Ariadne(55)

‘But couldn’t you have saved him?’ I blurted out.

He shook his head, sharply, as though batting away an irritating fly. ‘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. All I could do was pluck from him the light of his soul at the moment that he died so that I could save it from the chill eternity of the Underworld. I placed my Ampelos instead amongst the stars, where his beauty would brighten the night sky for all humanity to marvel at.’

I shivered, though the evening was warm. The stars would glimmer to life soon; those remnants of the desires of the gods, still burning in the empty dark. It reminded me of Eirene’s stories and I felt a curl of the old anger stirring within me. ‘To marvel at?’ I asked tightly. ‘Or to remind us of our place? All my life, I have heard of what happens when the gods take notice of a mortal. It never seems to end well for us. I have seen it for myself, let us not forget.’

Dionysus’ eyes hardened. ‘Ampelos died a human death. It happens a thousand times every day.’

‘To us, it happens. Perhaps tomorrow I will slip from the rocks at the cliff edge, or a hungry bear will come from the forest for me. What then?’

‘Then you will die, like you would have done if I had never come here at all!’ His tone was sharp and when I looked at him now, the louche sprawl of his limbs that made him look so human stiffened into a dignity that bristled with offended divinity. ‘It would be no more my fault than if you had pined away to nothing, as Theseus intended when he left you here.’

Somewhere within, I knew that it would not be his fault. I was not angry with him; what burned in me was that I did not know whether he would go on his way without another thought. All the power was his. I waited here on this island because I had nowhere else that I could go, wondering how long his interest in me would last – for surely that was all that was keeping me alive?

‘But of course, if that is what you would prefer. So be it!’ he snapped.

Before I could say a word, he was gone. The silence hummed around me.

I knew he was vanished from the island. The weight of its emptiness pressed around me. I had sent him away, with the anger that had flared so suddenly within me. His presence here, whilst being so joyous, carried with it the threat of how he might be gone at any moment. And now I had made it happen so that I did not have to fear it any longer.

Abandonment on Naxos, though, was not the death sentence it had been before. Even if Dionysus’ magic were to leave me, I realised that the knowledge he had imparted would not.

Without him there, 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. So what was I now to make of it?

I danced the old steps my mother had taught me, out in the courtyard, free from the watchful gaze and malicious whispers that had snaked around Knossos; the steps I remembered from a time before monsters and the men who used them for power and glory. The loom that had gathered dust before Dionysus transformed the old cottage into his palace now gleamed brightly and I set myself to weaving. As I spun the soft fleece into yarn, the deft action of my fingers brought back the memory of the thousand times I had done this with Phaedra. We had woven tapestries on the subject deemed most appropriate for princesses; scenes upon scenes of glorious weddings, as we awaited our own, still to come. The intricacy of the weaving had always absorbed me – though its slowness frustrated Phaedra – and I remembered how carefully I had woven in every peacock, every pomegranate in the borders as the symbol of Hera. As the goddess of marriage, our bridal scenes wrought in glossy thread were dedicated to her and exemplified our devotion to duty.

I did not want to recreate those tapestries here on Naxos. With no one peering over my shoulder, I was free to tell the stories I wanted to instead. The weary Leto, cursed by Hera to stagger ever onwards across the earth whilst her belly swelled with the twins Zeus had fathered. Io, bewildered by her metamorphosis from woman to cow when Zeus sought to hide his infidelity once more. And of course, Semele, vainly attempting to shield her eyes from the sunburst of gold that would turn her to dust.

I lost myself in the frenzy of creation, hours gone in the blink of an eye as the shuttle flew back and forth beneath my hands. When the tapestry was done, I beheld it with a fierce kind of pride. It was not full of dutiful scenes of praise to the gods. It was something else entirely.

That night, I dreamed the scenes that I had woven – a tumbling together of women transformed and tormented. And then the dream resolved itself into Naxos where I stood on the sand, the gnarled giant oaks and cypress trees of the forests at my back, looking up at the rocky faces of the mountains. A prickling sense of unease tingled at the base of my spine as I squinted at the foremost summit upon which a figure stood. As a cloud drifted across the sun, I saw her clearly. Her white arms glinted like marble. Her eyes were large and round, fringed by thick eyelashes like a parody of innocence. The black gaze in their centre was fixed implacably upon me and I felt the cold steel of her hatred like a blade at my throat. Hera.