The Ariadne Connection

She opened stinging eyes and touched the blossom again, careful not to loosen its tenuous hold on the rocky soil. Helen would have reminded her that the first poppies meant rebirth for the islands, the blood-red cups a sign of the coming Easter season.

Smiling through her tears, Ariadne nodded, rose to her feet, and lifted her chin. Raising her arms in a smooth sweep—bird wings, lifting, circling—she stepped slowly, ceremoniously, dipping and rising in a peasant dance. She flung back her head, crying out to the sky as she spun, twirling. Her feet were light over the grass, feathered, as she danced the silent music ringing up from the earth.

Finally she dropped onto the grass, blood pulsing in her ears. She pressed her flattened palms over the soil and felt the forces whirl around this center, pulling her inward. Into the comforting, frightening velvet darkness at the heart of mother earth. A tense fullness poured into her, welling up like the underground spring flowing beneath her, through fissures in the ancient vein of quartz, itself a frozen river of stone. She could see it.

She blinked. It was only common sense telling her, as any island goatherd would know, that beneath this green oasis ran an underground spring. Of course it would find its course along a mineral seam. The instrument readings would verify her hypothesis.

As if mocking logic, her fingers reflexively found the polished crystal of her pendant, though its cool serenity eluded her today. Why do you play this game? some inner voice was accusing. You feel it. You know.

She could feel it, a strange effervescence fizzing along her nerve pathways, something like the energy of the activated mineral water she used for her healing experiments. But this was more intense, ebbing and flowing with jarring eddies. Rising to her feet, she closed her eyes, obeying an impulse to open her arms, sweep her downturned palms in a slow circle as she cut through the shivering waves like a rolling wheel. She had to push against resistance until she was aligned, arms parallel to the flow.

She opened her eyes, saw that her right hand was pointing through the hill, in the direction of the town and sanctuary of the Tioniotissa, where the healing waters of the sacred spring bubbled out of the ground to fill Her sacred well.