Ariadne

by Jennifer Saint

I would be Medusa, if it came to it, I resolved. If the gods held me accountable one day for the sins of someone else, if they came for me to punish a man’s actions, I would not hide away like Pasiphae. I would wear that coronet of snakes, and the world would shrink from me instead.

His name would echo down the centuries with the likes of Heracles, who paved the way before him, and Achilles, who would come after: mighty legends who wrestled lions and razed cities and set the whole world aflame. But I sat with a flesh-and-blood man that night.

I wanted to fight monsters, rescue princesses, and punish wrongdoers, as I imagined he was doing.

He pushed me against the wall, and I didn’t care that the harsh stone scraped my skin. His kisses were urgent, not soft like they had been by the rocks. I felt like he was branding me.

no me gusta

I could only surmise that my sister had paid the price for something else, something far more offensive to the virgin immortal. But Theseus, sleeping soundly beside me, would never tell.

Despite the bitter jealousy of his wife, Hera, my father did not resist the temptations of the beautiful women he saw on the earth beneath him. Although he had the white-armed Hera in all her glory, he would not be satisfied with just one woman—even if she was the queen of all goddesses. And so when he saw Semele, he did not hesitate to make her his own.” Of course. A familiar story.

With a heavy heart, he cast aside his mortal shell and his awesome divinity blazed forth.

awesome..!?

I felt a pang of sorrow for him, a baby torn from his mother for nothing more than spite and wounded pride. At least the Minotaur had known the gentle touch of his mother’s caresses, even if his maddened brain could not understand that love.

I had not thought that Dionysus was like the other gods—cold, cruel, and petty. I do not know what expression of horror must have contorted my face but it caused Dionysus to hurl his head back and laugh aloud. “Ariadne! You do not think I would leave the child, do you? Of course I would not punish an innocent,” he said, swallowing his mirth. “And I was truly grateful to Midas, who was a kindly and gentle man, for taking care of Silenus. He saw the folly of his wish in an instant. I let him take it back at once by helping him to struggle to the nearest river and wash away the power. Indeed, the silt of that river is still rich with slivers of gold even now. I breathed life back into the girl, who did not remember a moment of what had happened, and all was restored to what it had been. King Midas learned a lesson about what is truly valuable—and it made for an entertaining anecdote, it cannot be denied.”

Without him here, I still cultivated the vegetables. I pounded barley between stones to bake bread. I swept the marble floors until they shone. I was not Minos’ captive daughter; I was not Cinyras’ trade for copper; nor was I Theseus’ diversion between heroic feats of glory. Somehow I had survived them all, and here I was, free of them at last. My life was before me, like one of the seeds that lay curled in my palm to sow. My destiny had never been my own until I left Crete and seized it for myself.

I was angry with the gods who held mortal lives in their hands so carelessly,

His smile—warm, open, and eager—was a golden beacon of reassurance. He caught me in his arms; the feel of his embrace after the solitude was both unreal and yet undeniably solid and true at the same time. All the things I could have said to him were tangled up inside me. What emerged was simple and honest: “I am so glad that you came back.” He looked at me. “I will always come back.”

Why mortals bloomed like flowers and crumbled to nothing. Why their absence left a gnawing ache, a hollow void that could never be filled. And how everything they once were, that spark within them, could be extinguished so completely yet the world did not collapse under the weight of so much pain and grief.”

Dionysus was a god and gods did not have to suffer the indignities of grief. I knew well enough from all the stories that when a god mourned, someone else would suffer.

I know that human life shines more brightly because it is but a shimmering candle against an eternity of darkness, and it can be extinguished with the faintest breeze.”

I would not let a man who knew the value of nothing make me doubt the value of myself.

PURRRRRRREIOD!!!

I had been a fool to trust in a hero, a man who could only love the mighty echo of his own name throughout the centuries. It could have undone me. I could have shriveled and died on this very beach. I could have wept a lonely ocean before the crows came for my eyes, and my blinded spirit could have howled for eternity in the bleak marshes at the banks of the Styx. But instead, this laughing god had cast his light across my story.

“I will love you when you are shriveled and ancient,” he said, an intensity in his tone that I had never heard before.

“Just as you will never lose me, you will never lose your crown,” he murmured, his arms wrapped tightly around me.

“A compliment to your wine, Queen Phaedra,” he said. “It is so good that I have to ask if it comes from Dionysus himself.” I laughed. “We cannot quite boast of that, good captain, but our vineyards are excellent in Athens.” I thought he was joking. “Ah, I wondered if it had been a gift from your mighty brother-in-law,” he said. I squinted at him. “I beg your pardon?” He was confused by my bewilderment. “Dionysus, your sister’s husband, the god of wine…” He trailed off at the expression on my face. “I think we speak at cross-purposes, captain,” I said. “I have no sister living anymore.” I caught Theseus’ eye, noticed that he looked uncharacteristically pale. I sat straighter in my chair. The captain’s honest brow creased. “Then … my condolences on your loss, my lady. It must have been very recent.”

He wanted nothing more than an heir, and so the balance of power had swung a little more in my favor of late.

“Your sister was a traitor,” he said. “How could I bring her back to the palace of Athens? My people had so recently been freed of the poisonous yoke of Medea, another foreign princess who left the blood of her own kin in her wake.”

My lack of maternal feeling drenched me with shame. The tears that burned in my eyes were not those of relief or love or joy. I cried for myself and for the terrible realization that was dawning upon me, the black, gaping pit that was yawning open in my soul. The truth was, I hated motherhood.

I could not see how this could end in any way other than disaster, humiliation, despair. All the mistakes of our childhood, repeated again in this monstrously misguided desire. But she would not see it and I knew that I could not make her.

“I took the baby to my husband, to show him what a perfect little miracle our joyless union had created.” There was a look in her eyes that made me lower my gaze, afraid to witness something so raw. “‘A girl,’ he said. ‘What am I to do with a girl? Cast it out upon a hillside; it is nothing but a pointless mouth to feed.’” Her face twisted. “They tore her from my arms even when I screamed. She cried and I screamed, but they carried her away, and I screamed more until the world went black around me. I did not wake for days; my baby was long dead on an empty hillside by then, but I heard her crying wherever I went, whatever I did. The crying only quieted when I climbed aboard that boat and came to Naxos. I pulled the oars myself, every stroke. When I reached this shore, it was the first happiness I had known, except for that one perfect moment when I held my child. I smiled so much I thought that my face would break in two.”

I look about me, confusion and terror overwhelming me now. Perhaps if I run back to the palace, to Ariadne, perhaps we could flee together? I have brought my sister into peril, too, I can see. For if Theseus returns and sees Hippolytus before I do … He had no compunction in letting Ariadne die once, after all. I have brought her into the oncoming storm of his rage, here, away from her immortal protector; she is alone and vulnerable because of me.

There is nowhere to go. For a moment, I think of hiding under the straw in the stable, like a child believing she is safe if she only closes her eyes tightly enough. But I knew, as a child, that was no defense against a monster.

“I know what men do,” he answered, his voice dark.

“Ariadne, you do not know men. Of course he has defiled her; she would not do this thing unless he had driven her mind clean from her body. I know it.”

“It is you who is the fool,” I hissed at him. “Blind to everything that happens around you. Phaedra spent years of misery at your side; I am glad that you ran away from me. I would rather have rotted on that beach than found myself wedded to you. I only wish that I could have saved her, too.”

“Perseus uses Medusa like your father used the Minotaur,” Dionysus said quietly. I turned my head, surprised. So he did remember. He took my hand. His palm was warm and dry against mine. I felt the space between us shrink a little.

Dionysus swung them in his arms and kissed them and pronounced them the brave guardians of Naxos while we were gone.

“You have five sons and a wife on Naxos,” I said. “We all grow older, day by day. You know this and yet you leave us, time after time. Why do you seek the love of the world when you have us only for our brief lifetimes? Why must you seek to force a city into submission while your sons’ childhoods drift into dust, nothing but memories that you cast aside?”

“You do not understand what being a god means,” he said, at length. “It means you will have an eternity after we are gone. Perhaps you should think of that,” I said softly.

“You told me once that one lifetime of human love was worth the loss.” “I was a fool,” he said.

At last, his honesty. I heard the patter of rain and the gentle slosh of still more wine in his cup. I had known that I had lost him, maybe even before the night in the woods. But I hadn’t known how the loss tore him apart just as much as it did me, if not more so. I had fallen in love with his vulnerability all those years ago. I had thought it made him different from all other men and gods alike. But it was his misery that made me so uneasy now. Because if I had learned anything, I had learned enough to know that a god in pain is dangerous.

...

I knew that there was no fighting around us and that he had lifted me, somehow, away from it all. Behind his face, there was only the empty sky. He was speaking again, but I heard nothing. He pressed his face to mine: cold stone against immortal flesh. His pain. It permeated the creeping paralysis of my mind. I felt it, the ragged pulsing anguish of his pain. The grief of a god. I knew it then, that there was nothing he could do. Somewhere, in the thickening mist of my thoughts, I drew on the image of my children’s faces; I pulled them to the forefront of my disappearing vision, and I saw us all together once more, as we had been. The span of a dozen, dying heartbeats. Our last embrace.

He flicked his hand in a gesture I had seen before, just once. Years ago, that movement had sent my wedding crown spiraling into the sky. I’d thought it was lost in the depths of the sea, but he had told me to look up into the night, where I would see it burn for eternity. I could not hear what he said now, but it can only have been one thing. Good-bye. My eyes stared blankly at him, but I hoped he could hear me say it back as the blood pulsing within me hardened and froze and the last flicker of my mind petrified into stone.

fucking stupid.

I float in the inky blackness. A tiny dot of light from where you stand, but bright as a flame. I flare into life as Helios leads his chariot down below the horizon, the glimmering jewel in the center of the crown. My thoughts are slow and ponderous now, rumbling in the deep heart of eternity, but I see the whole of life beneath me.

Up here, drifting in the infinite dark, I hear their prayers: the women of Naxos, of Crete, of Athens and Argos and every far-flung corner of the world. They call to me when the throes are upon them, when they tussle with the greatest struggle of humankind, when they summon every ounce of resolve and determination that they possess to bring another light into the universe. They call to me to guide their babies to safety, warm and damp in their arms. And here, in the dark bowl of the night sky, I hear them. I turn my light toward them and I bathe them in its unquenchable glow, gathering them all to share our inexhaustible strength together.