Convoluted Flexions
Hearsay had it God let in the light. For a moment we thought that meant freedom. We weren’t wrong, but we weren’t right, and that was the old trick – Be the first to say, and the first to finish is Nothing. They lost us there, when they made words for what wasn’t and thought what they opened to the new would be the language of their own gods. The king looked in his reflection and said if he was not first, then God could only be a mirror.
This king was in the early days, and not yet in that aeon when history would have the Dogstar burn the islands in vengeance for Asterion, and the Arcadian master’s device would have been shown. His name was the land, for he called that beast which came to the shore with nothing of light in its flesh, nothing of skin or heart; The Sea rages before Heaven peels its guilt from the Earth, and law makes a thin caul for the Ocean-bull. But this he did not place on the altar. His kingdom saw another, and when the sacrifice was made, ichor firstborn from the night did not stain him and the soil together, though the people could not see.
Thus came Pasiphae, for the queen knew Eros from the Sea’s dead names, and in her Titan blood took the love of what cannot be. Small worlds are born from this, and Pasiphae’s daughter had few words for God’s. The halls of her mind, ankle-deep in libations stolen and lost, took no limit entwining the halls of the palace, and as her age turned the kingdom slid from human hands.
It was known in Athens that the Sea had flooded the Minoan islands from within. Some youths among the gentry came to the idea that this was a worthy pilgrimage, and mingling with song-stitchers, they traveled in hope of blessings at the bent altars of that place where the stars were set free of a common path. The king’s guardianship rent, they entered by the thousand doors set in stone, wood, earth, and leaf.
There was Theseus, son of the Athenian king Aegeus, who had returned disgraced without sword or sandal and little blood as he fled the games of Cercyon in Eleusis. It was said he had lost such vitality as to have the flesh of a fish, and if he would not smear his body with clay and resin his heart and his bile could have burned in the light of the Sun. Spurned by his people but ever-full with the choler of heroes, he found need to reclaim his pride. He sought favor with the exiled Minos, who, glad to be free of the stench of Medea’s poultice, blessed him on that disastrous journey to slay the crooked spawn of his bull, and sent him with the protection of some of the most aggrieved of the king’s own escort. There was little help to be found among the Athenians, who for years had seen none return from the pilgrimage to the islands, and who had driven the traveling song-stitchers from the city as if they were one.
Medea had told him of Minos’s shame, the cause of the child of the Ocean-Bull and how Daedalus was lost finding means to stop the entwining Labyrinth, leading the child to a gate in the darkness where her paths would be locked in an eternal spiral.
None knew by what means that Daughter of Star and Sea was found in later years leading sacrifices in the temple of the Sun, for all the memory of the priests as if she had been raised there, or what it meant for her to take her place at the king’s table as if his court had always known her. The palace sunk into itself, strange things slithered in the cracks between sight and sound, and Pasiphae was only pleased.
The native Icarus had given Theseus a great clew of silk wrought for strength and blessed by the priests of the road-stone to trace his path through the living maze. There was nothing to be done when he found after three corners a line which, backwards, he saw tracing leagues he had never walked, leagues not even spun into the thread before he entered this domain.
Deeper, his feet became wet, sometimes with water, sometimes wine, sometimes that ancient mead kept also by the cult of song-stitchers of the Wine-God who led the fools of Athens here.
There was an open dancing-floor built by Daedalus on the edge of the palace facing the Sea and the rising Sun. It was here Icarus found the bones of Theseus amid his ashes, a dry mark burned where the ground all around had been soaked in the juices of the vine.
