The Face in Her Eyes
"Eeeeeeeek! Don't take this from me!"
"…Hah."
From beyond the wall came the sound of Daedalus heaving a long, deep sigh. Only moments ago he had been hopping mad, shrieking about how cruelly he had been wronged—until he recalled, all on his own, the atrocity he had committed in the past. For Pasiphae, wife of King Minos, he had custom-built a cow suit meant for an act of bestiality, and presented it to her. The memory struck, and his fury collapsed at once into black depression.
"…I'm going to sleep. Don't talk to me."
Straw rustled as he raked it into a bed and lay down, and with the sound came Daedalus's thoroughly wilted voice. He had realized anew that his was a crime for which he would have nothing to say even if his head rolled this very moment, and he had chosen to flee from the fact.
"Suit yourself."
I answered just as shortly. This was no time to keep batting worthless jokes back and forth. Tomorrow I would stand for judgment. I had to steady myself.
I set the back of my head against the cold stone wall and slowly let my eyes begin to close.
But.
"…Just one last question."
Daedalus, who had sworn he was going to sleep, failed to hold it in after all and opened his mouth again.
"Didn't you say you were sleeping?"
"I can't sleep, that's why! Answer me and I'll be out cold. I just need this one itchy bit of curiosity scratched."
The old man beyond the wall grumbled, then asked in a voice that had sunk into something almost serious.
"You… why did you let them take you?"
"What?"
"Word is you walked in without a fight. Nice and quiet, and let them bind you with rope. If you'd put your mind to it, you could have smashed the hunting party and everything else to pieces and run for the mountains. So why crawl into this miserable little cell of your own will and ask to be judged?"
Daedalus's question stopped my mouth for a moment.
Why hadn't I run? In this age of barbarism, where heroes treated human lives like flies and the gods hurled down disaster whenever the mood took them, why had I submitted to the law of men and climbed toward a seat of judgment that might well kill me?
I opened my eyes slowly in the pitch-black dark, and I remembered the moment I had faced inside the palace granary. The slender girl who had crawled through that high ventilation duct to find me. The voice with which she had called me.
"…Because I found out I had a name."
At my quiet answer, I felt the presence beyond the wall hold its breath.
"And I saw a face. For the first time."
"A face? Did you shove your head in a wine cask? You shouldn't have been able to see a thing."
"Not a mirror… In someone's eyes."
In the eyes of the sister who had told me my name. Ariadne.
"My face was reflected in her eyes. The self I had never once seen inside the Labyrinth—only then could I meet it, clearly, for the first time."
There were horns, and the fur was thick and wild. And yet it was, unmistakably, a human face.
"It was… far more human than I'd thought. My face."
"…"
For a long while, not a sound came from beyond the wall. Only now and then did the cold underground wind pass, keening as it brushed the iron bars.
How much time went by? At last Daedalus muttered, his voice soaked through with bitterness.
"So that's why you didn't run… Facing your sin yourself, and the judgment…"
He spoke it quietly, as if he were admonishing himself.
"You're far better than me. A hundred times better. Because I… I ran."
Ran?
What had Daedalus run from? The only escape that came to mind was one that had not even happened yet—fleeing the Labyrinth with his son.
"Run from what? You're locked in a cell as we speak."
"…What?"
"If you ran, then what are you doing shut up in prison? You're in the exact same fix I am, and you're striking a pose like some tragic wanderer who's turned his back on the world."
At my sarcasm there was a crash beyond the wall, the sound of Daedalus lurching upright.
"Hey—hey, you little bastard! What are you, some snot-nosed seven-year-old? I'm trying to set a moving mood here, and you pick at my wording and pitch a fit!"
"I'm not wrong, though. You are in prison."
"Argh, that mouth of yours, I swear! When they drag me out for judgment tomorrow, I'm telling them to sew your lips shut first, damn it all!"
Daedalus hopped and fumed, and the solemn, bitter air that had been flowing only a moment before vanished without a trace.
Yeah. This is better.
I let out a short breath of a laugh and tried once more to close my eyes.
That was when.
Tok. Ta-tok.
From beyond the bars, out of the darkness at the far end of the corridor where no light reached, something strange made a sound.
What is that? A rat?
I turned my head and looked past the bars. Against the wall of the prison corridor was the shape of a person. A woman stood there inside the shadow. The long fall of her robes seemed woven from darkness itself, and her face was lost so completely in that shadow that I could not make out a single feature.
Tok. Ta-tok. Tok.
In one hand she held a small clay tablet. With the sharp stylus gripped in the other, she scratched and wrote without pause.
I can't see her expression, but…
I could tell her head was not turned toward the tablet. Those two eyes of hers alone—I could feel them moving back and forth, watching not the clay but me, shut in this cell, and Daedalus in turn. She was recording something without looking at it.
What is a woman like that doing in a dungeon this deep…?
I had only just risen, the question forming, when—
"Making the rounds!"
Rough footsteps came with the shout, and a soldier on watch walked into the prison with a torch in hand. I expected him to spot the suspicious woman and bellow at her.
He did not.
He passed right beside her and never so much as glanced her way.
He can't see her?
Iron clanked and jingled. The soldier gave the lock on my cell a rough check, kicked the bars of Daedalus's cell once, pulled the torch from its bracket on the corridor wall, and set it in the sconce on the opposite side.
"Don't try anything stupid."
He spat once in my direction, then strolled out of the prison and barred the door behind him.
Bang—!
The door shut, and the prison went quiet again. With the torch moved, the angle of the light and the lie of every shadow had been turned completely around. Light fell full upon the place where the woman stood.
And yet, astonishingly—
It moved…
Her face was still sunk in heavy shadow. No matter which way the light came, the darkness laid over her face drank it down like a living creature and kept her identity sealed tight away.
Tok. Ta-tok.
As if she had not even noticed the soldier come and go, the woman went on in silence, scratching the stylus across the tablet.
"…Who are you, exactly?"
I pressed close to the bars and asked, wariness thick in my voice.
At the question, Daedalus—still lying there and fuming—snapped back in irritation.
"Who else would it be! The soldier on watch! Honestly, are you seeing things now?"
"Not the soldier. The woman standing beside where he was. The one with her face swallowed in shadow, writing on a tablet."
I heard Daedalus grumble and get to his feet.
"What the hell are you talking about. Where's there a woman in this dungeon—"
He had shoved his face to the bars to look outside. His voice cut off dead.
And then—
"H-hiiiiiiik—!!!!"
A bizarre, piercing scream, like a chicken having its neck wrung, burst out of Daedalus's cell.
"Th-the shadow face…! The tablet…! The stylus…!"
His voice was shaking hard. He could not even breathe properly; gasping, he shouted as if in a fit.
"L-Lady Calliope…? N-no. S-so it wasn't just some tall tale? Why would the Muse of epic poetry ever come to a squalid dungeon like this…! No—before that, how can a mere lowly human like me even see you…!"
The name he had spoken.
Calliope.
Foremost of the nine Muses, and the goddess who presides over epic poetry.
A god?!
Every hair on me stood on end. A real god, the sort I had only ever read about in myth, was right in front of my eyes, scratching away at a tablet as steadily as a hand turning a wheel.
"Th-this is no time for that! Hey! Hey, you monster! What are you standing there for! Don't stare—get your head on the floor and prostrate yourself! Meet a god's eyes and you'll burn for sacrilege…!"
In the very instant Daedalus was shouting at me in a panic—
"Mmm…"
From between the lips of the shadow-veiled woman, Calliope, a small and beautiful hum spilled out. The birth and ruin of heroes, wars that sprayed blood, tragic love—all of it was condensed into that one short bar of melody.
Beautiful.
So beautiful that it felt as though my soul might be torn out by the roots.
"Hhk…!"
Thud!
Daedalus left behind one grotesque last gasp—a choked krek—and toppled to the floor, already snoring.
"O-old man…!"
I called to him and fought with everything I had to hold my mind together. But my eyelids had grown heavy, as if a mountain had been laid across them, and the muscles of my limbs melted soft as cotton candy.
"Damn it…"
Thump.
I grabbed the bars and tried to hold myself up, but in the end my strength gave out, and I collapsed to the floor.
When she had confirmed that the half-man, half-bull and the genius inventor lay side by side, both of them out cold, Calliope drew her humming back in.
Soundlessly, she stepped out of the dark and came to stand before the bars. Her shadow-hidden head inclined toward the horned giant curled asleep on the floor—toward Asterion.
Without a word, she drew an old parchment scroll from her waist and unrolled it.
Tak!
Then she turned the clay tablet—every character she had pressed into it, stroke by stroke, with the stylus—face-down upon the scroll and stamped it hard. The letters carved in the clay bled into the parchment as if by magic, spread, and settled into place.
Calliope traced the sentences now set in the parchment with her fingertips, and whispered, as though she were telling them to someone else.
Two vast epics that ought to have burned in brilliance, each tracing its own orbit, never once meant to meet—those two had begun, with this strange half-man, half-bull imprisoned in a dungeon beneath Crete as their crux, to tangle together and put forth a new branch.
"Even I… cannot tell where this road leads."
The Muse drew a deep breath as she rolled the scroll tight in her hands.
"It frightens me."
As one who bestows inspiration and records history, she felt terror at the birth of a story whose ending she could not know.
And at the same time—
"And I am jealous. Until I see the ending with my own eyes… I shall never be able to look away."
To witness an unknown epic, one she had never once experienced—she could not contain the rapture of it.
Calliope withdrew once more into the dark.
Tok. Ta-tok. Tok.
The stylus in her hand began again to scratch the clay tablet, like the uneasy, exhilarated heartbeat of a god recording a tomorrow she could not foresee.
Tok, ta-tok, tok, tok, tok…
The pleasant song that had been circling my ears, and the sound of something scratching, were transposed into the rough, dull tread of hobnailed boots.
Clank!
Screeeech—!
"Get up! The hour of judgment is here!"
With the rough shout the door flew open, and sharp morning sunlight poured in together with the glare of torches.
"Nngh…"
I winced and forced my heavy eyelids up.
When did I fall asleep…? I was definitely about to say something to old man Daedalus…
Armed men came pouring into the cell in a rush. Before I had any chance to resist, they hauled me upright and forced me down onto a chair set in the middle of the corridor.
"Before he stands at the seat of judgment, the fur must be stripped away and the bare face shown! Bring water and a razor, now!"
The captain of the guard bellowed, driving the soldiers on.
The cell next door, meanwhile, was no less of an uproar.
"N-no! Let go, you ignorant louts! Not the beard! I'm an old man—if you shave off even my beard, what becomes of my dignity! Leave me this one thing, I said!"
Bound to a chair and thrashing, Daedalus sent a howl ringing through the prison.
"It is the law of Crete!"
The soldiers scrubbed soap-lather into his beard without mercy and set the razor to it just as ruthlessly.
"Eeeeeeeek! Don't take this from me!"
The old man's scream—like a pig having its throat cut—filled the cells.
And while the next room raged, quiet footsteps approached the place where I sat, staring blankly into empty air.
"Stand back, please. This child's face—I will tend to it myself."
A low voice, but a resolute one. The soldiers flinched, startled, and parted to either side to open a path.
A woman entered my sight. Her face was hidden behind a thin veil. The cloth was the very same material, the very same pattern, as the veil she had given me last night—the one now clutched tight in both of my hands.
Ariadne.
My sister stood before me, a bronze basin of clear water in her hands, and a razor honed to a keen edge.
"…Sister."
At my call, I felt Ariadne smile, small and faint, beyond the veil. She brought a towel soaked in warm water carefully against the shaggy, filthy mane beneath my jaw, and whispered.
"There now. Hold still, Asterion. Let us show them your true face."