When dawn broke the following morning, Theseus had never seen so much emptiness. He knew of the sand desert beyond the fertile river of Egypt and had spoken once to a trader in lapis lazuli who had spent many days journeying across it, but the desert he now found himself in was extraordinary. Who could have suspected that such a thing lay beneath the world?
From the top of a ridge, a grey and barren landscape spread below Theseus in two wide arcs, separated by a long line of chalk, a backbone of white beneath his feet. It was as though he stood upon a corpse. The wind blew bitingly; the only thing in this frozen world that seemed still to have life.
He stood looking north; behind him lay a low sun and a grey ocean.
Facing him, and beyond a flat sea of bare ground that lapped up to the chalk like a petrified coast, its grey waves motionless, lay more water. And ice. And a distant shoreline. And another distant coast beyond the water. There was no sign of the Minotaur. And there were no trees. No plants of any sort. Nothing.
Theseus turned and gazed southwards towards a distant megalithic standing stone, nestling in the hollow between two low hills and silhouetted against the sea. Where was the Temple Mansion? He looked into the sky, at the sea, at the frozen land and at the frost-shattered stones and icy chalk boulders around him in a sudden confusion of irrational panic. Bounding down the slippery white scarps and faces of the ridge, he ran over polygons of jagged rocks protruding through crumbling shale to the standing stone. The sea glistened with light reflected from a sky that brooded in a pale and menacing apology.
Running back up the steep hillside, Theseus paused to gather his breath and then sprinted down the other side of the white ridge to the tunnel entrance. He entered its dank and gloomy interior and found the end of the thread. Its tautness, when he pulled, gave him the reassurance he needed.
He did not have to understand.
Theseus travelled the length of the chalk ridge until he came again to the sea and, by nightfall, had made his way to the wide channel which separated this island from a land beyond. The further shore was clearly visible, but it was a long swim. There was no sign of the Minotaur. Could this beast have carried the Axe across the water? Theseus walked across the shingle of the beach, across rocky pools that the tide had left stranded and the wind had turned to ice, and made his way to the water's edge. It was icy cold and Theseus withdrew from it, satisfied that it was impossible. The land beyond seemed bleaker still, overcast and fresh and barren. Theseus re-crossed the steeply sloping flint pebbles with difficulty, they cascaded down as he tried to climb them and made him wonder if he had the strength and endurance to climb them at all; the ground above the cliff behind them lay in ridges, in corrugations of soil and stones, shifting and blowing in the wind like a fragmenting fossil. Soon it began to snow.
All day long, Theseus had not come across a single tree or a single plant. There was no sign of the Minotaur.
As night fell, Theseus melted snow in his hands and wondered how he was to survive the night.
The Goddess watched Theseus struggle to find a sheltered spot in the rocks behind the beach, in which to huddle, and wondered how to sustain him.
She became a deer.
The next morning, Theseus travelled the length of the ridge again, straining his eyes towards the south to try to locate the Axe and its companion. But to no avail. He came late in the afternoon to a low point in the chalk. A search along the edge of a dry rock-strewn platform beneath high cliffs revealed deep caves on this landward edge of a large rocky shelf that reached out to the distant beach a long and tiring scramble away. Theseus wondered how the cliffs could have been cut by the waves this high above the shore and speculated that the level of the sea must have dropped quite a bit. In the waning light, Theseus explored the cold and echoing chambers and recesses one by one, and as night fell, took shelter in the deepest of them. He had not eaten for two days.
The following morning, Theseus came upon footprints. Now it was only a matter of time. There was nothing to eat and the cold was beginning to sap his strength. The footprints were his own. The soil contained nothing. Nothing living and nothing dead. But as Theseus walked, he came upon another set of tracks; they led northwards. Theseus first heard a distant call, like that of a bull, and then, to his amazement, saw over the brow of a hill, a deer. The animal stood and cocked its ears, smelt the wind and remained motionless, then stamped on the bare earth. The world seemed to contain only Theseus and this deer. There was no trace of any other creature.
As Theseus crept conspicuously down a gentle incline, the deer started and galloped away from him. All day Theseus followed its erratic track, always within sight of her, never within reach. As dusk descended, he found himself in a gentle valley; on one side were lines of rock launching themselves towards the sky, as though eager, like Theseus, to escape from this world. The deer was exhausted and collapsed to her knees and Theseus made a final effort to bring her down before night fell. With his last remaining strength, he dispatched the animal.
He had no fire to light an offering to the Goddess and no fire to cook the deer with. But its flesh and its blood gave him the strength he needed.
·
The Testimony of the Minotaur
I have waited now for four days at the edge of this channel without finding any sign of the ferryman. If the sun shines in the afternoon there are pools of water to drink, but it is dirty. There is nothing to eat. Not even in the earth. I have dug with the help of the Axe and found only stones and ice. There are no roots. If I had tried to cross the water sooner, I may have made it successfully. But each day's hunger brings diminished strength and a hope that seems more completely hopeless. The water is almost freezing. I should return to the tunnels beneath the Temple.
But one alien environment is much like another, and I have vowed to cross to a new life. Somewhere in this underworld there are trees; somewhere there are people like me, handsome and bull-shouldered, with shining horns. Somewhere across the water, if only I could cross the water.
My dream haunts me. I have no idea where the Temple lies above me. Does Clitia exist? Where? Where in this world does Clitia exist?
I was able to watch the new Clitia from the shadows of the strange Temple Mansion, as Theseus delayed and appeared to take no interest in me.
I did not kill her.
The current was strong and took me a long way from the beach. The water was icy cold and salty. As I held the Axe to my chest and held myself above the waves with the strength remaining in my legs, my lungs filled, my limbs became frozen and my senses distraught, and my slowing thoughts turned again to Clitia. I imagined myself climbing through the Temple Mansion, through dark halls and passages to the storerooms, and watching her place a jug of milk on the ground. I could recall every step of the way. I had seen her oddly-shaped but recognisable flat face only from a distance, and in darkness. I had not spoken to her. The thought tormented me.
Who had I killed instead? Who in this world had I killed instead?
But I had been carried near to the shore again and the water became calmer and smoother, and a sudden fear gripped me. I could not cross. The shore was muddy where the current deposited me and I waded onto the land with frozen limbs and a brown stench covering me to the knees. In weakness and sickness I dropped the axe and collapsed into the mud, retching a seawater slime. Excruciating pain burst into my fingers and my toes as I lay motionless in the mud.
Why is there nobody here? This is the underworld! Why is there nobody here?
·
Theseus moved to the back of his cave and cut a hunk of meat from the dwindling carcass of the deer. The cave wall was cold, and outside a fresh fall of chalk had covered his favourite sitting-place in a rocky blanket of rubble. A flake of blue flint lay in his hand like a relic of some long-forgotten urgency, reminding him not only of his first attempt at skinning as he cut another piece from his near-exhausted store of sustenance but that he was no nearer to finding the Minotaur.
After eating, Theseus scrambled down the low incline of the broad and rocky platform and came at last to a small beach of angular pebbles and chalk boulders. If he waited long enough, the Minotaur might come to him. Theseus laughed to himself.
Perhaps the creature had swum the channel to the land beyond.
For many, many days, Theseus had scoured the length and breadth of the island, but the attraction of his cave and the anxiety of leaving his only source of survival untended and unguarded for any length of time had hindered his search. He was certain that nothing lived in this barren underworld. The water of the ocean, whose expanse stretched before him to an unbroken horizon, rose steadily and imperceptibly with the summer tide. There was no other breathing but his own. He was alone.
His meal finished, and wearing a deerskin wrapped as a cape around his shoulders and reaching almost to the ground, and with some shoes of hide fastened to his feet with sinew, Theseus scrambled around the boulders to a place where the cliffs bowed into a low gap, where a sombre light from the brightening clouds played onto the face of the distant chalk on either side of him. After a long climb, Theseus surveyed the landscape from the top of the white chalk hills, as he had done many times before. In a sudden resolve, he struck northwards, towards the ridges of blue clay and frozen lakes. For the rest of the day he explored the land around the convoluted inlets, trying to find the lair of the Minotaur. But the landscape was bare and a dusting of fine snow began to blow across the ground as the afternoon darkened into dusk. There was nowhere for the beast to be hiding.
Theseus spent the night huddled under the lee of a low cliff facing the land beyond. As morning approached, the cold became intense and dawn broke in a palette of reds and blues and yellows. The air was still, and just after dawn, Theseus heard a sound that made him start, and watch.
In the distance was the Minotaur.
Theseus crouched down and observed the strange beast. As it came closer, he saw the head and the horns and the human legs and feet and was astonished and repelled. He tracked around and followed the grotesque animal, closing the distance between them, unseen. Soon the Minotaur lay down as though to rest, and Theseus approached it cautiously, silently exulting that his prey had so suddenly and unexpectedly fallen at his feet.
·
The Testimony of the Minotaur
I am alone, and the universe contains only me; me and this barren, cold landscape. My hunger has gone, as though it, too, has wished to abandon me.
The wind ruffles the water. It is, like the sea, in no hurry.
I shall not return.
It was a warm day when I discovered Clitia lying on the ground. The rain had stopped and a strong wind was blowing the clouds across the sky like grey fleeces running from a wolf, casting off threads of white wool. The sun came out briefly, but as I leant over the girl, noting the blood and the strange angle at which one of her legs twisted away from the other, the hard ground of the mountainside absorbed her shadow again and a spot of warm rain fell onto my arm. I do not know how long she had lain there; it was the middle of the afternoon and everybody was sheltered indoors from the heat. I touched her cheek with my hand and she opened her eyes and managed a weak smile. 'I don't want to be alone any more.'
I could not decide how to carry her and could hardly contain my agony at her distress in a way that I should not have done if the pain had been my own. I found that if I held her legs together as I carried her and if I bore her weight slowly, she did not cry.
The physician made her scream and a rush of anger flowed through me, uncannily. A portent.
A sign and a portent.
Many died of the plague that spring. And during the summer, the girl Clitia came to me with a cloth, a white cloth that she had embroidered with blue butterflies and yellow bees; a gift to thank me for rescuing her from the mountainside. The bees looked like yellow sheep, but I cherished them.
I wore this cloth when I was the Bull of Minos at the Ladies Games the following summer. And it seemed to me that I was committing the most grotesque discourtesy when Clitia looked at the cloth that I was wearing and I saw the look of incomprehension in her face. How could such a thing be possible - she was thinking. But I was no stranger now to killing. When we had wound our way up the narrow path carrying the body of the Bull of Minos bound tightly to his wicker bier, nine months before, as the sun had set over the sea in a blaze of orange, we, the six contestants for the kingship, carried his body, and a priestess carried his head. The way was paved but steep and the sea sparkled as we climbed to the top of the isolated peak. The darkening sky made the white of the shroud seem mottled and stained.
At the top of this peak, the old skulls had been stacked, as always, in the temple, ready to be carried down in baskets to the Temple Mansion on the morning of the Games. It was a safe place. Soon, the Temple Mansion would fall into the sea. Already, its northern walls had collapsed and plunged down a low cliff into the rising water, to lie as their own monument on the shore below. Each year the winter rains pulled at the masonry, urging it into the sea.
The new addition was added to the army of skulls in order that it might return again, triumphantly, to the Temple Mansion to preside over the choosing of its successor. And as the body burned, this head looked out with all the others at the green and verdant land, a land teeming with life of every kind, and some of the horns we could see were much smaller and weaker than those of the more recent additions, and indeed of those upon the contestants around me - gleaming horns, and shining muzzles. The flames released the body's strength to the wind.
That same evening, as I raced towards the finishing line beneath the light of the full moon, with breath coming painfully and my horns glistening with sweat and the blood of others, I had no idea what further crimes I would be asked to commit.
The gates of the Temple Mansion opened before me.
But the grip of disease has closed ever tighter upon the pitiful remnants of our city, and its victims are the very young. The proud mothers of gracile fawns and bouncing lambs prick their ears in alarm at the choking coughs of our few children, and lead their own healthy offspring away.
Clitia's leg healed badly. Perhaps the physician had not made her scream loudly enough. And when she limped across the finishing line at Midsummer, to the castigating cheers of those few who had arrived sooner - and there was nobody behind her - I knew that the correction of this mistake was incumbent upon me.
But she did not scream. Instead, she looked into my eyes as I held the long spike of mistletoe over her breast, a breast that I should have kissed and not threatened, and I could see in her eyes not fear, but perplexity.
I have concealed the memory of this moment too often to be sure what happened next. I might have turned to the keepers, to the crowd sitting on the slope beneath the Temple Mansion and by the alder grove, and refused to obey custom. I might have refused to take things any further. I might have called a halt to this exaggeration, I might have forced moderation onto this audience whose expectation and greed had carried me forwards into such a blind flight of excess. I sometimes think that I might not have killed Clitia after all, and that she still lives - somewhere.
But I knew that I was too weak to brake the inertia of custom.
Clitia did not scream when I pushed the spike through her chest.
From an old, earthen granary beneath the Temple Mansion I discovered - when? When did I discover this - I discovered once, in the comforting darkness - tunnels. Tunnels! I ran joyfully along their descent, knowing that they held the promise of escape. But along those that ran northwards I came against blockages, landslides, the underside of a foul-smelling scree that carried, seeping through its damp stones, the sound of the sea. Undeterred, I retraced my steps and found other tunnels that descended as I hoped, into a welcome blackness; and they led me, at last, into an underworld. But this underworld was not as I had imagined it to be. It was sunlit and green. There was luxuriant vegetation everywhere, forests and parks, and circles. And on a ridge of the downs above the entrance to this world I encountered a strange creature who conversed with another. It spoke of a journey it had made, a journey of forty thousand years. How ridiculous! How could this creature, so frail and confused, have made a journey that had lasted for forty thousand years? And yet I had the strangest feeling that to kill this creature would be to compound a misunderstanding that lay at the root of my woe. The very root. I let the wind carry their words to me as I crouched behind a tree.
'They changed when it was time to change,' said the female. 'They knew when to stop and have reaped the rewards.' She looked out across the still sea.
'The electricity generators are beyond the horizon,' she explained, in a matter-of-fact way, 'and the calm water they provide inshore makes it easy to prevent the erosion that was once so severe along this coast. For hundreds of years now the amount of carbon in the atmosphere has remained stable, and the sea level has stopped rising. Tropical rainforest extends over a quarter of the Earth's landmass.' She seemed to swell a little with pride.
But when I returned to the underworld a second time, it was to find only stones and bare earth and a chilling wind that froze me to the marrow. I had laid no thread to guide me back. And in a room of a new Temple Mansion, upon my return, I stood in a dark storeroom and saw a face that, despite its strange and horrifying flatness, was unmistakably that of Clitia. Had some terrible evolution taken place in my absence? Some motion through the fabric of time into a world that contained Clitia again?
I watched Theseus paint Hermione with red ochre in the tunnels; erotically, tenderly. But something puzzles me above everything else. I looked into the eyes of the boy who burst suddenly into the storerooms, as I held him, trying to think how best to bring silence to his throat, and I saw myself. As plainly as though there was a mirror between us, I knew that I was looking at myself.
I can remember a face. It was unmistakably Clitia. Clitia.
These sharp stones - there! - I will try to get a little sleep. My gift shall buy me passage across the water when I wake. But I shall lie. I shall rest for a while.
·
Nothing stirred. Theseus waited for the creature to rise, not wanting to kill it dishonourably as it slept. But the beast remained inert. The Axe of the Covenant lay by the Minotaur's side, where the animal had dropped it. Theseus shouted, but there was no response. Curiously, around the Axe, small flowers had begun to appear, like a scattering of miniature crocus out of the dead earth.
'I have come to relieve you of two burdens!' Theseus shouted and kicked the creature. It started, opened its eyes and tried to roll over as though in an attempt to get up. Theseus leaned over the emaciated form and marvelled at the horns and muzzle, it was clear to him that the beast had been able to find nothing to eat. Theseus moved back in order to allow the beast to rise, but it collapsed back again onto the ground. Once more it tried to rise, but sank back again. Uncertain what to do, Theseus picked up the axe and, swinging it high above his head, brought the heavy blade down with all his strength upon the creature's neck. Theseus pulled the axe away and could see from the twisted head that the neck was broken.
Theseus made his way quickly back to the foot of the chalk ridge carrying the axe over his shoulder and, feeling his way carefully along the tunnel, found the end of the thread again and wearily ascended, now dragging the axe behind him, now carrying it uncomfortably under one arm and following the route he had laid into the maze of tunnels, leading him slowly and exhaustingly along narrow squeezes of sharp rocks and dry brittle clay back to the passages of red ochre beneath the Temple Mansion. Climbing upwards, through dark spaces, confined, infinite, he came upon the end of the thread.
The end!
With a sickening recognition of his folly, Theseus cursed himself for not securing the yarn where he had dropped it. He must have pulled it through the tunnels as he played it out behind him. Or pulled it towards him as he had been climbing back up. In the blackness, Theseus groped his way forwards with the axe held first in one hand, then the other, as he scrambled over the rough, damp litter of stones and clay, trying to see if there was another end of a break ahead of him. Soon he came to a space where many passages branched off and choosing one at random, continued onwards through a further maze of choices, fearfully aware of the extent of the nexus through which he had journeyed, and would now have to continue to explore, unguided.