Theseus and the Minotaur

Part One · The Black Sail

Every nine years, a ship with black sails slipped out of the harbor of Athens, carrying fourteen young people who were never seen again. Athens had lost a war against King Minos of Crete, and the conditions of its surrender were merciless. Minos demanded seven boys and seven girls as a tribute, and he locked them inside the labyrinth, an enormous maze so ingeniously constructed that nobody who entered it could ever discover the exit. At its center, the legends said, lived the Minotaur, a monstrous creature with the body of a man and the head of a bull. Mothers in Athens closed their shutters whenever the ship came back. Some said they could still hear the bellowing across the sea.

The king of Athens had a son named Theseus, who had been raised in a distant village and arrived in the city only after he had grown into a strong young man. He found the streets silent and the families miserable, and when he learned the reason, he announced his decision in front of the entire court. He would sail with the fourteen victims, he declared, and he would find some way to end the tribute forever, and his father, King Aegeus, begged him to stay, but Theseus was determined. Before departing, he made one promise. If he returned alive, he would replace the black sail with a white one, so that his father could see the good news from far away.

Part Two · Ariadne's Thread

The voyage across the sea lasted many days, and the captives spoke very little. Each evening, Theseus walked among them, telling jokes that were not particularly funny and making certain that every person had eaten something. When the cliffs of Crete finally emerged from the mist, the palace of King Minos was gleaming on the hill above the harbor, with golden stone and brilliantly painted pillars. It was a magnificent building, which somehow made it more terrifying. Soldiers marched the Athenians into an enormous courtyard, where the king inspected them one at a time with the bored expression of a merchant examining vegetables at a market, while the gulls overhead seemed oddly reluctant to look down.

Minos had a daughter, however, and she was not bored in the slightest, and her name was Ariadne, and she watched the prisoners from a high balcony as they marched through the courtyard. She noticed that the tallest of them did not stare at the ground like the others. Instead, he studied the walls, the doorways, and the guards, as if he were already assembling a clever plan. Ariadne understood that the labyrinth had never allowed a single person to return, and she also understood that her father's power depended on that dreadful fact. Quietly, and all at once, she decided that she could not permit it to happen again.

Late that night, Ariadne crept through the darkened palace and found the cell where Theseus was waiting, and she carried two objects. The first was a sword, concealed inside a cloth, and the second was a ball of thread so delicate that it sparkled in the lamplight. The labyrinth was designed to bewilder anyone who entered it, she explained in a whisper, but a trail laid down behind a traveler could never be lost, and he should fasten one end to the doorpost, she instructed, and let the thread unwind as he walked. Theseus thanked her sincerely. "Why are you helping me?" he asked. "Because somebody ought to," said Ariadne, "and everyone else is busy being afraid."

Part Three · The Heart of the Maze

At dawn, the guards escorted the fourteen prisoners to the enormous bronze doors of the labyrinth. Theseus volunteered to enter first. Nobody objected, because nobody else wanted to, and the doors swung open to reveal a long passage that smelled of damp stone. He tied the thread to the doorpost with a firm knot, took a deep breath, and stepped inside. Behind him, the doors closed with a tremendous boom, and the corridor divided into two, then three, and then into so many directions that he stopped counting. Every wall resembled the one before it, and only the thin bright line trailing behind him proved that he was not walking in circles.

He continued for what seemed like hours. The passages twisted and doubled back, and several of them ended at blank walls, where a careless explorer might have panicked. Lost sandals lay scattered in the corners, and a cracked lyre, and a child's wooden toy, which suggested that many people had traveled this way before him. Strange noises echoed through the stone, including a heavy breathing and the scrape of something enormous being dragged across the floor. Whenever the corridor divided, Theseus chose the path that sloped downward, reasoning that the center of any building is usually lower than its edges. Eventually the air grew warm, and the breathing became louder than his own heartbeat.

Then the thread moved, and it gave a small, sharp tug in his hand, as though something far behind him had taken hold of it. Theseus froze. The labyrinth had been silent for a long time, and now every shadow seemed to lean toward him. Somebody, or something, was on the other end of his only road home, and the thread tugged again, twice, gently, like a knock at a door, and for one terrible moment he could not decide whether to cut it. Then, slowly, he tugged back twice, and it answered with two more. Whatever was out there was not a monster. Monsters, he decided, did not knock.

The corridor opened into a circular chamber with a ceiling hidden in shadow. In the middle of the floor stood the Minotaur, gigantic and wild-eyed, its horns scraping the stones as it swung its massive head toward him. For a moment, neither of them moved. Then the creature lowered its head and charged, and the whole chamber trembled. Theseus leaped sideways, and the horns crashed into the wall where he had been standing, scattering dust and fragments of rock in every direction. He circled the room cautiously, watching how the Minotaur turned, learning its habits, and waiting for the moment when its fury would make it careless, and it was the longest moment of his life.

When the chance finally came, he took it. He ran toward a stone pillar in the middle of the chamber, trailing the thread behind him, and circled it twice with the creature thundering after him, and the Minotaur charged straight into the loops, tripped, and crashed against the floor, tangled like a kitten in yarn. Before it could rise, Theseus struck a single decisive blow, and the chamber became completely silent. He stood beside it for several minutes, breathing heavily, and he did not feel like a champion, and he felt exhausted, and strangely sorrowful that anything in the world could have become so lonely and so furious. Then he turned away and began to follow the line toward home.

Part Four · The White Sail

Winding the thread around his fingers as he walked, Theseus retraced every turn that he had previously taken. It was considerably easier than he had expected, and the maze that had seemed so merciless on the way in was merely a puzzle now, and the thread contained all of the answers. At last a sliver of daylight appeared at the end of a passage, and then the bronze doors were groaning open. Outside, the thirteen other young Athenians were waiting in the sunshine, and when they saw him alive and unharmed, they cheered so loudly that the astonished guards stumbled backward. Ariadne stood at the doorpost with the other end of the thread wound around her wrist, pretending that she was not crying.

"You tugged," said Theseus. "I thought it was a monster." "I thought it would be rude not to say hello," said Ariadne. That same night the Athenians crept down to the harbor and sailed away in the darkness, and Ariadne sailed with them, exactly as Theseus had promised. The ship glided out of the bay without an alarm, while behind them the great palace shrank until it looked like a toy left out in the rain. But as the coast of Greece rose out of the dawn, the crew sang and shouted for joy, and in all the celebration, nobody remembered the arrangement Theseus had made with his father. The black sail still hung from the mast, dark against the brilliant sky.

Only Ariadne remembered, and she had heard the promise in the cell, and she looked up at that sail and gasped. High on a cliff above Athens, she knew, King Aegeus was watching the water, and one look at those black sails would break his heart. Her heart pounded as loudly as the waves against the hull. "Theseus!" she cried. "The sail!" Theseus turned white, and then he turned practical. There was no time to find new cloth. Ariadne ripped the white linen sheet off her bunk and tied it to a rope, and Theseus swung up the mast like a monkey, cut down the black sail, and hoisted her bedsheet in its place.

On the cliff, King Aegeus squinted at a small ship in the distance and saw, instead of black, a white square that flapped and flapped, with a faint lump in the middle where a pillow had been tied, and he laughed until his knees gave out. By the time the ship reached the harbor, the whole city was pouring down the hill, and Theseus ran up it to meet his father halfway. The citizens made him their king, and he governed wisely for many years, always remembering that it is the small promises that sink ships, and the black sails were never needed again. Years later, people still told the story of the young man and the thread, and the bedsheet that saved the day.