Lost in the Labyrinth by Patrice Kindl (ereader with android txt) 📗

Once again I found it difficult to concentrate on the events enacted before me. The bull riders came and went. I stared at their brilliantly colored costumes and antic clowning without seeing. Dimly I noticed when a young bull crashed through the ring of spectators and tried to leap the barrier into the audience, but my thoughts kept returning to my mother and my sister. The audience gasped and applauded, but we three sat silent, unmoved and untouched by events in the amphitheater.

But soon the bull riders were done and the most beautiful and most dangerous part of the ritual had begun. A team of bull dancers entered the arena and all thought was banished; I watched with my whole heart and my whole mind. The dancers positioned themselves in front of the chute from which the bull would enter the ring: three to the left, three to the right, and one in the center, farthest from the chute.

The great crowd grew silent, and it seemed possible to hear a muffled heartbeat, as if all of our hearts were beating as one.

The music began. A fresh bull was released into the ring. He lifted his head and sniffed the air. Sensing nothing worse than seven nearly naked women and men arrayed before him, he advanced cautiously.

The bull’s little piggy eyes were too shortsighted to see the full extent of the crowd that surrounded him, but he could hear it and smell it. He did not like it. He bellowed deep in his throat, dropped his head, and prepared to impale the dancers on his horns. His tail lashed.

At this signal the dance began. The two dancers closest to the bull ran toward him, towing long red streamers that twirled and fluttered in the breeze. The bull, annoyed, pawed the ground and charged. The paths of the dancers intersected immediately in front of his nose, and the trailing banners lapped his body in scarlet. Bucking and twisting, he pulled free of the linen strips, only to find himself facing the second pair of running dancers, then the third. The bare arms of the last couple nearly brushed his horns, but their streamers wrapped around him and he was too confused to lunge.

Behind the third couple, the last dancer, a girl even younger than myself ran lightly up to the charging bull’s head and grasped him firmly by the horns. In one liquid movement she tucked her head down, curled her body upward, and, thrown into the air by the strength of her arms and a furious toss of the bull’s head, somersaulted right through his horns. For a brief instant, both bull and bull leaper were suspended in space, he in full stretch leaping forward, she a spinning ball above him.

It was flawlessly executed. One great sigh forced its way from the lungs of three thousand people, like the breath of the Bull in the Earth himself.

Two things then happened at once. Behind the bull, a male dancer caught the bull leaper in his arms, and in front of the bull the remaining dancers ran, madly waving their streamers. Utterly enraged, the bull plunged forward, his hind hooves narrowly missing the leaper and her catcher. He slashed to the right and the left with his horns, and the dancers scattered in all directions. The bull was left alone in the ring, bellowing with fury and deeply confused about what had happened to him.

The crowd went mad with joy.

Each performing team had a different routine, a different method for distracting the bull from the dancers. Most were beautiful, some were comic. When the last group of bull dancers had at last left the arena, my mother stood again and addressed the people.

“I am told that there is one here who wants the opportunity to join in our sport. Although he is a stranger to our land, he has an especial right to do so if he wishes.”

The crowd was startled. Foreigners were never allowed to participate in the Festival of the Bulls. And how could an untried and untested stranger hope to survive such an experience?

Daedalus walked out into the amphitheater again, this time accompanied by another man. The man inclined his head slightly and spoke, haltingly, in our language.

“I am Theseus, son of Aegeus, King of Athens. I give you greeting. I claim the right to compete in your games.”

I recognized him now. It was the man who had spoken out at the end of the Presentation yesterday. But—how could he be the son of Aegeus? Everyone knew that Aegeus of Athens had no son. I stared at this upstart who claimed to be someone who did not exist, looking at him carefully for the first time.

He was not beautiful, and that was against him, for we Keftiu love beauty. He had none of the lithe grace of a bull dancer but was short and stocky, with thick, knotted muscles. He wore no jewelry or fine attire.

Daedalus bowed deeply before my mother. Theseus did not.

“Hear, O Queen!” said Daedalus. “Before you stands Prince Theseus, son of Aethra of Troezen and Aegeus of Athens. He greets you and asks leave to wipe out his father’s blood debt by facing a bull as fierce and wild as the Marathonian Bull that killed your son Androgeus twelve years ago.”

“His father seems not to have known of his existence until recently,” Mother observed. “Certainly I did not.”

“He was reared by his mother in Troezen, without his father’s knowledge, my queen,” said Daedalus.

Ah! An illegitimate child, then. No doubt his father, lacking any other issue, was now willing to acknowledge him.

The queen considered, and then spoke.

“Your request is reasonable.”

The crowd murmured, pleased with her generosity.

“It is fitting that Aegeus’s son should pay for his crime. However, the bulls we have here today for our festival are exhausted from their efforts. You will no doubt be willing to remain as a guest in my court until a bull worthy of your