Asterion
That sound coming from in there...
Ariadne closed her eyes and listened to the beast's howl.
When she had taken it for the cry of a dreadful monster, it had been nothing but a thing to fear. Now, with a little of that fear drawn aside, she thought she heard something else tangled through it — a feeling that did not belong.
I've heard this before... a cry this wretched.
As she listened, a single tragic memory cut across her mind. Her father, on that day. Minos — great king of Crete, the man who had raised its laws. Her father had committed a sin against the gods that no washing could cleanse.
Poseidon, god of the sea, had sent a snow-white bull of blinding beauty and told him to prove the legitimacy of his kingship with it. Bewitched by the splendor of the very beast he was meant to offer, her father had nursed a vain greed, deceived the god, and sacrificed another bull in its place.
The price of cheating a god was hideous. For it, her mother Pasiphae suffered Poseidon's curse, and was driven to lie with a beast and give birth to a dreadful monster, half man and half bull. Nor did the misfortune end there. Not long after, her gentle half-brother Androgeos — who had left at Athens's invitation — came home a cold corpse, every limb that ought to have stayed joined to him torn away by the jealousy of King Aegeus.
That night, her father howled alone inside the king's sealed bedchamber. The pain was too vast, and too savage. Even after he had already raised a storm of blood in war against Athens. Even after he had smashed whatever lay within reach, and smashed it again. It was a grief so deep that he could see, with perfect clarity, that nothing would ever ease it — a pain that tore the chest open, and left him no choice but to scream.
That night her father had done nothing but scream until his voice broke. The sound Ariadne had swallowed her own tears to hear through the door, and the sound rising now from inside the storehouse, overlapped in her ears.
Yes... Asterion is crying too.
Ariadne was certain. The Asterion inside that storehouse was screaming the very same scream her father had screamed.
In a cold world where no one would understand him — cast off by his mother the moment he was born, turned away by his father, shut for years inside a labyrinth where not a thread of light could enter — how lonely must that time have been? How bitter?
He had broken the labyrinth and come out into the world, only to find that what waited for him was not a family's embrace, but hundreds of spearpoints and torches thick with the will to kill. Rage with nowhere to go, despair at the whole world, and at the last her poor little brother, hidden alone in a dark storehouse, simply crying his throat raw.
Asterion...
When that child was born, she had still been far too young. Grown hands had forced themselves over her eyes, and people had hushed one another and called him only Crete's calamity, Crete's shame, a monster. So she had been able to do nothing. She had only clutched a doll in the corner of a room and trembled.
But she was not that girl anymore. She was no longer small enough for an adult's hand to cover her eyes. She had strength enough now to shift a heavy wooden crate by herself, and she had grown tall enough that, standing upon it, her fingers could reach the high ventilation duct.
I want to see him with my own eyes, and judge for myself...! Whether you are a monster, or only my poor little brother, whom no one ever loved!
Ariadne shook off what fear remained and climbed onto the crate again. Balancing on the rocking wood, she rose onto the very tips of her toes, felt along the cold wall, and at last seized the lip of the vent in a hard grip. Heedless of her skirt hem fouling itself in the dust, she thrashed, and was just forcing her head and shoulders into the narrow shaft when—
"Kyaaah! Princess! There she is! Come down at once!"
"Princess Ariadne, please come down! It's dangerous! They're about to set fire to that place!"
The frantic cries of maids and soldiers, who had noticed her absence too late and come scrambling after her, rose at her back. But Ariadne's ears were already turned inward, toward the storehouse. Their urgency reached her only as a distant, droning ring.
Grrrrrnn!! Kyaaaah!!
Only Asterion's mournful crying circled in her ears. And as her sight slowly adjusted to the pitch dark, the inside of the storehouse came clear.
"As... terion...?"
Ariadne's pupils trembled.
There was no savage man-eater there, chewing on people and rampaging in madness. Only the thick, enormous horns on his head, and a frame like two grown men set one upon the other, marked him as something other than an ordinary human. That terrifying presence lay curled like a fetus atop a mountain of grain sacks, breathing rough, fast asleep. In one blunt hand he held an enormous smoked ham, as if he had bitten half of it away — and the ham bore the marks of teeth exactly like the ones in Ariadne's own mouth. Neat. Even. Human.
He's human... That child isn't a beast. He's a human being, with teeth like mine...
The rumor that he had eaten people might have been an exaggeration, or a misunderstanding. He was only a pitiful boy, too hungry to endure it, who had crept into the storehouse and stolen meat so that he might live, and who had fallen asleep from exhaustion.
Ariadne's eyes reddened.
"As... terion..."
Hot tears slid down her cheeks. She had been leaning too far forward against the grate. The veil wound about her head came loose with a soft tug and fell, and a fluttering scrap of thin white cloth drifted down in a graceful curve, like a butterfly, and settled — of all places — lightly on the tip of the sleeping Asterion's nose.
"Achoo—!"
Ah, my skull... Sneeze on a drunk and it feels like the bone's splitting...
Something strange tickled the tip of my nose. I coughed and sneezed at the same time out of sleep, opened my eyes, and had to face a sight that made no sense at all.
"Wh-what? Where am I? Who am I?"
"Ah!"
I rubbed my eyes and looked properly upward. From the ventilation hole high above, some crazy woman had shoved half her body out and was flailing, a breath away from slipping free and pitching headlong.
"Wh—whoa?!"
Startled, I shot upright. I had no idea where this lunatic had rolled in from, but if she fell from that height onto bare floor, I was clearly about to watch a skull crack open. I meant to run over right then and catch the poor soul—
"Hrrk—?!"
Oh, you have got to be kidding me.
The grape wine I'd inhaled — emptying a whole oak cask not long before — still hadn't worn off, and the meat and cheese I'd packed into my gut until I was ready to burst left my body heavy. On top of that, I had been starving in the labyrinth and then, all at once, gorged and drunk myself blind. There was no way my body was right. My footing tangled. My legs crossed, my bulk lost its center, and I toppled straight forward.
WHAM!
"Guhk—!"
My forehead drove dead-center into the thick pillar wall that held the storehouse up. It felt as if hundreds of stars burst in front of my eyes. Miraculously, though, that idiotic header threw a proper brake on the momentum carrying me forward.
Thump!
"Kyaah!"
Because I had thrown both arms out on reflex in the instant before my head hit, I barely managed to catch the woman — a heartbeat from slamming into the floor — between my chest and my arms. If I hadn't slowed myself by cracking my skull against a stone pillar, if I had taken her at that same speed and simply plowed over her? She would have been crushed under my weight on the spot. A hamburger patty with every organ burst.
"Aigo, my head... I didn't snap a horn, did I?"
I rubbed my throbbing brow and groaned, then looked down at the woman trembling in my arms. She was staring up at me with her eyes wide and round, as if stunned. In the moonlight and the faint torchlight from outside the storehouse, her face was quite lovely — large eyes brimming with tears, pale skin, and the clothes she wore.
But who is she? Judging by the clothes, she doesn't look like some ordinary village girl out for a stroll.
"Asterion... it's your sister..."
Sister?
Never mind that.
"Wasn't my real name the Minotaur?"
"As... terion?"
At the question I had let slip without thinking, the woman buried against my chest snapped her head up. Her cheeks were streaked with tears, and still both her eyes were shining.
"Yes! Asterion! My little brother!"
She cried it out, her two trembling hands carefully closing around my forearm.
Asterion.
The Minotaur. I had thought that was my name. Minos's bull. I had believed that proper noun — the name for a man-eating monster, half man and half bull — was my real name, because in the myth no one had ever called me anything else.
But.
"So I... had a name."
When I murmured it, the woman heard my voice, and she nodded as the tears spilled from her even harder.
Meanwhile, outside the palace granary, Deucalion — worn down at last by the tedious standoff with a monster that refused to crawl out — made his decision.
"Bring oil! We will not see the night through like this. Set fire to every side of the storehouse and burn him alive!"
"B-but, Your Highness!"
His adjutant tried urgently to stop him, but Deucalion's eyes were set.
"We live beneath the blessing of the goddess Demeter! Barley, once sown, grows again. The lives of my soldiers and the safety of Crete are not things I will trade away! Set it alight, now!"
The soldiers rolled in the casks of oil, splashed them against the storehouse walls, and were just bringing torches to the wood when—
"Your Highness! Disaster! Stop, I beg you!"
A soldier who had been searching the rear of the storehouse came running, pale as a dead man, and threw himself flat on the ground.
"What is this uproar! Has the brute come out!"
"P-Princess Ariadne... Her Highness fell through the ventilation duct at the back of the storehouse, into the chamber where the monster is!"
"Wh-what did you say?!"
Deucalion's eyes bulged as if they might start from his head. His heart dropped like a stone.
Ariadne? Crete's treasure, raised so gently — walked of her own feet into a monster's maw?
"Halt at once! Do not light the fire! Fall back, now!"
Deucalion roared like a madman and struck aside, with the flat of his sword, the torches of the soldiers about to set the oil alight. The torches tumbled across the ground and died.
His younger sister was inside that storehouse. Killing the monster — his mother's shame, and Crete's calamity — mattered, but he could not stand by and let Ariadne, his own blood, the sister he cherished so dearly, burn to death for nothing in a place like that.
"I will go in myself! Open the door! I will pull my sister out with my own hands!"
Deucalion snatched the heavy axe from the axeman beside him and strode toward the shut door of the storehouse.
This time... this time, I will protect her...
The face of Androgeos, the brother he had lost so senselessly in Athens, flickered past him. He could not endure the pain of losing blood-kin again. Whatever it took, he had to tear Ariadne out of that monster's grasp.