Ariadne

by Jennifer Saint

What I did not know was that I had hit upon a truth of womanhood: however blameless a life we led, the passions and the greed of men could bring us to ruin, and there was nothing we could do.

I only knew Medusa as a monster. I had not thought she had ever been anything else. The stories of Perseus did not allow for a Medusa with a story of her own.

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.

He would be bragging of how he had beaten the monster of Crete to death and scattered his bones—without a word to acknowledge my part, my sacrifice, what I had done for him. And he would not tell of how he had crept out before dawn and left me sleeping, unsuspecting, while he slunk away. That shameful retreat would not feature in his boasts, would it?

Now, before my eyes, red-tinted visions of his return were rising uncontrollably, but instead of embracing him, I would tear his head from his shoulders with my bare hands.

Sometimes I could see how their eyes skated across my body, how insignificant they thought my mind was. But even if they imagined that I was merely a decorative conduit for Theseus’ words, for the first time in my life the men who wielded the power stopped courteously to let me talk.

“What the Fates have decreed, it is not for the gods to intervene. All mortals live and die by the threads they spin—and each mortal shall die when they cut that thread. I mourned my beautiful Ampelos, but he was gone according to the laws that govern humanity, and I could not overturn the world to save my love.

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. So what was I now to make of it?

Theseus had not left me because I was at fault or because I did not matter. He had left because, to him, nothing mattered at all beyond the cold pursuit of his own fame. I would not let a man who knew the value of nothing make me doubt the value of myself.

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.

We might only have a mortal lifetime, but it will belong to us and no one else.”

“Perseus uses Medusa like your father used the Minotaur,”

Pasiphae. Semele. Medusa. Now a hundred grieving mothers. The price we paid for the resentment, the lust, and the greed of arrogant men was our pain, shining and bright like the blade of a newly honed knife. Dionysus had once seemed to me the best of them all, but I saw him now for what he was, no different from the mightiest of the gods. Or the basest of men.