since then I’ve seen what his cry does to people. They shiver; they cower; they run.
His cry made my heart dance.
That evening I went to my parents and demanded to see him, my brother.
At first they said he never lived.
Then they said he died.
Finally they said they’d never let him get me.
They locked me in my room.
I turned my face to the wall.
They said he’ll kill me.
I said I won’t live without him.
They took me to the door of his home and gave me a lantern and a skein of linen.
He bellowed. They shrank away.
I opened the door and went in.
The door slammed, shrouding me in shadows.
I closed my eyes, my mind seeking his.
The bellows stopped.
The sound of running feet grew until they filled my ears. When sound ceased I opened my eyes and saw him.
We gazed at each other, a moment, an eternity.
He held out a surprisingly human hand and said in a surprisingly human voice, “Welcome, Sister.”
“Tell me about bulls,” he said on that first day, my brother.
The next day I brought him a statuette of a cloud-white bull I stole from Mother.
He knelt by a pool of water, staring at his reflection. Then he picked up the bull with a white hand and dashed it against the rocks.
They said he loved human flesh, my brother.
The first time seven young men and seven young women were brought to our island from Athens my parents locked me up in the tower-room.
From my temporary prison, I watched the white-clad figures being prodded and pushed up the road. I shouted that there was no bull-headed monster who eats human flesh, that it was a tale to terrify people into obedience and cities into subjection.
My voice was lost in the distance, in the wind, in the babble.
When I was freed from the tower, I ran to the house where my father’s victims were being held. The guards barred my way. I was their princess, but they had orders from the king, the queen, and the high priest.
“Why did they do it?” he asked me the next day, my brother.
He sat slumped on the stones, his adamantine horns scraping the floor.
I muttered, “I don’t know.”
He lifted his head, catching my eyes. “There must never be lies between us, Sister. No half-truths either.”
I didn’t try to break from his mud-gaze. “Everyone believes you feast on human flesh.”
He didn’t ask whether ‘everyone’ included Father and Mother. I sensed the question in the weight of his silence.
“The high-priest says the Sea God came to him in a vision and told him,” I muttered, excuse and explanation. “So everyone must believe.”
He said nothing. Outside, the waves murmured a soft melody.
Later he took me to where they lay, faces contorted into monstrosities.
One man had a piece of his arm missing, a single mouthful. I found the missing flesh a foot away, in a pile of dried vomit.
“My human-part liked the taste,” he said. “The bull-part didn’t.”
I wanted to set him free, my brother.
I wove plans. We’d escape, cross the sea, and find a refuge. A place where no one would know us, no one would mind us.
His eyes would glitter amber and dull into earth. “There is no place in the human world I can be free. I will take the maze with me, wherever I go.”
The days go by, one like the other, until the morning Mother summons me.
She points to a low chair close to hers.
I sit.
“The sea is too quiet.” Her voice is the first tentative beginning of a long road.
“Your father has sent word.” Her voice is flat ground.
“Your brothers are dead. He needs an heir. “He has decided on a husband for you.” Her voice is a gentle rise.
“Ariadne, Ariadne…” Her voice is hills.
When my head is not spinning, when my vision is clear, I ask, “Who?”
She strokes my cheek. “A king who’ll make you a queen. A man who’ll give you sons.”
“Who?”
“Aegeus. The king of Athens.”
“He’s older than Father.”
“Not too old to give you sons.”
“He has a son. Theseus.”
“Kings have bastards. That is the way of the world.”
“The bastard is a grown man. He is not going to allow a son of mine to displace him.”
“We will ensure you and your sons are safe.”
“How?”
“When Athens sends the next batch of sacrifices, Theseus will head them.”
“So Aegeus agreed to the murder of his only son?”
“With a young wife in his bed, he can beget other sons.” Mother smiles. “Get ready for the wedding.”
He listens in silence as I spill my tale, my brother.
“Death is freedom,” he says.
Later he tells me a story, about the fearless hero who kills a monster with the help of a beautiful princess. When he comes to the end, I know it for what it is: a plan.
Another group of sacrifices arrives for him, my brother.
I watch the men and women being prodded up the road.
One man strides ahead, head held high.
When I’m free from the tower I run to him, my brother.
He listens to my story in silence.
When I’m done, he says, “You will do it?”
I cling to him. Without him, the aching emptiness will return. It will grow and grow, until someday, it consumes me.
His fingers weave in and out of my hair. “I have only you.”
I gaze into his eyes. They hover between mud and amber.
He has only me. I nod.
His eyes shine purest amber. His fingers dance through my curls.
Outside his door I allow my tears to flow.
The night has no light. The sea has no voice.
I creep out of the palace and head to the hall housing tomorrow’s sacrifices. My pockets bulge with gold to bribe the guards. The sacrificial knife nestles next to my heart. In my hand is the skein of linen which I never needed.
My brother’s parting words echo in my ears.
“Tell him where to strike.”
My reply was a kiss, the last one.
It was my pledge.
I will set him free, into this sky, this sea, into a time before time, my brother.
I will.
I finger the knife, its blade cold against my naked flesh. The formless dark of the night whirls and forms into a face, Necha’s. The rustling of olive leaves in a sudden breeze turns into Necha’s words in my ear, the way she would begin one of her stories,
A long time ago in a sea of trees…
My hand falls from the knife.
What if I tell Theseus about the agreement between his father and my parents? What if I offer him a bargain, a life for a life, his life for my brother’s? Will he, the duped son of the man I will never marry, accept it?
This story can have a different ending. An ending no poet, no dramatist, no painter would immortalize. An ending with no heroic murder. An ending without victors or victims, just survivors.
Before us is a sea of water, behind us a sea of trees, like the ones in Necha’s stories. The music of the waves and of the leaves lift my heart.
The ship no longer has a shape. It’s just a dark blob gliding across the smooth waters to where the blue sea meets the blue sky. But I know it well, know that it is bearing white sails, that it contains a man who is probably standing at the stern watching the vanishing land. A man who might have been my enemy, but became instead something else, savior, and for a few brief starlit nights, lover.
The ship reaches the horizon and is gone.
The fingers, laced through mine, tighten, fingers that are long, white, gentle and deceptively human.
I turn around to see the rays of a new sun shine on a pair of adamantine horns, to meet an amber gaze.
“Ari, the sea is a sky-full of water,” says my brother.
Sam Muller loves dogs and books and spends much time trying to save one from the other. Her first novel, I will paint the sky, will be published by Fractured Mirror Publishers in July.