The Ariadne Connection

LATER IT WOULD BE hot. But this early, the sky was still a cool, cloudless blue, the sun just rising above the hills.

Ariadne drank in the breeze with its taste of the sea and the dusty earth. She lengthened her stride, moving easily along the goat path through jagged rocks and thorn, savoring the solitude.

The path turned sharply. She climbed over a steep jumble of boulders, rough surfaces gripping like sandpaper. The raw landscape showed no sign of the storm’s passage, until she came up onto a ridge crest to look out over the sea and the cove below. Against the far walls, flotsam dipped and rose against the rocks—smashed planks, a red plastic basin, the carcass of a dog already attended by hungry gulls. Closer, Nereid bobbed like a toy, anchor lines threading clear azure. A curly dark head emerged from the cabin, and Ariadne backed quickly from the brink.

She turned, putting behind her Leeza’s sulking face and Peter’s exasperated protest against this solo foray ashore. She hurried down the trail.

Descending turns took her into the next ravine. She tried to recover the simple pleasure of the breeze sliding over her face and her bare legs beneath the skirt, the flush of exertion after her confinement on the boat. But all she could feel now was an irritable sensation of urgency goading her along. At the same time, palpable waves of pressure pushed against her, as if she were breasting an incoming surf.

Thick silence closed in. No chatter of small birds. Within these clashing geomagnetic fields, they could become disoriented, lose their way. . . .

It was a physical effort to concentrate. She took a deep breath and strode faster down the trail, rounding a switchback past a bluff cutting off the view of the sea. She stopped short. The trail broke away in a gap of raw earth and tumbled rocks where a fresh fault ran through the bluff, dropping the ground level beyond it. Pressure beat inside her head, breaking into jarring eddies. She edged along the remaining stone lip, glancing uneasily up the fault line.

Her ears were ringing again. The earth was a cracked bell, clanging with the reverberations that could last for days after a quake. No one else seemed to hear them, but now they screamed inside her, demanding . . . what, she didn’t know. She had no choice but to obey. Fear slithered through her, but it didn’t matter. She tightened the straps of the knapsack holding her magnetometer, a portable model used by mining scouts to locate mineral seams. She scrambled down shifting rocks to the chopped-off trail, using the tall sensor rod as a steadying staff. She glanced at the data readout clipped to the knapsack belt, adjusted the rod’s orientation, and hurried on without pausing to shake the pebbles from her sandals.

Another switchback brought her back toward the cove, into a rising breeze. The restless itch down her spine intensified, driving her on as the trail ended in untracked rock. She climbed up another weathered bluff and looked over into a cleft running toward a dropoff above the sea.

In the heart of the parched ravine, a patch of green glowed jewel-like. A scatter of wild crimson poppies bobbed in the breeze.

Ariadne climbed down. As she did, the insistent thrumming fell away into a muffled sensation, an underwater gliding as she stepped onto the shelf of green grass and blossoms. She suddenly knew it: this was the place, the calm heart of the maelstrom.

She shrugged off the knapsack and set it down, initiated the data analysis of the magnetometer measurements of the wavering fields, although she already knew it would confirm the anomalies Arun Singh and Teresa Esposito had charted. Then she closed her eyes and took a deep breath, arms dropping to her sides. Slowly she sank to her knees, pulled toward the cool earth where the sun had not yet penetrated. She reached out to touch a translucent blossom.

Helen Vendemis had loved the poppies Ariadne would bring, beautiful and frail as Helen herself after that last tortured childbirth. Tears stung Ariadne’s eyes. She pressed them tightly shut, suddenly furious at Leeza and Peter Mitchell for prying at her life, her memories.

The shivering silence of the place beat against her ears. It was Helen who’d been the strong one, even in her physical pain and weakness, the one who’d challenged Ariadne to face the growing attraction to Helen’s husband Michael. She’d begged Ariadne to relieve her of the burden of “wifely duty,” the agony of further pregnancies.

Ariadne had flung aside caution all too readily. She’d willfully lost herself, with Michael, in the blind mazes of the body’s delight.

Helen had known she was dying, had gone serene in the belief that Ariadne would marry Michael and take care of the family. Then he started making demands. Ariadne had made another mistake—the traditions in the islands were too strong, and she had no intention of becoming a Greek wife, a man’s property. Retreating in alarm, she’d guiltily established a trust fund, dowries for Helen’s daughters. And she’d been relieved when Michael found a new wife on another island, moving his family there.

Perhaps Leeza was right—all men were the same in their need to control and possess. She should have learned that from her father. But were women only different in their methods?

Ariadne wondered if she were incapable of the surrender that true friendship, intimacy, seemed to demand. The trust. And even if she had wanted to let down her guard now, it was too dangerous, impossible with so much at stake. Her loneliness simply didn’t matter.

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.